Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

Two nights earlier he had gotten so frightened that Dance would kill him that he had cried; but he never felt the yawning that came between himself and everything when his essential facilities for control began to lock up. Studying biology — at the end — he lost the connection between the sessile polyp he was dissecting and the firmament, in effect the kingdom-and-glory; or that at least was his first sign; within two hours, only Thorazine drove Satan from his eyes long enough for him to reform the connections between himself and what was palpably not himself. One more week and he was in Key West again, where it was widely reported that he had “lowered his expectations.” He wants to be a guide, people said, looking at each other with signification, out in a damn boat all the doo-dah day.

Skelton looked aside to Miranda. It this a loose woman? When he was young, he was always falling in love; once with a floozy from the base named Joyce; he had a souped-up Chevy BelAir then with a three-quarter-race engine, scavenger headers, and so on; and he and Joyce would take a bottle and go up the keys where Joyce would sometimes run along the four-inch bridge railings and — twice — fall off, missing the abutments, somehow. Joyce was loose as a goose. She chipped in with him on a set of slicks so they could drag-race sailors on A1A. A friend of Skelton’s told him that if Joyce had as many dicks sticking out of her as she’d had sticking in her she would look like a porcupine. Skelton punched him dutifully; they drifted apart and Skelton kept the racing slicks.

“Know what?”

“What.”

“Still haven’t seen my old man. Hasn’t showed up since he was around your place. But I want to ask you something. Do you think he was serious when he was asking you for a date?”

“No. He was making fun.”

“Well, he’s not an unkind person.”

“Can you eat that last oyster?”

“No, you.”

“I will. Well, what kind of father is he?”

“The best. And I been reviewing his performance since I was real little. He is always checking to see how things add up. He taught me how to step to one side about everything I looked at, always change the angle.”

“Does that make for a happy life?”

“Probably not. So what.”

“Is this upsetting you?”

“A little.”

“What has he done?”

“He got thrown out of the army during World War II and came home and invented a new kind of infrared film for night photography and got decorated. The army paid him a percentage on the film and he used the money to open a whorehouse, a blimp factory, and a reading room for Catholic-anarchist literature. He closed the reading room when he learned anarchists had fought with the White Russians. Then he opened it again when he learned the Communists had suppressed Basque anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. He is an idealist. — He kept a horse.”

“In Key West?”

“An American Saddlebred with rubber shoes. He could swim it to Christmas Island and gallop in the seashells.”

Miranda drove back. She was an aggressive driver and a tailgater; and when she passed she stayed too long in the left lane. Skelton hated riding with her. When they got to the dry shed, he told her to meet him at the dock.

The skiff was ready; they put the fork lift under the hull and backed out of the shed with it and lowered it into the water. Skelton got in and walked it around to the gas dock, where he fueled up. The engine started readily and he let it idle for a moment. Then he pushed off and backed around far enough that he could turn and pull out alongside the sponging skiffs, the old Johnson rum-running boat, and crawfish boats moored along the sea wall. When he had clearance, he put it up on a plane, hearing the strange two-stroke exhaust rap of the engine. The fully powered boat seemed to have a kind of loft and control that he had hoped for. He swung under the Eisenhower Causeway and could feel the flat-bottom hull skidding as he knew it would; but the chines didn’t catch, so the rate of slide was predictable. He powered it through the turn near Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, past the gaudy Cuban commercial boats that looked like dismasted sailboats, then out through the gap at Sigsby for a five-minute shakedown. He ran it past the little key there in a foot of water at 4,000 rpm and abruptly shut it down. The boat settled levelly without dropping the stern and fouling the prop on the bottom. He ran it up on a plane, snaking it off a little to put the prop away from the bottom a few inches, and headed for the dock at 2,900, its slowest planing speed, with a sense of complete satisfaction.

In three minutes, he rounded the island to Chambers Street where he could see, a hundred yards before he shut down, Miranda sitting on one of the guides’ lockers at the dock, talking to Jeannie Carter and Nichol Dance.

Wild horses belonged to that category of things that could not have made Skelton bring these three together on purpose, nor any collaboration of all the tea in China and months of Sundays. On days of more than twenty-knot wind, the foam lines began to build on the ocean and any bird that so much as raised its wings got the kind of scudding trip before superior force that Skelton felt himself now getting, as these clusters formed and foolish lives like his father’s began to break up. Something was afoot.

Nichol Dance fended the boat and threw two half-hitches around the bow cleat; Skelton reversed his engine against the line and swung the stern in alongside the dock and shut down.

“What’s up?”

“Your girl here wants to know why I’m going to shoot you if you guide.”

Jeannie released the long trilling laugh that had, after the baton, become, in effect, her trademark. It was her song; and she used it to skewer a few half-formed thoughts like shish kebab. Skelton climbed up on the dock.

“What are you laughing at?”

“The thought that Nichol could hurt a … a fly!”

When she knew as well as anybody that the personable Hoosier had blown that exercise boy to Kingdom Come; and in a moment of pique neatly gaffed Roy Soleil for ridiculing him. But hurt a fly!?

That is why Miranda said, “Come off it,” with that particular woman-to-woman force that scares men. Skelton sat on the wooden locker with the others.

“Why in the worl’ do you want to guide anyway?” Jeannie asked Skelton himself.

“It’s been sort of a process of elimination,” said Skelton.

“Well, you oughta had seen my husband about the time when he come in with his skin burnt half off!”

Dance was looking a little foolish; he didn’t see how he could reiterate his threat or add some credence to it without reminding everybody of TV.

“That’s a pretty little skiff though,” Jeannie observed. “I bet you’re real proud of it.”

“I am.”

“Best skiff I seen yet,” Dance said.

“And I know it’ll mortally fly,” Jeannie said, “with that one-twenty-five Starflite Evinrude settin on that transom waitin to flat shut down these other turkeys.”

“Aw well, who knows…” Skelton could do without Jeannie’s ascription of mechanical superiority here just now. But Dance didn’t take it that way; he smiled and listened, always a man who knew who he was. He talked without studying your eyes to see what you thought of what he said.

“But I sure will say this. Cart has never lost a day’s wages with his Merc. That old Thunderbolt ignition and Power-Trim just seem to be the combination for a workin fool like Cart.”

Skelton could hardly pay attention; he was in his trance. There was Nichol the same way. The Eternal Revenue Service is in the wings. But the girls with their race’s gift for the here and now were casting sidelong glances at one another. Jeannie’s skewer laugh shot forth again and she said, “What Key West needs with a beginner guide beats me for starters!”