Ninety-Two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

  * * *

  Miranda said she couldn’t help it. Skelton sighed.

  “Honestly, I couldn’t watch that little chippy take on that way without calling her.”

  “Miranda, a cat fight is a terrible thing to see. Can we not talk about it?”

  “All right. Am I badly scratched?”

  “Sort of.”

  “My scalp hurts. That whore gave me some yanks.”

  “I’ll bet. It looked like you had both gone ape-shit.”

  “Really?” She grinned and turned down White Street in time to see Skelton’s father streak into the alley past the Gulfstream Market. At the end of the alley, Miranda stopped the car and Skelton caught a flicker of motion behind three galvanized garbage pails. “Keep it up!” Skelton called. “You’re on your way!”

  * * *

  Myron looked up at the closing of the bait-shack door. Say it isn’t so. Humming a samba, Jeannie was twirling her baton and shedding her clothes. Myron Moorhen made frantic mute signs with his hands. He wants my pear-like tits, she thought, spinning spinning spinning. She advanced upon Myron’s agape face, once more a joyous pink cake with a slot behind the glittering baton, Myron waving frantic in the rising ardor of her wordless samba.

  Jeannie said breathlessly, “A youngster building up her wrist and forearm twirling a seventeen-ounce baton will have in later years terrific power for certain activities!” Jeannie’s speech was punctuated by the flushing of a toilet and the stepping of her husband, a member of fraternal organizations as well as of the republic, from the bathroom.

  Cart was awful surprised. What Jeannie was doing here in the bait shack was worse than real different.

  * * *

  Carter took Jeannie weeping to their showpiece home in the gelid air of the station wagon. He turned on the religious station to build a background. There was a small chat about the coming of Christ in your democratic manner: “Joseph and Mary really clicked. There is no two ways about it. But … when they found out their kid was God, frankly, it threw them for a loop.”

  Carter pulled up in the driveway and took the baton from Jeannie’s hands. She began to weep. “Please Cart please please please.”

  “Every time you get this sonofabitch out of storage, Jeannie, we run into a problem.”

  “Please Cart please.”

  “I come into the bait shack where I make my bread and butter and find you been dukin out some schoolteacher and five minutes later you’re doin your baton routine in the altogether with vodka on your breath for my accountant! And tellin him it builds up a girl’s forearm for jackin guys off!”

  “Oh but Cart!”

  “You’re sick Jeannie and your baton is sick.”

  He began to form a loop with the baton between his great guide’s hands as Jeannie’s wail rose to something as purely musical as her mad trilling laugh, as desolate as some final and inconceivable Orlando “nevermore.” Cart flung the pretzeled baton into the garbage pail, simultaneously discharging a yowling cat from within. Then the two entered their showpiece and stood on the terrazzo, each weeping for his own spavined dream.

  * * *

  When Cart reentered the bait shack Myron Moorhen recoiled against the trophy wall as though he had been hit by a howitzer.

  “Honest, I didn’t lay a finger on her!”

  A stuffed jack crevalle bounced off Myron’s head to the floor. Myron clapped a terrified hand to the spot as though it had been Carter’s first blow. Cart was looking at the floor patiently; when he raised his head, Myron shot fifteen feet to the left.

  “Honest! Honest honest honest!”

  “Myron…”

  Moorhen shot to the freezer and groped frantically within. He withdrew a frozen kingfish of perhaps twelve pounds. A member of the mackerel family, and therefore long and pointed, a frozen kingfish makes a formidable weapon. Myron raised the frosted blue shape over his shoulder in the “ready” stance Ted Williams has long advocated for batters. His eyes narrowed to a new confidence and his lips opened flat in a vague smile that showed a sharp white line of teeth.

  “Myron, relax! You are among friends and this is no clambake.”

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “Absolutely nothing. Put down that king.”

  “Not so fast. Tell me what’s going to happen to me.”

  “I already told you nothing is going to happen. Where did that fish come from?”

  “Lou O’Connor got it at American Shoals.”

  “Deep jigging?”

  “No, drifting with ballyhoo. He got six altogether.”

  “Huh. Maybe the run’s started.”

  “Excuse me, Cart, but what uh what was it you were going to do to me?”

  “About Jeannie?”

  “I think so,” said Myron, unobtrusively returning the frozen kingfish to the freezer.

  “Well, I was going to tell you that she is just kind of sick right now poor li’l thing and I want you Myron to try and forgive her for what she done to you this evening here.”

  “Aw Cart, Cart, Cart. Of course I forgive her.”

  “And she said she mm left some underthings…?”

  Myron, moving now with reckless freedom, took a wad of nylon and silk from the top drawer of his desk and tossed it, just between a couple of fellows, to Cart.

  “Cart, she is awful good with that baton!”

  Carter smiled shyly. “You know, Myron, she ain’t half bad … Only, Myron?”

  “Whussat, Cart?”

  “She don’t own her no baton no more.”

  “Uh, where’s it at, Cart?”

  “It’s one giant step up her ass, Myron.”

  Myron giggled, “You don’t mean that!”

