Duma Key

by Stephen King

Pam took the deal, and I think she might have taken me again instead of the deal if I’d offered—it was a look that came and went on her face like sunshine through clouds when we had our lunch to discuss the details—but I didn’t offer. I had Florida on my mind, that refuge of the newly wed and the nearly dead.

I looked at the ceiling and I wished this life was over. This unhappy life that had started out so confidently. I thought I would sleep no more that night, but eventually I did. In the end we always wear out our worries.

When I left St. Paul, flying in a Lear 55 (successful retirement has its privileges), it was twenty-four and spitting the first snowflakes of another long northern winter. When I landed in Sarasota it was eighty-five and sunny. Even crossing the tarmac to the private air terminal, still clumping along on my trusty red crutch, I thought I could feel my hip saying thank you.

There’s a charm-bracelet of keys lying off the west coast of Florida. If you had your seven-league boots on, you could step from Longboat to Lido, from Lido to Siesta, from Siesta to Casey. The next step takes you to Duma Key, nine miles long and half a mile wide at its widest, between Casey Key and Don Pedro Island. Most of it’s uninhabited, a tangle of banyans, palms, and Australian pines with an uneven, dune-rumpled beach running along the Gulf edge. The beach is guarded by a waist-high band of sea oats. “The sea oats belong,” Wireman once told me, “but the rest of that shit has no business growing without irrigation.”

As Jack went back and forth, stowing my bags in the bigger of the two bedrooms and putting the laptop on the desk in the smaller one, my eye kept being drawn to the living room’s western wall, which was all glass, and the Florida room beyond it, and the Gulf of Mexico beyond that. It was a vast blue expanse, flat as a plate on that hot November afternoon, and even with the sliding glass window-wall shut, I could hear its mild and steady sighing. I thought, It has no memory. It was an odd thought, and strangely optimistic. When it came to memory—and anger—I still had my issues.

Charley was a hurricane, and when hurricanes struck, I peeked at The Weather Channel, like the rest of America, and their hurricane guy was . . . I picked up Reba. She seemed to weigh at least twenty pounds in my soupy, half-asleep state. “The hurricane guy is Jim Cantore,” I said. “My help-out guy is Jack Cantori. Case fuckin closed.”

The sun was gone, but there was still a brilliant orange band above the flat line of the Gulf. It was broken in only one place, by the silhouette of some large ship. Its shape was as simple as a first-grader’s drawing. A cable stretched taut from the bow to what I assumed was the radio tower, creating a triangle of light. As that light skied upward, orange faded to a breathless Maxfield Parrish blue-green that I had never seen before with my own eyes . . . and yet I had a sense of déjà vu, as if maybe I had seen it, in my dreams. Maybe we all see skies like that in our dreams, and our waking minds can never quite translate them into colors that have names. Above, in the deepening black, the first stars.

I walked down the beach to the water. I quickly discovered my crutch was no help on the sand—was, in fact, a hindrance—but once I was around the corner of the house, the water’s edge was less than two dozen steps away. That was easy if I went slow. The surge was mild, the incoming wavelets only inches high. It was hard to imagine this water whipped into a destructive hurricane frenzy. Impossible, actually. Later, Wireman would tell me God always punishes us for what we can’t imagine.

In any case, there weren’t that many rainy days—not for nothing is Florida called the Sunshine State.

Two days later, when Jack came by to ask if I wanted to run errands, I said I wanted to go to a bookstore and buy a book of Salman Dalí’s art. Jack laughed. “I think you mean Salvador Dalí,” he said. “Unless you’re thinking about the guy who wrote the book that got him in so much hot water. I can’t remember the name of it.” “The Satanic Verses,” I said at once. The mind’s a funny monkey, isn’t it?

I turned on the faucet and hosed off the side of the Malibu, taking more time than the job really needed, wanting to make sure she was down for the count. And she was. When I peeked in through the half-open door of the second bedroom, I saw her lying on her side, sleeping just as she had as a kid: one hand tucked under her cheek and one knee drawn up almost to her chest. We think we change, but we don’t really—that’s what Wireman says.

