Ninety-Two in the Shade (20 page)

“Well,” said his father, “I have to make a piece of wreckage of myself so we can have a bedside scene together.”

“What are you talking about.”

“This.” An inclusive gesture.

Skelton refused to reply.

“All right.”

“We've all been chasing you. Mother is finally finished with this stuff too I can tell you.”

“I wanted to advise you. That is what fathers do.”

“Why didn't you just come over to my place. I have been looking for you every which way.”

“I didn't have the advice ready. I had to go through a certain number of operational maneuvers, as they say here at headquarters, to get myself down to the level at which I knew what you were going through.”

Skelton looked into his palms for a sign.

“I'm not going through anything in particular,” Skelton lied.

“Do you think your friend is joking?”

“No. We have just laid out some terrains and a process of natural selection is going on.”

“Oh, come on. I thought we'd been over that Darwin baloney. I don't even like it as a figure of speech.”

It appeared for a moment that he would actually be sick to his stomach. Skelton could not quite fathom the total degeneration he saw before him. His father's face, often compared to Manolete's, was covered with an uneven stubble; and his hair, always cut short as that of a monk, seemed like a barber-college special. The fingers of his inordinately long and ghostly hands arose to make a point, then faded with its vanishment from his mind. Whether from hunger or obsession, his face had receded from his eyes, isolating them in their sockets with an unmistakable suggestion of madness. Skelton felt a certain embarrassment at his own short-fingered, tough hands in his lap, rough-palmed from the pushpole: another sign that he had come from nowhere; a suggestion he was determined to put the lie to.

“I've had an adventure, I guess,” said his father wanly. “Like falling through space. I did some drinking and ended up here. I must think of when I left the army … I somehow consumed seven months getting to Key West. The things that happened to me were so foreign to what it seems
could
have happened to me. Much more disturbing than amnesia. You try to date your life around the things that happen to you that you can't understand. When you understand something, it is no longer any good to you. It's neutralized. When I got into the ‘bassinet' there for seven months, I was trying to create one of those situations, artificially; and I failed because it was just eccentric. There was no mystery, no real enigma.”

“Except to others.”

One of his father's eyelids was considerably lower than the other; and when he thought intensively, he usually pushed it up with his forefinger; he did now.

“It even lacked mystery for others. The odd and the mysterious are not the same.”

“Okay.”

“Then quite naturally I began to try to see what could be done about what was happening to you. I tried a few simple things like offering to buy the boat but my heart wasn't in it. And I knew it ran counter to what you would accept. You have always been dedicated to ordeals as a way of driving your spirit to the place where its first confusions are. I think you've gotten away from that now and I showed you a lot about sidestepping that may have been useful.”

“Better than that.”

“So anyway—and this will seem a little simple-minded—I had the plan that I would try to condition myself to the point that life could depart almost as a relinquishment, a little release of the will and it would seep away … or something, right?”

“Yes, right,” Skelton said very nearly inaudibly.

His father laughed. “Everything happened. I got drunk, worked over, run in by the police, thrown out of restaurants. I told these boys here that I was discharged dishonorably from the army and they locked me in the ‘brig,' which is the mop closet on the first floor. I know,
funny;
but I was in there two days without anything to eat. I have only been released five hours now.”

Skelton in pain glanced to the window where bright palm leaves shuddered in incongruous evening sunlight. And hearing traffic, he thought, How dare anyone go on about his business.

“But I began to find what could not be explained.” He drew out his upper plate; it was broken and taped back together. “I got drunk and fell down over in back of Carlos's market and this preacher took my plate out and stepped on it.”

“Why didn't you go home!”

“Oh come on.” His father's detachment was serene. If there was anything that identified him by blood in place of the dissimilarity of hands, it was this proclivity for slipping the moorings. Skelton's own “ordeals,” as his father termed them, his attempt to be sane,
a biologist,
when his actual instincts were less linear, less useful, only led to a bout of hallucinations, featuring drowning, falling, wild horses, endless crowds of driverless automobiles under evidently perfect control hurtling over rough landscapes; and even before Dance had spoken of Charlie Starkweather in the city jail, electrocution, which came to him as a kind of tickling to death, a trampling under electrical horses.

“My first instinct was that this face-off with what's-his-name was a matter of honor.”

“Oh God!”

“Well, you'll admit that was the obvious choice.”

“I don't admit that!”

“Well you goddamn prima donna! What was the obvious choice then!”

Skelton racked his brains. His father was right. But he didn't have a thing to tell him.

“That's the best I can do,” he said, not quite coming clean.

“All right then listen you dumb bunny. Now you can get killed at this thing you're up to. So, you see it through so you know what it is when it comes. Otherwise you are a bystander and nothing could be more disgusting.”

They stopped talking. Skelton remembered in his childhood his father explaining to him that he lived in a civilization that was founded from its family life to its government on the principle that the wheel that squeaks the loudest gets the grease.

“Your grandfather,” he said now, “is a great American in the way he has learned to work the gaps of control that exist between all the little selfish combines. That is why he has been able to rook the country out of millions without ever getting petty about it. —Now, at my best I have been a transitional figure in trying to get you some idea of his energy and coordinational power—with the conviction that I would be consumed in the process—so that you could use it toward something a little more durable than the kind of power your grandfather has craved so … horribly.”

He took up his fiddle and all that scarifying instinct for spirals upon spirals of cognition fell from his tormented face; and a turbulent gaze into emptiness that had become less Skelton's birthright than a kind of visitation fell across it. For Skelton's father always felt himself to be poised on the edge of some yawning fissure. One of the ways he crossed it, besides the sports page and its illusion of a constant skein of clear athletic effort in which no one was swept away in time, one of the ways he crossed that fissure was with his fiddle. His head inclined upon it now as though he would fall serenely asleep; the eccentrically long bow indented itself gently against the strings and paused before the opening strains in deepest space. And then the crazy man began
Jerusalem Ridge
pure and howling in a final elevation to the light that Skelton could understand.

