Ninety-Two in the Shade (19 page)

Nichol Dance fended the boat and threw two half-hitches around the bow cleat; Skelton reversed his engine against the line and swung the stern in alongside the dock and shut down.

“What's up?”

“Your girl here wants to know why I'm going to shoot you if you guide.”

Jeannie released the long trilling laugh that had, after the baton, become, in effect, her trademark. It was her song; and she used it to skewer a few half-formed thoughts like shish kebab. Skelton climbed up on the dock.

“What are you laughing at?”

“The thought that Nichol could hurt a … a fly!”

When she knew as well as anybody that the personable Hoosier had blown that exercise boy to Kingdom Come; and in a moment of pique neatly gaffed Roy Soleil for ridiculing him. But hurt a fly!?

That is why Miranda said, “Come off it,” with that particular woman-to-woman force that scares men. Skelton sat on the wooden locker with the others.

“Why in the worl' do you want to guide anyway?” Jeannie asked Skelton himself.

“It's been sort of a process of elimination,” said Skelton.

“Well, you oughta had seen my husband about the time when he come in with his skin burnt half off!”

Dance was looking a little foolish; he didn't see how he could reiterate his threat or add some credence to it without reminding everybody of TV.

“That's a pretty little skiff though,” Jeannie observed. “I bet you're real proud of it.”

“I am.”

“Best skiff I seen yet,” Dance said.

“And I know it'll mortally fly,” Jeannie said, “with that one-twenty-five Starflite Evinrude settin on that transom waitin to flat shut down these other turkeys.”

“Aw well, who knows…” Skelton could do without Jeannie's ascription of mechanical superiority here just now. But Dance didn't take it that way; he smiled and listened, always a man who knew who he was. He talked without studying your eyes to see what you thought of what he said.

“But I sure will say this. Cart has never lost a day's wages with his Merc. That old Thunderbolt ignition and Power-Trim just seem to be the combination for a workin fool like Cart.”

Skelton could hardly pay attention; he was in his trance. There was Nichol the same way. The Eternal Revenue Service is in the wings. But the girls with their race's gift for the here and now were casting sidelong glances at one another. Jeannie's skewer laugh shot forth again and she said, “What Key West needs with a beginner guide beats me for starters!”

“Your ass is sucking swamp water,” said Miranda.

“I guess that's about as lady-like as I'd expect from a Mallory Square weirdo all right.”

“What clodhoppers expect in the way of lady-like doesn't interest me that much.”

“Doesn't interest…! How would a poke in your fancy snoot do, schoolmarm?”

Miranda,
mirabile dictu,
sucker-punched poor Jeannie, fist to jaw with the sound of flounder on butcher's marble. But Jeannie came back kicking and clawing and making a long intermittent whine of rage. There was only a long flailing moment of this, ending with terrific yanks on each other's hair, which was long enough that they could stand a yard and a half apart ripping and hauling. Dance got Miranda and Skelton got Jeannie and took them away from each other. They were crying.

Jeannie ran across the street to the Sandpiper, and Miranda went inside the bait shack to doctor herself.

Dance shook his head. “I didn't know whether to shit or go blind. I believe they'd hurt each other.”

Myron Moorhen came to the door.

“What happened?”

“Nothing, Myron. Go count.”

“You wouldn't shoot a sweet guy like me,” Skelton said.

“I wouldn't want to.”

“But can't you tell I'm going to work now that I have the boat?”

“I'm not thinking that far ahead.”

“But just figuring I do—”

“Then you'll spend the rest of your life dead; and I'll spend mine in the joint. You'd have possibly the better shot at eternal reward.”

“But you might bail it out with last-minute repentance.”

“I ain't a Catholic.”

Miranda came out of the bait shack. “Honey, let's go home.” Dance walked with them to the parking lot.

“Night now,” Dance said and walked across to the Sandpiper, where he matched the bartender for the jukebox, won, and played
The Easy Part's Over
by Charley Pride; plus two old Waylon Jennings hits.

“Where's Jeannie at?”

