Scavenger reef kwm-2

by Laurence Shames

  "Let it rest a day or two," said Arty Magnus. He looked up and saw how crestfallen young McClintock was. That was the bitch of playing mentor: seeing people become disillusioned without getting any smarter. "Look," he said more gently, "if you're right, you'll still be right in forty-eight hours. If he's alive, he'll be alive. What's the hurry?"

  During those forty-eight hours, Augie Silver seemed quietly to break through some mysterious barrier that had been retarding his recovery. His ravaged body grew cleverer at relearning things, battered organs remembered their functions, and he felt a mute animal joy at the wonder of recuperation. That a broken thing could fix itself-this was as marvelous a fact as anything under heaven.

  He began to sit outside in the mornings, before the days had grown too beastly hot. Reuben brought him coffee and fruit in the shade of the poinciana tree. Augie watched the shadows move across the yard, looked at cloud reflections in the swimming pool when the wind was very still. Sometimes he sketched-pencil drawings of flowers and shrubs, quick life studies of Reuben which he would sign with a flourish then give the young man to take home. When the sun got high, Augie would go inside to nap, and the naps now seemed like earned rest from some activity rather than a mere slipping backward into helpless exhaustion.

  On the fourth of June, the convalescent had his best day yet. He ate. He drew. He strolled around his yard on legs that did not tremble. Midday, he took siesta and was ecstatically awakened by the tropical music of a fierce brief downpour clattering on the roof.

  That evening, when Nina came home, there were high spirits in the house. Augie's health was a shared crusade, a common mission; everyone partook of his invigoration, as though he were a racehorse. Reuben allowed himself a flush of knightly pride in his care and vigilance. Nina's face softened, the tension in her jaw diminished as she stroked her husband's forehead and found it neither cold nor feverish.

  For a little while they sat out by the pool, the three of them. Nina had a glass of wine. Reuben accepted a bit of rum. Augie asked for Scotch and was allowed a few drops in a lot of water. "Cutty Sark," said Fred the parrot as he perched on the back of a lawn chair.

  "Bullshit," said Augie. "H-two-O."

  The sky dimmed and deepened to a jewel-box blue, and Reuben the Cuban got up to leave.

  Augie Silver, the green parrot perched upon his shoulder, began the long slow stroll to bed.

  Outside the front door, just on his right as he exited, Reuben found a small bakery box with a card taped on top. He picked it up and brought it in to Nina. "Look what someone left," he said.

  Nina opened the card. Small neat handwriting she didn't recognize said, "A Speedy Recovery." Inside the little box was a single Key lime tart, the authentic kind that's yellow, not the tourist kind that's green.

  "How nice," said Nina. "I wonder who brought it."

  Reuben shrugged and smiled. He didn't know, but it made him happy that there were others who agreed that Augie Silver was a great man and who wished him well. He said good night again and slipped away.

  Nina took the tart out of the box and put it on a plate. Augie loved Key lime, anything Key lime. She was happy to get more food into him, coax another few ounces back onto his frame. She carried the treat toward the bedroom, and before she'd even reached the doorway, she sang out, "Dessert, Augie. Someone brought dessert."

  Augie was already in bed, he had the sheet pulled hallway up his sunken white-haired chest. He'd lit the hurricane lamp on the bedside table; it cast a weird light on the parrot's belly as the bird sidestepped on its perch.

  "I want to make love with you, Nina," the painter said. "I want to try."

  His wife swallowed, couldn't breathe, couldn't move. The last light made soft blue boxes of the windows. A barely visible wisp of smoke came through the chimney of the lamp. Nina tried to say something but Augie put a finger across his own lips and she didn't get as far as making words. They held each other's eyes a long moment, then Nina absently put the plate down on the bedside table and began to undress. She'd almost forgotten this part of nakedness: being seen, becoming ready. Lamplight played on her flanks, gleamed on her breasts and cast shadows in her hollows, and for the first time in a long time she felt beautiful.

  She got into bed next to her husband. His skin was hot and taut, as if pinched and tucked against his bones, but it was still his skin, she recognized it, she nestled close against his chest. They kissed, and through his lean lips, parched and cracked, she remembered the way of his kissing, the taste of his mouth was as it had always been. He touched her and their bodies remembered things together, struggled back from loss, pain, grief, disease, redeemed each other from deadness and laughed at incapacity from the high vantage of long love.

