Scavenger Reef (28 page)

He paused, dragged the back of his hand
across his eyes. He sniffled, and then, through the wet and
childlike noise, he gave a little laugh. The laugh carried a bleak
but genuine amusement. He pinched the bridge of the nose, then made
a dismissive gesture that seemed to take in his striped pajamas,
his tender pink feet, his neat kitchen with his cookbooks and his
saucepans and his wooden spoons. "But Augie, for God's sake, I'm
not a killer."

Augie stood back and appraised him. Phipps's
face would not stay still. His mouth held the bleak smile for just
a moment, then collapsed, folded down as if he would begin to sob.
The eyes crinkled with the last pinch of a laugh, then clouded over
in shame, and finally opened wide and liquid with a naked hope: the
hope that he would be forgiven.

Augie didn't know if he could come across
with that forgiveness. If it happened, it wouldn't happen by
decision but by feeling, and the feeling needed time to ripen or to
shrivel.

He turned without another word and walked
quickly through the denuded living room and out into the humid
purple dawn.

When he got home it was almost seven.

Rays like a crown were spiking up the
eastern sky, and the curbside puddles had dried. He locked the blue
fat-tire bicycle in front of his house. He opened the door and saw
Nina pacing in the living room and drinking coffee. Her eyes were
flat and tired.

"Augie," she said, "you shouldn't have gone
out alone."

"I know," he said. "I had to. I'm
sorry."

"You went to Clay's." It was not a
question.

"He's selling his paintings. All of them.
He's ashamed of himself and he wants to be friends again."

Nina held her coffee mug in both hands. Her
head was tilted at an inquiring angle.

"It isn't him," said Augie.

"You're absolutely sure?" said Nina.

"No. Not absolutely. But he had his chance.
I'm exhausted." He went to her. She didn't budge. "Mad?"

"Yes."

He rubbed a hand over his face, the skin
felt rubbery. "I don't blame you," he said.

He went to the bedroom. Reuben was there.
His hair was wet from the shower, and he was plumping Augie's
pillows. How did he know just what Augie wanted and how did he do
it so fast? Reuben was amazing.

Augie didn't bother to undress. He slipped
under the sheet, pulled a pillow over his eyes and ears, and when
he woke up it was noon.

Nina was mostly over being
angry, though she exacted a promise that Augie would run off on no
more reckless errands. They had lunch, and then the painter asked
Reuben to set up the big easel in the backyard and to carry out his
partly painted canvas from the storage room. He was ready to return
to work on the
hommage
to Fred, a heroic portrait of a noble bird against the
backdrop of a mythic forest.

He took his brush and palette and climbed
the ladder under the shelter of the strangely dainty poinciana
leaves. He began to paint and he began to hum. The jungle canopy
took on texture and humidity. Weird rootless flowers sprang to
crimson life in the damp and crumbly crevasses between branches.
Unknown huge-eyed creatures—antic crosses between cats and bats and
squirrels—flitted half-hidden in the camouflage of light and shade.
Here and there a flash of searing sun shot through; bulbous fruits
and pregnant pods swelled with excess of vitality. The foliage
shaped itself around a monumental absence, held itself open,
breathless and fluttering in expectation of the something that was
missing, till the picture seemed to cry out for the colossal
presence of an outsize parrot, a prodigious parrot in splendid and
extravagant plumage.

Augie was mixing colors, humming, chuckling
to himself, when the phone rang. He didn't hear it, nor did he see
Nina walking toward him until she was standing almost directly
underneath the ladder.

"Peter Brandenburg's on the line," she said.
"He wants to fly down tomorrow morning and do the interview in the
afternoon."

"Fine," said Augie, "fine."
He was thinking about birds and vines and jungle, he didn't want to
distract himself with journalists and interviews. But then he
remembered the suggestion Joe Mulvane had made. "Tell him there'll
probably be someone from the
Sentinel
along."

Nina shielded her eyes from the sun and
frowned up at him. "He won't like that," she said. "Big New York
critic sharing time with some reporter from the local rag."

Augie shrugged. "I hate giving the same
answers twice. If he wants the interview, that's the ground
rules."

