Scavenger Reef (6 page)

There was a pause. The three friends blinked
across the glare of Garrison Bight and watched the charter boats
straggle in, their practiced captains working shifters and
throttles to back them into their slips with swagger. Red and
seasick tourists gathered at the sterns, jockeying for position to
be the first ones back on land. Pelicans sat in the water, still as
bathtub toys, cormorants stood on pilings and spread their
prehistoric wings to dry.

"How many paintings ya got?" asked Ray
Yates.

The question fell just as Clay Phipps had
let himself imagine that the topic of Augie's canvases was closed,
and for all Yates's efforts to sound offhanded, there was something
inherently rude, salacious even, about the inquiry, like casually
asking someone the length of his dick or the amount of money in his
Keogh plan.

There had always been a certain
competitiveness among Augie Silver's friends. It stemmed from the
fact that they all admired Augie more than they did each other, and
more than they did themselves. There was something about the man
that made it seem crucial to be liked by him. He was a natural
arbiter, he conferred esteem the way a king grants titles of
nobility, and his favor suggested not just personal preference but
fundamental worth. In the matter of gift paintings, his favor could
also confer large amounts of cold cash, but that was something no
one wanted to be crude enough to be the first to mention.

"Six," said Clayton Phipps. He said it
softly, shyly even, looking down at his cheap scratched wineglass,
yet could not quite squelch a nervous smile, a hint of
bragging.

"Six!" said Ray Yates. His voice was also
soft, but an octave above its usual smooth range.

"Three large, three small," Phipps went on.
It seemed he'd decided to make a full disclosure of his holdings
and have it over with. 'Three oils, one acrylic, two watercolors.
Done over a span of twenty years."

"You sound like a fucking exhibition
catalogue," groused Robert Natchez.

Phipps did not immediately answer. He
glanced across the pier, saw fishermen hanging grouper on scales
and nailing angry-eyed barracuda onto posts. Jealousy. He knew he
was dealing with Natchez's scattershot corrosive jealousy and that
the higher course would be to let it slide. But lately Phipps's
higher impulses had been consistently losing out. Augie's death,
his rebuff at the gentle but definite hands of Augie's widow—things
like that made him weary of the vigilance it took to be dignified.
"How many d'you have?" he taunted Natchez.

"Just the one. You know that."

"Ah. It's one of the nicer of the small
ones."

"I have two," Ray Yates volunteered. "A
good-size oil on the boat and a little watercolor I hung at the
studio."

"Take it home, Ray," said Natchez bitterly.
"It's gonna be worth money."

Money. So there it was. The unholy word was
dropped like a plateful of soup and was as hard to ignore as a food
stain on a tie, but the other two men strove gamely to ignore it.
They sipped their drinks, glanced around them at the bar beginning
to fill up now with boat crews and returning sailors. The sun was
low enough that there were hems of pink on the bottoms of the puffy
clouds.

"So Clay," said Yates, "you gonna send your
paintings?"

"I haven't decided," said Phipps, though in
fact he had. "I just wish I was surer what Augie would want."

"What Augie would want," Yates said, "is not
to be dead."

To this, the two men clinked their smudged
and murky glasses. It was the sort of comradely gesture they used
to do more of, generally with Augie taking the lead. Now it had
less the feel of something done in the present than of something
re-enacted, an old routine trotted out without great conviction,
and Robert Natchez made no effort to join the toast.

"Clay," he said, "you know you want those
paintings in the show. Make you look like a big collector. And what
the hell—it's only NFS."

*

Some time later, Jimmy Gibbs parked his sore
legs and aching back on a stool at the Clove Hitch bar and ordered
up a double Wild Turkey, rocks, chased by a longneck Bud. His
captain, Matty Barnett, had offered to buy him a drink, and Gibbs
was not one to shortchange himself in matters of the cocktail. He
tipped his beer in thanks and sucked the neck of the bottle dry
while it was good and cold. Matty Barnett sipped tomato juice
livened up with horseradish. He'd been sober fifteen years, ever
since he drove his 1970 Bonneville convertible off the bridge and
into the Cow Key Channel. It wasn't sinking the car that had scared
Barnett onto the wagon; it was that a lot of time went by before
he'd noticed he was in the water. Now he watched his first mate
sponging up alcohol with the kindly disapproval of a Hindu watching
someone wolf a burger.

