Billingsgate Shoal

by Rick Boyer

  Billingsgate Shoal

  Rick Boyer

  1982

  For my parents,

  Betty and Paul Boyer,

  and for Tiny

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  The places in this book are real; the people aren't.

  The author wishes to thank those who helped in the various stages of the manuscript's development: Captain Leo Jordan and his staff of the United States Coast Guard; Detective Lieutenant Jack Dwyer of the Massachusetts State Police; Dana Booth, D.M.D.; David Savageau, friend and advisor; and the numerous fishermen I spoke with on the docks of New England. Any errors or inconsistencies, deliberate or accidental, are mine.

  I owe special thanks to Elaine for keeping the faith, and the greatest gratitude of all to my training wheels: Larry Kessenich and Bill Tapply.

  LOOMINGS

  CALL ME Doc.

  I'm Charles Adams, a doctor who lives with his wife, Mary, and two almost-grown sons in Concord, Massachusetts. I'm an oral surgeon, a cross between a doctor and a dentist, who performs tooth extractions and general and cosmetic surgery of the lower face and jaw.

  My most interesting recent operation was quick, spontaneous, and without benefit of surgeon's tools or anesthetic. I cut a human head in two, right down the middle. Deliberately. The operation was a success because the patient died.

  Listen: I didn't ask for any of it. If anyone had told me that all the pain and killing would begin with my sneaking a look at a stranded fishing boat I would have called them nuts. It sure looked innocent enough. It was just sitting out there on the sand flats. It looked like a Winslow Homer watercolor. . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  TWO AND A half miles directly offshore from our cottage in Eastham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, lies Billingsgate Shoal. It appears on nautical charts in a color between that of either land or sea. This is because Billingsgate is a sunken island and is visible only briefly, in all its soggy splendor, twice a day at tide's farthest ebb.

  The body of water that surrounds the island in this corner of Cape Cod Bay is called Billingsgate Sound, and stretches around the sunken island from Eastham on the south to the entrance of Wellfleet Harbor on the north. The sound is a bank rich in mollusks, especially the large marine clam called quahog, which is excellent in chowder, and the small, delicate, and tasty bay scallop (not to be confused with its larger cousin and sea scallop). Besides the proper conditions to promote the growth of these mollusks, Billingsgate Sound also has a large number of spider crabs, which dine almost exclusively on starfish. Since the starfish is the primary predator of the mollusks, one can see, by following the steps of this rude syllogism, that there must be fewer starfish here and (ergo) more mollusks. This is so.

  At high water the small bay trawlers, dozens of them, can be seen in the distance, crawling across the water hauling their big metal chain-link drags on the ocean floor behind them. Sometimes the wind shifts, bringing with it the faint growl and whine of their diesels. Another constant sound is the hoot of the groaner buoy at the foot of Billingsgate. It goes hoooo-ooooot! every fifteen seconds, round the clock, and is saying keep away. . .

  To the south, on the horizon in a direct line between our cottage and the village of West Brewster, lies the wreck of the James Longstreet. It was wrecked there deliberately by the United States government. This old Liberty Ship from the Second World War was towed in and sunk in the shallow water to be used as a target for the navy and air force. Planes dive at it, pelting the ancient concrete hulk with cannon and rocket fire. It is said that the Longstreet is "a bunch of holes held together by their rims." It's an apt description. The derelict ship sits immobile, ruined, on the horizon.

  Our cottage is situated on a bluff overlooking Billingsgate Sound. At low tide it is a place of frightening vastness, haunting noises, and optical tricks. No trees. Low sand hills. Miles and miles of marsh grass and water weed. And most desolate of all are the endless sand flats that grow for miles in the slow wake of the receding tides. These are absolutely flat and barren. People walk out on these vast stretches of damp sand. Some carry odd-shaped bent garden forks—these to dig out the quahogs, razor clams, and bay scallops. You could live off these flats with no problem whatsoever; the only thing not provided is the chilled chablis.

