"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?"
"You're crazy," said Ray Yates, to which
Robert Natchez gave a satisfied smile.
They went back to their drinks, and the
smell of the air changed. Suddenly it was carrying salt and iodine
and a suggestion of dry shells. Clay Phipps poured the last of his
unshared wine and turned the empty bottle upside down in the bucket
of long-melted ice. "S'gonna storm," he said.
"S'gonna be weird," Yates mused, "if Augie
really is alive."
"Wouldn't be hard to find out," Natchez
said.
Phipps regarded this as a challenge aimed
squarely at him, and he hid his eyes in his glass. He wanted no
more than the others to be the one to ask Nina Silver if Augie had
returned. He could think of no delicate way to phrase the question,
and he didn't want to confront her redoubled grief if the rumor
turned out to be false. But Phipps had once upon a time been Augie
Silver's best friend. He'd been his eulogist; he'd tried, albeit
feebly, to seduce his presumptive widow. "All right," he said, in
the tone of a guilty man taking on a debt of penance. "I'll find
out. I'll stop by. Tomorrow."
*
The rain came just as the three friends were
parting on the sidewalk.
It came down heavy but slow, in fat warm
creamy drops driven now and then by soft gusts that blew sheets of
it sideways past the streetlights while other parts rained down
straight as tap water. Ray Yates was soaked before he'd even
reached his scooter; his pink and lime-green shirt wrapped him like
a tattooed second skin. He kick-started the little bike; the gears
clattered unpromisingly, then a spark survived the deluge and the
motor whined, making a sound like a mosquito in your ear while
you're asleep.
Key West is very flat and almost all of it
is paved; the place drains about as well as a concrete basement
without a sump, and a heavy downpour turns it almost instantly into
a paddy-like landscape of uprooted garbage cans and fallen palm
fronds scudding by like rafts. Yates drove slowly. Water came
halfway up the scooter's spoked wheels; water streamed down his
legs and between his toes, over the oozing leather of his open
sandals. He wound his way through the narrow streets of Old Town,
then was able to go just a little faster on the stretch of A1A
along Smathers Beach. Dollops of rain pelted his forehead. A pickup
truck went by too fast and threw an arcing wave that broke at
shoulder height. By the time he'd reached his home on Houseboat Row
and locked the scooter to a No Parking sign, his hands and cheeks
had been slapped pink by shards of water and three postage stamps
buried deep in his wallet had glued themselves to the back of his
library card.
His head was down against the rain as he
bounded soggily along his gangplank. He didn't see the large dark
figure waiting for him there. " 'Lo, Ray," it said.
Yates recognized the voice and instantly
felt his bowels go soft, a jolting knife-edged heat suffused his
cool soaked khaki shorts. He stopped walking and stood there
breathless in the rain.
"You're late onna payment again, Ray," the
figure said. "Tha' shit gets old."
There are moments in life when anything you
do or say is wrong, and if you do and say nothing, that's wrong
too. Yates wrestled with the question of meeting his accuser's
eyes, though he knew that nothing better or worse would come of it.
There were no excuses to be made and no sympathy to be found: This
was Bruno. Bruno was a bagman and enforcer for a Miami-based loan
shark, bookmaker, and drug pusher named Charlie Ponte, and he was
very good at his job. He was loyal as a Doberman and neutral as a
snake, unburdened by intelligence and built like a pizza oven.
'Twice I let ya go already," Bruno said. "It don't look right, like
I'm fucking off. Ya got twelve hunnerd bucks for me?"
The two of them stood there in the pouring
rain and neither seemed to notice it was raining. The ocean was
pocked, curtains of wet swirled in front of the headlights of the
occasional passing car. Ray Yates was into Charlie Ponte for forty
thousand dollars. The interest rate was 1.5 percent a week, and
Yates had punted on two payments. The gambler had had losing
streaks before, but never like this. This was the kind of losing
streak from which people sometimes did not recover. "Bruno," he
said, "I got like forty dollars in my pocket. Friday I get four
hundred something. You can have it all, every penny."
