Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

"Mrs. Silvers?"

  "Silver."

  "Yes. This is Freddy McClintock, Key West Sentinel—"

  "Thank you, we don't want a subscription."

  "We? Did you say we?"

  Nina pulled the phone a few inches from her ear. Caution was not a habit with her, not since she'd left New York, nor was the feeling that she had anything to hide. "What is it you want?" she asked.

  The reporter cleared his throat. "I've heard from a couple of sources that your husband has been seen. Alive."

  Nina said nothing.

  "And I thought it'd make a terrific story," McClintock went on. " 'Key West's Own Lazarus.' Or Jonah. Maybe Jonah would be better. He was lost at sea, wasn't he?"

  "What if your rumor's wrong, Mr. McClintock? What if you're talking to a widow?"

  "Am I?" the reporter countered. "Is your husband alive, Mrs. Silver?"

  "I never for a moment believed that he was dead."

  "So you're saying he's alive?"

  "What I'm saying is goodbye."

  For a second she stared at the telephone as if she'd never seen one before. Then she went back to the bedroom and checked on her husband's heroic progress through half a cupful of soup.

  "Who was it?" he asked.

  "Hm?" she said. "Wrong number." A quick wave of nausea rippled through her stomach. It was an innocent fib, a protective fib, but she could not remember ever being untruthful with her husband before, and the words left a sick taste in her mouth. Stress. She had vowed to shield him from stress, to spread a calm place around him the way a tree throws a pool of shade. And it was just beginning to dawn on her that a tree casts shade only by suffering the heat itself.

  *

  As it stood, it was not much of a story. But then, the Sentinel was not much of a paper.

  "No interview. No real confirmation. Do we go with it?" McClintock asked Arty Magnus, his editor, idol, and reluctant mentor.

  "Ya got anything better?" Magnus, a wildly impractical man in all other aspects of his life, took an extremely pragmatic approach to the newspaper business. This was mainly because he didn't care about it very much. Facts bored him. Actual quotes from actual sources were always deathly dull. The best parts of a story were always the parts that somebody made up, but Magnus couldn't bring himself to tell that to the sincere, impressionable, and slightly stupid Freddy McClintock.

  The young reporter riffled through his notebook. It seemed the professional thing to do, though he knew damn well he had nothing better or even anything else. "No," he said at last.

  "Well then," Magnus said with a shrug. He shrugged a lot, it was a symptom of his stifled zest. He was forty and he didn't want to be sitting at a newspaper desk in front of an ancient air conditioner that managed to dribble condensation without cooling any air; he wanted to be writing novels in front of a huge window with an ocean view. Oceans of narrative truth, that's what he wanted, not flat and stagnant little pools of information. One of these days he'd find something to say, and he would say it wisely and well.

  McClintock pressed the eraser end of his pencil against his lower lip. "Boss," he meekly said, "what if I say he's alive and he isn't? Is that libel?"

  Magnus locked his hands behind his head and pushed back in his squeaky chair. "Freddy, do you bear malice in your heart toward Augie Silver?"

  "I don't even know the man."

  "No malice, no libel."

  "I know, I know," McClintock said. "But what about for dead people?"

  His editor considered. Facts bored him, yes, but occasionally they pretzeled up into paradoxes he found amusing. "The only other criterion is demonstrable economic damage to someone's reputation. . . . But if someone's dead, how can you damage his reputation just by claiming he's alive?"

  Arty Magnus was a savvy fellow, but he didn't understand the market for fine art.

  17

  "Sonofabitch," said Kip Cunningham. "Sonofabitch. That bastard is going to spoil everything."

  He wriggled in the stately leather chair in the locker room of the University Club, then adjusted the thick towel that had gotten tangled between his thighs as he twisted. Not far away, his squash racquet lay on top of a pile of dirty sweaty clothes that a flunky would pick up, launder, and neatly fold. He sipped his club soda and lime and cradled the phone against an ear that was still damp from the shower.

  "It's only a rumor, darling," said his wife. She'd taken to calling him darling again, and Cunningham was too oblivious to notice that she called him that the way some people call a Lhasa apso Killer or a knocked-out fighter Champ.

