Ninety-Two in the Shade (13 page)

“Miranda honey, look here: all of us”—he gestured around the boat—“are just free people looking to be prisoners, hoping for a quiet cell, a toothbrush and a washcloth; but we are the convicts of freedom. We look up with stony eyes from our old road-gang lives at all the vacationers we think we see heading for Tenerife, Leningrad, and the Mermaid Show at Weekeewatchee Springs. Miranda, life can become a refrigerator brimful of chilled wet hair. Or not.”

“In a certain light,” Miranda said, “you can see anything at all.” That was deft.

More to the point, Miranda caught a mangrove snapper which made a gentle thunder on the boat bottom; Skelton sapped it once with a carriage bolt, re-baited Miranda's hook; then with the flashlight tucked under his chin, he promptly filleted the snapper and laid the pearly meat on one end of a strip of brown paper and rolled it once. Miranda kept catching snappers and when they had six pairs of fillets they quit and poured the remaining bait over the side. Brilliant fish raced in the moonlight beneath them, catching the shrimp.

The wind had nearly ceased entirely; and the few clouds left had consolidated into a single continent to the west so thin the stars showed behind its edges. The night seemed ruptured on a gloating moon.

Skelton pulled the starter through once and the engine coughed into a marginal operative existence, be-bopping on the transom giddily. Skelton stood up taking the broom-handle tiller and headed for Key West glowing to the east of them pale as an aurora.

Twenty minutes of this night running and they were close enough to home that they could see a Greyhound bus cross the Stock Island bridge and penetrate the zygote of Cayo Hueso. Just beyond, the drive-in theater screen loomed among the trailers. Skelton stared: Appomattox Courthouse; Yankees and Rebels stately in the Key West sky. From the seaward vantage, it was the America you weep for. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee knee-deep in mobile homes surrounded by the vacant sea. Lee's horse, Traveller, materialized and vanished in the Atlantic skyway. Then Grant took Lee's hand and it was one nation indivisible; horses, heroes, tents, and munitions sunk among the mobile homes:
THE END
.

They stopped at a package store on the way to the fuselage and picked up a six-pack of Budweiser. It was a pleasant store and Tennessee Williams's picture was on the wall; the playwright was holding a whitish bulldog and smiling without guile.

Entering the fuselage, Skelton decided that if he ever had some fame, he would offer his portrait to the wino hotel, where it would be hung in the front hall out of the reach of angry hands and flung bottles.

Skelton cut the snapper into fingers and deep fried them in oil so hot it was just between smoking and beginning to speckle; the delectable fish sealed quickly. He put it all in a paper-lined basket and set it on the table with the six-pack, a pot of tartar sauce, and quartered limes from his own tree. Then they ate like there was no tomorrow. Plus one quickie, dog-style.

It was a school night; and Miranda went home on her bicycle. An hour later, Skelton's phone rang. It was Miranda.

“Tom, your father was here.”

“Go on.”

“He was wearing a sheet sort of pinned around him, you know, like a Roman … He was hopping around like a maniac…”

“Tell me the rest.” Doom.

“He wanted a date.”

*   *   *

God what a time. Such a loss of faith the Annunciation seemed an indecent advance. Everybody who had opened his eyes had been to hell and gone before he half knew it.

Thomas Skelton's mind had been reduced, as a fractured limb is reduced. Everyone looked at this improvement and remarked, “What a waste,” or words to the effect.

Skelton looked all about himself and thought,
I need for something to come in handy real bad. Boy, that sure would be good.

By dint of sloth, nothing had set in. And Skelton had been swept along. The cue ball of absurdity had touched the billiard balls in his mind and everything burst away from the center. Now the balls were back in the rack. Everyone should know what it is to be demoralized just so everyone knows what it is to be demoralized.

The king's ransom, the dog in the manger, the cat that swallowed the cream … A potato-like president, limp with murder, turns to his piquant attorney general and says, “I'd give America for a thirteen-year-old nympho.” But the attorney general always replies, “No soap.” Always.

Before you know it, it's a month of Sundays and you're a goner. Do remember that. The trick is to be all smiles. To be uncalled for. If you're at one remove, you're already too far gone.

