Ninety-Two in the Shade (16 page)

And now twenty-one years later in Key West, damned if there wasn't another moth-like number following him around at night. Dance cut himself one more piece of amberjack and cracked a beer. A man in his life, he thought, sure had to hack his way through a lot of lunch meat. But I will do what I have to. I'm all I've got, in a manner of speaking.

*   *   *

On big pine key, the first light of day passes through the high breezy forest. A key-deer buck, the size of a dog, places four perfect scarab hoofs on Route A1A and is splattered by a Lincoln Continental four weeks out of the Ford Motor Company, carrying three admirals bound to Miami and a “kick-off breakfast” for a fund-raiser. The taillights elevate abruptly at the Pine Channel Bridge and are gone. The corporate utopia advances by a figure equal to the weight of the little buck divided by infinity; the Reckoning advances by a figure equal to the buck multiplied by infinity. A funeral wake of carrion birds, insects, and microorganisms working assiduously between bursts of traffic takes the little deer home a particle at a time.

*   *   *

Miranda went into the bathroom. She was there five or ten minutes. When she came out her hair was in disarray and there were a few plastic curlers scattered arbitrarily through the snarl. She sat on the bed and began to shriek. Her face was scrubbed of all makeup; she looked like a loser in a Farm Administration photograph.

“Shittin place is drivin me nuts. You outa fuckin work and me expectin a child!”

“Honey, honey … I tried…”

“Tried my ass! You're out with faeries while I'm home wid a B-29 in the hangar!”

“A B-29 in the hangar!” Skelton fell on the floor. Miranda stared at him.

“An my ass is draggin in this shithouse while you're out golfin with flits and highfliers!”

“No more!”

“No more is right! I'm walkin outa this cockroach palace and leave you to stew in yer own juice like ya deserve ya four-bit louse!”

“Now just wait a goddamn minute. Whose a one around here with the diploma?”

“I'll tell you what I about had enough of,” she shrieked, “and that's midnight visits from in-laws in sheets and weenie pictures in the mail! That's what I'm tired of!”

A knock on the door. Miranda answered it. Skelton listened from the closet. It was a neighbor. Miranda was telling her yes she was all right; they were doing psychotherapy. Not to be interrupted or the AMA would be alerted.

*   *   *

When her friends were not on the phone asking for advice, when no meals were to be made, when unbeset by that complicated skein of petty social contrivances in Key West to which she had many years ago been coopted as a kind of servomechanism and without which the game would have been more carnivorous than it was because she, to a degree almost no longer rememberable in our time, was a generous creature; when all that presented a clear and silent lacuna in her existence as wife, mother, and daughter-in-law to three men of the same surname and in some ways uninterrupted stripe, she retreated to the bedroom and cried quite silently, not a single sob, but just a steady, streaming exhaustion with men who had become figments of their own imaginations; and of whom she probably ought long since to have been shut. After that, she had a system of restoration: a napkin in ice water to clear the eyes, then instead of her usual subdued lipstick she applied Fire and Ice, which was precisely the color of the bright oxygenated blood of an animal mortally shot through the lungs (Skelton's imaginary death wound would have produced this color), and some rouge to highlight her prominent cheekbones (her navy officer, Oklahoma grandfather had Indian blood, of which he was not proud).

She was less mortified than demoralized by her husband's latest absurdity. Mortification ended with his army discharge and his public announcement, long after Key West knew he was home on “a mental,” that Adolf Hitler was an invention of the Miami Press Club. He of course believed no such thing; but argued that it opened a useful avenue of thought. His pitiful belief in selective stupidity amid a situation of universal stupidity made it impossible for him to start anyone even daydreaming about his theories by which good guys in a monstrously linear and Ptolemaic universe demanded bad guys for the far seat of the seesaw. It was an easy idea, like those of Darwin, Francis Bacon, and Jack the Ripper.

