Ninety-Two in the Shade (3 page)

“Jealousy.”

“Well, that's wrong. And you weren't going to have any drugs any more.”

“I wasn't going to have any jealousy any more either. You ought to see some of the things I wasn't going to have any more. I'd like to cold-shake about a teacupful of reds and fire them right now. I'm just sick with hurt and jealousy and going back on myself. I want some more of that coke. And then to have to hear a description of that Viennese organism. God.”

Neither spoke for a time. Then Miranda said, “I'm twenty-four and I've been with a bunch of men—”

“—I know.”

“For whom there was always at least affection.”

“I understand.”

“And I won't have it made an ugliness. You'll have to think of another kind of innocence. I've been trying to get through too, you know.”

“I know, darling. I'm sorry. I want that of course too. But another thing comes in uh there, you see…”

They took the car and went to Rest Beach on the other side of the key. They could hear a fire engine down in the quarter off Simonton. It was hot and Skelton could smell fish in the garbage truck that went by bristling with palm leaves; a sign between the two men hanging off the back:
WE CATER WEDDINGS
. The wind was beginning to pull eastward into a weather change and the smell of City Electric was in the avenues.

They parked at Rest Beach and walked across between the sunbathers. There was not much wind and the sea was very plain under the empty sky. A long way off, a remote vessel, maybe a freighter, seemed absolutely still under its smoke which declined only slightly from the vertical before bluing away.

They walked out on the jetty, the sea trembling among the stones like gelatin. At the end, Miranda sat down, her brown thighs disappearing in her shorts. Her green, stony eyes did not seem to be seeing anything; and Skelton was not having a very good time.

“Haven't you ever walked in on a woman before?” Miranda asked, pushing her hair back over her ears with her thumbs.

“Yes.”

“Once?”

“No, three times.”

“And what were the women like?”

“They were types.”

“They were all three types?”

“Two were types and one was a junkie.”

“And what was I?”

“You were my girl.”

Three striped sergeant-major fish, inches long, rested in the swell at their feet, surging in on each small roller, trusting the wave not to carry them clear to the rocks and riding out in it again, only to repeat in a loop, in and out again. The water was as green as the jar of squash blossoms.

“You look strange,” said Miranda, “are you crashing from that cocaine?” Skelton said nothing. “Well, it's still Michael.”

“I guess.”

“Michael used to be my lover.”

“Why do I have to be so stupid about this?”

“I don't know.”

“I know better than to be this way.”

“I know but you just are.”

“I'll ride it out.”

Though he knew he could still maintain, Skelton felt that voluminous hollow rush inside, that slippage of control systems, the cocaine express. Mild enough on the face of it, he had known it in other days to be the first step on the ride to the O.D. Corral. It was a family tradition to go the distance. This time it had to be in another quadrant because he had recently seen that tremulous threshold where another breath is a matter for decision.

“I was the victim of timing. I've been thinking about death all day. Don't ask me why. My mother told me this ungodly story—” Skelton at last could lose himself in something that would hold the jealousy away, stories of the dead, beginning with the man killed on the Indian mounds by bees; the usual powdered visages of cousins or acquaintances laid out next to an air conditioner or beneath a ceiling fan, more deeply foreign under their makeup than the maddest vices could have made them in life. Or when, in junior high, he had found with a friend, a drowned Cuban nun in the cistern. No more than four and a half feet long she floated face down in the stagnant water, her habit flowing like wings amid clouds of immature frogs and mosquito larvae. When his friend's father, a pastry cook, came home, he looked into the cistern and said that he had known that she would do it sometime. Quite without passion, they carried the little body to the lawn; then all three at the same time dropped it on the grass, a black and white pile in draining cistern water and stranded tadpoles, a thing.

“That's dreadful.”

“I know.”

“Why did you tell me that?”

“There uh was some connection…”

“Between all this dead stuff and you walking in on me?”

“Yes!”

“Well, what was it,” Miranda demanded.

“It's just that when you realize that everyone dies you become a terrible kind of purist. There just doesn't seem to be time for this other business.”

