Ninety-Two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

  Abruptly, she rose to her feet, weeping silently with pride, and flung herself into her ungrateful lover’s arms. She stood there a long time in a gradually enlarging puddle of suds; shards of crystal were scattered about the table. And somehow, the suds, the pail, the mop, and the crystal were “mute testimony” to a life of charisma and reversals, the tawdry and the magnifique: in short, the universal condition of total blandness decorated only here and there, like cheap raisin bread, with modern French philosophers in waterproofs.

  Eight-thirty and Skelton was trudging for the dock. He would have dreaded this meeting less if it had been just a meeting with Dance, though he would still have dreaded it. In any case, he was now doing not what he wished to do but what he ought to do; and getting a gentle energy return from satisfying this minor imperative. Carter would be there, however; so would Roy Soleil; maybe even Myron Moorhen. All the way to the dock, Skelton was cultivating an air of reason. He did not consider this meeting to be a showdown; which is always an encounter of meat and blades for a hamburger reason.

  Faron Carter held in his hand a forged-steel nozzle at the end of a large-diameter black hose that trailed in four lazy curves all the way out to a Gulf truck at whose wheel sat a harmless footling of the oil monsters. Into a filler pipe, Carter was directing a golden rush of gasoline that (final suspiration of vanished forests, dinosaurs, and simple monocot meadows) soon enough would drive bright metal billets of cam and piston to blue whir of propeller for getting from Point A to Point B. Otherwise, the petroleum drive for hotcakes is too well known for further elucidation; it contests munitions for the winning turkey. One thinks of the opossum, a simple marsupial widely known in this land is our land. When the mother opossum is on a trip and hunger calls, she reaches into her pouch and eats a baby ’possum; until eventually mother opossum is alone in the American Night with no one to call her “Mom.”

  “Tom,” said Carter, “you been scarce as hen’s teeth. I don’t know when I seen you last—”

  “Last time I saw you,” said Skelton, “I was laying on the bottom of the canal over there watching you and Roy Rogers driving around looking for me with a pistol.”

  “Is ah that an admission of guilt?”

  “Not unless you have concealed a court recorder in that palmetto.”

  “Well, nice to have you around again,” said Cart, real friendly. “Your granddad come to our Lions Club luncheon yesterday and he and I had a chancet to visit awhile. Your old granddad is some character! He told me how much he was looking forward to you joinin the dock down here. And so am I! So am I…”

  “Where’s Nichol at?”

  “I’m over here!” Dance’s voice from behind the sea wall; must be in his skiff. That was a break: the chance to talk in private.

  Skelton walked across the springy Bermuda grass toward Dance; he could just see the curve of Dance’s back as he bent over the engine, an oval of dark sweat in the center of the khaki shirt.

  Faron Carter walked to the door of the bait shack and met Myron Moorhen, there risen from his desk at the sound of Skelton’s voice; columns of figures still seemed to hang in his ovine eyes. Beneath his jackknife nose his lower lip bunched in concern around the bright teeth of a lemur.

  “I’ll be.”

  “You’ll be what, Myron.”

  “I didn’t nearly expect to see that incendiary show his face…!”

  “I hadn’t known you to run you a court of inquiry on the subject!”

  “Well, now what is the policy then?”

  “We don’t have no policy. Nichol Dance had the policy. Nichol Dance you may just recall is the old boy lost his boat?” This last word soaring in ridicule.

  “Okay, okay.”

  “So he has the policy.”

  “Okay.”

  “And we live and let live or die and let die whichever the case may be.”

  “I get it then,” said Myron Moorhen. “Ours is a policy of non-intervention and Dance’s is … is what?”

  “Dry up, Myron.”

  Myron wandered dutiful to the numbers. The shrimp tank aerator bubbled; and the whole place smelled to high heaven because a customer had left a wahoo on the tournament scale all weekend and it had turned.

  Myron Moorhen started his Bic at the top of the third column and ran it clear to the last figure; where he moved its point horizontally to the word “debit.”

