Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“What about Brueghel, Vermeer, and Cézanne.”

“They don’t build boats.”

“You’re a redneck.”

“I’m worse, I’m a commercial fisherman. I’d pour water on a drowning man.”

“What are those numbers for?”

“Registration.”

“The orange sticker?”

“Commercial fishing sticker. — No, the boat means plenty; but there is a kind of letdown when you get something you want that bad.”

“I wish I knew what your plan was.”

“My plan is to go directly to heaven.”

“That was my father’s plan. He became an Episcopal priest. Until then he was interested in heaven. After that he was mostly concerned with blooded horses. After horses it was a lady who hunted foxes on horses.”

“What did that lead to.” The boat trailed easy.

“A blessed event. My mother took an apartment near Canaveral, divorced my father, and married a realtor. The realtor lost his shirt when NASA moved to the Houston Space Center and all those subdivisions went back to frog pond. Then my mother broke her back in a jeep accident during the Audubon Christmas bird-count competition. The realtor left her and now she lives alone with the blessed event, my half brother. My father handed him over so he could go to Florence and live on the Lungarno with the girl who ran the bake sale at the church picnic, a nymphomaniac golf instructor. My father is addicted to ether and their place stinks. She hangs out at American Express and has a room of her own behind the Duomo for her assignations, usually with buyers from stateside gift shops, not necessarily men … But my mother is happy, though she misses all the NASA scientists. Many of them were bird watchers.”

“And your dad found his heaven with a cross-sexed nympho bake-salesman in the city of Michelangelo.”

“Do I turn here?”

“Next block.”

“Well, he did find something. When do you plan on finding heaven?”

“I had what you might call a vision. Half a dozen little brainstorms about living right and being free. Now they weren’t any of them simple; but I didn’t half expect to have a fight over them. It looks like if I am going to hang in there with the rest of the carnivores, I’m going to have to draw some lines. Nothing obvious. Just some curving friendly lines with two-way turnstiles. — Pull up side of the dry shed there.”

“Two-way turnstiles.”

“On my Jesus Freeway.”

“Is this a joke?”

“Stop right here. You have a responsibility as a motorist. I’ll back the trailer in the shed. What we need here is Our Lady of the Skiff; though the record seems to indicate that she does not back small craft or in fact anything under fifty feet unless it has a teak deck or exceptional electronics.”

He backed the skiff in without event, detached the trailer; and Miranda parked outside the shed. Skelton stayed to watch them hang the big Evinrude engine, bringing it on a chain from the fork lift and swinging it down on the transom. Skelton gazed at the bright new powerhead, anodized and precise under a veil of light oil. The pulse pack was visible between the wedge of finned cylinders. And the electrical harness sent out its leads and cables to various sealed junctures in the power-head. Skelton stared, the sound of traffic faraway in his ears.

This like his books, fuselage, imaginary garden, family, loves, religion, and private history was an indispensable component of the spiritual survival multiple he was inventing for himself; and through which he intended to sandwich himself between earth, sea, and stars with the fit a waffle has within a waffle iron; or the kind of mortising James Powell had performed in his skiff; less a seamlessness than the kind of laminated strength a scar has.

While the skiff was being set up, Skelton proposed, they would go up to Big Pine and have something to eat at the Baltimore Oyster House. A geriatrical hippie in an MG came that close to nailing them head on; then nihilistically waved to them as he shot by, as though on a Final Mission. They cruised through Saddlebunch and Skelton could see the area of mangroves penetrated by the creek in which he had lost contact with the Rudleighs. Just past Saddlebunch, Miranda began an oral outrage that lasted till Sugarloaf Key, Skelton gaping wanly through the windshield. A Greyhound passed in the opposite direction, the driver leaning forward on the wheel in the professional slump. Did he see? The bus’s brake lights flashed three times in the rear-view mirror. He did. Skelton’s face compressed in a lizard grimace, and misfocus crossed his eyes like a momentary shadow. Wave to Sonny in the Gulf Station; he thinks I’m alone. On Summerland Key, wave to Bud in the Sinclair; he sees I’m with a girl. A little dock bar there on the left, on a raft; friendly place but no pool table. Skiffs moored in its shadow; lobster traps piled all over and ocean both ways; God if they will leave that ocean alone, I can take it all. Osprey goes over; kestrels on the wire watching for mice where they mow the shoulder; and anole lizards, of course, whose translucent rib cages and generally green delicateness recommend themselves to the little falcons. Big Pine and the Baltimore Oyster House.

“Hungry?” Skelton asks.

“I was.”

“Oh God, Miranda.”

They sat at the bar. The cook and owner was a former submariner, a burly bald man who carried a wordless moral impact Skelton supposed Sam Johnson must have owned.

“What are you going to have?” Miranda asked.

“She-crab soup.”

“Me too. Can you split an order of oysters?”

“What kind of oysters?” Skelton asked the barmaid.

“Both,” she said.

“Chesapeakes and Apalachicolas,” Skelton said to Miranda.

“You say.”

“Apalachicolas. It’s a state industry. And give us a pitcher.”

The oysters arrived shortly. Skelton said, “Let’s just eat these off the one plate instead of dividing them up.”

Skelton squeezed lime on an oyster, raised its barnacled shell to his lip, and pushed the occupant into his mouth. Word had it Apalachicola was having water problems; better enjoy these while you can. What an idea. My people have been eating Apalachicola oysters for a hundred years; I object on the basis of family. Spiders have so much bug-killer in them they can’t make symmetrical webs either. Skelton looked over at Miranda to reiterate his conviction of general pointlessness; but he noticed a button on her shirt pulled taut between her breasts, tilted almost enough to slip through the buttonhole; he knew those appendages to be slightly larger and slightly firmer than well-made Cuban flan and that concrete thought about something desired made him lose interest in despair. He had long since learned that the general view was tragic; but he had simultaneously learned that the trick was to become interested in something else. Look askance and it all shines on. The hope of reward in this line of religion was to be able to gaze with boredom straight into the big black hole, pausing only to wipe the face of your pocket watch with a clean linen handkerchief so that its next owner can trade it in on a new Bulova along with the gold he has knocked out of your indifferent teeth. After all, who on earth slipping it to a truly desired woman can seriously interest himself in the notion that the race is doomed; at such a time, the very thought is a flourish. Afterward, in the little death, a universal view spreads its arms; and the received world has “features” looped and looped in Nietzschean returns.

Skelton for his part, though blessed with good health and the lack of ordinary worries, was thankful that it had been since the trick Dance, Carter, and the Rudleighs had played him that he felt that separation of himself from the people and objects amid which he lived.