“But darling that's all there is time for.”

In the clear water at the jetty's end, the tide carried a few large jellyfish past. Ribbed as delicately as the squash blossoms, they swelled like a globe at the end of a glassblower's pipe; then pulsed suddenly in the direction of the tide.

“Let's get out of here.”

*   *   *

Thomas Skelton thought that key west was a town he could only take so much of. Without the ocean, he knew he couldn't take it at all. It was one thing to be blanking out on a forty-hour week; and another to be unemployed and in Duval Street at a wrong hour; or in front of the Red Doors on Caroline Street when they came out with the stretcher and the shrimpers wandered into the night to smoke under the stars and look through the ambulance windows. The character with the knife was never cut off at the bar. He just strolled to the Wurlitzer and tried to remember exactly who he was. He played
The Orange Blossom Special
to someone down there looking at herself in the Formica who sat and never looked up. In the dreamboat evening of half-time wages the song was finished. The ambulance attendant held a hand mirror to the victim's mouth; and tried to remember if he mailed in the guarantee on his air conditioner. The shrimper's eyes filled to
The Orange Blossom Special,
which was his anthem. He recalled a childhood in Pascagoula when he'd never stabbed a soul, perforated a hymen, or put the boot to a man who was down.

Then too you could remember when you had been below Key West to the Marquesas on a cool winter day when the horsetails were on a rising barometer sky and the radiant drop curtain of fuchsia light stood on edge from the Gulf Stream. And when he ran back across the Boca Grande channel into the lakes and then toward Cottrell to miss the finger banks he knew how he would raise Key West on the soft-pencil edge of sea and sky. Then the city would seem like a white folding ruler, in sections; and the frame houses always lifted slowly, painted and wooden, from the sullen contours of the submarine base.

On the days when he was roughed up in the channel crossings and stopped for a drink to dry off, the upcountry girl in a wash dress would offer him Seven Crown and Seven-up; so that the two of them could soar down Duval in a flood of artificial light, stars, and bugs.

Key West was a town where you had to pick and choose. It was always a favorite of pirates.

*   *   *

Skelton would not have picked a fuselage in a vacant lot next door to a rummy hotel if he had had a choice; but when the money ran out and half a dozen career daydreams collapsed like a telescope, those who might have helped failed to dart to his side. Impecunious as could be, his neighbors found his side trip into education rather fancy to begin with. House painting, culling shrimp, and the half-assed dream of being a guide had a homely recognizability. His popularity returned.

The fuselage, a remnant of a crash-landed navy reconnaissance plane, rested logically on a concrete form and had by now in the quick tropical growing seasons become impressively laced with strangler fig (a plant whose power was now slowly buckling the riveted aluminum panels), bougainvillea, Confederate star jasmine, and a delicate form of trumpeter vine whose blue translucent blossoms cascaded around the compression-sealed aerodynamic doorway.

Within the last month, an alcoholic drill sergeant had taken a room in the hotel; and every morning at seven o'clock, he drilled the winos in the back yard, the winos lurching across the packed earth under the early Key West sun, feet dragging in the dust and heads swinging under incomplete control on helpless and attenuated necks, hair slicked down, whitish blurred beards on some, veinous noses, broken teeth and bruises from falls. From his window in the morning, Skelton could only see the tops of their heads gliding and abruptly changing positions beyond the fence, the commands ringing out from the drill sergeant, the slow inexorable rise of absurd dust.

But today, coming home and closing the door, and opening his mind to the familiarity of his fuselage, Skelton felt a certain relief to be away from Carter and Dance, among whom he felt himself entirely to be the rube. Here in the fuselage, among Bohlke's
Fishes of the Bahamas, Field Notes on the Physiology of Marine Invertebrates,
and the entire Modern Library, from which, how many years ago, he had meant to assault the world on the most primal terms. Amid such familiarities, with all his ambitions flowing at once on parallel courses, it seemed to matter quite a lot less. He was a function of those continuities.

