Ninety-Two in the Shade (11 page)

A sane man thinking of death, however casually, should immediately visit a girl whether in quest of information, affinities, or carnal gratification. It's a case of any port in a storm, mortality being, in any case, an omnipresent hurricane.

Miranda had the second floor of a boatbuilder's recollection of Greek architecture from a nineteenth-century schoolboy's primer, executed in Dade County pine and painted a virginal white.

Miranda was a Saturday-morning pastry cook, and met him at the door in an apron dusted with flour. Skelton followed her toward the kitchen, gazing at the rooms as he went. They were tall, rectilinear rooms with great transomed windows, cool with their own spacious and circulatory atmospheres. (The astronauts are nose to bung in their “capsules”; while Captain Nemo sat at an ormolu control console; and if the astronauts have a capsule, Nemo had a Duomo.)

The last room shy of the kitchen seemed the most inhabited, with its small walnut dining-room table and re-covered divan; under the table were the small pyramids of termite sawdust that in Key West must be swept up almost daily.

“I'm making a cake for the Pillsbury Bake-off.” A handsome old kitchen; big windows looking into subtropical alleyways; a four-blade wooden fan with a bead chain, turning rather slowly now but displacing a wondrous amount of air full of baking smell. The stove was a restaurant-size Magic Chef, thirty or forty years old, black stars for burner grates and a control panel like one from an Hispano-Suiza, two ovens, and the whole covered in deep opalescent enamel with precise blue trim.

“What kind of cake?”

“It's sort of my invention.”

“What's it like?”

“Hm, well, it resembles a gâteau de Savoie moka, except I'm using my version of a Viennese icing. I forget, do you cook?”

“Some Cuban dishes.”

“I think we can have a look at this now.”

Skelton was next to her as she drew open the oven door. The beautiful cake was on the wire rack, rising uniformly; but something was wrong. Miranda cried out. A mouse had got into the oven and sunk to its flanks in the cake; as the air hit it, the mouse burst into flames.

Miranda seized a pair of pot holders and snatched the cake from the oven and put it atop the stove. The burning mouse smoked, then smoldered, and finally became a blackened emblem in the top of the cake. Gâteau rodentine.

Miranda said: “Jesus H. Christ.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Goddamn son of a bitch.”

“I know, I know. What a shame.”

Miranda slashed off the top of the cake; cut two big wedges out of the remainder and put them on plates with glasses of milk. They sat down and ate the cake. It was a kind of coffee sponge cake with an echo of lemon and butter; clear, and ethereal.

Miranda's hands were resting on the table, one a fist, the other open flat on the walnut, shapely with short clear fingernails, a part where you could read out the whole physical presence.

Afternoon subsides in a golden burst of sunlight and the smell of coffee. Skelton observes a tripartite composition in rich pre-Raphaelite pastels: a band of blue sky, and a band of baby clouds traversing slowly toward the right, the deeply radiused orbs of Miranda's bottom. Skelton lifts his cheek from the firm musculature at the small of her back and reverently brushes with his lips the flattened node of coccyx; a gesture at the point of a hip and she turns over, gray eyes grazing away to a white flash of gull in the upper margin of the window. Skelton feels the delicate touch of navel about the end of his nose, stomach tightens in tickling and a plane of pale tan light grades away in his vision, a Venusian touch to chin whose cleft it is not, crinkling slide against cheek, then a hirsute horizon surmounting a liquid slot: Geronimo!

Birds suddenly crowd the window, slate of warblers, and scatter in a cascade of trills. On the kitchen table, a slab of cake with an emblematical mouse in black seems the calling card of some figment.

Then an easy, yielding entry and in Miranda's face baleful shadows of ecstatic misery. And Skelton, dizzy in an existence that occupies less than a single dimension, rises ultimately to that procreative fission that lights up in his darkened head like a silver tree.

Some ten minutes later, wandering to the bathroom to wash his face, he struggles for purchase on the tile floor and falls into the tub.

“Are you all right?”

“I was struggling for purchase.”