  “Oh but I do.” Carter had a certain affection for this lie. “I suppose it’ll show up again one of these days,” he added.

  Guffaws.

  * * *

  Skelton thought that when what you ought to do had become less than a kind of absentee ballot you were always in danger of lending yourself to the deadly farce that surrounds us. The subtlest kind of maladjustment and you plummeted through the tissue surface of the socially lubricated and solvent to that curious helter-skelter of selves which produced such occasional private legislators as Nichol Dance.

  Ideas like that, thought Skelton, could set a man to barking. Even a brief soulful howl beside the garbage would help. Even the notions of what wild horses couldn’t get you to do acquired an unabstract vigor—to the extent that you could nearly see their luminous manes and screaming nocturnal shapes. Half the time when lives streamed past on parallel courses, a false security developed: and the victim began to imagine that these lifelines did not congest or break down. Too late, the head-ons became apparent and you looked up to scream: The sonofabitch is in my lane! Histories are fused as metal by heat.

  There was a knocking on the door of the fuselage. Skelton opened it; it was the wino drill sergeant from next door. “Come in.”

  “Thank you, sir. Do you have a dog?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I thought I heard barking.”

  “I was clearing my throat.”

  “I was wondering, sir, if you could accompany me to headquarters.”

  “Next door?” Skelton asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “No questions, please.”

  “All right,” Skelton said, thinking, I will lend myself to another’s trip as my own leads only to the sillier kind of despair, plus, of course, Hamletism; not to mention mooning and the unenunciated snivel.

  Skelton followed the sergeant with civilian dignity. At the door to the hotel, they were saluted by two winos who permitted them to enter the vomit-scented front hall. They ascended the stairway, whose walls approached within inches of Skelton’s shoulders. There was a man on duty at the top of the stairs and two men, rather less on duty, out cold in the upper hallway in their own puke, their blurred, raspy faces and crew-cuts communicating precise
ly what is communicated by a wrecking yard.

  Skelton was shown into a room; the door was closed behind him as the light was turned on. The room only had space for a single bed, and Skelton’s father was in it looking less mortal than ephemeral; and considerably more dead than alive. He had his fiddle with him.

  It was plain that the sheet beneath which his father lay was the one he had worn these last days around town. It had motor oil and dirt all over it, and on the section that covered his feet was a tire print.

  “Well,” said his father, “I have to make a piece of wreckage of myself so we can have a bedside scene together.”

  “What are you talking about.”

  “This.” An inclusive gesture.

  Skelton refused to reply.

  “All right.”

  “We’ve all been chasing you. Mother is finally finished with this stuff too I can tell you.”

  “I wanted to advise you. That is what fathers do.”

  “Why didn’t you just come over to my place. I have been looking for you every which way.”

  “I didn’t have the advice ready. I had to go through a certain number of operational maneuvers, as they say here at headquarters, to get myself down to the level at which I knew what you were going through.”

  Skelton looked into his palms for a sign.

  “I’m not going through anything in particular,” Skelton lied.

  “Do you think your friend is joking?”

  “No. We have just laid out some terrains and a process of natural selection is going on.”

  “Oh, come on. I thought we’d been over that Darwin baloney. I don’t even like it as a figure of speech.”

  It appeared for a moment that he would actually be sick to his stomach. Skelton could not quite fathom the total degeneration he saw before him. His father’s face, often compared to Manolete’s, was covered with an uneven stubble; and his hair, always cut short as that of a monk, seemed like a barber-college special. The fingers of his inordinately long and ghostly hands arose to make a point, then faded with its vanishment from his mind. Whether from hunger or obsession, his face had receded from his eyes, isolating them in their sockets with an unmistakable suggestion of madness. Skelton felt a certain embarrassment at his own short-fingered, tough hands in his lap, rough-palmed from the pushpole: another sign that he had come from nowhere; a suggestion he was determined to put the lie to.

  “I’ve had an adventure, I guess,” said his father wanly. “Like falling through space. I did some drinking and ended up here. I must think of when I left the army … I somehow consumed seven months getting to Key West. The things that happened to me were so foreign to what it seems could have happened to me. Much more disturbing than amnesia. You try to date your life around the things that happen to you that you can’t understand. When you understand something, it is no longer any good to you. It’s neutralized. When I got into the ‘bassinet’ there for seven months, I was trying to create one of those situations, artificially; and I failed because it was just eccentric. There was no mystery, no real enigma.”

  “Except to others.”

  One of his father’s eyelids was considerably lower than the other; and when he thought intensively, he usually pushed it up with his forefinger; he did now.

  “It even lacked mystery for others. The odd and the mysterious are not the same.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then quite naturally I began to try to see what could be done about what was happening to you. I tried a few simple things like offering to buy the boat but my heart wasn’t in it. And I knew it ran counter to what you would accept. You have always been dedicated to ordeals as a way of driving your spirit to the place where its first confusions are. I think you’ve gotten away from that now and I showed you a lot about sidestepping that may have been useful.”

  “Better than that.”

