Free Scavenger Reef by Laurence Shames Page A

him, terrified her hand would slip right
through his outline, that his shirt would be vacant, would prove to
be nothing more than a twisted piece of bedsheet, errant cloth
throwing the shadow of a man. She lay on her side and breathed
deeply. She thought she smelled the ocean, and now and then a sweet
chalky smell that made her remember the taste of her husband's
mouth.
    Dawn came, and with it came growing belief:
The private madnesses allowed in the dark cannot, for the sane,
cross the border into day. The bedroom windows began just barely to
lighten, and still Augie Silver was there in his bed. His wife
dared to put her face against his arm. It was shrunken but it was
warm. She cried silently and she dozed.
    When she awoke, the room was bright. Augie
was gone, and in some awful way Nina Silver was not surprised, only
confused to see Fred the parrot on his bedside perch.
    Then she heard the sound of tinkling, and a
moment later her husband was standing in the bathroom doorway.
Seeing his wife awake, he flashed her a tired smile that was full
of the reverent screwball miracle of finding himself alive. The
smile banished doubt forever. Nothing but a living person could
have an expression so wry, beat up, and full of zest.
    "Augie."
    "Nina."
    "Cutty Sark. Awk, awk."
    The painter, still in his clothes, came back
to bed and took his wife in his wizened arms. The movement and the
embrace seemed to drain him. "I'm so weak," he said. It was not a
complaint, just an observation, made with the sort of detached
amusement that comes to grownups when they watch a baby try to
walk.
    "Can you tell me?" asked his wife. "Can you
tell me what happened?"
    Augie settled in flat on his back and stared
up past the still fan at the ceiling. "I can try," he said, as if
he was being asked to relate a story of something that happened
long ago, to someone else. "But there's a lot I don't remember even
now."
    He shifted just slightly, and his crinkly
white hair spread around him on the pillow, his tinsel beard folded
down onto his chest. "It was a beautiful January afternoon. Bright
sun. Not too much humidity—"
    "I remember the day," she gently
interrupted.
    "Yes, of course," he said. "Well, I was out
past Scavenger Reef. I'd just come through it, I could see the line
of the Gulf Stream maybe two miles up ahead. It was gorgeous.
Pointy little whitecaps in the shallow water—nervous whitecaps,
high-pitched, like kids' voices. Then the slow, thick purple swells
in the deep. Off to the west there were huge tall clouds—not anvil
tops exactly, but mountain clouds, whole ranges of them. I watched
them. I wasn't the least bit worried, not even about getting rained
on—the weather was from the east. The boat was heeled but steady, I
just watched the clouds, sketched the shapes in my mind.
    "Then it was like the clouds were melting,
like there was a table across the sky and the clouds were pouring
down across it, perfectly flat, much heavier, denser than before.
They started rolling toward me; it was like a domed stadium
slamming shut. The sky got very confused, low clouds going one way,
high clouds going another, this odd sensation that the earth had
started spinning faster. Half the sky was black, the other half an
acid green. There was a wash of white over the shallow water and a
dull gleam like wet lead over the Gulf Stream. The wind picked
up—but not too much. I was enjoying it."
    His wife looked at him strangely, but Augie
didn't notice. He took a deep and labored breath that moved the
white bristles of his mustache. Outside, the morning's first breeze
set the palm fronds scratching at the tin roofs of Olivia
Street.
    "Then I saw the spouts starting to drop,"
the painter resumed. "I'd never actually seen that before, and it's
not the way I would have imagined. I would have pictured great dark
funnels thrusting fully formed down from the clouds. But in fact
they slip out almost shyly, like a man sticking a toe in cold
water. Wisps and scraps, little