Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

Now Goldsboro Skelton didn’t know anything about Georgia politics, except that they were rotten; but everyone knew that. Goldsboro Skelton didn’t know very much about mainland Florida politics either, when you came right down to it; but he could in an hour’s phoning form an ineluctable bridge of crooks to any state capitol within two thousand miles. The cybernetics of semi-respectable crime and its system of internal favors is a communal network as handsome in its way as the whorls of the chambered nautilus.

“Senator,” said Goldsboro Skelton, “tell our friend the colonel what you just told me.”

The senator quickly rose to accustomed orotundities about the “plugged nickel” he wouldn’t dream of giving for the colonel’s “sorry and worthless ass” if he didn’t find a way of putting young Skelton on the island of Key West within twenty-four hours, all papers of clearance in hand to shut him of the U.S. Army and those “piss-faced nincompoops” like the colonel himself who were allowed to torment youngsters in Georgia while grown men were out giving the Axis what for.

“Gentlemen,” said the colonel, trying desperately to forget Long Island and find a way into the mechanism of manipulation these highhanders from East Jesus convinced him existed. “You’re trying to make a horse’s ass of me.”

“Colonel,” said Skelton, “if you knew how close the ass of a horse was to actual glue and dog food…” He fluttered his hand to let the colonel finish his thought.

There was a reconvening in the army, after which Skelton was found gone of brain and sent home to Key West on a mental.

Years later when the retired colonel, now a leg man for Lever Brothers soap, thumbed open the Syntopicon to the Great Books to find something to stir his soldier’s memories, some nugget from Thucydides for instance, the words DOG FOOD would come to him and there would live again in his mind, more than his Exploits Against The Enemy, that day on Peachtree Street when being a horse’s ass had been the better part of valor. At such a time, he could turn to the wop-and-kike mob that had inundated his Long Island with a cozy, sold-out feeling that readied him for the millennium, senility, alienation, and dyspepsia.

* * *

Doctor Bienvenida had done the impossible. He had escaped from Cuba with his own finely trained person and he had managed to spring his practice too. Forty-six prosperous Havanans flew the coop to Cayo Hueso; so that, professionally, Bienvenida missed hardly a beat, little more than the time it took to make the ninety-mile ride in his own Hatteras sport-fisherman. Consequently there remained in his tone with his patients a lack of salesmanship, a bluntness of a kind that makes patients believe. He had Jeannie Carter before him now, and he leaned forward slowly to deliver his message, so that his stethoscope dangled free of his chest and his blue jowls made an imperceptible swell forward.

“He died,” said the doctor. Jeannie Carter was so tense that when she stood up from the Naugahyde seat her sweating behind made a tearing sound. She reached around and plucked the seersucker from her thighs.

“He died?”

“Afrai’ so.”

“Oh, but doctor!”

Jeannie began jumping around the doctor’s office, both feet together in a pompon dither reminiscent of her fifty-yard-line sprints at Orlando High.

“It’s goody-goody gumdrop!” That sort of thing.

The rabbit had passed away (she was not so blunt as the doctor) and a little one would soon be wedging its way into Sardineland ready for the life of hotcakes. Jeannie thought of the stork.

Now, after running down football fields to a thousand erections rising in salute, Jeannie Carter did not really believe the death of the rabbit meant the coming of the stork. But helplessly the big white bird appeared to her on glistening wings; with a rather biggish beak, to be sure. And a kid in a hankie.

When Carter came home that evening, tired, yet cautiously eyeing the living room for anything new, Jeannie kissed him with a robust suggestion of congratulations.

“Hon,” she said, “you’re okay.”

“What do you mean?”

“Looks like you up and hit the bull’s-eye. Wasn’t zif you lacked the know-how! Ha, ha!”

“You in a family way, Jeannie?”

“Yes sir, honey, I am.”

“Seems like a real miracle.” Carter himself envisioned the stork as something like Mothra, the flying Jap winged bug of the late-night horror show, Creature Feature.

Carter headed into the Florida room. Carter was tired from poling his skiff all over hell’s half acre and he sat on the couch in his khaki guide’s clothes and put his feet up. Jeannie followed a few moments later, suddenly full of spirit and even, frankly, joie de vivre. She had two demonstration flash cards depicting indistinct blobs and discolorations on a white background. Carter thought they were fetuses.

“Now Cart,” she said, beginning to stroll up and down, “don’t look bored because you was the one earlier this week what asked me to explain the difference between a pyrolytic self-cleaning oven and a catalytic self-cleaning oven.”

“I’m paying the fuck attention. Aw, Jesus…” he moaned. He was trying to make the connection between his wife and the self-cleaning oven.

“I believe that you are, Cart. I believe that. Now pictured here is a section of an actual oven panel from a General Electric pyrolytic oven that has been soiled with prune-pie spillover.” She turned the card over; it was blank on the other side. “The cleaning cycle is completed and no sign of the prune-pie spillover remains!”

She held up another flash card with a similar mess depicted. “Here you have the cheaper catalytic-oven panel soiled with the same prune-pie spillover.” Jeannie rotated the card; the reverse was identical to the facing side: a mess. “After a five-hour baking period there is no noticeable removal of the prune-pie spillover. And even after one hundred and sixty-eight hours at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, most of the prune-pie spillover remains on the catalytic oven panel!”

With simple cougar-like grace, Cart rose from the couch and began to stalk his wife. A bit of foam gathered at the corner of his mouth.

* * *

The skiff was finished. Skelton went over it, standing back at the bait wells and looking to follow the curve of the cockpit coaming; it faired forward to the casting deck without a dogleg. It was thoroughly finished, with every corner radiused off and smooth. Skelton wrote out the check.

“You won’t believe this but a man came in here,” said James Powell, “wearing no shoes and old navy pants with a rope to hold them up and kind of a sheet and offered me ten thousand dollars for this boat.”

“That was my father.”

“He dresses funny.”

“He is trying to keep me from guiding.”

“You are going to guide then—”

“Course I am!”

“Buy a gun.”

“News gets out, doesn’t it.”

“News like that does.”

They wheeled the skiff out by hand on the trailer through the corrugated shed door. Miranda’s car, Miranda inside, was parked in the alley. Skelton lifted the tongue of the trailer over the ball of the hitch and clamped it.

“Thank you, James. The skiff turned out a mile prettier than I even hoped.”

“I’m pleased myself. Take me for a ride some day.”

“I promise.”

“I didn’t build that for a coffin, you know.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Miranda. She drove, Skelton constantly looking back to see how it was trailing; the bow loomed in the rear window. “Does it mean a lot to you?”

“It will.”

“When?”

“When I have paid for it and put some fish in the box and some hours on the engine. Right now it’s just beautiful and beautiful isn’t very interesting.”