Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  "Being arrogant. Being secretive. Being himself."

  They ate. Augie sucked meat from a crab claw, then, as if thinking aloud, said softly, "I thought you liked Natch."

  "I've enjoyed him at moments," said Nina grudgingly. She nibbled at a wedge of avocado. "But everything seems different now. I just feel so let down, so disappointed in them all."

  Augie frowned at his food. He knew what she was saying, he'd felt it too. He passed along another of the unsought consolations that had come to him while working. "Nina," he said, "someone is trying to do something terrible to us. That doesn't mean everyone is guilty."

  "No?" said his wife. She put her fork down, dabbed her mouth on a napkin, then fixed her husband with a naked stare. "Then why do I feel that they are?"

  36

  The stairway up to Roberto Natchez's third-floor garret was narrow and steep and smelled like dead flowers mingled with onions simmered long ago. Heat spiraled up along the banister and collected in a shimmering mist beneath the wire-strengthened skylight cut into the sunstruck metal roof. It got hotter with each step, and even the young and slender Reuben was damp between the shoulder blades by the time he reached the poet's door. He mopped his forehead on his handkerchief, took a moment to collect himself, and knocked.

  Natchez looked up from the blank sheet of paper angled exactingly in front of him. He did not get many visitors, and he hid from himself the truth that he was grateful and curious to have one now, telling himself instead that he was annoyed at this interruption of his labors. He put down his pen with a show of irritation, then stood and examined himself briefly in the full length mirror tucked in a dim alcove near his desk. Content that his black shirt was presentable, he walked the two steps to the door.

  He saw Reuben standing there and felt a flash of disappointment. He'd imagined a more important-looking caller. "Yes?" he curtly said.

  "I am sent by Mr. and Mrs. Silver," Reuben said. "They would like to speak with you."

  "I know they would," said Natchez, as though it was obvious that everyone wanted to speak with him. He turned away and the momentum of turning carried him once again into his living room. Reuben decided to regard this as an invitation to enter, and he followed the poet in. Natchez wheeled on him. "I got their messages," he said.

  "So why you don't call back?" pressed the messenger. "They speak of you as a friend."

  Natchez squelched a pang of guilt before it could register as such, and went on the offensive. "And who are you?"

  "I am Reuben."

  Natchez nodded sagely and as if somehow vindicated. "Spanish."

  "American."

  The poet nodded again, a condescending smirk spreading across his mouth the way a drop of sludge smears itself across a puddle. He was standing near his desk now, and when he spoke he did not look right at Reuben, but a little off to the side. "American," he scoffed. "That's what the new ones always say. American. They say it with pride, as if it were some great accomplishment to come here and be used."

  "I am not used," said Reuben. "I do what I want to do."

  "Of course," said Natchez, sneering. "You want to run errands for the Anglos. You want to clean their toilets. You want to pick up the crumbs from their tables."

  Reuben found the lecture boring; he'd heard it before, in neighborhood bodegas, from old men playing dominoes. What did interest him, though, was the question of why Natchez didn't look at him while he lectured. He came a half-step farther into the living room and realized that the poet was watching himself in the mirror: practicing his delivery, but practicing for what?

  "You want to work for bad wages," the liberator droned on. "You want to call your bosses Mr. and Mrs. Anglo while they call you—"

  "I call them Augie and Nina," Reuben said. He said it softly but with a delight that exasperated Natchez. He turned away from the shadowed mirror and looked at his visitor with quiet fury.

  "Well, you tell Augie and Nina that I'm very busy just now and I'll call them when I can."

  Reuben stood his ground. He glanced around the poet's apartment. It was dusty, dim, starved for sunlight, air, and furniture polish. Termite droppings flecked the windowsills, limestone grit put a dull gray coating on the floors. "I won't," he said.

  "You won't what?" said Natchez.

  "I won't tell them that. It is too important. Do you know where Ray Yates is?"

  The poet put his hands on his hips, checked his posture in the mirror, and took a tone as superior as any rich Anglo could possibly muster. "What gives you the nerve—"

  "I ask you a question," Reuben shot right back. He wasn't trying to mimic Natchez, but he also put his hands on his hips, and the effect of the two of them standing there was faintly ludicrous. "Where is Ray Yates?"

