Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  "Matty," said Jimmy Gibbs in a raspy, strangled whisper, "where in fucking hell am I supposed to get the first eleven thousand?"

  Barnett blinked his pink eyes, sipped his tomato juice. "I dunno, Jimmy. I thought you might have something put away."

  Gibbs looked down at the bar as if he wanted to gnaw it to splinters. Only logical, he told himself, to imagine that a gray-haired man who'd worked thirty-eight years might have a measly eleven thousand dollars put away. Who wouldn't? "Thanks for thinkin' a me, Matty," he said, but his tone made it clear that Barnett had done him no favor.

  "Sure," said the captain. He put down his tomato stained glass, dropped ten dollars on the bar, and got up to leave. "Have another round, Jimmy. And if anything changes, lemme know."

  *

  "Wha'd Matty want?' asked Hogfish Mike Curran.

  The sky was full dark now, and the Clove Hitch bar had emptied out. It was an early place, a two-pops-after-work kind of place. By 9 p.m. there wasn't much left for the proprietor to do but throw ice in the urinals and hang the beer steins on their pegs.

  "Nothin'," said Jimmy Gibbs. "He wanted nothin' and he got it."

  Curran looked at Gibbs with gruff admiration; the man was a moody sonofabitch, give him that. He'd polished off Barnett's second double and was now nursing the dregs of one he'd purchased for himself. Hogfish Mike jerked some glasses up and down the bottle brush and tried a different conversational approach.

  "Some guys were in before, Ray Yates and a couple others, talkin' about your buddy Augie Silver."

  Gibbs was in that state of deep sulk where it becomes a sort of sick victory to remain utterly uninterested, but he could not help giving in to curiosity. "What about 'im?"

  "Didn't hear that much. Something about paintings. Selling 'em. Supposedly they're worth some money."

  Jimmy Gibbs looked down and shook his glass. He was trying to look indifferent and trying to rattle his ice cubes, but it was a hot night and the pieces left were in weightless crescent slivers that made no noise.

  Hogfish Mike flicked dishwater off his hands in an oddly dainty manner. "You got a painting a his, don't cha?" he asked.

  Gibbs had known the question was coming and vaguely wondered why he'd felt reluctant in advance to answer it. He nodded. Then he couldn't swallow a cockeyed smile. "He gimme this painting, said he hoped it wouldn't remind me too much a work. It's kind of a spooky picture, ya want the truth. Like a fisheye view of gutted fish."

  "Like cannibals?" said Curran.

  Gibbs shrugged. He hadn't thought of it exactly that way. "More like Who's next?"

  The proprietor of the Clove Hitch was wiping his bar with a rag. "Worth money, though."

  "Hogfish, hey, it was a gift."

  Jimmy Gibbs hefted his beer bottle and reminded himself for the fourth time it was empty. He thought of ordering another, then remembered he needed all the cash he had to pay the overdue electric bill. He pictured the line of dirt-bags at the City Electric office, their crusty feet and filthy sandals, everyone ready with their red-bordered shut-off notices and their bullshit excuses, and he was weary to death of always being broke. "Besides," he mumbled, "fuck could it be worth? Couple hundred?"

  Curran shrugged, moved down the long teak slab, mopping up water and emptying ashtrays as he went. Gibbs tossed back the last of his bourbon. It left a satisfying burn where his teeth poked out of his gums.

  He thought about the Fin Finder. It had twin big-ass Yamahas, outriggers arched and graceful like something off a bridge, and a man really looked like someone standing at the steering station, with the radar slowly spinning and the tuna tower gleaming in the sun. Jimmy Gibbs coughed softly in his fist and made his voice sound casual. "Few hundred, right, Hogfish? I mean, ain't likely to be more'n that."

