Ninety-Two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

  But in general he felt recovered; or in any event, at rest in a reasonably cool aftermath. He went inside to take out the trash, adding everything conceivably trash to the contents of the galvanized barrel, including a painting Spacey Tracy, the Day-Glo Dago, had given him on Simonton Street, depicting a tall thermos bottle standing in a field of breath mints. This same artist had done a series of “contemporary” portraits of historical figures. Kafka as remittance man. Van Gogh clipping coupons by the sea. Dostoevsky with a four-foot string of credit cards. San Juan de la Cruz peering out of a condominium as though room service had used cheap Triple Sec in his margarita. Into the shitcan with everything ironic for the fun of it.

  * * *

  Carter and Dance are in the bait shack and have told Myron Moorhen, the lickspittle accountant, to haul ass and give them the desk. They take one of his yellow legal sheets out and try to figure some way of salvaging Dance’s winter guiding schedule even though he is no longer the owner of a guide boat. First they determine how long it will take to have a new skiff built up, how long the insurance will take to settle on the old one; as against the number of days that Carter is not booked and Dance is—so that Dance can use his skiff. “There will have to be a small usage charge,” says Carter.

  “Naturally, man.”

  “Lemme tote this here up now.” He ran his fingernail up and down the columns of numbers.

  “What do you come up with.”

  “You look.”

  “Hm.”

  “Don’t look good.”

  “Sure don’t. It looks sorta rank.”

  “How’re you fixed now, Nichol.”

  Dance looked at him. “How’m I fixed?”

  “That’s what I ast.”

  “Cart, if turkeys was goin for one cent a pound I couldn’t buy a raffle ticket on a jaybird’s ass.”

  “Haw haw hawmmm.”

  “If ten cent’d buy a tuxedo for a elerfunt, I couldn’t buy a T-shirt for a flea.”

  “Heeheehee. Okay now. Let’s, seriously now…”

  Anyone else could have seen that Carter didn’t care about these jokes; and in his strenuous laughter for the benefit of a man who had learned or stolen everything he knew and now wanted the use of his skiff, there was the very faintest yet palpable hint of the craven.

  “Are you going to get around to doing something about that boy?” Carter asked; he liked Skelton well enough, but now by Christ things were getting to be an inconvenience.

  “It’s in the hands of the law,” said Dance. “I mean not that I didn’t give some thought to shooting him. But since I failed to shoot myself that day, I’ve kinda had a loss of innerest in shooting anything else.”

  “Heeheeheemmmm.”

  “I might could take a notion though. If this brand of irritation runs on I mean. He wasn’t a bad kind of a kid.”

  “He wanted to guide.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Suddenly Carter saw how to ingratiate himself. “We was just sendin him to the school of hard knocks, Nichol!”

  Now it was Dance’s turn to laugh. The little joke was such a success that it pushed Carter clear through to the other side of his mild instinct for ingratiation. He thought again of Skelton and the schooling they had given him; and did not feel particularly good about it. Nevertheless, as a major-league brown-nose, he was unprepared to investigate the emotion.

  * * *

  The phone rang and he ran back into the fuselage. It was his mother. “Your grandfather would like you to come over here after dinner tonight.”

  “I’d just love to!”

  “All right now.”

  “I’ll be there, Ma, with bells on.”

  “But be here.”

  * * *

  “The French have a word for it,” remarked his grandfather, his back toward the woman as he mixed a drink; presently he turned and proffered the grog. “I call it pussy.” His hands closed before him in a prayerful shape.

  “I know you do, Goldsboro.”

  They were in old man Skelton’s exercise room, whose variety of health machines seemed compromised by the presence of a well-stocked bar.

  “I call it that because it is candid to call it that and I am a candid man because I have nothing to hide.”

  “You won’t get a whole lot of agreement about that in Key West, Goldsboro,” said the lady. She was fifty and heavy. Her name was Bella Knowles. Her husband, an insurance broker who dabbled in gunrunning, now made his home on the Isle of Pines.

  He said, “I was trying out that tone before I talk to my grandson. I have got to set that little smartbutt on the straight and narrow or he will end up in a bassinet like his old man.”

