Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

When Skelton’s grandfather most kindly bailed him out and Skelton had returned Jakey Roberts’s copy of Swank to him and turned down his grandfather’s doubtlessly well-meant suggestion that they talk, and gone home to his fuselage, his private stock of hell-fire began to rise as volatile as rubbing spirits from the surfaces of his life.

Thou fool.

The odds and ends that lay around the interior of the fuselage, formerly in a skein of intimate connections that did not exclude himself, all began to separate amid cool segments of space. He felt the precise bevel at which his teeth rested against each other; and his hands lay in his lap within an invisible display case.

Hold on now, he told himself, no barking. For two hours he managed the control he needed, sitting as quietly at his breakfast table as a gyroscope. And then slowly the tramp of drilling winos came through his leafy window; and he wept with gratitude. When he had finished that, the salt and pepper shakers rejoined themselves to the table; the skein of connections returned and his hands sweated in one another’s grasp.

He stepped outside, out to his garden fence, into the heart of the uproar. Standing by the hedge of uncleared vegetation, oleander cresting up out of it around one scrawny but wildly productive lime tree, he was pointblank to the marchers lurching mustily from left to right, while the drill sergeant marched backward ahead of them, surveying their primitive efforts with apoplectic eyes. Directly in front of Skelton, a younger, livelier wino passed; and each time the command changed, this wino found himself separated a few more feet from the others. Partly it was that he threw a good deal of florid body English into his marching; after each command, he would hunch his shoulders suddenly and stylishly like Fred Astaire, and slope further out of line. Finally, the drill sergeant stopped everything and realigned the preoccupied marcher, addressing him as “Fuckah!” in a lyrical tenor.

This kind of punctuating sight welded Skelton to reality as succinctly as an accident; but it drifted gauzily from his mind and he was isolated once more behind the hedge, irritably blinded by the glare of light off the fuselage. As usual, he looked at the lines in his palms.

Now this too: if his grandfather had not been in such a goddamn hurry, he could have got a bondsman to make his bail and been done with the thing until his trial. Instead, there would have to be a conference with the old dizzard in which the shit was perfectly certain to hit the fan.

Finally, the younger wino was expelled from the march. He was out of breath.

“You’re the one lives in the bomb,” he said, pointing to the fuselage. Skelton nodded.

“Yes, that’s me.”

The young man said, raising his fingers to a seemingly deliquescent cheek: “My grandfather was decorated in the First World War.”

“Oh yes…”

“Ask me why he was decorated.”

“Why was he decorated?”

“I don’t know.”

Skelton thought: I want to live on the bottom of the sea. Nincompoops assault me in squads. The younger wino went off, taking the sergeant aside, and was pointing at Skelton; probably telling him: Commie, or meter smasher.

The sergeant came over. He had a peaceful, phlegmatic face, the face of a herbivore. “What’s your game?” he asked.

“I’m a moonshiner.”

“Well, more power to you. We’re running a works of our own up in the joint there. I made the coil myself. Last batch I run off kicked the hydrometer out on the floor. It was like rocket fuel.”

“I’d like to try it.”

“I’d offer you a drop; but these useless mothers over here have went through it quick as snot on a bottle. A man went blind here before I took over the still. But I run a tight, clean ship.”

Skelton looked over at the useless mothers. They were milling among fallen palm leaves, quite as lost as babies in the shadow of a half-boarded-up house with a moonshine works in its attic.

Well, thought Skelton, life looked straight in the eye was insupportable, as everyone knew by instinct. The great trick, contrary to the consensus of philosophy, is to avoid looking it straight in the eye. Everything askance and it all shines on.

But in general he felt recovered; or in any event, at rest in a reasonably cool aftermath. He went inside to take out the trash, adding everything conceivably trash to the contents of the galvanized barrel, including a painting Spacey Tracy, the Day-Glo Dago, had given him on Simonton Street, depicting a tall thermos bottle standing in a field of breath mints. This same artist had done a series of “contemporary” portraits of historical figures. Kafka as remittance man. Van Gogh clipping coupons by the sea. Dostoevsky with a four-foot string of credit cards. San Juan de la Cruz peering out of a condominium as though room service had used cheap Triple Sec in his margarita. Into the shitcan with everything ironic for the fun of it.

* * *

Carter and Dance are in the bait shack and have told Myron Moorhen, the lickspittle accountant, to haul ass and give them the desk. They take one of his yellow legal sheets out and try to figure some way of salvaging Dance’s winter guiding schedule even though he is no longer the owner of a guide boat. First they determine how long it will take to have a new skiff built up, how long the insurance will take to settle on the old one; as against the number of days that Carter is not booked and Dance is — so that Dance can use his skiff. “There will have to be a small usage charge,” says Carter.

“Naturally, man.”

“Lemme tote this here up now.” He ran his fingernail up and down the columns of numbers.

“What do you come up with.”

“You look.”

“Hm.”

“Don’t look good.”

“Sure don’t. It looks sorta rank.”

“How’re you fixed now, Nichol.”

Dance looked at him. “How’m I fixed?”

“That’s what I ast.”

“Cart, if turkeys was goin for one cent a pound I couldn’t buy a raffle ticket on a jaybird’s ass.”

“Haw haw hawmmm.”

“If ten cent’d buy a tuxedo for a elerfunt, I couldn’t buy a T-shirt for a flea.”

“ Heeheehee. Okay now. Let’s, seriously now…”

Anyone else could have seen that Carter didn’t care about these jokes; and in his strenuous laughter for the benefit of a man who had learned or stolen everything he knew and now wanted the use of his skiff, there was the very faintest yet palpable hint of the craven.

“Are you going to get around to doing something about that boy?” Carter asked; he liked Skelton well enough, but now by Christ things were getting to be an inconvenience.

“It’s in the hands of the law,” said Dance. “I mean not that I didn’t give some thought to shooting him. But since I failed to shoot myself that day, I’ve kinda had a loss of innerest in shooting anything else.”

“Heeheeheemmmm.”

“I might could take a notion though. If this brand of irritation runs on I mean. He wasn’t a bad kind of a kid.”

“He wanted to guide.”

“I know, I know.”

Suddenly Carter saw how to ingratiate himself. “We was just sendin him to the school of hard knocks, Nichol!”

Now it was Dance’s turn to laugh. The little joke was such a success that it pushed Carter clear through to the other side of his mild instinct for ingratiation. He thought again of Skelton and the schooling they had given him; and did not feel particularly good about it. Nevertheless, as a major-league brown-nose, he was unprepared to investigate the emotion.

* * *

The phone rang and he ran back into the fuselage. It was his mother. “Your grandfather would like you to come over here after dinner tonight.”