Scavenger reef
( Key West mystery - 2 )
Laurence Shames
Laurence Shames
Scavenger reef
Part One
1
"Funerals work best in the rain," said Robert Natchez.
"It isn't a funeral," said Ray Yates. "It's a memorial service." Yates licked another swath of salt from the rim of his glass and sucked on his tequila. He was slightly drunk, and increasingly fascinated by the wet circles his iced glass left on the varnished table at Raul's. Natchez ignored him.
"The gray sky, the black umbrellas-humble separate shelters against the damp-"
"You're a pompous pain in the ass," said Yates.
"Separate shelters," Natchez murmured. "I like that."
"It stinks," Yates told him. He wiped his moist hand on the front of his shirt. The shirt had a pattern of washed-out palm fronds and small flamingoes with the pink faded from their plumage.
"Then too," Natchez went on, "there's the way the rain softens the ground, the way the earth yields, squishes underfoot. Gentle or horrifying? Embracing the dead body, or pulling it down like-"
"There is no body." Yates slurped the last of his drink and gestured for another round. "And it isn't gonna rain. And people don't get buried here. They get filed, like in drawers. And you're a morbid sonofabitch."
They waited for their cocktails. It was mid-April in Key West, the night air was thick and smelled of old seaweed and dry shells. On the open roof of the old cafe, the trellised bougainvillea had darkened to a lewd and tired brownish pink, the petals were thin and brittle as crepe paper. Robert Natchez was tall, lean, and totally dressed in black. It was not a token of mourning, it was just the way he dressed.
"I'm sad," he suddenly announced. He sounded confused by an emotion that could be simply told.
"Augie shouldn't have died," said Ray Yates. "He was better than any of us, less full of shit, and he shouldn't have died."
The drinks arrived, the waiter wiped away the last round's rings of dampness. Overhead, a landing plane clattered past, bringing more of Augie Silver's many friends to say goodbye.
*
"He should never have stopped painting," said Claire Steiger, towel-drying her curly hair. "I pleaded with him not to stop."
Her husband nestled deeper into the hotel bathrobe and sipped champagne. "Because some mysterious intuition told you something terrible would happen three years after?" He fingered the fruit plate provided with the suite at the Flagler House, and briefly wondered why hotel mangoes were never ripe, hotel strawberries never red. "Or because his work was keeping the gallery afloat?"
Claire Steiger had soft brown eyes that kept their tender look no matter what she said. "The gallery's doing just fine, Kip. You're the one who's bankrupt, remember?"
It had been a lousy trip down from New York. A chilly yellow mist kept them on the La Guardia runway for forty minutes, which made them miss their connection in Miami, and they'd sat in the cramped and porous commuter terminal for two hours, eating jet exhaust and nursing grievances. Claire had spent a long time in the bath, and her skin still felt like an airport.
"Of course," said Kip Cunningham, "the canvases are worth a great deal more now that-"
"Kip, shut up. Don't be hateful."
"Hateful?" he echoed. It was a word that seemed to crop up often in the months since his overextended real estate company had collapsed under the weight of its debts, its velvety stationery, and its pretensions to empire. Lawyers were hateful. Judges were hateful. It was hateful that he could no longer pay his University Club dues out of company funds, hateful that creditors held liens against his horses. "Since when is it hateful to be candid?" he said. "You're in a business like any other, laddo. Supply and demand. Artist dies, no more supply. Ever. Prices-"
"You're gonna lecture me about capitalism, Kip? Lecture me about Chapter Eleven."
He poured more champagne and went to the window. Below, the coconut palms were dead still and threw heavy moon-shadows across the sand. The calm water of the Florida Straits gleamed with just a hint of goldish green. "Of course," the husband went on, his back to his wife, "how can you be rational about art if you're in love with the artist?"
"Everyone was in love with Augie. That was Augie."
Kip turned. He was a blandly handsome man, smooth-skinned and even-featured, and he now pulled back his thin lips to show a set of perfect teeth. "Strange, though, that he could have had the gallery owner-all it would have taken was a wink, the raise of an eyebrow-and he ran off instead with the assistant… Of course, she was younger. Slimmer. Better bred, some might say."
