Panama

by Thomas McGuane

  There was a kind of concrete fountain in front of the place with an iron egret rusting on a length of welding rod. I hung a sign on it that said:

  DEPRAVED PERVERT WISHING WELL

  and the money began to come in. It was clear that before the kids got on to the coins, I’d have enough to put on my party at the Casa Marina. Late at night, while I slept, I could hear the change plopping in the fountain and I felt happy. Still, I suspected that the law of averages would soon bring a justice-hungry citizen, some shitsucker, creeping into my place to avenge decency. Here though, I was confident my silent-running dog would have such a one by the leg. So I slept.

  The next day, Don stopped by to tell me about my wishing well. He also told me that I was cavorting in the sand at Rest Beach at three in the morning. I told him he’d made this up. He said, “You cut your foot on a Doctor Pepper bottle. You’d better put something on it.” I’d been limping all day. Don left. I got some mercurochrome.

  * * *

  Catherine and I lay in the sand. I was on my back feeling the sun form its evanescent oval on my belly, the hot retinal images that come through the lids. The sea was breathing at our feet and I considered how trying it can be to be crazy, with a Band-Aid on your arch, if you accept that you are that, crazy, which I had not, any more than I had dismissed it. I rolled over and rested my hand on Catherine.

  “Cut.”

  “What?”

  “Cut it out.”

  “Okay. What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s not wrong.”

  “Then what’s this?”

  “I just don’t want any.”

  “God why are you shouting? It was recently my birthday.”

  “I want some sun. And I’m thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About simply making a living. The cans are nearly empty. It’s a photo finish every month, getting everything paid. And I have to admit, this private detective is just about all I can handle.”

  “Catherine, I didn’t ask you to hire this private detective”.

  “He’s the only legitimate expense I have. Don’t start diminishing that.”

  “He’s useless.” I was shouting.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “He’s absolutely useless.”

  “I bet he’s already told you something you didn’t know.”

  That kiboshed my replies good.

  Catherine said, “Oh, please, I’m sorry. Why do I attack you? You haven’t got a chance.”

  And then she slept dreamlessly while I watched her. I got up quietly and slipped into the house to dress. I walked down to Juan Maeg’s store and bought a handful of tin rings with plastic jewels; and I bought a few dozen washable tattoos. I went back to the house, fished almost three dollars out of the wishing well under the disapproving gaze of fat Mrs. Dean next door, and walked around to the beach. Catherine was sound asleep. I haven’t got a chance? I slipped the rings over each finger, licking them so they’d slide on without waking her. Then I got a dish of water and began tattooing her: Donald Duck, Spider Man, anchors, hearts, Dodge, Chevrolet, a nice Virgin of Guadalupe, the Fonz, an American eagle, the Silver Streak, Bruce Lee. I covered her and went inside.

  When she came in a while later, I was conscious of what a spectacle she was; the tattoos were startling. I smiled a question and she said, “Let’s eat.” Then she started toward the door. The tide was turning.

  “Don’t you want to scrub up?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  She insisted on eating at the Pier House, which is a nice place, full at lunch, a professional clientele. We asked for a table, me in my huaraches and housepainter’s baggy pants, Catherine in a bathing suit, twelve paste rings, and twenty-five loud tattoos. It was the last month of hurricane season.

  Catherine wanted to discuss local Cuban politics. She didn’t know anything about them and I couldn’t get past how peculiar she looked. I asked her, “How can you do this to me?” The whole god damned restaurant was gaping. I felt like a fool.

  We went back to my place and Don the detective was waiting for me. I found this distressing, since I’d already picked some songs to play for her on the mandolin. But then, it seemed she was waiting for a reason to slip off; and suddenly she was gone. Don got out his notes. I said, “I don’t want to know.”

  “Don’t waste her money. She works hard for it.”

  “No she doesn’t. It’s all in a can. What does she pay you?”

  “Classified.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here now.”

