Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  "Will he?" Nina asked.

  "He loves that boat," said Mulvane. "And besides, it's part of the deal that was cut with the car company. He stays sober a year, they'll drop all charges."

  Augie shook his head, and said, not without affection, "I never figured Jimmy for a car thief."

  "He wasn't one," said Joe Mulvane, "till he gave up believing he'd ever see any money from your painting. Then he got it in his head he owed himself a bunch of cash. Heard about the stolen rent-a-car racket and liked the arithmetic: five grand a car at the loading docks in Jacksonville, a pat on the back and no questions asked."

  "How close did he come to going through with it?" asked Clayton Phipps.

  "Got about as far as Boca," said Mulvane. "Then he stopped at roadside to pour in some of the extra gas he'd brought—he didn't want to pull into a station and take a chance on getting the tag spotted. That's when he decided he was too old to become a thief. He drove back and confessed."

  Augie rubbed his jaw. "Solstice weekend," he said. "The weekend everyone went crazy."

  "The weekend Natch went crazy," said Clay Phipps.

  "Better crazy than killed," said Joe Mulvane. "To go to Cuban bars in the middle of the night and try to rabble-rouse. . . . Was this guy the last person in the world to figure out there's no more gung-ho American on earth than a refugee Cuban? He comes in and starts sounding like a Communist, like Fidel. . . . He's damn lucky to have landed in a nice cushy private nuthouse and not the morgue." He paused, then added, "But something I don't understand. Supposedly this guy was a struggling poet. How does he end up in such a pricey nuthouse?"

  Nina looked at Augie. But Augie didn't want it known that he was funding his deranged friend's treatment. He just said, "Natch isn't a bad person. Just frustrated. Misguided."

  "Misguided," hissed Joe Mulvane. He was a homicide cop, he didn't have much use for words that were excuses. "Some are misguided. Some are weak. Or jealous. Or downright evil. You can say some are worse than others, but they kill somebody, dead is dead."

  "Fair enough," said Augie. "But I'll tell you something—I'm very grateful for two things. I'm very grateful to be alive, and I'm very grateful it wasn't one of my good friends that was trying to kill me."

  "Amen to that," said Clay Phipps.

  "And Joe," Nina added, "we're very grateful to you. I'm not sure we've ever thanked you properly for all you did for us."

  Joe Mulvane was not especially good at accepting thanks; it was also true that in this instance he believed in his heart that he had utterly failed. "I did nothing for you," he said. "I couldn't prevent an arson, a tragedy . . ."

  The words pushed air out of the room. Eyes stung and for a long moment there was nothing left to breathe. When Augie finally filled his hollow chest it was with the rapture of some great hunger sated, some great gift acknowledged and given thanks for. The air had come to smell of jasmine and dry shells.

  "Reuben," Augie said. He said it softly, he shook his head in awe. "What a remarkable person. The only truly unselfish person I have known in all my life."

  The remark was aimed at no one, but it made the others squirm.

  "He'll be all right?" Claire Steiger asked.

  "He'll be all right," said Nina. "He'll have a long recovery, a hard adjustment. But he'll be all right."

  There was a silence, a long moment of reflection and regret that could only end in fidgeting and thirst. Clay Phipps cleared his throat and rose. "What say we have some old Bordeaux?"

  Augie Silver had remembered how to sweat. He mopped his forehead. "Awfully hot for Bordeaux," he said.

  "Awfully damn hot for anything," said Joe Mulvane.

  "It is," said Clay Phipps, moving toward the kitchen, "but goddamnit, let's have Bordeaux anyway."

  ###

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR— Laurence Shames has set eight critically acclaimed novels in Key West, his former hometown. Now based in California, he is also a prolific screenwriter and essayist. His extensive magazine work includes a stint as the Ethics columnist for Esquire. In his outings as a collaborator and ghostwriter, he has penned four New York Times bestsellers, under four different names. This might be a record. To learn more, please visit http://www.LaurenceShames.com.

