Ninety-Two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

  Skelton was trying to keep his mind on the job he had set out to do. The problem was, he told himself, to go from Point A to Point B; but every breath of humid air, half sea, and the steady tidal drain through root and elliptical shadow in his ears and eyes diffused his attention. Each heron that leaped like an arrow out of his narrow slot, spiraling invisibly into the sky, separated him from the job. Shafts of light in the side channels illuminated columns of pristine, dancing insects.

  Very close now. He released the line so that if his appearance at the dead end terrified the permit there would not be sufficient tension for the line to break. The sides of the mangrove slot began to yield. Skelton stopped.

  An embowered, crystalline tidal pool: the fish lay exhausted in its still water, lolling slightly and unable to right itself. It cast a delicate circular shadow on the sand bottom. Skelton moved in and the permit made no effort to rescue itself; instead, it lay nearly on its side and watched Skelton approach with a steady, following eye that was, for Skelton, the last straw. Over its broad, virginal sides a lambent, moony light shimmered. The fish seemed like an oval section of sky—yet sentient and alert, intelligent as tide.

  He took the permit firmly by the base of its tail and turned it gently upright in the water. He reached into its mouth and removed the hook from the cartilaginous operculum. He noticed that the suddenly loosened line was not retrieved: Rudleigh hadn’t even the sense to keep tension on the line.

  By holding one hand under the permit’s pectoral fins and the other around the base of its tail, Skelton was able to move the fish back and forth in the water to revive it. When he first tentatively released it, it teetered over on its side, its wandering eye still fixed upon him. He righted the fish again and continued to move it gently back and forth in the water; and this time when he released the permit, it stayed upright, steadying itself in equipoise, mirror sides once again purely reflecting the bottom. Skelton watched a long while until some regularity returned to the movement of its gills.

  Then he cautiously—for fear of startling the fish—backed once more into the green tidal slot and turned to head for the skiff. Rudleigh had lost his permit.

  The line was lying limp on the bottom. Why didn’t the fool at least retrieve it? With this irritation, Skelton began to return to normal. He trudged along the creek, this time against the tide; and returned to the skiff.

  The skiff was empty.

  * * *

  The search for the Rudleighs was long and exhausting. The only thing Tom Skelton could imagine was that they had gone wading for shells and been caught by the tide among the mangroves, unable to return to the skiff. Because of the variation in depths, he could not use the engine and had instead to continue poling among the little keys. His search was very thorough; and when he had finished with it, he was no longer able to imagine that the tide had caught them shelling. His mind began to cling to a sequence of horrific conjectures … water-swollen bodies tangled in the stems of brain corals, for instance; Ma and Pa Rudleigh goggling in Davey Jones’s locker.

  The sun was starting down; and to the west he could see the navy aircraft landing lights in the dusk. He simply could not think of another thing to do. He decided to return to the dock and contact the Coast Guard. He started the engine and ran toward Key West. The military aircraft were coming in with regularity, their lights streaming.

  His hands were blistered, and hurt against the steering wheel. He quartered, down sea, running wide open, and the boat twisted sharply when the forefoot dug, twisting the wheel against his blistered hands.

  Skelton landed the boat and tied it quickly; it was the end of his first day of professional guiding. He had no trophies to send to the taxidermist in Miami; he had lost both the fish and his clients.

  He ran inside the bait shack. Myron Moorhen, the accountant, was sitting at the desk poring over long yellow sheets under a gooseneck lamp. “Cart said you was to come across the street soon as you came in. He’s in the lounge.”

  “I’ve got a problem—”

  “That’s what it’s about.”

  Skelton looked at him for a long moment, then headed for Roosevelt Boulevard. It was a warm night, ready for rain, and the headlights on the street streamed a wet, lactic yellow while he waited to cross. He ran between cars, hearing sudden brakes, and ran into the entryway of the Sandpiper Lounge, stopping in the air-conditioned near-darkness to get his bearings.