  “You should have let him go to jail rather than hang out with charter-boat fishermen.”

  “Hurry up with your drink. I’m fixing to carry on.” He sat on the edge of the trampoline that dominated the room. Light from high, milky windows flooded into the little gym.

  “I’ll sip as long as I please.”

  “Long as you sip fast!”

  “You’re talking to a lady and the only one you’ll ever get.” Goldsboro Skelton rolled the medicine ball off the tremulous surface of the trampoline; it slumped to the floor.

  “Well…”

  The strange couple—the etiolated, successful crook and the rounded helpmeet of an imprisoned gunrunner—undressed without ceremony, the rickety and the ample in curious counterpart as they bent to slide off socks.

  Playfully, Goldsboro Skelton, Cuban bullet holes still dimpling his hind end, mounted the trampoline and began to hop around, veinous fists clenched next to his ears in simple heroics. Now he was making some fairly impressive leaps, not ignored by Bella Knowles. She joined him.

  At first they bounced in an irregular pattern, Skelton going up at the moment Bella touched down. They stopped for a moment toe to toe and fiddled with one another, and then began to bound again, this time in the same rhythm. As they each looked at the leaping and speeding against the far wall, Goldsboro Skelton was an arrow of capability to Bella Knowles, a pinksurge of desire.

  Beneath them, the black iron perimeter of the trampoline enlarged and contracted with their bounds. The thousands of springs that held its canvas surface squeaked like lemmings, unlubed harquebus locks or tholepins.

  Then they collided, recoiled apart, bounced each unequally through high air to a delirium of limbs, glanced off the trampoline, and crashed to the floor.

  They lay without motion. Reassured gym flies began to whirl in the light of the high windows once more. At that moment, Goldsboro Skelton’s grandson was reading the part in Pliny’s Natural History where the swell of tide at moon’s rising among the stars is described. And in other respects, life went on, though it seemed largely unassured here in the gym.

  Presently Goldsboro Skelton began to crawl immediately behind his own nosebleed toward Bella Knowles. When he got to her he looked at her open eyes above the terribly fattened lip. Skelton staggered to his feet for a glass of water, which he held tenderly to her mouth. “The French have a word for this,” he remarked with some preoccupation.

  “What is it, you cheesy piece of bung fodder?” Bella Knowles inquired.

  * * *

  At dusk, the light can’t get much past Carlos’s market on Elizabeth Street; so when you walk down Eaton to go to Skelton’s mother’s house, and look down William Street or Elizabeth Street, the shrimp boats are crowded hugely in the shadow of those streets while the clouds of gulls above them soar in sunlight; and on the corners, palm leaves that are piled for pickup and that rattle all day with lizards in the warmth now are cool and quiet.

  When you pass the corner of Simonton, the mail trucks are backed up to bays that are closed with corrugated doors, and at least one boy is doing a figure eight in the quiet parking lot on his bicycle; and the glass and iron pineapples on the gate at the Carriage Trade look like scarabs held in old silver.

  Duval Street, crowded and Latin all day, now seems fille
d with space and breeze, serenely modified by a taxicab spinning along in golden light; and the ticket seller at the dirty-movie house graciously promises the drill sergeant “no less than twenty fuck scenes.” From a boat, Key West would seem to have shrunk once more unto the sea. And the few boats that have gone out to night drift for tarpon in the channels carry their red and green running lights through the blackness sweetly.

  Dinner would still be transpiring at his parents’ house, borne upon crazy accusations by his grandfather and Dada rebuttals by his father; his mother taking a view not less than Olympian of this particular, by now ancient, squabble.

  So Skelton slipped into their garage and got his fishing rod, walked half a block to the corner of Front Street to the Dos Amigos bar, had a single bourbon and water, shot one maladroit game of eight-ball with a counterrevolutionary Cuban shrimper who claimed to be able to navigate from here to the north coast of Haiti without chart or sounding because “I am a Key West captain”; then took up his rod and crossed Front Street at last light and walked down to the pocket beach that lay between the fabric factory and Tony’s restaurant.

