A Beautiful Place to Die

by Philip Craig

  We were sitting on her couch. The late show was fluttering at us. Zee looked at me. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Well, are you going to try it or not?”

  “Well, yes.”

  I did. She put up with it. I got braver. When we kissed, her lips were moist and there was hunger in them. We were both a bit breathless when we parted.

  “Definitely more than a postpubescent kiss.” I said. “If you’d done that to me when I was fifteen, I’d have probably split my pants on the spot.”

  She glanced down and laughed. “You’re not doing so badly right now.”

  I went home about midnight, feeling good about everything but leaving.

  On Sunday we went to the game and then down to the Fireside for beer. The place was jumping, as usual, and the crowd made us feel like senior citizens. The music from the machine was rock. Bonzo saw us at the bar and came over.

  “Hey, J.W., how you doing?” He smiled his sweet, vacant smile. I introduced him to Zee, and he bobbed his head and smiled even more. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure. Hey, J.W., we going to go fishing again?”

  “Sure, Bonzo.” I turned to Zee. “You work tomorrow, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, Bonzo. How about tomorrow?”

  Bonzo’s simple face lit up. “Hey, great, J.W.! That’s great! You got a pole for me, like last time?”

  “Sure.” I ran the tides through my mind. “You be here at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, okay? I’ll pick you up.”

  “Hey,” said Bonzo. “Thanks.” Then he looked thoughtfully at Zee and me, frowned, smiled, said, “So long, you two,” and walked off with his broom.

  “Bad acid,” I said to Zee. “They say he used to be a really smart kid. He was a member of the pack Billy used to run with, I’m told.” Zee drank her beer. “He’s okay,” I said. “He likes birds. He’s got a tape recorder and a mike and he likes to go out and try to record bird songs. I take him fishing sometimes.”

  “You’re okay, too, Jefferson,” said Zee.

  “You, too, Zee. I like a woman who can cook and hold down a steady job.”

  She whacked me in the ribs with her elbow.

  * * *

  Monday was bright and blue. A Chamber of Commerce day. The June People were all over the beach well before noon. I picked up Bonzo and we headed for Wasque. Bonzo had his tape recorder. At the edge of the tern nesting ground just before Wasque, he had me stop.

  “I’m gonna get me some songs,” he said. He took his tape recorder over to a low dune and placed it in the sand. He put a mike on the end of a stick. “My tape runs for an hour,” he said, smiling. “I bet I get some good songs this time.”

  “Somebody may just come along and take your machine,” I said.

  He gave me a sly smile. “No. Look.” He took out a neatly lettered paper enclosed in cellophane and thumbtacked it to the stick. It said: ORNITHOLOGICAL RESEARCH, DO NOT DISTURB. Bonzo tapped a finger to his temple. “I’m no fool, you know. I always put this up. People leave my things alone. They don’t want to get into trouble with a scientist.”

  “Pretty smart, Bonzo.”

  “You’re a fisherman,” said Bonzo, smiling. “I’m an ornithologist. You’re smart about fish and I’m smart about birds.” He blinked his lashes over his hollow eyes. “I like birds best. That’s okay with you, isn’t it? You don’t mind my liking birds best, do you, J.W.?”

  “Naw,” I said. “Birds sound better than fish every time. And fish can’t fly.”

  “Flying fish can!” His laugh was like a child’s. “I got you there, J.W., didn’t I? Come on, admit it, I got you on that one! Flying fish!”

  I felt a grin on my face. “Yeah, you got me, Bonzo. Come on, let’s try for a bluefish.” We got into the Landcruiser and drove to the point. I wondered what Bonzo might have become if he’d stuck to drinking beer.

  He fished like a young boy, casting tirelessly and largely in vain, but never stopping. There was an awkwardness about him that kept him from ever getting any better, but he loved being there in the sun, feeling the wind in his face and the sand under his bare feet, seeing the blue ocean reaching out to the southern horizon. And he kept his mind on his business, never stopping to play with the water that surged up and down the sloping beach after every wave broke, but standing solid in the swirling water and keeping an intent, vacant eye on his plug as he tossed it out and reeled it in. He was happy for me when I finally tied into a fish far out at the end of my cast and got the rascal in after he did some tail dancing and short runs along the wave tops. And he was happy every time I caught a fish after that. And I was happy when at last the fish moved in closer and he could reach them with his short cast and he got one and landed it.

