Ninety-Two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

  “It’s beautiful,” said Miranda. She drove, Skelton constantly looking back to see how it was trailing; the bow loomed in the rear window. “Does it mean a lot to you?”

  “It will.”

  “When?”

  “When I have paid for it and put some fish in the box and some hours on the engine. Right now it’s just beautiful and beautiful isn’t very interesting.”

  “What about Brueghel, Vermeer, and Cézanne.”

  “They don’t build boats.”

  “You’re a redneck.”

  “I’m worse, I’m a commercial fisherman. I’d pour water on a drowning man.”

  “What are those numbers for?”

  “Registration.”

  “The orange sticker?”

  “Commercial fishing sticker. —No, the boat means plenty; but there is a kind of letdown when you get something you want that bad.”

  “I wish I knew what your plan was.”

  “My plan is to go directly to heaven.”

  “That was my father’s plan. He became an Episcopal priest. Until then he was interested in heaven. After that he was mostly concerned with blooded horses. After horses it was a lady who hunted foxes on horses.”

  “What did that lead to.” The boat trailed easy.

  “A blessed event. My mother took an apartment near Canaveral, divorced my father, and married a realtor. The realtor lost his shirt when NASA moved to the Houston Space Center and all those subdivisions went back to frog pond. Then my mother broke her back in a jeep accident during the Audubon Christmas bird-count competition. The realtor left her and now she lives alone with the blessed event, my half brother. My father handed him over so he could go to Florence and live on the Lungarno with the girl who ran the bake sale at the church picnic, a nymphomaniac golf instructor. My father is addicted to ether and their place stinks. She hangs out at American Express and has a room of her own behind the Duomo for her assignations, usually with buyers from stateside gift shops, not necessarily men … But my mother is happy, though she misses all the NASA scientists. Many of them were bird watchers.”

  “And your dad found his heaven with a cross-sexed nympho bake-salesman in the city of Michelangelo.”

  “Do I turn here?”

  “Next block.”

  “Well, he did find something. When do you plan on finding heaven?”

  “I had what you might call a vision. Half a dozen little brainstorms about living right and being free. Now they weren’t any of them simple; but I didn’t half expect to have a fight over them. It looks like if I am going to hang in there with the rest of the carnivores, I’m going to have to draw some lines. Nothing obvious. Just some curving friendly lines with two-way turnstiles. —Pull up side of the dry shed there.”

  “Two-way turnstiles.”

  “On my Jesus Freeway.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “Stop right here. You have a responsibility as a motorist. I’ll back the trailer in the shed. What we need here is Our Lady of the Skiff; though the record seems to indicate that she does not back small craft or in fact anything under fifty feet unless it has a teak deck or exceptional electronics.”

  He backed the skiff in without event, detached the trailer; and Miranda parked outside the shed. Skelton stayed to watch them hang the big Evinrude engine, bringing it on a chain from the fork lift and swinging it down on the transom. Skelton gazed at the bright new powerhead, anodized and precise under a veil of light oil. The pulse pack was visible between the wedge of finned cylinders. And the electrical harness sent out its leads and cables to various sealed junctures in the power-head. Skelton stared, the sound of traffic faraway in his ears.

  This like his books, fuselage, imaginary garden, family, loves, religion, and private history was an indispensable component of the spiritual survival multiple he was inventing for himself; and through which he intended to sandwich himself between earth, sea, and stars with the fit a waffle has within a waffle iron; or the kind of mortising James Powell had performed in his skiff; less a seamlessness than the kind of laminated strength a scar has.

