Ninety-Two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

  And everything would be O.K.

  * * *

  Olie Slatt said, “I wouldn’t trade this certificate for a king’s ransom. It cost me an arm and a leg to get to the southernmost U.S. and this right here is your high point.”

  “I hope she works out that way,” said Dance, “but to tell you the truth, I expected to see you a little sooner than this and now I’m booked up sixteen days straight.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means the soonest you could fish with me would be seventeen days from today.”

  “But what about my damn certificate! I up-chugged for ten hours!”

  “Wait a darn second now, Mr. Slatt. This certificate is good for a day’s guiding. You can go with the other boy on the dock here, the old boy in fact I learned everything I know off of.”

  Olie Slatt was wearing a green plaid suit today, a little short at all its cuffs like a Pinky Lee outfit, except that Slatt was rawboned and pared off to a kind of resistant and cartilaginous surface that seemed implicitly violent in this wax-museum suit.

  “Where do I find this other one?” Slatt’s pale and sullen face seemed to hang from the ring of his mouth.

  “Right there in the bait shack.”

  “I mean, look at me. Do I look like a rich man? Do I look like a man who can pay Howard Johnson sixteen times in a row to go out fishing on the seventeenth? What kind of queer breed of odds and ends do you have to get down here for you to think like that?”

  “Well, you go in there and ask for Faron Carter and give him your certificate. That old boy is a regular fish hawk. If it’s in Monroe County and swims, he’ll put it in the boat.”

  Olie Slatt turned as he crossed the lawn. The vent of his plaid coat was agape over his shining rump. “I whooped up ten hours of pie filling for that paper,” he said. “My nose is still burning and my gut feels like a mule kicked me. So, don’t you nor your sidekicks never try to put me off nor hand me down the line because I’ll come back lickety-split and be on you like a dog without a mother.” By this time Carter was in the bait-shack doorway listening in. “—I mean to hightail it back to Montana ten days from now with a trophy under my arm or I’m going to know the reason why. I have spent my leisure hours on the Missouri after paddlefish and saugers and dreaming of one day coming home to Roundup with a tropical trophy. Everybody knows why I am here. My reputation depends on my comin home with the goods.” All the time Dance watched him, Slatt was twisted around on his shining butt so you could see each button of his plaid suit fastened, his hamstrings sprung taut under the thin white socks as he flexed with irritation from head to toe; and Dance, already nonplused by existence in general, looked at Olie Slatt and thought he acted like a frog in a cloud of fruit flies.

  * * *

  Skelton was making an incision in the skin of the fuselage over the center of its only real room when the telephone rang.

  “Tom, Cart.”

  “Hey, Cart. What do you need?”

  “How’s your skiff coming along?”

  “Powell’s got a coat of paint on the inside. One more and I can hang the engine.”

  “You want to guide a week from today?”

  “Yes.”

  “I got me a sportsman here from the state of Montana.”

  “Sign him up, Cart.”

  “If you can get him a Citation fish, I think he’ll mount it; and I’ll see you get the kickback from the taxidermist.”

  Skelton said, “Tell him a week today at eight-thirty.”

  Skelton worked for some time making an opening in the fuselage where he had inscribed the long oval shape with a grease pencil. In the yard, he had a clear Plexiglas crown that had been a component from a field radar station. As they said in Key West, it had belonged to us’n, meaning U.S.N., and Skelton had laid hands on it for next to nothing. Within a day, he slid the great bubble into position on his opening, bolted it over a hand-cut gasket, and for good measure sealed it with silicone putty.

  Now when he entered the fuselage and closed its compression doorway, he could look up to an immense oval of blue sky, almost never without at least one bird. And when the sun went down, it was as though he were in a planetarium.

  He had one long table in the room; and the bunk bed was under the bubble. The bed itself was like a normal two-story bunk bed, except that there was no lower bunk; that area was storage multiples and a single shelf for his Zenith Transoceanic radio and the books he was reading—still Bohlke’s Fishes and D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form—trying to be a better guide.