  ALSO BY LAURENCE SHAMES—

  FICTION—

  Florida Straits

  Sunburn

  Tropical Depression

  Virgin Heat

  Mangrove Squeeze

  Welcome to Paradise

  The Naked Detective

  NON-FICTION

  The Big Time

  The Hunger for More

  Not Fade Away (with Peter Barton)

  IF YOU LOVED SCAVENGER REEF, BE SURE TO CATCH LAURENCE SHAMES' NEXT NOVEL SUNBURN

  Sunburn

  By

  Laurence Shames

  Copyright 2011 Laurence Shames

  1

  "Regrets?" said Vincente Delgatto. "Shit yeah, I got regrets. I got regrets like Heinz got beans."

  The old man pushed some air past his pale gums and espresso-stained teeth. The sound that came out wasn't a sigh exactly, wasn't a laugh, was more like a half-resigned grunt that had kept an edge to it, a hiss. He reached up to straighten his tie. This was an old habit, a gesture that helped his composure and helped the transition from one thought to the next; his hands were almost to his throat before he remembered he wasn't wearing a tie.

  He was sitting poolside in Key West, at the home of his bastard son, Joey Goldman. It was January, twilight, 77 degrees. A breeze was moving the palms, the fronds made a dry rattle, like maracas. It was not an American sound, this rhythmic scratching, it was an island sound, Caribbean, it made Vincente think of Havana in the old days, of smoky New York nightclubs back when Latin was the modern thing and women wore pointy brassieres and hats with fruit. For a moment he saw himself as a young man, dapper, limber, doing the rhumba with his long-dead favorite mistress, Joey's mother.

  "Shit yeah," he repeated, "I got regrets."

  He took a sip of wine, looked off at the green sky to the west. Back home in Queens, the sky never looked like that—green, yellow, with pink spikes sticking up like the crown of the Statue of Liberty.

  "But ya know," he resumed, "it's funny: in songs, inna movies, there's always some old guy, he's washed up, a has-been, he's got no hair, no teeth, he's wearing rubber underpants, and he's bragging about how he doesn't regret nothing, if he had it all to do over, he'd do it exactly the same. It's like . . . like a whaddyacallit—"

  "A cliche?" put in Sandra Dugan, Joey's wife.

  "Yeah, Sandra, thank you. A cliche. Like this is what an old fart automatically says. But come on. Ya live to be seventy, eighty years old, and wit' all the millions a chances ya get to fuck things up— 'scuse my language, Sandra—you'd do it all the same?"

  "Some people," Joey said, "maybe they would."

  "Bullshit," said his father. "There's only two reasons why a person would say that. One, he's so pigheaded he can't admit he made a mistake. Or two, he's so feeble inna head, his memory is so shot, he really can't remember what he did or shoulda did. Me, I remember. For better or worse, I remember."

  "Right, Pop," Joey Goldman said. "And this is why I'm telling ya: Write it down."

  The old man was shaking his head almost before his son had started to speak. He had a long face, Vincente did, with a big bridgeless nose and full lips that looked even fleshier against his sunken cheeks. His black eyes had always been deep-set but in recent years they seemed to have burrowed even farther into their bony sockets: they nestled in the shadows of brows and lids and wrinkles, it took a certain effort to reach them.

  "Fuhget about it, Joey," he said. "No offense, but it's like the worst fuckin' idea I ever heard. People like us, we don't write things down. Do we, Bert?"

  "Hm?" said Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia. He wasn't much older than Vincente, three, four years, but he'd lived in Key West for a decade or so and the easy life of Florida had somewhat melted his alertness. Als
o, he'd died some years before. Not for long, but he'd had a severe upset on the Eastern District courthouse steps, and in the hospital his heart had stopped for maybe half a minute; he'd used the flat place on his EKG as an argument for being excused from a profession that usually did not allow retirement.

  "Write stuff down," Vincente repeated. "People like us, we don't do it, right?"

  "People like us," said Bert, "a lotta guys can hardly read. How they gonna write?" He underscored the question with upturned palms, which then came to rest on an ancient chihuahua curled in his lap.

  "OK, OK," Vincente said, a little bit impatiently. "But aside from that, we don't write things down because we don't write things down."

  "That's true," said Bert, and he petted the dog.

