Ninety-Two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

  And now work to do. Bad but necessary work to do based on his and Carter’s dismal, yes he saw that now, dismal and stupid joke that he as well as anybody knew was so steeped in locker-room fatuity that when it backfired and his boat went up in flames, he and Cart, unable to escape the joke, had instead to hunt all over that canal, pistol in hand tumid with their own shared rage, vacant as any emotion based in property.

  But Dance was convinced that there was a necessity independent of what was right. Sometimes you did a wrong thing but then it was done and there you were. Damned if you weren’t—so best thing was, just rest your ass. The time to take your lumps would soon enough be at hand. Dance wished he hadn’t set Skelton up like he had; but it was done and now he had to follow through. He thought he was a nice enough boy. Nichol Dance truly hoped he wouldn’t have to waste him.

  So the pistol was slipped into the front of his pants, butt to the right, and a short-sleeved shirt (blue porpoises on a white background) outside his trousers concealed it all. Naturally, the pistol was uncomfortable; but it was credence and collateral in the most liquid form he knew. It answered the problem of what came in handy when you had to follow through.

  He stopped on the way out and looked at himself in the oval hall window. What’s happening to this boy? he wondered.

  Sometimes, he thought, you just wander around not feeling very smart and your clothes aren’t sharp and your car is a loser and you know you haven’t done a thing you will be remembered for and you haven’t got no more sense than a curbstone nor brains enough to come in out of the rain or quit playing the dumb gags that only lead from one atrocity to the next. And you just feel dumb.

  In the drive, he stopped and felt the south wind lifting the trees, warm as Cuba, and knew the fish were rolling in the channels, young moon and easy tides. I’m a boy without a future, he thought with a smile. I bought a Ford when I should’ve bought a Chevrolet.

  * * *

  Skelton and Miranda met at Mallory pier for sunset. A red sun was palpably completing its arc to the left of Man and Woman keys; in another couple of months, it would drop off by Mule and Archer keys. It would be hours after dinner and scratch-baseball games would be audible all through the city. Now a crowd of freaks waited for this thing to happen.

  “Are you still upset?”

  “About your old boyfriend? No. Not too much. Will I always have to be used to that?”

  “Not if it’s important.”

  There was an old converted liberty ship, now of Grand Cayman registry. A cucumber boat, someone said. It was moored at the fuel dock. Three muscular men in T-shirts hung over the fantail looking at the sunset hippie girls loose-titted in their ersatz Oshkosh By Gosh work rags. The conch-salad man glided by yelling “When you’re hot you’re hot! When you’re not, you’re not!” to strengthen his claims for the aphrodisiacal qualities of the conch salad he sold from the front basket of his bike.

  “If he’s right about that conch salad,” Skelton said, “it’s the last thing these crazy fuckers need.”

  The hot red sun began to penetrate the pale curve of sea, flaring optically at the thin line of division; the line gradually rose until only the smallest flame rested on the horizon; and snuffed. Applause rose.

  “Come to my place tonight,” said Skelton.

  “If you’d like.”

  They walked up Caroline and cut across Margaret to Skelton’s block. There was a south wind and Skelton was saying that with these new-moon tides there ought to be some fish moving. Miranda told him that she thought—she said it pleasantly—that he ought to be able to enjoy a south wind, the new moon, and swimming fish without having to go out and catch something.

  “Pretty esoteric.”

  “What kind of music are you going to woo me with?”

  “Pachanga from Radio Free Habana.”

  Miranda had a springy step. Let us compare her mouth, thought Skelton, to a delicate section of tangerine. Who said that kissing was sucking on a thirty-foot tube the last five feet of which were full of shit? It was not to the point who said it. Right frame of mind, he thought, surreptitiously looking at the lovely young girl, I’d bite on either end.

  Pausing sternly across from Key West Oxygen and Ambulance, Skelton swept Miranda into his arms and sucked at the tangerine-like end of the thirty-foot tube, never heeding what might have been at its other end, doubtless rising slowly toward his mouth.