“Here, let…”

Now she is in the tub with him. They struggle for purchase against the porcelain. The window here is smaller and interferes not at all with the smoky swoon of half-discovered girls in which Skelton finds himself. In his mind, he hears
Lovesick Blues
on the violin. He reaches for a grip and pulls down the shower curtain, collapses under embossed plastic unicorns. The shaft of afternoon light from the small window misses in its trajectory the tub by far; the tub is in the dark; the light ignites a place in the hallway, a giant shining a flashlight into the house. A rolled copy of the
Key West Citizen
hits the front porch and sounds like a tennis ball served, the first shot of a volley … Traffic bubbles the air. Skelton thinks that what he'd like is a True Heart to go to heaven with.

*   *   *

James Powell said, “your grandfather stopped payment on that check. I had to cover all that three-quarter marine out of my own pocket; I think I'm even took for that goddamn hull.” Sure enough; there was the hull, crisp and rough-edged but exquisite as a seashell, a nautilus. Seems the old bastard would have to be throttled and flung into the cistern with his spent safes. Can't appear to get depressed about it. Maybe Bella Knowles would get her Household Current after all. False teeth sailing over Key West roofs.

“Let me track this down, James. I'll see that it's covered.”

Powell was sore, using that expression of angry wonder at the cupidity of others that is an impossible emotion to sustain legitimately and which therefore bears always the sweet incense of fraud. “I called old Nichol Dance to tell him I was ready to make him a boat. But the bloody bugger has gone to Islamorada to buy one, so I'm afraid you and your cheap-ass old granddad has about cooked my goose!”

“Now James, like I told you, this here is going to be covered, unless you tell me to forget all about it.”

“No, I ain't saying that! I'm just saying it gets old when you have a runaround like this. I'm too busy for no runaround!
And it just gets old!
”

“I know what you mean; but look here, you get on with it now and build that skiff because I will make sure you have every cent of your money. Now you do know that, don't you?”

*   *   *

“What time is it?”

“Six.”

“You want to stop by my folks' house with me?”

“Sure, okay.”

“I have got to get this skiff. I'm getting on in years.”

Miranda said without challenge, “I wish I could understand.”

“It's the only thing I can do half right. It's as simple as that.”

“What about biology? Your old teachers told me you were gifted.”

“They said that? Huh. Well, yes I was good at it. But it needn't have taken me that many years of school to see I just liked salt water, you know, at some really simple phenomenological level. I like fishing better than ichthyology because it's all pointless and intuitive. I mean, there is no value equivalent in biology for the particular combination of noise and sight of blackfin tuna working bait in the Gulf Stream. Have you ever eaten in there?”

“The Fourth of July? No. I usually go to the O.K.”

“Good crawfish enchilada and good flan with you know, like caramel on the bottom. My grandfather got shot by a Cuban in that parking lot twenty years ago. Survived.”

Navy personnel drove past in a staff car, craning around to see Miranda quite obviously not wearing anything under her shift: seventh-grade boys diving for the chalk, Commander Merkin of the carrier escort vessel
Invincible
wrenching his neck in a flash daydream of how quickly he'd give up the Annapoline idyl of water murder for a crack at deploying polliwogs through his bosun's whistle into the cushy little bomb bay that young lady doubtless had concealed on her person. Rushing on to base headquarters, he raised manicured fingertips to his sore neck and cleared his mind of bilge.

Skelton thought for a minute about telling Miranda of Nichol Dance; he had hinted of his utopianist scheming as to fishing; it might be honest to add this. A man passed in a sandwich board; the Paraclete's visage on the front, the word NOW on the back; brain raid of street-side cryptograms.

“A man has told me if I guide he'll shoot me.”

“What?”

“Well, yes that.”

The superimposition of violence to pointless sport caused Skelton to feel a mild creeping of the cerebellum: fistfights over golf putts, tennis buffs kicking each other in the shins with steel-toe industrial safety shoes, ping-pong kamikaze maniacs slashing at enemies' faces with reddish paddles, skeet shooters peppering schoolgirls with birdshot, chess masters quietly decoding the brains of adversaries: all contrived to make the riverboat gambler of the nineteenth century with a Philadelphia cap-and-ball .41 caliber derringer on a hide string hanging behind his lace-front shirt playing everything-wild, one-eyed-jacks, king-with-the-ax, fours-and-whores type poker seem
altogether on the up and up!

