Stephen King - Duma Key

“Eventually I’ll walk down and say hi,” I said. “No golf cart for the kid. Dr. Kamen said to set goals, and I’m setting em.”

“You didn’t need a shrink to tell you about setting goals, Daddy,” she said, still peering south. “Which house do they belong to? The big one that looks like a rancho in a western movie?”

“I’m pretty sure, yes.”

“And no one else lives here?”

“Not now. Jack says there are folks who rent some of the other houses in January and February, but for now I guess it’s just me and them. The rest of the island is pure botanical pornography. Plants gone wild.”

“My God, why ?”

“Haven’t the slightest idea. I mean to find out — to try, anyway — but for now I’m still trying to get my feet under me. And I mean that literally.”

We were walking back to the house now. Ilse said, “An almost empty island in the sun — there should be a story. There almost has to be a story, don’t you think?”

“I do,” I said. “Jack Cantori offered to snoop, but I told him not to bother — thinking I might look on my own.” I snagged my crutch, fitted my arm into its two steel sleeves — always comforting after spending time on the beach without its support — and started thumping up the walk. But Ilse wasn’t with me. I turned and looked back. She was facing south, her hand once more shading her eyes. “Coming, hon?”

“Yes.” There was one more flash from down the beach — the breakfast tray. Or a coffeepot. “Maybe they know the story,” Ilse said, catching up.

“Maybe they do.”

She pointed to the road. “What about that? How far does it go?”

“Don’t know,” I said.

“Would you like to drive down it this afternoon and see?”

“Are you willing to pilot a Chevy Malibu from Hertz?”

“Sure,” she said. She put her hands on her slim hips, pretended to spit, and affected a Southern drawl. “I’ll drive until yonder road runs out.”

But we didn’t get even close to the end of Duma Road. Not that day. Our southward exploration began well, ended badly.

We both felt fine when we left. I’d had an hour off my feet, plus my midday Oxycontin. My daughter had changed to shorts and a halter top, and laughed when I insisted on anointing her nose with zinc oxide. “Bobo the clown,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror. She was in great spirits, I was happier than I’d been since the accident, so what happened to us that afternoon came as a total surprise. Ilse blamed lunch — maybe bad mayo in the tuna salad — and I let her, but I don’t think it was bad mayo at all. Bad mojo, more like it.

The road was narrow, bumpy, and badly patched. Until we reached the place where it ran into the overgrowth that covered most of the Key, it was also ridged with bone-colored sand dunes that had blown inland from the beach. The rental Chevy thudded gamely over most of these, but when the road curved a little closer to the water — this was just before we reached the hacienda Wireman called Palacio de Asesinos — the drifts grew thicker and the car waddled instead of bumping. Ilse, who had learned to drive in snow country, handled this without complaint or comment.

The houses between Big Pink and El Palacio were all in the style I came to think of as Florida Pastel Ugly. Most were shuttered and the driveways of all but one were gated shut. The driveway of the one exception had been barred with two sawhorses, bearing this faded stenciled warning: MEAN DOGS MEAN DOGS. Beyond the Mean Dog house, the grounds of the hacienda commenced. They were enclosed by a sturdy faux-stucco wall about ten feet high and topped with orange tile. More orange tile — the roof of the mansion inside — rose in slants and angles against the blameless blue sky.

“Jumping jeepers,” Ilse said — that was one she must have gotten from her Baptist boyfriend. “This place belongs in Beverly Hills.”

The wall ran along the east side of the narrow, buckled road for at least eighty yards. There weren’t any NO TRESPASSING signs; given that wall, the owner’s stance on door-to-door salesmen and proselytizing Mormons seemed perfectly clear. In the center was a two-piece iron gate, standing ajar. And sitting just inside its open halves —

“There she is,” I murmured. “The lady from down the beach. Holy shit, it’s The Bride of the Godfather.”

“ Daddy! ” Ilse said, laughing and shocked at the same time.

The woman was seriously old, mid-eighties at least. She was in her wheelchair. An enormous pair of blue Converse Hi-Tops were propped up on the chrome footrests. Although the temperature was in the mid-seventies, she wore a gray two-piece sweatsuit. In one gnarled hand a cigarette smoldered. Clapped on her head was the straw hat I’d seen on my walks, but on my walks I hadn’t realized how enormous it was — not just a hat but a battered sombrero. Her resemblance to Marlon Brando at the end of The Godfather — when he’s playing with his grandson in the garden — was unmistakable. There was something in her lap that did not quite look like a pistol.

Ilse and I both waved. For a moment she did nothing. Then she raised one hand, palm out, in an Indian How gesture, and broke into a sunny and nearly toothless grin. What seemed like a thousand wrinkles creased her face, turning her into a benign witch. I never even glimpsed the house behind her; I was still trying to cope with her sudden appearance, her cool blue sneakers, her delta of wrinkles, and her —

“Daddy, was that a gun ?” Ilse was looking into the rear-view mirror, wide-eyed. “Did that old lady have a gun ?”

The car was drifting, and I saw a real possibility of clipping the hacienda’s far corner. I touched the wheel and made a course correction. “I think so. Of a kind. Mind your driving, honey. There ain’t much road in this road.”

She faced front again. We’d been driving in bright sunshine, but that ended with the hacienda’s wall. “What do you mean, of a kind?”

“It looked like… I don’t know, a crossbow-pistol. Or something. Maybe she shoots snakes with it.”

“Thank God she smiled,” Ilse said. “And it was a great smile, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. “It was.”

The hacienda was the last house on Duma Key’s open north end. Beyond it, the road swung inland and the foliage crowded up in a way I found first interesting, then awesome, then claustrophobic. The masses of greenery towered to a height of twelve feet at least, the round leaves streaked a dark vermillion that looked like dried blood.

“What is that stuff, Daddy?”

“Seagrape. The green stuff with the yellow flowers is called wedelia. It grows everywhere. There’s also rhododendron. The trees are mostly just slash pine, I think, although—”

She slowed to a crawl and pointed to the left, craning to look up through the corner of the windshield to do so. “Those are palms of some kind. And look… right up there…”

The road bent still farther inland, and here the trunks flanking the road looked like knotted masses of gray rope. Their roots had buckled the tar. We’d be able to get over now, I judged, but cars passing this way a few years hence? No way.

“Strangler fig,” I said.

“Nice name, right out of Alfred Hitchcock. And they just grow wild?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She bumped the Chevy carefully over the tunneling roots and drove on. We were down to no more than five miles an hour. There was more strangler fig growing out of the masses of seagrape and rhododendron. The high growth cast the road into deep shadow. It was impossible to see any distance at all on either side. Except for an occasional wedge of blue or errant sunray, even the sky was gone. And now we began to see sprays of sawgrass and tough, waxy fiddlewood growing right up through cracks in the tar.