Scavenger Reef

"Shames turns out characters
flashier than a Key West sunset and dialogue tastier than a conch
stew."
—The New York Times Book
Review

"Shames offers sharp edged
parody without a trace of meanness, portraying his craven cast with
a bold, new affection."
—Publishers
Weekly

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Laurence Shames

http://www.LaurenceShames.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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this author.

Originally published by Simon &
Schuster

For Marilyn with love,

Knock wood-- How did I get so lucky?

Acknowledgements

Hearty thanks to my editor, Chuck Adams, and
my agent, Stuart Krichevsky, for doing much of the thinking and
most of the worrying, while telling me to just keep writing and
have fun. With them on my side, I did.

And a hug to Edie, who knows what it's
really all about.

"Funerals work best in the rain," said
Robert Natchez.

"It isn't a funeral," said Ray Yates. "It's
a memorial service." Yates licked another swath of salt from the
rim of his glass and sucked on his tequila. He was slightly drunk,
and increasingly fascinated by the wet circles his iced glass left
on the varnished table at Raul's. Natchez ignored him.

"The gray sky, the black umbrellas—humble
separate shelters against the damp—"

"You're a pompous pain in the ass," said
Yates.

"Separate shelters," Natchez murmured. "I
like that."

"It stinks," Yates told him. He wiped his
moist hand on the front of his shirt. The shirt had a pattern of
washed-out palm fronds and small flamingoes with the pink faded
from their plumage.

"Then too," Natchez went on, "there's the
way the rain softens the ground, the way the earth yields, squishes
underfoot. Gentle or horrifying? Embracing the dead body, or
pulling it down like—"

"There is no body." Yates slurped the last
of his drink and gestured for another round. "And it isn't gonna
rain. And people don't get buried here. They get filed, like in
drawers. And you're a morbid sonofabitch."

They waited for their cocktails. It was
mid-April in Key West, the night air was thick and smelled of old
seaweed and dry shells. On the open roof of the old cafe, the
trellised bougainvillea had darkened to a lewd and tired brownish
pink, the petals were thin and brittle as crepe paper. Robert
Natchez was tall, lean, and totally dressed in black. It was not a
token of mourning, it was just the way he dressed.

"I'm sad," he suddenly announced. He sounded
confused by an emotion that could be simply told.

"Augie shouldn't have died," said Ray Yates.
"He was better than any of us, less full of shit, and he shouldn't
have died."

The drinks arrived, the waiter wiped away
the last round's rings of dampness. Overhead, a landing plane
clattered past, bringing more of Augie Silver's many friends to say
goodbye.

*

"He should never have stopped painting,"
said Claire Steiger, towel-drying her curly hair. "I pleaded with
him not to stop."

Her husband nestled deeper into the hotel
bathrobe and sipped champagne. "Because some mysterious intuition
told you something terrible would happen three years after?" He
fingered the fruit plate provided with the suite at the Flagler
House, and briefly wondered why hotel mangoes were never ripe,
hotel strawberries never red. "Or because his work was keeping the
gallery afloat?"

Claire Steiger had soft brown eyes that kept
their tender look no matter what she said. "The gallery's doing
just fine, Kip. You're the one who's bankrupt, remember?"

It had been a lousy trip down from New York.
A chilly yellow mist kept them on the La Guardia runway for forty
minutes, which made them miss their connection in Miami, and they'd
sat in the cramped and porous commuter terminal for two hours,
eating jet exhaust and nursing grievances. Claire had spent a long
time in the bath, and her skin still felt like an airport.

"Of course," said Kip Cunningham, "the
canvases are worth a great deal more now that—"

"Kip, shut up. Don't be hateful."

