A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard

by Philip R. Craig

  “Now, that,” I said to Joshua, “is the right way to bring one in.”

  Joshua said he’d remember.

  I was out of the Land Cruiser when Zee brought the fish up. She was happy and breathless. “This guy gave me a real tussle!”

  She got the hook out of the fish’s mouth and smiled at Joshua. He stared back with his big eyes.

  “Get another one,” I said to Zee, as I set up Joshua’s custom-made beach and lounge chair, which I’d made by adding legs, a table space, and an attached umbrella to a plastic car seat. When Joshua was in it, he was about high-chair height above the ground and could play with a couple of toys too big to get into his mouth, watch what was going on, or take a nap. The sun couldn’t get to him, but Zee and I could keep an eye on him at the same time that we were fishing. It was one of my better furniture designs. My only one, in fact.

  I put Joshua into his chair.

  “Well, what do you think? Can you see everything?”

  Joshua said he was fine, so I got my rod off the roof rack and went down to the surf, where Zee was already on again.

  “Cast!” she said, flashing her white grin. “They’re queued up out there, waiting to get on your line!”

  I made my cast and had taken only a half-dozen turns on the reel when I saw the swirl and felt the fish hit my redheaded Roberts. I set the hook and joined the line of people with bent rods. Dynamite!

  It was a genuine blitz, with fish thicker than a state biologist’s head. And they were hitting anything you threw, so after a couple of casts, both Zee and I exchanged our good Roberts for junk lures we wouldn’t mind losing so much if we got cut off. For people were losing lures, as is often the case when the razor-toothed blues are in a feeding frenzy. The ocean bottom at Wasque Point must be covered with lures cut off over the years, and no small number of them are mine and Zee’s, so we played it safe today and caught fish anyway.

  Joshua approved of our decision, and took a real interest in the fish we brought in, but between my sixth and seventh blue he suddenly smelled of serious low tide, so I parked my rod and changed his diaper in the back of the Land Cruiser. Zee came up before I was through and bent over him and smiled. He gurgled and pissed straight up into her face.

  “Wretched child!” She wiped her face and laughed.

  “It’s penis envy,” I explained to him. “Girls can’t do that. It’s a manly talent.” I pinned his diaper.

  “I’m getting outnumbered by you guys,” said Zee. “I need another girl in the family to even things out.” She ran a hand down across my chest; I felt that thrill that was always there when she touched me, and was surer than ever that motherhood had made her not only more beautiful than before, but more sensual.

  She raised her dark eyes to mine, and I saw something smoldering deep down inside them. She let her hand fall farther.

  “I do believe you’ve got something alive in your pants,” she said.

  Behind me George Martin’s voice said, “Hey, is that the latest Jackson? Let’s have a look.”

  Zee removed her hand and smiled up at me. I picked Joshua up and we turned to greet George as he came to us, rod in hand, followed by a sun-bronzed man I’d never seen before. He looked like some kind of Greek god.

  George was in his sixties and spent as much time as he could manage on the beach. He had retired rich, but on the democratic surf-casting sands of Martha’s Vineyard, no one cared how much money he or anyone else had or didn’t have. George and Moonbeam were judged by the same standards. All the regulars cared about was how you handled yourself: whether you could cast without crossing everybody else’s lines. It was even better if you were kidding when you bragged, instead of one of those jerks who really meant it; whether you liked a joke, even if it was on you; and whether you took your losses without self-pity. George passed the tests. He was a good guy, and we had known him for years.

  He took a long look at Joshua, who stared back, as he tended to do when people stared at him.

  “Boy doesn’t look a bit like you, J.W., which is a good thing, all in all.”

  “You got that right.” I gave him my Robinson-Churchill interpretation of the lad’s face.

  “He does not look like Edward G. Robinson or Winston Churchill, either,” said Zee, only half-feigning maternal annoyance. “I think he looks like a little angel. You do, don’t you, Joshua?”

