Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“Aw Cart, Cart, Cart. Of course I forgive her.”

“And she said she mm left some underthings…?”

Myron, moving now with reckless freedom, took a wad of nylon and silk from the top drawer of his desk and tossed it, just between a couple of fellows, to Cart.

“Cart, she is awful good with that baton!”

Carter smiled shyly. “You know, Myron, she ain’t half bad … Only, Myron?”

“Whussat, Cart?”

“She don’t own her no baton no more.”

“Uh, where’s it at, Cart?”

“It’s one giant step up her ass, Myron.”

Myron giggled, “You don’t mean that!”

“Oh but I do.” Carter had a certain affection for this lie. “I suppose it’ll show up again one of these days,” he added.

Guffaws.

* * *

Skelton thought that when what you ought to do had become less than a kind of absentee ballot you were always in danger of lending yourself to the deadly farce that surrounds us. The subtlest kind of maladjustment and you plummeted through the tissue surface of the socially lubricated and solvent to that curious helter-skelter of selves which produced such occasional private legislators as Nichol Dance.

Ideas like that, thought Skelton, could set a man to barking. Even a brief soulful howl beside the garbage would help. Even the notions of what wild horses couldn’t get you to do acquired an unabstract vigor — to the extent that you could nearly see their luminous manes and screaming nocturnal shapes. Half the time when lives streamed past on parallel courses, a false security developed: and the victim began to imagine that these lifelines did not congest or break down. Too late, the head-ons became apparent and you looked up to scream: The sonofabitch is in my lane! Histories are fused as metal by heat.

There was a knocking on the door of the fuselage. Skelton opened it; it was the wino drill sergeant from next door. “Come in.”

“Thank you, sir. Do you have a dog?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I thought I heard barking.”

“I was clearing my throat.”

“I was wondering, sir, if you could accompany me to headquarters.”

“Next door?” Skelton asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“No questions, please.”

“All right,” Skelton said, thinking, I will lend myself to another’s trip as my own leads only to the sillier kind of despair, plus, of course, Hamletism; not to mention mooning and the unenunciated snivel.

Skelton followed the sergeant with civilian dignity. At the door to the hotel, they were saluted by two winos who permitted them to enter the vomit-scented front hall. They ascended the stairway, whose walls approached within inches of Skelton’s shoulders. There was a man on duty at the top of the stairs and two men, rather less on duty, out cold in the upper hallway in their own puke, their blurred, raspy faces and crew-cuts communicating precisely what is communicated by a wrecking yard.

Skelton was shown into a room; the door was closed behind him as the light was turned on. The room only had space for a single bed, and Skelton’s father was in it looking less mortal than ephemeral; and considerably more dead than alive. He had his fiddle with him.

It was plain that the sheet beneath which his father lay was the one he had worn these last days around town. It had motor oil and dirt all over it, and on the section that covered his feet was a tire print.

“Well,” said his father, “I have to make a piece of wreckage of myself so we can have a bedside scene together.”

“What are you talking about.”

“This.” An inclusive gesture.

Skelton refused to reply.

“All right.”

“We’ve all been chasing you. Mother is finally finished with this stuff too I can tell you.”

“I wanted to advise you. That is what fathers do.”

“Why didn’t you just come over to my place. I have been looking for you every which way.”

“I didn’t have the advice ready. I had to go through a certain number of operational maneuvers, as they say here at headquarters, to get myself down to the level at which I knew what you were going through.”

Skelton looked into his palms for a sign.

“I’m not going through anything in particular,” Skelton lied.

“Do you think your friend is joking?”

“No. We have just laid out some terrains and a process of natural selection is going on.”

“Oh, come on. I thought we’d been over that Darwin baloney. I don’t even like it as a figure of speech.”

It appeared for a moment that he would actually be sick to his stomach. Skelton could not quite fathom the total degeneration he saw before him. His father’s face, often compared to Manolete’s, was covered with an uneven stubble; and his hair, always cut short as that of a monk, seemed like a barber-college special. The fingers of his inordinately long and ghostly hands arose to make a point, then faded with its vanishment from his mind. Whether from hunger or obsession, his face had receded from his eyes, isolating them in their sockets with an unmistakable suggestion of madness. Skelton felt a certain embarrassment at his own short-fingered, tough hands in his lap, rough-palmed from the pushpole: another sign that he had come from nowhere; a suggestion he was determined to put the lie to.

“I’ve had an adventure, I guess,” said his father wanly. “Like falling through space. I did some drinking and ended up here. I must think of when I left the army … I somehow consumed seven months getting to Key West. The things that happened to me were so foreign to what it seems could have happened to me. Much more disturbing than amnesia. You try to date your life around the things that happen to you that you can’t understand. When you understand something, it is no longer any good to you. It’s neutralized. When I got into the ‘bassinet’ there for seven months, I was trying to create one of those situations, artificially; and I failed because it was just eccentric. There was no mystery, no real enigma.”

“Except to others.”

One of his father’s eyelids was considerably lower than the other; and when he thought intensively, he usually pushed it up with his forefinger; he did now.

“It even lacked mystery for others. The odd and the mysterious are not the same.”

“Okay.”

“Then quite naturally I began to try to see what could be done about what was happening to you. I tried a few simple things like offering to buy the boat but my heart wasn’t in it. And I knew it ran counter to what you would accept. You have always been dedicated to ordeals as a way of driving your spirit to the place where its first confusions are. I think you’ve gotten away from that now and I showed you a lot about sidestepping that may have been useful.”

“Better than that.”

“So anyway — and this will seem a little simple-minded — I had the plan that I would try to condition myself to the point that life could depart almost as a relinquishment, a little release of the will and it would seep away … or something, right?”

“Yes, right,” Skelton said very nearly inaudibly.

His father laughed. “Everything happened. I got drunk, worked over, run in by the police, thrown out of restaurants. I told these boys here that I was discharged dishonorably from the army and they locked me in the ‘brig,’ which is the mop closet on the first floor. I know, funny; but I was in there two days without anything to eat. I have only been released five hours now.”

Skelton in pain glanced to the window where bright palm leaves shuddered in incongruous evening sunlight. And hearing traffic, he thought, How dare anyone go on about his business.

“But I began to find what could not be explained.” He drew out his upper plate; it was broken and taped back together. “I got drunk and fell down over in back of Carlos’s market and this preacher took my plate out and stepped on it.”