Duma Key(34)

My right eye came over red and I thought I can do this. I can do this. I just have to get my poor old shit together.

I opened my door, reaching cross-body to do it, and got out. Lurched out, holding the top of the door to keep from sprawling headfirst into a wall of seagrape and the interwoven branches of a half-buried banyan. I itched all over. The bushes and branches were so close to the side of the car that they scraped me as I made my way up to the front. Half my vision

( RED )

seemed to be bleeding scarlet, I felt the tip of a pine-bough scrape across the wrist of - I could have sworn it - my right arm, and I thought I can do this, I MUST do this as I heard Ilse vomit again. I was aware that it was much hotter in that narrow lane than it should have been, even with the greenroof overhead. I had enough mind left in my mind to wonder what we'd been thinking, coming down this road in the first place. But of course it had seemed like nothing but a lark at the time.

Ilse was still leaning out, hanging onto the wheel with her right hand. Sweat stood on her forehead in clear beads. She looked up at me. "Oh boy-"

"Push over, Ilse."

"Daddy, what are you going to do?"

As if she couldn't see. And all at once both the words drive and back were unavailable to me, anyway. All I could have articulated in that moment was us, the most useless word in the English language when it stands by itself. I felt the anger rising in my throat like hot water. Or blood. Yes, more like that. Because the anger was, of course, red.

"Get us out of here. Push over." Thinking: Don't you get mad at her. Don't you start shouting no matter what. Oh for Christ's sake, please don't.

"Daddy, you, can't-"

"Yes. I can do this. Push over."

The habit of obedience dies hard - especially hard, maybe, between fathers and daughters. And of course she was sick. She pushed over and I got behind the wheel, sitting down in my clumsy stupid backwards fashion and using my hand to lift in my rotten right leg. My whole right side was buzzing, as if undergoing a low-level electric shock.

I closed my eyes tightly and thought: I CAN do this, goddammit, and I don't need any stuffed rag bitch to see me through, either.

When I looked at the world again, some of that redness - and some of the anger, thank God - had drained out of it. I dropped the transmission into reverse and began to back up slowly. I couldn't lean out as Ilse had done, because I had no right hand to steer with. I used the rear-view instead. In my head, ghostly, I heard: Meep-meep-meep.

"Please don't drive us off the road," Ilse said. "We can't walk. I'm too sick and you're too crippled-up."

"I won't, Monica," I said, but at that moment she leaned out the window to vomit again and I don't think she heard me.

xiii

Slowly, slowly, I backed away from the place where Ilse had stopped, telling myself Easy does it and Slow and steady wins the race. My hip snarled as we thumped back over the strangler fig roots burrowing under the road. On a couple of occasions I heard seagrape branches scree along the side of the car. The Hertz people weren't going to be happy, but they were the least of my worries that afternoon.

Little by little the light brightened as the foliage cleared out overhead. That was good. My vision was also clearing, that mad itch subsiding. Those things were even better.

"I see the big place with the wall around it," Ilse said, looking back over her shoulder.

"Do you feel any better?"

"Maybe a little, but my stomach's still sudsing like a Maytag." She made a gagging noise. "Oh God, I should never have said that." She leaned out, threw up again, then collapsed back onto the seat, laughing and groaning. Her bangs were sticking to her forehead in clumps. "I just shellacked the side of your car. Please tell me you have a hose."

"Don't worry about that. Just sit still and take long, slow breaths."

She saluted feebly and closed her eyes.

The old woman in the big straw hat was nowhere in evidence, but the two halves of the iron gate were now standing wide open, as if she was expecting company. Or knew we'd need a place to turn around.

I didn't waste time considering that, just backed the Chevy into the archway. For a moment I saw a courtyard paved with cool blue tiles, a tennis court, and an enormous set of double doors with iron rings set into them. Then I turned for home. We were there five minutes later. My vision was as clear as it had been when I woke up that morning, if not clearer. Except for the low itch up and down my right side, I felt fine.

I also felt a strong desire to draw. I didn't know what, but I would know, when I was sitting in Little Pink with one of my pads propped on my easel. I was sure of that.

"Let me clean off the side of your car," Ilse said.

"You're going to lie down. You look beat half to death."

She offered a wan smile. "That's just the better half. Remember how Mom used to say that?"

I nodded. "Go on, now. I'll do the rinsing." I pointed to where the hose was coiled on the north side of Big Pink. "It's all hooked up and ready to go."

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"Good to go. I think you ate more of the tuna salad than I did."

She managed another smile. "I always was partial to my own cooking. You were great to get us back here, Daddy. I'd kiss you, but my breath..."