Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

So the pistol was slipped into the front of his pants, butt to the right, and a short-sleeved shirt (blue porpoises on a white background) outside his trousers concealed it all. Naturally, the pistol was uncomfortable; but it was credence and collateral in the most liquid form he knew. It answered the problem of what came in handy when you had to follow through.

He stopped on the way out and looked at himself in the oval hall window. What’s happening to this boy? he wondered.

Sometimes, he thought, you just wander around not feeling very smart and your clothes aren’t sharp and your car is a loser and you know you haven’t done a thing you will be remembered for and you haven’t got no more sense than a curbstone nor brains enough to come in out of the rain or quit playing the dumb gags that only lead from one atrocity to the next. And you just feel dumb.

In the drive, he stopped and felt the south wind lifting the trees, warm as Cuba, and knew the fish were rolling in the channels, young moon and easy tides. I’m a boy without a future, he thought with a smile. I bought a Ford when I should’ve bought a Chevrolet.

* * *

Skelton and Miranda met at Mallory pier for sunset. A red sun was palpably completing its arc to the left of Man and Woman keys; in another couple of months, it would drop off by Mule and Archer keys. It would be hours after dinner and scratch-baseball games would be audible all through the city. Now a crowd of freaks waited for this thing to happen.

“Are you still upset?”

“About your old boyfriend? No. Not too much. Will I always have to be used to that?”

“Not if it’s important.”

There was an old converted liberty ship, now of Grand Cayman registry. A cucumber boat, someone said. It was moored at the fuel dock. Three muscular men in T-shirts hung over the fantail looking at the sunset hippie girls loose-titted in their ersatz Oshkosh By Gosh work rags. The conch-salad man glided by yelling “When you’re hot you’re hot! When you’re not, you’re not!” to strengthen his claims for the aphrodisiacal qualities of the conch salad he sold from the front basket of his bike.

“If he’s right about that conch salad,” Skelton said, “it’s the last thing these crazy fuckers need.”

The hot red sun began to penetrate the pale curve of sea, flaring optically at the thin line of division; the line gradually rose until only the smallest flame rested on the horizon; and snuffed. Applause rose.

“Come to my place tonight,” said Skelton.

“If you’d like.”

They walked up Caroline and cut across Margaret to Skelton’s block. There was a south wind and Skelton was saying that with these new-moon tides there ought to be some fish moving. Miranda told him that she thought — she said it pleasantly — that he ought to be able to enjoy a south wind, the new moon, and swimming fish without having to go out and catch something.

“Pretty esoteric.”

“What kind of music are you going to woo me with?”

“Pachanga from Radio Free Habana.”

Miranda had a springy step. Let us compare her mouth, thought Skelton, to a delicate section of tangerine. Who said that kissing was sucking on a thirty-foot tube the last five feet of which were full of shit? It was not to the point who said it. Right frame of mind, he thought, surreptitiously looking at the lovely young girl, I’d bite on either end.

Pausing sternly across from Key West Oxygen and Ambulance, Skelton swept Miranda into his arms and sucked at the tangerine-like end of the thirty-foot tube, never heeding what might have been at its other end, doubtless rising slowly toward his mouth.

They turned into Skelton’s lane; where a car was parked at the lane’s junction with Margaret Street. Skelton walked another twenty feet before he stopped and looked back at the car. Its frenched headlights, bubble skirts, dummy baby spotlights, tinted glass, bull-nosed hood, and rust declared it to be Nichol Dance’s.

“Miranda, you’re gonna have to go.”

“How come? I just walked ten blocks.”

“I can’t take the chance,” said Skelton half to himself.

“Shall I have my tubes tied?”

“That isn’t what I mean,” he said, staring past and around the car. “The truth is, Miranda, there’s a man around here belongs to that car who doesn’t like me.”

“You’re worried.”

“I really am.” Maybe he was.

“Wouldn’t you like me to wait.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay … be careful.”

“It’s not that serious, Miranda. It certainly may not be, in any case.”

“Okay…”

“I hate to miss out, I mean…”

“You’ll get another shot,” she said, adding though, “Possibly not.” She started down the lane for Margaret Street. Now Skelton just put his hands in his pockets and thought, Where is that sly mother hiding himself.

The shadows lay this way and that, the way a tide will carry on a particularly shaped bottom, bulging and deepening and only holding fish in specific places. Or the way six grandmothers will fall when simultaneously struck by lightning.

So Skelton watched that way, at the ledges of shadow behind the wino hotel, behind the pile of dry-rotted cypress planking and iron salvage; and for long moments, he just looked for motion. And tried not to think of trifles.

Violence. Why did this stillness go so well with violence? Like cupping your ear in the high wind to make a pocket of quiet. The palm leaves moved and sent bony fingers of shadow across the ground; and detailed shadows gave way to vacancy. And notionally, you see your spirit escape like smoke from a familiar corpse.

He slipped over alongside the car and looked inside. Nothing. A bonefish net lay across the back seat. A curved plane of reflected moonlight divided the dashboard into bright and dark isosceles triangles.

Where is that hillbilly sonofabitch, or whatever he is. That Hoosier dipshit.

Skelton decided to just go in the house and wait and see. Lock the door, locate a well-made paring knife that was destined to see other than cucumber in this karma. Lift an eye to the sill and get the drop on that crime monger.

I suppose you know he’s vicious.

No one was in the yard either. He looked next door. There were three lighted windows in the hotel, each with a silhouetted wino like a playing card. I bid three winos.

The boat burns once more in his mind. All that Nichol Dance owned, with the gas tank blowing sideways through the hull. Quicksink, scream of superheated gas, destruction bubbles, loss.

The boat sails against the moon, a gunman in the bow, sails and circles into the light, into the dark, into the light. The creak of his own breath.

Skelton opened the door of the fuselage and went in.

Nichol Dance said, “Turn on the light and sit down.”

“How’re you doing?” Skelton asked. Dance was doing his level best to look like the Antichrist.

“Not bad, not bad. Lost my boat. But apart from that, not too awful.”

“What’s the gun for?”

“I just wanted you to see what I would blow your head off with if you ever tried to guide out of any dock west of Marathon. Now you gawn and fill in the blanks.”

“Big Pine, Little Torch, Sugarloaf, Key West.”

“Amo ignore your little shit-ass joke and about halfway assume you got this deal crystal-clear,” Dance said, frittering with the Colt’s hammer.

“Right you are.”

Dance was thinking, He understands me but it don’t seem I got all that much credence.

“I have notched thisere pistol oncet,” he said meagerly.

“Yes, yes I heard.”

Dance was momentarily unable to speak. He felt that in using the killing of the exercise boy to establish credence here he had made a lie of all his penitence.