Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“What are you going to fish for?”

“I’m going to bonefish,” Skelton said. “I’ve got bonefish tides and I’m going to fish them. If Roy Rogers doesn’t want to bonefish, he can fuck off.”

“I’ve got a permit charter.”

“Well, you got the wrong goddamn tides.”

“I know, I know. What’s the matter with you?”

Skelton started shouting: “Why do these people want a guide? They can’t read tide tables but they already know what they want to fish for!”

“Boy, are you het up. Do like I do; make your moves until four o’clock; then run home and take his money.”

Olie Slatt arrived in a taxicab. He was wearing a men’s bikini and carrying a terrycloth beach bag. He was complected right for mine life and so it made a certain amount of abstract sense when he donned a bathrobe that came to the ground. He climbed aboard.

“I want a trophy.”

Skelton took the beach bag from him to stow it; inside were wrap-around La Dolce Vita sunglasses, a telephone book, bath clogs, and a roll of toilet paper.

So far Nichol Dance hadn’t shown. Carter’s people were around. First an anesthesiologist and a tool designer from Spokane who were fishing tomorrow; they wanted a brief casting lesson so they could practice up, a task compounded by a certain lack of simple motor control in either of them.

Then today’s customers arrived: the Rudleighs, who had abandoned Dance as “a nut case”; old pros in whites and deck shoes, they brought personal tackle boxes and two thermoses of Gibsons.

Skelton started the engine, warmed up briefly, and headed for the ocean. Carter watched him until he saw the skiff jump on plane, then turn downwind toward the backcountry.

Nichol Dance arrived about five minutes later. The Rudleighs backed away.

“We just sent off a guide on his maiden voyage,” said Carter.

“Don’t say.”

“Looked real organized. Had his lunch and gear all clean and layed out and rigged.”

“What’s he and that snake doctor out for?”

“Bonefish I believe…”

Dance nodded toward the two Rudleighs. “You fishing that lunchmeat, Cart?”

“Till four o’clock.”

“What kind of tides we got?”

“Five-eighteen Key West low.”

“That’d make the Barracuda Keys first stop for the new guide.”

“I suppose.”

Dance looked at Carter and laughed at him. “Where else? Toptree Hammock? Boy stole half that pattern off me.”

Dance was wearing a blue shirt with white dolphins all over it; short-sleeved, outside his pants. Dance was not robustly built but his strong arms made him look like a sport of some kind, a handball player, say.

Cart put his charter aboard and Dance got in his own skiff. Carter came out with a pack of cigarettes; he stopped on the dock and looked at Dance and tore the red thin strip of cellophane from the pack.

Then Dance’s engine wouldn’t start. Cart came over and primed it for him, pulled the plugs, replaced them, and then succeeded Dance in failing to start it.

“It ain’t gonna run,” he said, “I can hear it.”

Dance said in a vacuum, “Man oh man.”

“Do you want to borrow my skiff?” Carter asked him. Dance looked up; Carter was looking elsewhere.

“Do you want to borrow my gun?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want to lend me your skiff for?”

“I thought you could use it.”

“If I take your skiff, how are you going to pay for that cunt of yours’ shopping?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry, Cart. I am. I’m sorry I said that.”

“Nichol, my clients can see how upset you are.”

“All right, all right I’ll stop.”

“What do you want to do?” Carter asked again, resting his eyes on the highway, ticking off traffic, flow and volume.

“I don’t know what I want to do.”

“Do you want the skiff.”

“Yes, I’m going to take it.”

Carter and Dance walked up the dock to Carter’s boat. The Rudleighs were in the skiff now, lounging in the fighting chairs.

“Mister and Missus Rudleigh, can I ask you to get out please?”

The two climbed out bewildered.

“What’s up, Captain?”

“My friend needs the skiff. It’s looking more like miniature golf today.”

Rudleigh said, “Run it past us again, Captain, you were real unclear the first time.”

“I’m afraid our fishing is off. We have a kind of emergency to see to.”

“Well, we’ll be heading directly to the Chamber of Commerce,” said Rudleigh. “Do you have an official version of the event you’d like us to relay as to why a month-old date to fish was canceled?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What is it?”

“The captain — or guide — experienced a sudden loss of interest — or ambition — and flaked out without warning.”

* * *

Dance was gone in a roar.

* * *

“Honey,” called Skelton’s father to his mother from the bathroom, “scramble me four eggs and pour my coffee now so it will cool.”

He shaved very carefully and very thoroughly, preparing his face with a hot washcloth, brushing on the lather thick and hot, then drew stripes through the stubbled foam.

The conversion was quite startling; and once more the slightly olive skin was visible drawn across the facial bones that were those of an Iberian poet who was moved to verse only by a landscape with one tree and a full moon. Just as true, it was the face, if one believed such things, of someone incapable of cruelty; and deeply prone to folly.

He finished shaving, manicured his nails, combed his hair, and dressed for the day in one brisk motion after another; then strolled in for breakfast, which he ate while jotting notes to himself on a pad.

Today he was going to start something. He was trying to work it out on his pad, where he had written:

1. Fire

2. Air

3. Ocean

4. Streets

5. Houses

6. Space

He was still working on 7. It was his lucky number. He couldn’t decide between “Infinity” and “Waste Disposal.”

* * *

“I feel awful about that boy,” said Jeannie when she knew Dance had the boat.

“Why?”

“Because he is going to be killed!”

“Oh, Jeannie please. Nichol won’t hurt him.”

“What do you think he’s out there to do!”

Carter was thumb-indenting a neat four-in-hand for his visit to the Chamber of Commerce.

“Kill himself,” he said, “that seems pretty plain to me.” Then for the thousandth time he began to explain that no force on earth could keep a man from doing away with himself if that was what he was bound and determined to do. He checked the tie in the mirror; then raised his eyes to his own and thought: You are a hamster on a wheel and a low-breed dog in one.

“Jeannie, let’s us go out and buy something big.”

“Why hon?”

“Come on. Something big as all suicide to stand in the lawn. I think it should be some bright color or something to match the shutters.” Her face fell.

“No, you,” she said, frightening Carter for maybe the first time. “I think it’s something you should buy.”

It was a tough and gnarled remark that they would both get over; Jeannie would get over it first, deploying her bruised spirit among the New Year sales and One Time Only offers; first-to-come Jeannie would be the first served; until that undetermined hour when she is precipitated into the hole with the rest of us.

* * *

The flats appending the northwest end of the Barracuda Keys form a connection between that minute archipelago and Snipe Point. They are, in effect, the western rim of Turkey Basin, diurnally drawing two great sweeps of ocean across the turtle-grass flats, dividing the bank into beveled sections; which from the air resemble scarabs of an annealed green next to the sky-stained green of the Gulf of Mexico. Along the inner rim, there is a concentration of large and hazardous niggerheads.