Stephen King - Duma Key

"Are you worried about your guy and this Bridget?"

"No!" she said at once, and laughed. "He says she has a great voice and he's lucky to be singing with her - they have two songs now instead of just one - but she's shallow and stuck-up. Also, he wishes she'd pop some Certs before he has to, you know, share a mike with her."

I waited.

"Okay," Ilse said at last.

"Okay what?"

"Okay, I'm worried." A pause. "A little bit, because he's with her on a bus every day and on stage with her every night and I'm here." Another, longer pause. Then: "And he doesn't sound the same when I talk to him on the phone. Almost... but not quite."

"That could be your imagination."

"Yes. It could. And in any case, if something's going on - nothing is, I'm sure nothing is - but if something is, better now rather than after... you know, than after we..."

"Yes," I said, thinking that was so adult it hurt. I remembered finding the picture of them at the roadside stand with their arms around each other, and touching it with my missing right hand. Then rushing up to Little Pink with Reba clamped between my stump and my right side. A long time ago, that seemed. I love you, Punkin! "Smiley" had written, but the picture I'd done that day with my Venus colored pencils (they also seemed a long time ago) had somehow mocked the idea of enduring love: the little girl in her little tennis dress, looking out at the enormous Gulf. Tennis balls all around her feet. More floating in on the incoming waves.

That girl had been Reba, but also Ilse, and... who else? Elizabeth Eastlake?

The idea came out of nowhere, but I thought yes.

The water runs faster now, Elizabeth had said. Soon come the rapids. Do you feel that?

I felt it.

"Daddy, are you there?"

"Yes," I said again. "Honey, be good to yourself, okay? And try not to get too spun up. My friend down here says in the end we wear out our worries. I sort of believe that."

"You always make me feel better," she said. "That's why I call. I love you, Daddy."

"I love you too."

"How many bunches?"

How many years since she'd asked that? Twelve? Fourteen? It didn't matter, I remembered the answer.

"A million and one for under your pillow," I said.

Then I said goodbye and hung up and thought that if Carson Jones hurt my daughter, I'd kill him. The thought made me smile a little, wondering how many fathers had had the same thought and made the same promise. But of all those fathers, I might be the only one who could kill a heedless, daughter-hurting suitor with a few strokes of a paintbrush.

xi

Dario Nannuzzi and one of his partners, Jimmy Yoshida, came out the very next day. Yoshida was a Japanese-American Dorian Gray. Getting out of Nannuzzi's Jaguar in my driveway, dressed in faded straight-leg jeans and an even more faded Rihanna Pon De Replay tee-shirt, long black hair blowing in the breeze off the Gulf, he looked eighteen. By the time he got to the end of the walk, he looked twenty-eight. When he shook my hand, up close and personal, I could see the lines tattooed around his eyes and mouth and put him somewhere in his late forties.

"Pleased to meet you," he said. "The gallery is still buzzing over your visit. Mary Ire has been back three times to ask when we're going to sign you up."

"Come on in," I said. "Our friend down the beach - Wireman - has called me twice already to make sure I don't sign anything without him."

Nannuzzi smiled. "We're not in the business of cheating artists, Mr. Freemantle."

"Edgar, remember? Would you like some coffee?"

"Look first," Jimmy Yoshida said. "Coffee later."

I took a breath. "Fine. Come on upstairs."

xii

I'd covered my portrait of Wireman (which was still little more than a vague shape with a brain floating in it three-quarters of the way up), and my picture of Tina Garibaldi and Candy Brown had gone bye-bye in the downstairs closet (along with Friends with Benefits and the red-robe figure), but I had left my other stuff out. There was now enough to lean against two walls and part of a third; forty-one canvases in all, including five versions of Girl and Ship.

When their silence was more than I could bear, I broke it. "Thanks for the tip on that Liquin stuff. It's great. What my daughters would call da bomb."

Nannuzzi seemed not to have heard. He was going in one direction, Yoshida in the other. Neither asked about the big, sheet-draped canvas on the easel; I guessed that doing that might be considered poor etiquette in their world. Beneath us, the shells murmured. Somewhere, far off, a Jet-ski blatted. My right arm itched, but faint and very deep, telling me it wanted to paint but could wait - it knew the time would come. Before the sun went down. I'd paint and at first I would consult the photographs clipped to the sides of the easel and then something else would take over and the shells would grind louder and the chrome of the Gulf would change color, first to peach and then to pink and then to orange and finally to RED, and it would be well, it would be well, all manner of things would be well.

Nannuzzi and Yoshida met back by the stairs leading down from Little Pink. They conferred briefly, then came toward me. From the hip pocket of his jeans, Yoshida produced a business-size envelope with the words SAMPLE CONTRACT/SCOTO GALLERY neatly typed on the front. "Here," he said. "Tell Mr. Wireman we'll make any reasonable accommodation in order to represent your work."

"Really?" I asked. "Are you sure?"

Yoshida didn't smile. "Yes, Edgar. We're sure."

"Thank you," I said. "Thank you both." I looked past Yoshida to Nannuzzi, who was smiling. "Dario, I really appreciate this."

Dario looked around at the paintings, gave a little laugh, then lifted his hands and dropped them. "I think we should be the ones expressing appreciation, Edgar."

