Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  He broke off. Bar noise flooded the silence, the sun-seared bougainvillea rustled with a papery sound. Then Roberto Natchez said, "A charmed life."

  The comment was not generous. It was sour, grouchy, warped by the annoyance people tend to feel at the excessive good fortune of another. Augie looked at the poet not in accusation but with mute inquiry: Was he jealous even of another man's near death? Natchez's face told him nothing; he glanced at Yates and Phipps and came away with the unsettling feeling that the poet had somehow spoken for all of them, that all were envious of his adventure, his resilience, that his return in some dim way affronted them. Suddenly Augie was depressed, confused. He wanted to believe that he was only tired, maybe the noise and the smoke and the unaccustomed sociability were draining him too much, overloading him and skewing his perceptions. But sitting there among his buddies he felt more exiled, more cast adrift, than when he had been lost at sea.

  "I think I'd better go," he said, and no one tried to talk him out of it. "Doesn't take much to exhaust me."

  He rose amid uneasy smiles, paused for handshakes that fell short of being hearty, and slipped out past the bar. Reuben the Cuban, vigilant and silent, slid gracefully off his barstool and was ready to take him home.

  The next day, in answer to a call from Augie, Clay Phipps came to visit.

  He arrived at the door with beads of sweat strung along his bald pink head and a bakery box neatly tied with string in his hands. Reuben took the box and held it like it might contain a bomb. He remembered the Key lime tart; he remembered the guilty look, the Judas look, on the heavy man's face when he and Augie had embraced.

  Augie, fresh out of the shower, came into the living room and said hello.

  "I brought some cake," the visitor said. "Want some cake?"

  "Later," said Augie, "later. I want to talk."

  He led the way through the painting-strewn house, out toward the backyard. Reuben wondered why a fleeting look of disappointment had crossed Clay Phipps's face when Augie declined the pastry. Maybe it was just that the husky man wanted a slice himself. Or maybe there was some other reason.

  Augie motioned Clay Phipps toward the love seat where the family friend had felt up Nina, but he slid away from the illicit spot and took a single chair instead. He settled in, then nodded toward the west end of the pool. "That's where I delivered your eulogy. Set up a lectern so I wouldn't fall in if I swooned."

  "Nina tells me you praised me out of all proportion."

  "It's easy to be generous to the dead."

  "And extremely difficult to be fair to the living."

  This was a throwaway, a random bit of repartee, but Phipps felt sure it was somehow aimed at him. How much did Augie really know?

  "Clay," his host went on, "about last night ..."

  "What about it?"

  Augie pushed some breath through his teeth, it made a hissing sound. "Is it just me, or was there some unease, some tension ..."

  Phipps frowned. He didn't especially want to answer, nor was he content to let Augie go on probing. "Well, you know, the shock, the suddenness . . ."

  Augie stroked his chin. "I'd like to think it was only that. But I felt ... I felt . . . unwelcome."

  It hurt to say the word, and Augie looked down when he said it. His looking down made it easier for Phipps to tell a lie.

  "Nonsense," he said. "Ray and Natch, they seem to have a lot on their minds these days, they've been distant with me too."

  The painter considered, decided not without conflict to be satisfied. "Okay," he said, "okay. Death, you know, I guess it's made me touchy."

  Phipps saw an opportunity to change the subject. "Touchy but happy. Last night you said you were happier than ever. How come?"

  Augie looked around his yard, smiled at the oleanders and the pendant bundles of poinciana flowers. "I used to take myself too seriously," he said. "I didn't think I did, but I did. This whole thing about not painting. Maybe it could pass for modesty, but it was arrogance, pretension. I mean, what gave me the chutzpah to think I had to be that good? So I'm not Vermeer— who cares? The paintings you have, Clay—am I wrong to think they give a certain pleasure?"

  Phipps squirmed, gestured vaguely, made a soft harrumphing sound. Augie went right on.

  "So I'll paint as well as I can paint, and the hell with it. The people who are happy are the people who get up in the morning and do their best, don'tcha think?"