  Zee dropped her eyes to look at her son as I raised mine to find George’s companion’s eyes wide and staring as he looked at Zee. I’d observed the expression before in the faces of other men who saw her. I’d no doubt had it on my own face, and probably still did from time to time. It was a look of astonishment and wonder, mixed with wild imaginings.

  He stared, then became aware of my eyes on his face, and, with effort, looked at me instead of her. His tan may or may not have reddened. He put a grin on his face and held out his hand. There was a golden watch on his wrist and a golden chain around his neck. His perfect teeth flashed in the sun. I knew, suddenly, that he was from California.

  “Drew Mondry,” he said in a rich baritone voice. “Great-looking boy. They’re never too young to start learning to fish.”

  His grip was firm and so was mine. “J. W. Jackson,” I said.

  “I’m forgetting my manners,” said George. “Zee, this is Drew Mondry. Drew, this is Zee Jackson.”

  Zee looked at Drew and Drew looked at Zee. They shook hands.

  “How do you do?” he said, his hand holding hers a heartbeat longer than need be.

  She didn’t seem to notice the heartbeat. “How do you do?” She smiled.

  His hand released hers. “Your son is a beauty,” he said, flicking his bright blue eyes down to Joshua and then back up.

  She smiled some more. “Yes. We got it right the first time.”

  “You have no other children?”

  “Not yet.”

  Love me, love my child, I thought sourly.

  “Drew’s here looking over locations,” said George. “I thought he should see what the island’s really like, so I brought him out here.”

  “It’s terrific.” Mondry grinned. “I never saw anything like it. All these people catching fish like this. It’s amazing!”

  “He even got himself one,” said George. “Not bad, for his first time surf casting.”

  “Fish about wore me out,” said Mondry, who didn’t look at all worn out. “I’ve trolled out of San Diego, but I never tried this kind of fishing before. I can see how it could become addictive.”

  “Locations,” said Zee. “You must be tied in with that movie business we’ve been reading about.”

  He grinned a grin as white as her own. “That’s right. I’m one of the guys who scouts areas for the other people who actually make the movie. The more they know about possible shooting areas, the more time and money they save. And with the cost of films these days, they want to save all they can. There are going to be a lot of outdoor shots for this movie, so I’ll be here for quite a while, taking a look at things.”

  “I’d keep the cameras away from Wasque in September,” I said, putting in an unrequested two cents.

  He kept the grin on his face and looked at me. “Why’s that?”

  “Derby time. There’ll be this many guys and more down here fishing. They wouldn’t want anything interrupting them.”

  “Well,” he said, “we wouldn’t want that.”

  “No,” I said. “You wouldn’t.”

  Lawrence Ingalls, state biologist, appeared in my mind. Loathsome Lawrence, who had interrupted more Vineyard fishing than anyone in history.

  But Drew Mondry already had a new thought. “On the other hand, you’ve given me an idea. This is just the sort of shot we need to establish island ambiance.” He put his hands on his hips and swept the fisherman-filled beach with his eyes. “Yeah! Great idea! They’ll love this scene.”

  Terrific.

  “I think it’d be wonderful,” said Zee. “You could hire some of the regulars as extras
and pay them to fish, which was what they’ll be doing anyway. You can start with George. Now, he’s what I’d call local color.”

  George pretended dismay. “You mean I don’t get the lead?”

  Drew Mondry’s bright eyes swept back to Zee as though drawn by a magnet. “We will be hiring local people. How about you, Mrs. Jackson? Are you interested?”

  Zee knows that people find her attractive, but has no idea why they do. She hesitated. “Well . . .”

  I sniffed Joshua’s behind, found the fragrance satisfactory, and returned him to his lounge chair. Then I took my rod off the rack and nodded to Mondry. “Nice meeting you. Good luck with your project.”

  I went down to the surf. As I went, I heard him say, “May I call you Zee? Thanks. Are you in the book? I think you’d have a lot of fun being an extra, and that you’d photograph very well. Think it over. I’ll phone you later.”

