Shannington cleaned up the wreckage in the...
Shannington cleaned up the wreckage in the front
yard, Daddy driving the little red tractor and Mr
Shannington throwing drowned palm-fronds and
busted branches into the little trailer trundling
along behind
The doll whispered, the muse told its tale
Elizabeth listened and painted the place off Hag's
Rock that very day, the one where Noveen whispered
the buried treasure now lay exposed
Libbit begs her Daddy to go look, begs him begs
him begs himDaddy says NO, Daddy says he's too
tired, too stiff from all that yardwork
Nan Melda says Some time in the water might loosen
you up, Mr
Nan Melda says I'll bring down a picnic lunch and
the l'il girls
And then Nan Melda says You know how she is now
If she say something's out there, then maybe
So they went downbeach by Hag's Rock - Daddy in
the swimsuit that no longer fit him, and Elizabeth,
and the twins, and Nan MeldaHannah and Maria
were back in school, and Adiebut best not talk
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about herNan Melda was carrying
the red picnic basketInside was the lunch,
sunhats for the girls, Elizabeth's drawing things,
Daddy's spear-pistol, and a few harpoons for it
Daddy puts on his flippers and wades into the
caldo up to his knees and says This is cold! It
better not take long, LibbitTell me where omega automatic watches this
fabulous treasure lies
Libbit says I will, but do you promise I can have
the china dolly?
Daddy says Any doll is yours - fair salvage
The muse saw it and the girl painted itSo their
future is set
9 - Candy Brown
i
Two nights later I painted the ship for the first
time
I called it Girl and Ship to begin with, then Girl
and Ship No1, although neither was its real name;
its real name was Ilse and Ship NoIt was the
Ship series even more than what happened to Candy
Brown that decided me on whether or not to show my
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workIf Nannuzzi wanted to do it, I'd go along
Not because I was seeking what Shakespeare called
"the bubble reputation" (I owe Wireman for that
one), but because I came to understand that
Elizabeth was right: it was better not to let work
pile up on Duma Key
The Ship paintings were goodThey
certainly felt that way when I finished themThey
were also bad, powerful medicineI think I knew
that from the first one, executed during the small
hours of Valentine's DayDuring the last night of
Tina Garibaldi's life
ii
The dream wasn't exactly a nightmare, but it was
vivid beyond my power to describe in words,
although I captured some of the feeling on canvas
In that dream and all the ones which followed, it
was always men's gucci wallet sunsetVast red light filled the west,
reaching high to heaven, where it faded first to
orange, then to a weird greenThe Gulf was nearly
dead calm, with only the smallest and glassiest of
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rollers crossing its surface like respirationIn
the reflected sunset glare, it looked like a huge
socket filled with blood
Silhouetted against that furnace light was a
three-masted derelictThe ship's rotted sails
hung limp with red fire glaring through the holes
and ripsThere was no one alive on boardYou
only had to look to know thatThere was a feeling
of hollow menace about the thing, as though it had
housed some plague that had burned through the
crew, leaving only this rotting corpse of wood,
hemp, and sailclothI remember feeling that if a
gull or pelican flew over it, the bird would drop
dead on the deck with its feathers smoking
Floating about forty yards away was a small
rowboatSitting in it was a girl, her back to me
Her hair was red, but the hair was false - no live
girl had tangled yarn hair like thatWhat gave
away her identity was the dress she woreIt was
covered with tic-tac-toe grids and the printed
words I WIN, YOU WIN, over and overIlse had that
dress when she was four or fiveabout the age
of the twin girls in the family portrait pink prada handbag I'd seen
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on the second floor landing of El Palacio de
Asesinos
I tried to shout, to warn her not to go near the
derelictIn any case
it didn't seem to matterShe only sat there in
her sweet little rowboat on the mild red rollers,
watching and wearing Illy's tic-tac-toe dress
I fell out of my bed, and on my bad sideI cried
out in pain and rolled over on my back, listening
to the waves from outside and the soft grinding of
the shells under the houseThey told me where I
was but did not comfort me
My missing arm seemed to burnI had to put a stop
to it or go crazy, and there was only one way to
do thatI went upstairs and painted like a
lunatic for the next three hoursI had no model
on my table, no object in view out my windowIt was all in my headAnd as I
worked, I realized this was what all the pictures
had been struggling towardNot the girl in the
rowboat, necessarily; she was probably just an
added attraction, a toehold in realityIt was the
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ship I had been after all alongThe ship and the
sunsetWhen I thought back, I realized the irony
of that: Hello, the pencil-sketch I'd made on the
day I came, had been the closest
iii
I tumbled into bed around three-thirty and slept
until nineI woke feeling refreshed, cleaned dolce gabbana handbags out,
brand-newThe weather was fine: cloudless and
warmer than it had been in a weekThe Baumgartens
were getting ready to return north, but I had a
spirited game of Frisbee with their boys on the
beach before they leftMy appetite was high, my
pain-level lowIt was nice to feel like one of
the guys again, even for an hour
Elizabeth's weather had also clearedI read her a
number of poems while she arranged her chinas
Wireman was there, caught up for once and in good
spiritsThe world felt fine that dayIt occurred
to me only later that George "Candy" Brown might
well have been abducting twelve-year-old Tina
Garibaldi at the same time I was reading Richard
Wilbur's poem about laundry, "Love Calls Us to the
393
Things of the World," to ElizabethI chose it
because I happened to see an item in that day's
paper saying it had become something of a
Valentine's Day favoriteThe Garibaldi kidnapping
happened to be recordedIt occurred at exactly
3:16 PM, according to the time-stamp on the tape,
and that would have been just about the time I
paused to sip from my glass of Wireman's green tea
and unfold the Wilbur poem, which I had printed
off the Internet
There were closed-circuit cameras installed to
watch the loading-dock areas behind the cartier santos demoiselle Crossroads
Mall