Scavenger Reef (34 page)

"How close did he come to going through with
it?" asked Clayton Phipps.

"Got about as far as Boca," said Mulvane.
"Then he stopped at roadside to pour in some of the extra gas he'd
brought—he didn't want to pull into a station and take a chance on
getting the tag spotted. That's when he decided he was too old to
become a thief. He drove back and confessed."

Augie rubbed his jaw. "Solstice weekend," he
said. "The weekend everyone went crazy."

"The weekend Natch went crazy," said Clay
Phipps.

"Better crazy than killed," said Joe
Mulvane. "To go to Cuban bars in the middle of the night and try to
rabble-rouse. . . . Was this guy the last person in the world to
figure out there's no more gung-ho American on earth than a refugee
Cuban? He comes in and starts sounding like a Communist, like
Fidel. . . . He's damn lucky to have landed in a nice cushy private
nuthouse and not the morgue." He paused, then added, "But something
I don't understand. Supposedly this guy was a struggling poet. How
does he end up in such a pricey nuthouse?"

Nina looked at Augie. But Augie didn't want
it known that he was funding his deranged friend's treatment. He
just said, "Natch isn't a bad person. Just frustrated.
Misguided."

"Misguided," hissed Joe Mulvane. He was a
homicide cop, he didn't have much use for words that were excuses.
"Some are misguided. Some are weak. Or jealous. Or downright evil.
You can say some are worse than others, but they kill somebody,
dead is dead."

"Fair enough," said Augie. "But I'll tell
you something—I'm very grateful for two things. I'm very grateful
to be alive, and I'm very grateful it wasn't one of my good friends
that was trying to kill me."

"Amen to that," said Clay Phipps.

"And Joe," Nina added, "we're very grateful
to you. I'm not sure we've ever thanked you properly for all you
did for us."

Joe Mulvane was not especially good at
accepting thanks; it was also true that in this instance he
believed in his heart that he had utterly failed. "I did nothing
for you," he said. "I couldn't prevent an arson, a tragedy . .
."

The words pushed air out of the room. Eyes
stung and for a long moment there was nothing left to breathe. When
Augie finally filled his hollow chest it was with the rapture of
some great hunger sated, some great gift acknowledged and given
thanks for. The air had come to smell of jasmine and dry
shells.

"Reuben," Augie said. He said it softly, he
shook his head in awe. "What a remarkable person. The only truly
unselfish person I have known in all my life."

The remark was aimed at no one, but it made
the others squirm.

"He'll be all right?" Claire Steiger
asked.

"He'll be all right," said Nina. "He'll have
a long recovery, a hard adjustment. But he'll be all right."

There was a silence, a long moment of
reflection and regret that could only end in fidgeting and thirst.
Clay Phipps cleared his throat and rose. "What say we have some old
Bordeaux?"

Augie Silver had remembered how to sweat. He
mopped his forehead. "Awfully hot for Bordeaux," he said.

"Awfully damn hot for anything," said Joe
Mulvane.

"It is," said Clay Phipps, moving toward the
kitchen, "but goddamnit, let's have Bordeaux anyway."

###

ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
— Laurence Shames has set eight
critically acclaimed novels in Key West, his former hometown. Now
based in California, he is also a prolific screenwriter and
essayist. His extensive magazine work includes a stint as the
Ethics columnist for
Esquire.
In his outings as a collaborator and ghostwriter,
he has penned four
New York Times
bestsellers, under four different names. This
might be a record. To learn more, please visit
http://www.LaurenceShames.com
.

ALSO BY LAURENCE SHAMES—

FICTION—

Florida Straits

Sunburn

Tropical Depression

Virgin Heat

Mangrove Squeeze

Welcome to Paradise

The Naked Detective

NON-FICTION

The Big Time

The Hunger for More

Not Fade Away (with Peter Barton)

IF YOU LOVED SCAVENGER REEF, BE SURE TO
CATCH LAURENCE SHAMES' NEXT NOVEL SUNBURN

Copyright 2011 Laurence Shames

"Regrets?" said Vincente Delgatto. "Shit
yeah, I got regrets. I got regrets like Heinz got beans."

The old man pushed some air past his pale
gums and espresso-stained teeth. The sound that came out wasn't a
sigh exactly, wasn't a laugh, was more like a half-resigned grunt
that had kept an edge to it, a hiss. He reached up to straighten
his tie. This was an old habit, a gesture that helped his composure
and helped the transition from one thought to the next; his hands
were almost to his throat before he remembered he wasn't wearing a
tie.

He was sitting poolside in Key West, at the
home of his bastard son, Joey Goldman. It was January, twilight, 77
degrees. A breeze was moving the palms, the fronds made a dry
rattle, like maracas. It was not an American sound, this rhythmic
scratching, it was an island sound, Caribbean, it made Vincente
think of Havana in the old days, of smoky New York nightclubs back
when Latin was the modern thing and women wore pointy brassieres
and hats with fruit. For a moment he saw himself as a young man,
dapper, limber, doing the rhumba with his long-dead favorite
mistress, Joey's mother.

"Shit yeah," he repeated, "I got
regrets."

He took a sip of wine, looked off at the
green sky to the west. Back home in Queens, the sky never looked
like that—green, yellow, with pink spikes sticking up like the
crown of the Statue of Liberty.

"But ya know," he resumed, "it's funny: in
songs, inna movies, there's always some old guy, he's washed up, a
has-been, he's got no hair, no teeth, he's wearing rubber
underpants, and he's bragging about how he doesn't regret nothing,
if he had it all to do over, he'd do it exactly the same. It's like
. . . like a whaddyacallit—"

"A cliche?" put in Sandra Dugan, Joey's
wife.

