Duma Key - Stephen King

"Shirley Jackson," I said. "Circa whenever."

"Yep. Anyway, Wireman was making a point, or trying to. Big Pink THEN!" He swept his arms out in an all-encompassing gesture. "Furnished in that popular Florida style known as Twenty-First Century Rent-A-House! Big Pink NOW! Furnished in Twenty-First Century Rent-A-House, plus Cybex treadmill upstairs, and..." He squinted. "Is that a Lucille Ball dolly I spy sitting on the couch in the Florida room?"

"That's Reba, the Anger-Management Queen. She was given to me by my psychologist friend, Kramer." But that wasn't right. My missing arm began to itch madly. For the ten thousandth time I tried to scratch it and got my still-mending ribs instead. "Wait," I said, and looked at Reba, who was staring out at the Gulf. I can do this, I thought. It's like where you put money when you want to hide it from the government.

Wireman was waiting patiently.

My arm itched. The one not there. The one that sometimes wanted to draw. It wanted to draw then. I thought it wanted to draw Wireman. Wireman and the bowl of fruit. Wireman and the gun.

Stop the weird shit, I thought.

I can do this, I thought.

You hide money from the government in offshore banks, I thought. Nassau. The Bahamas. The Grand Caymans. And Bingo, there it was.

"Kamen," I said. "That's his name. Kamen gave me Reba. Xander Kamen."

"Well now that we've got that solved," Wireman said, "let's look at the art."

"If that's what it is," I said, and led the way upstairs, limping on my crutch. Halfway up, something struck me and I stopped. "Wireman," I said, without looking back, "how did you know my treadmill was a Cybex?"

For a moment he said nothing. Then: "It's the only brand I know. Now can you resume the upward ascent on your own, or do you need a kick in the ass to get going?"

Sounds good, rings false, I thought as I started up the stairs again. I think you're lying, and you know what? I think you know I know.

iii

My work was leaning against the north wall of Little Pink, with the afternoon sun giving the paintings plenty of natural light. Looking at them from behind Wireman as he walked slowly down the line, sometimes pausing and once even backtracking to study a couple of canvases a second time, I thought it was far more light than they deserved. Ilse and Jack had praised them, but one was my daughter and the other my hired man.

When he reached the colored pencil drawing of the tanker at the very end of the line, Wireman squatted and stared at it for maybe thirty seconds with his forearms resting on his thighs and his hands hanging limply between his legs.

"What- " I began.

"Shhh," he said, and I endured another thirty seconds of silence. At last he stood up. His knees popped. When he turned to face me, his eyes looked very large, and the left one was inflamed. Water - not a tear - was running from the inner corner. He pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and wiped it away, the automatic gesture of a man who does the same thing a dozen or more times a day.

"Holy God," he said, and walked toward the window, stuffing the handkerchief back into his pocket.

"Holy God what?" I asked. "Holy God what?"

He stood looking out. "You don't know how good these are, do you? I mean you really don't."

"Are they?" I asked. I had never felt so unsure of myself. "Are you serious?"

"Did you put them in chronological order?" he asked, still looking out at the Gulf. The joking, joshing, wisecracking Wireman had taken a hike. I had an idea the one I was listening to now had a lot more in common with the one juries had heard... always assuming he'd been that kind of lawyer. "You did, didn't you? Other than the last couple, I mean. Those're obviously much earlier."

I didn't see how anything of mine could qualify as "much earlier" when I'd only been doing pictures for a couple of months, but when I ran my eye over them, I saw he was right. I hadn't meant to put them in chronological order - not consciously - but that was what I had done.

"Yes," I said. "Earliest to most recent."

He indicated the last four paintings - the ones I'd come to think of as my sunset-composites. To one I'd added a nautilus shell, to one a compact disc with the word Memorex printed across it (and the sun shining redly through the hole), to the third a dead seagull I'd found on the beach, only blown up to pterodactyl size. The last was of the shell-bed beneath Big Pink, done from a digital photograph. To this I had for some reason felt the urge to add roses. There were none growing around Big Pink, but there were plenty of photos available from my new pal Google.

"This last group of paintings," he said. "Has anyone seen these? Your daughter?"

"No. These four were done after she left."

"The guy who works for you?"

"Nope."

"And of course you never showed your daughter the sketch you made of her boyfr-"

"God, no! Are you kidding?"

"No, of course you didn't. That one has its own power, hasty as it obviously is. As for the rest of these things..." He laughed. I suddenly realized he was excited, and that was when I started to get excited. But cautious, too. Remember he used to be a lawyer, I told myself. He's not an art critic.