Claire Steiger kept right on toweling her hair. "Darling," she said, "you're pathetic enough to be jealous of a dead man. Am I supposed to be jealous of a live widow?"
"Lemme tell ya somethin' about Augie Silver," said Jimmy Gibbs.
He was sitting at the Clove Hitch bar, dockside at City Marina, and tucked between his spread-out elbows was a shot of Jack Daniel's and a bottle of Bud. He was speaking in the general direction of Hogfish Mike Curran, the proprietor, but he wanted to talk and he didn't much care who if anyone was listening.
"Augie Silver was the best damn sailor I ever saw. Always calm. A natural. The wind talked to him. The seas like made a road to let him through. Currents, he always managed it so they helped him. That boat a his — thirty-seven feet, single-handed he sailed it nimble as a dinghy… What happened t'Augie, it coulda happened t'anyone. It was a freak. Fuckin' world is all fucked up. Fuckin' weather, ya can't count on it no more. Waterspout in January. Who ever heard of a fuckin' waterspout in January?"
"Happens," said Hogfish Mike. "Not often, but it happens."
Gibbs snorted disapproval, then nipped into his shot and his beer. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair pulled tightly back in a little ponytail, and after several boilermakers his scalp felt pinched. He reached up and loosened the elastic band. A pelican jumped clumsily from a nearby piling and splashed into the shallow water of Garrison Bight.
"Vicious, those waterspouts," Hogfish Mike went on. He crossed his ropy forearms and almost smiled. The ready violence of the natural world was for him a kind of confirmation. "Funnel comes down. Black as sin, you can almost see it spinning. Holy shit-do ya zig or zag? If it catches ya, you're fucked. Spout digs a hole innee ocean, makes a whirlpool that churns like a goddamn Maytag. Sucks fish right outta the water, twirls boats around till they rip apart or crash up onna reef. Breaks off masts like fuckin' breadsticks. I hate to think what would happen to a man in one of those. He'd get yanked to pieces, busted up like the dummy without the seat belt on."
Hogfish paused and finally noticed that his description was causing pain. He leaned across the bar toward Jimmy Gibbs and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Jimmy, hey, it's not like the guy was your bubba. He was a Yankee. Nice house. Big boat. O.K., he paid you fair to do the grunt work. Maybe he bought you a drink now and then. But come on-"
"Augie wasn't like the others," said Jimmy Gibbs, and there was something in his tone that made Hogfish Mike back off. "He treated a person like a person. Lemme get another round."
"Got cash, Jimmy? No tabs here, you know the rules."
Gibbs looked sadly down at his shot glass with nothing at the bottom but an amber stain. Then he considered his beer and sloshed around the last lukewarm pull. A seagull screamed nearby. "Come on, Hogfish, we known each other a lotta years."
"That's the problem, Jimmy," said Hogfish Mike. 'That's the problem."
"You like'a heah?" said Reuben the Cuban, suspending a huge vase of lilies and orchids above the center of a long split-willow table.
Nina Alonzo-Silver stood hands on hips in the middle of her living
room and weighed the arrangement with her eyes. "Too heavy there," she said. 'Try it over by the lamp."
The housekeeper moved the flowers. He was a slight, wiry young man with the surprising yellowish pallor of certain Key West Cubans; he moved in a low-slung whisper like a cat or a Japanese woman, and he nearly disappeared behind the thick stems of the lilies. "Oba heah?" he said.
The widow nodded. Then she cast an appraising glance at the buffet dishes and glasses already arrayed on the sideboard, and at her dead husband's paintings beautifully hung and immaculately lit on every wall. Through the French doors at the rear of the house, a soft blue gleam wafted up from the lights in the pool. In a big enameled cage near the door, a twitchy green parrot looked on. The widow squared a picture frame that had been perhaps a quarter-inch off-true. Then she tried to smile.
"You see, Reuben," she said. "It's just like getting ready for an opening."
