After what seemed a long time, Mulvane
continued. "If you learn anything, through friends, whatever, call
me. Don't do anything crazy."
The plastic box seemed to be waiting for an
answer, but Augie and Nina just stared at each other, and after a
few seconds Joe Mulvane hung up. A moment passed, then the dial
tone kicked in. It was a rude and ugly sound, urgent as a siren as
it blasted through the reedy speaker. Nina got up silently to turn
it off. "What now?" she said.
Augie blinked up at the ceiling. Fear and
bafflement had combined in his brain to produce something verging
on indifference, a numbness that allowed for certain threads of
clarity running through a fabric whose larger pattern had stopped
making sense. "Let's call Natchez," he suggested. "He'll know where
Ray is, if anybody does."
Nina dialed. Then she switched the speaker
on and nestled next to her husband. The phone rang two times, three
times, and on the fourth it was picked up; there followed the
telltale pause of an answering machine.
Then the poet's voice, somber and imperious,
filled the Silvers' living room.
"You have reached the home and workplace of
Roberto Natchez," it said. The R's had a lot of tongue, the O's
were round as sea-tossed stones. Augie and Nina stared first at
each other, then at the phone.
"I do not often take calls," the message
continued. "I make no promise to return them. I have much to do.
You may leave a message if you wish."
In the short space before the beep, Augie
tried without much luck to collect his thoughts. "Natch, it's
Augie, call me" was all he could manage to say.
Nina went to the phone, pre-empted the
intrusion of the dial tone. "He sounds deranged," she said.
Augie didn't answer. He was thinking at that
moment not about Natchez's sanity but his own. Not so many months
ago, he'd been walloped on the head, had a concussion and amnesia.
His brain had been blood-starved, sun-baked, desiccated. How sure
could he be that he'd ever quite recovered? Suddenly he was scared
in a different way than he had been before. He leaned forward, put
his elbows on his knees. His voice was soft and a little shaky.
"Nina," he said, "if something was wrong
with me, with my mind I mean, you wouldn't hide it from me, would
you?"
She moved to him quickly, her feet made no
sound on the floor. She squatted down in front of him and took his
hands. "I don't understand."
"I would want to know. If I was going crazy,
if I was crazy. . . . Promise me you'd tell me, you'd help me
understand that much at least. Promise."
She held his eyes. In her gaze was love and
respect and no false kindness.
"Good," said Augie. "Good. 'Cause, Nina, all
of this is seeming very strange to me."
It was the same shy, modest Reuben who
knocked first, then unlocked the front door of the Silver house at
eight o'clock on Monday morning. Heroism had not changed him,
because it hadn't dawned on him that he was a hero. What he'd done
did not require courage, as he saw it, but only vigilance and
loyalty. Those qualities the young man did credit himself with
having, but he didn't regard them as anything that should be
thought of as rare. They were the basic things a friend should be.
If bold acts followed from them, it was only because circumstance
had allowed a friend to be a friend.
He was surprised,
therefore, when Augie, dressed in shaving coat and slippers, came
sweeping out of the bedroom and took him in his arms. The painter
pressed the housekeeper's lean chest against his own, swayed with
him a moment as in a slow dance, and kissed the top of his head.
"Reuben," he murmured. "Reuben, what a fellow you are.
Machisimo.
"
The young man allowed his hands to rest
lightly on his friend's back, his cheek to he against the painter's
shoulder. Augie smelled like soap and toothpaste, the moist warmth
of a shower was still pulsing off him in waves. Reuben was happy.
He felt that he was getting back more than he possibly could have
given. When Augie at last withdrew from the embrace but still held
on to Reuben's arms, the young man's eyes were gleaming, his heart
was healed, his lips arced in a small smile that was as solemn as
it was joyful.
"You are feeling all right?" he asked.
Augie did not immediately answer. Rather, he
spun toward the living room, an unaccustomed manic edginess making
his movements angular, abrupt. "Today?" he said. "Today I feel
fine. Full of fight. But yesterday, Reuben, yesterday was one of
the worst days of my life." He perched briefly on the arm of the
sofa, then sprang up again, weakly but not without a certain
jauntiness. "Did you ever have a day, Reuben, when it suddenly
seemed that you'd been kidding yourself your whole life long, that
you've been mistaken about everything and everyone, that everything
you've believed in has been wrong?"
