"Reuben," Nina said, "Mr. Silver has been very sick."
The young man breathed deeply, taking the weight of his friend's illness into himself. He nodded solemnly.
"He needs a long rest, a perfect rest. And he needs someone to spend the days with him, to make sure he isn't bothered. Someone whose company he finds soothing. So I was wondering-"
"I will do it," Reuben said.
She looked at him, began just barely to smile, then understood that a smile was not called for, would cheapen the moment. "Maybe you should think about-"
"I will do it," he repeated.
"But Reuben, your other jobs. You should speak to Mrs. Dugan."
"I will tell Mrs. Dugan."
Nina lifted her eyebrows and looked down at her cuticles. She knew Sandra Dugan slightly-a quiet woman and nobody's pushover, a recent New York transplant who ran her business as a business: She had imported to Key West the exotic notion that a person might show up to clean two weeks in a row. "Maybe you should ask Mrs. Dugan."
Reuben gave a philosophic shrug. "It is no difference. If I ask and she says no, I quit. If I tell and she doesn't like that I tell, I am fired. It is the same."
"But Reuben-"
"Meesus Silber, please. It is what I wish to do."
And so it was agreed.
Reuben put his apron on and started to clean, humming Cuban songs. He dusted, he vacuumed, he cut flowers from the yard and arranged them neatly in porcelain vases. He was happy and proud. He had been singled out, called upon to serve, to care, to have the privilege of watching his friend grow stronger. He would watch him like a fisherman watches the sky, alert and knowing, the first to see a change, a danger. He would be the kind of friend he wished he had, and so perhaps become worthy of having such a friend himself.
18
"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."