  While the skiff was being set up, Skelton proposed, they would go up to Big Pine and have something to eat at the Baltimore Oyster House. A geriatrical hippie in an MG came that close to nailing them head on; then nihilistically waved to them as he shot by, as though on a Final Mission. They cruised through Saddlebunch and Skelton could see the area of mangroves penetrated by the creek in which he had lost contact with the Rudleighs. Just past Saddlebunch, Miranda began an oral outrage that lasted till Sugarloaf Key, Skelton gaping wanly through the windshield. A Greyhound passed in the opposite direction, the driver leaning forward on the wheel in the professional slump. Did he see? The bus’s brake lights flashed three times in the rear-view mirror. He did. Skelton’s face compressed in a lizard grimace, and misfocus crossed his eyes like a momentary shadow. Wave to Sonny in the Gulf Station; he thinks I’m alone. On Summerland Key, wave to Bud in the Sinclair; he sees I’m with a girl. A little dock bar there on the left, on a raft; friendly place but no pool table. Skiffs moored in its shadow; lobster traps piled all over and ocean both ways; God if they will leave that ocean alone, I can take it all. Osprey goes over; kestrels on the wire watching for mice where they mow the shoulder; and anole lizards, of course, whose translucent rib cages and generally green delicateness recommend themselves to the little falcons. Big Pine and the Baltimore Oyster House.

  “Hungry?” Skelton asks.

  “I was.”

  “Oh God, Miranda.”

  They sat at the bar. The cook and owner was a former submariner, a burly bald man who carried a wordless moral impact Skelton supposed Sam Johnson must have owned.

  “What are you going to have?” Miranda asked.

  “She-crab soup.”

  “Me too. Can you split an order of oysters?”

  “What kind of oysters?” Skelton asked the barmaid.

  “Both,” she said.

  “Chesapeakes and Apalachicolas,” Skelton said to Miranda.

  “You say.”

  “Apalachicolas. It’s a state industry. And give us a pitcher.”

  The oysters arrived shortly. Skelton said, “Let’s just eat these off the one plate instead of dividing them up.”

  Skelton squeezed lime on an oyster, raised its barnacled shell to his lip, and pushed the occupant into his mouth. Word had it Apalachicola was having water problems; better enjoy these while you can. What an idea. My people have been eating Apalachicola oysters for a hundred years; I object on the basis of family. Spiders have so much bug-killer in them they can’t make symmetrical webs either. Skelton looked over at Miranda to reiterate his conviction of general pointlessness; but he noticed a button on her shirt pulled taut between her breasts, tilted almost enough to slip through the buttonhole; he knew those appendages to be slightly larger and slightly firmer than well-made Cuban flan and that concrete thought about something desired made him lose interest in despair. He had long since learned that the general view was tragic; but he had simultaneously learned that the trick was to become interested in something else. Look askance and it all shines on. The hope of reward in this line of religion was to be able to gaze with boredom straight into the big black hole, pausing only to wipe the face of your pocket watch with a clean linen handkerchief so that its next owner can trade it in on a new Bulova along with the gold he has knocked out of your indifferent teeth. After all, who on earth slipping it to a truly desired woman can seriously interest himself in the notion that the race is doomed; at such a time, the very thought is a flourish. Afterward, in the little death, a universal view spreads its arms; and the received world has “features” looped and looped in Nietzschean returns.

  Skelton for his part, though blessed with good health and the lack of ordinary worries, was thankful that it had been since the trick Dance, Carter, and the Rudleighs had played him that he felt that separation of himself from the people and objects amid which he lived.


  Two nights earlier he had gotten so frightened that Dance would kill him that he had cried; but he never felt the yawning that came between himself and everything when his essential facilities for control began to lock up. Studying biology—at the end—he lost the connection between the sessile polyp he was dissecting and the firmament, in effect the kingdom-and-glory; or that at least was his first sign; within two hours, only Thorazine drove Satan from his eyes long enough for him to reform the connections between himself and what was palpably not himself. One more week and he was in Key West again, where it was widely reported that he had “lowered his expectations.” He wants to be a guide, people said, looking at each other with signification, out in a damn boat all the doo-dah day.

  Skelton looked aside to Miranda. It this a loose woman? When he was young, he was always falling in love; once with a floozy from the base named Joyce; he had a souped-up Chevy BelAir then with a three-quarter-race engine, scavenger headers, and so on; and he and Joyce would take a bottle and go up the keys where Joyce would sometimes run along the four-inch bridge railings and—twice—fall off, missing the abutments, somehow. Joyce was loose as a goose. She chipped in with him on a set of slicks so they could drag-race sailors on A1A. A friend of Skelton’s told him that if Joyce had as many dicks sticking out of her as she’d had sticking in her she would look like a porcupine. Skelton punched him dutifully; they drifted apart and Skelton kept the racing slicks.

