Duma Key

I began prospecting southward along the beach, accompanied only by my shadow and two or three dozen of the tiny birds - Ilse called them peeps - that prospect endlessly for food at the edge of the water. Farther out, pelicans cruised, then folded their wings and dropped like stones. I wasn't thinking of exercise that afternoon, I wasn't monitoring the pain in my hip, and I wasn't counting steps. I wasn't thinking of anything, really; my mind was gliding like the pelicans before they spotted dinner in the caldo largo below them. Consequently, when I finally spotted the kind of shell I wanted and looked back, I was stunned at how small Big Pink had become.

I stood bouncing the orange shell up and down in my hand, all at once feeling the broken-glass throb in my hip. It started there and went pulsing all the way down my leg. Yet the tracks I saw stretching back toward my house hardly dragged at all. It occurred to me then that I'd been babying myself - maybe a little, maybe quite a lot. Me and my stupid little Numbers Game. Today I had forgotten about giving myself an anxious mini-physical every five minutes or so. I'd simply... gone for a walk. Like any normal person.

So I had a choice. I could baby myself going back, stopping every now and then to do one of Kathi Green's side-stretches, which hurt like hell and didn't seem to do much of anything else, or I could just walk. Like any normal unhurt person.

I decided to go with that. But before I started, I glanced over my shoulder and saw a striped beach chair a ways farther south. There was a table beside it with an umbrella, striped like the chair, over it. A man was sitting in the chair. What was only a speck glimpsed from Big Pink had become a tall, heavyset guy dressed in jeans and a white shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows. His hair was long and blowing in the breeze. I couldn't make out his features; we were still too far apart for that. He saw me looking and waved. I waved back, then turned and began trudging for home along my own footprints. That was my first encounter with Wireman.

ii

My final thought before turning in that night was that I'd probably find myself hobbling through the second day of the New Year almost too sore to walk. I was delighted to find that wasn't true; a hot bath seemed to take care of the residual stiffness.

So of course I struck off again the following afternoon. No set goal; no New Year's resolution; no Numbers Game. Just a guy strolling on the beach, sometimes veering close enough to the mild run of the waves to scatter the peeps aloft in a smutchy cloud. Sometimes I'd pick up a shell and put it in my pocket (in a week I'd be carrying a plastic bag to store my treasures in). When I got close enough to make out the heavyset guy in some detail - today wearing a blue shirt and khakis, almost certainly barefoot - I once again turned and headed back to Big Pink. But not before giving him a wave, which he returned.

That was the real beginning of my Great Beach Walks. Every afternoon they got a little longer, and I saw the heavyset man in his striped beach chair a little more clearly. It seemed obvious to me that he had his own routine; in the mornings he came out with the old lady, pushing her down a wooden tongue of decking that I hadn't been able to see from Big Pink. In the afternoons he came out on his own. He never took off his shirt, but his arms and face were as dark as old furniture in a formal home. Beside him, on his table, were a tall glass and a pitcher that might have held ice water, lemonade, or gin and tonic. He always waved; I always waved back.

One day in late January, when I had closed the distance between us to not much more than an eighth of a mile, a second striped chair appeared on the sand. A second glass, empty (but tall and terribly inviting), appeared on the table. When I waved, he first waved back and then pointed at the empty chair.

"Thanks, but not yet!" I called.

"Hell, come on down!" he called back. "I'll give you a ride back in the golf cart!"

I smiled at that. Ilse had been all in favor of a golf cart, so I could go racing up and down the beach, scaring the peeps. "Not in the game-plan," I yelled, "but I'll get there in time! Whatever's in that pitcher - keep it on ice for me!"

"You know best, muchacho!" He sketched a little salute. "Meantime, do the day and let the day do you!"

I remember all sorts of things Wireman said, but I believe that's the one I associate with him the most strongly, maybe because I heard him say it before I knew his name or had even shaken his hand: Do the day and let the day do you.

iii