Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

It was easy to see how she, after refusing this figure of the night and receiving an anonymous organ photo by the morning post, might put two and two together. The former was his father all right; but until further proof was in hand, he would continue to regard the dong as a phantom.

* * *

It looked like a moth.

Some years ago, pouring drinks in his own warm and, if he did say so, well-run tavern, listening to trainers of bird dogs, construction stiffs, and short-range drifters who straggled in out of the heat, the cold, or lack of either for a sometimes paid-for drink to talk about, generally, Sputnik, farm parity, poontang, and game-bird populations.

Among them an exercise boy of forty summers from Lexington who came every Saturday night, in costume, to drink and turn nasty. One Saturday, after Dance had cut him off at the bar, the exercise boy had waited for him to close, then beat Dance half to death in his own parking lot with a tire iron. Dressed as the Sheik of Araby, he had given Dance the curious view of a halfwit Scots-Irish face pinched murderous under the great cloud of turban as the iron came down on his head and face beyond counting.

The exercise boy vanished, eluding all known forms of law for four months; Dance recovered, though his nose, which had detached entirely and slipped up under his cheek, never did look right; not broken-looking necessarily but as though it had been picked up in a sale of another’s effects.

Now one hot summer afternoon when it must have been ninety-two in the shade and the bar was empty as all get out, Nichol Dance looked up at the glaring doorway with its bands of greenery, yellow-striped road, and sky, to see the exercise boy enter as though afloat on that panel of uncomfortable light. He was dressed as a moth and wanted crème de menthe on shaved ice.

Dance told him to get out.

“Why?”

“Because I told you to. And as soon as you do go, I am going to call the law.” Dance was afraid of him.

“I prefer to stay and drive you batshit,” said the other, detecting Dance’s fear.

“You ain’t gonna drive me batshit,” Dance laughed.

“Why, I already have. And I tell you what else. I got a nigger-chasin cannon in my hand I’m gone to use on your ass.”

The exercise boy was sitting close enough to the bar that Dance couldn’t see what he was holding. But Nichol had a gun of his own, the useful Bisley Colt with the Mexican ivory grips; and he was pointing it through the thin paneling of the bar face. The exercise boy had his right hand in his lap, smoking with his left with conspicuous awkwardness. The two talked for an endless half an hour, the exercise boy in his serpentine voice. And the first time he moved his right arm, Nichol Dance blew him halfway across the room; where he lay, all wings, and made a spot.

The law it was who discovered the exercise boy to be not armed; so Dance, unpopular enough for coming from Indiana smelling of hardware and buckeyes, was placed under arrest; it was not until his trial that he ever heard the exercise boy’s name: George Washington. And Nichol Dance received a contempt citation for remarking, What a name for that shabby-ass snake doctor.

And now twenty-one years later in Key West, damned if there wasn’t another moth-like number following him around at night. Dance cut himself one more piece of amberjack and cracked a beer. A man in his life, he thought, sure had to hack his way through a lot of lunch meat. But I will do what I have to. I’m all I’ve got, in a manner of speaking.

* * *

On big pine key, the first light of day passes through the high breezy forest. A key-deer buck, the size of a dog, places four perfect scarab hoofs on Route A1A and is splattered by a Lincoln Continental four weeks out of the Ford Motor Company, carrying three admirals bound to Miami and a “kick-off breakfast” for a fund-raiser. The taillights elevate abruptly at the Pine Channel Bridge and are gone. The corporate utopia advances by a figure equal to the weight of the little buck divided by infinity; the Reckoning advances by a figure equal to the buck multiplied by infinity. A funeral wake of carrion birds, insects, and microorganisms working assiduously between bursts of traffic takes the little deer home a particle at a time.

* * *

Miranda went into the bathroom. She was there five or ten minutes. When she came out her hair was in disarray and there were a few plastic curlers scattered arbitrarily through the snarl. She sat on the bed and began to shriek. Her face was scrubbed of all makeup; she looked like a loser in a Farm Administration photograph.

“Shittin place is drivin me nuts. You outa fuckin work and me expectin a child!”

“Honey, honey … I tried…”

“Tried my ass! You’re out with faeries while I’m home wid a B-29 in the hangar!”

“A B-29 in the hangar!” Skelton fell on the floor. Miranda stared at him.

“An my ass is draggin in this shithouse while you’re out golfin with flits and highfliers!”

“No more!”

“No more is right! I’m walkin outa this cockroach palace and leave you to stew in yer own juice like ya deserve ya four-bit louse!”

“Now just wait a goddamn minute. Whose a one around here with the diploma?”

“I’ll tell you what I about had enough of,” she shrieked, “and that’s midnight visits from in-laws in sheets and weenie pictures in the mail! That’s what I’m tired of!”

A knock on the door. Miranda answered it. Skelton listened from the closet. It was a neighbor. Miranda was telling her yes she was all right; they were doing psychotherapy. Not to be interrupted or the AMA would be alerted.

* * *

When her friends were not on the phone asking for advice, when no meals were to be made, when unbeset by that complicated skein of petty social contrivances in Key West to which she had many years ago been coopted as a kind of servomechanism and without which the game would have been more carnivorous than it was because she, to a degree almost no longer rememberable in our time, was a generous creature; when all that presented a clear and silent lacuna in her existence as wife, mother, and daughter-in-law to three men of the same surname and in some ways uninterrupted stripe, she retreated to the bedroom and cried quite silently, not a single sob, but just a steady, streaming exhaustion with men who had become figments of their own imaginations; and of whom she probably ought long since to have been shut. After that, she had a system of restoration: a napkin in ice water to clear the eyes, then instead of her usual subdued lipstick she applied Fire and Ice, which was precisely the color of the bright oxygenated blood of an animal mortally shot through the lungs (Skelton’s imaginary death wound would have produced this color), and some rouge to highlight her prominent cheekbones (her navy officer, Oklahoma grandfather had Indian blood, of which he was not proud).

She was less mortified than demoralized by her husband’s latest absurdity. Mortification ended with his army discharge and his public announcement, long after Key West knew he was home on “a mental,” that Adolf Hitler was an invention of the Miami Press Club. He of course believed no such thing; but argued that it opened a useful avenue of thought. His pitiful belief in selective stupidity amid a situation of universal stupidity made it impossible for him to start anyone even daydreaming about his theories by which good guys in a monstrously linear and Ptolemaic universe demanded bad guys for the far seat of the seesaw. It was an easy idea, like those of Darwin, Francis Bacon, and Jack the Ripper.

So it all dribbled away to the point of his bedriddence; and expressed itself now in his love of running-backs who could run a slant off tackle and end up getting thirteen yards in a sweep. He believed in lateral moves at the line of scrimmage. She could understand that, however brittle the parallel; and it was her problem to discover now in what sense his vanishing into the darkness was a lateral move.