Ninety-Two in the Shade (10 page)

He sketched on the scratch pad for a few minutes.

“That's how I want it aft: three hatches with interconnected waterways routed in a taper so they drain to the sump—”

“All right.”

“—and all hardware flush-mounted to a drive fit—”

“All right.”

“—and maybe a half-inch overhang above that aft bulkhead.”

“All right.”

“Now in the corners of that same bulkhead, let's run the self-bailing drainage through PVC pipe, you know, right through the dry storage and into the sump like the waterways.”

“All right.”

“Now gunwales. Average width about seven inches, faired back from the forward casting deck to the live-well lids.”

“You want it all flush, right? No drop to the casting deck?”

“None. The fuel is forward. The controls are forward. So the forward bulkhead is vented; and the overflow is starboard a few inches under the gunwale.”

“All right. Let me tote up the materials and we'll make that your deposit. Have I got your telephone number?”

“It's in the book. —Now, anything there that throws you? —I'm just asking.”

“I've laid a thousand miles of teak on a radius. This here is all right angles and butt blocks. There isn't a Dutchman in that kind of work when yours truly is the carpenter. So save your last question for some jackleg of your acquaintance.”

*   *   *

Skelton stepped up onto the porch and looked under the net. His father was sound asleep, a volume of Huizinga on his chest; he seemed not so much to have dozed off as to be in a deep, granitic slumber from which he could not easily have awakened.

In the kitchen, his mother was reading Brillat-Savarin, learning about what his grandfather, the high-leaping Goldsboro Skelton, would call nigger food. It was surprising to find her home in the afternoon, or at least, home alone. She had so many friends whom she served as confessor and adviser. Her contact and its attendant gusts of energy created addiction among her coevals for whom she was the sole connection.

“Daddy looks exhausted.”

“He is!”

Skelton looked at her. Her hair was turned up in a twist behind, a vigorous, plaited gray.

“Meaning what?”

“Your father has been out all-night-long.”

“Come on.”

“You walked into the house at the moment I thought to tell you. Another half hour and I would have changed my mind.”

“Is this the first time?”

“No. It's been going on for months.”

Skelton asked with fear: “What does he do.”

“I suspect it's a girlfriend. I suppose sex is the only thing that would make
me
get up after seven months of making an ass of myself.”

She loved to get Skelton on the edge of his seat so that every word dropped like a stone on a sheet of tin. Counterploy:

“He could be performing Acts of Christian Mercy,” he said.

“Maybe he's learning to be a fishing guide,” she said, taking the trick.

“I'm not the one who isn't keeping him at home.”

“What other unkindness pops into your mind?”

“You started it.”

Glowering rises and fades.

Finally Skelton inquired, “What's his explanation?”

“He doesn't know I know. I haven't really … I mean I can't quite think what to say. For all I know, he's been out every night since he first got into that…”

“Bassinet.”

*   *   *

No mother dog turning an expectant nose to a garbage pail filled from top to bottom with racks of spring lamb ever felt a surer sense of unoccluded fortune than Skelton contemplating his skiff, Miranda, and his father abroad in the night. As to this last, yes, it was a mixed blessing. Perhaps he was having at a tart in the lower purlieus of Duval; perhaps her name was Mona and she drowned a man at the Muff Diver's Ball instead of merely washing his face as her calling card promised. And yes, the infidelities of an aging lame from a Key West bassinet were a sorry prospect when the lame was your very own progenitor. But there is a life that is not a life, in which the more adamant obstructions of the heart masquerade as loss, dreams, or carburetor trouble. A silent man wastes his own swerve of molecules; just as a bee “doing its number on the flower” is as gone to history as if it never was. The thing and its expression are to be found shaking hands at precisely that point where Neverneverland and Illyria collide with the Book of Revelation under that downpour of grackle droppings that is the present at any given time.

