"It's very… specialized," Augie said. He considered this as they turned onto A1A. The road was twenty feet from the Atlantic Ocean and maybe eighteen inches above it. "There are towns, you know, for making money. Towns to start a career. Towns to go to college. Towns to raise a family. Key West is no damn good for any of that. Key West is to feel good and be happy. That's all. Don'tcha think?"
"Si, yes," said Reuben absently, his attention riveted to the pavement. "Augie, where you like me to stop?"
"Over past the airport," Augie said. "Where the island curves around. You get the biggest sweep of water there."
Reuben put his blinker on a long time in advance and started driving even slower. Alongside A1A-a continuation of it, really-there is a broad concrete promenade that in certain places fronts the beach and in others ends directly at the seawall. This promenade is used by bicyclists and joggers, prostitutes both male and female. Windsurfers sometimes park their vans there, fishermen sometimes leave their pickup trucks along it and launch their dinghies over the rampart. At the spot Reuben finally edged off the road, there was no sand, the green water came right up to the barricaded island. Beyond the thigh-high wall, scattered mangroves perched atop their tangled cones of roots, stilts and egrets gawked around for food.
"Good," said Augie as Reuben turned off the Saab's ignition and the turquoise car slid slowly, silently past them and continued north. "This is good."
Reuben sighed with relief that the drive was over. Then he clambered out and reached into the back for Augie's easel. The painter, still brittle and unaccustomed to sudden movements, took a moment to unfold himself from the car. His knees were stiff beneath the ever-present khaki shorts, his shoulders felt tight inside the faded purple shirt. He stood with one hand on the Saab's warm roof and looked around. In the west, the sun was an orange ball that had lost its fire and dangled just above the low shrubs of the salt marsh; the sky above it was streaky green. In the east it was a different sky, satiny, already dim and sweetly modest, as if a shy bride was turning off the lights before she would receive the moon.
Augie meandered. That's what he always did, it was some fundamental part of his looking at the world, some basic ritual of settling in. He wandered to the seawall, he wandered to the edge of the road. He wandered past the car, backtracked, then did a lazy pirouette and sauntered off again. Reuben zigged and zagged behind him, the easel on his shoulder. Finally the painter found the place that felt right to his feet and looked right to his eyes. He put his hands in his pockets and sniffed the air; it had the good mud smell of limestone and the tang of sun-baked shells.
The pad and easel appeared in front of him and the artist started to draw. He sketched a feeding egret, captured the unlikely splayed angle of its stick-figure legs and the lightness of the feathered crest raked back from its head. He caught the shrewdness of the lidless eye and the strength in the darting neck that could unravel and strike as fast as any snake.
Reuben moved a respectful twenty feet away and watched. He was in awe of Augie working, not just the skill but the mysterious boldness it took to draw a line, the confidence and the belief that were needed to leave a mark. Reuben knew that he himself would never have such boldness. He liked to make small changes in things that already existed: arranging flowers, plumping pillows, setting dishes perfectly on a table; he made things more beautiful and it pleased him. But to start from nothing…
"Reuben, look," said Augie, pulling the young man out of his thoughts. He gestured quickly toward the west, abandoned by the sun, then made a sweep across the flatly glowing water to the east. "Should be any minute now."
The painter smiled, excited, and Reuben was happy for him and happy for himself, happy to have a friend who, even though his hair was white, even though he was not young, was excited at the thought of seeing moonrise.
They watched, scanning the horizon for a telltale gleam. On the seafront promenade, l ife streamed by around them. A jogger pushing a stroller ran past Augie's easel. A knot of screaming mopeds zipped by on the curbless shoulder of A1A.
Then Reuben noticed a turquoise car driving slowly toward them on the broad walkway. In Key West, a town of hazy boundaries, where storms confused the ocean with the land, where friendships sometimes crossed over into hatreds, where sidewalks slipped without a curbstone into roadways, it was not unusual to see a car among the joggers. Everyone wanted front row on the sea, and Reuben's only fear was that the vehicle, now perhaps a hundred yards away, would intrude on Augie's moonrise.
Reuben didn't want to let that happen, and imagined that by vigilance he could prevent it. He watched the car and left the blank and promising horizon to his friend. The painter, rapt, gazed toward the east. The air was dead still and the temperature of skin; a pair of ibis flew down and landed with a skipping splash. The tires of the turquoise car made a sudden squeal just at the instant that a blood-red cuticle of moon poked through its dark envelope of ocean. Augie turned and pointed, his face ecstatic, as the murderous vehicle hurtled toward him. Reuben, low, lithe, afraid of nothing, threw himself across the car's trajectory. His shoulder caught Augie in the solar plexus and the two men flew over the seawall and into the mangroves as the easel was reduced to matchsticks and the indifferent moon threw red beams that skipped across the water and tracked the turquoise convertible in its escape.
33
"He saved my life," Augie Silver softly said to Nina.
It was around 10 p.m. Reuben, bruised and soaking wet, had gone home. The painter was propped on pillows in his bed. It had taken him a long time to get his breath back as he lay stunned among the mangroves and the fleeing birds, and now he was unpleasantly aware of the weight of his lungs; they heaved in his chest like sacs of lukewarm gelatin. His arms ached, his leg muscles twitched in their loose wrappers of empty skin. His wife sat next to him and stroked his dry and feverish forehead.
"Damn drunk drivers," she muttered.
Augie briefly closed his eyes, swallowed, opened them again. "Nina," he said. She waited for him to continue, and as she waited she glanced toward the window. As on the evening Augie had come back to her, the thin curtain was blanched by moonlight and billowed softly on an unfelt breeze. He took her hand. "Nina, listen. I don't think it was a drunk. And I don't think it was an accident."
The former widow pushed out breath as though to speak but found she had no words. Augie paused, then with great effort lifted himself onto his elbows.
"I didn't want to say anything," he went on. "I wasn't sure. I didn't want to scare you. But ever since Fred, that tart, now this business with the auction…" He looked at Nina's face, her wide-set slate-gray eyes, and understood that no more needed saying. "You knew?"
"I suspected. I didn't want you to worry. Manny Rucker said-"
"Aren't doctors fabulous?" Augie interrupted. "They prescribe no stress and think life is gonna obey their orders."
He managed a parched smile that his wife could not return.
"I went to the police the day Fred died," she said. The words, long overdue, spilled out now. "They thought I was crazy. They told me to call the ASPCA. Maybe now they'll believe-"
"Believe what? That someone tried to run me over with a turquoise convertible? Half the cars in town are turquoise convertibles. Rented and identical."