Scavenger Reef (16 page)

He lumbered to his desk, looked up the phone
number of the Ars Longa Gallery in New York, and left a message
with the answering service. Then he refilled his glass. The wine
was getting soft and comfy as a well-used baseball mitt.

Why shouldn't Robert Natchez be told? Why
not Ray Yates? They were friends, after all, they had a right to
know.

Phipps made two more calls. But Natchez was
at a reading and Yates was hiding from his loan shark, and he just
talked to their machines. He poured out the last of the wine. He
didn't think he'd broken his word to Nina Silver. Had he even given
his word? He couldn't quite remember. That part of the evening
seemed a different day. His conscience was not clear exactly, but
shut down, benumbed. If he'd failed to find the cool, clear water
of loyalty, he'd at least availed himself of a damn nice puddle of
wine. His balance just a little tentative, he slipped out of his
linen clothes and went to bed alone.

"Did you ever see that experiment they do
with the Ping-Pong balls and mousetraps?" Arty Magnus asked his
eager but ungifted protege, Freddy McClintock. "They set about a
zillion traps, load 'em with Ping Pong balls instead of cheese.
Then they drop in one tiny, almost weightless Ping-Pong ball. It
lands on a trap and sets it off. Now you've got two balls
clattering around. Then four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, infinity.
It takes about one deep breath to happen, and with all the snapping
springs and flying balls and mayhem it very soon becomes impossible
to figure out how the whole goddamn thing got started."

The young reporter used the eraser end of
his pencil to coax his red hair back from his sweaty forehead. "And
you're saying that's how news spreads?"

"Very good, Freddy," said Arty Magnus. He
swiveled in his editor's chair, put his feet on the air conditioner
that dribbled water more than it pushed air, and wished that he was
somewhere else. "You're catching on."

McClintock beamed. He was proud of himself
for finding confirmation of the Augie Silver story, though all he'd
done was put himself, quite by chance, on a collision course with
the bouncing bit of news.

Ray Yates and Robert
Natchez, having heard last night's messages from Clay Phipps, had
convened for breakfast at Raul's. Their waitress was a lush who
finished her workday at 3
p.m
. and promptly repaired to the
Clove Hitch bar. Making chitchat with Hogfish Mike, she told him of
the miracle return she'd heard the two discussing. Curran, amazed
that anyone could survive being sucked into a waterspout, told the
tale to several customers, Jimmy Gibbs among them. McClintock,
nosing around the charter-boat docks somewhat aimlessly, picked up
the yarn from a group of skippers who had no customers that
day.

"So I'll do a follow-up?" McClintock
asked.

"What do you have to add?" said Arty
Magnus.

"That the rumor was true," said the young
reporter. "That I was right."

"You think anyone gives a flying crap you
were right?"

McClintock's hips moved but he found he had
no answer. There were in fact some new parts to the story, but the
local newshound, moving in his small domain, hadn't collided with
them. He didn't know who Claire Steiger was, or that she had spent
that morning strategizing with the small group of allies she
despised and badly needed. He didn't know that Jimmy Gibbs, now
jobless and having torched his bridges, had, in his provincial
purity, called Sotheby's to ask if the auction could still be held
if the painter was alive.

"Let it rest a day or two," said Arty
Magnus. He looked up and saw how crestfallen young McClintock was.
That was the bitch of playing mentor: seeing people become
disillusioned without getting any smarter. "Look," he said more
gently, "if you're right, you'll still be right in forty-eight
hours. If he's alive, he'll be alive. What's the hurry?"

During those forty-eight hours, Augie Silver
seemed quietly to break through some mysterious barrier that had
been retarding his recovery. His ravaged body grew cleverer at
relearning things, battered organs remembered their functions, and
he felt a mute animal joy at the wonder of recuperation. That a
broken thing could fix itself—this was as marvelous a fact as
anything under heaven.

He began to sit outside in the mornings,
before the days had grown too beastly hot. Reuben brought him
coffee and fruit in the shade of the poinciana tree. Augie watched
the shadows move across the yard, looked at cloud reflections in
the swimming pool when the wind was very still. Sometimes he
sketched—pencil drawings of flowers and shrubs, quick life studies
of Reuben which he would sign with a flourish then give the young
man to take home. When the sun got high, Augie would go inside to
nap, and the naps now seemed like earned rest from some activity
rather than a mere slipping backward into helpless exhaustion.

