Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

“… your dad meantime was trying to go straight listening to his classical music on the victrola. But with that father of his, he couldn’t help himself: he run some guns to Cuba; he horsewhipped the navy-base commander for calling up his girlfriend; he fished with me; he studied all the time for no good reason and went out to drink himself crazy five nights a week…”

“Was this girlfriend my mother?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Tell me what she was like.”

“I’m always telling you that. I’ll tell you another time…” Skelton never got an answer to this question.

They sat in the wheelhouse, neither of them fishing because of the blow that made the rigging clatter overhead.

“What have you got for power in this thing?” Skelton asked. To him, shop talk was always lyric.

“Detroit Diesels with Capitol reverse and reduction gears and a Lister auxiliary.”

“It’s a Lantana.”

“No sir, a Desco, out of St. Augustine. I bought it off of David Rawlin’s widow the year he died. It needed work.”

“Do you know this flats guide, Nichol Dance?”

“Heard of him.”

“He killed a man yesterday.”

James looked out at the scudding clouds. “No doubt,” he said.

* * *

Skelton, hiking to the dock, thought about Nichol Dance. In Skelton’s mind, Nichol Dance was saying again, “About that other, we’ll work something out.” The imprecision of the remark troubled Skelton.

It was that like so many of us Skelton had tried quite hard not to be crazy. Largely lucid and more than normally unaddled by abstract ambitions, Skelton had from time to time lapsed curiously into not terribly human actions. Perhaps it was his sense of humor; but, well, anyway he seems to have done some barking.

At first, it was inadvertent; or, as a joke. Then, once, he had driven back the urge to bark as though it were the embodiment of terror: to wit, that he was not human at all and that one day he would find himself beside a half-filled garbage pail, baying at the moon.

“You are baying at the moon now,” said a face once from the speeding Lagonda. “Right now.”

* * *

“Well sir,” said Carter, stacking the frozen balao in one end of the bait freezer, “it sorely grieves me to think of the mess he is in. But I would say that in view of his record, Nichol is all through.” But then, Carter was smiling.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” said Skelton.

“Oh sure it’s fair. I mean, Nichol is a good friend. But honestly, you don’t jump up and gaff folks.”

“I suppose—”

“You suppose?”

“I mean, I suppose you don’t.”

A few minutes later, Carter said, “What was that?”

“What?”

“I heard barking.”

* * *

Jake Roberts gave Skelton the elevator key and said, “They got him for the whole thing, hook, line, and sinker.” Jake was grinning too.

Nichol Dance was asleep. “Nichol?”

“Why, the keed,” said Dance, getting up readily and coming to the front of the cell. “Have you heard the news.”

“I believe so.”

“I’m going to use my connections to get on a road gang.”

Skelton didn’t know whether he was to laugh or not.

“Are you … worried?” Nichol Dance didn’t look worried.

“Hell yes I’m worried. About a lot of things. Not the least of which is my next piece of tail is in twenty years. That actually hurts my feelings. I’m the kind of person would fuck a brush pile if I thought they was a snake in it. — What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you ever hear of Charlie Starkweather?”

“Yes.”

“Charlie Starkweather is what happens when you push someone around once too often. They laughed at him when he stuttered. They called him a redheaded bowlegged woodpecker. Starkweather used to wear Tony Lama boots. He used to hang out in used-clothing stores. He wanted to marry a cocktail hostess and settle — you know— down. He killed eleven people outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, and owned a ’49 Merc chopped and channeled with a bullnosed hood and frenched headlights.”

“What does the ’49 Merc have to do with the eleven people?” Skelton said, confused.

“It’s just part of the whole story, is all. Charlie Starkweather was sort of an artist. He used to draw pictures of himself committing the killings. It appeared like he was spraying them people with a garden hose and they was just all folded up around the bullets…”

“That’s kind of … different.”

“Well, it was extreme of him. But his life was real colorful. I have one thing against him though: he had no sense of humor. You should never kill somebody if it isn’t funny.”

“I don’t like that idea.”

“That’s because you don’t understand it.”

“I suppose. But anyway Nichol, I wanted to get by before you headed for Raiford and uh well at least thank you for letting me take the boat while you’re away.”

“Oh, glad to do it, glad to do it.” He had one hand in his pocket and hung by the other from one of the vertical bars. “We’ll work something out. And tell Jake, would you, I want a salad tonight.”

* * *

The weather broke, streamed away in mackerel clouds, cleared and got hot. He would guide in the morning. He was on Duval Street now. The Conch Train drifted past Sloppy Joe’s and a thousand screaming ninnies cheered the clanging bell the barmaid rang at them as they passed. In the window of Gomez Plumbing the Christmas display rested on a field of palm leaves: Mary, Joseph, and Christ in His manger, entirely fabricated from plumbing parts; the head of Holy Mary Mother of God was a squat chromium faucet; the Christ Child was a lovingly assembled congestion of pipe fittings in a cardboard manger. A simple faith, thought Skelton unkindly, but it is mine.

He had a bowl of fabada asturiana at the Cacique and then a double Jim Beam across the street at the Anchor. There were foreign sailors leapfrogging down Duval Street, squealing and blocking traffic, until a huge black police lieutenant scattered them among the side streets. The sun went down and the light came up on the side of the La Concha Hotel.

Skelton wandered over to Eaton and sat on one of the benches donated by Mayor Papy, smoked a Canary Island cigar, waved to people he knew, and worried about guiding. He thumbed open Nichol Dance’s date-book: “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rudleigh, Rumson, Connecticut.” Well.

Skelton tried quite earnestly to think about Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rudleigh of Rumson, Connecticut. He imagined a brick house where Revolutionary War soldiers had fired at the British, a house with grapeshot in the lintels, covered with vines, and into whose front door Mr. Robert Rudleigh went each winter’s dusk, carrying an enormous newspaper and wearing a gray coat. “Darling,” he would have said to Mrs. Rudleigh, “it is time we had sport.” Then the Rudleighs go to the city of New York. They go to a great brown store where pictures of Theodore Roosevelt and stuffed heads of tigers adorn the walls. A well-mannered lesbian shows them “tropical outfits” which include mosquito netting, a bonefish rod, a pith helmet, and a prophylactic; all stapled to a large piece of cardboard upon which has been printed a “tropical scene,” the entire outfit protected by cellophane and displayed under a disinfecting ultraviolet light. Rudleigh’s motto is, “I pay, I take.” The city of New York and the town of Rumson know him for what he is: a marvel in a gray coat who sometimes walks chest deep through snowdrifts to get that enormous newspaper; and who only occasionally breaks a savage work pattern for sport in the tropics.

He pulled the bell on the gate, now locked, as it was not in his childhood; now barbed wire was stapled along the top of the wooden wall. As a child, he sat in the uncultivated end of the enclosed lot and listened to the chameleons rattling in the deep grass, crawled low in that grass and watched the lizards leap out green and tremulous into the streaked sunlight.