Duma Key

The barrel of the gun rose with the recoil. Wireman let it. I've never seen calm like that, and it still amazes me. When the gun came back to dead level, the alligator was no more than fifteen feet away. He fired again, and the second bullet lifted the thing's front half to the sky, revealing a greenish-white belly. For a moment it seemed to be dancing on its tail, like a happy gator in a Disney cartoon.

"Yahh, you ugly bastard!" Jack screamed. "Fuck ya mutha! Fuck ya GRANDmutha!"

The gun again rose with the recoil. Once again, Wireman let it. The alligator thumped down on its side, belly exposed, the stubs of its legs thrashing, its tail whipping and tearing up grass and earth in clots. When the muzzle came back level, Wireman pulled the trigger again, and the center of the thing's belly seemed to disintegrate. All at once the ragged, flattened circle in which it lay was mostly red instead of green.

I looked for the heron. The heron was gone.

Wireman got up, and I saw he was shaking. He walked toward the alligator - although not quite within the radius of the still-whipping tail - and pumped two more rounds into it. The tail gave a final convulsive whack against the ground, the body a final jerk, and then it was still.

He turned to Jack and held up the automatic in a shaking hand. "Desert Eagle,.357," he said. "One big old handgun, made by badass Hebrews - James McMurtry, two thousand-six. Mostly what added the weight to the basket was the ammo. I tossed in all the clips I had. That was about a dozen."

Jack walked over to him, embraced him, then kissed him on both cheeks. "I'll carry that basket to Cleveland if you want, and never say a word."

"At least you won't have to carry the gun," Wireman said. "From now on, sweet old Betsy McCall goes in my belt." And he put it there, after loading a fresh clip and carefully re-engaging the safety. This took him two tries, because of his shaking hands.

I came over to him and also kissed him on each cheek.

"Oh gosh," he said. "Wireman no longer feels Spanish. Wireman is beginning to feel positively French."

"How do you happen to have a gun in the first place?" I asked.

"It was Miss Eastlake's idea, after the last cocaine skirmish in Tampa-St. Pete." He turned to Jack. "You remember, don't you?"

"Yeah. Four dead."

"Anyway, Miss Eastlake suggested I get a gun for home protection. I got a big one. She and I even did some target practice together." He smiled. "She was good, and she didn't mind the noise, but she hated the recoil." He looked at the splattered alligator. "I guess it did the job. What next, muchacho?"

"Around back, but... did either of you see that heron?"

Jack shook his head. So did Wireman, looking bemused.

" I saw it," I told him. "And if I see it again... or if either of you do... I want you to shoot it, Jerome."

Wireman raised his eyebrows but said nothing. We resumed our tramp along the east side of the deserted estate.

xv

Finding a way in through the back turned out not to be a problem: there was no back. All but the most easterly corner of the mansion had been torn off, probably in the same storm that had taken the top stories. Standing there, looking into the overgrown ruin of what had once been a kitchen and pantry, I realized that Heron's Roost was little more than a moss-festooned fa ade.

"We can get in from here," Jack said doubtfully, "but I'm not sure I trust the floor. What do you think, Edgar?"

"I don't know," I said. I felt very tired. Maybe it was only spent adrenaline from our encounter with the alligator, but it felt like more than that to me. It felt like defeat. There had been too many years, too many storms. And a little girl's drawings were ephemeral things to start with. "What time is it, Wireman? Without the bullshit, if you please."

He looked at his watch. "Two-thirty. What do you say, muchacho? Go in?"

"I don't know," I repeated.

"Well, I do," he said. "I killed a fucking alligator to get here; I'm not leaving without at least a look around the old homestead. The pantry floor looks solid, and it's the closest to the ground. Come on, you two, let's pile up some shit to stand on. A couple of those beams should do. Jack, you can go first, then help me. We'll pull Edgar up together."

And that's how we did it, dirty and disheveled and out of breath, scrambling first into the pantry and going from there into the house itself, looking around with wonder, feeling like time travelers, tourists in a world that had ended over eighty years before.

18 - Noveen

i