Panama

by Thomas McGuane

  I stole a look at her through my terror of her authority, and through this vivid teeth-clenched fury, her face, lit by street lamps shining through the leaves of dead palms, seemed transcendent and fine, like the face of a legendary princess killed by lightning. I was lucky to have been in her life.

  “Do I have to listen to this,” I said gingerly and she slapped my face, one ringing blow, then idly stirred yet another piña colada while watching a little sloop look for a place to anchor. For all I knew, she could have been Jesse, a token of his power to inhabit my loved ones at will.

  10

  I HAD JUST RUN a lemon rind around the inside of my coffee cup, and I was staring at the awakening rummies on the icehouse loading dock, when Don sat down.

  I said, “Beat it, Peewee.”

  “Just doing my job.”

  He was dressed in a suit this time, with the kind of three-button jacket and ill-fitting pants that used to be high with academics from nice families, so that a college kid could look up and say to himself, That’s no smart-ass big-city Jew, that’s people.

  “I want my breakfast,” I said. “I don’t want to hear I molested an infant in Spokane at 3 a.m. when I thought I was sleeping.”

  “No, but you refused to speak to your father when he called.”

  “How would you know that if it were true?”

  “Lineman’s phone. Got alligator clips and I just plug into your wire.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You told your father he had a wrong number.”

  “Shut up! He’s dead!”

  The fry cook turned around and stared but kept on scraping.

  “And you bounced a check for five hundred thousand dollars.”

  I got up. “I don’t need this.”

  “You wrote a sixty-thousand-dollar check for a conch house on Caroline. That bounced.”

  “Check please.”

  The waitress quickly reached me a ticket. I slapped my empty pockets in panic. She couldn’t keep her eyes off me.

  “I got it,” said Don and tossed the thirty cents onto the counter. “And that might be the last I can do for your memory. —I’m heading for the pay window.”

  * * *

  Running on Dey Street, I slide on casuarina seeds and lose a shoe and bang my head and make blood where the cobbles come from under the tar. An old lady leans out from the balcony of the octagonal house, glances at the welding shop, jets snuff into the trees, and says, “You all right?”

  There is a trigger that makes the day begin and all life end and it breaks like a glass rod. It lies at the middle of everything that breathes or dreams. It will bend and break, and when it breaks it is night.

  I look up to tell her that I have hurt my head but noises even I can’t make out pour from my mouth.

  Two of them make a chair of their arms and they put me under the flashing light. One says his eyes are points and the other says Nylon’s gone to appreciate this. I feel sleep coming but I’m not crying and it’s okay because for once I’m not afraid of the ghosts.

  * * *

  “Jim,” I said to my brother, “do me a favor. Show me how you died.”

  “What do you mean? You say Daddy’s dead.”

  “He died in the Boston subway fire.”

  “I died the day of the Boston subway fire. You just slipped him in there too.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Not if you say Daddy is dead.”

  “Okay he’s not dead.”

  “Say he’s alive.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Say it.”

  I said it and started to choke. Someone I couldn’t see ran a finger into my mouth and pulled my tongue free. I vomited and for a moment lost Jim in the sailing shapes. But that lifted and it was sunny and he was there with the innocence I never had, still in his face; all the trust that let him be murdered by his life without humiliation.

  “Everything went off and left me,” Jim said.

  They took me to Catherine’s on my release. There was no bandage around my head, no bump, nothing. I had had a concussion and was supposed to lay low. I had few impressions except that my eyes had grown small, the worst had been wished on me, I had found something out from Jim, and I was among the living. My dog was missing.

  “I don’t know where she is,” Catherine said.

  “Well, we’ve got to find her.” I told her to call the pound, tell them it was Deirdre, spots, white feet, missing. I was thinking of those men, their frayed nerves and the gas. There was no answer. I said run an ad. Catherine covered the mouthpiece.

  “The paper wants to know what she answers to.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  She uncovered the mouthpiece and said, “Spots is the main thing I guess.” She hung up and came over. “Oh, darling, I love you. Get better. Stop being under such a strain.”

  “I can’t seem to.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Every time I try to relax, I start crying. I don’t feel like a grown man that way.”

  “Where is it written you have to be a grown man?”

  “All over the place.”

  “It’s not.”

  I could hear a shrimper’s diesel backing down at Brito’s yard; and the vacuum-cleaner sound of the bus. Catherine watched me steadily. I covertly tried to see if her eyes would shift; they didn’t.

  “I looked at my new house,” she said. “It was lovely.”

  “Oh, I’m glad.”

  “Very carefully made.”

  “Porch boards are sprung.”

  “That’ll give us something to do.”

  “And I’d like a wooden grill around the foundations so that cats don’t get under there and…”

  “… and fight.”

  “Yes, and fight under there all the time.”

  “Yes.”

  “They better find my dog. They don’t find my dog I’m calling Jesse.”

  Catherine watched me, her eyes two stones in the mercury air.

