*
"Lemme tell ya somethin' about Augie Silver," said Jimmy Gibbs.
He was sitting at the Clove Hitch bar, dockside at City Marina, and tucked between his spread-out elbows was a shot of Jack Daniel's and a bottle of Bud. He was speaking in the general direction of Hogfish Mike Curran, the proprietor, but he wanted to talk and he didn't much care who if anyone was listening.
"Augie Silver was the best damn sailor I ever saw. Always calm. A natural. The wind talked to him. The seas like made a road to let him through. Currents, he always managed it so they helped him. That boat a his —thirty-seven feet, single-handed he sailed it nimble as a dinghy. . . . What happened t'Augie, it coulda happened t'anyone. It was a freak. Fuckin' world is all fucked up. Fuckin' weather, ya can't count on it no more. Waterspout in January. Who ever heard of a fuckin' waterspout in January?"
"Happens," said Hogfish Mike. "Not often, but it happens."
Gibbs snorted disapproval, then nipped into his shot and his beer. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair pulled tightly back in a little ponytail, and after several boilermakers his scalp felt pinched. He reached up and loosened the elastic band. A pelican jumped clumsily from a nearby piling and splashed into the shallow water of Garrison Bight.
"Vicious, those waterspouts," Hogfish Mike went on. He crossed his ropy forearms and almost smiled. The ready violence of the natural world was for him a kind of confirmation. "Funnel comes down. Black as sin, you can almost see it spinning. Holy shit—do ya zig or zag? If it catches ya, you're fucked. Spout digs a hole innee ocean, makes a whirlpool that churns like a goddamn Maytag. Sucks fish right outta the water, twirls boats around till they rip apart or crash up onna reef. Breaks off masts like fuckin' breadsticks. I hate to think what would happen to a man in one of those. He'd get yanked to pieces, busted up like the dummy without the seat belt on."
Hogfish paused and finally noticed that his description was causing pain. He leaned across the bar toward Jimmy Gibbs and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Jimmy, hey, it's not like the guy was your bubba. He was a Yankee. Nice house. Big boat. O.K., he paid you fair to do the grunt work. Maybe he bought you a drink now and then. But come on—"
"Augie wasn't like the others," said Jimmy Gibbs, and there was something in his tone that made Hogfish Mike back off. "He treated a person like a person. Lemme get another round."
"Got cash, Jimmy? No tabs here, you know the rules."
Gibbs looked sadly down at his shot glass with nothing at the bottom but an amber stain. Then he considered his beer and sloshed around the last lukewarm pull. A seagull screamed nearby. "Come on, Hogfish, we known each other a lotta years."
"That's the problem, Jimmy," said Hogfish Mike. 'That's the problem."
*
"You like'a heah?" said Reuben the Cuban, suspending a huge vase of lilies and orchids above the center of a long split-willow table.
Nina Alonzo-Silver stood hands on hips in the middle of her living room and weighed the arrangement with her eyes. "Too heavy there," she said. 'Try it over by the lamp."
The housekeeper moved the flowers. He was a slight, wiry young man with the surprising yellowish pallor of certain Key West Cubans; he moved in a low-slung whisper like a cat or a Japanese woman, and he nearly disappeared behind the thick stems of the lilies. "Oba heah?" he said.
The widow nodded. Then she cast an appraising glance at the buffet dishes and glasses already arrayed on the sideboard, and at her dead husband's paintings beautifully hung and immaculately lit on every wall. Through the French doors at the rear of the house, a soft blue gleam wafted up from the lights in the pool. In a big enameled cage near the door, a twitchy green parrot looked on. The widow squared a picture frame that had been perhaps a quarter-inch off-true. Then she tried to smile.
"You see, Reuben," she said. "It's just like getting ready for an opening."
"Art sucks," said the parrot. "Johnnie Walker." The sound was metallic and wildly abrupt, scratchy as the sand in the bird's idiot throat.
"Tranquilo, Fred," said Reuben the Cuban.
"Cutty Sark. Where's Augie?" the parrot responded, and the widow started to cry. She made no sound. Her shoulders hunched slightly and flat streaks of wet almost instantly appeared under her slate-gray eyes.
"Noon tomorrow," she said.
Reuben didn't understand exactly what she meant. He stood there silent, hoping to be able to help.
"Service at ten," she said, her voice soft but without a quaver. "No rabbi. No minister. No God. No Heaven. The way Augie would have wanted. Just some stories, some laughing, some crying, some wine. A lot of wine. Then noon."