We clinked glasses and drank. I’d had green tea before and thought it was okay, but this was heavenly—like drinking cold silk, with just a faint tang of sweetness. “Do you taste the honey?” he asked, and smiled when I nodded. “Not everyone does. I just put in a tablespoonful per pitcher. It releases the natural sweetness of the tea. I learned that cooking on a tramp steamer in the China Sea.” He held up his glass and squinted through it. “We fought off many pirates and mated with strange and dusky women ’neath tropic skies.” “That sounds a trifle bullshitty to me, Mr. Wireman.” He laughed. “I actually read about the honey thing in one of Miss Eastlake’s cookery books.”

He looked at me—armless, all patchy-haired on one side—and nodded. Then for a little while we just looked out at the Gulf. I know that people come to Florida when they’re old and sick because it’s warm pretty much year-round, but I think the Gulf of Mexico has something else going for it. Just looking into that mild flat sunlit calm is healing. It’s a big word, isn’t it? Gulf, I mean. Big enough to drop a lot of things into and watch them disappear.

Wireman grinned. It made him handsome. He offered his hand and I shook with him again. “You know what I think? Friendships founded on laughter are always fortuitous.” “Maybe your next job will be writing the fortunes in Chinese cookies,” I said. “There could be worse jobs, muchacho. Far worse.”

Light showered down on us like white rain as we walked the main hall (Wireman walked; I limped), and I realized that, for all of the mansion’s grandeur, this part of it was no more than a glorified dogtrot—the kind that separates sections of older and much humbler Florida dwellings. That style, almost always constructed of wood (sometimes scrapwood) rather than stone, even has a name: Florida Cracker.

Beyond the tangle, on a blue-tiled walk that presumably connected with the main courtyard, stalked a sharp-eyed heron. It looked both thoughtful and grim, but I never saw a one on the ground that didn’t look like a Puritan elder considering which witch to burn next.

I sat on the couch awhile longer, watching as the sunset grew brighter and the air in the Florida room grew colder. People who think there is no winter in Florida are very mistaken. An inch of snow fell in Sarasota in 1977. I guess it gets cold everywhere. I bet it even snows in hell, although I doubt if it sticks.

Things were better for me now, but that was the world I’d woken up to, one where words clanged senselessly and memories were scattered like lawn furniture after a windstorm. It was a world where I had tried to communicate by hitting people and the only two emotions I really seemed capable of were fear and fury. One progresses beyond that state (as Elizabeth might say), but afterward one never quite loses the conviction that reality is gossamer. Behind its webwork? Chaos. Madness. The real truth, maybe, and the real truth is red.

There was something, after all: an enormous black-and-white photograph in a frame of narrow banded gold. I asked Wireman later how a black-and-white from the nineteen-twenties could have been blown up to such a size—it had to have been at least five feet tall by four wide—with so little blurring. He said it had probably been taken with a Hasselblad, the finest non-digital camera ever made.

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.

“So let them operate on you, Wireman, and take it out. Jack and I will make sure Elizabeth’s okay until you’re back on your . . .” He was shaking his head. “No? Why no?” “It’s too deep for surgery, amigo. That’s why I didn’t let them admit me. Did you think it was because I’ve got a Marlboro Man complex? No way. My days of wanting to be dead are over. I still miss my wife and my daughter, but now I’ve got Miss Eastlake to take care of, and I’ve come to love the Key. And there’s you, Edgar. I want to know how your story comes out. Do I regret what I did? Sometimes sí, sometimes no. When it’s sí, I remind myself I wasn’t the same man then that I am now, and that I have to cut the old me some slack. That man was so hurt and lost he really wasn’t responsible. This is my other life, and I try to look at my problems in it as . . . well . . . birth defects.”