  9

  On a Wednesday evening in early May, Kip Cunningham sipped champagne, poked a silver stud through the placket of his dress shirt, then responded with a tired sense of duty to his wife's request for assistance in doing up her dress. He cinched its panels together, tucked the zipper tab down neatly in its groove, finessed the hook through its little loop of thread, and vaguely noticed the way the top of the silk bodice bit softly into the flesh of Claire Steiger's back. He used to find her back very beautiful, that much Kip Cunningham remembered. Her back wasn't freckled, exactly, but there were light mottlings below the surface; the effect was of looking not at her skin but into it, it was like peering through sun-shot water in a trout stream and seeing pebbles at the bottom. Was her back still beautiful? Her husband could not really have said. He was losing her, though the loss that was happening now had mainly to do with money and social ease. The deeper loss he was oddly numb to because he'd inflicted it on himself, subtly, gradually murdering his chance for happiness with the slow poison of inattention.

  "What if someone tries to buy—" he began.

  The zip job completed, his wife slid away from his touch and cut him off. "At an opening, Kip? None of my clients would be so tacky."

  Cunningham flipped his collar up and began the painstaking process of tying his tie. "There might be discreet inquiries, hints as to price."

  Claire leaned forward and examined her eyes. What on earth, she wondered, had been on her mind eight years ago when she and the decorator designed this grand double bathroom with its his-and-hers mirrors, its twin dressing alcoves, its side-by-side scallop-shell sinks? She knew damn well what had been on her mind, and the recalling of it mocked her. What had been on her mind was a Hepburn-Tracy romance. Scintillating chitchat and intimate, brainy repartee while quaffing bubbly and grooming each other for some gala evening where they would take great pleasure and pride from being mates. Parts of the fantasy had come true, Claire Steiger reflected. If anything, there'd been too damn many black-tie evenings, an exhausting excess of verbal sparring, and perhaps too much fine wine. The only thing missing had been the marriage.

  "Kip," said the gallery owner, "you used to be a businessman. You can't talk about price until there's some basis for a price."

  "But—"

  "Ink, Kip. The show is about ink. Publicity. Reviews. You wanna help, do what you do best. Play squash."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Smile, Kip. Be your blithe preppy self. Don't talk about money and for Christ's sake don't talk about art. Talk horses, talk sports. Invite some critics to the club. They like that."

  Cunningham smoothed his collar and lifted his glass. With more champagne in him it was easier to imagine that his wife's contempt was only a form of affectionate banter. "Anybody in particular?"

  "You know who's who. Find someone susceptible to your boyish charm."

  The husband secured his cummerbund around his still-flat tummy. "So we get the ink. Then what?"

  Claire blotted her lipstick before she answered. "If the reviews are good, we've got six weeks' buildup before the auction. Enough time for the momentum to build, not enough time for the bubble to burst."

  The bankrupt examined himself in profile. "And if the reviews are bad?"

  "If they're bad?" said his wife. "If they're bad, I'm stuck with a bunch of damaged goods. Augie Silver goes down in history as one more second-rater. We'll lose the beach house and whatever else you've pawned."

  She moved to the small bathroom window that overlooked Fifth Avenue and stared down at Central Park. The spring foliage already looked sooty, the cherry blossoms were going brown and rank, they had the sodden look of yesterday's salad. "But there's a bright side, I suppose."

  Kip Cunningham did not ask what the bright side was. He knew it wouldn't really be bright, and he knew his wife would tell him anyway. He drained his glass.

  "The more we lose up front," she said, "the less to give up when I get free of you."

  In the dim living room of the house on Olivia Street, Nina Silver nestled into her soft-pillowed sofa and talked to her dead husband. She hadn't begun by speaking to him; she'd begun by looking at his paintings and thinking. But as the light h
ad faded, as the windows stopped framing colors and patterns and just passed along a uniform gray, there seemed less and less reason to deprive herself of the company of speech. "Augie," she said. "Up in New York, they're making you a star right now. D'you know that, Augie? A big fancy opening. Caviar. Canapes. Limos all up and down the street. . . . Just the sort of thing you always hated. Men looking ridiculous in patent-leather shoes. Young jealous colleagues wearing capes, dying to know what the critics are scrawling in their notebooks. The inevitable two women in the same expensive dress. . . . "What's it got to do with the work? you'd say. "What's it got to do with anything? "

  She paused, and it seemed that Fred the parrot felt compelled to fill the silence. The big green bird riffled through its limited vocabulary and picked some sounds at random. "Incha Pinch. Alla joke."

  "What's it got to do with anything?' the widow said again.