"Art sucks," said the parrot. "Johnnie Walker." The sound was metallic and wildly abrupt, scratchy as the sand in the bird's idiot throat.
" Tranquilo, Fred," said Reuben the Cuban.
"Cutty Sark. Where's Augie?" the parrot responded, and the widow started to cry. She made no sound. Her shoulders hunched slightly and flat streaks of wet almost instantly appeared under her slate-gray eyes.
"Noon tomorrow," she said.
Reuben didn't understand exactly what she meant. He stood there silent, hoping to be able to help.
"Service at ten," she said, her voice soft but without a quaver. "No rabbi. No minister. No God. No Heaven. The way Augie would have wanted. Just some stories, some laughing, some crying, some wine. A lot of wine. Then noon."
"Noon what?" asked Reuben.
The widow tried to smile again and the tear streaks took a sudden turn around the changed contours of her face. "Noon tomorrow. The official unofficial time to give up hope."
2
"Augie Silver," intoned his best friend, Clayton Phipps, once a promising playwright, now for many years the publisher, editor, and sole contributor to a quaint little newsletter called Best Revenge. "Augie Silver."
Phipps paused, leaning against a makeshift lectern set up at the deep end of the dead man's pool. He let the syllables hang in the bright, clear morning air, hoping to evoke the entire miracle and tragedy of a human being through the thin yet potent fact of his name. Much underrated, the magic of a name. It was the ultimate container, the profoundest and most elegant summing-up of the passions, capacities, follies, likes and dislikes, the fears, quests, and eccentricities that made one person distinguishable from all others.
"Augie Silver." Phipps chanted it a third time, and under a poinciana tree, very near the table with the liquor, Ray Yates elbowed Robert Natchez in the ribs.
"Only guy I know who's a more pompous asshole than you are."
Natchez frowned his disapproval and tugged at the cuffs of another black shirt. Reuben the Cuban slunk silently among the guests, content in the belief that in pouring coffee and delivering mimosas he was paying homage to the dead husband and bringing comfort to the widow.
Perhaps a hundred fifty people had come together to honor Augie Silver's memory, and they reflected the breadth and oddness of the painter's personal democracy. The art establishment, of course, was represented. There was an editor from Picture Plane, a publication that had once dubbed the deceased "a minor yet searing talent, achingly pure and infuriatingly unambitious." There was the famously snide yet annoyingly accurate critic Peter Brandenburg, who years before had described Silver as "a lavishly gifted underachiever who is gaining renown less for the canvases he paints than for those we hope he'll paint." There were reviewers from the newsmagazines and from papers in New York, Chicago, and Washington. There was even a gallery owner from Paris who happened to be vacationing in South Beach.
But when, ten years before, Augie Silver had moved to Key West from Manhattan, it was with the clear intention of escaping the hothouse atmosphere of the art capitals, broadening his circle beyond the clutch of those who could do favors and those who wanted favors done. To be sure, the Key West artsy set had gravitated to him: the writers who didn't write, the sculptors who didn't sculpt, the trust-funders kept just shy of suicidal self-loathing by the mercifully untested belief that they were in some sense creative. They could be quite amusing, these constipated, deluded bohemians and hangers-on: Their vision had nowhere to go except into what they said and how they lived, and their frustrations often gave rise to piquant comments on human nature and the state of the world.
Still, it was not the Ray Yateses and Bob Natchezes who had given the greatest zest to Augie Silver's last years. It was the people who were strangers to poetry, innocent of art. It was the wharf rats like Jimmy Gibbs, half of whom had done jail time. It was the fishing captains who at first took Augie out as one more pain-in-the-ass know-nothing client, then later invited him as a soothing companion. It was the old Cubans who poled out in the back country and showed him how to dig a sponge. They too were represented at Augie's corpseless send-off. They milled shyly along the periphery, these outsiders, bashful of the canapes, made nervous by the thinness of the glassware. They wanted to pay their respects and get the hell out of this elegant backyard, but Clayton Phipps was not about to race through his moment of high praise for his friend and spotlight for himself.