  The dog had been gray to begin with and now, at age thirteen, was turning ghastly white. It was white at the tips of its outsized ears and white around its bulbous eyes, which in turn were going milky with cataracts. The dog was always shedding white hairs the length of eyelashes, and Bert, unconsciously, was always plucking them off his gorgeous silk and linen shirts of mint green, lavender, and midnight blue.

  "Besides," Vincente said, "ya write something down, right away people can see it—"

  "That is the idea," Sandra put in.

  "Whose idea?" Vincente said. He had one of those rumbling voices that didn't get louder as he got worked up, it got deeper, it moved the air in a way that was felt more than heard.

  "And about this regrets thing," said Bert the Shirt. Having been dead and then alive, he didn't always see things in the same order as other people, he didn't believe that time and thought and conversation went in one direction only. "What is there really to say about it? This guy, maybe I shouldn'ta clipped 'im? That guy, maybe I shoulda clipped 'im sooner?"

  Vincente silenced his colleague with a lifted eyebrow. Certain things you didn't talk about, not even kiddingly, not even among family. Discretion—this was something no one seemed to understand anymore. Keeping secrets—when did this come to be seen as a bad thing? It used to be a sacred obligation to keep secrets; it was like guarding a treasure. It took courage, discipline. There was a soldierly pain that went with holding things inside, and the bearing of that pain became a source of pride, of dignity.

  Didn't people realize this? You kept secrets not for pleasure but because it was a duty. Keeping secrets had cost Vincente pain and anguish all his life; it cost him pain and anguish still. He thought about the pain and the hard pride it engendered, and he did a slow burn within himself.

  "Nah, Joey," he said at last, "fuhget about it. Writing stuff down." He made that hissing grunt again. "Just fuhget about it."

  Joey Goldman pursed his lips, looked down at his fingernails. This, he thought, was the story of his life where family was concerned. You try to do the right thing, you try to help; it ends up being the wrong thing, it ends up in a squabble. He got up just enough to reach across the patio table and pour more wine for everyone. He knew the question that needed to come next: Pop, then what are you gonna do? And he knew he couldn't ask it, it was too raw, too sharp. So he got up and strolled over the damp tiles around the swimming pool to light the propane grill.

  After three years in the Keys, Joey was a regular Floridian. He cooked outside, he ate outside, he lived in sunglasses, he'd almost learned to swim. And, unlike when he'd lived up north, he hardly ever got knots in his stomach, except where his family was concerned.

  2

  "Everyone's got a book in 'im," said Joey Goldman. "I read that somewhere, maybe I heard it on TV, who remembers? But I think it's true. Don't you?"

  "A decent book?" said Arty Magnus. "No, it isn't true. It's one of those lame and stupid democratic lies."

  It was around five-thirty the next day and they were sitting at the Eclipse Saloon, their elbows deep in the vinyl-covered padding that edged the U-shaped bar. The place was filling up around them, starting to smell of smoke and suntan lotion. Tourists who felt more authentically schnockered if they drank near locals were rubbing shoulders with the stuffed fish hanging on the walls.

  "Come on," said Joey. "Wit' the crazy things that happen to people, the wild thoughts they have?"

  "Joey," Magnus said, "lemme ask you something. In kindergarten you finger-painted, right?"

  Joey nodded.

  "You squeezed the paint out on your fingers, you shmeared it around. It felt nice, right? You expressed yourself—"

  "I see where you're goin'," Joey cut in. "But it's not the same."

  "Joey, was your painting any good? Did anybody but your mother wanna look at it?"

  "But a grown person," Joey pressed. "Someone who's seen a lotta life. It's different."

  "Is it?" Magnus said. "I'm not so sure. This town, every jerk in every bar thinks he has a great story, a goddam saga. I've never seen a place where there's so many basically dull people who think they must be great eccentrics, real characters, just because they live here."

  Joey sipped his rum and orange juice, fiddled with the earpiece of his shades, which dangled from the pocket of his shirt, and considered whether he would push the question or let it drop. He decided the hell with it, he'd let it drop, but his mouth carried on without him. "The person I'm thinking about, he isn't from here, he's from New York."

  "Ah," said Magnus, "another place that people think makes them automatically interesting."

  "It's my father," Joey said. He said it softly. The words were almost lost in the buzz of the bar.