  His smile reached his ears. He took the fish to the Landcruiser and carefully removed the plug, using my long-nosed pliers. Bluefish have teeth like little razors. Bonzo had once tried to retrieve a half-swallowed plug with his fingers and had lost some blood in the process. After that, he always used the pliers. I had a couple of scarred fingers myself. Bluefish don’t care who they chew.

  The fish were there for about an hour, and then they went off to wherever it is that bluefish go when they’re tired of being caught. Bonzo and I had beer and smoked bluefish salad sandwiches for lunch, then went and got his tape recorder and mike. On the way home he played his tape for me. I heard the hush of wind, the sound of engines as four-by-fours went by, and faintly, very faintly, the occasional cheep of a bird. Bonzo beamed.

  “You hear that, J.W.? Those are terns. I like terns.”

  “I like terns, too,” I said. “I like snowy egrets better and I like oyster catchers even better.”

  “And blue herons,” said Bonzo, nodding, “and ospreys and pheasants.”

  “And pheasants,” I agreed, thinking of hunting season, “and Canada geese . . .”

  “And swans and black ducks . . .”

  By the time I got Bonzo home, we must have gone through every bird on Martha’s Vineyard. That is, Bonzo went through them. My bird lore runs thin. He rattled off names like a living Peterson guidebook.

  Bonzo lived near the Oak Bluffs Camp Meeting grounds in a neat gingerbread house with pink and blue shutters. Pink and blue flowers grew in pink and blue pots on the porch. His mother had her colors down pat. She came out when we stopped in front of the house. Bonzo showed her his fish and turned on his tape recorder. His mother smiled and patted his shoulder and told him to go fillet the fish. Then she smiled at me. She taught math at the regional high school and her son Bonzo had been and probably always would be her joy and burden.

  “Thank you, J.W. It was kind of you.”

  “We had a good time. Do you have enough fish? I’ve got several more in back.”

  “No. There’s only the two of us. But thanks.”

  I sold the fish at the market. The price was still pretty good. I used my profit to buy gas and replenish my dwindling beer supply. In case someone bombed the liquor store I liked to have survival rations.

  — 13 —

  It was midafternoon when I got home. When I turned off the engine I heard the phone ringing. I got to it. It was Nancy Norris.

  “Something’s happened,” she said. “Maybe you can help.”

  “If I can.”

  “They’ve shipped Jimmy’s things home. His clothes and his tools and all. But they didn’t send his ring or his journal. I talked to the mortuary here because I thought he might have been wearing it. . . . It was a closed casket service, you know. . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “But they said he wasn’t wearing it. I asked them if—They said his hands were not hurt very much, but that there wasn’t any ring. I know he probably just lost it somewhere in his travels, but he never said so in his letters and he would have told us, I think, because it was really the only thing of his mother’s, the only thing he got from her. He always wore it. My mom is so upset. . . . And we especially wanted his journal. You know, so
we’d know what he’d been doing and thinking during those last days. . . . But it’s not with his books. Can you . . . could you look for them? It would mean a lot to my folks and me, too. I . . .”

  “Maybe he kept the book under his mattress or somewhere. Maybe they missed it when they collected his things. Maybe the coroner took the ring off during his examination and forgot about it. I’ll be glad to look around.”

  “The ring wasn’t valuable, but it means a lot to us. It’s just one of those high school class rings that you can buy when you graduate. It’s gold looking and it has a red stone in it and it says Longview High School 1951. It was his mother’s. She died giving birth and Mom got it when she got Jimmy. She gave it to him before he was even big enough to wear it. He used to hang it on a chain around his neck until he was big enough to wear it on his finger. I really appreciate your help, Mr. Jackson.”