  The Zenith was superb for picking up remote country music stations:

  Someday, when our dream world finds us,

  And these hard times are gone …

  And the cooking facilities were a salvaged kitchen from a Mobile trawler that went down between Washerwoman and American shoals full of shrimpers too drunk to drown.

  Skelton’s every effort was toward being a single-member, intentional community. Faced with the impossibility of cloning, it was imaginable that he would mate. But he was still sketching things in. His little piece of land included a cistern; and when he rebuilt the catchment for it (couldn’t see yet how to incorporate it with the fuselage), he would start the garden. Then he would begin culling his guide schedule to one day’s fishing a week with people he wanted to see. The bulk of the rest of his time would be used in aimless and pointless research in the natural world, from biology to lunar meditation; all on the principle, the absolute principle, that ripeness was all.

  * * *

  Communism, thought Goldsboro Skelton—one should really say Commonism, which is the way he thought of the word—has had God knows a baleful and ruinous influence on the world; but the one major Greaser among world Commonists, Fidel (Skelton called him Fido) Castro, had done him an immeasurable favor when he decided to release Bella Knowles’s husband, Peewee, from the Isle of Pines, where he had served some doubtless sorry hours atoning for the one manly thing he had ever done: run a boatload of Spring-fields to a handful of counterrevolutionaries in Camagüey so worn out they turned the little insurance adjuster over to the Fidelistas out of tedium vitae and small hope of recompense; Peewee Knowles had just been trying to pay off his swimming pool, like any other citizen high and dry on the Morris Plan.

  What occasioned this outburst of thought in which Skelton actually thanked Fidel Castro for repatriating Bella’s husband was a long inquiry on Bella’s part about his former wife. After forbearing her cross-examination, Goldsboro Skelton shocked her into final silence.

  “She had tits like that,” he said of his long-gone spouse, “and when she died, I threw a fiver in the hole and closed a chapter in my life. She had Bright’s disease, a ten-pound liver, and left a quarter of a million to the D.A.R., on the long shot America would quit producing people like me and our son.”

  “Your son is a little odd. And your grandson—!”

  “They are perfect.”

  “Goldsboro.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And the next time you answer me like that, I’ll have you and your musical background up in north Miami making parakeet-training records.”

  “So long as I’m back in time to see them wheel the ninny down Duval Street Easter time in his mosquito-proof bassinet.”

  “Why have I let you sass me and answer me back so long?”

  The old man thought, We’ve all got a story, don’t we; and it’s always a good one. Absolutely always. The thing that excited him in his seventieth year was that it may all have been the same story.

  * * *

  In the beehive twilight of Roosevelt Boulevard, seagulls veered around light poles to the murmur of vouching salesmen. And Thomas Skelton strolled the charter-boat docks with an increasing sense that somebody had his number.

  In school physics books, “force diagrams” illustrated balls being acted upon by various vectors of force; the question is, if I am the ball, which way do I go? Do I, he thou
ght, for example, go the way of all good things? Do I go for broke? Do I pass go? Do I go man go? Do I say go away? Do I go in my pants? Or do I simply call for my belongings and wait until called upon to stop by higher forces acting upon the simple ball of self. The answer was the simple “Dunno” of the Joe Palooka comic strips. When what we dread the most occurs, a loss of “features,” we look around and say, “Me? I dunno.”

  * * *

  Skelton sat in his quarters. He wondered that you could say the right word in a bad situation and all hell would break loose. He had found the word and said it and all hell had broken loose. Now a military tribunal had found him guilty of obstructing the war effort.

  World War II was just going to have to piss up a rope without him. He had perhaps made a little too much of Adolf Hitler and the Miami Press Club; but his present removal was less a consequence of that than it was of his running commentary on the possibilities of glory in war, which, it was said, demoralized the men; especially those types of enlisted men who found themselves at Fort Benning in 1943, a cast-iron year, obliged to jump daily from the practice tower or on the static line from the lumbering planes of the Airborne; who often as not came from one of those almost vanished and newsless backwaters ungoverned by external event or government adventure which had long since turned, blood and bone, to the more reliable products of human communities, season, and acts of God.

