Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  "Half a million is a lot of money," Claire Steiger purred. She gave an impressed curl to her lips, as though the client were in the room, looking to be stroked. "Are you sure it's worth that much?"

  Klein was the fourth big customer to call that morning, and Claire Steiger was having a better time than she could easily remember having. She was dusting off some of her favorite moves, the feints and tactics she had refined in the years when the building of her business had seemed each day an adventure. There was flattery, of course; nothing so crude as compliments, but the passive flattery of sitting tight and letting someone show off the size of his wallet. There was the preempting of doubt, the sly reversal that forced the buyer to defend his judgment and so sell the painting to himself.

  Though in the present instance the idea was not to sell the painting—and this offered an impish satisfaction all its own. Withholding. There was a power in it that was like the power of sex. The power to entice and frustrate, to beckon and dismiss. When its exercise was temporary, playful, that power could be delicious, could stoke appetites and make the nerve synapses incandescent. But when withholding became one's normal stance, a habit of the heart . . .

  Claire Steiger did not ask to be visited by this thought. It simply descended in the midst of her negotiations and spoiled her mood the way a swarm of gnats spoils a walk in the garden. She fell out of her professional trance and remembered her life. She was married to a man she no longer loved. She was no longer on the glad ascent of making her reputation and her fortune, but was locked now in the squalid scramble of trying to hold on to those very few things she still cared about. A wave of bitterness squeezed up from her belly and brought an evil taste to her throat. Avi Klein was still talking moistly in her ear, still trying to persuade her, and his voice had become maddening, appalling, a devil voice that spoke glozingly of wanting and paying, selling and haggling, a wet salacious voice that made all transactions seem inherently shameful, fundamentally corrupt, and somehow humiliating. For an instant the dealer envied Augie Silver, serenely dead and beyond the fray. When she spoke again, her voice was sour and abrupt, the charm had dried up like a lemon forgotten at the back of the fridge.

  "Avi, I'm leaving this to the open market. I hope to see you at Sotheby's."

  *

  "What the fuck is Sotheby's?" asked Jimmy Gibbs.

  Ray Yates, his apricot and turquoise shirt sticking to his broad and furry back, sucked an ice cube and reminded himself where he was and who he was talking to. Key West. A piece of limestone crust barely poking out of the ocean a hundred fifty miles from anywhere, the very tip of the very long tail of keys tucked under the sandy ass of the American dog. Difficult of access, bathed in sun and myth, splendidly uninterested in the high dry world outside, it was one of the last places where a person could truly be provincial. Had Jimmy Gibbs ever read a newspaper other than the Key West Sentinel? Did he read that for any farther-afield intelligence than the hopeful fibs of the fishing report and to see which of his bubbas had made the police blotter? What the fuck is Sotheby's? This was in its way a glorious question, a question full of archaic purity.

  "It's an auction house, Jimmy," Yates told him. "Ya know, a place where people bid on things. Art, antiques, famous people's autographs."

  Gibbs took a pull of his beer, clattered the dripping bottle back onto the bar, and belched demurely into his nicked-up fist. "What kinda asshole would pay good money just for someone's autograph?"

  "Lotta people do, Jimmy. They keep 'em awhile, then sell 'em at a profit."

  "To a bigger asshole."

  Yates shrugged, and Gibbs tried to picture what this Sotheby's must be like. He'd been to an auction once. It was up on Big Pine, mile marker thirty-one. It was held in a church parking lot under sheets of corrugated tin nailed down on four-by-fours. The auctioneer was a cranelike man in a string tie, and he'd had a voice as loud and irritating as an outboard with the cowling off. Jimmy Gibbs didn't like to talk in front of a lot of people, but he'd bid on a couple of things by raising his hand. He went three dollars on a tackle box of someone who had died, but the gear ended up fetching five fifty. Feeling thwarted, he bid eight bucks on a slightly used dinette set for the trailer, but the auctioneer had hawked his way into double figures before Jimmy Gibbs knew what hit him.

  "It's indoors, this Sotheby's place?" he asked.

  "Jimmy," said Ray Yates, "this is like a very fancy operation. Big room. Crystal chandeliers. Women in designer suits. Men with hundred-dollar ties. You get the picture?"

