Stephen King - Duma Key

“Slow down, Wireman, I can barely make you out.”

He didn’t slow down. Maybe he couldn’t. “A pain went through my bad eye at the height of the storm… pain like you wouldn’t believe… like a hot wire… I thought we’d been struck by lightning, so help me God… I tore off the eyepatch… and I could see! Do you understand what I’m telling you? I can see! ”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand. That’s wonderful.”

“Was it you? It was, wasn’t it?”

I said, “Maybe. Probably. I’ve got a painting for you. I’ll bring it tomorrow.” I hesitated. “I’d take good care of it, amigo . I don’t think it matters what happens to them once they’re done, but I also thought Kerry was gonna beat Bush.”

He laughed wildly. “Oh, verdad, I heard that. Was it hard?”

A thought struck me before I could answer. “Was the storm hard on Elizabeth?”

“Oh man, awful. They always scare her, but this one… she was in terror. Screaming about her sisters. Tessie and Lo-Lo, the ones who drowned back in the nineteen-twenties. She even had me going for awhile there… but it’s over now. Are you okay? Was it hard?”

I looked at the scatterings of sand on the floor between the front door and the stairs. Surely no footprints there. If I thought I was seeing more than sand, that was just my fucking artistic imagination . “A little. But it’s all over now.”

I hoped that was true.

We talked for another five minutes… or rather Wireman talked. Babbled, actually. The last thing he said was that he was afraid to go to sleep. He was afraid he might wake up to discover he was blind in his left eye again. I told him I didn’t think he had to worry about that, wished him a good night, and hung up. What I was worried about was waking up in the middle of the night to discover Tessie and Laura — Lo-Lo, to Elizabeth — sitting on either side of my bed.

One of them perhaps holding Reba on her damp lap.

I took another beer and went back upstairs. I approached the easel with my head down, staring at my feet, then looked up quickly, as if hoping to catch the portrait by surprise. Part of me — a rational part — expected to see it defaced by paint splattered from hell to breakfast, a partial Wireman obscured by the daubs and blotches I’d thrown at the canvas during the thunderstorm, when my only real light had been lightning. The rest of me knew better. The rest of me knew that I’d been painting by some other light (just as blinded knife-throwers use some other sense to guide their hands). That part knew Wireman Looks West had turned out just fine, and that part was right.

In some ways it was the best work I did on Duma Key, because it was my most rational work — up until the end, remember, Wireman Looks West had been done in daylight. And by a man in his right mind. The ghost haunting my canvas had become a sweetheart of a face, young and calm and vulnerable. The hair was a fine clear black. A little smile lurked at the corners of the mouth; in the green eyes, as well. The eyebrows were thick and handsome. The forehead above them was broad, an open window where this man bent his thoughts toward the Gulf of Mexico. There was no slug in that visible brain. I could just as easily have taken away an aneurism or a malignant tumor. The cost of finishing the job had been high, but the bill had been paid.

The storm had faded to a few faint rumbles somewhere over the Florida panhandle. I thought I could sleep, and I could do it with the bedside lamp on if I wanted to; Reba would never tell. I could even sleep with her nestled in between my stump and my side. I’d done it before. And Wireman could see again. Although even that seemed beside the point right then. The point seemed to be that I had finally painted something great.

And it was mine.

I thought I could sleep on that.

Keep your focus. It’s the difference between a good picture and just one more image cluttering up a world filled with them.

Elizabeth Eastlake was a demon when it came to focus; remember that she literally drew herself back into the world. And when the voice inhabiting Noveen told her about the treasure, she focused on that and drew pictures of it littered on the sandy floor of the Gulf. Once the storm had uncovered it, that entrancing strew was close enough to the surface so that the sun must have picked out gleams on it at midday — gleams that would have searched all the way to the surface.

She wanted to please her Daddy. All she wanted for herself was the china doll.

Daddy says Any doll is yours — fair salvage, and God help him for that.

She waded in beside him, up to her chubby knees, pointing, saying It’s right out there. Swim n kick til I say stop.

He waded out farther while she stood there, and when he rolled forward, giving his body to the caldo, his flippers looked to her the size of small rowboats. Later she would draw them just that way. He spat in his mask, rinsed it, and put it on. Popped the mouthpiece of his snorkel behind his lips. Went fin-trudging out into the sunny blue with his face in the water, his body merging with the moving sun-sparks that turned the glassy rollers to gold.

I know all this. Elizabeth drew some and I drew some.

I win, you win.

She stood up to her knees in the water with Noveen tucked under her arm, watching, until Nan Melda, worried about the rip, hollered her back to what they called Shade Beach. Then they all stood together. Elizabeth shouted for John to stop. They saw his flippers go up as he made his first dive. He was down maybe forty seconds, then surfaced in a spray, spitting the snorkel’s mouthpiece.

He says I’ll be damned if there isn’t something down there!

And when he came back to little Libbit, he hug her hug her hug her.

I knew it. I drew it. With the red picnic basket on a blanket nearby and the speargun sitting on top of the basket.

He went out again, and the next time he came in with an armload of antiquity held awkwardly against his chest. Later he would begin using Nan Melda’s market basket, a lead weight in the bottom to pull it down more easily. Later still came a newspaper photo with much of the rescued rickrack — the “treasure” — spread out before a smiling John Eastlake and his talented, fiercely focused daughter. But no china doll in that picture.

Because the china doll was special. It belonged to Libbit. It was her fair salvage.

Was it the doll-thing that drove Tessie and Lo-Lo to their deaths? That created the big boy? Just how much did Elizabeth have to do with it by then? Who was the artist, who the blank surface?

Some questions I have never answered to my own satisfaction, but I have drawn my own pictures and I know that when it comes to art, it’s perfectly okay to paraphrase Nietzsche: if you keep your focus, eventually your focus will keep you. Sometimes without parole.

The next morning, early, Wireman and I stood in the Gulf — plenty cold enough to be an eye-popper — up to our shins. He had walked in, and I had followed without question. Without a single word. Both of us were holding coffee cups. He was wearing shorts; I had paused just long enough to roll my pants to my knees. Behind us, at the end of the boardwalk, Elizabeth slouched in her chair, looking grimly out at the horizon and grizzling down her chin. A large part of her breakfast still lay before her. She had eaten some, scattered the rest. Her hair was loose, blowing in a warm breeze from the south.