  “What all is going to happen?”

  “Someone is going to get killed,” Carter replied. “Myron, where did you put that wahoo?”

  * * *

  “I don’t see why a busted o-ring would cause the engine to quit.”

  “All right now,” said Dance, “pay attention now.” He swung the engine over to one side. “The o-ring I’m talking about is right up here at the top of the drive shaft and keeps sea water from getting up here—right?—past the crank—right?—and killing the engine.”

  “How did you know the o-ring was busted?”

  “I figured it was, is how. Then I pulled the power-head and there it was in pieces.”

  “How did the rest of it look?”

  “It didn’t look good. I pulled the impeller in the water pump and the rubber blades were all deteriorated.”

  “How does it run now?”

  “Go up forward and start it.”

  The engine turned over and caught quickly; but idled unevenly. “Not great,” Skelton was the first to say.

  “Run it up another thousand.” The engine came up to pitch; but still rough. It was an old-timer. “Let’s see how it runs. I just changed the nineteen-inch prop it had for a twenty-one.”

  Skelton freed the lines and sat down in the portside chair. Then Dance sat down and wheeled the boat away from the dock. It was not an unhandsome skiff, a very old Roberts made on Tavernier.

  Dance said, “Lightning struck those little keys east of the Snipes day before yesterday; I have to make a quick run over there and see. There’s a lot of birds out there. I want to see how did they do.”

  They ran directly across Jewfish and Waltz Key basins and jumped the bank behind Old Dan Mangrove because they had the tide. Skelton studied Dance handling the tricky run. He went up behind the Mud Keys and broke through to the Gulf just northwest of the Snipes and turned east, shutting down over sandy bottom so that the shadow of the boat on the bottom swung and pivoted as the wake overtook the boat. The skiff came to rest, locked to its shadow as though on a pendulum.

  Skelton jacked up the engine by hand; it had no power tilt. Dance got up on the bow and poled them toward the beach in the thunderous old storm wash that came in off the Gulf. On the reef line, green rollers poured through the surge channels.

  Dance threw the anchor high up on the beach; and they went ashore. Before they walked up into the beach grass they could see a couple of wild palms shattered by lightning, some with livid streaks in their smooth gray trunks. As soon as they were up on the higher part of the key, they found a number of white herons, little blue herons, and one wood stork, killed by the lightning. “Isn’t that a crime,” said Dance. The birds were already throbbing and heavy with worms, perhaps ten birds scattered as the lightning had found them, long wading legs crisscrossed, beaks pointing about ridiculously in this last idleness of death.

  They started back. They were halfway across Waltz Key Basin before they talked again. Dance said, “Look here, I know it wasn’t much of a joke.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Not that it excuses what you done.”

  “Yeah well.”

  “And you cannot guide. I gave my word.”

  “Well, I am going to guide.”

  “You are not.”

  Skelton nodded that he was, as pleasant as he could.

  Two spotted rays shot out in front of the boat and coursed away on spotted wings, their white ventrals showing in their hurry: then vanished in the glare. The water was still and glassy, green over the turtle-grass bottom. There were birds everywhere now, soaring out before them—the
cormorants that rested on stakes and mangroves to dry out their wings, the anhingas, gulls, frigate birds, and pelicans, the wading herons and cranes of every variation of slate, whites upon whites, emblematic black chevrons or stripes, wings finished in a taper or left rough-ended. They threaded the keys amid this aerial display over uncounted fish coursing the tidal basin, over a bottom itself home to a million kinds of animal, that walked, stalked, and scuttled by every tropism from heat to light, and lived in intermeshing layers, layer upon layer, that passed through each other like light and never touched.

  A jet passed over and Skelton looked up for it; every year you had to look farther ahead of the sound. The plane made a beautiful silver line.

  * * *

  Thomas Skelton felt that simple survival at one level and the prevention of psychotic lesions based upon empirical observation of the republic depended upon his being able to get out on the ocean. Solitary floating as the tide carried him off the seaward shelf was in one sense sociopathic conduct for him; not infrequently such simplicity was one of three options; the others being berserking and smoking dope all the livelong day.

