Ninety-Two in the Shade (21 page)

Skelton walked around in a long silvery orbit, his hands behind him and his fingers trailing. Starlight came in overhead like the fine pinpoints of charged water.

“God!” said his father, “can you smell all that topsoil out there! No wonder the gardens do so well. Jesus, I can smell all that wet moss under your mother's philodendrons!” He pulled open a drawer beneath the salvaged marine cookstove and burst into laughter. Skelton walked over and looked in: there was some silverware and a corkscrew. It was pretty funny all right.

Skelton's father crawled around on the floor, tears of helpless laughter dripping before him. Skelton took one last look into the drawer—silverware and corkscrew maniacally arrayed there—and leaned up against the wall laughing convulsively.

When his father stood up, Skelton looked at him dressed in one thing or another from his own sorry wardrobe; and smiled. “You do look dapper.”

“Look what?”

“Dapper.”

“Dapper!”

“Oh, Lord!”

“Let's have another look in that silverware drawer,” his father said. It was the same in there: some knives, forks, spoons; and that corkscrew. Neither of them could take it.

In the eyes of Skelton's father, the effacement of his accumulated sorrows had given way to a silly serenity. And Skelton himself, who had been feeling so narrowly treated by his existence, was on the margin of that horselaugh magnanimity that reveals new things under heaven every time.

“Let's head for the old plant.”

“I'm for it.”

The two men hurried through the lunar palm shadows to the warehouse on upper Petronia. They passed a ghostly street sweeper with his own key to the cemetery, and a taxicab with golden interior light bustling down Flagler without a passenger through blue islands of moon shadow.

At the warehouse, Skelton's father lifted a piece of cracked concrete for the key, unlocked the padlock on the corrugated door, and led Skelton inside. “If we play our cards right,” said his father, “we are headed for an emotional El Dorado in here, a real jackpot.”

Skelton passed him entering and saw vainglory in his father's face. The data base here was decades of folly, the end-all praxis of quixotry.

Inside, the vast rubberoid wreckage of the Southernmost Blimp Works, presided over by a surplus, helium-filled barrage balloon on a swaying cable. Skelton's father hauled in a few feet of cable and released it; the barrage balloon throbbed back into its position up under the ceiling; there was a black flag on its side and the phrase,

MAKE IT MUTUAL.

Skelton found a cylinder full of helium. The two of them filled their lungs with it and began to speak in the voices of Walt Disney ducks.

Skelton said: “In the deep discovery of the subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some inquirers; who, if two or three yards were open about the surface, would not care to rake the bowels of Potosí.”

His father replied, like a duck too: “The dense and driven Passion, and frightful sweat … what none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay—,” sighed hugely with a hint of duck noise, picked up a sheet of thick, treated rubber, and quacked, “Oh this too, too solid flesh!”

Skelton's father was looking his inwardly lit best and wore his Manolete face with his witty hooded eyes—possibly now beclouded with those hallucinations that guided earlier Americans; it was the face of his power vision. His other face, his Sinclair Lewis face full-toothed and mildly simian, suggested problems of complexion in his youth and lack of solid moral reference (or blood sugar).

The two men quacked sharply at each other until the helium passed.

“Now son, I want to get back into this advice thing … if uh if these walls and floors would stop whipping around I'M A DOPE FIEND and so if you'd uh pay strict mm attention here—” Skelton
fils
was trying his best not to visualize a grave rat combat in the shadows.

“Let's sit down for advice.” He patted the air as if to materialize a chair.

The two men sat on rubber sheets that covered most of the floor of the balloonery. The barrage blimp was poised upon its cable with such stillness as to suggest that the cable supported it. Over the doorway, Skelton's now adjusted eyes perceived a portrait of Count Zeppelin with the date of his death, March 8, 1917. Beside the goner hydrogen visionary, a great rigid airship emblazoned
Hansa
rested on a pale, limitless glare of ice.

