Scavenger Reef (23 page)

"I thought ... I thought he was dead," the
gambler stammered.

"Yeah," said Ponte. "I know that's what you
thought." He leaned back against the railing, calmly lit a
cigarette. "Like usual you were wrong."

"I could end up being right."

"Fuck's that supposed to mean?"

Yates's voice was soft. "Mr. Ponte, you take
the money. From the paintings. Keep all of it."

For a moment Ponte said nothing. His
expression was midway between offended and amused. He took a puff
of his cigarette then threw it into the shark tank. Then his upper
hp abruptly pulled back and he pummeled Ray Yates in the kidney.
The blow sent a searing pain up his back and a hot surge through
his tubing.

"You mizzable fuck," the mobster said. He
pointed at Yates as at a species of lizard and spoke to his boys.
"The legitimate world. There it is. No self-control. No balls.
Won't even clean up its own messes." He turned his attention back
to the writhing debtor. "Scumbag, you think you can hire me, just
like that, to kill for you?"

Ray Yates tried to breathe. The air smelled
like the inside of a fish and there seemed to be big splinters
underneath his ribs. But he had somehow moved past fear, fallen
through the bottom of it into some horrid but clear place that was
like already being dead. "You're gonna kill, Mr. Ponte," he said,
in a voice grown weirdly even, weirdly certain. "You kill me, you
get nothing. You kill him—"

The debtor's words were swallowed up in a
watery mayhem. At a nod from Charlie Ponte, Sal had thrown the
second fish into the tank. The hammerhead rocketed up to meet it,
its appalling face came so close to Ray Yates's that he could see
the bilious color of its yellow eye, the bent, in-sloping
arrowheads of its vile teeth, could hear the sickening crush and
grinding of its jaws. A wave flew up around the thrusting shark, it
arced and billowed like a wake thrown off a boat. It drenched Ray
Yates as the shark plunged downward, and by the time the gambler
could see and hear again, his tormentors were gone and he was left
to scramble down from his precarious perch alone.

Key West is justly famous for its sunsets,
but most people do not realize that its moonrises are at certain
seasons equally sublime. In summer, the waxing moon migrates toward
the southern sky. When full, it emerges powdery salmon from the
flat and open waters of the Florida Straits. Those waters, in the
humid, windless dusks of June, take on an unearthly texture, part
mirror, part soup, and dully gleam like brushed aluminum. If one is
very lucky, one can sometimes see the very first flash of light as
it peeks above the tabletop horizon. The mottled moon takes a long
time to climb out of the ocean, and once it has, its color changes,
lightens every moment, like a big wet yellow dog as it shakes
itself and dries.

Saturday the twelfth was the full-moon
evening, and Augie Silver, feeling spry and restless, took it in
his head that he wanted to go to see it. "Come on," he said to
Reuben an hour or so before the great event. "We'll throw an easel
in the car. I'll sketch awhile, and who knows—it might be one of
life's great moonrises."

They were in the backyard. Augie had been
reading and Reuben was picking up the sticky brown pods that fell
from the poinciana tree. "I think maybe it is cloudy," the
housekeeper said. But it wasn't cloudy. It was perfectly clear,
albeit with the electric shimmer of a summer haze.

Augie looked at him. "You don't want to
go?"

This was difficult for Reuben to answer. He
wanted to do whatever Augie liked. But his mission was to keep the
painter safe. Then again it was hard to protect someone if he could
not know he needed to be protected. Nervously, the young man wiped
his hands on his apron. "We can go. Only—"

"Only what?"

"Only, Nina—"

"It's late night at the gallery. We'll be
back way before her. Maybe we'll bring home stone crab for
dinner."

So Reuben loaded the old Saab. He laid
Augie's easel and pad across the back seat. He put in a cooler of
mineral water in case Augie got thirsty, some fruit in case he got
hungry. He put in a jacket, though a jacket was unthinkable in the
unyielding mugginess. He noticed nothing unusual on Olivia Street.
Dogs lolled next to car tires. Bicycles went past. Here and there
clean undented convertibles were parked, their frivolous colors,
tinted glass, and lack of rust marking them as rentals. The palms
were still and limp, even the Mother-in-law tree was silent.

