Vineyard Blues

by Philip R. Craig

  I looked at the rubble on the lawn. “If you slept at all last night, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

  He nodded. “You work some places I’ve worked, you could sleep through hell afterwards.” He seemed in a good mood.

  Zee apparently noted this. “Adam get back?”

  He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Late. After you all left.”

  So far, so good. “He ever catch up with the girl?” I asked.

  Corrie smiled. “I heard him come home with a girl. I guess it was Millie, but I didn’t see her.” He nodded toward the house behind him. “They’re all still sawing wood. Young folks these days ain’t much on rising early.”

  Were they ever? I was glad that Millicent Dowling was okay and said so.

  “Me, too,” said Corrie, losing his smile. “Place where she lived was empty when it burned, but for a while people were afraid she was in it.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Nobody has told me that yet.”

  Zee touched my sleeve. “Let’s go have a look at the place. Maybe the fire marshal will be there and we can find out what started it.”

  Ben Krane owned a lot of property. Too much, in the opinion of a lot of people. I looked at Corrie. “Where was the fire?”

  He thought, then waved a hand in a gesture that took in most of the island. “Over there in what they call Arbutus Park. Or so they tell me. I never been there, myself.”

  Zee smiled at him. “You want a ride to the church tonight?”

  “No, thank you. Some ladies from the guild are going to pick me up and bring me back.”

  “Fine. I hope we can get in. I think they may have a lot bigger congregation tonight than usual.”

  “I’ll save you a couple of seats in the front row.”

  “Super,” said Zee, and we drove away.

  As we approached Arbutus Park, I could smell the sour stench of smoke. It got stronger as we turned up the bumpy sand road that led away from the highway and into the woods.

  “I hope the girl is okay,” said Zee. “Fire scares me more than most things. Do you know where you’re going?”

  “There’s an old farmhouse up here a ways that always looked to me like a typical Ben Krane place.”

  “You mean it looks like a dump and every summer it’s filled with college kids.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “I guess you’re right. There’s a fire truck.”

  We stopped on the road across from the blackened ruins of the house. There wasn’t much left. A few wisps of smoke still drifted into the air, watched by some of Edgartown’s volunteer firemen. One of them was Frank Costa. He came over.

  “Went up like a torch,” he said. “Good thing nobody was at home.”

  “What started it?” asked Zee.

  “Too soon to say. Could be anything. Cigarette, bad wiring, you name it.”

  “Arson?”

  The possibility didn’t seem to surprise Frank. “Could be, I guess. No hydrants anywhere close, pretty isolated spot, so nobody much would be around after the kids went off to that party. We had a bunch of arsons in places like this a few years back. You remember them?”

  “I remember.”

  He yawned. “I been here all day. I’m ready to hit the sack.” He turned and looked down the road, and when he did I could hear the sound of a car. “Well, well,” said Frank. “Here comes the owner, I do believe.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a new Land Rover coming up the road. It parked behind us and Ben Krane got out and looked angrily at the ruin.

  He was a tall, handsome man with a face like a hawk’s. He was twice divorced, but, according to gossip, women who weren’t married to him found him fascinating. He always seemed to have an attractive one around, anyway, though rarely the same one for too long. He and I bumped into each other now and then, and I had no fault to find with him other than his profession as slumlord.

  Zee’s views were stronger. She considered him a creep.

  “Not much left standing, Ben,” said Frank.

  “When’s the fire marshal going to get here?” snapped Ben.

  “Not much he can do till things cool down and he can get in there,” said Frank.

  “The sooner the better. One of those damned kids probably left a cigarette someplace. I ought to make them take out insurance!”

  “Trust Ben to come up with another way to squeeze money out of somebody,” hissed Zee. “Come to think of it, I’m surprised he doesn’t already do that. He could do it through his own company and make money coming and going.”

  “Down, Fang. Maybe he’s just a shocked landlord, distraught with grief.”

