"Maybe it's like an Elvis sighting," said Ray Yates. "You know, a delusion people have to link themselves to someone famous, to feel important."
"Our friend Augie," said Clay Phipps, "wasn't quite that much of a celebrity."
"Local celebrity," Yates countered, "local delusion."
The talk-show host had just finished work. His theme music, as usual, had made him thirsty, and now he was drinking with his buddies at Raul's. Overhead, misted stars showed here and there through the thinning bougainvillea. The relentless heat had baked most of the flowers away, they'd puckered up and fallen, fluttering to the ground like singed moths. What would survive the summer was mostly just a knuckly vine armed with thorns as sharp as fish hooks.
Robert Natchez took a pull on his rum, then clattered his glass onto the varnished table. The mention of Elvis had made him testy, as references to pop culture always did. Why did intelligent people gum up their brains with such garbage? How did such inane and trivial crap insinuate itself into the conversation of the sophisticated? "Look," he said, "it's one more instance of the Sentinel fucking up. Why not just leave it at that?"
"You don't have to get mad," said Clay Phipps. It was a way of egging the poet on, and it always worked.
"I do have to get mad," he said. "We're trying to have a civilized discussion here, and suddenly it's dragged down to the level of some Shirley MacLaine, Oprah fucking Winfrey, Nazi diet horseshit. Tabloid television. It's cheap. It's disgusting."
Phipps sipped his Meursault, noted how its caramel low notes came forward as the wine warmed, and tried to look contrite. "All right, Natch," he said, "you pick the level of discourse."
Natchez froze for an instant like a second-string halfback who's been clamoring all season to carry the ball and realizes suddenly he's got to run with it. "All right," he said, "all right." He cleared his throat, took a sip of rum. "First of all, we're all agreed that Augie is dead and the newspaper is wrong. Right?"
He sought out his friends' eyes and extorted hesitant nods, though the fact was there was no more reason to doubt the published story than to believe it.
"O.K.," Natchez agreed with himself. "So how does a sick rumor like this get started? Is it just that so little happens in this town that make-believe is required to fill in the blanks? Is it some lunatic form of homage? Does it start as an innocent mistake-someone who doesn't even know them sees Nina standing for half a second next to someone who vaguely resembles Augie, and boom, right away it's the buzz of Duval Street?"
Ray Yates had been sitting with his forearms flat across the table. A thin film of sweat had glued them to the varnish, his skin made a sound like tape lifting as he shifted positions to raise a finger. "Natch, hey," he said, "back up a step. What makes us so sure the rumor isn't true?"
The poet paused a beat, then visibly brightened, having thought of one of the glib but vacuous pronouncements of which he was so proud. "Because a person gets one life and one death. And Augie's had his."
"Very neat," said Clay Phipps, "but what if it just ain't so? What if he's had his one life and his one death, and it turns out he's alive again?"
There was an odd thing about Robert Natchez's bardic pronouncements: Once he'd made one he was stuck with it, he'd go to any length of logical gymnastics and verbal fireworks rather than admit that his lovely remark was finally devoid of content. "Then, by definition," he blithely announced, "he's no longer a person."
"Now you're being an asshole," said Ray Yates.
The poet was undaunted. He was happy. He was holding center stage, and besides, ideas in which people vaguely figured held his interest a great deal more than people did. "No," he said. It was not exactly a denial that he was being an asshole, more a categorical disagreement with anything anyone else might say. "Look, a person has certain prerogatives. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, that kind of bullshit. You think those prerogatives are boundless? No. They apply to one life, one death, one period of mourning. Once a person has used those up…"
Natchez fell silent and dimly realized he had no idea what he would say next. Yates and Phipps were staring at him, not drunk but not quite sober either, their eyes a little soupy with alcohol and mugginess. Beyond the knuckly bougainvillea, sodden summer clouds were massing; muted lightning bounced around inside them, indistinct and fleeting. The poet was not the type to leave a line of thought unfinished, but he understood that to go farther was reckless. It wasn't so much that he would say what he believed as that he would have no choice but to believe what he had said, since no utterances except his own could penetrate his skepticism and teach him anything. Recklessly, he continued.
