Ninety-Two in the Shade (15 page)

The hardware department with its bins of galvanized nails, black bolts, and chromium-plated screws, its bright power tools, was presided over by six clerks in green smocks who soared among its counters, from time to time regrouping at the cash register to clinch a sale or take a quick pull of coffee from a translucent white coffee cup. Skelton knew that—embroiled as he was as a customer—hardware, generally speaking, was bad for the world.

It was among the glues, directly behind the epoxy display, to be precise, that he knew it was time to go and see why his father was asking Miranda for a date. The two-part epoxy was best for maximum adhesion between clean flat surfaces. The one-part “mock” epoxies were “just the thing,” a lady clerk volunteered, for simple household repairs, including china, furniture, butter churns, ice skates, and simple treadle assemblies.

Sweet Jesus, thought Skelton, not in the least taking the Name in vain, death is in my lane tromping the passing gear.

“Ma'am,” he said to the lady clerk, whose beveled white hairdo strove implacable against air and light, “have you got time to join me in a smoke? I uh won't lay a hand on you.”

She broke into laughter. Here is where Skelton could serve humanity in its gloomy mission.

“Okay.”

They stood outside in the mall by speeding machines and parked-auto clusters. Skelton didn't smoke tobacco. This might be tough.

“I forgot my cigarettes.”

“Have one of mine, hon.” She held out a pack and he took one. A granny shot past baying on a go-cart. The gramp ran behind. He had just jerked the starter, and Gran shot off like Puffed Rice from a cannon. Now it looked like she would beat him to Akron.

“So!” said Skelton. “You smoke Luckies!”

“Two packs a day and I've tried them all.”

Skelton used to smoke. He had something to say here.

“I like Camels myself.”

“Well, they're a rich-type cigarette like Luckies. But Camels have I don't know too
deep
a taste for me. But I
hate
Chesterfields!”

“Me too! They're so harsh!”

“Harsh isn't the word. —Have you ever smoked filters?”

“Benson and Hedges!”

“Aha!”

“Parliaments!”

“Me too! Couldn't taste a thing! —I don't know,” she said, “for me it's L.S.M.F.T., Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.”

Skelton pulled her into his arms. His eyes were moist. “Do you want a light?” she asked. Skelton couldn't look her in the eye.

“I really don't smoke any more.”

*   *   *

Let us make barking up the wrong tree a way of life.

“Your father,” said his mother, “has not returned at all. He is rapidly approaching the time when he will not be allowed to return.”

“Why?”

“The minute I tell, you'll say it's bourgeois.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. If he decided to make of himself a figure of the night, I should have been notified.”

“Why?”

“So the consequences could be negotiated. I'm leading an unnatural existence and
have been
to the point that I must now ask myself if I am to redeem any of my remaining life.”

Skelton knew what she said. His father's adventures in shrimping, procurement, an ill-fated investment in a factory that would employ those of the failed cigar industry who had not moved to Ybor City in the manufacture of lighter-than-air craft purely on the somewhat mystical theory that a zeppelin and a cigar were similarly shaped—no, the Southernmost Blimp Works had not fared much better than the whorehouse; the first tropical depression and the blimps ripped up their moorings and vanished over the Gulf of Mexico. His father had been able to tolerate that; but what he resented, he said, was the whores in Duval Street cheering them on their way, his own father roaring, “Gas bags!” from the Mallory pier. The utter vanishing of the blimps, those artifacts of his father's ambitions, disturbed. Did they end up in the ionosphere? Or rip apart and sink to a lonesome sea, changing whale voices with helium bubbles? But the cry of “Gas bags!” and the door of an empty blimp works would carry through the years to a youth, his mother, a man loose in Key West streets in nothing but a bed sheet.

“Tom,” said his mother, “if I only knew what he had in mind. And I know him so well. But he will do a thing … Oh God, I don't know. He's so contrary. He twice called off our marriage because he had a deviated septum.”

“That's why he went to bed for seven months.”

