Ninety-Two in the Shade (7 page)

He pulled the fuel line out from under the gunwale, and cut it; then rocked the boat so the surge in the tank would force fuel onto the deck. Gasoline was quickly everywhere.

Skelton sat down to rest and wait for all the gas to flow. He opened the small dunnage box by the controls and took out a book of matches that read, he strangely noticed,
Hands tied because you lack a high school diploma?;
then the rag with which he had wiped down the deck when he refueled the skiff.

Out of the lounge, pausing momentarily beneath the neon beak of the sandpiper while traffic cleared, came the Rudleighs, Carter, Nichol Dance, Roy the dockmaster, and Myron Moorhen the accountant. Skelton looked at them. A moment earlier they had streamed out of the land of frozen daiquiris, past a buffet table covered with molded fruit medleys, past the fifteen chromium selector levers of the cigarette machine, and into the cloacal American night. Skelton on his lunar, fetid inshore tide did not for the moment belong to the nation; except in the sense that the two principal questions of citizenship,
Will-I-be-caught?
and
Can-I-get-away?,
dominated his mind entirely, only slightly modified by the prime New World lunacy of getting from Point A to Point B.

They were moving toward the dock, all facing forward rather than toward each other, which was strange: the Rudleighs were customers, and when you are around customers, you point your face at them. You are selling and they are buying.

Skelton was out of the skiff once more, matches in his mouth, oily rag in hand. He treaded water away from the skiff, keeping the rag high in the air; then he held himself in position, lit the balled-up rag, tossed it into the boat.

Flame zigzagged up and down the boat's interior with a sucking noise until the entire thing was afire. Low in the water and swimming through darkness toward the far side of the basin, Skelton could no longer see the five people crossing the street. Then suddenly they popped up on the dock. Carter and Dance boarded Carter's skiff and the engine started with a roar. They jumped the skiff up to planing speed, then shut down abruptly as Nichol Dance's skiff coughed into explosion, a ball of flame blowing flat out sideways through the hull, then up like liquid into the sky, pieces of the hull soaring up in the fountain, one piece sailing like a comet over the joyous face of Skelton, trailing flame and fire. Then the boat sank so abruptly that Carter and Dance vanished in the darkness like Skelton.

Skelton listened to the engine. The skiff rose up against the light of the boulevard, Carter at the wheel, Dance in the bow with a gun. Skelton didn't move.

The skiff traveled in a slow curve and vanished in the darkness between Skelton and the shore. The dim moon overhead and Skelton's lowness in the water kept him from seeing.

The skiff appeared once more against the light, very slowly; then modified its course in the narrow quarters so that Skelton could see they would find him if he did not think of something.

The skiff was coming toward him. He would submerge; but the boat was moving so very slowly that he would have to stay down for a good while; he had to judge the last minute. The skiff kept coming and at a range of fifty feet, the skiff against the light, Skelton submerged and gripped deeply into the bottom thinking giddily that if he grabbed an eel or sting ray he would have to hang on to it. He could hear the engine very well down here; and in a moment the skiff was overhead. Skelton looked up and saw the pearly trail from the engine, the skiff soaring against the moon, the shadow of Nichol Dance wavering past. Skelton's blood lagged in his brain.

The engine sang by. Skelton stayed on the bottom until he could bear to no longer and then surfaced. The skiff was transom toward him, heading for the dock, the water mercurial and brilliant in the security light.

The Rudleighs—no one knew why—were slapping each other on the dock. The surprise of that helped guarantee Skelton's life. The two guides jumped ashore and separated them. Mrs. Rudleigh spat; her husband's hat was askew.

Meanwhile, Skelton was suffering spiritually what is known on commercial aircraft as “a sudden loss of cabin pressure”; and his discovery of the Rudleigh's combat was like the dropping of the emergency oxygen mask into his lap. So he convinced himself that he was safe, forever really.