  “Know what?”

  “What.”

  “Still haven’t seen my old man. Hasn’t showed up since he was around your place. But I want to ask you something. Do you think he was serious when he was asking you for a date?”

  “No. He was making fun.”

  “Well, he’s not an unkind person.”

  “Can you eat that last oyster?”

  “No, you.”

  “I will. Well, what kind of father is he?”

  “The best. And I been reviewing his performance since I was real little. He is always checking to see how things add up. He taught me how to step to one side about everything I looked at, always change the angle.”

  “Does that make for a happy life?”

  “Probably not. So what.”

  “Is this upsetting you?”

  “A little.”

  “What has he done?”

  “He got thrown out of the army during World War II and came home and invented a new kind of infrared film for night photography and got decorated. The army paid him a percentage on the film and he used the money to open a whorehouse, a blimp factory, and a reading room for Catholic-anarchist literature. He closed the reading room when he learned anarchists had fought with the White Russians. Then he opened it again when he learned the Communists had suppressed Basque anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. He is an idealist. —He kept a horse.”

  “In Key West?”

  “An American Saddlebred with rubber shoes. He could swim it to Christmas Island and gallop in the seashells.”

  Miranda drove back. She was an aggressive driver and a tailgater; and when she passed she stayed too long in the left lane. Skelton hated riding with her. When they got to the dry shed, he told her to meet him at the dock.

  The skiff was ready; they put the fork lift under the hull and backed out of the shed with it and lowered it into the water. Skelton got in and walked it around to the gas dock, where he fueled up. The engine started readily and he let it idle for a moment. Then he pushed off and backed around far enough that he could turn and pull out alongside the sponging skiffs, the old Johnson rum-running boat, and crawfish boats moored along the sea wall. When he had clearance, he put it up on a plane, hearing the strange two-stroke exhaust rap of the engine. The fully powered boat seemed to have a kind of loft and control that he had hoped for. He swung under the Eisenhower Causeway and could feel the flat-bottom hull skidding as he knew it would; but the chines didn’t catch, so the rate of slide was predictable. He powered it through the turn near Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, past the gaudy Cuban commercial boats that looked like dismasted sailboats, then out through the gap at Sigsby for a five-minute shakedown. He ran it past the little key there in a foot of water at 4,000 rpm and abruptly shut it down. The boat settled levelly without dropping the stern and fouling the prop on the bottom. He ran it up on a plane, snaking it off a little to put the prop away from the bottom a few inches, and headed for the dock at 2,900, its slowest planing speed, with a sense of complete satisfaction.

  In three minutes, he rounded the island to Chambers Street where he could see, a hundred yards before he shut down, Miranda sitting on one of the guides’ lockers at the dock, talking to Jeannie Carter and Nichol Dance.

  Wild horses belonged to that category of things that could not have made Skelton bring these three together on purpose, nor any collaboration of all the tea in China and months of Sundays. On days of more than twenty-knot wind, the foam lines began to build on the ocean and any bird that so much as raised its wings got the kind of scudding trip before superior force that Skelton felt himself now getting, as these clusters formed and foolish lives like his father’s began to break up. Something was afoot.

  Nichol Dance fended the boat and threw two half-hitches around the bow cleat; Skelton reversed his engine against the line and swung the stern in alongside the dock and shut down.

  “What’s up?”

  “Your girl here wants to know why I’m going to shoot you if you guide.”

  Jeannie released the long trilling laugh that had, after the baton, become, in effect, her trademark. It was her song; and she used it to skewer a few half-formed thoughts like shish kebab. Skelton climbed up on the dock.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “The thought that Nichol could hurt a … a fly!”

  When she knew as well as anybody that the personable Hoosier had blown that exercise boy to Kingdom Come; and in a moment of pique neatly gaffed Roy Soleil for ridiculing him. But hurt a fly!?

  That is why Miranda said, “Come off it,” with that particular woman-to-woman force that scares men. Skelton sat on the wooden locker with the others.

