Vineyard Fear

by Philip Craig

  In mid-August, the sun is in the same place in the sky as it is in mid-April, so tans are hard to maintain. I gave mine two hours, then packed up. There were many kites still in the air, indicating that those who were vacationing on the island were not about to abandon the golden sands so soon in the day. I didn’t blame them. If I had been paying as much to be here as they were, I wouldn’t have left either.

  At home, I showered off the salt in the outdoor shower, slid into more modest clothes, and went to Iowa’s house to see how things were and to do some bragging about my bluefish. As I drove up, I saw a car with Iowa plates parked in front. Between the car and the house were Iowa, Jean, Geraldine Miles, and Lloyd Cramer.

  Lloyd Cramer’s arms were moving up and down in gestures of appeal and he was leaning forward. Geraldine Miles had Iowa’s shotgun in her hands and was pointing it at Cramer. I stopped the Toyota, flicked my CB to channel nine, and sent out an SOS to anyone whose ears were up to get the police to Iowa’s house. I repeated the message, but didn’t wait for an answer. I got out and walked toward Lloyd Cramer through air thick with the sound of his voice. That voice was a droning plea, a series of promises. I thought the shotgun muzzle swung a bit toward me.

  “Hold it, J.W.,” said Iowa in a strained voice that spoke through Cramer’s babble. “Gerry’s not used to guns.”

  “It’s me, Geraldine,” I said. “Nobody’s going to get hurt.”

  The gun muzzle wavered away. I walked slowly up to Cramer, my ears filled with the mad sound of his voice. He was begging to be taken back, swearing love eternal, promising to reform, admitting guilt, pleading for one more chance.

  I looked at Geraldine. The shotgun was none too steady. “Point the gun at the ground,” I said over the sound of Cramer’s voice. I put what I hoped was a friendly smile on my face. “I don’t think you want to hit me, but that’s what might happen if you shoot. Please, Gerry, point the gun at the ground.”

  I was beside Cramer now, but he didn’t notice me. He saw only Geraldine. He was pouring out his convoluted soul in a steady stream of words, asking her to forgive him and take him back. I saw the shotgun barrel drop and Iowa move carefully toward his niece.

  “I think he’s got a gun,” said Iowa’s flat voice.

  “Mr. Cramer,” I said, and touched his shoulder. He swung an arm as though to brush away a fly and his voice continued to fill the yard with pleas. “It’s time to leave, Mr. Cramer,” I said. “Geraldine doesn’t want to talk to you now. Come along.” I stepped around in front of him, beneath him and Geraldine.

  He was a big man. His eyes were wild and full of tears and focused behind me on Geraldine. There was indeed something thrust inside his shirt that didn’t belong there. I said, “Mr. Cramer,” and the eyes found mine. “I know you love her,” I said, “but she needs more time. Let’s get you back to your car. You need some rest. I know you don’t want to hurt anybody, so it’s best that we leave.”

  He was crying. “I don’t want to hurt anybody! I never did! I love Gerry!”

  “I know you do,” I said. “Come on. Let’s go to the car. I’ll go with you. We can talk. I’m sick of trouble and I know you are, too.”

  I put a hand on his arm and he blinked at me and we stepped back toward his car. For a moment I allowed myself to think that the situation was going to work out. Then he suddenly said, “I know you!” He pushed me away with a big hand and with his other groped inside his shirt. “You were there in her room! You’re the one! You want to take her away from me! I won’t let you! I’ll kill you both!”

  The hand came out of his shirt with a pistol in it. He swung it toward the people behind me. I got hold of his wrist with both hands and twisted it to one side as he squeezed off the first shot. Then his other hand was a fist as big and hard as a brick, beating at me, pounding me down. Another shot went off between our bodies. I got a knee into him, but that great thundering fist was making the world fade. Then I lost the wrist and he jerked away and swung the pistol toward me. I went for him again as the pistol swung into line and a shot boomed.

