Ninety-Two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

  THE CUBAN LIBERTY APOSTLE

  WISHED TO OFFER

  TO THE PEOPLE OF KEY WEST

  WHAT WAS LEFT OF HIS HEART

  Nor in the graven homage of “Los Caballeros de la Luz,” the horsemen of the light. Skelton could not see these things without some irrational desire to be a liberty apostle and horseman of the light, a shy delivery boy of eternity’s loops.

  A seabird-crowded sky made it quite impossible for Skelton to stay very long on land; and on the days when exaggerated tide fell below the mean low, exposing the flats around Key West and filling downwind side streets with the smell of ocean at its most fecund, he could grow quite frantic about it.

  Today’s revelations, the skiff and the bookings, he paid into his system slowly, having what he wanted.

  He walked to his family’s house on Peacon Lane; pulling the bell on the gate and waiting for his mother. She came without a word and let him through to the patio of old red street bricks. The deep bay porch swept out upon the patio in a watery-green cascade of vegetation and light, deep red pots of ferns hanging from the porch roof. At the far end of the patio, a small sprinkler turned and flung chains of glittering water up into the foliage-broken light; and high on the center of the green-floored porch was his father in his bed, covered by a gauzy mosquito canopy, his grandfather in a Cuban wicker chair beside.

  “How are things?” he asked his mother.

  “Fine.”

  “Mother, how are they?”

  “Go over and talk to them.”

  “Evening, Grandpa.”

  “Tom.”

  “How’re you feeling, Dad?”

  “He feels perfectly well,” volunteered the grandfather.

  “If no one will get that asshole out of here,” said the muted figure inside the gauze, “I will shit my pants and die on purpose.”

  “Do it!” said the grandfather. “You malinger well enough.”

  “Grandpa.”

  “Every doctor in Key West says it is in his head—”

  Mrs. Skelton was silent in the kitchen, an absentee ballot.

  Skelton’s father began to eat his pillow. Skelton reached gently under the canopy and pulled it from his tearing jaws; fluffs of eiderdown drifted on the porch.

  “Someone run shit pig into the Gulf Stream,” said Skelton’s father. The grandfather stood and lashed into the gauze before Skelton forcibly seated him again.

  “Go ahead,” said the grandfather, drawing his glass of rum from under the chair. “Gang up.”

  “Come on now, Grandpa.”

  “Got a job yet, bright boy?”

  “I’m starting.”

  “At what?”

  “Guiding.”

  “Terrific. I’ll see you at the Red Doors with the rest of the drunken charter-boat captains.”

  “I won’t be at the Red Doors. And I’m skiff-guiding anyway. Also, when did you join the lecture tour?”

  “Throw the old fart’s ass over the wall,” said Skelton’s father.

  “I’m hungry!” the old man bellowed toward the kitchen. Then in a hushed voice, “Look! Look! He’s playing dead.”

  Skelton stood by the canopy. His father seemed to have passed. “Dad?”

  “Let me go.” A stertorous sigh issued from the youthful-looking man. He sat up suddenly and looked all about his familiar surroundings. “Piss.”

  “Not so easy there, is it now?” chuckled the grandfather.

  Mrs. Skelton came to the door of the porch: “Soup’s on!”

  “What are we having?” the grandfather inquired.

  “You’ll like it.”

  “What are we having?”

  “Jewfish chowder.”

  “I’m leaving. I can’t eat that. I can’t eat nigger food.”

  The grandfather went into the pantry and came out with a glass of water which he hurled through the canopy into the face of Skelton’s father. “Life is beautiful!” he roared. “Can’t you understand one thing? Get out of bed!”

  Probably, seven months in bed had atrophied his muscles; so the grandfather’s call for a Lazarus was a little fanciful. In any case, the often unpleasant old man hurried across the patio and out of the gate without another word. A whole section of the gauze was wet and clear. Inside, Skelton’s father muttered with hatred a pastiche of maladroit quotations from Marlowe and local vulgarities.

