Natchez. It was a strong name and a proud one. But Robert? This gave the Liberator pause. What kind of name was Robert? It was bland, white, uncompelling, neutered. Then there was Bob, a name he'd always loathed, a name for a bait-shop assistant or someone's idea of a funny thing to call a dog. No, these names were unworthy of his newfound vocation, they were names he'd let himself be saddled with too long, but they had never been his true name. His true name was Roberto. In an instant this was clear to him, the realization was as bracing as a north breeze that put to flight the drooping and complacent clouds.
"Roberto." He said it aloud, rolling the R's, imparting a sensual and manly fullness to the O's. The sound reflected off his pitted walls and delighted him. He said his name again, closing down his throat to create a certain raspiness, a hint of threat and implacable will.
He swigged rum. His skin itched with excitement, with a wet sticky sense of having just been born. He skidded his chair close in to his desk, picked up his pen, and held it so hard it chafed against the small bones of his fingers. Grandly he pushed aside the application form. This was no time for trivialities, it was a time for poetry, for manifestos. With trembling fingers he grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and began to scribble down the creed and testament of this new man, this Liberator, Roberto Natchez.
*
Jimmy Gibbs opened the rust-pocked door of his bachelor-size refrigerator and looked inside with no great appetite. The dim bulb revealed four cans of beer, one sad misshapen stick of butter with toast crumbs on it, some shriveled carrots, a leprous mango, and one-quarter of a slightly sunken Key lime pie, not the tourist kind that's green but the local kind that's yellow.
He grabbed a beer and the pie and sat down at the nicked Formica table. Outside, tree toads were buzzing in the thick air, the sound mixed unpleasantly with the ugly hum of the ugly orange crime-deterrent streetlights. Not far away tires were crunching over the white gravel byways of the trailer park. The trailer park was on Stock Island, the wrong side of the tracks if there had been any tracks. It was where the help lived, and Jimmy Gibbs never forgot that for a moment. The black women who made the beds and swabbed the toilets in the hotels downtown. The new Cubans who were busboys. The eighth-grade dropouts with their green teeth and goofy smiles who did lawns sometimes, other times tree work, deliveries till they crashed the truck, pools till they fucked up the chemicals and someone got a rash, at which point they got fired, stayed drunk two, three days, then started asking around again.
Then there were the boat guys, the fishermen and the mates. Jimmy Gibbs was one of those until a week or so ago, and from day to day, as his torn hands healed and his aching back unknotted, he remembered it as being a much better job than he'd thought it was when he'd had it. It was healthy outdoor work, had a lot of independence to it. Got him out on the water, paid him a decent if not a handsome wage, let him do what he was good at. That was the main thing, he realized now, as he used some beer to unstick pie crust from his gums. He knew what he was about out there. From icing the bait to battening down at the end of the day, he knew what he was doing.
Well, that was history. He couldn't go back to those docks. He wouldn't. Not after his big blowup and the quiet kiss-off from Matty Barnett. Not after his confident brag that he was coming back to buy the boat. He'd settled things with that one, no denying it. Not that he hadn't spouted off plenty of times before, made a lifelong hobby out of fucking up. But a person's life, he thought, was a lot like fishing line, it had a lot of give, a lot of stretch, but there came a time when the stretch was all played out, the suppleness was gone, you gave one small tug too many and the whole thing snapped, went dead and weightless in your hand. That's how his life felt now, dead and weightless like a snapped line, the fish gone, the battle over way too soon and without even the satisfaction of having been fairly beaten.
And why had it happened? Why? Jimmy Gibbs stared out the little picture window of his trailer, out at the miniature front yard made of gravel and the maze of circuit boxes and crisscrossed wires beyond, and it seemed ever clearer that it happened because he'd been given false hope by a Yankee, an outsider. That goddamn painting, the promised windfall that now fell short. All bets were off-that's what Sotheby's had told him, although they said it prettier than that. And meanwhile he'd gone over the edge. Bitterly, Jimmy Gibbs remembered Hogfish Mike's whispered counsel on the eve of Augie Silver's memorial: He's not your bubba. Well, Hogfish had been right, and he, Jimmy Gibbs, had been stupid to imagine that something good might come from a few friendly moments between a Yankee and a Conch. He'd made a basic and humiliating error: He'd believed the outside world might help him out. And now Augie Silver had cost him his job and his final chance at amounting to something. Maybe he hadn't meant to mess him up, but screw it, intentions didn't matter, results did. And the result was that, as usual, the rich outsider came up roses and the local guy got fucked.
