Ninety-Two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

  “Me too,” Skelton interrupted quickly.

  “How would you know? You’re just like him.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re both convinced that you arrive at the right thing by eliminating all the wrong ones.”

  It was true. Neither he nor his father belonged to that class of succinct creatures that directly reached for what was right. The difference was that he was attracted to the merely incorrect, while his father very often began with the appalling.

  “So what are you going to do about it.”

  His mother put her shears down.

  “Nothing,” she said positively. “I’m going to do nothing. Do you understand what that implies?”

  * * *

  The old man, Goldsboro Skelton, stood across from his secretary. He held a sheet of paper upon which he had written and scratched out a number of sentences.

  “Okay now. Delete the sentence that ends ‘unforgiven blimp fiasco.’”

  “Okay…”

  “Delete from ‘cigar, mouse’ all the way to ‘favoring that we.’”

  “Okay…”

  “And the sentence ending ‘punks and losers.’”

  “Akay…”

  “And in the whole last paragraph, cut the following words: ‘duck,’ ‘flavor,’ ‘Marvin,’ ‘whereas,’ ‘celluloid,’ ‘bingo,’ and ‘dropsy.’ And cut the whole song Silver Threads among the Gold.”

  “Mmmmkay, there. Darling?”

  “What?”

  “Take me.” Bella was grimacing with amour.

  Goldsboro Skelton gazed past her. A wharf rat shot by in the foliage outside his window, scaling the trees like a squirrel. He turned to Bella Knowles.

  “The big Norways are in the palm,” he said.

  “So?”

  “So, forget the Spanish-fly act.”

  Bella sighed with what Skelton thought was a squalid rise of bosoms.

  * * *

  Skelton met James Davis, skipper of the shrimper Marquesa, across from the Western Union and went into Shorty’s to have coffee with him. They sat at the counter, across from the great wooden cyclorama that nearly formed the wall over the stoves, and upon which a genius of the show-card school had depicted the specialties of the house. Skelton observed anew Davis’s birch-stain complexion and kindly, malformed face; simultaneously Skelton noticed that the only gold inlay he himself owned had come loose.

  “Not fishing today?”

  “No,” said James.

  “How come.”

  “I lost my boat…”

  “You lost your boat…”

  “Florida First National Bank got it.”

  “Are you … working?”

  “I’m the salad chef at Howard Johnson’s,” he said right out.

  “… I’m sorry…”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Well, I’m looking for my old man.”

  “I thought he was bedridden.”

  “He was.”

  “What happened?”

  “He took a notion.”

  “Yeah? When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “Did you check with the whores?”

  “I don’t figure that’s it.”

  “The priest?”

  “The old man is always throwing him out.”

  “Maybe he’s watching Triple-A. He still likes sports, don’t he?”

  “The World Series, pro football, and winter Olympics only. I can’t figure this one out…”

  * * *

  It took an hour’s waiting to catch Miranda in the schoolyard (and three blind messages by cooperative students). She came out of the study-hall door in one of the hourly blurts of humanity, a scene at the Velveeta cheese works.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, referring, without need to specify, to his father’s Roman appearance.

  “Please, don’t be concerned. I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t thought you ought to know. Then today I got something strange in the mail. I don’t know if it’s him again because it’s unsigned.” She took a manila envelope out of her folder and handed it to Skelton. Inside was an unsigned photograph.

  It was a dong.

  Understandably, Skelton took immediate umbrage.

  “I can assure you that my father did not mail that … item.”

  “I said I didn’t know it was him. And ‘item’ isn’t quite the word.”

  “There is no way it could be him. It must be one of your students. And it’s unsigned. And ‘item’ is my choice of language.”

  “I doubt if it’s a student. Of course it’s not signed! It’s not a publicity photo.”

  “Are you being short with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t like this being attributed to my father.”

  “I was taking a wild guess. He was round my place in a bed sheet wanting a date.”

