Thomas McGuane - Panama

Catherine was lying there and the old man in the white shirt was arranging her hair like a sunburst in the mud. When he saw me, he stood up and moved away until his shirt smeared the dark. I bent over Catherine, her face pale between the black arrows of hair.

She said, “Are we alive?”

I DROPPED CATHERINE at her home. She never spoke again that night. Then I drove across the island to my place. There was something going on inside. I walked around very carefully, listening to mayhem in my house. I opened the door through the wall cautiously.

Inside, my dog cowered by the stack of plant pots, one eye swollen shut from a blow; and just beyond, Nylon Pinder was tipping over the furniture and flinging drawers across the room, kicking the bottoms out from under standing lamps and tearing up anything that would tear.

He turned when I came in and moved wide as his smile toward me and sent my teeth spinning through lamplight. It seemed an obvious extension of my beef with Peavey. But I asked him why he had hit the dog. This only reminded him and the grin became one of discovery. He headed for the dog and I headed for a tipped-over lamp. I picked up a piece of milk glass about the time he got to the dog and hit him in the side of the face with it.

He turned in astonishment and what there was was very much like the earlier smile; but it went back to his ear on one side and you could see teeth all the way.

“Run,” I said. “You’re bleeding to death.”

* * *

The morning Citizen said that Nylon Pinder had taken a tumble and was in satisfactory condition in Memorial Hospital. Next, I would have to begin on Peavey before he began on me.

I was feeling somber. I was the subject of assaults and menaces, told that the dead were alive; and I was in love with a woman who didn’t seem to care for anything except an evasion of the light that I understood but knew, as she did not know, to be poison. One false move and we’d all go under together.

I walked down to Duval Street and spent a quarter on a machine that analyzed my handwriting. I learned that I was given to emotional crescendos. I must have made some audible response because the proprietor of the arcade, a man so bald and so bearded as to suggest that his hair was on upside down, came up to me and glanced at my analysis card and asked me what I did. I told him I was a regimental musician at Vera Cruz. He asked what I was doing in Key West and I told him that my patent attorney, my allergy specialist, and the vicissitudes of my root canals urged a move.

There was a door at the back of the arcade that said “Adult Material.” I passed through and played a dirty-movie machine with a fifty-cent piece. A fat girl came on the screen, undressed, and hit the deck. She retracted her legs as a naked man trotted toward her. Her bum was like a turret. The gentleman penetrated this valved protrusion with martial address until the fifty cents ran out. I sighed.

I said to the proprietor, “This is a perfect town for a quiet killing.” There was no emotional crescendo in sight.

“I’ve got a few choice words for people like you,” he said and I passed into the street with a peaceful smile. I walked to the Southernmost Point. A very old man and a very old woman were arguing.

She said, “I never saw so many oddballs. I want to get us out from under all these filthy people.”

“I don’t care about this,” he said. “Did Robert fix the wind-up on the mower like I told him?”

“He best had!” she said with just as much vituperation as she’d displayed against the oddballs.

What I was doing was thinking and slowly circling back to Roxy’s. I was nervous. I knew Peavey would be there. I didn’t know whether to bring up Nylon Pinder; but I decided against it when I thought how cute Peavey was and how little chance there would be of his admitting such a connection.

Peavey behaved cordially. He was with Roxy among the grapefruits, trying to knock down a loner high in the tree with a bamboo pole. I was very slightly moved because the grapefruits were all Roxy owned up to caring about. Seeing Peavey try to get one down for her reconciled me to him a little.

Roxy said, “That Ruiz. I’m going to get a colored man, I swear I am.”

“No,” said Peavey, “you don’t want one of those.”

“I want a smart boogie.”

He shook his head again. “If the colored people had any imagination … but they don’t, do they? I mean, every urban area in the country is filled with pigeons — the Eurasian rock dove, that’s what a pigeon is. And they could go out and gather all the pigeons they could eat, take them home, clean them, pluck them, and pop them in the rotisserie. Baste them liberally with butter and a bouquet of white wine and herbes simple … brown them to a turn!.. and serve with a cold bottle of Montrachet. Mwah!” He kissed his fingers. “But they won’t do this. There’s a lack of imagination. I don’t know what it is, protein deficiency, the gene pool, I just don’t know. But I do fear this guy is little more than a monkey. I fear this very deeply. I fear monkey shows in the inner cities as well as right here in Key West. We already have to watch out for our lives with many of these apes owning Coupe De Villes, Smith and Wessons, and Godknowswhat. These are powerful devices and they have them.”

Then Peavey looked right at me.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Fine,” I retorted.

“Don’t overdo a good thing,” he said.

“You smell upset,” I said.

“I’m not,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “But you don’t smell right.”

* * *

Catherine, my ballad to you goes like this. You can replace me but I can’t let you go because I can’t let you go I can’t that’s all I just can’t. The night you sat on my Gibson Hummingbird I forgave you even though it was the last thing Johnny Horton ever touched I didn’t care because it was you. That writer has a girlfriend too. She used to be Joe Cain’s widow. He said she used to ride a train called the Hummingbird from Mobile to New Orleans. When he goes home, he’s going to take her with him. I think she’ll go. And how come you and me are always in pieces?

That night I dreamed again and again of the old man arranging Catherine’s hair on the mud while the tide whispered past. Two dreams out of three he was faceless; in the third, he was my father.

* * *

“Hello—”

“This Nylon Pinder.”

“Hello, Nylon.”

“I’m home from the hospital.”

“Right…”

“And feelin real good.”

“Yes, Nylon.”

“And you should think about that.”

“Thank you, Nylon, I will.”

I got off and reflected upon Nylon. I supposed he was dangerous but he seemed merely pitiful, manipulating his voice and announcing his ominous return as per some TV show he’d seen. It is very very hard in this life to be a nincompoop. I called him back.

“Say, I’m having a party at the Casa Marina Saturday. Can you make it?”

“Oh,” said Nylon, “I already was going to make it.”

Nylon is very close, save for certain root, unpremeditated instincts, to what I spent a number of years enacting. I was a simple occupant, the man the anonymous senders of junk mail have in mind when they buy the stamp. And it was only my ability to see something in the accretion of toothpaste on unscrubbed counters, the signaling stain from plugged eaves troughs, the smell of myself in fear, as unattractive and profound as the funk of unloaded clothes hampers, that propelled me into the public nerve net with the ability to terrify with a smile or merely missing teeth. My affection for the ordinary, for Joe Blow in all his wonder, has deprived me of the power. But if the recoil doesn’t kill me, if my affections don’t kill me, I may laugh all the way to the bank; and without ever becoming The Occupant again, I could be happy. Not happy with a grin and the days flying by, but picking up the hours like shining stones. Meanwhile, it is sea level, incidents of torpor, and I know that I have been preceded in death. But if Catherine and I find a way to be happy together, we’ll step aside when desolation roars past.