instant the dealer envied Augie Silver, serenely dead and beyond the fray. When she spoke again, her voice was sour and abrupt, the charm had dried up like a lemon forgotten at the back of the fridge.
'Avi, I'm leaving this to the open market. I hope to see you at Sotheby's.'
'What the fuck is Sotheby's?' asked Jimmy Gibbs.
Ray Yates, his apricot and turquoise shirt sticking to his broad and furry back, sucked an ice cube and reminded himself where he was and who he was talking to. Key West. A piece of limestone crust barely poking out of the ocean a hundred fifty miles from anywhere, the very tip of the very long tail of keys tucked under the sandy ass of the American dog. Difficult of access, bathed in sun and myth, splendidly uninterested in the high dry world outside, it was one of the last places where a person could truly be provincial. Had Jimmy Gibbs ever read a newspaper other than the Key West Sentinel? Did he read that for any farther-afield intelligence than the hopeful fibs of the fishing report and to see which of his bubbas had made the police blotter? What the fuck is Sotheby's? This was in its way a glorious question, a question full of archaic purity.
'It's an auction house, Jimmy,' Yates told him. 'Ya know, a place where people bid on things. Art, antiques, famous people's autographs.'
Gibbs took a pull of his beer, clattered the dripping bottle back onto the bar, and belched demurely into his nicked-up fist. 'What kinda asshole would pay good money just for someone's autograph?'
'Lotta people do, Jimmy. They keep 'em awhile, then sell 'em at a profit.'
'To a bigger asshole.'
Yates shrugged, and Gibbs tried to picture what this Sotheby's must be like. He'd been to an auction once. It was up on Big Pine, mile marker thirty-one. It was held in a church parking lot under sheets of corrugated tin nailed down on four-by-fours. The auctioneer was a cranelike man in a string tie, and he'd had a voice as loud and irritating as an outboard with the cowling off. Jimmy Gibbs didn't like to talk in front of a lot of people, but he'd bid on a couple of things by raising his hand. He went three dollars on a tackle box of someone who had died, but the gear ended up fetching five fifty. Feeling thwarted, he bid eight bucks on a slightly used dinette set for the trailer, but the auctioneer had hawked his way into double figures before Jimmy Gibbs knew what hit him.
'It's indoors, this Sotheby's place?' he asked.
'Jimmy,' said Ray Yates, 'this is like a very fancy operation. Big room. Crystal chandeliers. Women in designer suits. Men with hundred-dollar ties. You get the picture?'
Gibbs sucked beer and burped.
'People fly in from London, Paris, just to go to these auctions. People phone in bids from Tokyo, Germany-'
'They don't even see what they're buying?'
'They have advisers.'
'They need other people to tell 'em what they want?'
Yates ran a hand through his damp hair. The humidity and Jimmy Gibbs's logic were making him confused and sleepy. He sipped his tequila and glanced around the Clove Hitch bar. If you kept your eyes under the pseudo- thatch roof of the open structure, the light was soft and easy, but as soon as your glance strayed onto the water or over to the charter-boat docks, the late sunshine was sharp and scalding. The earth was tilting each day a little farther toward full summer, the ever-fiercer sun made the whole world seem to creak the way swollen wood complains at an over-tightened screw. Ray Yates was getting irritable, wondering why he'd bothered to try doing the impossible Gibbs a favor.
'Jimmy,' he said, 'you do what you like. But I'm telling you, you wanna pull some money out of that painting, that's the way to do it.'
Gibbs considered. The first thing he considered was whether, if he signaled for another drink, it would still be on Ray Yates. The radio host had paid for the first round with a twenty. Fourteen bucks in soggy bills and some silver was sitting on the bar, and Jimmy Gibbs decided to take a chance. He caught the eye of Hogfish Mike Curran, wagged his empty bottle, then, as the proprietor approached, gave the slightest and most discreet nod in the direction of Yates's cash. Curran bounced this signal over to the talk-show host in the form of a subtly lifted eyebrow, and Yates answered with a no less minimal tilt of his chin: The deal was done, a successful transaction among men who drink.
