I’ve been staring at this picture of you for almost twentyfive years, a quarter of a century. It’s hard to understand how all that time passed so quickly. In many ways, I’m still that kid cowering behind the jetty. In other ways, I’m not.
The funny thing is, I never planned for this. It’s not like I’ve been searching for you all this time. I wasn’t even looking for you when I saw you.
19.
The thing of it is, I don’t even want to know why you did what you did. It does and it doesn’t matter. In any case, it’s not that hard to figure out. And sure, a few years ago I asked my mother about the big fight I’d heard and why she kicked out the window on the front door. She said that Dad had blown four grand to a bookie. Four grand was a lot of money in 1986, right? Sure it was.
You see this camera? It used to belong to my grandfather. You’re probably about the same age he was when he died. Anyway, I kept the camera in working condition. Do you remember Polaroids? I’m sure you do. I’m sure you remember lots of things.
So this is you, duct taped to a chair in our hotel room. It’s hard to see with the tape over your mouth, the bruises, the dried blood, but it’s you. I know, compared to the you in the other picture, this you is the Brundlefly. But this was and is you, even if you are so much smaller than you used to be.
I’ve brought you back down to Dennisport. Just like old times, right? We’re at the Sea Shell Motel next to the Ocean House. I put the room on your card but don’t worry, it’s offseason, so I got a great rate.
This is the last picture on the last page of my album. I took this picture while you weren’t awake. Even for someone of your advanced age, you sure do sleep a lot.
I’m not one hundred percent sure what I want out of this. I could just leave you here and go back home to my own young family. Maybe you’d call the police or come after me yourself, or come after me with a little help. Maybe you wouldn’t do anything. Maybe everything would be okay if I just unwrapped you and watched you weakly limp out of here, old man that you are, and more than just a little broken. That might be enough for me.
Maybe later tonight, I’ll take you by the hand, the one that’s shaking even now when it’s taped behind your back, and we’ll take a walk together out into the water, the very same water. But it’s not the same water, it’s different. Maybe that’s okay.
So maybe we’ll walk out there, past the jetty, up to our waists in water, and just stand there and feel the cold all around us. Then maybe, at the very least, you’ll admit who you are and what you did to him and what you did to me.
VARIATIONS ON A
FIFTY-POUND BALE
BY ADAM MANSBACH
Martha’s Vineyard
It is generally agreed upon that at some point during the last several decades, a fifty-pound bale of commercialgrade marijuana, sealed in plastic and lashed with burlap, was found bobbing no more than a thousand feet off Menemsha Beach, in the calm waters separating Martha’s Vineyard from the privately owned, unpopulated Elizabeth Islands.
No consensus is to be had regarding the discoverer of this child-sized brick (child-sized in the sense of weighing as much as a ten-year-old, not in the sense of being an appropriate portion for a preadolescent), nor its fate. The consistency with which otherwise divergent tales pinpoint the size and location suggest a singular event, much as the persistence of flood myths across the whole of the world’s indigenous cultures is taken as evidence that some such cataclysm did occur. The bale is never forty pounds, or sixty; it is never found floating off Lucy Vincent Beach in Chilmark by nudist Jews, or spotted undulating in the frothy surf of Edgartown’s South Beach by salmon trouser–clad Republicans.
No version accounts for how a solitary swimmer—it is always a solitary swimmer, and the bale is always sighted from the beach, never a boat—managed to maneuver this ottomanshaped prize back to the island’s most public beach without attracting the kind of attention he would doubtlessly seek to avoid.
There are two possibilities. One is that the bale was not spotted during the summer months, and thus the beach was deserted, the boat slips empty, the Hatfield-and-McCoy bloodfeuding fish stores closed. Launching oneself into the ocean in the dead of winter or the dying of fall would have required far greater curiosity or bravery or foolishness or intuition on the part of the swimmer, or else previous experience in large-scale drug trafficking. Perhaps he had one of those. Perhaps he had several.