  Like most bullies, Roberto Natchez was ready to cave in at the first sign of real resistance. He dropped his hands and shrugged. "I don't know."

  Reuben considered. He had his answer but it was an empty answer. He looked down at the floor and wished someone would wash it.

  But now suddenly Natchez seemed eager to volunteer more information. It galled him to be asked a question to which he did not know the answer; it galled him to have given in to this fey little spick who spurned his liberator's message. He was ready to take out his pique on Ray Yates, who wasn't there to defend himself. "Ray Yates is a very weak person," he said.

  Reuben said nothing, just sucked shallowly at the fetid heavy air. Natchez glanced sideways, tugged at the placket of his shirt, and orated.

  "He lacks self-discipline. And, like many people of privileged background, he imagines there will always be someone to fix things for him. Someone to step in and write a check or make a phone call to some powerful friend who owes a favor."

  Reuben stayed quiet and watched a gekko slink along a cobwebbed baseboard.

  "He gambles," Natchez went on. "Heavily. Your kind employers—Augie and Nina—they know that? I'll bet they don't. He's a sneak about it. Even I didn't know how heavily he gambles until a couple of days ago. He's pathetic."

  "Last Friday night he rents a car," Reuben ventured.

  "Yes," said Natchez. "To run away. To hide. He's in trouble with his loan sharks. A mouse in trouble with the snakes. He's got to stay in a little hole somewhere until he pays them off."

  "How will he pay?" asked Reuben, but he knew the answer before he'd finished the question. Natchez, smirking, lifted a heavy eyebrow toward his single Augie Silver canvas.

  "It's so perfect," the poet said. "The mouse will pay the snakes with the money that some vulture will waste on a picture by a—"

  Reuben interrupted to spare himself the pain and rage of hearing Augie insulted. "You hate everyone," he said.

  It was not a question. Roberto Natchez did not bother to deny it. Rather, he straightened his back and appraised himself in the mirror, took his own measure as arbiter of all things. "I hate weakness," he said. "I hate fakes. I hate people who think that by fooling themselves they can fool the world. I hate—" "You hate Augie?" Reuben asked. Natchez paused, raised a finger in the manner of a preacher, then elected not to answer. He attempted a small ironic smile, but it stalled halfway through the muscles of his face and locked into a death's-head grimace. Reuben could not help falling back a step. The room suddenly seemed more suffocatingly close than it had been before, as if the air itself had melted away and left behind some noxious residue of stinging dust and the infernal swampy vapors of rotting vegetation. Reuben swallowed, his mouth tasted vile. With effort, he tore his eyes away from the poet's evilly contorted lips; he had to look at something else, anything else. His flitting eyes glanced at bookshelves, sooty windows, then came to rest on a wire cage standing end-up in a corner of the room.

  The poet's gaze caught up with Reuben's, his grimace was transfigured to a scowl of diabolic pleasure. "I catch chickens," he explained. He paused, showed teeth, cinched in the corners of his eyes. "Then I kill them. I wring their necks."

  "For food?"

  "For mo
ral exercise."

  Reuben blinked, recoiled. He felt shaky on his feet, he groped for some idea or image that would steady him and pictured the Silvers' yard, a place of sun and breeze and smells of living things. "Why should a chicken die—" he began.

  The poet cut him off, his scowl leavened but made no less horrible by the beginnings of a twisted grin. He moved toward Reuben, herded him to the door to be sure he'd get the last word in. "The same reason a chicken should live," he said. "No reason. No damn reason at all."

  37

  "Bad news," Claire Steiger said, her voice weary and clenched as it crackled through the speakerphone. "Lousy news. Peter Brandenburg smells a journalistic coup. He wants to do an interview with you, peg it to the auction."

  Augie was sitting on the sofa sipping tea and contentedly perspiring. He'd done a good day's work on the picture of Fred the parrot, the effort had left him feeling blithe and light. "Was a time," he said, "you would have opened champagne on news like that."