  “I’ll ask around. Can I do anything else for you?”

  I couldn’t. We rang off and I brought in the beer from the Landcruiser and popped one. I was giving serious thought to whipping up some smoked bluefish pâté and piling it on crackers for a snack, when I heard a car coming down my driveway. I looked out over the open half of the Dutch door and saw a large black Caddy pull into the yard. The door opened and Leon got out. I waited to see if he had company, but he did not. I knew why he had come and went out to meet him.

  “I’ll get right to the point,” he said as I came outside. “Mr. Sylvia was very annoyed with the way you threatened him. He wants to make sure it never happens again. My job is to protect Mr. Sylvia or, having failed that, as indeed I failed when you visited him, to extract suffering proportionate to that which he suffered.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I’ve been instructed to break you up a bit. Nothing fatal, I assure you, but it will be painful and probably will debilitate you for a few days or weeks. I recommend no resistance, since such would require me to use more force than otherwise.”

  “You’re very literate,” I said.

  “Very intelligent, too,” said Leon, “and very strong and fast. I played professional football for three years and earned enough money to begin medical school. My medical training has taught me a good deal about how to damage the human body. I know pretty well what to do and how to do it. I think we should get started. Please keep in mind that I can outrun you, outmuscle you, and probably outthink you. You are going to experience some pain, but you will recover from it if you don’t force me to go to extremes.”

  “How many more years of medical school do you have left?”

  “I’m in my second year.”

  “Well, Leon, before we begin the games, I have a word to say. While I haven’t the slightest doubt that you can probably outrun and outmuscle me, I’m not sure you can beat me up without risk. I’d guess, for example, that you probably left football for the same reason most young players do—injury. And since the most famous and career-ending injuries are knee injuries, I’d guess that that’s the sort that you suffered. And I assure you that if you insist on trying to maim me, I will concentrate my energies on smashing one or both of your knees. I hope I make myself clear.” Leon looked thoughtful. “You should also know that I do have some training, and even though I’m growing old and gray, I’ve not forgotten it.”

  “I have my duty, nevertheless,” said Leon.

  “Your duty is to gain guarantees that I’ll never again discomfort Sylvia. You have my personal assurance that I’ll never again enter the house. I never expect to see him again, for that matter. On the other hand, if you succeed in breaking me up, I’ll someday mend, and being the kind of guy I am, I will no doubt take out my irritation on him in person.”

  “Mr. Sylvia wants revenge as well as guarantees.”

  “My recommendation is that you report to your boss that you did indeed beat me up as ordered and that I promised never to disturb him again—that should satisfy him.”

  Leon studied me, weighing his thoughts. He was a very serious young man. Finally, he gave a small nod. “Very well. I believe your advice has merit. However, I must emphasize that if you ever give Mr. Sylvia reason to doubt this agreement, I will be obliged to return and fulfill my original intention with you. Is that clear?”

  “Very.”

  Leon nodded, got into the Caddy, and backed around so he could drive out. I had to know, so I put up a hand and walked around to the driver’s door. Leon leaned out of the window.

  “Leon,” I said, “do you intend to specialize?”

  “I do.”

  “In what?”

  “Pediatrics.”

  When Leon was gone, I went inside and finished my beer. I was sweating, and not just because it was a warm day. I took a shower and changed shirts and then drove downtown and went into Doc Meyer’s office.

  Doc Meyer was the old-time sort of family practitioner who still saw people without appointments. He had delivered hundreds of Vineyard children and a lot of their parents as well. He was a carver of model boats, a fiddle player, and county coroner, too. He didn’t like the last job because he was squeamish. Rumor had it that he’d planned to be a surgeon but just couldn’t stand the cutting the job required, so he’d become a family practitioner instead. He’d been coroner for decades, out of a sense of duty to the island.

  Three patients were ahead of me. I waited. Three more came into the waiting room and sat down after giving the nurse, Doc’s wife, their names. When my turn came, I went in, admired his latest ship model, and asked him about the ring. There wasn’t any ring, said Doc. I thanked him and left.