It wasn't fair, it stank. Augie Silver somehow buys himself a second life, and Jimmy Gibbs loses his last best shot at the only life he's got. Two lives to none: The accounts didn't balance, that was pretty goddamn clear. Augie owed him. He ate pie and drank beer, and his tightly pulled-back graying hair crawled in outrage. The way things stood, it wasn't right. It wasn't right at all.
27
The death of Fred the parrot changed the cadences of conversation in the Silver house. It used to be that silent beats were rare; the bird would fill them with imbecile pronouncements that added nothing but, like trills in music, eased the way from one line to the next. Now there were empty moments, it was as if Augie and Nina and Reuben were still holding a place for the departed pet, though from day to day the pauses grew briefer, time was squeezing shut around the lost one, as time does.
But if Nina was worried about the bird's demise impeding her husband's recovery, she needn't have been. Augie was getting better every day, his vigor leapfrogged over itself, and the pace of his recuperation was accelerating. His appetite was coming back and had far outstripped the wimpy tastes of convalescence: Now he wanted oysters, strong cheese, steak. He drank Guinness like an Irish baby, and a hint of something almost like roundness began returning to his clean-shaven cheeks. Reuben had cut his hair, and, shorter, it had recaptured some of its waviness and spring, the tinsel dryness that had made him look like Father Time was gone. On the ninth of June, the two-week anniversary of his return, he asked Reuben to set up an easel, and he stood at it to draw. Beneath his baggy khaki shorts, the sinews in his scrawny legs flexed with a remembered strength.
With vitality comes restlessness, however, and on that evening, blissfully unaware that someone had perhaps tried to poison him, Augie told Nina he was tired of being quarantined, he was ready to get out on the street, to resume his life, to see some friends.
They were sitting on the love seat near the pool. Nina looked away on the pretext of following the flight of a dragonfly as it skimmed across the water. But the dragonfly vanished and her dilemma did not. She had vowed to shield her husband from all worries; this was the way to save his life. But serene ignorance could be very dangerous now that Augie, sociable Augie, was antsy to reclaim his place at the hub of his circle.
"You don't think it would be too-"
Augie stroked her short neat hair and interrupted. "Really, darling, you don't have to coddle me quite this much." There was a pause, and when the painter spoke again it was in a playful tone his wife had not heard for many months. "Here's what I'm gonna do," he said. "Tomorrow, seven-thirty, I'm just gonna pop in at Raul's. Perfectly casual. Hi guys, what's new? Won't that be a pisser?"
That night the oblivious painter slept profoundly. His wife stared at the ceiling, at the slowly turning fan whose soft blur riveted her gaze but failed to quell her racing mind. The thin white curtains billowed softly in the moonlight and passed along the damp cardboard smell of closed and shriveling flowers.
In the morning her eyes itched, her skin felt slack, and she had a headache that throbbed with every heartbea
t. She got up alone and made coffee. She sat alone at the counter and drank a cup. Her husband was back but now this new aloneness was upon her, aloneness with her suspicions, with what to her was certainty and to others might seem madness. She looked for a bright spot and found none: Either someone had tried to kill her husband and might try again, or she was losing her mind.
Promptly at eight, Reuben knocked at the door. She let him in. He took one look at her and asked if she was ill. By way of answer, she fixed him with a stare that frightened him. There was pleading in it, and also desperation, but more than that, the young man felt, there was a fierce and merciless probing of his worthiness. He struggled to survive that gaze, to muster a limitless and joyful yes to whatever it was that was being asked of him. He held his dark eyes open, tried to put his heart in their black centers. He must have passed the awful test, because after a long moment Nina said, "Reuben, I have to talk to you. There's no one else I can talk to, Reuben."