  "Rumor? You just said it was in the paper."

  "Not a real paper," she said. "Only the Sentinel. And the Sentinel always gets things wrong."

  Cunningham sipped his soda and looked for the comfort in this. A couple of club colleagues strolled by, splotched with sweat and red as beef, and the bankrupt tried to look like he was doing business, real business, rather than helplessly hoping his wife would finesse him out of hock. Importantly, with great acumen, he moved the phone to his other ear.

  "What if it isn't wrong?" he said at last.

  Claire Steiger looked out her office window onto 57th Street. It was just after six. People were darting home from work, out for drinks, to early movies, to the park for a stroll. She tried to remember, and vaguely could, the romance, the dim still perfection of warm late-May dusks in Manhattan. Going to the theater while at the western verge of 45th Street the sky was red above the river. The cafe off Madison where darkness would slip in soft as Margaux while her handsome husband told laconic but exciting tales of business and she tried to think past his immaculate shirts to his skin. Was that this same city in this same season?

  "Awkward," she said. "It would be very awkward."

  "Muck up the auction," said Kip Cunningham. It wasn't a question, wasn't a statement, just a mumble. Absently he glanced toward his dressing cubicle where a white-haired black man was stooping slowly to gather his dirty clothes. "Maybe people won't find out," he added. The sneak's last hope.

  "Kip, don't be an ass. True, not true, anybody who might conceivably be interested is going to hear about this by tomorrow."

  There was a silence. The squash player looked across the locker room at a calendar near the pro shop window. It was a pin-up calendar of sorts, but instead of women as the objects of desire, each month had a different yacht. May had an elegant Concordia with tanbark sails, but Kip Cunningham wasn't looking at the boat. He was counting days until the Solstice Show, gauging how much time it would take for things to fall apart. "So how'll it play?"

  His wife had turned her back on the window, on its mocking promise. "Depends," she said. "Best-case scenario, the rumor is false. Nothing has really changed, and this buzz about the artist's return just adds interest."

  Oddly, disconnectedly, Kip Cunningham began to chuckle.

  Claire Steiger could find nothing remotely humorous in what she'd said, and she imagined her husband must be party to some clownishness in the locker room. "Kip, if you can't even pay attention to what I say—"

  "Oh," he interrupted, "I'm paying very close attention. You just said you hope that Augie Silver's dead."

  The artist's dealer underwent a hellish moment of knowing she'd been caught, a moment as unsettling and humiliating as being discovered naked in a dream. She squirmed in her chair as though dodging thrown rocks, scrambled in her mind for some avenue of excuse, some route of escape. "I didn't say anything about Augie Silver," she protested, and her voice was thin and shrill. "I was only talking about the situation."

  Kip Cunningham had not won much lately, not in business, not in squash, not in his marriage. He savored the event, let it fill his senses like wine, and when he answered, it was in the sweetly condescending tone of the victor. "But, my dear," he said, "Augie Silver is the situation."

  *

  The next day was a Tuesday, and just after ten o'clock in the morning Reuben the Cuban climbed the three porch steps of the widow Silver's house. The k
ey he'd been given many months before was in his hand, but even though he knew that Mrs. Silver would not be home, would be working at her gallery, he knocked. It was the proper thing to do, not only for a housekeeper but for anyone approaching another's place. He knocked, he waited, and was just moving the key toward the lock when the door swung open.

  Nina Silver stood before him, and even though she was smiling, Reuben was concerned that she was ill or freighted with that sadness that weighed people down like the muck around the mangroves, that made it so hard for them to move that they stayed in their houses, then in their rooms, and finally in their beds. With his eyes, he asked if she was all right.

  By way of answer she grabbed him by his slender wrist and coaxed him across the threshold into the living room. "Reuben," she said, "something wonderful has happened. Mr. Silver has come back."

  He looked at her, then past her shoulder at the blues and greens, the curves and edges of her husband's paintings. She did not seem crazy, but Reuben was afraid for her. Hadn't he served at the dead painter's memorial? Hadn't he heard the bald man with the deep voice give the eulogy?