He dialed his mother's house.

“Mother, Tom. I can't make it for dinner; but I'll stop in sometime this evening. How's Dad.”

“He's resting nicely; if your grandpa would leave him be…”

“Is he over there?”

“He came on the bike.”

“How's Dad taking it?”

“Not so well, to tell the truth.”

“Okay. I'll get by.”

Skelton warmed some food from the Frigidaire: picadillo, fried plantains, yellow rice, black beans; making notes to himself on a pad. He ate and ruminated, the sound of commands coming through the fuselage window, the plaint of catbirds and the gentle flutter of vine and leaf touching the yielding air-stream contours of the fuselage. Skelton liked this place with its black anarchist flag, utilitarian bunk, desk, card table, propane stove, and Frigidaire. He could sit on top of the bunk by way of a Pullman ladder he had installed and look out among the tin roofs, the beautiful old shipwright houses, and the poinciana trees that grew with vivid mystery along his street. The cemetery was close enough that he could see from the foot of his street the bronze Victorian sailor, holding his oar, of the monument to the sailors of the
Maine;
and save for one house he could have seen across to the tennis courts and the statue of José Martí whose bust appeared that of a schoolboy in a false moustache, thumbing marble pages with a languorous hand; a memorial with some private character not lost in the inscription:

THE CUBAN LIBERTY APOSTLE

WISHED TO OFFER

TO THE PEOPLE OF KEY WEST

WHAT WAS LEFT OF HIS HEART

Nor in the graven homage of “Los Caballeros de la Luz,” the horsemen of the light. Skelton could not see these things without some irrational desire to be a liberty apostle and horseman of the light, a shy delivery boy of eternity's loops.

A seabird-crowded sky made it quite impossible for Skelton to stay very long on land; and on the days when exaggerated tide fell below the mean low, exposing the flats around Key West and filling downwind side streets with the smell of ocean at its most fecund, he could grow quite frantic about it.

Today's revelations, the skiff and the bookings, he paid into his system slowly, having what he wanted.

He walked to his family's house on Peacon Lane; pulling the bell on the gate and waiting for his mother. She came without a word and let him through to the patio of old red street bricks. The deep bay porch swept out upon the patio in a watery-green cascade of vegetation and light, deep red pots of ferns hanging from the porch roof. At the far end of the patio, a small sprinkler turned and flung chains of glittering water up into the foliage-broken light; and high on the center of the green-floored porch was his father in his bed, covered by a gauzy mosquito canopy, his grandfather in a Cuban wicker chair beside.

“How are things?” he asked his mother.

“Fine.”

“Mother, how are they?”

“Go over and talk to them.”

“Evening, Grandpa.”

“Tom.”

“How're you feeling, Dad?”

“He feels perfectly well,” volunteered the grandfather.

“If no one will get that asshole out of here,” said the muted figure inside the gauze, “I will shit my pants and die on purpose.”

“Do it!” said the grandfather. “You malinger well enough.”

“Grandpa.”

“Every doctor in Key West says it is in his head—”

Mrs. Skelton was silent in the kitchen, an absentee ballot.

Skelton's father began to eat his pillow. Skelton reached gently under the canopy and pulled it from his tearing jaws; fluffs of eiderdown drifted on the porch.

“Someone run shit pig into the Gulf Stream,” said Skelton's father. The grandfather stood and lashed into the gauze before Skelton forcibly seated him again.

“Go ahead,” said the grandfather, drawing his glass of rum from under the chair. “Gang up.”

“Come on now, Grandpa.”

“Got a job yet, bright boy?”

“I'm starting.”

“At what?”

“Guiding.”

“Terrific. I'll see you at the Red Doors with the rest of the drunken charter-boat captains.”

“I won't be at the Red Doors. And I'm skiff-guiding anyway. Also, when did you join the lecture tour?”

“Throw the old fart's ass over the wall,” said Skelton's father.

“I'm hungry!” the old man bellowed toward the kitchen. Then in a hushed voice, “Look! Look! He's playing dead.”