Scavenger Reef (14 page)

Jimmy Gibbs took up his position on the port
side of the Fin Finder near the stern and got ready to loop his
heavy line around the bollard. It was June 1. Supposedly the season
was over, yet these goddamn know-nothing idiot tourists kept
showing up at the charter-boat docks and saying they wanted to go
out fishing. Bargain hunters, cheapskates—that's what you got this
time of year. Fat guys who drove straight through from Georgia with
miniature beer cans in their hatbands; guys whose shirttails
wouldn't stay tucked in and whose fumbling fingers would screw
things up if they so much as tried to put a shrimp on a hook. They
said they liked the heat, these out-of-season visitors, but that
was so much bullshit—nobody liked it ninety-two and hazy, with last
night's puddles turning to steam that made your legs sweat like hot
breath on your crotch. What they liked was the cheap motel rooms,
the greasy free tidbits at happy hour, the twofers in the
restaurants.

It was funny, Jimmy Gibbs hazily reflected
as he tightened down his line with his scored and grizzled hands:
You might have thought these people, being less unlike himself,
would be nicer to him, less demanding; you might have thought too
that Gibbs would feel less touchy taking care of them. But somehow
it didn't quite work out that way. There was no bigger pain in the
ass on earth than a workingman on vacation. Worried about every
dollar; his whole year spoiled if the sun didn't shine or if, God
forbid, the fat fuck didn't catch a fish; always suspicious that he
wasn't being treated royally enough, that the next guy up the
ladder was getting treated better. Rich northerners were wimpy
bastards, but Gibbs somehow found them less galling to work for.
Maybe it was just that it was less hot when they were here, he
didn't end the day quite so wrung out, sweat-soaked, thirsty not in
his throat but in some unreachable place halfway down his
gullet.

Matty Barnett, looking fine and dignified at
the wheel of his boat, cut the engines. In the sudden silence you
could hear the whoosh of the pelicans' wings as they gathered to
beg for their loops of gut, their fish stomachs full of littler
fish.

There were four clients, burned red and
swollen with beer, milling around the cockpit, antsy to get off.
They filed past Gibbs like he was one more piece of docking
hardware, then lolled on the pier, their caps pushed back on their
shiny heads. The mate cleated off his dock line and regarded them
from under his damp eyebrows: four fat cheapskates waiting to be
served.

The skipper stepped down from the steering
station. "Give 'em a beer," he told Gibbs mildly.

So easygoing, Matty was. So calm, so
diplomatic. It's a hot day and they're waiting for their fish; give
'em a beer and keep 'em happy.

It was just the kind of chore, having
nothing to do with fishing or the business of running the ship,
that Jimmy Gibbs most hated. He delivered the beers and kept his
mouth shut. Then he lifted the ice chest, jackassed it over the
gunwale and onto the dock, and got ready to clean the fish.

He hosed down the cleaning board so that the
splintered wood gleamed darkly in the sun, then reached into the
cooler and grabbed a hogfish. Its tail was curling upward and its
eye had the surprised look dead fish often have, a look of
disappointment, of having been betrayed.

"Whole or fillet?" asked Jimmy Gibbs.

The four fat fishermen looked over at him
and sucked their beers. Then one of them said, "Hey, that's mine.
That sumbitch had some fight in 'im, wuddn't it? Took line, lotta
line. That drag screamin', oh shit."

Gibbs stood there in the sun. His short gray
ponytail lay like a rotting log against the back of his neck and
dammed up the sweat coming down from his head.

"Fillet, I guess," the fisherman finally
said.

Gibbs shoved his knife in and tried to think
of other things. Like money. Soon he was going to have some. The
painting Augie Silver had given him was on its way to New York, and
it was going to fetch a bundle. The Sotheby's people had no doubt
of it. They even arranged the crating, shipping, insurance, said
they'd take the cost out later. Pretty decent of them, Gibbs
thought. He reached into the hogfish and disassembled it. The guts
were cold from the ice and felt almost good squishing through his
fingers. He spread the creature like an open book and cut the flesh
away from the backbone and the skin.

Then he pulled a small yellowtail, barely
legal, out of the cooler. Its stripes were still bright, its
brick-red gills fanned out in search of something they could
breathe.