  “Ben Krane has never been distraught about anything in his life. You have to have feelings to be distraught!”

  Ben glanced our way, then came over to the car and leaned down. “Hello, J.W., what brings you out this way? Hello, Zee. Haven’t seen you for a while.”

  “Hello, Ben,” said Zee. “No, it’s been a while. Did I hear you say you burned this place down for the insurance?”

  He managed to place a thin smile on his falcon face. “Same old Zee, always quick with the quip. These your kids? Pair of cuties. Little girl looks just like you, Zee. She’s going to grow up to be a beauty, J.W. You’ll be fighting off the boys in a few years.” He straightened and looked at his Rolex. “Well, I’m going to circumnavigate what’s left of this place, then I have to get back to work.”

  He walked toward the smoking remains of the house.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually did torch it,” said Zee. “It’s probably insured for more than it’s worth and he’s already collected his summer rent. He gets it up front and the kids will have to sue him to get it back.”

  “I imagine those thoughts will cross the fire marshal’s mind,” I said, putting the old Toyota in gear. Fires are like killings. They may be accidental or they may be on purpose, but if they’re on purpose, the first suspects are people close to the casualty. Of course, strangers commit crimes, too, but not as often as you might think. We usually get robbed or killed by our friends and families, and a lot of people burn down their own buildings.

  We drove home to get ready for Corrie’s concert in Oak Bluffs. We wanted to look respectable so Corrie wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen with us.

  Zee sniffed at her sleeve and wrinkled her nose. “We all smell like smoke,” she said. “These clothes will have to be washed.”

  I remembered a fire that had made me sick the first year I was a cop in Boston. A guy had been smoking in bed and had burned himself up. The whole apartment had smelled like cooked hot dogs.

  — 9 —

  Day-trippers to the Vineyard usually land in Oak Bluffs, so the docks and Circuit Avenue, its main street, are lined with snack-food joints and gift shops offering Taiwan-made Martha’s Vineyard mementos to visitors who have circumnavigated the island in tour buses and are now heading back to the mainland prepared to give authoritative reports about the place.

  Seeing them boarding the boat for their return trip to the mainland, I am reminded of the time when I was lying on the beach in the summer sun, and overheard two college-age girls talking about their plans for the next year. One of them said she was going to Europe. The other replied, “Oh, I’ve seen that place. I was there on spring break.”

  Never having been to Europe, I was aware that I was in no position to criticize the girl who had apparently seen it all in a week. Similarly, since I’ve never taken the tour bus around the Vineyard, I try to withhold judgment of the knowledge of island day-trippers, too.

  Oak Bluffs is also one of the two towns on the Vineyard that allow alcohol to be sold and served, and is the site of a couple of notorious bars, including the Fireside, where I have been known to lift a glass or two. All in all, OB is the funkiest town on the island, and OB people wouldn’t live anywhere else.

  The church where Corrie was performing was already overflowing when Zee and I got there, but the big
guy at the door was expecting us and showed us to our reserved seats in the front row, leading us past slightly irked people who had gotten there before us but were obliged to stand if they were going to hear Corrie.

  It was a mostly dark-complected crowd, but there were paler people, too. I recognized some of the folks seated in the pews: John and Mattie Skye; Stanley Crandel, the latest in a long line of Crandels who owned the big Crandel house on East Chop, and who liked to claim John Saunders, the slave turned Methodist preacher, as an ancestor; his wife, Betsy, who waved; their actress niece, Julie Crandel, who was visiting from Hollywood and also waved; and, seated across the hall away from the more respectable Crandels, the small, ageless figures of Cousin Henry Bayles and his wife. Cousin Henry, who reputedly had once run the black mobs in Philadelphia, but was now quietly retired in a cottage down by Lagoon Pond, did not wave.

  Since it was a house of God, the minister led a rousing prayer of thanks for grace and music, and turned the evening over to Corrie, who led off with a number I remembered hearing him sing with my father long long ago.

