Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  "The argument for," Augie roused himself, "is that, goddamnit, I will not be cowed." He was forcing himself upright in his chair; he pressed down on its arms so that his bony shoulders hunched up almost to his ears. "I keep silent, I hide—whoever's after me, they've won. I won't roll over."

  "Who cares who wins?' said Nina.

  But Augie went right on. "Besides, why should we imagine that this auction passes and suddenly the threat is over? There'll be other auctions, other shows, other reasons to kill me. Something like this doesn't just go away."

  "He's right about that," said Joe Mulvane. "As a rule."

  "So you're saying he should do the interview?" Nina asked.

  The detective fended off the suggestion with the lift of a meaty hand. "I can't give protection, I'm not giving advice. Look, you do the interview, you're raising the stakes, putting yourself out there—"

  "Setting a trap," said Augie, "with myself as bait."

  "Something like that," Mulvane resumed. "It's a risk. Keep quiet, maybe you're protecting yourself, maybe you're just prolonging things. It's a tough call."

  "I'm doing it," said Augie.

  Nina sipped her wine. Reuben checked around to see if anyone needed another drink, a fresh dry cocktail napkin. Off to the east, lightning made orange pulses inside a purple cloud.

  "Well, listen," said Mulvane, "if your mind's made up, I'll say one thing. General rule, there's two ways to stay out of trouble. Say nothing to nobody or say everything to everybody."

  "Meaning?" Augie said.

  "Meaning that if you're doing interviews, don't just talk to this one guy, talk to everyone who's interested."

  Augie could not help giving forth a little laugh. "Joe, I think you have an exaggerated notion of how many people give a damn about me."

  "Local paper does," said the detective. "This I know for sure."

  Augie shrugged. "O.K., I'll talk to the local paper. World famous in his hometown. Why not?"

  38

  That night Augie Silver couldn't sleep.

  He lay in bed and watched the lazy turning of the ceiling fan, listened to the fleeting showers that hammered briefly on the metal roof then stopped as abruptly as if someone had turned off a faucet. He looked at his sleeping wife, now and then brushed a stray hair from her face. At around 5 a.m. he slipped out from under the thin damp sheet.

  Nina roused herself enough to ask if he was all right.

  "Fine, darling, fine," he said. He leaned over with some difficulty and stroked her shoulder. 'There's something I need to do."

  "What?" she asked fuzzily.

  "Go back to sleep," he whispered.

  He pulled on his khaki shorts and a blue work shirt with paint spots on the sleeves. Then he tiptoed through the hallway, past the closed door of the guest bedroom where Reuben was now staying. From a basket on the kitchen counter he took the key to the lock on Nina's old fat-tire bicycle, and he left the house.

  Key West is a very quiet place at 5 a.m. A soft electric hum spills out of the pinkish streetlights; if a cat wails, fighting or fornicating, you can hear it many blocks away. Augie's tires made a nice sound, a sticky sound, as he slowly rode and, nub by nub, the rubber treads were stretched off the damp asphalt. The high parts of the streets had steamed themselves almost dry; along the curbs were shallow puddles that would be gone by daybreak. Nothing moved. The waxy flowers of the night-blooming cirrus gave off an uncanny lacquered gleam.

  Augie's legs were tired by the time he'd pedaled the eight flat blocks to Clay Phipps's house. He gave himself a moment to recover before he pushed open the wooden gate and climbed the four brick steps to his friend's front door. Then he knocked.

  He waited, taking in the salad smell of moist shrubbery and the short-lived freshness of air with the coral dust washed out of it by rain. He knocked again, hard enough so that his knuckles hurt, and in another moment a light came on inside and Clay Phipps opened the door.

  He looked confused, jowly, and not his best. He was wearing pajama bottoms, blue-and-white-striped silk; his pink stomach was bare and puffy, his soft chest showed the beginnings of unpretty breasts. The top of his bald head was blotchy with sleep, his side tufts were wispy, long, and tangled. "Augie," he muttered. "What the hell—'"

  "We have to talk," the painter said. "I'm coming in."