Every night on TV: America con carne. And eternity is little more than an inkling, a dampness … Even simple pleasure! The dream of simultaneous orgasm is just a herring dying on a mirror.

*   *   *

The morning ritual of dressing, redolent of an implicit dandyism, began after icy water returned the features to Skelton's face. He paused always at the mirror in those precious moments before full awakening to see an utterly amoral creature, slack as a murderer; and thought of the serenity of Starkweather before his accusers. Then cold water, and a sharpness returned; a fellow creature began to form like a mirage over his features; a creature who could compete elbow to elbow with anyone and who would fistfight shrimp captains over principles not even believed. Then well-broken Levi's sun-bleached and long, a braided leather belt, and a Cuban guayabera shirt that had already made its deal with the heat. When Skelton stood up after lacing his deck shoes, he wanted to feel his weight settle just slightly toward the heels; and when his spirits were particularly high, it seemed there was a full four feet between his belt buckle and his chin. At such times, he felt his movement was like a compass needle swinging inexorably and at a sweep, drawn rather than pushed.

Too often, he woke up miserable, wanting to stand in a slump, one eye needing to go one way, the other another. He felt the ridges between his eyebrows deepen and he could stand a good antacid, a Rolaid for example, or an Alka-Seltzer; even a gay, foaming all-American Bromo would have been, you know,
terrific.
In such a mood, Skelton was Starkweather howled at by his girlfriend's parents for using their car; and for being a garbage man in Lincoln, Nebraska, where teenagers learn the Australian crawl at sun-drenched, cretinoid country clubs, where even aging wage slaves burn up the Cornhuskers Highway on polyglas radial tires; the American Plains in a blue rear-view mirror; and slender green traffic islands penetrating the steppes and old treeless, buffalo-haunted dreamland of a vacant republic.

It must have been something Skelton ate.

Sometimes the buzz of a housefly in an empty room has the timbre of the human voice. On moonless nights, simple cities of the Plains bear witness to strange events: an elderly drunk charges over celery terraces, baying, “Peaceniks have fobbed off with my daughter!” And somewhere in the Dakotas, a hunter's lost beagle passes the night chewing the main cable of the President's Hot Line. When he leaps back, his head a blue spark, he gives a single bark and is gone; separated by continents and oceans, a commissar and a president run to headquarters in their pajamas. There you have it.

These were heavy thoughts and Skelton sat down. He knew that the word “serious” does not derive from the word “cereal.” He had a feeling that on the Plains of America everyone was named Don and Stacy. He knew that spiritual miniaturism frequently lay waiting in the foothills where a ranch was exchanged for a golf course; and that the Spalding Dot, the Maxfli, and the Acushnet soared over the bones of dead warriors. So, if he were driven from Key West, he knew the Plains were not the place he'd go.

Skelton wandered around the fuselage. Don and Stacy had come to life on the American Plains. It was the frontier and Don threw a glass of Lavoris in Stacy's face. It was the end of something. Stacy direct-dialed Mom at Leisureland, demanding a one-way on the jumbo jet. This was enough. Number-one son, Lance, caught a Cong mortar in the mouth in Nam. Daughter Sherri cold-turkeyed in the Oregon Women's Detention Center, then divorced her Gypsy Joker husband to marry a Young American for Freedom. The Young American for Freedom liked to put birthday candles up her behind, eat confetti, and spray Welch's grape juice on her thighs. At night, Don would sit before the freestone fireplace in the rec room, read his social security card, and harp. Stacy made spitballs in the storm cellar. Is it any wonder they woke up plumb grousing?

Skelton was in a bad mood. The morning ritual, with dandyism, hadn't cured it. He isolated his troubles to two specific areas: his father's show at Miranda's the night before and Nichol Dance's promise. He would see both of them today; the air was beginning to acquire the opacity again that it had before he clarified his life; now he had to do it again. It was, he thought for the moment, a case of bailing a leaky boat. But, well, do it.

*   *   *

Skelton's grandfather, the redoubtable, with, out of his long years on earth, not a day in the service of his country, remembered the wars from his sea-level eyrie in Cayo Hueso.