  The bar was in front of him, five rows of bottles against a mirror with a fluorescent light over them; and perhaps a dozen people at the bar. Beyond the bar were the rest rooms, marked with the profile of a ballerina on one, a top hat and cane on the other. Johnny Mathis sang from the jukebox, sounding as if he’d swallowed an intra-uterine coil.

  Out of the men’s room stepped Nichol Dance. He walked not very steadily to the bar and joined Cart, the Rudleighs, and Roy the dockmaster, whose bandages bulged his already enormous midriff.

  Tom Skelton began to track back through his mind. He remembered the skiff passing in two directions off the reef line that afternoon. It would have been Cart and Nichol; he remembered back in the mangroves, on Nichol’s fortieth suicide attempt, that talk about their overcrowded profession, only now, he realized, directed at him. Roy the dockmaster never died and Nichol never went to Raiford; and Tom Skelton was evidently no longer a guide.

  Rudleigh spotted him standing in the doorway and saluted him with a cocktail.

  Skelton turned quickly out of sight into the entryway, leaned against the cigarette machine a moment looking out onto the boulevard. It was dark and the rain had thrown a huge corolla around the moon. Skelton’s mind had just locked and was letting the finest thin stream of information in, a little at a time. Over the low crown of hill in the gleaming road, the smeared yellow lights mounted and dropped toward him out of a canyon of useless small businesses and franchised outrages. When you were down and out in Hotcakesland, there were always monuments of smut upon which to rest the mind. He looked at his hands.

  The heat burned up his neck and into his brain. A cocktail hostess late for work ran past in a wet raincoat, the wet heat of the night darting in against processed air. Then from the kitchen a figure passed, blurred underneath a tray of bright trembling jellies. Suddenly, Skelton’s brain began to fill with violence. He calmed himself, leaned over and touched fingers to the buttons of the cigarette machine, Kools, Luckies, Silva thins, Marlboros; and considered.

  This time, crossing, he had all the patience in the world for a clearing in the traffic. The rain came light and warm and vertical in windless air equally upon Skelton and upon the ocean and upon the boats along the Bight brightening under its fall. The corrugated roofs of the equipment sheds looked shining and combed; and the sky was translucent enough for the broad, watery moon to show through.

  Myron Moorhen the accountant could still be seen through the window of the bait shack, scratching at a yellow sheet and running his fingers deep into his hair. “I’ve got a problem,” Skelton had said. “That’s what it’s about,” he said, bored but part of the joke.

  To be a fool. A fool in one of Skelton’s children’s books had had a red, V-shaped mouth.

  Skelton eased himself over the side of the dock next to the skiff into the warm water. Some phosphor glowed at his movement. He untied the skiff’s lines.

  When Skelton’s father took to his bed, Skelton’s grandfather raged through the house looking for something bad enough to say; all he could come up with was the accusation that Skelton’s father was no fool. From afar, his father could be heard in healthy laughter; then, accompanying himself on the violin:

  “I’m an old cow hand,

  Not an old cow foot…”

  And the grandfather raging in to smash the violin and Skelton’s father holding him by the throat, shutting off his wind and asking with utmost loathing and mania, “Wouldn’t someone drop Mister Pig Shit in the Gulf Stream for me?”

  Now easing the skiff away from its mooring and listening for mo
vement on the dock, Skelton could sometimes touch bottom, sometimes only tread water. He had a thirty-yard stretch of canal flooded by the security light next to the bait shack and when he cleared that he would be safe. A door opened and closed in the shack: Moorhen wandering out still staring at his yellow sheets. He headed across the street to the lounge. Skelton began to rush, to push with all he had, and to rush.

  Darkness: a basin in the canal, the gentle pull of running tide, the moon overhead trying to drag him to sea. Merle Haggard says every fool has a rainbow. I am safe here. Skelton climbed aboard and looked back out of his bay of darkness. The boulevard was a lighted stage, cars entering and exiting in opposite directions. The lounge was upstage center; on its roof an enormous profile of a sandpiper, outlined in neon and ungodly in the mercury-vapor light from the street. Hotcakesland. It is all for sale, thought Skelton.

