Mood swings are tiring, and the morning's ups and downs left Augie feeling mopey.
He tried to put some finishing touches on the portrait of Fred, but not one brush stroke pleased him, he felt himself dangerously pulled toward muddying up his sprightly greens with brown, and rather than give in to that he put his paints aside.
After that, time dragged. It was four days before the summer solstice, the heavy sun struggled up the highest part of the sky like a fat man climbing stairs, and when it reached the zenith it seemed to pause a long time, panting, and the earth panted underneath it. Fronds drooped; flowers wilted; the blades of ceiling fans labored through the viscous air as though through pancake batter.
Around three o'clock there was a downpour which by rights should have ended the day. But it didn't. The sun was back in twenty minutes, as punishing as before. Steam rose from pavements, from the crowns of shrubs, and in the Silver house a small sin was committed: Everyone gave up on the endless afternoon and waited dully for the release of night and sleep.
After a cold dinner Nina went to bed to read. Reuben cleared the table, did the dishes. Augie stayed up just long enough to watch the early stars come out, and then he too retired.
He was going to his room when he saw something that redeemed the day. He saw Reuben praying.
The young man's bedroom door was open slightly, and behind it Reuben was at his bedside, on his knees. His hands were crossed on the cotton blanket, his forehead lay against them, a lamp on his nightstand threw a soft gleam on his dark and curly hair. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a sleeveless undershirt that showed his delicate shoulders and skinny chest, and he looked like a little boy. His lips moved, his head bobbed slightly as he prayed. After a moment he seemed to feel Augie's eyes on him. He looked up with a small shy smile.
Augie was nonplussed, embarrassed to be caught watching. "Reuben," he said. "I . . . I'm sorry. I didn't mean to disturb you."
"You do not disturb me," Reuben said. His hands were still crossed in front of him; he still smiled.
"I didn't know you prayed," Augie fumbled. "You told me once you'd stopped believing."
Reuben nodded solemnly. "Yes," he said. "I stopped. I start again."
"Ah," said Augie.
"I start again," said Reuben, "because I am here. In this house. I have never known a house like this. There is much life here, much kindness. I must believe God smiles on this house."
Reuben didn't stand but he lifted his back, twisted his slender shoulders, and turned his head straight on toward Augie. His torso was traced by the lamp's yellow glow, one side of his face shone as if in firelight, the other side was shadowed. It was an image Augie would remember.
"I hope He does," said Augie. "Good night, Reuben."
"Good night, Augie. Sleep well."
42
Roberto Natchez dropped Friday morning's paper on his dim disheveled desk and coaxed the top off his Styrofoam cup of cafe con leche. With the usual snarls and sneers he read the dismal unreal news briefs from the outside world, terse by-the-way accounts of coups and famines, scandals and indictments, riots and revolutions. In everything he read he saw confirmation of what he knew: that the truth was everywhere suppressed, fakery in gross but temporary triumph. In Africa as in Russia, in politics as in culture, the appalling pattern held: Lying mediocrity prospered while deep honesty could only fume and seethe and starve, and so it would continue until there was a Liberator clear-eyed enough to show the world its vileness, and strong and cruel enough to root the vileness out.
Approvingly, he examined his scowl in the alcove mirror, sipped some coffee, then turned to the second section and saw the big lead article, its headline sprawled across the whole front page: Augie Silver— Key West's Greatest (Twice-) Living Artist.
This sent Natchez briefly back to his looking glass. He did a double take, snapped the paper in what he intended as a gesture of mocking disbelief. Then, with a throbbing pulse in his temple and a quickly tightening knot in his stomach, he began to read.
"Our town," went Arty Magnus's opening, "is a cultural mecca with many pilgrims and very few prophets."
Already Natchez was so affronted that he laughed out loud, erupted in a demonic cackle that hurt his throat. Was it conceivable that this cipher of a local reporter was going to call Augie Silver—a dauber, a decorator—a prophet? No, it was too ridiculous, too grotesque.
"Artists come here," the article went on, "expecting —what? To be magically, effortlessly infused with the island's atmosphere? To absorb talent by some sort of painless tropical osmosis? Well, it doesn't work that way, as longtime Key West resident Augie Silver can testify. To understand the allure, the resonance, and the dangerous beauty of our corner of the world is a difficult, harrowing—and potentially fatal—experience."
