"Only one auction," she mimicked. "Only one auction. Goddamn you, Augie, you're impossible."
She hung up, the speakerphone squawked static at the loud bang of the receiver, and as soon as the connection had been broken the house seemed cooler. A faint breeze slid through the French doors, it carried a whiff of jasmine and chlorine.
Nina waited a moment, then said, "Augie, why the smile?"
He reached for her, took her forearm in his hand. "I feel like I've been reprieved," he said.
His wife just looked at him.
"If someone's trying to kill me," he went on, "they'd wait at least until my price goes up again. Don'tcha think?"
Nina smiled wanly. Outside, dry foliage rattled; it sounded not like living leaves but like beans and pebbles trapped inside of pods. Reuben also tried to smile. But he was still staring at the painted parrot, and the bird's red eyes seemed to be saying something different from what Augie said. The young man turned his face away.
44
Clay Phipps had taken Augie's advice. He'd gone to bed on Friday afternoon and slept through till 4 a.m. on Saturday. He read till dawn, then, groggy and disoriented, puttered in his house and fiddled in his garden before straggling back to bed around five that afternoon. Sunday he again woke up in darkness and went to sleep in daylight. By 2 a.m. on Monday he was all slept out.
His eyes snapped open as they sometimes did when he was in the deepest throes of jet lag. He felt a similar sort of edgy alertness, an energy more delicious because it could not last, a refreshing dislocation; though he was in his own bed in his own house, he felt a freedom that usually came with being far away: He felt he could, if he dared, afford to be a different person, a bolder person.
But bold how? For what? He scratched his belly, looked up at the ceiling, and wondered what was still worth being bold about. His writing? No, he'd blown it forever on that front. His love life? Well, maybe, if a fitting partner ever came his way. But in the meantime he came up with just one answer, and the simplicity of it surprised and pleased him: his friends. It was worth it to be bold and vigilant and insistent upon frankness with his chums. Wasn't it just exactly that sort of boldness that had brought Augie to his door in the middle of the night? That had cleared the air, got them talking again? There was a lesson there, Phipps thought. He had other friendships that were in trouble. What had happened to Yates, to Natchez, to their close if barbed camaraderie? Yates had left town without a word; Clay Phipps knew it only by his absence from the airwaves. Between good friends, it had come to that. But Natchez was here, a mere four blocks away. Why not go to him? Why not hammer on his door, wake him up, grab him by the shoulders, and force upon the poet the kind of cleansing confrontation that Augie had initiated with him?
Excited by his own resolve, he dressed by the light of a bedside lamp and went out into the night.
It was close to three now and the moon had set. A filmy canopy of mist slid along the sky, it was visible only by the way it dimmed the stars then thinned to let them shine more brightly. The heavy air carried reminders of the ocean, a hint of fish and seaweed. A stray and unkempt dog lolled by, its tongue hanging, its paws making dry clicks on the pavement, its head down in the shameless skulking posture of the scavenger.
Clay Phipps felt brave and young in the empty streets, he almost strutted. But his knees were not good at stairs, and as he labored up to Roberto Natchez's garret, he used his arms as much as he could to haul himself along the banister. By the time he stood on the third-floor landing, he was sweating and winded. He looked through the skylight at the flickering stars, took a moment to compose himself.
His newfound boldness was a tenuous thing, and his first knock was a soft one. But no matter-the poet's door, which was not locked or even closed securely, swung open under his light touch. Phipps, nonplussed, fell back half a step, then peered into the dark apartment. "Natch?" he said.
There was no answer, and something in the way his own voice was swallowed by the darkness told him with certainty that no one was at home. He stepped into the corridor and switched on its dim light. The first thing he saw was a small reddish feather on the floor, the first thing he heard was the erratic whirring whine of an out-of-balance ceiling fan. He inhaled and caught a strange bad smell, a smell from the bottom of a forgotten garbage can.
One small step more brought him to the living room. He switched on the ceiling light and his jaw fell slack. On Natchez's desk was a strangled chicken, its yellow feet clenched and brittle; the bird's narrow head faced back along its spine, a single drop of blood had spilled from its beak and dried on the poet's blotter. Swinging slowly from a blade of the ceiling fan, slightly stretched from the outward force of turning, was a hanged gray cat. It had been hanged with an old necktie, its fur overlay the knot like the loose flesh on an old man's throat; its open eyes were glazed and bulging, its claws were out and just barely whistled as they sliced the air.
Rapt by this dead menagerie, Clay Phipps did not for a moment notice the Augie Silver painting murdered on the wall. When he saw it he could not believe it. He moved closer; the dead cat's tail brushed against his ear as it swung by and he shuddered. He lifted a tatter of canvas; he felt the flaking paint and felt, as well, the rage, the hate. "Good Christ," he said aloud. "It's Natch."
Dizzy, reeling, sickened, he bolted the apartment and trundled down the stairs. Sweating in the silent street, he turned toward Augie Silver's house and begged his flaccid legs and burning lungs to take him faster than they could.
He was still five blocks away when he started hearing sirens.
45
Dade County pine is rich in resin and makes good kindling. Houses built from it burn very fast and very hot, with blue and yellow flames that lick their way from board to board and make popping crackling sounds as they sear into the deep hollows of captured sap.
The fire at the Silver house did not seem to have a beginning in either space or time. It sprang up everywhere at once, and there was about it an awful aspect of fulfillment, as though embers had been smoldering forever, waiting with a patient malice to burst forth and consume. Flames crawled up the porch steps and lapped at the front door. In the side yards, sparks shot from knotholes and ignited shrubs and palms; green things hissed away their moisture in the instant before they caught and blackened. A ring of fire framed the backyard like something from an infernal circus; oleanders burned like pinwheels and gave off poison fumes, the great umbrella of the poinciana began to flame, its dainty leaves tore off and flew away like fireflies.
In the same horrifying instant everyone woke up. Augie and Nina, naked, feeling their skin begin to bake and coughing in the strangling smoke, ran into the hallway. Reuben, in his innocent pajamas, was already on his way to fetch them. United now, they staggered into the hell of the living room. Sheets of yellow flame were flapping like ghosts in the windows; here and there panes exploded from the heat. The picture of Fred the parrot turned incandescent in the ungodly light; the bird's red eyes absorbed flame and flashed back blood. There was a low whistling roar as the fire greedily sucked air into itself, leaving less and less to breathe.
Bent low, their hands cupped over their mouths and noses, the three of them moved toward the front door just as the door crackled and began to blaze. They wheeled through the thickening smoke, coughing, choking, eyes tearing and the tears instantly simmering to nothing. Reuben led them over the steaming floor to the back of the house, he picked up a chair and smashed the glass panels of the French doors. Fire was converging on the portal, it was becoming an unbroken archway of flame. Reuben went through first then grabbed Nina by the wrist, then Augie, and pulled them after. There was no way out of the backyard, all its borders were made of fire, black smoke billowed up, rained down, spread its toxins everywhere. Reuben pushed his friends toward the swimming pool, urged them toward the flashing water, the only thing that was not burning.