*   *   *

Thomas Skelton, whose aim had been to be a practicing Christian, was now a little gone in the faith. But, he thought, no matter; and took some comfort to remember the Gospel according to St. Matthew:
Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell-fire.
Upon occasion, a man had to manufacture his own hell-fire, either for himself or others: as one kind of home brew for the spirit's extremer voyages.

When Skelton's grandfather most kindly bailed him out and Skelton had returned Jakey Roberts's copy of
Swank
to him and turned down his grandfather's doubtlessly well-meant suggestion that they talk, and gone home to his fuselage, his private stock of hell-fire began to rise as volatile as rubbing spirits from the surfaces of his life.

Thou fool.

The odds and ends that lay around the interior of the fuselage, formerly in a skein of intimate connections that did not exclude himself, all began to separate amid cool segments of space. He felt the precise bevel at which his teeth rested against each other; and his hands lay in his lap within an invisible display case.

Hold on now, he told himself, no barking. For two hours he managed the control he needed, sitting as quietly at his breakfast table as a gyroscope. And then slowly the tramp of drilling winos came through his leafy window; and he wept with gratitude. When he had finished that, the salt and pepper shakers rejoined themselves to the table; the skein of connections returned and his hands sweated in one another's grasp.

He stepped outside, out to his garden fence, into the heart of the uproar. Standing by the hedge of uncleared vegetation, oleander cresting up out of it around one scrawny but wildly productive lime tree, he was pointblank to the marchers lurching mustily from left to right, while the drill sergeant marched backward ahead of them, surveying their primitive efforts with apoplectic eyes. Directly in front of Skelton, a younger, livelier wino passed; and each time the command changed, this wino found himself separated a few more feet from the others. Partly it was that he threw a good deal of florid body English into his marching; after each command, he would hunch his shoulders suddenly and stylishly like Fred Astaire, and slope further out of line. Finally, the drill sergeant stopped everything and realigned the preoccupied marcher, addressing him as “Fuckah!” in a lyrical tenor.

This kind of punctuating sight welded Skelton to reality as succinctly as an accident; but it drifted gauzily from his mind and he was isolated once more behind the hedge, irritably blinded by the glare of light off the fuselage. As usual, he looked at the lines in his palms.

Now this too: if his grandfather had not been in such a goddamn hurry, he could have got a bondsman to make his bail and been done with the thing until his trial. Instead, there would have to be a conference with the old dizzard in which the shit was perfectly certain to hit the fan.

Finally, the younger wino was expelled from the march. He was out of breath.

“You're the one lives in the bomb,” he said, pointing to the fuselage. Skelton nodded.

“Yes, that's me.”

The young man said, raising his fingers to a seemingly deliquescent cheek: “My grandfather was decorated in the First World War.”

“Oh yes…”

“Ask me why he was decorated.”

“Why was he decorated?”

“I don't know.”

Skelton thought: I want to live on the bottom of the sea. Nincompoops assault me in squads. The younger wino went off, taking the sergeant aside, and was pointing at Skelton; probably telling him: Commie, or meter smasher.

The sergeant came over. He had a peaceful, phlegmatic face, the face of a herbivore. “What's your game?” he asked.

“I'm a moonshiner.”

“Well, more power to you. We're running a works of our own up in the joint there. I made the coil myself. Last batch I run off kicked the hydrometer out on the floor. It was like rocket fuel.”

“I'd like to try it.”

“I'd offer you a drop; but these useless mothers over here have went through it quick as snot on a bottle. A man went blind here before I took over the still. But I run a tight, clean ship.”

Skelton looked over at the useless mothers. They were milling among fallen palm leaves, quite as lost as babies in the shadow of a half-boarded-up house with a moonshine works in its attic.

Well, thought Skelton, life looked straight in the eye was insupportable, as everyone knew by instinct. The great trick, contrary to the consensus of philosophy, is to avoid looking it straight in the eye. Everything askance and it all shines on.

