Ninety-Two in the Shade Page 2

  He looked at Roy.

  “Roy, I’d go to Raiford Prison over you, if I needed.”

  “I see that.”

  When Tom Skelton came back, they sat to wait. First the ambulance came and took off the dockmaster. Then Nichol Dance handed Skelton a ledger of his bookings and told him to use the skiff. “I will call you from the joint as to what cut from your proceeds would be usual.”

  “How did you pick me?”

  “If I gave the bookings to Cart, I’d lose them. Anybody you’d guide I’m going to get back.”

  It was a messy beginning. Still, he could regard his start with no sense of incursion by the events that surrounded it. He had enormous hopes for the future. He considered: mucus egg congestions are related to radiant sea creatures via indecipherable links of change.

  * * *

  “I can remember,” said Skelton’s Mother, “that autumn so clearly because I was expecting you. A man from Sugarloaf had been stung to death by bees on one of the Indian mounds and they brought him into Key West. They took him right over to the newspaper and laid out the corpse on the steps of the old city hall to get some pictures, but a colored man’s dog wouldn’t stop howling and leave them be. So they threw the corpse into a Ford sedan and drove it to the funeral parlor. The face was as big as that with bee stings and the colored man’s dog chased the car and wouldn’t stop howling until his owner ran him off to the shrimp dock. The dog got down under the pilings and kept on howling. That night when the boats went out you could hear the howling over all those shrimpers’ engines and your father went down and brought the dog home and put him in the cistern with five pounds of sirloin until the howling stopped.”

  Skelton, still and listening, felt himself to be moving through the house, the full vacancy of its rooms, thinking, So much has been lost. In this heat, every garbage pail is full of fish skeletons and this town smells of the special lizard stench of churches or catacombs; narcosis dying as slowly as the life that would replace it.

  * * *

  Miranda’s hallway: A spindly mahogany end table to which the termites have had access for a hundred years sustains a green Mason jar with its lost patent numerals in heavy glass; and holding in its opaque vegetable water from the Keys Aqueduct, ribbed orange squash-blossoms in their delicately emblematic subdivision of light.

  It was cool in there, a house holding a beloved woman, the aural penetrations of a Cuban side street and the Gulf of Mexico in an upper window.

  Skelton perplexed himself as to how many dead had been transported through this hallway. If you had a specific answer to that, you would possess innumerable anecdotes about mortality with which to regale your friends; or if you had no friends, then to address to that not so finite darkness in which we are all corporate shareholders. The trick, finally, Skelton knew, was to keep them rolling in the aisles, saving the best one for last, about how we die and die and die.

  What a thought. I am going to fuck my way out of this one. Miranda used to do reds, crossed her sevens, and had a Leo rising. She was Skelton’s girl, a pretty thing whose long black hair carried behind her as she walked.

  The wooden fan made no sound in the front room. The door to the bedroom was ajar. Skelton paused midway across the room and felt a rising cold pass up through him as he began to hear through the doorway the bed’s rachitic sprung utterance. Skelton tried without amusing himself to think of this as an unspeakable pubic disaster. Pain. He stepped sideways very slightly and saw against that band of further space the writhing within; and could not keep himself from saying, “… Miranda…” so that the front-room quiet fell across everything like an eclipse.

  “Tom?”

  “Yes…”

  “I’m making love. Wait out there till I’m through.”

  Skelton walked to the window as though riding a thermal. Not able to stand in one place, he returned to the table, rifled through the sewing box, removed a small silver snuffbox, a pocket mirror, and a razor blade. He opened the snuffbox with trembling fingers and tapped out a little heap of cocaine on the mirror. He divided the pile and drew it out in two long thin white lines; blocked first one nostril, then the other, and drew the cocaine into each.

  He leaned back into the chair and tuned his ears once again to the bed’s noise, which seemed to open and close in the room, tenebrous as a bird’s claw. But by the time his nose numbed and his throat seemed to not quite close any longer, it had come to seem that the bed was not unmusical. And once its noise had stopped, he shared the exhausted breathing and relief from within. Across the room, the tall window suspended a pure convexity of luminous air toward Skelton; and in the door he had entered was a bar of fluorescing sun. He began to imagine that he could feel Key West urge itself against the Atlantic like a ship of terrible slow movement. The chrysalis he sometimes felt inside was beginning to shed and stream quite lambently.

  “Tom?”

  “Ah, Miranda.”

  “Are you blown away?”

  “A little.”

  “Because you were upset?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Michael.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Michael.

  “That’s all right. Did you have a nice time?”

  “Yes, very.”

  “Well, that’s fine.”

  Michael said, “I’ve got a plane to make.”

  “Well, good to see you and it’s fine with me that you had a nice time … and uh that there is a plane for you to make…”

  “Thanks.” A perfunctory kiss to Miranda and away with him. When he was gone, Miranda said, “You didn’t fire anything?”

  “Uh-uh. Couple blows of your coke. What’s that noise?”

  “Michael going out.”

  “Sounded like the house falling down.”

  “Tom, I had this incredible orgasm.”

  “Do I have to hear about your organism too?”

  “Just this one. It was like a whole dream of sweet things to eat. I mean, it all came to mind. Spun sugar, meringue, whipped egg whites, and all these clear German cake icings—”

  “How about when your chum shot off? Was it a blintz or an omelet?”

  “Ask him.” She held Skelton’s head standing beside him. He ran his hand up to her openness. That one hurt too; fragments of a life presumed dead. When would the light come. He would have to watch that pale cocaine edge pale like acetylene flame. And how could you dream of The Garden when what you would have had her have would have been a kind of beer fart: or, at best, the relief of a scarcely visible blackhead yielding to opposed thumbnails. Here it had been everything short of glacéed almonds and it made Skelton mean. When the shining city is at hand, a special slum will be built for me and my meanness. I will be the person, if that’s what I am, in the slum; there will be one of everything; one rat, one tin can. The shining city will beckon in the distance. The shadow of the Bakunin monument will not quite stretch to my door. In the evening, the sound of happy syndicalist badminton finals will be borne to me on a sweet wind that sours as it enters my slum. I will behave poorly.

  “Tom, what’s the matter?”

  “Jealousy.”

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

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

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

  “—I know.”

  “For whom there was always at least affection.”

  “I understand.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes.”

  “Once?”

  “No, three times.”

  “And what were the women like?”

  “They were types.”

  “They were all three types?”

  “Two were types and one was a junkie.”

  “And what was I?”

  “You were my girl.”

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

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

  “I guess.”

  “Michael used to be my lover.”

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

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know better than to be this way.”

  “I know but you just are.”

  “I’ll ride it out.”

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

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

  “That’s dreadful.”

  “I know.”

  “Why did you tell me that?”

  “There uh was some connection…”

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

  “Yes!”

  “Well, what was it,” Miranda demanded.

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

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

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

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  * * *

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

  He dialed his mother’s house.

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

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

  “Is he over there?”

  “He came on the bike.”

  “How’s Dad taking it?”

  “Not so well, to tell the truth.”

  “Okay. I’ll get by.”

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