She led him through the house and out the back. Her steps were measured and oddly cautious, as if she was trying to assure herself she was still in contact with the ground. She skirted the pool, had made it almost to the pillow of shade cast by the poinciana tree when she stopped abruptly, like a person with a heavy suitcase who can't go one more step. Reuben was taken by surprise when she wheeled around, he walked into her words as into a hailstorm. "Someone's trying to murder Augie."
Reuben said nothing. He put the amazing statement into Spanish but it remained incomprehensible. His mouth opened just slightly and stayed that way.
"I know it sounds crazy," Nina said, and Reuben allowed himself silently to agree. Her voice was a throaty whisper, her gray eyes, usually placid, were red-rimmed and wild. Reuben at that moment was more afraid for her than for her husband.
She grabbed the young man's wrist and pulled him toward a chair. She sat leaning close to him, her hands on her knees and her head pitched conspiratorially forward like an asylum patient hissing paranoid lies about the staff. She told Reuben about the pecked-at tart, the connections not seen until later. She told him about going to the police, about Joe Mulvane's refusal of involvement; she explained as best she could about the logic of the art world and why the value of Augie's work was set to plummet. She realized in some bone-deep way that if she was enlisting Reuben's help she could hold back nothing and spare him nothing: She told him that she had suspected him.
"Yes, Reuben. When I saw you with the razor, when I fainted… I thought you'd slit his throat."
Reuben took this in. It hurt badly, the pain of it scoured his insides like a rough cloth full of salt. What had he done to deserve his friend's mistrust? Had his own friendship been imperfect? Or perhaps it was necessary to be mistrusted, to feel the shame and the burn of it, as a passage to a deeper trust.
"I did you a terrible injustice," Nina went on. "For this you have to forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive," the young man said. "There is nothing to be sorry when you are protecting your mate."
Nina seemed to take comfort from this, and Reuben was happy. "No," she said, "there isn't. But Reuben, I can't protect him all by myself. I can't. I need other eyes, other ears. I need someone to talk to. Will you help me, Reuben, will you help me protect him?"
Reuben leaned far forward, it almost seemed that, knightlike, he might go down onto one slim knee. He made bold to take Nina's hand. He didn't know if she was any longer sane. He didn't know if Augie was in true danger. But none of that mattered to his pledge. His pledge was between himself and his yearning, a contract with the ideal, untouchable by circumstance. "With my life," he said.
28
"I really don't need a baby-sitter," said Augie.
It was just after seven that evening. The artist was wearing baggy shorts and an ancient denim shirt with fraying buttonholes and paint dabs on the sleeves. His white hair rose and fell in random waves, his deep blue eyes were bright with the prospect of some good talk with his friends; he seemed almost his old self, minus forty pounds and most of his robustness.
"I only drive you there," said Reuben. "I wait outside."
"You're not a coachman," said Augie. "I don't want you to wait outside."
There was a pause, a stalemate in the living room. Nina had asked Reuben to accompany Augie to Raul's, and, by God, Reuben wasn't letting his friend go out alone.
Augie sighed, defeated. "All right," he said, "you'll drive me. But none of this waiting outside bullshit. You'll come in, you'll have a drink."
"No," said Reuben, "I be in the way."
This time it was the younger man who lost the stare-down.
"Okay," he said, "I have a drink. But at the bar. I leave you with your friends."
They got into the old Saab and drove the ten blocks to Raul's. Reuben, a fretful and unpracticed driver, never got past second gear and was hunkered over the steering wheel all the way.
The cafe was crowded, noisy, roiled with the converging currents of people eating on the early side and people extending cocktail hour to the late side. Waitresses slid by with big trays of iced oysters, loud drunks clamored for more beers. Augie, unaccustomed to the clatter of dishes and the press of bodies, felt both invigorated and drained as he picked his way among the tables. Reuben peeled off at the bar, laid claim to a corner stool while waving away the cigarette smoke, and the painter continued toward the alcove under the knuckly bougainvillea, where he knew his friends would be.
He saw them before they saw him, and he was comforted, reassured somehow, that his companions had stayed within the small snug orbit afforded by island life, that certain things about the universe had stayed in place, were still familiar. Clay Phipps still wore long linen trousers that crinkled up behind his knees. Robert Natchez still dressed all in black, in token of some showy grief or theoretical outlaw-hood. Ray Yates, more local than the locals, still wore faded palm tree shirts and drank tequila.
