Moving slowly - I had no intention of falling in here on my first day - I made my way into the master bedroom. The bed was a king, and I wanted nothing more than to go to it, sit on it, sweep the foolish decorative throw-pillows (one bearing the likenessness of two cavorting Cockers and the rather startling idea that MAYBE DOGS ARE ONLY PEOPLE AT THEIR BEST) to the floor with my crutch, lie down, and sleep for two hours. Maybe three. But first I went to the bench at the end of the bed - still moving carefully, knowing how very easy it would be to tangle my feet and fall when I was at this level of exhaustion - where the kid had stacked two of my three suitcases. The one I wanted was on the bottom, of course. I shoved the one on top to the floor without hesitation and unzipped the front pocket of the other.
Glassy blue eyes looked out with their expression of eternal disapproving surprise: Oouuu, you nasty man! I been in here all this time! A fluff of lifeless orange-red hair sprang from confinement. Reba the Anger-Management Doll in her best blue dress and black Mary Janes.
I lay on the bed with her crooked between my stump and my side. When I had made an adequate space for myself among the ornamental pillows (it was mostly the cavorting Cockers I'd wanted on the floor), I laid her beside me.
"I forgot his name," I said. "I remembered it the whole way out here, then forgot it." Reba looked up at the ceiling, where the blades of the overhead fan were still and unmoving. I'd forgotten to turn it on. Reba didn't care if my new part-time hired man was Ike, Mike, or Andy Van Slyke. It was all the same to her, she was just rags stuffed into a pink body, probably by some unhappy child laborer in Cambodia or fucking Uruguay.
"What is it?" I asked her. Tired as I was, I could feel the old dismal panic setting in. The old dismal anger. The fear that this would go on for the rest of my life. Or get worse! Yes, possible! They'd take me back into the convalescent home, which was really just hell with a fresh coat of paint.
Reba didn't answer, that boneless bitch.
"I can do this," I said, although I didn't believe it. And I thought: Jerry. No, Jeff. Then You're thinking about Jerry Jeff Walker, asshole. Johnson? Gerald? Great Jumping Jehosaphat?
Starting to drift away. Starting to drift into sleep in spite of the anger and panic. Tuning in to the mild respiration of the Gulf.
I can do this, I thought. Crosspatch. Like when you remembered what B-and-C stood for.
I thought of the kid saying They condemned a couple beach houses at the north end of Casey Key and there was something there. My stump was itching like a mad bastard. But pretend that's some other guy's stump in some other universe, meantime chase that thing, that rag, that bone, that connection -
- drifting away -
Although if a big storm like Charley ever hits this part of the coast dead-on -
And bingo.
Charley was a hurricane, and when hurricanes struck, I peeked at The Weather Channel, like the rest of America, and their hurricane guy was...
I picked up Reba. She seemed to weigh at least twenty pounds in my soupy, half-asleep state. "The hurricane guy is Jim Cantore," I said. "My help-out guy is Jack Cantori. Case fuckin closed." I flopped her back down and closed my eyes. I might have heard that faint sigh from the Gulf for another ten or fifteen seconds. Then I was asleep.
I slept until sundown. It was the deepest, most satisfying sleep I'd had in eight months.
v
I had done no more than nibble on the plane, and consequently woke up ravenous. I did a dozen heel-slides instead of the usual twenty-five to loosen my hip, made a quick trip to the bathroom, then lurched toward the kitchen. I was leaning on my crutch, but not as heavily as I might have expected, given the length of my nap. My plan was to make myself a sandwich, maybe two. I hoped for sliced bologna, but reckoned any lunchmeat I found in the fridge would be okay. I'd call Ilse after I ate and tell her I'd arrived safely. Ilse could be depended upon to e-mail everyone else with an interest in the welfare of Edgar Freemantle. Then I could take tonight's dose of pain medication and explore the rest of my new environment. The whole second floor awaited.
What my plan hadn't taken into account was how the westward view had changed.
The sun was gone, but there was still a brilliant orange band above the flat line of the Gulf. It was broken in only one place, by the silhouette of some large ship. Its shape was as simple as a first-grader's drawing. A cable stretched taut from the bow to what I assumed was the radio tower, creating a triangle of light. As that light skied upward, orange faded to a breathless Maxfield Parrish blue-green that I had never seen before with my own eyes... and yet I had a sense of d j vu, as if maybe I had seen it, in my dreams. Maybe we all see skies like that in our dreams, and our waking minds can never quite translate them into colors that have names.
Above, in the deepening black, the first stars.