Gibbs then turned his attention to the question of Augie Silver's painting. The fact was he, Gibbs, was vaguely terrified at the thought of picking up the phone, calling New York, and having to explain to someone who talked fast and had a brisk and snooty Yankee accent who he was and what he wanted. He was afraid he'd be asked to describe the picture, and his description would sound stupid. He'd have to ask all sorts of dumb questions about how to wrap the painting, how to send it. 'Seems like a lotta trouble,' he said at last. 'I mean, what could the thing be worth — three, four hundred dollars?'
Ray Yates hadn't wanted another drink, or at least he hadn't until one was put in front of him. Then he couldn't help noticing that the fresh ice and lime tasted great and the alcohol wasn't too bad either. He smacked his lips, put his glass down slowly, and made a grand sweeping gesture past the unwalled Clove Hitch bar, across the cloudy water of Garrison Bight, up the Keys to the whole snaking coastline and continent beyond. 'Jimmy,' he said, 'there's a whole 'nother world out there. We're not talking hundreds. We're talking thousands, Jimmy. Probably tens of thousands. Maybe more.'
'You're shitting me,' said Gibbs, but he looked hard at the talk-show host and realized that he wasn't. He sucked beer, swallowed it, and worked at holding his face together.
Yates studied him in turn. Gibbs's scalp had started to crawl, the gray hair pulled tightly back began to wriggle like worms so that the small ponytail bobbed up and down. It seemed to Yates that this restless writhing scalp was the birth of greed made visible, and it occurred to him to wonder whether he'd ever really intended to do Jimmy Gibbs a favor or whether his real purpose had been to observe the corrupting of a local. Corrupting not in the sense of the innocent turning bad, because there was nothing remotely innocent about Jimmy Gibbs. Corrupting, rather, in the sense of someone being pulled away from what he was and pushed toward what he could never be, tempted into a fantasy of change that could only end in bafflement and failure.
A cormorant flapped its jointed wings and took off from a post. A spray of tiny fish roiled the water as they fled some large thing feeding on them from below. Jimmy Gibbs pictured himself at the wheel of the Fin Finder, alone in Ray-Bans at the steering station just below the tuna tower. Captain Jimmy. He'd hire a couple young guys to haul the lines, clean the fish; his hands would heal. Maybe he'd buy himself a new truck too. Captains didn't show up at the charter docks in dinged-up old heaps that sifted rust.
Yates watched him, felt a quick pang of remorse, and raised a cautionary finger. 'No such thing as a sure thing, Jimmy. Don't spend that fortune before you have it.'
It was sound advice and it was too bad the talk-show host was not following it himself. It was five o'clock, the sun was still throwing heat as heavy as bricks tossed off a building, and Ray Yates reminded himself that he had to meet a guy to discuss a small matter of some gambling debts. He took a final swig of his tequila and got up with all the gusto of a man on his way to a root canal. He waved goodbye to Hogfish Mike, put a hand on Jimmy Gibbs's shoulder, then trudged the length of the pier. At the foot of it, right up against the seawall, the remains of a filleted fish were floating. The affronted eye stared heavenward, some opal meat still clung to the backbone, and Ray Yates didn't like the look of it at all.
14
Augie Silver slept fitfully for most of the day. It was brutally hot, the palm fronds hung limp and silent outside the bedroom window, yet the painter never lowered the cotton quilt from under his chin. He was too thin, too dry, too tired to sweat, he lay there papery and brittle, his breathing shallow, the dream movements of his eyeballs clear and disconcerting through the veiny translucent skin of their lids.
Around six o'clock he struggled out of bed, slipped out of his clothes, and went slowly to the closet for his favorite robe. It never occurred to him that the robe perhaps had been moved from its accustomed peg during his four-month absence-and it hadn't been. It hung there patient and welcoming, the loops of yellow terrycloth worn flat and shiny at the elbows, the big soft collar suggesting a certain pomp, like the entrance of a champion boxer.
