Stephen King - Duma Key

“Lennon-McCartney,” I said. “1968. And don’t tell me I’m wrong on that one.”

He didn’t tell me anything. Not for a long time. But I could hear him breathing. Then, at last, he said: “Did you do something, Edgar? Tell Wireman. Tell your Daddy.”

I thought about telling him I hadn’t done a damn thing. Then I considered him checking his X-ray folder and finding one was gone. I also considered my sandwich, wounded but far from dead. “What about your vision? Any change there?”

“Nope, the left lamp is still out. And according to Principe, it ain’t coming back. Not in this life.”

Shit . But hadn’t part of me known the job wasn’t done? This morning’s diddling with Sharpie and Cardboard had been nothing like the previous night’s full-blown orgasm. I was tired. I didn’t want to do anything more today but sit and stare at the Gulf. Watch the sun go down in the caldo largo without painting the fucking thing. Only this was Wireman. Wireman, goddammit.

“You still there, muchacho ?”

“Yes,” I said. “Can you get Annmarie Whistler for a few hours later today?”

“Why? What for?”

“So you can sit for your portrait,” I said. “If your eye’s still out, I guess I need the actual Wireman.”

“You did do something.” His voice was low. “Did you paint me already? From memory?”

“Check the folder with your X-rays in it,” I said. “Be here around four. I want to take a nap first. And bring something to eat. Painting makes me hungry.” I thought of amending that to a certain kind of painting, and didn’t. I thought I’d said enough.

I wasn’t sure I’d be able to nap, but I did. The alarm roused me at three o’clock. I went up to Little Pink and considered my store of blank canvases. The biggest was five feet long by three wide, and this was the one I chose. I pulled my easel’s support-strut to full extension and set up the blank canvas longways. That blank shape, like a white coffin on end, touched off a little flutter of excitement in my stomach and down my right arm. I flexed those fingers. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them opening and closing. I could feel the nails digging into the palm. They were long, those nails. They had grown since the accident and there was no way to cut them.

I was cleaning my brushes when Wireman came striding up the beach in his shambling, bearlike gait, the peeps fleeing before him. He was wearing jeans and a sweater, no coat. The temperatures had begun to moderate.

He hollered a hello at the front door and I yelled for him to come on upstairs. He got most of the way and saw the big canvas on the easel. “Holy shit, amigo, when you said portrait, I got the idea we were talking about a headshot.”

“That’s sort of what I’m planning,” I said, “but I’m afraid it’s not going to be that realistic. I’ve already done a little advance work. Take a look.”

The pilfered X-ray and Sharpie sketch were on the bottom shelf of my workbench. I handed them to Wireman, then sat down again in front of my easel. The canvas waiting there was no longer completely blank and white. Three-quarters of the way up was a faintly drawn rectangle. I had made it by holding the shirt-cardboard against the canvas and running a No. 2 pencil around the edge.

Wireman said nothing for almost two minutes. He kept looking back and forth between the X-ray and the picture I had drawn from it. Then, in a voice almost too low to hear: “What are we talking about here, muchacho ? What are we saying?”

“We’re not,” I said. “Not yet. Hand me the shirt-cardboard.”

“Is that what this is?”

“Yes, and be careful. I need it. We need it. The X-ray doesn’t matter anymore.”

He passed me the shirt-cardboard picture with a hand that wasn’t quite steady.

“Now go over to the wall where the finished pictures are. Look at the one on the far left. In the corner.”

He went over, looked, and recoiled. “Holy shit! When did you do this?”

“Last night.”

He picked it up and turned it toward the light streaming through the big window. He looked at Tina, who was looking up at the mouthless, noseless Candy Brown.

“No mouth, no nose, Brown dies, case closed,” Wireman said. His voice was no more than a whisper. “Jesus Christ, I’d hate to be the maricón de playa who kicked sand in your face.” He set the picture back down and stepped away from it… carefully, like it might explode if it were joggled. “What got into you? What possessed you?”

“Goddam good question,” I said. “I almost didn’t show you. But… considering what we’re up to here…”

“What are we up to here?”

“Wireman, you know.”

He staggered a little bit, as if he were the one with the bad leg. And he had come over sweaty. His face shone with it. His left eye was still red, but maybe not as red. Of course that might only have been the Department of Wishful Thinking. “Can you do it?”

“I can try,” I said. “If you want me to.”

He nodded, then stripped off his sweater. “Go for it.”

“I need you by the window, so the light falls on your face nice and strong as the sun starts going down. There’s a stool in the kitchen you can sit on. How long have you got Annmarie for?”

“She said she could stay until eight, and she’ll give Miss Eastlake dinner. I brought us lasagna. I’ll put it in your oven at five-thirty.”

“Good.” By the time the lasagna was ready, the light would be gone, anyway. I could take some digital photos of Wireman, clip them to the easel, and work from those. I was a fast worker, but I already knew this was going to be a longer process — days, at least.

When Wireman came back upstairs with the stool, he stopped dead. “What are you doing ?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Cutting a hole in a perfectly good canvas.”

“Go to the head of the class.” I laid aside the cut rectangle, then picked up the cardboard insert with the floating brain on it. I went behind the easel. “Help me glue this in place.”

“When did you figure all this out, vato ?”

“I didn’t,” I said.

“You didn’t?” He was looking at me through the canvas, like a thousand lookie-loos I’d seen peering through a thousand peepholes at construction sites in my other life.

“Nope. Something’s kind of telling me as I go along. Come around to this side.”

With Wireman’s help, the rest of the prep only took a couple of minutes. He blocked the rectangle with the shirt-cardboard. I fished a little tube of Elmer’s Glue from my breast pocket, and began fixing it in place. When I came back around, it was perfect. Looked that way to me, anyway.

I pointed at Wireman’s forehead. “This is your brain,” I said. Then I pointed at my easel. “This is your brain on canvas.”

He looked blank.

“It’s a joke, Wireman.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

We ate like football players that night. I asked Wireman if he was seeing any better and he shook his head regretfully. “Things are still mighty black on the left side of my world, Edgar. Wish I could tell you different, but I can’t.”

I played him Nannuzzi’s message. Wireman laughed and pumped his fist. It was hard not to be touched by his pleasure, which bordered on glee. “You’re on your way, muchacho — this is your other life for sure. Can’t wait to see you on the cover of Time .” He held his hands up, as if framing a cover.

“There’s only one thing about it that worries me,” I said… and then had to laugh. Actually a lot of things about it worried me, including the fact that I had not the slightest idea what I was letting myself in for. “My daughter may want to come. The one who visited me down here.”