Ninety-Two in the Shade

“Run it up another thousand.” The engine came up to pitch; but still rough. It was an old-timer. “Let’s see how it runs. I just changed the nineteen-inch prop it had for a twenty-one.”

Skelton freed the lines and sat down in the portside chair. Then Dance sat down and wheeled the boat away from the dock. It was not an unhandsome skiff, a very old Roberts made on Tavernier.

Dance said, “Lightning struck those little keys east of the Snipes day before yesterday; I have to make a quick run over there and see. There’s a lot of birds out there. I want to see how did they do.”

They ran directly across Jewfish and Waltz Key basins and jumped the bank behind Old Dan Mangrove because they had the tide. Skelton studied Dance handling the tricky run. He went up behind the Mud Keys and broke through to the Gulf just northwest of the Snipes and turned east, shutting down over sandy bottom so that the shadow of the boat on the bottom swung and pivoted as the wake overtook the boat. The skiff came to rest, locked to its shadow as though on a pendulum.

Skelton jacked up the engine by hand; it had no power tilt. Dance got up on the bow and poled them toward the beach in the thunderous old storm wash that came in off the Gulf. On the reef line, green rollers poured through the surge channels.

Dance threw the anchor high up on the beach; and they went ashore. Before they walked up into the beach grass they could see a couple of wild palms shattered by lightning, some with livid streaks in their smooth gray trunks. As soon as they were up on the higher part of the key, they found a number of white herons, little blue herons, and one wood stork, killed by the lightning. “Isn’t that a crime,” said Dance. The birds were already throbbing and heavy with worms, perhaps ten birds scattered as the lightning had found them, long wading legs crisscrossed, beaks pointing about ridiculously in this last idleness of death.

They started back. They were halfway across Waltz Key Basin before they talked again. Dance said, “Look here, I know it wasn’t much of a joke.”

“You’re right.”

“Not that it excuses what you done.”

“Yeah well.”

“And you cannot guide. I gave my word.”

“Well, I am going to guide.”

“You are not.”

Skelton nodded that he was, as pleasant as he could.

Two spotted rays shot out in front of the boat and coursed away on spotted wings, their white ventrals showing in their hurry: then vanished in the glare. The water was still and glassy, green over the turtle-grass bottom. There were birds everywhere now, soaring out before them — the cormorants that rested on stakes and mangroves to dry out their wings, the anhingas, gulls, frigate birds, and pelicans, the wading herons and cranes of every variation of slate, whites upon whites, emblematic black chevrons or stripes, wings finished in a taper or left rough-ended. They threaded the keys amid this aerial display over uncounted fish coursing the tidal basin, over a bottom itself home to a million kinds of animal, that walked, stalked, and scuttled by every tropism from heat to light, and lived in intermeshing layers, layer upon layer, that passed through each other like light and never touched.

A jet passed over and Skelton looked up for it; every year you had to look farther ahead of the sound. The plane made a beautiful silver line.

* * *

Thomas Skelton felt that simple survival at one level and the prevention of psychotic lesions based upon empirical observation of the republic depended upon his being able to get out on the ocean. Solitary floating as the tide carried him off the seaward shelf was in one sense sociopathic conduct for him; not infrequently such simplicity was one of three options; the others being berserking and smoking dope all the livelong day.

Notwithstanding the shriveling of the earth before its most singular product, Skelton’s reflex to be a practicing Christian remained. His skill in sidestepping confrontation, his largest capability, left him — faith, hope, and charity — largely untried. Somewhere, he knew that. It had taken a quarter of a century to produce the combination for him: access to the space of ocean (and the mode of livelihood that would make that access constant) and an unformed vision of how he ought to live on earth with others.

So he told Nichol Dance, “I am going to guide.”

But today, by the time he got to Searstown, he was looking around at the human surge and thinking how attractive it must be to go shopping at the Annual White Sales without anyone offering to murder you over the percales, or to spew your guts across the Dansk Mug Set. Even the shapely teeny-bopper whom he had zero chance of having, looked in at the new Sugarcane Harris albums without the air of impending murder for anyone, much less herself.

And how shall I accept my own death? A forefinger in the entrance hole while a billion protozoa redistribute my chemical components from behind where the bullet exits and kills an innocent pelican whitening a speedboat nearby.

Miranda, said Skelton to himself at Searstown, I’d feel a lot better if I could do a little barking. Imagine: The course of the bullet; its “entry” is immediately to the left of the sternum, where in its passage it disrupts the heart’s determined flutter as to cause not quite immediate death. He knows what it is. There is the majesty of that surprise. His conviction that the chance against his living again is infinity minus one saves him from complete regret. Skelton’s eyes, which always had a bright and fluid life, become on this sunny day quickly dry; and a place where the small insects of the empty beach can walk without … struggling for purchase. Gradually, his eyes become a popular trysting spot for breeding beach bugs; and by the magic geometry of mitosis, each eyeball is soon transformed into a thriving community with roots in, on the one hand, the first aeons of earth time; and, on the other, the weirdest reaches of the evolutionary space-future in which, feasibly, the products of Skelton’s eyeballs might be colonizing planets of their own for reasons of civilization. By the same token, his prostate might get to the White House.

Skelton was modifying his fuselage, and shopping in the Sears hardware store for tools and parts. He bought a Craftsman variable-speed drill with a firm money-back guarantee. The magic of the electric drill was that it allowed you to take the oddly shaped hole of an electrical outlet and by running its force through a black cord and a silvery mechanism cause holes at the other end, of any size you liked.

Would Dance regret his deed? Would he look again at that delirious passage by which what is quick and numinous becomes meat, and say: Phooey? Or would he, like the television commentators before every event, “never cease to be amazed”?

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.

And now twenty-one years later in Key West, damned if there wasn’t another moth-like number following him around at night. Dance cut himself one more piece of amberjack and cracked a beer. A man in his life, he thought, sure had to hack his way through a lot of lunch meat. But I will do what I have to. I’m all I’ve got, in a manner of speaking.

* * *

On big pine key, the first light of day passes through the high breezy forest. A key-deer buck, the size of a dog, places four perfect scarab hoofs on Route A1A and is splattered by a Lincoln Continental four weeks out of the Ford Motor Company, carrying three admirals bound to Miami and a “kick-off breakfast” for a fund-raiser. The taillights elevate abruptly at the Pine Channel Bridge and are gone. The corporate utopia advances by a figure equal to the weight of the little buck divided by infinity; the Reckoning advances by a figure equal to the buck multiplied by infinity. A funeral wake of carrion birds, insects, and microorganisms working assiduously between bursts of traffic takes the little deer home a particle at a time.

* * *

Miranda went into the bathroom. She was there five or ten minutes. When she came out her hair was in disarray and there were a few plastic curlers scattered arbitrarily through the snarl. She sat on the bed and began to shriek. Her face was scrubbed of all makeup; she looked like a loser in a Farm Administration photograph.

“Shittin place is drivin me nuts. You outa fuckin work and me expectin a child!”

“Honey, honey … I tried…”

“Tried my ass! You’re out with faeries while I’m home wid a B-29 in the hangar!”

“A B-29 in the hangar!” Skelton fell on the floor. Miranda stared at him.

“An my ass is draggin in this shithouse while you’re out golfin with flits and highfliers!”

“No more!”

“No more is right! I’m walkin outa this cockroach palace and leave you to stew in yer own juice like ya deserve ya four-bit louse!”

“Now just wait a goddamn minute. Whose a one around here with the diploma?”

“I’ll tell you what I about had enough of,” she shrieked, “and that’s midnight visits from in-laws in sheets and weenie pictures in the mail! That’s what I’m tired of!”

A knock on the door. Miranda answered it. Skelton listened from the closet. It was a neighbor. Miranda was telling her yes she was all right; they were doing psychotherapy. Not to be interrupted or the AMA would be alerted.

* * *

When her friends were not on the phone asking for advice, when no meals were to be made, when unbeset by that complicated skein of petty social contrivances in Key West to which she had many years ago been coopted as a kind of servomechanism and without which the game would have been more carnivorous than it was because she, to a degree almost no longer rememberable in our time, was a generous creature; when all that presented a clear and silent lacuna in her existence as wife, mother, and daughter-in-law to three men of the same surname and in some ways uninterrupted stripe, she retreated to the bedroom and cried quite silently, not a single sob, but just a steady, streaming exhaustion with men who had become figments of their own imaginations; and of whom she probably ought long since to have been shut. After that, she had a system of restoration: a napkin in ice water to clear the eyes, then instead of her usual subdued lipstick she applied Fire and Ice, which was precisely the color of the bright oxygenated blood of an animal mortally shot through the lungs (Skelton’s imaginary death wound would have produced this color), and some rouge to highlight her prominent cheekbones (her navy officer, Oklahoma grandfather had Indian blood, of which he was not proud).

She was less mortified than demoralized by her husband’s latest absurdity. Mortification ended with his army discharge and his public announcement, long after Key West knew he was home on “a mental,” that Adolf Hitler was an invention of the Miami Press Club. He of course believed no such thing; but argued that it opened a useful avenue of thought. His pitiful belief in selective stupidity amid a situation of universal stupidity made it impossible for him to start anyone even daydreaming about his theories by which good guys in a monstrously linear and Ptolemaic universe demanded bad guys for the far seat of the seesaw. It was an easy idea, like those of Darwin, Francis Bacon, and Jack the Ripper.

So it all dribbled away to the point of his bedriddence; and expressed itself now in his love of running-backs who could run a slant off tackle and end up getting thirteen yards in a sweep. He believed in lateral moves at the line of scrimmage. She could understand that, however brittle the parallel; and it was her problem to discover now in what sense his vanishing into the darkness was a lateral move.

* * *

When Faron Carter was with his wife, he could contrive to deprive his face of all expression whatsoever. In this way he was able to keep from letting her know where she was picking up points and where she was losing them. It was a good little stunt; and without it, Carter would doubtless be in the rubber room at the state funny farm conducting Chinese fire drills. Now, when he had deprived his face of emotion, he had a wide and expressionless mouth like the juncture of a casserole dish with its lid.