"The rest of these fucking things..." He gave that little yipping laugh again. He walked in a circle around the room, stepping onto the treadmill and over it with an unconscious ease that I envied bitterly. He put his hands in his graying hair and pulled it out and up, as if to stretch his brains.

At last he came back. Stood in front of me. Confronted me, almost. "Look. The world has knocked you around a lot in the last year or so, and I know that takes a lot of gas out of the old self-image airbag. But don't tell me you don't at least feel how good they are."

I remembered the two of us recovering from our wild laughing fit while the sun shone through the torn umbrella, putting little scars of light on the table. Wireman had said I know what you're going through and I had replied I seriously doubt that. I didn't doubt it now. He knew. This memory of the day before was followed by a dry desire - not a hunger but an itch - to get Wireman down on paper. A combination portrait and still life, Lawyer with Fruit and Gun.

He patted my cheek with one of his blunt-fingered hands. "Earth to Edgar. Come in, Edgar."

"Ah, roger, Houston," I heard myself say. "You have Edgar."

"So what do you say, muchacho? Am I lyin or am I dyin? Did you or did you not feel they were good when you were doing them?"

"Yeah," I said. "I felt like I was kicking ass and taking down names."

He nodded. "It's the simplest fact of art - good art almost always feels good to the artist. And the viewer, the committed viewer, the one who's really looking-"

"I guess that'd be you," I said. "You took long enough."

He didn't smile. "When it's good and the person who's looking opens up to it, there's an emotional bang. I felt the bang, Edgar."

"Good."

"You bet it is. And when that guy at the Scoto gets a load of these, I think he'll feel it, too. In fact, I'd bet on it."

"They're really not so much. Re-heated Dal , when you get right down to it."

He put an arm around my shoulders and led me toward the stairs. "I'm not going to dignify that. Nor are we going to discuss the fact that you apparently painted your daughter's boyfriend via some weird phantom-limb telepathy. I do wish I could see that tennis-ball picture, but what's gone is gone."

"Good riddance, too," I said.

"But you have to be very careful, Edgar. Duma Key is a powerful place for... certain kinds of people. It magnifies certain kinds of people. People like you."

"And you?" I asked. He didn't answer immediately, so I pointed at his face. "That eye of yours is watering again."

He took out the handkerchief and wiped it.

"Want to tell me what happened to you?" I asked. "Why you can't read? Why it weirds you out to even look at pictures too long?"

For a long time he said nothing. The shells under Big Pink had a lot to say. With one wave they said the fruit. With the next they said the gun. Back and forth like that. The fruit, the gun, the gun, the fruit.

"No," he said. "Not now. And if you want to draw me, sure. Knock yourself out."

"How much of my mind can you read, Wireman?"

"Not much," he said. "You caught a break there, muchacho. "

"Could you still read it if we were off Duma Key? If we were in a Tampa coffee shop, for instance?"

"Oh, I might get a tickle." He smiled. "Especially after spending over a year here, soaking up the... you know, the rays."

"Will you go to the gallery with me? The Scoto?"

" Amigo, I wouldn't miss it for all the tea in China."

iv

That night a squall blew in off the water and it rained hard for two hours. Lightning flashed and waves pounded the pilings under the house. Big Pink groaned but stood firm. I discovered an interesting thing: when the Gulf got a little crazy and those waves really poured in, the shells shut up. The waves lifted them too high for conversation.

I went upstairs at the boom-and-flash height of the festivities, and - feeling a little like Dr. Frankenstein animating his monster in the castle tower - drew Wireman, using a plain old Venus Black pencil. Until the very end, that was. Then I used red and orange for the fruit in the bowl. In the background I sketched a doorway, and in the doorway I put Reba, standing there and watching. I supposed Kamen would have said Reba was my representative in the world of the picture. Maybe s , maybe no. The last thing I did was pick up the Venus Sky to color in her stupid eyes. Then it was done. Another Freemantle masterpiece is born.

I sat looking at it while the diminishing thunder rolled away and the lightning flashed a few goodbye stutters over the Gulf. There was Wireman, sitting at a table. Sitting there, I had no doubt, at the end of his other life. On the table was a bowl of fruit and the pistol he kept either for target practice (back then his eyes had been fine) or for home protection or both. I had sketched the pistol and then scribbled it in, giving it a sinister, slightly blobby look. That other house was empty. Somewhere in that other house a clock was ticking. Somewhere in that other house a refrigerator was whining. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers. The scent was terrible. The sounds were worse. The march of the clock. The relentless whine of the refrigerator as it went on making ice in a wifeless, childless world. Soon the man at the table would close his eyes, stretch out his hand, and pick a piece of fruit from the bowl. If it was an orange, he'd go to bed. If it was an apple, he would apply the muzzle of the gun to his right temple, pull the trigger, and air out his aching brains.

