Duma Key

Kamen's geographical worked, but when it came to fixing what was wrong with my head, I think the Florida part was coincidental. It's true that I lived there, but I never really lived there. No, Kamen's geographical worked because of Duma Key, and Big Pink. For me, those places came to constitute their own world.

I left St. Paul on November tenth with hope in my heart but no real expectations. Kathi Green the Rehab Queen came to see me off. She kissed me on the mouth, hugged me hard, and whispered "May all your dreams come true, Eddie."

"Thanks, Kathi," I said. I was touched even though the dream I fixed on was of Reba the Anger-Management Doll, grown to the size of an actual child, sitting in the moonlit living room of the house I'd shared with Pam. That dream coming true I could live without.

"And send me a picture from Disney World. I long to see you in mouse ears."

"I will," I said, but I never got to Disney World. Sea World, Busch Gardens, or Daytona Speedway, either.

When I left St. Paul, flying in a Lear 55 (successful retirement has its privileges), it was twenty-four and spitting the first snowflakes of another long northern winter. When I landed in Sarasota it was eighty-five and sunny. Even crossing the tarmac to the private air terminal, still clumping along on my trusty red crutch, I thought I could feel my hip saying thank you.

When I look back on that time, it's with the strangest stew of emotions: love, longing, terror, horror, regret, and the deep sweetness only those who've been near death can know. I think it's how Adam and Eve must have felt. Surely they looked back at Eden, don't you think, as they started barefoot down the path to where we are now, in our glum political world of bullets and bombs and satellite TV? Looked past the angel guarding the shut gate with his fiery sword? Sure. I think they must have wanted one more look at the green world they had lost, with its sweet water and kind-hearted animals. And its snake, of course.

ii

There's a charm-bracelet of keys lying off the west coast of Florida. If you had your seven-league boots on, you could step from Longboat to Lido, from Lido to Siesta, from Siesta to Casey. The next step takes you to Duma Key, nine miles long and half a mile wide at its widest, between Casey Key and Don Pedro Island. Most of it's uninhabited, a tangle of banyans, palms, and Australian pines with an uneven, dune-rumpled beach running along the Gulf edge. The beach is guarded by a waist-high band of sea oats. "The sea oats belong," Wireman once told me, "but the rest of that shit has no business growing without irrigation." For much of the time I spent on Duma Key, no one lived there but Wireman, the Bride of the Godfather, and me.

Sandy Smith was my Realtor in St. Paul. I had asked her to find me a place that was quiet - I'm not sure I used the word isolated, but I may have - but still within reach of services. Thinking of Kamen's advice, I told Sandy I wanted to lease for a year, and price wasn't an object, as long as I wasn't getting skint too bad. Even depressed and in more or less constant pain, I was averse to being taken advantage of. Sandy fed my requirements into her computer, and Big Pink was what came out. It was just the luck of the draw.

Except I don't really believe that. Because even my earliest pictures seem to have, I don't know, something.

Something.

iii

On the day I arrived in my rental car (driven by Jack Cantori, the young man Sandy Smith had hired through a Sarasota employment agency), I knew nothing about the history of Duma Key. I only knew one reached it by crossing a WPA-era drawbridge from Casey Key. Once over this bridge, I observed that the northern tip of the island was free of the vegetation that tangled the rest. Instead there was actual landscaping (in Florida this means palms and grass undergoing nearly constant irrigation). I could see half a dozen houses strung along the narrow, patchy band of road leading south, the last one of them a huge and undeniably elegant hacienda.

And close by, less than a football field's length from the Duma Key end of the drawbridge, I could see a pink house hanging over the Gulf.

"Is that it?" I asked, thinking Please let that be it. That's the one I want. "It is, isn't it?"

"I don't know, Mr. Freemantle," Jack said. "I know Sarasota, but this is the first time I've ever been on Duma. Never had any reason to come here." He pulled up to the mailbox, which had a big red 13 on it. He glanced at the folder lying between us on the seat. "This is it, all right. Salmon Point, number thirteen. I hope you're not superstitious."