But if it was summer—as seems likely, that being when people go to the beach—the swimmer would have decided to come ashore somewhere more private. Menemsha Beach ends a few hundred yards east, past a stone jetty. The coastline bunches, like a piece of fabric caught in a sewing machine, and all the land is private. Probably, the swimmer found an inlet or a dock, stashed his bale, and came back for it later with a car. Presumably, the teenage lifeguard on duty was too busy flirting or applying zinc oxide to his nose to notice any of this, or he didn’t care, or he was a friend of the swimmer’s and it was his car in which the bale rode home. Or else the swimmer was the lifeguard himself, which would make a lot of sense: binoculars, elevated chair, nautical aptitude.
It is also possible that it was simply 1973 when all this happened, and nobody raised an eyebrow at a bale of weed, so the swimmer just hauled it straight up onto the sand, where everybody slapped him on the back and said things like “Far out, man,” and grabbed fistfuls to take home.
In one popular version of the story, the guy—let’s call him Zonk—decides the best way to maximize profits (or the only way to make any sales) is to move the load piecemeal, smallbore, eighth-ounces, quarters, dime bags. Who cares how long it takes? Hell, the longer the better so long as it means he doesn’t have to work.
Zonk is an islander, knows everybody, does a little carpentry and a little fishing and plays guitar in a bar band just like fifty or a hundred other still-young-but-getting-older catch-as-catch-can good-time Island Charlies. It’s the 1970s, and Zonk’s got a beat-to-shit Ford pickup he tools around in, only it’s broken at the moment, needs a new fan belt, so he’s been hitching. Luckily, the mechanics at Up-Island Garage are all stoners, so by the weekend Zonk is up and running. He throws the whole bale into the flatbed, ties it down with a tarp, and spends the next few days making the rounds, howdy friends and acquaintances, I come bearing sensi, like he’s the Good Humor Man or something.
A few buddies tell Zonk he’s insane to roll around with the entire load like that, but their warnings are drowned out by the silent approval of the majority. Back then, not only do most Vineyarders not lock their cars, they never even remove their keys from the ignition. Granted, the example is flawed, as few things are less tenable than stealing a car on an island. The point is, there’s a pervasive atmosphere of trust. Which is not to say that Zonk isn’t something of a dipshit.
These days, Brazilians do all the Vineyard’s landscaping, and half the construction; most avoid driving except in a company vehicle, because they’re undocumented and if they get pulled over, they could end up on an airplane. The cops know they’re here, of course, and for the most part, it’s a live-andlet-live landscape, since the island would fall apart without them, but a traffic violation could still bring everything tumbling down. Before the Brazilians, it was Eastern European college kids coming over for the summer to work the cash registers and clean the hotel rooms, Slovaks and Ukrainians and Poles, plus a sprinkling of Jamaicans. But if you rewind all the way to Zonk’s Summer of Bud, the migrant seasonal help is all Irish and predominantly teenage. A lot of them stay together in a kind of barracks out by the airport, long gone now and probably doomed from the moment a building inspector got around to visiting.
The Irish kids come back year after year, trading up from retail to construction as their muscles come in. They bring their cousins, and sometimes their sisters and sweethearts. The girls post colorful, handmade fliers at the Chilmark Community Center and the six town libraries, advertising themselves as au pairs and mothers’ helpers, and ma
ke more money than the boys. There is usually a tapped keg of Natural Light or Milwaukee’s Best at the barracks, sitting in a plastic trash can full of ice. If a few of the boys are able to get three days off in a row, they take the ferry to Woods Hole and the bus to Boston, which they call “Southie,” and return with new tattoos.
Sometimes they turn up at islander parties, but the Irish kids make guys like Zonk uncomfortable. There is a sense of menace to them, as if bone-shattering violence is always only another beer away, and what makes it worse is that you can’t be certain you aren’t just imagining it. The Irish boys seem to know what they’re doing. Who they’re supposed to become.
Zonk figures they’ll buy an assload of weed from him, and he is right. The barracks pools its resources, and Zonk lets the McDonnell brothers, Sean and James, chisel him down a hundred bucks on a quarter-pound—more than twice the amount he’s sold to date. He stands there in the middle of the woods with them from early sunset to pitch black, drinking beers and listening to stories about crippling rugby injuries they’ve witnessed and inflicted, then gets back in his truck and motors home to take a nap before the night cranks up.