  These “yokels,” as they were known among an officer corps that holed up with cotton-chopping thirteen-year-olds for a giggle, these yokels thought that Skelton was as funny as Skelton’s own girlfriend back in Key West thought he was, with her genius intelligence and near-photographic memory; and her curious, not to say outrageous, special history.

  But one bird colonel out of Long Island, New York, who “knew from funny” and who would some years later be a charter subscriber to Mortimer J. Adler’s series of the Great Books of the Western World, resolved to snare this bird before he pissed away all the morale his phalanx of cannon fodder owned.

  Inside of ten days, he had Skelton shut up tight as a drum in the Fort Benning jail and ready to embark upon the duration at hard labor.

  And within forty-eight hours of that, the bird colonel and future Great Books subscriber found himself (bused at his own expense) on Peachtree Street in Atlanta in a quiet, freshly abandoned insurance office chatting with a retired senator and one Goldsboro Skelton of Key West, Florida, son of the last important wrecking master on that island, heir to a now lost salvage fortune, and apoplectic, entrepreneurial maniac, crook, and political manipulator. Skelton sat with one of his counterparts, a senator of the old Soufland school, a preposterous amalgamation of the man on the Quaker Oats box and a full-grown marsh weasel.

  Now Goldsboro Skelton didn’t know anything about Georgia politics, except that they were rotten; but everyone knew that. Goldsboro Skelton didn’t know very much about mainland Florida politics either, when you came right down to it; but he could in an hour’s phoning form an ineluctable bridge of crooks to any state capitol within two thousand miles. The cybernetics of semi-respectable crime and its system of internal favors is a communal network as handsome in its way as the whorls of the chambered nautilus.

  “Senator,” said Goldsboro Skelton, “tell our friend the colonel what you just told me.”

  The senator quickly rose to accustomed orotundities about the “plugged nickel” he wouldn’t dream of giving for the colonel’s “sorry and worthless ass” if he didn’t find a way of putting young Skelton on the island of Key West within twenty-four hours, all papers of clearance in hand to shut him of the U.S. Army and those “piss-faced nincompoops” like the colonel himself who were allowed to torment youngsters in Georgia while grown men were out giving the Axis what for.

  “Gentlemen,” said the colonel, trying desperately to forget Long Island and find a way into the mechanism of manipulation these highhanders from East Jesus convinced him existed. “You’re trying to make a horse’s ass of me.”

  “Colonel,” said Skelton, “if you knew how close the ass of a horse was to actual glue and dog food…” He fluttered his hand to let the colonel finish his thought.

  There was a reconvening in the army, after which Skelton was found gone of brain and sent home to Key West on a mental.

  Years later when the retired colonel, now a leg man for Lever Brothers soap, thumbed open the Syntopicon to the Great Books to find something to stir his soldier’s memories, some nugget from Thucydides for instance, the words DOG FOOD would come to him and there would live again in his mind, more than his Exploits Against The Enemy, that day on Peachtree Street when being a horse’s ass had been the better part of valor. At such a time, he could turn to the wop-and-kike mob that had inundated his Long Island with a cozy, sold-out feeling that readied him for the millennium, senility, alienation, and dyspepsia.

  * * *

  Doctor Bienvenida had done the impossible. He had escaped from Cuba with his own finely trained person and he had managed to spring his practice too. Forty-six prosperous Havanans flew the coop to Cayo Hueso; so that, professionally, Bienvenida missed hardly a beat, little more than the time it took to make the ninety-mile ride in his own Hatteras sport-fisherman. Consequently there remained in his tone with his patients a lack of salesmanship, a bluntness of a kind that makes patients believe. He had Jeannie Carter before him now, and he leaned forward slowly to deliver his message, so that his stethoscope dangled free of his chest and his blue jowls made an imperceptible swell forward.

