Ninety-Two in the Shade (2 page)

Nichol Dance sat up and announced that he wanted a career in show business, with an air of having had one in an earlier life. Chemical impact thickened the flesh around his eyes. On the floor of the skiff was the Colt's patent revolver with Mexican ivory grips; and on his chest, his flowered shirt bore the print of the pistol.

Dance's uncanny presence produced a momentary silence in which the dry velocities of birds could be heard in the brushy creek. Even the bubbling of crustaceans on the red mangrove roots around him and the slow tidal seepage seemed to rise a measure or so while Nichol Dance looked them over with the same remote gaze you would understandably associate with the recently raised dead.

“A person can scarcely be deliberate any more,” he said.

“What seems so exclusive to you about that,” Carter inquired.

“Does it need to be exclusive for me to bring it up?”

“Not unless you're offering a franchise.”

“You're the Skelton kid that's always on the goddamn flat in front of me.”

“That's right,” Skelton said positively to this basilisk drunk.

“I wonder how come.”

“I enjoy water sports would be just about exactly how come.”

“Very good. But child, I can't recommend it.”

“I wasn't applying for a recommendation,” Tom Skelton said.

“I was explaining,” Dance said, “about how unattractive a day on the water can come to be.”

“But I'd of known,” Tom Skelton said, “that a person would spoil a boat trip if he only went out to shoot himself.”

“Now look here, fucker, I didn't come here to be sassed—”

“Neither did I.”

Nichol Dance picked up the Colt's patent revolver and discharged it into the mangroves all around Tom Skelton with a collective noise that was close to that of war.

“Fucker,”
he said,
“I don't seem to have your attention!”

Carter said, “You have rattled the boy. Now let's just all of our selfs unwind and go home. And Nichol, that pistol has gotten to be a liability.”

And Dance said to Carter, “But we've kept so many from crowding our trade, it discourages me to come acrosst a hard case.” Then he smiled radiantly.

“I'm not a hard case, whatever that is. I am going to guide is all.”

Nichol Dance stared a moment at Tom Skelton with only mildly drunken appreciation. He said, “Then why don't you do the little thing?”

“I think he means to,” said Carter. “Now let's run before the sun sets.”

Nichol Dance said to Carter, “Let him lead us, Cart.”

Well, all right. Skelton reversed the engine, eased backward in the narrow marshy quarters past Carter who followed backing after him, the sandy turbulence on the creek bottom lifting and carrying down tide. Dance sat at ease in one of the fighting chairs, his face still blurred, but the impression of durability remained in the compression ridges of flesh under his eyes. Otherwise, Nichol Dance was just a displaced bumpkin run out of his own unmortgaged bar for shooting a man in the horse business through the wishbone in not quite disputable self-defense; part of the world of American bad actors who, when the chips are down, go to Florida with all the gothics and grotesqueries of chrome and poured-to-form concrete that that implies.

When Tom Skelton had running room, a nicety of judgment based on a precise guess of distance between propeller and ocean bottom, he put the skiff up on a plane and ran the shallow bank on a dead course for the Harbor Keys, then swung abruptly southwest on the crawfishermen's wheel track—a wandering trough perhaps two feet wide—which at this tide was absolutely the only way to cross the bank that separated them from Key West. Nichol Dance turned his head on a dark and sun-wrinkled neck to look at Carter and raise his eyebrows. Skelton centered the bow on the stacks of Key West Electric and started home.

Winter ducks and cormorants got up in front of the approaching skiffs and made off at angles to the boats' running course. Sea fans, coral heads, yellow cap rock, stone-crab and crawfish pots were inordinate and clear in the shallow water. The trap markers were affixed to Clorox-bottle floats that hung down tide on yellow lines; but Skelton by painful and slow process knew very well how to run the country having slept out in mosquito bogs for his misjudgments. He had poled the better parts of full days upwind and up tide with bent drive shafts and wiped-out propellers for having had on the map of his brain previously unlocated coral heads or discarded ice cans from commercial boats; or for having lost surge channels in the glare crossing shallow reefs.