Augie, unseen, crept up to their table and said, "Hi guys, what's new?"
Conversation stopped, faces froze, there was a slow distended moment of some nameless guilt, as though the three seated men were kids caught doing something dirty. The awkwardness went on just long enough for Augie Silver to have the first faint inkling that something had gone wrong among his friends. Like rusty musicians, they were off the beat somehow; gestures were stiff, smiles tentative, nothing flowed.
But then Clay Phipps, gracious if not tranquil, was on his feet. For a moment the two old friends stood back and appraised each other in the brave and galling way that old friends do, each seeing in the other the deflating but tenderness-inspiring evidence of his own aging, his own mortality. To Augie, Phipps looked paunchy and somewhat dissolute: a bald, distracted man whose earlobes were stretching and whose shoulders were folding inward. To Phipps, Augie looked decrepit, dried up, stringy as a sparerib; there was something wrenching and undignified about the empty skin around his knees.
They were a couple of fellows on the cusp of being old; they moved together and embraced.
Reuben discreetly but unflinchingly watched them from the bar. He saw, as Augie could not see, the uneasy, ashen look on Phipps's face, a look not of joy but shame.
Yates and Natchez had stood up as well, they reached handshakes across the table that was bejeweled with rings of condensation from their glasses.
"Ray," said Augie warmly. "Bob."
The poet could not help wincing at the bland and Anglo syllable. He looked at Augie hard and said, "Roberto."
Augie thought he was kidding, though he didn't see the joke. "I go away a few months, and you have an ethnic reawakening?"
Natchez didn't laugh, didn't answer. He just resumed his seat, and Augie was more baffled than before. He decided to try his luck with Yates. "And Ray," he said. "Or Raymond. How're things with you?"
The fact was, things were worse than they had ever been, but the talk-show host didn't feel like going into it. He gave a beefy shrug accompanied by a head tilt that brought into the light the
lingering remains of the black eye Bruno had given him the week before. A greenish bruise was ringed by purple clotting; it was hard to overlook.
"Walk into a door?" Augie asked him.
By way of answer, Ray Yates said, "Siddown, have a drink."
The painter was settling into a chair when the waitress bustled over. Her name was Suzy, she knew Augie only as a customer, a friendly face, yet she put a hand on his shoulder and smiled broadly when she saw him, and he could not help thinking that this stranger seemed more unambiguously glad to see him than did his closest friends. He ordered a Scotch and water, weak.
"Weak!" exclaimed Clay Phipps as Suzy walked away. "My God, man, you must really have been through something. Tell us."
So Augie nursed his watery cocktail and told the story. He knew he'd be asked to tell it many times, it was already taking on a life of its own. It was a story with three characters, even though they were all called Augie. The burly, vigorous Augie who had gone off sailing on that unmenacing day in January was not the same as the mindless half-dead Augie floating away from Scavenger Reef, nor was he the same as the chastened re-emerging Augie who was spinning out the yam. The name was like a briefcase, monogrammed but hollow, the only thing that stayed the same as the contents were shuffled in and shuffled out. "So here I am," the latest Augie concluded, "back where I started, beat to hell, and in some weird way happier than I've ever been."
He broke off. Bar noise flooded the silence, the sun-seared bougainvillea rustled with a papery sound. Then Roberto Natchez said, "A charmed life."
The comment was not generous. It was sour, grouchy, warped by the annoyance people tend to feel at the excessive good fortune of another. Augie looked at the poet not in accusation but with mute inquiry: Was he jealous even of another man's near death? Natchez's face told him nothing; he glanced at Yates and Phipps and came away with the unsettling feeling that the poet had somehow spoken for all of them, that all were envious of his adventure, his resilience, that his return in some dim way affronted them. Suddenly Augie was depressed, confused. He wanted to believe that he was only tired, maybe the noise and the smoke and the unaccustomed sociability were draining him too much, overloading him and skewing his perceptions. But sitting there among his buddies he felt more exiled, more cast adrift, than when he had been lost at sea.
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