"Jimmy," he began, "you got any idea why I
wanna talk to you?"

"Nope," said Gibbs, although several
possibilities had crossed his mind. He'd been late, hung over, a
couple times in the last week or so—but hey, no one expected a mate
on a charter boat to be a model of promptness and propriety. He'd
been, well, a little sarcastic to clients now and again—but it had
seemed to him the clients were too nauseous, nervous, and ignorant
to pick it up. Besides, Jimmy wasn't there to be anybody's best
buddy; he was there to rig the lines, keep them clear, land the
fish despite the customers' endless talent for losing them—and he
defied Matty Barnett or anybody else to question the quality of his
skill.

"I'm thinking of retiring, Jimmy."

This Gibbs had not expected, and it made him
take a hard look at his boss. Barnett was barely older than he was,
maybe fifty-five, fifty-seven tops. That did not seem like
retirement age to Gibbs. He had a tough time imagining someone
being far enough ahead of himself, money-wise. Besides, it didn't
look to him that the captain really worked that hard. True, he had
a constant weight of responsibility on him, but that wasn't work
like hauling lines and scaling fish was work. It didn't make your
back hurt, didn't ding up your hands.

"I useta love getting out on the water,"
Barnett went on. "Now it's just a job. Fishing's not what it was.
Or maybe it's just me. Anyway, I'm over it. I got a little place up
the Keys. Own it free and clear. The wife's got five, six years to
go with the Aqueduct. So the way I'm figuring …"

Gibbs knew by now how Matty
Barnett was figuring, and the knowledge put a knot in his gut.
Barnett was going to offer him a good deal on the boat that Gibbs
ached to have and could not possibly buy. The impossibility of it
made him furious with everything and persuaded him that there could
be no pure motive, no generous impulse, no fairness in all the
world. "The way you're figuring is business is lousy anyway so you
may as well sell the
Fin Finder
to me."

Barnett backed off. He seemed truly miffed
and Gibbs felt ashamed. He punished and soothed himself with a swig
of bourbon, then stared off toward the western sky. There was a
band of yellow near the horizon, and above that a lot of green.

"I'm offering it to you first," Barnett said
mildly. "It'd please me to have you be the next skipper. If you're
not interested, that's fine."

Gibbs glanced sideways at his captain.
Decades of scanning the glaring water for fish had bleached out
Matty's eyes and made their sockets pink and crinkly like the eyes
of Santa Claus. Gibbs could almost find it in himself to apologize
and to tell the other man of course he was interested, but he
suddenly had the ridiculous feeling that if he tried to speak he
would start to cry.

"Here's the situation," Barnett resumed.
"Boat's worth sixty-five, seventy. I'll let it go for fifty. I
still owe eleven on it myself, so I need that much up front. The
rest, I'd work with you, you could pay it off as—"

"Matty," said Jimmy Gibbs in a raspy,
strangled whisper, "where in fucking hell am I supposed to get the
first eleven thousand?"

Barnett blinked his pink eyes, sipped his
tomato juice. "I dunno, Jimmy. I thought you might have something
put away."

Gibbs looked down at the bar as if he wanted
to gnaw it to splinters. Only logical, he told himself, to imagine
that a gray-haired man who'd worked thirty-eight years might have a
measly eleven thousand dollars put away. Who wouldn't? "Thanks for
thinkin' a me, Matty," he said, but his tone made it clear that
Barnett had done him no favor.

"Sure," said the captain. He put down his
tomato stained glass, dropped ten dollars on the bar, and got up to
leave. "Have another round, Jimmy. And if anything changes, lemme
know."

*

"Wha'd Matty want?' asked Hogfish Mike
Curran.

The sky was full dark now,
and the Clove Hitch bar had emptied out. It was an early place, a
two-pops-after-work kind of place. By 9
p.m
. there wasn't much left for the
proprietor to do but throw ice in the urinals and hang the beer
steins on their pegs.

"Nothin'," said Jimmy Gibbs. "He wanted
nothin' and he got it."

Curran looked at Gibbs with gruff
admiration; the man was a moody sonofabitch, give him that. He'd
polished off Barnett's second double and was now nursing the dregs
of one he'd purchased for himself. Hogfish Mike jerked some glasses
up and down the bottle brush and tried a different conversational
approach.