“Now generally I am told that I am a fine one to talk; so let me offer that as a means of ignoring me. When I suggest something to you, however heartfelt, you remind yourself of my absurd ventures in the manufacturing of blimps, my mental discharge from the army, my unsuccessful family life, and so on. In other words, review my credentials, ha ha! And forget everything I tell you! But
don't
forget, even my whorehouse was a flop! My whorehouse was a flophouse! The floozies turned on me like a hundred raging toucans! They fired upon me with my own Seltzer! In twelve months of operation they never awarded me a freebie! I had a Congolese lesbian who used my Havana Churchills for dildos, then jammed the toilet with them! They peed on my fiddle, overcharged my friends, and gave your grandfather a bigger-than-life dose of Montezuman syphilis with chancres that ran up his body like mink tracks! When I saw what they could do, I gave my life some long thought. First I closed down the anarchist reading room. Then I closed down the Puta Palazzo, as I called my little business. Then I spent five years reading the religious literature of the world, homing in like an atomic pigeon on the Rig-Veda, the Bible, the journal of Pascal, Dostoevsky's
Insulted and Injured
and the
Exemplary Novels
of Cervantes in both the original spic and in the incomparable translation of James Mabbe/Don Diego Puede Ser, ha ha!—the Elizabethan courtier and monster whoremonger of Castille or Cast Steel as the other peerless Diego has it. Well, where was I? Oh, yes. End of religious training. The forging of a bright metal too ductile to be forged! Trainee takes to his bed where he is instructively badgered by his wife and father. The world is viewed through mosquito netting. Lizards and Norway rats are perceived in the moonlight while Cayo Hueso is beddie-bye. A slow but inescapable loathing of his own father begins to form so contrary to subject's wishes he realizes that it is his race's conscience, his utterly bastardized and serenely mongrel and multisexual transnational squid of a people, the cuttlefish of earth, speaking through him when, quite against his wishes, he looks out through the gauze at his own flesh and blood from whose loins needless to say he has leapt in his full deformity, and thinks:
God help me.
Now man in question is an ineffectualist and will not act upon his race's call. But the call is there. This great and powerful animal, your grandfather, this conniving millionaire son of wrecking masters and arch-abrogator of justice is slowly spinning to earth parachuting into his own history with his whores and washed-up coloratura singers, stalked by vague, pusillanimous insurance adjusters in gabardine and color-coordinated, fun-in-the-sun playsuits, and will finally either expire of his own disgust or will be run to ground by men who would ask for the opponent's track record before undertaking to take on a piss-ant! The successor often seems flyblown and rank to the succeeded. Uh, except to me. You have always been liable to revert to your grandfather.”

“That's painful for me to recognize. I don't mean that without respect either. But the load is heavy.” It was conceivable to Skelton that his earliest compulsive wishes were toward extracting his attention from the fields of changes which he like everyone else had inherited; at one point, phototropic plankton seemed the appropriate antiworld, a collective behemoth only estimable by electronic scanner, formulae, surmises; but even in that, there was a threshold and one which he couldn't penetrate. He suspected lack of intelligence or ability to reason. So on one trip with his most admired professor to study the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico, he heard the following between two deckhands:

“Do you believe our Lord will save you?”

“Fuckin A.”

This preposterous ontological skirmish had the effect of producing in Skelton the perfect, lingering laugh; one quite embedded now and one which crinkled his face from time to time in giddy spiritual desire. For
something.
For a more penetrating laugh, a victim who said
Bingo-Bango
on the Hill of Skulls and who returned better dividends than War Bonds and compulsory trips to Nepal for the messages you were not getting at home. Even a victim who never was.

“Now,” said his father, “one other thing. I ran into my old friend Captain James Davis, formerly skipper of the trawler
Marquesa
and currently doing time as salad chef at Howard Johnson's. What he tells me is that you are always talking to him about me—”

“That's right.”

“—and that you always wind up asking him about your mother.”

“That's right and he never tells me anything about her.”

“She was a whore.”

“That's what I suspected.”

“In my own whorehouse. Is that what you needed to know? She was beautiful. An angel and a gold mine. I'm proud of her.”

