barmaid.
He reached into the fish cooler again and told himself to think about the future and be happy. But he wasn't happy. There are two things that drive a poor man crazy. One is feeling that there's no way out and the other is feeling that there is. What used to be just miserable suddenly becomes unbearable. The last grains of patience slip through the glass the fastest.
'Whole or fillet?' asked Jimmy Gibbs.
The fish on the board was the biggest of the day, a grouper maybe thirty-three, thirty-four inches, ten, eleven pounds. It was a nice fish, but the fishermen were grumpy now, they didn't whoop about it or slap each other on the back. For a few seconds no one spoke, then a loud old car went past in the parking lot and over the noise of it Jimmy Gibbs heard someone say fillet.
He put down his knife, picked up the cleaver and the mallet, and with a single blow that sent loose scales jumping he chopped the head off the fish. Grouper have massive heads, heads like bison, and once this one was severed past the hump, it no longer looked big.
'Fuck you doin'?' one of the four fat fishermen said. He said it loud enough so heads turned three, four slips away, and a lot of people Jimmy Gibbs knew were curious to see what happened. 'I said whole, goddamnit. That one was to show the wife.'
Gibbs looked down at the decapitated fish. The face was at a funny angle, there was an inch or two of blood-smeared plywood between it and the body. The cleaver blow had made the jaws spring open and the tongue was sticking out. Gibbs felt bad. He'd heard wrong, O.K., it was his fault. He was choking down some evil-tasting stuff and working up the breath to say that he was sorry.
But the fat fisherman wouldn't leave it alone. He threw his beer can down and stomped it. It wasn't quite empty and some foam shot out. 'Goddamn fuckin' people roun' here,' he said. He said it loud. 'Fuckin' locals can't do nothin' right.'
A trickle of sweat loosed itself down Jimmy Gibbs's back. Late afternoon sun glared orange on the water, a half-circle of crews and tourists seemed to be drawing closer. Gibbs itched everywhere, his hands balled up and he felt his fingernails clawing at his palms. His knife was on the cutting board in front of him, flecked with gore and sharp as a razor. He'd used a knife once on a man, many years ago. He remembered the weird red pleasure of it, the sucking resistance of flesh to the blade, the fish-eyed surprise on the face of the one stabbed. To kill someone, Gibbs had learned, was less difficult than people thought. All it took was singlemindedness and a burst of raging purity.
Sun glinted off his knife, but when Gibbs made his lunge at the fat fisherman it was the oozing fish head he picked up.
He came quickly around the table, threw himself chest-to-chest against the man who had insulted him, and thrust the amputated grouper head against his cheek. The fisherman stepped clumsily back, warding off the slime with his sunburned elbows. The head slipped out of Jimmy Gibbs's hand and skipped along the pavement; gulls swooped down on it instantly and pecked away its eyes. People sprang toward Jimmy Gibbs to fend him off, but before they grabbed him the fisherman fell backward over the curb and Gibbs pancaked down on top of him like a lineman. He managed one weak punch against the ear, one backhand slap across the jaw, and was working his slime-covered hands toward the other man's throat when two guys grabbed him by the armpits and pulled him off. Gibbs jerked his shoulders and kicked the air. The fat fisherman got up spluttering. His three buddies made a token gesture to hold him back, one of them handed him his cap.
A gull tried to fly away with the grouper head, but it was too much weight, the big bird couldn't get it off the ground.
The first thing Gibbs saw as the blind white rage began to dim was the pink and mild face of Matty Barnett. He was speaking calmly to the four fat fishermen, trying to persuade them not to call the cops. 'It's the heat,' he said. 'Guys get a little crazy. Listen, trip's on me, how's that? Someone else'll finish your fish, you'll take the resta the beer…'
Gibbs pawed the ground. Cheapskate fat-fuck white-trash tourists: They even found a way not to pay to go out fishing.
Barnett walked slowly to where Gibbs was being held. His crinkly Santa Claus eyes were looking down, his posture was weary. He spoke very softly because there were a lot of people standing by. 'Jimmy,' he said, 'I can't have this. You're fired.'
An unfinished fight leaves a man like Jimmy Gibbs as jumpy as unfinished sex. His muscles were twitching, his insides knotted up for battle, and there was no one left to battle but himself. 'I'm not fired,' he said. 'I quit. Fuck this.' He was not in control of his voice and it got louder and rougher as he thrust his chin toward the Fin Finder. 'Next month I'm buyin' the fuckin' boat and you can all kiss my hairy ass.'
Barnett blinked. This was the first he'd heard about Jimmy Gibbs buying the boat and he set it down to his former first mate's desperate swagger. 'We'll talk about that some other time,' he said, as softly as before. 'For right now you better hit the road.'
The skipper nodded and the two guys holding Jimmy Gibbs moved him out, squeezing tight against his sides like prison guards as they walked him to his rusty truck.
20
'You know what they're starting to say,' said Peter Brandenburg, the art critic for Manhattan magazine. 'They're starting to say the whole thing-his disappearance, the retrospective, this supposed miracle return-was one big cheap publicity stunt.'
'That's ridiculous,' said Claire Steiger.
'Absurd,' put in Kip Cunningham.
'Is it?' Brandenburg prodded, and he lifted his martini. For his money, which it rarely was, Coco's Bar at the Hotel France still made the best cocktail in town. The classic glass alone made it worth the seven dollars. And there were no peanuts in the mix served up in heaping cut-glass bowls. Only the more aristocratic nuts: pecans with perfect cleavage, brazils like small canoes, cashews curled like salted shrimp.
'Think about it,' the critic resumed. He wiped his fingers on a napkin, then plucked at the neckline of his woven silk vest. 'You've got a painter who hasn't painted in three years. Who knows if he can paint anymore? He dies and he's suddenly a star. A speculative frenzy kicks in. Then, just when the momentum is perhaps beginning to slow, there's a dramatic new twist: a rumor that he's back! Really, doesn't it seem-'
'Seem what?' Claire Steiger cut him off. Her fingers reached toward the nut bowl and grabbed a couple of depth charges of sodium and fat. She chomped a walnut, then seemed to realize what she was doing and dropped a filbert onto her coaster.
'Convenient,' said Brandenburg, and he managed to make the word sound dirty.
'It's hardly convenient,' said Augie Silver's agent. 'Peter, you remember what happened to prices when Warhol died, when Rothko killed himself. They take a huge leap, we all know that. If it turns out he's alive-' 'Alive, not alive,' said Brandenburg impatiently. 'I'm telling you that people are suspicious, confused, and ready to be very pissed off. It's the kind of thing that ruins people.'
'Ruins who?' asked Kip Cunningham. Peter Brandenburg flashed him a quick glance from underneath his eyebrows and pretended not to understand the question. He was known at Coco's and it did not do for a critic to look upset, to appear to be taking things personally. But Brandenburg did look upset, if only for an instant, and only to someone who knew him fairly well. Claire Steiger saw the twitch at the corner of his eye and went at it the way a boxer attacks a cut.
'Yes, Peter,' she said. 'Who would it ruin?' She caught her husband's eye and for a second, only a second, they were allies, almost lovers, again.
Brandenburg sipped his martini. He was forty-four years old and had all the advantages that youngish/oldish age could offer. People who didn't know him assumed he must be sixty because he had that kind of power and had been in print forever. Yet there were boyish things about his looks that allowed him still to pass, in any but the harshest light, for not much more than thirty. His reddish hair had neither thinned nor faded. He was lean as he'd been in prep school, his astute hazel eyes were every bit as clear. His posture was firm and rather stiff, inviolate;