  It was easy to see how she, after refusing this figure of the night and receiving an anonymous organ photo by the morning post, might put two and two together. The former was his father all right; but until further proof was in hand, he would continue to regard the dong as a phantom.

  * * *

  It looked like a moth.

  Some years ago, pouring drinks in his own warm and, if he did say so, well-run tavern, listening to trainers of bird dogs, construction stiffs, and short-range drifters who straggled in out of the heat, the cold, or lack of either for a sometimes paid-for drink to talk about, generally, Sputnik, farm parity, poontang, and game-bird populations.

  Among them an exercise boy of forty summers from Lexington who came every Saturday night, in costume, to drink and turn nasty. One Saturday, after Dance had cut him off at the bar, the exercise boy had waited for him to close, then beat Dance half to death in his own parking lot with a tire iron. Dressed as the Sheik of Araby, he had given Dance the curious view of a halfwit Scots-Irish face pinched murderous under the great cloud of turban as the iron came down on his head and face beyond counting.

  The exercise boy vanished, eluding all known forms of law for four months; Dance recovered, though his nose, which had detached entirely and slipped up under his cheek, never did look right; not broken-looking necessarily but as though it had been picked up in a sale of another’s effects.

  Now one hot summer afternoon when it must have been ninety-two in the shade and the bar was empty as all get out, Nichol Dance looked up at the glaring doorway with its bands of greenery, yellow-striped road, and sky, to see the exercise boy enter as though afloat on that panel of uncomfortable light. He was dressed as a moth and wanted crème de menthe on shaved ice.

  Dance told him to get out.

  “Why?”

  “Because I told you to. And as soon as you do go, I am going to call the law.” Dance was afraid of him.

  “I prefer to stay and drive you batshit,” said the other, detecting Dance’s fear.

  “You ain’t gonna drive me batshit,” Dance laughed.

  “Why, I already have. And I tell you what else. I got a nigger-chasin cannon in my hand I’m gone to use on your ass.”

  The exercise boy was sitting close enough to the bar that Dance couldn’t see what he was holding. But Nichol had a gun of his own, the useful Bisley Colt with the Mexican ivory grips; and he was pointing it through the thin paneling of the bar face. The exercise boy had his right hand in his lap, smoking with his left with conspicuous awkwardness. The two talked for an endless half an hour, the exercise boy in his serpentine voice. And the first time he moved his right arm, Nichol Dance blew him halfway across the room; where he lay, all wings, and made a spot.

  The law it was who discovered the exercise boy to be not armed; so Dance, unpopular enough for coming from Indiana smelling of hardware and buckeyes, was placed under arrest; it was not until his trial that he ever heard the exercise boy’s name: George Washington. And Nichol Dance received a contempt citation for remarking, What a name for that shabby-ass snake doctor.

  And now twenty-one years later in
Key West, damned if there wasn’t another moth-like number following him around at night. Dance cut himself one more piece of amberjack and cracked a beer. A man in his life, he thought, sure had to hack his way through a lot of lunch meat. But I will do what I have to. I’m all I’ve got, in a manner of speaking.

  * * *

  On big pine key, the first light of day passes through the high breezy forest. A key-deer buck, the size of a dog, places four perfect scarab hoofs on Route A1A and is splattered by a Lincoln Continental four weeks out of the Ford Motor Company, carrying three admirals bound to Miami and a “kick-off breakfast” for a fund-raiser. The taillights elevate abruptly at the Pine Channel Bridge and are gone. The corporate utopia advances by a figure equal to the weight of the little buck divided by infinity; the Reckoning advances by a figure equal to the buck multiplied by infinity. A funeral wake of carrion birds, insects, and microorganisms working assiduously between bursts of traffic takes the little deer home a particle at a time.

  * * *

  Miranda went into the bathroom. She was there five or ten minutes. When she came out her hair was in disarray and there were a few plastic curlers scattered arbitrarily through the snarl. She sat on the bed and began to shriek. Her face was scrubbed of all makeup; she looked like a loser in a Farm Administration photograph.