  “I won’t be regular. That would only start your memory loping. I’ll just pop up.”

  “I hate popping up. That’s against everything I’ve ever fought for. Don’t you fucking pop up on me.”

  Then he recited each thing I had done from bandaging my foot to tattooing Catherine. There were no surprises; but I didn’t like the feeling I was getting. I didn’t like it at all. I looked at Don. Today he was wearing mesh shoes and a banlon sport shirt. I could not fail to notice that he had moved his part from one side of his head to the other since the morning.

  “I’m going to give you a little extra time,” he said, “let you get in a little trouble with your memory. —See ya.”

  As he darted off, I sensed the air pouring into the tops of his shoes, his purely professional curiosity, the shifting part of his hair, and the utter menace of being up against someone who had a real memory he’d use on you.

  * * *

  It wasn’t long before I began having a problem retrieving funds from the depraved pervert wishing well. As you know, I have been beset by impostors. Years ago numerous elephants lost their lives in Western Europe at the hands of people who had no idea what a batting practice machine was. An enterprising Frenchman emerged in Brazilian soccer clothes; but that wasn’t the point. That odd young fellow, Chris Burden, who shoots himself, was closer to me and my elephant than these deluded Europeans. The main thing is that impostors have been my cross. The worst of them was at the well today.

  I emerged from my home by the sea in shorts and drugstore flipflops. I was not anxious to run into anyone, as I had been making notes to myself that morning on my stomach with a ballpoint while I drank my coffee and greeted the new day. I hadn’t had a chance for a shower; and I knew that from a stranger’s point of view, I did look a bit like something from the National Geographic. At any rate, there was a stranger at the well. In human history, one of the most terrifying appearances is that of the stranger at the well. The truth is, if I had still been in the same business of my recent years, I would have included this in my repertoire. He peered at the upside-down map of the Lesser Antilles on my stomach, the word “Antigua” scrawled across my belly button. I really shouldn’t have come out.

  He was dressed in clean white ducks stylishly unpressed. A chambray shirt and a handsome old blazer. He wore deck shoes on brown sockless ankles. He was a well-groomed man in his fifties and he carried a small, heavy satchel that said “Racquetball” on its side. When I appeared, he reached inside and began throwing handfuls of silver dollars into the well.

  “Now will you talk to me?” he said. “I am your father.”

  “This is a cruel ploy to take with an orphan,” I told him. I wondered if he would ever find his son. He kept showering the silver dollars into the well, as if to say I would not talk to him otherwise. The pathos of this empty gesture is absolutely all that kept me there.

  “You touch me with your desperation,” I said. “And I advise you to roll up your pants and get your money back. You’ve got the wrong Joe.” With this he angrily emptied the whole satchel into the water. I would never touch that haunted money.

  “Now listen you sonofabitch. I haven’t got all day. I’m going to find out if you’re compos mentis before I go back to Ohio or know the reason why. I’m trying to have a well-earned rest on my yacht, which I have maintained at the dock for five years unused in anticipation of this holiday, and I’m pissing the entire d
eal away running down my birdbrain, notorious son who refuses to admit I exist.”

  It was quiet for a long time.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because it’s all I want!” he said, and his voice caught. He turned away. He hurled the racquetball bag into the well and walked off to a waiting car.

  So, you see?

  8

  I DECIDED that if I was to break out of my present pattern of impoverishment, sorrows, and anger, and stop waiting for everything with Catherine to repair itself, then I would have to fly in the face of my instincts and perhaps discipline myself and do things I didn’t want to do and make friends with Peavey even though he was robbing my stepmother of what was rightfully hers and ensconcing himself in her Florida room with his associates and his bimbo secretary. This was not going to be easy. This was going to be a bitch. But if I succeeded, I might begin to make sense to other people too.