  Notwithstanding the shriveling of the earth before its most singular product, Skelton’s reflex to be a practicing Christian remained. His skill in sidestepping confrontation, his largest capability, left him—faith, hope, and charity—largely untried. Somewhere, he knew that. It had taken a quarter of a century to produce the combination for him: access to the space of ocean (and the mode of livelihood that would make that access constant) and an unformed vision of how he ought to live on earth with others.

  So he told Nichol Dance, “I am going to guide.”

  But today, by the time he got to Searstown, he was looking around at the human surge and thinking how attractive it must be to go shopping at the Annual White Sales without anyone offering to murder you over the percales, or to spew your guts across the Dansk Mug Set. Even the shapely teeny-bopper whom he had zero chance of having, looked in at the new Sugarcane Harris albums without the air of impending murder for anyone, much less herself.

  And how shall I accept my own death? A forefinger in the entrance hole while a billion protozoa redistribute my chemical components from behind where the bullet exits and kills an innocent pelican whitening a speedboat nearby.

  Miranda, said Skelton to himself at Searstown, I’d feel a lot better if I could do a little barking. Imagine: The course of the bullet; its “entry” is immediately to the left of the sternum, where in its passage it disrupts the heart’s determined flutter as to cause not quite immediate death. He knows what it is. There is the majesty of that surprise. His conviction that the chance against his living again is infinity minus one saves him from complete regret. Skelton’s eyes, which always had a bright and fluid life, become on this sunny day quickly dry; and a place where the small insects of the empty beach can walk without … struggling for purchase. Gradually, his eyes become a popular trysting spot for breeding beach bugs; and by the magic geometry of mitosis, each eyeball is soon transformed into a thriving community with roots in, on the one hand, the first aeons of earth time; and, on the other, the weirdest reaches of the evolutionary space-future in which, feasibly, the products of Skelton’s eyeballs might be colonizing planets of their own for reasons of civilization. By the same token, his prostate might get to the White House.

  Skelton was modifying his fuselage, and shopping in the Sears hardware store for tools and parts. He bought a Craftsman variable-speed drill with a firm money-back guarantee. The magic of the electric drill was that it allowed you to take the oddly shaped hole of an electrical outlet and by running its force through a black cord and a silvery mechanism cause holes at the other end, of any size you liked.

  Would Dance regret his deed? Would he look again at that delirious passage by which what is quick and numinous becomes meat, and say: Phooey? Or would he, like the television commentators before every event, “never cease to be amazed”?

  The hardware department with its bins of galvanized nails, black bolts, and chromium-plated screws, its bright power tools, was presided over by six clerks in green smocks who soared among its counters, from time to time regrouping at the cash register to clinch a sale or take a quick pull of coffee from a translucent white coffee cup. Skelton knew that—embroiled as he was as a customer—hardware, generally speaking, was bad for the world.

  It was among the glues, directly behind the epoxy display, to be precise, that he knew it was time to go and see why his father was asking Miranda for a date. The two-part epoxy was best for maximum adhesion between clean flat surfaces. The one-part “mock” epoxies were “just the thing,” a lady clerk volunteered, for simple household repairs, including china, furniture, butter churns, ice skates, and simple treadle assemblies.

  Sweet Jesus, thought Skelton, not in the least taking the Name in vain, death is in my lane tromping the passing gear.

  “Ma’am,” he said to the lady clerk, whose beveled white hairdo strove implacable against air and light, “have you got time to join me in a smoke? I uh won’t lay a hand on you.”

  She broke into laughter. Here is where Skelton could serve humanity in its gloomy mission.

  “Okay.”

  They stood outside in the mall by speeding machines and parked-auto clusters. Skelton didn’t smoke tobacco. This might be tough.

  “I forgot my cigarettes.”