There followed what Roberto Natchez considered a strained transition to an unctuous, overblown account of Augie's misadventure at sea—and this evoked another derisive chortle from the poet: The man has a trivial mishap in a sailboat, a rich child's toy, and this is evidence of his profundity, this marks him as a seer?
Absurdity followed absurdity in the article. Augie Silver's bland commercial work was described as "haunting and uncompromising." His prissy bourgeois house was characterized as "cozy and devoid of ostentation." Augie himself—sloppy, haphazard, careless Augie—was passed off as "a man of unpretentious dignity, who wears his great gift with modesty and humor."
Great gift? thought Natchez. Ha! A gift for public relations maybe, a gift for facile showmanship. . . .
But then the profile took a darker turn. Fame also had its perils, and there had recently been threats, the piece revealed, against the artist's life. The details were withheld, though Arty Magnus allowed himself to observe that Key West had no shortage of crackpots to whom any outrage, from the sickest prank all the way to murder, might conceivably seem justified. "Indeed" —and here the journalist ended with a flourish—"such twisted and deluded souls are symptomatic of the untamed hothouse life of the tropics—the life that Augie Silver so powerfully and unsparingly portrays."
Natchez let the paper fall flat against his desk. He glanced at the mirror and attempted a supercilious smile, but his face was too tense for that, his upper lip did a mad-dog twitch against his eyeteeth. "Crackpots." He said the word aloud, then he gave a bitter laugh that curdled in his windpipe and closed his throat like the taste of sour milk. Crackpots. Wasn't that just too typical? Anyone who took a stand against a fraud like Augie Silver must by definition be a crackpot. What simpler, more insidious way for the mendacious, mediocre status quo to maintain its death grip on the imagination than by pinning the label crackpot on anyone who saw beyond its narrow, constipated limits?
The poet did not remember rising from his chair, but he found himself pacing the confines of his small apartment. He paced, he wheeled—and then he saw the Augie Silver canvas still hanging on his wall. Why in God's name did he keep that wretched thing? He wouldn't stoop to sell it—never!—but why did he allow it to sully his workplace? Maybe, long before, he'd kept it as a kind of private joke, a goad, but that was in a less ripe phase of his development. Such frivolity, such an invasion of marketplace crassness, could no longer be abided.
Roberto Natchez had a silver-plated letter opener. He'd bought it many years before; it had struck him as a necessary accoutrement for a budding literary man, though the implement, weighty and portentous, seemed designed for the unsealing of more important mail than the poet ever got. He grabbed it now and stood before the painting Augie Silver had given him in friendship. His face contorted, he raised the blade and let the point of it rest lightly near the center of the canvas, poking at a swath of sunshot sky. He breathed deeply, gripped his weapon as tightly as though he were about to plunge it into flesh, and he slashed. He slashed again and again, the canvas made a rasping, screaming sound as it was rent, flecks of brightly colored paint floated off the sundered cloth like tinsel glitter. He slashed until the picture was in
shreds too narrow to hold the knife, and then he stepped back, breathless and sweating, to see what he had done.
The frame had been knocked askew, ribbons of canvas hung down at random angles over the bottom of it. Natchez smiled. He examined the ghastly smile in the mirror, then turned to the painting again. He moved toward it, intending to take it off the wall, smash it, and put it in the garbage. Then he had a different idea. He'd leave it where it was and as it was. Let it hang there in tatters. Let it hang there dead. It struck him as somehow more authentic that way, more in the spirit of the crackpot tropics.
*
Clayton Phipps had not left his house in four days and was turning a sickly shade of yellowish gray. He hadn't shaved, he'd slept only for brief intervals at odd hours. His scalp seemed to have stretched from the weight of fatigue; a roll of loose skin gathered at the base of his skull, another formed a curving ledge above his eyebrows. When he finally ventured out late on Friday afternoon, the damp white light stung his eyes, and the concrete sidewalks felt bruisingly hard against his feet.
He walked to Augie Silver's house and knocked softly, tentatively, on the door.
