without which human activity was just so much pathetic silliness, so much blundering around. Still, at some point there was no substitute for action; action alone could prove the rightness and integrity of intellect.
It was perhaps three minutes before the chicken appeared from underneath a canopy of weeds and started walking jerkily, obliquely, toward the popcorn. In the dim mix of fading dusk and distant streetlight, the bird looked dull brown and unkempt; its leg feathers were ragged and there was something unseemly, slatternly, about the drunken way it waddled. Roberto Natchez felt exhilarated: He watched the chicken and realized he would have no trouble killing it.
No trouble at all, and that was fitting. He was a true artist, and the true artist shrank from nothing. The true artist protected the pure from the impure, the worthy from the fake. There was between those things a gulf as broad and absolute as the gulf between life and death, and to perform his sacred duty the artist had to know both sides of that dread chasm. He had to be willing to hold death in his hands. Only then could he consign the true and the false to their proper places.
He watched the chicken. It had reached the far end of the ribbon of bait and cautiously, deliberately at first, was beginning to eat. It dropped its head, grabbed a kernel with its beak, then vigilantly stood erect again and looked around before it began the strenuous and unattractive job of chewing. Its horny jaw labored up and down and sideways, shreds of popcorn fell out the edges of its mouth.
The feeding gained momentum, the bird's vigilance soon gave way to gluttony. Now the chicken ate like a famished child, never lifting its eyes from the food; on its yellow feet it followed the zigs and zags of the popcorn trail and soon had entered the outer chamber of the trap.
Here it paused, and Roberto Natchez held his breath. For what seemed a long time, the bird just stood there. Could it be that it was sated? Was it bothered, perhaps, by some change in the light as it filtered through the slender wire bars? Caught up in the clenched and sanguinous excitement of the hunt, Natchez narrowed his black eyes and willed the chicken onward.
The chicken obeyed. It dropped its head and pecked at the little pile of popcorn at its feet, then, before it was halfway finished, seemed to be distracted by the bigger pile on the far side of the metal platform. It edged forward, placed a single three-clawed foot on the trigger, then leaned over daintily and not without a certain grace, rather like a dancer bowing low across one leg. Natchez watched and felt his bitten neck grow hot with anxiety as kernel after kernel disappeared and still the trap did not clatter shut. Then, finally, inevitably, the chicken overreached itself. Straining to seize the last few morsels, it brought its other foot onto the steel plate; the trip wire let go with a muffled twang and the door fell closed with tinny finality.
Roberto Natchez exhaled like a dragon. He was just slightly dizzy and he saw gold-green streamers behind his eyes. He did not feel the ground as he strode forward to claim his prize.
The chicken was still eating, did not seem to know that it was doomed. Not until its captor bent low and cast his giant shadow did the bird realize anything was wrong. Then it wheeled in its small space and saw that its escape was blocked. It retreated, squawked, flapped its futile wings so that its feather tips raked unmusically against the bars. It leaped in an aborted takeoff and banged its narrow head against the top of the trap. The poet considered the moment, examined his emotions. So this was how it felt to be in charge, to be enforcer, judge, and executioner. He liked it.
Squatting down, he opened the cage and gingerly reached inside. The bird shrieked and pecked at his fingers. The beak was half sharp, like the tines of a fork; the feel of it was less painful than bracing. He thrust his hand in more decisively and grabbed the chicken by the neck. He felt vertebrae beneath the scraggly feathers as he pulled his victim through the wire door.
It had been Roberto Natchez's intention to make the killing ceremonial, to invest it with the dignity and slowness of a rite. He realized now with a certain self-embarrassment that that would be impossible. The chicken, its red eye fiery with terror, squirmed and swelled, and Natchez was amazed at the quantity of senseless stubborn life that pulsed within it. Its wings pressed against his grip in bony supplication, its absurd pebbled legs still tried to run. To hold the creature was appalling; its relentless squawking was a mayhem that made a travesty of any sort of pomp, and Natchez admitted that the bird and not himself was dictating the pace of its decease. Less like a priest than a butcher, the poet pushed the chicken flat against the ground and with his other hand he made a motion like opening a jar of jam and wrung its neck.