"Once a person has used up his life and his death, he's got no rights left, don'tcha see? Laws don't apply or protect him, usual standards make no sense. He's an outsider more than any living person can be an outsider. An alien, a ghost."
"How about if he's a friend of ours?" Clay Phipps asked mildly.
"Can a ghost be a friend?" Natchez shot back. "Can a ghost be anything?"
"You're crazy," said Ray Yates, to which Robert Natchez gave a satisfied smile.
They went back to their drinks, and the smell of the air changed. Suddenly it was carrying salt and iodine and a suggestion of dry shells. Clay Phipps poured the last of his unshared wine and turned the empty bottle upside down in the bucket of long-melted ice. "S'gonna storm," he said.
"S'gonna be weird," Yates mused, "if Augie really is alive."
"Wouldn't be hard to find out," Natchez said.
Phipps regarded this as a challenge aimed squarely at him, and he hid his eyes in his glass. He wanted no more than the others to be the one to ask Nina Silver if Augie had returned. He could think of no delicate way to phrase the question, and he didn't want to confront her redoubled grief if the rumor turned out to be false. But Phipps had once upon a time been Augie Silver's best friend. He'd been his eulogist; he'd tried, albeit feebly, to seduce his presumptive widow. "All right," he said, in the tone of a guilty man taking on a debt of penance. "I'll find out. I'll stop by. Tomorrow."
The rain came just as the three friends were parting on the sidewalk.
It came down heavy but slow, in fat warm creamy drops driven now and then by soft gusts that blew sheets of it sideways past the streetlights while other parts rained down straight as tap water. Ray Yates was soaked before he'd even reached his scooter; his pink and lime-green shirt wrapped him like a tattooed second skin. He kick-started the little bike; the gears clattered unpromisingly, then a spark survived the deluge and the motor whined, making a sound like a mosquito in your ear while you're asleep.
Key West is very flat and almost all of it is paved; the place drains about as well as a concrete basement without a sump, and a heavy downpour turns it almost instantly into a paddy-like landscape of uprooted garbage cans and fallen palm fronds scudding by like rafts. Yates drove slowly. Water came halfway up the scooter's spoked wheels; water streamed down his legs and between his toes, over the oozing leather of his open sandals. He wound his way through the narrow streets of Old Town, then was able to go just a little faster on the stretch of A1A along Smathers Beach. Dollops of rain pelted his forehead. A pickup truck went by too fast and threw an arcing wave that broke at shoulder height. By the time he'd reached his home on Houseboat Row and locked the scooter to a No Parking sign, his hands and cheeks had been slapped pink by shards of water and three postage stamps buried deep in his wallet had glued themselves to the back of his library card.
His head was down against the rain as he bounded soggily along his gangplank. He didn't see the large dark figure waiting for him there. " 'Lo, Ray," it said.
Yates recognized the voice and instantly felt his bowels go soft, a jolting knife-edged heat suffused his cool soaked khaki shorts. He stopped walking and stood there breathless in the rain.
"You're late onna payment again, Ray," the figure said. "Tha' shit gets old."
There are moments in life when anything you do or say is wrong, and if you do and say nothing, that's wrong too. Yates wrestled with the question of meeting his accuser's eyes, though he knew that nothing better or worse would come of it. There were no excuses to be made and no sympathy to be found: This was Bruno. Bruno was a bagman and enforcer for a Miami-based loan shark, bookmaker, and drug pusher named Charlie Ponte, and he was very good at his job. He was loyal as a Doberman and neutral as a snake, unburdened by intelligence and built like a pizza oven. 'Twice I let ya go already," Bruno said. "It don't look right, like I'm fucking off. Ya got twelve hunnerd bucks for me?"
