Scavenger Reef (27 page)

Augie was drinking white wine. It looked
greenish in the fading light. The artist gave a nervous little
laugh, and squirmed. "Look," he said, "I started giving him
pictures—Jesus, it must be twenty, twenty-two years ago. . . . And
I've spoken with him, we've talked. I mean, he had a chance to tell
me, he would have said something. . . . And it's not like he's
strapped for funds. At least I don't think he is. . . . No, he
would have told me, I know it."

There was an embarrassed silence, a pained
silence such as might surround a person who'd just come to suspect
a spouse's infidelity that had been long before surmised by others.
Nina reached out gently and put a hand on Augie's wrist. Reuben
pulled a deep breath in, as though trying to take the hurt into
himself and thereby cleanse the air.

Joe Mulvane softly cleared his throat. "Try
to find out for sure," he said.

Augie nodded. He slumped down in his chair,
his thin bare knees splayed out. Far away there was thunder, the
sound was less heard than felt. It was dim enough now for the
headlight bugs to glow, they flew by slowly, their red eyes bright
before their blurring wings.

Nina steeled herself to press on. "And we've
yet to decide about this interview," she said.

"Pros and cons?' said Joe Mulvane.

"The argument against," said Nina, "is Do we
really want any more attention? The argument for—"

"The argument for," Augie roused himself,
"is that, goddamnit, I will not be cowed." He was forcing himself
upright in his chair; he pressed down on its arms so that his bony
shoulders hunched up almost to his ears. "I keep silent, I
hide—whoever's after me, they've won. I won't roll over."

"Who cares who wins?' said Nina.

But Augie went right on. "Besides, why
should we imagine that this auction passes and suddenly the threat
is over? There'll be other auctions, other shows, other reasons to
kill me. Something like this doesn't just go away."

"He's right about that," said Joe Mulvane.
"As a rule."

"So you're saying he should do the
interview?" Nina asked.

The detective fended off the suggestion with
the lift of a meaty hand. "I can't give protection, I'm not giving
advice. Look, you do the interview, you're raising the stakes,
putting yourself out there—"

"Setting a trap," said Augie, "with myself
as bait."

"Something like that," Mulvane resumed.
"It's a risk. Keep quiet, maybe you're protecting yourself, maybe
you're just prolonging things. It's a tough call."

"I'm doing it," said Augie.

Nina sipped her wine. Reuben checked around
to see if anyone needed another drink, a fresh dry cocktail napkin.
Off to the east, lightning made orange pulses inside a purple
cloud.

"Well, listen," said Mulvane, "if your
mind's made up, I'll say one thing. General rule, there's two ways
to stay out of trouble. Say nothing to nobody or say everything to
everybody."

"Meaning?" Augie said.

"Meaning that if you're doing interviews,
don't just talk to this one guy, talk to everyone who's
interested."

Augie could not help giving forth a little
laugh. "Joe, I think you have an exaggerated notion of how many
people give a damn about me."

"Local paper does," said the detective.
"This I know for sure."

Augie shrugged. "O.K., I'll talk to the
local paper. World famous in his hometown. Why not?"

That night Augie Silver couldn't sleep.

He lay in bed and watched
the lazy turning of the ceiling fan, listened to the fleeting
showers that hammered briefly on the metal roof then stopped as
abruptly as if someone had turned off a faucet. He looked at his
sleeping wife, now and then brushed a stray hair from her face. At
around 5
a.m
. he
slipped out from under the thin damp sheet.

Nina roused herself enough to ask if he was
all right.

"Fine, darling, fine," he said. He leaned
over with some difficulty and stroked her shoulder. 'There's
something I need to do."

"What?" she asked fuzzily.

"Go back to sleep," he whispered.

He pulled on his khaki shorts and a blue
work shirt with paint spots on the sleeves. Then he tiptoed through
the hallway, past the closed door of the guest bedroom where Reuben
was now staying. From a basket on the kitchen counter he took the
key to the lock on Nina's old fat-tire bicycle, and he left the
house.