  He pulled the fuel line out from under the gunwale, and cut it; then rocked the boat so the surge in the tank would force fuel onto the deck. Gasoline was quickly everywhere.

  Skelton sat down to rest and wait for all the gas to flow. He opened the small dunnage box by the controls and took out a book of matches that read, he strangely noticed, Hands tied because you lack a high school diploma?; then the rag with which he had wiped down the deck when he refueled the skiff.

  Out of the lounge, pausing momentarily beneath the neon beak of the sandpiper while traffic cleared, came the Rudleighs, Carter, Nichol Dance, Roy the dockmaster, and Myron Moorhen the accountant. Skelton looked at them. A moment earlier they had streamed out of the land of frozen daiquiris, past a buffet table covered with molded fruit medleys, past the fifteen chromium selector levers of the cigarette machine, and into the cloacal American night. Skelton on his lunar, fetid inshore tide did not for the moment belong to the nation; except in the sense that the two principal questions of citizenship, Will-I-be-caught? and Can-I-get-away?, dominated his mind entirely, only slightly modified by the prime New World lunacy of getting from Point A to Point B.

  They were moving toward the dock, all facing forward rather than toward each other, which was strange: the Rudleighs were customers, and when you are around customers, you point your face at them. You are selling and they are buying.

  Skelton was out of the skiff once more, matches in his mouth, oily rag in hand. He treaded water away from the skiff, keeping the rag high in the air; then he held himself in position, lit the balled-up rag, tossed it into the boat.

  Flame zigzagged up and down the boat’s interior with a sucking noise until the entire thing was afire. Low in the water and swimming through darkness toward the far side of the basin, Skelton could no longer see the five people crossing the street. Then suddenly they popped up on the dock. Carter and Dance boarded Carter’s skiff and the engine started with a roar. They jumped the skiff up to planing speed, then shut down abruptly as Nichol Dance’s skiff coughed into explosion, a ball of flame blowing flat out sideways through the hull, then up like liquid into the sky, pieces of the hull soaring up in the fountain, one piece sailing like a comet over the joyous face of Skelton, trailing flame and fire. Then the boat sank so abruptly that Carter and Dance vanished in the darkness like Skelton.

  Skelton listened to the engine. The skiff rose up against the light of the boulevard, Carter at the wheel, Dance in the bow with a gun. Skelton didn’t move.

  The skiff traveled in a slow curve and vanished in the darkness between Skelton and the shore. The dim moon overhead and Skelton’s lowness in the water kept him from seeing.

  The skiff appeared once more against the light, very slowly; then modified its course in the narrow quarters so that Skelton could see they would find him if he did not think of something.

  The skiff was coming toward him. He would submerge; but the boat was moving so very slowly that he would have to stay down for a good while; he had to judge the last minute. The skiff kept coming and at a range of fifty feet, the skiff against the light, Skelton submerged and gripped deeply into the bottom thinking giddily that if he grabbed an eel or sting ray he would have to hang on to it. He could hear the engine very well down here; and in a moment the skiff was overhead. Skelton looked up and saw the pearly trail from the engine, the skiff soaring against the moon, the shadow of Nichol Dance wavering past. Skelton’s blood lagged in his brain.

  The engine sang by. Skelton stayed on the bottom until he could bear to no longer and then surfaced. The skiff was transom toward him, heading for the dock, the water mercurial and brilliant in the security light.

  The Rudleighs—no one knew why—were slapping each other on the dock. The surprise of that helped guarantee Skelton’s life. The two guides jumped ashore and separated them. Mrs. Rudleigh spat; her husband’s hat was askew.

  Meanwhile, Skelton was suffering spiritually what is known on commercial aircraft as “a sudden loss of cabin pressure”; and his discovery of the Rudleigh’s combat was like the dropping of the emergency oxygen mask into his lap. So he convinced himself that he was safe, forever really.

