Duma Key - Stephen King

Not a bad question. All at once the seagrape seemed to be pushing in and the interweaving palms overhead seemed thicker. I realized I could smell the growth around us, a ropy aroma that seemed to come to life halfway down my throat. And why not? It came from live things, after all; they were crowded in on both sides. And above.

"Dad?"

The itch was worse. It was red, that itch, as red as the stink in my nose and throat was green. That itch you got when you were stuck in the burn, stuck in the char.

"Daddy, I'm sorry but I think I'm going to vomit."

Not a burn, not a char, it was a car, she opened the door of the car and leaned out, holding onto the wheel with one ham, and then I heard her sowing up.

My right eye came over red and I thought I can do this. I can do this. I just have to get my poor old shit together.

I opened my door, reaching cross-body to do it, and got out. Lurched out, holding the top of the door to keep from sprawling headfirst into a wall of seagrape and the interwoven branches of a half-buried banyan. I itched all over. The bushes and branches were so close to the side of the car that they scraped me as I made my way up to the front. Half my vision

( RED )

seemed to be bleeding scarlet, I felt the tip of a pine-bough scrape across the wrist of - I could have sworn it - my right arm, and I thought I can do this, I MUST do this as I heard Ilse vomit again. I was aware that it was much hotter in that narrow lane than it should have been, even with the greenroof overhead. I had enough mind left in my mind to wonder what we'd been thinking, coming down this road in the first place. But of course it had seemed like nothing but a lark at the time.

Ilse was still leaning out, hanging onto the wheel with her right hand. Sweat stood on her forehead in clear beads. She looked up at me. "Oh boy-"

"Push over, Ilse."

"Daddy, what are you going to do?"

As if she couldn't see. And all at once both the words drive and back were unavailable to me, anyway. All I could have articulated in that moment was us, the most useless word in the English language when it stands by itself. I felt the anger rising in my throat like hot water. Or blood. Yes, more like that. Because the anger was, of course, red.

"Get us out of here. Push over." Thinking: Don't you get mad at her. Don't you start shouting no matter what. Oh for Christ's sake, please don't.

"Daddy, you, can't-"

"Yes. I can do this. Push over."

The habit of obedience dies hard - especially hard, maybe, between fathers and daughters. And of course she was sick. She pushed over and I got behind the wheel, sitting down in my clumsy stupid backwards fashion and using my hand to lift in my rotten right leg. My whole right side was buzzing, as if undergoing a low-level electric shock.

I closed my eyes tightly and thought: I CAN do this, goddammit, and I don't need any stuffed rag bitch to see me through, either.

When I looked at the world again, some of that redness - and some of the anger, thank God - had drained out of it. I dropped the transmission into reverse and began to back up slowly. I couldn't lean out as Ilse had done, because I had no right hand to steer with. I used the rear-view instead. In my head, ghostly, I heard: Meep-meep-meep.

"Please don't drive us off the road," Ilse said. "We can't walk. I'm too sick and you're too crippled-up."

"I won't, Monica," I said, but at that moment she leaned out the window to vomit again and I don't think she heard me.

xiii

Slowly, slowly, I backed away from the place where Ilse had stopped, telling myself Easy does it and Slow and steady wins the race. My hip snarled as we thumped back over the strangler fig roots burrowing under the road. On a couple of occasions I heard seagrape branches scree along the side of the car. The Hertz people weren't going to be happy, but they were the least of my worries that afternoon.

Little by little the light brightened as the foliage cleared out overhead. That was good. My vision was also clearing, that mad itch subsiding. Those things were even better.

"I see the big place with the wall around it," Ilse said, looking back over her shoulder.

"Do you feel any better?"

"Maybe a little, but my stomach's still sudsing like a Maytag." She made a gagging noise. "Oh God, I should never have said that." She leaned out, threw up again, then collapsed back onto the seat, laughing and groaning. Her bangs were sticking to her forehead in clumps. "I just shellacked the side of your car. Please tell me you have a hose."

"Don't worry about that. Just sit still and take long, slow breaths."

She saluted feebly and closed her eyes.

The old woman in the big straw hat was nowhere in evidence, but the two halves of the iron gate were now standing wide open, as if she was expecting company. Or knew we'd need a place to turn around.