  Afterwards they cried a little in each other's arms, and after that they slept, slept so soundly that they didn't hear a scuffling as Fred the parrot came down off his perch and ate the Key lime tart, and didn't hear the feathered thump as the bird dropped stone dead on the floor.

  Part Three

  23

  Fred the dead parrot lay on Augie's side of the bed, but it was Nina who saw him first.

  As she sidled sleepily to the bathroom in the half-light of 6 a.m., she glimpsed but did not recognize the stiffening bundle on the floor. It was not till the return trip back to bed that she understood what she was looking at. She squatted over the expired pet and examined it. Fred's eye was open, staring at the ceiling, the lens glassy and thick. The green feathers had pulled in neat as fish scales, and the claws were rounded down as though grasping desperately for some perch in eternity. Nina lifted the bird before figuring out exactly what she would do with it. She held it a moment, noting its fluffy, hollow-boned lightness, then put it softly on her dresser.

  For herself she felt no great grief. The bird was noisy, as devoid of tact as a Parisian; the occasionally funny things it said were witless accidents and did not amuse her. But she felt a pang for Augie. She was afraid the bird's demise would depress him, would slow his recovery. As though to fortify him against the loss, she climbed back into bed and softly pressed herself against his taut dry skin.

  In the dim light she had not noticed the pecked-at Key lime tart; in fact the arrival of the Get Well offering in its string-tied bakery box had been greatly overshadowed by the momentous event of making love, and she had nearly forgotten about it. She saw no great mystery in the bird's having died. Parrots were longlived creatures, but mortal, after all. Things went wrong with them, they caught viruses, succumbed to cancers, just like people. The bird had died and that was that.

  Augie woke up shortly after seven. He blinked in the direction of the vacant perch but did not immediately realize anything was wrong. Nina brought him juice and coffee. To make room on his bedside table, she carried away the mutilated pastry and last night's glass of water; she was thinking about how best to break the sad news to her husband and didn't pay particular attention to the mundane chores her hands were doing.

  "Coffee in bed," Augie was saying. He was smiling, he woke up cheerful. He sipped the hot brew a little awkwardly, brown drops clung to his unruly white mustache. "Makes it all worthwhile just to get coffee in bed-

  Nina sat softly next to him and stroked his hair. "Darling," she said, "something happened to Fred last night. I found him dead this morning."

  Augie frowned and sighed. He sipped coffee and looked out the bedroom window. It was a flat still morning, the breeze had yet to rouse itself, and neither plants, people, nor even lizards seemed quite awake yet either. "Smart bird," he said at last.

  "He's here," Nina resumed. "Do you want to see him?"

  Augie nodded, and Nina brought him the dead bird the way a mother brings a sick child a favorite doll. The painter took the rigid parrot and laid it against his shoulder. He stroked the sleek green feathers, kissed the top of the beak where the flat hard nostrils were, then stoically handed the stiff bundle back to his wife.

  "Should we bury him?" Nina asked.

  Augie pr
essed his lips together and shook his head. 'That wouldn't be doing him a favor." In Key West, not even people got buried; their caskets were stacked three-high in concrete hurricane-resistant mausoleums. The ground was so rocky and the water table so near the surface that even shallow holes filled almost instantly with a gray seepage that oozed through the limestone like milk through a sponge, "just wrap 'im up and toss 'im."

  Nina took the corpse to the kitchen, swaddled it in newspaper, and dropped it in the trash, where it lay oblivious among the mango peels, the coffee grounds, the squashed tart in its foil shell.

  It was not until hours later, when she was at her gallery and losing herself in the savingly precise task of cutting a mat, that the truth of what had happened flooded in on her with the sudden slow momentum of a car crash. Her breath caught, her stomach knotted. Her hand slipped, the knife zigged crazily across the drafting table and clattered to the floor. Nina didn't pick it up. Paralyzed by an awful certainty, she stood there pale and rigid; and the sunlight coming through the gallery window held no cheer but only a viscous gluey weight.

