Scavenger Reef (8 page)

Yates stopped reading and
looked up at the clock. It was twenty seconds before 7
p.m
., and behind the
engineer's booth window his producer was flashing him the O.K.
sign. The host searched for some final comment, a capper, and when
none came he decided that the most effective way to end the show
was to let the Brandenburg review hang in the air through a rare
moment of radio silence. He paused a double beat, then said, "This
is Ray Yates, and this is WKEY, the voice of the lower Keys. See
you tomorrow on Culture Cocktail."

He gave a nod and a point, and the producer
played his theme music. It was a tune that always made Yates
thirsty. Most evenings he bolted immediately from the padded womb
of the studio and went directly to Raul's for several drinks.
Tonight he broke the pattern. He looked at the painting on the
wall. It was an impression of wind-lashed trees against a green sky
full of reverence and menace. More important, it was a signed
original Augie Silver. Picasso, thought Ray Yates. Matisse. You
didn't leave such things around a public place where anyone could
grab them. He decided to bring the picture to the houseboat, and
reminded himself to install the dead bolt he'd meant to put on
months ago. He owned two works by someone in the top rank of
contemporary painters, and he felt a twinge as at a betting window
when he let himself imagine how much they might be worth.

Nina Silver switched off the radio, walked
softly through the French doors at the back of the living room, and
sat down near the pool. Strange, she thought, what happens to a
person when he's dead. He becomes the property of others, part of
some ghastly common pot from which anyone may feed, a shared
blurred memory that can be put to many uses. He can be talked
about, written about, set up as a yardstick to measure or to shame
the living. A person, dead, becomes a topic, a silent, neutral
thing about which others have opinions. Chatter that would be
called mere gossip in regard to the living passes for serious
appraisal, something right and fitting, when applied to someone
dead.

But it was still gossip, reflected Nina
Silver. Gossip and presumption by people trying to lay claim to a
ghost. What did any of the chatter have to do with the flesh and
blood man who had been her husband? What did it say about the smell
of coffee on his morning breath, the glad gleam in his open eyes
when their faces were close and they were making love? What did it
say about the particular warp of his wit, the gruff charm that was
indescribably different from the charm of other charming men, as
ticklish, comforting, and sometimes prickly as an unshaved
cheek?

The widow sat and smelled the evening. Salt
and iodine flavored the air, a slippery odor as of earthworms in
wet dirt wafted up from the cooling ground. The poinciana was just
coming into flower, and Nina noticed for the thousandth time what
tiny, feathery leaves it had for such a big and spreading tree; it
always made her think of a great fat man with the palest, daintiest
fingers.

Time passed. She knew this
because the mosquitoes had come and gone, the western sky had
phased from pink to lavender to jewel-box blue, and higher up
Castor and Pollux, the tall spring twins, were nearly at the
zenith. Nina Silver was wondering if she too was trying to lay
claim to a ghost. Her claim, she told herself, at least was
lawful—lawful in that vague portentous sense of
lawful wedded wife
. But what did that
really mean? Did it set her up beyond dispute as the keeper of the
true memory, the vestal standing guard against the vandals? She had
built, was still building, a shrine of remembrance; other
people—friends, colleagues, self-appointed judges—were building
other shrines. Nina told herself her own temple was the grandest
because it was built with the greatest love. But what it had in
common with all the others was that it was meant to house, contain,
hold captive the ghost of Augie Silver—and maybe Augie's ghost did
not wish to be held.

This was a terrible thought, a thought to
turn grief guilty. Perhaps, of all the rudenesses and well-meaning
indignities that the living heaped upon the longed-for and admired
dead, the worst was simply that they wouldn't let them go. Perhaps
the dead were like tired guests who truly wanted nothing more than
to leave the party and have some peace. Why did the noisy, selfish,
stubborn living try to bully them into staying?

"Augie," Nina Silver said aloud, "do you
really want to go?"

That night, as usual, she dreamed of her
dead husband.