  “Shittin place is drivin me nuts. You outa fuckin work and me expectin a child!”

  “Honey, honey … I tried…”

  “Tried my ass! You’re out with faeries while I’m home wid a B-29 in the hangar!”

  “A B-29 in the hangar!” Skelton fell on the floor. Miranda stared at him.

  “An my ass is draggin in this shithouse while you’re out golfin with flits and highfliers!”

  “No more!”

  “No more is right! I’m walkin outa this cockroach palace and leave you to stew in yer own juice like ya deserve ya four-bit louse!”

  “Now just wait a goddamn minute. Whose a one around here with the diploma?”

  “I’ll tell you what I about had enough of,” she shrieked, “and that’s midnight visits from in-laws in sheets and weenie pictures in the mail! That’s what I’m tired of!”

  A knock on the door. Miranda answered it. Skelton listened from the closet. It was a neighbor. Miranda was telling her yes she was all right; they were doing psychotherapy. Not to be interrupted or the AMA would be alerted.

  * * *

  When her friends were not on the phone asking for advice, when no meals were to be made, when unbeset by that complicated skein of petty social contrivances in Key West to which she had many years ago been coopted as a kind of servomechanism and without which the game would have been more carnivorous than it was because she, to a degree almost no longer rememberable in our time, was a generous creature; when all that presented a clear and silent lacuna in her existence as wife, mother, and daughter-in-law to three men of the same surname and in some ways uninterrupted stripe, she retreated to the bedroom and cried quite silently, not a single sob, but just a steady, streaming exhaustion with men who had become figments of their own imaginations; and of whom she probably ought long since to have been shut. After that, she had a system of restoration: a napkin in ice water to clear the eyes, then instead of her usual subdued lipstick she applied Fire and Ice, which was precisely the color of the bright oxygenated blood of an animal mortally shot through the lungs (Skelton’s imaginary death wound would have produced this color), and some rouge to highlight her prominent cheekbones (her navy officer, Oklahoma grandfather had Indian blood, of which he was not proud).

  She was less mortified than demoralized by her husband’s latest absurdity. Mortification ended with his army discharge and his public announcement, long after Key West knew he was home on “a mental,” that Adolf Hitler was an invention of the Miami Press Club. He of course believed no such thing; but argued that it opened a useful avenue of thought. His pitiful belief in selective stupidity amid a situation of universal stupidity made it impossible for him to start anyone even daydreaming about his theories by which good guys in a monstrously linear and Ptolemaic universe demanded bad guys for the far seat of the seesaw. It was an easy idea, like those of Darwin, Francis Bacon, and Jack the Ripper.

  So it all dribbled away to the point of his bedriddence; and expressed itself now in his love of running-backs who could run a slant off tackle and end up getting thirteen yards in a sweep. He believed in lateral moves at the line of scrimmage. She could understand that, however brittle the parallel; and it was her problem to discover now in what sense his vanishing into the darkness was a lateral move.

  * * *

  When Faron Carter was with his wife, he could contrive to deprive his face of all expression whatsoever. In this way he was able to keep from letting her know where she was picking up points and where she was losing them. It was a good little stunt; and without it, Carter would doubtless be in the rubber room at the state funny farm conducting Chinese fire drills. Now, when he had deprived his face of emotion, he had a wide and expressionless mouth like the juncture of a casserole dish with its lid.

  Today his wife was ironing in front of the set, watching a teenage dance hour. The music was coughing so explosively that he could feel it in the ironing board when he rested his hand. And now and then the television would give them close-ups of the dancers with the points of their tongues protruding from the corners of their mouths. It was out of this world.

