Free Ninety-Two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane Page B

well-organized bit of cruelty. The touch of authenticity had been the story of Charlie Starkweather, who Skelton remembered as a kind of anachronistic dry-gulch artist running through the West; who got wired to a Nebraska utility outlet in a metal chair by officials of the republic. Restaurants darkened and Starkweather went off like a flashbulb at Tricia’s wedding. It reduced his bulk through vaporization. He no longer fitted the electrical collar. They found him in the goodbye room like a wind-torn 1890 umbrella. A year later he might have grown Virginia creeper like a grape stake. After each electrocution, the officials of the republic get together for a real down-home Christian burial out of that indomitable American conviction that even God likes fried food.
    â€œI didn’t know you had this affection for violence,” said his father as humor, studying his eyes gone vague beneath his Starkweather revery.
    â€œI don’t.”
    â€œHad you been emotionally forced into it?”
    â€œMore or less.”
    â€œAre you going to admit it?”
    â€œNo. I’m not going to pay for it either.”
    â€œI can’t imagine this happening among scientists.”
    â€œI’m not a scientist and I’m not going to be one. It takes all the brains I’ve got to figure out where game fish keep themselves.”
    â€œAnd you never got into these cross fires until you started reading French poets. Furthermore, when your grandfather offered to bail you out, you didn’t make yourself plausible to him by asking him to bring your Apollinaire instead.”
    â€œWell, he didn’t know what I was talking about. Jakey Roberts gave me his copy of Swank and I read a short history of Spanish fly instead of L’Hérésiarque et Cie. ”
    â€œThose frog lunatics have produced a generation of destructive addlepates to which I fear you appending yourself. Though I’d prefer it to your fiddling with dope, it’s a narrow choice.”
    Little does he know, thought Skelton.
    The two men laughed; possibly close to tears. Skelton peeled up one end of the netting and twisted it over the corner of the frame. “That’s not true.” He could look at his father.
    â€œWhat’s not?” his father asked.
    â€œAbout Apollinaire and the others.”
    â€œDon’t you think?”
    â€œI’d say Nietzsche produced more addlepates.”
    â€œWhat about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky?”
    â€œWhat about Kahlil Gibran?”
    â€œWhat about Tex Ritter?” And so on through Father Coughlin, Darius Milhaud, Stockhausen, Donald Duck, Baba Ram Dass, Lenin, a certain Bürgermeister in a Milwaukee beer ad, guitar fops from the hideous 1960s, Thomas Edison—and more laughter. Then, mock serious, his father took up his violin and played the opening of Corrinne Corrina hillbilly style and beautiful. Skelton lit a powdery Dutch cigar and listened in a swoon of those sad clodhopper strains, dying day, newspaper boys yelling faintly as they filled their baskets; a swoon that was as much as anything a part of his more than trifling instinct for some kind of topographical perspective upon his own life, as against a vision of cycling chemicals in a closed system that somehow never explained the attrition of the things that ail you.
    He could hear the quarterback now calling signals in the new style: “Blue! Right! Get back! Eighty! Red!” Snap. The play was underway. The quarterback rolled out in a fake draw.
    *   *   *
    Skelton’s grandfather stepped onto the porch in a fog of cooking smells and looked across at the two of them talking with an air of reconnaissance. He made a minute adjustment of his shoulders before coming over.
    â€œWhat happened to your nose, Gramp?” Skelton asked. His grandfather raised fingers to the swollen bridge.
    â€œDamn trunk lid on my Coupe de Ville popped up and got my beezer.”
    A hand reached out