Today his wife was ironing in front of the set, watching a teenage dance hour. The music was coughing so explosively that he could feel it in the ironing board when he rested his hand. And now and then the television would give them close-ups of the dancers with the points of their tongues protruding from the corners of their mouths. It was out of this world.

Jeannie Carter had been a pretty Orlando baton twirler twenty years ago; but now she looked like death warmed over; you had the feeling that if you touched your fingernail to her forehead, the skull within would jump into your lap. She was a driven lady with the baton and back-seat feel-ups so long past they were scarcely good for an off-color laugh on pinochle night; Jeannie Carter just needed a lot of goods to keep the mortal wolf from the door. She was a forlorn little sociopath, crazy with accumulated purchases, who could have been saved from her shopping sprees only by a weekly gang-fuck behind the high school; for she was not so degenerated that the varsity club wouldn’t line up the way they would, in mountain regions say, for a healthy sheep or yearling cow full of burdock and thistles. The truth was, Faron Carter did his best; but when she scrabbled, eyes popping, on his spacious chest, twisting a fierce and cosmically insatiable twat around his simple meat, it was in a vision of bleak and endless space that could only be modified to something in which she could live by purchases and then more purchases.

Now that is not to say she used her scattered ownerships to harm her neighbors, nor even, God knew, to characterize herself with her friends and what was left of her family.

It started with the showpieces. Their first showpiece was this modest concrete block house with its two bedrooms, its terrazzo-floored john and Florida room. There were reproductions on the walls that were more pitiful than tasteless; and Faron Carter’s tournament citations, his stuffed world’s records.

The second showpiece was the air-conditioned station wagon with the electric everything and the power-assisted altogether. It was cream-colored and had tooled Naugahyde upholstery. After ten months, none of it was scuffed; they had no children. I want my Gran Torino scuffed, thought Jeannie. I want the rich simuwood cherry-and-oak body paneling covered with a little one’s scratches. I want some li’l peeper to give me fits hacking around with the Selectshift Cruise-O-Matic, the RimBlow Deluxe three-spoke steering wheel or the Power-plus positive windows. I wanna look down at the optional color-keyed vinyl floor carpet and see bubble gum with them precious toothprints.

At each of her temples, Jeannie had barely visible veins that showed under her film of skin. You wouldn’t want to touch them either. When Jeannie used to poise heels together on the fifty-yard line, the white bulbs of rubber making a pale circle around her flawless twirling, her perfect, silver-sateen-enclosed, indented buttocks sent half the audience into a jack-off frenzy that made them blur out the first quarter of the game itself.

And Jeannie knew that. Twirling, dropping to one knee for the catches, then prancing downfield in a mindlessness now growing culturally impossible, she was a simple pink cake with a slot. And two broad bleacher-loads wanted a piece of it. It was a whole civilization up shit creek in a cement canoe without a dream of a paddle.

Now with veins in her temples ready to leak and a skull to jump out of its pale, thin envelope, she wanted to buy things. And it only made her sorry when she did; not that Carter went after her. He would come home and there would be some unpaid-for showpiece and Jeannie weeping by the TV and drawing flower-print tissues in decorative colors from a gift box. And Carter would feel sorry because he had just come from the Lions Club luncheon where things seemed fine; and here they’d gone from bad to worse.

They had gotten to the point of collection agents; and sometimes when Carter came in from guiding he found Jeannie in terror because some beef-fed muscleman had been around putting the heat on; or had perhaps gone so far as to garnishee the infrared barbecue oven or intercept some panel truck trying to deliver a love seat.

Years ago, in the lid of a makeup box she still used, she had printed this message from a book by Roger L. Lee called Baton Twirling Made Easy:

There is a tendency when strutting to shorten one’s stride. If one allows his stride to become less than thirty inches, he will crowd the first rank in the band. This, naturally, will cause the first rank to shorten its stride, throwing the entire band off.

Today, again, Carter had to explain that he couldn’t have every customer that came to the dock; there was another guide as much in demand as he was; and a kid who was the real McCoy was having a skiff built.

“Couldn’t you talk to Myron,” she pleaded.

“Myron doesn’t have anything to do with it. He just tells you what’s happened after it has happened.”

There was no use explaining. When Jeannie first saw Myron Moorhen at his desk with the yellow sheets and the columns of numbers streaming from his fingertips to the word TOTAL, something imprinted. Myron had the combination; and if you could only talk to him right, the immense empty space would send runners and connections toward one another.

And everything would be O.K.

* * *

Olie Slatt said, “I wouldn’t trade this certificate for a king’s ransom. It cost me an arm and a leg to get to the southernmost U.S. and this right here is your high point.”

“I hope she works out that way,” said Dance, “but to tell you the truth, I expected to see you a little sooner than this and now I’m booked up sixteen days straight.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the soonest you could fish with me would be seventeen days from today.”

“But what about my damn certificate! I up-chugged for ten hours!”

“Wait a darn second now, Mr. Slatt. This certificate is good for a day’s guiding. You can go with the other boy on the dock here, the old boy in fact I learned everything I know off of.”

Olie Slatt was wearing a green plaid suit today, a little short at all its cuffs like a Pinky Lee outfit, except that Slatt was rawboned and pared off to a kind of resistant and cartilaginous surface that seemed implicitly violent in this wax-museum suit.

“Where do I find this other one?” Slatt’s pale and sullen face seemed to hang from the ring of his mouth.

“Right there in the bait shack.”

“I mean, look at me. Do I look like a rich man? Do I look like a man who can pay Howard Johnson sixteen times in a row to go out fishing on the seventeenth? What kind of queer breed of odds and ends do you have to get down here for you to think like that?”

“Well, you go in there and ask for Faron Carter and give him your certificate. That old boy is a regular fish hawk. If it’s in Monroe County and swims, he’ll put it in the boat.”

Olie Slatt turned as he crossed the lawn. The vent of his plaid coat was agape over his shining rump. “I whooped up ten hours of pie filling for that paper,” he said. “My nose is still burning and my gut feels like a mule kicked me. So, don’t you nor your sidekicks never try to put me off nor hand me down the line because I’ll come back lickety-split and be on you like a dog without a mother.” By this time Carter was in the bait-shack doorway listening in. “—I mean to hightail it back to Montana ten days from now with a trophy under my arm or I’m going to know the reason why. I have spent my leisure hours on the Missouri after paddlefish and saugers and dreaming of one day coming home to Roundup with a tropical trophy. Everybody knows why I am here. My reputation depends on my comin home with the goods.” All the time Dance watched him, Slatt was twisted around on his shining butt so you could see each button of his plaid suit fastened, his hamstrings sprung taut under the thin white socks as he flexed with irritation from head to toe; and Dance, already nonplused by existence in general, looked at Olie Slatt and thought he acted like a frog in a cloud of fruit flies.

* * *

Skelton was making an incision in the skin of the fuselage over the center of its only real room when the telephone rang.

“Tom, Cart.”

“Hey, Cart. What do you need?”

“How’s your skiff coming along?”

“Powell’s got a coat of paint on the inside. One more and I can hang the engine.”

“You want to guide a week from today?”

“Yes.”

“I got me a sportsman here from the state of Montana.”

“Sign him up, Cart.”

“If you can get him a Citation fish, I think he’ll mount it; and I’ll see you get the kickback from the taxidermist.”

Skelton said, “Tell him a week today at eight-thirty.”

Skelton worked for some time making an opening in the fuselage where he had inscribed the long oval shape with a grease pencil. In the yard, he had a clear Plexiglas crown that had been a component from a field radar station. As they said in Key West, it had belonged to us’n, meaning U.S.N., and Skelton had laid hands on it for next to nothing. Within a day, he slid the great bubble into position on his opening, bolted it over a hand-cut gasket, and for good measure sealed it with silicone putty.

Now when he entered the fuselage and closed its compression doorway, he could look up to an immense oval of blue sky, almost never without at least one bird. And when the sun went down, it was as though he were in a planetarium.

He had one long table in the room; and the bunk bed was under the bubble. The bed itself was like a normal two-story bunk bed, except that there was no lower bunk; that area was storage multiples and a single shelf for his Zenith Transoceanic radio and the books he was reading — still Bohlke’s Fishes and D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form—trying to be a better guide.

The Zenith was superb for picking up remote country music stations:

Someday, when our dream world finds us,

And these hard times are gone …

And the cooking facilities were a salvaged kitchen from a Mobile trawler that went down between Washerwoman and American shoals full of shrimpers too drunk to drown.

Skelton’s every effort was toward being a single-member, intentional community. Faced with the impossibility of cloning, it was imaginable that he would mate. But he was still sketching things in. His little piece of land included a cistern; and when he rebuilt the catchment for it (couldn’t see yet how to incorporate it with the fuselage), he would start the garden. Then he would begin culling his guide schedule to one day’s fishing a week with people he wanted to see. The bulk of the rest of his time would be used in aimless and pointless research in the natural world, from biology to lunar meditation; all on the principle, the absolute principle, that ripeness was all.

* * *

Communism, thought Goldsboro Skelton — one should really say Commonism, which is the way he thought of the word — has had God knows a baleful and ruinous influence on the world; but the one major Greaser among world Commonists, Fidel (Skelton called him Fido) Castro, had done him an immeasurable favor when he decided to release Bella Knowles’s husband, Peewee, from the Isle of Pines, where he had served some doubtless sorry hours atoning for the one manly thing he had ever done: run a boatload of Spring-fields to a handful of counterrevolutionaries in Camagüey so worn out they turned the little insurance adjuster over to the Fidelistas out of tedium vitae and small hope of recompense; Peewee Knowles had just been trying to pay off his swimming pool, like any other citizen high and dry on the Morris Plan.

What occasioned this outburst of thought in which Skelton actually thanked Fidel Castro for repatriating Bella’s husband was a long inquiry on Bella’s part about his former wife. After forbearing her cross-examination, Goldsboro Skelton shocked her into final silence.

