Scavenger Reef (4 page)

Gibbs looked down at the
bill. What the fuck was a dollar? Two-thirds of a beer. Three
quarts of gas. One three-hundredth of his rent. Nothing that would
last the evening. Gibbs's hairline itched. He raked his forearm
across it, then took a moment to look up and down the dock at the
Key West charter fleet. There were maybe thirty boats that cost an
average, say, of eighty thousand bucks apiece. Fuck had all that
money come from? Some of it, Gibbs knew, was drug money. Well,
O.K., people would do what they had to do, and anyone who thought
otherwise was an idiot. Some of it had come from land that the old
families, the real Conchs, sold off to developers for what seemed
at first vast sums then always turned out to be a lousy deal, a
deal that ate the soul. Then of course there were the guys who
acted like big shots but were really hired help, the paid captains
with the silent partners in Dallas, Atlanta, or New York. They'd
use the boat a week or two, these money guys, and take most of the
profits the rest of the time. They liked the idea of being able to
say they had a fishing boat in Key West.
My
boat.
My
captain.
My
crew. It gave them a hard-on, they
could run around all thinking they were little
Hemingways.

Gibbs reached into a bucket, grabbed a
grouper by the tail, slapped it onto the cleaning table, and
stabbed and slashed it open. He'd almost bought a boat once, Jimmy
had. It was during the recession that most people hardly
remembered, '81-'82, when business stank, no one was making money,
and the market was flooded with bargains. There was an old Bertram,
thirty-one feet, twin gas inboards, worth a good forty grand and
going begging at twenty-seven. Back then, Jimmy Gibbs had five
thousand dollars put away, the proceeds of some discreet
transporting of bales of marijuana He'd put on a fresh blue shirt
and jeans with a crease and gone to the bank to borrow the
rest.

The banker was a realist. "Lotta guys,
Jimmy, they think a charter boat's a money machine, think once ya
got the boat, everything is easy. Not true. Things go wrong.
There's a lousy season. Ya get sick. Someone breaks a leg and sues.
A lotta guys can't cut it. And we take the boats back, Jimmy. Don't
think for a second we don't. It's embarrassing, it makes you crazy
mad, and you can't ever borrow money again. You sure ya wanna
try?"

Gibbs yanked the guts out of the grouper,
flicked off a loop of purplish intestine that was clinging to his
finger. He had been sure he wanted the loan, until he came to the
part of the application that asked if he'd ever been convicted of a
felony. "I gotta answer this?" he'd asked.

The banker had folded his hands, dropped his
voice, and put on an expression that was a mixture of concern and
grisly curiosity. "Jimmy, we're a local bank. You're a local guy
from a local family. Up to a point, we're very understanding. . . .
What you did, how bad was it?"

Gibbs slid the hollowed grouper to the edge
of the cleaning table and plunged into the bucket for a yellowtail.
It had already begun to curl and grow rigid, he had to flatten it
with one hand while puncturing its belly. Jimmy Gibbs didn't go
around telling people what he'd done as a younger man with a
vicious temper and a stock of grievances close-packed as a seaman's
trunk. He'd told the banker he'd finish the application at home.
Then he'd left, crumpled up the paper in the parking lot, dropped
it in the trash, gone out and gotten shit-face drunk, and that was
as close as he'd come to owning a boat. Now he reached into the
yellowtail and felt its gelatinous organs turn to a warm paste
between his fingers.

"Whole or fillet?" he said to the tourist
who owned the gutted fish.

The tourist was short and sunburned and had
white cream on his lips. "Lemme ask the wife," he said, and he
turned away to find her.

Jimmy Gibbs stood there, the hot sun on the
back of his neck, his nicked fingers smarting from the salt and the
drying fish blood, and the hand that held the filleting knife was
twitching as he waited.

"How 'bout you, cap'n?" he asked the next
know-nothing fisherman down the line. It seemed that Jimmy Gibbs
couldn't wait to plunge his blade back into something. "How you
want them snappers?"

"It's as good a system as any other," said
Ray Yates, stepping gingerly through the kennel area at the Stock
Island dog track between the evening's sixth and seventh races.

