Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” said his father. He looked at his son. “Do me a favor.”

“Name it.”

“Get off the violence. You’re too romantic to be any good at it. This bird Dance will eat you alive. He knows how to do violence and you’re a dilettante at it.”

Skelton thought with some admiration that Dance’s trick had been a well-organized bit of cruelty. The touch of authenticity had been the story of Charlie Starkweather, who Skelton remembered as a kind of anachronistic dry-gulch artist running through the West; who got wired to a Nebraska utility outlet in a metal chair by officials of the republic. Restaurants darkened and Starkweather went off like a flashbulb at Tricia’s wedding. It reduced his bulk through vaporization. He no longer fitted the electrical collar. They found him in the goodbye room like a wind-torn 1890 umbrella. A year later he might have grown Virginia creeper like a grape stake. After each electrocution, the officials of the republic get together for a real down-home Christian burial out of that indomitable American conviction that even God likes fried food.

“I didn’t know you had this affection for violence,” said his father as humor, studying his eyes gone vague beneath his Starkweather revery.

“I don’t.”

“Had you been emotionally forced into it?”

“More or less.”

“Are you going to admit it?”

“No. I’m not going to pay for it either.”

“I can’t imagine this happening among scientists.”

“I’m not a scientist and I’m not going to be one. It takes all the brains I’ve got to figure out where game fish keep themselves.”

“And you never got into these cross fires until you started reading French poets. Furthermore, when your grandfather offered to bail you out, you didn’t make yourself plausible to him by asking him to bring your Apollinaire instead.”

“Well, he didn’t know what I was talking about. Jakey Roberts gave me his copy of Swank and I read a short history of Spanish fly instead of L’Hérésiarque et Cie. ”

“Those frog lunatics have produced a generation of destructive addlepates to which I fear you appending yourself. Though I’d prefer it to your fiddling with dope, it’s a narrow choice.”

Little does he know, thought Skelton.

The two men laughed; possibly close to tears. Skelton peeled up one end of the netting and twisted it over the corner of the frame. “That’s not true.” He could look at his father.

“What’s not?” his father asked.

“About Apollinaire and the others.”

“Don’t you think?”

“I’d say Nietzsche produced more addlepates.”

“What about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky?”

“What about Kahlil Gibran?”

“What about Tex Ritter?” And so on through Father Coughlin, Darius Milhaud, Stockhausen, Donald Duck, Baba Ram Dass, Lenin, a certain Bürgermeister in a Milwaukee beer ad, guitar fops from the hideous 1960s, Thomas Edison — and more laughter. Then, mock serious, his father took up his violin and played the opening of Corrinne Corrina hillbilly style and beautiful. Skelton lit a powdery Dutch cigar and listened in a swoon of those sad clodhopper strains, dying day, newspaper boys yelling faintly as they filled their baskets; a swoon that was as much as anything a part of his more than trifling instinct for some kind of topographical perspective upon his own life, as against a vision of cycling chemicals in a closed system that somehow never explained the attrition of the things that ail you.

He could hear the quarterback now calling signals in the new style: “Blue! Right! Get back! Eighty! Red!” Snap. The play was underway. The quarterback rolled out in a fake draw.

* * *

Skelton’s grandfather stepped onto the porch in a fog of cooking smells and looked across at the two of them talking with an air of reconnaissance. He made a minute adjustment of his shoulders before coming over.

“What happened to your nose, Gramp?” Skelton asked. His grandfather raised fingers to the swollen bridge.

“Damn trunk lid on my Coupe de Ville popped up and got my beezer.”

A hand reached out of the bed, tugged the mosquito netting free, and drew it down over the opening. A moment later, they heard the television; Green Bay had the ball on their own forty-nine.

“Guess who I just had a drink with,” said the grandfather to Skelton.

“Can’t.”

“Nichol Dance.”

“Ah, then.”

“Now I had had a look into that boy’s insurance situation and learned he wasn’t going to be out a dime. So, I told him if he wanted you in court I would see him in hell first but I would at least run him clean out of Monroe County on a rail. I asked him, I said, ‘Mr. Dance, are you a gambler?’ And he said no he was not and so I told him, ‘Mr. Dance, let the insurance company handle your woes.’ I had backed myself up with a transcript of his criminal record. I suppose you know he is vicious.”

“I guess I did.”

“Anyway, he is a lively boy with a mean streak in him. But he listens to reason. He’s part of the community and so he’ll have to do like I told him.”

“Do you want a chair?”

“No. — Now what were you doing with his boat?”

“Guiding.”

“You haven’t dropped that yet?”

“Not going to.”

“How much would it cost to have your own boat?”

“About four grand if you have it built and powered right.”

“You want me to stake you?”

“Sure. Ha. Ha.”

“How would you pay me back? And don’t laugh so fast.”

“Out of my guiding fees.”

“I’d doubt that except Dance told me you’d make a great skiff guide. I guess you’re on.”

When Skelton’s grandfather meant every word he was saying, he talked to you belly to belly, eyes looking through yours; if he had a drink, he crimped it high and close and emphasized his sentences by the gentle knuckle bumps against your sternum. He was a winning man, so far from schizophrenia that a thousand pitiful losers knew no more than to give him their money. Skelton’s father, listening, said, “Generation after generation, the blind leading the blind. It gives them something to do.”

* * *

In his back yard and under a tortuous, unleafed poinciana, Nichol Dance was removing slabs of amberjack from a tray of brine and laying them across rough wire racks inside a gutted refrigerator that he used as a smoker. He was feeling stupid, real dumb in fact.

He had a good little fire of buttonwood coals going and the rich dark amberjack would smoke down to just the right moisture. But he was making work for himself, filleting and brining all that fish meat; and, in general, not feeling very bright, maybe even, you know, dumb.

What I need, he thought, is some credence; because damned if I’m not getting pushed out of shape around here. Skiff all burnt to shit and that old crud telling me to wait on the insurance. Damn.

And now work to do. Bad but necessary work to do based on his and Carter’s dismal, yes he saw that now, dismal and stupid joke that he as well as anybody knew was so steeped in locker-room fatuity that when it backfired and his boat went up in flames, he and Cart, unable to escape the joke, had instead to hunt all over that canal, pistol in hand tumid with their own shared rage, vacant as any emotion based in property.

But Dance was convinced that there was a necessity independent of what was right. Sometimes you did a wrong thing but then it was done and there you were. Damned if you weren’t — so best thing was, just rest your ass. The time to take your lumps would soon enough be at hand. Dance wished he hadn’t set Skelton up like he had; but it was done and now he had to follow through. He thought he was a nice enough boy. Nichol Dance truly hoped he wouldn’t have to waste him.