  He slipped past the other man, brushed lightly against his gut while passing. He strode firmly through the entrance hall and confronted the six naked rectangles on the living-room walls. They were only dimly lit by the entry light and yet they glared. Some were high, some were low, some were tall, some were wide. The centers of the rectangles were very white and seemed not meant to be exposed, they were like the parts inside the bathing suit. Along the edges were lines of soot and grime, nasty suggestions that nothing was ever quite clean. Augie gestured toward the rude blanks and looked his old friend in the eye. "Clay," he said. "Why?"

  Phipps was not yet totally awake, but he was awake enough to know what he was being asked. He blinked, glanced around his living room as if it were a stranger's house. He sighed, walked heavy-footed and obliquely toward a chair, and sat down on the edge of it. He said nothing.

  "Why, Clay?" Augie repeated. "Why all of them?"

  Phipps stayed silent. He put his elbows on his knees and ran his hands across his head, but his sparse hair came away no less disheveled than before.

  "Money?" Augie asked. He waited a beat then answered his own question. "No, I don't think so. You've always liked to pamper yourself, but I've never known you to be greedy. If you needed money, you'd sell one, two—you wouldn't sell all six."

  Phipps kept quiet. Augie locked his hands behind his back and looked up at the ceiling as if puzzling out a problem in the higher math.

  "Were you just showing off, Clay? Is it as simple as that? Were you hoping to get kissed up to as a big collector, invited to some fancy East Side parties?"

  Clay Phipps tried to speak, but all that came out was a low rasp, a sound like someone stirring gravel with a spoon. He tried again. "Augie, we all thought you were dead."

  The painter moved away from the guilty wall and stood above his friend. "I don't want to sound like a sentimental fool," he said, "but it seems to me that that might be a reason to keep the fucking paintings. A little something to remember me by."

  "I don't need pictures to remember you," Phipps said weakly, but it sounded smarmy even in his own ears and it evoked nothing but an icy stare from Augie. A moment passed and then Phipps spoke again. He spoke so softly that Augie had to lean down low, straining in the pre-dawn quiet to catch the words. "Or maybe it's that I didn't want to remember you."

  Augie straightened up. He felt a pain that was also a relief; the decay of a lie had been scraped away, a nerve was open to the air. "Ah," he said, "a bit of naked honesty creeps in. How bracing. How rare."

  "I need a drink of water," Clay Phipps said. Abstractedly, almost as if sleepwalking, he got up and padded barefoot toward the kitchen. Augie dogged his steps.

  "You thought I was dead," he said to Phipps's back. "Well, I had some things wrong too. I thought I had friends to come home to."

  Phipps switched on the kitchen light. He was a fastidious bachelor and the place was neat. A single place setting had dried in the drain-board. Wineglasses gleamed on a shelf. There was a handsome wooden knife block on the counter with every knife in place. "You do," he said as he drew a glass of water from the cooler.

  "Bullshit," Augie answered. He watched his old friend gulp down his drink, watched his throat pulse with swallowing and his belly stretch a little farther, and he was suddenly seized by a physical revulsion mingled with an aching and useless compassion not just for Clay Phipps but for all things human. Drinking water and pissing urine; getting old and getting fat; disappointing friends and being disappointed; all of it a noisy and befuddled prologue to the lonely act of dying. "Clay, what did I do to you? What did I do that you need to forget about?"

  Phipps leaned back again
st his kitchen counter. He blinked down at the floor, he scratched his scalp. The sleepiness seemed finally to fall away from him and was replaced by a whining defiance, a complaining that had gone unspoken for far too long and turned rancid. "You want to know, Augie? You really want to know? You shamed me. You shamed all of us. Me. Yates. Natchez. You made us feel like shit."

  They locked eyes. The kitchen was narrow and they were standing very close. The knife block bristled near Phipps's right elbow. Augie said nothing.

  "I don't think any of us realized it until you disappeared," the heavy man went on. "Until we thought you died. It's like . . . how can I explain it? When you were around, we figured we were your friends, we must be like you. Then you were gone, and it was very clear we weren't like you at all. You had your work. You had your marriage. You had your way of getting on with people, different kinds of people, making everybody feel good. We had none of that. Not really. And the worst thing, the humiliating part? We didn't even know we didn't have it—you had it for us.

