He could hear Dance’s skiff the last ten minutes of the fight, but poled Slatt in on his prize and netted it succinctly. Dance ran right in on them and cut his engine. He climbed into Skelton’s boat with the gun in his hand and asked Skelton where he wanted it. Skelton pointed to the place he had imagined at the shopping plaza some time ago. And the question of his conviction or courage was answered. But this was not theater; and Dance shot him through the heart anyway. It was the discovery of his life.
Dance gave Slatt the heavy gun and sat in the bottom of the skiff next to Skelton.
Instead of shooting Dance, which is what Slatt first thought he owed the republic, Slatt hit him over the head a sledge blow with the gun. He kept hitting until he felt the head jelly under his blows. The empty skiff began to fall with the tide toward the sea.
Then he started the engine. He ran standing up, with Skelton and Dance, two foiled and strangely synchronous lives, in a pile at his feet. The white robe he wore carried behind him and he held the bright trophy to his chest. His jaws were parted slightly to the rush of air.
He was heading for A1A.
BOOKS BY Thomas McGuane
Fiction
The Cadence of Grass, 2002
Nothing But Blue Skies, 1992
Keep the Change, 1989
To Skin a Cat, 1985
Something to Be Desired, 1983
Nobody’s Angel, 1982
Panama, 1978
Ninety-two in the Shade, 1973
The Bushwhacked Piano, 1971
The Sporting Club, 1969
Nonfiction
The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing, 1999
Some Horses, 1999
An Outside Chance, 1980
Thomas McGuane
Ninety-two in the Shade
Thomas McGuane is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including The Sporting Club; The Bushwhacked Piano, which won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; Ninety-two in the Shade, which was nominated for the National Book Award; Panama; Nobody’s Angel; Something to Be Desired; Keep the Change; and Nothing But Blue Skies. He has also written To Skin a Cat, a collection of short stories; and An Outside Chance, a collection of essays on sports. His books have been published in ten languages. He was born in Michigan and educated at Michigan State University, earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Yale School of Drama and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. An ardent conservationist, he is a director of American Rivers and of the Craighead Wildlife-Wildlands Institute. He lives with his family in McLeod, Montana.
Copyright © 1972, 1973 by Thomas McGuane
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., New York, in 1973. This edition published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Portions of this book appeared in Fiction and in TriQuarterly.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGuane, Thomas.
Ninety-two in the shade / Thomas McGuane. — 1st Vintage contemporaries ed.
p. cm. — (Vintage contemporaries)
ISBN: 0-679-75289-7
1. Fishing guides—Florida—Key West—Fiction. 2. Key West (Fla.—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A3114N56 1995
813'.54—dc20 94-42801
CIP
eISBN 9781466858299
First eBook edition: November 2013
Ninety-Two in the Shade Page 18