During the glum scheming of the First War, when Thomas Edison had experimented with depth charges at navy headquarters on Key West, Goldsboro kept a cruiser at Garrison Bight for the express purpose of whoremongering and trips to Cuba of mysterious object.

One war later, his son, Skelton's father, kept a converted rum-runner as a fishing launch with the black flag of anarchism flying from its transom. Dizzily evading all known goals, he had become a chimera.

Now here is what Skelton wondered: was there a connection between himself and these two male forebears? And if there was, what was he being steered toward? Universal consciousness or early death? And lastly, why did both seem oceanic? He could not escape the suspicion that this association of boats—cruiser, rumrunner, skiff—implied something sequential. He feared that if he could go back one more generation on hard data to his great-grandfather, he would discover the old wrecking master in the maze of his schooner's cordage running the southerly shoals, spaced-out and as incipiently suicidal as fifty 1947 Existentialists.

G. Skelton himself, meanwhile, moved through his safe-cluttered offices. Safes of every vintage, opened, closed, dynamited, doorless or lock-picked, seemed a kind of audience for the streams of thought that poured uninterrupted from a brow as round and serene as a radar dome.

If there was a single thing for which he had a gift, besides that of pulling rugs out from under his opponents, it was for a kind of manipulation of conditions so that the problem or the solution seemed fresh to the point of being raw. He had, for example, carefully kept his grandson dancing on a string of unease over this guide boat. On the one hand, he wanted it to be as vivid as only uncertainty could make it; and, on the other, he could not resist the dicey gaming around, the spirals of manipulation that were the actual texture of his life. When Goldsboro Skelton walked around his bailiwick and viewed his contemporaries sunning away their last days on earth in louvered porches, he thanked Christ for the grandiose instinct for creating a vortex that had been his since the turn of the twentieth century.

Goldsboro Skelton had been among the last Key Westers to go to sea with the wrecking masters before he was twenty, had piloted a diesel ferry that had been built a hundred forty miles up the Mississippi through the impossible Delta and across the Gulf of Mexico in offshore summer storms, a vessel of minimal sheltered-water freeboard never designed for such open-sea crossings. He was religiously ambiguous—“I deal with Jesus directly”—and had acquired some fame on a salvage trip in his teens with a dipsomaniacal wrecking master who kept the young Goldsboro Skelton and six school friends in the superheated hold of a condemned freighter that had broken its back on a Honduran reef a hundred miles out of Stann Creek; seven youths loading crude sugar from the steaming hold of a boat that creaked and shifted on the reef and threatened to roll with their lives inside. When the freighter groaned more than usual or when the slow scream of its iron hull against the implacable coral rose a quarter octave, Skelton and the others would plead to go topsides in case the freighter should finally roll. But the wrecking master, who often knelt on the salvage boat bobbing safely alongside to pray Jaheezuss for the safety of those young souls, his hands and eyes fluttering firmament-ward in a curiously female explosion of emotion, the wrecking master always said quite emphatically, no. Then on the third day of salvage, a jet of blue Caribbean came in through the packing seal around the shaft, a blast of sea water that looked vividly like the end, jetting out across tons of unrefined sugar in the heat.

This time, Skelton fetched himself a seven-pound splinter from the fractured oak stringers of the sugar freighter and carried it to where he found the wrecking master praying in the shade of the pilothouse. He took the good captain off his knees with the first blow of that scantling across his god-fearing fundament; then marched him to the forecastle where he was confined to quarters with all the green-glass shippers' demijohns of bad Cuban rum he could drink. By now Skelton's terrified shipmates were there to hear a speech that became the rooftree of his early fame.

“I am now the master of this vessel,” he said more magisterial than would seem possible. “And you are forbidden to pray.”

A week later, Goldsboro Skelton was tried and acquitted of mutiny. The first strands of his net had begun to spin out over Key West. He was a hero of the streets.

*   *   *

“Bella, Bella, Bella,” Goldsboro said, too weary to mount the trampoline.

“All right.”

“I'm mean, you know.”

“Tired.”

“Well, yes, tired; but no tireder than you, Bella. I just won't pretend like you will pretend, busting your butt till the cows come home just to prove that time doesn't pass.”