Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

* * *

Skelton was making an incision in the skin of the fuselage over the center of its only real room when the telephone rang.

“Tom, Cart.”

“Hey, Cart. What do you need?”

“How’s your skiff coming along?”

“Powell’s got a coat of paint on the inside. One more and I can hang the engine.”

“You want to guide a week from today?”

“Yes.”

“I got me a sportsman here from the state of Montana.”

“Sign him up, Cart.”

“If you can get him a Citation fish, I think he’ll mount it; and I’ll see you get the kickback from the taxidermist.”

Skelton said, “Tell him a week today at eight-thirty.”

Skelton worked for some time making an opening in the fuselage where he had inscribed the long oval shape with a grease pencil. In the yard, he had a clear Plexiglas crown that had been a component from a field radar station. As they said in Key West, it had belonged to us’n, meaning U.S.N., and Skelton had laid hands on it for next to nothing. Within a day, he slid the great bubble into position on his opening, bolted it over a hand-cut gasket, and for good measure sealed it with silicone putty.

Now when he entered the fuselage and closed its compression doorway, he could look up to an immense oval of blue sky, almost never without at least one bird. And when the sun went down, it was as though he were in a planetarium.

He had one long table in the room; and the bunk bed was under the bubble. The bed itself was like a normal two-story bunk bed, except that there was no lower bunk; that area was storage multiples and a single shelf for his Zenith Transoceanic radio and the books he was reading — still Bohlke’s Fishes and D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form —trying to be a better guide.

The Zenith was superb for picking up remote country music stations:

Someday, when our dream world finds us,

And these hard times are gone …

And the cooking facilities were a salvaged kitchen from a Mobile trawler that went down between Washerwoman and American shoals full of shrimpers too drunk to drown.

Skelton’s every effort was toward being a single-member, intentional community. Faced with the impossibility of cloning, it was imaginable that he would mate. But he was still sketching things in. His little piece of land included a cistern; and when he rebuilt the catchment for it (couldn’t see yet how to incorporate it with the fuselage), he would start the garden. Then he would begin culling his guide schedule to one day’s fishing a week with people he wanted to see. The bulk of the rest of his time would be used in aimless and pointless research in the natural world, from biology to lunar meditation; all on the principle, the absolute principle, that ripeness was all.

* * *

Communism, thought Goldsboro Skelton — one should really say Commonism, which is the way he thought of the word — has had God knows a baleful and ruinous influence on the world; but the one major Greaser among world Commonists, Fidel (Skelton called him Fido) Castro, had done him an immeasurable favor when he decided to release Bella Knowles’s husband, Peewee, from the Isle of Pines, where he had served some doubtless sorry hours atoning for the one manly thing he had ever done: run a boatload of Spring-fields to a handful of counterrevolutionaries in Camagüey so worn out they turned the little insurance adjuster over to the Fidelistas out of tedium vitae and small hope of recompense; Peewee Knowles had just been trying to pay off his swimming pool, like any other citizen high and dry on the Morris Plan.

What occasioned this outburst of thought in which Skelton actually thanked Fidel Castro for repatriating Bella’s husband was a long inquiry on Bella’s part about his former wife. After forbearing her cross-examination, Goldsboro Skelton shocked her into final silence.

“She had tits like that, ” he said of his long-gone spouse, “and when she died, I threw a fiver in the hole and closed a chapter in my life. She had Bright’s disease, a ten-pound liver, and left a quarter of a million to the D.A.R., on the long shot America would quit producing people like me and our son.”

“Your son is a little odd. And your grandson—!”

“They are perfect.”

“Goldsboro.”

“Perfect.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And the next time you answer me like that, I’ll have you and your musical background up in north Miami making parakeet-training records.”

“So long as I’m back in time to see them wheel the ninny down Duval Street Easter time in his mosquito-proof bassinet.”

“Why have I let you sass me and answer me back so long?”

The old man thought, We’ve all got a story, don’t we; and it’s always a good one. Absolutely always. The thing that excited him in his seventieth year was that it may all have been the same story.

* * *

In the beehive twilight of Roosevelt Boulevard, seagulls veered around light poles to the murmur of vouching salesmen. And Thomas Skelton strolled the charter-boat docks with an increasing sense that somebody had his number.

In school physics books, “force diagrams” illustrated balls being acted upon by various vectors of force; the question is, if I am the ball, which way do I go? Do I, he thought, for example, go the way of all good things? Do I go for broke? Do I pass go? Do I go man go? Do I say go away? Do I go in my pants? Or do I simply call for my belongings and wait until called upon to stop by higher forces acting upon the simple ball of self. The answer was the simple “Dunno” of the Joe Palooka comic strips. When what we dread the most occurs, a loss of “features,” we look around and say, “Me? I dunno.”

* * *

Skelton sat in his quarters. He wondered that you could say the right word in a bad situation and all hell would break loose. He had found the word and said it and all hell had broken loose. Now a military tribunal had found him guilty of obstructing the war effort.

World War II was just going to have to piss up a rope without him. He had perhaps made a little too much of Adolf Hitler and the Miami Press Club; but his present removal was less a consequence of that than it was of his running commentary on the possibilities of glory in war, which, it was said, demoralized the men; especially those types of enlisted men who found themselves at Fort Benning in 1943, a cast-iron year, obliged to jump daily from the practice tower or on the static line from the lumbering planes of the Airborne; who often as not came from one of those almost vanished and newsless backwaters ungoverned by external event or government adventure which had long since turned, blood and bone, to the more reliable products of human communities, season, and acts of God.

These “yokels,” as they were known among an officer corps that holed up with cotton-chopping thirteen-year-olds for a giggle, these yokels thought that Skelton was as funny as Skelton’s own girlfriend back in Key West thought he was, with her genius intelligence and near-photographic memory; and her curious, not to say outrageous, special history.

But one bird colonel out of Long Island, New York, who “knew from funny” and who would some years later be a charter subscriber to Mortimer J. Adler’s series of the Great Books of the Western World, resolved to snare this bird before he pissed away all the morale his phalanx of cannon fodder owned.

Inside of ten days, he had Skelton shut up tight as a drum in the Fort Benning jail and ready to embark upon the duration at hard labor.

And within forty-eight hours of that, the bird colonel and future Great Books subscriber found himself (bused at his own expense) on Peachtree Street in Atlanta in a quiet, freshly abandoned insurance office chatting with a retired senator and one Goldsboro Skelton of Key West, Florida, son of the last important wrecking master on that island, heir to a now lost salvage fortune, and apoplectic, entrepreneurial maniac, crook, and political manipulator. Skelton sat with one of his counterparts, a senator of the old Soufland school, a preposterous amalgamation of the man on the Quaker Oats box and a full-grown marsh weasel.