It’s worth noting that the McDonnell brothers feature in any number of stories, usually as black hat–wearing villains or entropy-embodying Billy Badasses, and that police records from the era reflect no such thing. Sean was arrested four times between 1976 and 1979, twice for disorderly conduct, once for misdemeanor theft, and once for assault. James’s record includes a DUI, an underage drinking charge, and an assault rap. Neither served any time. Not in Massachusetts, anyway.
Zonk wakes up, scarfs down a leftover thing of clam chowder, and makes his way to a small gathering in the town now called Aquinnah and then known as Gay Head. Only when he’s parked, climbed up on the Ford’s flatbed, and thrown off the tarp to grab some nugs for smoking and selling does he realize his stash is gone.
There are a couple of Irish au pairs from the barracks there, the kind of cute, frisky fifteen-year-olds who always move as a duo and only last one summer on the Vineyard because the older brothers or cousins who’ve brought them spend all their time engaged in a furious and losing battle to defend the girls’ purity. Zonk and a few of his bearded fishermen-carpenter compatriots corner them and demand, wild-eyed, to know where Sean and James are.
The girls shrug and tilt their beer cans to their lips, then call over two more fifteen-year-old au pairs. Eventually, it emerges that the McDonnell brothers have their boss’s Jeep for the weekend, and are on their way to Southie.
Zonk, or somebody acting on Zonk’s behalf, calls the Vineyard Haven cops and tells them a red Laredo containing two Irishmen and fifty pounds of marijuana is either boarding the last Woods Hole–bound ferry or has recently reached the mainland and is currently headed north on Route 24.
The cops call the Steamship Authority, learn the ship has left the port. The man who answers the on-board phone, a ferry worker whose name is lost to history or bullshit, is appraised of the situation, asked to confirm the presence of a red Laredo registered to the Tisbury Landscaping & Construction Co., and told to sit tight; the Woods Hole PD will meet the boat and take it from there.
Sensing an opportunity for heroism or grand larceny, the ferry worker unlocks the safebox in the crew quarters, removes and loads the handgun stored there, and makes his way to the cargo bay. There, he finds the Laredo. And the McDonnell brothers, slumped down in the front bucket seats, passing a pint of whiskey.
The ferry worker’s approach lacks artifice. Glancing behind him in the driver’s-side mirror, Sean sees a man snaking through the narrow aisle between vehicles with a gun held low at his side. The McDonnell brothers jump from the doorless Jeep and rush him. No shots are fired; whatever the ferry worker has in mind, he does not have in body. It is also possible that the gun jammed.
Either way, Sean and James McDonnell beat the nameless ferry worker within a yard of his life, and then they either do or do not throw him off the boat into the blue-black moonlit or not-moonlit Atlantic. There is no record of a ferry worker dying, so if they throw him off, he swims. It is even possible, if slightly romantic, to imagine Sean and James providing him with a life vest or an instantly inflating raft, both of which are in ample and accessible supply.
Regardless of how the McDonnell brothers dispense with the ferry worker, it does not solve the problem they now understand themselves to be confronting: namely, that the authorities know what is in the Jeep, and Sean and James are trapped in the middle of the ocean.
Thinking quickly, the brothers do one of three things.
They decide to cut their losses, easy come easy go, and heave the contraband into the water. This possibility is attractive in that it returns the bale of weed to the ocean from whence it came, setting the stage for rediscovery and further adventures. It is even conceivable that the ferry worker, if he too is in the drink, finds the bale and paddles it to shore.
Or else, the McDonnell brothers figure in for a dime, in for a dollar, steal a lifeboat, and load the bale. Then one of them rows home and stashes the shit, denying the limp-dick accusations of Zonk and his weirdo-beardo islander pals, while the other stays with the Jeep, drives it off the docks, and sits placidly on the nearest curb in handcuffs as the WHPD search it to no avail, eventually accepting the baffled officers’ apologies and heading up to Southie.
