by Philip Craig
We walked on. After a while I noticed that it was dark.
“We’d better get back,” I said.
We turned and walked back up the lane toward the lighted windows in John’s house.
Outside of John’s door, we paused. Zee looked up at me.
“Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Will you love me if I go away in August?”
“Yes.”
“Because I am going to go.”
“I know.”
She put her head against my chest and I put my hand in her hair and pressed her against me. I could feel my heart beating.
After a while we went inside to escape the night. John looked at us thoughtfully.
Long afterward, I wondered if, far away, someone else had been looking out at the same darkness, his soul cold, his feelings twisted, forming the plan which would, in not too great a time, lead him to stalk me through that curious moral jungle where manhunters seek their prey.
— 4 —
Three days after John’s supper, I got word about when they were going to open the Edgartown Great Pond. This annual exercise is to insure that salt water gets into the pond so the shellfish there won’t die. The opening through South Beach is dug by heavy equipment and for a while the tides sweep in and out of the pond, allowing the fresh water to escape and the ocean water to run in. After not very long, Nature closes up the opening again, but by that time the shellfish are in good shape for another year. Since I do my oystering in the Great Pond, I have a personal interest in those shellfish. Moreover, while the opening is open, it is a popular place for fishing, since both bass and bluefish are attracted by the bait that is carried by the tides in and out of the pond. For reasons which elude me, the exact time of the opening of the pond is not widely publicized, and fishermen play games trying to be among the earliest at the new opening. This year my hot tip turned out to be true, and I was there at dawn when the bass showed up.
I didn’t normally fish for bass since I don’t hunt for fish I can’t keep, and the minimum keepable length for bass that year was 36 inches, which meant that most of the ones you’d catch you’d end up throwing back. The minimum length rule was in force because for years the bass population had been declining and efforts were being made to bring the fish back. I also didn’t like to keep the bigger fish because they’re mostly the females who lay the eggs.
But this year I did a bit of bass fishing, so I could tag them and let them go again. It was part of an effort to learn more about the migratory and other habits of the fish. The tagging was simple and, according to the island’s resident marine biologist, painless to the fish: You ran a needle, threaded with a strip of plastic printed with the address of the Littoral Society in New Jersey, through the fish’s flesh just behind the dorsal fin, knotted the plastic, and let the fish go. You recorded the size of the fish and the time and place of the tagging and sent that information to the New Jersey address. If the fish was ever caught again, the person catching it could send the plastic in along with information about the size of the fish and the time and location of the catch.
Lest I give the impression that I am a dedicated law keeper and environmental moralist, I should confess that if I catch a bass when I feel like eating one I keep it no matter what size it is. Unless someone is looking, of course.
I had tagged five bass running about two feet and weighing six pounds or so and had just recaught a particularly dumb one I’d tagged not an hour before, when I saw a blue Jeep Wagoneer coming west from Katama. I had decided that if I was doomed to recatch fish that I didn’t want in the first place I would quit fishing, so my rod was racked and I was having coffee when John Skye drove up with Iowa.
Iowa got out and looked around. He was disappointed.
“Where the hell’s Zee?”
“Working.”
“Damned shame. Any fish here?”
“Small bass.”
“Get any?”
“No keepers. Tagged some.”
“Good enough.”
He got his rod from the roof of John’s Jeep and stepped down to the surf. Iowa would fish in a bucket if that was the only water around.
“What’s Iowa doing riding around with you?” I asked John.
“His pickup is in the shop. Tore up his muffler at the jetties. He’ll have his own wheels again tomorrow.”
“Didn’t bring his niece with him this trip.”
“She’s home with Jean. Kid’s had a tough time, I understand.”
“Somebody roughed her up. Boyfriend, I’d guess.”
“How’d you know that?”
I told him about the bruises. “I figure she’s here to either get over the bastard or decide to go back to him. Women have a hard time leaving these guys, sometimes.” It was a truth I could never really understand.
“You hit it on the head,” said John. “Guy living with her lost his job and started beating on her. She took it for a while, then got out. Came here. Iowa’s a favorite uncle.”
“I see her walking the bike paths. She’s looking better. She going to stay?”
“I don’t think she knows, yet.”
“The guy know she’s here?”
“I don’t know.”
When I was a cop in Boston, I learned a lot about women and the men who beat them up. I knew that men beat up women here on the island, too, but I wasn’t a cop anymore, so I didn’t have to deal with it. I had had enough of cop stuff.
“Maybe she’ll be sensible enough to shake him.”
“Sometimes the men come after the women who leave them.”
True enough. About half the killings you read about in the Boston papers are the result of turf wars or drug wars. A lot of the others are men killing the wives and girlfriends who want to leave them or who have left them and been hunted down.
“Let’s hope she’s smart enough to shake him for good.”
John nodded and looked for a new subject. “When I saw your truck, I thought Zee might be here. I didn’t know she was working mornings.”
“Maybe she isn’t. I haven’t seen too much of her lately.”
