Gibbs reached into a bucket, grabbed a grouper by the tail, slapped it onto the cleaning table, and stabbed and slashed it open. He'd almost bought a boat once, Jimmy had. It was during the recession that most people hardly remembered, '81-'82, when business stank, no one was making money, and the market was flooded with bargains. There was an old Bertram, thirty-one feet, twin gas inboards, worth a good forty grand and going begging at twenty-seven. Back then, Jimmy Gibbs had five thousand dollars put away, the proceeds of some discreet transporting of bales of marijuana He'd put on a fresh blue shirt and jeans with a crease and gone to the bank to borrow the rest.
The banker was a realist. "Lotta guys, Jimmy, they think a charter boat's a money machine, think once ya got the boat, everything is easy. Not true. Things go wrong. There's a lousy season. Ya get sick. Someone breaks a leg and sues. A lotta guys can't cut it. And we take the boats back, Jimmy. Don't think for a second we don't. It's embarrassing, it makes you crazy mad, and you can't ever borrow money again. You sure ya wanna try?"
Gibbs yanked the guts out of the grouper, flicked off a loop of purplish intestine that was clinging to his finger. He had been sure he wanted the loan, until he came to the part of the application that asked if he'd ever been convicted of a felony. "I gotta answer this?" he'd asked.
The banker had folded his hands, dropped his voice, and put on an expression that was a mixture of concern and grisly curiosity. "Jimmy, we're a local bank. You're a local guy from a local family. Up to a point, we're very understanding… What you did, how bad was it?"
Gibbs slid the hollowed grouper to the edge of the cleaning table and plunged into the bucket for a yellowtail. It had already begun to curl and grow rigid, he had to flatten it with one hand while puncturing its belly. Jimmy Gibbs didn't go around telling people what he'd done as a younger man with a vicious temper and a stock of grievances close-packed as a seaman's trunk. He'd told the banker he'd finish the application at home. Then he'd left, crumpled up the paper in the parking lot, dropped it in the trash, gone out and gotten shit-face drunk, and that was as close as he'd come to owning a boat. Now he reached into the yellowtail and felt its gelatinous organs turn to a warm paste between his fingers.
"Whole or fillet?" he said to the tourist who owned the gutted fish.
The tourist was short and sunburned and had white cream on his lips. "Lemme ask the wife," he said, and he turned away to find her.
Jimmy Gibbs stood there, the hot sun on the back of his neck, his nicked fingers smarting from the salt and the drying fish blood, and the hand that held the filleting knife was twitching as he waited.
"How 'bout you, cap'n?" he asked the next know-nothing fisherman down the line. It seemed that Jimmy Gibbs couldn't wait to plunge his blade back into something. "How you want them snappers?"
6
"It's as good a system as any other," said Ray Yates, stepping gingerly through the kennel area at the Stock Island dog track between the evening's sixth and seventh races.
"It's asinine," said Robert Natchez. Natchez, a fastidious man, picked his footfalls even more carefully than his friend. He was wearing black sneakers, black jeans, black T-shirt, and black blazer.
Around the two men, nervous greyhounds, their limbs taut as frogs' legs, their gleaming fur given a hellish orange cast by the strange stadium lights, were being led out of their pens. Handlers stroked their lean flanks and petted their bony heads while fitting on their numbers. The dogs pranced, high-stepping as carousel horses frozen in the glory of full gait. Now and then one of the animals would pause, sniff the ground, lower its elegantly rippling haunches, fix the nearest human with a gaze of sympathetic candor, and take a dump.
When that happened, Ray Yates would reach for his program and check the dog's name against its number. "There's your winner," he'd confidently say to Natchez. "A lighter dog is a faster dog."
'That hasn't proven true so far," Natchez pointed out. The information wafted gently over the radio host without putting the slightest dent in his certainty.
Back in the grandstand, the audience of hard-core bettors, bored locals, and ragtag tourists waited for the next grim pursuit of Swifty the mechanical rabbit. Beauty parlor blondes, their lobes stretched tribal-style by weighty jangling earrings, sucked powdery whiskey sours through straws. Fat men in the inevitable plaids smoked Cuban cigars that had been bought with a wink in Miami. The night sky was reduced to a hazy black bowl above the pink glare of the floods.
"Gimme two dollars on number seven," said Robert Natchez. He didn't quite know why he'd agreed to accompany Ray Yates to the track, this place of shit and greed. He'd told himself the artist should see everything, however tawdry. But Key West offered abundant seaminess, squalor, pathos, and depravity without the need of going to the dogs.
Yates glanced at his annotated program. "Number seven didn't go," he advised.
"Maybe he runs better constipated," Natchez said. "I'll take my chances."
The more systematic bettor shrugged. "My two simoleons are going on the lighter number four."
Yates took Natchez's money and went to place the bets. Low to the ground and purposeful, he bulled through the milling crowd, his palm-tree shirt just slightly damp with sweat. A queasy and familiar excitement overtook him as he neared the barred, illicit cashier's window. The excitement started as a tickle at the backs of his knees, then became a not unpleasant burning in his stomach. The burning transformed itself to a twinge in his loins followed by a pulsing in the veins of his neck. Now he stood directly in front of the dead-faced woman who punched the pari-mutuel machine and his mouth was dry. He took a quick look over his shoulder to make sure that Robert Natchez, his closest friend, had not for some reason followed him. Then, with fingers that were not quite steady, he reached across and placed a two-dollar bet on number seven and bought another hundred dollars' worth of losing tickets for himself.
Later, after nine dull races and a nightcap under the bougainvillea at Raul's, Robert Natchez returned to his small apartment to do some work. He had a grant application to complete. And maybe, he admitted to himself, that was the real reason he'd agreed to waste the evening at the track: to avoid yet another confrontation with the inane, insulting, subtly humiliating questions on yet another grant form. He'd applied for them all at one time or another. National Endowment. Florida Arts Council. Southeastern Poetry Foundation. They all asked, in their polite and neutered institutional prose, why he wanted the grant. Morons! How about to eat? They all wanted to know what he would bring to the program. On this question, Natchez's colossal arrogance contended with his fragile sense of decorum. When decorum lost out, he'd submit answers like "a bracingly fresh approach to language coupled with a masterful grasp of poetic form and an emotional intensity reminiscent of Pound." To go on record with a self-evaluation like that and still not get the grant was a distressing experience.
Even on those rare occasions when the funding came through, the result was generally depressing. Three thousand dollars to drag himself around the flat and endless state of Florida giving poetry workshops to baffled, nose-picking, germ-carrying first-graders in the public schools. Two thousand to read soothing verses to frothing schizophrenics in county nuthouses, to dozing oldsters in their rubber-sheeted beds. So worthy, these foundation projects, and so futile and bad-paying. Though Robert Natchez could never have brought himself to acknowledge it, they made him feel like a runt kitten still burrowing blindly toward some grudging public tit while his more robust and savvy peers had opened their eyes, stretched their legs, and set out to stalk their destinies in the wider world.