Skelton was walking to his grandfather's office on Eaton Street on a morning so full of heat and light that traffic seemed composed of wet, swollen cars. A carpenter rebuilding a porch along Skelton's way dropped his wrecking bar and it rang like a bell. With each breath you got more for your money. He passed the library where thoughtful ladies held the fort and said good morning to a man carrying a cockatoo in a white enameled cage; no one could have avoided the resemblance of the ring-like brilliant eyes of the cockatoo to those of its owner. The bird made some snarky remark; and Skelton gave it a small compulsive wave, regretting it immediately.

Skelton had no way of knowing that the man's name was also Thomas Skelton (no kin), though he had seen the name in the telephone book and wondered if it mightn't be some distant connection of his family's (not).

When the sun first assembles itself over the broken skyline of Key West on a morning of great humidity, a thunderous light fills the city and everyone moves in stately flotation through streets that are conduits of something empyrean. Also, things can get sweaty.

*   *   *

James Powell, the Boatbuilder, had called with the cost of materials and Skelton was going to take his grandfather up on his kind offer of cash money.

The “Skelton Building” on Eaton Street was a two-story frame house whose formerly domestic rooms were now the world's most gerrymandered office, with the stenographer, for example, working out of an upstairs bedroom filled with war-surplus filing cabinets; and an accountant with the only abacus in Key West busy in the old music room under a ceiling full of putti and cherubs in the school of Rubens out of
The Saturday Evening Post.
At one time, Goldsboro Skelton had felt the need of safes; and so whole rooms were filled with them, combinations lost and hinges rusted to inutility. In the front-hall closet, a ragged hole showed where a small Diebold Chicago Universal safe with a rainbow on its door had shot through the floor and into the cistern, probably killing frogs.

In the front hall, directly behind the front door, Bella Knowles abused visitors from a low mahogany desk whose bland surface held five Princess Phones like a relief model of the Caribbean. Every time the door opened, she was revealed in amazing proximity to people passing on the sidewalk, really only a few feet away, her eyes at rump level.

Goldsboro Skelton himself ran his curious and impalpable island empire from an old water closet, a generous one of the Victorian years, whose pipes and dainty crapper had been replaced with horizontal writing surfaces for the signing of checks and those letters of business which in a republic more perfect than the one here in Hotcakesland would be actionable matters of extortion.

“Hello, Thomas,” said Bella Knowles. “I suppose you're here for money.”

“Do you.”

“Aren't you?”

“What?”

“Here for money?”

“Are you talking to me?”

“Yes!”

“Oh … here for money? No no no. To see my grandfather, Missus uh…”

“Knowles.”

“Right. And uh anything transpiring between my grandfather and I is just liable to be none of your business!”

“Now, now.”

“Is he alone?”

“Yes he is.”

“I'll just go in then.”

“I'll buzz him.”

“Don't bother.”

“I'LL JUST BUZZ HIM.”

“Well, whatever gets you off, Missus…”

“Knowles.”

“Hey! I read that the hubby's being released from Cuba—”

“Yes he is.”

“Gee, I suppose it's been awful with the uh cat away so long.”

“Awful.”

In the imperceptible moment of actual crossing of the grandfather's threshold, Skelton realized he was off on the wrong foot; and he quickly balanced the irritation with the fact that James Powell had ordered the materials.

“Sit down, Tom. I'll be with you in a moment.”

Skelton waited standing until his grandfather looked up from his papers with a wordless interrogative glance.

“Well, the boat is underway,” Skelton said with, for some reason, embarrassment. There was a pause.

“I'm sorry, I don't follow.”

“James Powell is starting my guide skiff.”

“Right…?”

“Well, you said you would lend me the money.”

“When?” he said, quick. “When did I say that?”

“The other night,” said Skelton nearly inaudible.

“Oh God, let me look through my books here a sec.”

“If you don't want to lend me the money, say so.”

Goldsboro Skelton leaped up in a rage: “I just bailed you out of the damn jail! How much do you want from an old man!”

Skelton walked out, passing Bella Knowles hurrying into the office. When Skelton was safely gone, she asked, “Was it about money?”

Well, face it, Skelton thought, you're screwed. How dear it would have been to me, he thought, to bust the old fart in the teeth; then rip the electrical cord out of the lamp and shove it one furlong up Bella Knowles's fundament and waggle the light switch until she blew her dentures out the skylight. Stuff like that. You know, mean.