Key West is a very quiet
place at 5
a.m
. A
soft electric hum spills out of the pinkish streetlights; if a cat
wails, fighting or fornicating, you can hear it many blocks away.
Augie's tires made a nice sound, a sticky sound, as he slowly rode
and, nub by nub, the rubber treads were stretched off the damp
asphalt. The high parts of the streets had steamed themselves
almost dry; along the curbs were shallow puddles that would be gone
by daybreak. Nothing moved. The waxy flowers of the night-blooming
cirrus gave off an uncanny lacquered gleam.

Augie's legs were tired by the time he'd
pedaled the eight flat blocks to Clay Phipps's house. He gave
himself a moment to recover before he pushed open the wooden gate
and climbed the four brick steps to his friend's front door. Then
he knocked.

He waited, taking in the salad smell of
moist shrubbery and the short-lived freshness of air with the coral
dust washed out of it by rain. He knocked again, hard enough so
that his knuckles hurt, and in another moment a light came on
inside and Clay Phipps opened the door.

He looked confused, jowly, and not his best.
He was wearing pajama bottoms, blue-and-white-striped silk; his
pink stomach was bare and puffy, his soft chest showed the
beginnings of unpretty breasts. The top of his bald head was
blotchy with sleep, his side tufts were wispy, long, and tangled.
"Augie," he muttered. "What the hell—'"

"We have to talk," the painter said. "I'm
coming in."

He slipped past the other man, brushed
lightly against his gut while passing. He strode firmly through the
entrance hall and confronted the six naked rectangles on the
living-room walls. They were only dimly lit by the entry light and
yet they glared. Some were high, some were low, some were tall,
some were wide. The centers of the rectangles were very white and
seemed not meant to be exposed, they were like the parts inside the
bathing suit. Along the edges were lines of soot and grime, nasty
suggestions that nothing was ever quite clean. Augie gestured
toward the rude blanks and looked his old friend in the eye.
"Clay," he said. "Why?"

Phipps was not yet totally awake, but he was
awake enough to know what he was being asked. He blinked, glanced
around his living room as if it were a stranger's house. He sighed,
walked heavy-footed and obliquely toward a chair, and sat down on
the edge of it. He said nothing.

"Why, Clay?" Augie repeated. "Why all of
them?"

Phipps stayed silent. He put his elbows on
his knees and ran his hands across his head, but his sparse hair
came away no less disheveled than before.

"Money?" Augie asked. He waited a beat then
answered his own question. "No, I don't think so. You've always
liked to pamper yourself, but I've never known you to be greedy. If
you needed money, you'd sell one, two—you wouldn't sell all
six."

Phipps kept quiet. Augie locked his hands
behind his back and looked up at the ceiling as if puzzling out a
problem in the higher math.

"Were you just showing off, Clay? Is it as
simple as that? Were you hoping to get kissed up to as a big
collector, invited to some fancy East Side parties?"

Clay Phipps tried to speak, but all that
came out was a low rasp, a sound like someone stirring gravel with
a spoon. He tried again. "Augie, we all thought you were dead."

The painter moved away from the guilty wall
and stood above his friend. "I don't want to sound like a
sentimental fool," he said, "but it seems to me that that might be
a reason to keep the fucking paintings. A little something to
remember me by."

"I don't need pictures to remember you,"
Phipps said weakly, but it sounded smarmy even in his own ears and
it evoked nothing but an icy stare from Augie. A moment passed and
then Phipps spoke again. He spoke so softly that Augie had to lean
down low, straining in the pre-dawn quiet to catch the words. "Or
maybe it's that I didn't want to remember you."

Augie straightened up. He felt a pain that
was also a relief; the decay of a lie had been scraped away, a
nerve was open to the air. "Ah," he said, "a bit of naked honesty
creeps in. How bracing. How rare."

"I need a drink of water," Clay Phipps said.
Abstractedly, almost as if sleepwalking, he got up and padded
barefoot toward the kitchen. Augie dogged his steps.

"You thought I was dead," he said to
Phipps's back. "Well, I had some things wrong too. I thought I had
friends to come home to."

Phipps switched on the kitchen light. He was
a fastidious bachelor and the place was neat. A single place
setting had dried in the drain-board. Wineglasses gleamed on a
shelf. There was a handsome wooden knife block on the counter with
every knife in place. "You do," he said as he drew a glass of water
from the cooler.

