Ninety-Two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

  “You started it.”

  Glowering rises and fades.

  Finally Skelton inquired, “What’s his explanation?”

  “He doesn’t know I know. I haven’t really … I mean I can’t quite think what to say. For all I know, he’s been out every night since he first got into that…”

  “Bassinet.”

  * * *

  No mother dog turning an expectant nose to a garbage pail filled from top to bottom with racks of spring lamb ever felt a surer sense of unoccluded fortune than Skelton contemplating his skiff, Miranda, and his father abroad in the night. As to this last, yes, it was a mixed blessing. Perhaps he was having at a tart in the lower purlieus of Duval; perhaps her name was Mona and she drowned a man at the Muff Diver’s Ball instead of merely washing his face as her calling card promised. And yes, the infidelities of an aging lame from a Key West bassinet were a sorry prospect when the lame was your very own progenitor. But there is a life that is not a life, in which the more adamant obstructions of the heart masquerade as loss, dreams, or carburetor trouble. A silent man wastes his own swerve of molecules; just as a bee “doing its number on the flower” is as gone to history as if it never was. The thing and its expression are to be found shaking hands at precisely that point where Neverneverland and Illyria collide with the Book of Revelation under that downpour of grackle droppings that is the present at any given time.

  Skelton was walking to his grandfather’s office on Eaton Street on a morning so full of heat and light that traffic seemed composed of wet, swollen cars. A carpenter rebuilding a porch along Skelton’s way dropped his wrecking bar and it rang like a bell. With each breath you got more for your money. He passed the library where thoughtful ladies held the fort and said good morning to a man carrying a cockatoo in a white enameled cage; no one could have avoided the resemblance of the ring-like brilliant eyes of the cockatoo to those of its owner. The bird made some snarky remark; and Skelton gave it a small compulsive wave, regretting it immediately.

  Skelton had no way of knowing that the man’s name was also Thomas Skelton (no kin), though he had seen the name in the telephone book and wondered if it mightn’t be some distant connection of his family’s (not).

  When the sun first assembles itself over the broken skyline of Key West on a morning of great humidity, a thunderous light fills the city and everyone moves in stately flotation through streets that are conduits of something empyrean. Also, things can get sweaty.

  * * *

  James Powell, the Boatbuilder, had called with the cost of materials and Skelton was going to take his grandfather up on his kind offer of cash money.

  The “Skelton Building” on Eaton Street was a two-story frame house whose formerly domestic rooms were now the world’s most gerrymandered office, with the stenographer, for example, working out of an upstairs bedroom filled with war-surplus filing cabinets; and an accountant with the only abacus in Key West busy in the old music room under a ceiling full of putti and cherubs in the school of Rubens out of The Saturday Evening Post. At one time, Goldsboro Skelton had felt the need of safes; and so whole rooms were filled with them, combinations lost and hinges rusted to inutility. In the front-hall closet, a ragged hole showed where a small Diebold Chicago Universal safe with a rainbow on its door had shot through the floor and into the cistern, probably killing frogs.

  In the front hall, directly behind the front door, Bella Knowles abused visitors from a low mahogany desk whose bland surface held five Princess Phones like a relief model of the Caribbean. Every time the door opened, she was revealed in amazing proximity to people passing on the sidewalk, really only a few feet away, her eyes at rump level.

  Goldsboro Skelton himself ran his curious and impalpable island empire from an old water closet, a generous one of the Victorian years, whose pipes and dainty crapper had been replaced with horizontal writing surfaces for the signing of checks and those letters of business which in a republic more perfect than the one here in Hotcakesland would be actionable matters of extortion.

  “Hello, Thomas,” said Bella Knowles. “I suppose you’re here for money.”

  “Do you.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Here for money?”

  “Are you talking to me?”

  “Yes!”

  “Oh … here for money? No no no. To see my grandfather, Missus uh…”

  “Knowles.”

  “Right. And uh anything transpiring between my grandfather and I is just liable to be none of your business!”

