An old lamp threw stale yellow light across the poet's desk, put a brown glow in his glass of rum. At his elbow lay a grant application that had grown limp in the steamy air. The South Florida Rehabilitation League was offering two thousand dollars for a poet to teach haiku to crack addicts in halfway houses. Natchez didn't like haiku, found its modesty fake, and he wasn't crazy about crack addicts either. Their eyes were a spooky red and they had a lot of tics. Their shoulders twitched and their noses ran. They tended to like crack more than life, and Robert Natchez, given his own passionate morbidity, would have had a tough time mustering the conviction to talk them out of that preference. But he needed the money.
He needed the money, yet his one Augie Silver canvas still hung on the wall above his desk.
This was because there were other things that Robert Natchez needed more. He needed to feel exceptional. He needed to maintain the rigid priestly purity that justified him as the final arbiter of right and wrong. He needed to feel superior to Phipps, to Yates, to everyone who had run out to hock his Augie Silver paintings, and as he had lately realized, he needed maybe most of all to triumph in some final way over Augie Silver himself. Augie the sudden darling of the marketplace. Augie the lightweight who had somehow bamboozled the critics with the illusion of substance. Augie whose lucky and so far inconclusive dance with death had cast a falsely dramatic fight on what was in the end a small, conventional, bourgeois talent.
Natchez sipped his rum, breathed deeply of the molasses fumes that blended with the lewd and fetid smells of the rotting flowers from the lot beyond the alley. Fine, he thought, as he glanced once more at the application angled on the blotter: Let Augie be the sweetheart of the trendoids from New York, the moneyed philistines with their vapid pictures in their vapid houses filled with vapid conversation. He, Natchez, would fill a nobler, more heroic role: Poet Laureate to the addicted and the retarded, troubadour to the incontinent and the insane. Now here was a mission: bringing haiku to the doomed, sonnets to the senile, nonsense verses to those pure and damaged souls beyond the iron grip of sense. This would be no mere dabbling, no whore's diddling in the gross lap of commerce. It would be a liberation.
Yes. And he, Robert Natchez, would be a Liberator.
The word excited him, warmed his chest like a sudden image of remembered sex. Poet and Liberator. He swigged rum, pushed his chair back on its hind legs, narrowed his eyes as if contemplating some grand vista, as if orating to a rapt multitude. Liberator. Freeing men from their slavery to a wan and mediocre falseness. Pointing the way to a new order where reigned a more muscular and savage truth, where the authority of the artist was untrammeled and supreme.
Liberator. Isn't that what the greatest of his forebears had always been? Bolivar. San Martin. Even Fidel. Robert Natchez felt a sudden brotherhood with these men who had bloodied themselves in glorious victory over the smugness of wealth and choked tradition. It was exalting, this sudden sense of kinship, and it was odd: Natchez's family had been American for five generations, Hispanic pride had been for him the merest remnant of an echo. Now suddenly that echo was resonating, swelling, doubling back on itself as though whispered in an oval room. He was Robert Natchez, of hot and ancient Iberian blood.
Natchez. It was a strong name and a proud one. But Robert? This gave the Liberator pause. What kind of name was Robert? It was bland, white, uncompelling, neutered. Then there was Bob, a name he'd always loathed, a name for a bait-shop assistant or someone's idea of a funny thing to call a dog. No, these names were unworthy of his newfound vocation, they were names he'd let himself be saddled with too long, but they had never been his true name. His true name was Roberto. In an instant this was clear to him, the realization was as bracing as a north breeze that put to flight the drooping and complacent clouds.
"Roberto." He said it aloud, rolling the R's, imparting a sensual and manly fullness to the O's. The sound reflected off his pitted walls and delighted him. He said his name again, closing down his throat to create a certain raspiness, a hint of threat and implacable will.
He swigged rum. His skin itched with excitement, with a wet sticky sense of having just been born. He skidded his chair close in to his desk, picked up his pen, and held it so hard it chafed against the small bones of his fingers. Grandly he pushed aside the application form. This was no time for trivialities, it was a time for poetry, for manifestos. With trembling fingers he grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and began to scribble down the creed and testament of this new man, this Liberator, Roberto Natchez.
*
Jimmy Gibbs opened the rust-pocked door of his bachelor-size refrigerator and looked inside with no great appetite. The dim bulb revealed four cans of beer, one sad misshapen stick of butter with toast crumbs on it, some shriveled carrots, a leprous mango, and one-quarter of a slightly sunken Key lime pie, not the tourist kind that's green but the local kind that's yellow.
He grabbed a beer and the pie and sat down at the nicked Formica table. Outside, tree toads were buzzing in the thick air, the sound mixed unpleasantly with the ugly hum of the ugly orange crime-deterrent streetlights. Not far away tires were crunching over the white gravel byways of the trailer park. The trailer park was on Stock Island, the wrong side of the tracks if there had been any tracks. It was where the help lived, and Jimmy Gibbs never forgot that for a moment. The black women who made the beds and swabbed the toilets in the hotels downtown. The new Cubans who were busboys. The eighth-grade dropouts with their green teeth and goofy smiles who did lawns sometimes, other times tree work, deliveries till they crashed the truck, pools till they fucked up the chemicals and someone got a rash, at which point they got fired, stayed drunk two, three days, then started asking around again.
Then there were the boat guys, the fishermen and the mates. Jimmy Gibbs was one of those until a week or so ago, and from day to day, as his torn hands healed and his aching back unknotted, he remembered it as being a much better job than he'd thought it was when he'd had it. It was healthy outdoor work, had a lot of independence to it. Got him out on the water, paid him a decent if not a handsome wage, let him do what he was good at. That was the main thing, he realized now, as he used some beer to unstick pie crust from his gums. He knew what he was about out there. From icing the bait to battening down at the end of the day, he knew what he was doing.
Well, that was history. He couldn't go back to those docks. He wouldn't. Not after his big blowup and the quiet kiss-off from Matty Barnett. Not after his confident brag that he was coming back to buy the boat. He'd settled things with that one, no denying it. Not that he hadn't spouted off plenty of times before, made a lifelong hobby out of fucking up. But a person's life, he thought, was a lot like fishing line, it had a lot of give, a lot of stretch, but there came a time when the stretch was all played out, the suppleness was gone, you gave one small tug too many and the whole thing snapped, went dead and weightless in your hand. That's how his life felt now, dead and weightless like a snapped line, the fish gone, the battle over way too soon and without even the satisfaction of having been fairly beaten.
And why had it happened? Why? Jimmy Gibbs stared out the little picture window of his trailer, out at the miniature front yard made of gravel and the maze of circuit boxes and crisscrossed wires beyond, and it seemed ever clearer that it happened because he'd been given false hope by a Yankee, an outsider. That goddamn painting, the promised windfall that now fell short. All bets were off-that's what Sotheby's had told him, although they said it prettier than that. And meanwhile he'd gone over the edge. Bitterly, Jimmy Gibbs remembered Hogfish Mike's whispered counsel on the eve of Augie Silver's memoriaclass="underline" He's not your bubba. Well, Hogfish had been right, and he, Jimmy Gibbs, had been stupid to imagine that something good might come from a few friendly moments between a Yankee and a Conch. He'd made a basic and humiliating error: He'd believed the outside world might help him out. And now Augie Silver had cost him his job and his final chance at amounting to something. Maybe he hadn't meant to mess him up, but screw it, intentions didn't matter, results did. And the result was that, as usual, the rich outsider came up roses and the local guy got fucked.