I was no longer hungry, and no longer wanted to call Ilse. All I wanted to do was draw what I was looking at. I knew I couldn't get all of it, but I didn't care - that was the beauty part. I didn't give Shit One.
My new employee (for a moment I blanked on his name again, then I thought Weather Channel, then I thought Jack: case fuckin closed) had put my knapsack of art supplies in the second bedroom. I flailed my way out to the Florida room with it, carrying it awkwardly and trying to use my crutch at the same time. A mildly curious breeze lifted my hair. The idea that such a breeze and snow in St. Paul might exist at the same time, in the same world, seemed absurd to me - science fiction.
I set the sack down on the long, rough wooden table, thought about snapping on a light, and decided against it. I would draw until I couldn't see to draw, and then call it a night. I sat in my awkward fashion, unzipped the bag, pulled out my pad. ARTISAN, it said on the front. Given the level of my current skills, that was a joke. I grubbed deeper and brought out my box of colored pencils.
I drew and colored quickly, hardly looking at what I was doing. I shaded up from an arbitrary horizon-line, stroking my Venus Yellow from side to side with wild abandon, sometimes going over the ship (it would be the first tanker in the world to come down with yellow jaundice, I reckoned) and not caring. When I had the sunset band to what seemed like the right depth - it was dying fast now - I grabbed the orange and shaded more, and heavier. Then I went back to the ship, not thinking, just putting a series of angular black lines on my paper. That was what I saw.
When I was done, it was almost full dark.
To the left, the three palms clattered.
Below and beyond me - but not so far beyond now, the tide was coming back in - the Gulf of Mexico sighed, as if it had had a long day and there was more work to do yet.
Overhead there were now thousands of stars, and more appearing even as I looked.
This was here all the time, I thought, and recalled something Melinda used to say when she heard a song she really liked on the radio: It had me from hello. Below my rudimentary tanker, I scratched the word HELLO in small letters. So far as I can remember (and I'm better at that now), it was the first time in my life I named a picture. And as names go, it's a good one, isn't it? In spite of all the damage that followed, I still think that's the perfect name for a picture drawn by a man who was trying his best not to be sad anymore - who was trying to remember how it felt to be happy.
It was done. I put my pencil down, and that was when Big Pink spoke to me for the first time. Its voice was softer than the sigh of the Gulf's breathing, but I heard it quite well just the same.
I've been waiting for you, it said.
vi
That was my year for talking to myself, and answering myself back. Sometimes other voices answered back as well, but that night it was just me, myself, and I.
"Houston, this is Freemantle, do you copy, Houston?" Leaning into the fridge. Thinking, Christ, if this is basic staples, I'd hate to see what it would look like if the kid really decided to load up - I could wait out World War III.
"Ah, roger, Freemantle, we copy."
"Ah, we have bologna, Houston, that's a go on the bologna, do you copy?"
"Roger, Freemantle, we read you loud and clear. What's your mayo situation?"
We were a go for mayo, too. I made two bologna sandwiches on white - where I grew up, children are raised to believe mayonnaise, bologna, and white bread are the food of the gods - and ate them at the kitchen table. In the pantry I found a stack of Table Talk Pies, both apple and blueberry. I began to think of changing my will in favor of Jack Cantori.
Almost sloshing with food, I went back to the living room, snapped on all the lights, and looked at Hello. It wasn't very good. But it was interesting. The scribbled afterglow had a sullen, furnacey quality that was startling. The ship wasn't the one I'd seen, but mine was interesting in a spooky sort of way. It was little more than a scarecrow ship, and the overlapping scribbles of yellow and orange had turned it into a ghost-ship, as well, as if that peculiar sunset were shining right through it.
I propped it atop the TV, against the sign reading THE OWNER REQUESTS THAT YOU AND YOUR GUESTS DO NOT SMOKE INDOORS. I looked at it a moment longer, thinking it needed something in the foreground - a smaller boat, maybe, just to lend the one on the horizon some perspective - but I no longer wanted to draw. Besides, adding something might fuck up what little charm the thing had. I tried the telephone instead, thinking if it wasn't working yet I could call Ilse on my cell, but Jack had been on top of that, too.
I thought I'd probably get her machine - college girls are busy girls - but she answered on the first ring. "Daddy?" That startled me so much that at first I couldn't speak and she said it again. "Dad?"
"Yes," I said. "How did you know?"
"The callback number's got a 941 area code. That's where that Duma place is. I checked."
"Modern technology. I can't catch up. How are you, kiddo?"
"Fine. The question is, how are you?"
"I'm all right. Better than all right, actually."
"The fellow you hired -?"
