Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“That’s painful for me to recognize. I don’t mean that without respect either. But the load is heavy.” It was conceivable to Skelton that his earliest compulsive wishes were toward extracting his attention from the fields of changes which he like everyone else had inherited; at one point, phototropic plankton seemed the appropriate antiworld, a collective behemoth only estimable by electronic scanner, formulae, surmises; but even in that, there was a threshold and one which he couldn’t penetrate. He suspected lack of intelligence or ability to reason. So on one trip with his most admired professor to study the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico, he heard the following between two deckhands:

“Do you believe our Lord will save you?”

“Fuckin A.”

This preposterous ontological skirmish had the effect of producing in Skelton the perfect, lingering laugh; one quite embedded now and one which crinkled his face from time to time in giddy spiritual desire. For something. For a more penetrating laugh, a victim who said Bingo-Bango on the Hill of Skulls and who returned better dividends than War Bonds and compulsory trips to Nepal for the messages you were not getting at home. Even a victim who never was.

“Now,” said his father, “one other thing. I ran into my old friend Captain James Davis, formerly skipper of the trawler Marquesa and currently doing time as salad chef at Howard Johnson’s. What he tells me is that you are always talking to him about me—”

“That’s right.”

“—and that you always wind up asking him about your mother.”

“That’s right and he never tells me anything about her.”

“She was a whore.”

“That’s what I suspected.”

“In my own whorehouse. Is that what you needed to know? She was beautiful. An angel and a gold mine. I’m proud of her.”

“I should hope so,” Skelton managed.

“Okay,” said his father, “what are you going to do?”

“What I said I was.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go back to the house and have a shower and wait and hope to see you again.”

The two men walked out of the building under the portraits of Count Zeppelin and the airship Hansa. The sun had begun to rise. In half a day, it would drop into the sea before a cheering throng at Mallory dock. Footloose, deracinated tourists, moving coordinates on a thousand chamber-of-commerce war maps, would soon percolate into the density of downtown side streets.

Skelton and his father parted with minimal ceremony. These trips to the hole had been exhausting. Soon they would be looking askance again. Each of them knew that what is perhaps least appropriate in our drumming, cursory march across the glacier is our feckless sense of progress.

* * *

Slippage, daydreams: The eye is almost never on the ball. Skelton could not go to the bathroom. If you plug up a man’s ass, he thought, you will finally shut off his brain. He recalled his old figments, Don and Stacy, the People of the Plains. A knock on the door of their flatlands house. Stacy calls: “Don?”

“What?”

“There is somebody out here with a terrible swift sword.”

Tomorrow morning, he was taking Olie Slatt, Montana strip-miner, out to get a trophy.

* * *

“Let’s go out to dinner.”

“Where?” Miranda asked. Skelton named a good place for sea food. “Really,” said Miranda.

“What do you mean by that?”

“The stone crab is always cooked too long and it gets mushy. The red snapper is flecked with barf. They use paint thinner on the salad.”

“What kind of soap is this?”

“Pine tar,” she said.

“We’ll smell like a lumberyard. How come it has this cord hooked onto it? So you can retrieve it if you swallow it?”

Skelton pushed one of his feet, invisible under the sudsy water, into Miranda’s crotch and gently explored her interior with his toes. “Are you still loaded?”

“Not too.”

“What’d you do in school?”

“We all told our best true stories.”

“What were the best ones?”

“One boy caught a rattlesnake swimming in the channel at Little Torch … I can’t think of any more…”

“What’s wrong.”

“I’m afraid about you.”

“Don’t be.”

“I’d plead if I thought it would do any good.”

“It wouldn’t.”

“I still don’t see why you think this is a matter of conviction when it’s just an extended bar fight.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. It’s not a fight at all.”

“Well, if you’re going to guide tomorrow, I’m going up to the mainland to see my grandmother. I don’t even want to be on the key. And I can’t stand my grandmother!”

“You’ve got school. You can’t leave.”

“I don’t care.”

“You’ll lose your job.”

“So what.”

“Can I come down to your end?” She said that he could. Skelton slithered around to the opposite end of the tub, displacing so much water that a roller traveled all the way up over the overflow, causing an enormous vomiting noise from the plumbing.

“I want some key lime pie,” Skelton said with a smile.

“Maybe not, if you’re going to guide.”

“Doctor Irving Marfak says in Key Lime Pie without Tears that it should never be used to bargain with.”

“All right.”

“All right what?”

“Pie time.”

“Then stop crying.”

* * *

Miranda drove up A1A all the way to alligator Alley, using the Homestead cutoff to save some time. She couldn’t seem to even listen to the radio. After Key West, it was always surprising to see the vegetable stands, the tomato and bean fields; and the straggling agricultural life that transpired on the edge of the ’glades. She was not surprised any more than she listened to the radio.

The beginning of Miranda’s stay with her grandmother was like the middle and the end of her stay with her grandmother. Miranda arrived in time for dinner; and her grandmother, a famous social lady, and author of a book about the shells of Sanibel and Captiva islands called The Bivalve and Me, was wearing a floor-length dinner dress. She carried a chain bag and a dog.

She was drunk as a skunk.

From time to time, as Miranda readied herself for the dinner upon which she did not have her mind, the dog threw itself at her snapping and snarling. The dog’s name was Vecky, short for Carl Van Vechten, and he looked like a wasted rat of imprecise morals.

“Grandmother,” said Miranda evenly, “get this animal away from me or I’ll take something to its head.” Miranda’s grandmother showed her disapproval of Miranda. She permitted her lower eyelids to sag farther and farther — quite far actually — until there were considerable red bands of disapproval beneath each of her goo-goo eyes. She was never sure of her footing when she was looped; so she wore the floor-length dresses to hide her basketball shoes. Everyone knew anyway because they could hear their mad squeegee tread as she swept across the room.

They neither of them ate their dinners at the club but hung disconsolate over plates of expensive meat upon which only the bright parsley could draw the eye. The room, it seemed to Miranda, was cast in bluish gloom; in its middle a baby spotlight gave an ice mountain with its shrimp avalanche an unnatural prominence.

Ultimately, Miranda’s grandmother called to the waiter in a gravel command voice.

“Klaus! Klaus! Klaus!”

Klaus ran at them; so that others might enjoy their dinners.

“Klaus,” she said, “Vecky’s heart would be broken.” A broad executive gesture passed over the inviolate meat. “What do you say to a bowser bag?”