Thomas McGuane - Panama

“Has she had a chance to scrub up?” I asked.

“Hey, go fuck yourself.”

The line was dead. I wasn’t making the best of the conversations. I don’t quite know why, except insofar as it was part of this trajectory of declining hope which had gone so far in depriving me of what I formerly considered worth working for. For instance, I will soon be broke. Already, on the occasion of massive overdrafts, where once an obsequious vice-president would appear at the door, I now got an ill-tempered trainee with a pencil behind his ear who menaced my dog.

Then I thought, I could make Marcelline feel better about all this, about this terrible agent doing this to her face, with his thing, that agent. And by so doing, apart from placating my own humanity, I could wend my way back into Catherine’s affections, even to the extent of her withdrawing her remark about my fucking myself.

AT TRUMAN AND FRANCIS there is a florist’s shop in a building made of the kind of cinderblock that is bulged to look like rocks. The window is always fogged from the cool interior and it is run like a dry cleaner’s, with a counter and cash register jutting into its greenery like a dock in the Everglades.

“I want something nice,” I said, watching across the street as a pallid rock-and-roll band loaded equipment behind a franchised fun bin called Big Daddy’s Lounge. “For a friend. A whole plant.” I could smell cold flowers.

“Is this a special occasion, I mean something for which we might have a price arrangement or any of them good things?” An eighty-year-old woman ought not to talk that way.

“A friend,” I said, “who’s had an accident.”

“Oh dear, what?”

“Peed on.”

“What?”

“She got peed on.”

I settled for a plant with blue flowers in a terracotta turtle; not settled, really. I liked the plant and felt good marching through the cemetery toward Elizabeth Street toward Marcelline’s, a Christian soldier. I spotted Peavey ward-heeling in front of the library and waved without eliciting one in return. I felt uplifted in some way, taking a little something to a friend who had gotten it as we all have, though seldom so directly. Then I remembered Marcelline wasn’t precisely a friend; and in fact, I didn’t know her very well. Maybe I don’t know why I felt good, beyond that the obligation of being a screaming misfit was gone, the onus of dirty money was about to lift off, and the simple motifs of poverty and Christian vengeance were starting to back-fill their absence.

Vengeance? It’s so intricate, maybe no one else would call it that. I don’t question it any more; anyone’s sources are as mysterious as spring water.

Marcelline’s house is on the dead end of William Street, what was the dead end until the fire department opened it on through for access to the wooden tinderbox houses of this old quarter, on through past the empty stables in the overgrown palm-shrouded field; so that what was once still as countryside now carried the tin murmur of Truman Avenue.

Marcelline came to the door just as my finger touched it. She had painted bright red circles on her face and was wearing fifteen or twenty rings. I could hear the radio and a teakettle at once. She said, “Hi you!”

I told her, “Fine,” then I said, “Marcelline, you look just, just—”

She said, “Go ahead.”

I said, “It’s not that, it’s—”

And she said, “I know. I’m indescribable. ”

I can’t quite recall; I believe, though, she told me to come in. I did go. We bumped in the woody smell of the hallway, her bright circled cheeks in that light and the teakettle screaming now over a Spanish-language broadcast out of Miami, Havana, I don’t know. Machine-gun music.

She cried, “Is that for me!” And ran the plant into the little sitting room. She had a coffee can with a soldered spigot and babied the vegetable while I tried to figure out what I was doing there. I believed that it had to do with Catherine. The room was dim and the windows drained everything; the lines in the wooden floor ran off into the glare and you could hardly decide what was what.

“We had a plant with blue flowers in Oklahoma once. My mother took it into the cellar with us during a tornado. I had a Peter and the Wolf record and my mother had a handbag. There was this big groan and the house was gone. The plant was okay but I forgot the record when we moved to Tampa. This was on a Wednesday.”

“What was?”

“When we moved to Tampa. My mother worked for a pirate-type-atmosphere restaurant. Then she was a target for a knife thrower, and ran an addressograph. Jack-of-all-trades kind of deal I guess.”

When she sat down finally, she said, “What brought this on?”

“Thought I’d you know come on over see how things were.”

“Well, they’re not too neat.”

“I heard about your accident.”

“That’s just the end of it. The trip to New Orleans was also ratshit. I stayed out at the Cornstalks and it was full of musicians. So, I spent the whole time taking cabs into the Quarter, where you can’t get nothin any more, not even a beignet you’d want to eat. You’re better off down on Canal watching traffic. I tell you, bad luck and trouble is getting to be my middle name.”

“Well, that and a dime will get you a cup of coffee in any town in America.”

“I just want to fix up my place and kick back for about a year. I want them to be able to put the story of my life on a Wheaties box. I’m sick of junkies and dancers and triggermen.”

“They’re not going to put your unnatural conduct with Catherine on Wheaties.”

“It’s not unnatural. You ever read this Sappho?”

“Not Sappho again. You get the right Greek and you can really cover the waterfront.”

“I go straight and you see what happens. All over everything. I nail the guy where it does the most good and he starts to whine. Save it for the john, I told him. I don’t like it. So, then he tore up my place and split. I’d like to find out whose agent he is and tell his clients.”

“You know what happens when agents die? They go to ten percent heaven.”

“That helps.”

“Can I do anything?” I asked, very much in earnest.

“You’re not any more together than I am, as I hear it.”

“I know,” I said, “but I’ve made a start. Just ask me and I’ll help you out.”

“I don’t need anything. It’d be nice if you could get that agent off the key. He’s drinking at the Full Moon Saloon and that is my bar.”

“Consider it done.”

Marcelline stopped fidgeting around and rearranging and stared at me a moment, absolutely otherworldly in her red cheeks. You’d want her on your arm at some kind of fiendish ball. I resolved to take her to my seaside gala, given that I could succeed in organizing it; that is, if Catherine predictably refused me. Marcelline was a vivid primitive and that was okay with me.

“Catherine is sure that she’s a survivor. I’m just a flashy cunt. But I know a thing or two. I know what’s what.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know, the street. How to stay up all night by yourself, fry okra without it getting slimy, tell when plantains are ripe. I can test coke more accurate than a lab even if it’s ether or acetone base and repair furniture without glue. But I’m not absolutely sure I’m a survivor. I might be gone in the next reel.”

“Well, I’ll get the slicker off the key and you’ll have the Full Moon back. That’ll be a step in the right direction.”

There are people anyone knows who are at times stranger to them than Hottentots. Peter and the Wolf in the storm cellar. And for me, these strangers are dangerously simple obsessions, not durable necessarily, but certainly it can get smokey. A topless dancer tells you about her paper route in Indiana. A shrimper shows you his collection of Fred Waring records. But without that, maybe you’re all by yourself. I saw an old drunk fall in front of the laundromat at Elizabeth and Fleming. He cracked his head open and made a terrible pool of blood. Someone seemed to know he wouldn’t die of it. But I looked down through spinning air filled with frangipani and rock and roll and saw how quickly you are alone, how that can be shown to you in an instant. I think for a long time that it was my business to drive this into relief, that this was what I did for my time, poured blood from my head so that strangers could form a circle. The immaculate dream of touching and holding was shed and I stood, an integer, not touched; for nothing but power. I couldn’t even name my dog. But there was something I wanted besides that; something as simple as to ache in the literal heart and chest for all of us who had lost ourselves as parents lose children, to the horizon which is finally only overtaken in remorse and in death.