In the first dream he was walking with her
down a New York street. It was winter, night, big halos of icy blue
surrounded all the streetlights. The parked cars were so black they
gleamed like schist, and the brownstones all had stately stoops
that exactly paralleled each other, like something out of Egypt. It
was cold, with a gritty wind, but Nina didn't mind because she had
her warmest jacket on and she was holding Augie's arm. He wore a
camel topcoat, carelessly buttoned, and though she couldn't see his
hands she knew they were balled lightly into fists at the bottom of
his pockets. She was looking at the sidewalk; it had small shiny
stones embedded in it. Then something went wrong. Nina had the
sudden certainty that she was holding not her husband's arm but an
empty sleeve. When she looked up they were standing at a broad
intersection. Many traffic lights were flashing and the wind was
blowing from everywhere at once. Augie was now standing outside his
coat. He was naked, pale as egg, and skin was blowing off of him,
his face was distorted and flesh was being stretched and torn away
like leaves from a tree in the first November storm.

Nina sat up groaning, then leaned back on
her elbows. She brought a hand to her throat and felt her racing
pulse. She poured some water from her nightstand carafe. A late
moon had risen and a dim ivory light was spilling through the thin
curtains. It put a soft gleam on the pine-cone bedposts, and the
gleam reminded Nina of the delicious and secure fatigue of
childhood. After a while she went back to sleep.

When she dreamed again, the dream was
gentler. She was on a beach, sitting at the water's edge, letting
wet sand sift through her fingers. The sun was hot on her
shoulders, the water so flat she could see the place where the
earth curved underneath it. Augie was behind her, lying in a
hammock. At least she trusted that he was: She could only see his
leg, pegged in the sand like a bird's leg, his toes faintly
wiggling just below the surface. She was happy. She looked down the
beach and saw a black man selling coconuts. He was wearing a big
hat of woven palm. She wanted to buy a coconut for her husband. She
wanted to surprise him, to see him drink the rich milk through a
straw. But there was a dilemma. She was happy as she was, knowing
Augie's toes were wiggling. She would be happier sitting next to
him and giving him a coconut, but she feared that if she reached
for greater happiness she might lose the happiness she had. She
glanced up the beach, then back at the hammock. She gestured toward
the man with the coconuts. Then her nerve failed and she woke up
just enough to break the dream, to finish it without an ending.

She rolled over and smoothed an imagined
crease in her pillowcase. Her leg twitched once, she cleared her
throat, and some time later her husband appeared to her once
more.

He stood before her looking very old and
thin, as if he'd been dead for many years. His hair was pure white
and hung down past his shoulders. He had a beard dry as tinsel on
his sunken cheeks, and his cheeks were not ashen but burned the
color of rosewood. He wore a threadbare shirt, a pauper's shirt,
and on his shoulder perched a parrot.

"Nina," said her husband. "I've come
home."

The widow smiled sadly on her pillow. Augie
had never before appeared in such a ghostlike way, never seemed so
old, so low, so fragile. Yet his deep eyes in the moonlight seemed
at peace. "Augie," she murmured. She froze his image for a moment,
nestled it into her shrine of recollection, then blinked herself
awake.

Or thought she did. The apparition did not
vanish. The widow tried to shake herself out of a sleep that was
stubborn as memory, stubborn as love, struggled upward as from a
dive where one has gone too deep, but still her husband's image
loomed before her. She was dreaming now that she was sitting up,
looking past the dead man's tinsel hair at the familiar curtains
moving with the breeze, though she knew this could not be.

"Whiskey sour," squawked Fred the parrot.
"Pretty Nina."

"Augie?" said his wife.

He sat down on the bed. He'd grown so light
he barely made a dent. His wife reached out a trembling hand to
touch him. The parrot fluttered in protest and moved to its
master's other shoulder. "I'm very tired," said the painter. "Very
tired."

He swiveled slowly on his shrunken hips, let
himself fall backward, and was sleeping in an instant. The bird
jumped onto its bedside perch and sat there preening in the
moonlight.

Nina Silver lay awake the rest of the night,
afraid that if she blinked, her husband would again be gone. She
held back from touching him, terrified her hand would slip right
through his outline, that his shirt would be vacant, would prove to
be nothing more than a twisted piece of bedsheet, errant cloth
throwing the shadow of a man. She lay on her side and breathed
deeply. She thought she smelled the ocean, and now and then a sweet
chalky smell that made her remember the taste of her husband's
mouth.

