Ninety-Two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

  “It’s the only thing I can do half right. It’s as simple as that.”

  “What about biology? Your old teachers told me you were gifted.”

  “They said that? Huh. Well, yes I was good at it. But it needn’t have taken me that many years of school to see I just liked salt water, you know, at some really simple phenomenological level. I like fishing better than ichthyology because it’s all pointless and intuitive. I mean, there is no value equivalent in biology for the particular combination of noise and sight of blackfin tuna working bait in the Gulf Stream. Have you ever eaten in there?”

  “The Fourth of July? No. I usually go to the O.K.”

  “Good crawfish enchilada and good flan with you know, like caramel on the bottom. My grandfather got shot by a Cuban in that parking lot twenty years ago. Survived.”

  Navy personnel drove past in a staff car, craning around to see Miranda quite obviously not wearing anything under her shift: seventh-grade boys diving for the chalk, Commander Merkin of the carrier escort vessel Invincible wrenching his neck in a flash daydream of how quickly he’d give up the Annapoline idyl of water murder for a crack at deploying polliwogs through his bosun’s whistle into the cushy little bomb bay that young lady doubtless had concealed on her person. Rushing on to base headquarters, he raised manicured fingertips to his sore neck and cleared his mind of bilge.

  Skelton thought for a minute about telling Miranda of Nichol Dance; he had hinted of his utopianist scheming as to fishing; it might be honest to add this. A man passed in a sandwich board; the Paraclete’s visage on the front, the word NOW on the back; brain raid of street-side cryptograms.

  “A man has told me if I guide he’ll shoot me.”

  “What?”

  “Well, yes that.”

  The superimposition of violence to pointless sport caused Skelton to feel a mild creeping of the cerebellum: fistfights over golf putts, tennis buffs kicking each other in the shins with steel-toe industrial safety shoes, ping-pong kamikaze maniacs slashing at enemies’ faces with reddish paddles, skeet shooters peppering schoolgirls with birdshot, chess masters quietly decoding the brains of adversaries: all contrived to make the riverboat gambler of the nineteenth century with a Philadelphia cap-and-ball .41 caliber derringer on a hide string hanging behind his lace-front shirt playing everything-wild, one-eyed-jacks, king-with-the-ax, fours-and-whores type poker seem altogether on the up and up!

  “I like the idea of living behind a wall in this noisy town,” Miranda said. Skelton pushed open the gate, a cabinet of greenery, speeding lizards, a bird screaming in the soursop tree, the Da Vincian geometry of un-pruned oleander.

  “Think House of Seven Gables and you will have fun here; it’s just a little American home in another time warp.”

  Immediately through the gate, they could see Skelton’s mother and grandfather, standing off to one side at the kitchen entrance, abruptly gesturing to them to come; quite evidently indicating that they would have to sneak by the gauze-enclosed bed, solitary as an island on the broad green-and-white porch.

  “Miranda this is my mother.”

  “Hello, Miranda,” said his mother, smiling enough to make inscrutable slits of her eyes; but Skelton saw the examining flicker.

  “And my grandfather.” Skelton’s grandfather caught one of Miranda’s hands in both of his as you would catch a small creature so that you could lift your upper hand carefully and perceive the creature peering out at you. And bent over her, a chicken over a piece of corn. “Thomas,” said his mother, “your father had some kind of a fit. He has got the idea that if you guide, someone will kill you—”

  “Imagine.” Skelton cast a cautioning glance at Miranda.

  “—and he made your grandfather cancel that check.”

  “Yeah, I found out.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” his grandfather said, “that part is easy to straighten out.”

  “The question is, where does he get such a notion.”

  “I couldn’t guess,” said Skelton.

  “Well, we can,” said his grandfather.

  “He is out on the town now every night,” said his mother, “where he is privy to all the gossip and foolishness available in Key West—”

  “What he is doing, where he is going,” said his grandfather in the tone of Philbrick of I Led Three Lives, “none of us can say. But he is at large and I don’t like it.”

  “I thought you wanted him to get out of bed so bad.”