  "What's it got to do with anything?' asked Kip Cunningham, leaning against the marble counter at the entrance of Ars Longa. His voice was thick with wine, his tie was crooked, his shave no longer fresh, and in all he was about as trashed as the gallery itself. Champagne corks swollen up like tumors littered the tables and the countertops. Lipstick-stained glasses lay on their sides like toy soldiers killed by kisses. Here and there the marble floor had been scorched by cigarettes. The ladies' toilet needed plunging, and someone, it seemed, had walked off with the crystal paperweight that held down the stack of catalogues.

  "I just can't believe that someone would steal a paperweight," said Claire Steiger. "That's all."

  It was 11 p.m. The hostess looked fresh as an anchorwoman, but she was in the grip of the sort of brain fatigue that makes little things like stolen paperweights into large distractions that call forth a draining and useless indignation. She'd been up since six that morning. She'd overseen the hanging of the show, the catering, dealt with the last-minute RSVPs. She'd strutted through the evening in high-heel shoes and greeted perhaps two hundred people by name. Used to be, she cruised through days like this on waves of glad ambition; the grasping joy of reaching her next goal would keep her primed with adrenaline. Now the ambition was mainly habit; it kept its form just as her hair and makeup kept their form, but the joy had dried up inside it the way a stranded clam bakes away to a gooey nothing. "I mean," she went on, "who would be so small—"

  "Claire, fuck the paperweight," slurred her husband. "How'd we do?"

  The gallery owner paused, then fluttered her soft brown eyes as if waking from a nap. She was ready to go one more mile. "The right people showed up," she said. "Some big-money no-nerve collectors—the kind who wait for the Grade A stamp. Couple of agents for Japanese investors. The heavy critics."

  "I talked to a few," said Cunningham. He was pleased with himself, gave a drunk smile. "Joe Rudman from the Times. Talked ponies. What's-his-name, the Newsweek guy. Likes croquet. And Peter Brandenburg —I'm playing squash with him tomorrow."

  It had been a long time since Claire Steiger approved of anything her husband had done, but she could not now prevent an impressed look from stealing across her tired face. "He counts, Kip. He counts a lot."

  Cunningham nodded. Then he grabbed an end of his tie and pulled out the knot. When he'd been younger, less embittered, when his shallowness could pass for finesse and his essential dullness for aristocratic restraint, he'd looked especially debonair with his tie undone and hanging on his chest. Now he just looked dissolute, hollowed out, ready for three aspirin and an icepack. Absently, with no great interest, he jerked a thumb toward the softly spotlighted paintings on the gallery walls. "For what it's worth," he said, "you think this stuff is any good?"

  "Everything I show is good," Claire Steiger said. Outside, on 57th Street, someone honked a horn. A cross-town bus whined loudly as it pulled away from a stop, and the gallery owner somewhat guiltily indulged herself in an unchecked yawn. "You've got to believe in the product, Kip. That's rule number one."

  *

  Ray Yates had always wanted to be a local character.

  He'd tried on towns like some people try on hats, telling himself he needed one that fit his image, but in fact looking for the image in the hat. What he was searching for was a place that would embrace him as a perfect type, adopt him as a kind of mascot.

  He'd had false starts in several careers, and these had been custom-fitted to various cities. In Boston, all in tweeds and baggy corduroys, he'd edited a small and unprofitable magazine of poetry and opinion. In Los Angeles, he'd managed to make seven payments on a leased Porsche before realizing that no one was going to hire him to doctor scripts. In Chicago, the last newspaper town, he'd worn real suits and the ugly ties reporters wear, but quit when he realized it might be twenty frigid winters before he was recognized on Michigan Avenue.

  When he arrived in Key West six years ago, he'd immediately begun trying to out-local the locals. His wardrobe turned abruptly turquoise, he bought a stack of palm tree and flamingo shirts, which he laundered repeatedly to fade. He bought sandals and denied himself the use of Band-Aids, hoping to speed the process by which blisters turned to calluses. He rented a houseboat, and felt extremely Floridian having a teensy toilet with a hand pump and a gangplank for a driveway.