"Hateful?" he echoed. It was a word that
seemed to crop up often in the months since his overextended real
estate company had collapsed under the weight of its debts, its
velvety stationery, and its pretensions to empire. Lawyers were
hateful. Judges were hateful. It was hateful that he could no
longer pay his University Club dues out of company funds, hateful
that creditors held liens against his horses. "Since when is it
hateful to be candid?" he said. "You're in a business like any
other, laddo. Supply and demand. Artist dies, no more supply. Ever.
Prices--"

"You're gonna lecture me about capitalism,
Kip? Lecture me about Chapter Eleven."

He poured more champagne and went to the
window. Below, the coconut palms were dead still and threw heavy
moon-shadows across the sand. The calm water of the Florida Straits
gleamed with just a hint of goldish green. "Of course," the husband
went on, his back to his wife, "how can you be rational about art
if you're in love with the artist?"

"Everyone was in love with Augie. That was
Augie."

Kip turned. He was a blandly handsome man,
smooth-skinned and even-featured, and he now pulled back his thin
lips to show a set of perfect teeth. "Strange, though, that he
could have had the gallery owner—all it would have taken was a
wink, the raise of an eyebrow—and he ran off instead with the
assistant. ... Of course, she was younger. Slimmer. Better bred,
some might say."

Claire Steiger kept right on toweling her
hair. "Darling," she said, "you're pathetic enough to be jealous of
a dead man. Am I supposed to be jealous of a live widow?"

*

"Lemme tell ya somethin' about Augie
Silver," said Jimmy Gibbs.

He was sitting at the Clove Hitch bar,
dockside at City Marina, and tucked between his spread-out elbows
was a shot of Jack Daniel's and a bottle of Bud. He was speaking in
the general direction of Hogfish Mike Curran, the proprietor, but
he wanted to talk and he didn't much care who if anyone was
listening.

"Augie Silver was the best damn sailor I
ever saw. Always calm. A natural. The wind talked to him. The seas
like made a road to let him through. Currents, he always managed it
so they helped him. That boat a his —thirty-seven feet,
single-handed he sailed it nimble as a dinghy. . . . What happened
t'Augie, it coulda happened t'anyone. It was a freak. Fuckin' world
is all fucked up. Fuckin' weather, ya can't count on it no more.
Waterspout in January. Who ever heard of a fuckin' waterspout in
January?"

"Happens," said Hogfish Mike. "Not often,
but it happens."

Gibbs snorted disapproval, then nipped into
his shot and his beer. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair pulled
tightly back in a little ponytail, and after several boilermakers
his scalp felt pinched. He reached up and loosened the elastic
band. A pelican jumped clumsily from a nearby piling and splashed
into the shallow water of Garrison Bight.

"Vicious, those waterspouts," Hogfish Mike
went on. He crossed his ropy forearms and almost smiled. The ready
violence of the natural world was for him a kind of confirmation.
"Funnel comes down. Black as sin, you can almost see it spinning.
Holy shit—do ya zig or zag? If it catches ya, you're fucked. Spout
digs a hole innee ocean, makes a whirlpool that churns like a
goddamn Maytag. Sucks fish right outta the water, twirls boats
around till they rip apart or crash up onna reef. Breaks off masts
like fuckin' breadsticks. I hate to think what would happen to a
man in one of those. He'd get yanked to pieces, busted up like the
dummy without the seat belt on."

Hogfish paused and finally noticed that his
description was causing pain. He leaned across the bar toward Jimmy
Gibbs and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Jimmy,
hey, it's not like the guy was your bubba. He was a Yankee. Nice
house. Big boat. O.K., he paid you fair to do the grunt work. Maybe
he bought you a drink now and then. But come on—"

"Augie wasn't like the others," said Jimmy
Gibbs, and there was something in his tone that made Hogfish Mike
back off. "He treated a person like a person. Lemme get another
round."

"Got cash, Jimmy? No tabs here, you know the
rules."

Gibbs looked sadly down at his shot glass
with nothing at the bottom but an amber stain. Then he considered
his beer and sloshed around the last lukewarm pull. A seagull
screamed nearby. "Come on, Hogfish, we known each other a lotta
years."

"That's the problem, Jimmy," said Hogfish
Mike. 'That's the problem."

