Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“You got anything to drink?”

“Maybe a beer,” said Skelton.

“I disburden myself of a life’s discoveries and you offer me a beer.”

“What do you want a drink for?”

“I want to get illuminated.”

“Well, then you just hold on there—” Skelton took a film canister out of one of his ammunition cases and opened it.

“Lick your finger and stick it in there—”

“Like that?”

“Now lick it off.”

“What is it? Is it dope?”

“No. Just do it.” He made his father do that three times, then did the same himself.

“All right,” said his father, “I trusted you. Now you tell me what that is.”

“Mushrooms carefully gathered by South American Indian witch-doctor curandero genius-maniacs.”

“Then you gave me dope.”

“No, sir. It’s another thing.”

“I’m a dope fiend,” said his father.

“No,” said Skelton, “I can tell you about that because I was one of those—”

“How bad was it? I thought that was what you were up to.”

“Pretty bad.”

“But like what?”

“A little like real flu combined with bad nerves and extreme old age.”

“Sounds attractive. Now what I’d like to know is why, on the basis of that, and with my proffered trust, you would pour drugs down my gullet.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

* * *

Elapse. A zone ensues: time in clarity.

Skelton explained how he had put his shelter together; and said he had wanted a kind of second-floor compartment but couldn’t see how to do it. His father sat down and started sketching a kind of blister for the fuselage with a floor suspended on cables; it was made of tetrahedral sections, some windows, some hinged-on marine hardware so that it could be vented, the whole capable of flexion: the sides to fair into the fuselage itself and the floor on its braided cables to be a live surface (“So that each step you take provides part of the next step”), all drawn in an elegant dry-point style reminiscent of old artist-engineers. His father looked down at his work and laughed. “Later, we’ll talk about how to keep the rain out.”

Skelton walked around in a long silvery orbit, his hands behind him and his fingers trailing. Starlight came in overhead like the fine pinpoints of charged water.

“God!” said his father, “can you smell all that topsoil out there! No wonder the gardens do so well. Jesus, I can smell all that wet moss under your mother’s philodendrons!” He pulled open a drawer beneath the salvaged marine cookstove and burst into laughter. Skelton walked over and looked in: there was some silverware and a corkscrew. It was pretty funny all right.

Skelton’s father crawled around on the floor, tears of helpless laughter dripping before him. Skelton took one last look into the drawer — silverware and corkscrew maniacally arrayed there — and leaned up against the wall laughing convulsively.

When his father stood up, Skelton looked at him dressed in one thing or another from his own sorry wardrobe; and smiled. “You do look dapper.”

“Look what?”

“Dapper.”

“Dapper!”

“Oh, Lord!”

“Let’s have another look in that silverware drawer,” his father said. It was the same in there: some knives, forks, spoons; and that corkscrew. Neither of them could take it.

In the eyes of Skelton’s father, the effacement of his accumulated sorrows had given way to a silly serenity. And Skelton himself, who had been feeling so narrowly treated by his existence, was on the margin of that horselaugh magnanimity that reveals new things under heaven every time.

“Let’s head for the old plant.”

“I’m for it.”

The two men hurried through the lunar palm shadows to the warehouse on upper Petronia. They passed a ghostly street sweeper with his own key to the cemetery, and a taxicab with golden interior light bustling down Flagler without a passenger through blue islands of moon shadow.

At the warehouse, Skelton’s father lifted a piece of cracked concrete for the key, unlocked the padlock on the corrugated door, and led Skelton inside. “If we play our cards right,” said his father, “we are headed for an emotional El Dorado in here, a real jackpot.”

Skelton passed him entering and saw vainglory in his father’s face. The data base here was decades of folly, the end-all praxis of quixotry.

Inside, the vast rubberoid wreckage of the Southernmost Blimp Works, presided over by a surplus, helium-filled barrage balloon on a swaying cable. Skelton’s father hauled in a few feet of cable and released it; the barrage balloon throbbed back into its position up under the ceiling; there was a black flag on its side and the phrase,

MAKE IT MUTUAL.

Skelton found a cylinder full of helium. The two of them filled their lungs with it and began to speak in the voices of Walt Disney ducks.

