Barnett blinked his pink eyes, sipped his tomato juice. "I dunno, Jimmy. I thought you might have something put away."
Gibbs looked down at the bar as if he wanted to gnaw it to splinters. Only logical, he told himself, to imagine that a gray-haired man who'd worked thirty-eight years might have a measly eleven thousand dollars put away. Who wouldn't? "Thanks for thinkin' a me, Matty," he said, but his tone made it clear that Barnett had done him no favor.
"Sure," said the captain. He put down his tomato stained glass, dropped ten dollars on the bar, and got up to leave. "Have another round, Jimmy. And if anything changes, lemme know."
*
"Wha'd Matty want?' asked Hogfish Mike Curran.
The sky was full dark now, and the Clove Hitch bar had emptied out. It was an early place, a two-pops-after-work kind of place. By 9 p.m. there wasn't much left for the proprietor to do but throw ice in the urinals and hang the beer steins on their pegs.
"Nothin'," said Jimmy Gibbs. "He wanted nothin' and he got it."
Curran looked at Gibbs with gruff admiration; the man was a moody sonofabitch, give him that. He'd polished off Barnett's second double and was now nursing the dregs of one he'd purchased for himself. Hogfish Mike jerked some glasses up and down the bottle brush and tried a different conversational approach.
"Some guys were in before, Ray Yates and a couple others, talkin' about your buddy Augie Silver."
Gibbs was in that state of deep sulk where it becomes a sort of sick victory to remain utterly uninterested, but he could not help giving in to curiosity. "What about 'im?"
"Didn't hear that much. Something about paintings. Selling 'em. Supposedly they're worth some money."
Jimmy Gibbs looked down and shook his glass. He was trying to look indifferent and trying to rattle his ice cubes, but it was a hot night and the pieces left were in weightless crescent slivers that made no noise.
Hogfish Mike flicked dishwater off his hands in an oddly dainty manner. "You got a painting a his, don't cha?" he asked.
Gibbs had known the question was coming and vaguely wondered why he'd felt reluctant in advance to answer it. He nodded. Then he couldn't swallow a cockeyed smile. "He gimme this painting, said he hoped it wouldn't remind me too much a work. It's kind of a spooky picture, ya want the truth. Like a fisheye view of gutted fish."
"Like cannibals?" said Curran.
Gibbs shrugged. He hadn't thought of it exactly that way. "More like Who's next?"
The proprietor of the Clove Hitch was wiping his bar with a rag. "Worth money, though."
"Hogfish, hey, it was a gift."
Jimmy Gibbs hefted his beer bottle and reminded himself for the fourth time it was empty. He thought of ordering another, then remembered he needed all the cash he had to pay the overdue electric bill. He pictured the line of dirt-bags at the City Electric office, their crusty feet and filthy sandals, everyone ready with their red-bordered shut-off notices and their bullshit excuses, and he was weary to death of always being broke. "Besides," he mumbled, "fuck could it be worth? Couple hundred?"
Curran shrugged, moved down the long teak slab, mopping up water and emptying ashtrays as he went. Gibbs tossed back the last of his bourbon. It left a satisfying burn where his teeth poked out of his gums.
He thought about the Fin Finder. It had twin big-ass Yamahas, outriggers arched and graceful like something off a bridge, and a man really looked like someone standing at the steering station, with the radar slowly spinning and the tuna tower gleaming in the sun. Jimmy Gibbs coughed softly in his fist and made his voice sound casual. "Few hundred, right, Hogfish? I mean, ain't likely to be more'n that."
9
On a Wednesday evening in early May, Kip Cunningham sipped champagne, poked a silver stud through the placket of his dress shirt, then responded with a tired sense of duty to his wife's request for assistance in doing up her dress. He cinched its panels together, tucked the zipper tab down neatly in its groove, finessed the hook through its little loop of thread, and vaguely noticed the way the top of the silk bodice bit softly into the flesh of Claire Steiger's back. He used to find her back very beautiful, that much Kip Cunningham remembered. Her back wasn't freckled, exactly, but there were light mottlings below the surface; the effect was of looking not at her skin but into it, it was like peering through sun-shot water in a trout stream and seeing pebbles at the bottom. Was her back still beautiful? Her husband could not really have said. He was losing her, though the loss that was happening now had mainly to do with money and social ease. The deeper loss he was oddly numb to because he'd inflicted it on himself, subtly, gradually murdering his chance for happiness with the slow poison of inattention.