Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

Miranda said, “One of us say something philosophical.”

“Miranda, we’re on the ocean meadow far far from the laughing kangaroos of the F.A.O. Schwarz main-floor toy room. This will do more to save you than either religion, futurism, or the pecky cypress walls of your West Marin hideaway.”

Skelton threaded a kicking shrimp onto Miranda’s hook and instructed her to cast; which she did with evidence of having done it before. He thought: facetiousness can be a way of dancing at the edges of the beautiful; it can also be facetiousness.

“Miranda honey, look here: all of us”—he gestured around the boat—“are just free people looking to be prisoners, hoping for a quiet cell, a toothbrush and a washcloth; but we are the convicts of freedom. We look up with stony eyes from our old road-gang lives at all the vacationers we think we see heading for Tenerife, Leningrad, and the Mermaid Show at Weekeewatchee Springs. Miranda, life can become a refrigerator brimful of chilled wet hair. Or not.”

“In a certain light,” Miranda said, “you can see anything at all.” That was deft.

More to the point, Miranda caught a mangrove snapper which made a gentle thunder on the boat bottom; Skelton sapped it once with a carriage bolt, re-baited Miranda’s hook; then with the flashlight tucked under his chin, he promptly filleted the snapper and laid the pearly meat on one end of a strip of brown paper and rolled it once. Miranda kept catching snappers and when they had six pairs of fillets they quit and poured the remaining bait over the side. Brilliant fish raced in the moonlight beneath them, catching the shrimp.

The wind had nearly ceased entirely; and the few clouds left had consolidated into a single continent to the west so thin the stars showed behind its edges. The night seemed ruptured on a gloating moon.

Skelton pulled the starter through once and the engine coughed into a marginal operative existence, be-bopping on the transom giddily. Skelton stood up taking the broom-handle tiller and headed for Key West glowing to the east of them pale as an aurora.

Twenty minutes of this night running and they were close enough to home that they could see a Greyhound bus cross the Stock Island bridge and penetrate the zygote of Cayo Hueso. Just beyond, the drive-in theater screen loomed among the trailers. Skelton stared: Appomattox Courthouse; Yankees and Rebels stately in the Key West sky. From the seaward vantage, it was the America you weep for. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee knee-deep in mobile homes surrounded by the vacant sea. Lee’s horse, Traveller, materialized and vanished in the Atlantic skyway. Then Grant took Lee’s hand and it was one nation indivisible; horses, heroes, tents, and munitions sunk among the mobile homes: THE END.

They stopped at a package store on the way to the fuselage and picked up a six-pack of Budweiser. It was a pleasant store and Tennessee Williams’s picture was on the wall; the playwright was holding a whitish bulldog and smiling without guile.

Entering the fuselage, Skelton decided that if he ever had some fame, he would offer his portrait to the wino hotel, where it would be hung in the front hall out of the reach of angry hands and flung bottles.

Skelton cut the snapper into fingers and deep fried them in oil so hot it was just between smoking and beginning to speckle; the delectable fish sealed quickly. He put it all in a paper-lined basket and set it on the table with the six-pack, a pot of tartar sauce, and quartered limes from his own tree. Then they ate like there was no tomorrow. Plus one quickie, dog-style.

It was a school night; and Miranda went home on her bicycle. An hour later, Skelton’s phone rang. It was Miranda.

“Tom, your father was here.”

“Go on.”

“He was wearing a sheet sort of pinned around him, you know, like a Roman … He was hopping around like a maniac…”

“Tell me the rest.” Doom.

“He wanted a date.”

* * *

God what a time. Such a loss of faith the Annunciation seemed an indecent advance. Everybody who had opened his eyes had been to hell and gone before he half knew it.

Thomas Skelton’s mind had been reduced, as a fractured limb is reduced. Everyone looked at this improvement and remarked, “What a waste,” or words to the effect.

Skelton looked all about himself and thought, I need for something to come in handy real bad. Boy, that sure would be good.

By dint of sloth, nothing had set in. And Skelton had been swept along. The cue ball of absurdity had touched the billiard balls in his mind and everything burst away from the center. Now the balls were back in the rack. Everyone should know what it is to be demoralized just so everyone knows what it is to be demoralized.

The king’s ransom, the dog in the manger, the cat that swallowed the cream … A potato-like president, limp with murder, turns to his piquant attorney general and says, “I’d give America for a thirteen-year-old nympho.” But the attorney general always replies, “No soap.” Always.

Before you know it, it’s a month of Sundays and you’re a goner. Do remember that. The trick is to be all smiles. To be uncalled for. If you’re at one remove, you’re already too far gone.

Every night on TV: America con carne. And eternity is little more than an inkling, a dampness … Even simple pleasure! The dream of simultaneous orgasm is just a herring dying on a mirror.

* * *

The morning ritual of dressing, redolent of an implicit dandyism, began after icy water returned the features to Skelton’s face. He paused always at the mirror in those precious moments before full awakening to see an utterly amoral creature, slack as a murderer; and thought of the serenity of Starkweather before his accusers. Then cold water, and a sharpness returned; a fellow creature began to form like a mirage over his features; a creature who could compete elbow to elbow with anyone and who would fistfight shrimp captains over principles not even believed. Then well-broken Levi’s sun-bleached and long, a braided leather belt, and a Cuban guayabera shirt that had already made its deal with the heat. When Skelton stood up after lacing his deck shoes, he wanted to feel his weight settle just slightly toward the heels; and when his spirits were particularly high, it seemed there was a full four feet between his belt buckle and his chin. At such times, he felt his movement was like a compass needle swinging inexorably and at a sweep, drawn rather than pushed.

Too often, he woke up miserable, wanting to stand in a slump, one eye needing to go one way, the other another. He felt the ridges between his eyebrows deepen and he could stand a good antacid, a Rolaid for example, or an Alka-Seltzer; even a gay, foaming all-American Bromo would have been, you know, terrific. In such a mood, Skelton was Starkweather howled at by his girlfriend’s parents for using their car; and for being a garbage man in Lincoln, Nebraska, where teenagers learn the Australian crawl at sun-drenched, cretinoid country clubs, where even aging wage slaves burn up the Cornhuskers Highway on polyglas radial tires; the American Plains in a blue rear-view mirror; and slender green traffic islands penetrating the steppes and old treeless, buffalo-haunted dreamland of a vacant republic.

It must have been something Skelton ate.

Sometimes the buzz of a housefly in an empty room has the timbre of the human voice. On moonless nights, simple cities of the Plains bear witness to strange events: an elderly drunk charges over celery terraces, baying, “Peaceniks have fobbed off with my daughter!” And somewhere in the Dakotas, a hunter’s lost beagle passes the night chewing the main cable of the President’s Hot Line. When he leaps back, his head a blue spark, he gives a single bark and is gone; separated by continents and oceans, a commissar and a president run to headquarters in their pajamas. There you have it.