Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  Afternoon came, shadows lengthened. But the sun stayed and stayed, stayed like a draining and obnoxious guest who moved tantalizingly to the threshold but would not go home.

  The heat killed appetites, digestion seemed a gross and thankless exercise. Not till evening did anyone think about food. Then Reuben tossed a salad, sliced some fruits. When the three of them sat down at the poolside table, the sky was still flame-red in the west and it was nearly 10 p.m.

  The phone rang. Reuben jogged into the living room and answered it. A harsh thick voice said, "This is Claire Steiger. I need to speak with Augie."

  "Meester and Meesus Silber," Reuben said, "they just sit down to dinner."

  "Get him, Chico," said the agent. "It's important."

  Reuben paused. He'd gotten unaccustomed to being insulted and realized quite suddenly that he didn't have to take it. "What you say is very stupid. I will tell Meester Silber you are on the line."

  Augie dabbed his lips and went toward the phone. Nina strode ahead of him and switched the speaker on. "Hello, Claire," the painter said.

  The agent took no time for pleasantries. "That little prick," she said. "That clever vile sneaky little prick." She sounded like she'd been drinking, and this was unusual—not for her to have a glass too much, but to let it show, to lose control of her measured tone, her polished diction.

  "Who?" said Augie.

  "Brandenburg," Claire spat out. "The sexless little creep bastard."

  Half an hour before, the agent had come into the city from Sagaponack to find that an early copy of Manhattan magazine had been brought by courier to her building on Fifth Avenue. She'd read the piece on Augie and started swilling vodka. It had been such a perfect weekend, that was the bitch of it. Kip was away, off finagling with his bankruptcy attorneys; she'd had her beloved beach house to herself. She'd slept with a south breeze bringing her the sound of surf; she'd wakened to a soft damp mystic light pouring serenely through her gauzy curtains. Two days' peace had been enough to soften her, albeit briefly, to trick her into imagining that things might yet turn out all right, that somehow she could buy back her mortgaged life. "He's ruined us. The little eunuch has ruined us."

  More than anything, Augie Silver was confused. "Claire, it wasn't even a review. What could he possibly have said—"

  "Nothing bad," she cut in bitterly. "Not one disparaging word. That would be too direct for Peter. Too honest. He took a much wormier approach. Here, I'll read you some choice bits."

  There was a pause in which was heard the rustle of glossy pages. Augie and Nina could almost see the clumsy workings of Claire Steiger's drunk and trembling fingers.

  "Here, how's this?" she said. " 'Augie Silver, a mercurial artist whose each new phase seems almost to undo the work that's come before' ... Or this: With a candor that more careerist painters might gasp at,' blah, blah, blah. . . . Oh, and here's the capper: 'After a three-year retirement that saw his earlier canvases become sought-after rarities, he seems bursting with creative drive and has set himself the daunting goal of being 'as prolific as the tropics.'"

  She fell silent. Through the speakerphone it sounded almost as though she was panting, not out of breath but waiting avidly, hungrily, for someone to join in and fortify her pique. No one did. Augie and Nina looked at each other. Reuben had moved away and was staring at the picture of Fred.

  "Don'tcha see?" Claire resumed, though of course Augie and Nina did see. The distraught agent raved on anyway. "It's all in code, and every fucking word of it is telling buyers not to buy, to wait. The older work might turn out to be considered minor, just a warm-up. Then again, you don't think about your career, you could shoot your mouth off and blow the whole thing any minute. And now you're gonna flood the market—"

  She broke off finally, blowing air between her teeth, and it was a mercy she could not see Augie at that moment, because Augie was smiling. The smile had appeared gradually, had taken the painter unawares, starting small and then spreading almost to a grin.

  "Damnit, Augie," said his agent, "say something."

  "Claire," he said, "it's only one auction."

  "Only one auction," she mimicked. "Only one auction. Goddamn you, Augie, you're impossible."

