Duma Key - Stephen King

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 fucking 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 clusterfuck 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 fucking 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.

I don't think that endless, looping coverage and near-constant repetition of The Picture accounts for everything that followed, but did it play a part? Yeah.

Sure it did.

viii

It was past dark when I finally drove out of the parking garage and turned south on the Trail, headed back toward Duma. At first I hardly thought about Wireman; I was totally absorbed in my driving, somehow positive this time my luck would run out and we would have an accident. Once we got past the Siesta Key turnoffs and the traffic thinned a little, I started to relax. When we got to the Crossroads Mall, Wireman said: "Pull in."

"Need something at The Gap? Joe Boxers? Couple of tee-shirts with pockets?"

"Don't be a smartass, just pull in. Park under a light."

I parked under one of the lights and turned off the engine. I found it moderately creepy there, even though the lot was well over half full and I knew that Candy Brown had taken Tina Garibaldi on the other side, the loading dock side.

"I guess I can tell this once," Wireman said. "And you deserve to hear. Because you've been good to me. And you've been good for me."

"Right back atcha on that, Wireman."

His hands were resting on a slim gray folder he had carried out of the hospital with him. His name was on the tab. He raised one finger off it to still me without looking at me - he was looking straight ahead, at the Bealls Department Store anchoring this end of the mall. "I want to do this all at once. That work for you?"

"Sure."

"My story is like..." He turned to me, suddenly animated. His left eye was bright red and weeping steadily, but at least now it was pointing at me along with the other one. " Muchacho, have you ever seen one of those happynews stories about a guy winning two or three hundred million bucks on the Powerball?"

"Everyone has."

"They get him up on stage, they give him a great big fake cardboard check, and he says something which is almost always inarticulate, but that's good, in a situation like that inarticulate is the point, because picking all those numbers is fucking outrageous. Absurd. In a situation like that the best you can do is 'I'm going to fucking Disney World.' Are you with me so far?"

"So far, yeah."

Wireman went back to studying the people going in and out of Bealls, behind which Tina Garibaldi had met Candy Brown to her pain and sorrow.

"I won la loter a, too. Only not in a good way. In fact, I'd say it was just about the world's worst way. The lawyering I did in my other life was in Omaha. I worked for a firm called Fineham, Dooling, and Allen. Wits - of which I considered myself one - sometimes called it Findum, Fuckum, and Forgettum. It was actually a great firm, honest as the day. We did good business, and I was well positioned there. I was a bachelor, and by that time - I was thirty-seven - I thought that was probably my lot in life. Then the circus came to town, Edgar. I mean an actual circus, one with big cats and aerialists. Most of the performers were of other nationalities, as is often the case. The aerialist troupe and their families were from Mexico. One of the circus accountants, Julia Taveres, was also from Mexico. As well as keeping the books, she functioned as translator for the fliers."

He gave her name the Spanish pronunciation - Hulia.

"I did not go to the circus. Wireman does the occasional rock-show; he doesn't do circuses. But here's the lottery again. Every few days, the circus's clerical staff would draw slips from a hat to see who'd go shopping for the office snacks - chips, dips, coffee, soda. One day in Omaha, Julia drew the marked slip. While coming back across the supermarket parking lot to the van, a produce truck entering the lot at a high rate of speed struck a line of shopping carts - you know how they stack them up?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Bang! The carts roll thirty feet, strike Julia, break her leg. She was blindsided, had no chance to get out of the way. There happened to be a cop parked nearby, and he heard her screaming. He called an ambulance. He also Breathalyzed the produce truck driver. He blew a one-seven."

"Is that bad?"

"Yes, muchacho. In Nebraska, a one-seven means do not collect two hundred dollars, go directly to drunk. Julia, on the advice of the doctor who saw her in the Emergency Room, came to us. There were thirty-five lawyers in Findum, Fuckum, and Forgettum back then, and Julia's personal-injury case could have ended up with any one of fifteen. I got it. Do you see the numbers starting to roll into place?"

"Yes."

"I did more than represent her; I married her. She wins the suit and a large chunk of change. The circus rolls out of town, as circuses have a way of doing, only minus one accountant. Shall I tell you we were very much in love?"

"No," I said. "I hear it every time you say her name."

"Thank you, Edgar. Thanks." He sat there with his head bowed and his hands on his folder. Then he dragged a battered, bulging wallet from his hip pocket. I had no idea how he could bear to sit on such a rock. He flipped through the little windows meant for photographs and important documents, then stopped and slid out a photograph of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in a white sleeveless blouse. She looked about thirty. She was a heart-stopper.