"Whole or fillet?" asked Jimmy Gibbs.

Three of the four fat fishermen laughed. The
fish guts dried on Gibbs's hands. They itched. Flies came to the
dead fish and landed on the first mate's wrists.

"Ain't nothin' t'fillet on that baby," said
one of the laughing clients.

"Leave 'im whole, I guess," said the one who
wasn't laughing.

Gibbs worked. His blue shirt was soaked
under the arms and along the spine. A drop of sweat fell into his
eye and he had no way to rub it.

When he was halfway through the chestful of
fish, one of the clients said to him, "Yo, friend, grab us another
beer."

Gibbs just stared at him, then went back to
his gutting.

Now the clients were offended, they weren't
being treated well enough. You could see all four of them turn
sulky, just like that. Let 'em, thought Gibbs. The trip was over,
and if at the end the four fat fucks got pissy and didn't tip him,
who the hell cared? He'd be well off soon, he'd be a captain, and
when he was, he'd dock his boat and go sit in the shade, like Matty
Barnett was doing now. No more gutting, no more scaling, no more
playing barmaid.

He reached into the fish cooler again and
told himself to think about the future and be happy. But he wasn't
happy. There are two things that drive a poor man crazy. One is
feeling that there's no way out and the other is feeling that there
is. What used to be just miserable suddenly becomes unbearable. The
last grains of patience slip through the glass the fastest.

"Whole or fillet?" asked Jimmy Gibbs.

The fish on the board was the biggest of the
day, a grouper maybe thirty-three, thirty-four inches, ten, eleven
pounds. It was a nice fish, but the fishermen were grumpy now, they
didn't whoop about it or slap each other on the back. For a few
seconds no one spoke, then a loud old car went past in the parking
lot and over the noise of it Jimmy Gibbs heard someone say
fillet.

He put down his knife, picked up the cleaver
and the mallet, and with a single blow that sent loose scales
jumping he chopped the head off the fish. Grouper have massive
heads, heads like bison, and once this one was severed past the
hump, it no longer looked big.

"Fuck you doin'?" one of the four fat
fishermen said. He said it loud enough so heads turned three, four
slips away, and a lot of people Jimmy Gibbs knew were curious to
see what happened. "I said whole, goddamnit. That one was to show
the wife."

Gibbs looked down at the decapitated fish.
The face was at a funny angle, there was an inch or two of
blood-smeared plywood between it and the body. The cleaver blow had
made the jaws spring open and the tongue was sticking out. Gibbs
felt bad. He'd heard wrong, O.K., it was his fault. He was choking
down some evil-tasting stuff and working up the breath to say that
he was sorry.

But the fat fisherman wouldn't leave it
alone. He threw his beer can down and stomped it. It wasn't quite
empty and some foam shot out. "Goddamn fuckin' people roun' here,"
he said. He said it loud. "Fuckin' locals can't do nothin'
right."

A trickle of sweat loosed itself down Jimmy
Gibbs's back. Late afternoon sun glared orange on the water, a
half-circle of crews and tourists seemed to be drawing closer.
Gibbs itched everywhere, his hands balled up and he felt his
fingernails clawing at his palms. His knife was on the cutting
board in front of him, flecked with gore and sharp as a razor. He'd
used a knife once on a man, many years ago. He remembered the weird
red pleasure of it, the sucking resistance of flesh to the blade,
the fish-eyed surprise on the face of the one stabbed. To kill
someone, Gibbs had learned, was less difficult than people thought.
All it took was singlemindedness and a burst of raging purity.

Sun glinted off his knife, but when Gibbs
made his lunge at the fat fisherman it was the oozing fish head he
picked up.

He came quickly around the table, threw
himself chest-to-chest against the man who had insulted him, and
thrust the amputated grouper head against his cheek. The fisherman
stepped clumsily back, warding off the slime with his sunburned
elbows. The head slipped out of Jimmy Gibbs's hand and skipped
along the pavement; gulls swooped down on it instantly and pecked
away its eyes. People sprang toward Jimmy Gibbs to fend him off,
but before they grabbed him the fisherman fell backward over the
curb and Gibbs pancaked down on top of him like a lineman. He
managed one weak punch against the ear, one backhand slap across
the jaw, and was working his slime-covered hands toward the other
man's throat when two guys grabbed him by the armpits and pulled
him off. Gibbs jerked his shoulders and kicked the air. The fat
fisherman got up spluttering. His three buddies made a token
gesture to hold him back, one of them handed him his cap.