Reuben looked at him. He was sorry Augie had
felt bad, glad that Augie was telling him. It did not occur to him
that maybe the question was not meant to be answered.
"No," he said.
Augie pulled up short.
"The things I believe," Reuben went on,
"there are not many, but I never doubt them. Maybe they are not
possible. But I know that they are right."
The words soothed Augie like a rubdown; the
tightness went out of his posture and he sat. "Yes, Reuben," he
said abstractedly. "Yes. Damnit, that's exactly as it should
be."
There was a long silence except for the dry
rattle of the palm fronds, the soft scrape of leaves against the
tin roof. Then Reuben said, "Where is Nina?"
"In bed," said Augie. "She had an awful
night. Come here, Reuben. Sit down."
He patted the sofa next to him, and the
housekeeper very tentatively parked himself on the edge of it.
"I know what's going on, Reuben," the
painter said. "Nina and I have spoken. We've talked to the
police."
The young man looked at the blond wood floor
between his feet. "Were we wrong—"
Augie waved the question away. "Not at all,
not at all. But Reuben, here's the thing. Yesterday I was so glum,
so rattled, I almost forgot to be pissed off. Then all of a sudden
I said to myself, Wait a second, someone's trying to kill you, and
your reaction is to get depressed? That's too much philosophy where
your balls should be. So I got mad. Very mad.
"Reuben, the auction is one week from today.
Between now and then, I'm gonna find out who's after me, I'm gonna
find out why, and I'm gonna put that person out of business. I
don't know how, but I'm gonna do it. Nina's closing the gallery for
the week. We'd like you to be here with us. Can you move in for a
while?"
The young man puffed with pride and sat up
very straight. "Of course," he said. "Of course. Later on I'll get
my things."
Then he stood, moved lithely to the kitchen,
and put his apron on. Hero or no, it was still his job to dust, to
do the dishes, plump the pillows, and arrange the flowers.
Art happens when a person of talent is
seized with nervous energy and discovers that he or she has nothing
to do except create.
At around 9
a.m
., pacing aimlessly
along the blind paths of his newfound rage, Augie decided he wanted
to paint. He wanted to work on something big, something bright,
something that would confirm him in his resolve while at the same
time providing respite from his preoccupation and his fear. He
asked Reuben to scavenge through the storage room and pull out the
largest easel he could find, along with a huge canvas, eight feet
by five, that had been stretched and gessoed ages ago and never
used.
Not till the canvas had
been set up in the shade of the poinciana tree did Augie have the
faintest notion of what the painting's subject would be; and then
he knew at once. It would be a picture of Fred, an
hommage
to the murdered
parrot who had died as a proxy for its master.
"Green," the painter said to Reuben. "I'll
need a lot of green. And a ladder. I'm starting at the upper left.
There's jungle there, can you see it, Reuben? Vines with purple
flowers. And berries tempting as tits. Parrot heaven. Maybe some
monkeys peeking out, very small."
He climbed the ladder, his wizened legs
twitchy in the khaki shorts, and he began to work. Extravagant
leaves appeared, veined and pendant; suggestions of muted sunlight
filtered through from everywhere. Augie hummed as he painted; he
didn't seem to know it. He smacked his lips as here and there he
plopped down dollops of bright red among the foliage: succulent
fruits full of sun-warm juice. He painted, and he thought of
nothing, yet in that fecund blankness certain things became clear
to him. Suddenly he understood that whoever was trying to kill him
was an awful coward. A poisoned tart that killed a bird, a car as
murder weapon; these were craven stratagems, and in that
realization was both a comfort and a warning. Augie now felt
confident that no one would confront him, no one would appear
before him with a loaded gun. He understood too that no ploy, no
deceit would be too abject or too crass for this enemy. He painted.
