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Authors: Thomas McGuane

Panama (2 page)

BOOK: Panama
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*   *   *

My father was a store detective who was killed in the Boston subway fire, having gone to that city in connection with the Bicentennial. He had just left Boston Common, where we have kin buried. Everything I say about my father is disputed by everyone. My family have been shipwrights and ship's chandlers, except for him and me. I have been as you know in the Svengali business; I saw a few things and raved for money. I had a very successful show called
The Dog Ate The Part We Didn't Like.
I have from time to time scared myself. Even at the height of my powers, I was not in good health. But a furious metabolism preserves my physique and I am considered a tribute to evil living.

Those who have cared for me, friends, uncles, lovers, think I'm a lost soul or a lost cause. When I'm tired and harmless, I pack a gun, a five-shot Smith and Wesson .38. It's the only .38 not in a six-shot configuration I know of. How the sacrifice of that one last shot makes the gun so flat and concealable, so deadlier than the others. Just by giving up a little!

As to my mother, she was a flash act of the early fifties, a bankrolled B-girl who caught cancer like a bug that was going around; and died at fifty-six pounds. There you have it. The long and the short of it. And I had a brother Jim.

The money began in a modest way in the 1840's. A grandfather of minor social bearing, who had fought a successful duel, married a beautiful girl from the Canary Islands with two brothers who were ship's carpenters. They built coasters, trading smacks, sharpie mailboats, and a pioneer lightship for the St. Lucie inlet. The Civil War came and they built two blockade runners for the rebellion, the
Red Dog
and the
Rattlesnake;
went broke, jumped the line to Key West again while Stephen Mallory left town to become Secretary of the Confederate Navy. At what is now the foot of Ann Street, they built a series of deadly blockade boats, light, fast, and armed. They were rich by then, had houses with pecan wood dining-room tables, crazy chandeliers, and dogwood joists pinned like the ribs of ships. Soon they were all dead; but the next gang were solid and functional and some of them I remember. Before our shipyard went broke in the Depression, they had built every kind of seagoing conveyance that could run to Cuba and home; the prettiest, a turtle schooner, the
Hillary B. Cates,
was seen last winter off Cap Haitien with a black crew, no masts, and a tractor engine for power, afloat for a century. She had been a yacht and a blockade runner, and her first master, a child Confederate officer from the Virginia Military Institute, was stabbed to death by her engineer, Noah Card, who defected to the North and raised oranges at Zephyrhills, Florida, until 1931. He owed my grandfather money; but I forget why.

My grandfather was a dull, stupid drunk; and the white oak and cedar and longleaf pine rotted and the floor fell out of the mold loft while he filed patents on automobiles and comic cigarette utensils. I recall only his rheumy stupor and his routine adoration of children.

Let me try Catherine again.

“One more and I go to the police for a restraining order.”

No sense pursuing that for the moment.

*   *   *

My stepmother had a suitor. He was an attorney-at-law and affected argyle socks and low blue automobiles. He screamed when he laughed. What I think he knew was that the shipyard was a world of waterfront property and that when the Holiday Inn moved in where the blockade boats and coasters had been built, Roxy got all the money. His name was Curtis Peavey and he was on her case like a man possessed, running at the house morning noon and night with clouds of cheap flowers. Roxy had been known to fuck anything; and I couldn't say she ever so much as formed an opinion of Peavey. I noticed though that she didn't
throw
the flowers away, she pushed them into the trash, blossoms forward, as if they'd been involved in an accident. In this, I pretended to see disgust. I myself didn't like Peavey. His eyes were full of clocks, machinery, and numbers. The curly head of hair tightened around his scalp when he talked to me and his lips stuck on his teeth. But he had a devoted practice. He represented Catherine. No sense concealing that. If Peavey could, he'd throw the book at me. He said I was depraved and licentious; he said that to Roxy. Whenever I saw him, he was always about to motivate in one of the low blue cars. Certain people thought of him as a higher type; he donated Sandburg's life of Lincoln to the county library with his cornball bookplate in every volume, a horrific woodcut of a sturdy New England tree; with those dismal words: Curtis G. Peavey. As disgusting as Roxy was, I didn't like to see her gypped; which is what Peavey clearly meant to do. I didn't care about the money at all. I have put that shipyard up my nose ten times over.