  It was dark and warm as summer, and tarpon were assailing bait under the restaurant lights; there were maybe a couple of dozen fish striking the lit-up water and shrimp were clearing the water completely and kicking out into the darkness.

  Directly above the fish, on the corner of a balustrade, a man in a white dinner jacket was pressing at a girl in a gown, hauling her against the iron balcony, mashing into her with his face and holding his cocktail perfectly balanced out over the ocean without looking at it.

  “Natalie.”

  “Gordon.”

  Skelton climbed out onto the transom of a half-beached skiff and chopped a cast right into the working bait from his lair in the darkness. He made one strip and came up tight on a tarpon. The heavy fish just held its own a moment, trying to think what had happened; then it vaulted high and terrific into the light, right up clear to where its gills rattled alongside the balustrade.

  Gordon spun; and Natalie dropped her jaw. Gordon glanced ornery into his empty glass, looked at Skelton’s line trailing into the darkness, and led “Nat” to an empty table inside, his moment quite gone.

  Skelton cupped the reel handles, broke the fish off, reeled up; and headed back to the house feeling an exquisite synthesis of spirit and place. His grandfather would possibly be there with his secretary, Bella Knowles, rotating her wry, discerning face and the spit curls that had adorned her temples for nearly forty years. Skelton wondered how many gallons of saliva that must have required.

  He walked in through the gate without knocking. At the end of the porch, he could see his grandfather without his secretary eating in the lighted breakfast room. His father was on the porch, beneath his netting; with the television shoved under one end. He pulled up an iron chair and sat next to his father, who in a moment glanced at Skelton and said, “Green Bay missed the extra point.” A few minutes later, he leaned forward and turned down the sound. “Green Bay has got great flankers,” he told his son. “But Jesus, Macarthur Lane is some running-back. He’s got these lateral moves right at the line of scrimmage that don’t seem physically possible. —Watch now: this close to the end zone, the linebackers will be keying off the running-backs.” Touchdown. The linebackers keyed off the running-backs; but the quarterback threw the ball.

  “I’ll be a sonofabitch,” said his father. He looked at his son. “Do me a favor.”

  “Name it.”

  “Get off the violence. You’re too romantic to be any good at it. This bird Dance will eat you alive. He knows how to do violence and you’re a dilettante at it.”

  Skelton thought with some admiration that Dance’s trick had been a well-organized bit of cruelty. The touch of authenticity had been the story of Charlie Starkweather, who Skelton remembered as a kind of anachronistic dry-gulch artist running through the West; who got wired to a Nebraska utility outlet in a metal chair by officials of the republic. Restaurants darkened and Starkweather went off like a flashbulb at Tricia’s wedding. It reduced his bulk through vaporization. He no longer fitted the electrical collar. They found him in the goodbye room like a wind-torn 1890 umbrella. A year later he might have grown Virginia creeper like a grape stake. After each electrocution, the officials of the republic get together for a real down-home Christian burial out of that indomitable American conviction that even God likes fried food.

  “I didn’t know you had this affection for violence,” said his father as humor, studying his eyes gone vague beneath his Starkweather revery.

  “I don’t.”

  “Had you been emotionally forced into it?”

  “More or less.”

  “Are you going to admit it?”

  “No. I’m not going to pay for it either.”

  “I can’t imagine this happening among scientists.”

  “I’m not a scientist and I’m not going to be one. It takes all the brains I’ve got to figure out where game fish keep themselves.”

  “And you never got into these cross fires until you started reading French poets. Furthermore, when your grandfather offered to bail you out, you didn’t make yourself plausible to him by asking him to bring your Apollinaire instead.”

  “Well, he didn’t know what I was talking about. Jakey Roberts gave me his copy of Swank and I read a short history of Spanish fly instead of L’Hérésiarque et Cie.”

  “Those frog lunatics have produced a generation of destructive addlepates to which I fear you appending yourself. Though I’d prefer it to your fiddling with dope, it’s a narrow choice.”

  Little does he know, thought Skelton.

