Vineyard Fear

by Philip Craig

  VINEYARD FEAR

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  For my grandchildren, Jessica and Peter Harmon, who live with their parents in the Colorado mountains far, very far, from Martha’s Vineyard and the singing sea.

  “There are always many more disordered states than there are ordered ones.”

  —Stephen W. Hawking

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME

  “Though lovers be lost love shall not;

  And death shall have no dominion.”

  —Dylan Thomas

  “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”

  — 1 —

  The first time, I thought that I’d just been involved in a near-miss accident. The second time, I thought I’d almost killed myself. The third time, I realized that someone wanted me dead. I couldn’t imagine why. But then many a murder victim probably has a look of surprise on his face.

  If the bluefish hadn’t gone north early or if the bonito had arrived on time, maybe none of it would have happened to me, but late July found the waters around Martha’s Vineyard so barren of fish that it seemed the usually fertile sea was dead, and I worked the beaches in vain. I didn’t have any better luck fishing from the Shirley J., either, partially because the midsummer winds were fluky and weak and an eighteen-foot catboat is none too swift in the best of conditions. Unlike the power boats, whose speed was not dependent upon the winds, the Shirley J. was slow to get out to the shoals and just as slow returning home, and I had little daylight fishing time between going and coming back. Not that it would have made much difference, since the shoals were almost as empty of fish as the shore and the guys in power boats weren’t doing much better than I was in the Shirley J.

  I was bored and eating the early summer’s catch out of my freezer instead of fresh stuff out of the sea.

  Of course I could have been eating shellfish. Martha’s Vineyard, and Edgartown in particular, has some of the East Coast’s finest shellfishing ponds, after all. I could have had clams, quahogs, mussels, or maybe even some oysters, in spite of the truism that you’re really only supposed to eat oysters in months with an “r” in their names. The “oysters are mushy and tasteless in warm months” theory is not necessarily gospel. I’ve eaten good Vineyard oysters in the middle of the summer.

  But I didn’t want any shellfish. Eating shellfish bored me.

  Everything bored me. If I hadn’t been bored, I never would have gone across Vineyard Sound to America, and if I hadn’t done that, then . . .

  The real problem was not the lack of fish. I had gone fishless before. The problem was that Zee had left the island for a month. I had learned about this plan for the first time in the spring, when we were down on Wasque Point on a very brisk May morning waiting for the blue-fish to arrive.

  Zee, wearing her waders, a sweater, a hooded sweatshirt, and her topsider jacket, did not look like her normal slender self. Her apparent bulk did not fool me, though, because I knew what she looked like in warm weather. She and I had been alternating between making casts out toward the light buoy to the south of the point (one way to determine which way “straight out” is, when it’s too dark to see anything) and coming back to the truck for its meager warmth, and coffee from my large, stainless steel thermos jug.

  I was as bundled up as she was, because it wasn’t yet sunup and the southwest wind, blowing in from the sea, was cold. Moreover, the heater in my ancient, rusty Toyota Land Cruiser was none too good and you had to wear a lot of clothes to keep warm anytime the air was chill, even if you weren’t going fishing.

  When Zee came up to the truck, I would usually go down and make my casts, just so one of us would have a line in the water most of the time. Sometimes, though, we were both in the cab at the same time, drinking coffee and listening either to the C and W station from Rhode Island, which for some reason I can pick up well on Wasque, or to the classical station over in Chatham.

  Gradually the sky lightened in the east, most brightly just to the left of where Nantucket lay right over the horizon, and then the sun inched into sight behind low clouds and climbed until it was a huge orange-red ball of fire coloring the sky and setting the ocean momentarily aflame. I put my rod in the spike on the front of the Land Cruiser, and dug out the slingshot I’d made from a piece of leather and two thongs. I picked up some choice pebbles from the edge of the surf. I smiled at Zee.

  “Watch this.”

  I put a stone in the sling and whipped it down the beach.