  She hung up, the speakerphone squawked static at the loud bang of the receiver, and as soon as the connection had been broken the house seemed cooler. A faint breeze slid through the French doors, it carried a whiff of jasmine and chlorine.

  Nina waited a moment, then said, "Augie, why the smile?"

  He reached for her, took her forearm in his hand. "I feel like I've been reprieved," he said.

  His wife just looked at him.

  "If someone's trying to kill me," he went on, "they'd wait at least until my price goes up again. Don'tcha think?"

  Nina smiled wanly. Outside, dry foliage rattled; it sounded not like living leaves but like beans and pebbles trapped inside of pods. Reuben also tried to smile. But he was still staring at the painted parrot, and the bird's red eyes seemed to be saying something different from what Augie said. The young man turned his face away.

  44

  Clay Phipps had taken Augie's advice. He'd gone to bed on Friday afternoon and slept through till 4 a.m. on Saturday. He read till dawn, then, groggy and disoriented, puttered in his house and fiddled in his garden before straggling back to bed around five that afternoon. Sunday he again woke up in darkness and went to sleep in daylight. By 2 a.m. on Monday he was all slept out.

  His eyes snapped open as they sometimes did when he was in the deepest throes of jet lag. He felt a similar sort of edgy alertness, an energy more delicious because it could not last, a refreshing dislocation; though he was in his own bed in his own house, he felt a freedom that usually came with being far away: He felt he could, if he dared, afford to be a different person, a bolder person.

  But bold how? For what? He scratched his belly, looked up at the ceiling, and wondered what was still worth being bold about. His writing? No, he'd blown it forever on that front. His love life? Well, maybe, if a fitting partner ever came his way. But in the meantime he came up with just one answer, and the simplicity of it surprised and pleased him: his friends. It was worth it to be bold and vigilant and insistent upon frankness with his chums. Wasn't it just exactly that sort of boldness that had brought Augie to his door in the middle of the night? That had cleared the air, got them talking again? There was a lesson there, Phipps thought. He had other friendships that were in trouble. What had happened to Yates, to Natchez, to their close if barbed camaraderie? Yates had left town without a word; Clay Phipps knew it only by his absence from the airwaves. Between good friends, it had come to that. But Natchez was here, a mere four blocks away. Why not go to him? Why not hammer on his door, wake him up, grab him by the shoulders, and force upon the poet the kind of cleansing confrontation that Augie had initiated with him?

  Excited by his own resolve, he dressed by the light of a bedside lamp and went out into the night.

  It was close to three now and the moon had set. A filmy canopy of mist slid along the sky, it was visible only by the way it dimmed the stars then thinned to let them shine more brightly. The heavy air carried reminders of the ocean, a hint of fish and seaweed. A stray and unkempt dog lolled by, its tongue hanging, its paws making dry clicks on the pavement, its head down in the shameless skulking posture of the scavenger.

  Clay Phipps felt brave and young in the empty streets, he almost strutted. But his knees were not good at stairs, and as he labored up to Roberto Natchez's garret, he used his arms as much as he could to haul himself along the banister. By the time he stood on the third-floor landing, he was sweating and winded. He looked through the skylight at the flickering stars, took a moment to compose himself.

  His newfound boldness was a tenuous thing, and his first knock was a soft one. But no matter—the poet's door, which was not locked or even closed securely, swung open under his light touch. Phipps, nonplussed, fell back half a step, then peered into the dark apartment. "
Natch?" he said.

  There was no answer, and something in the way his own voice was swallowed by the darkness told him with certainty that no one was at home. He stepped into the corridor and switched on its dim light. The first thing he saw was a small reddish feather on the floor, the first thing he heard was the erratic whirring whine of an out-of-balance ceiling fan. He inhaled and caught a strange bad smell, a smell from the bottom of a forgotten garbage can.