On the fourth of June, the convalescent had
his best day yet. He ate. He drew. He strolled around his yard on
legs that did not tremble. Midday, he took siesta and was
ecstatically awakened by the tropical music of a fierce brief
downpour clattering on the roof.

That evening, when Nina came home, there
were high spirits in the house. Augie's health was a shared
crusade, a common mission; everyone partook of his invigoration, as
though he were a racehorse. Reuben allowed himself a flush of
knightly pride in his care and vigilance. Nina's face softened, the
tension in her jaw diminished as she stroked her husband's forehead
and found it neither cold nor feverish.

For a little while they sat out by the pool,
the three of them. Nina had a glass of wine. Reuben accepted a bit
of rum. Augie asked for Scotch and was allowed a few drops in a lot
of water. "Cutty Sark," said Fred the parrot as he perched on the
back of a lawn chair.

"Bullshit," said Augie. "H-two-O."

The sky dimmed and deepened to a jewel-box
blue, and Reuben the Cuban got up to leave.

Augie Silver, the green parrot perched upon
his shoulder, began the long slow stroll to bed.

Outside the front door, just on his right as
he exited, Reuben found a small bakery box with a card taped on
top. He picked it up and brought it in to Nina. "Look what someone
left," he said.

Nina opened the card. Small neat handwriting
she didn't recognize said, "A Speedy Recovery." Inside the little
box was a single Key lime tart, the authentic kind that's yellow,
not the tourist kind that's green.

"How nice," said Nina. "I wonder who brought
it."

Reuben shrugged and smiled. He didn't know,
but it made him happy that there were others who agreed that Augie
Silver was a great man and who wished him well. He said good night
again and slipped away.

Nina took the tart out of the box and put it
on a plate. Augie loved Key lime, anything Key lime. She was happy
to get more food into him, coax another few ounces back onto his
frame. She carried the treat toward the bedroom, and before she'd
even reached the doorway, she sang out, "Dessert, Augie. Someone
brought dessert."

Augie was already in bed, he had the sheet
pulled hallway up his sunken white-haired chest. He'd lit the
hurricane lamp on the bedside table; it cast a weird light on the
parrot's belly as the bird sidestepped on its perch.

"I want to make love with you, Nina," the
painter said. "I want to try."

His wife swallowed, couldn't breathe,
couldn't move. The last light made soft blue boxes of the windows.
A barely visible wisp of smoke came through the chimney of the
lamp. Nina tried to say something but Augie put a finger across his
own lips and she didn't get as far as making words. They held each
other's eyes a long moment, then Nina absently put the plate down
on the bedside table and began to undress. She'd almost forgotten
this part of nakedness: being seen, becoming ready. Lamplight
played on her flanks, gleamed on her breasts and cast shadows in
her hollows, and for the first time in a long time she felt
beautiful.

She got into bed next to her husband. His
skin was hot and taut, as if pinched and tucked against his bones,
but it was still his skin, she recognized it, she nestled close
against his chest. They kissed, and through his lean lips, parched
and cracked, she remembered the way of his kissing, the taste of
his mouth was as it had always been. He touched her and their
bodies remembered things together, struggled back from loss, pain,
grief, disease, redeemed each other from deadness and laughed at
incapacity from the high vantage of long love.

Afterwards they cried a little in each
other's arms, and after that they slept, slept so soundly that they
didn't hear a scuffling as Fred the parrot came down off his perch
and ate the Key lime tart, and didn't hear the feathered thump as
the bird dropped stone dead on the floor.

Fred the dead parrot lay on Augie's side of
the bed, but it was Nina who saw him first.

As she sidled sleepily to
the bathroom in the half-light of 6
a.m.,
she glimpsed but did not
recognize the stiffening bundle on the floor. It was not till the
return trip back to bed that she understood what she was looking
at. She squatted over the expired pet and examined it. Fred's eye
was open, staring at the ceiling, the lens glassy and thick. The
green feathers had pulled in neat as fish scales, and the claws
were rounded down as though grasping desperately for some perch in
eternity. Nina lifted the bird before figuring out exactly what she
would do with it. She held it a moment, noting its fluffy,
hollow-boned lightness, then put it softly on her
dresser.