"Ya don't take me serious," Bruno said.
"I do. I do," said Yates.
"Nah," said Bruno. He sounded sad and
neutral. "On'y way you're gonna take me serious is if I hurt
ya."
Without hurry, he moved through the rain
toward Ray Yates, and Ray Yates didn't budge. There is a pathetic
inevitability in a confrontation between someone who is tough and
someone who is not. It is not a struggle but a ritual, the weak one
keeps his anguish to himself and goes down with the humble and
defeated silence of some toothless creature being gutted alive by a
lion. Yates blinked water off his lashes and peed in his pants.
Then Bruno smashed him between his left cheekbone and the socket of
his eye. The blow came so quick that the debtor didn't know if he'd
been hit with a fist, a forearm, or an elbow. His head snapped back
and he turned half sideways, and Bruno pummeled the exposed flank
with a punch that shook blood out of Yates's lung. He went down on
one bare knee and covered up as best he could. Rain and snot poured
down his throat as he labored to get back his wind.
Bruno stood over him, patient as death. He
reached into a pocket for his cigarettes, then seemed to notice for
the first time that he was soaking wet. He threw the ruined smokes
into the water and found a stick of gum instead. He unwrapped it,
folded it into his mouth, then gave his quarry a casual kick in the
ass. "More?" he asked. He asked as casually as if he were offering
a second helping of potatoes.
"No, Bruno," Ray Yates whispered. "No
more."
"Stan' up like a man then. Ya look
ridiculous."
Yates got to his feet. The left side of his
face was already beginning to swell, the eye squeezing shut at the
outside corner. His knees were jelly and he leaned against the
frail wooden railing of his walkway.
"Sataday it goes ta eighteen hunnerd," Bruno
said. His face was close to Yates's now, and the gambler smelled
spearmint gum and garlic through the salty rain. "Fuck we gonna do
about that, Ray?"
Yates's throat clamped shut, and for a while
he couldn't speak. "Bruno," he rasped at last, "I don't know. The
truth, Bruno? Short of a miracle, I'm not gonna have the money for
another three, four weeks."
The enforcer spit his gum. It hit Yates in
the forehead then bounced into the ocean. "That stinks. My
business, that's a long time in my business."
"Look, tack on a penalty, double the
interest, anything you want. Like I told you, Bruno, it's about
those paintings. Once they're auctioned there'll be plenty of cash,
I'll pay off in full, I swear."
Bruno put his hands on Yates's shoulders.
The gesture was almost friendly, until he started pushing with his
ramrod thumbs into the soft places behind the other man's
collarbones. "How long's it been since you won a fucking bet,
Ray?"
It was a gauche question and Yates didn't
answer.
"What if you lose this next one too? What
then?"
"Those pictures aren't a bet, Bruno. They're
money in the bank."
The tough guy dropped his hands, moved his
tongue around inside his cheek, and seemed to be considering. Then
he looked up at the sky. Rain was still pouring down in big frothy
drops, it ran in rivulets between his oily bundles of slick black
hair. "Gonna catch cold on accounta you," he said, suddenly taking
things personally. "I hate that, a summer cold."
He grabbed the front of Yates's tropical
shirt, pulled him forward, then thrust him backward against the
wooden rail. The rail was nothing more than a two-by-four nailed
onto posts, and the beefy Yates crashed through it like a bowling
ball through pins. The water next to the seawall was too shallow to
break his fall; knobs of coral racked his legs and slammed against
his back and he lay there stunned amid the beer cans and the
condoms, the turds and tampons shot out the bottoms of people's
boats.
Bruno looked enormous standing on the
gangplank. "I'll see what Mr. Ponte wants to do with you," he
said.
He walked off slowly through the rain, and
Ray Yates lay dead still in the slimy water until he was very sure
the big man wasn't coming back.