Thomas McGuane: Ninety-Two in the Shade

Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic …

Riding home from Gainesville with four people, Thomas Skelton was in a globe of his own hallucinatory despair, a little blown away it is true; but nothing quite as serious as that sense of internal collapse and loss almost of armature that made it increasingly difficult to so much as sit up straight.

Skelton, two men, two women, wound up in a white clapboard hotel near Homestead frequented by citrus pickers; and a long night began of streaks, halos, and comas. Toward its end, Skelton found himself sitting on an enormous expanse of gleaming wood floor. He could see no furniture and the walls were yielding. He seemed to be alone; and he came to wonder what was becoming of him. There was a liquid window filling with silver light; and just over the sill he could see the crown of a palm tree moistly easing itself into his view. Thus he knew he was on the second floor. He turned over on his side and heard the change in his pocket ring out on the hardwood floor. There were voices in fatigue cadences, movement below, and vague, humming vibrations in the joists.

He got to his feet and moved upon the region of the window. There was an empty intersection and a traffic light that changed colors in mid-air at lazy, musical intervals. The red was rather penetrating and Skelton closed his eyes when he saw it coming.

The voices were flying from the bathroom. Skelton left the window and traversed the vague space of the empty room to the voice-filled doorway. In the bathroom a terrible fluorescence curved over the surfaces of the plumbing. The four people were standing naked in the tub with the lurid fluorescence all over them. One of the men was bending over and squeezing his hands between his knees. The other man leaned up against the wall behind the tub as though waiting to board a bus or to light a blonde’s cigarette in a 1947 movie. The two women were heating something in a screw-on bottle cap over a Zippo. The tub rested on iron frog’s feet.

Skelton studied himself until he was sure that he was dressed and slipped out of the hotel. He walked to Homestead, then right on through town, tripping his brains out in the emptiness of 5 a.m. His feet were making an awful clatter on the pavement. When he got to the far side of town, he felt a small pain in his stomach. He touched himself and discovered a short heavy gun in his waistband, a.38 Colt Cobra. What in the hell was that doing there. He took it out and threw it into a mosquito ditch and walked on. Then he couldn’t believe that there had ever been a gun; so he walked back to the mosquito ditch and saw it lying on the bottom, hard and brilliant in the stagnant slime.

The trees along the road were full of catbirds. Skelton kept on. It was getting warm and he could begin to smell the blacktop. Then the intersection of A1A and the sign to Key West. He stuck out his thumb and thought, They won’t see I’m insane until I’m already in the car. It is hot and when I get to Key West I’ll borrow some money and order a beverage. I’ll get a six-pack and take my skiff out on the reef. If they say in the car that I am insane, I will take over the wheel.

No one said he was insane; neither the hardware salesman, the United Parcel driver nor the crawfisherman who drove the last leg into Key West suggested such a thing. When Skelton told the hardware salesman that the paint had just lifted off the whole car in a single piece, the hardware salesman agreed with him about how Detroit put things together. This was the epoch of uneasy alliances.

The sun penetrated the blue-green sea over the reef in shafts like church light clear to the reef. Schools of bait were on the reef like some vast gleaming silver pointillism shifting suddenly when predators passed through, then re-forming around the invisible trajectory of the vanished assailant. Skelton drifted over the millionfold expanse of the bait school calming down and finishing his six beers at some speed. More pelagic fish were finding the bait, and as they drove up under it, sheets of silver erupted from the sea scattering with the noise of heavy rain. The gulls came then by the tens and twenties and dropped everywhere among the bait, heavy and singular.

When the bait was gone and Skelton was drifting once more in the wooden skiff over the stony, illuminated reef, he saw that he would have to find a way of going on.

* * *

Carter had a skiff like Nichol Dance’s but where Carter’s would high-center on a shallow bank Nichol’s would pole in dew and let him drop in those little basins where the fish held faced up tide on the incoming water.

Now it was Dance’s system to fish by the tide like a sniper and time his stops so the fish would come to him or to his chum slick; where Faron Carter fished the flats in the old style poling the skiff from the bow on the edge of the flats in the early flood then dropping back to the mangroves on the high water and looking for the waking fish.

But Dance knew the intersections and only touched the pole to set the skiff up and slip the anchor; or to chase a hooked fish in water too shallow to run the engine in. He made twice as many stops in a day as Carter and fished more by his brain as it was his method to be on the money when the fish came in on the moving water. So, Dance not only saw the flat from the top, but he saw it in cross section; because where the troughs were, the little sand streaks in the turtle grass, that is where the earliest fish came.

But on those days on the young moon or when a tide forced him to fish falling water, he was less skillful in poling out a bad situation to find what fish there were.

So, when Tom Skelton decided to guide, he knew it was these two men that he would study; because theirs were the styles that there were. The other men at the dock were averages of Carter and Dance without either edge.

Now Carter was a level person who presented certain civic virtues that could not be ascribed to Dance. Carter could spend the day in the boat with well-known golfers charming them with articulate fishing stories. While Dance would brood about the tide or lose his temper; or, much the worst, begin drinking. The two men were similarly successful as guides over the long haul. Day after day, Carter put a sound amount of fish on the dock. While Dance, the incessant addict of long shots, would sometimes blank out entirely, coming home in an empty skiff black in the face; but on his best days he would produce fish in quantities incomprehensible to Carter. Skelton favored Dance.

Nichol Dance was in one or two ways an interchangeable creature, born in Center, Indiana, in 1930.

Twelve years ago he inherited the hardware store in Center and a woodlot six miles away full of buckeyes that stank in the spring. It took him six months to piss away half of what had been left him; hunting coons and drinking with his and his father’s friends, he was picking up everybody’s tabs. His sister who had married a Croatian foundryman from Gary tried to sue him out of the rest; but he hung on to what was about now the price of a new Ford, made a trip to Kentucky to buy a redbone bitch and bought a tavern instead.

One year later, in hazy circumstances, he shot and killed an exercise boy of forty from Lexington; and was run out of town.

For many years he carried that handgun, a rather esoteric Colt’s “Bisley” model, with Mexican ivory grips showing eagles killing snakes, chambered for the army issue.45. The exercise boy had acted up, true enough; but the Colt made what is called short work of him, about what a two-iron would do to a deliquescent toadstool.