Stephen King - Duma Key

I told her, for instance, about my morning walks along the beach, and that I was walking a little farther each day, but not about the Numbers Game, because it sounded too silly… or maybe obsessive-compulsive is the term I actually want.

Just thirty-eight steps from Big Pink on that first morning. On my second one I helped myself to another huge glass of orange juice and then walked south along the beach again. This time I walked forty-five steps, which was a long distance for me to totter crutchless in those days. I managed by telling myself it was really only nine. That sleight-of-mind is the basis of the Numbers Game. You walk one step, then two steps, then three, then four, rolling your mental odometer back to zero each time until you reach nine. And when you add the numbers one through nine together, you come out with forty-five. If that strikes you as nuts, I won’t argue.

The third morning I coaxed myself into walking ten steps from Big Pink sans crutch, which is really fifty-five, or about ninety yards, round-trip. A week later and I was up to seventeen… and when you add all those numbers, you come out with a hundred and fifty-three. I’d get to the end of that distance, look back at my house, and marvel at how far away it looked. I’d also sag a little at the thought of having to walk all the way back again.

You can do it, I’d tell myself. It’s easy. Just seventeen steps, is all.

That’s what I’d tell myself, but I didn’t tell Ilse.

A little farther each day, stamping out footprints behind me. By the time Santa Claus showed up at the Beneva Road Mall, where Jack Cantori sometimes took me shopping, I realized an amazing thing: all my southbound footprints were clear. The right sneaker-print didn’t start to drag and blur until I was on my way back.

Exercise becomes addictive, and rainy days didn’t put a stop to mine. The second floor of Big Pink was one large room. There was an industrial-strength rose-colored carpet on the floor and a huge window facing the Gulf of Mexico. There was nothing else. Jack suggested that I make a list of furniture I wanted up there, and said he’d get it from the same rental place where he’d gotten the downstairs stuff… assuming the downstairs stuff was all right. I assured him it was fine, but said I wouldn’t need much on the second floor. I liked the emptiness of that room. It called to my imagination. What I wanted, I said, was three things: a plain straight-backed chair, an artist’s easel, and a Cybex treadmill. Could Jack provide those things? He could and did. In three days. From then until the end it was the second floor for me when I wanted to draw or paint, and it was the second floor for exercise on days when the weather closed in. The single straight-backed chair was the only real piece of furniture that ever lived up there during my tenure in Big Pink.

In any case, there weren’t that many rainy days — not for nothing is Florida called the Sunshine State. As my southward strolls grew longer, the speck or specks I’d seen on that first morning eventually resolved into two people — at least, on most days it was two. One was in a wheelchair and wearing what I thought was a straw hat. The other pushed her, then sat beside her. They appeared on the beach around seven AM. Sometimes the one who could walk left the one in the wheelchair for a little while, only to come back with something that glittered in the early sun. I suspected a coffee pot, a breakfast tray, or both. I further suspected they came from the huge hacienda with the acre or so of orange tiled roof. That was the last house visible on Duma Key before the road ran into the enthusiastic overgrowth that covered most of the island.

I couldn’t quite get used to the emptiness of the place. “It’s supposed to be very quiet,” Sandy Smith had told me, but I had still pictured the beach filling up by midday: couples sunning on blankets and slathering each other with tanning lotion, college kids playing volleyball with iPods strapped to their biceps, little kids in saggy swimsuits paddling at the edge of the water while Jet-Skis buzzed back and forth forty feet out.

Jack reminded me that it was only December. “When it comes to Florida tourism,” he said, “the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is Morgue City. Not as bad as August, but still pretty dead. Also…” He gestured with his arm. We were standing out by the mailbox with the red 13on it, me leaning on my crutch, Jack looking sporty in a pair of denim cut-offs and a fashionably tattered Tampa Devil Rays shirt. “It’s not exactly tourist country here. See any trained dolphins? What you got is seven houses, counting that big ’un down there… and the jungle. Where there’s another house falling apart, by the way. That’s according to some of the stories I’ve heard on Casey Key.”

“What’s with Duma, Jack? Nine miles of prime Florida real estate, a great beach, and it’s never been developed? What’s up with that?”

He shrugged. “Some kind of long-running legal dispute is all I know. Want me to see if I can find out?”

I thought about it, then shook my head.

“Do you mind it?” Jack looked honestly curious. “All the quiet? Because it’d get on my nerves a little, to tell you the God’s honest.”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.” And that was the truth. Healing is a kind of revolt, and as I think I’ve said, all successful revolts begin in secret.

“What do you do? If you don’t mind me asking?”

“Exercise in the mornings. Read. Sleep in the afternoons. And I draw. I may eventually try painting, but I’m not ready for that yet.”

“Some of your stuff looks pretty good for an amateur.”

“Thank you, Jack, that’s very kind.”

I didn’t know if kind was all he was being or if he was telling me his version of the truth. Maybe it didn’t matter. When it comes to things like pictures, it’s always just someone’s opinion, isn’t it? I only knew that something was going on for me. Inside me. Sometimes it felt a little scary. Mostly it felt pretty goddam wonderful.

I did most of my drawing upstairs, in the room I’d come to think of as Little Pink. The only view from there was of the Gulf and that flat horizon-line, but I had a digital camera and I took pictures of other things sometimes, printed them out, clipped them to my easel (which Jack and I turned so the strong afternoon light would strike across the paper), and drew that stuff. There was no rhyme or reason to those snapshots, although when I told Kamen this in an e-mail, he responded that the unconscious mind writes poetry if it’s left alone.

Maybe sí, maybe no .

I drew my mailbox. I drew the stuff growing around Big Pink, then had Jack buy me a book — Common Plants of the Florida Coast — so I could put names to my pictures. Naming seemed to help — to add power, somehow. By then I was on my second box of colored pencils… and I had a third waiting in the wings. There was aloe vera; sea lavender with its bursts of tiny yellow flowers (each possessing a tiny heart of deepest violet); inkberry with its long spade-shaped leaves; and my favorite, sophora, which Common Plants of the Florida Coast also identified as necklace-bush, for the tiny podlike necklaces that grow on its branches.

I drew shells, too. Of course I did. There were shells everywhere, an eternity of shells just within my limited walking distance. Duma Key was made of shells, and soon I’d brought back dozens.

And almost every night when the sun went down, I drew the sunset. I knew sunsets were a cliché, and that’s why I did them. It seemed to me that if I could break through that wall of been-there-done-that even once, I might be getting somewhere. So I piled up picture after picture, and none of them looked like much. I tried overlaying Venus Yellow with Venus Orange again, but subsequent efforts didn’t work. The sullen furnace-glow was always missing. Each sunset was only a penciled piece of shit where the colors said I’m trying to tell you the horizon’s on fire . You could undoubtedly have bought forty better ones at any sidewalk art show on a Saturday in Sarasota or Venice Beach. I saved some of those drawings, but I was so disgusted with most of them that I threw them away.