Death on a Vineyard Beach

by Philip R. Craig

  There were different stories about why Jimmy had gone belly-up. He and his boy claimed it was because the draggers and trawlers had destroyed too many of his pots and other gear; others claimed it was because Jimmy had succumbed to the fisherman’s traditional companion and enemy, the booze. Whatever the case, I hoped that Albert would have better luck, and was once again grateful that I was only part-owner of the boat, and not a real fisherman or farmer, the two chanciest professions that I knew of. On the other hand, I didn’t have a profession of any kind. Was that better? I decided to follow Scarlett’s advice and think about that tomorrow.

  “There’s my retirement plan,” I now said to Zee. “The Lucky Lil. If I go first, my share will all be yours.”

  “A big spender from the East,” said Zee. “A shipping tycoon. My favorite kind of husband.”

  We passed through the boats and headed for the Cape Pogue Gut.

  The tide and wind carried us smoothly into Cape Pogue Pond, around John Oliver Point, and down to the south end of the pond, where I dropped the hook.

  There, ignoring Edgartown’s regulation forbidding overnight anchoring in the pond, Zee and I spent the first night of our married life on the cockpit floor, since the bunks in the cabin were singles, too narrow for two.

  Sometime during the night I drifted half awake, and found myself wondering who the man in the driveway had been. But then Zee sighed in her sleep and curled a long, sleek leg over mine, and the man went out of my mind. Until morning, when the explosions came down into my dreams, and I woke with Zee shaking me and saying, “Wake up! Wake up! What is it?”

  2

  I don’t often have the dream, and when I do it’s more surrealistic than real, but it’s real enough. There’s blood and noise and splintering trees and breaking earth, and I’m filled first with paralyzing fear, then the cold certainty that I’m going to die. I start dragging myself through the explosions and bodies toward the radio, but I never get there. I wake up making the kind of sound that frightened Zee that first morning of our married life.

  She had me in her arms, and her voice was gentle. “It’s okay, it’s okay. It was just a dream. It’s gone now.”

  My brow was cold and wet. I lay there until my breathing was normal again. Then I said, “Sorry. Just a nightmare. I have it sometimes.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” I put a smile on my face and looked up at her. “Don’t worry.”

  She tightened her arms around me. “What’s the dream?”

  “It’s nothing. The day I got hurt in the war. I almost never have it anymore.”

  “You’ve never told me about that.”

  “There isn’t much to tell, but I was pretty scared at the time.”

  She rocked me in her arms. “Poor baby. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I said.

  The boat was wet with morning dew. We put the sleeping bags in the cabin, had breakfast, and motored out of the gut into the sound as the sun climbed out of the sea and the morning wind rose.

  I raised the sail and cut the engine, and we headed east around the tip of Cape Pogue.

  “One interesting thing,” I said. “Remember me asking you about that guy I saw at our wedding? I think seeing him triggered the dream. I didn’t recognize him then, but I do now. He was my sergeant. A guy named Joe Begay. They called him Lucky Joe, although he wasn’t so lucky that day.”

  “Let’s not think about those days anymore,” said Zee. “Let’s think about now.”

  “Good idea.” But I wondered what Joe Begay was doing on Martha’s Vineyard. I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years.

  Although the islands are within sight of each other, a lot of Nantucket people have never been to Martha’s Vineyard, and a lot of Vineyarders have never been to Nantucket. Zee and I were two of the latter, although we’d often seen the low outline of Muskeget on the horizon while we were fishing at Wasque Point. Muskeget is a tiny island at the west end of Nantucket, where, I’m told, seals gather in February to give birth to their young. Wasque, where I spend a lot of time, is the southeastern corner of Chappaquiddick, and is probably the best place on the east coast to surf cast for bluefish. I’d seen a few seals there as well.

  Once we’d cleared Cape Pogue light, we’d stripped and were now naked and sopping up the rays of the sun as we sailed slowly eastward. I was at the tiller, and Zee was stretched out on a sleeping pad on the cockpit deck. She looked like a bronze goddess, and her long black hair was spread like a dark halo around her head.