  But most of the people aren't diggers—they're beachcombers, people on vacation who wander out to see what there is to find. From a mile away they look like moving specks. Tall, dark, slow-moving lines are adults. Short specks that dawdle, or run on winking legs, are children. Sometimes you can see low specks that travel with incredible speed, and leap into the air. The faint barking tells you they are dogs. Occasionally the wind will bring the sound of laughter, or a mother calling a child, from miles away. And it is weird, even unsettling, to hear the voices and laughter clearly, coming from these tiny dots that move slowly to and fro on the shimmering sand far, far away.

  It is quiet when the tide is out. Gone is the crump and hiss of breaking waves. The gulls don't shriek overhead; they are out on the flats, waddling around officiously pausing, pecking, squabbling, and gobbling up the tiny hermit crabs—no bigger than garden spiders—that scamper in the shallow tide pools.

  "Looming" is what Melville called it, an optical phenomenon caused by thermal inversions in the atmosphere. These thermal inversions have the effect of layering the air, and these layers, like the elements of a lens, cause light waves to bend, allowing objects beyond the horizon to seem to be visible. The object floats high over the horizon upside down and shimmers ghostlike in the dancing air currents. It happens a lot in our corner of the bay.

  The far-off sounds, the wrecked ship, the ghostly and desolate flats—all of these add to the general feeling of the place. And if a vacation is a change, then Sunken Meadow Beach overlooking Billingsgate Sound is a vacation indeed from the pine forests, hills, and thick meadows of Concord.

  One morning in late summer I got up a bit too early. Three hours too early. It was getting to be a habit. I couldn't sleep. Moe Abramson, my colleague, said it was only a midlife reshuffling of values and not to worry. He gave me pills to help my depression and insomnia. Mary said it was because I'm an idealist and dreamer, and wanted everything to be perfect. She gave me loving and scolding to help my depression and insomnia.

  Gee, I had lots of help.

  It wasn't working.

  Every night for three weeks I had risen between three and four A.M. Not rested. I had awakened exhausted and irritable. The month-long vacation was supposed to cure all this.

  It didn't. It seemed to intensify it. Mary, my short-suffering wife, wasn't about to put up with much more of my Weltschmerz.

  "Shape up or take a hike, pal," was her comment.

  Who could blame her?

  So there I was at five A.M., out on the deck of our cottage gazing off over Cape Cod Bay. The tide was out; I was looking mostly at the immense expanse of tidal flats. It was so early all things were dim and blurry. Most of what I looked at was full of the fuzzy little specks of nighttime vision. I was I still half asleep. or was I asleep—fina1ly—and dreaming this? No. I was awake. I'd almost forgotten what sleep felt like. I sat and propped my feet up on the railing and stared at the vast gray emptiness before me. I waited an hour. I could either take a downer and return to the sack or have coffee and make it another early day. I decided on the coffee. When it was perking I heard the bedroom door open and Many came out in her robe. She comes to coffee like a buzzard to a bloated carcass. She can see and smell it—sense it—a mile .away.

  She sat down next to me with her mug and drew the robe tight around her. In the semi-darkness she looked very dark, like a black woman. When a Calabrian spends three weeks on the beach the results are awesome.

  "Again huh?"


  "Uh huh."

  There was a slow sigh.

  "How far did you run `yesterday?"

  "Seven miles."

  "And you took two sauna baths. You had a split of wine with a big dinner. And you can't sleep?"

  "I think the running makes you sleep less. You sleep harder or something. But that's not it. Basically, toots, I don't want to be who I am."

  She absorbed this minor detail in silence.

  "You what?"

  "I don't want to be Dr. Charles Adams, tooth-puller."

  "I'm so worried about you lately, Charlie. We thought the month down here would help you, but I think it's made things worse."

  "I think you're right. And now I'm beginning to see what the problem really is."

  "What?" She looked at me, searching for a ray of hope.

  "Boredom. It's what you've been saying, Mary: we've got it. We've done it. So what do we do now? I think what set this whole depression off was a line I read in John Berryman's Dream Songs."

  "Who? What? Never heard of him."

  "John Berryman was an alcoholic poet who ended his life by doing a swan dive off a bridge at the University of Minnesota and blasting himself to pieces on the rocks a hundred feet below."