“She's around here some place. She's been here three nights tryin her damndest to throw Myron some tail; but he runs like a rabbit.”

Jeannie, to be precise, was in the ladies', dabbing at her wounds and taking some easy maneuvers with the baton, around the waist, figure eight between the legs, little toss behind the back, drop to one knee: Dah-
DAH!

She had her custom baton: thirty inches long, eleven-sixteenths of an inch in diameter and seventeen ounces in weight—just as big as it could be without dragging at her routine. Here in the ladies' she ran through all nine rudiments as a warm-up (
Wrist Twirl, Figure Eight, Cartwheel, Two-Hand Spin, Pass Around the Back, Four-Finger Twirl, Beating Time, Aerial Work, and Salute
); then she put the baton down and climbed up on the toilet so she could see out through the chicken-wire window to the bait shack across the way.

*   *   *

Miranda said she couldn't help it. Skelton sighed.

“Honestly, I couldn't watch that little chippy take on that way without calling her.”

“Miranda, a cat fight is a terrible thing to see. Can we not talk about it?”

“All right. Am I badly scratched?”

“Sort of.”

“My scalp hurts. That whore gave me some yanks.”

“I'll bet. It looked like you had both gone ape-shit.”

“Really?” She grinned and turned down White Street in time to see Skelton's father streak into the alley past the Gulfstream Market. At the end of the alley, Miranda stopped the car and Skelton caught a flicker of motion behind three galvanized garbage pails. “Keep it up!” Skelton called.
“You're on your way!”

*   *   *

Myron looked up at the closing of the bait-shack door. Say it isn't so. Humming a samba, Jeannie was twirling her baton and shedding her clothes. Myron Moorhen made frantic mute signs with his hands. He wants my pear-like tits, she thought, spinning spinning spinning. She advanced upon Myron's agape face, once more a joyous pink cake with a slot behind the glittering baton, Myron waving frantic in the rising ardor of her wordless samba.

Jeannie said breathlessly, “A youngster building up her wrist and forearm twirling a seventeen-ounce baton will have in later years terrific power for certain activities!” Jeannie's speech was punctuated by the flushing of a toilet and the stepping of her husband, a member of fraternal organizations as well as of the republic, from the bathroom.

Cart was awful surprised. What Jeannie was doing here in the bait shack was worse than real different.

*   *   *

Carter took Jeannie weeping to their showpiece home in the gelid air of the station wagon. He turned on the religious station to build a background. There was a small chat about the coming of Christ in your democratic manner: “Joseph and Mary really clicked. There is no two ways about it.
But
 … when they found out their kid was God,
frankly,
it threw them for a loop.”

Carter pulled up in the driveway and took the baton from Jeannie's hands. She began to weep. “Please Cart please please please.”

“Every time you get this sonofabitch out of storage, Jeannie, we run into a problem.”

“Please Cart please.”

“I come into the bait shack where I make my bread and butter and find you been dukin out some schoolteacher and five minutes later you're doin your baton routine in the altogether with vodka on your breath for my accountant! And tellin him it builds up a girl's forearm for jackin guys off!”

“Oh but Cart!”

“You're sick Jeannie and your baton is sick.”

He began to form a loop with the baton between his great guide's hands as Jeannie's wail rose to something as purely musical as her mad trilling laugh, as desolate as some final and inconceivable Orlando “nevermore.” Cart flung the pretzeled baton into the garbage pail, simultaneously discharging a yowling cat from within. Then the two entered their showpiece and stood on the terrazzo, each weeping for his own spavined dream.

*   *   *

When Cart reentered the bait shack Myron Moorhen recoiled against the trophy wall as though he had been hit by a howitzer.

“Honest, I didn't lay a finger on her!”

A stuffed jack crevalle bounced off Myron's head to the floor. Myron clapped a terrified hand to the spot as though it had been Carter's first blow. Cart was looking at the floor patiently; when he raised his head, Myron shot fifteen feet to the left.