  “You see that? I hit that tree dead center.”

  I threw another stone. Zee got out of the truck.

  “I used to do this when I was a kid,” I said. “Yesterday I was reading Samuel again; you know, the part where David and Goliath are promising to feed each other’s flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, just before David does Goliath in, and I remembered making these things, so I made this one. Nifty, isn’t it? And I haven’t lost the old skill either. It must be like riding a bicycle.’ ”

  “There’s no tree there,” said Zee.

  “Use your imagination,” I said. “Watch this. There! I got it again. Great, eh?”

  “You’re a sick man, Jefferson.”

  “If you’ll just call some fish in, I won’t have to do this. Wow! Another hit! Ah, I have the golden touch! You want to try?”

  “No. Put that away, and have some coffee.”

  “I used to make slingshots out of forked pieces of wood and strips of rubber from old inner tubes, too, and later I had a BB gun. Ah, this brings it all back.” I grinned at her, put away the slingshot, snagged my coffee cup from the dashboard, and watched the birth of yet another day. There is no prettier place to see it happen. Zee leaned on the truck beside me.

  “How did you manage to become such a saint, after such a violent childhood?” she asked.

  “Moral vigor,” I said. I waved at the ocean. “I have a hunch that just at the exact moment when I finish this coffee and walk down there and make my cast there’ll be a fish out there waiting for the plug to hit the water.”

  “Sure,” said Zee. “I think that’s about the tenth time you’ve made that prediction this morning.”

  “I was just practicing before. This time I mean it.”

  “I’m going away for most of August,” said Zee.

  I drank my coffee.

  “I’m going to a women’s conference up in New Hampshire.”

  “You don’t have to tell me where you’re going.”

  “I thought you might want to know. It’s a conference on ‘Women in the Health Professions.’ ”

  Zee was a nurse. “It’s probably a good time to go,” I said. “The fish will be going away and you’ll get to miss the August People.” Some of the island cops say the August People are more trouble than either the June People or the July People.

  “I’ve been thinking about going to medical school,” said Zee.

  I hadn’t heard that before. I finished the coffee and held the cup in my hand, looking at the rising sun. “You’d make a good doctor.”

  “I haven’t decided yet. That’s one reason I’m going to the conference.”

  I was still surprised about the medical school idea. “It must be some conference if it lasts a month.”

  “There are two conferences, actually. The medical one and then another one about women’s lives. Some of the same people will be at both of them. Then I’m going to just take some time off and be by myself for a while. Maybe I’ll eve
n go see my folks.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  “I’m going to make a cast,” said Zee. She took her nice eleven-and-a-half-foot graphite rod out of its spike and walked down to the silvery-red water. The waves weren’t too big, but the water was chilly if you let it splash up into the front of your waders. Zee walked the receding water down, made her long, straight cast, and stepped back before the next wave hit the beach. Out toward the whitecaps in the Wasque rip I saw her Roberts hit the water.

  I looked to the west. A couple of trucks were coming along the beach. One of them looked like George Martin’s Jeep and the other looked like Iowa’s pickup. They were planning to hit the rip two hours before the turning of the west tide. Not a bad idea. Zee and I had arrived four hours before the turning and had nothing to show for it. So much for the Early Bird theory. As I looked west, I heard Zee yell and turned to watch a huge swirl surround her plug. A bluefish, sure as taxes!

  “Get on there!” encouraged Zee, slowing her reel.

  Another swirl, but no hit. Zee inched the plug in. A Roberts is about as good a surface plug as I know. It catches fish sometimes when nothing else seems to do. Zee flicked her rod tip and the Roberts jumped a bit at the end of her line. The bluefish took another whack at it and missed again.

  “Come on!” said Zee, encouragingly. Another swirl. Her rod bent. “There!” She jerked up the rod tip to set the hook and the Roberts flew through the air. “Damn!”