  “Not like this, Tom. Not like a sneak a … a figure of the night, Tom.”

  “A figure of the night…!”

  “We had this from him during the war,” said his mother. “He went to Fort Benning…” She trailed off suddenly, looking almost angrily into space. Could she have only now remembered.

  “Your mother is absolutely right. He was around here like an I don’t know what. He was arrested for sword fighting! Hung out with criminals! The worst of it I can hardly tell.”

  “Who cares!” said his mother. “Tell him the whole thing.”

  “There was a house of ill repute.”

  “What about it?” Skelton said.

  “It was his, lock, stock, and whores.” His mother looked away at this last. His grandfather studied her. “Uh, ladies of fortune.”

  Skelton looked at Miranda. He had only known about the whorehouse for twenty years. Why did they need to tell Miranda?

  “A real one?” he asked his grandfather; let them have their fun.

  “Not really,” his grandfather smiled condescendingly; there was an inadvertence in the expertise he implied. “It was just an old falling-down conch house with half a dozen highfliers from Miami.” He looked at his daughter-in-law and winked. “Even they couldn’t take him. He had a hootchy-cootchy from Opa-Locka. Even she thought he was dumb!”

  “You know, fake air raids. Fire drills where he ran from room to room hosing down his own customers,” said Mrs. Skelton.

  “It was ridiculous. Pictures of Jim Thorpe on the walls. The Boy Scout Oath. The Constitution. An anarchist library in the front room. Statues of saints. A clothing-store dummy dressed as the Pope. I mean, God. What kind of whorehouse…! He carried things too far. Seltzer bottles. Custard pies. No one goes to a whorehouse for that! They can stay home and watch the Three Stooges. And the girls got tired of it the minute the pies started flying. They always had colds from the Seltzer. It was ridiculous.”

  “Running guns,” said his mother in a drone. “And you’re right about the colds.”

  “Yes, yes,” said his grandfather. “Shrimping!”

  “Drove a taxi. The only thing he didn’t think of—”

  “Was guiding,” Skelton and his grandfather interrupted simultaneously.

  “Go on now,” said his mother, “wake him up. It’s time.”

  Skelton crossed the porch and juggled the squeaking cedar mosquito frame, thinking about revealing to his father that everyone knew he was a figure of the night. He decided not to because it would not be interesting to do so.

  “I’m awake.”

  “Hello, Dad. This is Miranda.”

  “How do you do, Miranda.”

  “Hello.”

  “What are they telling you over there?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “About my whorehouse, weren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a beacon of sanity. Pairing off in the most ceremonial way, unexpected friendship and disease, field-hospital camaraderie, orgasms. Miranda,” said his father, “have you ever been a prostitute?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “You’d make a dandy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m pleased you take it as a compliment. Dear ones have come to me from whoring. It’s a modus operandi I understand very well.”

  “None of us have had good sense,” said Skelton, “except my mother and we’re all beginning to bore her.”

  “Is that a violin you have in there, Mr. Skelton?” asked Miranda.


  “Yes, it is.”

  “Would you play something?”

  “I don’t know how. From time to time it plays itself and I attach myself to its moving parts. Now it sleeps lightly, twitching like a dog.”

  * * *

  Sometimes when a wino comes off a bat he is as unmanageable from this grape residue in his “system” as he would be with semi-fatal dumdum rounds in the brain pan; he is, moreover, spavined in the morals. If he is in a neighborhood, he looks darkly about himself at his neighbors. A dire grape madness is upon him; and not the Castalian libido Olympiad of the wine’s first onslaught that ends with an alpha-wave glissando into sleep; from which he has every expectation of waking in other than this Wild Kingdom Mutual of Omaha rhino rush, smashing of beak and noggin against the Land Rover of life itself. Especially not if the wine is one of the chemical daydreams of the republic’s leisure-time industrial combines that produce and bottle curious, opaque effluents in the colors of Micronesian tides or meteor trails; these things are called “beverages” and exist not only in their bright fruit-festooned bottles but conceptually in the notebooks of technicians, diagrams of hydrocarbon chains that can be microfilmed if another “winery” should be after their secrets. It is, you suppose, one of the troubles we are having with our republic.