Reuben opened it. "Meester Pheeps," he said. There was surprise in his voice, though it was unclear whether it had to do with the visit itself or the neat man's slovenly condition.
"Is Augie home?"
Reuben recognized suffering; he recognized repentance. He answered gently. "He is home. I do not know if he likes to see you."
Phipps gave a resigned and tired nod. "Would you ask him, please?"
Reuben left the visitor standing at the door; in deference to his unhappiness, he did not close it in his face. Augie was in the backyard sketching Nina as she swam. He put his pencil down at Reuben's news, and hesitated only for an instant. "Yes," he said, "of course I'll see him."
There is a kind of fondness that can co-exist with disappointment and that persists even in the absence of forgiveness—a fondness that itself becomes an unexalted but tolerable species of forgiveness—and this is what Augie Silver felt as his old friend came through the French doors and approached him. He looked at the white stubble on Phipps's jowls, the black bags under his sagging eyes, and he found it unexpectedly easy to muster a wry affection. "Clay," he said, "you look like hell."
The other man managed something like a smile. "Thank you."
"Whisky?"
Phipps's shirt was damp, he was itchy behind the knees. "Awfully hot for whisky," he said.
"That's obvious," said Augie. "Let's have whisky anyway."
Reuben went for drinks. Nina, dimly aware of muffled voices, peeked above the water just long enough to identify their guest; she decided she would keep on swimming. For a few moments no one spoke; Phipps seemed to be recharging, taking nourishment from the fact that he had been invited in, that he had not been turned away forever. Not until the Scotch and ice arrived and the two men had clinked glasses did he say another word. "Augie, those paintings. I was thinking. Maybe it's not too late to withdraw—"
"I don't ever want to see those pictures again, Clay." The artist's voice was soft but it was definite. "I don't imagine you do either. It's history. Cheers."
The chilled whisky was both cold and hot; it tickled first and then it burned.
Phipps looked into his glass. The ice was melting so fast he could see water streaming off the cubes, shimmering pale currents snaking through the brown liquor. "What happened to us, Augie? To our hale little group of buddies?"
"I know what happened to me," Augie said. "Damned if I know what's going on with you guys." He watched his wife swim. He loved the way she turned, reaching for the wall then becoming a liquid J as she reversed direction underwater. After a moment he said, "You going to the auction?"
Phipps listened hard for a note of rancor, but he heard no blame. "I was going to," he said. "Now I just don't know."
"You might want to decide," Augie said. "It's three days from now."
Phipps shrugged absently. "There's a fellow does charters in a Learjet. Dies in the off-season. Said he'd take me anywhere, anytime for a mention in the newsletter."
Augie could not help smiling. Incorrigibility might not be the loftiest of human traits, but there is always comfort in consistency. "Same old Clay," he said, "the freeloader's freeloader."
By way of answer, Phipps raised his glass. But the twinkle in his eye lasted only for an instant. Then his face caved in, his gray cheeks went slack, his voice turned shrill and maudlin. "Isn't there anything I can do? I feel like such a shit."
"Don't feel like a shit," said Augie. "And no, there's nothing you can do."
With effort, Phipps leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. There was a creaking sound, it was unclear whether it was the furniture or his disused joints. "Augie, these threats, are you really in danger?"
"D'you think I was grandstanding the other night?"
"Maybe I can help," said Phipps. "There has to be some way I can help."
The painter regarded him. He was fat, he was old, he was bald, he was slow, he was searching desperately for some shred of grandeur within himself. Augie patted his knee and with his other hand poured him half a glass of Scotch. "Maybe there will be, Clay," he said. "In the meantime, drink up, go home, and get some sleep."
43
That weekend was the hottest of the year.
People woke up sweating, tangled sheets kicked down near their ankles; pillows took on a sour smell, a smell like something from an overcrowded hospital. The wind went dead calm and the clouds melted into a shroud of rainless haze. Asphalt softened; houses swelled; window sashes seized like rusted pistons. The ocean went improbably flat and soupy green; there seemed to be a cushion of milky white between the water and the air, a zone reserved for the vapor that was constantly rising as from a pot about to boil.