Well astern now, on Mente Chica Key, the outline of a bat tower could be seen against the smeared and windless sky.

“Leave it at the fuel dock,” said Dance now blearier than ever but still letting a thin devilish gas from slightly pursed lips evidence some dire bowel chemistry.

Roy Soleil, the dockmaster, stood beside the two pumps with a mild visual suggestion that he was the third. He made no move to throw them a line as Tom eased in and reversed the engines for an eggshell landing that lifted Dance's eyebrows once more. Behind them, Carter was just now mooring; and Tom Skelton's brain was tumid with uncommitted navigational errors.

“Why my God,” said Roy, “the original survivor.”

Nichol Dance did not look up but kept his reddening neck bent while he refueled the skiff.

“I mean, what makes folks keep signing up on these rescue missions?” Roy inquired. “Or is a rescue something every boy should have?”

When Nichol raised himself up to fix Roy with a baleful stare, Roy flushed very slightly but did not, you could see, deviate from his curious course.

“What ails you?” said Nichol Dance.

“Ails me?”

Roy, the dockmaster, twice Nichol Dance's size, with the fame of maddened rages on his side, said: “Nichol, that is what I have been trying to touch upon.”

Carter by this time saw even from his distance what was afoot exactly; but the interval, even from Skelton's proximate view, between releasing the gas pump and arriving on the dock with the ash-handled kill-gaff in hand was imperceptible. Skelton supposed there had been some prelude, even some subsequent move by the immense dockmaster; but Nichol Dance was sure with the gaff and the dockmaster was quickly down, neatly skewered between hip and short ribs; while Nichol Dance, standing over as he thrashed, gripped the hardwood handle with both hands and bore down as though to kill a snake. Nichol Dance said to Carter, “Call a doctor for this New Jersey arc-welder polack.” Carter ran to the pay phone and Dance disempaled the dockmaster, who lay bleeding, glaring and holding himself in with laced fingers. Then to Skelton he said, “Better get some law in here too before I think to wind this bug fucker's clock.”

He looked at Roy.

“Roy, I'd go to Raiford Prison over you, if I needed.”

“I see that.”

When Tom Skelton came back, they sat to wait. First the ambulance came and took off the dockmaster. Then Nichol Dance handed Skelton a ledger of his bookings and told him to use the skiff. “I will call you from the joint as to what cut from your proceeds would be usual.”

“How did you pick me?”

“If I gave the bookings to Cart, I'd lose them. Anybody you'd guide I'm going to get back.”

It was a messy beginning. Still, he could regard his start with no sense of incursion by the events that surrounded it. He had enormous hopes for the future. He considered: mucus egg congestions are related to radiant sea creatures via indecipherable links of change.

*   *   *

“I can remember,” said Skelton's Mother, “that autumn so clearly because I was expecting you. A man from Sugarloaf had been stung to death by bees on one of the Indian mounds and they brought him into Key West. They took him right over to the newspaper and laid out the corpse on the steps of the old city hall to get some pictures, but a colored man's dog wouldn't stop howling and leave them be. So they threw the corpse into a Ford sedan and drove it to the funeral parlor. The face was as big as
that
with bee stings and the colored man's dog chased the car and wouldn't stop howling until his owner ran him off to the shrimp dock. The dog got down under the pilings and kept on howling. That night when the boats went out you could hear the howling over all those shrimpers' engines and your father went down and brought the dog home and put him in the cistern with five pounds of sirloin until the howling stopped.”

Skelton, still and listening, felt himself to be moving through the house, the full vacancy of its rooms, thinking, So much has been lost. In this heat, every garbage pail is full of fish skeletons and this town smells of the special lizard stench of churches or catacombs; narcosis dying as slowly as the life that would replace it.

*   *   *

Miranda's hallway: A spindly mahogany end table to which the termites have had access for a hundred years sustains a green Mason jar with its lost patent numerals in heavy glass; and holding in its opaque vegetable water from the Keys Aqueduct, ribbed orange squash-blossoms in their delicately emblematic subdivision of light.

