Duma Key

I waited twenty seconds, then thirty. I had just about decided that she'd forgotten to hang up on her end and was reaching to push the STOP button on the answering machine when she spoke again. Just six words, and they made no more sense than the thing about the leaking table, but still they brought gooseflesh out on my arms and turned the hair on the nape of my neck into hackles.

"My father was a skin diver," Elizabeth Eastlake said. Each word was clearly enunciated. Then came the clear click of the phone being hung up on her end.

"No more messages," the phone robot said. "The message tape is full."

I stood staring down at the machine, thought of erasing the tape, then decided to save it and play it for Wireman. I undressed, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. I lay in the dark, feeling the soft throb of my head, while below me the shells whispered the last thing she'd said over and over: My father was a skin diver.

8 - Family Portrait

i

Things slowed down for awhile. Sometimes that happens. The pot boils, and then, just before it can boil over, some hand - God, fate, maybe plain coincidence - lowers the heat. I mentioned this once to Wireman and he said life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.

I thought he'd go with me to see a doctor and we'd find out what was wrong with him. I thought he'd tell me why he'd shot himself in the head and how a man survives that sort of thing. The answer seemed to be, "With seizures and a lot of trouble reading the fine print." Maybe he'd even be able to tell me why his employer had a bee in her bonnet about keeping Ilse off the island. And the capper: I'd decide on what came next in the life of Edgar Freemantle, the Great American Primitive.

None of those things actually happened, at least for awhile. Life does produce changes, and the end results are sometimes explosive, but in soap operas and in real life, big bangs often have a long fuse.

Wireman did agree to go see a doctor with me and "get his head examined," but not until March. February was too busy, he said. Winter residents - what Wireman called "the monthlies," as if they were menstrual periods instead of tenants - would start moving into all the Eastlake properties the coming weekend. The first snowbirds to arrive would be the ones Wireman liked least. These were the Godfreys from Rhode Island, known to Wireman (and hence to me) as Joe and Rita Mean Dog. They came for ten weeks every winter and stayed in the house closest to the Eastlake estate. The signs warning of their Rotties and their Pit Bull were out; Ilse and I had seen them. Wireman said Joe Mean Dog was an ex-Green Beret, in a tone of voice which seemed to indicate that explained everything.

"Mr. Dirisko won't even get out of his car when he has a package for them," Wireman said. He was referring to the U.S. Postal Service's fat and jolly representative on the south end of Casey and all of Duma Key. We were sitting on the sawhorses in front of the Mean Dog house a day or two before the Godfreys were scheduled to arrive. The crushed-shell driveway was glistening a damp pink. Wireman had turned on the sprinklers. "He just leaves whatever he's got at the foot of the mailbox post, honks, and then rolls wheels for El Palacio. And do I blame him? Non, non, Nannette."

"Wireman, about the doctor-"

"March, muchacho, and before the Ides. I promise."

"You're just putting it off," I said.

"I'm not. I have only one busy season, and this be it. I got caught a little off-guard last year, but it's not going to happen this time around. It can't happen this time around, because this year Miss Eastlake's going to be far less capable of pitching in. At least the Mean Dogs are returners, known quantities, and so are the Baumgartens. I like the Baumgartens. Two kids."

"Either of them girls?" I asked, thinking about Elizabeth's prejudice concerning daughters and Duma.

"Nope, both the kind of boys who ought to have GOT IT MADE BUT DON'T HOLD IT AGAINST US stamped on their foreheads. The people coming into the other four houses are all new. I can hope that none of them will be the rock-and-roll-all-night, party-every-day type, but what are the odds?"

"Not good, but you can at least hope they left their Slipknot CDs home."

"Who's Slipknot? What's Slipknot?"

"Wireman, you don't want to know. Especially not while you're busy working yourself into a state."