Stephen King - Duma Key

I picked up another piece of breakfast pastry. She opened her mouth obediently for it... but I hesitated. "What's in the red picnic basket, Elizabeth? The one in the attic?"

She seemed to think. And hard. Then: "Any old pipe-dip." She hesitated. Shrugged. "Any old pipe-dip Adie wants. Shoot!" And cackled. It was a startling, witchlike sound. I fed her the rest of her breakfast pastry, piece by piece, and asked no more questions.

xiv

When Wireman returned, he had a microcassette recorder. He handed it to me. "I hate to ask you to put that contract on tape, but I have to. At least the damn thing's only two pages long. I'd like it back this afternoon, if that's possible."

"It is. And if some of my pictures actually sell, you're on commission, my friend. Fifteen per cent. That should cover both legal and talent."

He sat back in his chair, laughing and groaning at the same time. " Por Dios! Just when I thought I couldn't sink any lower in life, I become a fucking talent agent! Excuse the language, Miss Eastlake."

She took no notice, only stared sternly out at the Gulf, where - at the farthest, bluest edge of vision - a tanker was dreaming north toward Tampa. It fascinated me at once. Boats on the Gulf had a way of doing that to me.

Then I forced my attention back to Wireman. "You're responsible for all of this, so-"

"Bull shit you say!"

" - so you have to be prepared to stand up and take your cut like a man."

"I'll take ten per cent, and that's probably too much. Take it, muchacho, or we start discussing eight."

"All right. Ten it is." I stuck out my hand and we shook over Elizabeth's crumb-littered tray. I put the little recorder in my pocket. "And you'll let me know if there's any change in your..." I pointed at his red eye. Which really wasn't as red as it had been.

"Of course." He picked up the contract. There were crumbs on it from Elizabeth's pastry. He brushed them off and handed it to me, then leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees, gazing at me over the imposing shelf of Elizabeth's bosom. "If I had another X-ray, what would it show? That the slug was smaller? That it was gone?"

"I don't know."

"Are you still working on my portrait?"

"Yes."

"Don't stop, muchacho. Please don't stop."

"I don't plan to. But don't get your hopes up too high, okay?"

"I won't." Then another thought struck him, one that was eerily similar to Dario's stated concern. "What do you think would happen if lightning struck Big Pink and it burned flat with that picture inside? What do you think would happen to me?"

I shook my head. I didn't want to think about it. I did think about asking Wireman if I could go up to El Palacio 's attic and look around for a certain picnic basket (it was RED ), then decided not to. I was sure it was there, less sure that I wanted to know what was in it. There were strange things kicking around Duma Key, and I had reason to believe they weren't all nice things, and what I wanted to do about most of them was nothing. If I left them alone, then maybe they'd leave me alone. I'd send most of my pictures off-island to keep everything nice and peaceful; sell them, too, if people wanted to buy them. I could watch them go without a pang. I was passionate about them while I was working on them, but when they were done, they meant no more to me than the hard semi circles of callus I'd sometimes sand off the sides of my great toes so my workboots wouldn't pinch at the end of a hot August day on some job site.

I'd hold back the Girl and Ship series, not out of any special affection, but because the series wasn't done; those paintings were still live flesh. I might show them and sell them later, but for now I meant to keep them right where they were, in Little Pink.

xv

There were no boats on the horizon by the time I got back to my place, and the urge to paint had passed for the time being. I used Wireman's micro-recorder instead, and put the sample contract on tape. I was no lawyer, but I'd seen and signed my share of legal paper in my other life, and this struck me as pretty simple.

That evening I took both the contract and the tape recorder back down to El Palacio. Wireman was making supper. Elizabeth was sitting in the China Parlor. The gimlet-eyed heron - which was a kind of unofficial housepet - stood on the walk outside, peering in with grim disapproval. The late-day sun filled the room with light. Yet it was not light. China Town was in disarray, the people and animals tumbled here and there, the buildings scattered to the four corners of the bamboo table. The pillared plantation-house was actually overturned. In her chair beside it, wearing her Captain Bligh expression, Elizabeth seemed to dare me to put things right.

Wireman spoke from behind me, making me jump. "If I try to set things back up in any kind of pattern, she sweeps it apart again. She's knocked a bunch to the floor and broken them."

"Are they valuable?"

"Some, but that's really not the point. When she's herself, she knows every one of them. Knows and loves. If she comes around and asks where Bo Peep is... or the Coaling Man... and I have to tell her she broke them, she'll be sad all day."

"If she comes around."

"Yes. Well."

"Think I'll head on home, Wireman."

"Gonna paint?"

"That's the plan." I turned to the disarray on the table. "Wireman?"

"Right here, vato."

"Why does she mess them up when she's like this?"

"I think... because she can't stand looking at what she's not."

I started to turn around. He put a hand on my shoulder.

"I'd just as soon you didn't look at me just now," he said. His voice was barely under control. "I'm not myself just now. Go out the front door and then cut back through the courtyard, if you want to take the beach. Would you do that?"