*   *   *

I don't think Peavey was glad to see me hunker next to him on the red stool. The fanaticism with which he slurped down the bargain quantities of ropa vieja, black beans, and yellow rice suggested a speedy exit.

I said, “Hello, Curtis.”

“How long are you back for—”

“Got a bit of it on your chin there, didn't you.”

“Here, yes, pass me one of those.”

“How's Roxy holding up?” I asked.

“She's more than holding up. A regular iron woman.”

“A regular what?”

“Iron woman.”

“You want another napkin?”

“Get out of here you depraved pervert.”

I said, “You'll never get her money.”

“I'd teach you a lesson,” said Curtis Peavey, rising to his feet and deftly thumbing acrylic pleats from his belt line, “but you're carrying a gun, aren't you?”

“Yes,” I said, “to perforate your duodenum.”

“You have threatened me,” he said softly. “Did you hear that, shit-for-brains? It won't do.” Peavey strolled into the heat and wind. I stopped at the cash register and paid for his slop.

I went for a walk.

Something started the night I rode the six-hundred-pound Yorkshire hog into the Oakland auditorium; I was double-billed with four screaming soul monsters and I shut everything down as though I'd burned the building. I had dressed myself in Revolutionary War throwaways and a top hat, much like an Iroquois going to Washington to ask the Great White Father to stop sautéing his babies. When they came over the lights, I pulled a dagger they knew I'd use. I had still not replaced my upper front teeth and I helplessly drooled. I was a hundred and eighty-five pounds of strangely articulate shrieking misfit and I would go too god damn far.

At the foot of Seminary I stopped to look at a Czech marine diesel being lowered into a homemade trap boat on a chain fall. It was stolen from Cuban nationals, who get nice engines from the Reds. The police four-wheel drifted around the corner aiming riot guns my way. Getting decency these days is like pulling teeth. Once the car was under control and stopped, two familiar officers, Nylon Pinder and Platt, put me up against the work shed for search.

“Drive much?” I asked.

“Alla damn time,” said Platt.

“Why work for Peavey?” I asked.

Platt said, “He's a pillar of our society. When are you gonna learn the ropes?”

Nylon Pinder said, “He don't have the gun on him.”

Platt wanted to know, “What you want with the .38 Smith?”

“It's for Peavey's brain pan. I want him to see the light. He's a bad man.”

“Never register a gun you mean to use. Get a cold piece. Peavey's a pillar of our society.”

“Platt said that.”

“Shut up, you. He's a pillar of our society and you're a depraved pervert.”

“Peavey said that.”

“Nylon said for you to shut your hole, misfit.”

“I said that, I said ‘misfit.'”

Platt did something sudden to my face. There was blood. I pulled out my bridge so if I got trounced I wouldn't swallow it. Platt said, “Look at that, will you.”

I worked my way around the Czech diesel. They were going to leave me alone now. “Platt,” I said, “when you off?”

“Saturdays. You can find me at Rest Beach.”

“Depraved pervert,” said Nylon, moving only his lips in that vast face. “Get some teeth,” he said. “You look like an asshole.”

The two of them sauntered away. I toyed with the notion of filling their mouths with a couple of handfuls of bees, splitting their noses, pushing small live barracudas up their asses. The mechanic on the chain fall said, “What did they want with you? Your nose is bleeding.”

“I'm notorious,” I said. “I'm cheating society and many of my teeth are gone. Five minutes ago I was young. You saw me! What is this? I've given my all and this is the thanks I get. If Jesse James had been here, he wouldn't have let them do that.”

The mechanic stared at me and said,
“Right.”

I hiked to my stepmother's, to Roxy's. I stood like a druid in her doorway and refused to enter. “You and your Peavey,” I said. “I can't touch my face.”

“Throbs?”

“You and your god damn Peavey.”

“He won't see me any more. He says you've made it impossible. I ought to kill you. But your father will be here soon and he'll straighten you out.”

“Peavey buckled, did he? I don't believe that. He'll be back. —And my father is dead.”

“Won't see me any more. Peavey meant something and now he's gone. He called me his tulip.”