  * * *

  Sometime later I awakened and Catherine was sleeping beside me, warmth radiating from her brown back, and I laid my face in the channel between her shoulder blades and pulled her thick curly hair around her neck so that I could look at the telegraph wires in the window. Warm moist air moved in a gentle mass over us; and across the way, a radio played a giddy weather report for the tourists. In the bottom of the window, laundry floated into my view. I felt like sailing with my love, feeling the centerboard hum in the wooden hull, the shapes of islands vault past our daydreams.

  That or reviewing my life; but a good bit too much life reviewing has gone on already. The only wisdom it produces is the resolution to not do any further reviewing. My nose itched and I ground it against Catherine’s spine. She stirred and curved her bottom up against me; and then again, and then we were sleepily making love. When we were done, she turned and put her arms around me and her face against my chest and said, “Oh, darling, get well.”

  The statement seemed to come from a very far place within her. I didn’t know exactly what she meant by it; but I felt, with great strength, that I wanted to give that to her. I wanted to get well. I just didn’t know what that was. If there was a fear, it was that I had never known; that I had been strikingly not well from the start; that my ticket to ride, such as it was, was based on the vividness of disease; and that I was paying for everyone else.

  My first instinct was that a social life depended simply upon giving people what they wanted. So, I called Peavey, as a kind of test case.

  I told him that I had finally understood that marriage was what Roxy wanted and that I therefore endorsed that view and would see Roxy that very day to make myself clear.

  “Why, that’s very nice.”

  “I am going to try to stop interfering,” I said.

  “I think you should.”

  “I am going to attempt to be normal,” I said, “eat regularly, see some motion pictures, and take in the hot spots on weekends.”

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sp; “Right…”

  “And anyway, that’s all.”

  “Well, that’s very nice. And look here, I’d like to return the favor. I got a line on your dog. I’ll have Nylon Pinder drop it by.”

  “Say,” I said, “thanks a lot. I appreciate that. Nylon been feeding her pretty good?”

  “Not too bad. Not too damn bad.”

  “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

  “A house pet should have special care,” Peavey said.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll be talking to you.”

  “Real good, and thanks!”

  Catherine was looking at me.

  “I’m trying,” I explained. It was quiet.

  She said, “You’re the original snowball in hell.” She was shaking all over.

  11

  MY UNCLE PAT was in his yard on a stepladder, out in the middle of the yard, wiring a creeper to a freestanding trellis. He was in some aerial relationship to the trellis, as though he, on his ladder, were feeding it like a tall bird.

  “Pat, Roxy wants to get married.”

  “I don’t care a thing about it.”

  “I’m making my party at the Casa Marina a wedding party. But she wants to know if you’ll come.”

  “I couldn’t say, Chet.” A bead of sweat fell from the tip of Pat’s nose sixteen feet to the ground.

  “It’s going to be dressy as hell, Pat. And there’d, you know, be a ceremony.”

  “But would I figure?”

  “You’d have to work that out with Roxy.”

  “It’d be good to have something other than Peavey’s henchmen and their trashy girlfriends.”

  “That’s why I thought you might stand up for Roxy.”

  “Can I dress?”

  I hesitated, but not for long. Pat lived to dress up. It was the key to his attending. I said sure. He got happy quick and the ladder started over. He reached and embraced the trellis. They went down together in parallel. In the descending arc, I could see his happy eyes.

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “The plant’s shot,” I said, looking at the turmoil of vines.

  “I don’t have a green thumb,” he said. His mind was already on the wedding, his eyes glowing with yet unseen ceremony. I myself thought of the wedding, the orchestra, Catherine, semi-familiar faces, a warm and swollen ocean beaded with the lights of ships. I helped Pat to his feet, lost in happiness. I knocked loose dirt from his getup. “You’re a good uncle,” I told him, remembering the crazy angles of my father’s roof.

  “If I could quit cruising,” he said. “People talk.”

  * * *

  Waiting in front of my house was a familiar man in safari clothes. His hair was slicked straight back without a part and he was chewing a cheroot.

  “You are Ramón Condor,” I said, “star of The Reluctant Gaucho.”

  “The keys.”

  “?”

  “The check bounced on the Land-Rover. Get me the keys.”

  “They’re in it.”

  He walked over to the car.

  “This was a go-anywhere vehicle,” he said, “now it’s nothing but a repo.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re a bald-ass liar and your checks are bum.”

  “I knew only confusion.”

  He was halfway in the car and he got out again. He flicked away the cheroot and cinched up his safari coat. “You knew only confusion…” He started at me. There are those who despise my flair for language.

  I saw another smack coming and I lowered my head between my shoulders for protection, simultaneously turning my false-tooth-filled mouth to one side. But then when he got to me, I reflexively popped him in the side of the head and he sat down.

  “This whole deal is getting highly Chinese,” he said.

  “Don’t be coming at me like that.”

  “I oughta leave you for the birds.”

  “You’ll have to get to your feet first.”

  “Nylon said, ‘Let me collect that for you,’ but me, I had to be big.”

  “Nylon hasn’t been doing so good either.”