  Cramer’s face disappeared in a flower of blood and bone, and he went backward onto the ground. I turned to see Geraldine Miles with the shotgun in her hands. Her face was white as whey, but she was struggling to pump another round into the firing chamber and coming forward, her eyes fixed on Cramer. I turned back. The pistol had fallen from Cramer’s hand. He wasn’t going to use it anymore. In the distance I heard sirens coming. I put out a hand toward Geraldine as she stepped toward Cramer’s body and raised the shotgun again.

  “It’s okay, Geraldine,” I said. “It’s all over. He’s as dead as he’s ever going to get.”

  Geraldine said a word which at one time would have been called unprintable, and shot Cramer again. I took the shotgun away before she could give him another round and thumbed on the safety. Behind us, Jean and Iowa stared at us, then came forward. Jean took Geraldine in her arms.

  “It’s all right, dear,” said Iowa gently. “All of us are all right now.”

  Geraldine looked at her uncle. Her battered face was red and contorted. Her voice was like a knife. “He’s dead! He’s dead! The turd is dead!”

  I had rarely seen such hatred on so young a face. I wondered if it would ever go completely away.

  “I thank you,” I said to her. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d be lying there instead of him.”

  Geraldine stared at me and said nothing.

  “And if it wasn’t for you, J.W.,” said Iowa in a shaky voice, “we might be lying there. What a world we live in.”

  The first police car came into the yard. The driver took one look at things and called for a lot of backup. Then he went to Cramer’s body, felt for a pulse, stood up, and looked around in a confused way. We all waited in the yard for the rest of the police to come. It was a soft August afternoon. Overhead, the pale blue sky held a few gentle-looking clouds. At South Beach, the kites were no doubt still flying. On the green grass of Iowa’s front yard, Cramer’s blood soaked slowly into the ground.

  — 29 —

  “You’re always where the trouble is,” said Corporal Dominic Agganis.

  “I’m just not lucky, I guess.”

  “You’d better get out of the trouble business,” said Agganis. “You’ve already used up eight of your lives.”

  “You’ve talked me into it. From now on, you can have all the trouble. “If you’re done with me, I’m going home.”

  “Oh, I’m done with you, but other people aren’t.” He nodded across the yard toward the house where Iowa, Jean, and Geraldine were talking with the Edgartown police, the sheriff of The County of Dukes County, another state cop, and some other cops I didn’t recognize. The yard was full of them, too. “The girl will be charged. We got a hotshot DA with political ambitions, and you can be sure he’ll bring her to trial if he can. There’ll be a grand jury, at least, and you, my friend, will be on the witness list.”

  “Good. Self-defense. She saved my life and her own.”

  “So you say.” He yawned. “We’ll see what the grand jury says. I got to go talk to the lady in question. See you in court.” He walked toward the house.

  I drove home and poured myself a double vodka on the rocks and went up to the balcony. The view was as lovely as ever, but it meant nothing to me. I had felt this way before, and knew that in time I would feel better, that I would stop feeling empty and angry just because justice was rare and love elusive.

  I drank my vodka and tried to let the beauty of the world flow into me. I had read that when the Navaho poets walk across the great, dry, brutal desert which is their home, they are not aliens to it. “Beauty before me,” they say. “Beauty behind me. Beauty all around me.” Martha’s Vineyard, green and golden, surrounded by the eternal sea, was no desert, but rather a small Eden. Still I felt remote from it. I tried to let its gentle splendor enter my eyes and the sounds of its gulls and songbirds enter my ears and find my soul.

  When it was dark, I went down
stairs, still moody, knowing that I would have a bad night. Of all the earth’s life-forms, only man wishes things were different. It is his bane, his absurdity.

  But bad nights end, and the sea is a great restorer. It is indifferent to our fears and joys, merciless, beautiful, terrible, and nurturing. In the morning I went down to the harbor and rowed out to the Mattie, John Skye’s lovely old catboat. She was beginning to collect some hair around her waterline, but was otherwise fine. Because he had chosen to spend so much time in Colorado, John had barely used her this summer. As I checked her bilge and bowline, I thought of Dr. Jonathan Scarlotti and his little band of graduate students, who had not had time to go sailing in the Mattie. I wondered if Dr. Scarlotti would ever know that he had perhaps indirectly been the cause of the deaths of Bernie Orwell and her brother, and what effect it would have upon him if he knew. I wondered if I should drive up to Weststock and make sure he at least knew his role in those deaths. The prospect appealed to part of me. I thought Dr. Scarlotti was exactly the sort of exploiter of women that Orwell had hated.