  "Come," the former widow said, and again she took his wrist. "I'll show you."

  Reuben's feet did not want to move, it was as if they'd been replaced by wooden skids that scraped hotly across the floor. He dreaded the moment when he would stand in the bedroom doorway and see nothing, and would know that he had lost a second friend, not to the ocean this time but to that other bottomless sea called madness. He struggled for the courage not to close his eyes.

  He let himself be dragged down the hallway, and when he saw Augie Silver propped on pillows, his white beard billowing forth like foam, he did the pure and necessary thing. He fell to his knees with his chest across the returned man's bed and wept against the back of his bony hand. His tears left dark streaks on the sun-scorched skin that was white-coated with a powdery dryness. The parrot looked on and did a slow dance on its perch.

  "I pray for you," Reuben said through his weeping. "I don't like to pray, I don't believe, but I pray for you, then I feel like I believe enough to feel bad I don't believe, so I shouldn't pray. But I pray for you, Meester Silber. I do."

  Augie put his hand on the young man's dark hair. "You're a pal, Reuben. You're really a pal."

  He received the words like an anointment and answered with a knightly modesty. "Yes," he said. "A pal for you. And for Meesus Silber too. A pal." He stood up, wiped his eyes.

  "The Cubans saved my life, you know."

  "Yes?" said Reuben. There was confusion in his heart. The Cubans were his people, and if they were kind to Mister Silver he was proud. But the Cubans were also the ones who called him maricon and made him feel cast out, who scoffed and threatened and mimicked his walk. Why was he outside the circle of their kindness?

  "I'll tell you about it sometime," Augie said, and then Nina caught Reuben's eye and gestured him out of the convalescent's room.

  They went to the kitchen. Morning light was pouring in through the French doors at the back of the house. Hibiscus flowers were stretching fully open, their pistils brassy with pollen and thrust forth like silent trumpets. The dark leaves of the oleanders looked almost blue.

  "Reuben," Nina said, "Mr. Silver has been very sick."

  The young man breathed deeply, taking the weight of his friend's illness into himself. He nodded solemnly.

  "He needs a long rest, a perfect rest. And he needs someone to spend the days with him, to make sure he isn't bothered. Someone whose company he finds soothing. So I was wondering—"

  "I will do it," Reuben said.

  She looked at him, began just barely to smile, then understood that a smile was not called for, would cheapen the moment. "Maybe you should think about—"

  "I will do it," he repeated.

  "But Reuben, your other jobs. You should speak to Mrs. Dugan."

  "I will tell Mrs. Dugan."

  Nina lifted her eyebrows and looked down at her cuticles. She knew Sandra Dugan slightly—a quiet woman and nobody's pushover, a recent New York transplant who ran her business as a business: She had imported to Key West the exotic notion that a person might show up to clean two weeks in a row. "Maybe you should ask Mrs. Dugan."

  Reuben gave a philosophic shrug. "It is no difference. If I ask and she says no, I quit. If I tell and she doesn't like that I tell, I am fired. It is the same."

  "But Reuben—"

  "Meesus Silber, please. It is what I wish to do."

  And so it was agreed.

  Reuben put his apron on and started to clean, humming Cuban songs. He dusted, he vacuumed, he cut flowers from the yard and arranged them neatly in porcelain vases. He was happy and proud. He had been singled out, called upon to serve, to care, to have the privilege of watching his friend grow stronger. He would watch him like a fisherman watches the sky, alert and knowing, the first to see a change, a danger. He would be the kind of friend he wished he had, and so perhaps become worthy of having such a friend himself.

  18

  "Maybe it's like an Elvis sighting," said Ray Yates. "You know, a delusion people have to link themselves to someone famous, to feel important."

  "Our friend Augie," said Clay Phipps, "wasn't quite that much of a celebrity."

  "Local celebrity," Yates countered, "local delusion."

  The talk-show host had just finished work. His theme music, as usual, had made him thirsty, and now he was drinking with his buddies at Raul's. Overhead, misted stars showed here and there through the thinning bougainvillea. The relentless heat had baked most of the flowers away, they'd puckered up and fallen, fluttering to the ground like singed moths. What would survive the summer was mostly just a knuckly vine armed with thorns as sharp as fish hooks.

