Duma Key(33)

"Jumping jeepers," Ilse said - that was one she must have gotten from her Baptist boyfriend. "This place belongs in Beverly Hills."

The wall ran along the east side of the narrow, buckled road for at least eighty yards. There weren't any NO TRESPASSING signs; given that wall, the owner's stance on door-to-door salesmen and proselytizing Mormons seemed perfectly clear. In the center was a two-piece iron gate, standing ajar. And sitting just inside its open halves -

"There she is," I murmured. "The lady from down the beach. Holy shit, it's The Bride of the Godfather."

" Daddy! " Ilse said, laughing and shocked at the same time.

The woman was seriously old, mid-eighties at least. She was in her wheelchair. An enormous pair of blue Converse Hi-Tops were propped up on the chrome footrests. Although the temperature was in the mid-seventies, she wore a gray two-piece sweatsuit. In one gnarled hand a cigarette smoldered. Clapped on her head was the straw hat I'd seen on my walks, but on my walks I hadn't realized how enormous it was - not just a hat but a battered sombrero. Her resemblance to Marlon Brando at the end of The Godfather - when he's playing with his grandson in the garden - was unmistakable. There was something in her lap that did not quite look like a pistol.

Ilse and I both waved. For a moment she did nothing. Then she raised one hand, palm out, in an Indian How gesture, and broke into a sunny and nearly toothless grin. What seemed like a thousand wrinkles creased her face, turning her into a benign witch. I never even glimpsed the house behind her; I was still trying to cope with her sudden appearance, her cool blue sneakers, her delta of wrinkles, and her -

"Daddy, was that a gun?" Ilse was looking into the rear-view mirror, wide-eyed. "Did that old lady have a gun?"

The car was drifting, and I saw a real possibility of clipping the hacienda's far corner. I touched the wheel and made a course correction. "I think so. Of a kind. Mind your driving, honey. There ain't much road in this road."

She faced front again. We'd been driving in bright sunshine, but that ended with the hacienda's wall. "What do you mean, of a kind?"

"It looked like... I don't know, a crossbow-pistol. Or something. Maybe she shoots snakes with it."

"Thank God she smiled," Ilse said. "And it was a great smile, wasn't it?"

I nodded. "It was."

The hacienda was the last house on Duma Key's open north end. Beyond it, the road swung inland and the foliage crowded up in a way I found first interesting, then awesome, then claustrophobic. The masses of greenery towered to a height of twelve feet at least, the round leaves streaked a dark vermillion that looked like dried blood.

"What is that stuff, Daddy?"

"Seagrape. The green stuff with the yellow flowers is called wedelia. It grows everywhere. There's also rhododendron. The trees are mostly just slash pine, I think, although-"

She slowed to a crawl and pointed to the left, craning to look up through the corner of the windshield to do so. "Those are palms of some kind. And look... right up there..."

The road bent still farther inland, and here the trunks flanking the road looked like knotted masses of gray rope. Their roots had buckled the tar. We'd be able to get over now, I judged, but cars passing this way a few years hence? No way.

"Strangler fig," I said.

"Nice name, right out of Alfred Hitchcock. And they just grow wild?"

"I don't know," I said.

She bumped the Chevy carefully over the tunneling roots and drove on. We were down to no more than five miles an hour. There was more strangler fig growing out of the masses of seagrape and rhododendron. The high growth cast the road into deep shadow. It was impossible to see any distance at all on either side. Except for an occasional wedge of blue or errant sunray, even the sky was gone. And now we began to see sprays of sawgrass and tough, waxy fiddlewood growing right up through cracks in the tar.

My arm began to itch. The one that wasn't there. I reached to scratch it without thinking and only scratched my still-sore ribs, as I always did. At the same time the left side of my head started to itch. That I could scratch, and did.

"Daddy?"

"I'm okay. Why are you stopping?"

"Because... I don't feel so great myself."

Nor, I realized, did she look it. Her complexion had gone almost as white as the dab of zinc oxide on her nose. "Ilse? What is it?"

"My stomach. I'm starting to have serious questions about that tuna salad I made for lunch." She gave me a sickly coming-down-with-the-flu smile. "I'm also wondering how I'm going to get us out of here."

Not a bad question. All at once the seagrape seemed to be pushing in and the interweaving palms overhead seemed thicker. I realized I could smell the growth around us, a ropy aroma that seemed to come to life halfway down my throat. And why not? It came from live things, after all; they were crowded in on both sides. And above.

"Dad?"

The itch was worse. It was red, that itch, as red as the stink in my nose and throat was green. That itch you got when you were stuck in the burn, stuck in the char.

"Daddy, I'm sorry but I think I'm going to vomit."

Not a burn, not a char, it was a car, she opened the door of the car and leaned out, holding onto the wheel with one ham, and then I heard her sowing up.