Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“So, I guess I’ll be on my way.”

“Okay, so long.”

Skelton got up and excused himself, squeezed past Nichol Dance and out the door, and ran down the lane toward Margaret Street. “Miranda! Wait up!”

Dance, bemused, sat and wondered when the last time was he could say he’d had some honest-to-god credence, and not the kind of cheapjack reasonable facsimile thereof he’d just brought out for display.

* * *

Intelligent morning: Indian river orange juice, thousand-times-washed Levi’s, perfect Cuban guayabera shirt, Eric Clapton on the radio, sunlight swimming the walls, cucarachas running a four-forty in the breadbox, mockingbirds doing an infinitely delicate imitation of mockingbirds. Yes, gentlemen, there is next to nothing; but I’m going to have fun anyway.

Now simply for the hell of it, let’s see what Jesus is up to today. Skelton the Bible jock pulled down his Good Book and read for a half hour to see what would catch the mind. A sunshine morning for ordering a skiff, radio daydreams, and Bible reading. Better wake Miranda. Matthew 9:13. I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous.

“Miranda honey!”

“Turn down the radio, Tom, just a little.”

“If you say.”

“Just a little. Thanks. Who is that?”

“Derek and the Dominos.”

“What time is it?”

“Seven-thirty. Want some Cheerios?”

“Sure, let me dress now, I’ve just got time. Seventh-grade geography in an hour.”

Skelton the spy: the gloom of women dressing. The swell of buttocks where they glide into back, vanishing under swoop of Indian cotton blouse. Turn for sleepy smile. Demiglobes of breast in blouse, pale half of moon belly, gone under the advance of mother-of-pearl buttons. It is summer in Russia; I am preparing for a mortal duel in a swoon of girls. Miranda the pale.

Skelton bent to the raining Cheerios. Calm yourself. Love, knowledge, Jesus, ocean, cunt, and harmless victory. Try to think of more things at once. A richness of reference. Old friends of the family smothering in W-2 forms. I have wiped my butt with a sheet of personal numerals. What was Count Tolstoy’s social security number? If you don’t answer that in one second, the Republic is Dead.

Miranda came in from the fresh air.

“Who are those men out there?”

“Winos.”

“Do they always march?”

“Just recently.”

Sometimes from the hotel you could hear ping-pong players, radios, cats, fighting, seagulls, and the failure of simple machinery. The hotel was surrounded and in effect seized by vegetation in every form; and on winter days the wind would occasionally bend each leaf at a certain angle to the sun and the whole would seem to combust with vegetable light and glitter. The drunks responded to this magnificence and moved about the miserable lawn, eyes squinted, in an impressive rummy minuet.

Skelton remembered singing in kindergarten:

“The Blue Danube Waltz,

By Strauss, By Strauss…”

“Well, I have to go. Do I look all right?”

“You look great.”

“Don’t have my books. I’ll wing it in geography.”

“Tell them the Miami oölite doesn’t run southwest of Big Pine.”

“Can’t. We’re still on the East Coast alluvial shelf. Besides, what you say isn’t quite true. You’re thinking of Key Largo limestone.”

“Sure felt good!” Skelton said at the door.

Said Miranda, “I’ll see you at Mallory dock one of these days.”

Nine o’clock. Thomas Skelton started for Powell’s Boat Shop. He was feeling the first wonder of living in a town where there is someone who wouldn’t mind killing you. That truly gave a community subjective structure. They laughed at my killer dildo when I drove deep into the lasagna. Pipkins of menace were scattered on the Navajo. Yes, thought Skelton, I am giddy with anticipation and not in the least slowed down by seven instances of having my ashes hauled in the previous eight hours.

* * *

Powell was idling in the front of his shop, fitting a replacement iron to an eight-inch lignum-vitae jack plane. He looked up over his glasses.

“Is what I hear true?”

“About what?”

“Nichol’s skiff?”

“Not hardly.” Tom smiled.

“Hm.”

Powell brushed the sawdust off his bench, then set the jack plane next to two sharply radiused rock-maple spar planes, their irons bright under a coat of 3-in-One oil.

“Are you building now, James?”

“Nosuh.”

“Feel like it?”

“Do I feel like building what, Tom?”

“Guide skiff.”

“Well, can you pay for it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I expect old Dance is going to be in here after one as soon as he hears from the inshawrance.”

“Well, this is a firm order, James.”

Powell put down the plane and picked up a broad carpenter’s pencil and a pad of paper from Tropical Sheet Metal on Green Street. Skelton was dizzy with pleasure.

They laid the skiff out along the firm edges of Skelton’s daydreams, not in any way sparing the horses. They would start with a rough glass hull sent down from the mainland, build it up, and finish it.

“It’s the hull I want, James. It rides rough and has too steep an entry forward. But it poles good. It won’t sail and still floats in dew.”

“What does the hull look like when we get it?”

“Rough.”

“Is it cut down to the shear line?”

“No. There’s a scribe.”

“I guess I’ll go through a bunch of saber-saw blades. What about the transom?”

“Twenty-one inches.”

“Well, I can electroplane that to where we need it. What about live wells?”

“They come attached. The ones I’ve seen were through-bolted in five places and glassed directly to the transom.”

“All right. Now let’s lay the sonofabitch out. You want to do it in half-inch?”

“No, three-quarter.”

“That stuff goes for an arm and a leg now!”

Skelton’s happiness was hard to hide. When you thought there was nothing, this was one of the things there was. For example.

He sketched on the scratch pad for a few minutes.

“That’s how I want it aft: three hatches with interconnected waterways routed in a taper so they drain to the sump—”

“All right.”

“—and all hardware flush-mounted to a drive fit—”

“All right.”

“—and maybe a half-inch overhang above that aft bulkhead.”

“All right.”

“Now in the corners of that same bulkhead, let’s run the self-bailing drainage through PVC pipe, you know, right through the dry storage and into the sump like the waterways.”

“All right.”

“Now gunwales. Average width about seven inches, faired back from the forward casting deck to the live-well lids.”

“You want it all flush, right? No drop to the casting deck?”

“None. The fuel is forward. The controls are forward. So the forward bulkhead is vented; and the overflow is starboard a few inches under the gunwale.”

“All right. Let me tote up the materials and we’ll make that your deposit. Have I got your telephone number?”

“It’s in the book. — Now, anything there that throws you? — I’m just asking.”

“I’ve laid a thousand miles of teak on a radius. This here is all right angles and butt blocks. There isn’t a Dutchman in that kind of work when yours truly is the carpenter. So save your last question for some jackleg of your acquaintance.”

* * *

Skelton stepped up onto the porch and looked under the net. His father was sound asleep, a volume of Huizinga on his chest; he seemed not so much to have dozed off as to be in a deep, granitic slumber from which he could not easily have awakened.