“Oh.” John dug around in his Jeep and came up with a thermos and a box of doughnuts. He pushed the open box at me. I found what looked like a blueberry-filled doughnut and took a bite. Skye squinted at me. We chewed doughnuts. He swallowed the last of his. “Maybe you should get off the island for a while. Why don’t you come out to Colorado with me? Different country. Change might do you good.”
“Maybe so.” I remembered flying over the Rockies long ago on my way to Vietnam. The mountains had been covered with winter snow and had gleamed white in the sun.
“I’m going out there early in August,” said John. “I’ll be back in September. Zee’ll be back by then, too.” He raised an eyebrow.
“Um.”
John drank coffee for a while. “Well, if you don’t want to go that far, maybe you’ll do me a favor and drive up to Weststock with me when I go, and then bring my Jeep back down here.”
I looked at him.
“Get you off the island for a couple of days, at least,” he said. “We can drive up together. I have to pick up some gear at home, then I’ll fly west from Boston. I want the Jeep here when I get back so I can get a little fishing in before I go back to slaving over hot students. You can stay in the house up there in Weststock after I head to Durango, if you want. Go into Boston to see a show or two. Whatever.”
Weststock was close to the New Hampshire border. Zee would be there somewhere. My ex-wife was not too far away either. She and her husband and their little kids lived north of Boston in a suburb where fewer bullets flew than had been the case in the city when I’d caught mine and she had decided that she didn’t want to spend her life wondering if I was going to come home at all the next time. The two most important women in my life would both be within miles of Weststock, but neither one of them would want to see me.
Still, John’s offer had appeal. I hadn’t been
to America for quite a while. Getting away felt like a good idea.
On the other hand, the fish still filled Vineyard’s waters, my garden was flourishing, and in a few days the annual used-book fair in West Tisbury would allow me to turn in the books I’d finished reading during the past year and get another year’s supply. Books, beer, fish, and fresh veggies on Martha’s Vineyard made a winning combination, one which had made an islander (howbeit a transplanted one) out of me.
“I’ll drive you up and bring the Jeep back,” I said. “I don’t know about staying over. There are still a lot of fish around . . .”
“Good. You’ll be helping me out.”
I left them there and drove home, where I yelled at a bunny who was looking thoughtfully through the chicken-wire fence that surrounded my garden, and went inside just as the telephone rang.
It was Manny Fonseca, the Portagee Pistoleer. Manny had for years taken great pleasure in insulting the Wampanoag Indians who inhabit Gay Head. Then, to his dismay and his wife’s great amusement, he had discovered that he himself had enough Wampanoag blood in him to be an official Native American. After he had recovered from the shock, he gradually stopped telling his jokes about “professional Indians” and being “ready to pull yourself into a circle if you go to Gay Head,” and “Fort Wampanoag,” and in their stead began to develop some “white eye” wisecracks.
“Hail, Chief,” I said. “What’s going on in the pre-Columbian community?”
“Gottum new firestick,” said Manny, whose idea of tribal languages was primarily acquired from the comic books all of us had read in our youth. “Got an electronic dot reticle scope, too,” continued Manny. “Brand-new. I’m headed for the club to try it out. You want to come along?”
Manny’s profession was as a finish woodworker, but his avocation was pistol shooting. He shot up his share of the family entertainment money at the Rod and Gun Club target range and was greatly involved in the buying and selling of guns and ammunition. If it was new and interesting and had to do with shooting, Manny bought it. He was, in fact, an excellent combat pistol shooter.
I was not into the sport. I had had a brief experience with real combat in a faraway land and had not found it sporting at all. On the other hand, I didn’t have anything else to do at the moment and needed some distraction. Among other things, I might find out what an electronic dot reticle scope might be.
“I’ll see you there, Cochise.”
I got my earplugs out of the gun cabinet where I kept the shotguns and rifle I’d inherited from my father and the police .38 I’d carried for the Boston PD. I was still into a bit of duck and goose shooting in the winter, but my gunning seemed to be slackening off more and more as time went by. If I hadn’t enjoyed eating the birds so much, I’d have given it up completely. Still, the guns in their cabinet were so much a part of the house that I’d never considered getting rid of them.
The Rod and Gun Club was within sound of my house. I could hear the guns popping there while I sat in my yard or worked in my garden, and had grown so used to them that I often did not hear them at all. With the key that came with my R and G membership, I let myself in through the locked gate to the club and waited at the new target range until Manny showed up in his shiny Ford Bronco.
He was wearing his shooting gear: a black belt with a holster on the right side and extra clips and other gear attached elsewhere. He got out a satchel and walked down to the table at the twenty-five-yard marker.
“How?” I said, holding up a hand.
“You foreigners will regret making fun of us original Americans,” said Manny. “If my ancestors had had hardware like this stuff I’m carrying, instead of clubs and stone axes, you never would have made a beachhead.”
“You’re not original Americans,” I said. “You’re a bunch of Asians who came across the land bridge up in Alaska. You probably ran somebody out who was here before you were.”
“Nah. We’ve always been here. Probably we went across the land bridge the other way and settled the whole damned world. You’re probably one of my descendants. Look at this.”
