Stephen King - Duma Key

The water surged around us. Once I got used to it, I loved the silky feel of that surge: first the lift that made me feel as if I’d magically dieted off twelve pounds or so, then the backrun that pulled sand out from between my toes in small, tickling whirlpools. Seventy or eighty yards beyond us, two fat pelicans drew a line across the morning. Then they folded their wings and dropped like stones. One came up empty, but the other had breakfast in its bill. The small fish disappeared down the hatch even as the pelican rose. It was an ancient ballet, but no less pleasing for that. South and inland, where the green tangles rose, another bird cried “Oh-oh! Oh-oh!” over and over.

Wireman turned toward me. He didn’t look twenty-five, but he looked younger than at any time since I’d met him. There was no redness at all in his left eye, and it had lost that disjointed, I’m-looking-my-own-way cast. I had no doubt that it was seeing me; that it was seeing me very well.

“Anything I can ever do for you,” he said. “Ever. In my life. You call, I come. You ask, I do. It’s a blank check. Are you clear on that?”

“Yes,” I said. I was clear on something else, as well: when someone offers you a blank check, you must never, ever cash it. That wasn’t a thing I thought out. Sometimes understanding bypasses the brain and proceeds directly from the heart.

“All right, then,” he said. “It’s all I’m going to say.”

I heard snoring. I looked around and saw that Elizabeth’s chin had sunk to her chest. One hand was fisted around a piece of toast. Her hair whirled around her head.

“She looks thinner,” I said.

“She’s lost twenty pounds since New Year’s. I’m slipping her those maxi-shakes — Ensure, they’re called — once a day, but she won’t always take em. What about you? Is it just too much work that’s got you looking that way?”

“What way?”

“Like the Hound of the Baskervilles recently bit off your left asscheek. If it’s overwork, maybe you ought to knock off and stretch out a little.” He shrugged. “‘That’s our opinion, we welcome yours,’ as they say on Channel 6.”

I stood where I was, feeling the lift and drop of the waves, and thinking about what I could tell Wireman. About how much I could tell Wireman. The answer seemed self-evident: all or nothing.

“I think I better fill you in on what happened last night. You just have to promise not to call for the men in the white coats.”

“All right.”

I told him about how I’d finished his portrait mostly in the dark. I told him about seeing my right arm and hand. Then seeing the two dead girls at the foot of the stairs and passing out. By the time I finished, we’d waded back out of the water and walked to where Elizabeth was snoring. Wireman began to clean her tray, sweeping the refuse into a bag he took from the pouch hanging on one arm of her chair.

“Nothing else?” he asked.

“That isn’t enough?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Nothing else. I slept like a baby until six o’clock. Then I put you — the painting of you — in the back of the car and drove down here. When you’re ready to see it, by the way—”

“All in good time. Think of a number between one and ten.”

“What?”

“Just humor me, muchacho .”

I thought of a number. “Okay.”

He was silent for a moment, looking out at the Gulf. Then he said, “Nine?”

“Nope. Seven.”

He nodded. “Seven.” He drummed his fingers against his chest for a few moments, then dropped them into his lap. “Yesterday I could have told you. Today I can’t. My telepathy thing — that little twinkle — is gone. It’s more than a fair trade. Wireman is as Wireman was, and Wireman says muchas gracias. ”

“What’s your point? Or did you have one?”

“I did. The point is you’re not going crazy, if that’s what you’re afraid of. On Duma Key, broken people seem to be special people. When they cease being broken, they cease being special. Me, I’m mended. You’re still broken, so you’re still special.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“Because you’re trying to make a simple thing hard. Look in front of you, muchacho, what do you see?”

“The Gulf. What you call the caldo largo .”

“And what do you spend most of your time painting?”

“The Gulf. Sunsets on the Gulf.”

“And what is painting?”

“Painting is seeing, I guess.”

“No guess about it. And what is seeing on Duma Key?”

Feeling like a child reciting a lesson of which he’s not quite sure, I said: “ Special seeing?”

“Yes. So what do you think, Edgar? Were those dead girls there last night or not?”

I felt a chill up my back. “Probably they were.”

“I think so, too. I think you saw the ghosts of her sisters.”

“I’m frightened of them.” I said this in a low voice.

“Edgar… I don’t think ghosts can hurt people.”

“Maybe not ordinary people in an ordinary place,” I said.

He nodded, rather reluctantly. “All right. So what do you want to do?”

“What I don’t want to do is leave. I’m not done here yet.”

I wasn’t just thinking of the show — the bubble reputation. There was more. I just didn’t know what the more was. Not yet. If I’d attempted putting it into words, it would have come out sounding stupid, like something written on a fortune cookie. Something with the word fate in it.

“Do you want to come down here to the Palacio ? Move in with us?”

“No.” I thought that might make matters even worse, somehow. And besides, Big Pink was my place. I had fallen in love with it. “But Wireman, will you see how much you can find out about the Eastlake family in general and those two girls in particular? If you can read again, then maybe you could dig around on the Internet—”

He gripped my arm. “I’ll dig like a motherfucker. Maybe you could do some good in that direction, as well. You’re going to do an interview with Mary Ire, right?”

“Yes. They’ve scheduled it for the week after my so-called lecture.”

“Ask her about the Eastlakes. Maybe you’ll hit the jackpot. Miss Eastlake was a big patron of the arts in her time.”

“Okay.”

He grasped the handles of the sleeping old woman’s wheelchair and turned it around so it faced the orange roofs of the estate house again. “Now let’s go look at my portrait. I want to see what I looked like back when I still thought Jerry Garcia could save the world.”

I’d parked my car in the courtyard, beside Elizabeth Eastlake’s silver Vietnam War–era Mercedes-Benz. I slid the portrait from my much humbler Chevrolet, set it on end, and held it up for Wireman to look at. As he stood there silently regarding it, a strange thought occurred to me: I was like a tailor standing beside a mirror in a men’s clothing store. Soon my customer would either tell me he liked the suit I’d made for him, or shake his head regretfully and say it wouldn’t do.

Far off to the south, in what I was coming to think of as the Duma Jungle, that bird took up its warning “Oh-oh!” cry again.

Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. “Say something, Wireman. Say anything.”

“I can’t. I’m speechless.”

“You? Not possible.”

But when he looked up from the portrait, I realized it was true. He looked like someone had walloped him on the head with a hammer. I understood by then that what I was doing affected people, but none of those reactions were quite like Wireman’s on that March morning.

What finally woke him up was a sharp knocking sound. It was Elizabeth. She was awake and rapping on her tray. “Smoke!” she cried. “Smoke! Smoke! ” Some things survived even the fog of Alzheimer’s, it seemed. The part of her brain that craved nicotine never decayed. She’d smoke until the end.