Duma Key(26)

The sophora bracelet seemed to rear over the horizon-line like the tentacle of a sea creature big enough to swallow a supertanker. The single yellow blossom could have been an alien eye. More important to me, it had somehow given the sunset back the truth of its ordinary I-do-this-every-night beauty.

That picture I set aside. Then I went downstairs, microwaved a Hungry Man fried chicken dinner, and ate it right down to the bottom of the box.

v

The following night I lined the sunset with bundles of witchgrass, and the brilliant orange shining through the green turned the horizon into a forest fire. The night after that I tried palm trees, but that was no good, that one was another clich , I could almost see hula-hula girls and hear ukes strumming. Next I put a big old conch shell on the horizon with the sunset firing off around it like a corona, and the result was - to me, at least - almost unbearably creepy. That one I turned to the wall, thinking when I looked at it the next day it would have lost its magic, but it hadn't. Not for me, anyway.

I snapped a picture of it with my digital camera, and attached it to an e-mail. It prompted the following exchange, which I printed out and stowed in a folder:

EFree19 to KamenDoc

10:14 AM

December 9

Kamen: I told you I was drawing pictures again. This is your fault, so the least you can do is look at the attached and tell me what you think. The view is from my place down here. Do not spare my feelings.

Edgar

KamenDoc to EFree19

12:09 PM

December 9

Edgar: I think you are getting better. A LOT.

Kamen

P.S. In truth the picture is amazing. Like an undiscovered Dal . You have clearly found something. How big is it?

EFree19 to KamenDoc

1:13 PM

December 9

Don't know. Big, maybe.

EF

KamenDoc to EFree19

1:22 P

M December 9

Then MINE IT!

Kamen

Two days later, when Jack came by to ask if I wanted to run errands, I said I wanted to go to a bookstore and buy a book of Salman Dal 's art.

Jack laughed. "I think you mean Salvador Dal ," he said. "Unless you're thinking about the guy who wrote the book that got him in so much hot water. I can't remember the name of it."

"The Satanic Verses," I said at once. The mind's a funny monkey, isn't it?

When I got back with my book of prints - it cost a staggering one hundred and nineteen dollars, even with my Barnes Noble discount card, good thing I'd saved a few million out of the divorce for myself - the MESSAGE WAITING lamp of my answering machine was flashing. It was Ilse, and the message was cryptic only at first listen.

"Mom's going to phone you," she said. "I did my best talking, Dad - called in every favor she owed me, added my very best pretty-please and just about begged Lin, so say yes, okay? Say yes. For me."

I sat down, ate a Table Talk pie I'd been looking forward to but no longer wanted, and leafed through my expensive picture-book, thinking - and I'm sure this wasn't original - Well hello, Dal . I wasn't always impressed. In many cases I thought I was looking at the work of a talented smartass who was doing little more than passing the time. Yet some of the pictures excited me and a few frightened me the way my looming conch shell had. Floating tigers over a reclining nude woman. A floating rose. And one picture, Swans Reflecting Elephants, that was so strange I could barely look at it... yet I kept flipping back to look some more.

And what I was really doing was waiting for my soon-to-be-ex-wife to call and invite me back to St. Paul, for Christmas with the girls. Eventually the phone rang, and when she said I'm extending this invitation against my better judgment I resisted the urge to smash that particular hanging curveball out of the park: And I'm accepting it against mine. What I said was I understand that. What I said was How does Christmas Eve sound? And when she said That's fine, some of the I'm-covered-up-and-ready-to-fight had gone out of her voice. The argument that might have nipped Christmas with the Family in the bud had been averted. Which did not make this trip back home a good idea.

MINE IT, Kamen had said, and in big capital letters. I suspected that by leaving now I might kill it, instead. I could come back to Duma Key... but that didn't mean I'd get my groove back. The walks, the pictures. One was feeding the other. I didn't know exactly how, and I didn't need to know.

But Illy: Say yes. For me. She knew I would, not because she was my favorite (Lin was the one who knew that, I think), but because she had always been satisfied with so little and so seldom asked for anything. And because when I listened to her message, I remembered how she'd started to cry that day she and Melinda had come out to Lake Phalen, leaning against me and asking why it couldn't be the way it was. Because things never are, I think I replied, but maybe for a couple of days they could be... or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Ilse was nineteen, probably too old for one last childhood Christmas, but surely not too old to deserve one more with the family she'd grown up with. And that went for Lin, too. Her survival skills were better, but she was flying home from France yet again, and that told me something.

All right, then. I'd go, I'd make nice, and I would be sure to pack Reba, just in case one of my rages swept over me. They were abating, but of course on Duma Key there was really nothing to rage against except for my periodic forgetfulness and shitty limp. I called the charter service I'd used for the last fifteen years and confirmed a Learjet, Sarasota to MSP International, leaving at nine o'clock AM on the twenty-fourth of December. I called Jack, who said he'd be happy to drive me to Dolphin Aviation and pick me up again on the twenty-eighth. And then, just when I had all of my ducks in a row, Pam called to tell me the whole thing was off.