  Such a wino had abandoned himself upon the interior of Skelton’s fuselage. Skelton found him asleep in a bed of his own trashing. He woke the man up. The wino, whose delicately intelligent face was that of an amateur translator or local begonia prince, looked about himself at the wreckage and asked, “Did I do this?” cringing for the first of the blows.

  “It appears that you did.”

  Long quiet.

  “What are you going to do.”

  “I’m going to clean it up,” said Skelton.

  “I mean what are you going to do to me?”

  “I’m going to be disappointed in you.”

  “How can you be disappointed in me. You had no expectations.”

  This stumped Skelton for a moment. “I have expectations about humanity in general,” he finally said.

  “Please, why don’t you come off it. I’m a sick-ass drunk and I don’t need that kind of romance.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want nothing. But I want plenty of nothing.”

  “Well, let me tell you as proprietor of this place what I got in mind. First I’m going to roll your sorry hide into the roadway so that I can clean up your damn wreckage.”

  “That’s more like it. We are in extremis here, chum. And it’s time for a dialogue.”

  “I don’t want it—”

  “It’s time for polemics.”

  “—You wrecked my home.”

  “Precisely.”

  For Skelton, this brought back terrible memories of school. He looked about himself and thought, Why did this interlude seek me out?

  * * *

  Nichol Dance ran his skiff down the trailer’s rollers over the edge of the ramp and hand-walked it around to his slip and tied it; it was a skiff so old it had Cuban hardwood gunwales. One thing no one could ever make me do, thought Dance, is start over. I would listen to all the resurrection plans anyone had for me. But starting over is out of the question. He looked at the skiff and thought, I am lucky that miserable gunk-board floats.

  Saturday night. By Carter’s good offices, the Chamber of Commerce as part of its touristic activities had bought a day’s guiding from Dance; and it was being awarded as a contest prize tonight down at Mallory Square.

  They asked that Dance show up to hand the winner a certificate entitling him to the day’s fishing.

  * * *

  There were twenty of them lined up out front, seated behind the long wooden table. Officials stood at either end holding stop watches and counting devices. Mallory Square was full of the laughing, the hooting, and the damaged of brain; Ohioans who wore hats they had used to hold chicken eggs all winter were gathered in knots and clusters. Californians with rakish sideburns moved with cosmopolitan aplomb. The Kounter Kulture was everywhere, rolling its eyes, fingering costly jewelry. In a few minutes out here, it was going to be the republic.

  Nearby, the big catering trucks were assembled, their internal steam tables giving off a moist warmth even outside the trucks, even in all this muggy weather.

  Dance had been drinking a little Lem Motlow Number Seven; and he watched anxiously, mentally sizing up the twenty from all over America, trying to think which one would be confined with him in the skiff. No one, it seemed, could overlook the tall, rawboned redhaired man who dominated the far end of the table. He was from Montana and his name was Olie Slatt. His speech introducing himself, as all the contestants had to, was the most interesting:

  “I am Olie Slatt. And don’t you ever forget it. I mine for subbituminous low-sulphur coal in the Bull Mountains of Roundup, Montana, where they have to blast through twenty feet of sandstone to reach the vein. We have two spoils banks with eight slopes and four different strata arrangements. I’m damned proud of that and I’m going to win today. Don’t you ever forget it.”

  Olie Slatt had a constituency in the audience and they yelled, “Mother dog! Mother dog!” with ardor.

  There were others more prepossessing, to be sure, even to Nichol Dance; but none with the immensely formidable, almost insect-like jaws of this redhead.

  All three of the women sat together; no one could say how they would do but everyone sensed that the aggregate result would be impressive; they consulted among themselves, these women, as if they meant to work as a team.

  Nichol Dance had the certificate and shifted it from hand to hand to keep from spoiling it with sweat.

  Before he was really prepared for the event, it was upon him. Abruptly, uniformed men from the truck were trooping to the tables, tall piles of stacked pies in their hands. By the time the pies were emplaced, with the flavor choices of the contestants honored, the judges had raised their pistols.