  The blues tell of hard times and down times, of lonesome times, of sin and sorrow, of prisons with and without bars; but they also speak of endurance, of outlasting adversity, of good times with good women and good liquor.

  Corrie sang mourning songs of ropes, chain gangs, and cotton fields, but mixed them with soft songs of rocking chairs on Southern summer porches, of bedrooms and barrooms that were warm and friendly, at least for a time. Sometimes we clapped hands as he sang, sometimes we sat and just listened to that voice of his, which he never raised, but that carried to the farthest corners of the hall. It delivered despair and hope without sentimentality or self-pity, and when Corrie put aside his guitar for the last time, the audience was left with emotions of both joy and sorrow, right where the blues usually leave you. As Corrie shook hands with the Crandels and others who surrounded him, the rest of us slowly exited into the night, feeling sad and good and somehow wiser than we had just a couple of hours earlier.

  As we went out the door, we looked back and I saw Corrie embrace Cousin Henry Bayles and kiss Henry’s wife.

  “Well,” said Zee, holding my hand as we walked to the truck. “That was mighty fine. I thought I heard some Brownie McGhee and maybe some Gary Davis in there, along with the other stuff.”

  “Could be. Reverend Gary worked with a lot of guys. I wouldn’t be surprised if Corrie was one of them.”

  “I see that Corrie and Cousin Henry are close.”

  “Maybe Corrie spent some time in Philly when Cousin Henry was down there. As I understand it, Cousin Henry owned some clubs or at least took some money out of them before he left town for good. Maybe Corrie worked in some of them. He’s mixed with some tough birds in some tough places, from what he says.”

  “I’m glad to learn that Cousin Henry likes the blues. It makes him seem more human.”

  My mouth said, “He’s as human as most of us, I think.”

  But in my mind I wasn’t so sure. The cop’s jungle telegraph, to which I had been hooked while on the Boston PD, had it that Cousin Henry had done some very, very bad things to people while in Philadelphia. Admittedly, the victims were pretty bad themselves, for the most part, and would have done to Henry what he had done to them, had they gotten the chance. Still, if the rumors were even somewhat true, at least part of Cousin Henry was arguably more beast than human.

  But then there are monsters inside of most of us, just waiting to get out.

  We drove home and relieved the twin of her baby-sitting duties.

  “How was the concert? Were Mom and Daddy there?”

  “Great and yes. A good time was had by all.”

  “How long is Mr. Appleyard going to be on the island? I hear that there’s going to be a big party at a house tomorrow night, and that everybody’s going to take something for the kids who got burned out, and that they wanted Mr. Appleyard to sing a couple of songs for the cause, but he’s leaving the island before the party, so he can’t do it.”

  “How did you hear about all that?”

  Only the faintest of blushes touched the twin’s cheeks. “I used your phone a little. I hope you don’t mind.”

  We didn’t mind, so the twin accepted her money, assured us that our offspring had been angels, got into her mother’s car, and left.

  “It would be encouraging to think that these summer kids would actually want to hear the blues,” said Zee. “Maybe I’ve misjudged them. Too bad Corrie can’t be there.”

  “I’d like to think some of them have good taste in music,” I said, “but I don’t have any reason to.”

  “We’re becoming old fuddy-duddies, just like my parents,” sighed Zee. “They didn’t like the music I liked, and now I don’t like the music the next generation likes.”

  As one who was born disliking most of whatever music was currently popular—preferring country-and-western and classical, and having a selective taste for traditional English, Scottish, Irish, and Russian ballads, some jazz and some blues—I did not instantly admit to fuddy-duddyism.

  “Maybe it’s the sweaty-bed blues they like,” I said, easing up to her and starting to unbutton her shirt.

  Her blue-black hair smelled sweet and musky, and her dark eyes were deep as the sea. “Maybe that’s it,” she said, unbuttoning my shirt in return. “Makes sense to me.”

