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."
9
On a Wednesday evening in early May, Kip Cunningham sipped champagne, poked a silver stud through the placket of his dress shirt, then responded with a tired sense of duty to his wife's request for assistance in doing up her dress. He cinched its panels together, tucked the zipper tab down neatly in its groove, finessed the hook through its little loop of thread, and vaguely noticed the way the top of the silk bodice bit softly into the flesh of Claire Steiger's back. He used to find her back very beautiful, that much Kip Cunningham remembered. Her back wasn't freckled, exactly, but there were light mottlings below the surface; the effect was of looking not at her skin but into it, it was like peering through sun-shot water in a trout stream and seeing pebbles at the bottom. Was her back still beautiful? Her husband could not really have said. He was losing her, though the loss that was happening now had mainly to do with money and social ease. The deeper loss he was oddly numb to because he'd inflicted it on himself, subtly, gradually murdering his chance for happiness with the slow poison of inattention.
"What if someone tries to buy-" he began.
The zip job completed, his wife slid away from his touch and cut him off. "At an opening, Kip? None of my clients would be so tacky."
Cunningham flipped his collar up and began the painstaking process of tying his tie. "There might be discreet inquiries, hints as to price."
Claire leaned forward and examined her eyes. What on earth, she wondered, had been on her mind eight years ago when she and the decorator designed this grand double bathroom with its his-and-hers mirrors, its twin dressing alcoves, its side-by-side scallop-shell sinks? She knew damn well what had been on her mind, and the recalling of it mocked her. What had been on her mind was a Hepburn-Tracy romance. Scintillating chitchat and intimate, brainy repartee while quaffing bubbly and grooming each other for some gala evening where they would take great pleasure and pride from being mates. Parts of the fantasy had come true, Claire Steiger reflected. If anything, there'd been too damn many black-tie evenings, an exhausting excess of verbal sparring, and perhaps too much fine wine. The only thing missing had been the marriage.
"Kip," said the gallery owner, "you used to be a businessman. You can't talk about price until there's some basis for a price."
"But-"
"Ink, Kip. The show is about ink. Publicity. Reviews. You wanna help, do what you do best. Play squash."
"What's that supposed to mean?"