  “Now, now.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “Yes he is.”

  “I’ll just go in then.”

  “I’ll buzz him.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “I’LL JUST BUZZ HIM.”

  “Well, whatever gets you off, Missus…”

  “Knowles.”

  “Hey! I read that the hubby’s being released from Cuba—”

  “Yes he is.”

  “Gee, I suppose it’s been awful with the uh cat away so long.”

  “Awful.”

  In the imperceptible moment of actual crossing of the grandfather’s threshold, Skelton realized he was off on the wrong foot; and he quickly balanced the irritation with the fact that James Powell had ordered the materials.

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

  Skelton waited standing until his grandfather looked up from his papers with a wordless interrogative glance.

  “Well, the boat is underway,” Skelton said with, for some reason, embarrassment. There was a pause.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

  “James Powell is starting my guide skiff.”

  “Right…?”

  “Well, you said you would lend me the money.”

  “When?” he said, quick. “When did I say that?”

  “The other night,” said Skelton nearly inaudible.

  “Oh God, let me look through my books here a sec.”

  “If you don’t want to lend me the money, say so.”

  Goldsboro Skelton leaped up in a rage: “I just bailed you out of the damn jail! How much do you want from an old man!”

  Skelton walked out, passing Bella Knowles hurrying into the office. When Skelton was safely gone, she asked, “Was it about money?”

  Well, face it, Skelton thought, you’re screwed. How dear it would have been to me, he thought, to bust the old fart in the teeth; then rip the electrical cord out of the lamp and shove it one furlong up Bella Knowles’s fundament and waggle the light switch until she blew her dentures out the skylight. Stuff like that. You know, mean.

  Powell was in his shop fitting up a handsome little dunnage box out of teak mill ends, countersinking the screws and pegging them with plugs of mahogany dowel. Skelton was in an agony of embarrassment.

  “James—”

  “We’re gonna have the hull in the morning!”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why? What?”

  “The whole thing is off, James, I’m sorry.”

  Powell put down his tools a little angrily.

  “What’s a matter?”

  “I don’t have the money.”

  “What!” Powell laughed at him.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “Your grandfather paid the whole thing this morning, material and labor in advance.”

  Skelton headed for the office again, resigned to a day of embarrassment.

  * * *

  Myron Moorhen the accountant was at the front window of the bait shack, his fingertips indenting slightly against the glass, looking out at the rain. The rain was coming down so heavily that it no longer seemed to move. Traffic hissed. It was a hot winter day.

  Carter was leaning back in a chair next to a freezer, walking a penny between his fingers. Nichol Dance stood in the open doorway, the heavy rain falling just past the end of his nose like a curtain.

  Carter said, “You’ve gon
e soft.”

  Dance, dejected, said, “Maybe so.”

  “Now you’re out of it. Now what are you gonna do?”

  Dance turned slowly, bored. “Caddy. I’m gonna be Jack Nicklaus’s caddy. I’ll have a V-neck sweater and at night I’ll jack off in a hankie. My life will be simple but it will be complete.”

  “Come on, Nichol.”

  “What do you care?”

  “I care because I give you ten days before it’s fun with bottles and you out at Snipe Point trying to get around to shooting yourself.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I mean this is insulting.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I mean, didn’t you forbid him to guide?”

  “Yeah I did.”

  “Then how come James Powell is building him a guide boat? I mean, now you can’t get one built and he’s gone to guide.”

  “I didn’t forbid him to have a skiff built.”

  “What do you think he means to do with it!”

  “I don’t know, pull crab pots. I have to let him hang himself, if that’s what he is gonna do. This is a democracy.”

  “God I don’t know about you. Jese, I mean what are you planning when he guides, and it does look to me like he will when that boat is ready?”

  “Didn’t I told you?” Dance asked him impatiently. “I will shoot him!”

  “That’s what you say!”

  “Hey, Cart?”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you do it, you got yourself so worked up?”

