Duma Key

"I'm not. Wireman is just explaining February on Duma Key, muchacho. I'm going to be fielding everything from emergency queries about what to do if one of the Baumgarten boys gets stung by a jellyfish to where Rita Mean Dog can get a fan for her grandmother, who they'll probably stash in the back bedroom again for a week or so. You think Miss Eastlake's getting on? I've seen Mexican mummies hauled through the streets of Guadalajara on the Day of the Dead who looked better than Gramma Mean Dog. She's got two basic lines of conversation. There's the inquisitive line - 'Did you bring me a cookie?' - and the declarative - 'Get me a towel, Rita, I think that last fart had a lump in it.'"

I burst out laughing.

Wireman scraped a sneaker through the shells, creating a smile with his foot. Beyond us, our shadows lay on Duma Key Road, which was paved and smooth and even. Here, at least. Farther south was a different story. "The answer to the fan problem, should you care, is Dan's Fan City. Is that a great name, or what? And I'll tell you something: I actually like solving these problems. Defusing little crises. I make folks a hell of a lot happier here on Duma Key than I ever did in court."

But you haven't lost the knack for leading people away from the things you don't want to discuss, I thought. "Wireman, it would only take half an hour to get a physician to look into your eyes and tap your skull-"

"You're wrong, muchacho, " he said patiently. "At this time of year it takes a minimum of two hours to get looked at in a roadside Doc-in-the-Box for a lousy strep throat. When you add on an hour of travel time - more now, because it's Snowbird Season and none of them know where they're going - you're talking about three daylight hours I just can't give up. Not with appointments to see the air conditioning guy at 17... the meter-reader at 27... the cable guy right here, if he ever shows up." He pointed to the next house down the road, which happened to be 39. "Youngsters from Toledo are taking that one until March fifteenth, and they're paying an extra seven hundred bucks for something called Wi-Fi, which I don't even know what it is."

"Wave of the future, that's what it is. I've got it. Jack took care of it. Wave of the father-raping, mother-stabbing future."

"Good one. Arlo Guthrie, 1967."

"Movie was 1969, I think," I said.

"Whenever it was, viva the wave of the mother-raping, froggy-stabbing future. Doesn't change the fact that I'm busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest... plus come on, Edgar. You know it's going to be more than a quick tap and peek with the old doctor-flashlight. That's just where it starts."

"But if you need it-"

"For the time being I'm good to go."

"Sure. That's why I'm the one reading her poems every afternoon."

"A little literary culture won't hurt you, you fucking cannibal."

"I know it won't, and you know that's not what I'm talking about." I thought - and not for the first time - that Wireman was one of the very few men I ever met in my adult life who could consistently tell me no without making me angry. He was a genius of no. Sometimes I thought it was him; sometimes I thought the accident had changed something in me; sometimes I thought it was both.

"I can read, you know," Wireman said. "In short bursts. Enough to get by. Medicine bottle labels, phone numbers, things like that. And I will get looked at, so relax that Type-A compulsion of yours to set the whole world straight. Christ, you must have driven your wife crazy." He glanced at me sideways and said, "Oops. Did Wireman step on a corn there?"

"Ready to talk about that little round scar on the side of your head yet? Muchacho? "

He grinned. " Touch , touch . All apologies."

"Kurt Cobain," I said. "1993. Or thereabouts."

He blinked. "Really? I would have said '95, but rock music has largely left me behind. Wireman got old, sad but true. As for the seizure thing... sorry, Edgar, I just don't believe it."

He did, though. I could see it in his eyes. But before I could say anything else, he climbed down from the sawhorse and pointed north. "Look! White van! I think the Forces of Cable TV have arrived!"

ii

I believed Wireman when he said he had no idea what Elizabeth Eastlake had been talking about on the answering machine tape after I played it for him. He continued to think that her concern for my daughter had something to do with her own long-deceased sisters. He professed to be completely puzzled about why she didn't want me to stockpile my pictures on the island. About that, he said, he didn't have a clue.