Thomas McGuane - Panama

I went in through the front of the Pier House and stopped at the desk, where a boy with a trained voice saw to the registry of guests. I told him that all I knew was the first name of this agent, which was Mory, and that he was a member of the firm called International Famous. I mentioned none of his proclivities. In the trained voice, I hear, “That’s not enough for me to go on.”

“I think you’re hearing the name Mory as being all I know of this person and I think that you’ll find the room number and even remember what he looks like.”

When you are tired in a certain way you can say things like that; a matter of what is the least you’ll go through with; and above all, how you are to be avoided if you have a mean streak.

Mory was taking a call at the poolside phone, aggressive in smart trunks, and his eyes bearing forward at the image of the person he was speaking to. I waited for him to finish.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but we have a mutual friend and I’d like a word with you.”

“What kind of a friend,” he said, wandering to his pool chair. I had to follow.

“One who owes you the minimum of a lawsuit. Have you got a minute?”

“That’s a very silky opening,” he said, “but I’m always being sued. It’s a testimonial to my energy. Every benefactor has his off days and mine make people bring suit. I don’t like this heat. When I’m with Double S on the boat, we move offshore when the heat gets this gummy. Then we keep the boat moving. We keep everything moving. You look irritable. This almost makes me forget the heat which is terrific but it’s not nice heat. It’s like dandruff.” He was very compact and he smiled with a crazy aggressive arc that showed how he saw all he wished for happening already in his mind’s eye. He got up. “A cold shower. I gotta get the lead out. You want to talk to me, you’re gonna have to yell it through a plastic curtain.”

I walked behind him as he arranged a towel over his reddened shoulders, really arranged it, making each hanging end of the towel the exact length of the other. And he walked that way, staring at the imagined adversary. I could watch these special cases for hours.

He had a suite looking out on the harbor. When we walked in, he pumped my hand and I gave him a false name. “I’m edgy,” he said. “I got this director, a cunt face. And his insolence is about to bust my balls. He’s Pied Piper to all these gifted kids who always think it’s a repertory company. But his fee is batshit and he wants my action. The lift is otherwise perfect. He has a house critic who sucks him off on every motion picture he makes and he has a gift. He’s an art whore and I only like the regular kind of whore.” Mory was getting more interesting and in some ways more appealing than that which he was about to get from me warranted. He moved around the room amid the Vuitton luggage and luxury denim piles and I watched him clean from the center of my ugly streak while he talked away with marvelous accuracy. “Now our hero of the youth with his picture-book beach home and his actresses for the hotels is sticking me up for half my fee on a picture which I conceived and upon which we had an airtight conversation indicating he was gonna flat-rate the cocksucker for a nice remunerative ride on the back end! The insolence! — You don’t even know what I’m talking about. If it wasn’t you, I’d tell it to the lamp.” He climbed into the shower. I went to the window and stood in the cold metallic air from the vents and looked at the anchored boats and the silver tanks and the casuarinas on the island across the way, ugly inside. When he was out of the shower, he wandered along the Habitat block walls plucking grooming tools off the dressers.

I said, “I’m here about a friend of mine. Her name is Marcelline and I don’t like the way you treated her. I want you off the key.”

“You want me off the key.” He didn’t turn around. “Marcelline. Well, you can’t blame me for that.”

“I’m afraid that I do and you’re going.”

“I’ll tell you what, my pal, she bored me. It was a question of getting the cattle to Abilene.”

When I hit him my ugliness and weight were all there. I caught him in the back of the head and his face collided with the block wall. When he slid down it, he turned, his face not at all what it had been; and I had to lean to let him have it again, and snapped him back good. “Three hours or the next plane,” I said, “whichever comes soonest.”

“Let me give you an errand,” he said, “that’ll clip your wings good. Tell Marcelline thanks for the invitation but I’m not gonna be able to make it over for dinner tonight. You go, chum. She was making me a nice piece of fish. You eat it. Yellowtail and black butter sauce from her sad little hands.”

“It sounds like you got caught in traffic. What brought you to our island town?”

“Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy,” he said. “I’m the guy who could breathe life back into him.”

“I know him,” I said. “There’s no hope. He’s in knots and nobody has anything he wants any more. You’re gonna have to sell it, but sell it in Los Angeles. You’re all throwing in your lot kind of pari passu, except for the kids — and send something to the critic. Make the ride silky for everybody. It’s good business.”

“You’re magic,” said the agent. “You’re me all over.”

“What you would like to be,” I said, “I can make come true.”

“There’s only one thing I’d like to be.”

“Let’s hear it.”

He grinned bleakly and said, “Runyonesque.”

AT 3 A.M. there are cats on the ledges, diffident animals of odd hours who know the enemy is at his weakest right around then. When you walk the street at that hour you think you share something and you reach out, try to make a deal, to touch. But the cats remember and they run.

Catherine didn’t mind. She knew better. Nor did she offer to demonstrate the five things she remembered from ballet when she was ten. She didn’t rant about cucumber sandwiches, other beings, the Montessori method, or the Schick center for the prevention of smoking. Fundamentally, she didn’t try to pet the cats. She understood that they’d clear out. A lot of people I know would reach and then find that space on the ledge, rotten shitsuckers who had no right to pester cats at three in the morning.

“Let’s buy some ammo,” I said.

“Too late. What do you want with ammo?”

“I feel strangely Hessian,” says I.

When we got to the corner of Duval and Caroline, some people sat on the wall and played various instruments. Catherine and I sang for them and we weren’t too god damned bad.

Catherine limped around in time to the music. I removed my teeth. We commenced hopping up and down. I combed my hair with my bridgework. Ya-ya-ya-ya, say hello to the mayor of New York ya-ya- yah!

Well, we were having a nice time out there. Certain abuses of our expectations were at arm’s length. No one clamored for encores. They stared at me and tried to put two and two together.

We lined up at the taco stand. “I hate lines,” I said.

“Nothing you can do about them,” said Catherine. “Not if you want a nice taco.”

“I do. I want one.”

“I want a messy one.”

“They put us in mind,” I said, “of our neighbors to the south.”

“Don’t be cavalier.”

“After this let’s go down to the fuel dock and decode the sky.”

We carried our tacos to the Gulf filling station. Avoiding interference from ambient or stray light, I was able to identify the Big Dipper, for Catherine. “Contrary to popular opinion,” I explained, “the Big Dipper did not die in a plane crash with Buddy Holly.” I was straining for laughs.