It was seven-thirty when they set out,
Reuben driving, slowly. The light was soft, the roads were quiet.
What traffic there was, was mainly heading the other way—downtown,
west, toward the gaudier, commoner spectacle of sunset. On White
Street, old Cubans sat on mesh chairs in front of empty stores and
slid dominoes across the cardboard boxes that served as make-shift
tables. On Atlantic Boulevard the pink and aqua condos stood like
blocks of giant candy. Australian pines lined the wetlands, looking
dejected and enduring, like people who are always moaning and
complaining yet will outlive all their friends. The air smelled of
frangipani.

"You know," said Augie, "sometimes I forget
how much I love this town."

"Is a nice town," Reuben said, without
taking his eyes from the road. He leaned slightly forward over the
steering wheel. He regarded driving as a grave adventure that
required all his concentration. He took no notice of the turquoise
convertible with tinted glass that stayed a steady hundred yards
behind him, moving at a sightseer's pace with its top up.

"It's very . . . specialized," Augie said.
He considered this as they turned onto A1A. The road was twenty
feet from the Atlantic Ocean and maybe eighteen inches above it.
"There are towns, you know, for making money. Towns to start a
career. Towns to go to college. Towns to raise a family. Key West
is no damn good for any of that. Key West is to feel good and be
happy. That's all. Don'tcha think?"

"Si, yes," said Reuben absently, his
attention riveted to the pavement. "Augie, where you like me to
stop?"

"Over past the airport," Augie said. "Where
the island curves around. You get the biggest sweep of water
there."

Reuben put his blinker on a long time in
advance and started driving even slower. Alongside A1A—a
continuation of it, really—there is a broad concrete promenade that
in certain places fronts the beach and in others ends directly at
the seawall. This promenade is used by bicyclists and joggers,
prostitutes both male and female. Windsurfers sometimes park their
vans there, fishermen sometimes leave their pickup trucks along it
and launch their dinghies over the rampart. At the spot Reuben
finally edged off the road, there was no sand, the green water came
right up to the barricaded island. Beyond the thigh-high wall,
scattered mangroves perched atop their tangled cones of roots,
stilts and egrets gawked around for food.

"Good," said Augie as Reuben turned off the
Saab's ignition and the turquoise car slid slowly, silently past
them and continued north. "This is good."

Reuben sighed with relief that the drive was
over. Then he clambered out and reached into the back for Augie's
easel. The painter, still brittle and unaccustomed to sudden
movements, took a moment to unfold himself from the car. His knees
were stiff beneath the ever-present khaki shorts, his shoulders
felt tight inside the faded purple shirt. He stood with one hand on
the Saab's warm roof and looked around. In the west, the sun was an
orange ball that had lost its fire and dangled just above the low
shrubs of the salt marsh; the sky above it was streaky green. In
the east it was a different sky, satiny, already dim and sweetly
modest, as if a shy bride was turning off the lights before she
would receive the moon.

Augie meandered. That's what he always did,
it was some fundamental part of his looking at the world, some
basic ritual of settling in. He wandered to the seawall, he
wandered to the edge of the road. He wandered past the car,
backtracked, then did a lazy pirouette and sauntered off again.
Reuben zigged and zagged behind him, the easel on his shoulder.
Finally the painter found the place that felt right to his feet and
looked right to his eyes. He put his hands in his pockets and
sniffed the air; it had the good mud smell of limestone and the
tang of sun-baked shells.

The pad and easel appeared in front of him
and the artist started to draw. He sketched a feeding egret,
captured the unlikely splayed angle of its stick-figure legs and
the lightness of the feathered crest raked back from its head. He
caught the shrewdness of the lidless eye and the strength in the
darting neck that could unravel and strike as fast as any
snake.

Reuben moved a respectful twenty feet away
and watched. He was in awe of Augie working, not just the skill but
the mysterious boldness it took to draw a line, the confidence and
the belief that were needed to leave a mark. Reuben knew that he
himself would never have such boldness. He liked to make small
changes in things that already existed: arranging flowers, plumping
pillows, setting dishes perfectly on a table; he made things more
beautiful and it pleased him. But to start from nothing . . .

