"Nina, are you all right?"
She flinched just slightly at the sound of Phipps's voice, and felt not gratitude but resentment for the intrusive concern that had pulled her back to the here and now. "No," she said after a moment, "I'm not all right. My husband has been gone—what is it, Clay, three months now?—and he's more alive to me than anybody living. I'm not all right."
Phipps took her hand, and neither of them could help glancing down at the suspect twining of their fingers. Twenty minutes ago, before his bizarre and meager attempt at lust, the contact would have been clean. "Nina, is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?"
Even in his own ears, the question sounded a shade unwholesome, and Clay Phipps understood that he had forever forfeited the privilege of being totally trusted, of being mistaken for unselfish.
The widow took her hand away. "Don't try to be Augie, Clay. That's what you can do for me. Don't try to be the man I love."
Later, asleep, Nina again saw Augie Silver.
She saw him often in dreams, and savored these meetings as if they were deliciously forbidden trysts. They were always different and always the same, these dreams, full of the sore joy of reunion which then melted into a growing but never serene acceptance that the reunion was unreal.
This time Nina saw Augie while she was sitting in the kitchen drinking a mug of coffee. The front door opened and there he was. He hadn't shaved, his face gleamed with a steely stubble, and his throat was very tan beneath the collar of his shirt. "Augie," she said. She held her mug in front of her, smelling the fragrant steam and embracing the miracle of her husband coming back.
"Coffee?" he said, and walked through the living room toward the counter. She glanced at the coffee maker and noticed that the red brew light was flickering, blinking like a buoy at sea. She watched Augie walk, and though his walk was casual, shuffling as always, he became more insubstantial with each step, his form flattening, his feet in less secure contact with the floor, and the sleeping Nina felt him slipping away yet again. With the dreamer's comforting illusion that she could choose, she wrestled with the choice of waking up to dream-capture him before he had vanished, or staying asleep and willing him not to fade, willing him to explain but most of all to keep existing. "Just a cup of coffee," she said in the dream, and in her empty bedroom the words came out only as a soft mumble that woke her up. She opened her eyes, lifted onto her elbows for just a moment, and tried to memorize this most recent visit with her husband. He'd looked so handsome coming through the door.
5
Jimmy Gibbs pushed the point of his knife into the anus of a six-pound mutton snapper and slit its belly to the arc of bone beneath its jaw. Absently, he felt the fish deflate, then reached into the body cavity and plucked out the guts. Tubes and membranes, red nodes and green sacs came away in his hand, and he flung them into the shallow water shimmering with fish oil. It was a measure of Jimmy Gibbs's mood, where he flung the guts. When he was happy, feeling benign, he tossed them in the air so the wheeling gulls could snag the unspeakable morsels from the sky. When he was feeling foul, he threw the slimy viscera into Garrison Bight and made the squawking, miserable scavengers dunk for them.
Today Jimmy Gibbs was feeling especially foul. His back hurt. His hands were stiff, his fingers crosshatched with tiny cuts from spiny fish fins, edges of scales, other people's hooks. He had complaining knees, a swollen liver, a weakening bladder, and he was too damn old to be a mate on someone else's boat. Fifty-two, and a beat-up fifty-two at that. Living in a trailer; driving an ancient pickup that sifted rust every time he closed the door; and having something under nine hundred dollars of cash money in the bank. He yanked the innards out of another fish and swept them disgustedly off his cleaning table. They left behind a bloody and slightly iridescent smear.
"Whole or fillet?" Gibbs said to the tourist who, with a great deal of help and plenty of coaching, had managed to catch some fish. The tourist just stood there blankly. Was it too fucking difficult a question? Was it unthinkable that the tourist, God forbid, might sometime have to eat something with a bone in it? It was five o'clock, the sun was still hot, and Jimmy Gibbs had two more buckets of dead fish to clean.
"Fillet," the tourist said at last; and with more force than was required, Gibbs slashed the glistening flesh away from the pliant backbones. The tourist reached a clean hand into a clean pocket and came up with a dollar. He took his fish fillets in a plastic bag and dropped the bill onto the cleaning table, where it soaked up some slime. It was breezy on the dock but the dollar didn't blow away because fish stuff was gluing it to the plywood.