“She had tits like that,” he said of his long-gone spouse, “and when she died, I threw a fiver in the hole and closed a chapter in my life. She had Bright’s disease, a ten-pound liver, and left a quarter of a million to the D.A.R., on the long shot America would quit producing people like me and our son.”

“Your son is a little odd. And your grandson—!”

“They are perfect.”

“Goldsboro.”

“Perfect.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And the next time you answer me like that, I’ll have you and your musical background up in north Miami making parakeet-training records.”

“So long as I’m back in time to see them wheel the ninny down Duval Street Easter time in his mosquito-proof bassinet.”

“Why have I let you sass me and answer me back so long?”

The old man thought, We’ve all got a story, don’t we; and it’s always a good one. Absolutely always. The thing that excited him in his seventieth year was that it may all have been the same story.

* * *

In the beehive twilight of Roosevelt Boulevard, seagulls veered around light poles to the murmur of vouching salesmen. And Thomas Skelton strolled the charter-boat docks with an increasing sense that somebody had his number.

In school physics books, “force diagrams” illustrated balls being acted upon by various vectors of force; the question is, if I am the ball, which way do I go? Do I, he thought, for example, go the way of all good things? Do I go for broke? Do I pass go? Do I go man go? Do I say go away? Do I go in my pants? Or do I simply call for my belongings and wait until called upon to stop by higher forces acting upon the simple ball of self. The answer was the simple “Dunno” of the Joe Palooka comic strips. When what we dread the most occurs, a loss of “features,” we look around and say, “Me? I dunno.”

* * *

Skelton sat in his quarters. He wondered that you could say the right word in a bad situation and all hell would break loose. He had found the word and said it and all hell had broken loose. Now a military tribunal had found him guilty of obstructing the war effort.

World War II was just going to have to piss up a rope without him. He had perhaps made a little too much of Adolf Hitler and the Miami Press Club; but his present removal was less a consequence of that than it was of his running commentary on the possibilities of glory in war, which, it was said, demoralized the men; especially those types of enlisted men who found themselves at Fort Benning in 1943, a cast-iron year, obliged to jump daily from the practice tower or on the static line from the lumbering planes of the Airborne; who often as not came from one of those almost vanished and newsless backwaters ungoverned by external event or government adventure which had long since turned, blood and bone, to the more reliable products of human communities, season, and acts of God.

These “yokels,” as they were known among an officer corps that holed up with cotton-chopping thirteen-year-olds for a giggle, these yokels thought that Skelton was as funny as Skelton’s own girlfriend back in Key West thought he was, with her genius intelligence and near-photographic memory; and her curious, not to say outrageous, special history.

But one bird colonel out of Long Island, New York, who “knew from funny” and who would some years later be a charter subscriber to Mortimer J. Adler’s series of the Great Books of the Western World, resolved to snare this bird before he pissed away all the morale his phalanx of cannon fodder owned.

Inside of ten days, he had Skelton shut up tight as a drum in the Fort Benning jail and ready to embark upon the duration at hard labor.

And within forty-eight hours of that, the bird colonel and future Great Books subscriber found himself (bused at his own expense) on Peachtree Street in Atlanta in a quiet, freshly abandoned insurance office chatting with a retired senator and one Goldsboro Skelton of Key West, Florida, son of the last important wrecking master on that island, heir to a now lost salvage fortune, and apoplectic, entrepreneurial maniac, crook, and political manipulator. Skelton sat with one of his counterparts, a senator of the old Soufland school, a preposterous amalgamation of the man on the Quaker Oats box and a full-grown marsh weasel.

Now Goldsboro Skelton didn’t know anything about Georgia politics, except that they were rotten; but everyone knew that. Goldsboro Skelton didn’t know very much about mainland Florida politics either, when you came right down to it; but he could in an hour’s phoning form an ineluctable bridge of crooks to any state capitol within two thousand miles. The cybernetics of semi-respectable crime and its system of internal favors is a communal network as handsome in its way as the whorls of the chambered nautilus.

“Senator,” said Goldsboro Skelton, “tell our friend the colonel what you just told me.”

The senator quickly rose to accustomed orotundities about the “plugged nickel” he wouldn’t dream of giving for the colonel’s “sorry and worthless ass” if he didn’t find a way of putting young Skelton on the island of Key West within twenty-four hours, all papers of clearance in hand to shut him of the U.S. Army and those “piss-faced nincompoops” like the colonel himself who were allowed to torment youngsters in Georgia while grown men were out giving the Axis what for.

“Gentlemen,” said the colonel, trying desperately to forget Long Island and find a way into the mechanism of manipulation these highhanders from East Jesus convinced him existed. “You’re trying to make a horse’s ass of me.”

“Colonel,” said Skelton, “if you knew how close the ass of a horse was to actual glue and dog food…” He fluttered his hand to let the colonel finish his thought.

There was a reconvening in the army, after which Skelton was found gone of brain and sent home to Key West on a mental.

Years later when the retired colonel, now a leg man for Lever Brothers soap, thumbed open the Syntopicon to the Great Books to find something to stir his soldier’s memories, some nugget from Thucydides for instance, the words DOG FOOD would come to him and there would live again in his mind, more than his Exploits Against The Enemy, that day on Peachtree Street when being a horse’s ass had been the better part of valor. At such a time, he could turn to the wop-and-kike mob that had inundated his Long Island with a cozy, sold-out feeling that readied him for the millennium, senility, alienation, and dyspepsia.

* * *

Doctor Bienvenida had done the impossible. He had escaped from Cuba with his own finely trained person and he had managed to spring his practice too. Forty-six prosperous Havanans flew the coop to Cayo Hueso; so that, professionally, Bienvenida missed hardly a beat, little more than the time it took to make the ninety-mile ride in his own Hatteras sport-fisherman. Consequently there remained in his tone with his patients a lack of salesmanship, a bluntness of a kind that makes patients believe. He had Jeannie Carter before him now, and he leaned forward slowly to deliver his message, so that his stethoscope dangled free of his chest and his blue jowls made an imperceptible swell forward.

“He died,” said the doctor. Jeannie Carter was so tense that when she stood up from the Naugahyde seat her sweating behind made a tearing sound. She reached around and plucked the seersucker from her thighs.

“He died?”

“Afrai’ so.”

“Oh, but doctor!”

Jeannie began jumping around the doctor’s office, both feet together in a pompon dither reminiscent of her fifty-yard-line sprints at Orlando High.

“It’s goody-goody gumdrop!” That sort of thing.

The rabbit had passed away (she was not so blunt as the doctor) and a little one would soon be wedging its way into Sardineland ready for the life of hotcakes. Jeannie thought of the stork.

Now, after running down football fields to a thousand erections rising in salute, Jeannie Carter did not really believe the death of the rabbit meant the coming of the stork. But helplessly the big white bird appeared to her on glistening wings; with a rather biggish beak, to be sure. And a kid in a hankie.

When Carter came home that evening, tired, yet cautiously eyeing the living room for anything new, Jeannie kissed him with a robust suggestion of congratulations.

“Hon,” she said, “you’re okay.”

“What do you mean?”

“Looks like you up and hit the bull’s-eye. Wasn’t zif you lacked the know-how! Ha, ha!”

“You in a family way, Jeannie?”

“Yes sir, honey, I am.”

“Seems like a real miracle.” Carter himself envisioned the stork as something like Mothra, the flying Jap winged bug of the late-night horror show, Creature Feature.

Carter headed into the Florida room. Carter was tired from poling his skiff all over hell’s half acre and he sat on the couch in his khaki guide’s clothes and put his feet up. Jeannie followed a few moments later, suddenly full of spirit and even, frankly, joie de vivre. She had two demonstration flash cards depicting indistinct blobs and discolorations on a white background. Carter thought they were fetuses.

“Now Cart,” she said, beginning to stroll up and down, “don’t look bored because you was the one earlier this week what asked me to explain the difference between a pyrolytic self-cleaning oven and a catalytic self-cleaning oven.”

“I’m paying the fuck attention. Aw, Jesus…” he moaned. He was trying to make the connection between his wife and the self-cleaning oven.

“I believe that you are, Cart. I believe that. Now pictured here is a section of an actual oven panel from a General Electric pyrolytic oven that has been soiled with prune-pie spillover.” She turned the card over; it was blank on the other side. “The cleaning cycle is completed and no sign of the prune-pie spillover remains!”

She held up another flash card with a similar mess depicted. “Here you have the cheaper catalytic-oven panel soiled with the same prune-pie spillover.” Jeannie rotated the card; the reverse was identical to the facing side: a mess. “After a five-hour baking period there is no noticeable removal of the prune-pie spillover. And even after one hundred and sixty-eight hours at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, most of the prune-pie spillover remains on the catalytic oven panel!”

With simple cougar-like grace, Cart rose from the couch and began to stalk his wife. A bit of foam gathered at the corner of his mouth.

* * *

The skiff was finished. Skelton went over it, standing back at the bait wells and looking to follow the curve of the cockpit coaming; it faired forward to the casting deck without a dogleg. It was thoroughly finished, with every corner radiused off and smooth. Skelton wrote out the check.

“You won’t believe this but a man came in here,” said James Powell, “wearing no shoes and old navy pants with a rope to hold them up and kind of a sheet and offered me ten thousand dollars for this boat.”

“That was my father.”

“He dresses funny.”

“He is trying to keep me from guiding.”

“You are going to guide then—”

“Course I am!”

“Buy a gun.”

“News gets out, doesn’t it.”

“News like that does.”

They wheeled the skiff out by hand on the trailer through the corrugated shed door. Miranda’s car, Miranda inside, was parked in the alley. Skelton lifted the tongue of the trailer over the ball of the hitch and clamped it.

“Thank you, James. The skiff turned out a mile prettier than I even hoped.”

“I’m pleased myself. Take me for a ride some day.”

“I promise.”

“I didn’t build that for a coffin, you know.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Miranda. She drove, Skelton constantly looking back to see how it was trailing; the bow loomed in the rear window. “Does it mean a lot to you?”

“It will.”

“When?”