"Bullshit," Augie answered. He watched his
old friend gulp down his drink, watched his throat pulse with
swallowing and his belly stretch a little farther, and he was
suddenly seized by a physical revulsion mingled with an aching and
useless compassion not just for Clay Phipps but for all things
human. Drinking water and pissing urine; getting old and getting
fat; disappointing friends and being disappointed; all of it a
noisy and befuddled prologue to the lonely act of dying. "Clay,
what did I do to you? What did I do that you need to forget
about?"

Phipps leaned back against his kitchen
counter. He blinked down at the floor, he scratched his scalp. The
sleepiness seemed finally to fall away from him and was replaced by
a whining defiance, a complaining that had gone unspoken for far
too long and turned rancid. "You want to know, Augie? You really
want to know? You shamed me. You shamed all of us. Me. Yates.
Natchez. You made us feel like shit."

They locked eyes. The kitchen was narrow and
they were standing very close. The knife block bristled near
Phipps's right elbow. Augie said nothing.

"I don't think any of us realized it until
you disappeared," the heavy man went on. "Until we thought you
died. It's like . . . how can I explain it? When you were around,
we figured we were your friends, we must be like you. Then you were
gone, and it was very clear we weren't like you at all. You had
your work. You had your marriage. You had your way of getting on
with people, different kinds of people, making everybody feel good.
We had none of that. Not really. And the worst thing, the
humiliating part? We didn't even know we didn't have it—you had it
for us.

"You feel betrayed, Augie?
I feel betrayed. When you hit the reef, we
all
hit the reef. Don't you see that?
This pleasant little life we had down here, we thought there was
some heart to it, some depth. But no, it only seemed that way
because you buoyed it up. You had an obligation-"

Almost casually, almost as if the gesture
were an accidental fidget, Augie reached for a knife. His left hand
moved forward abruptly but with no special quickness. It went past
Clay Phipps's flank and seized the biggest handle. The blade was
long and thin, the flexing metal rang softly as it was whisked out
of the block. Phipps fell silent, his breath caught with a
strangled gurgling sound. He tucked his chin and the loose flesh
underneath it began instantly to tremble.

"Someone's trying to kill me, Clay," said
Augie. "Is it you?"

Phipps didn't answer. He stared at the
knife, his eyes throbbed in and out of focus. Augie held it
loosely, carelessly; it glinted in the electric light, and the
point was a few inches from Phipps's bare pink stomach. He arched
his back and tried to shrink, he leaned back hard against the
counter and squeezed the edges of it with white fingers.

"You think I'm going to stab you, Clay?
Terrible thing, a guilty conscience. Hold out your hand."

Slowly, warily, Phipps lifted his eyes. He
let go of the counter edge; his palm made a moist sound as it came
away. He presented his soft plump hand and Augie gently placed the
knife in it. "Feel better now?" he asked.

Phipps just stared at him.

"I asked you a question," Augie went on.
"Answer it."

Phipps blinked. He remembered to breathe,
but he seemed as baffled and as terrified to find the knife in his
own hand as he had been to see it in his friend's. "Augie, Jesus
Christ—"

"All right, let's try a different question.
You want me dead, Clay?"

The refrigerator switched on; the sudden
noise was shocking. Somewhere far away a dog yelped. Outside the
small kitchen window the darkness was changing from pure black to a
veiled and grainy purple. All at once the knife felt not just
brutal but unutterably obscene, disgusting, in Phipps's hand. He
turned and put it on the counter, and when he faced Augie again he
was crying. The tears didn't fall, they just made his irises look
melted, smeared; the rims of his eyelids were bright red and the
corners of his mouth began to quiver.

"I've wished you were dead," he said softly.
"Once you'd gone, once the secret was out about how small my life
is, how alone I am, how ridiculous . . ." He shook his bald head,
lightly slapped his belly with a mix of self-mockery and affection
without respect. "Yeah. I've felt maybe there'd be less to be
embarrassed about, less to feel like a failure about, if you didn't
exist."