  I rowed to the Shirley J., put a bag of clothes and a cooler of food and drink aboard, and put to sea. I needed to sort things out.

  I sailed on a broad reach all the way to Woods Hole, caught a fair tide through the narrows, and beat into Hadley’s. I wound up the centerboard, found a shallow spot far from the other boats anchored there, and dropped the hook. I didn’t want company. I took a swim, then sat in the wide cockpit and watched the yachts come in for the night. I was still there when the stars came out.

  The next day I had a fair wind all the way to Newport, and the day after that to Block Island, where I anchored for two days while I walked that lovely little island from end to end, and ate my lunches on a long veranda overlooking the old harbor. On the third day, the rains came, so I stayed in the cuddy cabin and read again Childers’ wonderful Riddle of the Sands, a required item in any ship’s library. In the middle of the afternoon, it began to rain even harder. I put on my daring bathing suit, so no water-soaked sailors who might be looking would be shocked, got some soap, and went out into the cockpit and had a shower. The rain was hard and cold and felt good. It kept raining, so that night I cooked inside.

  The following morning was gray and cool, with spats of rain blowing in on a southwest wind. I hauled anchor and beat out to sea, taking a bit of a pounding as I cleared the harbor entrance, but then having a better time when I headed north to clear Sandy Point, and finally having a fine following wind as I swung up toward Martha’s Vineyard.

  I sailed all day and into the night, because the Shirley J., for all her many virtues, is not too swift. In the last of the light, I dropped the hook outside the entrance to Cuttyhunk, that tiny, westernmost member of the Elizabeth Islands. The people on Cuttyhunk live there partly because they like to be alone. I understood that desire, and did not go ashore.

  At first light, I pulled anchor. In light morning breezes, I loafed along on the Buzzards Bay side of Nashawena and Pasque, then cut through Robinson’s Hole, and caught the east tide past Tarpaulin Cove toward West Chop. The late morning wind came up and I had a fine sail. I rounded West Chop, crossed to East Chop, noted that the bonito fishermen were still at work around the Oak Bluffs ferry dock, and headed for home close-hauled.

  I was back on the stake by mid-afternoon, and ashore a half hour later. I put my gear in the Toyota and walked down to the Navigator Room for a beer. When I came out, the chief was drinking coffee across the street in front of the Dock Street Coffee Shop. I walked across.

  “Home is the sailor, home from the sea,” he said.

  “As the general said, ‘I have returned.’ ”

  “Your millions of fans will be greatly relieved,” said the chief. “Your boat’s been gone for eight days.”

  “My, Grandma, what big eyes you have.”

  “The Law never sleeps. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for a couple of days. The harbormaster told me the Shirley J. was gone. Where you been?”

  “Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main. Block Island and points between here and there. Why do you want to see me?”

  “The DA is going to convene a grand jury.”

  “I figured as much. I guess I would, too, if I was the DA. A man’s been shot to death, after all.”

  “I imagine he’s going to make as much as he can about that second shot after Cramer was down.”

  “I’ll testify that Cramer seemed alive to me and that I was in fear of my life.”

  “The doctors will testify that he was probably dead.”

  “I’m no doctor and neither is Geraldine Miles. I thought he was still alive.”

  “Geraldine told us that you said he was dead.”

  “She was confused. She only wanted to save my life. His pistol was still in his hand.”

  “When we got there, it wasn’t.”

  “I kicked it out after she shot at him the second time. I was in fear of my life. I’ll testify to that.”

  “You spent a lot of that time in fear of your life. You got a lawyer?”

  “No. I don’t trust lawyers.”

  “Maybe you’d better get one. Perjury is a bad rap.”

  I spread my arms. “Perjury? Me, commit perjury? What are you talking about? I’m a fisherman! Would a fisherman lie?!”

  The chief stared up the street. His mouth was kinking, almost as if he wanted to laugh. Instead, he drank some coffee.