Nina was momentarily exasperated, then a
small and enigmatic smile crossed her lips. When she'd thought her
husband was dead, she'd made of him, if not a saint, then someone
milder, less rambunctious and unmanageable than in fact he
sometimes was. She'd almost forgotten what a stubborn bullheaded
pain in the neck he could be when he was working, when he was
strong. She shook her head and went back to the phone.

Augie mixed pigments, concocted an
unabashedly ferocious shade of acidy lime green, and began the
arduous and endlessly amusing job of trying to give the flightless
paint the fluff and lift and airiness of feathers.

"Matty been around?" asked Jimmy Gibbs.

"More'n you have," said Hogfish Mike Curran.
Losing Gibbs as a regular was no great financial loss to the Clove
Hitch, but still Hogfish spoke in the slightly wounded tone of the
barkeep who has been abandoned.

"Been busy," said Jimmy Gibbs.

Curran doubted it but kept that opinion to
himself. A few seconds went by, then Gibbs blindsided him by saying
the real reason he'd been away. "Besides, that little scene the
other week. ... I just ain't felt like bein' at the docks."

A sudden wave of fellow feeling swept over
Hogfish Mike. "I gotcha, bubba. Have one on me?'

In the instant after the words had left his
mouth Curran understood two things: He understood that he'd been
ambushed, worked around to the offer of a freebie, and he
understood that Gibbs, being Gibbs, would try to stretch the
offer.

"Jeez, Hogfish, thanks. A shot and a beer,
if you don't mind."

The bartender wheeled around, grabbed a
longneck and poured a slightly grudging shot of no-name bourbon.
When he spun back toward Gibbs, the former mate was watching a
fishing boat come into the Bight, watching the way it chiseled out
a wake and the way the green water went foamy but flat behind it,
and there was a no-bullshit sadness in his face that made Curran
feel a little mean for not giving him more alcohol.

But then Gibbs brightened—brightened even
before he'd put the cold beer to his lips. His eyes flashed, and in
the first instant Hogfish Mike thought it was a twinkle of innocent
mischief. In the second instant he decided he'd been half right. It
was mischief, but the sadness was still there, mixed in with it,
giving it a snarl and a weight and an angry drive that meant
trouble.

Gibbs sipped his beer. "Ain'tcha curious why
I'm lookin' for Matty?"

Hogfish looked away, watched a cormorant
baking its wet wings on a piling. "My business," he said, "it don't
do to be too curious."

"Yeah, yeah," said Gibbs.
"Well, I need to make sure the
Fin
Finder
is still for sale."

"Far as I know it is," said Curran. He
paused, then crossed his ropy forearms and leaned in a little
closer. "But Jimmy, what good's it do ya? That auction thing, the
painting—you told me it was all screwed up."

Now Gibbs was having fun. He'd managed to
pull Hogfish in. He sipped beer, watched a cloud of gulls trail out
behind a returning boat. A mate with a rubber apron and no shirt
was cleaning the catch. "Is screwed up," he said at last. He
swigged again, then gestured toward the swarm of flying scavengers
plucking entrails from midair. "But there's more'n one way to gut a
fish."

The twinkle in Gibbs's eye had become a
glower, he was clutching his beer bottle like it was a bludgeon,
and Curran didn't like the look of things at all. He put his hands
flat on the bar and leaned in even closer. "Jimmy, you ain't gonna
go and do somethin' stupid, are ya?"

Gibbs let go of his beer, grabbed his shot
glass, and tossed the bourbon down. Then he grimaced. His gums had
seen enough alcohol over the years so that a shot of booze no
longer made them burn; still, the grimace was part of the ritual of
drinking, a visible reminder that the shot had registered. He
waited for his face to settle back down before he spoke. "Nah,
Hogfish, nothin' stupid. For a change, in fact, I'm doin' somethin'
smart."

Arty Magnus did not often pull rank on his
subordinates. It made for bad morale around the newsroom, and
besides it was extremely rare for there to be a story that the
editor had the faintest interest in personally covering.