  Then the guns were fired and all twenty lashed into the pies; a moment later and the slowest contestants had eaten five; and in another moment, the first vomiter rose, the gelatinous, undigested cherries of her “flavor option” dribbling down her chest.

  And very quickly it was over. Losers were roughly hustled away from the table and the redhead was left alone. He looked around himself in happy disbelief for the brief remaining moment before he was declared the winner. Then all hesitation vanishing, he rose powerfully, baying his triumph in an impressive hurricane of crumbs, the insect jaws agape.

  When Nichol Dance gave him his certificate, he said, “Boy, fishing is all I’m about! I’m the mother dog of all fishermen and I want to go out with you real bad—” With the word “bad” he began to vomit all over himself.

  And Dance went off in a panic, saying, “Well, I’ll look to hear from you down to the dock. I hope you’re feeling better!”

  * * *

  “Look, in the brown shirt and the heavy tan, see him? He’s starting to leave now—”

  “I see him, I see him!” said Miranda. “That’s the first killer I have ever seen. Does he have a notch on his pistol?”

  “He may have one.”

  “Well, I think he ought to be in jail.”

  “He is, a good deal of the time.”

  “Don’t you hate him?”

  “I admire him. There is nothing like feeling your days may be numbered. Everybody’s days are numbered but because of him I know it more surely even though I might live to be a hundred. This afternoon I had five orgasms, which would have been impossible if there hadn’t been someone in town who wanted my life.”

  “Would you rather number your days or your orgasms?” asked Miranda.

  “Does it come with the dinner?”

  “The only thing that comes with the dinner now is progress. The rest is à la carte. What would you recommend?”

  Clever girl, thought Skelton, I must show flash: “The spécialité de la maison, depending on the nigh
t, is whooping crane with blanched almonds or various fricassees of endangered species with pommes frites. For a consideration, the headwaiter can arrange to have your table bulldozed while you dine; and, I might add, on Saturday evenings a tour of the kitchens is available, where all of the cooking is by controlled napalm flash, you know, with Baked Alaska à la Dow and, natch, side orders are always available of gook-in-his-own-juices, which is nothing so much like the calamares en su tinta of the Basques; for the salad lover, a defoliation buffet is continually in operation!”

  “My mouth is watering.”

  Truth is, Skelton was wound up like a cuckoo clock; and the frenetic glibness of the kind he just trotted out for Miranda was something he had long meant to avoid. Maybe Dance was doing it to him.

  He could no longer synthesize the life of his father, his grandfather, and himself; he realized now, however, that that was something he had been trying to do all along. It was all coming up, but nothing in sequence.

  * * *

  Miranda took him to see friends of hers who lived on Petronia. Dopers. Skelton watched them, two men and a woman, as they waltzed gaga around the room to do walkie-talkie gags on the telephone with vague roots in ordering Chinese food or pizzas. A hookah burned on the floor and the proprietor of the house, a harmless witling in a jellaba, broke out his collection of “drips” for Skelton’s delectation.

  He placed a cardboard shoe box at Skelton’s feet; it contained minutely scissored photographs of water drips sliding down cans and bottles in advertisements.

  “Toughest part of commercial art, making those drips run down a bottle or can in a way that looks right to the camera. You have to wet down the whole fuckin thing, then make a track for the drip with a toothpick. Then you start the drip at the top of the bottle or whatever and when she starts to get up speed you flash your picture. You go through thousands of toothpicks looking for a good one. It—is—a—killer!”

  Skelton looked into the shoe box: a hundred thousand drips—a whole culture in parable. These people couldn’t save him.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry to come so late; can you give me a dozen live shrimp?”

  With Miranda on Geiger Key, at Marvin’s bait camp; when you called on old Marvin at an odd hour he usually told you it was just as well; because this time next year he would be in hell. He was a witty man of orthodox religion, and saw his coming perdition as a malicious joke of primarily comic value. With twenty of his early years in an Appalachian mine, he had black lung and wheezed around the dock toting his bait net.