  “He died,” said the doctor. Jeannie Carter was so tense that when she stood up from the Naugahyde seat her sweating behind made a tearing sound. She reached around and plucked the seersucker from her thighs.

  “He died?”

  “Afrai’ so.”

  “Oh, but doctor!”

  Jeannie began jumping around the doctor’s office, both feet together in a pompon dither reminiscent of her fifty-yard-line sprints at Orlando High.

  “It’s goody-goody gumdrop!” That sort of thing.

  The rabbit had passed away (she was not so blunt as the doctor) and a little one would soon be wedging its way into Sardineland ready for the life of hotcakes. Jeannie thought of the stork.

  Now, after running down football fields to a thousand erections rising in salute, Jeannie Carter did not really believe the death of the rabbit meant the coming of the stork. But helplessly the big white bird appeared to her on glistening wings; with a rather biggish beak, to be sure. And a kid in a hankie.

  When Carter came home that evening, tired, yet cautiously eyeing the living room for anything new, Jeannie kissed him with a robust suggestion of congratulations.

  “Hon,” she said, “you’re okay.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Looks like you up and hit the bull’s-eye. Wasn’t zif you lacked the know-how! Ha, ha!”

  “You in a family way, Jeannie?”

  “Yes sir, honey, I am.”

  “Seems like a real miracle.” Carter himself envisioned the stork as something like Mothra, the flying Jap winged bug of the late-night horror show, Creature Feature.

  Carter headed into the Florida room. Carter was tired from poling his skiff all over hell’s half acre and he sat on the couch in his khaki guide’s clothes and put his feet up. Jeannie followed a few moments later, suddenly full of spirit and even, frankly, joie de vivre. She had two demonstration flash cards depicting indistinct blobs and discolorations on a white background. Carter thought they were fetuses.

  “Now Cart,” she said, beginning to stroll up and down, “don’t look bored because you was the one earlier this week what asked me to explain the difference between a pyrolytic self-cleaning oven and a catalytic self-cleaning oven.”

  “I’m paying the fuck attention. Aw, Jesus…” he moaned. He was trying to make the connection between his wife and the self-cleaning oven.

  “I believe that you are, Cart. I believe that. Now pictured here is a section of an actual oven panel from a Ge
neral Electric pyrolytic oven that has been soiled with prune-pie spillover.” She turned the card over; it was blank on the other side. “The cleaning cycle is completed and no sign of the prune-pie spillover remains!”

  She held up another flash card with a similar mess depicted. “Here you have the cheaper catalytic-oven panel soiled with the same prune-pie spillover.” Jeannie rotated the card; the reverse was identical to the facing side: a mess. “After a five-hour baking period there is no noticeable removal of the prune-pie spillover. And even after one hundred and sixty-eight hours at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, most of the prune-pie spillover remains on the catalytic oven panel!”

  With simple cougar-like grace, Cart rose from the couch and began to stalk his wife. A bit of foam gathered at the corner of his mouth.

  * * *

  The skiff was finished. Skelton went over it, standing back at the bait wells and looking to follow the curve of the cockpit coaming; it faired forward to the casting deck without a dogleg. It was thoroughly finished, with every corner radiused off and smooth. Skelton wrote out the check.

  “You won’t believe this but a man came in here,” said James Powell, “wearing no shoes and old navy pants with a rope to hold them up and kind of a sheet and offered me ten thousand dollars for this boat.”

  “That was my father.”

  “He dresses funny.”

  “He is trying to keep me from guiding.”

  “You are going to guide then—”

  “Course I am!”

  “Buy a gun.”

  “News gets out, doesn’t it.”

  “News like that does.”

  They wheeled the skiff out by hand on the trailer through the corrugated shed door. Miranda’s car, Miranda inside, was parked in the alley. Skelton lifted the tongue of the trailer over the ball of the hitch and clamped it.

  “Thank you, James. The skiff turned out a mile prettier than I even hoped.”

  “I’m pleased myself. Take me for a ride some day.”

  “I promise.”

  “I didn’t build that for a coffin, you know.”