Augie ran a hand over the crests and troughs
of his wavy white hair. "Well, it happened when I was stranded down
in Cuba—"
"You were shipwrecked, weren't you?" put in
Arty Magnus. "Marooned?"
"Yes," said Augie. "Right. I guess I really
should begin with that. Back in January . . ."
The New York critic briefly shut his eyes,
shifted impatiently in his chair. He was there to talk about art,
not shipwrecks. He knew as much of the shipwreck tale as he needed
and he had a tight deadline to meet. Besides, he'd already decided
what the gist of his story would be; all he needed was some quotes
to flesh it out.
"... so by the time I came around," Augie
was concluding, "I'd decided I'd been a perverse and arrogant ass
to give up painting. I felt that I was shirking in some way. Not a
way that mattered to anybody else—"
"Apparently it does matter to someone else,"
the local newspaperman interrupted. "Isn't it true that there've
been threats against your life?"
Nina was sitting next to Augie on the couch.
They took a moment to consult each other's eyes. They hadn't been
able to decide in advance how public they would go, what, if
anything, they'd refuse to divulge.
"Something about a poisoned bird?" pressed
Arty Magnus. "About an attempted hit-and-run?"
Peter Brandenburg dropped all pretense of
hiding his restlessness. He squirmed, his face grew petulant and
sour. "Excuse me," he said, "but I thought we were here to talk
about your work, not indulge in sordid gossip."
The tone was meant to offend, but the
sharpness of it was blunted by the humid air, heavy as wet wool,
and Augie answered not with umbrage but with a languid irony. "It
would be nice to have the luxury to separate the two."
There was an uneasy silence. Arty Magnus
sipped coffee, Peter Brandenburg watched his tape recorder futilely
turn. Nina tried not to sound like she was scolding. "Peter, if
Augie's in danger, that's more important than any—"
"Of course, of course," said Brandenburg. He
tried to sound conciliatory and almost managed. "But in the
meantime—"
"In the meantime you've got your story to
do," said Augie mildly. "I understand. So let me say this about the
work. I live in the tropics. Almost the tropics, if you want to be
technical. And fact one about the tropics is that they are
unbelievably fruitful. Everything grows here. Everything overgrows
here. And not all of it is beautiful. Or gentle. Not by a long
shot. You've got ugly choking vines, rubbery things with varicose
veins. You've got soupy marshes that stink and reflect a putrid
glare. You've got biting spiders, carnivorous plants, fish with
spike teeth, shrubs with barbed thorns. And the lesson that goes
with that? It doesn't so much matter if something is pretty, if
it's benign; it matters that it's there, that it hangs on, that it
produces—"
"So you're saying," Brandenburg coaxed, "you
want to be as prolific as the tropics?"
Augie cocked his head and let that settle in
his ear. "That's impossible," he said. "But yeah, it'd be a worthy
thing to shoot for. As prolific and as accepting."
For the first time in the interview,
Brandenburg wrote something in his leather notebook. But when he
looked down to do so, Arty Magnus recaptured the initiative. He
gestured toward the unfinished, unframed painting on its vast
untidy easel. "This picture," he said, "this bird here. This the
bird that ate the poison?"
Brandenburg stiffened. He'd finally worked
the conversation around to art, and now it was being dragged down
again to gutter level. He slapped his pen against his notes and
lectured: "It's obviously a universal—"
"No," said Augie, "it's not a universal. As
a matter of fact, it's Fred."
Stung at being contradicted, the critic fell
instantly into a sulk. Nina saw the narrowed eyes, the tightened
lips, and flashed a look of mute advice to her husband.
Augie backpedaled. "It's both, of course,"
he said. "I mean, it started as Fred, but then . . . Look, if you
only paint what you already know, you're in a rut. Why bother? You
paint to find out what you know. You see what I'm saying? I painted
this to find out what I knew about Fred. What I know about parrots.
What I know about feathers. What I know about green."
The New York reviewer rallied somewhat and
started taking notes again. Arty Magnus held his stub of pencil
against his lower lip and waited for the pendulum to swing back his
way. Augie paused for breath, then went on with the untrammeled
directness of a man thinking out loud.
"You paint to find out what you know, but
then the painting outsmarts you, ends up knowing more than you do."