Skelton said: “In the deep discovery of the subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some inquirers; who, if two or three yards were open about the surface, would not care to rake the bowels of Potosí.”

His father replied, like a duck too: “The dense and driven Passion, and frightful sweat … what none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay—,” sighed hugely with a hint of duck noise, picked up a sheet of thick, treated rubber, and quacked, “Oh this too, too solid flesh!”

Skelton’s father was looking his inwardly lit best and wore his Manolete face with his witty hooded eyes — possibly now beclouded with those hallucinations that guided earlier Americans; it was the face of his power vision. His other face, his Sinclair Lewis face full-toothed and mildly simian, suggested problems of complexion in his youth and lack of solid moral reference (or blood sugar).

The two men quacked sharply at each other until the helium passed.

“Now son, I want to get back into this advice thing … if uh if these walls and floors would stop whipping around I’M A DOPE FIEND and so if you’d uh pay strict mm attention here—” Skelton fils was trying his best not to visualize a grave rat combat in the shadows.

“Let’s sit down for advice.” He patted the air as if to materialize a chair.

The two men sat on rubber sheets that covered most of the floor of the balloonery. The barrage blimp was poised upon its cable with such stillness as to suggest that the cable supported it. Over the doorway, Skelton’s now adjusted eyes perceived a portrait of Count Zeppelin with the date of his death, March 8, 1917. Beside the goner hydrogen visionary, a great rigid airship emblazoned Hansa rested on a pale, limitless glare of ice.

“Now generally I am told that I am a fine one to talk; so let me offer that as a means of ignoring me. When I suggest something to you, however heartfelt, you remind yourself of my absurd ventures in the manufacturing of blimps, my mental discharge from the army, my unsuccessful family life, and so on. In other words, review my credentials, ha ha! And forget everything I tell you! But don’t forget, even my whorehouse was a flop! My whorehouse was a flophouse! The floozies turned on me like a hundred raging toucans! They fired upon me with my own Seltzer! In twelve months of operation they never awarded me a freebie! I had a Congolese lesbian who used my Havana Churchills for dildos, then jammed the toilet with them! They peed on my fiddle, overcharged my friends, and gave your grandfather a bigger-than-life dose of Montezuman syphilis with chancres that ran up his body like mink tracks! When I saw what they could do, I gave my life some long thought. First I closed down the anarchist reading room. Then I closed down the Puta Palazzo, as I called my little business. Then I spent five years reading the religious literature of the world, homing in like an atomic pigeon on the Rig-Veda, the Bible, the journal of Pascal, Dostoevsky’s Insulted and Injured and the Exemplary Novels of Cervantes in both the original spic and in the incomparable translation of James Mabbe/Don Diego Puede Ser, ha ha! — the Elizabethan courtier and monster whoremonger of Castille or Cast Steel as the other peerless Diego has it. Well, where was I? Oh, yes. End of religious training. The forging of a bright metal too ductile to be forged! Trainee takes to his bed where he is instructively badgered by his wife and father. The world is viewed through mosquito netting. Lizards and Norway rats are perceived in the moonlight while Cayo Hueso is beddie-bye. A slow but inescapable loathing of his own father begins to form so contrary to subject’s wishes he realizes that it is his race’s conscience, his utterly bastardized and serenely mongrel and multisexual transnational squid of a people, the cuttlefish of earth, speaking through him when, quite against his wishes, he looks out through the gauze at his own flesh and blood from whose loins needless to say he has leapt in his full deformity, and thinks: God help me. Now man in question is an ineffectualist and will not act upon his race’s call. But the call is there. This great and powerful animal, your grandfather, this conniving millionaire son of wrecking masters and arch-abrogator of justice is slowly spinning to earth parachuting into his own history with his whores and washed-up coloratura singers, stalked by vague, pusillanimous insurance adjusters in gabardine and color-coordinated, fun-in-the-sun playsuits, and will finally either expire of his own disgust or will be run to ground by men who would ask for the opponent’s track record before undertaking to take on a piss-ant! The successor often seems flyblown and rank to the succeeded. Uh, except to me. You have always been liable to revert to your grandfather.”