"It's asinine," said Robert Natchez.
Natchez, a fastidious man, picked his footfalls even more carefully
than his friend. He was wearing black sneakers, black jeans, black
T-shirt, and black blazer.

Around the two men, nervous greyhounds,
their limbs taut as frogs' legs, their gleaming fur given a hellish
orange cast by the strange stadium lights, were being led out of
their pens. Handlers stroked their lean flanks and petted their
bony heads while fitting on their numbers. The dogs pranced,
high-stepping as carousel horses frozen in the glory of full gait.
Now and then one of the animals would pause, sniff the ground,
lower its elegantly rippling haunches, fix the nearest human with a
gaze of sympathetic candor, and take a dump.

When that happened, Ray Yates would reach
for his program and check the dog's name against its number.
"There's your winner," he'd confidently say to Natchez. "A lighter
dog is a faster dog."

'That hasn't proven true so far," Natchez
pointed out. The information wafted gently over the radio host
without putting the slightest dent in his certainty.

Back in the grandstand, the audience of
hard-core bettors, bored locals, and ragtag tourists waited for the
next grim pursuit of Swifty the mechanical rabbit. Beauty parlor
blondes, their lobes stretched tribal-style by weighty jangling
earrings, sucked powdery whiskey sours through straws. Fat men in
the inevitable plaids smoked Cuban cigars that had been bought with
a wink in Miami. The night sky was reduced to a hazy black bowl
above the pink glare of the floods.

"Gimme two dollars on number seven," said
Robert Natchez. He didn't quite know why he'd agreed to accompany
Ray Yates to the track, this place of shit and greed. He'd told
himself the artist should see everything, however tawdry. But Key
West offered abundant seaminess, squalor, pathos, and depravity
without the need of going to the dogs.

Yates glanced at his annotated program.
"Number seven didn't go," he advised.

"Maybe he runs better constipated," Natchez
said. "I'll take my chances."

The more systematic bettor shrugged. "My two
simoleons are going on the lighter number four."

Yates took Natchez's money and went to place
the bets. Low to the ground and purposeful, he bulled through the
milling crowd, his palm-tree shirt just slightly damp with sweat. A
queasy and familiar excitement overtook him as he neared the
barred, illicit cashier's window. The excitement started as a
tickle at the backs of his knees, then became a not unpleasant
burning in his stomach. The burning transformed itself to a twinge
in his loins followed by a pulsing in the veins of his neck. Now he
stood directly in front of the dead-faced woman who punched the
pari-mutuel machine and his mouth was dry. He took a quick look
over his shoulder to make sure that Robert Natchez, his closest
friend, had not for some reason followed him. Then, with fingers
that were not quite steady, he reached across and placed a
two-dollar bet on number seven and bought another hundred dollars'
worth of losing tickets for himself.

Later, after nine dull races and a nightcap
under the bougainvillea at Raul's, Robert Natchez returned to his
small apartment to do some work. He had a grant application to
complete. And maybe, he admitted to himself, that was the real
reason he'd agreed to waste the evening at the track: to avoid yet
another confrontation with the inane, insulting, subtly humiliating
questions on yet another grant form. He'd applied for them all at
one time or another. National Endowment. Florida Arts Council.
Southeastern Poetry Foundation. They all asked, in their polite and
neutered institutional prose, why he wanted the grant. Morons! How
about to eat? They all wanted to know what he would bring to the
program. On this question, Natchez's colossal arrogance contended
with his fragile sense of decorum. When decorum lost out, he'd
submit answers like "a bracingly fresh approach to language coupled
with a masterful grasp of poetic form and an emotional intensity
reminiscent of Pound." To go on record with a self-evaluation like
that and still not get the grant was a distressing experience.

Even on those rare occasions when the
funding came through, the result was generally depressing. Three
thousand dollars to drag himself around the flat and endless state
of Florida giving poetry workshops to baffled, nose-picking,
germ-carrying first-graders in the public schools. Two thousand to
read soothing verses to frothing schizophrenics in county
nuthouses, to dozing oldsters in their rubber-sheeted beds. So
worthy, these foundation projects, and so futile and bad-paying.
Though Robert Natchez could never have brought himself to
acknowledge it, they made him feel like a runt kitten still
burrowing blindly toward some grudging public tit while his more
robust and savvy peers had opened their eyes, stretched their legs,
and set out to stalk their destinies in the wider world.