  I got there rather early in the morning. Mary, the housekeeper, was sitting on the front stoop, drunk. I said good morning and she attempted a reply but could only make a bubble, though it was a good-sized one. I stepped past her and went into the house. I saw Peavey immediately. He looked up at me without acknowledgment, crossed to the Florida room, and closed the door behind him. He was dressed rather simply: a grimy pair of Fruit of the Loom underdrawers. When he opened the door, I caught a glimpse of his secretary rolled up in a sleeping bag and idly returning the empties to a six-pack carton.

  Roxy was in the living room, legs crossed at her writing desk, looking smart in an off-pink Chanel suit. This set piece of normalcy was not going to take me in.

  “Sit down, Chet, I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  “Take your time.”

  “Bills, obligations, God.”

  “What’s Counselor Peavey doing running around in his underwear?”

  “Just got up. What’s seven times nine?”

  “Sixty-three. Was that his secretary in the sleeping bag?”

  “Sometimes she’s a secretary. She’s kind of a late riser. Works late. If that little gal gets wind of the Equal Rights Amendment, Peavey’ll have his hands full. —I thought so! The aqueduct commission has robbed me to the tune of two dollars and nineteen cents. Did you see Ruiz when you came in?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he’s selling my grapefruits. I’m going to skin that chiseler.”

  We could hear Peavey making not-quite-human noises through the door to the Florida room.

  “What’s he charging?” Roxy asked.

  “Who?”

  “Ruiz. For the grapefruits.”

  “God, Roxy, I’ve never seen him selling your grapefruits.”

  Mary walked through the room with a thin row of bubbles on her lips.

  “What’s the matter with her?” I asked.

  “Get that fly,” shouted Roxy.

  “Roxy, what fly?”

  “What fly? The fly walking through my addition practically into your face.”

  “I want to give you away.”

  “I think your father should do that.”

  “But I’m having a party at the Casa Marina,” I said.

  “Who’s the orchestra?”

  “Jorge Cruz.”

  “That’s very nice. Jorge is very good indeed. Plays some attractive sambas—” Roxy got to her feet and began to samba. I could see her starting to get peculiar and I returned her to her chair.

  “Don’t start shoving me around,” she snarled. “Not with my obligations you don’t.”

  “I just wanted you to sit and talk to me for a moment.”

  “I’ve got a thieving gardener, a stack of bills like that, and a drunken attorney with an outside line consorting in my Florida room with some women’s libber in a sleeping bag.”

  “Well, why are you marrying him!”

  Peavey peeked out of the door.

  “Who asked for your two cents?” he demanded.

  “I just I…”

  “Nixon.”

  He withdrew.

  * * *

  The usual pattern of mayhem in the morning paper was altered in the edition of The Key West Citizen I bought to forget the situation at Roxy’s (where I had got no reply to my offer to give away my stepmother, in matrimony). A young couple living on Big Coppitt, having fun with morphine and Quaaludes, beat up their three-year-old son and threw him through the window; the little boy took seventeen hours to die. Page 2: “Hints for Shell Collectors.”

  I walked to my place with tinned dog food, stepped into the patio, and said, “Deirdre” to my dog. I had named her, after seven years. I held out my arms and she leapt about, running on her hind legs. “Deirdre,” I said, “Deirdre, Deirdre, Deirdre.” And for a moment, page one’s hint that the human race was in line for a fiery death, vanished.

  I looked out at the ocean, past the ruined pier where nothing was visible except Don smoking in the shadows. I called out, “Aren’t you hot in that suit?” and opened a can of dog food. Weird guy, Don; he smokes Virginia Slims and carries his car and office keys hanging on a split ring from the belt loop of his gleaming suit. I have to study him as a means of keeping him at arm’s length. A less patient man than me would pull all his teeth or something. When I looked out again, Don was gone, but his cigarette smoke was still in the air, quite visible against the quiet blue sea.

  Beyond the wall, I could hear sunbathers talking and I eavesdropped on their senseless conversations. Deirdre stood beside me.

  “Scarred for life…”

  “Not excited…”

  “… nothing personal between us.”

