He turned without another word and walked quickly through the denuded living room and out into the humid purple dawn.
39
When he got home it was almost seven.
Rays like a crown were spiking up the eastern sky, and the curbside puddles had dried. He locked the blue fat-tire bicycle in front of his house. He opened the door and saw Nina pacing in the living room and drinking coffee. Her eyes were flat and tired.
"Augie," she said, "you shouldn't have gone out alone."
"I know," he said. "I had to. I'm sorry."
"You went to Clay's." It was not a question.
"He's selling his paintings. All of them. He's ashamed of himself and he wants to be friends again."
Nina held her coffee mug in both hands. Her head was tilted at an inquiring angle.
"It isn't him," said Augie.
"You're absolutely sure?" said Nina.
"No. Not absolutely. But he had his chance. I'm exhausted." He went to her. She didn't budge. "Mad?"
"Yes."
He rubbed a hand over his face, the skin felt rubbery. "I don't blame you," he said.
He went to the bedroom. Reuben was there. His hair was wet from the shower, and he was plumping Augie's pillows. How did he know just what Augie wanted and how did he do it so fast? Reuben was amazing.
Augie didn't bother to undress. He slipped under the sheet, pulled a pillow over his eyes and ears, and when he woke up it was noon.
Nina was mostly over being angry, though she exacted a promise that Augie would run off on no more reckless errands. They had lunch, and then the painter asked Reuben to set up the big easel in the backyard and to carry out his partly painted canvas from the storage room. He was ready to return to work on the hommage to Fred, a heroic portrait of a noble bird against the backdrop of a mythic forest.
He took his brush and palette and climbed the ladder under the shelter of the strangely dainty poinciana leaves. He began to paint and he began to hum. The jungle canopy took on texture and humidity. Weird rootless flowers sprang to crimson life in the damp and crumbly crevasses between branches. Unknown huge-eyed creatures-antic crosses between cats and bats and squirrels-flitted half-hidden in the camouflage of light and shade. Here and there a flash of searing sun shot through; bulbous fruits and pregnant pods swelled with excess of vitality. The foliage shaped itself around a monumental absence, held itself open, breathless and fluttering in expectation of the something that was missing, till the picture seemed to cry out for the colossal presence of an outsize parrot, a prodigious parrot in splendid and extravagant plumage.
Augie was mixing colors, humming, chuckling to himself, when the phone rang. He didn't hear it, nor did he see Nina walking toward him until she was standing almost directly underneath the ladder.
"Peter Brandenburg's on the line," she said. "He wants to fly down tomorrow morning and do the interview in the afternoon."
"Fine," said Augie, "fine." He was thinking about birds and vines and jungle, he didn't want to distract himself with journalists and interviews. But then he remembered the suggestion Joe Mulvane had made. "Tell him there'll probably be someone from the Sentinel along."
Nina shielded her eyes from the sun and frowned up at him. "He won't like that," she said. "Big New York critic sharing time with some reporter from the local rag."
Augie shrugged. "I hate giving the same answers twice. If he wants the interview, that's the ground rules."
Nina was momentarily exasperated, then a small and enigmatic smile crossed her lips. When she'd thought her husband was dead, she'd made of him, if not a saint, then someone milder, less rambunctious and unmanageable than in fact he sometimes was. She'd almost forgotten what a stubborn bullheaded pain in the neck he could be when he was working, when he was strong. She shook her head and went back to the phone.
Augie mixed pigments, concocted an unabashedly ferocious shade of acidy lime green, and began the arduous and endlessly amusing job of trying to give the flightless paint the fluff and lift and airiness of feathers.
"Matty been around?" asked Jimmy Gibbs.
"More'n you have," said Hogfish Mike Curran. Losing Gibbs as a regular was no great financial loss to the Clove Hitch, but still Hogfish spoke in the slightly wounded tone of the barkeep who has been abandoned.
"Been busy," said Jimmy Gibbs.
Curran doubted it but kept that opinion to himself. A few seconds went by, then Gibbs blindsided him by saying the real reason he'd been away. "Besides, that little scene the other week… I just ain't felt like bein' at the docks."
A sudden wave of fellow feeling swept over Hogfish Mike. "I gotcha, bubba. Have one on me?'
In the instant after the words had left his mouth Curran understood two things: He understood that he'd been ambushed, worked around to the offer of a freebie, and he understood that Gibbs, being Gibbs, would try to stretch the offer.
"Jeez, Hogfish, thanks. A shot and a beer, if you don't mind."
The bartender wheeled around, grabbed a longneck and poured a slightly grudging shot of no-name bourbon. When he spun back toward Gibbs, the former mate was watching a fishing boat come into the Bight, watching the way it chiseled out a wake and the way the green water went foamy but flat behind it, and there was a no-bullshit sadness in his face that made Curran feel a little mean for not giving him more alcohol.
But then Gibbs brightened-brightened even before he'd put the cold beer to his lips. His eyes flashed, and in the first instant Hogfish Mike thought it was a twinkle of innocent mischief. In the second instant he decided he'd been half right. It was mischief, but the sadness was still there, mixed in with it, giving it a snarl and a weight and an angry drive that meant trouble.
Gibbs sipped his beer. "Ain'tcha curious why I'm lookin' for Matty?"
Hogfish looked away, watched a cormorant baking its wet wings on a piling. "My business," he said, "it don't do to be too curious."
"Yeah, yeah," said Gibbs. "Well, I need to make sure the Fin Finder is still for sale."
"Far as I know it is," said Curran. He paused, then crossed his ropy forearms and leaned in a little closer. "But Jimmy, what good's it do ya? That auction thing, the painting-you told me it was all screwed up."
Now Gibbs was having fun. He'd managed to pull Hogfish in. He sipped beer, watched a cloud of gulls trail out behind a returning boat. A mate with a rubber apron and no shirt was cleaning the catch. "Is screwed up," he said at last. He swigged again, then gestured toward the swarm of flying scavengers plucking entrails from midair. "But there's more'n one way to gut a fish."
The twinkle in Gibbs's eye had become a glower, he was clutching his beer bottle like it was a bludgeon, and Curran didn't like the look of things at all. He put his hands flat on the bar and leaned in even closer. "Jimmy, you ain't gonna go and do somethin' stupid, are ya?"
Gibbs let go of his beer, grabbed his shot glass, and tossed the bourbon down. Then he grimaced. His gums had seen enough alcohol over the years so that a shot of booze no longer made them burn; still, the grimace was part of the ritual of drinking, a visible reminder that the shot had registered. He waited for his face to settle back down before he spoke. "Nah, Hogfish, nothin' stupid. For a change, in fact, I'm doin' somethin' smart."
40
Arty Magnus did not often pull rank on his subordinates. It made for bad morale around the newsroom, and besides it was extremely rare for there to be a story that the editor had the faintest interest in personally covering.
But when Joe Mulvane called late on Tuesday to say that Nina Silver had asked his advice about who her husband should speak to at the paper, Magnus decided to assign the interview to himself. Famous painter returns from dead to real or imagined attempts on his life. This was a cut above the promotional pap and small-town politics usually covered by the Sentinel; this might be of interest more than a few mile markers up the road. Freddy McClintock, the eager and deficient young reporter, would briefly sulk at his boss's usurpation, but he'd get over it; young reporters always did.