Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  "It doesn't sound crazy," said Nina Silver, but her husband continued as though he hadn't heard. Even through his weakness, it seemed a kind of frenzy was upon him now, and he hurtled through the rest of his story as if the meaning of it existed not in the details but in the sheer momentum.

  "Day to day," he said, "I felt that I was getting stronger, but the strength wasn't going to my body, it was being siphoned off into this groping quest for memory, this blank struggle to recall or invent who I was and what I was put on earth to do. Everything had to be relearned; it was exhausting as childhood. Little bits of things triggered recollections that, maddeningly, went nowhere. A color. A smell. I knew them. But how? From where? I asked for a paper and pencil and I started to draw. I didn't know I knew how, I just drew. I looked for hints in the pictures. And that's what I saw: hints, nothing more. A couple of months went by. I doodled and racked my brain. Meanwhile, my body was languishing, this need to remember was like a tumor, was like a sucker on a plant, it just took all the nourishment for itself.

  "Then one day it clicked. By chance. That's always how it happens, isn't it? Some screwball fact that becomes the anchor of a new universe. There was a big sport-fishing tournament—marlin, sailfish—international. Big beautiful boats flocked by, the whole village stood on the beach and cheered and waved. Boats from Venezuela, Mexico, boats from Argentina, Panama. Americans weren't supposed to participate—part of the economic embargo, you understand. So if the U.S. government says don't do something, who's the most likely person to do it? A Key Wester, right? So sure enough a Key West boat goes by. Lip Smacker, Key West. I'm standing on the beach, taking turns looking through this ancient spyglass someone had, and I see it on the transom.

  "Suddenly it was as if I had a fever. I had to be carried to my cot. I spent a couple days in bed, totally immobile. I was conscious and I had the weirdest sensation I've ever had in my life: a kind of itching, clicking, sparking inside my brain, like the whole computer was being reprogrammed and it was draining every last volt from the battery. I came out of the stupor, and I remembered.

  "The tournament headquarters was about thirty miles up the coast, at a small resort called Puerto Dorado. The old croupier went there and made discreet contact with the Key West captain, a real crazy man named Wahoo Mateer. For the two of them, I imagine, the whole thing was pretty titillating, both sides feeling pleasantly subversive. A couple of evenings later, Mateer came and fetched me, and here I am. In and out of Cuba without a passport."

  The painter paused and settled in farther against the back of the settee. He ran the sleeve of his bathrobe across his forehead as though mopping perspiration, but there was no moisture there, only a brick-red sheeny flush through the burned and crinkly skin. He pulled a slow deep breath into his ravaged lungs, and when he spoke again his voice was even and serene.

  "I'm home with my mate. And I've remembered the work I have to do. I'm going to paint again, Nina. As soon as I'm a little stronger. I'm going to paint every day. I don't have to be great. That was arrogant nonsense: genius or nothing. I'll do what I can. I'm going to fill the world with paintings."

  It was full dark beyond the windows now, and the only brightness was a yellow oval thrown by the lamp where Nina Silver had been reading. Her husband looked closely at her face and saw a catch at the corners of her mouth as she stretched her lips to smile.

  "You don't think that's a good idea?" he asked.

  15

  Clayton Phipps expertly sliced the lead foil from the top of a bottle of Gruaud-Larose 1975 and centered his corkscrew in the spongy wood of the stopper. He wasn't quite sure why he was squandering such a venerable wine on the unschooled palate of Robert Natchez; part of him, moreover, disapproved of the whole notion of quaffing a serious red on such a thick and sticky evening, a night that called for talcum powder, fume blanc, and a cool washcloth on the brow. But goddamnit, there were times in a man's life when he wanted Bordeaux and nothing but Bordeaux, and Clay Phipps saw less and less the virtue of denying himself what he wanted at the moment that he wanted it. He pulled the cork. The festive pop carried with it instant scents of black currants, pepper, forest floor, and violets. Thank God there were some things, some few things, that a man could count on and that did not lose their savor.