He opened the satchel and got out a long-barreled pistol mounted with a lumpy-looking sight that looked too big for the gun.
“Llama M-87 Competition Pistol,” glowed Manny. “Got your built-in ported compensator, got your beveled rapid-load fourteen-round magazine with your rubberized base pad, got your oversized safety and your fixed barrel bushing.”
“No kidding.”
“Better yet, look at that scope. Thirty mm tube, coated optics, adjustable click-stop rheostat so you can adjust your red dot, lithium battery power pack, polarized filter, filter caps, glare shields, and a 3X booster. Nifty, eh?”
“The Pilgrims should be glad you guys didn’t have that in 1620.”
“Bet your ass. Let’s put up some target and see what happens.”
We walked down and hung three paper targets on the frames in front of the dirt backstop.
“What’s the advantage of this fancy sight, Ton to?”
“Simple. You put the red dot on the target and that’s exactly where your bullet is going to go. Especially good in dim light.”
“There are those who say you shouldn’t hunt in light that’s so dim you can’t really see.”
“What do they know? Besides, now you can do it just fine. Got night sights, for that matter. See in the dark.”
“Modern technology is awesome.”
“I loaded both clips at home. Let’s pop some caps.” Manny put on his shooting glasses and stuck plugs in his ears. He slid a clip into the pistol and jacked a shell into the chamber. He locked his right arm, cupped his left hand below and around his right, and the gun boomed. I looked at the targets. There seemed to be a hole near the bull’s-eye of the center one. A tiny red dot danced near the bull’s-eye, then steadied. The gun boomed again. Another tiny hole near the bull’s-eye. Another boom. Another hole.
Manny made a small adjustment on the sight. “Shooting right,” he said in that loud way people have of speaking when they have muffled their ears. He raised the weapon in one smooth motion. The red dot bounced on the target and then steadied. The gun jumped and boomed. “Better,” said Manny. He emptied the clip carefully into the target, jacked out the clip, and slid in a second one. He put the gun on safety and laid it on the table and we walked up to the target. There were fourteen bullet holes near the center. We covered them with tape. It didn’t take much.
“You try it,” said Manny. “Just remember that the red dot tells you where your bullet is going to go. Don’t yank the trigger, just squeeze it.”
I plugged my ears, put on my shooting glasses, and took up the pistol. The red dot danced all over the target. I steadied my arm and the dancing slowed. When the dot touched the bull’s-eye, I squeezed off the shot. A bullet hole appeared six inches to the left. Not good, Kemo Sabe. Again the red dot touched the bull’s-eye and again I fired. High. I fired again. Closer, this time. Eleven more shots. One in the bull’s-eye. It took fourteen pieces of tape to cover the holes.
“Well,” said Manny, “if it’d been a man, you’d have hit him most of the time.”
“If it’d been an elephant, I’d have hit him every time.”
“We don’t shoot many elephants on Martha’s Vineyard,” said Manny, reloading the clips.
“There used to be mastodons or woolly mammoths or some such creatures out west before you red-skinned savages killed them all,” I said.
“I think those other guys did that,” said Manny. “The ones you say we ran off when we came over the land bridge. Here, try again.”
We shot his new pistol for a while and then shot another one, since Manny always shot more than one pistol when on the target range.
Two trucks pulled up beside my Land Cruiser and Manny’s Bronco, and guys with guns and satchels got out.
“I guess we’ve used up our time,” said Manny. He put his guns and gear away. I put my earplugs and glasses in my pocket and got our targets.
“What do you think of the scope,” asked Manny, as we walked.
“I think that Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull or whoever it was that did in Custer had a bunch of them at the Little Bighorn.”
“Red dot, red power,” grinned Manny, raising a clenched fist.
I gave him some money for my share of the ammunition we’d shot up and went home. After lunch I went to the Eel Pond and spent an hour and a half on my hands and knees digging soft-shelled clams. When I had my bucket full, I went home and put them in a bigger bucket full of salt water, so they could spit out the sand in their systems. Tomorrow I’d freeze them. You can steam frozen clams just like fresh ones and never know the difference, and I always liked to have a batch on hand in case an irresistible clam boil urge came over me unexpectedly.
Manny thought digging clams was a nonsensical way to spend time. I liked it. He liked to shoot guns at targets. Everyone to his own madness, I say. Almost everyone, that is. Some madness can be fatal.
— 5 —
It was mid-July and hot when I discovered I had to actually go downtown into Edgartown. This is a venture I undertake in the summer for only the most serious of motivations, since the lovely, narrow streets of Edgartown are filled with tourists and jammed with cars and there is never anywhere to park.
But I was out of books and the big book fair in West Tisbury was still days away, so I had to make a run to the library to keep myself going. Normally I have at least one book to read, since I keep one in each place I expect to be. I have a bedroom book that I only read before sleeping, a bathroom book that I only read while on the throne (poetry here, since it comes in appropriately short slices), a kitchen book, two living room books, and a car book for traffic jams. However, a cruel fate had touched my life: I had finished all of these books within days of each other and was suddenly bookless.
So downtown I went.