  I made my cast. The lure arched far out into the water. No swirl surrounded it. No fish took it as I reeled in. I thought that Drew Mondry might be having better luck.

  — 3 —

  “Well, what do you think? Do I have a future on the silver screen?”

  Zee sipped her Luksusowa martini, and looked out over the garden and the pond to the far barrier beach, where the very last of the day’s swimmers and tanners were packing up and heading home.

  I took more than a sip of my own drink (perfectly pre-pared, as usual: vodka and chilled glasses from the freezer, a splash of vermouth spilled into each glass, swirled, then tossed out; two green olives into my glass, two black ones into Zee’s, and Luksusowa to the brim).

  “You can probably have a lot of fun finding out,” I said. “And when Joshua is a little older, he can watch your reruns on the VCR.”

  “I can see the headlines now,” said Zee, waving a languid arm. “Humble island housewife transformed into glamorous cinema queen, but Academy Award winner never forgets her simple island roots.” She sipped some more, then gave me her dazzling smile. “Really, what do you think?”

  “As one who’s ogled women since puberty, I bow to none as an expert on good-looking women, so you can take it from me that you’re at least a ten in any man’s book. And I’ve never known a woman who wasn’t an actress part of the time. If that’s what it takes to make a star, you’ve got it made.”

  She reached out her strong brown arm and took my hand in hers. “I’ve got it made right here.”

  We were on our balcony, and Joshua, after his long day on the beach, was snoozing down below in our bedroom. The window was open, and we took turns running downstairs to make sure that he was okay. We were still in the stage where we worried that he was dying when he cried or that he was dead when he was quiet. Like all beginning parents, we were amateurs at the job, and like all amateurs, we used up a lot of worry-energy to no useful end.

  I liked having Zee’s hand in mine. I liked being married to her, and having Joshua making us three. I didn’t want to do anything to unbalance us.

  One of the things I liked about our marriage was that it was stuck together without any coercion of any kind. There was no “We have to stay together because we said we would” or “You owe me” or “You promised me you’d love me” stuff or, now, any “Think of the children” stuff, either, even though we had said we’d stick together, and we did owe each other more than we could say, and we did love each other and, now, we did have Joshua to think about.

  Basically Zee and I were married because we wanted to be married, and for no other reason.

  I wondered why I was thinking such thoughts, and suspected that it was because of two things: the first was a sort of restlessness that had come over Zee since Joshua had made his appearance. Her usual confidence and independence were occasionally less pronounced, occasionally more; her normal fearlessness was sometimes replaced by an uneasiness that I’d not seen in her before, and at other times she became almost fierce.

  A postpartum transformation of some kind? I didn’t know. Maybe she saw the same things in me, and all that either of us was seeing was the fretting of new parents who didn’t really know how to do their job and were worried that they were doing it wrong.

  The second thing bothering me was more easily identified. It was Drew Mondry.

  Him, Tarzan; Zee, Jane.

  They even looked like Tarzan and Jane. Both were sun-tanned and spectacularly made, with his blond hair and brilliant blue eyes contrasting well indeed with her dark eyes and long, blue-black hair. Golden Tarz; bronze Jane.

  And there was that little charged current that had run between them this morning.

  May I call you Zee? I’ll phone you later.

  But why shouldn’t there be electricity between them? She was a great beauty who left only blind men unscathed, and he was a handsome man with two bright eyes. And didn’t I still eyeball female beauties while married to Zee? What was so different about Drew Mondry being fascinated by Zee and her being interested in him?

  Or was I only imagining things? Was I just being jealous?

  “Come to think of it,” Zee now said, looking at me with a parody of a frown, “what do you mean when you say all women are actresses? What sort of a sexist thing is that for a nineties kind of guy to say?”

  “I’m a late nineties kind of guy. I’m in my post-sensitive period.”

  “I see. And when were you in your sensitive period?”

  “It happened fast. You had to be watching for it.”

  Her hand squeezed mine. “I don’t think you’ve quite left it yet. But what’s this actress notion you have?”