He said that Mr. Brown was a drug addict, a porn-addicted sex addict, and a schizophrenic. Nothing about being powerless over ice cream and Now That’s What I Call Music compilations, but of course the jury hadn’t been empanelled yet. In addition to Channel 6’s mike, I saw NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and CNN logos. Tina Garibaldi couldn’t have gotten coverage like this winning a spelling bee or a science fair, not even for saving the family dog from a raging river, but get raped and murdered and you’re nationwide, Swee’pea. Everyone knows your killer had your underpants in his bureau drawer.

“Bozie would come. But don’t call him that, Wireman. Not to his face.” “Call another lawyer Bozie? Do you think I’m stupid?” He considered. “I shot myself in the head and didn’t manage to kill myself, so you better not answer that.”

“You always make me feel better,” she said. “That’s why I call. I love you, Daddy.” “I love you too.” “How many bunches?” How many years since she’d asked that? Twelve? Fourteen? It didn’t matter, I remembered the answer. “A million and one for under your pillow,” I said. Then I said goodbye and hung up and thought that if Carson Jones hurt my daughter, I’d kill him. The thought made me smile a little, wondering how many fathers had had the same thought and made the same promise. But of all those fathers, I might be the only one who could kill a heedless, daughter-hurting suitor with a few strokes of a paintbrush.

She took no notice, only stared sternly out at the Gulf, where—at the farthest, bluest edge of vision—a tanker was dreaming north toward Tampa. It fascinated me at once. Boats on the Gulf had a way of doing that to me.

Now it was its own magic trick. I had become very selfish about it, and anything that might come after—a promised interview with Mary Ire, the lecture, the show itself—seemed to be not ahead of me but somehow far above me. The way rain on the surface of the Gulf must seem to a fish.

Outside there was a rumble that sounded like a big, heavily loaded truck crossing a plank bridge. I looked toward the Gulf—where there were no plank bridges—and realized I’d heard thunder far off to the west.

The thunderheads stacked up, huge flatboats black on the bottom and bruise-purple through the middle. Every now and then lightning would flash inside them, and then they looked like brains filled with bad ideas. The Gulf lost its color and went dead. Sunset was a yellow band that flicked feeble orange and went out.

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.

“No? How did you think about this kind of behavior in your other life, amigo? What conclusions did you draw about a supplier who contracted for cement and then didn’t show up on the dime? Or a plumbing sub who got the job on a new bank and wasn’t there on the day he was supposed to start? Did you feel real, I dunno, confident about guys like that? Did you believe their excuses?”

I was holding my palm on the side of Elizabeth’s head, feeling the smoothness of her hair as I had often felt the smoothness of my daughters’ after it had been shampooed; when memory takes its strongest hold, our own bodies become ghosts, haunting us with the gestures of our younger selves.

People say night falls, but down here it rises. It rises out of the Gulf, after sunset’s done. Seeing that happen amazed me.”

Their voices seemed to come from far away. Juanita removed the box-top. I think Jack took that. And then Reba was looking up at me, this time in a red dress instead of a blue one, but the polka-dots were the same; so were the shiny black Mary Janes, the lifeless red hair and the blue eyes that said Oouuuu, you nasty man! I been in here all this time!

We were sitting in Mary Ire’s penthouse apartment on Davis Islands, a tony Tampa enclave which looked to me like the art deco capital of the world.

“She’s a rarity, you know. Florida’s full of old people—they don’t call it God’s waiting room for nothing—but precious few of em grew up here. The Suncoast Elizabeth remembers—remembered—really was another Florida. Not the hurry-scurry sprawl we have now, with the domed stadiums and the turnpikes going everywhere, and not the one I grew up in, either. Mine was the John D. MacDonald Florida, back when people in Sarasota still knew their neighbors and the Tamiami Trail was a honky-tonk. Back then people sometimes still came home from church to find alligators in their swimming pools and bobcats rooting in their trash.”