But in general he felt recovered; or in any event, at rest in a reasonably cool aftermath. He went inside to take out the trash, adding everything conceivably trash to the contents of the galvanized barrel, including a painting Spacey Tracy, the Day-Glo Dago, had given him on Simonton Street, depicting a tall thermos bottle standing in a field of breath mints. This same artist had done a series of “contemporary” portraits of historical figures. Kafka as remittance man. Van Gogh clipping coupons by the sea. Dostoevsky with a four-foot string of credit cards. San Juan de la Cruz peering out of a condominium as though room service had used cheap Triple Sec in his margarita. Into the shitcan with everything ironic for the fun of it.

*   *   *

Carter and Dance are in the bait shack and have told Myron Moorhen, the lickspittle accountant, to haul ass and give them the desk. They take one of his yellow legal sheets out and try to figure some way of salvaging Dance's winter guiding schedule even though he is no longer the owner of a guide boat. First they determine how long it will take to have a new skiff built up, how long the insurance will take to settle on the old one; as against the number of days that Carter is not booked and Dance is—so that Dance can use his skiff. “There will have to be a small usage charge,” says Carter.

“Naturally, man.”

“Lemme tote this here up now.” He ran his fingernail up and down the columns of numbers.

“What do you come up with.”

“You look.”

“Hm.”

“Don't look good.”

“Sure don't. It looks sorta rank.”

“How're you fixed now, Nichol.”

Dance looked at him. “How'm I fixed?”

“That's what I ast.”

“Cart, if turkeys was goin for one cent a pound I couldn't buy a raffle ticket on a jaybird's ass.”

“Haw haw hawmmm.”

“If ten cent'd buy a tuxedo for a elerfunt, I couldn't buy a T-shirt for a flea.”

“
Heeheehee.
Okay now. Let's, seriously now…”

Anyone else could have seen that Carter didn't care about these jokes; and in his strenuous laughter for the benefit of a man who had learned or stolen everything he knew and now wanted the use of his skiff, there was the very faintest yet palpable hint of the craven.

“Are you going to get around to doing something about that boy?” Carter asked; he liked Skelton well enough, but now by Christ things were getting to be an inconvenience.

“It's in the hands of the law,” said Dance. “I mean not that I didn't give some thought to shooting him. But since I failed to shoot myself that day, I've kinda had a loss of innerest in shooting anything else.”

“Heeheeheemmmm.”

“I might could take a notion though. If this brand of irritation runs on I mean. He wasn't a bad kind of a kid.”

“He wanted to guide.”

“I know, I know.”

Suddenly Carter saw how to ingratiate himself.
“We was just sendin him to the school of hard knocks, Nichol!”

Now it was Dance's turn to laugh. The little joke was such a success that it pushed Carter clear through to the other side of his mild instinct for ingratiation. He thought again of Skelton and the schooling they had given him; and did not feel particularly good about it. Nevertheless, as a major-league brown-nose, he was unprepared to investigate the emotion.

*   *   *

The phone rang and he ran back into the fuselage. It was his mother. “Your grandfather would like you to come over here after dinner tonight.”

“I'd just love to!”

“All right now.”

“I'll be there, Ma, with bells on.”

“But be here.”

*   *   *

“The French have a word for it,” remarked his grandfather, his back toward the woman as he mixed a drink; presently he turned and proffered the grog. “I call it pussy.” His hands closed before him in a prayerful shape.

“I know you do, Goldsboro.”

They were in old man Skelton's exercise room, whose variety of health machines seemed compromised by the presence of a well-stocked bar.

“I call it that because it is candid to call it that and I am a candid man because I have nothing to hide.”

“You won't get a whole lot of agreement about that in Key West, Goldsboro,” said the lady. She was fifty and heavy. Her name was Bella Knowles. Her husband, an insurance broker who dabbled in gunrunning, now made his home on the Isle of Pines.

He said, “I was trying out that tone before I talk to my grandson. I have got to set that little smartbutt on the straight and narrow or he will end up in a bassinet like his old man.”

“You should have let him go to jail rather than hang out with charter-boat fishermen.”

“Hurry up with your drink. I'm fixing to carry on.” He sat on the edge of the trampoline that dominated the room. Light from high, milky windows flooded into the little gym.

“I'll sip as long as I please.”