Or perhaps, and most ingeniously, Sean and James transfer the bale to another vehicle—the flatbed of a truck, perhaps—and one of the brothers stows away there also, with the ferry worker’s gun. WHPD surround the disembarking Jeep and find nothing; meanwhile, some working stiff drives the bale and the hidden McDonnell brother onto the mainland, then is ordered at gunpoint to deliver both to a prearranged rendezvous point, such as the parking lot of the International House of Pancakes just before the Bourne Bridge.
Another equally apocryphal story takes place in the late 1960s. The swimmer—let’s call him Timothy—is a staid, respectable type in his mid-thirties. He and his wife, both professors at a small liberal arts college somewhere in northern New England, have been renting the same Vineyard Haven house each summer for six or seven years.
Timothy is no drug dealer, but he’s no fool, either. Sitting in his basement, staring at this absurd quantity of marijuana, he knows the only sensible thing to do is sell it all at once, as quickly as possible and at an attractive markdown.
Timothy does not move among the exceedingly wealthy, especially not the kind of rich people likely to drop fifty thousand dollars (Timothy’s steep-discount appraisal of the bale’s market value) on reefer. But the exceedingly wealthy are certainly within shouting distance, here on Martha’s Vineyard in glorious mid-August, and they are full of surprises. Why wouldn’t one of them want to lay in a supply of cannabis? The thing to do, Timothy decides, is to proceed as he would were it a barrel of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1945 he’d pulled out of the surf. Only with greater discretion.
Timothy waits a couple of days, then begins making quiet, theoretically phrased inquiries at the cocktail parties he and his wife attend at the rate of two per night. On consecutive evenings, multiple interlocutors invoke the same man as a potential buyer, and here the story trifurcates.
The enthusiast is either a foreign-born energy magnate who owns a palatial spread in Chilmark, a best-selling novelist with harbor-front property in Vineyard Haven, or a glaucomastricken movie star retired to a hundred-acre farm in West Tisbury.
No telling of the story specifies how Timothy manages to secure entrée to the tycoon, writer, or actor—although presumably, as an enthusiastic and pedigreed cocktail party–goer on a miniscule and rarefied island, he is separated from these distinguished personages by no more than one or two degrees.
Trundling his product in a pair of smart new suitcases, Timothy is shown into the Chilmark, Vineyard Haven, or West Tisbury estate sometime around eleven at night, by a servant. A large dinner party seems to have recently adjourned. Timothy is unsure what to do, but the
servant—assistant is probably a better word—makes it all very easy. He relieves Timothy of the bags, hands him a personal check for fifty thousand dollars, and asks if he has time to stay for a drink. Timothy says he does, and is shown to a screened porch or den in which half a dozen men are sipping bourbon and smoking cigars.
The actor or writer or tycoon greets Timothy warmly, fixes him a drink, and insists that he tell the story of his windfall. But Timothy finds himself tongue-tied, because among the men who break off talking and turn toward him with an air of inquiry is Frank Sinatra.
Timothy is not starstruck. He is terrified. He has read about Sinatra. He knows the Chairman of the Board is a Mafioso, mixed up with the gangsters who got Kennedy killed. He does not belong in a room with this man—this man and his muscle. For that is what the others are, Timothy realizes at once: the singer’s portable amen corner of New Jersey paisanos, every last one decked out in a gorgeous handmade suit slightly inferior to Il Padrone’s.
A few beats of silence is all it takes for Sinatra to lose interest in Timothy, and when his attention flags, so does that of every other man in the room. Timothy is merely an observer now, and by the time his panic subsides, Sinatra is holding forth on cigars, waving his in the air so that the ember draws a streak of light and telling the star or writer or businessman that what he needs instead of this second-rate crap are some authentic hand-rolled Cubans.
Sinatra drains his glass. It is instantly refilled. He takes it down to half-mast, then calls for a telephone, announcing that he’s going to procure some decent shit.
Cape Cod Noir Page 8