  I caught up with the chief in, of all places, his office. He was happy to hear that I wasn’t going to nose around in police business today, and he told me how to find Jim Norris’s landlord up in Chilmark. He said the Chilmark police or maybe the sheriff’s department had probably sent Jim’s belongings back to Oregon. I drove up to Chilmark.

  Chilmark is the next-to-last township up island. It’s a beautiful, hilly place famous for offering the principal nude beach on the island. If you live in Chilmark, you can go to that beach if you want to, but if you don’t live in Chilmark, you might be asked to leave. A lot of summer people refuse to rent anywhere but Chilmark just so they can go to that beach. Everybody to his own style, I say.

  Jim Norris’s landlord was not the nude-beach type. He had a fishing boat that he ran out of Menemsha and made a lot of summer money renting houses to those people who wanted to go to the nude beach and were willing to pay high prices to do so. He got by quite nicely, thank you.

  Jim’s cottage was tiny and sparsely furnished, but he’d taken it in the fall of the year he’d arrived and had proved so handy at fixing it up that his landlord had just let him stay there instead of throwing him out the following summer for the sake of a higher seasonal rental. On Martha’s Vineyard, a lot of year-round residents rent houses in the wintertime when they’re cheap, give them up for the summer trade when they’re expensive, and go back to them again in the fall. Jim had been lucky. His landlord had liked him. Everybody had liked Jim. Even me.

  “Look around,” said his landlord when I told him of Nancy Norris’s phone call. “I got some people coming in later in the week. Good thing you got here today. Lock up when you’re through and stick the key over the door.” He went away.

  There wasn’t much. Empty closet. Empty bureau, empty medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Nothing under the bed, nothing under the mattress, nothing in or under the couch, nothing down in the old overstuffed chair in the corner. Nothing in or under the bunks in the spare room or in the bureau there, nothing in the corners of the rooms. Nothing.

  Finally I found the ring in an old, cracked coffee cup on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet. Nobody but me had had a reason to look for it, and only someone looking for it would have looked in the coffee cup.

  It was just what Nancy Norris had said it was—a golden metal ring with a red stone in it. Real gold? A real gemstone? No matter. Around the stone wer
e the words LONGVIEW HIGH SCHOOL and the date 1951. Jim’s mother’s ring.

  But it wasn’t Jim’s mother’s ring. It was a man’s ring, too big for a woman unless she had huge hands. It looked like my high school class ring, like every guy’s high school class ring. Mine had my initials engraved inside. I looked inside this one. There were the initials: GHM.

  I went out and locked the door. I hadn’t found Jim’s journal, but I did have the ring. I put the key above the door and drove home.

  GHM. Jim’s middle name was Singleton, according to his sister. His middle name was his mother’s name. You couldn’t bend Singleton enough to make it start with M no matter how hard you tried. Ergo, Jim’s mother either really was named Singleton and for some reason had GHM’s ring—probably because GHM was the child’s father—or she wasn’t named Singleton at all. Maybe. GHM? General H. Motors? Did Geoffrey of Monmouth have a middle initial?

  As I drove through West Tisbury I wondered if Zee was home yet. I didn’t think so. I wondered if I was seeing her too much too soon. She made me feel healthy, but I wasn’t sure I made her feel that way. I loved her laugh. I passed the field of dancing statues and the general store, turned right, and drove toward home. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen Jim wearing the ring. I couldn’t, but I couldn’t remember whether he hadn’t, either. Who would remember? Susie Martin would.

  So instead of going straight home, I drove to the Martin place. Susie and her mother were out watering flowers. They were of the buy-them-grown-in-the-pot-so-you-can-grow-them-right-away school of flower growers. I was a plant-the-seeds-yourself man. My flowers were just beginning to push out of the earth and theirs were big and beautiful.

  I asked them both if they’d ever seen Jim wearing a class ring. They hadn’t. I fingered the ring in my pocket and felt perverse about not showing it to them. There was no reason not to, but I didn’t. I wondered if Bilbo Baggins felt the same way when he was playing the riddle game with Gollum.