I did that. And when I got back, I worked on his portrait. It was all right. By which I suppose I mean it was good. I could see his face in there, wanting to come out. Starting to rise. There was nothing special, but that was fine. It was always best when it was nothing special. I was happy, I remember that. I was at peace. The shells murmured. My right arm itched, but very low and deep. The window giving on the Gulf was a rectangle of blackness. Once I went downstairs and ate a sandwich. I turned on the radio and found The Bone: J. Geils doing "Hold Your Lovin." J. Geils was nothing special, only great - a gift from the gods of rock and roll. I painted and Wireman's face rose a little more. It was a ghost now. It was a ghost haunting the canvas. But it was a harmless ghost. If I turned around, Wireman wouldn't be standing at the head of the stairs where Tom Riley had been standing, and down the beach at El Palacio de Asesinos, the left side of Wireman's world was still dark; it was just a thing I knew. I painted. The radio played. Below the music, the shells whispered.

At some point I quit, showered, and went to bed. There were no dreams.

When I think back to my time on Duma Key, those days in February and March when I was working on Wireman's portrait seem like the best days.

xvi

Wireman called the next day at ten. I was already at my easel. "Am I interrupting?"

"It's okay," I said. "I can use a break." This was a lie.

"We missed you this morning." A pause. "Well, you know. I missed you. She..."

"Yeah," I said.

"The contract's a bunny-hug. Very little to fuck with. It says you and the gallery split right down the middle, but I'm gonna cap that. Fifty-fifty shall not live after gross sales reach a quarter-mil. Once you pass that point, the split goes to sixty-forty, your favor."

"Wireman, I'll never sell a quarter of a million dollars' worth of paintings!"

"I'm hoping they'll feel exactly the same way, muchacho, which is why I'm also going to propose that the split goes to seventy-thirty at half a million."

"Plus a handjob from Miss Florida," I said feebly. "Get that in there."

"Noted. The other thing is this one-hundred-and-eighty-day termination clause. It ought to be ninety. I don't foresee a problem there, but I think it's interesting. They're afraid some big New York gallery is going to swoop down and carry you off."

"Anything else about the contract I should know?"

"Nope, and I sense you want to get back to work. I'll get in touch with Mr. Yoshida about these changes."

"Any change in your vision?"

"No, amigo. Wish I could say there was. But you keep painting."

I was taking the phone away from my ear when he said, "Did you happen to see the news this morning?"

"No, never turned it on. Why?"

"County coroner says Candy Brown died of congestive heart failure. Just thought you'd like to know."

xvii

I painted. It was a slow go but far from a no go. Wireman swam into existence around the window where his brain swam on the Gulf. It was a younger Wireman than the one in the photos clipped to the sides of my easel, but that was okay; I consulted them less and less, and on the third day I took them down altogether. I didn't need them anymore. Still, I painted the way I supposed most other artists painted: as if it were a job instead of some speed-trip insanity that came and went in spasms. I did it with the radio on, now always tuned to The Bone.

On the fourth day, Wireman brought me a revised contract and told me I could sign. He said Nannuzzi wanted to photograph my paintings and make slides for a lecture at the Selby Library in Sarasota in mid-March, a month before my show opened. The lecture, Wireman said, would be attended by sixty or seventy art patrons from the Tampa-Sarasota area. I told him fine and signed the contract.

Dario came out that afternoon. I was impatient for him to click his pix and be gone so I could go back to work. Mostly to make conversation, I asked him who would be giving the lecture at the Selby Library.

Dario looked at me with one eyebrow cocked, as if I had made a joke. "The one person in the world who is now conversant with your work," he said. "You."

I gaped at him. "I can't give a lecture! I don't know anything about art!"

He swept his arm at the paintings, which Jack and two part-timers from the Scoto were going to crate and transport to Sarasota the following week. They would remain crated, I assumed, in the storage area at the back of the gallery, until just before the show opened. "These say different, my friend."

"Dario, these people know stuff! They've taken courses! I'll bet most of them were art majors, for Christ's sake! What do you want me to do, stand up there and say duh?"

"That's pretty much what Jackson Pollock did when he talked about his work. Often while drunk. And it made him rich." Dario came over to me and took me by the stump. That impressed me. Very few people will touch the stump of a limb; it's as if they believe, down deep, that amputation might be catching. "Listen, my friend, these are important people. Not just because they have money, but because they're interested in new artists and each one knows three more who feel the same. After the lecture - your lecture - the talk will start. The kind of talk that almost always turns into that magical thing called 'buzz.'"

He paused, twiddling the strap of his camera and smiling a little.

"All you have to do is talk about how you began, and how you grew-"

"Dario, I don't know how I grew!"

"Then say that. Say anything! You're an artist, for God's sake!"

I left it at that. The threatened lecture still seemed distant to me, and I wanted him out of there. I wanted to turn on The Bone, pull the cloth off the painting on the easel, and go back to work on Wireman Looks West. Want the dirty-ass truth? The painting was no longer about some hypothetical magic trick. Now it was its own magic trick. I had become very selfish about it, and anything that might come after - a promised interview with Mary Ire, the lecture, the show itself - seemed to be not ahead of me but somehow far above me. The way rain on the surface of the Gulf must seem to a fish.