“I like the idea of living behind a wall in this noisy town,” Miranda said. Skelton pushed open the gate, a cabinet of greenery, speeding lizards, a bird screaming in the soursop tree, the Da Vincian geometry of un-pruned oleander.

“Think
House of Seven Gables
and you will have fun here; it's just a little American home in another time warp.”

Immediately through the gate, they could see Skelton's mother and grandfather, standing off to one side at the kitchen entrance, abruptly gesturing to them to come; quite evidently indicating that they would have to sneak by the gauze-enclosed bed, solitary as an island on the broad green-and-white porch.

“Miranda this is my mother.”

“Hello, Miranda,” said his mother, smiling enough to make inscrutable slits of her eyes; but Skelton saw the examining flicker.

“And my grandfather.” Skelton's grandfather caught one of Miranda's hands in both of his as you would catch a small creature so that you could lift your upper hand carefully and perceive the creature peering out at you. And bent over her, a chicken over a piece of corn. “Thomas,” said his mother, “your father had some kind of a fit. He has got the idea that if you guide, someone will kill you—”

“Imagine.” Skelton cast a cautioning glance at Miranda.

“—and he made your grandfather cancel that check.”

“Yeah, I found out.”

“Don't worry about it,” his grandfather said, “that part is easy to straighten out.”

“The question is, where does he get such a notion.”

“I couldn't guess,” said Skelton.

“Well, we can,” said his grandfather.

“He is out on the town now every night,” said his mother, “where he is privy to all the gossip and foolishness available in Key West—”

“What he is doing, where he is going,” said his grandfather in the tone of Philbrick of
I Led Three Lives,
“none of us can say. But he is at large and I don't like it.”

“I thought you wanted him to get out of bed so bad.”

“Not like this, Tom. Not like a sneak a … a figure of the night, Tom.”

“A figure of the night…!”

“We had this from him during the war,” said his mother. “He went to Fort Benning…” She trailed off suddenly, looking almost angrily into space. Could she have only now remembered.

“Your mother is absolutely right. He was around here like an I don't know what. He was arrested for sword fighting! Hung out with criminals! The worst of it I can hardly tell.”

“Who cares!”
said his mother. “Tell him the whole thing.”

“There was a house of ill repute.”

“What about it?” Skelton said.

“It was his, lock, stock, and whores.” His mother looked away at this last. His grandfather studied her. “Uh, ladies of fortune.”

Skelton looked at Miranda. He had only known about the whorehouse for twenty years. Why did they need to tell Miranda?

“A real one?” he asked his grandfather; let them have their fun.

“Not really,” his grandfather smiled condescendingly; there was an inadvertence in the expertise he implied. “It was just an old falling-down conch house with half a dozen highfliers from Miami.” He looked at his daughter-in-law and winked. “Even they couldn't take him. He had a hootchy-cootchy from Opa-Locka. Even she thought he was dumb!”

“You know, fake air raids. Fire drills where he ran from room to room hosing down his own customers,” said Mrs. Skelton.

“It was ridiculous. Pictures of Jim Thorpe on the walls. The Boy Scout Oath. The Constitution. An anarchist library in the front room. Statues of saints. A clothing-store dummy dressed as the Pope. I mean, God. What kind of whorehouse…! He carried things too far. Seltzer bottles. Custard pies. No one goes to a whorehouse for that! They can stay home and watch the Three Stooges. And the girls got tired of it the minute the pies started flying. They always had colds from the Seltzer. It was ridiculous.”

“Running guns,” said his mother in a drone. “And you're right about the colds.”

“Yes, yes,” said his grandfather. “Shrimping!”

“Drove a taxi. The only thing he didn't think of—”

“Was guiding,”
Skelton and his grandfather interrupted simultaneously.

“Go on now,” said his mother, “wake him up. It's time.”

Skelton crossed the porch and juggled the squeaking cedar mosquito frame, thinking about revealing to his father that everyone knew he was a figure of the night. He decided not to because it would not be interesting to do so.