  He poured two glasses and carried them into the living room, where Robert Natchez was sitting, dressed all in black. Phipps wore tan linen, and the two of them might have been the only people in the Florida Keys, not counting maitre'd's and cops, in long pants just then. Clay Phipps was self-conscious about his pale and hairless calves; Robert Natchez keenly felt that shorts did not befit his dignity. So they sweated behind the knees and felt well dressed.

  "Cheers," said Phipps, handing the poet a glass. "It's too good for you, but what the hell."

  "Ever the gracious host," said Natchez, and he nosed into the wine.

  They settled into their chairs. Clay Phipps had bought his Old Town house around a dozen years before, in the wake of the infamous Mariel boat lift. Fidel Castro, in a gesture of great magnanimity, slyness, and spite, had thrown open the gates of his country's loony bins and prisons and allowed anyone who wished to escape to America. Most of the fruitcakes, murderers, catatonics, child molesters, mental defectives, and petty thieves had made landfall in Key West, which did the local real estate market no good at all. Those who, like Clay Phipps, believed that the island outpost was a tough town to kill, scarfed up historic houses at a small fraction of their worth, and found themselves gentry when the Marielitos, not surprisingly, were absorbed into the population with barely an uptick in the crime rate and no discernible effect on the community's overall level of weirdness and delusion. So Phipps now owned a sweet dwelling on a prime block. It was one more instance of his traveling first class without paying for it, living well but without the resonance of believing that living well was an earned reward.

  The walls of his house were made of horizontal slats of white-painted pine, and here and there were brighter rectangles where Augie Silver's paintings had formerly been hung. There was something naked, naughty about those paler patches, they grabbed the eye like an unexpected flash of a woman's panties. Robert Natchez looked up from his glass of ruby wine and peeked rather lewdly at the empty places.

  "Show's been over a week or more," he said. "When're the pictures coming back?"

  This was a taunt, and no mistake. Phipps took it in stride. Taunting was what he expected and in some perverse way what he needed from Robert Natchez. "They're not," he said.

  The poet smirked in his Bordeaux. A glad cynicism opened up his sinuses and he suddenly smelled cedar and mint in the wine. "Don't tell me you've decided to sell them? I thought everything was strictly NFS."

  "They're being offered at auction," said the allegedly dead artist's alleged best friend. In an effort to appear casual, he swung a leg over the opposite knee. The dampness on his thigh made the nubbly linen itch. "Sotheby's. Next month."

  "Ah," said Natchez. He leered from under his black eyebrows at the nude rectangles, and managed to work into his expression both disapproval and nasty enjoyment. The look maneuvered his host into an abject stance of self-defense.

  "You think it matters to Augie?" Phipps heard himself saying.

  "I have no opinion on what matters to the dead," said the poet. This was just the sort of pronouncement, portentous yet inane, that delighted Natchez, and he was tickled with himself for mouthing it. He paused, sipped some wine, then added, "But they were gifts."

  At this, Clay Phipps could not hold back a nervous snorting laugh, a laugh that rasped his throat. "A sentimentalist! You of all people a sentimentalist!"

  The swarthy Natchez almost blushed at the charge, which was nearly the most debasing accusation he could imagine. "It has nothing to do with sentiment. It has to do with what's dignified and fitting. Those paintings were given in friendship."

  "Friendship is complicated," said Clay Phipps.

  "So is envy," said Robert Natchez.
"So is old stale jealousy. So is hate." He swirled his wine the way he'd seen Phipps do it, drained his glass, and licked his lips. "Any more of this?" he asked.

  Phipps somewhat grudgingly got up to fetch the bottle.

  *

  Augie Silver nestled the thin smock between his skinny thighs and slowly, cautiously settled back onto the examination table. "I feel like Mahatma Gandhi in this thing," he said.

  "You look like an anorectic Father Time," said Manny Rucker, his doctor for the past ten years. "Now lie still and let me goose you."