  "Oh that John Berryman. Christ, no wonder you're depressed."

  "No. His death was the good part. The 'funsies' at the end. It's the words he wrote, a line from Dream Songs that's got me down. It's got me down because it's so damn true."

  "And the line is'?"

  " 'Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.' "

  Another silence.

  "That's it?"

  "Yep."

  "Well, Charlie, I think you should go and see Moe Abramson on a regular basis."

  "Nah. I already asked him about therapy and he said I don't need it. But I'll tell you, this vacation has done me no good and I don't want to return to my practice. I don't seem to want to do anything, including sleep. It's all boring, Mary. BORING!"

  She snuggled her fanny down on my lap and put her arms around my neck. Thank God for her at least—

  "What about Betsy Kelly?"

  I luxuriated in the thought of Betsy Kelly (which is not her real name). If I want anything on my tombstone (and I suppose I'm bound to have one—another discouraging thought), it's the fact that I performed a four-hour operation on a girl that changed her appearance, personality, and her whole life.

  Betsy Kelly was born, poor thing, with a prognathic jaw so pronounced it made her look like a cross between a bulldog and Tyrannosaurus Rex. Needless to say, she wasn't pretty. But four hours under the knife, bone saw, chisel, and mallet had made her emerge looking not only normal, but almost pretty. Her parents cried and wrung my hands for three hours. That wasn't pulling teeth.

  "If all my patients were Betsy Kellys I'd be the happiest person on earth."

  "But you're not."

  "No. I'm dissatisfied and bored."

  "Look: you can't keep being a dropout, Charlie. You left medicine after two years—"

  "When Peter died."

  "When Peter died. Then you settled on dentistry."

  "That was really boring—"

  "Fine. Then you compromised on oral surgery, a profession that combined medicine, surgery, and dentistry. You're good at it. You've provided for us well with it, you—What are you staring at?"

  "There's something out on Billingsgate. A dark blob. See it?"

  "Uh huh. But what I'm driving at is, that's two dropouts in your life, Charlie. You can't do it again. You're almost fifty. Especially when you're so good—"

  "It looks small from here. But of course—it's over two miles away. It's not a tent or trailer. It's gotta be a boat—"

  "I think Moe can have you squared away in no time. And I think you should read Passages. It explains a lot about these midlife crises."

  "Yeah. It's a boat. Aground out there on the .sand."

  "You know Moe really thinks you're very talented—"

  "But why did they run her aground? Maybe they just want to get her hull up out of the water to work on it—"

  "Maybe just a couple of talks with Moe. . .maybe he could make a few concrete suggestions?

  I left the deck and retrieved my aluminum camera case from the inner depths of our bedroom closet. I keep it hidden there under piles of dirty clothes in hopes that thieves, if any, I will overlook it. I took out the Canon F-l, a 500-millimeter lens, and grabbed my tripod. I returned to the sundeck and rigged up the equipment. What I now had, besides a camera, was a telescope of sorts. Viewing through the camera I could get a close look at the boat wedged up against the toe of Billingsgate Shoal.

  "Will you see Moe or not?" Mary demanded, taking little interest in the proceedings.

  "Sure I'll see Moe. I always see Moe; his office is two doors down from mine, remember? Except that if I let him even think for a second it's professional the Shylock will take me for every cent we've got."

  She sat back down in the chair.

  "I'm assuming," she said with a deep frown, "that's meant in irony."

  "Of course. The dope gives away more than he earns, and he earns plenty, believe me. The jerk doesn't even buy himself a house. Do you know that that Airstream he lives in was built in nineteen fifty-seven? Can you believe it? One of New England's finest shrinks living in a beat up old trailer in Walden Breezes Park? But you know what they say about psychiatrists: they're all nuts—"