For herself she felt no great grief. The
bird was noisy, as devoid of tact as a Parisian; the occasionally
funny things it said were witless accidents and did not amuse her.
But she felt a pang for Augie. She was afraid the bird's demise
would depress him, would slow his recovery. As though to fortify
him against the loss, she climbed back into bed and softly pressed
herself against his taut dry skin.

In the dim light she had not noticed the
pecked-at Key lime tart; in fact the arrival of the Get Well
offering in its string-tied bakery box had been greatly
overshadowed by the momentous event of making love, and she had
nearly forgotten about it. She saw no great mystery in the bird's
having died. Parrots were longlived creatures, but mortal, after
all. Things went wrong with them, they caught viruses, succumbed to
cancers, just like people. The bird had died and that was that.

Augie woke up shortly after seven. He
blinked in the direction of the vacant perch but did not
immediately realize anything was wrong. Nina brought him juice and
coffee. To make room on his bedside table, she carried away the
mutilated pastry and last night's glass of water; she was thinking
about how best to break the sad news to her husband and didn't pay
particular attention to the mundane chores her hands were
doing.

"Coffee in bed," Augie was saying. He was
smiling, he woke up cheerful. He sipped the hot brew a little
awkwardly, brown drops clung to his unruly white mustache. "Makes
it all worthwhile just to get coffee in bed-

Nina sat softly next to him and stroked his
hair. "Darling," she said, "something happened to Fred last night.
I found him dead this morning."

Augie frowned and sighed. He sipped coffee
and looked out the bedroom window. It was a flat still morning, the
breeze had yet to rouse itself, and neither plants, people, nor
even lizards seemed quite awake yet either. "Smart bird," he said
at last.

"He's here," Nina resumed. "Do you want to
see him?"

Augie nodded, and Nina brought him the dead
bird the way a mother brings a sick child a favorite doll. The
painter took the rigid parrot and laid it against his shoulder. He
stroked the sleek green feathers, kissed the top of the beak where
the flat hard nostrils were, then stoically handed the stiff bundle
back to his wife.

"Should we bury him?" Nina asked.

Augie pressed his lips together and shook
his head. 'That wouldn't be doing him a favor." In Key West, not
even people got buried; their caskets were stacked three-high in
concrete hurricane-resistant mausoleums. The ground was so rocky
and the water table so near the surface that even shallow holes
filled almost instantly with a gray seepage that oozed through the
limestone like milk through a sponge, "just wrap 'im up and toss
'im."

Nina took the corpse to the kitchen,
swaddled it in newspaper, and dropped it in the trash, where it lay
oblivious among the mango peels, the coffee grounds, the squashed
tart in its foil shell.

It was not until hours later, when she was
at her gallery and losing herself in the savingly precise task of
cutting a mat, that the truth of what had happened flooded in on
her with the sudden slow momentum of a car crash. Her breath
caught, her stomach knotted. Her hand slipped, the knife zigged
crazily across the drafting table and clattered to the floor. Nina
didn't pick it up. Paralyzed by an awful certainty, she stood there
pale and rigid; and the sunlight coming through the gallery window
held no cheer but only a viscous gluey weight.

"Lemme make sure I have this straight," said
Detective Sergeant Joe Mulvane. He sat on a corner of his desk and
let the thick part of one beefy thigh hang over the edge. His knee
almost touched a file cabinet. The tiny office had no window, and a
greasy oscillating fan was pushing the stale air around. "Your bird
died and you think someone is trying to murder your husband."

Nina Silver squirmed in her aluminum chair.
O.K., it sounded ridiculous. Probably she hadn't done the best job
of explaining. But how could she be expected to be cool, organized,
thorough? She was panicked. She'd dropped everything, locked the
gallery, and ridden her old fat-tire bike as fast as she could to
the undistinguished building that served as city hall, police
headquarters, and Key West's central firehouse. She'd dashed up the
handicapped ramp, sprinted a flight of anciently linoleumed stairs,
followed the faded arrows to the police part of the premises. She'd
arrived sweating and winded. Instant airtight logic was a little
too much to ask on top of that.