“When I have paid for it and put some fish in the box and some hours on the engine. Right now it’s just beautiful and beautiful isn’t very interesting.”

“What about Brueghel, Vermeer, and Cézanne.”

“They don’t build boats.”

“You’re a redneck.”

“I’m worse, I’m a commercial fisherman. I’d pour water on a drowning man.”

“What are those numbers for?”

“Registration.”

“The orange sticker?”

“Commercial fishing sticker. — No, the boat means plenty; but there is a kind of letdown when you get something you want that bad.”

“I wish I knew what your plan was.”

“My plan is to go directly to heaven.”

“That was my father’s plan. He became an Episcopal priest. Until then he was interested in heaven. After that he was mostly concerned with blooded horses. After horses it was a lady who hunted foxes on horses.”

“What did that lead to.” The boat trailed easy.

“A blessed event. My mother took an apartment near Canaveral, divorced my father, and married a realtor. The realtor lost his shirt when NASA moved to the Houston Space Center and all those subdivisions went back to frog pond. Then my mother broke her back in a jeep accident during the Audubon Christmas bird-count competition. The realtor left her and now she lives alone with the blessed event, my half brother. My father handed him over so he could go to Florence and live on the Lungarno with the girl who ran the bake sale at the church picnic, a nymphomaniac golf instructor. My father is addicted to ether and their place stinks. She hangs out at American Express and has a room of her own behind the Duomo for her assignations, usually with buyers from stateside gift shops, not necessarily men … But my mother is happy, though she misses all the NASA scientists. Many of them were bird watchers.”

“And your dad found his heaven with a cross-sexed nympho bake-salesman in the city of Michelangelo.”

“Do I turn here?”

“Next block.”

“Well, he did find something. When do you plan on finding heaven?”

“I had what you might call a vision. Half a dozen little brainstorms about living right and being free. Now they weren’t any of them simple; but I didn’t half expect to have a fight over them. It looks like if I am going to hang in there with the rest of the carnivores, I’m going to have to draw some lines. Nothing obvious. Just some curving friendly lines with two-way turnstiles. — Pull up side of the dry shed there.”

“Two-way turnstiles.”

“On my Jesus Freeway.”

“Is this a joke?”

“Stop right here. You have a responsibility as a motorist. I’ll back the trailer in the shed. What we need here is Our Lady of the Skiff; though the record seems to indicate that she does not back small craft or in fact anything under fifty feet unless it has a teak deck or exceptional electronics.”

He backed the skiff in without event, detached the trailer; and Miranda parked outside the shed. Skelton stayed to watch them hang the big Evinrude engine, bringing it on a chain from the fork lift and swinging it down on the transom. Skelton gazed at the bright new powerhead, anodized and precise under a veil of light oil. The pulse pack was visible between the wedge of finned cylinders. And the electrical harness sent out its leads and cables to various sealed junctures in the power-head. Skelton stared, the sound of traffic faraway in his ears.

This like his books, fuselage, imaginary garden, family, loves, religion, and private history was an indispensable component of the spiritual survival multiple he was inventing for himself; and through which he intended to sandwich himself between earth, sea, and stars with the fit a waffle has within a waffle iron; or the kind of mortising James Powell had performed in his skiff; less a seamlessness than the kind of laminated strength a scar has.

While the skiff was being set up, Skelton proposed, they would go up to Big Pine and have something to eat at the Baltimore Oyster House. A geriatrical hippie in an MG came that close to nailing them head on; then nihilistically waved to them as he shot by, as though on a Final Mission. They cruised through Saddlebunch and Skelton could see the area of mangroves penetrated by the creek in which he had lost contact with the Rudleighs. Just past Saddlebunch, Miranda began an oral outrage that lasted till Sugarloaf Key, Skelton gaping wanly through the windshield. A Greyhound passed in the opposite direction, the driver leaning forward on the wheel in the professional slump. Did he see? The bus’s brake lights flashed three times in the rear-view mirror. He did. Skelton’s face compressed in a lizard grimace, and misfocus crossed his eyes like a momentary shadow. Wave to Sonny in the Gulf Station; he thinks I’m alone. On Summerland Key, wave to Bud in the Sinclair; he sees I’m with a girl. A little dock bar there on the left, on a raft; friendly place but no pool table. Skiffs moored in its shadow; lobster traps piled all over and ocean both ways; God if they will leave that ocean alone, I can take it all. Osprey goes over; kestrels on the wire watching for mice where they mow the shoulder; and anole lizards, of course, whose translucent rib cages and generally green delicateness recommend themselves to the little falcons. Big Pine and the Baltimore Oyster House.

“Hungry?” Skelton asks.

“I was.”

“Oh God, Miranda.”

They sat at the bar. The cook and owner was a former submariner, a burly bald man who carried a wordless moral impact Skelton supposed Sam Johnson must have owned.

“What are you going to have?” Miranda asked.

“She-crab soup.”

“Me too. Can you split an order of oysters?”

“What kind of oysters?” Skelton asked the barmaid.

“Both,” she said.

“Chesapeakes and Apalachicolas,” Skelton said to Miranda.

“You say.”

“Apalachicolas. It’s a state industry. And give us a pitcher.”

The oysters arrived shortly. Skelton said, “Let’s just eat these off the one plate instead of dividing them up.”

Skelton squeezed lime on an oyster, raised its barnacled shell to his lip, and pushed the occupant into his mouth. Word had it Apalachicola was having water problems; better enjoy these while you can. What an idea. My people have been eating Apalachicola oysters for a hundred years; I object on the basis of family. Spiders have so much bug-killer in them they can’t make symmetrical webs either. Skelton looked over at Miranda to reiterate his conviction of general pointlessness; but he noticed a button on her shirt pulled taut between her breasts, tilted almost enough to slip through the buttonhole; he knew those appendages to be slightly larger and slightly firmer than well-made Cuban flan and that concrete thought about something desired made him lose interest in despair. He had long since learned that the general view was tragic; but he had simultaneously learned that the trick was to become interested in something else. Look askance and it all shines on. The hope of reward in this line of religion was to be able to gaze with boredom straight into the big black hole, pausing only to wipe the face of your pocket watch with a clean linen handkerchief so that its next owner can trade it in on a new Bulova along with the gold he has knocked out of your indifferent teeth. After all, who on earth slipping it to a truly desired woman can seriously interest himself in the notion that the race is doomed; at such a time, the very thought is a flourish. Afterward, in the little death, a universal view spreads its arms; and the received world has “features” looped and looped in Nietzschean returns.

Skelton for his part, though blessed with good health and the lack of ordinary worries, was thankful that it had been since the trick Dance, Carter, and the Rudleighs had played him that he felt that separation of himself from the people and objects amid which he lived.

Two nights earlier he had gotten so frightened that Dance would kill him that he had cried; but he never felt the yawning that came between himself and everything when his essential facilities for control began to lock up. Studying biology — at the end — he lost the connection between the sessile polyp he was dissecting and the firmament, in effect the kingdom-and-glory; or that at least was his first sign; within two hours, only Thorazine drove Satan from his eyes long enough for him to reform the connections between himself and what was palpably not himself. One more week and he was in Key West again, where it was widely reported that he had “lowered his expectations.” He wants to be a guide, people said, looking at each other with signification, out in a damn boat all the doo-dah day.

Skelton looked aside to Miranda. It this a loose woman? When he was young, he was always falling in love; once with a floozy from the base named Joyce; he had a souped-up Chevy BelAir then with a three-quarter-race engine, scavenger headers, and so on; and he and Joyce would take a bottle and go up the keys where Joyce would sometimes run along the four-inch bridge railings and — twice — fall off, missing the abutments, somehow. Joyce was loose as a goose. She chipped in with him on a set of slicks so they could drag-race sailors on A1A. A friend of Skelton’s told him that if Joyce had as many dicks sticking out of her as she’d had sticking in her she would look like a porcupine. Skelton punched him dutifully; they drifted apart and Skelton kept the racing slicks.

“Know what?”

“What.”

“Still haven’t seen my old man. Hasn’t showed up since he was around your place. But I want to ask you something. Do you think he was serious when he was asking you for a date?”

“No. He was making fun.”

“Well, he’s not an unkind person.”

“Can you eat that last oyster?”

“No, you.”

“I will. Well, what kind of father is he?”

“The best. And I been reviewing his performance since I was real little. He is always checking to see how things add up. He taught me how to step to one side about everything I looked at, always change the angle.”

“Does that make for a happy life?”

“Probably not. So what.”

“Is this upsetting you?”

“A little.”

“What has he done?”

“He got thrown out of the army during World War II and came home and invented a new kind of infrared film for night photography and got decorated. The army paid him a percentage on the film and he used the money to open a whorehouse, a blimp factory, and a reading room for Catholic-anarchist literature. He closed the reading room when he learned anarchists had fought with the White Russians. Then he opened it again when he learned the Communists had suppressed Basque anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. He is an idealist. — He kept a horse.”

“In Key West?”

“An American Saddlebred with rubber shoes. He could swim it to Christmas Island and gallop in the seashells.”

Miranda drove back. She was an aggressive driver and a tailgater; and when she passed she stayed too long in the left lane. Skelton hated riding with her. When they got to the dry shed, he told her to meet him at the dock.

The skiff was ready; they put the fork lift under the hull and backed out of the shed with it and lowered it into the water. Skelton got in and walked it around to the gas dock, where he fueled up. The engine started readily and he let it idle for a moment. Then he pushed off and backed around far enough that he could turn and pull out alongside the sponging skiffs, the old Johnson rum-running boat, and crawfish boats moored along the sea wall. When he had clearance, he put it up on a plane, hearing the strange two-stroke exhaust rap of the engine. The fully powered boat seemed to have a kind of loft and control that he had hoped for. He swung under the Eisenhower Causeway and could feel the flat-bottom hull skidding as he knew it would; but the chines didn’t catch, so the rate of slide was predictable. He powered it through the turn near Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, past the gaudy Cuban commercial boats that looked like dismasted sailboats, then out through the gap at Sigsby for a five-minute shakedown. He ran it past the little key there in a foot of water at 4,000 rpm and abruptly shut it down. The boat settled levelly without dropping the stern and fouling the prop on the bottom. He ran it up on a plane, snaking it off a little to put the prop away from the bottom a few inches, and headed for the dock at 2,900, its slowest planing speed, with a sense of complete satisfaction.