Dawn came, and with it came growing belief:
The private madnesses allowed in the dark cannot, for the sane,
cross the border into day. The bedroom windows began just barely to
lighten, and still Augie Silver was there in his bed. His wife
dared to put her face against his arm. It was shrunken but it was
warm. She cried silently and she dozed.

When she awoke, the room was bright. Augie
was gone, and in some awful way Nina Silver was not surprised, only
confused to see Fred the parrot on his bedside perch.

Then she heard the sound of tinkling, and a
moment later her husband was standing in the bathroom doorway.
Seeing his wife awake, he flashed her a tired smile that was full
of the reverent screwball miracle of finding himself alive. The
smile banished doubt forever. Nothing but a living person could
have an expression so wry, beat up, and full of zest.

"Augie."

"Nina."

"Cutty Sark. Awk, awk."

The painter, still in his clothes, came back
to bed and took his wife in his wizened arms. The movement and the
embrace seemed to drain him. "I'm so weak," he said. It was not a
complaint, just an observation, made with the sort of detached
amusement that comes to grownups when they watch a baby try to
walk.

"Can you tell me?" asked his wife. "Can you
tell me what happened?"

Augie settled in flat on his back and stared
up past the still fan at the ceiling. "I can try," he said, as if
he was being asked to relate a story of something that happened
long ago, to someone else. "But there's a lot I don't remember even
now."

He shifted just slightly, and his crinkly
white hair spread around him on the pillow, his tinsel beard folded
down onto his chest. "It was a beautiful January afternoon. Bright
sun. Not too much humidity—"

"I remember the day," she gently
interrupted.

"Yes, of course," he said. "Well, I was out
past Scavenger Reef. I'd just come through it, I could see the line
of the Gulf Stream maybe two miles up ahead. It was gorgeous.
Pointy little whitecaps in the shallow water—nervous whitecaps,
high-pitched, like kids' voices. Then the slow, thick purple swells
in the deep. Off to the west there were huge tall clouds—not anvil
tops exactly, but mountain clouds, whole ranges of them. I watched
them. I wasn't the least bit worried, not even about getting rained
on—the weather was from the east. The boat was heeled but steady, I
just watched the clouds, sketched the shapes in my mind.

"Then it was like the clouds were melting,
like there was a table across the sky and the clouds were pouring
down across it, perfectly flat, much heavier, denser than before.
They started rolling toward me; it was like a domed stadium
slamming shut. The sky got very confused, low clouds going one way,
high clouds going another, this odd sensation that the earth had
started spinning faster. Half the sky was black, the other half an
acid green. There was a wash of white over the shallow water and a
dull gleam like wet lead over the Gulf Stream. The wind picked
up—but not too much. I was enjoying it."

His wife looked at him strangely, but Augie
didn't notice. He took a deep and labored breath that moved the
white bristles of his mustache. Outside, the morning's first breeze
set the palm fronds scratching at the tin roofs of Olivia
Street.

"Then I saw the spouts starting to drop,"
the painter resumed. "I'd never actually seen that before, and it's
not the way I would have imagined. I would have pictured great dark
funnels thrusting fully formed down from the clouds. But in fact
they slip out almost shyly, like a man sticking a toe in cold
water. Wisps and scraps, little rags of cloud. They hesitate,
sometimes they crawl back up. Then they venture down a little
farther, and then they start to spin. Once they start turning, they
digest the whole huge cloud they came from, suck it all down
through their writhing hollow bodies.

"I saw three spouts touch down, and they all
were moving toward me. I had to make a choice: drop sail and take
my chances or try to outrun the storm. You know me, I made a race
of it. I sailed away. The funnels followed. I headed farther out to
sea—away from the reef, away from the shallows. The wind started
really ripping, and then in an instant it totally changed
direction. I wasn't ready for that. I got slammed around, I
couldn't even hold the wheel, there was no way I could keep my
course.