  “Have one of mine, hon.” She held out a pack and he took one. A granny shot past baying on a go-cart. The gramp ran behind. He had just jerked the starter, and Gran shot off like Puffed Rice from a cannon. Now it looked like she would beat him to Akron.

  “So!” said Skelton. “You smoke Luckies!”

  “Two packs a day and I’ve tried them all.”

  Skelton used to smoke. He had something to say here.

  “I like Camels myself.”

  “Well, they’re a rich-type cigarette like Luckies. But Camels have I don’t know too deep a taste for me. But I hate Chesterfields!”

  “Me too! They’re so harsh!”

  “Harsh isn’t the word. —Have you ever smoked filters?”

  “Benson and Hedges!”

  “Aha!”

  “Parliaments!”

  “Me too! Couldn’t taste a thing! —I don’t know,” she said, “for me it’s L.S.M.F.T., Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.”

  Skelton pulled her into his arms. His eyes were moist. “Do you want a light?” she asked. Skelton couldn’t look her in the eye.

  “I really don’t smoke any more.”

  * * *

  Let us make barking up the wrong tree a way of life.

  “Your father,” said his mother, “has not returned at all. He is rapidly approaching the time when he will not be allowed to return.”

  “Why?”

  “The minute I tell, you’ll say it’s bourgeois.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. If he decided to make of himself a figure of the night, I should have been notified.”

  “Why?”

  “So the consequences could be negotiated. I’m leading an unnatural existence and have been to the point that I must now ask myself if I am to redeem any of my remaining life.”

  Skelton knew what she said. His father’s adventures in shrimping, procurement, an ill-fated investment in a factory that would employ those of the failed cigar industry who had not moved to Ybor City in the manufacture of lighter-than-air craft purely on the somewhat mystical theory that a zeppelin and a cigar were similarly shaped—no, the Southernmost Blimp Works had not fared much better than the whorehouse; the first tropical depression and the blimps ripped up their moorings and vanished over the Gulf of Mexico. His father had been able to tolerate that; but what he resented, he said, was the whores in Duval Street cheering them on their way, his own father roaring, “Gas bags!” from the Mallory pier. The utter vanishing of the blimps, those artifacts of his father’s ambitions, disturbed. Did they end up in the ionosphere? Or rip apart and sink to a lones
ome sea, changing whale voices with helium bubbles? But the cry of “Gas bags!” and the door of an empty blimp works would carry through the years to a youth, his mother, a man loose in Key West streets in nothing but a bed sheet.

  “Tom,” said his mother, “if I only knew what he had in mind. And I know him so well. But he will do a thing … Oh God, I don’t know. He’s so contrary. He twice called off our marriage because he had a deviated septum.”

  “That’s why he went to bed for seven months.”

  “And as soon as people began to count on him going to bed, he got up. Now he runs around at night. But the minute we plan on it … hell.”

  “That’s all right, Mother.” She was going to cry. It was like seeing Marciano cry. “Don’t you think he’s trying to find something?”

  “I knew you would say that,” she said, “it’s always religion to you.”

  “But don’t you?”

  “No. I think he’s contrary.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I know I don’t.”

  “So why do you say it?”

  “Because it is impossible to understand what he could be looking for. Nonsense is nonsense.”

  Skelton was thinking, You could get what you want and have a laugh a minute, take a pill, see God, play a record, weep poignantly, and discover mortality on a form letter that began “Greetings.” Or you could just lie there. When we came in, he was just lying there. Or you could louse up. You could fail to get the joke. You could lift up thine eyes. Skelton thought: I think I’ll lift up mine eyes. When we came in, he was just lying there, his eyes at a weird angle.

  His mother took her beautiful English stainless-steel pruning shears—the closest thing she had to jewelry—and began cutting back the broadleaf elephant’s-ear philodendron near the stairway; these plants were rain basins that poured water onto the wooden steps, rotting them out in a year’s time if they weren’t pruned.

  “I ask myself, should he be confined? And I always decide absolutely not. It isn’t so much that he is harmless as that I have a suspicion he is on to something—”