DEATH IN THE
POLKA DOT SHOES
— A Novel —
by
MARLIN FITZWATER
Death in the Polka Dot Shoes: A Novel
Copyright ©2011 by Marlin Fitzwater
ISBN-13 978-1-926918-69-3
First Edition
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fitzwater, Marlin, 1942-
Death in the polka dot shoes [electronic resource] : a novel /
written by Marlin Fitzwater. – 1st ed.
Electronic monograph in PDF format.
ISBN 978-1-926918-69-3
Also available in print format.
I. Title.
PS3606.I89D42 2011a 813'.6 C2011-904638-5
Cover Art by Judy Ward
Cover Design by Mari Abercrombie and Isaac Fer
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, architecture and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the express written permission of the publisher.
Publisher: CCB Publishing
British Columbia, Canada
www.ccbpublishing.com
Dedication
For All Those Men And Women Who
Make Their Living On The Water.
Other books written by Marlin Fitzwater
Call the Briefing!
A Memoir: Ten Years in the White House
with Presidents Reagan and Bush
Esther’s Pillow: A Novel
Sunflowers:
A Collection of Short Stories
“Listen for the oyster music.”
--Shady Side, Maryland waterman
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
About the Author
Chapter One
His shoes were never found. My brother apparently was leaning over the side of his thirty-six foot fishing boat about two miles off the coast of Cape Hatteras, sweating from having to work the giant blue fin tuna for nearly an hour, almost sick from the ache in his arms, yet about to land the biggest catch of his life. With a gaff hook in his left hand, ready to tear into the side of the two hundred pound fish, he twisted his right wrist into the last few feet of leader line for one final hoist of the fish into the boat. But facing the certainty of death, the tuna gathered itself for one final whack at freedom. Its gills began to heave and its marble eye focused on Jimmy’s cap, which read “Cedar Winds Boat Works.” In that instant, Jimmy must have known the violence to come because he started to shift his weight lower in the boat, but he never got to his knees. There was a mighty jerk, and a flash of green and blue scales above a white tee shirt, then nothing. The tuna went straight to the bottom with Jimmy in tow.
The charter captain later testified at the inquest that he was sitting high on the tower, watching the big fish weave its way through the water to the boat, with the heavy filament line flashing where the sun picked up its break with the surface. It was headed straight for the boat, he said, when he glanced down at his depth finder, reading a hundred and thirty feet. When he looked back for the tuna, Jimmy was gone. Simply vanished into the stillness of the day.
The captain said he circled the site for hours and nothing surfaced. He called the Coast Guard and they searched for the rest of the day, but found nothing. No clothing. No fishing gear. Nothing.
Jimmy had been on a bus man’s holiday from his regular life as a waterman on the Chesapeake Bay, running an old bay-built crab boat out of Parkers, Maryland, at least on those days when crabs were plentiful and selling for eighty to a hundred dollars per bushel. On other days, he scrubbed up the boat and took city slickers from Washington, D.C. on half day outings for striped bass or bluefish. Fishing had been our family’s life for five generations, going back to the great Virginia oyster wars of 1878. Back then, our great-grandfather would end the crabbing season in October, refit the boat with a culling board, pull his hand tongs out of the barn, and spend the winter oystering. Even at the young age of 31, Jimmy had given up the oysters. Too much strain on the shoulders. Instead, he crabbed in the morning, took tourists fishing in the afternoon, and made enough money to give up oystering completely. Next season, he planned to give up crabbing as well, especially if he could convince me to help him buy a new boat. And I probably would have helped, just because I knew how much he loved being a waterman.
Jimmy and I spent our youth on the crab boats of the Bay, helping our father run his trotlines or harvest his crab pots. We liked leaning over the gunnels of our dad’s deadrise, the Martha Claire, hooking the float lines as the hydraulic winch pulled the crab pots from the bottom of the bay. We eagerly grabbed the pot as it surfaced and pulled it into the boat. The “pot” is a square wire mesh cage that lets crabs check in but they can’t check out. They are trapped. As teenagers, we Shannon boys were solid and our shoulders offered the power of a diesel winch. A full crab pot can weigh forty pounds or more and Dad ran nearly three hundred of them. Jimmy and I would flip the screen of the pot open, tip it and shake it until all of the sideways scavengers could scramble onto the deck and into bushel baskets. I used to imagine that every bushel basket was a hundred dollar bill, and that helped ease the shoulder ache as the stack of baskets grew over my head. Then I would shove an alewife or handful of razor clams into the bait box and slide the pot over the side. With the same motion Jimmy would reach for the throttle and power the boat on to the next pot. We loved it when Dad let us drive the boat and help with the catch.
