Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

Winter ducks and cormorants got up in front of the approaching skiffs and made off at angles to the boats’ running course. Sea fans, coral heads, yellow cap rock, stone-crab and crawfish pots were inordinate and clear in the shallow water. The trap markers were affixed to Clorox-bottle floats that hung down tide on yellow lines; but Skelton by painful and slow process knew very well how to run the country having slept out in mosquito bogs for his misjudgments. He had poled the better parts of full days upwind and up tide with bent drive shafts and wiped-out propellers for having had on the map of his brain previously unlocated coral heads or discarded ice cans from commercial boats; or for having lost surge channels in the glare crossing shallow reefs.

Well astern now, on Mente Chica Key, the outline of a bat tower could be seen against the smeared and windless sky.

“Leave it at the fuel dock,” said Dance now blearier than ever but still letting a thin devilish gas from slightly pursed lips evidence some dire bowel chemistry.

Roy Soleil, the dockmaster, stood beside the two pumps with a mild visual suggestion that he was the third. He made no move to throw them a line as Tom eased in and reversed the engines for an eggshell landing that lifted Dance’s eyebrows once more. Behind them, Carter was just now mooring; and Tom Skelton’s brain was tumid with uncommitted navigational errors.

“Why my God,” said Roy, “the original survivor.”

Nichol Dance did not look up but kept his reddening neck bent while he refueled the skiff.

“I mean, what makes folks keep signing up on these rescue missions?” Roy inquired. “Or is a rescue something every boy should have?”

When Nichol raised himself up to fix Roy with a baleful stare, Roy flushed very slightly but did not, you could see, deviate from his curious course.

“What ails you?” said Nichol Dance.

“Ails me?”

Roy, the dockmaster, twice Nichol Dance’s size, with the fame of maddened rages on his side, said: “Nichol, that is what I have been trying to touch upon.”

Carter by this time saw even from his distance what was afoot exactly; but the interval, even from Skelton’s proximate view, between releasing the gas pump and arriving on the dock with the ash-handled kill-gaff in hand was imperceptible. Skelton supposed there had been some prelude, even some subsequent move by the immense dockmaster; but Nichol Dance was sure with the gaff and the dockmaster was quickly down, neatly skewered between hip and short ribs; while Nichol Dance, standing over as he thrashed, gripped the hardwood handle with both hands and bore down as though to kill a snake. Nichol Dance said to Carter, “Call a doctor for this New Jersey arc-welder polack.” Carter ran to the pay phone and Dance disempaled the dockmaster, who lay bleeding, glaring and holding himself in with laced fingers. Then to Skelton he said, “Better get some law in here too before I think to wind this bug fucker’s clock.”

He looked at Roy.

“Roy, I’d go to Raiford Prison over you, if I needed.”

“I see that.”

When Tom Skelton came back, they sat to wait. First the ambulance came and took off the dockmaster. Then Nichol Dance handed Skelton a ledger of his bookings and told him to use the skiff. “I will call you from the joint as to what cut from your proceeds would be usual.”

“How did you pick me?”

“If I gave the bookings to Cart, I’d lose them. Anybody you’d guide I’m going to get back.”

It was a messy beginning. Still, he could regard his start with no sense of incursion by the events that surrounded it. He had enormous hopes for the future. He considered: mucus egg congestions are related to radiant sea creatures via indecipherable links of change.

* * *

“I can remember,” said Skelton’s Mother, “that autumn so clearly because I was expecting you. A man from Sugarloaf had been stung to death by bees on one of the Indian mounds and they brought him into Key West. They took him right over to the newspaper and laid out the corpse on the steps of the old city hall to get some pictures, but a colored man’s dog wouldn’t stop howling and leave them be. So they threw the corpse into a Ford sedan and drove it to the funeral parlor. The face was as big as that with bee stings and the colored man’s dog chased the car and wouldn’t stop howling until his owner ran him off to the shrimp dock. The dog got down under the pilings and kept on howling. That night when the boats went out you could hear the howling over all those shrimpers’ engines and your father went down and brought the dog home and put him in the cistern with five pounds of sirloin until the howling stopped.”

Skelton, still and listening, felt himself to be moving through the house, the full vacancy of its rooms, thinking, So much has been lost. In this heat, every garbage pail is full of fish skeletons and this town smells of the special lizard stench of churches or catacombs; narcosis dying as slowly as the life that would replace it.

* * *

Miranda’s hallway: A spindly mahogany end table to which the termites have had access for a hundred years sustains a green Mason jar with its lost patent numerals in heavy glass; and holding in its opaque vegetable water from the Keys Aqueduct, ribbed orange squash-blossoms in their delicately emblematic subdivision of light.

It was cool in there, a house holding a beloved woman, the aural penetrations of a Cuban side street and the Gulf of Mexico in an upper window.

Skelton perplexed himself as to how many dead had been transported through this hallway. If you had a specific answer to that, you would possess innumerable anecdotes about mortality with which to regale your friends; or if you had no friends, then to address to that not so finite darkness in which we are all corporate shareholders. The trick, finally, Skelton knew, was to keep them rolling in the aisles, saving the best one for last, about how we die and die and die.

What a thought. I am going to fuck my way out of this one. Miranda used to do reds, crossed her sevens, and had a Leo rising. She was Skelton’s girl, a pretty thing whose long black hair carried behind her as she walked.

The wooden fan made no sound in the front room. The door to the bedroom was ajar. Skelton paused midway across the room and felt a rising cold pass up through him as he began to hear through the doorway the bed’s rachitic sprung utterance. Skelton tried without amusing himself to think of this as an unspeakable pubic disaster. Pain. He stepped sideways very slightly and saw against that band of further space the writhing within; and could not keep himself from saying, “… Miranda…” so that the front-room quiet fell across everything like an eclipse.

“Tom?”

“Yes…”

“I’m making love. Wait out there till I’m through.”

Skelton walked to the window as though riding a thermal. Not able to stand in one place, he returned to the table, rifled through the sewing box, removed a small silver snuffbox, a pocket mirror, and a razor blade. He opened the snuffbox with trembling fingers and tapped out a little heap of cocaine on the mirror. He divided the pile and drew it out in two long thin white lines; blocked first one nostril, then the other, and drew the cocaine into each.

He leaned back into the chair and tuned his ears once again to the bed’s noise, which seemed to open and close in the room, tenebrous as a bird’s claw. But by the time his nose numbed and his throat seemed to not quite close any longer, it had come to seem that the bed was not unmusical. And once its noise had stopped, he shared the exhausted breathing and relief from within. Across the room, the tall window suspended a pure convexity of luminous air toward Skelton; and in the door he had entered was a bar of fluorescing sun. He began to imagine that he could feel Key West urge itself against the Atlantic like a ship of terrible slow movement. The chrysalis he sometimes felt inside was beginning to shed and stream quite lambently.