In three minutes, he rounded the island to Chambers Street where he could see, a hundred yards before he shut down, Miranda sitting on one of the guides’ lockers at the dock, talking to Jeannie Carter and Nichol Dance.

Wild horses belonged to that category of things that could not have made Skelton bring these three together on purpose, nor any collaboration of all the tea in China and months of Sundays. On days of more than twenty-knot wind, the foam lines began to build on the ocean and any bird that so much as raised its wings got the kind of scudding trip before superior force that Skelton felt himself now getting, as these clusters formed and foolish lives like his father’s began to break up. Something was afoot.

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.

“Well,” said his father, “I have to make a piece of wreckage of myself so we can have a bedside scene together.”

“What are you talking about.”

“This.” An inclusive gesture.

Skelton refused to reply.

“All right.”

“We’ve all been chasing you. Mother is finally finished with this stuff too I can tell you.”

“I wanted to advise you. That is what fathers do.”

“Why didn’t you just come over to my place. I have been looking for you every which way.”

“I didn’t have the advice ready. I had to go through a certain number of operational maneuvers, as they say here at headquarters, to get myself down to the level at which I knew what you were going through.”

Skelton looked into his palms for a sign.

“I’m not going through anything in particular,” Skelton lied.

“Do you think your friend is joking?”

“No. We have just laid out some terrains and a process of natural selection is going on.”

“Oh, come on. I thought we’d been over that Darwin baloney. I don’t even like it as a figure of speech.”

It appeared for a moment that he would actually be sick to his stomach. Skelton could not quite fathom the total degeneration he saw before him. His father’s face, often compared to Manolete’s, was covered with an uneven stubble; and his hair, always cut short as that of a monk, seemed like a barber-college special. The fingers of his inordinately long and ghostly hands arose to make a point, then faded with its vanishment from his mind. Whether from hunger or obsession, his face had receded from his eyes, isolating them in their sockets with an unmistakable suggestion of madness. Skelton felt a certain embarrassment at his own short-fingered, tough hands in his lap, rough-palmed from the pushpole: another sign that he had come from nowhere; a suggestion he was determined to put the lie to.

“I’ve had an adventure, I guess,” said his father wanly. “Like falling through space. I did some drinking and ended up here. I must think of when I left the army … I somehow consumed seven months getting to Key West. The things that happened to me were so foreign to what it seems could have happened to me. Much more disturbing than amnesia. You try to date your life around the things that happen to you that you can’t understand. When you understand something, it is no longer any good to you. It’s neutralized. When I got into the ‘bassinet’ there for seven months, I was trying to create one of those situations, artificially; and I failed because it was just eccentric. There was no mystery, no real enigma.”

“Except to others.”

One of his father’s eyelids was considerably lower than the other; and when he thought intensively, he usually pushed it up with his forefinger; he did now.

“It even lacked mystery for others. The odd and the mysterious are not the same.”

“Okay.”

“Then quite naturally I began to try to see what could be done about what was happening to you. I tried a few simple things like offering to buy the boat but my heart wasn’t in it. And I knew it ran counter to what you would accept. You have always been dedicated to ordeals as a way of driving your spirit to the place where its first confusions are. I think you’ve gotten away from that now and I showed you a lot about sidestepping that may have been useful.”

“Better than that.”

“So anyway — and this will seem a little simple-minded — I had the plan that I would try to condition myself to the point that life could depart almost as a relinquishment, a little release of the will and it would seep away … or something, right?”

“Yes, right,” Skelton said very nearly inaudibly.

His father laughed. “Everything happened. I got drunk, worked over, run in by the police, thrown out of restaurants. I told these boys here that I was discharged dishonorably from the army and they locked me in the ‘brig,’ which is the mop closet on the first floor. I know, funny; but I was in there two days without anything to eat. I have only been released five hours now.”

Skelton in pain glanced to the window where bright palm leaves shuddered in incongruous evening sunlight. And hearing traffic, he thought, How dare anyone go on about his business.

“But I began to find what could not be explained.” He drew out his upper plate; it was broken and taped back together. “I got drunk and fell down over in back of Carlos’s market and this preacher took my plate out and stepped on it.”

“Why didn’t you go home!”

“Oh come on.” His father’s detachment was serene. If there was anything that identified him by blood in place of the dissimilarity of hands, it was this proclivity for slipping the moorings. Skelton’s own “ordeals,” as his father termed them, his attempt to be sane, a biologist, when his actual instincts were less linear, less useful, only led to a bout of hallucinations, featuring drowning, falling, wild horses, endless crowds of driverless automobiles under evidently perfect control hurtling over rough landscapes; and even before Dance had spoken of Charlie Starkweather in the city jail, electrocution, which came to him as a kind of tickling to death, a trampling under electrical horses.

“My first instinct was that this face-off with what’s-his-name was a matter of honor.”

“Oh God!”

“Well, you’ll admit that was the obvious choice.”

“I don’t admit that!”

“Well you goddamn prima donna! What was the obvious choice then!”

Skelton racked his brains. His father was right. But he didn’t have a thing to tell him.

“That’s the best I can do,” he said, not quite coming clean.

“All right then listen you dumb bunny. Now you can get killed at this thing you’re up to. So, you see it through so you know what it is when it comes. Otherwise you are a bystander and nothing could be more disgusting.”

They stopped talking. Skelton remembered in his childhood his father explaining to him that he lived in a civilization that was founded from its family life to its government on the principle that the wheel that squeaks the loudest gets the grease.

“Your grandfather,” he said now, “is a great American in the way he has learned to work the gaps of control that exist between all the little selfish combines. That is why he has been able to rook the country out of millions without ever getting petty about it. — Now, at my best I have been a transitional figure in trying to get you some idea of his energy and coordinational power — with the conviction that I would be consumed in the process — so that you could use it toward something a little more durable than the kind of power your grandfather has craved so … horribly.”

He took up his fiddle and all that scarifying instinct for spirals upon spirals of cognition fell from his tormented face; and a turbulent gaze into emptiness that had become less Skelton’s birthright than a kind of visitation fell across it. For Skelton’s father always felt himself to be poised on the edge of some yawning fissure. One of the ways he crossed it, besides the sports page and its illusion of a constant skein of clear athletic effort in which no one was swept away in time, one of the ways he crossed that fissure was with his fiddle. His head inclined upon it now as though he would fall serenely asleep; the eccentrically long bow indented itself gently against the strings and paused before the opening strains in deepest space. And then the crazy man began Jerusalem Ridge pure and howling in a final elevation to the light that Skelton could understand.

* * *

Skelton thought about the electrical drill and how it could take the hole of the light socket and modify it to another; hole power; perhaps ridiculous but close to his father and his mysteries. He thought of the vultures you could see circling a pit (usually filled with garbage but never mind that); or how during the eclipse of the sun in 1970, running to the Snipe Keys, he had stopped the skiff when the light started to go out, looked up as proscribed by radio news broadcasts to see half a thousand seabirds circling a black hole in the sky. It was the kind of hole people could create, throwing each other into shadow. But there was something there to be considered, the radios everywhere telling you not to look, the vultures over the garbage pit, the news broadcasts of 1970 reflecting another eclipse and a quarter of a billion people staring into the black hole in the sky. And in his own fractional quadrant of world, Skelton looking to the whirling seabirds and their black pivot and then across the still, mercurial sea darkening as though oxydized by this lunar tropism. The power of nothing.

* * *

His father was laughing, half to himself. “Four nights ago, I got particularly drunk with these fellows that work the boats, then bum their way up to the Carolinas in the summer. I left them about midnight I suppose and was crawling, literally crawling, along Eaton Street when a car pulled up and Bella got out. She took about fifty pictures of me creeping down Eaton in my sheet, saying, “Bahyewtiful, bahyewtiful!” the whole while. I suppose she’s fanning them out for the old man right now. That won’t take him in! He’s seen it all … By the way, he knows your plan and completely disagrees with my interfering.”

Skelton thought, That does not surprise; any more than that his father, who had eschewed authority in himself as well as others throughout most of a lifetime, should suddenly attempt to advise and force, however halfheartedly; while his mother, who cultivated durability as another might table manners, was beginning to discover an exasperation with all three men, as anyone would with cheap or highly tuned machinery that constantly needed repairs.

“Well, I don’t know what I wanted to tell you. I’m so down now it seems like I could tell you more about what might await you. Even my veins feel slack. And I’ve only gotten to that place where everything is ironic in a simpleton’s way; you know, looking down at people living beyond their means, ridiculing bad taste and so on. That’s not very interesting. So I haven’t got much to tell you. Except that I wish you’d give up this idea.”

“What would you do in my place?”

“I’d go through with it.”

“That neutralizes your advice.”

“No it doesn’t. I have a perspective that I couldn’t have if it was me acting.”

“Like what kind of perspective.”

“A Christian one.”

“Why couldn’t I have that myself?”

“Because the Christian perspective is one that only obtains in the third person; otherwise it vanishes in egotism and you become a figure from which ridicule can derive as from Christ himself.”

“Well, let me say first of all that I don’t believe that for a minute. And then let me remark that when a man goes to such trouble to set up a crisis, I have a certain duty that comes of my respect for him to let that crisis take place.”

“I’d say, on the basis of that, that you were a smart little fuck. But I think you’re just reacting by temperament and out of your nose for trouble.”

“Anyway, it never got me anywhere except a trip to the ward until I started acting on my own instincts and following through. Now what I’m doing and what Nichol is doing are two cases of just exactly that.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“No, I’m really not.”

Skelton was getting tired of this; and he could see his father was too. So he asked his father to get up and come to his place; and surprisingly he bounded out of bed, the fiddle familiarly in one hand like a tennis racket.