  Gibbs sucked beer and burped.

  "People fly in from London, Paris, just to go to these auctions. People phone in bids from Tokyo, Germany—"

  "They don't even see what they're buying?"

  "They have advisers."

  "They need other people to tell 'em what they want?"

  Yates ran a hand through his damp hair. The humidity and Jimmy Gibbs's logic were making him confused and sleepy. He sipped his tequila and glanced around the Clove Hitch bar. If you kept your eyes under the pseudo-thatch roof of the open structure, the light was soft and easy, but as soon as your glance strayed onto the water or over to the charter-boat docks, the late sunshine was sharp and scalding. The earth was tilting each day a little farther toward full summer, the ever-fiercer sun made the whole world seem to creak the way swollen wood complains at an over-tightened screw. Ray Yates was getting irritable, wondering why he'd bothered to try doing the impossible Gibbs a favor.

  "Jimmy," he said, "you do what you like. But I'm telling you, you wanna pull some money out of that painting, that's the way to do it."

  Gibbs considered. The first thing he considered was whether, if he signaled for another drink, it would still be on Ray Yates. The radio host had paid for the first round with a twenty. Fourteen bucks in soggy bills and some silver was sitting on the bar, and Jimmy Gibbs decided to take a chance. He caught the eye of Hogfish Mike Curran, wagged his empty bottle, then, as the proprietor approached, gave the slightest and most discreet nod in the direction of Yates's cash. Curran bounced this signal over to the talk-show host in the form of a subtly lifted eyebrow, and Yates answered with a no less minimal tilt of his chin: The deal was done, a successful transaction among men who drink.

  Gibbs then turned his attention to the question of Augie Silver's painting. The fact was he, Gibbs, was vaguely terrified at the thought of picking up the phone, calling New York, and having to explain to someone who talked fast and had a brisk and snooty Yankee accent who he was and what he wanted. He was afraid he'd be asked to describe the picture, and his description would sound stupid. He'd have to ask all sorts of dumb questions about how to wrap the painting, how to send it. "Seems like a lotta trouble," he said at last. "I mean, what could the thing be worth —three, four hundred dollars?"

  Ray Yates hadn't wanted another drink, or at least he hadn't until one was put in front of him. Then he couldn't help noticing that the fresh ice and lime tasted great and the alcohol wasn't too bad either. He smacked his lips, put his glass down slowly, and made a grand sweeping gesture past the unwalled Clove Hitch bar, across the cloudy water of Garrison Bight, up the Keys to the whole snaking coastline and continent beyond. "Jimmy," he said, "there's a whole 'nother world out there. We're not talking hundreds. We're talking thousands, Jimmy. Probably tens of thousands. Maybe more."

  "You're shitting me," said Gibbs, but he looked hard at the talk-show host and realized that he wasn't. He sucked beer, swallowed it, and worked at holding his face together.

  Yates studied him in turn. Gibbs's scalp had started to crawl, the gray hair pulled tightly back began to wriggle like worms so that the small ponytail bobbed up and down. It seemed to Yates that this restless writhing scalp was the birth of greed made visible, and it occurred to him to wonder whether he'd ever really intended to do Jimmy Gibbs a favor or whether his real purpose had been to observe the corrupting of a local. Corrupting not in the sense of the innocent turning bad, because there was nothing remotely inn
ocent about Jimmy Gibbs. Corrupting, rather, in the sense of someone being pulled away from what he was and pushed toward what he could never be, tempted into a fantasy of change that could only end in bafflement and failure.

  A cormorant flapped its jointed wings and took off from a post. A spray of tiny fish roiled the water as they fled some large thing feeding on them from below. Jimmy Gibbs pictured himself at the wheel of the Fin Finder, alone in Ray-Bans at the steering station just below the tuna tower. Captain Jimmy. He'd hire a couple young guys to haul the lines, clean the fish; his hands would heal. Maybe he'd buy himself a new truck too. Captains didn't show up at the charter docks in dinged-up old heaps that sifted rust.

  Yates watched him, felt a quick pang of remorse, and raised a cautionary finger. "No such thing as a sure thing, Jimmy. Don't spend that fortune before you have it."