  One small step more brought him to the living room. He switched on the ceiling light and his jaw fell slack. On Natchez's desk was a strangled chicken, its yellow feet clenched and brittle; the bird's narrow head faced back along its spine, a single drop of blood had spilled from its beak and dried on the poet's blotter. Swinging slowly from a blade of the ceiling fan, slightly stretched from the outward force of turning, was a hanged gray cat. It had been hanged with an old necktie, its fur overlay the knot like the loose flesh on an old man's throat; its open eyes were glazed and bulging, its claws were out and just barely whistled as they sliced the air.

  Rapt by this dead menagerie, Clay Phipps did not for a moment notice the Augie Silver painting murdered on the wall. When he saw it he could not believe it. He moved closer; the dead cat's tail brushed against his ear as it swung by and he shuddered. He lifted a tatter of canvas; he felt the flaking paint and felt, as well, the rage, the hate. "Good Christ," he said aloud. "It's Natch."

  Dizzy, reeling, sickened, he bolted the apartment and trundled down the stairs. Sweating in the silent street, he turned toward Augie Silver's house and begged his flaccid legs and burning lungs to take him faster than they could.

  He was still five blocks away when he started hearing sirens.

  45

  Dade County pine is rich in resin and makes good kindling. Houses built from it burn very fast and very hot, with blue and yellow flames that lick their way from board to board and make popping crackling sounds as they sear into the deep hollows of captured sap.

  The fire at the Silver house did not seem to have a beginning in either space or time. It sprang up everywhere at once, and there was about it an awful aspect of fulfillment, as though embers had been smoldering forever, waiting with a patient malice to burst forth and consume. Flames crawled up the porch steps and lapped at the front door. In the side yards, sparks shot from knotholes and ignited shrubs and palms; green things hissed away their moisture in the instant before they caught and blackened. A ring of fire framed the backyard like something from an infernal circus; oleanders burned like pinwheels and gave off poison fumes, the great umbrella of the poinciana began to flame, its dainty leaves tore off and flew away like fireflies.

  In the same horrifying instant everyone woke up. Augie and Nina, naked, feeling their skin begin to bake and coughing in the strangling smoke, ran into the hallway. Reuben, in his innocent pajamas, was already on his way to fetch them. United now, they staggered into the hell of the living room. Sheets of yellow flame were flapping like ghosts in the windows; here and there panes exploded from the heat. The picture of Fred the parrot turned incandescent in the ungodly light; the bird's red eyes absorbed flame and flashed back blood. There was a low whistling roar as the fire greedily sucked air into itself, leaving less and less to breathe.

  Bent low, their hands cupped over their mouths and noses, the three of them moved toward the front door just as the door crackled and began to blaze. They wheeled through the thickening smoke, coughing, choking, eyes tearing and the tears instantly simmering to nothing. Reuben led them over the steaming floor to the back of the house, he picked up a chair and smashed the glass panels of the French doors. Fire was converging on the portal, it was becoming an unbroken archway of flame. Reuben went through first then grabbed Nina by the wrist, then Augie, and pulled them after. There was no way out of the backyard, all its borders were made of fire, black smoke billowed up, rained down, spread its toxins everywhere. Reuben pushed his friends toward the swimming pool, urged them toward the flashing water, the only thing that was not burning.

  Weakly, desperately, Nina and Augie dragged themselves across the patch of lawn and tumbled in. The splash of their landing was lost in the sputter and whoosh of the fire, the mild water felt like dry ice against their reddened flesh. For a moment they did not realize that Reuben was not with them.

  Then they turned back toward the blazing skeleton of their home. The tin roof had buckled, entire walls had burned away, the house was ceasing to exist. Against the wreckage of what was left, moving through the indigo smoke sparked with orange flame, they saw a slender form. Reuben was going back in; he was going to rescue Augie's canvas.

  "My God," the painter said. He screamed out Reuben's name to call him back; the sound was swallowed by the fire and the futile whine of approaching sirens, for all its anguish it went no farther than an unfelt prayer.