  "You feel betrayed, Augie? I feel betrayed. When you hit the reef, we all hit the reef. Don't you see that? This pleasant little life we had down here, we thought there was some heart to it, some depth. But no, it only seemed that way because you buoyed it up. You had an obligation-"

  Almost casually, almost as if the gesture were an accidental fidget, Augie reached for a knife. His left hand moved forward abruptly but with no special quickness. It went past Clay Phipps's flank and seized the biggest handle. The blade was long and thin, the flexing metal rang softly as it was whisked out of the block. Phipps fell silent, his breath caught with a strangled gurgling sound. He tucked his chin and the loose flesh underneath it began instantly to tremble.

  "Someone's trying to kill me, Clay," said Augie. "Is it you?"

  Phipps didn't answer. He stared at the knife, his eyes throbbed in and out of focus. Augie held it loosely, carelessly; it glinted in the electric light, and the point was a few inches from Phipps's bare pink stomach. He arched his back and tried to shrink, he leaned back hard against the counter and squeezed the edges of it with white fingers.

  "You think I'm going to stab you, Clay? Terrible thing, a guilty conscience. Hold out your hand."

  Slowly, warily, Phipps lifted his eyes. He let go of the counter edge; his palm made a moist sound as it came away. He presented his soft plump hand and Augie gently placed the knife in it. "Feel better now?" he asked.

  Phipps just stared at him.

  "I asked you a question," Augie went on. "Answer it."

  Phipps blinked. He remembered to breathe, but he seemed as baffled and as terrified to find the knife in his own hand as he had been to see it in his friend's. "Augie, Jesus Christ—"

  "All right, let's try a different question. You want me dead, Clay?"

  The refrigerator switched on; the sudden noise was shocking. Somewhere far away a dog yelped. Outside the small kitchen window the darkness was changing from pure black to a veiled and grainy purple. All at once the knife felt not just brutal but unutterably obscene, disgusting, in Phipps's hand. He turned and put it on the counter, and when he faced Augie again he was crying. The tears didn't fall, they just made his irises look melted, smeared; the rims of his eyelids were bright red and the corners of his mouth began to quiver.

  "I've wished you were dead," he said softly. "Once you'd gone, once the secret was out about how small my life is, how alone I am, how ridiculous . . ." He shook his bald head, lightly slapped his belly with a mix of self-mockery and affection without respect. "Yeah. I've felt maybe there'd be less to be embarrassed about, less to feel like a failure about, if you didn't exist."

  He paused, dragged the back of his hand across his eyes. He sniffled, and then, through the wet and childlike noise, he gave a little laugh. The laugh carried a bleak but genuine amusement. He pinched the bridge of the nose, then made a dismissive gesture that seemed to take in his striped pajamas, his tender pink feet, his neat kitchen with his cookbooks and his saucepans and his wooden spoons. "But Augie, for God's sake, I'm not a killer."

  Augie stood back and appraised him. Phipps's face would not stay still. His mouth held the bleak smile for just a moment, then collapsed, folded down as if he would begin to sob. The eyes crinkled with the last pinch of a laugh, then clouded over in shame, and finally opened wide and liquid with a naked hope: the hope that he would be forgiven.

  Augie didn't know if he could come across with that forgiveness. If it happened, it wouldn't happen by decision but by feeling, and the feeling needed time to ripen or to shrivel.

  He turned without another word and walked quickly through the denuded living room and out into the humid purple dawn.

  39

  When he got home it was almost seven.

  Rays like a crown were spiking up the eastern sky, and the curbside puddles had dried. He locked the blue fat-tire bicycle in front of his house. He opened the door and saw Nina pacing in the living room and drinking coffee. Her eyes were flat and tired.

  "Augie," she said, "you shouldn't have gone out alone."

  "I know," he said. "I had to. I'm sorry."

  "You went to Clay's." It was not a question.

  "He's selling his paintings. All of them. He's ashamed of himself and he wants to be friends again."

  Nina held her coffee mug in both hands. Her head was tilted at an inquiring angle.

  "It isn't him," said Augie.

  "You're absolutely sure?" said Nina.

  "No. Not absolutely. But he had his chance. I'm exhausted." He went to her. She didn't budge. "Mad?"

  "Yes."

  He rubbed a hand over his face, the skin felt rubbery. "I don't blame you," he said.

