"So this Steiger woman," said Ray Yates. "She call you?"
Clayton Phipps took a small sip of extremely nasty white wine and silently cursed himself for being talked into slumming at the Clove Hitch bar. It was well and good for Yates to play out this man-of-the-people routine; he had to, being a radio host, a local personality. But why should Phipps have to subject himself to this resinous, oxidized fluid out of a green gallon screw-top jug with an ear? "Yes," the connoisseur said reluctantly. "She called."
"She want your paintings?" Yates pressed.
"She wants to show my paintings," Phipps corrected. "There's an understanding that it's strictly NFS."
"NFS," muttered Robert Natchez, who was sitting on Phipps's other side. Like most pretentious people, the poet was uncannily sensitive to pretension in others, it irritated him like sand in the mesh cup of a bathing suit. "Goddamnit, Clay, can't you just say 'not for sale' like a normal human being?"
Phipps shrugged. The whole subject of the paintings made him highly uncomfortable, and his discomfort made him feel as nasty as the wine. "O.K., Natch," he said. "Not for sale. Like your journals."
There was a pause. The three friends blinked across the glare of Garrison Bight and watched the charter boats straggle in, their practiced captains working shifters and throttles to back them into their slips with swagger. Red and seasick tourists gathered at the sterns, jockeying for position to be the first ones back on land. Pelicans sat in the water, still as bathtub toys, cormorants stood on pilings and spread their prehistoric wings to dry.
"How many paintings ya got?" asked Ray Yates.
The question fell just as Clay Phipps had let himself imagine that the topic of Augie's canvases was closed, and for all Yates's efforts to sound offhanded, there was something inherently rude, salacious even, about the inquiry, like casually asking someone the length of his dick or the amount of money in his Keogh plan.
There had always been a certain competitiveness among Augie Silver's friends. It stemmed from the fact that they all admired Augie more than they did each other, and more than they did themselves. There was something about the man that made it seem crucial to be liked by him. He was a natural arbiter, he conferred esteem the way a king grants titles of nobility, and his favor suggested not just personal preference but fundamental worth. In the matter of gift paintings, his favor could also confer large amounts of cold cash, but that was something no one wanted to be crude enough to be the first to mention.
"Six," said Clayton Phipps. He said it softly, shyly even, looking down at his cheap scratched wineglass, yet could not quite squelch a nervous smile, a hint of bragging.
"Six!" said Ray Yates. His voice was also soft, but an octave above its usual smooth range.
"Three large, three small," Phipps went on. It seemed he'd decided to make a full disclosure of his holdings and have it over with. 'Three oils, one acrylic, two watercolors. Done over a span of twenty years."
"You sound like a fucking exhibition catalogue," groused Robert Natchez.
Phipps did not immediately answer. He glanced across the pier, saw fishermen hanging grouper on scales and nailing angry-eyed barracuda onto posts. Jealousy. He knew he was dealing with Natchez's scattershot corrosive jealousy and that the higher course would be to let it slide. But lately Phipps's higher impulses had been consistently losing out. Augie's death, his rebuff at the gentle but definite hands of Augie's widow-things like that made him weary of the vigilance it took to be dignified. "How many d'you have?" he taunted Natchez.
"Just the one. You know that."
"Ah. It's one of the nicer of the small ones."
"I have two," Ray Yates volunteered. "A good-size oil on the boat and a little watercolor I hung at the studio."
"Take it home, Ray," said Natchez bitterly. "It's gonna be worth money."
Money. So there it was. The unholy word was dropped like a plateful of soup and was as hard to ignore as a food stain on a tie, but the other two men strove gamely to ignore it. They sipped their drinks, glanced around them at the bar beginning to fill up now with boat crews and returning sailors. The sun was low enough that there were hems of pink on the bottoms of the puffy clouds.
"So Clay," said Yates, "you gonna send your paintings?"
"I haven't decided," said Phipps, though in fact he had. "I just wish I was surer what Augie would want."
"What Augie would want," Yates said, "is not to be dead."