“The Florida Elizabeth and her sisters grew up in was the one that existed after the Indians were gone but before old Mr. White Man had fully conshol . . . consolidated his hold. Your little island would have looked very different to you. I’ve seen the pictures. It was cabbage palms covered in strangler fig and gumbo limbo and slash pine inland; it was liveoak and mangrove in the few places the ground was wet. There was Cherokee bean and inkberry low on the ground, but none of that jungle shit that’s growing out there now. The beaches are the only thing that’s the same, and the sea oats, of course . . . like the hem of a skirt. The drawbridge was there at the north end, but there was just one house.”

“You paint,” she said. “Yes.” “Have you painted the ship yet?” A curious thing happened to my stomach. It didn’t sink so much as it seemed to disappear and leave a void between my heart and the rest of my guts. My knees tried to buckle. The steel in my hip went hot. The back of my neck went cold. And warm, prickling fire ran up the arm that wasn’t there. “Yes,” I said. “Again and again and again.”

Remember that “seeing is believing” puts the cart before the horse. Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery. And besides—if you don’t believe what you see, who will believe your art?

He gestured toward the canvases in the main room. “What are they, really? I mean, no bullshit. Because—I wouldn’t say this to very many people—they remind me of the way life was inside my head when I wasn’t taking my pills.” “They’re just make-believe,” I said. “Shadows.” “I know about shadows,” he said. “You just want to be careful they don’t grow teeth. Because they can. Then, sometimes when you reach for the light-switch to make them go away, you discover the power’s out.”

“Art is memory, Edgar. There is no simpler way to say it. The clearer the memory, the better the art. The purer. These paintings—they break my heart and then make it new again.

Elizabeth exclaimed over I See the Moon and the Duma Road series, but it was the way she reached her hands out to Roses Grow from Shells, as if to embrace it, that gave me goosebumps. She lowered her arms again and looked over her shoulder at me. “That’s the essence of it,” she said. “The essence of Duma. Why those who’ve lived there awhile can never really leave. Even if their heads carry their bodies away, their hearts stay.” She looked at the picture again and nodded. “Roses Grow from Shells. That is correct.”

Pain is the biggest power of love. That’s what Wireman says.

It was the red-robe, my red-robe, only seen from the front. Three empty sockets peered from its head, and its grin outran the sides of its face in a crazy jumble of lips and teeth. It was far more horrible than my Girl and Ship paintings, because it went straight to the heart of the matter without any pause for the mind to catch up. This is everything awful, it said. This is everything you ever feared to find waiting in the dark. See how its grin races off its face in the moonlight. See how the drowned salute it.

My guess was that Elizabeth had forgotten most of what had happened to her when she was a child even before the Alzheimer’s came along to complicate things. Because forgetting isn’t always involuntary. Sometimes it’s willed.

It was like being given a tongue when you had been mute. And more. Better. It was like being given back your memory, and a person’s memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It’s you. Even from that first line—that incredibly brave first line meant to show where the Gulf met the sky—she had understood that seeing and memory were interchangeable, and had set out to mend herself.

“Daddy, what about the rest of your pictures? Are they all like this one?” “I’m taking care of it, honey. It’s a story for another day.” “All right. Thank you, Daddy. You’re still my hero. I love you.” “I love you, too.” That was the last time we spoke, and neither of us knew. We never know, do we? At least we ended by exchanging our love. I have that. It’s not much, but it’s something. Others have it worse. I tell myself that on the long nights when I can’t sleep. Others have it worse.

My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say I can do this even when you know you can’t.

On the Gulf side of Heron’s Roost, the snarl of weeds, vines, and creepers that had once been John Eastlake’s lawn gave way to sea oats. The breeze was good and the view was better, making me realize that the one thing you rarely got in Florida was height. Here we had just enough to make it seem like the Gulf of Mexico was at our feet.

“DD was Dave Davis,” I said. “In the Roaring Twenties he was a Suncoast mogul.” “How do you know that?” “Mary Ire told me,” I said, and a cold part of me that would probably never warm up again could appreciate the irony; life is a wheel, and if you wait long enough, it always comes back around to where it started.