It had been an apple.

v

Jack showed up the next day with a borrowed van and plenty of soft cloth in which to wrap my canvases. I told him I'd made a friend from the big house down the beach, and that he'd be going with us. "No problem," Jack said cheerfully, climbing the stairs to Little Pink and trundling a hand-dolly along behind him. "There's plenty of room in the - whoa!" He had stopped at the head of the stairs.

"What?" I asked.

"Are these ones new? They must be."

"Yeah." Nannuzzi from the Scoto had asked to see half a dozen pictures, no more than ten, so I'd split the difference and set out eight. Four were the ones that had impressed Wireman the night before. "What do you think?"

"Dude, these are awesome!"

It was hard to doubt his sincerity; he'd never called me dude before. I mounted a couple more steps and then poked his bluejeaned butt with the tip of my crutch. "Make room."

He stepped aside, pulling the dolly with him, so I could climb the rest of the way up to Little Pink. He was still staring at the pictures.

"Jack, is this guy at the Scoto really okay? Do you know?"

"My Mom says he is, and that's good enough for me." Meaning, I think, that it should be good enough for me, too. I guessed it would have to be. "She didn't tell me anything about the other partners - I think there are two more - but she says Mr. Nannuzzi's okay."

Jack had called in a favor for me. I was touched.

"And if he doesn't like these," Jack finished, "he's wack."

"You think so, huh?"

He nodded.

From downstairs, Wireman called cheerfully: "Knock-knock! I'm here for the field trip. Are we still going? Who's got my name-tag? Was I supposed to pack a lunch?"

vi

I had pictured a bald, skinny, professorial man with blazing brown eyes - an Italian Ben Kingsley - but Dario Nannuzzi turned out to be fortyish, plump, courtly, and possessed of a full head of hair. I was close on the eyes, though. They didn't miss a trick. I saw them widen once - slightly but perceptibly - when Wireman carefully unwrapped the last painting I'd brought, Roses Grow from Shells. The pictures were lined up against the back wall of the gallery, which was currently devoted mostly to photographs by Stephanie Shachat and oils by William Berra. Better stuff, I thought, than I could do in a century.

Although there had been that slight widening of the eyes.

Nannuzzi went down the line from first to last, then went again. I had no idea if that was good or bad. The dirty truth was that I had never been in an art gallery in my life before that day. I turned to ask Wireman what he thought, but Wireman had withdrawn and was talking quietly with Jack, both of them watching Nannuzzi look at my paintings.

Nor were they the only ones, I realized. The end of January is a busy season in the pricey shops along Florida's west coast. There were a dozen or so lookie-loos in the good-sized Scoto Gallery (Nannuzzi later used the far more dignified term "potential patrons"), eyeing the Shachat dahlias, William Berra's gorgeous but touristy oils of Europe, and a few eyepopping, cheerfully feverish sculptures I'd missed in the anxiety of getting my own stuff unwrapped - these were by a guy named David Gerstein.

At first I thought it was the sculptures - jazz musicians, crazy swimmers, throbbing city scenes - that were drawing the casual afternoon browsers. And some glanced at them, but most didn't even do that. It was my pictures they were looking at.

A man with what Floridians call a Michigan tan - that can mean skin that's either dead white or burned lobster red - tapped me on the shoulder with his free hand. The other was interlaced with his wife's fingers. "Do you know who the artist is?" he asked.

"Me," I muttered, and felt my face grow hot. I felt as if I were confessing to having spent the last week or so downloading pictures of Lindsay Lohan.

"Good for you!" his wife said warmly. "Will you be showing?"

Now they were all looking at me. Sort of the way you might look at a new species of puffer-fish that may or may not be the sushi du jour. That was how it felt, anyway.

"I don't know if I'll be snowing. Showing." I could feel more blood stacking up in my cheeks. Shame-blood, which was bad. Anger-blood, which was worse. If it spilled out, it would be anger at myself, but these people wouldn't know that.

I opened my mouth to pour out words, and closed it. Take it slow, I thought, and wished I had Reba. These people would probably view a doll-toting artist as normal. They had lived through Andy Warhol, after all.

Take it slow. I can do this.

"What I mean to say is I haven't been working long, and I don't know what the procedure is."