  It was sound advice and it was too bad the talk-show host was not following it himself. It was five o'clock, the sun was still throwing heat as heavy as bricks tossed off a building, and Ray Yates reminded himself that he had to meet a guy to discuss a small matter of some gambling debts. He took a final swig of his tequila and got up with all the gusto of a man on his way to a root canal. He waved goodbye to Hogfish Mike, put a hand on Jimmy Gibbs's shoulder, then trudged the length of the pier. At the foot of it, right up against the seawall, the remains of a filleted fish were floating. The affronted eye stared heavenward, some opal meat still clung to the backbone, and Ray Yates didn't like the look of it at all.

  14

  Augie Silver slept fitfully for most of the day. It was brutally hot, the palm fronds hung limp and silent outside the bedroom window, yet the painter never lowered the cotton quilt from under his chin. He was too thin, too dry, too tired to sweat, he lay there papery and brittle, his breathing shallow, the dream movements of his eyeballs clear and disconcerting through the veiny translucent skin of their lids.

  Around six o'clock he struggled out of bed, slipped out of his clothes, and went slowly to the closet for his favorite robe. It never occurred to him that the robe perhaps had been moved from its accustomed peg during his four-month absence—and it hadn't been. It hung there patient and welcoming, the loops of yellow terrycloth worn flat and shiny at the elbows, the big soft collar suggesting a certain pomp, like the entrance of a champion boxer. Directly under the robe, as if held in place by an invisible mannequin, were the backless slippers that so perfectly suited his shuffling, meandering walk. He stepped into them with the reverent confidence of the prodigal who knows in his bones that his wanderings have made him more profoundly, more legitimately the possessor of his home, his comforts, his life.

  Silently he strolled into the living room. His former widow was lying on a sofa reading, and she did not hear him approach. He took a moment to gaze around the house. His paintings hung on almost every wall, they rang in his brain with a glad but overwhelming clamor that had less to do with sight than sound, as though he were a composer and ten orchestras were simultaneously playing every tune he'd ever written.

  "Looks like a goddamn museum in here," he said.

  Nina looked up. Her reading glasses stretched her eyes, made them huge and liquid, and the lifting of her head made the sinews rise and quiver from her collarbone to her jaw. She had at that moment an unposed loveliness that made Augie's knees go even weaker in appreciation of what he had come home to.

  "I hung the paintings for the memorial service," said his wife.

  "Memorial service," mused the painter. "I keep forgetting I was dead." He mused further. "Guess I'm still dead, far as anybody knows. It's kind of relaxing. . . . Was I lavishly and excessively praised?"

  "Your ears must have been on fire."

  "Who gave the eulogy?"

  "Clay."

  "Ah. Elegant and flowery, I bet. I owe him one."

  Nina said nothing and Augie shuffled to the sofa. He leaned over to kiss his wife and tried not to let her see what an effort it was to straighten up again. She tried not to let him know that she had noticed.

  "Hungry?"

  The word sounded somehow foreign to him and he took a moment to respond. "I should be. But my body seems to have forgotten what to do with food." He sat.

  Nina hesitated. It seemed too soon to speak of doctors, of worries, of the fresh fear of recurring death. She draped herself across her husband's shoulders.

  "I blew to Cuba," he suddenly said, being pulled back into his story as into a fever dream. "Funny, huh? A place I'd always wanted to go."

  "Cuba?" said his wife.

  Outside, soft evening light filtered through the oleanders and the crotons. A faint smell of jasmine and mango slipped past the louvered shutters and through the unscreened windows. Augie half leaned, half fell against the back of the sofa. His robe splayed open to reveal a white thigh that had grown thinner than his knee.

  "Eventually," he said. "I guess I passed out after hauling myself into the broken dinghy. When I came awake, I was still having trouble breathing, my arms and chest ached horribly. But the storm was over and a fresh cool norther had blown up behind it. From the color of the sea I figured I was in the Gulf Stream. It was just before sunset. I watched awhile and conked out again.