  Rucker put his soft hands on Augie's belly, pressed under his ribs to palpate the liver, felt for enlarged spleen, for hernia, for strangled loops of intestine. Augie blinked at the ceiling and was almost lulled asleep by the visceral massage. He'd spent the morning with electrodes taped onto his head and glued across his chest. He'd given blood, produced urine samples, labored mightily but without success to deliver a stool. He was exhausted.

  "You are one hell of a case study," said his doctor, and the voice pulled Augie back to the waking present: the hum of the air conditioning, hot light being sliced by narrow blinds, the waxy paper of the exam table crinkling under him, the smell of alcohol masking but not effacing the intimate aromas of sundry sorts of human goo. "Rest awhile if you like. I'll come back for you later."

  Nina Silver was waiting in the consultation room. She sat on the edge of a green leather chair and stifled an urge to straighten the frames of the gold-sealed diplomas and purple-bordered certificates: paraphernalia of reassurance, fetishes of hope, pompous promises that things would probably turn out O.K., and if they didn't, well, at least everything humanly possible had been done. A silver pen stood next to a tortoiseshell box that held prescription slips. Behind the doctor's imposing chair was a pen-and-ink caricature of a fat woman bending over to receive a shot in the behind: No Norman Rockwell prints for Manny Rucker.

  He bustled in, hands buried wrist-deep in his labcoat pockets, and started talking before he'd even reached his desk. "Nina," he said, "your husband is an extremely stubborn man. He really should be dead about five different ways."

  She swallowed and slid backward in her seat. Her spine went soft and it took tremendous concentration, a gymnast's concentration, to hold herself erect. The doctor bounded around his desk, tossed a manila folder onto his green blotter, then dropped so heavily into his swiveling, rolling chair that the entire office seemed to quake around him. "I'm not saying this to frighten you," he resumed. "I'm saying it because I'm impressed as hell. I'm amazed.

  "Listen. We don't yet know everything that went on with him—we won't know that till the lab work is done, and even then a lot of it will be surmising, reconstructing. But here's the minimum we're up against."

  Rucker bore down on the arms of his throne until the springs creaked and the casters chattered against their Plexiglas platform. He exhaled noisily, then leaned forward, opened the folder, and spread his thick and hairy elbows on either side of it.

  "Last time Augie was in here, he weighed a hundred seventy-four pounds, and he wasn't fat. He now weighs one sixteen. That kind of weight loss, the dehydration, the metabolic craziness, is very debilitating. His kidneys shut down for a while—the function seems to be returning, but we can't tell how badly they've been compromised. His stomach has shrunk up smaller than a fist, which means it's going to be a long, slow process getting the weight back on him. His spleen is enlarged, who knows why. That's another obstacle to recovery."

  The doctor paused for breath, and Nina felt herself starting to cry. She struggled not to, because doctors' offices make everyone feel like children being spoken to sternly but well-meaningly by a grownup, and, absurdly, pathetically, it seems important to be brave and well behaved. Still, she thought she could feel her own stomach shrinking up like a puddle in the sun, her own spleen swelling like a sodden sponge, her kidneys growing parched and brittle, tubes and passageways caving in like long-abandoned tunnels.

  Manny Rucker noticed that her face was collapsing and decided not to acknowledge it. She was not the patient and there was nothing to be gained by coddling.

  "He's had a concussion," the doctor resumed. "That's rather a vague concept, concussion is. It basically means he's been clunked on the head and something went kerblooey. We don't yet know if he's fully recovered his memory or where the gaps might be. We don't know if the loss might recur. Probably he's now at somewhat higher risk of Parkinson's and of stroke."

  Manny Rucker flipped shut the manila folder, and Nina Silver allowed herself to exhale. She thought she'd heard all she had to listen to. She was wrong.

  "There's one other thing," the doctor told her. "He's had a heart attack."

  Nina's eyes went out of focus and settled vaguely on the buttocks of the fat woman awaiting her injection. "Heart attack?"

  "There's a pronounced irregularity in the EKG that wasn't there before," said Rucker. "It's clear evidence. Too much time has passed to gauge the severity from the blood enzymes. But there's no doubt that something happened."