  I grabbed my rod and made my cast as I reached the surf. Zee’s plug was back in the water and sure enough there was another swirl right on it.

  “Look at that!” cried Zee. “There he is again! And again! He can’t catch it, the rascal! Come on, fish, catch it!”

  But the fish did not catch it. He swirled and flashed and hit it with his nose and chased it all the way into the surf, but he never got it.

  Meanwhile, about two turns on the reel in from the end of my cast, I was on. I felt the hit, set the hook, and heard the reel sing.

  “Get him!” Zee grinned at me and made her second cast and a moment later we were both on, rods bent, lines cutting through the water.

  They were fighters, and they walked us down the beach before we got them in. Nice ten-pounders, just up from the Carolinas/ We were carrying them to the Land Cruiser when George and Iowa pulled up beside us and got out. There was a passenger in Iowa’s pickup. A woman.

  “Perfect timing,” said George, taking his rod off his roof rack.

  “What’s that Madieras person doing here?” said Iowa. “Women belong in the kitchen, not out here catching us men’s fish.”

  “I left a couple for you,” said Zee, “but you won’t catch them by standing around complaining.”

  “All right, all right,” said Iowa, getting his rod and following George down to the surf. “Getting so a man’s got no place to call his own. Damned women are everywhere. I thought I told you not to bring her out here anymore, J.W.”

  “Just because your wife’s too smart to hang around listening to you grouse all day doesn’t mean I have to forsake the company of the fairer sex,” I said.

  “Nothing fair about Zee,” said Iowa, making his cast. “She’s caught a lot of fish that rightfully belonged to me. Whoops! On, by Gadfrey!”

  And he was. And so was George. And moments later, so were Zee and I.

  As I brought my fish in, I looked at the passenger sitting in Iowa’s pickup. She was a youngish woman, one I’d not seen before. Several fish later, the young woman was out of the pickup, getting a closer look at the action on the beach.

  “My niece,” yelled Iowa over the sound of the surf. He took a fish off his plug and gestured all around. “Gerry, these characters live off the fish they steal from me. That’s George, that’s J.W., that’s Zee. She’s the worst of the bunch. Everybody, this is my niece, Geraldine Miles. Visiting from Iowa City. Brought up all wrong. Doesn’t know a damned thing about fishing. Trying to teach her how to live right!”

  The woman smiled and Iowa was headed back to the surf.

  “Gangbusters,” said Zee an hour later.

  The fish had gone, but we’d gotten our share and the five of us were standing by the trucks drinking George’s coffee since Zee and I had almost finished our own before the fish had hit.

  “Not bad, not bad,” Iowa said. “Even a woman could catch ’em today.”

  Zee pretended to peek into his fishbox. “How many did you get onto the beach? One? Two? A bent rod doesn’t mean a thing. They don’t count until you land them, you know.”

  “You’re hard,” said Iowa. He had at least ten fish in his box and was feeling good.

  Geraldine Miles drank coffee with us, smiled, and was quiet. She moved in an unnatural, awkward way, as though some of her bones hurt. She was a pretty woman about Zee’s age, with brownish hair and a milky skin. At first I thought that she was shy. After a short time, though, I suddenly realized she was more troubled than shy. I studied her when she wasn’t looking and decided that her smiles were more polite than real, that she was trying to be happy rather than actually being happy. The fact that she’d gotten up in the wee hours to come to Wasque with Iowa when she knew nothing at all about fishing suggested two things: that Iowa, who normally went fishing alone or with his dog or very occasionally with his wife, Jean, who did not share his fanatical love of surf casting, was trying to get his niece occupied with things other than those troubling her, and that she was agreeable to such distractions.

  Maybe she had come to the island to escape problems at home. I knew something about that, having come to live on the island for the same reasons several years before. Now I felt a sympathy for her, but had my own desire for distraction. Zee would be away for the last month of the summer, and I wasn’t really up to thinking about that yet.

