Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“Stay here.”

Skelton climbed out of the boat and, running the line through his fingers lightly, began to wade the tidal creek. The mosquitoes found him quickly and held in a pale globe around his head. He waded steadily, flushing herons out of the mangroves over his head. At one point, he passed a tiny side channel, blocking the exit of a heron that raised its stiff wings very slightly away from its body and glared at him. In the green shadows, the heron was a radiant, perfect white.

He stopped a moment to look at the bird. All he could hear was the slow musical passage of tide in the mangrove roots and the low pattern of bird sounds more liquid than the sea itself in these shallows. He moved away from the side channel, still following the line. Occasionally, he felt some small movement of life in it; but he was certain now the permit could go no farther. He had another thirty yards to go, if he had guessed right looking at Rudleigh’s partially emptied spool.

Wading along, he felt he was descending into the permit’s world; in knee-deep water, the small mangrove snappers, angelfish, and baby barracudas scattered before him, precise, contained creatures of perfect mobility. The brilliant blue sky was reduced to a narrow ragged band quite high overhead now and the light wavered more with the color of the sea and of estuarine shadow than that of vulgar sky. Skelton stopped and his eye followed the line back in the direction he had come. The Rudleighs were at its other end, infinitely far away.

Skelton was trying to keep his mind on the job he had set out to do. The problem was, he told himself, to go from Point A to Point B; but every breath of humid air, half sea, and the steady tidal drain through root and elliptical shadow in his ears and eyes diffused his attention. Each heron that leaped like an arrow out of his narrow slot, spiraling invisibly into the sky, separated him from the job. Shafts of light in the side channels illuminated columns of pristine, dancing insects.

Very close now. He released the line so that if his appearance at the dead end terrified the permit there would not be sufficient tension for the line to break. The sides of the mangrove slot began to yield. Skelton stopped.

An embowered, crystalline tidal pool: the fish lay exhausted in its still water, lolling slightly and unable to right itself. It cast a delicate circular shadow on the sand bottom. Skelton moved in and the permit made no effort to rescue itself; instead, it lay nearly on its side and watched Skelton approach with a steady, following eye that was, for Skelton, the last straw. Over its broad, virginal sides a lambent, moony light shimmered. The fish seemed like an oval section of sky — yet sentient and alert, intelligent as tide.

He took the permit firmly by the base of its tail and turned it gently upright in the water. He reached into its mouth and removed the hook from the cartilaginous operculum. He noticed that the suddenly loosened line was not retrieved: Rudleigh hadn’t even the sense to keep tension on the line.

By holding one hand under the permit’s pectoral fins and the other around the base of its tail, Skelton was able to move the fish back and forth in the water to revive it. When he first tentatively released it, it teetered over on its side, its wandering eye still fixed upon him. He righted the fish again and continued to move it gently back and forth in the water; and this time when he released the permit, it stayed upright, steadying itself in equipoise, mirror sides once again purely reflecting the bottom. Skelton watched a long while until some regularity returned to the movement of its gills.

Then he cautiously — for fear of startling the fish — backed once more into the green tidal slot and turned to head for the skiff. Rudleigh had lost his permit.

The line was lying limp on the bottom. Why didn’t the fool at least retrieve it? With this irritation, Skelton began to return to normal. He trudged along the creek, this time against the tide; and returned to the skiff.

The skiff was empty.

* * *

The search for the Rudleighs was long and exhausting. The only thing Tom Skelton could imagine was that they had gone wading for shells and been caught by the tide among the mangroves, unable to return to the skiff. Because of the variation in depths, he could not use the engine and had instead to continue poling among the little keys. His search was very thorough; and when he had finished with it, he was no longer able to imagine that the tide had caught them shelling. His mind began to cling to a sequence of horrific conjectures … water-swollen bodies tangled in the stems of brain corals, for instance; Ma and Pa Rudleigh goggling in Davey Jones’s locker.

The sun was starting down; and to the west he could see the navy aircraft landing lights in the dusk. He simply could not think of another thing to do. He decided to return to the dock and contact the Coast Guard. He started the engine and ran toward Key West. The military aircraft were coming in with regularity, their lights streaming.

His hands were blistered, and hurt against the steering wheel. He quartered, down sea, running wide open, and the boat twisted sharply when the forefoot dug, twisting the wheel against his blistered hands.

Skelton landed the boat and tied it quickly; it was the end of his first day of professional guiding. He had no trophies to send to the taxidermist in Miami; he had lost both the fish and his clients.

He ran inside the bait shack. Myron Moorhen, the accountant, was sitting at the desk poring over long yellow sheets under a gooseneck lamp. “Cart said you was to come across the street soon as you came in. He’s in the lounge.”

“I’ve got a problem—”

“That’s what it’s about.”

Skelton looked at him for a long moment, then headed for Roosevelt Boulevard. It was a warm night, ready for rain, and the headlights on the street streamed a wet, lactic yellow while he waited to cross. He ran between cars, hearing sudden brakes, and ran into the entryway of the Sandpiper Lounge, stopping in the air-conditioned near-darkness to get his bearings.

The bar was in front of him, five rows of bottles against a mirror with a fluorescent light over them; and perhaps a dozen people at the bar. Beyond the bar were the rest rooms, marked with the profile of a ballerina on one, a top hat and cane on the other. Johnny Mathis sang from the jukebox, sounding as if he’d swallowed an intra-uterine coil.

Out of the men’s room stepped Nichol Dance. He walked not very steadily to the bar and joined Cart, the Rudleighs, and Roy the dockmaster, whose bandages bulged his already enormous midriff.

Tom Skelton began to track back through his mind. He remembered the skiff passing in two directions off the reef line that afternoon. It would have been Cart and Nichol; he remembered back in the mangroves, on Nichol’s fortieth suicide attempt, that talk about their overcrowded profession, only now, he realized, directed at him. Roy the dockmaster never died and Nichol never went to Raiford; and Tom Skelton was evidently no longer a guide.

Rudleigh spotted him standing in the doorway and saluted him with a cocktail.

Skelton turned quickly out of sight into the entryway, leaned against the cigarette machine a moment looking out onto the boulevard. It was dark and the rain had thrown a huge corolla around the moon. Skelton’s mind had just locked and was letting the finest thin stream of information in, a little at a time. Over the low crown of hill in the gleaming road, the smeared yellow lights mounted and dropped toward him out of a canyon of useless small businesses and franchised outrages. When you were down and out in Hotcakesland, there were always monuments of smut upon which to rest the mind. He looked at his hands.