"Some guys were in before, Ray Yates and a
couple others, talkin' about your buddy Augie Silver."

Gibbs was in that state of deep sulk where
it becomes a sort of sick victory to remain utterly uninterested,
but he could not help giving in to curiosity. "What about 'im?"

"Didn't hear that much. Something about
paintings. Selling 'em. Supposedly they're worth some money."

Jimmy Gibbs looked down and shook his glass.
He was trying to look indifferent and trying to rattle his ice
cubes, but it was a hot night and the pieces left were in
weightless crescent slivers that made no noise.

Hogfish Mike flicked dishwater off his hands
in an oddly dainty manner. "You got a painting a his, don't cha?"
he asked.

Gibbs had known the question was coming and
vaguely wondered why he'd felt reluctant in advance to answer it.
He nodded. Then he couldn't swallow a cockeyed smile. "He gimme
this painting, said he hoped it wouldn't remind me too much a work.
It's kind of a spooky picture, ya want the truth. Like a fisheye
view of gutted fish."

"Like cannibals?" said Curran.

Gibbs shrugged. He hadn't thought of it
exactly that way. "More like Who's next?"

The proprietor of the Clove Hitch was wiping
his bar with a rag. "Worth money, though."

"Hogfish, hey, it was a gift."

Jimmy Gibbs hefted his beer bottle and
reminded himself for the fourth time it was empty. He thought of
ordering another, then remembered he needed all the cash he had to
pay the overdue electric bill. He pictured the line of dirt-bags at
the City Electric office, their crusty feet and filthy sandals,
everyone ready with their red-bordered shut-off notices and their
bullshit excuses, and he was weary to death of always being broke.
"Besides," he mumbled, "fuck could it be worth? Couple
hundred?"

Curran shrugged, moved down the long teak
slab, mopping up water and emptying ashtrays as he went. Gibbs
tossed back the last of his bourbon. It left a satisfying burn
where his teeth poked out of his gums.

He thought about the Fin Finder. It had twin
big-ass Yamahas, outriggers arched and graceful like something off
a bridge, and a man really looked like someone standing at the
steering station, with the radar slowly spinning and the tuna tower
gleaming in the sun. Jimmy Gibbs coughed softly in his fist and
made his voice sound casual. "Few hundred, right, Hogfish? I mean,
ain't likely to be more'n that."

On a Wednesday evening in early May, Kip
Cunningham sipped champagne, poked a silver stud through the
placket of his dress shirt, then responded with a tired sense of
duty to his wife's request for assistance in doing up her dress. He
cinched its panels together, tucked the zipper tab down neatly in
its groove, finessed the hook through its little loop of thread,
and vaguely noticed the way the top of the silk bodice bit softly
into the flesh of Claire Steiger's back. He used to find her back
very beautiful, that much Kip Cunningham remembered. Her back
wasn't freckled, exactly, but there were light mottlings below the
surface; the effect was of looking not at her skin but into it, it
was like peering through sun-shot water in a trout stream and
seeing pebbles at the bottom. Was her back still beautiful? Her
husband could not really have said. He was losing her, though the
loss that was happening now had mainly to do with money and social
ease. The deeper loss he was oddly numb to because he'd inflicted
it on himself, subtly, gradually murdering his chance for happiness
with the slow poison of inattention.

"What if someone tries to buy—" he
began.

The zip job completed, his wife slid away
from his touch and cut him off. "At an opening, Kip? None of my
clients would be so tacky."

Cunningham flipped his collar up and began
the painstaking process of tying his tie. "There might be discreet
inquiries, hints as to price."

Claire leaned forward and examined her eyes.
What on earth, she wondered, had been on her mind eight years ago
when she and the decorator designed this grand double bathroom with
its his-and-hers mirrors, its twin dressing alcoves, its
side-by-side scallop-shell sinks? She knew damn well what had been
on her mind, and the recalling of it mocked her. What had been on
her mind was a Hepburn-Tracy romance. Scintillating chitchat and
intimate, brainy repartee while quaffing bubbly and grooming each
other for some gala evening where they would take great pleasure
and pride from being mates. Parts of the fantasy had come true,
Claire Steiger reflected. If anything, there'd been too damn many
black-tie evenings, an exhausting excess of verbal sparring, and
perhaps too much fine wine. The only thing missing had been the
marriage.