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Big Pink 4 ñòðàíèöà






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 upI 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.

Just lie here for awhile, that was…

I got that far, and then I was gone again. There were no dreams.

 

Viii

 

I slipped back to some sort of consciousness in the middle of the night with my right arm itching and my right hand tingling and no idea of where I was, only that from below me something vast was grinding and grinding and grinding. At first I thought it was machinery, but it was too uneven to be machinery. And too organic, somehow. Then I thought of teeth, but nothing had teeth that vast. Nothing in the known world, at least.

Breathing, I thought, and that seemed right, but what kind of animal made such a vast grinding sound when it drew in breath? And God, that itch was driving me crazy, all the way up my forearm to the crease of the elbow. I went to scratch it, reaching across my chest with my left hand, and of course there was no elbow, no forearm, and I scratched nothing but the bedsheet.

That brought me fully awake and I sat up. Although the room was still very dark, enough starlight came in through the westward-facing window for me to see the foot of the bed, where one of my suitcases rested on a bench. That locked me in place. I was on Duma Key, just off the west coast of Florida — home of the newly wed and the nearly dead. I was in the house I was already thinking of as Big Pink, and that grinding sound —

“It’s shells, ” I murmured, lying back down. “Shells under the house. The tide’s in.”

I loved that sound from the first, when I woke up and heard it in the dark of night, when I didn’t know where I was, who I was, or what parts were still attached. It was mine.

It had me from hello.

 


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