Duma Key(78)

"I'll be right there. Just hang on, Wireman. Stay where you are and hang on."

v

I hadn't had trouble with my own eyesight in weeks. The accident had caused some loss of peripheral vision and I tended to turn right to look at things I'd formerly picked up easily while looking straight ahead, but otherwise I was fine in the vision department. Going out to my anonymous rental Chevy, I wondered how I'd feel if that bloody redness started to creep over things again... or if I woke up some morning with nothing but a black hole on one side of my world. That made me wonder how Wireman could have managed a laugh. Even a little one.

I had my hand on the Malibu's doorhandle when I remembered him saying that Annmarie Whistler, whom he depended upon to stay with Elizabeth when he had to be gone for any length of time, was on a call. I hurried back to the house and called Jack's mobile, praying that he'd answer and that he could come. He did, and he could. That was one for the home team.

vi

I drove off the island for the first time that morning, and I broke my cherry in a big way, joining the bumper-to-bumper northbound traffic on the Tamiami Trail. We were bound for Sarasota Memorial Hospital. This was on the recommendation of Elizabeth's doctor, who I'd called over Wireman's weak protests. And now Wireman kept asking me if I was all right, if I was sure I could do this, if it wouldn't have been better to let Jack drive him so I could stay with Elizabeth.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Well, you look scared to death. I can see that much." His right eye had shifted in my direction. His left tried to follow suit, but without much success. It was bloodshot, slightly upturned, and welling careless tears. "You gonna freak out, muchacho?"

"No. Besides, you heard Elizabeth. If you hadn't gone on your own, she would have taken a broom and beaten you right out the door."

He hadn't meant "Miss Eastlake" to know there was anything wrong with him, but she'd been coming into the kitchen on her walker and overheard his end of our conversation. And besides, she had a little of what Wireman had. It went unacknowledged between us, but it was there.

"If they want to admit you-" I began.

"Oh, they'll want to, it's a f**king reflex with them, but it's not going to happen. If they could fix it, that would be different. I'm only going because Hadlock may be able to tell me that this isn't a permanent clusterf*ck but just a temporary blip on the radar." He smiled wanly.

"Wireman, what the hell's wrong with you?"

"All in good time, muchacho. What are you painting these days?"

"Never mind right now."

"Oh dear," Wireman said. "Looks like I'm not the only one who's tired of questions. Did you know that during the winter months, one out of every forty regular users of the Tamiami Trail will have a vehicular mishap? It's true. And according to something I heard on the news the other day, the chances of an asteroid the size of the Houston Astrodome hitting the earth are actually better than the chances of-"

I reached for the radio and said, "Why don't we have some music?"

"Good idea," he said. "But no f**king country."

For a second I didn't understand, and then I remembered the recently departed boot-scooters. I found the area's loudest, dumbest rock station, which styles itself The Bone. There Nazareth was screaming its way through "Hair of the Dog."

"Ah, puke-on-your-shoes rock and roll," Wireman said. "Now you're talkin, mi hijo. "

vii

That was a long day. Any day you drop your bod onto the conveyor belt of modern medicine especially as it's practiced in a city overstuffed with elderly, often ailing winter visitors you're in for a long day. We were there until six. They did indeed want to admit Wireman. He refused.

I spent most of my time in those purgatorial waiting rooms where the magazines are old, the cushions on the chairs are thin, and the TV is always bolted high in one corner. I sat, I listened to worried conversations compete with the TV-cackle, and every now and then I went to one of the areas where cell phones were allowed and used Wireman's to call Jack. Was she good? She was terrific. They were playing Parcheesi. Then reconfiguring China Town. The third time they were eating sandwiches and watching Oprah. The fourth time she was sleeping.

"Tell him she's made all her restroom calls," Jack said. "So far."

I did. Wireman was pleased to hear it. And the conveyor belt trundled slowly along.

Three waiting rooms, one outside General Admitting, where Wireman refused to even take a clipboard with a form on it possibly because he couldn't read it (I filled in the necessary information), one outside Neurology, where I met both Gene Hadlock, Elizabeth's doctor, and a pallid, goateed fellow named Herbert Principe. Dr. Hadlock claimed that Principe was the best neurologist in Sarasota. Principe did not deny this, nor did he say shucks. The last waiting room was on the second floor, home of Big Fancy Equipment. Here Wireman was taken not to Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a process with which I was very familiar, but instead to X-Ray at the far end of the hall, a room I imagined to be dusty and neglected in this modern age. Wireman gave me his Mary medallion to hold and I was left to wonder why Sarasota's best neurologist would resort to such old-fashioned technology. No one bothered to enlighten me.

The TVs in all three waiting rooms were tuned to Channel 6, where again and again I was subjected to The Picture: Candy Brown with his hand locked on Tina Garibaldi's wrist, her face turned up to his, frozen in a look that was terrible because anyone brought up in a halfway decent home knew, in his or her heart, exactly what it meant. You told your children be careful, very careful, that a stranger could mean danger, and maybe they believed it, but kids from nice homes had also been raised to believe safety was their birthright. So the eyes said Sure, mister, tell me what I'm supposed to do. The eyes said You're the adult, I'm the kid, so tell me what you want. The eyes said I've been raised to respect my elders. And most of all, what killed you, were the eyes saying I've never been hurt before.