Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

In the kitchen, his mother was reading Brillat-Savarin, learning about what his grandfather, the high-leaping Goldsboro Skelton, would call nigger food. It was surprising to find her home in the afternoon, or at least, home alone. She had so many friends whom she served as confessor and adviser. Her contact and its attendant gusts of energy created addiction among her coevals for whom she was the sole connection.

“Daddy looks exhausted.”

“He is!”

Skelton looked at her. Her hair was turned up in a twist behind, a vigorous, plaited gray.

“Meaning what?”

“Your father has been out all-night-long.”

“Come on.”

“You walked into the house at the moment I thought to tell you. Another half hour and I would have changed my mind.”

“Is this the first time?”

“No. It’s been going on for months.”

Skelton asked with fear: “What does he do.”

“I suspect it’s a girlfriend. I suppose sex is the only thing that would make me get up after seven months of making an ass of myself.”

She loved to get Skelton on the edge of his seat so that every word dropped like a stone on a sheet of tin. Counterploy:

“He could be performing Acts of Christian Mercy,” he said.

“Maybe he’s learning to be a fishing guide,” she said, taking the trick.

“I’m not the one who isn’t keeping him at home.”

“What other unkindness pops into your mind?”

“You started it.”

Glowering rises and fades.

Finally Skelton inquired, “What’s his explanation?”

“He doesn’t know I know. I haven’t really … I mean I can’t quite think what to say. For all I know, he’s been out every night since he first got into that…”

“Bassinet.”

* * *

No mother dog turning an expectant nose to a garbage pail filled from top to bottom with racks of spring lamb ever felt a surer sense of unoccluded fortune than Skelton contemplating his skiff, Miranda, and his father abroad in the night. As to this last, yes, it was a mixed blessing. Perhaps he was having at a tart in the lower purlieus of Duval; perhaps her name was Mona and she drowned a man at the Muff Diver’s Ball instead of merely washing his face as her calling card promised. And yes, the infidelities of an aging lame from a Key West bassinet were a sorry prospect when the lame was your very own progenitor. But there is a life that is not a life, in which the more adamant obstructions of the heart masquerade as loss, dreams, or carburetor trouble. A silent man wastes his own swerve of molecules; just as a bee “doing its number on the flower” is as gone to history as if it never was. The thing and its expression are to be found shaking hands at precisely that point where Neverneverland and Illyria collide with the Book of Revelation under that downpour of grackle droppings that is the present at any given time.

Skelton was walking to his grandfather’s office on Eaton Street on a morning so full of heat and light that traffic seemed composed of wet, swollen cars. A carpenter rebuilding a porch along Skelton’s way dropped his wrecking bar and it rang like a bell. With each breath you got more for your money. He passed the library where thoughtful ladies held the fort and said good morning to a man carrying a cockatoo in a white enameled cage; no one could have avoided the resemblance of the ring-like brilliant eyes of the cockatoo to those of its owner. The bird made some snarky remark; and Skelton gave it a small compulsive wave, regretting it immediately.

Skelton had no way of knowing that the man’s name was also Thomas Skelton (no kin), though he had seen the name in the telephone book and wondered if it mightn’t be some distant connection of his family’s (not).

When the sun first assembles itself over the broken skyline of Key West on a morning of great humidity, a thunderous light fills the city and everyone moves in stately flotation through streets that are conduits of something empyrean. Also, things can get sweaty.

* * *

James Powell, the Boatbuilder, had called with the cost of materials and Skelton was going to take his grandfather up on his kind offer of cash money.

The “Skelton Building” on Eaton Street was a two-story frame house whose formerly domestic rooms were now the world’s most gerrymandered office, with the stenographer, for example, working out of an upstairs bedroom filled with war-surplus filing cabinets; and an accountant with the only abacus in Key West busy in the old music room under a ceiling full of putti and cherubs in the school of Rubens out of The Saturday Evening Post. At one time, Goldsboro Skelton had felt the need of safes; and so whole rooms were filled with them, combinations lost and hinges rusted to inutility. In the front-hall closet, a ragged hole showed where a small Diebold Chicago Universal safe with a rainbow on its door had shot through the floor and into the cistern, probably killing frogs.

In the front hall, directly behind the front door, Bella Knowles abused visitors from a low mahogany desk whose bland surface held five Princess Phones like a relief model of the Caribbean. Every time the door opened, she was revealed in amazing proximity to people passing on the sidewalk, really only a few feet away, her eyes at rump level.

Goldsboro Skelton himself ran his curious and impalpable island empire from an old water closet, a generous one of the Victorian years, whose pipes and dainty crapper had been replaced with horizontal writing surfaces for the signing of checks and those letters of business which in a republic more perfect than the one here in Hotcakesland would be actionable matters of extortion.

“Hello, Thomas,” said Bella Knowles. “I suppose you’re here for money.”

“Do you.”

“Aren’t you?”

“What?”

“Here for money?”

“Are you talking to me?”

“Yes!”

“Oh … here for money? No no no. To see my grandfather, Missus uh…”

“Knowles.”

“Right. And uh anything transpiring between my grandfather and I is just liable to be none of your business!”

“Now, now.”

“Is he alone?”

“Yes he is.”

“I’ll just go in then.”

“I’ll buzz him.”

“Don’t bother.”

“I’LL JUST BUZZ HIM.”

“Well, whatever gets you off, Missus…”

“Knowles.”

“Hey! I read that the hubby’s being released from Cuba—”

“Yes he is.”

“Gee, I suppose it’s been awful with the uh cat away so long.”

“Awful.”

In the imperceptible moment of actual crossing of the grandfather’s threshold, Skelton realized he was off on the wrong foot; and he quickly balanced the irritation with the fact that James Powell had ordered the materials.

“Sit down, Tom. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Skelton waited standing until his grandfather looked up from his papers with a wordless interrogative glance.

“Well, the boat is underway,” Skelton said with, for some reason, embarrassment. There was a pause.

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

“James Powell is starting my guide skiff.”

“Right…?”

“Well, you said you would lend me the money.”

“When?” he said, quick. “When did I say that?”

“The other night,” said Skelton nearly inaudible.

“Oh God, let me look through my books here a sec.”

“If you don’t want to lend me the money, say so.”

Goldsboro Skelton leaped up in a rage: “I just bailed you out of the damn jail! How much do you want from an old man!”

Skelton walked out, passing Bella Knowles hurrying into the office. When Skelton was safely gone, she asked, “Was it about money?”

Well, face it, Skelton thought, you’re screwed. How dear it would have been to me, he thought, to bust the old fart in the teeth; then rip the electrical cord out of the lamp and shove it one furlong up Bella Knowles’s fundament and waggle the light switch until she blew her dentures out the skylight. Stuff like that. You know, mean.