A cormorant flapped its jointed wings and took off from a post. A spray of tiny fish roiled the water as they fled some large thing feeding on them from below. Jimmy Gibbs pictured himself at the wheel of the Fin Finder, alone in Ray-Bans at the steering station just below the tuna tower. Captain Jimmy. He'd hire a couple young guys to haul the lines, clean the fish; his hands would heal. Maybe he'd buy himself a new truck too. Captains didn't show up at the charter docks in dinged-up old heaps that sifted rust.
Yates watched him, felt a quick pang of remorse, and raised a cautionary finger. "No such thing as a sure thing, Jimmy. Don't spend that fortune before you have it."
It was sound advice and it was too bad the talk-show host was not following it himself. It was five o'clock, the sun was still throwing heat as heavy as bricks tossed off a building, and Ray Yates reminded himself that he had to meet a guy to discuss a small matter of some gambling debts. He took a final swig of his tequila and got up with all the gusto of a man on his way to a root canal. He waved goodbye to Hogfish Mike, put a hand on Jimmy Gibbs's shoulder, then trudged the length of the pier. At the foot of it, right up against the seawall, the remains of a filleted fish were floating. The affronted eye stared heavenward, some opal meat still clung to the backbone, and Ray Yates didn't like the look of it at all.
14
Augie Silver slept fitfully for most of the day. It was brutally hot, the palm fronds hung limp and silent outside the bedroom window, yet the painter never lowered the cotton quilt from under his chin. He was too thin, too dry, too tired to sweat, he lay there papery and brittle, his breathing shallow, the dream movements of his eyeballs clear and disconcerting through the veiny translucent skin of their lids.
Around six o'clock he struggled out of bed, slipped out of his clothes, and went slowly to the closet for his favorite robe. It never occurred to him that the robe perhaps had been moved from its accustomed peg during his four-month absence—and it hadn't been. It hung there patient and welcoming, the loops of yellow terrycloth worn flat and shiny at the elbows, the big soft collar suggesting a certain pomp, like the entrance of a champion boxer. Directly under the robe, as if held in place by an invisible mannequin, were the backless slippers that so perfectly suited his shuffling, meandering walk. He stepped into them with the reverent confidence of the prodigal who knows in his bones that his wanderings have made him more profoundly, more legitimately the possessor of his home, his comforts, his life.
Silently he strolled into the living room. His former widow was lying on a sofa reading, and she did not hear him approach. He took a moment to gaze around the house. His paintings hung on almost every wall, they rang in his brain with a glad but overwhelming clamor that had less to do with sight than sound, as though he were a composer and ten orchestras were simultaneously playing every tune he'd ever written.
"Looks like a goddamn museum in here," he said.
Nina looked up. Her reading glasses stretched her eyes, made them huge and liquid, and the lifting of her head made the sinews rise and quiver from her collarbone to her jaw. She had at that moment an unposed loveliness that made Augie's knees go even weaker in appreciation of what he had come home to.
"I hung the paintings for the memorial service," said his wife.
"Memorial service," mused the painter. "I keep forgetting I was dead." He mused further. "Guess I'm still dead, far as anybody knows. It's kind of relaxing. . . . Was I lavishly and excessively praised?"
"Your ears must have been on fire."
"Who gave the eulogy?"
"Clay."
"Ah. Elegant and flowery, I bet. I owe him one."
Nina said nothing and Augie shuffled to the sofa. He leaned over to kiss his wife and tried not to let her see what an effort it was to straighten up again. She tried not to let him know that she had noticed.
"Hungry?"
The word sounded somehow foreign to him and he took a moment to respond. "I should be. But my body seems to have forgotten what to do with food." He sat.
Nina hesitated. It seemed too soon to speak of doctors, of worries, of the fresh fear of recurring death. She draped herself across her husband's shoulders.
"I blew to Cuba," he suddenly said, being pulled back into his story as into a fever dream. "Funny, huh? A place I'd always wanted to go."
"Cuba?" said his wife.
Outside, soft evening light filtered through the oleanders and the crotons. A faint smell of jasmine and mango slipped past the louvered shutters and through the unscreened windows. Augie half leaned, half fell against the back of the sofa. His robe splayed open to reveal a white thigh that had grown thinner than his knee.