It was a simple repetitive exercise that mirrored assembly lines the world over, except that it was on the water, in the midst of a lonely yet beautiful theatre where you paid the price of admission with every pot lifted. And the old men of the Bay whose bodies were scraped and twisted by the sharp edges of crabbing, could never turn their backs on the delight, regardless of the cost. It was their stage, their sense of freedom and independence, their manhood and their pride.
I never quite inherited those qualities, but my brother did. He absorbed all the family instincts for the water, rowing into the fog on a dreary day, just so he could meet the challenge of a safe return. Our mother would stand on the family dock, watching for Jimmy to come back out of the fog with both oars slowly moving the water, while his head and shoulders were stretched over the side as if he was smelling or listening to the water. His eyes scanned low, under the fog, following the surface and searching for birds, or boats, or landmarks or whatever it was that always brought him safely home. He scared our mother to death, and she told him stories of ships lost in the fog to discourage his interest. But instead of being afraid, he loved the stories and begged for more, until mom finally gave up. She knew he was a waterman.
Today, when I get really sick of the law library and the pompous clamoring of my partners at Simpson, Feldstein and James, I look back at those wonderful days on the water, colored by the distance of time and the glory of youth. I forget how much I wanted off the water, out of the Town of Parkers, and into a white collar world of fancy cars and exotic travel. I look back at a culture that honored truth, loyalty and the absorbing drama of a sharp bow on a silent bay. Then I remember the cuts on my hands from the crabs, and the heavy rubber gloves that were caked with salt, brine and mud and hung like barbells from my fingers. They never kept out the cold, the water, or the crab’s bony pinchers. I had worked for years to escape that occupational fate. So why would my brother’s death now draw me back to the water? Why would it start me thinking about the glories of a simpler life and a different culture?
My brother’s body didn’t come up. The old watermen around Parkers said the tuna no doubt figured out his predicament, and wrapped the line around some bottom debris until it broke, leaving my brother tethered to a fate I didn’t want to contemplate. Jimmy’s death left me shattered. I could not shake the idea of young life ended, fatherhood extinguished, all the dreams of a wife and daughter vanished. I also felt great guilt for all the inequities of life that my brother faced, and for my treatment of him. He was two years younger, and not nearly so competitive. I would force him to play basketball with me, and then beat him in every game of one on one. I would ridicule him for not wanting to play baseball with me, even though I would always hit the ball over his head and make him run for it. We would argue, get angry, and he would run from me. When I think today about the competitions of youth, and how much I owe him for the normal inequities of youth, my guilt is overwhelming. And sometimes in the days since his death, I mourn so violently that I lose my breath and have to stand up to breathe. Then I walk to the refrigerator, lean against the door with my arm under my forehead, and cry out with pain and anguish for my lost brother, and for myself. I intended to make it up to him. But now I can’t. He is simply gone forever.
We had a memorial service at Christ Church, a quaint little wood frame structure built in the 1800s of heavy timbers from nearby trees. The sanctuary looked like the hold of an ancient schooner. It was built on the crest of a hill, surrounded by tall pines, with a sloping graveyard on three sides so steep that you wondered how the dead could possibly get any rest. As a boy, I dreamed that the bodies behind Christ Church were all buried with their heels dug in to keep from sliding down the hill. Surely not a peaceful recline. The stone markers were mostly from the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, often with short biographical references, or poems, about the deceased. Many carried the title of “Captain” as a tribute to their life’s work. If you owned your own boat, no matter the size or condition, and it worked the waters of the Bay for livelihood, then you were a Captain for life. Most of the crab boat captains had a crew of one, usually a son, sometimes an old partner who had shared the catch and all their troubles for decades. There were a few “big boat” captains behind the church, men who had guided the tall merchant ships for long months at sea, out of Baltimore or Annapolis. I noticed their headstones often looked like the Washington Monument, with small cast iron fences around the graves. Some of those fences had been standing, by the way, for 200 years, as compared to my townhouse fence in Washington that was knocked down about three times a month. The measurements of life are different in Parkers, Maryland, and the monuments are respected.
I bought a burial plot and small headstone for my brother that was still being chiseled with the appropriate dates. As I wandered among the markers after the service, I noticed dozens of flat stones with the simple etching: waterman. Some with flat bottom work boats drawn below the name. The watermen always had been on the lowest wrung of the economic scale, even below farmers, who at least could rise to the top by accumulating enough land. It appreciated. There simply was nothing about crabbing that would appreciate in value. In the area around Parkers, by the year 2009, the farmers had become owners of horse farms or at least landlords and real estate speculators, while the watermen were still struggling to find markets for their ever dwindling catch. Although a crabber who had graduated to using his boat for charter fishing, with some skillful internet marketing, could do pretty well. But the crabbers’ fiercely independent trade, involving the lone captain who secured his catch and delivered it directly to market at a local pier, was the occupation most pure and true to its origin, and a source of great pride to the watermen families. I was proud of my dad and my brother.