  They turned into Skelton’s lane; where a car was parked at the lane’s junction with Margaret Street. Skelton walked another twenty feet before he stopped and looked back at the car. Its frenched headlights, bubble skirts, dummy baby spotlights, tinted glass, bull-nosed hood, and rust declared it to be Nichol Dance’s.

  “Miranda, you’re gonna have to go.”

  “How come? I just walked ten blocks.”

  “I can’t take the chance,” said Skelton half to himself.

  “Shall I have my tubes tied?”

  “That isn’t what I mean,” he said, staring past and around the car. “The truth is, Miranda, there’s a man around here belongs to that car who doesn’t like me.”

  “You’re worried.”

  “I really am.” Maybe he was.

  “Wouldn’t you like me to wait.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay … be careful.”

  “It’s not that serious, Miranda. It certainly may not be, in any case.”

  “Okay…”

  “I hate to miss out, I mean…”

  “You’ll get another shot,” she said, adding though, “Possibly not.” She started down the lane for Margaret Street. Now Skelton just put his hands in his pockets and thought, Where is that sly mother hiding himself.

  The shadows lay this way and that, the way a tide will carry on a particularly shaped bottom, bulging and deepening and only holding fish in specific places. Or the way six grandmothers will fall when simultaneously struck by lightning.

  So Skelton watched that way, at the ledges of shadow behind the wino hotel, behind the pile of dry-rotted cypress planking and iron salvage; and for long moments, he just looked for motion. And tried not to think of trifles.

  Violence. Why did this stillness go so well with violence? Like cupping your ear in the high wind to make a pocket of quiet. The palm leaves moved and sent bony fingers of shadow across the ground; and detailed shadows gave way to vacancy. And notionally, you see your spirit escape like smoke from a familiar corpse.

  He slipped over alongside the car and looked inside. Nothing. A bonefish net lay across the back seat. A curved plane of reflected moonlight divided the dashboard into bright and dark isosceles triangles.

  Where is that hillbilly sonofabitch, or whatever he is. That Hoosier dipshit.

  Skelton decided to just go in the house and wait and see. Lock the door, locate a well-made paring knife that was destined to see other than cucumber in this karma. Lift an eye to the sill and get the drop on that crime monger.

  I suppose you know he’s vicious.

  No one was in the yard either. He looked next door. There were three lighted windows in the hotel, each with a silhouetted wino like a playing card. I bid three winos.

  The boat burns once more in his mind. All that Nichol Dance owned, with the gas tank blowing sideways through the hull. Quicksink, scream of superheated gas, destruction bubbles, loss.

  The boat sails against the moon, a gunman in the bow, sails and circles into the light, into the dark, into the light. The creak of his own breath.

  Skelton opened the door of the fuselage and went in.

  Nichol Dance said, “Turn on the light and sit down.”

  “How’re you doing?” Skelton asked. Dance was doing his level best to look like the Antichrist.

  “Not bad, not bad. Lost my boat. But apart from that, not too awful.”

  “What’s the gun for?”

  “I just wanted you to see what I would blow your head off with if you ever tried to guide out of any dock west of Marathon. Now
you gawn and fill in the blanks.”

  “Big Pine, Little Torch, Sugarloaf, Key West.”

  “Amo ignore your little shit-ass joke and about halfway assume you got this deal crystal-clear,” Dance said, frittering with the Colt’s hammer.

  “Right you are.”

  Dance was thinking, He understands me but it don’t seem I got all that much credence.

  “I have notched thisere pistol oncet,” he said meagerly.

  “Yes, yes I heard.”

  Dance was momentarily unable to speak. He felt that in using the killing of the exercise boy to establish credence here he had made a lie of all his penitence.

  “So, I guess I’ll be on my way.”

  “Okay, so long.”

  Skelton got up and excused himself, squeezed past Nichol Dance and out the door, and ran down the lane toward Margaret Street. “Miranda! Wait up!”