So it all dribbled away to the point of his bedriddence; and expressed itself now in his love of running-backs who could run a slant off tackle and end up getting thirteen yards in a sweep. He believed in
lateral moves at the line of scrimmage.
She could understand that, however brittle the parallel; and it was her problem to discover now in what sense his vanishing into the darkness was a lateral move.

*   *   *

When Faron Carter was with his wife, he could contrive to deprive his face of all expression whatsoever. In this way he was able to keep from letting her know where she was picking up points and where she was losing them. It was a good little stunt; and without it, Carter would doubtless be in the rubber room at the state funny farm conducting Chinese fire drills. Now, when he had deprived his face of emotion, he had a wide and expressionless mouth like the juncture of a casserole dish with its lid.

Today his wife was ironing in front of the set, watching a teenage dance hour. The music was coughing so explosively that he could feel it in the ironing board when he rested his hand. And now and then the television would give them close-ups of the dancers with the points of their tongues protruding from the corners of their mouths. It was out of this world.

Jeannie Carter had been a pretty Orlando baton twirler twenty years ago; but now she looked like death warmed over; you had the feeling that if you touched your fingernail to her forehead, the skull within would jump into your lap. She was a driven lady with the baton and back-seat feel-ups so long past they were scarcely good for an off-color laugh on pinochle night; Jeannie Carter just needed a lot of goods to keep the mortal wolf from the door. She was a forlorn little sociopath, crazy with accumulated purchases, who could have been saved from her shopping sprees only by a weekly gang-fuck behind the high school; for she was not so degenerated that the varsity club wouldn't line up the way they would, in mountain regions say, for a healthy sheep or yearling cow full of burdock and thistles. The truth was, Faron Carter did his best; but when she scrabbled, eyes popping, on his spacious chest, twisting a fierce and cosmically insatiable twat around his simple meat, it was in a vision of bleak and endless space that could only be modified to something in which she could live by purchases and then more purchases.

Now that is not to say she used her scattered ownerships to harm her neighbors, nor even, God knew, to characterize herself with her friends and what was left of her family.

It started with the showpieces. Their first showpiece was this modest concrete block house with its two bedrooms, its terrazzo-floored john and Florida room. There were reproductions on the walls that were more pitiful than tasteless; and Faron Carter's tournament citations, his stuffed world's records.

The second showpiece was the air-conditioned station wagon with the electric everything and the power-assisted altogether. It was cream-colored and had tooled Naugahyde upholstery. After ten months, none of it was scuffed; they had no children. I want my Gran Torino scuffed, thought Jeannie. I want the rich simuwood cherry-and-oak body paneling covered with a little one's scratches. I want some li'l peeper to give me fits hacking around with the Selectshift Cruise-O-Matic, the RimBlow Deluxe three-spoke steering wheel or the Power-plus positive windows. I wanna look down at the optional color-keyed vinyl floor carpet and see
bubble gum
with them precious toothprints.

At each of her temples, Jeannie had barely visible veins that showed under her film of skin. You wouldn't want to touch them either. When Jeannie used to poise heels together on the fifty-yard line, the white bulbs of rubber making a pale circle around her flawless twirling, her perfect, silver-sateen-enclosed, indented buttocks sent half the audience into a jack-off frenzy that made them blur out the first quarter of the game itself.

And Jeannie knew that. Twirling, dropping to one knee for the catches, then prancing downfield in a mindlessness now growing culturally impossible, she was a simple pink cake with a slot. And two broad bleacher-loads wanted a piece of it. It was a whole civilization up shit creek in a cement canoe without a dream of a paddle.

Now with veins in her temples ready to leak and a skull to jump out of its pale, thin envelope, she wanted to buy things. And it only made her sorry when she did; not that Carter went after her. He would come home and there would be some unpaid-for showpiece and Jeannie weeping by the TV and drawing flower-print tissues in decorative colors from a gift box. And Carter would feel sorry because he had just come from the Lions Club luncheon where things seemed fine; and here they'd gone from bad to worse.

They had gotten to the point of collection agents; and sometimes when Carter came in from guiding he found Jeannie in terror because some beef-fed muscleman had been around putting the heat on; or had perhaps gone so far as to garnishee the infrared barbecue oven or intercept some panel truck trying to deliver a love seat.