"I'm impressed by their clarity," Yoshida said. "And their... I don't know, but... I think... lucidity. These images carry the viewer along without drowning him. The other thing that amazes me is how fast you've worked. You're unbottling."

"I don't know that word."

"Artists who begin late are sometimes said to unbottle," Nannuzzi said. "It's as if they're trying to make up for lost time. Still... forty paintings in a matter of months... of weeks, really..."

And you didn't even see the one that killed the child-murderer, I thought.

Dario laughed without much humor. "Try not to let the place burn down, all right?"

"Yes - that would be bad. Assuming we make a deal, could I store some of my work at your gallery?"

"Of course," Nannuzzi said.

"That's great." Thinking I'd like to sign as soon as possible no matter what Wireman thought of the contract, just to get these pictures off the Key... and it wasn't fire I was worried about. Unbottling might be fairly common among artists who began later in life, but forty-one paintings on Duma Key were at least three dozen too many. I could feel their live presence in this room, like electricity in a bell jar.

Of course, Dario and Jimmy felt it, too. That was part of what made those fucking pictures so effective. They were catching.

xiii

I joined Wireman and Elizabeth for coffee at the end of El Palacio 's boardwalk the next morning. I was down to nothing but aspirin to get going, and my Great Beach Walks were now a pleasure instead of a challenge. Especially since the weather had warmed up.

Elizabeth was in her wheelchair with the remains of a breakfast pastry scattered across her tray. It looked to me as if he'd also managed to get some juice and half a cup of coffee into her. She was staring out at the Gulf with an expression of stern disapproval, looking this morning more like Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty than a Mafia don's daughter.

" Buenos d as, mi amigo, " Wireman said. And to Elizabeth: "It's Edgar, Miss Eastlake. He came for sevens. Want to say hello?"

"Piss shit head rat," she said. I think. In any case, she said it to the Gulf, which was still dark blue and mostly asleep.

"Still not so good, I take it," I said.

"No. She's gone down before and come back up, but she's never gone down so far."

"I still haven't brought her any of my pictures to look at."

"No point right now." He handed me a cup of black coffee. "Here. Get your bad self around this."

I passed him the envelope with the sample contract in it. As Wireman pulled it out, I turned to Elizabeth. "Would you like some poems later today?" I asked her.

Nothing. She only looked out at the Gulf with that stony frown: Captain Bligh about to order someone strapped to the foremast and flogged raw.

For no reason at all, I asked: "Was your father a skin diver, Elizabeth?"

She turned her head slightly and cut her ancient eyes in my direction. Her upper lip lifted in a dog's grin. There was a moment - it was brief, but seemed long - when I felt another person looking at me. Or not a person at all. An entity that was wearing Elizabeth Eastlake's old, doughy body like a sock. My right hand clenched briefly, and once more I felt nonexistent, too-long fingernails bite into a nonexistent palm. Then she looked back at the Gulf, simultaneously feeling across the tray until her fingers happened on a piece of the breakfast pastry, and I was calling myself an idiot who had to stop letting his nerves get the best of him. There were undoubtedly strange forces at work here, but not every shadow was a ghost.

"He was," Wireman said absently, unfolding the contract. "John Eastlake was a regular Ricou Browning - you know, the guy who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon back in the fifties."

"Wireman, you're an artesian well of useless information."

"Yeah, ain't I cool? Her old man didn't buy that harpoon pistol in a store, you know; Miss Eastlake says he had it commissioned. It probably ought to be in a museum."

But I didn't care about John Eastlake's harpoon gun, not just then. "Are you reading that contract?"

He dropped it on the tray and looked at me, bemused. "I was trying."

"And your left eye?"

"Nothing. But hey, no reason to be disappointed. The doctor said -"

"Do me a favor. Cover your left peeper."

He did.

"What do you see?"

"You, Edgar. One hombre muy feo. "

"Yeah, yeah. Cover the right one."

He did. "Now I just see black. Only..." He paused. "Maybe not as black." He dropped his hand again. "I can't tell for sure. These days I can't separate the truth from the wishful thinking." He shook his head hard enough to make his hair fly, then thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand.

"Take it easy."

"Easy for you to say." He sat silent for a few moments, then picked the piece of breakfast pastry out of Elizabeth's hand and fed it to her. When it was tucked safely away in her mouth, he turned to me. "Would you mind her while I go get something?"

"Happy to."

He jogged up the boardwalk and I was left with Elizabeth. I tried feeding her one of the remaining pieces of breakfast pastry and she nibbled it out of my hand, bringing back a fleeting recollection of a rabbit I'd had when I was seven or eight. Mr. Hitchens had been its name, although I no longer knew why - memory's a funny thing, isn't it? Her lips were toothless and soft, but not unpleasant. I stroked the side of her head, where her white hair - wiry, rather coarse - was pulled back toward a bun. It occurred to me that Wireman must comb that hair each morning, and make that bun. That Wireman must have dressed her this morning, including diapers, for surely she wasn't continent when she was like this. I wondered if he thought of Esmeralda when he pinned the pins or secured the ties. I wondered if he thought of Julia when he made the bun.