  The two men laughed; possibly close to tears. Skelton peeled up one end of the netting and twisted it over the corner of the frame. “That’s not true.” He could look at his father.

  “What’s not?” his father asked.

  “About Apollinaire and the others.”

  “Don’t you think?”

  “I’d say Nietzsche produced more addlepates.”

  “What about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky?”

  “What about Kahlil Gibran?”

  “What about Tex Ritter?” And so on through Father Coughlin, Darius Milhaud, Stockhausen, Donald Duck, Baba Ram Dass, Lenin, a certain Bürgermeister in a Milwaukee beer ad, guitar fops from the hideous 1960s, Thomas Edison—and more laughter. Then, mock serious, his father took up his violin and played the opening of Corrinne Corrina hillbilly style and beautiful. Skelton lit a powdery Dutch cigar and listened in a swoon of those sad clodhopper strains, dying day, newspaper boys yelling faintly as they filled their baskets; a swoon that was as much as anything a part of his more than trifling instinct for some kind of topographical perspective upon his own life, as against a vision of cycling chemicals in a closed system that somehow never explained the attrition of the things that ail you.

  He could hear the quarterback now calling signals in the new style: “Blue! Right! Get back! Eighty! Red!” Snap. The play was underway. The quarterback rolled out in a fake draw.

  * * *

  Skelton’s grandfather stepped onto the porch in a fog of cooking smells and looked across at the two of them talking with an air of reconnaissance. He made a minute adjustment of his shoulders before coming over.

  “What happened to your nose, Gramp?” Skelton asked. His grandfather raised fingers to the swollen bridge.

  “Damn trunk lid on my Coupe de Ville popped up and got my beezer.”

  A hand reached out of the bed, tugged the mosquito netting free, and drew it down over the opening. A moment later, they heard the television; Green Bay had the ball on their own forty-nine.

  “Guess who I just had a drink with,” said the grandfather to Skelton.

  “Can’t.”

  “Nichol Dance.”

  “Ah, then.”

  “Now I had had a look into that boy’s insurance situation and learned he wasn’t going to be out a dime. So, I told him if he wanted you
in court I would see him in hell first but I would at least run him clean out of Monroe County on a rail. I asked him, I said, ‘Mr. Dance, are you a gambler?’ And he said no he was not and so I told him, ‘Mr. Dance, let the insurance company handle your woes.’ I had backed myself up with a transcript of his criminal record. I suppose you know he is vicious.”

  “I guess I did.”

  “Anyway, he is a lively boy with a mean streak in him. But he listens to reason. He’s part of the community and so he’ll have to do like I told him.”

  “Do you want a chair?”

  “No.—Now what were you doing with his boat?”

  “Guiding.”

  “You haven’t dropped that yet?”

  “Not going to.”

  “How much would it cost to have your own boat?”

  “About four grand if you have it built and powered right.”

  “You want me to stake you?”

  “Sure. Ha. Ha.”

  “How would you pay me back? And don’t laugh so fast.”

  “Out of my guiding fees.”

  “I’d doubt that except Dance told me you’d make a great skiff guide. I guess you’re on.”

  When Skelton’s grandfather meant every word he was saying, he talked to you belly to belly, eyes looking through yours; if he had a drink, he crimped it high and close and emphasized his sentences by the gentle knuckle bumps against your sternum. He was a winning man, so far from schizophrenia that a thousand pitiful losers knew no more than to give him their money. Skelton’s father, listening, said, “Generation after generation, the blind leading the blind. It gives them something to do.”

  * * *

  In his back yard and under a tortuous, unleafed poinciana, Nichol Dance was removing slabs of amberjack from a tray of brine and laying them across rough wire racks inside a gutted refrigerator that he used as a smoker. He was feeling stupid, real dumb in fact.

  He had a good little fire of buttonwood coals going and the rich dark amberjack would smoke down to just the right moisture. But he was making work for himself, filleting and brining all that fish meat; and, in general, not feeling very bright, maybe even, you know, dumb.

  What I need, he thought, is some credence; because damned if I’m not getting pushed out of shape around here. Skiff all burnt to shit and that old crud telling me to wait on the insurance. Damn.