Thomas McGuane: Ninety-Two in the Shade

Then too you could remember when you had been below Key West to the Marquesas on a cool winter day when the horsetails were on a rising barometer sky and the radiant drop curtain of fuchsia light stood on edge from the Gulf Stream. And when he ran back across the Boca Grande channel into the lakes and then toward Cottrell to miss the finger banks he knew how he would raise Key West on the soft-pencil edge of sea and sky. Then the city would seem like a white folding ruler, in sections; and the frame houses always lifted slowly, painted and wooden, from the sullen contours of the submarine base.

On the days when he was roughed up in the channel crossings and stopped for a drink to dry off, the upcountry girl in a wash dress would offer him Seven Crown and Seven-up; so that the two of them could soar down Duval in a flood of artificial light, stars, and bugs.

Key West was a town where you had to pick and choose. It was always a favorite of pirates.

* * *

Skelton would not have picked a fuselage in a vacant lot next door to a rummy hotel if he had had a choice; but when the money ran out and half a dozen career daydreams collapsed like a telescope, those who might have helped failed to dart to his side. Impecunious as could be, his neighbors found his side trip into education rather fancy to begin with. House painting, culling shrimp, and the half-assed dream of being a guide had a homely recognizability. His popularity returned.

The fuselage, a remnant of a crash-landed navy reconnaissance plane, rested logically on a concrete form and had by now in the quick tropical growing seasons become impressively laced with strangler fig (a plant whose power was now slowly buckling the riveted aluminum panels), bougainvillea, Confederate star jasmine, and a delicate form of trumpeter vine whose blue translucent blossoms cascaded around the compression-sealed aerodynamic doorway.

Within the last month, an alcoholic drill sergeant had taken a room in the hotel; and every morning at seven o’clock, he drilled the winos in the back yard, the winos lurching across the packed earth under the early Key West sun, feet dragging in the dust and heads swinging under incomplete control on helpless and attenuated necks, hair slicked down, whitish blurred beards on some, veinous noses, broken teeth and bruises from falls. From his window in the morning, Skelton could only see the tops of their heads gliding and abruptly changing positions beyond the fence, the commands ringing out from the drill sergeant, the slow inexorable rise of absurd dust.

But today, coming home and closing the door, and opening his mind to the familiarity of his fuselage, Skelton felt a certain relief to be away from Carter and Dance, among whom he felt himself entirely to be the rube. Here in the fuselage, among Bohlke’s Fishes of the Bahamas, Field Notes on the Physiology of Marine Invertebrates, and the entire Modern Library, from which, how many years ago, he had meant to assault the world on the most primal terms. Amid such familiarities, with all his ambitions flowing at once on parallel courses, it seemed to matter quite a lot less. He was a function of those continuities.

He dialed his mother’s house.

“Mother, Tom. I can’t make it for dinner; but I’ll stop in sometime this evening. How’s Dad.”

“He’s resting nicely; if your grandpa would leave him be…”

“Is he over there?”

“He came on the bike.”

“How’s Dad taking it?”

“Not so well, to tell the truth.”

“Okay. I’ll get by.”

Skelton warmed some food from the Frigidaire: picadillo, fried plantains, yellow rice, black beans; making notes to himself on a pad. He ate and ruminated, the sound of commands coming through the fuselage window, the plaint of catbirds and the gentle flutter of vine and leaf touching the yielding air-stream contours of the fuselage. Skelton liked this place with its black anarchist flag, utilitarian bunk, desk, card table, propane stove, and Frigidaire. He could sit on top of the bunk by way of a Pullman ladder he had installed and look out among the tin roofs, the beautiful old shipwright houses, and the poinciana trees that grew with vivid mystery along his street. The cemetery was close enough that he could see from the foot of his street the bronze Victorian sailor, holding his oar, of the monument to the sailors of the Maine; and save for one house he could have seen across to the tennis courts and the statue of José Martí whose bust appeared that of a schoolboy in a false moustache, thumbing marble pages with a languorous hand; a memorial with some private character not lost in the inscription:

THE CUBAN LIBERTY APOSTLE

WISHED TO OFFER

TO THE PEOPLE OF KEY WEST

WHAT WAS LEFT OF HIS HEART

Nor in the graven homage of “Los Caballeros de la Luz,” the horsemen of the light. Skelton could not see these things without some irrational desire to be a liberty apostle and horseman of the light, a shy delivery boy of eternity’s loops.

A seabird-crowded sky made it quite impossible for Skelton to stay very long on land; and on the days when exaggerated tide fell below the mean low, exposing the flats around Key West and filling downwind side streets with the smell of ocean at its most fecund, he could grow quite frantic about it.

Today’s revelations, the skiff and the bookings, he paid into his system slowly, having what he wanted.

He walked to his family’s house on Peacon Lane; pulling the bell on the gate and waiting for his mother. She came without a word and let him through to the patio of old red street bricks. The deep bay porch swept out upon the patio in a watery-green cascade of vegetation and light, deep red pots of ferns hanging from the porch roof. At the far end of the patio, a small sprinkler turned and flung chains of glittering water up into the foliage-broken light; and high on the center of the green-floored porch was his father in his bed, covered by a gauzy mosquito canopy, his grandfather in a Cuban wicker chair beside.

“How are things?” he asked his mother.

“Fine.”

“Mother, how are they?”

“Go over and talk to them.”

“Evening, Grandpa.”

“Tom.”

“How’re you feeling, Dad?”

“He feels perfectly well,” volunteered the grandfather.

“If no one will get that asshole out of here,” said the muted figure inside the gauze, “I will shit my pants and die on purpose.”

“Do it!” said the grandfather. “You malinger well enough.”

“Grandpa.”

“Every doctor in Key West says it is in his head—”

Mrs. Skelton was silent in the kitchen, an absentee ballot.

Skelton’s father began to eat his pillow. Skelton reached gently under the canopy and pulled it from his tearing jaws; fluffs of eiderdown drifted on the porch.

“Someone run shit pig into the Gulf Stream,” said Skelton’s father. The grandfather stood and lashed into the gauze before Skelton forcibly seated him again.

“Go ahead,” said the grandfather, drawing his glass of rum from under the chair. “Gang up.”

“Come on now, Grandpa.”

“Got a job yet, bright boy?”

“I’m starting.”

“At what?”

“Guiding.”

“Terrific. I’ll see you at the Red Doors with the rest of the drunken charter-boat captains.”

“I won’t be at the Red Doors. And I’m skiff-guiding anyway. Also, when did you join the lecture tour?”

“Throw the old fart’s ass over the wall,” said Skelton’s father.

“I’m hungry!” the old man bellowed toward the kitchen. Then in a hushed voice, “Look! Look! He’s playing dead.”

Skelton stood by the canopy. His father seemed to have passed. “Dad?”

“Let me go.” A stertorous sigh issued from the youthful-looking man. He sat up suddenly and looked all about his familiar surroundings. “Piss.”