They entered the fuselage, the first time for his father; he beamed around its interior and began dressing as Skelton handed him articles of clothing.

Skelton quite suddenly recalled Nichol Dance. Let’s think about this thing head on now. It has become clear that I am liable to forfeit, as they say, my, you know, life. What you get in that case is … death. Now: what can I expect in the way of a tremendous death? Not much. There are no tremendous deaths any more. The pope, the president, the commissar all come to it like cigarette butts dropped to the sidewalk from the fingers of a pedestrian hurrying on toward some cloudy appointment.

“You got anything to drink?”

“Maybe a beer,” said Skelton.

“I disburden myself of a life’s discoveries and you offer me a beer.”

“What do you want a drink for?”

“I want to get illuminated.”

“Well, then you just hold on there—” Skelton took a film canister out of one of his ammunition cases and opened it.

“Lick your finger and stick it in there—”

“Like that?”

“Now lick it off.”

“What is it? Is it dope?”

“No. Just do it.” He made his father do that three times, then did the same himself.

“All right,” said his father, “I trusted you. Now you tell me what that is.”

“Mushrooms carefully gathered by South American Indian witch-doctor curandero genius-maniacs.”

“Then you gave me dope.”

“No, sir. It’s another thing.”

“I’m a dope fiend,” said his father.

“No,” said Skelton, “I can tell you about that because I was one of those—”

“How bad was it? I thought that was what you were up to.”

“Pretty bad.”

“But like what?”

“A little like real flu combined with bad nerves and extreme old age.”

“Sounds attractive. Now what I’d like to know is why, on the basis of that, and with my proffered trust, you would pour drugs down my gullet.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

* * *

Elapse. A zone ensues: time in clarity.

Skelton explained how he had put his shelter together; and said he had wanted a kind of second-floor compartment but couldn’t see how to do it. His father sat down and started sketching a kind of blister for the fuselage with a floor suspended on cables; it was made of tetrahedral sections, some windows, some hinged-on marine hardware so that it could be vented, the whole capable of flexion: the sides to fair into the fuselage itself and the floor on its braided cables to be a live surface (“So that each step you take provides part of the next step”), all drawn in an elegant dry-point style reminiscent of old artist-engineers. His father looked down at his work and laughed. “Later, we’ll talk about how to keep the rain out.”

Skelton walked around in a long silvery orbit, his hands behind him and his fingers trailing. Starlight came in overhead like the fine pinpoints of charged water.

“God!” said his father, “can you smell all that topsoil out there! No wonder the gardens do so well. Jesus, I can smell all that wet moss under your mother’s philodendrons!” He pulled open a drawer beneath the salvaged marine cookstove and burst into laughter. Skelton walked over and looked in: there was some silverware and a corkscrew. It was pretty funny all right.

Skelton’s father crawled around on the floor, tears of helpless laughter dripping before him. Skelton took one last look into the drawer — silverware and corkscrew maniacally arrayed there — and leaned up against the wall laughing convulsively.

When his father stood up, Skelton looked at him dressed in one thing or another from his own sorry wardrobe; and smiled. “You do look dapper.”

“Look what?”

“Dapper.”

“Dapper!”

“Oh, Lord!”

“Let’s have another look in that silverware drawer,” his father said. It was the same in there: some knives, forks, spoons; and that corkscrew. Neither of them could take it.

In the eyes of Skelton’s father, the effacement of his accumulated sorrows had given way to a silly serenity. And Skelton himself, who had been feeling so narrowly treated by his existence, was on the margin of that horselaugh magnanimity that reveals new things under heaven every time.

“Let’s head for the old plant.”

“I’m for it.”

The two men hurried through the lunar palm shadows to the warehouse on upper Petronia. They passed a ghostly street sweeper with his own key to the cemetery, and a taxicab with golden interior light bustling down Flagler without a passenger through blue islands of moon shadow.

At the warehouse, Skelton’s father lifted a piece of cracked concrete for the key, unlocked the padlock on the corrugated door, and led Skelton inside. “If we play our cards right,” said his father, “we are headed for an emotional El Dorado in here, a real jackpot.”

Skelton passed him entering and saw vainglory in his father’s face. The data base here was decades of folly, the end-all praxis of quixotry.

Inside, the vast rubberoid wreckage of the Southernmost Blimp Works, presided over by a surplus, helium-filled barrage balloon on a swaying cable. Skelton’s father hauled in a few feet of cable and released it; the barrage balloon throbbed back into its position up under the ceiling; there was a black flag on its side and the phrase,

MAKE IT MUTUAL.

Skelton found a cylinder full of helium. The two of them filled their lungs with it and began to speak in the voices of Walt Disney ducks.

Skelton said: “In the deep discovery of the subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some inquirers; who, if two or three yards were open about the surface, would not care to rake the bowels of Potosí.”

His father replied, like a duck too: “The dense and driven Passion, and frightful sweat … what none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay—,” sighed hugely with a hint of duck noise, picked up a sheet of thick, treated rubber, and quacked, “Oh this too, too solid flesh!”

Skelton’s father was looking his inwardly lit best and wore his Manolete face with his witty hooded eyes — possibly now beclouded with those hallucinations that guided earlier Americans; it was the face of his power vision. His other face, his Sinclair Lewis face full-toothed and mildly simian, suggested problems of complexion in his youth and lack of solid moral reference (or blood sugar).

The two men quacked sharply at each other until the helium passed.

“Now son, I want to get back into this advice thing … if uh if these walls and floors would stop whipping around I’M A DOPE FIEND and so if you’d uh pay strict mm attention here—” Skelton fils was trying his best not to visualize a grave rat combat in the shadows.

“Let’s sit down for advice.” He patted the air as if to materialize a chair.

The two men sat on rubber sheets that covered most of the floor of the balloonery. The barrage blimp was poised upon its cable with such stillness as to suggest that the cable supported it. Over the doorway, Skelton’s now adjusted eyes perceived a portrait of Count Zeppelin with the date of his death, March 8, 1917. Beside the goner hydrogen visionary, a great rigid airship emblazoned Hansa rested on a pale, limitless glare of ice.

“Now generally I am told that I am a fine one to talk; so let me offer that as a means of ignoring me. When I suggest something to you, however heartfelt, you remind yourself of my absurd ventures in the manufacturing of blimps, my mental discharge from the army, my unsuccessful family life, and so on. In other words, review my credentials, ha ha! And forget everything I tell you! But don’t forget, even my whorehouse was a flop! My whorehouse was a flophouse! The floozies turned on me like a hundred raging toucans! They fired upon me with my own Seltzer! In twelve months of operation they never awarded me a freebie! I had a Congolese lesbian who used my Havana Churchills for dildos, then jammed the toilet with them! They peed on my fiddle, overcharged my friends, and gave your grandfather a bigger-than-life dose of Montezuman syphilis with chancres that ran up his body like mink tracks! When I saw what they could do, I gave my life some long thought. First I closed down the anarchist reading room. Then I closed down the Puta Palazzo, as I called my little business. Then I spent five years reading the religious literature of the world, homing in like an atomic pigeon on the Rig-Veda, the Bible, the journal of Pascal, Dostoevsky’s Insulted and Injured and the Exemplary Novels of Cervantes in both the original spic and in the incomparable translation of James Mabbe/Don Diego Puede Ser, ha ha! — the Elizabethan courtier and monster whoremonger of Castille or Cast Steel as the other peerless Diego has it. Well, where was I? Oh, yes. End of religious training. The forging of a bright metal too ductile to be forged! Trainee takes to his bed where he is instructively badgered by his wife and father. The world is viewed through mosquito netting. Lizards and Norway rats are perceived in the moonlight while Cayo Hueso is beddie-bye. A slow but inescapable loathing of his own father begins to form so contrary to subject’s wishes he realizes that it is his race’s conscience, his utterly bastardized and serenely mongrel and multisexual transnational squid of a people, the cuttlefish of earth, speaking through him when, quite against his wishes, he looks out through the gauze at his own flesh and blood from whose loins needless to say he has leapt in his full deformity, and thinks: God help me. Now man in question is an ineffectualist and will not act upon his race’s call. But the call is there. This great and powerful animal, your grandfather, this conniving millionaire son of wrecking masters and arch-abrogator of justice is slowly spinning to earth parachuting into his own history with his whores and washed-up coloratura singers, stalked by vague, pusillanimous insurance adjusters in gabardine and color-coordinated, fun-in-the-sun playsuits, and will finally either expire of his own disgust or will be run to ground by men who would ask for the opponent’s track record before undertaking to take on a piss-ant! The successor often seems flyblown and rank to the succeeded. Uh, except to me. You have always been liable to revert to your grandfather.”

“That’s painful for me to recognize. I don’t mean that without respect either. But the load is heavy.” It was conceivable to Skelton that his earliest compulsive wishes were toward extracting his attention from the fields of changes which he like everyone else had inherited; at one point, phototropic plankton seemed the appropriate antiworld, a collective behemoth only estimable by electronic scanner, formulae, surmises; but even in that, there was a threshold and one which he couldn’t penetrate. He suspected lack of intelligence or ability to reason. So on one trip with his most admired professor to study the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico, he heard the following between two deckhands:

“Do you believe our Lord will save you?”

“Fuckin A.”

This preposterous ontological skirmish had the effect of producing in Skelton the perfect, lingering laugh; one quite embedded now and one which crinkled his face from time to time in giddy spiritual desire. For something. For a more penetrating laugh, a victim who said Bingo-Bango on the Hill of Skulls and who returned better dividends than War Bonds and compulsory trips to Nepal for the messages you were not getting at home. Even a victim who never was.

“Now,” said his father, “one other thing. I ran into my old friend Captain James Davis, formerly skipper of the trawler Marquesa and currently doing time as salad chef at Howard Johnson’s. What he tells me is that you are always talking to him about me—”

“That’s right.”

“—and that you always wind up asking him about your mother.”

“That’s right and he never tells me anything about her.”

“She was a whore.”

“That’s what I suspected.”

