Duma Key

"Six years old. Elizabeth would have been four, old enough to understand what had happened. Maybe old enough to read a newspaper headline as simple as THEY ARE GONE. The twins dead and Adriana, the oldest, eloped off to Atlanta with one of his plant managers... no wonder John had had enough of Duma for awhile. He and the remaining three moved to Miami. Many years later, he moved back here to die, and Miss Eastlake cared for him." Wireman shrugged. "Pretty much as I'm caring for her. So... do you see why an old lady with onset-Alzheimer's might consider Duma a bad place for daughters?"

"I guess so, but how does an old lady with onset-Alzheimer's find the phone number of her new tenant?"

Wireman gave me a sly look. "New tenant, old number, autodial function on all the phones back there." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Any other questions?"

I gaped at him. "She has me on autodial?"

"Don't blame me; I came in late on this movie-show. My guess is that the Realtor who handles things for her programmed the rental properties into the phones. Or maybe Miss Eastlake's business manager. He pops down from St. Petersburg every six weeks or so to make sure she's not dead and I'm not stealing the Spode. I'll ask him the next time he shows up."

"So she can call any house on the north end of the Key at the touch of a button."

"Well... yeah. I mean, they are all hers." He patted my hand. "But you know what, muchacho? I think your button is going to have a little nervous breakdown this evening."

"No," I said, not even thinking about it. "Don't do that."

"Ah," Wireman said, exactly as if he understood. And who knows, maybe he did. "Anyway, that explains your mystery caller - although I have to tell you, explanations have a way of thinning out on Duma Key. As your story demonstrates."

"What do you mean? Have you had... experiences?"

He looked at me squarely, his large tanned face inscrutable. The chilly late January wind gusted, blowing sand around our ankles. It also lifted his hair, once again revealing the coin-shaped scar above his right temple. I wondered if someone had poked him with the neck of a bottle, maybe in a bar fight, and tried to imagine someone getting mad at this man. It was hard to do.

"Yes, I've had... experiences, " he said, and hooked the first two fingers of each hand into little quotation marks. "It's what makes children into... adults. Also what gives English teachers something to bullshit about in first year... lit courses." Each time with the air-quotes.

Okay, he didn't want to talk about it, at least not then. So I asked him how much of my story he believed.

He rolled his eyes and sat back in his chair. "Don't try my patience, vato. You might be mistaken about a few things, but you ain't nuts. I got a lady up there... sweetest lady in the world and I love her, but sometimes she thinks I'm her Dad and it's Miami circa nineteen thirty-four. Sometimes she pops one of her china people into a Sweet Owen cookie-tin and tosses it into the koi pond behind the tennis court. I have to get em out when she naps, otherwise she pitches a bitch. No idea why. I think by this summer she may be wearing an adult didey full-time."

"Point?"

"The point is I know loco, I know Duma, and I'm getting to know you. I'm perfectly willing to believe you had a vision of your friend dead."

"No bullshit?"

"No bullshit. Verdad. The question is what you're going to do about it, assuming you're not eager to see him into the ground for - may I be vulgar? - buttering what used to be your loaf."

"I'm not. I did have this momentary thing... I don't know how to describe it..."

"Was it a momentary thing where you felt like chopping off his dick, then putting out his eyes with a hot toasting-fork? Was it that momentary thing, muchacho?" Wireman made the thumb and forefinger of one hand into a gun and pointed it at me. "I was married to a Mexican lassie, and I know jealousy. It's normal. Like a startle-reflex."

"Did your wife ever..." I stopped, suddenly aware all over again that I'd only met this man the day before. That was easy to forget. Wireman was intense.

"No, amigo, not to my knowledge. What she did was die on me." His face was perfectly expressionless. "Let's not go there, okay?"

"Okay."

"Thing to remember about jealousy is it comes, it goes. Like the afternoon showers down here during the mean season. You're over it, you say. You should be, because you ain't her campesino no more. The question is what you're going to do about this other thing. How you going to keep this guy from killing himself? Because you know what happens when the happy-family cruise is over, right?"

For a moment I said nothing. I was translating that last bit of Spanish, or trying to. You ain't her farmer no more, was that right? If so, it had a bitter ring of truth.

" Muchacho? Your next move?"