  Skelton was tasting the chowder, looking at chunks of jewfish and disks of carrots, parsnips, pieces of potato, onions, streaks of tomato turning and disappearing in the fragrant bisque with the turbulence of the wooden spoon he passed through the big pot. “I shouldn’t have eaten,” he said.

  “The hell with that,” said his mother. “You sit with him and talk.”

  Skelton deliberately sat next to the wet part of the canopy so that his father’s features were as perceived in fog.

  “Well, Dad.”

  “I like it this way, all right?”

  “It seems like such a lot of trouble.”

  “All right, it seems like a lot of trouble.”

  “Grandpa out of sorts?”

  “Your grandfather’s Huey Long complex has finally put him beyond communication. I’m not sure the old bastard ever did have good sense.” Skelton could see his father gesticulating emptily inside the canopy. “Aw, I take that back. But God he’s wearing me out. If only he’d get old. But year after year, he wears us all out! It’s inhuman!”

  * * *

  Jake Roberts was on the desk. “Hello, Bubba,” he said to Skelton. He called everyone Bubba. He sat next to the telephone and the teletype machine with which he had informationally ensnared various and sundry. He was always working on his “spread,” by which he meant the variance between the cause of arrest and the eventual conviction based on teletype information. His best to date was an armed-robbery conviction arising from a loitering arrest. If he could get a murder conviction out of an unpaid parking ticket, jacking up the crime with teletype info, Jake would die happy. “Old boy has crossed his sef up,” said the cyberneticist.

  Skelton followed Roberts behind the desk to the holding room, whose cell held three tired shrimpers. “Let’s make this official,” said Roberts and scrawled a note on the pad on the fingerprinting desk. He put Skelton up to the height chart and photographed him with the Polaroid camera; then he unlocked the elevator with the key and on the way up handed Skelton his mug shot, with his height behind him, five feet eleven. They got out of the elevator on the second floor where you could look into the Greyhound station parking lot. Roberts left him at the first cell. Dance was there, all by himself.

  “What do you want?” Dance asked, putting on the good cheer; he was not happy.

  “Thought I’d check in and see if you needed anything.”

  “Nope.”

  “How you gettin on otherwise?”

  “Real lousy. All my pigeons come home to roost.”

  “Well, it’s not so bad.” Skelton said. “Sure worked out for me. I haven’t been able to get up cash money for a skiff.”

  “Well, now you have got you a skiff.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “And all them good bookings it took me ten years to cull out of all them bad bookings I didn’t ask back.”

  “I do appreciate it.”

  “Well, we’ll work something out.”

  “I understand that.”

  “There’s only a hundred twenty hours on that engine. You should get a couple of years or more out of it.” Dance grinned a little.

  “Don’t you think that’s a little pessimistic about how long you’re going to be in stir?”

  “No, I don’t,” Nichol Dance said. “The dockmaster died.” That was not so much a thing for Tom Skelton to think about as to receive like news of induction or perhaps curable carcinoma.

  “It hardly seems you could have killed him.”

  “I didn’t. I just popped that little hole in him and he leaked out and quit. I feel like I been framed.”

  “I can�
��t think what to say.”

  “Oh for God’s sake! Go on now. Visit me another time.”

  Skelton started away. Nichol Dance called to him.

  “About that other,” he called, “we’ll work something out.”

  “Mutual aid,” said Skelton, in honor of his father.

  * * *

  Walking from the foot of William to the foot of Margaret, among all the shrimp boats driven in by heavy weather, some with the net spilled in one place on the deck and others with the net streaming gauzily from the boom, various sea animals stranded in the web, Tom Skelton thinks: Of all my idiocies this one of guiding is the silliest; no it is not.

  You could, he decided, erode everything always with these inquiries as to higher meaning. Now let us think of something amusing. From a single mustard seed grew a gargling violin. Why did the moron tiptoe past the medicine cabinet. Hm. Around the bases of the piers the green water was racing and whitening, racing back under his feet and colliding resonantly in the under-pier darkness.