  Dance, bemused, sat and wondered when the last time was he could say he’d had some honest-to-god credence, and not the kind of cheapjack reasonable facsimile thereof he’d just brought out for display.

  * * *

  Intelligent morning: Indian river orange juice, thousand-times-washed Levi’s, perfect Cuban guayabera shirt, Eric Clapton on the radio, sunlight swimming the walls, cucarachas running a four-forty in the breadbox, mockingbirds doing an infinitely delicate imitation of mockingbirds. Yes, gentlemen, there is next to nothing; but I’m going to have fun anyway.

  Now simply for the hell of it, let’s see what Jesus is up to today. Skelton the Bible jock pulled down his Good Book and read for a half hour to see what would catch the mind. A sunshine morning for ordering a skiff, radio daydreams, and Bible reading. Better wake Miranda. Matthew 9:13. I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous.

  “Miranda honey!”

  “Turn down the radio, Tom, just a little.”

  “If you say.”

  “Just a little. Thanks. Who is that?”

  “Derek and the Dominos.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Seven-thirty. Want some Cheerios?”

  “Sure, let me dress now, I’ve just got time. Seventh-grade geography in an hour.”

  Skelton the spy: the gloom of women dressing. The swell of buttocks where they glide into back, vanishing under swoop of Indian cotton blouse. Turn for sleepy smile. Demiglobes of breast in blouse, pale half of moon belly, gone under the advance of mother-of-pearl buttons. It is summer in Russia; I am preparing for a mortal duel in a swoon of girls. Miranda the pale.

  Skelton bent to the raining Cheerios. Calm yourself. Love, knowledge, Jesus, ocean, cunt, and harmless victory. Try to think of more things at once. A richness of reference. Old friends of the family smothering in W-2 forms. I have wiped my butt with a sheet of personal numerals. What was Count Tolstoy’s social security number? If you don’t answer that in one second, the Republic is Dead.

  Miranda came in from the fresh air.

  “Who are those men out there?”

  “Winos.”

  “Do they always march?”

  “Just recently.”

  Sometimes from the hotel you could hear ping-pong players, radios, cats, fighting, seagulls, and the failure of simple machinery. The hotel was surrounded and in effect seized by vegetation in every form; and on winter days the wind would occasionally bend each leaf at a certain angle to the sun and the whole would seem to combust with vegetable light and glitter. The drunks responded to this magnificence and moved about the miserable lawn, eyes squinted, in an impressive rummy minuet.

  Skelton remembered singing in kindergarten:

  “The Blue Danube Waltz,

  By Strauss, By Strauss…”

  “Well, I have to go. Do I look all right?”

  “You look great.”

  “Don’t have my books. I’ll wing it in geography.”

  “Tell them the Miami oölite doesn’t run southwest of Big Pine.”

  “Can’t. We’re still on the East Coast alluvial shelf. Besides, what you say isn’t quite true. You’re thinking of Key Largo limestone.”

  “Sure felt good!” Skelton said at the door.

  Said Miranda, “I’ll see you at Mallory dock one of these days.”

  Nine o’clock. Thomas Skelton started for Powell’s Boat Shop. He was feeling the first wonder of living in a town where there is someone who wouldn’t mind killing you. That truly gave a community subjective structure. They laughed at my killer dildo when I drove deep into the lasagna. Pipkins of menace were scattered on the Navajo. Yes, thought Skelton, I am giddy with anticipation and not in the least slowed down by seven instances of having my ashes hauled in the previous eight hours.

  * * *

  Powell was idling in the front of his shop, fitting a replacement iron to an eight-inch lignum-vitae jack plane. He looked up over his glasses.

  “Is what I hear true?”

  “About what?”

  “Nichol’s skiff?”

  “Not hardly.” Tom smiled.

  “Hm.”

  Powell brushed the sawdust off his bench, then set the jack plane next to two sharply radiused rock-maple spar planes, their irons bright under a coat of 3-in-One oil.

  “Are you building now, James?”

  “Nosuh.”

  “Feel like it?”