To this, the two men clinked their smudged and murky glasses. It was the sort of comradely gesture they used to do more of, generally with Augie taking the lead. Now it had less the feel of something done in the present than of something re-enacted, an old routine trotted out without great conviction, and Robert Natchez made no effort to join the toast.
"Clay," he said, "you know you want those paintings in the show. Make you look like a big collector. And what the hell-it's only NFS."
Some time later, Jimmy Gibbs parked his sore legs and aching back on a stool at the Clove Hitch bar and ordered up a double Wild Turkey, rocks, chased by a longneck Bud. His captain, Matty Barnett, had offered to buy him a drink, and Gibbs was not one to shortchange himself in matters of the cocktail. He tipped his beer in thanks and sucked the neck of the bottle dry while it was good and cold. Matty Barnett sipped tomato juice livened up with horseradish. He'd been sober fifteen years, ever since he drove his 1970 Bonneville convertible off the bridge and into the Cow Key Channel. It wasn't sinking the car that had scared Barnett onto the wagon; it was that a lot of time went by before he'd noticed he was in the water. Now he watched his first mate sponging up alcohol with the kindly disapproval of a Hindu watching someone wolf a burger.
"Jimmy," he began, "you got any idea why I wanna talk to you?"
"Nope," said Gibbs, although several possibilities had crossed his mind. He'd been late, hung over, a couple times in the last week or so-but hey, no one expected a mate on a charter boat to be a model of promptness and propriety. He'd been, well, a little sarcastic to clients now and again-but it had seemed to him the clients were too nauseous, nervous, and ignorant to pick it up. Besides, Jimmy wasn't there to be anybody's best buddy; he was there to rig the lines, keep them clear, land the fish despite the customers' endless talent for losing them-and he defied Matty Barnett or anybody else to question the quality of his skill.
"I'm thinking of retiring, Jimmy."
This Gibbs had not expected, and it made him take a hard look at his boss. Barnett was barely older than he was, maybe fifty-five, fifty-seven tops. That did not seem like retirement age to Gibbs. He had a tough time imagining someone being far enough ahead of himself, money-wise. Besides, it didn't look to him that the captain really worked that hard. True, he had a constant weight of responsibility on him, but that wasn't work like hauling lines and scaling fish was work. It didn't make your back hurt, didn't ding up your hands.
"I useta love getting out on the water," Barnett went on. "Now it's just a job. Fishing's not what it was. Or maybe it's just me. Anyway, I'm over it. I got a little place up the Keys. Own it free and clear. The wife's got five, six years to go with the Aqueduct. So the way I'm figuring…"
Gibbs knew by now how Matty Barnett was figuring, and the knowledge put a knot in his gut. Barnett was going to offer him a good deal on the boat that Gibbs ached to have and could not possibly buy. The impossibility of it made him furious with everything and persuaded him that there could be no pure motive, no generous impulse, no fairness in all the world. "The way you're figuring is business is lousy anyway so you may as well sell the Fin Finder to me."
Barnett backed off. He seemed truly miffed and Gibbs felt ashamed. He punished and soothed himself with a swig of bourbon, then stared off toward the western sky. There was a band of yellow near the horizon, and above that a lot of green.
"I'm offering it to you first," Barnett said mildly. "It'd please me to have you be the next skipper. If you're not interested, that's fine."
Gibbs glanced sideways at his captain. Decades of scanning the glaring water for fish had bleached out Matty's eyes and made their sockets pink and crinkly like the eyes of Santa Claus. Gibbs could almost find it in himself to apologize and to tell the other man of course he was interested, but he suddenly had the ridiculous feeling that if he tried to speak he would start to cry.
"Here's the situation," Barnett resumed. "Boat's worth sixty-five, seventy. I'll let it go for fifty. I still owe eleven on it myself, so I need that much up front. The rest, I'd work with you, you could pay it off as-"
"Matty," said Jimmy Gibbs in a raspy, strangled whisper, "where in fucking hell am I supposed to get the first eleven thousand?"
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."