  “How about women faking orgasms because guys fake foreplay?”

  She sniffed. “Oh, that . . .”

  I became conscious of silence in Joshua’s room. “I’ll be right back,” I said, and trotted downstairs.

  Joshua was snoozing, not dead. He looked soft and sweet. I gave him a kiss on the forehead and went back upstairs.

  I decided to change the subject while I had a chance. “I saw Manny Fonseca downtown when I was selling the fish, and we talked about this and that. He sends his regards and wonders if you might want to do some more practice tomorrow.”

  To everyone’s surprise, especially her own, Zee had fairly recently discovered that she had an amazing knack for shooting the very pistols she had always viewed with distrust and alarm. With Manny, the local gun fanatic, as her mentor, she had quickly become a far better shot than I had ever learned to be, in spite of my training in the military and the Boston PD, and had, in fact, started attracting attention at contests Manny had persuaded her to enter. As she continued to practice and compete, her enthusiasm had mounted. She was, as Manny often said, a natural, and after Joshua had been born, he’d not waited long before luring her to the pistol range once more.

  Now she looked at me. “Tomorrow will be fine. I have to get ready for that October competition.”

  “I’ll stick cotton in Joshua’s ears,” I said, “and we’ll both watch you pop those targets.”

  She gave me a smile. “Pistol-packin’ momma?”

  “When the other kids learn about your gunslinging, nobody at school will try to beat up our boy. I could have used a mom like you when I was a kid.”

  Her smile got bigger, more genuine. “I’m sure nobody ever beat you up. You probably beat them up, if they tried.”

  “Like my sister says: There’s never a bronc that’s never been rode, and never a rider who’s never been throwed. I got pounded a few times.”

  My sister Margarite lives near Santa Fe, and, like many Eastern transplants, prides herself on her knowledge of Western lore.

  Neither of us had had a mom for long, ours having died when we were young, and our father, a one-woman man, never having remarried.

  “I like shooting that forty-five Manny’s got me using,” said Zee. “My only problem is that I feel I should be with Joshua all the time even though I know that I can’t be. I keep hoping that if I keep shooting, it’ll wean me. I have to be weaned soon
er or later.”

  Zee had taken a two-month maternity leave from the hospital where she worked as a nurse, but now was back at work part-time.

  “You don’t have to shoot or go back to work if you don’t want to,” I said. “We’ve got enough dough stashed away to keep us alive for a year or two, as long as we don’t live too high off the hog. Besides, if I absolutely have to, I can get a regular job.”

  In the years since I’d retired from the Boston PD and moved to the island, I had managed to avoid anything resembling a steady job. Like a lot of people on Martha’s Vineyard, I had, instead, brought in money in a variety of ways: looking after other people’s boats and houses during the winter, doing commercial fishing and shellfishing, and taking the occasional odd job. These incomes, combined with small disability pensions from the Feds and Boston (the first for shrapnel wounds contributed by a Vietnamese mortar, the second for a bullet, still nestled near my spine, the gift of a frightened thief trying to escape the scene of the crime), had allowed me to live as well as any bachelor needs to live. I ate a lot of fish and shellfish, grew a garden, which gave me fresh veggies all summer and canned and frozen ones all winter, got fed a lot of meals by women who thought it their duty to feed such as me, and thrived.

  But now I was a married man and a father to boot, and maybe it was time for me to change my ways.

  On the other hand, maybe not, because Zee now said, “But I want to shoot and I want to go back to work. I love my work. I’m not going to spend Joshua’s college fund just so I can stay home and cuddle him.”

  Joshua’s college fund?

  “How about staying home and cuddling me, then?” I asked.

  “If you go out and get a steady job, you won’t be home to cuddle either one of us,” said Zee. “It’s better the way you do things now. You can take Joshua with you when-ever I’m not here, and vice versa.”

  That was true. For centuries women have known how to handle work and babies at the same time, and I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t do it too, so I had made some preparations to help myself out.