Panama by Thomas McGuane Page A

retrieving funds from the depraved pervert wishing well. As you know, I have been beset by impostors. Years ago numerous elephants lost their lives in Western Europe at the hands of people who had no idea what a batting practice machine was. An enterprising Frenchman emerged in Brazilian soccer clothes; but that wasn’t the point. That odd young fellow, Chris Burden, who shoots himself, was closer to me and my elephant than these deluded Europeans. The main thing is that impostors have been my cross. The worst of them was at the well today.
    I emerged from my home by the sea in shorts and drugstore flipflops. I was not anxious to run into anyone, as I had been making notes to myself that morning on my stomach with a ballpoint while I drank my coffee and greeted the new day. I hadn’t had a chance for a shower; and I knew that from a stranger’s point of view, I did look a bit like something from the National Geographic. At any rate, there was a stranger at the well. In human history, one of the most terrifying appearances is that of the stranger at the well. The truth is, if I had still been in the same business of my recent years, I would have included this in my repertoire. He peered at the upside-down map of the Lesser Antilles on my stomach, the word “Antigua” scrawled across my belly button. I really shouldn’t have come out.
    He was dressed in clean white ducks stylishly unpressed. A chambray shirt and a handsome old blazer. He wore deck shoes on brown sockless ankles. He was a well-groomed man in his fifties and he carried a small, heavy satchel that said “Racquetball” on its side. When I appeared, he reached inside and began throwing handfuls of silver dollars into the well.
    â€œNow will you talk to me?” he said. “I am your father.”
    â€œThis is a cruel ploy to take with an orphan,” I told him. I wondered if he would ever find his son. He kept showering the silver dollars into the well, as if to say I would not talk to him otherwise. The pathos of this empty gesture is absolutely all that kept me there.
    â€œYou touch me with your desperation,” I said. “And I advise you to roll up your pants and get your money back. You’ve got the wrong Joe.” With this he angrily emptied the whole satchel into the water. I would never touch that haunted money.
    â€œNow listen you sonofabitch. I haven’t got all day. I’m going to find out if you’re compos mentis before I go back to Ohio or know the reason why. I’m trying to have a well-earned rest on my yacht, which I have maintained at the dock for five years unused in anticipation of this holiday, and I’m pissing the entire deal away running down my birdbrain, notorious son who refuses to admit I exist.”
    It was quiet for a long time.
    â€œWhy?” I asked.
    â€œBecause it’s all I want!” he said, and his voice caught. He turned away. He hurled the racquetball bag into the well and walked off to a waiting car.
    So, you see?

8
    I DECIDED that if I was to break out of my present pattern of impoverishment, sorrows, and anger, and stop waiting for everything with Catherine to repair itself, then I would have to fly in the face of my instincts and perhaps discipline myself and do things I didn’t want to do and make friends with Peavey even though he was robbing my stepmother of what was rightfully hers and ensconcing himself in her Florida room with his associates and his bimbo secretary. This was not going to be easy. This was going to be a bitch. But if I succeeded, I might begin to make sense to other people too.
    I got there rather early in the morning. Mary, the housekeeper, was sitting on the front stoop, drunk. I said good morning and she attempted a reply but could only make a bubble, though it was a good-sized one. I stepped past her and went into the house. I saw Peavey immediately. He looked up at me without acknowledgment, crossed to the Florida