Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

Lying on his back he had watched a spider let itself down forty feet from the Alexandria palm inch by inch over a period of hours; so that after watching until it had magnified to subsume the world, the sky itself seemed to radiate from its back. The spider, noxiously banana-shaped, landed on his face, walked away and thus vanished.

“Come in and leave that cigar in the driveway.”

“Can’t stop but a minute. I just wanted to say hi.”

He walked over to the gauze canopy.

“Evening, Dad.”

“Tom.”

“What are you doing?”

“Reading Shakespeare.”

Skelton had come to associate the higher arts with his father’s holing up in bed.

“I also have my violin in here,” he added.

Skelton could barely see inside; but after an instant’s rustling about, a phrase from Sibelius flowed out through the gauze; then, imperceptibly blurred into Hank Williams’s Lovesick Blues. Skelton listened to those abject hillbilly strains a long moment, remembering his father on the porch in his Cuban chair so many years ago now, playing for his pals, fishermen, idlers, and crazies. The music stopped.

* * *

“Ma’am, you want to hand me that lunch so I can stow it?” Skelton took the wicker basket from Mrs. Rudleigh; and then the thermos she handed him. “I’ve got plenty of water,” he said.

“That’s not water.”

“What is it?”

“Gibsons.”

“Let me put them in the cooler for you then—”

“We put them in the thermos,” said Rudleigh, “so we don’t have to put them in the cooler. We like them where we can get at them. In case we need them, you know, real snappy.”

Tom Skelton looked up at him. Most people when they smile expose a section of their upper teeth; when Rudleigh smiled, he exposed his lower teeth.

“Hold the thermos in your lap,” Skelton said. “If that starts rolling around the skiff while I’m running these banks, I’ll throw it overboard.”

“An ecologist,” said Mrs. Rudleigh.

“Are you sure Nichol cannot appeal his sentence, Captain?” asked Rudleigh.

“I’m sure,” said Skelton.

Mrs. Rudleigh reached out one hand and bent it backward so her fingernails were all in display; she was thinking of a killer line but it wouldn’t come; so she didn’t speak.

Skelton knew from other guides he could not let the clients run the boat for him; but he had never expected this; now all three of them were glancing past one another with metallic eyes.

Mrs. Rudleigh came and Skelton put her in the forward chair. Rudleigh followed in squeaking bright deck shoes and sat aft, swiveling about in the chair with an executive’s preoccupation.

“Captain,” Rudleigh began. Men like Rudleigh believed in giving credit to the qualified. If an eight-year-old were running the skiff, Rudleigh would call him “Captain” without irony; it was a credit to his class. “Captain, are we going to bonefish?” Mrs. Rudleigh was putting zinc oxide on her thin nose and on the actual edges of her precise cheekbones. She was a thin pretty woman of forty who you could see had a proclivity for hysterics, slow burns, and slapping.

“We have a good tide for bonefish.”

“Well, Missus Rudleigh and I have had a good deal of bonefishing in Yucatán and we were wondering if it mightn’t be an awfully long shot to fish for permit…”

Skelton knew it was being put to him; finding permit — big pompano — was a guide’s hallmark and he didn’t particularly have a permit tide. “I can find permit,” he said though, finishing a sequence Rudleigh started with the word “Captain.”

Carter strolled up. He knew the Rudleighs and they greeted each other. “You’re in good hands,” he said to them, tilting his head toward Skelton. “Boy’s a regular fish hawk.” He returned his head to the perpendicular.

“Where are your people, Cart?” Skelton asked to change the subject.

“They been partying, I guess. Man said he’d be late. Shortens my day.”

Skelton choked the engine and started it. He let it idle for a few minutes and then freed up his lines. The canal leading away from the dock wandered around lazily, a lead-green gloss like pavement.

“Ought to find some bonefish in the Snipes on this incoming water,” Carter said. Skelton looked at him a moment.

“We’re permit fishing, Cart.”

“Oh, really. Why, permit huh.”

“What do you think? Boca Chica beach?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. But yeah okay, Boca Chica.”

Skelton idled on the green tidal gloss of the canal until he cleared the entrance, then ran it up to 5,000 rpm and slacked off to an easy plane in the light chop. He leaned back over his shoulder to talk to Rudleigh. “We’re going to Boca Chica beach. I think it’s our best bet for permit on this tide.”

“Fine, fine.”

“I hate to take you there, a little bit, because it’s in the landing pattern.”

“I don’t mind if the fish don’t mind.”

Skelton swung in around by Cow Key channel, past the navy hospital, under the bridge where boys were getting in some snapper fishing before it would be time for the military hospitals; then out the channel along the mangroves with the great white wing of the drive-in theater to their left, with an unattended meadow of loudspeaker stanchions; and abruptly around the corner to an expanse of blue Atlantic. Skelton ran tight to the beach, inside the boat-wrecking niggerheads; he watched for sunken ice cans and made the run to Boca Chica, stopping short.

The day was clear and bright except for one squall to the west, black with etched rain lines connecting it to sea; the great reciprocating engine of earth, thought Skelton, looks like a jellyfish.

“Go ahead and get ready, Mr. Rudleigh, I’m going to pole us along the rocky edge and see what we can see.” Skelton pulled the pushpole out of its chocks and got up in the bow; Rudleigh was ready in the stern behind the tilted engine. It took two or three leaning thrusts to get the skiff underway; and then they were gliding over the sand, coral, sea fans, staghorn, and lawns of turtle grass. Small cowfish, sprats, and fry of one description or another scattered before them and vanished in the glare. Stone crabs backed away in bellicose, Pentagonian idiocy in the face of the boat’s progress. Skelton held the boat into the tide at the breaking edge of the flat and looked for moving fish.

A few small sharks came early on the flood and passed down light, yellow-eyed and sweeping back and forth schematically for something in trouble. The first military aircraft came in overhead, terrifyingly low; a great delta-winged machine with howling, vulvate exhausts and nervous quick-moving control flaps; so close were they that the bright hydraulic shafts behind the flaps glittered; small rockets were laid up thickly under the wings like insect eggs. The plane approached, banked subtly, and the pilot glanced out at the skiff; his head looking no larger than a cocktail onion. A moment after the plane passed, its shock wave swept toward them and the crystal, perfect world of the flat paled and vanished; not reappearing until some minutes later and slowly. The draconic roar of the engines diminished and twin blossoms of flame shrank away toward the airfield.

“It must take a smart cookie,” said Mrs. Rudleigh, “to make one of those do what it is supposed to.”

“It takes balls for brains,” said Rudleigh.

“That’s even better,” she smiled.

“Only that’s what any mule has,” Rudleigh added.

Mrs. Rudleigh threw something at her husband, who remained in the stern, rigid as a gun carriage.

Skelton was so determined that this first day of his professional guiding be a success that he felt with some agony the ugliness of the aircraft that came in now at shorter and shorter intervals, thundering with their volatile mists drifting over the sea meadow.