“And as soon as people began to count on him going to bed, he got up. Now he runs around at night. But the minute we plan on it … hell.”

“That's all right, Mother.” She was going to cry. It was like seeing Marciano cry. “Don't you think he's trying to find something?”

“I knew you would say that,” she said, “it's always religion to you.”

“But don't you?”

“No. I think he's contrary.”

“No, you don't.”

“I know I don't.”

“So why do you say it?”

“Because it is impossible to understand what he could be looking for. Nonsense is nonsense.”

Skelton was thinking, You could get what you want and have a laugh a minute, take a pill, see God, play a record, weep poignantly, and discover mortality on a form letter that began “Greetings.” Or you could just lie there. When we came in, he was just lying there. Or you could louse up. You could fail to get the joke. You could lift up thine eyes. Skelton thought: I think I'll lift up mine eyes. When we came in, he was just lying there, his eyes at a weird angle.

His mother took her beautiful English stainless-steel pruning shears—the closest thing she had to jewelry—and began cutting back the broadleaf elephant's-ear philodendron near the stairway; these plants were rain basins that poured water onto the wooden steps, rotting them out in a year's time if they weren't pruned.

“I ask myself, should he be confined? And I always decide absolutely not. It isn't so much that he is harmless as that I have a suspicion he is on to something—”

“Me too,” Skelton interrupted quickly.

“How would you know? You're just like him.”

“No, I'm not.”

“You're both convinced that you arrive at the right thing by eliminating all the wrong ones.”

It was true. Neither he nor his father belonged to that class of succinct creatures that directly reached for what was right. The difference was that he was attracted to the merely incorrect, while his father very often began with the appalling.

“So what are you going to do about it.”

His mother put her shears down.

“Nothing,” she said positively. “I'm going to do nothing. Do you understand what that implies?”

*   *   *

The old man, Goldsboro Skelton, stood across from his secretary. He held a sheet of paper upon which he had written and scratched out a number of sentences.

“Okay now. Delete the sentence that ends ‘unforgiven blimp fiasco.'”

“Okay…”

“Delete from ‘cigar, mouse' all the way to ‘favoring that we.'”

“Okay…”

“And the sentence ending ‘punks and losers.'”

“Akay…”

“And in the whole last paragraph, cut the following words: ‘duck,' ‘flavor,' ‘Marvin,' ‘whereas,' ‘celluloid,' ‘bingo,' and ‘dropsy.' And cut the whole song
Silver Threads among the Gold.
”

“Mmmmkay, there. Darling?”

“What?”

“Take me.” Bella was grimacing with amour.

Goldsboro Skelton gazed past her. A wharf rat shot by in the foliage outside his window, scaling the trees like a squirrel. He turned to Bella Knowles.

“The big Norways are in the palm,” he said.

“So?”

“So, forget the Spanish-fly act.”

Bella sighed with what Skelton thought was a squalid rise of bosoms.

*   *   *

Skelton met James Davis, skipper of the shrimper
Marquesa,
across from the Western Union and went into Shorty's to have coffee with him. They sat at the counter, across from the great wooden cyclorama that nearly formed the wall over the stoves, and upon which a genius of the show-card school had depicted the specialties of the house. Skelton observed anew Davis's birch-stain complexion and kindly, malformed face; simultaneously Skelton noticed that the only gold inlay he himself owned had come loose.

“Not fishing today?”

“No,” said James.

“How come.”

“I lost my boat…”

“You lost your boat…”

“Florida First National Bank got it.”

“Are you … working?”

“I'm the salad chef at Howard Johnson's,” he said right out.

“… I'm sorry…”

“Don't be.”

“Well, I'm looking for my old man.”

“I thought he was bedridden.”

“He was.”

“What happened?”

“He took a notion.”

“Yeah? When?”

“Two days ago.”

“Did you check with the whores?”

“I don't figure that's it.”

“The priest?”

“The old man is always throwing him out.”