  “Well, how do you like being married?” I asked.

  “It’s better than having a sharp stick up your nose.”

  “How sweet. And they say that the language of lovers is a thing of the past.”

  “What would happen if you let go of the tiller and slacked the sheet, and came down here for a minute or two?”

  I looked around the horizon. There were some tall sails to the north of us, and some fishing boats to the south, down toward Wasque or maybe even farther. Two trawlers, their outriggers spread wide so that they looked like great birds or insects sitting on the sea, were moving across the channel. There were no signs of a shoal close by.

  “Let’s check it out,” I said, and loosed the sheet and tiller. The Shirley J. turned slowly and drifted broadside down wind and stream. I eased down beside Zee.

  Afterward we lay together while the boat wallowed gently on the small waves.

  “Is your mast all in splinters, are your shrouds all unstrung?” asked Zee, flashing her dazzling smile.

  “Only momentarily.” I ran my hands over her smooth tanned body. “Skin,” I said. “There’s nothing like it.”

  “Look up there,” she said, staring at the sky.

  I looked at the clouds moving across the blue.

  “A cloud-eating sky.” She pointed.

  Sure enough, amid the light, fluffy clouds there was a patch of cloud-eating blue sky. As the windblown clouds moved into it, they grew rapidly smaller and then disappeared. Clouds that didn’t enter that bit of blue sky kept right on blowing down wind, intact and undiminished. More proof that nature is weird.

  We lay and watched the clouds being eaten up.

  “Are we going to have babies soon?” asked Zee.

  “If you want babies, you get babies.”

  “Or should we just have the two of us for a while?”

  “If you want just two of us, you get just two of us.”

  “But what do you want? I don’t want you just to want what I want. I want you to have some wants of your own.”

  “But I do want what you want. I know you want to have babies, so if you want them now, that’s okay with me. Or if you want to have them later, that’s okay, too.”

  “But you do want to have them.”

  “Actually, I do,” I said. “I just don’t want you to feel that you should have them right away just because I’d like to have some.”

  “How many do you want?”

  “I think two. Or three at the most. My parents had two. One of each kind. That seemed to be a good number and a nice variety of genders.”

  “My parents had three. Two boys and me. That seemed like a nice selection, too. Do you want a boy or a girl first?”

  “A girl, because they’re made of sugar and spice and everything nice. And I want her to look just like you. Later we can have a boy. Or if we don’t, that’ll be okay, too.”

  “What if we get boys instead of girls?”

  “I think boys would be okay. You can teach them how to fish and I’ll teach them how to cook. We’ll do the same with the girls. We’ll both teach them how to garden, and Manny Fonseca can teach them all how to shoot.”

  “I don’t know if I want them to know how to shoot.”

  “In that case, I’ll have to sneak them off to the Rod and Gun Club range by myself while you’re at work, because I want them to know how to handle weapons.”

  “Are we having our first argument about the children?�
��

  “Nope. But since there are guns in our house, I want you to learn how to use them, too, and how to be safe with them. But I may have gotten to you too late. You may already be molded.”

  “Mold, shmold. I just don’t like guns. We never had any in our house.”

  In a locked gun cabinet, I kept the shotguns and the rifle that had been my father’s, and the .38 pistol that I’d had when I’d been a Boston cop. I didn’t do much hunting anymore, but I kept the guns anyway. Now and then I used one.

  I got up and took the tiller and hauled in the sheet, and the Shirley J. turned and headed east once more.

  Zee, the sea goddess, lolled on the deck and looked ahead. “Say, I do believe that’s Nantucket there.”

  “I do believe it is.”

  “What’s that ship doing there? It looks like it’s aground.”

  “What keen eyes you have, my dear. It is, indeed, a ship gone aground. It’s been there several years, I believe.”

  “How romantic. A wrecked ship on the fabled island.”

  “How about the two of us on the fabled island. That’s even more romantic.”

