Duma Key(44)

He smiled. "Honey, live like you got to live. Chuck Berry, nineteen sixty-nine."

I positioned myself beside the empty chair, said a little prayer, and dropped. I leaned left as always, to spare my bad hip. I didn't land quite square, but I grabbed the wooden arms, pushed with my strong foot, and the chair only teetered. A month before I would have spilled, but I was stronger now. I could imagine Kathi Green applauding.

"Good job, Edgar," he said. "Or are you an Eddie?"

"Pick your poison, I answer to either. What might you have in that pitcher?"

"Iced green tea," he said. "Very cooling. Try some?"

"I'd love to."

He poured me a glass, then topped up his own and raised it. The tea was only faintly green. His eyes, caught in fine nets of wrinkles, were greener. His hair was black, streaking in white at the temples, and quite long indeed. When the wind lifted it, I could see a scar at the top of his hairline on the right side, coin-shaped but smaller. He was wearing a bathing suit today, and his legs were as brown as his arms. He looked fit, but I thought he also looked tired.

"Let's drink to you, muchacho. You made it."

"All right," I said. "To me."

We clinked glasses and drank. I'd had green tea before and thought it was okay, but this was heavenly - like drinking cold silk, with just a faint tang of sweetness.

"Do you taste the honey?" he asked, and smiled when I nodded. "Not everyone does. I just put in a tablespoonful per pitcher. It releases the natural sweetness of the tea. I learned that cooking on a tramp steamer in the China Sea." He held up his glass and squinted through it. "We fought off many pirates and mated with strange and dusky women 'neath tropic skies."

"That sounds a trifle bullshitty to me, Mr. Wireman."

He laughed. "I actually read about the honey thing in one of Miss Eastlake's cookery books."

"Is she the lady you come out with in the mornings? The one in the wheelchair?"

"Indeed she is."

And without thinking much about what I was saying - it was her enormous blue sneakers propped up on the chrome footrests of her wheelchair I was thinking about - I said: "The Bride of the Godfather."

Wireman gaped, those green eyes of his so wide I was about to apologize for my faux pas. Then he really began to laugh. It was the kind of balls-to-the-wall bellowing you give out on those rare occasions when something sneaks past all your defenses and gets to the sweet spot of your funnybone. I mean the man was busting a gut, and when he saw I didn't have the slightest idea what had gotten him, he laughed even harder, his not inconsiderable belly heaving. He tried to put his glass back on the little table and missed. The glass plummeted straight down to the sand and stuck there, perfectly upright, like a cigarette-butt in one of those urns of sand you used to see beside the elevators in hotel lobbies. That struck him even funnier, and he pointed at it.

"I couldn't have done that if I was trying!" he managed, and then was off again, gale upon gale, heaving in his chair, one hand clutching his stomach, the other planted on his chest. A snatch of poetry read in high school, over thirty years before, suddenly came back to me with haunting clarity: Men do not sham convulsion, Nor simulate a throe.

I was smiling myself, smiling and chuckling, because that kind of high hilarity is catching, even when you don't know what the joke is. And the glass falling that way, with every drop of Wireman's tea staying inside... that was funny. Like a gag in a Road Runner cartoon. But the plummeting glass hadn't been the source of Wireman's hilarity.

"I don't get it. I mean I'm sorry if I-"

"She sort of is!" Wireman cried, cackling so crazily he was almost incoherent. "She sort of is, that's the thing! Only it's daughter, of course, she's The Daughter of the Godfa-"

But he had been rocking from side to side as well as up and down - no sham, authentic throe - and that was when his beach chair finally gave up the ghost with a loud crrrack, first snapping him forward with an extremely comical look of surprise on his face and then spilling him onto the sand. One of his flailing arms caught the post of the umbrella and upended the table. A gust of wind caught the umbrella, puffed it like a sail, and began to drag the table down the beach. What got me laughing wasn't the bug-eyed look of amazement on Wireman's face when his disintegrating beach chair tried to clamp on him like a striped jaw, nor his sudden barrel-roll onto the sand. It wasn't even the sight of that table trying to escape, tugged by its own umbrella. It was Wireman's glass, still standing placidly upright between the sprawling man's side and left arm.

Acme Iced Tea Company, I thought, still stuck on those old Road Runner cartoons. Meep-meep! And that, of course, made me think of the crane that had done the damage, the one with the f**ked-up beeper that hadn't beeped, and all at once I saw myself as Wile E. Coyote in the cab of my disintegrating pickup truck, eyes bugged in bewilderment, frazzled ears sticking off in two opposite directions and maybe smoking a little at the tips.

That did it. I laughed until I rolled bonelessly out of my own chair and plopped onto the sand beside Wireman... but I also missed the glass, which still stood perfectly upright like a cigarette-butt in an urn of sand. It was impossible for me to laugh any harder, but I did. Tears gushed down my cheeks and the world had begun to dim out as my brain went into oxygen-deprivation mode.