  “So anyway—and this will seem a little simple-minded—I had the plan that I would try to condition myself to the point that life could depart almost as a relinquishment, a little release of the will and it would seep away … or something, right?”

  “Yes, right,” Skelton said very nearly inaudibly.

  His father laughed. “Everything happened. I got drunk, worked over, run in by the police, thrown out of restaurants. I told these boys here that I was discharged dishonorably from the army and they locked me in the ‘brig,’ which is the mop closet on the first floor. I know, funny; but I was in there two days without anything to eat. I have only been released five hours now.”

  Skelton in pain glanced to the window where bright palm leaves shuddered in incongruous evening sunlight. And hearing traffic, he thought, How dare anyone go on about his business.

  “But I began to find what could not be explained.” He drew out his upper plate; it was broken and taped back together. “I got drunk and fell down over in back of Carlos’s market and this preacher took my plate out and stepped on it.”

  “Why didn’t you go home!”

  “Oh come on.” His father’s detachment was serene. If there was anything that identified him by blood in place of the dissimilarity of hands, it was this proclivity for slipping the moorings. Skelton’s own “ordeals,” as his father termed them, his attempt to be sane, a biologist, when his actual instincts were less linear, less useful, only led to a bout of hallucinations, featuring drowning, falling, wild horses, endless crowds of driverless automobiles under evidently perfect control hurtling over rough landscapes; and even before Dance had spoken of Charlie Starkweather in the city jail, electrocution, which came to him as a kind of tickling to death, a trampling under electrical horses.

  “My first instinct was that this face-off with what’s-his-name was a matter of honor.”

  “Oh God!”

  “Well, you’ll admit that was the obvious choice.”

  “I don’t admit that!”

  “Well you goddamn prima donna! What was the obvious choice then!”

  Skelton racked his brains. His father was right. But he didn’t have a thing to tell him.

  “That’s the best I can do,” he said, not quite coming clean.

  “All right then listen you dumb bunny. Now you can get killed at this thing you’re up to. So, you see it through so you know what it is when it comes. Otherwise you are a bystander and nothing could be more disgusting.”

  They stopped talking. Skelton remembered in his childhood his father explaining to him that he lived in a civilization that was founded from its family life to its government on the principle that the wheel that squeaks the loudest gets the grease.

  “Your grandfather,” he said now, “is a great American in the way he has learned to work the gaps of control that exist between all the little selfish combines. That is why he has been able to rook the country out of millions without ever getting petty about it. —Now, at my best I have been a transitional figure in trying to get you some idea of his energy and coordinational power—with the conviction that I would be consumed in the process—so that you could use it toward something a little more durable than the kind of power your grandfather has craved so … horribly.”

  He took up his fiddle and all that scarifying instinct for spirals upon spirals of cognition fell from his tormented face; and a turbulent gaze into emptiness that had become less Skelton’s birthright than a kind of visitation fell across it. For Skelton’s father always felt himself to be poised on the edge of some yawning fissure. One of the ways he crossed it, besides the sports page and its illusion of a constant skein of clear athletic effort in which no one was swept away in time, one of the ways he crossed that fissure was with his fiddle. His head inclined upon it now as though he would fall serenely asleep; the eccentrically long bow indented itself gently against the strings and paused before the opening strains in deepest space. And then the crazy man began Jerusalem Ridge pure and howling in a final elevation to the light that Skelton could understand.

  * * *

  Skelton thought about the electrical dr
ill and how it could take the hole of the light socket and modify it to another; hole power; perhaps ridiculous but close to his father and his mysteries. He thought of the vultures you could see circling a pit (usually filled with garbage but never mind that); or how during the eclipse of the sun in 1970, running to the Snipe Keys, he had stopped the skiff when the light started to go out, looked up as proscribed by radio news broadcasts to see half a thousand seabirds circling a black hole in the sky. It was the kind of hole people could create, throwing each other into shadow. But there was something there to be considered, the radios everywhere telling you not to look, the vultures over the garbage pit, the news broadcasts of 1970 reflecting another eclipse and a quarter of a billion people staring into the black hole in the sky. And in his own fractional quadrant of world, Skelton looking to the whirling seabirds and their black pivot and then across the still, mercurial sea darkening as though oxydized by this lunar tropism. The power of nothing.

  * * *

  His father was laughing, half to himself. “Four nights ago, I got particularly drunk with these fellows that work the boats, then bum their way up to the Carolinas in the summer. I left them about midnight I suppose and was crawling, literally crawling, along Eaton Street when a car pulled up and Bella got out. She took about fifty pictures of me creeping down Eaton in my sheet, saying, “Bahyewtiful, bahyewtiful!” the whole while. I suppose she’s fanning them out for the old man right now. That won’t take him in! He’s seen it all … By the way, he knows your plan and completely disagrees with my interfering.”

  Skelton thought, That does not surprise; any more than that his father, who had eschewed authority in himself as well as others throughout most of a lifetime, should suddenly attempt to advise and force, however halfheartedly; while his mother, who cultivated durability as another might table manners, was beginning to discover an exasperation with all three men, as anyone would with cheap or highly tuned machinery that constantly needed repairs.