“In my own whorehouse. Is that what you needed to know? She was beautiful. An angel and a gold mine. I’m proud of her.”

“I should hope so,” Skelton managed.

“Okay,” said his father, “what are you going to do?”

“What I said I was.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go back to the house and have a shower and wait and hope to see you again.”

The two men walked out of the building under the portraits of Count Zeppelin and the airship Hansa. The sun had begun to rise. In half a day, it would drop into the sea before a cheering throng at Mallory dock. Footloose, deracinated tourists, moving coordinates on a thousand chamber-of-commerce war maps, would soon percolate into the density of downtown side streets.

Skelton and his father parted with minimal ceremony. These trips to the hole had been exhausting. Soon they would be looking askance again. Each of them knew that what is perhaps least appropriate in our drumming, cursory march across the glacier is our feckless sense of progress.

* * *

Slippage, daydreams: The eye is almost never on the ball. Skelton could not go to the bathroom. If you plug up a man’s ass, he thought, you will finally shut off his brain. He recalled his old figments, Don and Stacy, the People of the Plains. A knock on the door of their flatlands house. Stacy calls: “Don?”

“What?”

“There is somebody out here with a terrible swift sword.”

Tomorrow morning, he was taking Olie Slatt, Montana strip-miner, out to get a trophy.

* * *

“Let’s go out to dinner.”

“Where?” Miranda asked. Skelton named a good place for sea food. “Really,” said Miranda.

“What do you mean by that?”

“The stone crab is always cooked too long and it gets mushy. The red snapper is flecked with barf. They use paint thinner on the salad.”

“What kind of soap is this?”

“Pine tar,” she said.

“We’ll smell like a lumberyard. How come it has this cord hooked onto it? So you can retrieve it if you swallow it?”

Skelton pushed one of his feet, invisible under the sudsy water, into Miranda’s crotch and gently explored her interior with his toes. “Are you still loaded?”

“Not too.”

“What’d you do in school?”

“We all told our best true stories.”

“What were the best ones?”

“One boy caught a rattlesnake swimming in the channel at Little Torch … I can’t think of any more…”

“What’s wrong.”

“I’m afraid about you.”

“Don’t be.”

“I’d plead if I thought it would do any good.”

“It wouldn’t.”

“I still don’t see why you think this is a matter of conviction when it’s just an extended bar fight.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. It’s not a fight at all.”

“Well, if you’re going to guide tomorrow, I’m going up to the mainland to see my grandmother. I don’t even want to be on the key. And I can’t stand my grandmother!”

“You’ve got school. You can’t leave.”

“I don’t care.”

“You’ll lose your job.”

“So what.”

“Can I come down to your end?” She said that he could. Skelton slithered around to the opposite end of the tub, displacing so much water that a roller traveled all the way up over the overflow, causing an enormous vomiting noise from the plumbing.

“I want some key lime pie,” Skelton said with a smile.

“Maybe not, if you’re going to guide.”

“Doctor Irving Marfak says in Key Lime Pie without Tears that it should never be used to bargain with.”

“All right.”

“All right what?”

“Pie time.”

“Then stop crying.”

* * *

Miranda drove up A1A all the way to alligator Alley, using the Homestead cutoff to save some time. She couldn’t seem to even listen to the radio. After Key West, it was always surprising to see the vegetable stands, the tomato and bean fields; and the straggling agricultural life that transpired on the edge of the ’glades. She was not surprised any more than she listened to the radio.

The beginning of Miranda’s stay with her grandmother was like the middle and the end of her stay with her grandmother. Miranda arrived in time for dinner; and her grandmother, a famous social lady, and author of a book about the shells of Sanibel and Captiva islands called The Bivalve and Me, was wearing a floor-length dinner dress. She carried a chain bag and a dog.

She was drunk as a skunk.

From time to time, as Miranda readied herself for the dinner upon which she did not have her mind, the dog threw itself at her snapping and snarling. The dog’s name was Vecky, short for Carl Van Vechten, and he looked like a wasted rat of imprecise morals.

“Grandmother,” said Miranda evenly, “get this animal away from me or I’ll take something to its head.” Miranda’s grandmother showed her disapproval of Miranda. She permitted her lower eyelids to sag farther and farther — quite far actually — until there were considerable red bands of disapproval beneath each of her goo-goo eyes. She was never sure of her footing when she was looped; so she wore the floor-length dresses to hide her basketball shoes. Everyone knew anyway because they could hear their mad squeegee tread as she swept across the room.

They neither of them ate their dinners at the club but hung disconsolate over plates of expensive meat upon which only the bright parsley could draw the eye. The room, it seemed to Miranda, was cast in bluish gloom; in its middle a baby spotlight gave an ice mountain with its shrimp avalanche an unnatural prominence.

Ultimately, Miranda’s grandmother called to the waiter in a gravel command voice.

“Klaus! Klaus! Klaus!”

Klaus ran at them; so that others might enjoy their dinners.

“Klaus,” she said, “Vecky’s heart would be broken.” A broad executive gesture passed over the inviolate meat. “What do you say to a bowser bag?”

“Immediately, Missussss Cole.”

Some grave force carried Klaus to the kitchen. He emerged shortly with the bowser and, positioning himself to look down Miranda’s blouse, he rammed the beef home. Later, Miranda watched the little beast growling in defense of this world of meat, bloodying his bald narrow paws, and running his sliver of tongue through the fat.

* * *

When Peewee Knowles returned from Cuba, he spent a week in political quarantine watched by a mongoose from Central Intelligence, watched and questioned and obliged to fill out profiles until his actual nauseating footling politics were triangulated. The Central Intelligence man, who turned out, oddly enough, to be named Don and who was, weird thing, from the Plains states, totaled up the numerical equivalents of Peewee’s responses and evaluations. Don’s manner with a column of numbers was not unlike that of Myron Moorhen; and when he came up with his total, he divided it by the index number of 10, checked his figures, rose to his feet, and told Peewee he was a Great American.

Peewee headed for Burdine’s and bought the complete Arnold Palmer dress ensemble; then sloped to the barbershop in the shopping plaza. “Where did you get your last haircut?” asked the barber. “Key West?”

Peewee turned to him, stared, and said, “No clippers in the back.”

When the little insurance man returned to the island city and rejoined his great wife, he was surprised to find himself set upon once more by collection agents. Peewee grew hot around the collar. He was fit to be tied. Soon, however, by selling insurance himself rather than only adjusting, Peewee began to perceive a light at the end of the tunnel. And somewhere along in there, Peewee heard what no married man wants to hear: that, in his absence, the little woman had been putting out.

His first response was an unkind joke. He told Bella that before he’d consider making the love with her again, he would have to slam a five-pound picnic ham in her twat and pull out the bone. Bella gave him a good thrashing for that one.

A day later, Peewee was storming across Key West toward the Skelton Building on Eaton. Goldsboro Skelton was either going to buy a Homeowner’s, a Premium Endowment, and a costly Life, or Peewee was going to know the reason why.

“I’m here to see Mr. Goldsboro Skelton.”

“I’ll ring him,” said Bella.

Peewee entered Skelton’s office.

“How much of that jazz am I going to have to buy?” Goldsboro Skelton inquired of the American. Then just to show Skelton who he was dealing with, Peewee Knowles wrote out a check for a thousand dollars and lit his cigar with it.

That night Peewee entered Bella from beneath, figuring forth the rising aspirations that newly filled his breast like a thousand angry penguins. As for Bella, she lowered herself upon Peewee with a rubicund sense of her own age and history that soon had the temporarily forgotten Peewee calling for air.

* * *

Skelton laid his fear in like supplies. Up before the sun, he had the gear on his bed, his Polaroids hanging around his neck on monofilament. No wind yet; trees still in the dark; one or two lights on next door.

What does that strip-miner want to eat. He will eat what I give him. Skelton made four liver-sausage and onion sandwiches and put them in the wooden box with oranges and a six-pack of Gator Ade. Tackle was in the boat. Shrimp were in the live wells: six dozen chum, four dozen bait. He had to keep his eye on the ball: a trophy for Olie Slatt.

Ready. Skelton walked around the inside of the fuselage, opened his books with their pages of magic animals; he glanced at his own jejune speculations on DNA replication, graphs in Thompson on the variability of error, a sketch of hypertrophied feathers and prehensile fingers buried in whale flippers: his private, lost science.

* * *

There is something, he thought, that I am tired of.

Breakfast at Shorty’s: the famous French toast. Open-hearted fry cooks soar under the menu-cyclorama. The waitress with the blue hair cast a discriminating glance into the doughnut cabinet.

A black gentleman, the only other customer, slid the sugar bowl down the counter to Skelton with exquisite judgment of distance. Skelton fell in love with him. The other waitress, a blond indifferent trull, refilled Skelton’s coffee without his asking. He fell in love with her; and mooned between his two new paramours while his Shorty’s famous French toast chilled and glazed under a glossy patina of syrup.

I am in love, thought Skelton, though his glances seemed to embarrass both objects of his ardor.

Now let’s get over that and read the tide book so we will know where the trophies mean to be today.

TIDE TABLES

High and low water predictions

EAST COAST OF NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA

INCLUDING GREENLAND

He opened the book and stared at it a few long moments before realizing he didn’t need the predictions for Isla Zapara, Venezuela. Idly he eliminated Savannah River entrance, Galveston, and St. John, New Brunswick.

Key West, wintertime, was on page 122. He found his date and read:

0024 0.8

0518 0.0

1142 1.7

1906 0.7

With the three-hour Gulf lag at the Barracudas, he could have good early-incoming water first thing in the morning; then drop back to the Snipes on the West side of Turkey Basin; then Mud Keys, Harbor Keys, Bay Keys, Mule-and-Archer for the long shot on permit, and home; presumably, with a trophy for Olie Slatt to snow his neighbors with.

With that settled, Skelton began to fall out of love. He looked into the street and watched a chromed, rusting Chrysler Imperial glide by, and thought: How terribly depressing. Such an Imperial might rut its lust upon a Dodge Coronet, jetting transmission fluid into our roadway.

