Duma Key

I stooped to examine the mess that had blown in through the open door. Just sand and water, the water already beading atop the wax my housekeeper used to keep the cypress gleaming. There was some dampness on the lower stair risers, which were carpeted, but dampness was all it was.

I wouldn't admit to myself that I'd been looking for footprints.

I went to the kitchen, made a chicken sandwich, and gobbled it standing at the counter. I grabbed a beer from the fridge to wash it down. When the sandwich was gone, I ate the remains of the previous day's salad, more or less floating in Newman's Own French. Then I went into the living room to call El Palacio. Wireman answered on the first ring. I was prepared to tell him I'd been outside, looking to see if the storm had done any damage to the house, but my whereabouts at the time of his call were the last thing on Wireman's mind. Wireman was crying and laughing.

"I can see! As well as ever! Left eye's as clear as a bell. I can't believe it, but-"

"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.

xxi

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.

How to Draw a Picture (VI)

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