  The question hung a moment in the hot thick air. It was precisely what Clay Phipps thought; and precisely what Clay Phipps had never done. Augie knew that.

  Was he goading him? Was he mocking him now not only by example but by precept? Or was Phipps, in his guilt and his festering disappointment, simply that determined to take offense, to find or imagine scraps of justification for turning against his friend?

  Reuben, moving soundlessly and with his low-slung self-effacing geisha's grace, appeared near the two men and offered them something cold to drink. "A beer?" he said. "A glass of wine?"

  "And there's the cake," said Clayton Phipps. "It's apricot."

  "Ah," said Augie. He seemed to be considering. "Will you have some?"

  "Me?" said Phipps, as if he was being singled out in a crowded room. "No, I've just had lunch. I brought it for you."

  Augie pursed his lips, pulled his eyebrows together. A lot went into a man's decision about whether to have a piece of cake. Was he hungry? Would the sweetness be too cloying in the heat? Did he want the coffee the cake cried out for? Reuben leaned far forward on the balls of his feet, so far forward that he had to flex his toes as hard as he could to keep from falling over. For one mad instant it seemed to him that he should throw himself on Clayton Phipps's neck, wrestle him to the ground, and unmask him at once as the would-be killer. But he waited. He didn't want to make a scene in front of Augie; besides, if Augie said no to cake there would be no emergency.

  The painter frowned through to the end of his deliberations. Then he said, "Yes, I think I'll have a piece. A small one." He paused a half-beat, then added, "Sure you won't join me, Clay?"

  Phipps shook his head and Reuben didn't like the shadowy smile that slithered quickly across his face.

  The young man glided back to the house and paced around the kitchen. He took a knife and cut through the string around the bakery box. He opened the package and looked inside. He saw a neat arrangement of apricot halves, round and orange as just-risen moons, overlaid with a glaze like tinted glass and bordered with a butter-rich marzipan crust. Reuben liked sweets. His mouth, one of the body parts that didn't know what was good for it, watered perversely even as his mind recoiled. He shook his head and swallowed, then brought down the top of the box like the lid of a coffin. He got the stepstool and put the cake on the highest shelf of the least-used cabinet, hid it like a gun from a curious child. He put a bottle of mineral water and two glasses on a tray and went outside again.

  "The cake," he announced, "I'm sorry, you can't have any." He poured water for Augie and Phipps, handed them their glasses.

  "Whaddya mean, I can't have any?" Augie asked. His body had readied itself for cake, the taste buds were prepared, the passageways open, and now, goddamn it, he wanted something sweet.

  "The cake, it will make you sick," said Reuben. He spoke to Augie but looked at Phipps, and Phipps seemed unable to stay still in his chair.

  "Reuben," Augie said, "I'd like a piece of cake."

  The young man balanced his tray, bit his lower lip. "The cake, I didn't want to say this, is full of bugs."

  "That's impossible," blurted Clay Phipps, who suddenly seemed far more exasperated than was called for by a spoiled cake. "I just bought it. It's from Jean Claude's. It's—"

  "It's the tropics," Augie interrupted with a shrug. O.K., he'd live without the cake. "There are bugs here."

  "Well, damnit," said Clay Phipps, "there shouldn't be! Not in a fancy cake from a fancy baker. I'll bring it back."

  This, Reuben had not counted on. But for Phipps to take the
cake away was out of the question. The cake was very important. The cake was evidence. It would end the danger to Augie and would prove that Nina was not crazy.

  "I'm sorry," Reuben said. "The cake, I put it in the garbage. The compactor. The cake it is squished."

  Phipps tisked, threw a damp leg over the opposite knee. Reuben turned back toward the kitchen, wondering if he had seen, along with Phipps's exasperation, a hint of something like relief that the cake had been destroyed. But Augie saw only his visitor's annoyance. He watched him writhe and sweat, and gently mused on how easily rattled people were before they got on terms with death.

  "It's nothing, Clay," he softly said, and he put a hand across the other man's forearm.

