Duma Key(6)

"So where does that leave me?" I asked.

"Right now it leaves you in suburban St. Paul. What I'm suggesting is that you pick someplace far from here and go there. You're in a unique position to do so, given your financial situation and marital status."

"For how long?"

"At least a year." He looked at me inscrutably. His large face was made for such an expression; etched on King Tut's tomb, I believe it might have made even Howard Carter consider. "And if you do anything at the end of that year, Edgar, for God's sake - no, for your daughters' sake - make it look good."

He had nearly disappeared into the old sofa; now he began to struggle up again. I stepped forward to help him and he waved me away. He made it to his feet at last, wheezing more loudly than ever, and took up his briefcase. He looked down at me from his height of six and a half feet, those staring eyeballs with their yellowish corneas made even larger by his glasses, which had very thick lenses.

"Edgar, does anything make you happy?"

I considered the surface of this question (the only part that seemed safe) and said, "I used to sketch." It had actually been a little more than just sketching, but that was long ago. Since then, other things had intervened. Marriage, a career. Both of which were now going or gone.

"When?"

"As a kid."

I thought of telling him I'd once dreamed of art school - had even bought the occasional book of reproductions when I could afford to - and then didn't. In the last thirty years, my contribution to the world of art had consisted of little more than doodles while taking telephone calls, and it had probably been ten years since I'd bought the sort of picture-book that belongs on a coffee table where it can impress your friends.

"Since then?"

I considered lying - didn't want to seem like a complete fixated drudge - but stuck to the truth. One-armed men should tell the truth whenever possible. Wireman doesn't say that; I do. "No."

"Take it up again," Kamen advised. "You need hedges."

"Hedges," I said, bemused.

"Yes, Edgar." He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept. "Hedges against the night."

vi

A week or so later, Tom Riley came to see me again. By then the leaves had started to turn color, and I remember the clerks putting up Halloween posters in the Wal-Mart where I bought my first sketchpads since college... hell, maybe since high school.

What I remember most clearly about that visit is how embarrassed and ill-at-ease Tom seemed.

I offered him a beer and he took me up on it. When I came back from the kitchen, he was looking at a pen-and-ink I'd done - three palm trees silhouetted against an expanse of water, a bit of screened-in porch jutting into the left foreground. "This is pretty good," he said. "You do this?"

"Nah, the elves. They come in the night. Cobble my shoes, draw the occasional picture."

He laughed too hard and set the picture back down on the desk. "Don't look much like Minnesota, dere," he said, doing a Swedish accent.

"I copied it out of a book," I said. I had actually used a photograph from a Realtor's brochure. It had been taken from the so-called "Florida room" of Salmon Point, the place I had just leased for a year. I had never been in Florida, not even on vacation, but that picture had called to something deep in me, and for the first time since the accident, I felt actual anticipation. It was thin, but it was there. "What can I do for you, Tom? If it's about the business-"

"Actually, Pam asked me to come out." He ducked his head. "I didn't much want to, but I didn't feel I could say no. Old times' sake, you know."

"Sure." Tom went back to the days when The Freemantle Company had been nothing but three pickup trucks, a Caterpillar D9, and a lot of big dreams. "So talk to me. I'm not going to bite you."

"She's got herself a lawyer. She's going ahead with this divorce business."

"I never thought she wouldn't." It was the truth. I still didn't remember choking her, but I remembered the look in her eyes when she told me I had. And there was this: once Pam started down a road, she rarely turned around.

"She wants to know if you're going to be using Bozie."

I had to smile at that. William Bozeman III was a dapper, manicured, bow-tie-wearing sixty-five, wheeldog of the Minneapolis law-firm my company used, and if he knew Tom and I had been calling him Bozie for the last twenty years, he would probably have suffered an embolism.

"I hadn't thought about it. What's the deal, Tom? What exactly does she want?"

He drank off half his beer, then put the glass on a bookshelf beside my half-assed sketch. His cheeks had flushed a dull brick red. "She said she hopes it doesn't have to be mean. She said, 'I don't want to be rich, and I don't want a fight. I just want him to be fair to me and the girls, the way he always was, will you tell him that?' So I am." He shrugged.

I got up, went to the big window between the living room and the porch, and looked out at the lake. Soon I would be able to go out into my very own "Florida room," whatever that was, and look out at the Gulf of Mexico. I wondered if it would be any better, any different, than looking out at Lake Phalen. I thought I would settle for different, at least to begin with. Different would be a start. When I turned back, Tom Riley didn't look himself at all. At first I thought he was sick to his stomach, and then I realized he was struggling not to cry.