"It's not like we're wasting his precious time with chitchat," Nina went on. "If he knows where Ray is… And come on-he's not away. He's got no money and nowhere to go. He's just being-"
"Being what?"
"Being arrogant. Being secretive. Being himself."
They ate. Augie sucked meat from a crab claw, then, as if thinking aloud, said softly, "I thought you liked Natch."
"I've enjoyed him at moments," said Nina grudgingly. She nibbled at a wedge of avocado. "But everything seems different now. I just feel so let down, so disappointed in them all."
Augie frowned at his food. He knew what she was saying, he'd felt it too. He passed along another of the unsought consolations that had come to him while working. "Nina," he said, "someone is trying to do something terrible to us. That doesn't mean everyone is guilty."
"No?" said his wife. She put her fork down, dabbed her mouth on a napkin, then fixed her husband with a naked stare. "Then why do I feel that they are?"
36
The stairway up to Roberto Natchez's third-floor garret was narrow and steep and smelled like dead flowers mingled with onions simmered long ago. Heat spiraled up along the banister and collected in a shimmering mist beneath the wire-strengthened skylight cut into the sunstruck metal roof. It got hotter with each step, and even the young and slender Reuben was damp between the shoulder blades by the time he reached the poet's door. He mopped his forehead on his handkerchief, took a moment to collect himself, and knocked.
Natchez looked up from the blank sheet of paper angled exactingly in front of him. He did not get many visitors, and he hid from himself the truth that he was grateful and curious to have one now, telling himself instead that he was annoyed at this interruption of his labors. He put down his pen with a show of irritation, then stood and examined himself briefly in the full length mirror tucked in a dim alcove near his desk. Content that his black shirt was presentable, he walked the two steps to the door.
He saw Reuben standing there and felt a flash of disappointment. He'd imagined a more important-looking caller. "Yes?" he curtly said.
"I am sent by Mr. and Mrs. Silver," Reuben said. "They would like to speak with you."
"I know they would," said Natchez, as though it was obvious that everyone wanted to speak with him. He turned away and the momentum of turning carried him once again into his living room. Reuben decided to regard this as an invitation to enter, and he followed the poet in. Natchez wheeled on him. "I got their messages," he said.
"So why you don't call back?" pressed the messenger. "They speak of you as a friend."
Natchez squelched a pang of guilt before it could register as such, and went on the offensive. "And who are you?"
"I am Reuben."
Natchez nodded sagely and as if somehow vindicated. "Spanish."
"American."
The poet nodded again, a condescending smirk spreading across his mouth the way a drop of sludge smears itself across a puddle. He was standing near his desk now, and when he spoke he did not look right at Reuben, but a little off to the side. "American," he scoffed. "That's what the new ones always say. American. They say it with pride, as if it were some great accomplishment to come here and be used."
"I am not used," said Reuben. "I do what I want to do."
"Of course," said Natchez, sneering. "You want to run errands for the Anglos. You want to clean their toilets. You want to pick up the crumbs from their tables."
Reuben found the lecture boring; he'd heard it before, in neighborhood bodegas, from old men playing dominoes. What did interest him, though, was the question of why Natchez didn't look at him while he lectured. He came a half-step farther into the living room and realized that the poet was watching himself in the mirror: practicing his delivery, but practicing for what?
"You want to work for bad wages," the liberator droned on. "You want to call your bosses Mr. and Mrs. Anglo while they call you-"
"I call them Augie and Nina," Reuben said. He said it softly but with a delight that exasperated Natchez. He turned away from the shadowed mirror and looked at his visitor with quiet fury.
"Well, you tell Augie and Nina that I'm very busy just now and I'll call them when I can."
Reuben stood his ground. He glanced around the poet's apartment. It was dusty, dim, starved for sunlight, air, and furniture polish. Termite droppings flecked the windowsills, limestone grit put a dull gray coating on the floors. "I won't," he said.
"You won't what?" said Natchez.
"I won't tell them that. It is too important. Do you know where Ray Yates is?"
The poet put his hands on his hips, checked his posture in the mirror, and took a tone as superior as any rich Anglo could possibly muster. "What gives you the nerve-"
"I ask you a question," Reuben shot right back. He wasn't trying to mimic Natchez, but he also put his hands on his hips, and the effect of the two of them standing there was faintly ludicrous. "Where is Ray Yates?"
Like most bullies, Roberto Natchez was ready to cave in at the first sign of real resistance. He dropped his hands and shrugged. "I don't know."
Reuben considered. He had his answer but it was an empty answer. He looked down at the floor and wished someone would wash it.
But now suddenly Natchez seemed eager to volunteer more information. It galled him to be asked a question to which he did not know the answer; it galled him to have given in to this fey little spick who spurned his liberator's message. He was ready to take out his pique on Ray Yates, who wasn't there to defend himself. "Ray Yates is a very weak person," he said.
Reuben said nothing, just sucked shallowly at the fetid heavy air. Natchez glanced sideways, tugged at the placket of his shirt, and orated.
"He lacks self-discipline. And, like many people of privileged background, he imagines there will always be someone to fix things for him. Someone to step in and write a check or make a phone call to some powerful friend who owes a favor."
Reuben stayed quiet and watched a gekko slink along a cobwebbed baseboard.
"He gambles," Natchez went on. "Heavily. Your kind employers-Augie and Nina-they know that? I'll bet they don't. He's a sneak about it. Even I didn't know how heavily he gambles until a couple of days ago. He's pathetic."
"Last Friday night he rents a car," Reuben ventured.
"Yes," said Natchez. "To run away. To hide. He's in trouble with his loan sharks. A mouse in trouble with the snakes. He's got to stay in a little hole somewhere until he pays them off."
"How will he pay?" asked Reuben, but he knew the answer before he'd finished the question. Natchez, smirking, lifted a heavy eyebrow toward his single Augie Silver canvas.
"It's so perfect," the poet said. "The mouse will pay the snakes with the money that some vulture will waste on a picture by a-"
Reuben interrupted to spare himself the pain and rage of hearing Augie insulted. "You hate everyone," he said.
It was not a question. Roberto Natchez did not bother to deny it. Rather, he straightened his back and appraised himself in the mirror, took his own measure as arbiter of all things. "I hate weakness," he said. "I hate fakes. I hate people who think that by fooling themselves they can fool the world. I hate-" "You hate Augie?" Reuben asked. Natchez paused, raised a finger in the manner of a preacher, then elected not to answer. He attempted a small ironic smile, but it stalled halfway through the muscles of his face and locked into a death's-head grimace. Reuben could not help falling back a step. The room suddenly seemed more suffocatingly close than it had been before, as if the air itself had melted away and left behind some noxious residue of stinging dust and the infernal swampy vapors of rotting vegetation. Reuben swallowed, his mouth tasted vile. With effort, he tore his eyes away from the poet's evilly contorted lips; he had to look at something else, anything else. His flitting eyes glanced at bookshelves, sooty windows, then came to rest on a wire cage standing end-up in a corner of the room.