" Mi Julia, " he said. I started to hand the picture back and he shook his head. He was choosing another photo. I dreaded to see it. I took it, though, when he handed it over.

It was Julia Wireman in miniature. That same dark hair, framing a pale, perfect face. Those same dark solemn eyes.

"Esmeralda," Wireman said. "The other half of my heart."

"Esmeralda," I said. I thought the eyes looking out of this photograph and the eyes looking up at Candy Brown in The Picture were almost the same. But maybe all children's eyes are the same. My arm began to itch. The one that had been burnt up in a hospital incinerator. I scratched at it and got my ribs. No news there.

Wireman took the pictures back, kissed each with a brief, dry ardor that was terrible to see, and returned them to their transparent sleeves. It took him a little while, because his hands had picked up a tremble. And, I suppose, he was having trouble seeing. "You actually don't even have to watch those old numbers, amigo. If you close your eyes you can hear them falling into place: Click and click and click. Some guys just strike lucky. Hotcha! " He popped his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The sound was shockingly loud in the little sedan.

"When Ez was three, Julia signed on part-time with an outfit called Work Fair, Immigration Solutions in downtown Omaha. She helped Spanish-speakers with and without green cards get jobs, and she helped start illegals who wanted citizenship on the right road. Just a little storefront outfit, low profile, but they did a lot more practical good than all the marches and sign-waving. In Wireman's humble opinion."

He pressed his hands against his eyes and drew a deep, shuddering breath. Then he let his palms fall on top of the file-folder with a thump.

"When it happened, I was in Kansas City on business. Julia spent Monday to Thursday mornings at Work Fair. Ez went to a daycare. A good one. I could have sued and broken that place - beggared the women who ran it - but I didn't. Because even in my grief, I understood that what happened to Esmeralda could have happened to anyone's child. It's all just la loter a, entiendes? Once our firm sued a Venetian blind company - I wasn't personally involved - when a baby lying in his crib got hold of the draw-cord, swallowed it, and choked to death. The parents won and there was a payout, but their baby was just as dead, and if it hadn't been the cord, it might have been something else. A Matchbox car. The ID tag off the dog's collar. A marble." Wireman shrugged. "With Ez it was the marble. She pulled it down her throat during playtime and choked to death."

"Wireman, Jesus! I'm so sorry!"

"She was still alive when they got her to the hospital. The woman from the daycare called both Julia's office and mine. She was babbling-crazy, insane. Julia went tearing out of Work Fair, got into her car, drove like hell. Three blocks from the hospital she had a head-on collision with an Omaha Public Works truck. She was killed instantly. By then our daughter had probably already been dead for twenty minutes. That Mary medallion you held for me... that was Julia's."

He fell silent, and the silence spun out. I didn't fill it; there's nothing to say to a story like that. Eventually he resumed.

"Just another version of the Powerball. Five numbers, plus that all-important Bonus Number. Click, click, click, click, click. And then clack for good measure. Did I think such a thing could happen to me? No, muchacho, never in my wildest, and God punishes us for what we can't imagine. My mother and dad begged me to go see a psychiatrist, and for a little while - eight months after the funerals - I did indeed go. I was tired of floating through the world like a balloon tethered three feet over my own head."

"I know the feeling," I said.

"I know you do. We checked into hell on different shifts, you and me. And out again, I suppose, although my heels are still smoking. How about yours?"

"Yeah."

"The psychiatrist... nice man, but I couldn't talk to him. With him I was inarticulate. With him I found myself grinning a lot. I kept expecting a cute chick in a bathing suit to trot out my big cardboard check. The audience would see it and applaud. And eventually a check did come. When we married, I'd taken out a joint life insurance policy. When Ez came, I added to it. So I really did win la loter a. Especially when you add in the compensation Julia received from the accident in the supermarket parking lot. Which brings us to this."

He held up the slim gray folder.

"The thought of suicide had been out there, circling closer and closer. The primary attraction was the idea that Julia and Esmeralda might also still be out there, waiting for me to catch up... but they might not wait forever. I'm not a conventionally religious man, but I think there's at least a chance that there is life after death, and that we survive as... you know, ourselves. But of course..." A wintry smile touched the sides of his mouth. "Mostly I was just depressed. I had a gun in my safe. A.22. I bought it for home protection after Esmeralda was born. One night I sat down with it at the dining room table, and... I believe you might know this part of the story, muchacho."