  He went to the bedroom. Reuben was there. His hair was wet from the shower, and he was plumping Augie's pillows. How did he know just what Augie wanted and how did he do it so fast? Reuben was amazing.

  Augie didn't bother to undress. He slipped under the sheet, pulled a pillow over his eyes and ears, and when he woke up it was noon.

  Nina was mostly over being angry, though she exacted a promise that Augie would run off on no more reckless errands. They had lunch, and then the painter asked Reuben to set up the big easel in the backyard and to carry out his partly painted canvas from the storage room. He was ready to return to work on the hommage to Fred, a heroic portrait of a noble bird against the backdrop of a mythic forest.

  He took his brush and palette and climbed the ladder under the shelter of the strangely dainty poinciana leaves. He began to paint and he began to hum. The jungle canopy took on texture and humidity. Weird rootless flowers sprang to crimson life in the damp and crumbly crevasses between branches. Unknown huge-eyed creatures—antic crosses between cats and bats and squirrels—flitted half-hidden in the camouflage of light and shade. Here and there a flash of searing sun shot through; bulbous fruits and pregnant pods swelled with excess of vitality. The foliage shaped itself around a monumental absence, held itself open, breathless and fluttering in expectation of the something that was missing, till the picture seemed to cry out for the colossal presence of an outsize parrot, a prodigious parrot in splendid and extravagant plumage.

  Augie was mixing colors, humming, chuckling to himself, when the phone rang. He didn't hear it, nor did he see Nina walking toward him until she was standing almost directly underneath the ladder.

  "Peter Brandenburg's on the line," she said. "He wants to fly down tomorrow morning and do the interview in the afternoon."

  "Fine," said Augie, "fine." He was thinking about birds and vines and jungle, he didn't want to distract himself with journalists and interviews. But then he remembered the suggestion Joe Mulvane had made. "Tell him there'll probably be someone from the Sentinel along."

  Nina shielded her eyes from the sun and frowned up at him. "He won't like that," she said. "Big New York critic sharing time with some reporter from the local rag."

  Augie shrugged. "I hate giving the same answers twice. If he wants the interview, that's
the ground rules."

  Nina was momentarily exasperated, then a small and enigmatic smile crossed her lips. When she'd thought her husband was dead, she'd made of him, if not a saint, then someone milder, less rambunctious and unmanageable than in fact he sometimes was. She'd almost forgotten what a stubborn bullheaded pain in the neck he could be when he was working, when he was strong. She shook her head and went back to the phone.

  Augie mixed pigments, concocted an unabashedly ferocious shade of acidy lime green, and began the arduous and endlessly amusing job of trying to give the flightless paint the fluff and lift and airiness of feathers.

  "Matty been around?" asked Jimmy Gibbs.

  "More'n you have," said Hogfish Mike Curran. Losing Gibbs as a regular was no great financial loss to the Clove Hitch, but still Hogfish spoke in the slightly wounded tone of the barkeep who has been abandoned.

  "Been busy," said Jimmy Gibbs.

  Curran doubted it but kept that opinion to himself. A few seconds went by, then Gibbs blindsided him by saying the real reason he'd been away. "Besides, that little scene the other week. ... I just ain't felt like bein' at the docks."

  A sudden wave of fellow feeling swept over Hogfish Mike. "I gotcha, bubba. Have one on me?'

  In the instant after the words had left his mouth Curran understood two things: He understood that he'd been ambushed, worked around to the offer of a freebie, and he understood that Gibbs, being Gibbs, would try to stretch the offer.

  "Jeez, Hogfish, thanks. A shot and a beer, if you don't mind."

  The bartender wheeled around, grabbed a longneck and poured a slightly grudging shot of no-name bourbon. When he spun back toward Gibbs, the former mate was watching a fishing boat come into the Bight, watching the way it chiseled out a wake and the way the green water went foamy but flat behind it, and there was a no-bullshit sadness in his face that made Curran feel a little mean for not giving him more alcohol.

  But then Gibbs brightened—brightened even before he'd put the cold beer to his lips. His eyes flashed, and in the first instant Hogfish Mike thought it was a twinkle of innocent mischief. In the second instant he decided he'd been half right. It was mischief, but the sadness was still there, mixed in with it, giving it a snarl and a weight and an angry drive that meant trouble.