But when Joe Mulvane called
late on Tuesday to say that Nina Silver had asked his advice about
who her husband should speak to at the paper, Magnus decided to
assign the interview to himself.
Famous
painter returns from dead to real or imagined attempts on his
life.
This was a cut above the promotional
pap and small-town politics usually covered by the
Sentinel
; this might be of
interest more than a few mile markers up the road. Freddy
McClintock, the eager and deficient young reporter, would briefly
sulk at his boss's usurpation, but he'd get over it; young
reporters always did.

The interview was scheduled for three on
Wednesday afternoon.

In preparation, Reuben had taken down most
of the paintings that had hung in the Silvers' living room since
the eve of Augie's memorial. The painter no longer wanted them
there. If he was bothering to give interviews, he didn't want to
talk about the past but the future—the new phase of his work that
was being exuberantly launched with the huge odd portrait of
Fred.

Not quite finished, the flamboyant canvas
had been moved near the sofa, it leaned back on its spattered easel
and dominated the house. There was a lot of birdness in it, Augie
thought, but he allowed himself to feel there was more in it as
well. God knows how, he had managed to put some disturbing
knowledge into the parrot's red eyes, some wisdom about the lush
and sensual death grip that was the dark side of the seduction of
the tropics. Then again, it was hardly a tragic painting. In fact,
minus the solemnity that seized people when they thought they were
beholding Art, it was more or less hilarious: a giant bird the
color of some sickening candy, out of all proportion to a berserk
forest full of fake fruits and sham creatures. . . .

"Nina, what the hell am I supposed to say
about this thing?"

She patted his arm as he leaned back on the
couch. "You'll think of something clever, something quotable," she
said. It was a quarter till three. Ceiling fans were giving an
illusion of freshness to the stultifying air. Reuben was putting up
coffee. Nina looked with pleasure at the oleanders in their vases.
She was glad people were coming to the house. It was nice to have
some distraction, to be doing something, anything, besides worrying
about her husband dying.

Punctually at three, a pink taxi pulled up
in front of the Silvers' home and Peter Brandenburg got out.
Fussily handsome and almost as tan as a local, he was wearing an
off-white linen suit over a shirt of cotton oxford; he carried a
notebook bound in cordovan leather, along with a German tape
recorder of space-age design. He paid the driver, straightened the
collar of his jacket, and was approaching the porch steps just as
Arty Magnus pulled up on his bicycle. It was brutally hot and
Magnus was wearing shorts and sandals. In his bike basket was a
cardboard-covered spiral notebook, the kind with the wire that
always catches things. "Hi," he said. He held out a hand as he
deployed his kick-stand.

Nina had apparently been
right: Brandenburg seemed miffed at having to share his interview
time and appeared to loathe his small-town colleague on sight. He
shook hands briefly and limply. "Peter Brandenburg," he said.
"
Manhattan
magazine."

This last was without doubt an act of
aggression, meant to establish his dominion over the other man.
Magnus, a graduate of Columbia Journalism, did not roll over.

"Arty Magnus. Key
West
Sentinel
."

They went together to the front door. Reuben
ushered them through to the living room, where they stood awkwardly
for a moment, dwarfed by the painted parrot and uncertain who
should speak. Magnus introduced himself, shook hands with Augie and
with Nina, and Brandenburg, in another gambit to assert his
preeminence, made it clear that they had met before. "You've lost
weight," the critic said to the painter.

Augie ran a hand over his sunken chest and
wizened tummy. "I've put a fair bit back on," he said. "But sit
down, sit down. Coffee? Wine? What would you like?"

"Nothing for me," said Brandenburg. He
picked a solo chair, took a gold pen from an inside jacket pocket,
and started setting up his tape recorder.

"Coffee'd be great," said Magnus. He plopped
down on the edge of a love seat and shook a stub of pencil out of
the spiral binding of his notebook; the metal flange that held the
eraser had been bitten flat.

There was a moment's small talk, then Peter
Brandenburg crossed his legs, straightened his linen trousers,
cleared his throat, and gestured noncommittally toward the looming
canvas. "Why don't we begin," he said, "with your decision to start
painting again. How did that come about?"