Scavenger Reef (35 page)

"Is it?" Magnus said. "I'm not so sure. This
town, every jerk in every bar thinks he has a great story, a goddam
saga. I've never seen a place where there's so many basically dull
people who think they must be great eccentrics, real characters,
just because they live here."

Joey sipped his rum and orange juice,
fiddled with the earpiece of his shades, which dangled from the
pocket of his shirt, and considered whether he would push the
question or let it drop. He decided the hell with it, he'd let it
drop, but his mouth carried on without him. "The person I'm
thinking about, he isn't from here, he's from New York."

"Ah," said Magnus, "another place that
people think makes them automatically interesting."

"It's my father," Joey said. He said it
softly. The words were almost lost in the buzz of the bar.

Arty Magnus frowned, took a hand that was
cold from holding his bottle of beer, ran it over his tall forehead
and through his frizzy hair. Magnus was city editor of the Key West
Sentinel and, like most journalists, he reveled in the confidence
that he could really cream someone with a few well-chosen words,
but it shamed him, seemed a failure of attention and a sloppy piece
of work, to give offense without meaning to. "Shit," he said.
"Sorry."

Joey shook it off. "Hey, I'm just thinkin'
out loud heah. No big deal. I'm a little worried about the old man,
is all."

Magnus kept a safe and sympathetic silence,
and after a moment Joey went on.

"His wife died a couple weeks ago."

"Your mother? Jesus, Joey—"

"Nah, not my mother."

"Stepmother then."

"Nah. Just his wife. It's a long story. But
inna meantime, after forty-seven years, he's got nobody at home. He
leaves here, he goes back north to an empty house."

"That's gotta be hard," said Magnus. He
lived alone, Arty did; he knew the faintly thrumming silence one
hears after the click of the key, the squeak of the knob on a front
door with no one waiting behind it. "He work? Retired?"

"Anything but retired," Joey said. "But he's
had some ... I guess you'd call 'em professional setbacks. My old
man, he's used to having authority. Lot of authority. Now . . .
it's just all going sour for 'im."

Arty Magnus took a sip of beer, blinked his
hazel eyes, then splayed his long thin fingers on the bar. Several
thoughts occurred to him, the first of which was how little he
really knew about Joey Goldman, much less his family. Who was this
guy, whose widowed father had apparently not been married to his
mother, who'd arrived in town with nothing, got a dumb job hawking
time shares on the street, and within a few short years, at the
green age of thirty, had set himself up as something of a big shot
in local real estate? They had friends in common, Arty and Joey
did; they got together now and then for drinks. But they weren't
close, and life before Key West wasn't something that casual Key
West friends often talked about; they'd come to Key West to wash
away the life before.

The second thing that occurred to Arty
Magnus was what a maddening and undodgeable pain it was to see
one's parents get old and slow and grouchy and alone, to see them
insulted by sickness and abandoned by time, useless in the world's
eyes and eventually their own. He made bold to put a hand on Joey's
forearm. "It's tough," he said. "It's really tough. But there's
only so much you can do."

"Yeah," said Joey, "I know, I know. That's
why I was thinking, a book maybe ..."

"Joey, listen," the editor said. "I don't
want to sound discouraging. Your father wants to think through his
memories, write them down—hey, I think that's great. If he thinks
of it as a book, what's the harm? But between us, Joey, a book is a
different kind of thing. It isn't finger painting. It isn't just
somebody remembering."

Joey put a couple of fingers around his
glass, helped the streams of condensation run down to the bottom.
"Yeah, I'm sure you're right," he said. "I mean, you've done it,
right?"

It was an innocent question, it wasn't meant
to needle, but it found Arty Magnus's sorest spot as sure as a
blast of dentist's air finds the hole in a tooth. No, he hadn't
written a book, though he'd meant to for as long as he could
remember. He'd meant to write one in college, he'd meant to write
one in grad school; he'd filled several dozen spiral notebooks with
ideas, sketches, observations. He'd meant to write a book while
living in New York, and six years ago, when he'd moved to Key West,
part of his reason had been the hackneyed and half-ironic belief
that that would be a good place to write a book. But he hadn't.

He'd done a lot of things instead, been
impressively resourceful at finding things to do instead.