"Reuben, look," said Augie, pulling the
young man out of his thoughts. He gestured quickly toward the west,
abandoned by the sun, then made a sweep across the flatly glowing
water to the east. "Should be any minute now."

The painter smiled, excited, and Reuben was
happy for him and happy for himself, happy to have a friend who,
even though his hair was white, even though he was not young, was
excited at the thought of seeing moonrise.

They watched, scanning the horizon for a
telltale gleam. On the seafront promenade, l ife streamed by around
them. A jogger pushing a stroller ran past Augie's easel. A knot of
screaming mopeds zipped by on the curbless shoulder of A1A.

Then Reuben noticed a turquoise car driving
slowly toward them on the broad walkway. In Key West, a town of
hazy boundaries, where storms confused the ocean with the land,
where friendships sometimes crossed over into hatreds, where
sidewalks slipped without a curbstone into roadways, it was not
unusual to see a car among the joggers. Everyone wanted front row
on the sea, and Reuben's only fear was that the vehicle, now
perhaps a hundred yards away, would intrude on Augie's
moonrise.

Reuben didn't want to let that happen, and
imagined that by vigilance he could prevent it. He watched the car
and left the blank and promising horizon to his friend. The
painter, rapt, gazed toward the east. The air was dead still and
the temperature of skin; a pair of ibis flew down and landed with a
skipping splash. The tires of the turquoise car made a sudden
squeal just at the instant that a blood-red cuticle of moon poked
through its dark envelope of ocean. Augie turned and pointed, his
face ecstatic, as the murderous vehicle hurtled toward him. Reuben,
low, lithe, afraid of nothing, threw himself across the car's
trajectory. His shoulder caught Augie in the solar plexus and the
two men flew over the seawall and into the mangroves as the easel
was reduced to matchsticks and the indifferent moon threw red beams
that skipped across the water and tracked the turquoise convertible
in its escape.

"He saved my life," Augie Silver softly said
to Nina.

It was around 10
p.m
. Reuben, bruised and
soaking wet, had gone home. The painter was propped on pillows in
his bed. It had taken him a long time to get his breath back as he
lay stunned among the mangroves and the fleeing birds, and now he
was unpleasantly aware of the weight of his lungs; they heaved in
his chest like sacs of lukewarm gelatin. His arms ached, his leg
muscles twitched in their loose wrappers of empty skin. His wife
sat next to him and stroked his dry and feverish
forehead.

"Damn drunk drivers," she muttered.

Augie briefly closed his eyes, swallowed,
opened them again. "Nina," he said. She waited for him to continue,
and as she waited she glanced toward the window. As on the evening
Augie had come back to her, the thin curtain was blanched by
moonlight and billowed softly on an unfelt breeze. He took her
hand. "Nina, listen. I don't think it was a drunk. And I don't
think it was an accident."

The former widow pushed out breath as though
to speak but found she had no words. Augie paused, then with great
effort lifted himself onto his elbows.

"I didn't want to say anything," he went on.
"I wasn't sure. I didn't want to scare you. But ever since Fred,
that tart, now this business with the auction . . ." He looked at
Nina's face, her wide-set slate-gray eyes, and understood that no
more needed saying. "You knew?"

"I suspected. I didn't want you to worry.
Manny Rucker said—"

"Aren't doctors fabulous?" Augie
interrupted. "They prescribe no stress and think life is gonna obey
their orders."

He managed a parched smile that his wife
could not return.

"I went to the police the day Fred died,"
she said. The words, long overdue, spilled out now. "They thought I
was crazy. They told me to call the ASPCA. Maybe now they'll
believe—"

"Believe what? That someone tried to run me
over with a turquoise convertible? Half the cars in town are
turquoise convertibles. Rented and identical."

"At least they'll know you're in
danger."

Augie tossed his head on the pillow. "So
what will they do? Put a patrolman at the door? Keep me under house
arrest for my own protection? For how long? There's only so
much—"

"Augie," said Nina, and there was a
letting-go in her voice, a half-groan like muted thunder very far
away. "I've been so afraid. I've been so afraid for so long
now."