“Honest!
Honest honest honest!
”

“Myron…”

Moorhen shot to the freezer and groped frantically within. He withdrew a frozen kingfish of perhaps twelve pounds. A member of the mackerel family, and therefore long and pointed, a frozen kingfish makes a formidable weapon. Myron raised the frosted blue shape over his shoulder in the “ready” stance Ted Williams has long advocated for batters. His eyes narrowed to a new confidence and his lips opened flat in a vague smile that showed a sharp white line of teeth.

“Myron, relax! You are among friends and this is no clambake.”

“What are you going to do to me?”

“Absolutely nothing. Put down that king.”

“Not so fast. Tell me what's going to happen to me.”

“I already told you nothing is going to happen. Where did that fish come from?”

“Lou O'Connor got it at American Shoals.”

“Deep jigging?”

“No, drifting with ballyhoo. He got six altogether.”

“Huh. Maybe the run's started.”

“Excuse me, Cart, but what uh what was it you were going to do to me?”

“About Jeannie?”

“I think so,” said Myron, unobtrusively returning the frozen kingfish to the freezer.

“Well, I was going to tell you that she is just kind of sick right now poor li'l thing and I want
you Myron
to try and forgive her for what
she
done to
you
this evening here.”

“Aw Cart, Cart, Cart. Of
course
I forgive her.”

“And she said she mm left some underthings…?”

Myron, moving now with reckless freedom, took a wad of nylon and silk from the top drawer of his desk and tossed it, just between a couple of fellows, to Cart.

“Cart, she is awful good with that baton!”

Carter smiled shyly. “You know, Myron, she
ain't
half bad … Only, Myron?”

“Whussat, Cart?”

“She don't own her no baton no more.”

“Uh, where's it at, Cart?”

“It's one giant step up her ass, Myron.”

Myron giggled, “You don't mean that!”

“Oh but I do.” Carter had a certain affection for this lie. “I suppose it'll show up again one of these days,” he added.

Guffaws.

*   *   *

Skelton thought that when what you ought to do had become less than a kind of absentee ballot you were always in danger of lending yourself to the deadly farce that surrounds us. The subtlest kind of maladjustment and you plummeted through the tissue surface of the socially lubricated and solvent to that curious helter-skelter of selves which produced such occasional private legislators as Nichol Dance.

Ideas like that, thought Skelton, could set a man to barking. Even a brief soulful howl beside the garbage would help. Even the notions of what wild horses couldn't get you to do acquired an unabstract vigor—to the extent that you could nearly see their luminous manes and screaming nocturnal shapes. Half the time when lives streamed past on parallel courses, a false security developed: and the victim began to imagine that these lifelines did not congest or break down. Too late, the head-ons became apparent and you looked up to scream: The sonofabitch is in my lane! Histories are fused as metal by heat.

There was a knocking on the door of the fuselage. Skelton opened it; it was the wino drill sergeant from next door. “Come in.”

“Thank you, sir. Do you have a dog?”

“No, I don't.”

“I thought I heard barking.”

“I was clearing my throat.”

“I was wondering, sir, if you could accompany me to headquarters.”

“Next door?” Skelton asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“No questions, please.”

“All right,” Skelton said, thinking, I will lend myself to another's trip as my own leads only to the sillier kind of despair, plus, of course, Hamletism; not to mention mooning and the unenunciated snivel.

Skelton followed the sergeant with civilian dignity. At the door to the hotel, they were saluted by two winos who permitted them to enter the vomit-scented front hall. They ascended the stairway, whose walls approached within inches of Skelton's shoulders. There was a man on duty at the top of the stairs and two men, rather less on duty, out cold in the upper hallway in their own puke, their blurred, raspy faces and crew-cuts communicating precisely what is communicated by a wrecking yard.

Skelton was shown into a room; the door was closed behind him as the light was turned on. The room only had space for a single bed, and Skelton's father was in it looking less mortal than ephemeral; and considerably more dead than alive. He had his fiddle with him.

It was plain that the sheet beneath which his father lay was the one he had worn these last days around town. It had motor oil and dirt all over it, and on the section that covered his feet was a tire print.