  * * *

  Thomas Skelton, whose aim had been to be a practicing Christian, was now a little gone in the faith. But, he thought, no matter; and took some comfort to remember the Gospel according to St. Matthew: Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell-fire. Upon occasion, a man had to manufacture his own hell-fire, either for himself or others: as one kind of home brew for the spirit’s extremer voyages.

  When Skelton’s grandfather most kindly bailed him out and Skelton had returned Jakey Roberts’s copy of Swank to him and turned down his grandfather’s doubtlessly well-meant suggestion that they talk, and gone home to his fuselage, his private stock of hell-fire began to rise as volatile as rubbing spirits from the surfaces of his life.

  Thou fool.

  The odds and ends that lay around the interior of the fuselage, formerly in a skein of intimate connections that did not exclude himself, all began to separate amid cool segments of space. He felt the precise bevel at which his teeth rested against each other; and his hands lay in his lap within an invisible display case.

  Hold on now, he told himself, no barking. For two hours he managed the control he needed, sitting as quietly at his breakfast table as a gyroscope. And then slowly the tramp of drilling winos came through his leafy window; and he wept with gratitude. When he had finished that, the salt and pepper shakers rejoined themselves to the table; the skein of connections returned and his hands sweated in one another’s grasp.

  He stepped outside, out to his garden fence, into the heart of the uproar. Standing by the hedge of uncleared vegetation, oleander cresting up out of it around one scrawny but wildly productive lime tree, he was pointblank to the marchers lurching mustily from left to right, while the drill sergeant marched backward ahead of them, surveying their primitive efforts with apoplectic eyes. Directly in front of Skelton, a younger, livelier wino passed; and each time the command changed, this wino found himself separated a few more feet from the others. Partly it was that he threw a good deal of florid body English into his marching; after each command, he would hunch his shoulders suddenly and stylishly like Fred Astaire, and slope further out of line. Finally, the drill sergeant stopped everything and realigned the preoccupied marcher, addressing him as “Fuckah!” in a lyrical tenor.

  This kind of punctuating sight welded Skelton to reality as succinctly as an accident; but it drifted gauzily from his mind and he was isolated once more behind the hedge, irritably blinded by the glare of light off the fuselage. As usual, he looked at the lines in his palms.

  Now this too: if his grandfather had not been in such a goddamn hurry, he could have got a bondsman to make his bail and been done with the thing until his trial. Instead, there would have to be a conference with the old dizzard in which the shit was perfectly certain to hit the fan.

  Finally, the younger wino was expelled from the march. He was out of breath.

  “You’re the one lives in the bomb,” he said, pointing to the fuselage. Skelton
nodded.

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  The young man said, raising his fingers to a seemingly deliquescent cheek: “My grandfather was decorated in the First World War.”

  “Oh yes…”

  “Ask me why he was decorated.”

  “Why was he decorated?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Skelton thought: I want to live on the bottom of the sea. Nincompoops assault me in squads. The younger wino went off, taking the sergeant aside, and was pointing at Skelton; probably telling him: Commie, or meter smasher.

  The sergeant came over. He had a peaceful, phlegmatic face, the face of a herbivore. “What’s your game?” he asked.

  “I’m a moonshiner.”

  “Well, more power to you. We’re running a works of our own up in the joint there. I made the coil myself. Last batch I run off kicked the hydrometer out on the floor. It was like rocket fuel.”

  “I’d like to try it.”

  “I’d offer you a drop; but these useless mothers over here have went through it quick as snot on a bottle. A man went blind here before I took over the still. But I run a tight, clean ship.”

  Skelton looked over at the useless mothers. They were milling among fallen palm leaves, quite as lost as babies in the shadow of a half-boarded-up house with a moonshine works in its attic.

  Well, thought Skelton, life looked straight in the eye was insupportable, as everyone knew by instinct. The great trick, contrary to the consensus of philosophy, is to avoid looking it straight in the eye. Everything askance and it all shines on.