  “Nichol! I like him!” Carter bustled around the freezer, then pointlessly opened it, drawing out a block of ice that imprisoned myriad silver fish. He held it to the light and looked. “Shoot!”

  * * *

  “Well, sergeant, how are you doing with those new men?”

  “Not bad at all.” The just-blown whistle hung from his neck, a concise scapular to the general chop-chop of getting from Point A to Point B in Hotcakesland.

  The thunder of winos on the resonant staircases of the wooden hotel, their appearance, and the slow inexorable milling impressed themselves more upon Skelton than the subsequent extrusion of the insulted and injured through the cuneiforms of drill so indispensable to that choral oink we call the military. A small sea of the harmed poured onto the impromptu drill field; and as the sergeant’s barks and whistles rang out, they began to move as a man.

  * * *

  Two men, not entirely dissimilar, were beginning the day under the bright scudding clouds of the southeast trades. Thomas Skelton, with his lust for affinities, was going to visit Miranda Cole. Nichol Dance, who so rued his life and the things that had come of it that he drove his entire rather complicated self through the needle’s eye of a career in guiding—Nichol Dance was heading to Islamorada to buy a skiff.

  The future cast a bright and luminous shadow over Thomas Skelton’s fragmented past; for Dance, it was the past that cast the shadow. Both men were equally prey to mirages. Thomas Skelton required a sense of mortality; and, ironically, it was Nichol Dance who was giving it to him; for Skelton understood perfectly well that there was a chance, however small, that Nichol Dance would kill him. This faint shadow lay upon his life now as discreetly as the shadow of cancer lies among cells. And Skelton asked himself, not particularly thinking of an act of Dance’s, shall I find it hard to die?

  A sane man thinking of death, however casually, should immediately visit a girl whether in quest of information, affinities, or carnal gratification. It’s a case of any port in a storm, mortality being, in any case, an omnipresent hurricane.

  Miranda had the second floor of a boatbuilder’s recollection of Greek architecture from a nineteenth-century schoolboy’s primer, executed in Dade County pine and painted a virginal white.

  Miranda was a Saturday-morning pastry cook, and met him at the door in an apron dusted with flour. Skelton followed her toward the kitchen, gazing at the rooms as he went. They were tall, rectilinear rooms with great transomed windows, cool with their own spacious and circulatory atmospheres. (The astronauts are nose to bung in their “capsules”; while Captain Nemo sat at an ormolu control console; and if the astronauts have a capsule, Nemo had a Duomo.)

  The last room shy of the kitchen seemed the most inhabited, with its small walnut dining-room table and re-covered divan; under the table were the small pyramids of termite sawdust that in Key West must be swept up almost daily.

  “I’m making a cake for the Pillsbury Bake-off.” A handsome old kitchen; big windows looking into subtropical alleyways; a four-blade wooden fan with a bead chain, turning rather slowly now but displacing a wondrous amount of air full of baking smell. The stove was a restaurant-size Magic Chef, thirty or forty years old, black stars for burner grates and a control panel like one from an Hispano-Suiza, two ovens, and the whole covered in deep opalescent enamel with precise blue trim.

  “What kind of cake?”

  “It’s sort of my invention.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Hm, well, it resembles a gâteau de Savoie moka, except I’m using my version of a Viennese icing. I forget, do you cook?”

  “Some Cuban dishes.”

  “I think we can have a look at this now.”

  Skelton was next to her as she drew open the oven door. The beautiful cake was on the wire rack, rising uniformly; but something was wrong. Miranda cried out. A mouse had got into the oven and sunk to its flanks in the cake; as the air hit it, the mouse burst into flames.

  Miranda seized a pair of pot holders and snatched the cake from the oven and put it atop the stove. The burning mouse smoked, then smoldered, and finally became a blackened emblem in the top of the cake. Gâteau rodentine.

  Miranda said: “Jesus H. Christ.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Goddamn son of a bitch.”

