easel in the car. I'll sketch awhile, and who knows-it might be one of life's great moonrises.'
They were in the backyard. Augie had been reading and Reuben was picking up the sticky brown pods that fell from the poinciana tree. 'I think maybe it is cloudy,' the housekeeper said. But it wasn't cloudy. It was perfectly clear, albeit with the electric shimmer of a summer haze.
Augie looked at him. 'You don't want to go?'
This was difficult for Reuben to answer. He wanted to do whatever Augie liked. But his mission was to keep the painter safe. Then again it was hard to protect someone if he could not know he needed to be protected. Nervously, the young man wiped his hands on his apron. 'We can go. Only-'
'Only what?'
'Only, Nina-'
'It's late night at the gallery. We'll be back way before her. Maybe we'll bring home stone crab for dinner.'
So Reuben loaded the old Saab. He laid Augie's easel and pad across the back seat. He put in a cooler of mineral water in case Augie got thirsty, some fruit in case he got hungry. He put in a jacket, though a jacket was unthinkable in the unyielding mugginess. He noticed nothing unusual on Olivia Street. Dogs lolled next to car tires. Bicycles went past. Here and there clean undented convertibles were parked, their frivolous colors, tinted glass, and lack of rust marking them as rentals. The palms were still and limp, even the Mother-in-law tree was silent.
It was seven-thirty when they set out, Reuben driving, slowly. The light was soft, the roads were quiet. What traffic there was, was mainly heading the other way-downtown, west, toward the gaudier, commoner spectacle of sunset. On White Street, old Cubans sat on mesh chairs in front of empty stores and slid dominoes across the cardboard boxes that served as make-shift tables. On Atlantic Boulevard the pink and aqua condos stood like blocks of giant candy. Australian pines lined the wetlands, looking dejected and enduring, like people who are always moaning and complaining yet will outlive all their friends. The air smelled of frangipani.
'You know,' said Augie, 'sometimes I forget how much I love this town.'
'Is a nice town,' Reuben said, without taking his eyes from the road. He leaned slightly forward over the steering wheel. He regarded driving as a grave adventure that required all his concentration. He took no notice of the turquoise convertible with tinted glass that stayed a steady hundred yards behind him, moving at a sightseer's pace with its top up.
'It's very… specialized,' Augie said. He considered this as they turned onto A1A. The road was twenty feet from the Atlantic Ocean and maybe eighteen inches above it. 'There are towns, you know, for making money. Towns to start a career. Towns to go to college. Towns to raise a family. Key West is no damn good for any of that. Key West is to feel good and be happy. That's all. Don'tcha think?'
'Si, yes,' said Reuben absently, his attention riveted to the pavement. 'Augie, where you like me to stop?'
'Over past the airport,' Augie said. 'Where the island curves around. You get the biggest sweep of water there.'
Reuben put his blinker on a long time in advance and started driving even slower. Alongside A1A-a continuation of it, really-there is a broad concrete promenade that in certain places fronts the beach and in others ends directly at the seawall. This promenade is used by bicyclists and joggers, prostitutes both male and female. Windsurfers sometimes park their vans there, fishermen sometimes leave their pickup trucks along it and launch their dinghies over the rampart. At the spot Reuben finally edged off the road, there was no sand, the green water came right up to the barricaded island. Beyond the thigh-high wall, scattered mangroves perched atop their tangled cones of roots, stilts and egrets gawked around for food.
'Good,' said Augie as Reuben turned off the Saab's ignition and the turquoise car slid slowly, silently past them and continued north. 'This is good.'
Reuben sighed with relief that the drive was over. Then he clambered out and reached into the back for Augie's easel. The painter, still brittle and unaccustomed to sudden movements, took a moment to unfold himself from the car. His knees were stiff beneath the ever-present khaki shorts, his shoulders felt tight inside the faded purple shirt. He stood with one hand on the Saab's warm roof and looked around. In the west, the sun was an orange ball that had lost its fire and dangled just above the low shrubs of the salt marsh; the sky above it was streaky green. In the east it was a different sky, satiny, already dim and sweetly modest, as if a shy bride was turning off the lights before she would receive the moon.
Augie meandered. That's what he always did, it was some fundamental part of his looking at the world, some basic ritual of settling in. He wandered to the seawall, he wandered to the edge of the road. He wandered past the car, backtracked, then did a lazy pirouette and sauntered off again. Reuben zigged and zagged behind him, the easel on his shoulder. Finally the painter found the place that felt right to his feet and looked right to his eyes. He put his hands in his pockets and sniffed the air; it had the good mud smell of limestone and the tang of sun-baked shells.
The pad and easel appeared in front of him and the artist started to draw. He sketched a feeding egret, captured the unlikely splayed angle of its stick-figure legs and the lightness of the feathered crest raked back from its head. He caught the shrewdness of the lidless eye and the strength in the darting neck that could unravel and strike as fast as any snake.
Reuben moved a respectful twenty feet away and watched. He was in awe of Augie working, not just the skill but the mysterious boldness it took to draw a line, the confidence and the belief that were needed to leave a mark. Reuben knew that he himself would never have such boldness. He liked to make small changes in things that already existed: arranging flowers, plumping pillows, setting dishes perfectly on a table; he made things more beautiful and it pleased him. But to start from nothing…
'Reuben, look,' said Augie, pulling the young man out of his thoughts. He gestured quickly toward the west, abandoned by the sun, then made a sweep across the flatly glowing water to the east. 'Should be any minute now.'
The painter smiled, excited, and Reuben was happy for him and happy for himself, happy to have a friend who, even though his hair was white, even though he was not young, was excited at the thought of seeing moonrise.
They watched, scanning the horizon for a telltale gleam. On the seafront promenade, l ife streamed by around them. A jogger pushing a stroller ran past Augie's easel. A knot of screaming mopeds zipped by on the curbless shoulder of A1A.
Then Reuben noticed a turquoise car driving slowly toward them on the broad walkway. In Key West, a town of hazy boundaries, where storms confused the ocean with the land, where friendships sometimes crossed over into hatreds, where sidewalks slipped without a curbstone into roadways, it was not unusual to see a car among the joggers. Everyone wanted front row on the sea, and Reuben's only fear was that the vehicle, now perhaps a hundred yards away, would intrude on Augie's moonrise.
Reuben didn't want to let that happen, and imagined that by vigilance he could prevent it. He watched the car and left the blank and promising horizon to his friend. The painter, rapt, gazed toward the east. The air was dead still and the temperature of skin; a pair of ibis flew down and landed with a skipping splash. The tires of the turquoise car made a sudden squeal just at the instant that a blood-red cuticle of moon poked through its dark envelope of ocean. Augie turned and pointed, his face ecstatic, as the murderous vehicle hurtled toward him. Reuben, low, lithe, afraid of nothing, threw himself across the car's trajectory. His shoulder caught Augie in the solar plexus and the two men flew over the seawall and into the mangroves as the easel was reduced to matchsticks and the indifferent moon threw red beams that skipped across the water and tracked the turquoise convertible in its escape.
33
'He saved my life,' Augie Silver softly said to Nina.
It was around 10 p.m. Reuben, bruised and soaking wet, had gone home. The painter was propped on pillows