  Robert Natchez took a pull on his rum, then clattered his glass onto the varnished table. The mention of Elvis had made him testy, as references to pop culture always did. Why did intelligent people gum up their brains with such garbage? How did such inane and trivial crap insinuate itself into the conversation of the sophisticated? "Look," he said, "it's one more instance of the Sentinel fucking up. Why not just leave it at that?"

  "You don't have to get mad," said Clay Phipps. It was a way of egging the poet on, and it always worked.

  "I do have to get mad," he said. "We're trying to have a civilized discussion here, and suddenly it's dragged down to the level of some Shirley MacLaine, Oprah fucking Winfrey, Nazi diet horseshit. Tabloid television. It's cheap. It's disgusting."

  Phipps sipped his Meursault, noted how its caramel low notes came forward as the wine warmed, and tried to look contrite. "All right, Natch," he said, "you pick the level of discourse."

  Natchez froze for an instant like a second-string halfback who's been clamoring all season to carry the ball and realizes suddenly he's got to run with it. "All right," he said, "all right." He cleared his throat, took a sip of rum. "First of all, we're all agreed that Augie is dead and the newspaper is wrong. Right?"

  He sought out his friends' eyes and extorted hesitant nods, though the fact was there was no more reason to doubt the published story than to believe it.

  "O.K.," Natchez agreed with himself. "So how does a sick rumor like this get started? Is it just that so little happens in this town that make-believe is required to fill in the blanks? Is it some lunatic form of homage? Does it start as an innocent mistake—someone who doesn't even know them sees Nina standing for half a second next to someone who vaguely resembles Augie, and boom, right away it's the buzz of Duval Street?"

  Ray Yates had been sitting with his forearms flat across the table. A thin film of sweat had glued them to the varnish, his skin made a sound like tape lifting as he shifted positions to raise a finger. "Natch, hey," he said, "back up a step. What makes us so sure the rumor isn't true?"

  The poet paused a beat, then visibly brightened, having thought of one of the glib but vacuous pronouncements of which he was so proud. "Because a person gets one life and one death. And Augie's had
his."

  "Very neat," said Clay Phipps, "but what if it just ain't so? What if he's had his one life and his one death, and it turns out he's alive again?"

  There was an odd thing about Robert Natchez's bardic pronouncements: Once he'd made one he was stuck with it, he'd go to any length of logical gymnastics and verbal fireworks rather than admit that his lovely remark was finally devoid of content. "Then, by definition," he blithely announced, "he's no longer a person."

  "Now you're being an asshole," said Ray Yates.

  The poet was undaunted. He was happy. He was holding center stage, and besides, ideas in which people vaguely figured held his interest a great deal more than people did. "No," he said. It was not exactly a denial that he was being an asshole, more a categorical disagreement with anything anyone else might say. "Look, a person has certain prerogatives. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, that kind of bullshit. You think those prerogatives are boundless? No. They apply to one life, one death, one period of mourning. Once a person has used those up . . ."

  Natchez fell silent and dimly realized he had no idea what he would say next. Yates and Phipps were staring at him, not drunk but not quite sober either, their eyes a little soupy with alcohol and mugginess. Beyond the knuckly bougainvillea, sodden summer clouds were massing; muted lightning bounced around inside them, indistinct and fleeting. The poet was not the type to leave a line of thought unfinished, but he understood that to go farther was reckless. It wasn't so much that he would say what he believed as that he would have no choice but to believe what he had said, since no utterances except his own could penetrate his skepticism and teach him anything. Recklessly, he continued.

  "Once a person has used up his life and his death, he's got no rights left, don'tcha see? Laws don't apply or protect him, usual standards make no sense. He's an outsider more than any living person can be an outsider. An alien, a ghost."

  "How about if he's a friend of ours?" Clay Phipps asked mildly.

  "Can a ghost be a friend?" Natchez shot back. "Can a ghost be anything?"