  The room was falling away from Nina Silver, the angles between walls and floor and ceiling becoming jarring, oblique, and insane. Her other reunions with Augie, the ones in dreams, had never been so complicated, so fraught. "He told me his chest ached, his arms, when he crawled into the dinghy."

  Rucker nodded. "Very possibly he was having the attack while he was in the water. Truly amazing he didn't drown."

  There was a long silence. In the examination room, Augie Silver, all alone, was rousing himself from a catnap; his bony fingers clutched the edges of the table and he gamely strained to sit himself up without assistance. His wife was trying equally hard to ask a simple question. She opened her mouth three times before the words squeezed past her clenched throat.

  "Will he die?"

  Rucker folded his hands and skidded his huge chair a little closer to the desk. "Eventually," he said. "But he hasn't died yet, and I'm not going to bet against him now. I think he'll recover, I think he's got a good shot at a normal life span. But he needs a very long and very total rest. He's got to get the weight back. If he can't do it at home, he's got to go to the hospital—"

  "He doesn't want to do that."

  "He's made that clear," said Rucker. "That's why I'm making it a threat. He has to eat. He has to drink. And he has to be totally shielded from stress."

  Nina Silver straightened up, willed her mind to clear, and looked at Manny Rucker with a kind of defiance. She loved her husband. She would protect him, care for him, heal him. For this she didn't need diplomas, certificates, prescription pads. "He'll be best off at home," she said. Then her expression softened and she almost smiled. "Besides, this is Key West. What kind of stress could there possibly be?"

  16

  What kind of stress?

  For starters, the subtle subliminal stress of finding oneself the subject of rumors, whispers, the sort of breathless gossip that attends such odd occurrences as a slightly famous neighbor's return from the dead.

  Nothing could be clearer than that Augie Silver was not yet ready for company, much less a full-scale reemergence into society. When Nina bundled her husband into their seldom-used old Saab and drove him to Manny Rucker's Fleming Street office, it was with the intention of getting him there and back again unseen.

  But Key West is a small place, a sparse place, and little that belongs to it goes unnoticed. Politics, economics, world events go largely unnoticed, being the province of the chill, drear world north of mile marker five. Tourists go unnoticed, because they are not of the town and no one cares what happens to them or what they do; they pass through as undifferentiated parcels of sunburn and noise.

  It is a very different thing among the few thousand people who are truly of the place, who are the place. Unconsciously and unfailingly, they recognize each other against the backdrop of faceless transients, they pick each other out as though by some invisible genetic marking. And the Silvers, husband and wife, were very much of the place, di
stinctive and familiar by dozens of small details: her square-cut jet-black hair; his archaic penchant for corduroy. His meandering Socratic walk; the French net shopping bag she used for groceries. Her gallery; his death. They were known.

  So it was inevitable they'd be seen as they passed, even briefly, on such a busy sidewalk as that of Fleming one block up from Duval.

  The first person to see them was Lindy Barnes, a checker at Fausto's market. She did a quick and bashful double take, and later told her colleagues across the cashiers' aisles that it had to be the husband, the painter you know, I mean he looked like an old dirtbag, stooped and sick, but really who else could it be?

  The second person to see them was Claire Davidson, the head teller at the downtown branch of Keys Marine. She was not a chatterbox, but it was part of her job to recognize faces and remember names, and the real or apparent return of Augie Silver was not something she could quite keep to herself.

  By the end of the business day, perhaps a hundred people had heard the rumor, and one of them was Freddy McClintock, an eager young reporter for the Key West Sentinel. With a newsman's fine and fitting lack of decency, he decided to call the Silver home.

  When the phone rang, Nina was sitting on the edge of the bed urging Augie to drink some broth. He'd managed two sips. Fred the parrot was on his perch, nuzzling his wing pit with his beak and adding a new sound to his idiot vocabulary. "Eat," squawked the bird. "Jack Daniel's. Eat, eat."

  Nina went to the living room and picked up the receiver. "Hello?"