  “I see you hauled the Mattie and put her back in again,” said George. “Kind of early, isn’t it? John Skye doesn’t usually come down until the middle of June.”

  John Skye was a professor at Weststock College who hired me to keep an eye on his house and boat in the winter and to get both ready for his arrival for the summer. If you’re going to live on Martha’s Vineyard year-round, you take jobs like that. The Mattie was his big old wooden catboat. She floated at her stake in the harbor all winter and sometimes I had to chop ice away from her hull. In the spring I hauled her, painted her bottom and topsides, and dropped her back in. An old wooden boat will last forever if you keep her painted and in the water. Haul her out and put her in the barn, she’ll dry up and fall apart.

  I looked away from Geraldine Miles. “I got a call from John,” I said. “Seems that he’s making his house and boat available to a professor he works with. John does that sort of thing sometimes. If he’s not here, he’ll let other professorial types use his place. This guy and some students are coming down to the island to do a study of some sort. Everything’s got to be ready and waiting for them.”

  “More for you to do now, but less to do later,” nodded George.

  “When are they coming?” asked Zee.

  “Next week. They’ll be here about ten days, I guess.”

  “And then John and Mattie and the girls will be here.” Zee was fond of the Skyes.

  “I don’t think so. According to John, Mattie and the twins are going out to Colorado for the summer.”

  “There’s no ocean in Colorado,” said Iowa. “There’s no bluefish. Why would anybody want to go there?”

  “There’s no ocean or bluefish in Des Moines, either,” Zee reminded him.

  Iowa was a retired high school superintendent. “Yeah,” he said, “but I was smart enough to leave Iowa as soon as they’d let me go! Well, I suppose they can’t fish for trout out there in the Rockies. That way the trip won’t be a total waste of time.”

  “Not everybody likes to fish,” said Zee.

  Iowa’s eyes widened. “Is that a fact? I never knew.”

  “John came from out there someplace,” explained George. “Grew up on
a cattle ranch before he came east. Mattie and the girls went out there to meet his mother after he and Mattie got married, and the three of them fell in love with the place.”

  “The twins are horse crazy,” added Zee. “And they love the mountains.”

  “Well, the mountains are okay . . .” grumbled Iowa.

  In the warming morning sunshine, Geraldine Miles pushed the sleeves of her sweatshirt up, then caught herself and pulled them down again, but not before I saw the bruises on her upper arms. Her eyes flicked around and met mine. She looked away.

  “Not a bad choice of summer vacations.” said George. “The mountains of Colorado or Martha’s Vineyard. Too bad you can’t be both places at once.”

  “Maybe they’ll split the season,” I said. “Half out there, half here.”

  “The perfect solution,” said Zee. “I’d love to go to Colorado someday.”

  “The Vineyard will do for me,” I said, wondering if that would still be true if Zee went off to medical school. How long did medical school take? Four years? And then there’d be a residency. How much longer would that be?

  “Well, I’d like to go out there,” said Zee.

  “Good idea,” said Iowa. “I’ll be glad to help, if you’ll just leave right now and stay away from my bluefish till the derby’s over this fall. Now lemme see if I’ve got any money here . . .” He pretended to dig in his pocket.

  Geraldine Miles smiled and the rest of us laughed. But I was wondering if Zee was developing a sugar foot. Was the wander-thirst on her? Was the island giving her cabin fever? First she was going to New Hampshire and now she’d like to go to Colorado.

  As things turned out, I was the one who went to Colorado. I nearly died there, in fact.

  — 2 —

  Martha’s Vineyard is verdant island surrounded by golden sand beaches. It lies about five miles south of Cape Cod and lives off its tourists. Ten thousand year-round islanders play host to a hundred thousand summer visitors who bring in the money which oils the island’s gears. The year-rounders labor mightily in the summer, some working two or three jobs, some renting out their houses and summering illegally in tents or shacks; many then go on unemployment during the winter.