  “Why in the worl’ do you want to guide anyway?” Jeannie asked Skelton himself.

  “It’s been sort of a process of elimination,” said Skelton.

  “Well, you oughta had seen my husband about the time when he come in with his skin burnt half off!”

  Dance was looking a little foolish; he didn’t see how he could reiterate his threat or add some credence to it without reminding everybody of TV.

  “That’s a pretty little skiff though,” Jeannie observed. “I bet you’re real proud of it.”

  “I am.”

  “Best skiff I seen yet,” Dance said.

  “And I know it’ll mortally fly,” Jeannie said, “with that one-twenty-five Starflite Evinrude settin on that transom waitin to flat shut down these other turkeys.”

  “Aw well, who knows…” Skelton could do without Jeannie’s ascription of mechanical superiority here just now. But Dance didn’t take it that way; he smiled and listened, always a man who knew who he was. He talked without studying your eyes to see what you thought of what he said.

  “But I sure will say this. Cart has never lost a day’s wages with his Merc. That old Thunderbolt ignition and Power-Trim just seem to be the combination for a workin fool like Cart.”

  Skelton could hardly pay attention; he was in his trance. There was Nichol the same way. The Eternal Revenue Service is in the wings. But the girls with their race’s gift for the here and now were casting sidelong glances at one another. Jeannie’s skewer laugh shot forth again and she said, “What Key West needs with a beginner guide beats me for starters!”

  “Your ass is sucking swamp water,” said Miranda.

  “I guess that’s about as lady-like as I’d expect from a Mallory Square weirdo all right.”

  “What clodhoppers expect in the way of lady-like doesn’t interest me that much.”

  “Doesn’t interest�
�! How would a poke in your fancy snoot do, schoolmarm?”

  Miranda, mirabile dictu, sucker-punched poor Jeannie, fist to jaw with the sound of flounder on butcher’s marble. But Jeannie came back kicking and clawing and making a long intermittent whine of rage. There was only a long flailing moment of this, ending with terrific yanks on each other’s hair, which was long enough that they could stand a yard and a half apart ripping and hauling. Dance got Miranda and Skelton got Jeannie and took them away from each other. They were crying.

  Jeannie ran across the street to the Sandpiper, and Miranda went inside the bait shack to doctor herself.

  Dance shook his head. “I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. I believe they’d hurt each other.”

  Myron Moorhen came to the door.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, Myron. Go count.”

  “You wouldn’t shoot a sweet guy like me,” Skelton said.

  “I wouldn’t want to.”

  “But can’t you tell I’m going to work now that I have the boat?”

  “I’m not thinking that far ahead.”

  “But just figuring I do—”

  “Then you’ll spend the rest of your life dead; and I’ll spend mine in the joint. You’d have possibly the better shot at eternal reward.”

  “But you might bail it out with last-minute repentance.”

  “I ain’t a Catholic.”

  Miranda came out of the bait shack. “Honey, let’s go home.” Dance walked with them to the parking lot.

  “Night now,” Dance said and walked across to the Sandpiper, where he matched the bartender for the jukebox, won, and played The Easy Part’s Over by Charley Pride; plus two old Waylon Jennings hits.

  “Where’s Jeannie at?”

  “She’s around here some place. She’s been here three nights tryin her damndest to throw Myron some tail; but he runs like a rabbit.”

  Jeannie, to be precise, was in the ladies’, dabbing at her wounds and taking some easy maneuvers with the baton, around the waist, figure eight between the legs, little toss behind the back, drop to one knee: Dah-DAH!

  She had her custom baton: thirty inches long, eleven-sixteenths of an inch in diameter and seventeen ounces in weight—just as big as it could be without dragging at her routine. Here in the ladies’ she ran through all nine rudiments as a warm-up (Wrist Twirl, Figure Eight, Cartwheel, Two-Hand Spin, Pass Around the Back, Four-Finger Twirl, Beating Time, Aerial Work, and Salute); then she put the baton down and climbed up on the toilet so she could see out through the chicken-wire window to the bait shack across the way.