“The sun just doesn’t half seem to want to come up,” he said to the man down the counter, his spirit sinking quick.

“No, sure don’t,” said the man with a chuckle and holding his breath in case he should need to go on. The waitress said to Skelton, “You want to buy a Studebaker?”

“No. But thanks for asking.”

“Huh?”

Skelton’s hand, resting in his lap, began to feel for the boat keys; and not discovering them immediately he jumped to his feet and slapped at his pockets, quickly finding them. He sat down again.

It was time to head for the dock. The bill came to $1.40. Skelton had a twenty; he tucked it with the check under his coffee cup. The waitress came up.

“That’s good,” he said.

“I don’t get it.”

“Isn’t that enough for you?”

Skelton dug in his mouth with his fork and pried out the loose gold inlay, which he set upon the twenty and the check which enumerated French toast and coffee.

“Tell me when you’ve got enough,” he said.

“I’ve got enough,” she said.

“I can’t hear you.”

“I’ve got enough,” she said, somewhat louder. She was as white as the powdered jelly bismarcks behind her. There was something that Skelton was tired of.

“Who was that masked man?” asked the customer who had slid Skelton the sugar.

“I think he’s a guide.”

“He’s not right in the noggin.”

“You can say that again.”

“He’s not right in the noggin.”

“Ha-ha!”

The waitress liked to laugh; she sidled down the counter with half a mind to divvy up the inlay. She thought the customer was a real scream.

* * *

“My man here?”

“Not yet,” said Carter. Skelton climbed into the skiff and stowed the lunch. “Cart, grab me a block of ice, would you.” Carter brought the block in the tongs and swung it down from the dock; Skelton got the handle and eased the ice into the insulated box. It was too high. Carter handed him the ice pick and he chipped away, ice splintering and flying all over, until the lid would close. He tore the soft drinks from their cardboard and arrayed them around the ice block.

“What are you going to fish for?”

“I’m going to bonefish,” Skelton said. “I’ve got bonefish tides and I’m going to fish them. If Roy Rogers doesn’t want to bonefish, he can fuck off.”

“I’ve got a permit charter.”

“Well, you got the wrong goddamn tides.”

“I know, I know. What’s the matter with you?”

Skelton started shouting: “Why do these people want a guide? They can’t read tide tables but they already know what they want to fish for!”

“Boy, are you het up. Do like I do; make your moves until four o’clock; then run home and take his money.”

Olie Slatt arrived in a taxicab. He was wearing a men’s bikini and carrying a terrycloth beach bag. He was complected right for mine life and so it made a certain amount of abstract sense when he donned a bathrobe that came to the ground. He climbed aboard.

“I want a trophy.”

Skelton took the beach bag from him to stow it; inside were wrap-around La Dolce Vita sunglasses, a telephone book, bath clogs, and a roll of toilet paper.

So far Nichol Dance hadn’t shown. Carter’s people were around. First an anesthesiologist and a tool designer from Spokane who were fishing tomorrow; they wanted a brief casting lesson so they could practice up, a task compounded by a certain lack of simple motor control in either of them.

Then today’s customers arrived: the Rudleighs, who had abandoned Dance as “a nut case”; old pros in whites and deck shoes, they brought personal tackle boxes and two thermoses of Gibsons.

Skelton started the engine, warmed up briefly, and headed for the ocean. Carter watched him until he saw the skiff jump on plane, then turn downwind toward the backcountry.

Nichol Dance arrived about five minutes later. The Rudleighs backed away.

“We just sent off a guide on his maiden voyage,” said Carter.

“Don’t say.”

“Looked real organized. Had his lunch and gear all clean and layed out and rigged.”

“What’s he and that snake doctor out for?”

“Bonefish I believe…”

Dance nodded toward the two Rudleighs. “You fishing that lunchmeat, Cart?”

“Till four o’clock.”

“What kind of tides we got?”

“Five-eighteen Key West low.”

“That’d make the Barracuda Keys first stop for the new guide.”

“I suppose.”

Dance looked at Carter and laughed at him. “Where else? Toptree Hammock? Boy stole half that pattern off me.”

Dance was wearing a blue shirt with white dolphins all over it; short-sleeved, outside his pants. Dance was not robustly built but his strong arms made him look like a sport of some kind, a handball player, say.

Cart put his charter aboard and Dance got in his own skiff. Carter came out with a pack of cigarettes; he stopped on the dock and looked at Dance and tore the red thin strip of cellophane from the pack.

Then Dance’s engine wouldn’t start. Cart came over and primed it for him, pulled the plugs, replaced them, and then succeeded Dance in failing to start it.

“It ain’t gonna run,” he said, “I can hear it.”

Dance said in a vacuum, “Man oh man.”

“Do you want to borrow my skiff?” Carter asked him. Dance looked up; Carter was looking elsewhere.

“Do you want to borrow my gun?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want to lend me your skiff for?”

“I thought you could use it.”

“If I take your skiff, how are you going to pay for that cunt of yours’ shopping?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry, Cart. I am. I’m sorry I said that.”

“Nichol, my clients can see how upset you are.”

“All right, all right I’ll stop.”

“What do you want to do?” Carter asked again, resting his eyes on the highway, ticking off traffic, flow and volume.

“I don’t know what I want to do.”

“Do you want the skiff.”

“Yes, I’m going to take it.”

Carter and Dance walked up the dock to Carter’s boat. The Rudleighs were in the skiff now, lounging in the fighting chairs.

“Mister and Missus Rudleigh, can I ask you to get out please?”

The two climbed out bewildered.

“What’s up, Captain?”

“My friend needs the skiff. It’s looking more like miniature golf today.”

Rudleigh said, “Run it past us again, Captain, you were real unclear the first time.”

“I’m afraid our fishing is off. We have a kind of emergency to see to.”

“Well, we’ll be heading directly to the Chamber of Commerce,” said Rudleigh. “Do you have an official version of the event you’d like us to relay as to why a month-old date to fish was canceled?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What is it?”

“The captain — or guide — experienced a sudden loss of interest — or ambition — and flaked out without warning.”

* * *

Dance was gone in a roar.

* * *

“Honey,” called Skelton’s father to his mother from the bathroom, “scramble me four eggs and pour my coffee now so it will cool.”

He shaved very carefully and very thoroughly, preparing his face with a hot washcloth, brushing on the lather thick and hot, then drew stripes through the stubbled foam.

The conversion was quite startling; and once more the slightly olive skin was visible drawn across the facial bones that were those of an Iberian poet who was moved to verse only by a landscape with one tree and a full moon. Just as true, it was the face, if one believed such things, of someone incapable of cruelty; and deeply prone to folly.

He finished shaving, manicured his nails, combed his hair, and dressed for the day in one brisk motion after another; then strolled in for breakfast, which he ate while jotting notes to himself on a pad.

Today he was going to start something. He was trying to work it out on his pad, where he had written:

1. Fire

2. Air

3. Ocean

4. Streets

5. Houses

6. Space

He was still working on 7. It was his lucky number. He couldn’t decide between “Infinity” and “Waste Disposal.”

* * *

“I feel awful about that boy,” said Jeannie when she knew Dance had the boat.

“Why?”

“Because he is going to be killed!”

“Oh, Jeannie please. Nichol won’t hurt him.”

“What do you think he’s out there to do!”

Carter was thumb-indenting a neat four-in-hand for his visit to the Chamber of Commerce.

“Kill himself,” he said, “that seems pretty plain to me.” Then for the thousandth time he began to explain that no force on earth could keep a man from doing away with himself if that was what he was bound and determined to do. He checked the tie in the mirror; then raised his eyes to his own and thought: You are a hamster on a wheel and a low-breed dog in one.

“Jeannie, let’s us go out and buy something big.”

“Why hon?”

“Come on. Something big as all suicide to stand in the lawn. I think it should be some bright color or something to match the shutters.” Her face fell.

“No, you,” she said, frightening Carter for maybe the first time. “I think it’s something you should buy.”

It was a tough and gnarled remark that they would both get over; Jeannie would get over it first, deploying her bruised spirit among the New Year sales and One Time Only offers; first-to-come Jeannie would be the first served; until that undetermined hour when she is precipitated into the hole with the rest of us.

* * *

The flats appending the northwest end of the Barracuda Keys form a connection between that minute archipelago and Snipe Point. They are, in effect, the western rim of Turkey Basin, diurnally drawing two great sweeps of ocean across the turtle-grass flats, dividing the bank into beveled sections; which from the air resemble scarabs of an annealed green next to the sky-stained green of the Gulf of Mexico. Along the inner rim, there is a concentration of large and hazardous niggerheads.

Skelton started fishing the first of these flats on the incoming water, poling down light toward Snipe Point. They found four schools of bonefish on the first flat coming in with sting rays, bonnet sharks, and small cudas. They found two schools on the second flat, tailing on the edge of the creek and making a thirty- or forty-foot mud. Olie Slatt hooked his trophy in this second school, an exceptional bonefish. They drifted in on the tide while they fought the fish and Skelton boated it among the niggerheads.

He could hear Dance’s skiff the last ten minutes of the fight, but poled Slatt in on his prize and netted it succinctly. Dance ran right in on them and cut his engine. He climbed into Skelton’s boat with the gun in his hand and asked Skelton where he wanted it. Skelton pointed to the place he had imagined at the shopping plaza some time ago. And the question of his conviction or courage was answered. But this was not theater; and Dance shot him through the heart anyway. It was the discovery of his life.

Dance gave Slatt the heavy gun and sat in the bottom of the skiff next to Skelton.

Instead of shooting Dance, which is what Slatt first thought he owed the republic, Slatt hit him over the head a sledge blow with the gun. He kept hitting until he felt the head jelly under his blows. The empty skiff began to fall with the tide toward the sea.

Then he started the engine. He ran standing up, with Skelton and Dance, two foiled and strangely synchronous lives, in a pile at his feet. The white robe he wore carried behind him and he held the bright trophy to his chest. His jaws were parted slightly to the rush of air.

He was heading for A1A.