  James Davis, a slender gaunt gesticulatory fellow with walnut-shaped eyes and a face the color of birch stain, was skipper of the shrimper Marquesa. In years past he was the boon companion and, in some spiritual sense, the underling cohort of Skelton’s father.

  James Davis and Tom Skelton sat together in the wheelhouse of the Marquesa, James with his feet on the chart desk, looking up out of one window in recollection, himself partly obscured to Skelton’s view in the shadows of navigational and depth-finding electronics.

  “… when your old man came of draft age, he would talk about shooting away his big toe or going to Cuba for a dose. Then Uncle called him up and he went to Fort Benning for basic but returned in real short order.” Returned, Skelton knew, discharged as insane after a corps of officers met to determine just what would hamstring him longer in civilian life than a dishonorable discharge. In healthy quarters even then, a dishonorable discharge was no more than a certificate of some racy proclivity. But insane made folks jumpy.

  Racy proclivities he had had even in the years Skelton’s grandfather was in the state senate fabricating remunerative franchises around the state and establishing a gerrymandered kingdom for himself that in the face of subsequent investigations at the federal level proved to have nine lives; in countless Gulf Coast communities Skelton’s grandfather was revered unseen and unmet as only a crook of limitless cynicism can be revered. Ultimately, various congeries of “Miami Jews and legal swindlers out of the District of Columbia,” later replaced by simple “Castro sympathizers,” nibbled old man Skelton’s duchy to that small country below Big Pine. Here he retrenched, bilking everything and everyone when money changed hands, being downright fatherly about it, right up to the point he suggested a divvy on the city-wide bolita games; at which time a cadre of “Castro types” arranged to have half his ass blown away with the time-honored, sawed-off shotgun. Murder was intended, and before anyone could try again, the old man let up on the bolita. The true residue of this incident was another myth of old man Skelton hightailing it behind the Fourth of July restaurant, flat out as a sprinter, the shotgun barking in the humid night and driving his own self to Monroe General with half his backside still in the street.

  “… your dad meantime was trying to go straight listening to his classical music on the victrola. But with that father of his, he couldn’t help himself: he run some guns to Cuba; he horsewhipped the navy-base commander for calling up his girlfriend; he fished with me; he studied all the time for no good reason and went out to drink himself crazy five nights a week…”

  “Was this girlfriend my mother?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Tell me what she was like.”

  “I’m always telling you that. I’ll tell you another time…” Skelton never got an answer to this question.

  They sat in the wheelhouse, neither of them fishing because of the blow that made the rigging clatter overhead.

  “What have you got for power in this thing?” Skelton asked. To him, shop talk was always lyric.

  “Detroit Diesels with Capitol reverse and reduction gears and a Lister auxiliary.”

  “It’s a Lantana.”

  “No sir, a Desco, out of St. Augustine. I bought it off of David Rawlin’s widow the year he died. It needed work.”

  “Do you know this flats guide, Nichol Dance?”

  “Heard of him.”

  “He killed a man yesterday.”

  James looked out at the scudding clouds. “No doubt,” he said.

  * * *

  Skelton, hiking to the dock, thought about Nichol Dance. In Skelton’s mind, Nichol Dance was saying again, “About that other, we’ll work something out.” The imprecision of the remark troubled Skelton.

  It was that like so many of us Skelton had tried quite hard not to be crazy. Largely lucid and more than normally unaddled by abstract ambitions, Skelton had from time to time lapsed curiously into not terribly human actions. Perhaps it was his sense of humor; but, well, anyway he seems to have done some barking.

  At first, it was inadvertent; or, as a joke. Then, once, he had driven back the urge to bark as though it were the embodiment of terror: to wit, that he was not human at all and that one day he would find himself beside a half-filled garbage pail, baying at the moon.

