Free Ninety-Two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane

about that in Key West, Goldsboro,” said the lady. She was fifty and heavy. Her name was Bella Knowles. Her husband, an insurance broker who dabbled in gunrunning, now made his home on the Isle of Pines.
    He said, “I was trying out that tone before I talk to my grandson. I have got to set that little smartbutt on the straight and narrow or he will end up in a bassinet like his old man.”
    â€œYou should have let him go to jail rather than hang out with charter-boat fishermen.”
    â€œHurry up with your drink. I’m fixing to carry on.” He sat on the edge of the trampoline that dominated the room. Light from high, milky windows flooded into the little gym.
    â€œI’ll sip as long as I please.”
    â€œLong as you sip fast!”
    â€œYou’re talking to a lady and the only one you’ll ever get.” Goldsboro Skelton rolled the medicine ball off the tremulous surface of the trampoline; it slumped to the floor.
    â€œWell…”
    The strange couple—the etiolated, successful crook and the rounded helpmeet of an imprisoned gunrunner—undressed without ceremony, the rickety and the ample in curious counterpart as they bent to slide off socks.
    Playfully, Goldsboro Skelton, Cuban bullet holes still dimpling his hind end, mounted the trampoline and began to hop around, veinous fists clenched next to his ears in simple heroics. Now he was making some fairly impressive leaps, not ignored by Bella Knowles. She joined him.
    At first they bounced in an irregular pattern, Skelton going up at the moment Bella touched down. They stopped for a moment toe to toe and fiddled with one another, and then began to bound again, this time in the same rhythm. As they each looked at the leaping and speeding against the far wall, Goldsboro Skelton was an arrow of capability to Bella Knowles, a pinksurge of desire.
    Beneath them, the black iron perimeter of the trampoline enlarged and contracted with their bounds. The thousands of springs that held its canvas surface squeaked like lemmings, unlubed harquebus locks or tholepins.
    Then they collided, recoiled apart, bounced each unequally through high air to a delirium of limbs, glanced off the trampoline, and crashed to the floor.
    They lay without motion. Reassured gym flies began to whirl in the light of the high windows once more. At that moment, Goldsboro Skelton’s grandson was reading the part in Pliny’s Natural History where the swell of tide at moon’s rising among the stars is described. And in other respects, life went on, though it seemed largely unassured here in the gym.
    Presently Goldsboro Skelton began to crawl immediately behind his own nosebleed toward Bella Knowles. When he got to her he looked at her open eyes above the terribly fattened lip. Skelton staggered to his feet for a glass of water, which he held tenderly to her mouth. “The French have a word for this,” he remarked with some preoccupation.
    â€œWhat is it, you cheesy piece of bung fodder?” Bella Knowles inquired.
    *   *   *
    At dusk, the light can’t get much past Carlos’s market on Elizabeth Street; so when you walk down Eaton to go to Skelton’s mother’s house, and look down William Street or Elizabeth Street, the shrimp boats are crowded hugely in the shadow of those streets while the clouds of gulls above them soar in sunlight; and on the corners, palm leaves that are piled for pickup and that rattle all day with lizards in the warmth now are cool and quiet.
    When you pass the corner of Simonton, the mail trucks are backed up to bays that are closed with corrugated doors, and at least one boy is doing a figure eight in the quiet parking lot on his bicycle; and the glass and iron pineapples on the gate at the Carriage Trade look like scarabs held in old silver.
    Duval Street, crowded and Latin all day, now seems filled with space and breeze, serenely modified by a taxicab spinning along in