Panama by Thomas McGuane

Author:Thomas McGuane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

7

I CAME HOME Wednesday night loaded, having had enough of the writer. An isometric bull with the jaws of a wolf was guarding the door to the patio. So I knew I needed coffee. It was raining.

The instant coffee dropped in veils through a fathom of hot water and then a cockroach fell off a framed recipe into it and drowned. I flipped him out with a butter knife and bethought myself of change and a new life.

O Catherine, don’t leave your dead meteor! I’ll be better for you and the weeping will end. I’ll be better for you and the weeping will end.

* * *

Yet when I awakened, something still hung over me. I went over to Francis Street for bollos and coffee and was taken aside, right on the sidewalk, by a man who wanted to know if I had any angles on local attics. He was a collector of everything but especially of barbed wire and Orange Crush bottles. He had the world’s largest collection of early New Mexico burglar alarms and that wasn’t even an area of specialization for him. “No attics,” I said simply.

He said, “Take it easy, pal. I’m not gonna bite you.”

I ate the bollos and drank the coffee. Back out on the street, I noticed something: my shadow was pointing in the wrong direction. I was walking toward the sun and my shadow was straight out in front of me.

Then the police pulled the big cruiser up alongside of me and kept it at walking speed until I nipped up Lopez Lane and bought an aloe plant for a dime.

When I got to Roxy’s, all was not well with her. She was now engaged to marry Peavey and she was rolling around the floor, fully dressed, crushing a fine old straw hat with each revolution. I ordered her to her feet. She got into a kind of crouch and ran across the room into an armoire. That was the end of the hat. Then the phone book walked to the sofa like an octopus before it sloughed to a stop.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. She got up and began to march. Her diphthongs seemed to last forever.

“I’m never going to enjoy life,” she said. “I hate everything.”

I got out of there.

* * *

They are raising the contents of a wrecked galleon below Key West, Nuestra Señora de Atocha. There is distress; for, in addition to the numerous pieces of eight, they are finding coke spoons. There has been an attempt to describe these as spoons for ear wax. They won’t go in an ear. The divers knew what they were. They find jeweled rosaries and crosses; they find swords. The divers pay off bar tabs with pieces of eight. Where did all that coke go? And how much did this New World brain-raker have to do with the Golden Age of Spain?

They hauled two cannons up on the beach at the foot of Greene Street. Catherine and I went to look at them.

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