  “You are baying at the moon now,” said a face once from the speeding Lagonda. “Right now.”

  * * *

  “Well sir,” said Carter, stacking the frozen balao in one end of the bait freezer, “it sorely grieves me to think of the mess he is in. But I would say that in view of his record, Nichol is all through.” But then, Carter was smiling.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” said Skelton.

  “Oh sure it’s fair. I mean, Nichol is a good friend. But honestly, you don’t jump up and gaff folks.”

  “I suppose—”

  “You suppose?”

  “I mean, I suppose you don’t.”

  A few minutes later, Carter said, “What was that?”

  “What?”

  “I heard barking.”

  * * *

  Jake Roberts gave Skelton the elevator key and said, “They got him for the whole thing, hook, line, and sinker.” Jake was grinning too.

  Nichol Dance was asleep. “Nichol?”

  “Why, the keed,” said Dance, getting up readily and coming to the front of the cell. “Have you heard the news.”

  “I believe so.”

  “I’m going to use my connections to get on a road gang.”

  Skelton didn’t know whether he was to laugh or not.

  “Are you … worried?” Nichol Dance didn’t look worried.

  “Hell yes I’m worried. About a lot of things. Not the least of which is my next piece of tail is in twenty years. That actually hurts my feelings. I’m the kind of person would fuck a brush pile if I thought they was a snake in it.—What are you laughing at?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you ever hear of Charlie Starkweather?”

  “Yes.”

  “Charlie Starkweather is what happens when you push someone around once too often. They laughed at him when he stuttered. They called him a redheaded bowlegged woodpecker. Starkweather used to wear Tony Lama boots. He used to hang out in used-clothing stores. He wanted to marry a cocktail hostess and settle—you know—down. He killed eleven people outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, and owned a ’49 Merc chopped and channeled with a bullnosed hood and frenched headlights.”

  “What does the ’49 Merc have to do with the eleven people?” Skelton said, confused.

  “It’s just part of the whole story, is all. Charlie Starkweather was sort of an artist. He used to draw pictures of himself committing the killings. It appeared like he was spraying them people with a garden hose and they was just all folded up around the bullets…”

  “That’s kind of … different.”

  “Well, it was extreme of him. But his life was real colorful. I have one thing against him though: he had no sense
of humor. You should never kill somebody if it isn’t funny.”

  “I don’t like that idea.”

  “That’s because you don’t understand it.”

  “I suppose. But anyway Nichol, I wanted to get by before you headed for Raiford and uh well at least thank you for letting me take the boat while you’re away.”

  “Oh, glad to do it, glad to do it.” He had one hand in his pocket and hung by the other from one of the vertical bars. “We’ll work something out. And tell Jake, would you, I want a salad tonight.”

  * * *

  The weather broke, streamed away in mackerel clouds, cleared and got hot. He would guide in the morning. He was on Duval Street now. The Conch Train drifted past Sloppy Joe’s and a thousand screaming ninnies cheered the clanging bell the barmaid rang at them as they passed. In the window of Gomez Plumbing the Christmas display rested on a field of palm leaves: Mary, Joseph, and Christ in His manger, entirely fabricated from plumbing parts; the head of Holy Mary Mother of God was a squat chromium faucet; the Christ Child was a lovingly assembled congestion of pipe fittings in a cardboard manger. A simple faith, thought Skelton unkindly, but it is mine.

  He had a bowl of fabada asturiana at the Cacique and then a double Jim Beam across the street at the Anchor. There were foreign sailors leapfrogging down Duval Street, squealing and blocking traffic, until a huge black police lieutenant scattered them among the side streets. The sun went down and the light came up on the side of the La Concha Hotel.

  Skelton wandered over to Eaton and sat on one of the benches donated by Mayor Papy, smoked a Canary Island cigar, waved to people he knew, and worried about guiding. He thumbed open Nichol Dance’s date-book: “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rudleigh, Rumson, Connecticut.” Well.