Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“Not like this, Tom. Not like a sneak a … a figure of the night, Tom.”

“A figure of the night…!”

“We had this from him during the war,” said his mother. “He went to Fort Benning…” She trailed off suddenly, looking almost angrily into space. Could she have only now remembered.

“Your mother is absolutely right. He was around here like an I don’t know what. He was arrested for sword fighting! Hung out with criminals! The worst of it I can hardly tell.”

“Who cares!” said his mother. “Tell him the whole thing.”

“There was a house of ill repute.”

“What about it?” Skelton said.

“It was his, lock, stock, and whores.” His mother looked away at this last. His grandfather studied her. “Uh, ladies of fortune.”

Skelton looked at Miranda. He had only known about the whorehouse for twenty years. Why did they need to tell Miranda?

“A real one?” he asked his grandfather; let them have their fun.

“Not really,” his grandfather smiled condescendingly; there was an inadvertence in the expertise he implied. “It was just an old falling-down conch house with half a dozen highfliers from Miami.” He looked at his daughter-in-law and winked. “Even they couldn’t take him. He had a hootchy-cootchy from Opa-Locka. Even she thought he was dumb!”

“You know, fake air raids. Fire drills where he ran from room to room hosing down his own customers,” said Mrs. Skelton.

“It was ridiculous. Pictures of Jim Thorpe on the walls. The Boy Scout Oath. The Constitution. An anarchist library in the front room. Statues of saints. A clothing-store dummy dressed as the Pope. I mean, God. What kind of whorehouse…! He carried things too far. Seltzer bottles. Custard pies. No one goes to a whorehouse for that! They can stay home and watch the Three Stooges. And the girls got tired of it the minute the pies started flying. They always had colds from the Seltzer. It was ridiculous.”

“Running guns,” said his mother in a drone. “And you’re right about the colds.”

“Yes, yes,” said his grandfather. “Shrimping!”

“Drove a taxi. The only thing he didn’t think of—”

“Was guiding,” Skelton and his grandfather interrupted simultaneously.

“Go on now,” said his mother, “wake him up. It’s time.”

Skelton crossed the porch and juggled the squeaking cedar mosquito frame, thinking about revealing to his father that everyone knew he was a figure of the night. He decided not to because it would not be interesting to do so.

“I’m awake.”

“Hello, Dad. This is Miranda.”

“How do you do, Miranda.”

“Hello.”

“What are they telling you over there?”

“Nothing much.”

“About my whorehouse, weren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“It was a beacon of sanity. Pairing off in the most ceremonial way, unexpected friendship and disease, field-hospital camaraderie, orgasms. Miranda,” said his father, “have you ever been a prostitute?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“You’d make a dandy.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m pleased you take it as a compliment. Dear ones have come to me from whoring. It’s a modus operandi I understand very well.”

“None of us have had good sense,” said Skelton, “except my mother and we’re all beginning to bore her.”

“Is that a violin you have in there, Mr. Skelton?” asked Miranda.

“Yes, it is.”

“Would you play something?”

“I don’t know how. From time to time it plays itself and I attach myself to its moving parts. Now it sleeps lightly, twitching like a dog.”

* * *

Sometimes when a wino comes off a bat he is as unmanageable from this grape residue in his “system” as he would be with semi-fatal dumdum rounds in the brain pan; he is, moreover, spavined in the morals. If he is in a neighborhood, he looks darkly about himself at his neighbors. A dire grape madness is upon him; and not the Castalian libido Olympiad of the wine’s first onslaught that ends with an alpha-wave glissando into sleep; from which he has every expectation of waking in other than this Wild Kingdom Mutual of Omaha rhino rush, smashing of beak and noggin against the Land Rover of life itself. Especially not if the wine is one of the chemical daydreams of the republic’s leisure-time industrial combines that produce and bottle curious, opaque effluents in the colors of Micronesian tides or meteor trails; these things are called “beverages” and exist not only in their bright fruit-festooned bottles but conceptually in the notebooks of technicians, diagrams of hydrocarbon chains that can be microfilmed if another “winery” should be after their secrets. It is, you suppose, one of the troubles we are having with our republic.

Such a wino had abandoned himself upon the interior of Skelton’s fuselage. Skelton found him asleep in a bed of his own trashing. He woke the man up. The wino, whose delicately intelligent face was that of an amateur translator or local begonia prince, looked about himself at the wreckage and asked, “Did I do this?” cringing for the first of the blows.

“It appears that you did.”

Long quiet.

“What are you going to do.”

“I’m going to clean it up,” said Skelton.

“I mean what are you going to do to me?”

“I’m going to be disappointed in you.”

“How can you be disappointed in me. You had no expectations.”

This stumped Skelton for a moment. “I have expectations about humanity in general,” he finally said.

“Please, why don’t you come off it. I’m a sick-ass drunk and I don’t need that kind of romance.”

“What do you want?”

“I want nothing. But I want plenty of nothing.”

“Well, let me tell you as proprietor of this place what I got in mind. First I’m going to roll your sorry hide into the roadway so that I can clean up your damn wreckage.”

“That’s more like it. We are in extremis here, chum. And it’s time for a dialogue.”

“I don’t want it—”

“It’s time for polemics.”

“—You wrecked my home.”

“Precisely.”

For Skelton, this brought back terrible memories of school. He looked about himself and thought, Why did this interlude seek me out?

* * *

Nichol Dance ran his skiff down the trailer’s rollers over the edge of the ramp and hand-walked it around to his slip and tied it; it was a skiff so old it had Cuban hardwood gunwales. One thing no one could ever make me do, thought Dance, is start over. I would listen to all the resurrection plans anyone had for me. But starting over is out of the question. He looked at the skiff and thought, I am lucky that miserable gunk-board floats.

Saturday night. By Carter’s good offices, the Chamber of Commerce as part of its touristic activities had bought a day’s guiding from Dance; and it was being awarded as a contest prize tonight down at Mallory Square.

They asked that Dance show up to hand the winner a certificate entitling him to the day’s fishing.

* * *

There were twenty of them lined up out front, seated behind the long wooden table. Officials stood at either end holding stop watches and counting devices. Mallory Square was full of the laughing, the hooting, and the damaged of brain; Ohioans who wore hats they had used to hold chicken eggs all winter were gathered in knots and clusters. Californians with rakish sideburns moved with cosmopolitan aplomb. The Kounter Kulture was everywhere, rolling its eyes, fingering costly jewelry. In a few minutes out here, it was going to be the republic.

Nearby, the big catering trucks were assembled, their internal steam tables giving off a moist warmth even outside the trucks, even in all this muggy weather.