At Christ Church the watermen of Parkers all stood together and lamented the passing of their friend, Jimmy Shannon, taken by the sea as so many of their brothers and fathers had been. They saw no humor or irony in the tuna’s action, only the terribly fine line between life and death that is drawn every day on the water. For them, Jimmy’s death could just as easily have resulted from storm, or cold, or a fall from the rigging of a skipjack. I was appalled when the Old Bay Circular, Parkers’ weekly newspaper, reported my brother’s death with the headline, Fish Catches Man. But the watermen seemed to ignore it, as if the frivolity of a newspaper account had little value or consequence anyway.
There were a few new faces at the service, friends of my brother who had just discovered the chop of the Bay in their varnished sailboats, or had discovered the little two bedroom bungalows with the beautiful sunsets, houses that could be torn down in an afternoon and rebuilt as glass palaces. The marinas around Parkers were filling with sailboats, crowding out dock space for the crab boats. Watermen saw sailboats as vehicles for pleasure, not for work. And in nearby Annapolis in 2008 the city council evicted the last working crab boat from the city dock. The economy of the Bay was changing, and the population of Parkers was beginning to shift as well. I was in the eddy, not quite knowing what the future would hold in these swirling economic currents. Standing under the covering pines with the green shuttered church and the English boxwood along every walking path made me yearn again for the simplicity of my youth. It was so quiet at Christ Church, with an occasional gnatcatcher swooping through the trees, that I almost missed the young woman standing with the watermen, moving somewhat awkwardly with the group as they ambled around the church. I didn’t pay much attention, but I think she was laughing, perhaps at a joke between them about my brother. I made a mental note to ask about her later.
Then I spotted three of my old friends from high school and a lump caught in my throat. My mind went to long afternoons of basketball on the town court, and shared conversations about life that are possible only in youth. I started to cry and the tears would not stop. I yanked a long white handkerchief from my pocket and covered my face. I wanted to speak to my dear friends, missed through the years, and now virtually unknown to me. I didn’t even know where they lived, nearby I suppose, or they wouldn’t have been at the funeral. And they probably came just to see me. But whenever I lowered my handkerchief I started to cry again. It was their youth. I looked in their faces and saw myself as a boy, and realized that I was crying for our lost youth. These were boys who respected my father, and knew my brother, and now they stood alone under the pines like trees without forests. I couldn’t face them, so I walked away, hoping for the distraction of others, another group of mourners who could change my focus. I looked around for smiling faces.
My family’s friends and neighbors had great senses of humor, laughing at the sea and its unruly manner, mimicking their friends, exaggerating each other’s weaknesses and foibles, and sometimes a joke would lead to a fight. Humor and fig
hting were linked somehow in ways I never understood, but instinctively knew not to challenge. Perhaps because strength was the final measure of a waterman, fighting was common. Men in their fifties, who had been at sea for decades, could measure every catch by the strain in their arms, and they knew that in the end, it would be the weight of the oyster tongs, or a full pot of crabs, or a stumble while climbing into their boat, that would mark the end of their career. Similarly, the watermen could be incredibly sentimental, helping each other’s families, sitting up with sick friends, or repairing each other’s boats, because they also understood the capriciousness of their lives, and every soul had its own value. They needed each other.
The story is told in Parkers of “Gunnels” Newton, a first mate who never quite grew out of the position, and at age 52 was still signing on every morning with a new crab boat or oyster tonger, wherever he was needed. He liked to work the oysters because he liked to eat them. He was a relatively small man, with wiry frame, but a huge belly filled every night with beer and oysters. Locally, he was known as the champion oyster eater in Jenkins County. Soon, Gunnels was entering oyster eating contests all around the Bay.
The watermen of Parkers, meeting in solemn conclave one Sunday morning at the Bayfront bar, which was always full by eight o’clock in the morning, especially on Sunday, voted to take up a collection to send Gunnels to the Guinness Book of World Records oyster eating contest in London, England. Gunnels had a special technique in which he shucked oysters as fast as he could, then put them in a bottle of milk, threw back his head and let the whole concoction flow silently down his throat. By this method he could consume pounds of oysters in minutes. He won the Guinness contest, of course, coming home with enough prize money to keep him wet for months. But the strain of ready cash was too much for his heart. One Saturday afternoon, after the final round of the St. Michael’s oyster eating contest, he was bent over the gunnels of his work boat dispensing with the excesses of his competition, when he died.
Death in the Polka Dot Shoes Page 1