Years ago, in the lid of a makeup box she still used, she had printed this message from a book by Roger L. Lee called
Baton Twirling Made Easy:

There is a tendency when strutting to shorten one's stride. If one allows his stride to become less than thirty inches, he will crowd the first rank in the band. This, naturally, will cause the first rank to shorten its stride, throwing the entire band off.

Today, again, Carter had to explain that he couldn't have every customer that came to the dock; there was another guide as much in demand as he was; and a kid who was the real McCoy was having a skiff built.

“Couldn't you talk to Myron,” she pleaded.

“Myron doesn't have anything to do with it. He just tells you what's happened after it has happened.”

There was no use explaining. When Jeannie first saw Myron Moorhen at his desk with the yellow sheets and the columns of numbers streaming from his fingertips to the word TOTAL, something imprinted. Myron had the combination; and if you could only talk to him right, the immense empty space would send runners and connections toward one another.

And everything would be O.K.

*   *   *

Olie Slatt said, “I wouldn't trade this certificate for a king's ransom. It cost me an arm and a leg to get to the southernmost U.S. and this right here is your high point.”

“I hope she works out that way,” said Dance, “but to tell you the truth, I expected to see you a little sooner than this and now I'm booked up sixteen days straight.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the soonest you could fish with me would be seventeen days from today.”

“But what about my damn certificate! I up-chugged for ten hours!”

“Wait a darn second now, Mr. Slatt. This certificate is good for a day's guiding. You can go with the other boy on the dock here, the old boy in fact I learned everything I know off of.”

Olie Slatt was wearing a green plaid suit today, a little short at all its cuffs like a Pinky Lee outfit, except that Slatt was rawboned and pared off to a kind of resistant and cartilaginous surface that seemed implicitly violent in this wax-museum suit.

“Where do I find this other one?” Slatt's pale and sullen face seemed to hang from the ring of his mouth.

“Right there in the bait shack.”

“I mean, look at me. Do I look like a rich man? Do I look like a man who can pay Howard Johnson sixteen times in a row to go out fishing on the seventeenth? What kind of queer breed of odds and ends do you have to get down here for you to think like that?”

“Well, you go in there and ask for Faron Carter and give him your certificate. That old boy is a regular fish hawk. If it's in Monroe County and swims, he'll put it in the boat.”

Olie Slatt turned as he crossed the lawn. The vent of his plaid coat was agape over his shining rump. “I whooped up ten hours of pie filling for that paper,” he said. “My nose is still burning and my gut feels like a mule kicked me. So, don't you nor your sidekicks never try to put me off nor hand me down the line because I'll come back lickety-split and be on you like a dog without a mother.” By this time Carter was in the bait-shack doorway listening in. “—I mean to hightail it back to Montana ten days from now with a trophy under my arm or I'm going to know the reason why. I have spent my leisure hours on the Missouri after paddlefish and saugers and dreaming of one day coming home to Roundup with a tropical trophy. Everybody knows why I am here. My reputation depends on my comin home with the goods.” All the time Dance watched him, Slatt was twisted around on his shining butt so you could see each button of his plaid suit fastened, his hamstrings sprung taut under the thin white socks as he flexed with irritation from head to toe; and Dance, already nonplused by existence in general, looked at Olie Slatt and thought he acted like a frog in a cloud of fruit flies.

*   *   *

Skelton was making an incision in the skin of the fuselage over the center of its only real room when the telephone rang.

“Tom, Cart.”

“Hey, Cart. What do you need?”

“How's your skiff coming along?”

“Powell's got a coat of paint on the inside. One more and I can hang the engine.”

“You want to guide a week from today?”

“Yes.”

“I got me a sportsman here from the state of Montana.”

“Sign him up, Cart.”

“If you can get him a Citation fish, I think he'll mount it; and I'll see you get the kickback from the taxidermist.”

Skelton said, “Tell him a week today at eight-thirty.”