Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

Powell was in his shop fitting up a handsome little dunnage box out of teak mill ends, countersinking the screws and pegging them with plugs of mahogany dowel. Skelton was in an agony of embarrassment.

“James—”

“We’re gonna have the hull in the morning!”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Why? What?”

“The whole thing is off, James, I’m sorry.”

Powell put down his tools a little angrily.

“What’s a matter?”

“I don’t have the money.”

“What!” Powell laughed at him.

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“Your grandfather paid the whole thing this morning, material and labor in advance.”

Skelton headed for the office again, resigned to a day of embarrassment.

* * *

Myron Moorhen the accountant was at the front window of the bait shack, his fingertips indenting slightly against the glass, looking out at the rain. The rain was coming down so heavily that it no longer seemed to move. Traffic hissed. It was a hot winter day.

Carter was leaning back in a chair next to a freezer, walking a penny between his fingers. Nichol Dance stood in the open doorway, the heavy rain falling just past the end of his nose like a curtain.

Carter said, “You’ve gone soft.”

Dance, dejected, said, “Maybe so.”

“Now you’re out of it. Now what are you gonna do?”

Dance turned slowly, bored. “Caddy. I’m gonna be Jack Nicklaus’s caddy. I’ll have a V-neck sweater and at night I’ll jack off in a hankie. My life will be simple but it will be complete.”

“Come on, Nichol.”

“What do you care?”

“I care because I give you ten days before it’s fun with bottles and you out at Snipe Point trying to get around to shooting yourself.”

“I suppose.”

“I mean this is insulting.”

“I suppose.”

“I mean, didn’t you forbid him to guide?”

“Yeah I did.”

“Then how come James Powell is building him a guide boat? I mean, now you can’t get one built and he’s gone to guide.”

“I didn’t forbid him to have a skiff built.”

“What do you think he means to do with it!”

“I don’t know, pull crab pots. I have to let him hang himself, if that’s what he is gonna do. This is a democracy.”

“God I don’t know about you. Jese, I mean what are you planning when he guides, and it does look to me like he will when that boat is ready?”

“Didn’t I told you?” Dance asked him impatiently. “I will shoot him!”

“That’s what you say! ”

“Hey, Cart?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you do it, you got yourself so worked up?”

“Nichol! I like him! ” Carter bustled around the freezer, then pointlessly opened it, drawing out a block of ice that imprisoned myriad silver fish. He held it to the light and looked. “Shoot!”

* * *

“Well, sergeant, how are you doing with those new men?”

“Not bad at all.” The just-blown whistle hung from his neck, a concise scapular to the general chop-chop of getting from Point A to Point B in Hotcakesland.

The thunder of winos on the resonant staircases of the wooden hotel, their appearance, and the slow inexorable milling impressed themselves more upon Skelton than the subsequent extrusion of the insulted and injured through the cuneiforms of drill so indispensable to that choral oink we call the military. A small sea of the harmed poured onto the impromptu drill field; and as the sergeant’s barks and whistles rang out, they began to move as a man.

* * *

Two men, not entirely dissimilar, were beginning the day under the bright scudding clouds of the southeast trades. Thomas Skelton, with his lust for affinities, was going to visit Miranda Cole. Nichol Dance, who so rued his life and the things that had come of it that he drove his entire rather complicated self through the needle’s eye of a career in guiding — Nichol Dance was heading to Islamorada to buy a skiff.

The future cast a bright and luminous shadow over Thomas Skelton’s fragmented past; for Dance, it was the past that cast the shadow. Both men were equally prey to mirages. Thomas Skelton required a sense of mortality; and, ironically, it was Nichol Dance who was giving it to him; for Skelton understood perfectly well that there was a chance, however small, that Nichol Dance would kill him. This faint shadow lay upon his life now as discreetly as the shadow of cancer lies among cells. And Skelton asked himself, not particularly thinking of an act of Dance’s, shall I find it hard to die?

A sane man thinking of death, however casually, should immediately visit a girl whether in quest of information, affinities, or carnal gratification. It’s a case of any port in a storm, mortality being, in any case, an omnipresent hurricane.

Miranda had the second floor of a boatbuilder’s recollection of Greek architecture from a nineteenth-century schoolboy’s primer, executed in Dade County pine and painted a virginal white.

Miranda was a Saturday-morning pastry cook, and met him at the door in an apron dusted with flour. Skelton followed her toward the kitchen, gazing at the rooms as he went. They were tall, rectilinear rooms with great transomed windows, cool with their own spacious and circulatory atmospheres. (The astronauts are nose to bung in their “capsules”; while Captain Nemo sat at an ormolu control console; and if the astronauts have a capsule, Nemo had a Duomo.)

The last room shy of the kitchen seemed the most inhabited, with its small walnut dining-room table and re-covered divan; under the table were the small pyramids of termite sawdust that in Key West must be swept up almost daily.

“I’m making a cake for the Pillsbury Bake-off.” A handsome old kitchen; big windows looking into subtropical alleyways; a four-blade wooden fan with a bead chain, turning rather slowly now but displacing a wondrous amount of air full of baking smell. The stove was a restaurant-size Magic Chef, thirty or forty years old, black stars for burner grates and a control panel like one from an Hispano-Suiza, two ovens, and the whole covered in deep opalescent enamel with precise blue trim.

“What kind of cake?”

“It’s sort of my invention.”

“What’s it like?”

“Hm, well, it resembles a gâteau de Savoie moka, except I’m using my version of a Viennese icing. I forget, do you cook?”

“Some Cuban dishes.”

“I think we can have a look at this now.”

Skelton was next to her as she drew open the oven door. The beautiful cake was on the wire rack, rising uniformly; but something was wrong. Miranda cried out. A mouse had got into the oven and sunk to its flanks in the cake; as the air hit it, the mouse burst into flames.

Miranda seized a pair of pot holders and snatched the cake from the oven and put it atop the stove. The burning mouse smoked, then smoldered, and finally became a blackened emblem in the top of the cake. Gâteau rodentine.

Miranda said: “Jesus H. Christ.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Goddamn son of a bitch.”

“I know, I know. What a shame.”

Miranda slashed off the top of the cake; cut two big wedges out of the remainder and put them on plates with glasses of milk. They sat down and ate the cake. It was a kind of coffee sponge cake with an echo of lemon and butter; clear, and ethereal.

Miranda’s hands were resting on the table, one a fist, the other open flat on the walnut, shapely with short clear fingernails, a part where you could read out the whole physical presence.

Afternoon subsides in a golden burst of sunlight and the smell of coffee. Skelton observes a tripartite composition in rich pre-Raphaelite pastels: a band of blue sky, and a band of baby clouds traversing slowly toward the right, the deeply radiused orbs of Miranda’s bottom. Skelton lifts his cheek from the firm musculature at the small of her back and reverently brushes with his lips the flattened node of coccyx; a gesture at the point of a hip and she turns over, gray eyes grazing away to a white flash of gull in the upper margin of the window. Skelton feels the delicate touch of navel about the end of his nose, stomach tightens in tickling and a plane of pale tan light grades away in his vision, a Venusian touch to chin whose cleft it is not, crinkling slide against cheek, then a hirsute horizon surmounting a liquid slot: Geronimo!