  The young man vanished in the black and choking fog. When he appeared again, the huge prophetic picture of the parrot was on his shoulders and he was struggling toward the doors. But the flames were beyond all boundaries now, there was no inside and no outside, there was only fire everywhere. The fire caught up with Reuben, and when he staggered through the blazing archway, he himself was burning. Yellow flame crawled up his legs; pathetically he tried to run and the flames streamed back behind him; a blue gleam came off his burning hair. He struggled forward then pitched down on the patch of grass; with supreme effort he tried to throw the monumental painting clear of the inferno; it landed very near him, singed but not destroyed.

  Augie, dazed, acting without the need of thought, pulled himself from the water and crawled beneath the waves of smoke to the unconscious Reuben. An acrid smell came from the young man's scalp, flames still licked at his back and legs; Augie smothered them with his own wet body, choked back nausea at the unspeakable feel of his friend's oozing skinless flesh. He pulled and rolled the ravaged form toward the coolness of the pool; it left a trail of ash and blood. Nina helped him lower the unmoving body into the water, then cradled it against herself as Augie, weeping, worked desperately to breathe life back into Reuben's slack mouth.

  46

  Charles Effingham, the white-maned chairman of Sotheby's, had been in the business forty years and could predict the success or failure of a given sale by the presence or absence of a certain smell in the auction room. This smell needed to be ferreted out behind the aromas that always pertained in gatherings of the wealthy—the round spiced scents of expensive perfumes, the creamy leather musk of the finest shoes and handbags. The odor Effingham sought out was rather less refined. It was a lusty, avid smell; nervous and glandular, it was a grown-up, toned-down version of the soupy stink of prep school dances. It was a smell that happened when people wanted something badly and were willing to be as stupid as necessary to get it.

  In the minutes before the opening of bidding at the Solstice Show, the chairman worked the room. He greeted, he joked, he sniffed; he didn't smell much lust.

  "I think I'll sit in the back," he said to Campbell Epstein, the head of Paintings. Epstein got the message; it made his stomach burn and caused the scallop-pattern furrows in his forehead to etch themselves a trifle deeper.

  And yet the turnout wasn't bad at all. Perhaps a hundred fifty people were treading the huge Bokhara carpet in the auction room, chatting softly under the Venetian crystal chandeliers. The heavy critics, the important dealers, the big collectors were there in force. Claire Steiger was there, hiding her hangover and her despair. She talked with Avi Klein and several other of her clients, clients to whom she had refused to sell Augie Silvers back when the price was skyrocketing; she felt them gloating now, she smiled but her face hurt. She made a point of keeping far away from Peter Brandenburg, whose calamitous article had already been read by nearly everyone and was the subject of half a dozen conversations in that room. Dressed in perfect linen, distant and impregnable, he stood by himself and made notes in his well-thumbed copy of the auction catalogue.

  Among the debonair crowd were a few
people who were less so. One of these was Ray Yates. Bearded, wearing sunglasses and an ill-fitting jacket over a palm-tree shirt, he skulked in a corner and avoided the insulting glances of the security guards. He'd been running for his life for almost two weeks now; the habit of furtiveness did in fact make him look decidedly suspicious. And lonely, desperately lonely. So much so that when, just at ten o'clock, Clay Phipps, looking frazzled but not inelegant in a pale yellow suit, swept into the room, Yates almost threw himself against his chest.

  The new arrival barely had time to drop a mention of his Learjet ride before the auctioneer pounded the gavel and people were asked to take seats.

  The auction began, and it went badly from the start.

  Works by Larry Rivers and Jim Dine sold for disappointing prices after languid bidding; a Helen Frankenthaler was practically stolen. Campbell Epstein, sitting near the auctioneer at a table manned by unbusy spotters, looked slightly jaundiced. A Jasper Johns was carried for display through a door at the auctioneer's left; no one ante'd up the work's lofty minimum, and the spurned canvas was ignominiously carted back to storage.

  After twenty minutes a young assistant approached Charles Effingham and whispered in his ear. The head of Paintings, his yellow tie dancing against his throbbing Adam's apple, watched the chairman rise and leave, and wondered if the sly old boy had arranged to be called away from the debacle.