Duma Key(73)

"I think it was in the kitchen. Should I bring it?"

"Not on such a wet day," she said. "I thought I'd have you throw her in the pond, the pond would do, but I've changed my mind. It seems unnecessary on such a wet day. The quality of mercy is not strained, you know. It droppeth like the gentle rain."

"From heaven," I said.

"Yeah, yeah." She flapped her hand as if that part were of no matter.

"Why don't you arrange your chinas, Elizabeth? They're all mixed up today."

She cast a glance at the table, then looked at the window when an especially strong gust of wind slapped it with rain. "Fuck," she said. "I'm so f**king confused." And then, with a spite I would not have guessed she had in her: "They all died and left me to this."

I was the last one to be repulsed by her lapse into vulgarity; I understood it too well. Maybe the quality of mercy isn't strained, there are millions of us who live and die by the idea, but... we have things like this waiting. Yes.

She said, "He never should have got that thing, but he didn't know."

"What thing?"

"What thing," she agreed, and nodded. "I want the train. I want to get out of here before the big boy comes."

After that we both lapsed into silence. Elizabeth closed her eyes and appeared to doze off in her wheelchair.

For something to do, I got out of my own chair, which would have looked at home in a gentlemen's club, and approached the table. I plucked up a china girl and boy, looked at them, then put them aside. I scratched absently at the arm that wasn't there, studying the senseless litter before me. There had to be at least a hundred figures on the polished length of oak. Maybe two hundred. Among them was a china woman with an old-fashioned cap on a milkmaid's cap, I thought but I didn't want her, either. The cap was wrong, and besides, she was too young. I found another woman with long painted hair, and she was better. That hair was a little too long and a little too dark, but -

No it wasn't, because Pam had been to the beauty parlor, sometimes known as the Midlife Crisis Fountain of Youth.

I held the china figure, wishing I had a house to put her in and a book for her to read.

I tried to switch the figurine to my right hand perfectly natural because my right hand was there, I could feel it and it fell to the table with a clack. It didn't break, but Elizabeth's eyes opened. "Dick! Was that the train? Did it whistle? Did it cry?"

"Not yet," I said. "Why don't you nap a little?"

"Oh, you'll find it on the second floor landing," she said as if I had asked her something else, and closed her eyes again. "Call me when the train comes. I'm so sick of this station. And watch for the big boy, that cuntlicker could be anywhere."

"I will," I said. My right arm itched horribly. I reached into my back pocket, hoping my notebook was there. It wasn't. I'd left it on the kitchen counter back at Big Pink. But that made me think of the Palacio kitchen. There was a notepad for messages on the counter where I'd left the tin. I hurried back, snatched up the pad, stuck it between my teeth, then almost ran back to the China Parlor, already pulling my Uni-ball pen from my breast pocket. I sat down in my wingback chair and began to sketch the china doll rapidly while the rain whipped the windows and Elizabeth sat leaning in her wheelchair across the table from me, dozing with her mouth ajar. The wind-driven shadows of the palms flew around the walls like bats.

It didn't take long, and I realized something as I worked: I was pouring the itch out through the tip of the pen, decanting it onto the page. The woman in my drawing was the china figure, but she was also Pam. The woman was Pam, but she was also the china figure. Her hair was longer than when I'd last seen her, and spread out on her shoulders. She was sitting in

( the BURN, the CHAR )

a chair. What chair? A rocking chair. Hadn't been any such item in our house when I left it, but there was now. Something was on the table beside her. I didn't know what it was at first, but it emerged from the tip of the pen and became a box with printing across the top. Sweet Owen? Did it say Sweet Owen? No, it said Grandma's. My Uni-ball put something on the table beside the box. An oatmeal cookie. Pam's favorite. While I was looking at it, the pen drew the book in Pam's hand. Couldn't read the title because the angle was wrong. By now my pen was adding lines between the window and her feet. She'd said it was snowing, but now the snow was over. The lines were meant to be sunrays.

I thought the picture was finished, but apparently there were two more things. My pen moved to the far left side of the paper and added the television, quick as a flash. New television, flat screen like Elizabeth's. And below it -

The pen finished and fell away. The itch was gone. My fingers were stiff. On the other side of the long table, Elizabeth's doze had deepened into real sleep. Once she might have been young and beautiful. Once she might have been some young man's dream baby. Now she was snoring with her mostly toothless mouth pointed at the ceiling. If there's a God, I think He needs to try a little harder.

viii

I had seen a phone in the library as well as the kitchen, and the library was closer to the China Parlor. I decided neither Wireman nor Elizabeth would begrudge me a long-distance call to Minnesota. I picked up the phone, then paused with it curled to my chest. On a wall next to the suit of armor, highlighted by several cunning little pin-spots in the ceiling, was a display of antique weapons: a long-barreled muzzle-loader that looked of Revolutionary War vintage, a flintlock pistol, a derringer that would have been at home in a riverboat gambler's boot, a Winchester carbine. Mounted above the carbine was the gadget Elizabeth had been holding in her lap the day Ilse and I had seen her. To either side, making an inverted V, were four loads for the thing. You couldn't call them arrows; they were too short. Harpoonlets still seemed like the right word. Their tips were very bright, and looked very sharp.