  "But it was a gift," the visitor said miserably, and immediately wished he hadn't used the word. It was a gift like Augie's paintings had been gifts, and he, Clay Phipps, was always doing just the wrong thing where gifts were concerned, gifts always seemed to be the litmus test that pointed up his smallness, the unintentional and unchangeable lack of generosity that was poisoning his life. Gift. The word and Augie's all-forgiving touch made him feel as loathsome as a serpent, and as spiteful. He sipped his mineral water, mopped his forehead, and wished that he was home, alone.

  29

  June was a slow time in Key West, slow for culture as for everything else, and from week to week Ray Yates had a tougher job finding guests and events to fill up time on Culture Cocktail. The seasonal people had gone north, taking with them to the Vineyard or to Provincetown their harpsichords, their loose-leaf binders of lesbian love poems. Road shows didn't come south in June, and no booking agent who wanted to keep a has-been pop act would send them to this off-season purgatory of heat, humidity, and empty seats. So Yates muddled through with the occasional self-published author, a psychic or two, and the local impresarios who spoke with relentless enthusiasm about the upcoming winter season, a million years away.

  Still, the talk-show host loved going to the studio, loved it even more of late. It was a haven, a cloister, a funkily pristine cell sealed off from the world of loan sharks and mildew, losing bets and sudden hammering downpours. The studio walls were soundproofed, heavily padded in vinyl like a Barcalounger all around. The lights were recessed and soft as stars. Wires were taped down, chair casters always oiled; nothing raided, nothing squeaked. Intercourse with the universe beyond was blessedly one-way: Yates's voice went fluently forth and nothing came back in. It was safe, it was controlled, and the host had come to crave his time in the studio like a therapy junkie craves his time on the couch, as the only respite from the mayhem and disquiet of his other waking hours.

  And now Yates was just finishing the show. The guests had left; he was wrapping up with an improvised and not terribly persuasive ramble on the pleasures of the rainy season. He glanced up at the clock above the engineer's window, and in one crammed and befuddling instant he saw two things: He saw that it was twenty seconds before seven, and he saw that Bruno had invaded the production booth.

  The huge thug stood there behind the triple-thick glass, his massive arms crossed over his breakfront of a chest. He had commandeered the engineer's headset, the earpieces drew attention to the way his neck tapered to his head. The quailing engineer, a trouper, managed to hit the switch that started Yates's theme music, and Bruno's face took on an expression that was uncomprehending yet transfixed, it bore the smallbrained ecstasy of an ape at the opera.

  The ecstasy didn't last long.

  "Yo, crumbfuck." Bruno said it through the intercom, and at the moment the barking voice bounced off the soft walls Ray Yates's cloister was desecrated, his safe haven was spoiled forever.

  The violation made Yates mad; he mustered a flash of feistiness that felt heroic but vanished as quickly as a hot pee in a cold ocean, chilled to nothing by his fear.

  "We got a meeting tuh go tuh," Bruno barked. "Ya ready?"

  *

  It was buggy in the vacant lot at dusk, but Roberto Natchez, dressed in black, didn't seem to notice. Mosquitoes buzzed unharassed around his hair, landed on his neck and bit; tropical roaches the size of mice slithered among ground-hugging vines and over red-veined roots the thickness and consistency of garden hoses. Fetid puddles between jagged chunks of ancient coral sent forth a nasty smell of sulfur. Undaunted, the poet continued on his mission. In one hand he held a wire cage, in the other a bag of popcorn.

  He found a small clearing, knelt, and set his trap.

  He sprinkled some kernels to draw his prey to the first chamber of the cage. A more generous helping lured the quarry to the second, narrower compartment. The mother lode of popcorn was piled temptingly on the far side of a small spring-loaded platform attached to the trip wire that would slam the door.

  Content with his snare, Natchez retreated to the shadow of his building and waited. It was time, he had decided, to put theory into practice. Credos, manifestos were necessary, of course; they provided the rigorous logic without which human activity was just so much pathetic silliness, so much blundering around. Still, at some point there was no substitute for action; action alone could prove the rightness and integrity of intellect.