He gestured toward the monumental canvas, toward the parrot's down
turned beak and frozen gaze. "Look at those eyes, that stare. Is it
accusing? Resigned? Is it serene or is it mocking? For the life of
me, I can't tell. But I know, without a doubt, that bird knows
something I don't know."
For a moment everybody stared at Fred. In
the thick and shimmering light, the parrot's plumage was velvety,
its unsettling red eyes appeared to pulse.
Then a soft voice was heard from an
unexpected direction. It was Reuben. He'd kept a discreet distance
from the guests and was leaning over the kitchen counter. "Maybe he
knows who is trying to hurt you."
Augie twisted and looked at his friend
across the back of the settee. "Maybe. Maybe he does. And maybe
someday he'll tell us."
Detective Sergeant Joe Mulvane had seen
countless crime scenes in his life, and they never failed to
depress him. The scenes of homicides, of course, were especially
appalling: the oddly metallic smell of blood, the ghastly
chalk-drawn silhouette showing where and in what posture the dead
guy had fallen. So often they fell with one hand reaching out.
Probably they were just trying to hit the bastard that killed them,
but it didn't look that way when they chalked it on the floor, it
always looked like the victim was making one final grab at
something good and beautiful, something he would never capture,
never touch.
But even when nobody got hurt, when the
crime was just some dipshit burglary or apparently aimless B-and-E,
there was something bleak about the scene, something that made
Mulvane feel gloomy. It had to do, he figured, with waste. Waste
and stupidity. Shattered windows; smashed crockery; clothing pulled
from ransacked dresser drawers and either torn or stretched all out
of shape—these morons destroyed more than they stole. And there was
something that never stopped seeming pathetic about a broken thing:
a trashed room, a cracked mirror, even a busted coffee cup. You
couldn't say those things had ever been alive, but still, when they
were broken they were as full of death as any corpse.
Mulvane was feeling the crime-scene gloom at
first light Thursday morning as he stood on Ray Yates's gangplank
on Houseboat Row and saw what had been done to the radio host's
floating home.
The louvered front door had been wrenched
out of alignment; it hung limp and useless on a single mangled
hinge. Inside, all was havoc. The living-room upholstery had been
slashed with knives, white fiber stuffing poked out of it like hair
from an old man's ears. The drawers from a file cabinet had been
yanked out, the files dumped in a chaos of paper. Liquor bottles
lay smashed on the floor, brandy fumes wafted from shards of green
glass. In the bedroom, the closet had been decimated, the palm-tree
shirts thrown in a pile and stomped with dirty shoes. The medicine
chest was torn off the bathroom wall, the shower curtain ripped
from its rod. In the tiny kitchen, a rotting fish had been left on
the counter near the sink; flies clustered on its clouded eye.
Above the fish, a terse note had been scrawled on the wall in red
magic marker. It said No Deal, Ray. Clean Up Your Own Mess.
Mulvane looked at the fish, the note, and
the beat cop who had called in the crime. "Probably Ponte," he
said.
"Dust for prints?" asked the cop.
"If you enjoy that sort of thing," said
Mulvane. "You won't find any."
Later that morning he drove to Olivia
Street. Feeling grim himself, he expected others to be feeling
grim, and he was faintly put out to find the members of the Silver
household positively chipper. Reuben answered the door in a crisp
new apron, candy-striped. Smiling, he led the detective through the
house and out toward the pool. Nina was swimming laps. Her legs
scissored evenly and powerfully, her hair streamed sleekly back
behind her, and when she lifted her face from the water, the
tension seemed to have washed out of it, eased by exercise and
chlorine. Augie was sitting at a shady table. He had a cup of
coffee in front of him and a sketch pad on his lap. He wore a straw
hat and was chewing on a toothpick.
"Ah, Joe," he said. "Beautiful morning. Cup
of coffee? Muffin maybe?"
"Just coffee," said Mulvane. He lifted a
chair and turned it backwards, then straddled the seat with his
beefy thighs and rested his forearms on the back.
"Did that interview yesterday," Augie said.
"With your friend Magnus and this big-deal critic from New York.
Got a big kick out of it, I have to tell you."
"That's nice," Mulvane said.