It was cool in there, a house holding a beloved woman, the aural penetrations of a Cuban side street and the Gulf of Mexico in an upper window.

Skelton perplexed himself as to how many dead had been transported through this hallway. If you had a specific answer to that, you would possess innumerable anecdotes about mortality with which to regale your friends; or if you had no friends, then to address to that not so finite darkness in which we are all corporate shareholders. The trick, finally, Skelton knew, was to keep them rolling in the aisles, saving the best one for last, about how we die and die and die.

What a thought. I am going to fuck my way out of this one. Miranda used to do reds, crossed her sevens, and had a Leo rising. She was Skelton's girl, a pretty thing whose long black hair carried behind her as she walked.

The wooden fan made no sound in the front room. The door to the bedroom was ajar. Skelton paused midway across the room and felt a rising cold pass up through him as he began to hear through the doorway the bed's rachitic sprung utterance. Skelton tried without amusing himself to think of this as an unspeakable pubic disaster. Pain. He stepped sideways very slightly and saw against that band of further space the writhing within; and could not keep himself from saying, “… Miranda…” so that the front-room quiet fell across everything like an eclipse.

“Tom?”

“Yes…”

“I'm making love. Wait out there till I'm through.”

Skelton walked to the window as though riding a thermal. Not able to stand in one place, he returned to the table, rifled through the sewing box, removed a small silver snuffbox, a pocket mirror, and a razor blade. He opened the snuffbox with trembling fingers and tapped out a little heap of cocaine on the mirror. He divided the pile and drew it out in two long thin white lines; blocked first one nostril, then the other, and drew the cocaine into each.

He leaned back into the chair and tuned his ears once again to the bed's noise, which seemed to open and close in the room, tenebrous as a bird's claw. But by the time his nose numbed and his throat seemed to not quite close any longer, it had come to seem that the bed was not unmusical. And once its noise had stopped, he shared the exhausted breathing and relief from within. Across the room, the tall window suspended a pure convexity of luminous air toward Skelton; and in the door he had entered was a bar of fluorescing sun. He began to imagine that he could feel Key West urge itself against the Atlantic like a ship of terrible slow movement. The chrysalis he sometimes felt inside was beginning to shed and stream quite lambently.

“Tom?”

“Ah, Miranda.”

“Are you blown away?”

“A little.”

“Because you were upset?”

“Yes.”

“This is Michael.”

“I'm sorry,” said Michael.

“That's all right. Did you have a nice time?”

“Yes, very.”

“Well, that's fine.”

Michael said, “I've got a plane to make.”

“Well, good to see you and it's fine with me that you had a nice time … and uh that there is a plane for you to make…”

“Thanks.” A perfunctory kiss to Miranda and away with him. When he was gone, Miranda said, “You didn't fire anything?”

“Uh-uh. Couple blows of your coke. What's that noise?”

“Michael going out.”

“Sounded like the house falling down.”

“Tom, I had this incredible orgasm.”

“Do I have to hear about your organism too?”

“Just this one. It was like a whole dream of sweet things to eat. I mean, it all came to mind. Spun sugar, meringue, whipped egg whites, and all these clear German cake icings—”

“How about when your chum shot off? Was it a blintz or an omelet?”

“Ask him.” She held Skelton's head standing beside him. He ran his hand up to her openness. That one hurt too; fragments of a life presumed dead. When would the light come. He would have to watch that pale cocaine edge pale like acetylene flame. And how could you dream of The Garden when what you would have had her have would have been a kind of beer fart: or, at best, the relief of a scarcely visible blackhead yielding to opposed thumbnails. Here it had been everything short of glacéed almonds and it made Skelton mean. When the shining city is at hand, a special slum will be built for me and my meanness. I will be the person, if that's what I am, in the slum; there will be one of everything; one rat, one tin can. The shining city will beckon in the distance. The shadow of the Bakunin monument will not quite stretch to my door. In the evening, the sound of happy syndicalist badminton finals will be borne to me on a sweet wind that sours as it enters my slum. I will behave poorly.

“Tom, what's the matter?”