  His agent ignored him. "He wants to fly down there in the next day or two. Get the piece done fast, to run next issue. That means it hits the newsstands Sunday night and goes to subscribers Monday morning. Which means that by the time the auction starts at ten o'clock, the whole world knows you're painting again."

  Augie said nothing; it was all the same to him. Nina paced silently near the phone, concentrating less on her former boss's words than on her tone. There was something in it that Nina didn't think she'd ever heard before: a grudging acknowledgment that maybe she could not control events. At this, Nina felt a kind of triumph; she was not proud of the feeling, nor did it surprise her. What did surprise her was the flash of sympathy she felt as well: Take the ability to control things away from a person like Claire Steiger, and what was left of her?

  "I tried to talk him out of it," the dealer resumed. "He went on a tear about how the critic has to stand above commerce and blah, blah, blah. It's not like Peter to get so righteous, so shrill. It's almost like he's being spiteful."

  "Why would he be?" asked Nina.

  The agent paused, there was a seething helplessness in the silence. When she spoke again, something had snapped, her voice was both whiny and ruthless. It made Nina think of the terrifying girls she had sometimes seen in city playgrounds, remorseless girls who would fight harder and dirtier than any boy, biting and kicking and going after eyes with their fingernails and never saying uncle.

  "He's a bitch," Claire said of Brandenburg, "and I have no idea what's on his mind. But Augie, I'm asking you one last time, please don't do this interview. Stall. Sandbag. Do whatever—"

  Nina cut her off. "Claire, there'll be other paintings, other auctions. Why not think about the long term—"

  "For me this is the only one that matters," Claire Steiger interrupted in turn.

  "But if you're representing Augie's interests?" said his wife.

  "That's just how it is," the agent said. "Don't ask me to explain."

  Nina paced, unappeased and unsatisfied. "Claire," she pressed, "I think you should explain."

  For a moment the humid air seemed to oscillate, pulled first one way then the other by the tug of wills. But when the agent spoke again, her position had only hardened, her tone grown still more steely. "Augie, Nina, there will be serious consequences, dire consequences, if this auction falls flat."

  "Consequences for whom?" pressed Nina.

  Some static came through the speakerphone, but the agent didn't answer. Augie and Nina looked at each other, their eyes grabbed like only the eyes of longtime mates can do, affirming for the millionth time a concord much profounder than mere agreement. "Claire," said Augie, "nothing personal, but your advice doesn't mean that much to me right now. We'll let you know."

  *

  Pants are handy things but they never fit exactly right.

  On thick-built men like Joe Mulvane, they tend to bind around the thighs, the back seam has an annoying tendency to crawl between the buttocks. When such men sit and lean forward, say, against a bar, the waistband of their trousers binds them in the belly, while at the base of their spines an unattractive gap appears and seems to tug their shirttails out as well as to create a natural channel for sweat to pour. A belt doesn't close the trench in back; it only presents a retaining wall that bites into the flesh below the navel.

  About the only benefit a belt provided a man like Joe Mulvane was that it gave him a place to hang his beeper—and most of the time he wished the beeper had never been invented. He was sitting at the Clove Hitch bar having an end-of-workday beer with Arty Magnus when the goddamn thing went off. Conversation died in a wide swath all around them; everyone had a morbid urge to listen in on the latest carnage when a homicide cop got beeped. Hogfish Mike Curran did a quick turn with his rag and mopped up condensation in Mulvane's direction. Even the gulls and pelicans standing on the nearby pilings fell silent for the moment. But the message was nothing gruesome. It was Augie Silver saying simply that he thought the two of them should talk.

  The detective went back to his beer. A week before the summer solstice, the sun was still white hot at nearly 6 p.m. and cold beer seemed God's kindest gift to sweltering humanity.

  Arty Magnus, reluctant journalist, felt a fleeting impulse to attend to the business of his newspaper. "Augie Silver," he said. "The slightly famous painter with the dead parrot."

  "Yup," said Mulvane, and left it at that.

  Magnus nipped at his gin. He was a stringy guy, gangly even, and he liked the heat. He liked extremes. If you lived someplace hot, let it be hot. Let the streets melt, let exhausted air conditioners explode. "Joe," he said, "can I ask you a question?"