If Augie caught the lack of enthusiasm, he
didn't let it daunt him. "It's a game, talking to press. I'd almost
forgotten how amusing it is. They ask you questions about what you
do, and you're supposed to pretend you can explain it. Then they
pretend they can explain—"
"Augie," Mulvane interrupted, "listen, I'm
sorry to rain on your parade here, but Ray Yates—how close a friend
is he?"
The words, the tone—they killed the mood
sure as turning the lights up in a bar. Nina was standing at the
edge of the pool, her elbows on the wet tiles; her face socked in
again, you could see flesh moving, tightening around her jaw. Augie
slapped his sketch pad onto the table and threw the jaunty
toothpick on his saucer.
"Joe," he said, "that's exactly the kind of
question I don't know how to answer anymore."
"His place was trashed last night. Not a
burglary. Whoever did it left a fish on the counter."
"A fish?" said Nina.
"Quaint Mafia calling card," said Mulvane.
"There was also a note about a deal."
Reuben came out with the detective's coffee.
It took him no time at all to see that his friends were unhappy
again. The spring went out of his step, his face took on a
remorseful look, as if he were somehow to blame for the morning's
high spirits being dashed.
"What kind of deal?" asked Augie.
Mulvane shrugged. "Loan sharks kill people
who welsh on big debts. Yates owns paintings which, if you're dead,
are worth enough to bail him—"
"Are you suggesting," Nina said, "that Ray
Yates got the Mafia—"
"No," Mulvane said. "If he'd got the Mafia,
Augie would be dead by now."
"Is that supposed to be comforting?" she
asked.
"Well," said Mulvane, "yeah. Sort of. But
what I'm suggesting is he might have tried to get the Mafia. So I'm
asking how well do you know him? Is he someone who could do that to
a friend?"
Augie and Nina looked at each other and
riffled through their impressions of Ray Yates. Plump, easygoing
good-time Ray, Ray who'd always have a drink, another drink, a
conversation. Ray with his mellow voice, his flattering talk-show
way of asking everybody questions and showing a practiced interest
in their answers. Ray who always tagged along. Ray who tried to
out-local the locals. Ray who went from place to place and thing to
easy, temporary thing, and was a different person in every setting:
Ray who was soft and scared and soulless in the middle.
"Poor bastard" was all that Augie said.
"So you think that means—" said Nina
"It means nothing," said Mulvane, "except
that he's a crumb." He put his untouched coffee on the table and
stood up from his backwards chair. "Good news is, the police are
now officially looking for him. Just to tell him he's been the
victim of a crime."
The cop left. Nina shivered, not from cold
but from a spasm of disgust. Her skin felt itchy, oily, soiled with
the guilt of others. She dropped underwater, kicked out to the
middle of the pool, and stayed down as long as she could, cleansing
herself, fending off the bright and scorching surface, hiding.
Mood swings are tiring, and the morning's
ups and downs left Augie feeling mopey.
He tried to put some finishing touches on
the portrait of Fred, but not one brush stroke pleased him, he felt
himself dangerously pulled toward muddying up his sprightly greens
with brown, and rather than give in to that he put his paints
aside.
After that, time dragged. It was four days
before the summer solstice, the heavy sun struggled up the highest
part of the sky like a fat man climbing stairs, and when it reached
the zenith it seemed to pause a long time, panting, and the earth
panted underneath it. Fronds drooped; flowers wilted; the blades of
ceiling fans labored through the viscous air as though through
pancake batter.
Around three o'clock there was a downpour
which by rights should have ended the day. But it didn't. The sun
was back in twenty minutes, as punishing as before. Steam rose from
pavements, from the crowns of shrubs, and in the Silver house a
small sin was committed: Everyone gave up on the endless afternoon
and waited dully for the release of night and sleep.
After a cold dinner Nina went to bed to
read. Reuben cleared the table, did the dishes. Augie stayed up
just long enough to watch the early stars come out, and then he too
retired.
He was going to his room when he saw
something that redeemed the day. He saw Reuben praying.
The young man's bedroom door was open
slightly, and behind it Reuben was at his bedside, on his knees.
His hands were crossed on the cotton blanket, his forehead lay
against them, a lamp on his nightstand threw a soft gleam on his
dark and curly hair. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a sleeveless
undershirt that showed his delicate shoulders and skinny chest, and
he looked like a little boy. His lips moved, his head bobbed
slightly as he prayed. After a moment he seemed to feel Augie's
eyes on him. He looked up with a small shy smile.