The bird shat a yellowish paste between Natchez's black sneakers. It went rigid for a moment, a final rippling wave ran through its frenzied muscles. Then, belatedly, it seemed to realize it was dead. The tension left the carcass, Natchez felt the bones shift against the will-less meat.
He stood up, the slaughtered chicken dangling from his hand. His shirt was soaked with sweat, he felt a violent exultation mixed with fleeting nausea. He lifted the corpse to the level of his eyes, peered at it, and was gratified to discover that he felt not a whisper of remorse. He flung the bird a few feet into the tangled weeds, retrieved his wire cage, and went home to his garret to drink and write.
30
At the Eclipse Bar, Detective Sergeant Joe Mulvane sipped ale from a frosted mug and with his free hand pulled his damp blue collar away from his moist pink neck, the better to expose the mottled skin to the chill breath of the air conditioner. He swallowed, let forth an exaggerated ahh of satisfaction, then went on with his story.
'So this pretty little Cuban boy comes in,' he said. 'A strange bird, lemme tell ya. Walks like Daryl Hannah, talks like Jose Jimenez with some night school and a lisp. He's all excited, he's twitching. He's got this cake, apricot, he's holding it like a fucking hand grenade. It's poisoned, he's sure of it. This on top of the paranoid broad who comes in the other day. I mean Arty, you been here longer than I have. Who are these people?'
Arty Magnus sipped his wine, then dug his elbows deeper into the thickly upholstered bar rail, an armrest that conduced to drinking and reflection, mostly drinking. One of the very few things he liked about being a newspaperman was the chance it gave him to shoot the shit with cops. Information. Everybody needed it, and in more discreet places there was never enough to go around; in Key West, which was about as discreet as a public bathhouse, there was generally too much. Information was cheap as local mangoes and about as firm.
'The Silvers?' said the editor. 'Some of our leading citizens. He's one of the very few people down here who isn't jerking off when he calls himself an artist. She's one of the very few people still trying to run a quality business on Duval Street instead of doing T-shirts and schlock. Maybe they're strange like artsy-strange. But lunatics? No. The Cuban lad, him I don't know.'
'I do,' said the fellow who'd come in with Arty Magnus and was sitting on the other side of him. His name was Joey Goldman, he was slightly built with dark blue eyes and wavy black hair, and he had the earpiece of his sunglasses hanging over the pocket of his shirt. The other two men looked at him like they hadn't expected him to contribute, hadn't expected him to know much.
'Yeah,' Joey went on. 'He used to work for us. Before he went full-time for the Silvers. Worked in our Cleaning Division.'
He said this rather grandly, in the manner of the newly successful. Joey Goldman was an oddity in Key West, a place where many people of more privileged background came to fail, to give up, to go pleasantly down the tubes. He'd come from dubious roots, some thought criminal roots, and with a little luck and more savvy than anyone thought he had, he'd become a businessman of substance, a wheeler-dealer in real estate. In this his questionable past had served him well: It was axiomatic that it was easier to rob a place if you had a guy inside. Why shouldn't this logic extend to legitimate business? Who knew before the housekeeper when an owner was thinking of making a move, selling out or trading up? Thus the Cleaning Division was what might be thought of as the clandestine intelligence arm of Paradise Properties, Joey Delgatto Goldman, boss.
'So what's his story?' asked Joe Mulvane. 'The Cuban kid.'
Joey sipped his Campari, dabbed his lips. 'We got like sixteen, eighteen people cleaning for us,' he said. 'Most of 'em I couldn't tell ya nothin'. But Reuben I can, I'll tell ya why I remember: The first day he came to us he was black and blue. Beat up. Big bruise on his neck, one eye not open all the way. So shy he could hardly talk. Leanin' away like a terrorized cat. Sandra's askin' 'im the usual questions. Where d'ya live? He lives with his parents. How old are ya? He's twenty-three, twenty-four, somethin' like that.
'Then I cut in, I couldn't help it. 'Hey Reuben,' I say, 'who beatcha up?' With this, he shoots me a look that