  As for a job, Yates hadn't known exactly what he'd do. He didn't want to work very hard. He didn't want to start early in the morning. And he wanted the kind of position that would help him insinuate himself, that would give him the kind of access, insider-ness, small renown even, that had eluded him in bigger, more important places.

  So it had seemed providential when, at a cocktail party, he'd met Rich Florio, manager of radio station WKEY. KEY was nothing if not local. It broadcast from an ancient cottage in a downtown alley and had a transmitter slightly more powerful than an under-counter microwave; in perfect atmospheric conditions, its signal could be detected as far away as mile marker twenty. The format was eclectic: pop in the morning, jazz at night, some classical on Sundays, and lots of local news and notices. School-board meetings. Church outings. Benefits to save the reef, the manatee, the embossed tin roofs of Old Town.

  But the station lacked a talk show, and Ray Yates, drinking tequila on the strength of a third-hand invitation, found himself pitching one to the station manager. "In a town with so much going on," he'd said. "So many writers, artists, so many famous people ... An interview show. Early evenings. Call it . . . call it Culture Cocktail."

  They'd agreed to talk further, and when Florio hired Yates, the new Key Wester thought he'd done a masterful sell job, though the truth was that the station manager had been having the damnedest time recruiting anyone remotely qualified who would work for what KEY could pay. But Yates was in it for the entree, not the money. His rent was cheap, he had some savings from Chicago, and if he kept his gambling under control, he could get by.

  The problem, as he discovered early on, was that Key West was not nearly as sophisticated or culturally vibrant as its reputation—the reputation that Yates had wholeheartedly bought into, and which he now had both to exploit and to perpetuate. Writers' haven. Ha! Maybe two dozen writers, most of them bad sober and worse drunk, perhaps four of whom were actually working at a given time. Artists? Well, if you granted the premise that painting on T-shirts was a major art form, then, yes, Key West abounded in artists. Theater, you could take your pick between drag shows downtown and road companies doing recycled musicals out at the college. True, there were the street performers from Mallory Dock—but juggling was not ideally suited to radio and nothing was surer to make dials turn than a guy playing bagpipes. Faced with the unremitting task of filling air time, Ray Yates had grown every year more grateful for the existence of the Gay Men's Chorus, the Lesbian Political Verse Initiative, the annual Tattoo Show.

  Still, every now and then Yates had the pleasure of reporting a real piece of culture news, an item that did not need to be qualified by the diminutive term local, something of interest north of mile marker twenty. On an evening toward the middle of May, he had
such a story, and he devoted the last segment of his show to it. He swept off his headset and spread a yellow-highlighted magazine in front of him. He glanced at the big clock above the engineer's booth window. Then he laid his forearms against the cheap veneers of the studio table and leaned in toward his microphone.

  "Back live on Culture Cocktail," he said as the producer gave the signal that the hair-salon and dive-shop ads were over. "Friends, it's always been my belief that all of us who love Key West should root for each other, should take pride whenever the accomplishments of one of our own are recognized by the outside world. So I'd like to share with you an art review from this week's Manhattan magazine. The review is by Peter Brandenburg. Some of you might know of him. He's got a reputation as the hardest marker around, someone with such exquisite taste that he doesn't like anything. Except he loves our former Key West neighbor Augie Silver.

  "Probably a lot of you knew Augie—knew him as a wonderful companion who loved his food and drink, a man interested and generous toward local causes, a man who celebrated the beauty and uniqueness of the Keys. But I wonder how many of us realized we had a truly major painter in our midst? Honestly, I'm not sure I did—and Augie Silver was one of my dearest friends.

  " 'Some painters are badly served by retrospectives.' I'm quoting Brandenburg now. 'Comprehensive shows reveal less of their talent than their limitations. We see the place they stopped growing, ran dry of ideas, almost as clearly as if a black line were painted on the wall, separating the discoveries from the walkthroughs. Such was not the case with Augie Silver. He never reached a plateau and never coasted. He reinvented his vision with every canvas, and in this regard the inevitable comparisons are with Picasso and Matisse—tireless talents who kept exploring and refining till the day they died.'

  "Picasso and Matisse!" editorialized Ray Yates. He could not help glancing at the small painting Augie had given him and which hung now, crooked on a rusty nail, on the smudged wall of the studio.