The two of them stood there in the pouring rain and neither seemed to notice it was raining. The ocean was pocked, curtains of wet swirled in front of the headlights of the occasional passing car. Ray Yates was into Charlie Ponte for forty thousand dollars. The interest rate was 1.5 percent a week, and Yates had punted on two payments. The gambler had had losing streaks before, but never like this. This was the kind of losing streak from which people sometimes did not recover. "Bruno," he said, "I got like forty dollars in my pocket. Friday I get four hundred something. You can have it all, every penny."
"Ya don't take me serious," Bruno said.
"I do. I do," said Yates.
"Nah," said Bruno. He sounded sad and neutral. "On'y way you're gonna take me serious is if I hurt ya."
Without hurry, he moved through the rain toward Ray Yates, and Ray Yates didn't budge. There is a pathetic inevitability in a confrontation between someone who is tough and someone who is not. It is not a struggle but a ritual, the weak one keeps his anguish to himself and goes down with the humble and defeated silence of some toothless creature being gutted alive by a lion. Yates blinked water off his lashes and peed in his pants. Then Bruno smashed him between his left cheekbone and the socket of his eye. The blow came so quick that the debtor didn't know if he'd been hit with a fist, a forearm, or an elbow. His head snapped back and he turned half sideways, and Bruno pummeled the exposed flank with a punch that shook blood out of Yates's lung. He went down on one bare knee and covered up as best he could. Rain and snot poured down his throat as he labored to get back his wind.
Bruno stood over him, patient as death. He reached into a pocket for his cigarettes, then seemed to notice for the first time that he was soaking wet. He threw the ruined smokes into the water and found a stick of gum instead. He unwrapped it, folded it into his mouth, then gave his quarry a casual kick in the ass. "More?" he asked. He asked as casually as if he were offering a second helping of potatoes.
"No, Bruno," Ray Yates whispered. "No more."
"Stan' up like a man then. Ya look ridiculous."
Yates got to his feet. The left side of his face was already beginning to swell, the eye squeezing shut at the outside corner. His knees were jelly and he leaned against the frail wooden railing of his walkway.
"Sataday it goes ta eighteen hunnerd," Bruno said. His face was close to Yates's now, and the gambler smelled spearmint gum and garlic through the salty rain. "Fuck we gonna do about that, Ray?"
Yates's throat clamped shut, and for a while he couldn't speak. "Bruno," he rasped at last, "I don't know. The truth, Bruno? Short of a miracle, I'm not gonna have the money for another three, four weeks."
The enforcer spit his gum. It hit Yates in the forehead then bounced into the ocean. "That stinks. My business, that's a long time in my business."
"Look, tack on a penalty, double the interest, anything you want. Like I told you, Bruno, it's about those paintings. Once they're auctioned there'll be plenty of cash, I'll pay off in full, I swear."
Bruno put his hands on Yates's shoulders. The gesture was almost friendly, until he started pushing with his ramrod thumbs into the soft places behind the other man's collarbones. "How long's it been since you won a fucking bet, Ray?"
It was a gauche question and Yates didn't answer.
"What if you lose this next one too? What then?"
"Those pictures aren't a bet, Bruno. They're money in the bank."
The tough guy dropped his hands, moved his tongue around inside his cheek, and seemed to be considering. Then he looked up at the sky. Rain was still pouring down in big frothy drops, it ran in rivulets between his oily bundles of slick black hair. "Gonna catch cold on accounta you," he said, suddenly taking things personally. "I hate that, a summer cold."
He grabbed the front of Yates's tropical shirt, pulled him forward, then thrust him backward against the wooden rail. The rail was nothing more than a two-by-four nailed onto posts, and the beefy Yates crashed through it like a bowling ball through pins. The water next to the seawall was too shallow to break his fall; knobs of coral racked his legs and slammed against his back and he lay there stunned amid the beer cans and the condoms, the turds and tampons shot out the bottoms of people's boats.
Bruno looked enormous standing on the gangplank. "I'll see what Mr. Ponte wants to do with you," he said.
He walked off slowly through the rain, and Ray Yates lay dead still in the slimy water until he was very sure the big man wasn't coming back.