  “Girl is getting me down. (I spoke to her of) … Rasputin, the Kalahari, the telegraphy of souls and ocean. All she wants to do is sixty-nine.”

  * * *

  Then I went straight back to Roxy’s, blood in my eye. I went to the outside window on the west side of the house, stood among the raped grapefruit trees, adjusting the garden hose. Peavey was dictating a memo to the bimbo and I let that shitsucker have it, squirting everything and shorting out the typewriter. Peavey said I wouldn’t be able to say I didn’t ask for it. His hair spread in vertical lines behind his glasses. There were puddles.

  * * *

  The morning mail made a terrific difference. Paramount had released Chronicles of a Depraved Pervert, which was good for a deferment of just about a half a million dollars. I wrote out a deposit, knowing I’d cover the check before it went through. Oh, boy. I went back to the same teller, endorsed and presented the check. “Call me when this clears.”

  “I shall.”

  “Break your balls?”

  “It’s only money.”

  When I got to the house again, the phone was ringing. I answered it and had a long, tormenting conversation with someone close to me, which confused me very much as it was someone I had long believed to be dead. My own unstoried dead are an important phase of my current balance and having them pop up like this produces unusual stress and an urge for mayhem. The living are skeletons in livery anyway. I’m not going for this. My first impulse was to wonder if they ever found Jesse James’s body.

  * * *

  I bought a Land-Rover, and an attractive home for Catherine. She refused to look at the house on her own. I didn’t feel I had the time; I had bought the place by phone and didn’t want to be disappointed. She was tending to Marcelline again; Marcelline’s fiancé—I didn’t know she’d had one—was arrested in New Orleans for grave robbery. I thought this was a ghastly crime but Marcelline assured Catherine that many young musicians in that city survive by robbing the Creole cemeteries.

  “I thought she hated the Cornstalks Hotel because it was full of musicians.”

  “One was right for her.”

  “One was right for her? What does he play?”

  “What?”

  “What instrument?”

  “Moog.”

  This left me with an undeservedly bad impression of Catherine; and I called again and asked her if she would go up the
keys with me in my new Land-Rover. We could go to No Name and see all the way to Little Knock Em Down. This touched her craving for actuality and she said, “Yes, oh yes.”

  I made crab-salad sandwiches and iced two quarts of piña coladas. I got a blanket and some bug repellent. I loaded everything into the Land-Rover and glanced across the street. For just an instant I thought I spotted Jesse James on the broken sidewalk.

  * * *

  I had some trouble with the Land-Rover in the beginning. While not a Road Ace, I am a good driver with illegal left-hand turns as my only moving violations. But the Land-Rover had a number of shift levers, high range, low range, transfer case; and when I looked in the manual, I found only the instructions for attaching sheep shears to the power takeoff. None of the gears were synchronized, and by the time I got to Catherine’s, I had crashed the gearbox good. I slurped insistently on the piña coladas and peered about behind the divided windshield, idling with the controls.

  Catherine climbed up and in, Marcelline waving from a curtain. All along the street, people had piled their dead palm leaves for pickup and the Spanish limes were dropping steadily on the tin roofs. We were on a gloomy side street with traffic flickering at either end and the sky high and oceanic.

  I said, “It takes a rhino to turn one of these over.”

  “What is this?”

  “A Buick.”

  “They’re supposed to be good.”

  “Why won’t you look at your new house?”

  “What’s the meaning of this house?”

  “This is a little present, this house.”

  “In honor of what?”

  “Panama.”

  “Oh, God, Panama. I found your suitcase from the wedding trip. We never unpacked it.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Ammo.”

  “What?”

  “Ammo.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Burke’s Peerage. Linen. A beer.”

  We crossed Stock Island and on Big Coppitt I studied the slow, wind-moving electric lights on a one-man used-car lot. The hospital sat to our left in the marl and mangroves. We were drinking fast to avoid the queer noise of eternity in the air.