Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“I’d just love to!”

“All right now.”

“I’ll be there, Ma, with bells on.”

“But be here.”

* * *

“The French have a word for it,” remarked his grandfather, his back toward the woman as he mixed a drink; presently he turned and proffered the grog. “I call it pussy.” His hands closed before him in a prayerful shape.

“I know you do, Goldsboro.”

They were in old man Skelton’s exercise room, whose variety of health machines seemed compromised by the presence of a well-stocked bar.

“I call it that because it is candid to call it that and I am a candid man because I have nothing to hide.”

“You won’t get a whole lot of agreement about that in Key West, Goldsboro,” said the lady. She was fifty and heavy. Her name was Bella Knowles. Her husband, an insurance broker who dabbled in gunrunning, now made his home on the Isle of Pines.

He said, “I was trying out that tone before I talk to my grandson. I have got to set that little smartbutt on the straight and narrow or he will end up in a bassinet like his old man.”

“You should have let him go to jail rather than hang out with charter-boat fishermen.”

“Hurry up with your drink. I’m fixing to carry on.” He sat on the edge of the trampoline that dominated the room. Light from high, milky windows flooded into the little gym.

“I’ll sip as long as I please.”

“Long as you sip fast!”

“You’re talking to a lady and the only one you’ll ever get.” Goldsboro Skelton rolled the medicine ball off the tremulous surface of the trampoline; it slumped to the floor.

“Well…”

The strange couple — the etiolated, successful crook and the rounded helpmeet of an imprisoned gunrunner — undressed without ceremony, the rickety and the ample in curious counterpart as they bent to slide off socks.

Playfully, Goldsboro Skelton, Cuban bullet holes still dimpling his hind end, mounted the trampoline and began to hop around, veinous fists clenched next to his ears in simple heroics. Now he was making some fairly impressive leaps, not ignored by Bella Knowles. She joined him.

At first they bounced in an irregular pattern, Skelton going up at the moment Bella touched down. They stopped for a moment toe to toe and fiddled with one another, and then began to bound again, this time in the same rhythm. As they each looked at the leaping and speeding against the far wall, Goldsboro Skelton was an arrow of capability to Bella Knowles, a pinksurge of desire.

Beneath them, the black iron perimeter of the trampoline enlarged and contracted with their bounds. The thousands of springs that held its canvas surface squeaked like lemmings, unlubed harquebus locks or tholepins.

Then they collided, recoiled apart, bounced each unequally through high air to a delirium of limbs, glanced off the trampoline, and crashed to the floor.

They lay without motion. Reassured gym flies began to whirl in the light of the high windows once more. At that moment, Goldsboro Skelton’s grandson was reading the part in Pliny’s Natural History where the swell of tide at moon’s rising among the stars is described. And in other respects, life went on, though it seemed largely unassured here in the gym.

Presently Goldsboro Skelton began to crawl immediately behind his own nosebleed toward Bella Knowles. When he got to her he looked at her open eyes above the terribly fattened lip. Skelton staggered to his feet for a glass of water, which he held tenderly to her mouth. “The French have a word for this,” he remarked with some preoccupation.

“What is it, you cheesy piece of bung fodder?” Bella Knowles inquired.

* * *

At dusk, the light can’t get much past Carlos’s market on Elizabeth Street; so when you walk down Eaton to go to Skelton’s mother’s house, and look down William Street or Elizabeth Street, the shrimp boats are crowded hugely in the shadow of those streets while the clouds of gulls above them soar in sunlight; and on the corners, palm leaves that are piled for pickup and that rattle all day with lizards in the warmth now are cool and quiet.

When you pass the corner of Simonton, the mail trucks are backed up to bays that are closed with corrugated doors, and at least one boy is doing a figure eight in the quiet parking lot on his bicycle; and the glass and iron pineapples on the gate at the Carriage Trade look like scarabs held in old silver.

Duval Street, crowded and Latin all day, now seems filled with space and breeze, serenely modified by a taxicab spinning along in golden light; and the ticket seller at the dirty-movie house graciously promises the drill sergeant “no less than twenty fuck scenes.” From a boat, Key West would seem to have shrunk once more unto the sea. And the few boats that have gone out to night drift for tarpon in the channels carry their red and green running lights through the blackness sweetly.

Dinner would still be transpiring at his parents’ house, borne upon crazy accusations by his grandfather and Dada rebuttals by his father; his mother taking a view not less than Olympian of this particular, by now ancient, squabble.

So Skelton slipped into their garage and got his fishing rod, walked half a block to the corner of Front Street to the Dos Amigos bar, had a single bourbon and water, shot one maladroit game of eight-ball with a counterrevolutionary Cuban shrimper who claimed to be able to navigate from here to the north coast of Haiti without chart or sounding because “I am a Key West captain”; then took up his rod and crossed Front Street at last light and walked down to the pocket beach that lay between the fabric factory and Tony’s restaurant.

It was dark and warm as summer, and tarpon were assailing bait under the restaurant lights; there were maybe a couple of dozen fish striking the lit-up water and shrimp were clearing the water completely and kicking out into the darkness.

Directly above the fish, on the corner of a balustrade, a man in a white dinner jacket was pressing at a girl in a gown, hauling her against the iron balcony, mashing into her with his face and holding his cocktail perfectly balanced out over the ocean without looking at it.

“Natalie.”

“Gordon.”

Skelton climbed out onto the transom of a half-beached skiff and chopped a cast right into the working bait from his lair in the darkness. He made one strip and came up tight on a tarpon. The heavy fish just held its own a moment, trying to think what had happened; then it vaulted high and terrific into the light, right up clear to where its gills rattled alongside the balustrade.

Gordon spun; and Natalie dropped her jaw. Gordon glanced ornery into his empty glass, looked at Skelton’s line trailing into the darkness, and led “Nat” to an empty table inside, his moment quite gone.

Skelton cupped the reel handles, broke the fish off, reeled up; and headed back to the house feeling an exquisite synthesis of spirit and place. His grandfather would possibly be there with his secretary, Bella Knowles, rotating her wry, discerning face and the spit curls that had adorned her temples for nearly forty years. Skelton wondered how many gallons of saliva that must have required.

He walked in through the gate without knocking. At the end of the porch, he could see his grandfather without his secretary eating in the lighted breakfast room. His father was on the porch, beneath his netting; with the television shoved under one end. He pulled up an iron chair and sat next to his father, who in a moment glanced at Skelton and said, “Green Bay missed the extra point.” A few minutes later, he leaned forward and turned down the sound. “Green Bay has got great flankers,” he told his son. “But Jesus, Macarthur Lane is some running-back. He’s got these lateral moves right at the line of scrimmage that don’t seem physically possible. — Watch now: this close to the end zone, the linebackers will be keying off the running-backs.” Touchdown. The linebackers keyed off the running-backs; but the quarterback threw the ball.