Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“Is it?”

“Yes. If he decided to make of himself a figure of the night, I should have been notified.”

“Why?”

“So the consequences could be negotiated. I’m leading an unnatural existence and have been to the point that I must now ask myself if I am to redeem any of my remaining life.”

Skelton knew what she said. His father’s adventures in shrimping, procurement, an ill-fated investment in a factory that would employ those of the failed cigar industry who had not moved to Ybor City in the manufacture of lighter-than-air craft purely on the somewhat mystical theory that a zeppelin and a cigar were similarly shaped — no, the Southernmost Blimp Works had not fared much better than the whorehouse; the first tropical depression and the blimps ripped up their moorings and vanished over the Gulf of Mexico. His father had been able to tolerate that; but what he resented, he said, was the whores in Duval Street cheering them on their way, his own father roaring, “Gas bags!” from the Mallory pier. The utter vanishing of the blimps, those artifacts of his father’s ambitions, disturbed. Did they end up in the ionosphere? Or rip apart and sink to a lonesome sea, changing whale voices with helium bubbles? But the cry of “Gas bags!” and the door of an empty blimp works would carry through the years to a youth, his mother, a man loose in Key West streets in nothing but a bed sheet.

“Tom,” said his mother, “if I only knew what he had in mind. And I know him so well. But he will do a thing … Oh God, I don’t know. He’s so contrary. He twice called off our marriage because he had a deviated septum.”

“That’s why he went to bed for seven months.”

“And as soon as people began to count on him going to bed, he got up. Now he runs around at night. But the minute we plan on it … hell.”

“That’s all right, Mother.” She was going to cry. It was like seeing Marciano cry. “Don’t you think he’s trying to find something?”

“I knew you would say that,” she said, “it’s always religion to you.”

“But don’t you?”

“No. I think he’s contrary.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I know I don’t.”

“So why do you say it?”

“Because it is impossible to understand what he could be looking for. Nonsense is nonsense.”

Skelton was thinking, You could get what you want and have a laugh a minute, take a pill, see God, play a record, weep poignantly, and discover mortality on a form letter that began “Greetings.” Or you could just lie there. When we came in, he was just lying there. Or you could louse up. You could fail to get the joke. You could lift up thine eyes. Skelton thought: I think I’ll lift up mine eyes. When we came in, he was just lying there, his eyes at a weird angle.

His mother took her beautiful English stainless-steel pruning shears — the closest thing she had to jewelry — and began cutting back the broadleaf elephant’s-ear philodendron near the stairway; these plants were rain basins that poured water onto the wooden steps, rotting them out in a year’s time if they weren’t pruned.

“I ask myself, should he be confined? And I always decide absolutely not. It isn’t so much that he is harmless as that I have a suspicion he is on to something—”

“Me too,” Skelton interrupted quickly.

“How would you know? You’re just like him.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re both convinced that you arrive at the right thing by eliminating all the wrong ones.”

It was true. Neither he nor his father belonged to that class of succinct creatures that directly reached for what was right. The difference was that he was attracted to the merely incorrect, while his father very often began with the appalling.

“So what are you going to do about it.”

His mother put her shears down.

“Nothing,” she said positively. “I’m going to do nothing. Do you understand what that implies?”

* * *

The old man, Goldsboro Skelton, stood across from his secretary. He held a sheet of paper upon which he had written and scratched out a number of sentences.

“Okay now. Delete the sentence that ends ‘unforgiven blimp fiasco.’”

“Okay…”

“Delete from ‘cigar, mouse’ all the way to ‘favoring that we.’”

“Okay…”

“And the sentence ending ‘punks and losers.’”

“Akay…”

“And in the whole last paragraph, cut the following words: ‘duck,’ ‘flavor,’ ‘Marvin,’ ‘whereas,’ ‘celluloid,’ ‘bingo,’ and ‘dropsy.’ And cut the whole song Silver Threads among the Gold. ”

“Mmmmkay, there. Darling?”

“What?”

“Take me.” Bella was grimacing with amour.

Goldsboro Skelton gazed past her. A wharf rat shot by in the foliage outside his window, scaling the trees like a squirrel. He turned to Bella Knowles.

“The big Norways are in the palm,” he said.

“So?”

“So, forget the Spanish-fly act.”

Bella sighed with what Skelton thought was a squalid rise of bosoms.

* * *

Skelton met James Davis, skipper of the shrimper Marquesa, across from the Western Union and went into Shorty’s to have coffee with him. They sat at the counter, across from the great wooden cyclorama that nearly formed the wall over the stoves, and upon which a genius of the show-card school had depicted the specialties of the house. Skelton observed anew Davis’s birch-stain complexion and kindly, malformed face; simultaneously Skelton noticed that the only gold inlay he himself owned had come loose.

“Not fishing today?”

“No,” said James.

“How come.”

“I lost my boat…”

“You lost your boat…”

“Florida First National Bank got it.”

“Are you … working?”

“I’m the salad chef at Howard Johnson’s,” he said right out.

“… I’m sorry…”

“Don’t be.”

“Well, I’m looking for my old man.”

“I thought he was bedridden.”

“He was.”

“What happened?”

“He took a notion.”

“Yeah? When?”

“Two days ago.”

“Did you check with the whores?”

“I don’t figure that’s it.”

“The priest?”

“The old man is always throwing him out.”

“Maybe he’s watching Triple-A. He still likes sports, don’t he?”

“The World Series, pro football, and winter Olympics only. I can’t figure this one out…”

* * *

It took an hour’s waiting to catch Miranda in the schoolyard (and three blind messages by cooperative students). She came out of the study-hall door in one of the hourly blurts of humanity, a scene at the Velveeta cheese works.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, referring, without need to specify, to his father’s Roman appearance.

“Please, don’t be concerned. I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t thought you ought to know. Then today I got something strange in the mail. I don’t know if it’s him again because it’s unsigned.” She took a manila envelope out of her folder and handed it to Skelton. Inside was an unsigned photograph.

It was a dong.

Understandably, Skelton took immediate umbrage.

“I can assure you that my father did not mail that … item.”

“I said I didn’t know it was him. And ‘item’ isn’t quite the word.”

“There is no way it could be him. It must be one of your students. And it’s unsigned. And ‘item’ is my choice of language.”

“I doubt if it’s a student. Of course it’s not signed! It’s not a publicity photo.”

“Are you being short with me?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like this being attributed to my father.”

“I was taking a wild guess. He was round my place in a bed sheet wanting a date.”