“His…?”

“You heard me.”

I gazed at Roxy. She looked like a circus performer who had been shot from the cannon one too many times.

In family arguments, things are said which are so heated and so immediate as to seem injuries which could never last; but which in fact are never forgotten. Now nothing is left of my family except two uncles and this tattered stepmother who technically died; nevertheless, I can trace myself through her to those ghosts, those soaring, idiot forebears with their accusations, and their steady signal that, whatever I thought I was, I was not the real thing. We had all said terrible things to each other, added insult to injury. My father had very carefully taken me apart and thrown the pieces away. And now his representatives expected me to acknowledge his continued existence.

So, you might ask, why have anything to do with Roxy? I don't know. It could be that after the anonymity of my fields of glory, coming back had to be something better than a lot of numinous locations, the house, the convent school, Catherine. Maybe not Catherine. Apart from my own compulsions, which have applied to as little as the open road, I don't know what she has to do with the price of beans … I thought I'd try it anyway. Catherine. Roxy looked inside me.

“Well, you be a good boy and butt out. Somehow, occupy yourself. We can't endlessly excuse you because you're recuperating. I
died
and got less attention. Then, I was never an overnight sensation.”

I went home and fed the dog, this loving speckled friend who after seven trying years in my life has never been named. The dog. She eats very little and stares at the waves. She kills a lizard; then, overcome with remorse, tips over in the palm shadows for a troubled snooze.

*   *   *

Catherine stuck it out for a while. She stayed with me at the Sherry-Netherland and was in the audience when I crawled out of the ass of a frozen elephant and fought a duel in my underwear with a baseball batting practice machine. She looked after my wounds. She didn't quit until late. There was no third party in question.

*   *   *

I could throw a portion of my body under a passing automobile in front of Catherine's house. A rescue would be necessary. Catherine running toward me resting on my elbows, my crushed legs on the pavement between us. All is forgiven. I'll be okay. I'll learn to remember. We'll be happy together.

*   *   *

I had a small sharpie sailboat which I built with my own hands in an earlier life and which I kept behind the A&B Lobster House next to the old cable schooner. I did a handsome job on this boat if I do say so; and she has survived both my intermediate career and neglect. I put her together like a fiddle, with longleaf pine and white-oak frames, fastened with bronze. She has a rabbeted chine and I let the centerboard trunk directly into the keel, which was tapered at both ends. Cutting those changing bevels in hard pine and oak took enormous concentration and drugs; not the least problem was in knowing ahead of time that it would be handy to have something I had made still floating when my life fell apart years later.

She had no engine and I had to row her in and out of the basin. When the wind dropped, I'd just let the canvas slat around while I hung over the transom staring down the light shafts into the depths. Then when it piped up, she'd trim herself and I'd slip around to the tiller and take things in hand. Sailboats were never used in the Missouri border fighting.

I went out today because my nose hurt from Peavey's goons and because I was up against my collapse; and because Catherine wouldn't see me. My hopes were that the last was the pain of vanity. It would be reassuring to think that my ego was sufficiently intact as to sustain injury; but I couldn't bank that yet.

The wind was coming right out of the southeast fresh, maybe eight or ten knots, and I rowed just clear of the jetty and ran up the sails, cleated off the jib, sat back next to the tiller, pointed her up as good as I could, and jammed it right in close to the shrimp boats before I came about and tacked out of the basin. I stayed on that tack until I passed two iron wrecks and came about again. The sharpie is so shoal I could take off cross-country toward the Bay Keys without fear of going aground. I trimmed her with the sail, hands off the tiller, cleated the main sheet, and turned on some Cuban radio. I put my feet up and went half asleep and let the faces parade past.

Immediately east of the Pearl Basin, I found a couple shivering on a sailboard they had rented at the beach. He was wearing a football jersey over long nylon surfing trunks; and she wore a homemade bikini knotted on her brown, rectilineal hips. What healthy people! They had formed a couple and rented a sailboard. They had clean shy smiles, and though they may not have known their asses from a hole in the ground in terms of a personal philosophy, they seemed better off for it, happier, even readier for life and death than me with my ceremonious hours of thought and unparalleled acceleration of experience.

BOOK: Panama
13.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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