  “I know, I know. What a shame.”

  Miranda slashed off the top of the cake; cut two big wedges out of the remainder and put them on plates with glasses of milk. They sat down and ate the cake. It was a kind of coffee sponge cake with an echo of lemon and butter; clear, and ethereal.

  Miranda’s hands were resting on the table, one a fist, the other open flat on the walnut, shapely with short clear fingernails, a part where you could read out the whole physical presence.

  Afternoon subsides in a golden burst of sunlight and the smell of coffee. Skelton observes a tripartite composition in rich pre-Raphaelite pastels: a band of blue sky, and a band of baby clouds traversing slowly toward the right, the deeply radiused orbs of Miranda’s bottom. Skelton lifts his cheek from the firm musculature at the small of her back and reverently brushes with his lips the flattened node of coccyx; a gesture at the point of a hip and she turns over, gray eyes grazing away to a white flash of gull in the upper margin of the window. Skelton feels the delicate touch of navel about the end of his nose, stomach tightens in tickling and a plane of pale tan light grades away in his vision, a Venusian touch to chin whose cleft it is not, crinkling slide against cheek, then a hirsute horizon surmounting a liquid slot: Geronimo!

  Birds suddenly crowd the window, slate of warblers, and scatter in a cascade of trills. On the kitchen table, a slab of cake with an emblematical mouse in black seems the calling card of some figment.

  Then an easy, yielding entry and in Miranda’s face baleful shadows of ecstatic misery. And Skelton, dizzy in an existence that occupies less than a single dimension, rises ultimately to that procreative fission that lights up in his darkened head like a silver tree.

  Some ten minutes later, wandering to the bathroom to wash his face, he struggles for purchase on the tile floor and falls into the tub.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I was struggling for purchase.”

  “Here, let…”

  Now she is in the tub with him. They struggle for purchase against the porcelain. The window here is smaller and interferes not at all with the smoky swoon of half-discovered girls in which Skelton finds himse
lf. In his mind, he hears Lovesick Blues on the violin. He reaches for a grip and pulls down the shower curtain, collapses under embossed plastic unicorns. The shaft of afternoon light from the small window misses in its trajectory the tub by far; the tub is in the dark; the light ignites a place in the hallway, a giant shining a flashlight into the house. A rolled copy of the Key West Citizen hits the front porch and sounds like a tennis ball served, the first shot of a volley … Traffic bubbles the air. Skelton thinks that what he’d like is a True Heart to go to heaven with.

  * * *

  James Powell said, “your grandfather stopped payment on that check. I had to cover all that three-quarter marine out of my own pocket; I think I’m even took for that goddamn hull.” Sure enough; there was the hull, crisp and rough-edged but exquisite as a seashell, a nautilus. Seems the old bastard would have to be throttled and flung into the cistern with his spent safes. Can’t appear to get depressed about it. Maybe Bella Knowles would get her Household Current after all. False teeth sailing over Key West roofs.

  “Let me track this down, James. I’ll see that it’s covered.”

  Powell was sore, using that expression of angry wonder at the cupidity of others that is an impossible emotion to sustain legitimately and which therefore bears always the sweet incense of fraud. “I called old Nichol Dance to tell him I was ready to make him a boat. But the bloody bugger has gone to Islamorada to buy one, so I’m afraid you and your cheap-ass old granddad has about cooked my goose!”

  “Now James, like I told you, this here is going to be covered, unless you tell me to forget all about it.”

  “No, I ain’t saying that! I’m just saying it gets old when you have a runaround like this. I’m too busy for no runaround! And it just gets old!”

  “I know what you mean; but look here, you get on with it now and build that skiff because I will make sure you have every cent of your money. Now you do know that, don’t you?”

  * * *

  “What time is it?”

  “Six.”

  “You want to stop by my folks’ house with me?”

  “Sure, okay.”

  “I have got to get this skiff. I’m getting on in years.”

  Miranda said without challenge, “I wish I could understand.”