  “I don’t think a grand jury will bring an indictment against her,” he said, “but you never know.”

  “They won’t, if I have anything to say about it.”

  “So I gather. There’s another thing. The Sheriffs Department in La Plata County, Colorado, say they’ve found a car rented in Jackson, Wyoming, by one Gordon Berkeley Orwell, but carrying the New Jersey plates that are supposed to be on Orwell’s New Jersey Jeep Cherokee. They wonder if you know anything about that.”

  “I’m the one who told them to look for that car. Where’d they find it?”

  “How should I know? At the foot of a trail that goes up some cliffs or other. They want to know if you know where Orwell is. Seems that they talked to John Skye and he said he saw you and Orwell at the top of those cliffs. The sheriff hasn’t talked to anybody who’s seen Orwell since. Wonders if you know where he is.”

  Where was Orwell? Was he smiling down at me from heaven? Frowning up at me from hell? Floating disembodied in the primal fluids of the universe? Had he been reabsorbed into the World Soul? Had he seen the white light of Truth? Were the energies that once had taken the form of his earthly life been recycled into some new shape? A flower? A fish? A cancerous cell in some smoker’s lung?

  I told the chief about how I’d taken Orwell up to the top of the cliffs so he could talk with John. Then I said, “After he and John talked, I talked to John on the walkie-talkie. John told me that he had convinced Orwell that he was after the wrong man. I stayed there on the cliffs for a while, then came down. The last time I saw Orwell, he was near the top of the cliffs. The last thing he said to me was that he hoped I had no hard feelings.”

  “You didn’t toss him off the cliff, then?”

  “I have acrophobia,” I said. “I get sick if I get too close to the edge of high places. Ask John Skye. Ask Mattie. Ask the twins. Ask John’s niece. They’ll all tell you.”

  “He was scheduled to return to duty, but he didn’t show up. Apparently very unlike him. Do you think he was suicidal?”

  “I think you have to be a little off center to do some of the things he did. I don’t know if he was suicidal.”

  “They say he was on special leave. Stress syndrome, or some such thing. Do you think he might have jumped?”

  “I don’t read minds.”

  He finished his coffee and dropped the paper cup into a refuse disposal container. Edgartown is a neat town, and the chief would never drop his cup in the gutter.

  “I don’t read minds either,” he said. “Glad I don’t. I wouldn’t want to
know what a lot of people are thinking.”

  “How’s Geraldine Miles?”

  “Women are tough. I just hope this doesn’t make her too tough. It’s not good to be too tough.” He walked up Main Street.

  I went home, showered, shaved, brushed my teeth, and dressed up in my fancy clothes—Vineyard Red slacks, a blue shirt with a reef anchor over the pocket, boat shoes without socks, my belt with little sailboats on it, and called Iowa’s house. Jean answered.

  “I want to take your niece out on a date,” I said. “Do you think she’ll go?”

  “I don’t know, J.W. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Put her on the line.”

  Geraldine’s voice said, “Hello?”

  “J. W. Jackson here,” I said. “I want to take you to dinner. I just got back from a week at sea, and I need to look across the table at a real, live girl and talk to her instead of to myself. Can I pick you up at six?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure . . .”

  “Great! I’ll see you at six. You have a white dress?”

  “Well . . .”

  “A white blouse will do. You look terrific in white. See you at six. Wear your dancing shoes.”

  I rang off and made myself a martini, wondering if I knew what I was doing.

  At six, I picked up Geraldine. She was wearing low heels, a dark skirt, and a white blouse. Her hair was combed so that it partially covered the side of her face that was most hurt.

  “Very nice,” I said. “The Veronica Lake look.”

  “Who’s Veronica Lake?”

  “A woman in my father’s world. Let’s go.” I gave her my arm.

  We ate at the Navigator Room, which not only has excellent food, but also has the best view of any Ed-gartown restaurant. She ate with little bites and had white wine. Afterward I talked her into having coffee and a cognac. Everything went on my plastic card. I had so much on there already that a bit more didn’t hurt at all. When we were through with our cognac, I walked with her down to the town wharf and we went up to the balcony and looked at the boats. The stars were just beginning to come out. There was a soft wind from the south.