Powell was in his shop fitting up a handsome little dunnage box out of teak mill ends, countersinking the screws and pegging them with plugs of mahogany dowel. Skelton was in an agony of embarrassment.

“James—”

“We're gonna have the hull in the morning!”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Why? What?”

“The whole thing is off, James, I'm sorry.”

Powell put down his tools a little angrily.

“What's a matter?”

“I don't have the money.”

“What!”
Powell laughed at him.

“I'm sorry, I don't.”

“Your grandfather paid the whole thing this morning, material and labor in advance.”

Skelton headed for the office again, resigned to a day of embarrassment.

*   *   *

Myron Moorhen the accountant was at the front window of the bait shack, his fingertips indenting slightly against the glass, looking out at the rain. The rain was coming down so heavily that it no longer seemed to move. Traffic hissed. It was a hot winter day.

Carter was leaning back in a chair next to a freezer, walking a penny between his fingers. Nichol Dance stood in the open doorway, the heavy rain falling just past the end of his nose like a curtain.

Carter said, “You've gone soft.”

Dance, dejected, said, “Maybe so.”

“Now you're out of it. Now what are you gonna do?”

Dance turned slowly, bored. “Caddy. I'm gonna be Jack Nicklaus's caddy. I'll have a V-neck sweater and at night I'll jack off in a hankie. My life will be simple but it will be complete.”

“Come on, Nichol.”

“What do you care?”

“I care because I give you ten days before it's fun with bottles and you out at Snipe Point trying to get around to shooting yourself.”

“I suppose.”

“I mean this is insulting.”

“I suppose.”

“I mean, didn't you forbid him to guide?”

“Yeah I did.”

“Then how come James Powell is building him a guide boat? I mean, now
you
can't get one built and he's gone to guide.”

“I didn't forbid him to have a skiff built.”

“What do you think he means to do with it!”

“I don't know, pull crab pots. I have to let him hang himself, if that's what he is gonna do. This is a democracy.”

“God I don't know about you. Jese, I mean what are you planning when he guides, and it does look to me like he will when that boat is ready?”

“Didn't I told you?” Dance asked him impatiently. “I will shoot him!”

“That's what you
say!
”

“Hey, Cart?”

“What?”

“Why don't
you
do it, you got yourself so worked up?”

“Nichol!
I like him!
” Carter bustled around the freezer, then pointlessly opened it, drawing out a block of ice that imprisoned myriad silver fish. He held it to the light and looked. “Shoot!”

*   *   *

“Well, sergeant, how are you doing with those new men?”

“Not bad at all.” The just-blown whistle hung from his neck, a concise scapular to the general chop-chop of getting from Point A to Point B in Hotcakesland.

The thunder of winos on the resonant staircases of the wooden hotel, their appearance, and the slow inexorable milling impressed themselves more upon Skelton than the subsequent extrusion of the insulted and injured through the cuneiforms of drill so indispensable to that choral oink we call the military. A small sea of the harmed poured onto the impromptu drill field; and as the sergeant's barks and whistles rang out, they began to move as a man.

*   *   *

Two men, not entirely dissimilar, were beginning the day under the bright scudding clouds of the southeast trades. Thomas Skelton, with his lust for affinities, was going to visit Miranda Cole. Nichol Dance, who so rued his life and the things that had come of it that he drove his entire rather complicated self through the needle's eye of a career in guiding—Nichol Dance was heading to Islamorada to buy a skiff.

The future cast a bright and luminous shadow over Thomas Skelton's fragmented past; for Dance, it was the past that cast the shadow. Both men were equally prey to mirages. Thomas Skelton required a sense of mortality; and, ironically, it was Nichol Dance who was giving it to him; for Skelton understood perfectly well that there was a chance, however small, that Nichol Dance would kill him. This faint shadow lay upon his life now as discreetly as the shadow of cancer lies among cells. And Skelton asked himself, not particularly thinking of an act of Dance's, shall I find it hard to die?