*

"You like'a heah?" said Reuben the Cuban,
suspending a huge vase of lilies and orchids above the center of a
long split-willow table.

Nina Alonzo-Silver stood hands on hips in
the middle of her living room and weighed the arrangement with her
eyes. "Too heavy there," she said. 'Try it over by the lamp."

The housekeeper moved the flowers. He was a
slight, wiry young man with the surprising yellowish pallor of
certain Key West Cubans; he moved in a low-slung whisper like a cat
or a Japanese woman, and he nearly disappeared behind the thick
stems of the lilies. "Oba heah?" he said.

The widow nodded. Then she cast an
appraising glance at the buffet dishes and glasses already arrayed
on the sideboard, and at her dead husband's paintings beautifully
hung and immaculately lit on every wall. Through the French doors
at the rear of the house, a soft blue gleam wafted up from the
lights in the pool. In a big enameled cage near the door, a twitchy
green parrot looked on. The widow squared a picture frame that had
been perhaps a quarter-inch off-true. Then she tried to smile.

"You see, Reuben," she said. "It's just like
getting ready for an opening."

"Art sucks," said the parrot. "Johnnie
Walker." The sound was metallic and wildly abrupt, scratchy as the
sand in the bird's idiot throat.

"
Tranquilo
, Fred," said Reuben the
Cuban.

"Cutty Sark. Where's Augie?" the parrot
responded, and the widow started to cry. She made no sound. Her
shoulders hunched slightly and flat streaks of wet almost instantly
appeared under her slate-gray eyes.

"Noon tomorrow," she said.

Reuben didn't understand exactly what she
meant. He stood there silent, hoping to be able to help.

"Service at ten," she said, her voice soft
but without a quaver. "No rabbi. No minister. No God. No Heaven.
The way Augie would have wanted. Just some stories, some laughing,
some crying, some wine. A lot of wine. Then noon."

"Noon what?" asked Reuben.

The widow tried to smile again and the tear
streaks took a sudden turn around the changed contours of her face.
"Noon tomorrow. The official unofficial time to give up hope."

"Augie Silver," intoned his
best friend, Clayton Phipps, once a promising playwright, now for
many years the publisher, editor, and sole contributor to a quaint
little newsletter called
Best
Revenge.
"Augie Silver."

Phipps paused, leaning against a makeshift
lectern set up at the deep end of the dead man's pool. He let the
syllables hang in the bright, clear morning air, hoping to evoke
the entire miracle and tragedy of a human being through the thin
yet potent fact of his name. Much underrated, the magic of a name.
It was the ultimate container, the profoundest and most elegant
summing-up of the passions, capacities, follies, likes and
dislikes, the fears, quests, and eccentricities that made one
person distinguishable from all others.

"Augie Silver." Phipps chanted it a third
time, and under a poinciana tree, very near the table with the
liquor, Ray Yates elbowed Robert Natchez in the ribs.

"Only guy I know who's a more pompous
asshole than you are."

Natchez frowned his disapproval and tugged
at the cuffs of another black shirt. Reuben the Cuban slunk
silently among the guests, content in the belief that in pouring
coffee and delivering mimosas he was paying homage to the dead
husband and bringing comfort to the widow.

Perhaps a hundred fifty
people had come together to honor Augie Silver's memory, and they
reflected the breadth and oddness of the painter's personal
democracy. The art establishment, of course, was represented. There
was an editor from
Picture
Plane
, a publication that had once dubbed
the deceased "a minor yet searing talent, achingly pure and
infuriatingly unambitious." There was the famously snide yet
annoyingly accurate critic Peter Brandenburg, who years before had
described Silver as "a lavishly gifted underachiever who is gaining
renown less for the canvases he paints than for those we hope he'll
paint." There were reviewers from the newsmagazines and from papers
in New York, Chicago, and Washington. There was even a gallery
owner from Paris who happened to be vacationing in South
Beach.