“Maybe he's watching Triple-A. He still likes sports, don't he?”

“The World Series, pro football, and winter Olympics only. I can't figure this one out…”

*   *   *

It took an hour's waiting to catch Miranda in the schoolyard (and three blind messages by cooperative students). She came out of the study-hall door in one of the hourly blurts of humanity, a scene at the Velveeta cheese works.

“I'm so sorry,” he said, referring, without need to specify, to his father's Roman appearance.

“Please, don't be concerned. I wouldn't have told you if I hadn't thought you ought to know. Then today I got something strange in the mail. I don't know if it's him again because it's unsigned.” She took a manila envelope out of her folder and handed it to Skelton. Inside was an unsigned photograph.

It was a dong.

Understandably, Skelton took immediate umbrage.

“I can assure you that my father did not mail that … item.”

“I said I didn't know it was him. And ‘item' isn't quite the word.”

“There is no way it could be him. It must be one of your students. And it's unsigned. And ‘item' is my choice of language.”

“I doubt if it's a student. Of course it's not signed! It's not a publicity photo.”

“Are you being short with me?”

“Yes.”

“I don't like this being attributed to my father.”

“I was taking a wild guess. He was round my place in a bed sheet wanting a date.”

It was easy to see how she, after refusing this figure of the night and receiving an anonymous organ photo by the morning post, might put two and two together. The former was his father all right; but until further proof was in hand, he would continue to regard the dong as a phantom.

*   *   *

It looked like a moth.

Some years ago, pouring drinks in his own warm and, if he did say so, well-run tavern, listening to trainers of bird dogs, construction stiffs, and short-range drifters who straggled in out of the heat, the cold, or lack of either for a sometimes paid-for drink to talk about, generally, Sputnik, farm parity, poontang, and game-bird populations.

Among them an exercise boy of forty summers from Lexington who came every Saturday night, in costume, to drink and turn nasty. One Saturday, after Dance had cut him off at the bar, the exercise boy had waited for him to close, then beat Dance half to death in his own parking lot with a tire iron. Dressed as the Sheik of Araby, he had given Dance the curious view of a halfwit Scots-Irish face pinched murderous under the great cloud of turban as the iron came down on his head and face beyond counting.

The exercise boy vanished, eluding all known forms of law for four months; Dance recovered, though his nose, which had detached entirely and slipped up under his cheek, never did look right; not broken-looking necessarily but as though it had been picked up in a sale of another's effects.

Now one hot summer afternoon when it must have been ninety-two in the shade and the bar was empty as all get out, Nichol Dance looked up at the glaring doorway with its bands of greenery, yellow-striped road, and sky, to see the exercise boy enter as though afloat on that panel of uncomfortable light. He was dressed as a moth and wanted crème de menthe on shaved ice.

Dance told him to get out.

“Why?”

“Because I told you to. And as soon as you do go, I am going to call the law.” Dance was afraid of him.

“I prefer to stay and drive you batshit,” said the other, detecting Dance's fear.

“You ain't gonna drive me batshit,” Dance laughed.

“Why, I already have. And I tell you what else. I got a nigger-chasin cannon in my hand I'm gone to use on your ass.”

The exercise boy was sitting close enough to the bar that Dance couldn't see what he was holding. But Nichol had a gun of his own, the useful Bisley Colt with the Mexican ivory grips; and he was pointing it through the thin paneling of the bar face. The exercise boy had his right hand in his lap, smoking with his left with conspicuous awkwardness. The two talked for an endless half an hour, the exercise boy in his serpentine voice. And the first time he moved his right arm, Nichol Dance blew him halfway across the room; where he lay, all wings, and made a spot.

The law it was who discovered the exercise boy to be not armed; so Dance, unpopular enough for coming from Indiana smelling of hardware and buckeyes, was placed under arrest; it was not until his trial that he ever heard the exercise boy's name: George Washington. And Nichol Dance received a contempt citation for remarking,
What a name for that shabby-ass snake doctor.