  She came and sat beside me and put her head against my shoulder. “I like being married,” she said.

  The sun was swinging low when we entered the channel leading into Nantucket harbor and became one of a steady stream of boats headed in. An hour before, as we had closed with the island and the sea around us had grown less empty, we had exchanged nudity for shorts and shirts, and were now models of well-dressed summer sailors.

  We sailed in past the lighthouse and the ferry dock, found a spot where we’d have room to swing, nosed up into the wind, and dropped anchor. I lowered the big mainsail and lashed it to the boom, and we were there.

  Zee came up from the cabin with champagne, glasses, caviar, and crackers. We sat and watched the busy harbor while we downed the wine and hors d’oeuvres. When the bottle was empty, I looked at Zee.

  “Go get into some going-ashore duds, my love, and pack whatever you’ll want when we explore this unknown island tomorrow. You and I have reservations for supper at eight at Vincent’s, and then two nights at the Jared Coffin House.”

  She looked at her watch and leaped to her feet. “Eight o’clock? Good grief, why didn’t you warn me?” She ducked down into the cabin. Then she hurried back out and gave me a large kiss. “You are so sweet! I thought we were going to be living on the boat!” She disappeared again.

  For two days we played tourist, enjoying our inn, taking the tour bus out to the east end of the island, walking the cobbled streets of the town, and finally finding a Jeep and going out over the sands to Great Point, where the rip reminded us of Chappaquiddick’s lonely beaches, and we’d felt much at home and had missed our surf-casting rods.

  Then we sailed for Chatham in front of a south wind.

  “Well, what do you think of Nantucket?” I asked, looking across the shoaly waters toward the sands of Monomoy and Cape Cod.

  “Not a bad island for a honeymoon,” said Zee, balancing a Sam Adams on her flat belly as she lay in the sun. “Not many trees, of course.”

  “They make up for the trees by having lots of fog.”

  “The Gray Lady,” agreed Zee. “I’m glad we went. Maybe we should just keep sailing from place to place forever. Maybe we should sail up to Boston to see the opera.”

  One of our presents was a set of tickets to see Carmen the coming weekend. After that, the honeymoon would officially be over. I wasn’t sure I wanted it to be.

  We sailed into Chatham Harbor and anchored and walked that lovely town for two days. We spent a good deal of time on the cliffs overlooking the opening in the eastern barrier beach, noting how the recent wicked storms had savaged the waterways and beachfront properties.

  “Remind me not to build my next house too close to the ocean,” said Zee.

  “Okay. Don’t build your next house too close to the ocean.”

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  The wind was still from the south when we left Chatham and sailed west along the south shore of the cape. Zee wrote thank-you notes as we went. One long reach took us to Hyannis, where we went ashore long enough to mail the notes and get ice for our last two bottles of champagne. The next morning we had an east wind that blew us to Hadley’s, where we found a far corner of the harbor, popped those bottles, and ate the last of our caviar.

  “How did you arrange for such a fine trip?” asked Zee.

  “A gentleman never sails into the wind,” I said. “I made a deal with Neptune before we left. Nep and I are just like that.” I held up a hand with fore and middle fingers side by side.

  The next day we caught the tide and sailed back to Edgartown, where I managed to fetch our stake so perfectly that I knew that nobody was watching, since people are only watching when you mess things up.

  I rowed us ashore, found a taxi to take us home, and carried my bride across the threshold. My sister and her husband were gone, but the cats were waiting, looking well fed and lazy.

  “The honeymoon isn’t officially over yet,” I said. I kicked the door shut behind us and walked straight into the bedroom. Zee laughed.

  The next day, having arranged for the Skye twins to tend to Oliver Underfoot and Velero in our absence, we shoved suitcases into the back of Zee’s little Jeep, and headed for Boston, where we planned not only to see Carmen, but to catch a Sox game.

  As things turned out, there was moderate conflict at Fenway, but two violent confrontations at the Wang Center. One involved Don José and Carmen, and the other included me.