He'd helped elevate the Sentinel from a
fifth-rate paper to a third-rate one. He'd learned to sail a boat.
He'd become a fair fisherman and, to his own surprise, an
impassioned gardener. But he was forty-one years old, a few silver
wires were beginning to wind like tinsel through the brown
corkscrews of his hair; it had lately dawned on him that all those
ingenious insteads had so far used up half his life, give or take a
few years.

Joey looked sideways at him and knew he'd
said the wrong thing. "Hey." He back-pedaled. "Doesn't matter."

They drank. Behind the busy bar, Cliff the
bartender was in his glory. He had a cocktail shaker in either
hand, was taking an order from a fat guy in a lime-green tank top
and carrying on a conversation with a plastered redhead. Arty
Magnus looked straight ahead and waited for the sting of this book
thing to subside. Then he figured it would subside faster if he
distracted himself by playing journalist.

"But Joey, your old man: you really think he
has a story?"

"Yeah," said Joey. "I really do."

Arty gave a noncommittal nod and tried to
picture what Joey Goldman's father must be like. What would his
name be? Abe Goldman? Sol Goldman?

A little old Jewish guy not unlike Arty's
own father, a retired CPA, warm, decent, unfascinating, a man of
lengthy anecdotes and jokes with forgotten punch lines, who at that
moment was either playing rummy, striving for a bowel movement, or
watching the market final up in Vero Beach.

"Why?" said Arty. "What makes you think he
has a story?"

But now Joey got shy. He had dark blue eyes
that were a little surprising against his jet-black hair, and when
he got to feeling bashful they narrowed down; the long lashes
shaded them like awnings. "I dunno. Maybe he doesn't."

Arty Magnus, reluctant newspaperman, had
done a one-eighty, had come to feel that maybe he did. "His
background? War experience? Wha'?"

"I dunno, Arty. Let it go, it's probably a
dumb idea."

"Nah, come on, Joey," the editor coaxed. "If
there's really something there—"

Joey Goldman sighed. He leaned a little
lower across the padded bar, twined his fingers, and cast wary
upward glances over both his shoulders. He pursed his lips, then
gave an instant's worth of nervous smile that was erased almost
before it could be glimpsed. "Arty, are we, whaddyacallit, off the
record heah?"

"Of course we are," said Arty Magnus, but he
said it a little too blithely for Joey's taste. Joey raised a
single finger, and his face took on a look that Arty had never seen
before. It was a look not of threat, exactly, but of purpose and of
a solemn pride that carried with it a burden and a sadness. The
slight cleft in Joey's chin grew suddenly deeper, his skin appeared
suddenly more shadowed with the full day's growth of beard.

"No shit now," he said. "Off the
record?"

Magnus, slightly chastened, slightly
rattled, said, "Yeah, Joey. Yeah."

Joey Goldman sat up straight, gently tugged
the placket of his shirt, gave his neck a rearranging twist. He put
his palms flat on the bar, leaned close to Arty Magnus, and softly
said, "My old man, he's the Godfather."

The blender was slushing up a batch of
frozen daiquiris. The air conditioner was whining. There were
conversations all around them, and here and there cigarette
lighters were rasping into flame.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

"Cut it out."

But Joey just looked at Arty, and Arty
understood he wasn't kidding. He drained his beer, held the empty
bottle against his lips an extra second, and tried to think. Then
he said, "Goldman?"

"Try Delgatto," Joey said. "Vincente
Delgatto."

"Holy shit," said Magnus.

Joey lifted an eyebrow. The momentary
hardness had gone out of his face, was replaced by a wry look, a
little bit self-mocking but tempered by years of settling into the
oddness of his beginnings and making a life that by now felt hardly
odd at all. "So whaddya think?" he said. " 'Zere a book there?"

"Jesus Christ," said Magnus.

"Well, do me a favor," Joey said. "Fuhget we
talked about it. It's a very dumb idea."

"It isn't dumb—"

"It's impossible. It's against everything
the old guy thinks is right. He'd never do it. It's just tavern
talk."

"But—"

"Nah, I shouldn'ta brought it up. I guess I
figured, Hey, you work for the paper, you probably know guys who
write books."

Magnus put his bottle down and twisted it
against his soggy coaster. The noise of the bar flooded in on him,
surrounded him like puffs of cotton, both buffered him and kept him
pinned. "Guys who write books," he said. "Yeah, I know a few."