  "Lemme make sure I have this straight," said Detective Sergeant Joe Mulvane. He sat on a corner of his desk and let the thick part of one beefy thigh hang over the edge. His knee almost touched a file cabinet. The tiny office had no window, and a greasy oscillating fan was pushing the stale air around. "Your bird died and you think someone is trying to murder your husband."

  Nina Silver squirmed in her aluminum chair. O.K., it sounded ridiculous. Probably she hadn't done the best job of explaining. But how could she be expected to be cool, organized, thorough? She was panicked. She'd dropped everything, locked the gallery, and ridden her old fat-tire bike as fast as she could to the undistinguished building that served as city hall, police headquarters, and Key West's central firehouse. She'd dashed up the handicapped ramp, sprinted a flight of anciently linoleumed stairs, followed the faded arrows to the police part of the premises. She'd arrived sweating and winded. Instant airtight logic was a little too much to ask on top of that.

  "Sergeant," she said, "I'm telling you-that tart was poisoned."

  "If we had it we could test it," said Mulvane. "Or if we had the bird."

  "I know, I know," said Nina. "But I told you. I didn't think. I threw it away. The housekeeper took the trash out-I checked with him. The garbagemen came. The tart. The bird. They're gone."

  Mulvane drummed lightly on his desk with the fingers of one hand. Of all the kinds of people who settle in Key West, not the least numerous are those for whom Key West would seem the most unlikely place on earth, a purgatory almost, and Joe Mulvane was one of these. He had a pale freckled complexion that could not stand the sun. He was thickly built with larded muscle; you could picture him shoveling snow in a T-shirt, and the heat was for him as much a torment as it is to a long-haired dog. He was not a bigot, but nor did he exactly revel in human diversity. He belonged, it seemed, in a blue-collar suburb south of Boston, a place where people had basement workshops and basketball hoops in the driveway; yet he was restless, perverse, and spirited enough to flee where he belonged.

  "Look, Mrs. Silver," he said, "I understand you've been under a lot of strain-"

  "Don't condescend to me, Sergeant," the former widow cut him off. "I'm not a child. I'm not a hysteric. The fact is there are a lot of people who would profit from my husband's death."

  Mulvane pursed his lips and lifted his red eyebrows. When paranoiacs started ascribing motives, it could sometimes get interesting. "Like who?"

  "Like anyone who owns one of his paintings. Anyone who wants to see the price go up."

  "Ah," said Mulvane. "Someone who's selling."

  Nina nodded.

  "Okay," said the cop. "So who's selling?"

  "I don't know," said Nina. "I don't know if anybody is."

  The detective frowned. For a moment it had almost seemed he had a thread. "Let's back up a step. How many people have pictures?"

  Nina shrugged and could not quite rein in a quick sigh of frustration. She admired her husband's profligate generosity-and it had often driven her batty. Forget the money; money, they'd always had enough. But here he had a significant body of work, maybe a great body of work, and he was so casual about it, so careless. Almost as if it didn't matter. And that of course was the crux of it. To Augie, it didn't matter, life mattered. The work was incidental, a by-product, a residue.

  "In Key West?" she answered at last. "Maybe a dozen. Maybe twenty. Altogether, probably a hundred. Maybe more."

  "That's a lot of killers," said Mulvane. "Your husband suspect anyone in particular?"

  "He doesn't know," said Nina.

  "Doesn't know what?"

  "That someone tried to kill him. Look, he's very weak, he's had a heart attack. He can't find out."

  Mulvane scratched an ear, let out a bigger breath than it seemed the tiny office could hold. "All right," he said, "all right. Let's start at the beginning. This tart. You don't know who brought it."

  Nina said, "That's right."

  "You just found it by the door."

  "No. I didn't find it. It was brought in to me."

  "Ah. Who brought it in?"

  "The housekeeper. Reuben. But Sergeant, really-"

  "Reuben," said Mulvane. "Cuban?"

  There was something a little rancid in the way he said it. "You don't like Cubans?" Nina asked.

  "Mrs. Silver, I'm a homicide cop. I don't like anybody."

  "All right, then. He's a spick. He's a queer. What else would you like to know, Sergeant?"