At the Silver house a kind of equatorial stupor had set in. The stupor did not undo anxiety but gave a giddy, unreal cast to it. It seemed impossible that someone was trying to murder Augie; it seemed impossible to prevent it. His killing was so inconceivable that it seemed at moments almost not to matter; then the enormity of imagining it did not matter broke through the haze, and another wave of panic surged over the household. The panic gradually subsided into temporary exhaustion; then, after a nap, a swim, the debilitating march of moods replayed itself.
On Saturday night, in bed, naked, uncovered and not touching, Nina said to Augie, "I so want to believe that somehow, after Monday, this will all be over."
Augie, depressed and sulky from the heat and the fear, perversely made a joke he realized would not be funny. "No way," he said, "the summer is just starting."
He turned over on the soggy sheets and tried to go to sleep.
*
A lot of guys didn't like to work on Saturdays and didn't like the four-to-midnight shift. They had wives, families, girlfriends, boyfriends. They had dinner dates, poker games, softball leagues to get to. Which was fine with Jimmy Gibbs. To him, a day was a day and the evening shift had certain advantages.
For one thing, it was cooler, sort of. As the sun got lower, the steel roof of the washing shed stopped groaning against its rivets. The steam was still as suffocating, Gibbs's short gray ponytail still got glued with sweat against his neck, but at least in the short breaks between spotless rented ragtops a man could drop his chamois and draw a breath or two that didn't scorch his lungs.
Then too the lighting, or the lack of it, was better after dark. Inside the shed, orangy spotlights gave a fittingly hellish cast to the dancing sheets of vapor. Out in the yard, purplish floods, rather feeble and spaced too far apart, cast a weak gleam on the fleet of convertibles that stretched away a hundred yards or so to a perimeter of chain-link fence. Beyond the fence, through a broad gate to which most workers had a key, was an employee parking lot that was barely lit at all.
That was the lot where Jimmy Gibbs parked his truck. Except today he didn't have his truck. Nobody knew it, but he'd walked to work, three miles mayb
e from Stock Island, carrying two empty five-gallon gas cans. He didn't try to hide them. What was unusual about gas cans in a place where people were always fiddling with cars? He stashed the containers in the washing shed, and when the guy who worked the pump went on break, he casually strolled over and filled them up. Sometime later, after dark, he tucked the cans into the trunk of an anonymous lease-tagged ragtop as it clattered by on the conveyor. He drove the washed car out of the shed and parked it near the others, only a little farther from the purple floodlights, a little closer to the gate. He put the key into his pocket.
At midnight, when the shifts were changing, Jimmy Gibbs went to the employee men's room, slipped into a toilet stall, and sat there till his shift mates had gone home and the new group had settled in. He felt good. Things were going smoothly.
Talking to no one, he walked past the washing shed and through the yard. He opened the gate, strolled back to the car with the gas cans in the trunk, drove it through, got out and unhurriedly locked up behind himself. He felt so calm he even took a moment to find a good station on the radio before he motored away. There was nothing to worry about. Tomorrow he was off, and by Monday he'd be back at work, scrubbing coral dust off fenders and scratching bird shit off windshields, a little tired maybe but neither surlier nor friendlier than tonight, acting like nothing at all had happened.
*
On Sunday morning Joe Mulvane stopped by the Silver house. His blue shirt was translucent with sweat, you could see the whorls of stomach hair. Ray Yates had not been found; the detective had no news for them; they had none for him. He gulped a glass of ice water and he left.
The white sun climbed the sky, and even Reuben seemed knocked off balance by the pulsing force of it. His movements, like those of a distracted cat, were less lithe and weightless than usual, his relative awkwardness resulted now and then in a small sound—a brushing against furniture, the clatter of a plate—that seemed loud because of its unexpectedness. At moments he was gripped by an antsy drive for projects; he rearranged cabinets, folded and refolded linens. Between spurts of ambition he slipped into a kind of trance, a waking siesta in which his eyes stayed open, he would answer normally if spoken to, yet seemed to be asleep and dreaming. He fell into long gazes at the picture of Fred the martyred parrot, met the bird's red stare and communed with it somehow, seemed to plumb the mysterious space behind the paint in a way that not even the painter had done.
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