  3

  It’s arguable that anyone who deliberately leaves Martha’s Vineyard in July and drives to Boston for a weekend deserves whatever wretchedness he encounters, the principle being that stupidity is its own reward.

  It’s not that Zee and I never go to Boston at all. We usually drive up there once a year, in the fall, just before the Bluefish Derby starts, to catch a Red Sox game. By that time, all hope for Sox success is usually gone, and we can relax and watch without any actual expectations of winning the World Series as the local guys last did in 1918. Going to the city during the summer is something else entirely. Who would do such a thing unless they were fools or had been given opera tickets, or both?

  We went north over the Bourne Bridge up to 495, took a right onto 24, another onto 128, and a left onto the Southeast Expressway, and so on into the city. From my Boston cop days I had a little local knowledge, so we managed to find a fairly cheap hotel not too far from the Wang Center that provided a decent room for us and a parking place for our car, which I had no intention of using while we were in town. It was Saturday morning, so the traffic hadn’t been bad, but not even I was such an idiot as to drive in downtown Boston when I didn’t have to. Better by far to take the T, or grab a cab. Or, better yet, to walk, since Boston is a very walkable city. Like London, someone once told me, although I wouldn’t know, never having been to London.

  Boston was hot and full of exhaust fumes, but Fenway Park would be better. Under a pale blue sky, we walked across the Common and through the Garden, stopping briefly on the bridge to watch the swan boats in the pond, then strolled up Newbury Street, window-shopping. Zee picked out several extremely expensive items that she said she would accept from me as tokens of my esteem, and I promised her we’d get them all on our way back to the hotel. She held my arm and smiled at passersby.

  The far end of Newbury is shabbier than the Garden end, but it leads toward baseball, so we didn’t care. We crossed the Muddy River, and then, without getting killed by Sox fans looking for parking places, made it to the old ballpark, America’s finest and quirkiest.

  You never know quite what a ball will do when it’s hit down either line or off the left field wall in Fenway Park. It can take crazy bounces that will drive outfielders mad, and turn a routine play into something quite bizarre. Oh, for the days when Yaz and Dewey were still out there in left and right, playing the angles with grace an
d winging the ball back in. The golden days of yesteryear.

  But this was this year, and Yaz and Dewey and Jim Rice and the rest of the old Sox sluggers were only distant memories.

  But they still had Roger, if not a lot else, and they were playing almost .500 ball, in spite of their usual shaky infield, limp bull pen, and sore-kneed, bingle-hitting outfielders.

  We managed two pretty good tickets behind third, where we could see everything but the left field corner, and bought beer, hot dogs and popcorn, the necessities.

  “Home at last,” said Zee, sitting down and looking at her program. “Warm beer and cold hot dogs, instead of the other way around. It must be Fenway.”

  “Pennant fever,” I said, looking at the noisy, midsummer lazy, shirtsleeved crowd.

  The wind barely moved the flags, and it was warm. The teams and the crowd stood for the national anthem, and the Sox took the field.

  “Our team,” said Zee, clapping.

  Our team, indeed. For better or for worse. Like marriage.

  “Go get ’em!” yelled Zee, as the pitcher put one down the middle and the first batter popped up.

  More beer, more hot dogs, more popcorn. Not too much scoring, but just enough for the local guys to win. We were carried out of the park by a happy crowd.

  “How long is our winning streak?” asked Zee.

  “One game. This one.”

  “The pennant for sure. Nobody can stop us now!”

  Across the street from Fenway is the Boston Beer Works, where they make and serve their own beer. We shouldered our way in and actually found seats in the back.

  Their Amber Ale is good. Maybe not quite up to Commonwealth Brewery standards, but good. One of the really positive signs of good health in America is the increasing number of micro-breweries across the country. Boston alone has a half dozen or so, and there are others everywhere, all making good, local, English-style beers.

  I said all this to Zee and smiled a masculine smile. “It makes a man proud to be an Amurican.”

  “I think that’s American, with an e.”