  Jeannie Carter had been a pretty Orlando baton twirler twenty years ago; but now she looked like death warmed over; you had the feeling that if you touched your fingernail to her forehead, the skull within would jump into your lap. She was a driven lady with the baton and back-seat feel-ups so long past they were scarcely good for an off-color laugh on pinochle night; Jeannie Carter just needed a lot of goods to keep the mortal wolf from the door. She was a forlorn little sociopath, crazy with accumulated purchases, who could have been saved from her shopping sprees only by a weekly gang-fuck behind the high school; for she was not so degenerated that the varsity club wouldn’t line up the way they would, in mountain regions say, for a healthy sheep or yearling cow full of burdock and thistles. The truth was, Faron Carter did his best; but when she scrabbled, eyes popping, on his spacious chest, twisting a fierce and cosmically insatiable twat around his simple meat, it was in a vision of bleak and endless space that could only be modified to something in which she could live by purchases and then more purchases.

  Now that is not to say she used her scattered ownerships to harm her neighbors, nor even, God knew, to characterize herself with her friends and what was left of her family.

  It started with the showpieces. Their first showpiece was this modest concrete block house with its two bedrooms, its terrazzo-floored john and Florida room. There were reproductions on the walls that were more pitiful than tasteless; and Faron Carter’s tournament citations, his stuffed world’s records.

  The second showpiece was the air-conditioned station wagon with the electric everything and the power-assisted altogether. It was cream-colored and had tooled Naugahyde upholstery. After ten months, none of it was scuffed; they had no children. I want my Gran Torino scuffed, thought Jeannie. I want the rich simuwood cherry-and-oak body paneling covered with a little one’s scratches. I want some li’l peeper to give me fits hacking around with the Selectshift Cruise-O-Matic, the RimBlow Deluxe three-spoke steering wheel or the Power-plus positive windows. I wanna look down at the optional color-keyed vinyl floor carpet and see bubble gum with them precious toothprints.

  At each of her temples, Jeannie had barely visible veins that showed under her film of skin. You wouldn’t want to touch them either. When Jeannie used to poise heels together on the fifty-yard line, the white bulbs of rubber making a pale circle around her flawless twirling, her perfect, silver-sateen-enclosed, indented buttocks sent half the audience into a jack-off frenzy that made them blur out the first quarter of the game itself.

  And Jeannie knew that. Twirling, droppin
g to one knee for the catches, then prancing downfield in a mindlessness now growing culturally impossible, she was a simple pink cake with a slot. And two broad bleacher-loads wanted a piece of it. It was a whole civilization up shit creek in a cement canoe without a dream of a paddle.

  Now with veins in her temples ready to leak and a skull to jump out of its pale, thin envelope, she wanted to buy things. And it only made her sorry when she did; not that Carter went after her. He would come home and there would be some unpaid-for showpiece and Jeannie weeping by the TV and drawing flower-print tissues in decorative colors from a gift box. And Carter would feel sorry because he had just come from the Lions Club luncheon where things seemed fine; and here they’d gone from bad to worse.

  They had gotten to the point of collection agents; and sometimes when Carter came in from guiding he found Jeannie in terror because some beef-fed muscleman had been around putting the heat on; or had perhaps gone so far as to garnishee the infrared barbecue oven or intercept some panel truck trying to deliver a love seat.

  Years ago, in the lid of a makeup box she still used, she had printed this message from a book by Roger L. Lee called Baton Twirling Made Easy:

  There is a tendency when strutting to shorten one’s stride. If one allows his stride to become less than thirty inches, he will crowd the first rank in the band. This, naturally, will cause the first rank to shorten its stride, throwing the entire band off.

  Today, again, Carter had to explain that he couldn’t have every customer that came to the dock; there was another guide as much in demand as he was; and a kid who was the real McCoy was having a skiff built.

  “Couldn’t you talk to Myron,” she pleaded.

  “Myron doesn’t have anything to do with it. He just tells you what’s happened after it has happened.”

  There was no use explaining. When Jeannie first saw Myron Moorhen at his desk with the yellow sheets and the columns of numbers streaming from his fingertips to the word TOTAL, something imprinted. Myron had the combination; and if you could only talk to him right, the immense empty space would send runners and connections toward one another.