I didn't waste time considering that, just backed the Chevy into the archway. For a moment I saw a courtyard paved with cool blue tiles, a tennis court, and an enormous set of double doors with iron rings set into them. Then I turned for home. We were there five minutes later. My vision was as clear as it had been when I woke up that morning, if not clearer. Except for the low itch up and down my right side, I felt fine.

I also felt a strong desire to draw. I didn't know what, but I would know, when I was sitting in Little Pink with one of my pads propped on my easel. I was sure of that.

"Let me clean off the side of your car," Ilse said.

"You're going to lie down. You look beat half to death."

She offered a wan smile. "That's just the better half. Remember how Mom used to say that?"

I nodded. "Go on, now. I'll do the rinsing." I pointed to where the hose was coiled on the north side of Big Pink. "It's all hooked up and ready to go."

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"Good to go. I think you ate more of the tuna salad than I did."

She managed another smile. "I always was partial to my own cooking. You were great to get us back here, Daddy. I'd kiss you, but my breath..."

I kissed her. On the forehead. The skin was cool and damp. "Put your feet up, Miss Cookie - orders from headquarters."

She went. I turned on the faucet and hosed off the side of the Malibu, taking more time than the job really needed, wanting to make sure she was down for the count. And she was. When I peeked in through the half-open door of the second bedroom, I saw her lying on her side, sleeping just as she had as a kid: one hand tucked under her cheek and one knee drawn up almost to her chest. We think we change, but we don't really - that's what Wireman says.

Maybe s , maybe no - that's what Freemantle says.

xiv

There was something pulling me - maybe something that had been in me since the accident, but surely something that had come back from Duma Key Road with me. I let it pull. I'm not sure I could have stood against it in any case, but I didn't even try; I was curious.

My daughter's purse was on the coffee table in the living room. I opened it, took out her wallet, and flipped through the pictures inside. Doing this made me feel a little like a cad, but only a little. It's not as if you're stealing anything, I told myself, but of course there are many ways of stealing, aren't there?

Here was the photo of Carson Jones she'd shown me at the airport, but I didn't want that. I didn't want him by himself. I wanted him with her. I wanted a picture of them as a couple. And I found one. It looked as if it had been taken at a roadside stand; there were baskets of cucumbers and corn behind them. They were smiling and young and beautiful. Their arms were around each other, and one of Carson Jones's palms appeared to be resting on the swell of my daughter's blue jeans-clad ass. Oh you crazy Christian. My right arm was still itching, a low, steady skin-crawl like prickly heat. I scratched at it, scratched through it, and got my ribs instead for the ten thousandth time. This picture was also in a protective see-through envelope. I slid it out, glanced over my shoulder - nervous as a burglar on his first job - at the partially open door of the room where Ilse was sleeping, then turned the picture over.

I love you, Punkin!

"Smiley"

Could I trust a suitor who called my daughter Punkin and signed himself Smiley? I didn't think so. It might not be fair, but no - I didn't think so. Nevertheless, I had found what I was looking for. Not one, but both. I turned the picture over again, closed my eyes, and pretended I was touching their Kodachrome images with my right hand. Although pretending wasn't what it felt like; I suppose I don't have to tell you that by now.

After some passage of time - I don't know exactly how long - I returned the picture to its plastic sleeve and submerged her wallet beneath the tissues and cosmetics to approximately the same depth at which I had found it. Then I put her purse back on the coffee table and went into my bedroom to get Reba the Anger-Management Doll. I limped upstairs to Little Pink with her clamped between my stump and my side. I think I remember saying "I'm going to make you into Monica Seles" when I set Reba down in front of the window, but it could as easily have been Monica Goldstein; when it comes to memory, we all stack the deck. The gospel according to Wireman.

I'm clearer than I want to be about most of what happened on Duma, but that particular afternoon seems very vague to me. I know that I fell into a frenzy of drawing, and that the maddening itch in my nonexistent right arm disappeared completely while I was working; I do not know but am almost sure that the reddish haze which always hung over my vision in those days, growing thicker when I was tired, disappeared for awhile.

I don't know how long I was in that state. I think quite awhile. Long enough so I was both exhausted and famished when I was finished.

I went back downstairs and gobbled lunchmeat by the fridge's frosty glow. I didn't want to make an actual sandwich, because I didn't want Ilse to know I'd felt well enough to eat. Let her go on thinking our problems had been caused by bad mayonnaise. That way we wouldn't have to spend time hunting for other explanations.

None of the other explanations I could think of were rational.