  It was low tide; the sand flats were extended to their maximum length. Billingsgate was barely visible as a low patch of tan on the horizon. I aimed the huge lens at the distant speck on the tan patch. Long lenses, even on a heavy tripod, exaggerate camera motion and cause the viewed image to shake and dance about. I draped a sand-filled sock over the end of the lens to reduce this tendency and brought the long tube into focus. I peered through the eyepiece and made the necessary adjustments. The wavy blob of green became clear and crisp. I viewed the trawler as if I were a few hundred yards away instead of on the deck of our beach cottage over two miles away. The conditions could hardly have been better. There was low cloud cover. A sky of stratocumulus clouds rolled away endlessly into the distance, like an inverted ocean. The light shone through these clouds with various stages of intensity, giving the sky a metallic, galvanized look like crumpled lead foil or hammered zinc. But as is often the case with this kind of sky cover (which usually means nasty weather coming), the level visibility was superb, causing objects on the horizontal plane to appear clearer, closer than they ordinarily would. I don't know why this is so, but it is. I could now see the stranded vessel with amazing clarity.

  Naturally, I assumed the grounding had been unintentional. Had she lost power in the ebbing tide and been stranded? Was her skipper foolishly trawling near Billingsgate as the tide fell and ran her aground? Either one did not seem plausible; the weather had not been bad and all the local skippers knew about Billingsgate and the tricky Wellfleet channel in general. Didn't he have a chart?

  Two men were walking around the boat. They looked calm. Of course they were in no danger. They could even have walked to Wellfleet via Jeremy Point and Great Island less than an hour if they wished. A third man appeared on deck. He was lugging at something heavy. Soon afterward he threw something over the side: a sledgehammer. One of the men on the sand picked it up and swung it low underhanded at the boat's hull. I could hear the rhythmic deep booming from across the sand flats. It sounded like a muted timpani when the wind was right. Clearly they were making some kind of repair to the hull, however crude.

  Perhaps they had grounded the boat deliberately by anchoring her over the shoal in high water, then letting the ebbing tide strand her. This would be less expensive than having the vessel hauled out on a donkey. It would be the sensible, thrifty thing to do (in true Yankee fashion), if the repair was it minor.

  I was losing interest in the whole project when I noticed one of the men return to the deck and enter the wheelhouse, only to re-emerge immediately with bin
oculars. He stationed himself behind the bows and swept the glasses to and fro. Since the early morning sun was directly behind me, I could see its reflection off the lenses as they swept by me. Now why were they doing that? Perhaps they were in difficulty after all and needed help. I stood up on the picnic table and waved my arms slowly, as a sign I'd seen them. But in all likelihood I was invisible—hidden in the rising sun as a fighter pilot is hidden when he dives out of the sun at the enemy plane below.

  It grew warmer gradually. We sat on the deck and chatted and sipped coffee and watched the green boat on the sand. The faint sheen of distant water puddles that were growing ever larger told us the tide was beginning to ooze back in. Whatever those guys out there were doing, they'd better hurry; they didn't have a lot of time left. It was now after eight o'clock.

  "Should we call the Coast Guard'?" she asked.

  "I'll try to get their attention."

  "From here? You'll look smaller than a gnat to them—"

  I dragged the big beach umbrella up onto the deck and I opened it. Its panels alternated blue and yellow. Mary sat at the camera-telescope and sipped coffee while I got back up on the picnic table and waved the huge contraption back and forth like a semaphore.

  "Well? Any reaction'?"

  She said no, but to keep trying. Our cottage, fatuously named The Breakers after the elegant Newport mansion, sits atop a solitary steep bluff. It is the highest cottage around. Therefore, perched as I was atop the table on the deck, I was I above the horizon. After twenty seconds of signaling, Mary said the man in the bow had apparently seen me.

  "He's calling the other guys, Charlie. The other men are climbing up on the deck to have a look too. Keep waving."

  So I did.

  "Now they're kind of scurrying around. One guy's raising his hands up and down. I think they're arguing, Charlie."

  I dropped the umbrella and had a look. The deck was deserted. I said I was going to call the Coast Guard, but Mary suggested we wait because they had made no attempt to signal us back. I sat a while and watched the boat. There seemed to be no sense of alarm aboard her. Just the same, I phoned the Nauset station and said there was a stranded fishing vessel perched on the southernmost tip of Billingsgate Shoal, and that there was no apparent danger.