Stephen King - Duma Key

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. ”

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.

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 lotería, 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.”