  Arty Magnus frowned, took a hand that was cold from holding his bottle of beer, ran it over his tall forehead and through his frizzy hair. Magnus was city editor of the Key West Sentinel and, like most journalists, he reveled in the confidence that he could really cream someone with a few well-chosen words, but it shamed him, seemed a failure of attention and a sloppy piece of work, to give offense without meaning to. "Shit," he said. "Sorry."

  Joey shook it off. "Hey, I'm just thinkin' out loud heah. No big deal. I'm a little worried about the old man, is all."

  Magnus kept a safe and sympathetic silence, and after a moment Joey went on.

  "His wife died a couple weeks ago."

  "Your mother? Jesus, Joey—"

  "Nah, not my mother."

  "Stepmother then."

  "Nah. Just his wife. It's a long story. But inna meantime, after forty-seven years, he's got nobody at home. He leaves here, he goes back north to an empty house."

  "That's gotta be hard," said Magnus. He lived alone, Arty did; he knew the faintly thrumming silence one hears after the click of the key, the squeak of the knob on a front door with no one waiting behind it. "He work? Retired?"

  "Anything but retired," Joey said. "But he's had some ... I guess you'd call 'em professional setbacks. My old man, he's used to having authority. Lot of authority. Now . . . it's just all going sour for 'im."

  Arty Magnus took a sip of beer, blinked his hazel eyes, then splayed his long thin fingers on the bar. Several thoughts occurred to him, the first of which was how little he really knew about Joey Goldman, much less his family. Who was this guy, whose widowed father had apparently not been married to his mother, who'd arrived in town with nothing, got a dumb job hawking time shares on the street, and within a few short years, at the green age of thirty, had set himself up as something of a big shot in local real estate? They had friends in common, Arty and Joey did; they got together now and then for drinks. But they weren't close, and life before Key West wasn't something that casual Key West friends often talked about; they'd come to Key West to wash away the life before.

  The second thing that occurred to Arty Magnus was what a maddening and undodgeable pain it was to see one's parents get old and slow and grouchy and alone, to see them insulted by sickness and abandoned by time, useless in the world's eyes and eventually their own. He made bold to put a hand on Joey's forearm. "It's tough," he said. "It's really tough. But there's only so much you can do."

  "Yeah," said Joey, "I know, I know. That's
why I was thinking, a book maybe ..."

  "Joey, listen," the editor said. "I don't want to sound discouraging. Your father wants to think through his memories, write them down—hey, I think that's great. If he thinks of it as a book, what's the harm? But between us, Joey, a book is a different kind of thing. It isn't finger painting. It isn't just somebody remembering."

  Joey put a couple of fingers around his glass, helped the streams of condensation run down to the bottom. "Yeah, I'm sure you're right," he said. "I mean, you've done it, right?"

  It was an innocent question, it wasn't meant to needle, but it found Arty Magnus's sorest spot as sure as a blast of dentist's air finds the hole in a tooth. No, he hadn't written a book, though he'd meant to for as long as he could remember. He'd meant to write one in college, he'd meant to write one in grad school; he'd filled several dozen spiral notebooks with ideas, sketches, observations. He'd meant to write a book while living in New York, and six years ago, when he'd moved to Key West, part of his reason had been the hackneyed and half-ironic belief that that would be a good place to write a book. But he hadn't.

  He'd done a lot of things instead, been impressively resourceful at finding things to do instead.

  He'd helped elevate the Sentinel from a fifth-rate paper to a third-rate one. He'd learned to sail a boat. He'd become a fair fisherman and, to his own surprise, an impassioned gardener. But he was forty-one years old, a few silver wires were beginning to wind like tinsel through the brown corkscrews of his hair; it had lately dawned on him that all those ingenious insteads had so far used up half his life, give or take a few years.

  Joey looked sideways at him and knew he'd said the wrong thing. "Hey." He back-pedaled. "Doesn't matter."

  They drank. Behind the busy bar, Cliff the bartender was in his glory. He had a cocktail shaker in either hand, was taking an order from a fat guy in a lime-green tank top and carrying on a conversation with a plastered redhead. Arty Magnus looked straight ahead and waited for the sting of this book thing to subside. Then he figured it would subside faster if he distracted himself by playing journalist.