The gloriously tangled canopy of leaves took shape, trumpet flowers
in orange and magenta were strung along the vines, and after a
couple of hours Augie realized quite abruptly that he was happily
exhausted. He came down from the ladder on stiff knees, handed his
brush and palette to Reuben, then walked on feet that tingled to
his bed.
*
When Augie awoke from his nap, Reuben had
already set lunch on the shady table near the pool, and Nina, who
had slept late but was still frazzled and unrested, was on a
rave.
"I tried calling Robert again," she was
saying. "Same crazy message. And I just think it's really shitty
that he doesn't even return the call."
Augie looked down at the plates of sliced
fruits and cold seafood. Painting made him hungry. That was one of
the things he loved about it. "Maybe he's away. Maybe he didn't get
the message."
"It's not like we're wasting his precious
time with chitchat," Nina went on. "If he knows where Ray is . . .
And come on—he's not away. He's got no money and nowhere to go.
He's just being—"
"Being what?"
"Being arrogant. Being secretive. Being
himself."
They ate. Augie sucked meat from a crab
claw, then, as if thinking aloud, said softly, "I thought you liked
Natch."
"I've enjoyed him at moments," said Nina
grudgingly. She nibbled at a wedge of avocado. "But everything
seems different now. I just feel so let down, so disappointed in
them all."
Augie frowned at his food. He knew what she
was saying, he'd felt it too. He passed along another of the
unsought consolations that had come to him while working. "Nina,"
he said, "someone is trying to do something terrible to us. That
doesn't mean everyone is guilty."
"No?" said his wife. She put her fork down,
dabbed her mouth on a napkin, then fixed her husband with a naked
stare. "Then why do I feel that they are?"
The stairway up to Roberto Natchez's
third-floor garret was narrow and steep and smelled like dead
flowers mingled with onions simmered long ago. Heat spiraled up
along the banister and collected in a shimmering mist beneath the
wire-strengthened skylight cut into the sunstruck metal roof. It
got hotter with each step, and even the young and slender Reuben
was damp between the shoulder blades by the time he reached the
poet's door. He mopped his forehead on his handkerchief, took a
moment to collect himself, and knocked.
Natchez looked up from the blank sheet of
paper angled exactingly in front of him. He did not get many
visitors, and he hid from himself the truth that he was grateful
and curious to have one now, telling himself instead that he was
annoyed at this interruption of his labors. He put down his pen
with a show of irritation, then stood and examined himself briefly
in the full length mirror tucked in a dim alcove near his desk.
Content that his black shirt was presentable, he walked the two
steps to the door.
He saw Reuben standing there and felt a
flash of disappointment. He'd imagined a more important-looking
caller. "Yes?" he curtly said.
"I am sent by Mr. and Mrs. Silver," Reuben
said. "They would like to speak with you."
"I know they would," said Natchez, as though
it was obvious that everyone wanted to speak with him. He turned
away and the momentum of turning carried him once again into his
living room. Reuben decided to regard this as an invitation to
enter, and he followed the poet in. Natchez wheeled on him. "I got
their messages," he said.
"So why you don't call back?" pressed the
messenger. "They speak of you as a friend."
Natchez squelched a pang of guilt before it
could register as such, and went on the offensive. "And who are
you?"
"I am Reuben."
Natchez nodded sagely and as if somehow
vindicated. "Spanish."
"American."
The poet nodded again, a condescending smirk
spreading across his mouth the way a drop of sludge smears itself
across a puddle. He was standing near his desk now, and when he
spoke he did not look right at Reuben, but a little off to the
side. "American," he scoffed. "That's what the new ones always say.
American. They say it with pride, as if it were some great
accomplishment to come here and be used."
"I am not used," said Reuben. "I do what I
want to do."
"Of course," said Natchez, sneering. "You
want to run errands for the Anglos. You want to clean their
toilets. You want to pick up the crumbs from their tables."
Reuben found the lecture boring; he'd heard
it before, in neighborhood bodegas, from old men playing dominoes.
What did interest him, though, was the question of why Natchez
didn't look at him while he lectured. He came a half-step farther
into the living room and realized that the poet was watching
himself in the mirror: practicing his delivery, but practicing for
what?