Thomas McGuane: Ninety-Two in the Shade

He traded the deed to the bar for a two-door Fair-lane convertible and drove to the sea thinking that would be the spot to start over. He hit the beach at Hampton Roads, a brake drum binding the wheel in a sleet storm; picked up Route 1 and turned south till it ran out in Key West.

He’d driven those many miles without any terminal mechanical trouble, but on Southard Street in Key West the brake drum had had enough and caught fire. Burning rubber and oil from the brake line slowly worked into the Fairlane proper which was loaded down with belongings including a Motorola TV, the pistol in hand, and a case of government ammunition. Nothing to do but stand back and watch her go. When the flame reached eight feet over the sputtering convertible top, the ammunition began to fire; and then the television let go. Dance had the Bisley Colt in the top of his pants underneath a palm-leafed sport shirt he bought in St. Augustine and great alligator tears swam down his cheeks. The truth was he felt free as a bird.

A burning Ford full of things that blow up does draw a crowd. And the conchs — as the old-time white people of Key West are called — the conchs who saw Dance for the next month drove him crazy, toothlessly following him around and saying, “There he is! That’n’s the one whats car caught afire!”

A couple of weeks of this and Dance began to wheel on them. He thought, I’ve got to scatter these bastards. They look like they’d eat you up some dark night.

Then odd jobs, hanging out at the dock, doing things for guides like Faron Carter, sandblasting flamingos on glass shower doors, substituting and finally guiding. And all along thinking about that exercise boy, once every year or so nearly getting to the point about that exercise boy that he nearly gave himself the same as he gave him, as a matter of restitution, as a matter of symmetry and as the one response to that fatal perfidy that put him and the exercise boy on the opposite sides of that empty bar, the deed to which was the final trace of a family business and a woodlot — integers of a winding-down life.

Then, a fifty-seven-day bad marriage to a Catholic from Chokoloskee that ended in the court reconciling everything he had acquired but a skiff and it all went off in a Bekins moving van with the wife up front by the driver, headed for the Everglades. And drinking of the kind that is a throwing of yourself against the threshold of suicide though lacking that final will to your own ceasing, without which all the hemlock and Colt’s patented revolvers are of no more avail than ringside tickets, photostats of lost deeds, or snapshots of Granddad’s five-bottom plow.

* * *

Nichol Dance’s guide boat, “Bushmaster,” was nosed up the tidal creek that bisected Grassy Key, not anchored but rammed into the red mangrove roots in a canopy of mosquitoes and sand flies. Nichol Dance’s whole end of the creek smelled of whiskey. The ship-to-shore radio was turned on to the broadcast band; and out of its crackling loudspeaker, someone advised the prostrate Hoosier to “think young.” Dance lay there, vaguely alive, his brain curing like a ham.

Carter shut the engine down and the two looked at Dance’s person and found neither bullet holes nor seepage and knew as they had known in advance that he had polluted himself once more with one of the fifths that he always stored in the live wells. But, Tom Skelton thought, the intention to kill himself, however garbled or interfered with, was quite enough.

“Get in and see can you start the mother,” said Carter.

Tom Skelton climbed aboard the Bushmaster and lowered the engine with the power tilt control up forward. With the electrical hum of its motor, Nichol Dance began to stir. Tom Skelton forgot himself for the moment, forgot the rather lurid momentary circumstance and felt only his own fine tremble to be that of the boat when, choked and started, the powerful engine passed its life through the craft and sent fine lapping tremors out around itself into the tidal creek.

Nichol Dance sat up and announced that he wanted a career in show business, with an air of having had one in an earlier life. Chemical impact thickened the flesh around his eyes. On the floor of the skiff was the Colt’s patent revolver with Mexican ivory grips; and on his chest, his flowered shirt bore the print of the pistol.

Dance’s uncanny presence produced a momentary silence in which the dry velocities of birds could be heard in the brushy creek. Even the bubbling of crustaceans on the red mangrove roots around him and the slow tidal seepage seemed to rise a measure or so while Nichol Dance looked them over with the same remote gaze you would understandably associate with the recently raised dead.

“A person can scarcely be deliberate any more,” he said.

“What seems so exclusive to you about that,” Carter inquired.

“Does it need to be exclusive for me to bring it up?”

“Not unless you’re offering a franchise.”

“You’re the Skelton kid that’s always on the goddamn flat in front of me.”

“That’s right,” Skelton said positively to this basilisk drunk.

“I wonder how come.”

“I enjoy water sports would be just about exactly how come.”

“Very good. But child, I can’t recommend it.”

“I wasn’t applying for a recommendation,” Tom Skelton said.

“I was explaining,” Dance said, “about how unattractive a day on the water can come to be.”

“But I’d of known,” Tom Skelton said, “that a person would spoil a boat trip if he only went out to shoot himself.”

“Now look here, fucker, I didn’t come here to be sassed—”

“Neither did I.”

Nichol Dance picked up the Colt’s patent revolver and discharged it into the mangroves all around Tom Skelton with a collective noise that was close to that of war.

“Fucker,” he said, “I don’t seem to have your attention!”

Carter said, “You have rattled the boy. Now let’s just all of our selfs unwind and go home. And Nichol, that pistol has gotten to be a liability.”

And Dance said to Carter, “But we’ve kept so many from crowding our trade, it discourages me to come acrosst a hard case.” Then he smiled radiantly.

“I’m not a hard case, whatever that is. I am going to guide is all.”

Nichol Dance stared a moment at Tom Skelton with only mildly drunken appreciation. He said, “Then why don’t you do the little thing?”

“I think he means to,” said Carter. “Now let’s run before the sun sets.”

Nichol Dance said to Carter, “Let him lead us, Cart.”

Well, all right. Skelton reversed the engine, eased backward in the narrow marshy quarters past Carter who followed backing after him, the sandy turbulence on the creek bottom lifting and carrying down tide. Dance sat at ease in one of the fighting chairs, his face still blurred, but the impression of durability remained in the compression ridges of flesh under his eyes. Otherwise, Nichol Dance was just a displaced bumpkin run out of his own unmortgaged bar for shooting a man in the horse business through the wishbone in not quite disputable self-defense; part of the world of American bad actors who, when the chips are down, go to Florida with all the gothics and grotesqueries of chrome and poured-to-form concrete that that implies.

When Tom Skelton had running room, a nicety of judgment based on a precise guess of distance between propeller and ocean bottom, he put the skiff up on a plane and ran the shallow bank on a dead course for the Harbor Keys, then swung abruptly southwest on the crawfishermen’s wheel track — a wandering trough perhaps two feet wide — which at this tide was absolutely the only way to cross the bank that separated them from Key West. Nichol Dance turned his head on a dark and sun-wrinkled neck to look at Carter and raise his eyebrows. Skelton centered the bow on the stacks of Key West Electric and started home.