"Yeah, Sandra, thank you. A cliche. Like
this is what an old fart automatically says. But come on. Ya live
to be seventy, eighty years old, and wit' all the millions a
chances ya get to fuck things up— 'scuse my language, Sandra—you'd
do it all the same?"

"Some people," Joey said, "maybe they
would."

"Bullshit," said his father. "There's only
two reasons why a person would say that. One, he's so pigheaded he
can't admit he made a mistake. Or two, he's so feeble inna head,
his memory is so shot, he really can't remember what he did or
shoulda did. Me, I remember. For better or worse, I remember."

"Right, Pop," Joey Goldman said. "And this
is why I'm telling ya: Write it down."

The old man was shaking his head almost
before his son had started to speak. He had a long face, Vincente
did, with a big bridgeless nose and full lips that looked even
fleshier against his sunken cheeks. His black eyes had always been
deep-set but in recent years they seemed to have burrowed even
farther into their bony sockets: they nestled in the shadows of
brows and lids and wrinkles, it took a certain effort to reach
them.

"Fuhget about it, Joey," he said. "No
offense, but it's like the worst fuckin' idea I ever heard. People
like us, we don't write things down. Do we, Bert?"

"Hm?" said Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia. He
wasn't much older than Vincente, three, four years, but he'd lived
in Key West for a decade or so and the easy life of Florida had
somewhat melted his alertness. Also, he'd died some years before.
Not for long, but he'd had a severe upset on the Eastern District
courthouse steps, and in the hospital his heart had stopped for
maybe half a minute; he'd used the flat place on his EKG as an
argument for being excused from a profession that usually did not
allow retirement.

"Write stuff down," Vincente repeated.
"People like us, we don't do it, right?"

"People like us," said Bert, "a lotta guys
can hardly read. How they gonna write?" He underscored the question
with upturned palms, which then came to rest on an ancient
chihuahua curled in his lap.

"OK, OK," Vincente said, a little bit
impatiently. "But aside from that, we don't write things down
because we don't write things down."

"That's true," said Bert, and he petted the
dog.

The dog had been gray to begin with and now,
at age thirteen, was turning ghastly white. It was white at the
tips of its outsized ears and white around its bulbous eyes, which
in turn were going milky with cataracts. The dog was always
shedding white hairs the length of eyelashes, and Bert,
unconsciously, was always plucking them off his gorgeous silk and
linen shirts of mint green, lavender, and midnight blue.

"Besides," Vincente said, "ya write
something down, right away people can see it—"

"That is the idea," Sandra put in.

"Whose idea?" Vincente said. He had one of
those rumbling voices that didn't get louder as he got worked up,
it got deeper, it moved the air in a way that was felt more than
heard.

"And about this regrets thing," said Bert
the Shirt. Having been dead and then alive, he didn't always see
things in the same order as other people, he didn't believe that
time and thought and conversation went in one direction only. "What
is there really to say about it? This guy, maybe I shouldn'ta
clipped 'im? That guy, maybe I shoulda clipped 'im sooner?"

Vincente silenced his colleague with a
lifted eyebrow. Certain things you didn't talk about, not even
kiddingly, not even among family. Discretion—this was something no
one seemed to understand anymore. Keeping secrets—when did this
come to be seen as a bad thing? It used to be a sacred obligation
to keep secrets; it was like guarding a treasure. It took courage,
discipline. There was a soldierly pain that went with holding
things inside, and the bearing of that pain became a source of
pride, of dignity.

Didn't people realize this? You kept secrets
not for pleasure but because it was a duty. Keeping secrets had
cost Vincente pain and anguish all his life; it cost him pain and
anguish still. He thought about the pain and the hard pride it
engendered, and he did a slow burn within himself.

"Nah, Joey," he said at last, "fuhget about
it. Writing stuff down." He made that hissing grunt again. "Just
fuhget about it."

Joey Goldman pursed his lips, looked down at
his fingernails. This, he thought, was the story of his life where
family was concerned. You try to do the right thing, you try to
help; it ends up being the wrong thing, it ends up in a squabble.
He got up just enough to reach across the patio table and pour more
wine for everyone. He knew the question that needed to come next:
Pop, then what are you gonna do? And he knew he couldn't ask it, it
was too raw, too sharp. So he got up and strolled over the damp
tiles around the swimming pool to light the propane grill.

After three years in the Keys, Joey was a
regular Floridian. He cooked outside, he ate outside, he lived in
sunglasses, he'd almost learned to swim. And, unlike when he'd
lived up north, he hardly ever got knots in his stomach, except
where his family was concerned.

"Everyone's got a book in 'im," said Joey
Goldman. "I read that somewhere, maybe I heard it on TV, who
remembers? But I think it's true. Don't you?"

"A decent book?" said Arty Magnus. "No, it
isn't true. It's one of those lame and stupid democratic lies."

It was around five-thirty the next day and
they were sitting at the Eclipse Saloon, their elbows deep in the
vinyl-covered padding that edged the U-shaped bar. The place was
filling up around them, starting to smell of smoke and suntan
lotion. Tourists who felt more authentically schnockered if they
drank near locals were rubbing shoulders with the stuffed fish
hanging on the walls.

"Come on," said Joey. "Wit' the crazy things
that happen to people, the wild thoughts they have?"

"Joey," Magnus said, "lemme ask you
something. In kindergarten you finger-painted, right?"

Joey nodded.

"You squeezed the paint out on your fingers,
you shmeared it around. It felt nice, right? You expressed
yourself—"

"I see where you're goin'," Joey cut in.
"But it's not the same."

"Joey, was your painting any good? Did
anybody but your mother wanna look at it?"

"But a grown person," Joey pressed. "Someone
who's seen a lotta life. It's different."