Scavenger Reef(10)

When that happened, Ray Yates would reach for his program and check the dog's name against its number. "There's your winner," he'd confidently say to Natchez. "A lighter dog is a faster dog."

'That hasn't proven true so far," Natchez pointed out. The information wafted gently over the radio host without putting the slightest dent in his certainty.

Back in the grandstand, the audience of hard-core bettors, bored locals, and ragtag tourists waited for the next grim pursuit of Swifty the mechanical rabbit. Beauty parlor blondes, their lobes stretched tribal-style by weighty jangling earrings, sucked powdery whiskey sours through straws. Fat men in the inevitable plaids smoked Cuban cigars that had been bought with a wink in Miami. The night sky was reduced to a hazy black bowl above the pink glare of the floods.

"Gimme two dollars on number seven," said Robert Natchez. He didn't quite know why he'd agreed to accompany Ray Yates to the track, this place of shit and greed. He'd told himself the artist should see everything, however tawdry. But Key West offered abundant seaminess, squalor, pathos, and depravity without the need of going to the dogs.

Yates glanced at his annotated program. "Number seven didn't go," he advised.

"Maybe he runs better constipated," Natchez said. "I'll take my chances."

The more systematic bettor shrugged. "My two simoleons are going on the lighter number four."

Yates took Natchez's money and went to place the bets. Low to the ground and purposeful, he bulled through the milling crowd, his palm-tree shirt just slightly damp with sweat. A queasy and familiar excitement overtook him as he neared the barred, illicit cashier's window. The excitement started as a tickle at the backs of his knees, then became a not unpleasant burning in his stomach. The burning transformed itself to a twinge in his loins followed by a pulsing in the veins of his neck. Now he stood directly in front of the dead-faced woman who punched the pari-mutuel machine and his mouth was dry. He took a quick look over his shoulder to make sure that Robert Natchez, his closest friend, had not for some reason followed him. Then, with fingers that were not quite steady, he reached across and placed a two-dollar bet on number seven and bought another hundred dollars' worth of losing tickets for himself.

Later, after nine dull races and a nightcap under the bougainvillea at Raul's, Robert Natchez returned to his small apartment to do some work. He had a grant application to complete. And maybe, he admitted to himself, that was the real reason he'd agreed to waste the evening at the track: to avoid yet another confrontation with the inane, insulting, subtly humiliating questions on yet another grant form. He'd applied for them all at one time or another. National Endowment. Florida Arts Council. Southeastern Poetry Foundation. They all asked, in their polite and neutered institutional prose, why he wanted the grant. Morons! How about to eat? They all wanted to know what he would bring to the program. On this question, Natchez's colossal arrogance contended with his fragile sense of decorum. When decorum lost out, he'd submit answers like "a bracingly fresh approach to language coupled with a masterful grasp of poetic form and an emotional intensity reminiscent of Pound." To go on record with a self-evaluation like that and still not get the grant was a distressing experience.

Even on those rare occasions when the funding came through, the result was generally depressing. Three thousand dollars to drag himself around the flat and endless state of Florida giving poetry workshops to baffled, nose-picking, germ-carrying first-graders in the public schools. Two thousand to read soothing verses to frothing schizophrenics in county nuthouses, to dozing oldsters in their rubber-sheeted beds. So worthy, these foundation projects, and so futile and bad-paying. Though Robert Natchez could never have brought himself to acknowledge it, they made him feel like a runt kitten still burrowing blindly toward some grudging public tit while his more robust and savvy peers had opened their eyes, stretched their legs, and set out to stalk their destinies in the wider world.

The poet picked up his pen, angled the application in the pool of yellow lamplight in front of him, and stared at the wall.

The wall was of dark wood, old Dade County pine. Dade County pine was purportedly termite-proof, but Natchez's walls were riddled with tiny holes, out of which, on windy days or when a plane went over especially low, flew termite droppings slightly smaller than poppy seeds. It had become second nature to Natchez to begin work by shaking the pellets off his papers and into the trash.

He'd had the apartment eighteen years, an astonishing tenure in transient Key West. At first it had seemed the perfect writer's garret. Not the classical northern garret of Dostoyevsky or La Boheme: no snow climbing up the windowpanes, no burning of timeless manuscripts for a few moments' warmth. This was a tropical garret. It had a moist, rank, generative smell from the rotting leaves in the vacant lot next door; from that lot, as well, came feral sounds of rutting cats and the brainless clucking of runaway chickens that led unimaginable lives and sometimes laid eggs in the undergrowth. As the setting was funky, so was the furniture—rickety wicker, cracked and squeaky rattan, end tables found by chance, thrift-shop lamps of cheap archaic charm.