After eating half a package of sliced salami and swilling a pint or so of sweet tea, I went into my bedroom, lay down, and fell into a sodden sleep.

xv

Sunsets.

Sometimes it seems to me that my clearest memories of Duma Key are of orange evening skies that bleed at the bottom and fade away at the top, green to black. When I woke up that evening, another day was going down in glory. I thudded into the big main room on my crutch, stiff and wincing (the first ten minutes were always the worst). The door to Ilse's room was standing open and her bed was empty.

"Ilse?" I called.

For a moment there was no answer. Then she called back from upstairs. "Daddy? Holy crow, did you do this? When did you do this?"

All thought of aches and pains left me. I got up to Little Pink as fast as I could, trying to remember what I'd drawn. Whatever it was, I hadn't made any effort to put it out of sight. Suppose it was something really awful? Suppose I'd gotten the bright idea of doing a crucifixion caricature, with The Gospel Hummingbird riding the cross?

Ilse was standing in front of my easel, and I couldn't see what was there. Her body was blocking it out. Even if she'd been standing to one side, the only light in the room was coming from that bloody sunset; the pad would have been nothing but a black rectangle against the glare.

I flicked on the lights, praying I hadn't done something to distress the daughter who had come all this way to make sure I was okay. From her voice, I hadn't been able to tell. "Ilse?"

She turned to me, her face bemused rather than angry. "When did you do this one?"

"Well..." I said. "Stand aside a little, would you?"

"Is your memory playing tricks again? It is, isn't it?"

"No," I said. "Well, yeah." It was the beach outside the window, I could tell that much but no more. "As soon as I see it, I'm sure I'll... step aside, honey, you make a better door than a window."

"Even though I am a pain, right?" She laughed. Rarely had the sound of laughter so relieved me. Whatever she'd found on the easel, it hadn't made her mad, and my stomach dropped back where it belonged. If she wasn't angry, the risk that I might get angry and spoil what had, on measure, been a pretty damned good visit went down.

She stepped to the left, and I saw what I'd drawn while in my dazed, pre-nap state. Technically, it was probably the best thing I'd done since my first tentative pen-and-inks on Lake Phalen, but I thought it was no wonder she was puzzled. I was puzzled, too.

It was the section of beach I could see through Little Pink's nearly wall-length window. The casual scribble of light on the water, achieved with a shade the Venus Company called Chrome, marked the time as early morning. A little girl in a tennis dress stood at the center of the picture. Her back was turned, but her red hair was a dead giveaway: she was Reba, my little love, that girlfriend from my other life. The figure was poorly executed, but you somehow knew that was on purpose, that she wasn't a real little girl at all, only a dream figure in a dream landscape.

All around her feet, lying in the sand, were bright green tennis balls.

Others floated shoreward on the mild waves.

"When did you do it?" Ilse was still smiling - almost laughing. "And what the heck does it mean?"

"Do you like it?" I asked. Because I didn't like it. The tennis balls were the wrong color because I hadn't had the right shade of green, but that wasn't why; I hated it because it felt all wrong. It felt like heartbreak.

"I love it!" she said, and then did laugh. "C'mon, when did you do it? Give."

"While you were sleeping. I went to lie down, but I felt queasy again, so I thought I better stay vertical for awhile. I decided to draw a little, see if things would settle. I didn't realize I had that thing in my hand until I got up here." I pointed to Reba, sitting propped against the window with her stuffed legs sticking out.

"That's the doll you're supposed to yell at when you forget things, right?"

"Something like that. Anyway, I drew the picture. It took maybe an hour. By the time I was finished, I felt better." Although I remembered very little about making the drawing, I remembered enough to know this story was a lie. "Then I lay down and took a nap. End of story."

"Can I have it?"

I felt a surge of dismay, but couldn't think of a way to say no that wouldn't hurt her feelings or sound crazy. "If you really want it. It's not much, though. Wouldn't you rather have one of Freemantle's Famous Sunsets? Or the mailbox with the rocking horse! I could-"

"This is the one I want," she said. "It's funny and sweet and even a little... I don't know... ominous. You look at her one way and you say, 'A doll.' You look another way and say, 'No, a little girl - after all, isn't she standing up?' It's amazing how much you've learned to do with colored pencils." She nodded decisively. "This is the one I want. Only you have to name it. Artists have to name their pictures."

"I agree, but I wouldn't have any idea-"

"Come on, come on, no weaseling. First thing to pop into your mind."

I said, "All right - The End of the Game."