"Augie Silver was the most generous man I ever knew," said the eulogist. "Ya know, some people decide to be generous. It occurs to them to give you something. Augie wasn't like that. He didn't decide. It just happened. It was his nature. Gifts flowed from him. He was a source, a well. Life burned in him, and he could not help but give back warmth."
Phipps looked toward the shady place where Nina Silver was sitting, all alone. A hundred people had greeted her, many had embraced her, and yet there had remained a dread and stubborn space around her, a cuticle of passionate blankness that she would not allow to be moved aside or filled.
"Who among us," he went on, "does not have something of Augie's? Some remembered story, some flash of insight or shred of his wise-ass wisdom. Some taste or preference we learned from him. A sweater he gave you because you said you liked the color. A jacket he put around your shoulders because you were cold and he was not. A tool he lent and promptly forgot about, a book he thought you might like…"
Around the dead man's yard and through the open doors of his house, the mourners shifted from foot to foot, remembered, smiled privately, and glanced at each other, secretly wondering who'd gotten the sweaters, the jackets…
"And the paintings," Clayton Phipps resumed. "My God, the paintings! The man gave them away like they were so much scratch paper. His life's work, his livelihood, his legacy. Where did he find the strength and the humor that enabled him to take it all so lightly? 'Here,' he'd say, about a canvas that had taken him a month. 'You like it? Put it in your house.' 'Here,' he'd say with this amazing casualness. 'This little one? Sell it if you can-get your boat fixed.' 'Here, put this over your desk for luck.' 'Here, put this in your kid's room.' How many beautiful and precious paintings did Augie Silver give away? Does anybody even know?"
The question rose up over the swimming pool and hovered there. Claire Steiger, the dead man's agent, read her bankrupt husband's face and despised him for the bloodless calculations she knew were going on behind it. And she wondered if it showed in her own expression that she could not help but do some calculating too.
By 1 p.m. the speeches were over, the ice cubes were melted, the crowd had thinned, and Nina Silver had barely noticed that her promised deadline of hope had come and gone and nothing whatever had changed in her heart. She bid farewell to the dispersing guests, accepted their sincere and irrelevant sympathies, nodded to all the well-meant pledges to stay close, to see more of one another. She yearned for everyone to be gone and dreaded the moment when the house would once again be empty. Emptier than before, with no event to plan, no exquisitely small details-irises or lilies? champagne or chardonnay? — to rivet her attention.
She straightened a picture frame that a departing friend had shouldered awry, then stared at the level edge to steady herself, the way a seasick man searches for sanity in a clear horizon.
Out in the garden, a few men whose nature it was to be the last to leave were honoring Augie the way the men of Athens honored the martyred Socrates, by talking and drinking, drinking and arguing.
"Here's the part I still don't get," Ray Yates said, slipping into the mock-ingenuous interviewer's tone he used in his radio show. He was sitting on a white wrought-iron chair and his inappropriately cheery shirt was darkened here and there with moisture. Yates was thickly built, squat and hairy, the type that's always sweaty. It didn't help that there was no ice left for his rum. "Guy's got this great career. A New York gallery that loves him. He can sell whatever he paints, prices are better all the time… Then he just stops working. Why?"
Clayton Phipps sipped his warmish Sancerre and noted how the flinty taste turned cactusy as the wine approached body temperature. He hooked a thumb through one of his suspenders and slid it to a fresh place on his shoulder. "Ray," he said, "this might be tough for you to grasp, but it had to do with standards.
I remember a dinner I had with Augie, about five years ago. We were drinking a Lynch Bages 'seventy-eight, rather young but very concen-"
"Who gives a shit what you were drinking?" interjected Robert Natchez.
Phipps glared at him from under his heavy brows. "It speaks of the quality of the moment, Natch. Isn't that what you poets supposedly care about? Anyway, we were talking about standards. About the difference between talent and genius. Between skilled painting and great painting. Augie had no fake modesty-we all know that. He knew he had talent. He knew he had skill. He doubted he had genius. And he was coming to feel that if he didn't have genius, then what was the point-"
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