  I slid her shirt off her shoulders and kissed her right there on that spot at the base of her throat. She put her arms around my neck. I picked her up and carried her into the bedroom.

  Marriage is good for you.

  The next day, Joshua and I worked on the addition, with Diana supervising from her corral. It was pretty clear that I’d probably get more done without assistance, but so what? I wanted my kids to know how to swing hammers, fish, and do the other stuff that I did. As we worked, the pop-pop-pop of gunfire came through the trees from the Rod and Gun Club. One of the poppers was Zee, using her custom .45.

  Zee was practicing at the club range with Manny Fonseca, who was her tutor in the competitive pistol-shooting game they played. In spite of her belief that the world would be a better place without firearms, Zee was a whiz with a pistol and had begun to make a name for herself shooting competitively.

  She also had a lot of fun, which was something she had expected even less than her discovery that she was what Manny called a natural with a handgun. Her moral convictions about weapons were thus at odds with her talent and the pleasure shooting gave her, but the conflict didn’t prevent her from being a better pistol shot than I had ever been, even when I’d packed iron professionally, first as a soldier and then as a cop. Like Scarlett O’Hara, I could shoot pretty well as long as I didn’t have to shoot too far. Zee was a veritable Joanna Wayne.

  In time, she and I would teach our children about pistols, rifles, and shotguns, for ignorance of weapons is, like ignorance of most things, more dangerous than knowledge. But that would come later, when they were older and bigger. For now, as the sounds of Manny’s and Zee’s practice rounds came snapping at us through the trees, Joshua and Diana were apprentice carpenters.

  That afternoon, after cleaning her pistol and making note of an upcoming competition over in America, Zee went off to work on the four-to-midnight shift.

  No doubt there would be plenty of work waiting for her. The emergency ward at the hospital in OB took in a pretty steady stream of customers during the summer, including moped casualties; sufferers of sprains, contusions, broken bones, heart problems, alcohol and drug overdoses; and other routine patients. I don’t think I could ever do the work of medics without becoming hard as granite, but Zee, like most nurses and doctors I’ve met, somehow managed to stay quite human. It’s almost enough to make you believe that there is a God.

  Not long after she left, Corrie Appleyard, looking none too well, came putt-putting down the driveway on the same moped he’d been working on earlier.

  “Easy rider,” he said with a forced smile. “Just
came by to say good-bye, and thanks. I’m catching the seven-thirty boat back to the mainland.” He put out his long brown hand and shook mine.

  “Zee’s gone to work,” I said. “She’ll be sorry to have missed you. We’ll have a room ready for you in the fall, so come back anytime.”

  “Sorry to have missed your wife,” said Corrie, “but I’ll take you up on that offer to visit.” He lifted a hand. “It’s been nice meeting your family. See you next time.”

  He drove back up the driveway and out of sight.

  That night, sometime after Zee came home, climbed into bed beside me, and we both snuggled to sleep, I was awakened by the fire whistle in Edgartown calling to the volunteers. Then I heard sirens and more sirens, and I was disturbed by the direction they seemed to be headed. I listened, then eased out of bed and went into the living room and turned on the scanner. Voices and static crackled from the speaker. I heard the name of the street where Corrie had been staying, and had an almost irresistible urge to go there. But I knew that the last thing the firemen needed was another citizen getting in their way, so I remained where I was.

  In time I heard someone say that the place seemed to be empty, and I felt a surge of relief. Apparently, everybody had gone to a party at another house, said the voice.

  That would be the party the twin had mentioned, where the college kids would combine fun with charity as they tried to help those who’d gotten burned out earlier, and where Corrie had been asked to do some singing for the good cause.

  Another bad fire, but at least no one had gotten hurt, in spite of the arsonist who I now believed was pretty clearly at work. The fire marshal could handle it. I turned off the scanner and went back to bed.