  "Night came. It got cold. In the morning I was shivering and parched but alert enough to remind myself not to go crazy. I needed something to concentrate on; but when I tried to pick something, I noticed I couldn't remember my name. Or what I did. Or where I lived. Or you. For a while I was panicked, then a weird acceptance kicked in: I was in the ocean and as blank as the ocean. I drifted. I curled up this way and that way, trying to hide from the sun. Now and then I peered around, imagining I would see a boat, an island.

  I tried to sleep but my head was pounding, surging like waves were trapped inside it.

  "By the next day I think I was getting delirious. I shook. I tasted blood in my throat. I was no longer sure whether I was asleep or awake, wet or dry, cold or hot. The glare on the water was blinding me, I kept seeing green streamers like when you press on your eyeballs. Then I saw the fins, circling, approaching, retreating, approaching."

  Nina whimpered. It was an involuntary sound, a tiny shriek from an ancient nightmare. Augie reached out and put a hand on her head. The sleeve of his robe hung down from his bony arm. "Sharks?" she whispered.

  "Dolphins," said her husband. "They were swimming with me. Or at least I think they were. I was pretty out of it by then. My sense of time was all screwed up, I expect I was yammering to myself. But I had the definite impression that a pod of dolphins, four or five, was surrounding me, protecting me, guiding me to wherever it was I was floundering. I watched those beautiful arched backs, the spume flying up from their blowholes and exploding into rainbows in the sun.

  "More time passed. Another day, maybe two. I could feel myself shriveling up like a leaf. My skin was cracking open. Then, when I was asleep or raving, I felt and heard the dinghy being rammed, nudged, pushed. It was the first time I was afraid of capsizing. I grabbed the gunwale and looked over the side. Coconut palms. The dolphins were shepherding me to land.

  "I have a very dim recollection of crawling to shore. Pebbles and shells cutting my hands. Saltwater searing deep into my flesh. I remember cool sand against my cheek. And the next thing I knew, I was waking up in an old fisherman's hut.

  "I heard voices before I could open my eyes. Spanish voices. I couldn't understand much, but I guess I wasn't in very good shape, because one of them kept saying muerto, muerto. That made me nervous. I felt I had to do something impressive to show them I was alive, or they might do the decent thing and bury me. So I tried to move. I couldn't. I tried to speak, to groan. Nothing. I used to think failure was relative, but this was failure in the absolute. I couldn't even blink.

  "But they must've found a pulse or something," the painter continued. "Maybe they just didn't feel like digging right then. Anyway, they told me afterward I was unconscious for around ten days."

  "Who told you, Augie?" asked his w
ife.

  He slowly shifted on the sofa and managed a skeletal smile. "This old man who spoke pretty decent English. Used to work at a casino in the Batista days. Told me I almost cashed in all my cheeps."

  Nina tried to smile in return but found that she could not. The person to whom something terrible has happened is usually the first to be able to laugh about it; those who love him are always the last. "But Augie," she said, "why did it take you so long to get home?"

  "Amnesia, paranoia, and politics," he said. "I didn't know who I was. It wasn't till much later that I remembered the waterspouts, the wreck. I had no I.D. As soon as I could speak, the fishermen realized I was American, and they didn't know what to do with me. Where I landed was very remote—an isolated little peninsula called Boca de Cangrejo. What these people knew of the outside world was what the government radio told them. They were savvy enough to see I was no Yanqui imperialist devil, but they were afraid of what might happen if they turned me in."

  "Afraid for themselves?"

  "For themselves. For me. Afraid. Who knows of what exactly? So they kept me under wraps. Tried to feed me fish broth. As I got a little stronger, they helped me to the beach to watch the boats. They were very kind."

  He paused, and Nina rubbed his shoulders. It was almost dark outside, the windows were soft gray pauses in the painting-covered walls. A block away a dog was barking, palm fronds scratched softly against the tin shingles of the roof.

  "Only problem was, these little strands of memory started tugging at me, more and more each day. It didn't bother me especially that I didn't have a name. So what? But I was getting to ache about other things. Yearn. Yearning. I'd used those words, everybody does, but now I knew what they meant. I knew I had a home somewhere and I yearned to get back to it. I believed I had a mate, someone it was my proper destiny to be with. And I had this nagging and, if this doesn't sound too crazy, religious sense that I had work, some kind of work, to do."