A gull tried to fly away with the grouper
head, but it was too much weight, the big bird couldn't get it off
the ground.

The first thing Gibbs saw as the blind white
rage began to dim was the pink and mild face of Matty Barnett. He
was speaking calmly to the four fat fishermen, trying to persuade
them not to call the cops. "It's the heat," he said. "Guys get a
little crazy. Listen, trip's on me, how's that? Someone else'll
finish your fish, you'll take the resta the beer . . ."

Gibbs pawed the ground. Cheapskate fat-fuck
white-trash tourists: They even found a way not to pay to go out
fishing.

Barnett walked slowly to where Gibbs was
being held. His crinkly Santa Claus eyes were looking down, his
posture was weary. He spoke very softly because there were a lot of
people standing by. "Jimmy," he said, "I can't have this. You're
fired."

An unfinished fight leaves
a man like Jimmy Gibbs as jumpy as unfinished sex. His muscles were
twitching, his insides knotted up for battle, and there was no one
left to battle but himself. "I'm not fired," he said. "I quit. Fuck
this." He was not in control of his voice and it got louder and
rougher as he thrust his chin toward the
Fin Finder
. "Next month I'm buyin' the
fuckin' boat and you can all kiss my hairy ass."

Barnett blinked. This was the first he'd
heard about Jimmy Gibbs buying the boat and he set it down to his
former first mate's desperate swagger. "We'll talk about that some
other time," he said, as softly as before. "For right now you
better hit the road."

The skipper nodded and the two guys holding
Jimmy Gibbs moved him out, squeezing tight against his sides like
prison guards as they walked him to his rusty truck.

"You know what they're
starting to say," said Peter Brandenburg, the art critic for
Manhattan
magazine.
"They're starting to say the whole thing—his disappearance, the
retrospective, this supposed miracle return—was one big cheap
publicity stunt."

"That's ridiculous," said Claire
Steiger.

"Absurd," put in Kip Cunningham.

"Is it?" Brandenburg prodded, and he lifted
his martini. For his money, which it rarely was, Coco's Bar at the
Hotel France still made the best cocktail in town. The classic
glass alone made it worth the seven dollars. And there were no
peanuts in the mix served up in heaping cut-glass bowls. Only the
more aristocratic nuts: pecans with perfect cleavage, brazils like
small canoes, cashews curled like salted shrimp.

"Think about it," the critic resumed. He
wiped his fingers on a napkin, then plucked at the neckline of his
woven silk vest. "You've got a painter who hasn't painted in three
years. Who knows if he can paint anymore? He dies and he's suddenly
a star. A speculative frenzy kicks in. Then, just when the momentum
is perhaps beginning to slow, there's a dramatic new twist: a rumor
that he's back! Really, doesn't it seem—"

"Seem what?" Claire Steiger cut him off. Her
fingers reached toward the nut bowl and grabbed a couple of depth
charges of sodium and fat. She chomped a walnut, then seemed to
realize what she was doing and dropped a filbert onto her
coaster.

"Convenient," said Brandenburg, and he
managed to make the word sound dirty.

"It's hardly convenient," said Augie
Silver's agent. "Peter, you remember what happened to prices when
Warhol died, when Rothko killed himself. They take a huge leap, we
all know that. If it turns out he's alive—" "Alive, not alive,"
said Brandenburg impatiently. "I'm telling you that people are
suspicious, confused, and ready to be very pissed off. It's the
kind of thing that ruins people."

"Ruins who?" asked Kip Cunningham. Peter
Brandenburg flashed him a quick glance from underneath his eyebrows
and pretended not to understand the question. He was known at
Coco's and it did not do for a critic to look upset, to appear to
be taking things personally. But Brandenburg did look upset, if
only for an instant, and only to someone who knew him fairly well.
Claire Steiger saw the twitch at the corner of his eye and went at
it the way a boxer attacks a cut.

"Yes, Peter," she said. "Who would it ruin?"
She caught her husband's eye and for a second, only a second, they
were allies, almost lovers, again.