*   *   *

Skelton thought about the electrical drill and how it could take the hole of the light socket and modify it to another; hole power; perhaps ridiculous but close to his father and his mysteries. He thought of the vultures you could see circling a pit (usually filled with garbage but never mind that); or how during the eclipse of the sun in 1970, running to the Snipe Keys, he had stopped the skiff when the light started to go out, looked up as proscribed by radio news broadcasts to see half a thousand seabirds circling a black hole in the sky. It was the kind of hole people could create, throwing each other into shadow. But there was something there to be considered, the radios everywhere telling you not to look, the vultures over the garbage pit, the news broadcasts of 1970 reflecting another eclipse and a quarter of a billion people staring into the black hole in the sky. And in his own fractional quadrant of world, Skelton looking to the whirling seabirds and their black pivot and then across the still, mercurial sea darkening as though oxydized by this lunar tropism. The power of nothing.

*   *   *

His father was laughing, half to himself. “Four nights ago, I got particularly drunk with these fellows that work the boats, then bum their way up to the Carolinas in the summer. I left them about midnight I suppose and was crawling, literally crawling, along Eaton Street when a car pulled up and Bella got out. She took about fifty pictures of me creeping down Eaton in my sheet, saying, “Bahyewtiful, bahyewtiful!” the whole while. I suppose she's fanning them out for the old man right now. That won't take him in! He's seen it all … By the way, he knows your plan and completely disagrees with my interfering.”

Skelton thought, That does not surprise; any more than that his father, who had eschewed authority in himself as well as others throughout most of a lifetime, should suddenly attempt to advise and force, however halfheartedly; while his mother, who cultivated durability as another might table manners, was beginning to discover an exasperation with all three men, as anyone would with cheap or highly tuned machinery that constantly needed repairs.

“Well, I don't know what I wanted to tell you. I'm so down now it seems like I could tell you more about what might await you. Even my veins feel slack. And I've only gotten to that place where everything is ironic in a simpleton's way; you know, looking down at people living beyond their means, ridiculing bad taste and so on. That's not very interesting. So I haven't got much to tell you. Except that
I
wish you'd give up this idea.”

“What would you do in my place?”

“I'd go through with it.”

“That neutralizes your advice.”

“No it doesn't. I have a perspective that I couldn't have if it was me acting.”

“Like what kind of perspective.”

“A Christian one.”

“Why couldn't I have that myself?”

“Because the Christian perspective is one that only obtains in the third person; otherwise it vanishes in egotism and you become a figure from which ridicule can derive as from Christ himself.”

“Well, let me say first of all that I don't believe that for a minute. And then let me remark that when a man goes to such trouble to set up a crisis, I have a certain duty that comes of my respect for him to let that crisis take place.”

“I'd say, on the basis of that, that you were a smart little fuck. But I think you're just reacting by temperament and out of your nose for trouble.”

“Anyway, it never got me anywhere except a trip to the ward until I started acting on my own instincts and following through. Now what I'm doing and what Nichol is doing are two cases of just exactly that.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“No, I'm really not.”

Skelton was getting tired of this; and he could see his father was too. So he asked his father to get up and come to his place; and surprisingly he bounded out of bed, the fiddle familiarly in one hand like a tennis racket.

They entered the fuselage, the first time for his father; he beamed around its interior and began dressing as Skelton handed him articles of clothing.

Skelton quite suddenly recalled Nichol Dance. Let's think about this thing head on now. It has become clear that I am liable to forfeit, as they say, my, you know,
life.
What you get in that case is … death. Now: what can I expect in the way of a tremendous death? Not much. There are no tremendous deaths any more. The pope, the president, the commissar all come to it like cigarette butts dropped to the sidewalk from the fingers of a pedestrian hurrying on toward some cloudy appointment.

“You got anything to drink?”

“Maybe a beer,” said Skelton.

“I disburden myself of a life's discoveries and you offer me a beer.”

“What do you want a drink for?”

“I want to get illuminated.”

“Well, then you just hold on there—” Skelton took a film canister out of one of his ammunition cases and opened it.

“Lick your finger and stick it in there—”

“Like that?”

“Now lick it off.”

“What is it? Is it dope?”

“No. Just do it.” He made his father do that three times, then did the same himself.

“All right,” said his father, “I trusted you. Now you tell me what that is.”

“Mushrooms carefully gathered by South American Indian witch-doctor curandero genius-maniacs.”

“Then you gave me dope.”

“No, sir. It's another thing.”

“I'm a dope fiend,” said his father.

“No,” said Skelton, “I can tell you about that because I was one of those—”

“How bad was it? I thought that was what you were up to.”

“Pretty bad.”

“But like what?”

“A little like real flu combined with bad nerves and extreme old age.”

“Sounds attractive. Now what I'd like to know is why, on the basis of that, and with my proffered trust, you would pour drugs down my gullet.”

“It's not the same thing.”

*   *   *

Elapse. A zone ensues: time in clarity.

Skelton explained how he had put his shelter together; and said he had wanted a kind of second-floor compartment but couldn't see how to do it. His father sat down and started sketching a kind of blister for the fuselage with a floor suspended on cables; it was made of tetrahedral sections, some windows, some hinged-on marine hardware so that it could be vented, the whole capable of flexion: the sides to fair into the fuselage itself and the floor on its braided cables to be a live surface (“So that each step you take provides part of the next step”), all drawn in an elegant dry-point style reminiscent of old artist-engineers. His father looked down at his work and laughed. “Later, we'll talk about how to keep the rain out.”