Thomas McGuane - Panama

“I was shocked when we went in there and saw what was going on,” said Catherine. “But you stood tall in the face of all that coke.” She was proud of me.

Once inside Catherine’s house, she reached out, taking me by the front of my shirt. “Let me help you with your little things,” she said and pulled the shirt violently open, shooting buttons around the room. I reached up and pulled the bead chain and saw the shadows of the fan race against the walls. Star holes appeared in my brain pan. I looked down the front of her Cuban blouse and saw a nipple aiming in space with agonizing delicacy. I realized that the crew of the cucumber boat at Mallory dock had been in a position to spot these glands when we had walked — see, I can remember this — and discussed without raving our own lives together in the rooms and corridors of big-city hotels.

From the bedroom I heard a gruff voice, “Oral love, not that! I’m no shootist!” Catherine jerked open the door and there was Marcelline with the agent, that sight, engaged in a blur of manual intercourse. She shut the door again.

“Your place,” she said. When we opened the door to go out, there was an intelligent-looking young man poising his hand to knock. “Go to it,” said Catherine to him, “they’ve got the jump on you though.” I had to race to keep up. The breeze poured into my buttonless shirt. “That was the grave robber,” said Catherine. “He had a synthesizer fellowship at Juilliard.”

“He looks it.”

“Give me any other century,” she replied. She insisted on making two stops: one to buy an album called Great Waltzes of the World and another for six bottles of Evian mineral water. When we got to my place, we put on the record and danced until we polished off the mineral water. The dog watched the prom from the sunny patio. Playing cards of afternoon light from the kitchen window crawled across the floor until my father’s picture lit up on the wall and I screamed holy murder.

“I’m getting out of here.”

“Sit down,” said Catherine.

“Bugger that, my ears are ringing.”

“Just calm down, Chet, please.”

“My father led a long and heroic life at sea and died ironically in a tunnel under the city of Boston instead of at the helm of a schooner as he should have. It upsets me to see his likeness.”

“Chet, please listen to me quietly. Your father is a happy man from Bunkerville, Ohio, who has made a fortune packaging snack foods. He is here in Key West. He wants to see you.”

“He was always calling my bluff. He personally manufactured all the small, fine instruments necessary for giving my self-esteem back to the Indians. But he was a durable man of the high seas and it kills me he uh died of uh smoke inhalation.”

“No high seas, no death. Happy snack-food packager.”

“Nuts.”

“True.”

“Uh-uh, nuts. Can we go in there?”

“You’re not getting off that way. I’m not interested in going to bed with you five minutes after you’re screaming at a framed portrait.”

“Do I have to be attractive twenty-four hours a day?”

“You have to be attractive once in a while.”

“Oh, brother.”

“Go for a walk. Calm down. And when you get back, I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll love you and hold you and kiss your eyelids. But I’m learning that I can’t make you better.”

I knew she would keep her word. So I went outside to collate these mysteries into a uniform package I could live with. This necromancy of Catherine’s in attempting to bring the dead to life was out of the question. I had to decide why she wanted to lie to me about my father. Then I lost control of my feet and found myself speeding along the hedges, shouting, “Coming through!” whenever a knot of pedestrians ambled into my way. Like a heartsick housewife on a shopping spree, I thought an interesting acquisition would divert me from my pinwheeling insides and flying feet. Therefore, on Galveston Lane, I made arrangements to purchase a parrot which said Jesus, Mary, Joseph at the trilling of a bell, the sight of a monstrance or a cracker. We discussed wampum but the Cuban gentilhomme who owned the parrot wanted, I thought, in excess of its real value. I attempted to seize the parrot, having placed an amount equal to the parrot’s real value upon the sideboard. But I was badly bitten by the parrot itself and obliged to beat a hasty retreat.

I was jumped by photographers in front of Bahama Mama’s, and while a stenographer wrote frantically, I recited my Act of Contrition, genuflecting with enough sincerity that my knee could be heard against the sidewalk a hundred feet away. A photographer leaned in for a close-up and a tourist who had been staring at me, a middle-aged man in a LaCoste shirt, slapped the camera to the street and said to the photographer, “Leave him alone, you god damned ghoul.” Once more my flying feet had me soaring down the island. I found I could knife sideways through streaming traffic without harm and even the shriek of brakes and horns seemed very far away. I could set my nose on the point of a cloud and run navigating the blocks of houses on Whitehead Street until my lungs caught fire and I had to lie down in front of the barbershop. Two men came out in their aprons, vividly black West Indians, and asked me what I was going to do now.

“Lie here get my wind.”

“Need’ny hep?”

“Nope.”

They went back in to finish their haircuts. I watched the movements of diverted feet as they passed my face until I had my breath. I sat up on my haunches until I could rise with some dignity and angle toward the Casa Marina. Electricity was running up my swollen arches and my bones felt translucent as I fled toward Catherine in subaqueous strides, eyes hanging low in their sockets and teeth vibrating very slightly against each other.

More than anyone else, pedestrians and out-of-towners are assailed by the forces of evil. Moving through these hopeless ones, I knew that they would have to go some to help me at all. Everybody has a rough time getting what they come for. The real cowboys are all in drugstores; these people got hung up in the rigging.

As soon as I got to the house, I could see Mrs. Dean carrying a Portuguese man-of-war to the ocean on a stick. Last fall her Chow ate one and went to his reward making unearthly noises at both ends. She turned her eyes slowly toward me.

Catherine said, “I can’t rise above it. I can’t stand it.”

“May I come in?”

“God, what happened to your head?”

“I was attempting to purchase a beautiful green parrot.”

“What happened to your finger?”

“I fell. No one came to me. I curse this nation.”

“You what?”

“I curse this nation. Can you imagine the time I’m having?”

We went inside. I noted the air of mildew. I am a Floridian and I accept the mildew.

The first thing I told Catherine was that I was glad the marine biologist knocked his eye out, the one he looked through the microscope with, glad, the rotten one-eyed shitsucking wage ape.

No reply. I was being indulged. O God, this isn’t funny and only the sonorous, vacant sea gave me any sense of truth, truth in the sense of what was in store: circulating minerals.

Then I felt horrid again and I wanted a family with Catherine. I wanted us to want the same thing with no hideous discussions of our rights and obligations. I would be Papa Bear and there would be peace, peace in the valley for … for me. And over the chimney, the shimmer of smokeless fuel. There would be rabbits on the lawn in the evening. And Jesse’s saddle horse would be in the tie stall with the morning light on his shining coat.

“What is this?”

“A compress. You’ve got an egg on your forehead. Can’t you hit something besides your head? And look at these.”