Duma Key(76)

Libbit says I will, but do you promise I can have the china dolly?

Daddy says Any doll is yours fair salvage.

The muse saw it and the girl painted it. So their future is set.

Chapter 9 Candy Brown

i

Two nights later I painted the ship for the first time.

I called it Girl and Ship to begin with, then Girl and Ship No. 1, although neither was its real name; its real name was Ilse and Ship No. 1. It was the Ship series even more than what happened to Candy Brown that decided me on whether or not to show my work. If Nannuzzi wanted to do it, I'd go along. Not because I was seeking what Shakespeare called "the bubble reputation" (I owe Wireman for that one), but because I came to understand that Elizabeth was right: it was better not to let work pile up on Duma Key.

The Ship paintings were good. Maybe great. They certainly felt that way when I finished them. They were also bad, powerful medicine. I think I knew that from the first one, executed during the small hours of Valentine's Day. During the last night of Tina Garibaldi's life.

ii

The dream wasn't exactly a nightmare, but it was vivid beyond my power to describe in words, although I captured some of the feeling on canvas. Not all, but some. Enough, maybe. It was sunset. In that dream and all the ones which followed, it was always sunset. Vast red light filled the west, reaching high to heaven, where it faded first to orange, then to a weird green. The Gulf was nearly dead calm, with only the smallest and glassiest of rollers crossing its surface like respiration. In the reflected sunset glare, it looked like a huge socket filled with blood.

Silhouetted against that furnace light was a three-masted derelict. The ship's rotted sails hung limp with red fire glaring through the holes and rips. There was no one alive on board. You only had to look to know that. There was a feeling of hollow menace about the thing, as though it had housed some plague that had burned through the crew, leaving only this rotting corpse of wood, hemp, and sailcloth. I remember feeling that if a gull or pelican flew over it, the bird would drop dead on the deck with its feathers smoking.

Floating about forty yards away was a small rowboat. Sitting in it was a girl, her back to me. Her hair was red, but the hair was false no live girl had tangled yarn hair like that. What gave away her identity was the dress she wore. It was covered with tic-tac-toe grids and the printed words I WIN, YOU WIN, over and over. Ilse had that dress when she was four or five... about the age of the twin girls in the family portrait I'd seen on the second floor landing of El Palacio de Asesinos.

I tried to shout, to warn her not to go near the derelict. I couldn't. I was helpless. In any case it didn't seem to matter. She only sat there in her sweet little rowboat on the mild red rollers, watching and wearing Illy's tic-tac-toe dress.

I fell out of my bed, and on my bad side. I cried out in pain and rolled over on my back, listening to the waves from outside and the soft grinding of the shells under the house. They told me where I was but did not comfort me. I win, they said. I win, you win. You win, I win. The gun, I win. The fruit, you win. I win, you win.

My missing arm seemed to burn. I had to put a stop to it or go crazy, and there was only one way to do that. I went upstairs and painted like a lunatic for the next three hours. I had no model on my table, no object in view out my window. Nor did I need any. It was all in my head. And as I worked, I realized this was what all the pictures had been struggling toward. Not the girl in the rowboat, necessarily; she was probably just an added attraction, a toehold in reality. It was the ship I had been after all along. The ship and the sunset. When I thought back, I realized the irony of that: Hello, the pencil-sketch I'd made on the day I came, had been the closest.

iii

I tumbled into bed around three-thirty and slept until nine. I woke feeling refreshed, cleaned out, brand-new. The weather was fine: cloudless and warmer than it had been in a week. The Baumgartens were getting ready to return north, but I had a spirited game of Frisbee with their boys on the beach before they left. My appetite was high, my pain-level low. It was nice to feel like one of the guys again, even for an hour.

Elizabeth's weather had also cleared. I read her a number of poems while she arranged her chinas. Wireman was there, caught up for once and in good spirits. The world felt fine that day. It occurred to me only later that George "Candy" Brown might well have been abducting twelve-year-old Tina Garibaldi at the same time I was reading Richard Wilbur's poem about laundry, "Love Calls Us to the Things of the World," to Elizabeth. I chose it because I happened to see an item in that day's paper saying it had become something of a Valentine's Day favorite. The Garibaldi kidnapping happened to be recorded. It occurred at exactly 3:16 PM, according to the time-stamp on the tape, and that would have been just about the time I paused to sip from my glass of Wireman's green tea and unfold the Wilbur poem, which I had printed off the Internet.

There were closed-circuit cameras installed to watch the loading-dock areas behind the Crossroads Mall. To guard against pilferage, I suppose. What they caught in this case was the pilferage of a child's life. She comes into view crossing right to left, a slim kid dressed in jeans with a pack on her back. She was probably planning to duck into the mall before going the rest of the way home. On the tape, which the TV stations replayed obsessively, you see him emerge from a rampway and take her by the wrist. She turns her face up to his and appears to ask him a question. Brown nods in reply and leads her away. At first she's not struggling, but then just before they disappear behind a Dumpster she attempts to pull free. But he's still holding her firmly by the wrist when they disappear from the camera's view. He killed her less than six hours later, according to the county medical examiner, but judging by the terrible evidence of her body, those hours must have seemed very long to that little girl, who never harmed anyone. They must have seemed endless.