Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

These were heavy thoughts and Skelton sat down. He knew that the word “serious” does not derive from the word “cereal.” He had a feeling that on the Plains of America everyone was named Don and Stacy. He knew that spiritual miniaturism frequently lay waiting in the foothills where a ranch was exchanged for a golf course; and that the Spalding Dot, the Maxfli, and the Acushnet soared over the bones of dead warriors. So, if he were driven from Key West, he knew the Plains were not the place he’d go.

Skelton wandered around the fuselage. Don and Stacy had come to life on the American Plains. It was the frontier and Don threw a glass of Lavoris in Stacy’s face. It was the end of something. Stacy direct-dialed Mom at Leisureland, demanding a one-way on the jumbo jet. This was enough. Number-one son, Lance, caught a Cong mortar in the mouth in Nam. Daughter Sherri cold-turkeyed in the Oregon Women’s Detention Center, then divorced her Gypsy Joker husband to marry a Young American for Freedom. The Young American for Freedom liked to put birthday candles up her behind, eat confetti, and spray Welch’s grape juice on her thighs. At night, Don would sit before the freestone fireplace in the rec room, read his social security card, and harp. Stacy made spitballs in the storm cellar. Is it any wonder they woke up plumb grousing?

Skelton was in a bad mood. The morning ritual, with dandyism, hadn’t cured it. He isolated his troubles to two specific areas: his father’s show at Miranda’s the night before and Nichol Dance’s promise. He would see both of them today; the air was beginning to acquire the opacity again that it had before he clarified his life; now he had to do it again. It was, he thought for the moment, a case of bailing a leaky boat. But, well, do it.

* * *

Skelton’s grandfather, the redoubtable, with, out of his long years on earth, not a day in the service of his country, remembered the wars from his sea-level eyrie in Cayo Hueso.

During the glum scheming of the First War, when Thomas Edison had experimented with depth charges at navy headquarters on Key West, Goldsboro kept a cruiser at Garrison Bight for the express purpose of whoremongering and trips to Cuba of mysterious object.

One war later, his son, Skelton’s father, kept a converted rum-runner as a fishing launch with the black flag of anarchism flying from its transom. Dizzily evading all known goals, he had become a chimera.

Now here is what Skelton wondered: was there a connection between himself and these two male forebears? And if there was, what was he being steered toward? Universal consciousness or early death? And lastly, why did both seem oceanic? He could not escape the suspicion that this association of boats — cruiser, rumrunner, skiff — implied something sequential. He feared that if he could go back one more generation on hard data to his great-grandfather, he would discover the old wrecking master in the maze of his schooner’s cordage running the southerly shoals, spaced-out and as incipiently suicidal as fifty 1947 Existentialists.

G. Skelton himself, meanwhile, moved through his safe-cluttered offices. Safes of every vintage, opened, closed, dynamited, doorless or lock-picked, seemed a kind of audience for the streams of thought that poured uninterrupted from a brow as round and serene as a radar dome.

If there was a single thing for which he had a gift, besides that of pulling rugs out from under his opponents, it was for a kind of manipulation of conditions so that the problem or the solution seemed fresh to the point of being raw. He had, for example, carefully kept his grandson dancing on a string of unease over this guide boat. On the one hand, he wanted it to be as vivid as only uncertainty could make it; and, on the other, he could not resist the dicey gaming around, the spirals of manipulation that were the actual texture of his life. When Goldsboro Skelton walked around his bailiwick and viewed his contemporaries sunning away their last days on earth in louvered porches, he thanked Christ for the grandiose instinct for creating a vortex that had been his since the turn of the twentieth century.

Goldsboro Skelton had been among the last Key Westers to go to sea with the wrecking masters before he was twenty, had piloted a diesel ferry that had been built a hundred forty miles up the Mississippi through the impossible Delta and across the Gulf of Mexico in offshore summer storms, a vessel of minimal sheltered-water freeboard never designed for such open-sea crossings. He was religiously ambiguous—“I deal with Jesus directly”—and had acquired some fame on a salvage trip in his teens with a dipsomaniacal wrecking master who kept the young Goldsboro Skelton and six school friends in the superheated hold of a condemned freighter that had broken its back on a Honduran reef a hundred miles out of Stann Creek; seven youths loading crude sugar from the steaming hold of a boat that creaked and shifted on the reef and threatened to roll with their lives inside. When the freighter groaned more than usual or when the slow scream of its iron hull against the implacable coral rose a quarter octave, Skelton and the others would plead to go topsides in case the freighter should finally roll. But the wrecking master, who often knelt on the salvage boat bobbing safely alongside to pray Jaheezuss for the safety of those young souls, his hands and eyes fluttering firmament-ward in a curiously female explosion of emotion, the wrecking master always said quite emphatically, no. Then on the third day of salvage, a jet of blue Caribbean came in through the packing seal around the shaft, a blast of sea water that looked vividly like the end, jetting out across tons of unrefined sugar in the heat.

This time, Skelton fetched himself a seven-pound splinter from the fractured oak stringers of the sugar freighter and carried it to where he found the wrecking master praying in the shade of the pilothouse. He took the good captain off his knees with the first blow of that scantling across his god-fearing fundament; then marched him to the forecastle where he was confined to quarters with all the green-glass shippers’ demijohns of bad Cuban rum he could drink. By now Skelton’s terrified shipmates were there to hear a speech that became the rooftree of his early fame.

“I am now the master of this vessel,” he said more magisterial than would seem possible. “And you are forbidden to pray.”

A week later, Goldsboro Skelton was tried and acquitted of mutiny. The first strands of his net had begun to spin out over Key West. He was a hero of the streets.

* * *

“Bella, Bella, Bella,” Goldsboro said, too weary to mount the trampoline.

“All right.”

“I’m mean, you know.”

“Tired.”

“Well, yes, tired; but no tireder than you, Bella. I just won’t pretend like you will pretend, busting your butt till the cows come home just to prove that time doesn’t pass.”

“No, Goldsboro, I’m not tired. You’re tired. I’m not tired. But you honey, you’re real tired.”

“Could you still sing, Bella?”

Bella Knowles had twice performed at the World of Disney Planetarium, actually before that place had been constructed; but the dreams and romance of those intrepid Americans had led them to at least put up the visitors’ center, little more than a Quonset hut in the sodden alligator marsh; and a giant styrene figment of Donald Duck.

“I could still shatter glass with my voice, e.g., my vitality.”

Goldsboro Skelton, less La Manchan than Cartesian, ran out of the gym and returned with a fine wineglass.

“Where do you want it?”

“Anywhere. Right there. Go on, on the table.”

Bella Knowles prepared her lungs, breathing deeply and composing her face in a deep abstracted expression, like a policeman suddenly confronted with a problem in jurisprudence. Suddenly she screamed at the glass.