Duma Key(60)

At last he came back. Stood in front of me. Confronted me, almost. "Look. The world has knocked you around a lot in the last year or so, and I know that takes a lot of gas out of the old self-image airbag. But don't tell me you don't at least feel how good they are."

I remembered the two of us recovering from our wild laughing fit while the sun shone through the torn umbrella, putting little scars of light on the table. Wireman had said I know what you're going through and I had replied I seriously doubt that. I didn't doubt it now. He knew. This memory of the day before was followed by a dry desire not a hunger but an itch to get Wireman down on paper. A combination portrait and still life, Lawyer with Fruit and Gun.

He patted my cheek with one of his blunt-fingered hands. "Earth to Edgar. Come in, Edgar."

"Ah, roger, Houston," I heard myself say. "You have Edgar."

"So what do you say, muchacho? Am I lyin or am I dyin? Did you or did you not feel they were good when you were doing them?"

"Yeah," I said. "I felt like I was kicking ass and taking down names."

He nodded. "It's the simplest fact of art good art almost always feels good to the artist. And the viewer, the committed viewer, the one who's really looking-"

"I guess that'd be you," I said. "You took long enough."

He didn't smile. "When it's good and the person who's looking opens up to it, there's an emotional bang. I felt the bang, Edgar."

"Good."

"You bet it is. And when that guy at the Scoto gets a load of these, I think he'll feel it, too. In fact, I'd bet on it."

"They're really not so much. Re-heated Dal , when you get right down to it."

He put an arm around my shoulders and led me toward the stairs. "I'm not going to dignify that. Nor are we going to discuss the fact that you apparently painted your daughter's boyfriend via some weird phantom-limb telepathy. I do wish I could see that tennis-ball picture, but what's gone is gone."

"Good riddance, too," I said.

"But you have to be very careful, Edgar. Duma Key is a powerful place for... certain kinds of people. It magnifies certain kinds of people. People like you."

"And you?" I asked. He didn't answer immediately, so I pointed at his face. "That eye of yours is watering again."

He took out the handkerchief and wiped it.

"Want to tell me what happened to you?" I asked. "Why you can't read? Why it weirds you out to even look at pictures too long?"

For a long time he said nothing. The shells under Big Pink had a lot to say. With one wave they said the fruit. With the next they said the gun. Back and forth like that. The fruit, the gun, the gun, the fruit.

"No," he said. "Not now. And if you want to draw me, sure. Knock yourself out."

"How much of my mind can you read, Wireman?"

"Not much," he said. "You caught a break there, muchacho. "

"Could you still read it if we were off Duma Key? If we were in a Tampa coffee shop, for instance?"

"Oh, I might get a tickle." He smiled. "Especially after spending over a year here, soaking up the... you know, the rays."

"Will you go to the gallery with me? The Scoto?"

" Amigo, I wouldn't miss it for all the tea in China."

iv

That night a squall blew in off the water and it rained hard for two hours. Lightning flashed and waves pounded the pilings under the house. Big Pink groaned but stood firm. I discovered an interesting thing: when the Gulf got a little crazy and those waves really poured in, the shells shut up. The waves lifted them too high for conversation.

I went upstairs at the boom-and-flash height of the festivities, and feeling a little like Dr. Frankenstein animating his monster in the castle tower drew Wireman, using a plain old Venus Black pencil. Until the very end, that was. Then I used red and orange for the fruit in the bowl. In the background I sketched a doorway, and in the doorway I put Reba, standing there and watching. I supposed Kamen would have said Reba was my representative in the world of the picture. Maybe s , maybe no. The last thing I did was pick up the Venus Sky to color in her stupid eyes. Then it was done. Another Freemantle masterpiece is born.

I sat looking at it while the diminishing thunder rolled away and the lightning flashed a few goodbye stutters over the Gulf. There was Wireman, sitting at a table. Sitting there, I had no doubt, at the end of his other life. On the table was a bowl of fruit and the pistol he kept either for target practice (back then his eyes had been fine) or for home protection or both. I had sketched the pistol and then scribbled it in, giving it a sinister, slightly blobby look. That other house was empty. Somewhere in that other house a clock was ticking. Somewhere in that other house a refrigerator was whining. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers. The scent was terrible. The sounds were worse. The march of the clock. The relentless whine of the refrigerator as it went on making ice in a wifeless, childless world. Soon the man at the table would close his eyes, stretch out his hand, and pick a piece of fruit from the bowl. If it was an orange, he'd go to bed. If it was an apple, he would apply the muzzle of the gun to his right temple, pull the trigger, and air out his aching brains.

It had been an apple.

v

Jack showed up the next day with a borrowed van and plenty of soft cloth in which to wrap my canvases. I told him I'd made a friend from the big house down the beach, and that he'd be going with us. "No problem," Jack said cheerfully, climbing the stairs to Little Pink and trundling a hand-dolly along behind him. "There's plenty of room in the whoa!" He had stopped at the head of the stairs.