The poet picked up his pen, angled the
application in the pool of yellow lamplight in front of him, and
stared at the wall.

The wall was of dark wood, old Dade County
pine. Dade County pine was purportedly termite-proof, but Natchez's
walls were riddled with tiny holes, out of which, on windy days or
when a plane went over especially low, flew termite droppings
slightly smaller than poppy seeds. It had become second nature to
Natchez to begin work by shaking the pellets off his papers and
into the trash.

He'd had the apartment
eighteen years, an astonishing tenure in transient Key West. At
first it had seemed the perfect writer's garret. Not the classical
northern garret of Dostoyevsky or
La
Boheme
: no snow climbing up the
windowpanes, no burning of timeless manuscripts for a few moments'
warmth. This was a tropical garret. It had a moist, rank,
generative smell from the rotting leaves in the vacant lot next
door; from that lot, as well, came feral sounds of rutting cats and
the brainless clucking of runaway chickens that led unimaginable
lives and sometimes laid eggs in the undergrowth. As the setting
was funky, so was the furniture—rickety wicker, cracked and squeaky
rattan, end tables found by chance, thrift-shop lamps of cheap
archaic charm.

Women loved the place—or used to.
Lank-haired and blithe, they came to him easily in the early years,
drawn by the aura of the pure and struggling artist. They were won
over by the chipped coffee cups, content to get politely plastered
on syrupy Liebfraumilch or vinegary Bardolino swigged from glasses
that had formerly held grated supermarket parmesan. And when
Natchez had a poem accepted at one of the little magazines and a
check for fifteen or twenty-five dollars arrived, there was cause
for pride and celebration.

Then the eighties descended and the honor
went out of being poor. Women no longer seemed titillated at the
thought of sleeping in Robert Natchez's platform bed that one had
to crawl across to reach the john. Inconveniently, the poet passed
the age of forty, and season by season his image slipped from that
of someone very intriguing to that of someone not quite suitable.
His apartment underwent a similarly discouraging change. It was no
longer cozy; it was cramped. It was no longer quaint; it was dark,
musty, and held a perennial and unromantic whiff of mildew.

"My God, man," Augie Silver had said to him
the very first time he visited, "you need a window."

So Augie went home and painted him one. It
was a canvas full of fight and air, with suggestions of brilliant
sky, hints of spring-green lawn, a calm movement running through it
as of wind-tossed fronds. It was the cheeriest object by far in
Natchez's apartment and had recently become by a vast margin the
most valuable.

The poet looked over at it now, dropped his
pen, and turned his thoughts to the dead painter. There is an awe
spiked with envy and verging on hatred that those for whom life is
difficult feel for those to whom life comes easily. And life, or so
it seemed, had come easily to Augie Silver. He didn't agonize about
painting; he painted. He didn't agonize about quitting; he quit. He
had with his wife the sort of apparently effortless contentment
that is the steadiest form of affection and regard, and that
remains an utter mystery to those outside of it. He made enough
money and, perversely, seemed to make more the less he worked.

And he wasn't, even by his own assessment, a
major artist. That was the part that nettled Natchez, or that
justified his pique. To the great artist, much was allowed, maybe
everything; that was basic. But why should Augie Silver—a gifted
dauber, a freakishly facile lightweight—have been admired, fawned
on, taken seriously, while Natchez, who knew beyond a doubt that he
was an important poet, a major voice, was still filling out
applications like a goddamn high school senior? Where was the
justice in it? He burned to know.

Disgusted, feeling wronged and righteous,
Natchez pushed aside the grant forms, switched off his desk light,
and walked the one step to the kitchenette to pour a glass of rum.
Justice. It mattered deeply to Robert Natchez, as it matters to all
profoundly frustrated people. As long as they themselves are the
ones defining what is just and, in fantasy at least, the ones with
the awful power to see that every person ends up as he
deserves.