"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.
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
heartbeat. 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.
"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.