  “Do I feel like building what, Tom?”

  “Guide skiff.”

  “Well, can you pay for it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I expect old Dance is going to be in here after one as soon as he hears from the inshawrance.”

  “Well, this is a firm order, James.”

  Powell put down the plane and picked up a broad carpenter’s pencil and a pad of paper from Tropical Sheet Metal on Green Street. Skelton was dizzy with pleasure.

  They laid the skiff out along the firm edges of Skelton’s daydreams, not in any way sparing the horses. They would start with a rough glass hull sent down from the mainland, build it up, and finish it.

  “It’s the hull I want, James. It rides rough and has too steep an entry forward. But it poles good. It won’t sail and still floats in dew.”

  “What does the hull look like when we get it?”

  “Rough.”

  “Is it cut down to the shear line?”

  “No. There’s a scribe.”

  “I guess I’ll go through a bunch of saber-saw blades. What about the transom?”

  “Twenty-one inches.”

  “Well, I can electroplane that to where we need it. What about live wells?”

  “They come attached. The ones I’ve seen were through-bolted in five places and glassed directly to the transom.”

  “All right. Now let’s lay the sonofabitch out. You want to do it in half-inch?”

  “No, three-quarter.”

  “That stuff goes for an arm and a leg now!”

  Skelton’s happiness was hard to hide. When you thought there was nothing, this was one of the things there was. For example.

  He sketched on the scratch pad for a few minutes.

  “That’s how I want it aft: three hatches with interconnected waterways routed in a taper so they drain to the sump—”

  “All right.”

  “—and all hardware flush-mounted to a drive fit—”

  “All right.”

  “—and maybe a half-inch overhang above that aft bulkhead.”

  “All right.”

  “Now in the corners of that same bulkhead, let’s run the self-bailing drainage through PVC pipe, you know, right through the dry storage and into the sump like the waterways.”

  “All right.”

  “Now gunwales. Average width about seven inches, faired back from the forward casting deck to the live-well lids.”

  “You want it all flush, right? No drop to the casting deck?”

  “None. The fuel is forward. The controls are forward. So the forward bulkhead is vented; and the overflow is starboard a few inches under the gunwale.”


  “All right. Let me tote up the materials and we’ll make that your deposit. Have I got your telephone number?”

  “It’s in the book. —Now, anything there that throws you? —I’m just asking.”

  “I’ve laid a thousand miles of teak on a radius. This here is all right angles and butt blocks. There isn’t a Dutchman in that kind of work when yours truly is the carpenter. So save your last question for some jackleg of your acquaintance.”

  * * *

  Skelton stepped up onto the porch and looked under the net. His father was sound asleep, a volume of Huizinga on his chest; he seemed not so much to have dozed off as to be in a deep, granitic slumber from which he could not easily have awakened.

  In the kitchen, his mother was reading Brillat-Savarin, learning about what his grandfather, the high-leaping Goldsboro Skelton, would call nigger food. It was surprising to find her home in the afternoon, or at least, home alone. She had so many friends whom she served as confessor and adviser. Her contact and its attendant gusts of energy created addiction among her coevals for whom she was the sole connection.

  “Daddy looks exhausted.”

  “He is!”

  Skelton looked at her. Her hair was turned up in a twist behind, a vigorous, plaited gray.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Your father has been out all-night-long.”

  “Come on.”

  “You walked into the house at the moment I thought to tell you. Another half hour and I would have changed my mind.”

  “Is this the first time?”

  “No. It’s been going on for months.”

  Skelton asked with fear: “What does he do.”

  “I suspect it’s a girlfriend. I suppose sex is the only thing that would make me get up after seven months of making an ass of myself.”

  She loved to get Skelton on the edge of his seat so that every word dropped like a stone on a sheet of tin. Counterploy:

  “He could be performing Acts of Christian Mercy,” he said.

  “Maybe he’s learning to be a fishing guide,” she said, taking the trick.

  “I’m not the one who isn’t keeping him at home.”

  “What other unkindness pops into your mind?”