Ninety-Two in the Shade (23 page)

“Yes, I do.”

“What is it?”

“The captain—or guide—experienced a sudden loss of interest—or ambition—and flaked out without warning.”

*   *   *

Dance was gone in a roar.

*   *   *

“Honey,” called Skelton's father to his mother from the bathroom, “scramble me four eggs and pour my coffee now so it will cool.”

He shaved very carefully and very thoroughly, preparing his face with a hot washcloth, brushing on the lather thick and hot, then drew stripes through the stubbled foam.

The conversion was quite startling; and once more the slightly olive skin was visible drawn across the facial bones that were those of an Iberian poet who was moved to verse only by a landscape with one tree and a full moon. Just as true, it was the face, if one believed such things, of someone incapable of cruelty; and deeply prone to folly.

He finished shaving, manicured his nails, combed his hair, and dressed for the day in one brisk motion after another; then strolled in for breakfast, which he ate while jotting notes to himself on a pad.

Today he was going to start something. He was trying to work it out on his pad, where he had written:

1. Fire

2. Air

3. Ocean

4. Streets

5. Houses

6. Space

He was still working on 7. It was his lucky number. He couldn't decide between “Infinity” and “Waste Disposal.”

*   *   *

“I feel awful about that boy,” said Jeannie when she knew Dance had the boat.

“Why?”

“Because he is going to be killed!”

“Oh, Jeannie please. Nichol won't hurt him.”

“What do you think he's out there to do!”

Carter was thumb-indenting a neat four-in-hand for his visit to the Chamber of Commerce.

“Kill himself,” he said, “that seems pretty plain to me.” Then for the thousandth time he began to explain that no force on earth could keep a man from doing away with himself if that was what he was bound and determined to do. He checked the tie in the mirror; then raised his eyes to his own and thought:
You are a hamster on a wheel and a low-breed dog in one.

“Jeannie, let's us go out and buy something big.”

“Why hon?”

“Come on. Something big as all suicide to stand in the lawn. I think it should be some bright color or something to match the shutters.” Her face fell.

“No, you,” she said, frightening Carter for maybe the first time. “I think it's something you should buy.”

It was a tough and gnarled remark that they would both get over; Jeannie would get over it first, deploying her bruised spirit among the New Year sales and One Time Only offers; first-to-come Jeannie would be the first served; until that undetermined hour when she is precipitated into the hole with the rest of us.

*   *   *

The flats appending the northwest end of the Barracuda Keys form a connection between that minute archipelago and Snipe Point. They are, in effect, the western rim of Turkey Basin, diurnally drawing two great sweeps of ocean across the turtle-grass flats, dividing the bank into beveled sections; which from the air resemble scarabs of an annealed green next to the sky-stained green of the Gulf of Mexico. Along the inner rim, there is a concentration of large and hazardous niggerheads.

Skelton started fishing the first of these flats on the incoming water, poling down light toward Snipe Point. They found four schools of bonefish on the first flat coming in with sting rays, bonnet sharks, and small cudas. They found two schools on the second flat, tailing on the edge of the creek and making a thirty- or forty-foot mud. Olie Slatt hooked his trophy in this second school, an exceptional bonefish. They drifted in on the tide while they fought the fish and Skelton boated it among the niggerheads.

He could hear Dance's skiff the last ten minutes of the fight, but poled Slatt in on his prize and netted it succinctly. Dance ran right in on them and cut his engine. He climbed into Skelton's boat with the gun in his hand and asked Skelton where he wanted it. Skelton pointed to the place he had imagined at the shopping plaza some time ago. And the question of his conviction or courage was answered. But this was not theater; and Dance shot him through the heart anyway. It was the discovery of his life.

Dance gave Slatt the heavy gun and sat in the bottom of the skiff next to Skelton.

Instead of shooting Dance, which is what Slatt first thought he owed the republic, Slatt hit him over the head a sledge blow with the gun. He kept hitting until he felt the head jelly under his blows. The empty skiff began to fall with the tide toward the sea.

Then he started the engine. He ran standing up, with Skelton and Dance, two foiled and strangely synchronous lives, in a pile at his feet. The white robe he wore carried behind him and he held the bright trophy to his chest. His jaws were parted slightly to the rush of air.

He was heading for A1A.

BOOKS BY
Thomas McGuane

Fiction

The Cadence of Grass,
2002

Nothing But Blue Skies,
1992

Keep the Change,
1989

To Skin a Cat,
1985

Something to Be Desired,
1983

Nobody's Angel,
1982

Panama,
1978

Ninety-two in the Shade,
1973

The Bushwhacked Piano,
1971

The Sporting Club,
1969

Nonfiction

The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing,
1999

Some Horses,
1999

An Outside Chance,
1980

Thomas McGuane

Ninety-two in the Shade

Thomas McGuane is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including
The Sporting Club; The Bushwhacked Piano,
which won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters;
Ninety-two in the Shade,
which was nominated for the National Book Award;
Panama; Nobody's Angel; Something to Be Desired; Keep the Change;
and
Nothing But Blue Skies.
He has also written
To Skin a Cat,
a collection of short stories; and
An Outside Chance,
a collection of essays on sports. His books have been published in ten languages. He was born in Michigan and educated at Michigan State University, earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Yale School of Drama and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. An ardent conservationist, he is a director of American Rivers and of the Craighead Wildlife-Wildlands Institute. He lives with his family in McLeod, Montana.

Copyright © 1972, 1973 by Thomas McGuane

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., New York, in 1973. This edition published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

Portions of this book appeared in
Fiction
and in
TriQuarterly.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGuane, Thomas.

Ninety-two in the shade / Thomas McGuane. — 1st Vintage contemporaries ed.

p. cm. — (Vintage contemporaries)

ISBN: 0-679-75289-7

1. Fishing guides—Florida—Key West—Fiction. 2. Key West (Fla.—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3563.A3114N56   1995

813'.54—dc20   94-42801

CIP

eISBN 9781466858299

First eBook edition: November 2013