  “But if I hadn’t had to be big, it would of been him instead of me. Now look. God damn polished cotton’s worth its weight in gold. One knee’s done for and the thing is an outfit, not just pants and a jacket. And a tough one to come by.”

  “They do reweaving down off Simonton Street.”

  “I did it. I have to live with it.” He got in the Land-Rover and left.

  “Where’s he going in the Buick,” Catherine asked.

  I turned around. “Where did you come from?”

  “Kiss me hard.”

  I held her.

  “I just thought today, maybe I can stand it. You’re out of the question but today I thought, it won’t kill me.”

  “I never said that,” I said. “I never said it would kill you.”

  I looked at her and she was glowing. She had evidently had some kind of moment with herself. I was holding it away. It seemed as if she was coming back or going to try and I didn’t want to distort it; if I could just hold on to one place for her to come back to. She would do that for me. And why in hell couldn’t I do that for her?

  We walked around to the beach and Marcelline was there, sitting on a Ramada Inn towel and reading pornography. I had my arm around Catherine’s waist when Marcelline commenced an excerpt; it was gruesome filth. She laughed, then stopped and looked up. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I mean, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Look,” she said, getting up and folding her towel, “no salesman will call at your door.”

  She left.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Gee,” said Catherine.

  Then Marcelline was back and she was throwing rocks at us. “It’s no call to do me like some doormat!” she shouted.

  “Lay off the speed, Marcelline,” Catherine said, “this always happens. It’s venom … put down those rocks.” Marcelline vanished again, weeping this time. “It’s venom, I tell you. Monday she’s blowing one boyfriend in his sports car and by Wednesday she’s cutting her wrists in another’s apartment because he says he doesn’t love her. Then by the time she gets back to the blowjob in the sports car, it’s on holiday in Europe and Marcelline’s standing there wondering why she’s always holding the bag. One minute you’re holding the bag, the next you are the bag.”

  “This is your version?”

  “This is it, this is la vie en rose.”

  “Do you think it’s possible for a little romance?”

  “I seriously doubt it. It’s like eating gravel.”

  Even in the sun, all the world seems to contain a hollow wailing moan, long and drawn out, as though purgatory understood the meaning of not knowing what was next.

  “I love you so,” said Catherine. “Whatever’s missing in the world, I’m doing my part.”

  We passed down the purlieus of Duval Street, past vile restaurants addressed “Rue Duval.” On the steps of St. Paul’s Church, a pigeon worked its way diagonally below the feet of two elderly gentlemen, factional members of a Long Island exodus.

  “We could have had such a damned good time together,” I heard one say.

  “Yes,” replied the one in the bonnet, “isn’t it pretty to think so.”

  “Now,” said the former, “I’m heading home to put things by.”

  * * *

  “Want to hear some poetry, Catherine?”

  “Like what?”

  “Sappho or Dylan Thomas?”

  “You don’t know any Sappho unless Marcelline told you.”

  “The fuck I don’t.”

  “She better not be reading your ass poems.”

  I gave her my favorite Sappho. “Someone, I tell you, will remember us. We are oppressed by fears of oblivion, yet are always saved by the judgment of good men.”

  “I didn’t think you knew one.”

  “I don’t love Sappho as an excuse for eating pussy,” I said. “Now, l
et me tell you the Dylan Thomas poem I like.”

  “None of the drunken slobber poems,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you one that means the most to me: A process blows the moon into the sun, pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin; and the heart gives up its dead.”

  “Why is that one important to you?”

  “I read it at my father’s funeral.”

  “Your father didn’t die, fuckface.”

  “Don’t tell me that an event I know by heart didn’t happen. I was the third mourner from the left in the funeral party and don’t call me fuckface.”

  “That was your mother’s funeral. You showed me the picture. She did die.”

  “My father died in the Boston subway fire!”

  “Your father has never been in Boston! I asked him!”

  We went into Fitzgerald’s for a drink. The waitresses were stuffing rugs under the lid of the piano. When one came we ordered Stolichnaya and limes. My ears were ringing.

  “What are you doing to that piano?”

  “The guy we hired is good but he’s too loud. He’s a spade.”

  “That makes him too loud?”

  “No, he happens to be an Afro-American person. I thought I’d mention that.”

  When she came back with the drinks, I said, “Those rugs are going to keep it from playing at all.”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  “I think you’re showing real aggression toward this musician.”

  “Leave her alone, Chet,” said Catherine.

  “We love him. He teaches all the ofay waitresses how to get down, and we do his charts and balance his aura.”

  “I see.”

  “Three dollars.”

  Catherine paid. I was on the humble, having mislaid my wallet. People were staring into the bar from outside. I let no one catch my eye. All they want are loans.

  “Let’s take a sink or swim approach,” said Catherine.

  “A little idle laughter or something?”

  “Yeah, or something. We’re getting morbid or something.”

  “Or something.”

  “How do you feel you’re doing on your memory?”

  “I’m avoiding that gumshoe like the plague. He’s been dogging my heels, following me into restaurants with his shitsucker showdowns.”