  Mulvane looked at her. She was artsy but she was prim. The short neat hair. The quiet classy jewelry. She was no longer short of breath and now that she had settled down she was precise and logical as a watch. He leaned forward over her, and in the tiny office the effect was of a mountainous cresting wave about to break. "What else I'd like to know," he said, "is if there is even one small possibly relevant fact besides the fact that it was this queer Cuban who handed you the supposedly poisoned goody."

  Nina bit her lip, then shook her head in a defeated no.

  Mulvane shrugged, then reached into a damp shirt pocket and produced a slightly soggy business card. "Call me when there is."

  "But Sergeant-"

  "Mrs. Silver, listen. I'm not unsympathetic, I'm really not. But we don't do preventive medicine here. Real murders, people murders, we take care of those first. Dead parrots-call the ASPCA."

  Nina's hands were crossed in her lap. She took a deep breath, then pressed her palms down on her knees and got up from the chair. Grudgingly she took the business card. It was a paltry thing but it was all she had. She said, "Thank you, Sergeant," and she turned to go.

  When she was halfway through the open doorway Mulvane spoke again. "That houseboy, Mrs. Silver. He have any paintings?"

  24

  The razor glinted in the dappled shade beneath the poinciana tree.

  Reuben the Cuban held it by the yellowed bone handle and for a moment kept the blade poised a couple inches above Augie Silver's upturned throat. Through the thin skin of the painter's neck, the blue and lightly coursing jugular could be quite clearly seen. The funnel of the windpipe stood out fibrous as the gizzard of a chicken. Augie's breathing was shallow but even, his eyes were trustingly closed. Here and there doves were cooing, a hummingbird blurred against the hibiscus. Reuben held his breath and brought the cool and well-stropped blade a centimeter closer. The artist seemed oblivious to the approaching steel, he gave a slight twitch as though in sleep and a sinew fluttered beneath his ear.

  "You sure you want to do this, Augie?"

  "Go ahead," the painter said without opening his eyes. "Get it over with."

  "But the beard looks good. Makes you look like Papa Hemingway."

  "I used to be plenty macho, Reuben. I've caught enough fish and drunk enough alcohol. I don't need to look like Papa Hemingway."

  The younger man shrugged and bent over Augie. With his free hand he pulled the skin along the jawbo
ne, and he began to shave his neck. The dry white hair was light as cornsilk, it drifted onto the old sheet in which Augie was shrouded, and some of it continued falling to the ground. Now and then Reuben rinsed the razor in a basin of hot soapy water. He worked in silence for a minute or two, but there seemed to be something on his mind. "Is this what macho is, Augie?" he asked at last. "To catch fish and drink a lot of alcohol?"

  Augie smiled and Reuben felt the skin move. "Part of it," the painter said. "Also you have to know how to fix things, cars and such. And you have to fuck a lot of women till it hurts and now and then punch someone in the nose."

  Reuben stood poised with the razor and considered. "I am not macho," he confessed.

  "Me neither anymore," said Augie. "It's a phase."

  The young Cuban went back to his barbering. "You used to punch people in the nose?" he asked.

  "No," said Augie. "But not because I didn't want to. Only because I was afraid they'd hit me back."

  "To be afraid," said Reuben. "This is not macho."

  "No," said Augie. "But everybody is."

  Reuben rinsed the razor. The sun was near its zenith, it made a steely mirror of the swimming pool. The tree the Cubans call Mother-in-law made a rattling complaining noise although there did not seem to be a breeze. Reuben looked at Augie's chin. It was odd to be shaving someone else, to be paying such unflinching pore-by-pore attention to another's face, and there was something deeply naked about Augie's skin, pale under the beard, splotched pink from the tug of the blade as the hair was scraped away.

  "You have fear?" Reuben didn't exactly mean to ask the question, he just heard himself asking it.

  "Damn straight," Augie said. He was going to leave it at that, but there are certain questions that are like siphons, they suction off truth and once the flow starts it continues of itself. After a moment Augie went on. "I used to have a terrible fear of falling short somehow, disappointing myself in some final way, some way that could never be fixed. I'm not afraid of that anymore. No, that's a lie. I still am. But much less. What the hell. But I was terrified of dying down in Cuba, I'll tell you that. Among strangers. Without even saying goodbye to anyone… And you?"