“I should hope so,” Skelton managed.

“Okay,” said his father, “what are you going to do?”

“What I said I was.”

“That's what I thought.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go back to the house and have a shower and wait and hope to see you again.”

The two men walked out of the building under the portraits of Count Zeppelin and the airship
Hansa.
The sun had begun to rise. In half a day, it would drop into the sea before a cheering throng at Mallory dock. Footloose, deracinated tourists, moving coordinates on a thousand chamber-of-commerce war maps, would soon percolate into the density of downtown side streets.

Skelton and his father parted with minimal ceremony. These trips to the hole had been exhausting. Soon they would be looking askance again. Each of them knew that what is perhaps least appropriate in our drumming, cursory march across the glacier is our feckless sense of progress.

*   *   *

Slippage, daydreams: The eye is almost never on the ball. Skelton could not go to the bathroom. If you plug up a man's ass, he thought, you will finally shut off his brain. He recalled his old figments, Don and Stacy, the People of the Plains. A knock on the door of their flatlands house. Stacy calls: “Don?”

“What?”

“There is somebody out here with a terrible swift sword.”

Tomorrow morning, he was taking Olie Slatt, Montana strip-miner, out to get a trophy.

*   *   *

“Let's go out to dinner.”

“Where?” Miranda asked. Skelton named a good place for sea food. “Really,” said Miranda.

“What do you mean by that?”

“The stone crab is always cooked too long and it gets mushy. The red snapper is flecked with barf. They use paint thinner on the salad.”

“What kind of soap is this?”

“Pine tar,” she said.

“We'll smell like a lumberyard. How come it has this cord hooked onto it? So you can retrieve it if you swallow it?”

Skelton pushed one of his feet, invisible under the sudsy water, into Miranda's crotch and gently explored her interior with his toes. “Are you still loaded?”

“Not too.”

“What'd you do in school?”

“We all told our best true stories.”

“What were the best ones?”

“One boy caught a rattlesnake swimming in the channel at Little Torch … I can't think of any more…”

“What's wrong.”

“I'm afraid about you.”

“Don't be.”

“I'd plead if I thought it would do any good.”

“It wouldn't.”

“I still don't see why you think this is a matter of conviction when it's just an extended bar fight.”

“That's where you're wrong. It's not a fight at all.”

“Well, if you're going to guide tomorrow, I'm going up to the mainland to see my grandmother. I don't even want to be on the key. And I can't
stand
my grandmother!”

“You've got school. You can't leave.”

“I don't care.”

“You'll lose your job.”

“So what.”

“Can I come down to your end?” She said that he could. Skelton slithered around to the opposite end of the tub, displacing so much water that a roller traveled all the way up over the overflow, causing an enormous vomiting noise from the plumbing.

“I want some key lime pie,” Skelton said with a smile.

“Maybe not, if you're going to guide.”

“Doctor Irving Marfak says in
Key Lime Pie without Tears
that it should never be used to bargain with.”

“All right.”

“All right what?”

“Pie time.”

“Then stop crying.”

*   *   *

Miranda drove up A1A all the way to alligator Alley, using the Homestead cutoff to save some time. She couldn't seem to even listen to the radio. After Key West, it was always surprising to see the vegetable stands, the tomato and bean fields; and the straggling agricultural life that transpired on the edge of the 'glades. She was not surprised any more than she listened to the radio.

The beginning of Miranda's stay with her grandmother was like the middle and the end of her stay with her grandmother. Miranda arrived in time for dinner; and her grandmother, a famous social lady, and author of a book about the shells of Sanibel and Captiva islands called
The Bivalve and Me,
was wearing a floor-length dinner dress. She carried a chain bag and a dog.

She was drunk as a skunk.

From time to time, as Miranda readied herself for the dinner upon which she did not have her mind, the dog threw itself at her snapping and snarling. The dog's name was Vecky, short for Carl Van Vechten, and he looked like a wasted rat of imprecise morals.