Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

Dance had been drinking a little Lem Motlow Number Seven; and he watched anxiously, mentally sizing up the twenty from all over America, trying to think which one would be confined with him in the skiff. No one, it seemed, could overlook the tall, rawboned redhaired man who dominated the far end of the table. He was from Montana and his name was Olie Slatt. His speech introducing himself, as all the contestants had to, was the most interesting:

“I am Olie Slatt. And don’t you ever forget it. I mine for subbituminous low-sulphur coal in the Bull Mountains of Roundup, Montana, where they have to blast through twenty feet of sandstone to reach the vein. We have two spoils banks with eight slopes and four different strata arrangements. I’m damned proud of that and I’m going to win today. Don’t you ever forget it.”

Olie Slatt had a constituency in the audience and they yelled, “Mother dog! Mother dog!” with ardor.

There were others more prepossessing, to be sure, even to Nichol Dance; but none with the immensely formidable, almost insect-like jaws of this redhead.

All three of the women sat together; no one could say how they would do but everyone sensed that the aggregate result would be impressive; they consulted among themselves, these women, as if they meant to work as a team.

Nichol Dance had the certificate and shifted it from hand to hand to keep from spoiling it with sweat.

Before he was really prepared for the event, it was upon him. Abruptly, uniformed men from the truck were trooping to the tables, tall piles of stacked pies in their hands. By the time the pies were emplaced, with the flavor choices of the contestants honored, the judges had raised their pistols.

Then the guns were fired and all twenty lashed into the pies; a moment later and the slowest contestants had eaten five; and in another moment, the first vomiter rose, the gelatinous, undigested cherries of her “flavor option” dribbling down her chest.

And very quickly it was over. Losers were roughly hustled away from the table and the redhead was left alone. He looked around himself in happy disbelief for the brief remaining moment before he was declared the winner. Then all hesitation vanishing, he rose powerfully, baying his triumph in an impressive hurricane of crumbs, the insect jaws agape.

When Nichol Dance gave him his certificate, he said, “Boy, fishing is all I’m about! I’m the mother dog of all fishermen and I want to go out with you real bad—” With the word “bad” he began to vomit all over himself.

And Dance went off in a panic, saying, “Well, I’ll look to hear from you down to the dock. I hope you’re feeling better!”

* * *

“Look, in the brown shirt and the heavy tan, see him? He’s starting to leave now—”

“I see him, I see him!” said Miranda. “That’s the first killer I have ever seen. Does he have a notch on his pistol?”

“He may have one.”

“Well, I think he ought to be in jail.”

“He is, a good deal of the time.”

“Don’t you hate him?”

“I admire him. There is nothing like feeling your days may be numbered. Everybody’s days are numbered but because of him I know it more surely even though I might live to be a hundred. This afternoon I had five orgasms, which would have been impossible if there hadn’t been someone in town who wanted my life.”

“Would you rather number your days or your orgasms?” asked Miranda.

“Does it come with the dinner?”

“The only thing that comes with the dinner now is progress. The rest is à la carte. What would you recommend?”

Clever girl, thought Skelton, I must show flash: “The spécialité de la maison, depending on the night, is whooping crane with blanched almonds or various fricassees of endangered species with pommes frites. For a consideration, the headwaiter can arrange to have your table bulldozed while you dine; and, I might add, on Saturday evenings a tour of the kitchens is available, where all of the cooking is by controlled napalm flash, you know, with Baked Alaska à la Dow and, natch, side orders are always available of gook-in-his-own-juices, which is nothing so much like the calamares en su tinta of the Basques; for the salad lover, a defoliation buffet is continually in operation!”

“My mouth is watering.”

Truth is, Skelton was wound up like a cuckoo clock; and the frenetic glibness of the kind he just trotted out for Miranda was something he had long meant to avoid. Maybe Dance was doing it to him.

He could no longer synthesize the life of his father, his grandfather, and himself; he realized now, however, that that was something he had been trying to do all along. It was all coming up, but nothing in sequence.

* * *

Miranda took him to see friends of hers who lived on Petronia. Dopers. Skelton watched them, two men and a woman, as they waltzed gaga around the room to do walkie-talkie gags on the telephone with vague roots in ordering Chinese food or pizzas. A hookah burned on the floor and the proprietor of the house, a harmless witling in a jellaba, broke out his collection of “drips” for Skelton’s delectation.

He placed a cardboard shoe box at Skelton’s feet; it contained minutely scissored photographs of water drips sliding down cans and bottles in advertisements.

“Toughest part of commercial art, making those drips run down a bottle or can in a way that looks right to the camera. You have to wet down the whole fuckin thing, then make a track for the drip with a toothpick. Then you start the drip at the top of the bottle or whatever and when she starts to get up speed you flash your picture. You go through thousands of toothpicks looking for a good one. It — is — a—killer!”

Skelton looked into the shoe box: a hundred thousand drips — a whole culture in parable. These people couldn’t save him.

* * *

“I’m sorry to come so late; can you give me a dozen live shrimp?”

With Miranda on Geiger Key, at Marvin’s bait camp; when you called on old Marvin at an odd hour he usually told you it was just as well; because this time next year he would be in hell. He was a witty man of orthodox religion, and saw his coming perdition as a malicious joke of primarily comic value. With twenty of his early years in an Appalachian mine, he had black lung and wheezed around the dock toting his bait net.

Marvin dipped the shrimp by flashlight into Skelton’s bucket; they shot about backward, their ruby eyes shining.

“I hear you’re gonna guide,” said Marvin; he was half shaved and his Cuban wife was peering out from their house, which floated at the end of an unfixed dock upon navy oil drums.

“Inside the month. Who told you?”

“Jamesie Powell. You gonna permit fish?”

“That’s how I mean to make my reputation.”

“Want me to save you bait crabs?”

“I wish you would. Dollar-size.”

“Want some chum crabs?”

“I’m going to pole.”

“Hard guy,” he said.

Skelton was running the wooden wreck he learned the country in under a sky clouded with stars. The water was black in the night, the mangrove keys blacker, and the boat smelled of uncured sponges and unretrieved fragments of bait; it smelled bad. Miranda was in front; Skelton thought he could see her.

“How can you tell where you are going?”

“Vision.”

The Scott-Atwater engine cried like a baby on the transom; it had repeatedly tried to throw in the towel since Eisenhower’s first administration. A gibbous and Olympic moon breasted the clouds meter upon meter. Skelton checked the shrimp with the flashlight; eyes still brilliant, they hovered like birds instead of darting against the sides of the bucket.

Now nearing Cayo Agua, he slowed down and finally coasted in alongside the mangroves, shutting off the engine. At first there was silence and then the reedy conversation of birds from the interior of the key. When the boat was at rest, the moon began to penetrate the clear water and fish could be seen glistening and gliding among the mangrove roots. The breeze barely moved enough to be felt; but the key sighed like the souls in purgatory.