"He's got game. The bed's made and the fridge is full. I got here and took a five-hour nap."
There was a pause, and when she spoke again she sounded more concerned than ever. "You're not hitting those pain pills too hard, are you? Because Oxycontin's supposed to be sort of a Trojan horse. Not that I'm telling you anything you didn't already know."
"Nope, I stick to the prescribed dosage. In fact-" I stopped.
"What, Daddy? What?" Now she sounded almost ready to hail a cab and take a plane.
"I was just realizing I skipped the five o'clock Vicodin... " I checked my watch. "And the eight o'clock Oxycontin, too. I'll be damned."
"How bad's the pain?"
"Nothing a couple of Tylenol won't handle. At least until midnight."
"It's probably the change in climate," she said. "And the nap."
I had no doubt those things were part of it, but I didn't think they were all of it. Maybe it was crazy, but I thought drawing had played a part. In fact, it was something I sort of knew.
We talked for awhile, and little by little I could hear that concern going out of her voice. What replaced it was unhappiness. She was understanding, I suppose, that this thing was really happening, that her mother and father weren't just going to wake up one morning and take it back. But she promised to call Pam and e-mail Melinda, let them know I was still in the land of the living.
"Don't you have e-mail there, Dad?"
"I do, but tonight you're my e-mail, Cookie."
She laughed, sniffed, laughed again. I thought to ask if she was crying, then thought again. Better not to, maybe.
"Ilse? I better let you go now, honey. I want to shower off the day."
"Okay, but..." A pause. Then she burst out: "I hate to think of you all the way down there in Florida by yourself! Maybe falling on your ass in the shower! It's not right!"
"Cookie, I'm fine. Really. The kid - his name's..." Hurricanes, I thought. Weather Channel. "His name's Jim Cantori." But that was a case of right church, wrong pew. "Jack, I mean."
"That's not the same, and you know it. Do you want me to come?"
"Not unless you want your mother to scalp us both bald," I said. "What I want is for you to stay right where you are and TCB, darlin. I'll stay in touch."
"'Kay. But take care of yourself. No stupid shit."
"No stupid shit. Roger that, Houston."
"Huh?"
"Never mind."
"I still want to hear you promise, Dad."
For one terrible and surpassingly eerie moment I saw Ilse at eleven, Ilse dressed in a Girl Scout's uniform and looking at me with Monica Goldstein's shocked eyes. Before I could stop the words, I heard myself saying, "Promise. Big swear. Mother's name."
She giggled. "Never heard that one before."
"There's a lot about me you don't know. I'm a deep one."
"If you say so." A pause. Then: "Love you."
"Love you, too."
I put the phone gently back into its cradle and stared at it for a long time.
vii
Instead of showering, I walked down the beach to the water. I quickly discovered my crutch was no help on the sand - was, in fact, a hindrance - but once I was around the corner of the house, the water's edge was less than two dozen steps away. That was easy if I went slow. The surge was mild, the incoming wavelets only inches high. It was hard to imagine this water whipped into a destructive hurricane frenzy. Impossible, actually. Later, Wireman would tell me God always punishes us for what we can't imagine.
That was one of his better ones.
I turned to go back to the house, then paused. There was just enough light to see a deep carpet of shells - a drift of shells - under the jutting Florida room. At high tide, I realized, the front half of my new house would be almost like the foredeck of a ship. I remembered Jack saying I'd get plenty of warning if the Gulf of Mexico decided to eat the place, that I'd hear it groaning. He was probably right... but then, I was also supposed to get plenty of warning on a job site when a heavy piece of equipment was backing up.
I limped back to where my crutch leaned against the side of the house and took the short plank walk around to the door. I thought about the shower and took a bath instead, going in and coming out in the careful sidesaddle way Kathi Green had shown me in my other life, both of us dressed in bathing suits, me with my right leg looking like a badly butchered cut of meat. Now the butchery was in the past; my body was doing its miracle work. The scars would last a lifetime, but even they were fading. Already fading.
Dried off and with my teeth brushed, I crutched into the master bedroom and surveyed the king, now divested of decorative pillows. "Houston," I said, "we have bed."
"Roger, Freemantle," I replied. "You are go for bed."
Sure, why not? I'd never sleep, not after that whopper of a nap, but I could lie down for awhile. My leg still felt pretty good, even after my expedition to the water, but there was a knot in my lower back and another at the base of my neck. I lay down. No, sleep was out of the question, but I turned off the lamp anyway. Just to rest my eyes. I'd lie there until my back and neck felt better, then dig a paperback out of my suitcase and read.