  Mulvane just looked at him without pulling his lips very far from his beer.

  "Augie Silver—there something going on here I should know about?"

  "That's two questions," said Mulvane. He sucked the last of his brew and stood up so that the gap closed at the back of his pants and the cloth blotted the sweat that had rim down. In all, it was not a pleasant sensation. "I'll see ya later," said the cop.

  *

  "If Yates is in bad hock with his loan shark," reasoned Mulvane, "that's a big problem for him. He might rather make it a big problem for you."

  "He has paintings," Nina said. "And he rented a turquoise car."

  "But in the meantime," the detective said, "it's the agent who seems antsier than anybody else."

  "She has the most to gain," said Nina. "And I don't see why she's got this shoot-the-moon attitude about this one auction."

  "And then there's the crazy man," the cop added to the tally. "The chicken slayer. What's his angle?"

  "He is evil," Reuben said.

  Mulvane nodded. He knew from evil. "But there's no money motive?"

  "His painting is still on the wall," said Augie. "Reuben saw it. Besides, mere greed would be too bourgeois for Robert. He'd have to find a way to make it philosophical."

  The four of them were sitting in the backyard near the pool. The sun had slipped below the level of the trees, the drooping fronds absorbed the last of the day's battering, and the dappled air that filtered through seemed no temperature at all. Fat summer clouds towered here and there. Their bottoms were lavender, they were voluptuous with swelling curves, and they roamed the sky like sniffing dogs, deliberating as to where they'd drop their rain.

  Mulvane sipped his beer. He felt suddenly irritable, out of his depth. Conniving art dealers. Philosophical poets who choked chickens. Key West was a weird town, and the weirdness extended even to why and how inhabitants got murdered. Mulvane wanted to bring the discussion back to more familiar grass-roots criminality.

  "The other people on your list," he said. "Jimmy Gibbs. You know he once killed a man?"

  There was a general recoil, but less so than there would have been a week ago. People could get used to anything.

  "I knew he'd been in trouble," Augie said. "I didn't know . . ." His voice faltered, he gestured weakly, he thought about the time he'd spent on
the water and at the Clove Hitch with the gruff, grumpy, always-bitching-and-moaning Jimmy Gibbs. Damnit, he enjoyed the guy.

  "Was a long time ago," Mulvane said. "Almost thirty years. And supposedly there were some mitigating circumstances, maybe he was even justified. But still, there are people who can kill and people who can't." He raised his beer; the timing made it seem like some macabre toast to homicide. "So who else?"

  He glanced from face to face and Reuben piped up. "Meester Pheeps. Who brought the cake."

  "Right," said Joe Mulvane. "That excellent poison cake."

  "Come on," said Augie, "he's my oldest friend. And he isn't selling his paintings."

  Mulvane put his glass down on the low iron table in front of him and glanced at the painter from under his eyebrows. "How do you know?" he asked.

  Augie was drinking white wine. It looked greenish in the fading light. The artist gave a nervous little laugh, and squirmed. "Look," he said, "I started giving him pictures—Jesus, it must be twenty, twenty-two years ago. . . . And I've spoken with him, we've talked. I mean, he had a chance to tell me, he would have said something. . . . And it's not like he's strapped for funds. At least I don't think he is. . . . No, he would have told me, I know it."

  There was an embarrassed silence, a pained silence such as might surround a person who'd just come to suspect a spouse's infidelity that had been long before surmised by others. Nina reached out gently and put a hand on Augie's wrist. Reuben pulled a deep breath in, as though trying to take the hurt into himself and thereby cleanse the air.

  Joe Mulvane softly cleared his throat. "Try to find out for sure," he said.

  Augie nodded. He slumped down in his chair, his thin bare knees splayed out. Far away there was thunder, the sound was less heard than felt. It was dim enough now for the headlight bugs to glow, they flew by slowly, their red eyes bright before their blurring wings.

  Nina steeled herself to press on. "And we've yet to decide about this interview," she said.

  "Pros and cons?' said Joe Mulvane.

  "The argument against," said Nina, "is Do we really want any more attention? The argument for—"