  It was perhaps three minutes before the chicken appeared from underneath a canopy of weeds and started walking jerkily, obliquely, toward the popcorn. In the dim mix of fading dusk and distant streetlight, the bird looked dull brown and unkempt; its leg feathers were ragged and there was something unseemly, slatternly, about the drunken way it waddled. Roberto Natchez felt exhilarated: He watched the chicken and realized he would have no trouble killing it.

  No trouble at all, and that was fitting. He was a true artist, and the true artist shrank from nothing. The true artist protected the pure from the impure, the worthy from the fake. There was between those things a gulf as broad and absolute as the gulf between life and death, and to perform his sacred duty the artist had to know both sides of that dread chasm. He had to be willing to hold death in his hands. Only then could he consign the true and the false to their proper places.

  He watched the chicken. It had reached the far end of the ribbon of bait and cautiously, deliberately at first, was beginning to eat. It dropped its head, grabbed a kernel with its beak, then vigilantly stood erect again and looked around before it began the strenuous and unattractive job of chewing. Its horny jaw labored up and down and sideways, shreds of popcorn fell out the edges of its mouth.

  The feeding gained momentum, the bird's vigilance soon gave way to gluttony. Now the chicken ate like a famished child, never lifting its eyes from the food; on its yellow feet it followed the zigs and zags of the popcorn trail and soon had entered the outer chamber of the trap.

  Here it paused, and Roberto Natchez held his breath. For what seemed a long time, the bird just stood there. Could it be that it was sated? Was it bothered, perhaps, by some change in the light as it filtered through the slender wire bars? Caught up in the clenched and sanguinous excitement of the hunt, Natchez narrowed his black eyes and willed the chicken onward.

  The chicken obeyed. It dropped its head and pecked at the little pile of popcorn at its feet, then, before it was halfway finished, seemed to be distracted by the bigger pile on the far side of the metal platform. It edged forward, placed a single three-clawed foot on the trigger, then leaned over daintily and not without a certain grace, rather like a dancer bowing low across one leg. Natchez watched and felt his bitten neck grow hot with anxiety as kernel after kernel disappeared and still the trap did not clatter shut. Then, finally, inevitably, the chicken overreached itself. Straining to seize the last few morsels, it brought its other foot onto the steel plate; the trip wire let go with a muffled twang and the door fell closed with tinny finality.

  Roberto Natchez exhaled like a dragon. He was just slightly dizzy and he saw gold-green streamers behind his eyes. He did not feel the ground as he strode forward to claim his prize.

  The chicken was still eating, did not seem to know that it was doomed. Not until its captor bent low and cast
his giant shadow did the bird realize anything was wrong. Then it wheeled in its small space and saw that its escape was blocked. It retreated, squawked, flapped its futile wings so that its feather tips raked unmusically against the bars. It leaped in an aborted takeoff and banged its narrow head against the top of the trap. The poet considered the moment, examined his emotions. So this was how it felt to be in charge, to be enforcer, judge, and executioner. He liked it.

  Squatting down, he opened the cage and gingerly reached inside. The bird shrieked and pecked at his fingers. The beak was half sharp, like the tines of a fork; the feel of it was less painful than bracing. He thrust his hand in more decisively and grabbed the chicken by the neck. He felt vertebrae beneath the scraggly feathers as he pulled his victim through the wire door.

  It had been Roberto Natchez's intention to make the killing ceremonial, to invest it with the dignity and slowness of a rite. He realized now with a certain self-embarrassment that that would be impossible. The chicken, its red eye fiery with terror, squirmed and swelled, and Natchez was amazed at the quantity of senseless stubborn life that pulsed within it. Its wings pressed against his grip in bony supplication, its absurd pebbled legs still tried to run. To hold the creature was appalling; its relentless squawking was a mayhem that made a travesty of any sort of pomp, and Natchez admitted that the bird and not himself was dictating the pace of its decease. Less like a priest than a butcher, the poet pushed the chicken flat against the ground and with his other hand he made a motion like opening a jar of jam and wrung its neck.