“What do you want to do?”
“I have to work, of course. Not right now, because I’ve got enough for the moment, but eventually. What I’d really like to do is get another plane or boat. I like flying and I’m good at it. Stupidest thing I ever did—well, maybe not the stupidest but stupid enough—was giving Samantha my airplane when we split. I should have kept it. If I’d have done that, I could have made enough money to keep her happy and piled up some retirement cash of my own. I’d be sitting pretty by now. But I was trying to do the right thing in a hurry, so the plane went to her and I’ve never gotten another one.”
“I didn’t know there was that much money in flying.”
“You’d be surprised. I’ve flown planes in several countries, and I could still be doing it if I wasn’t getting so old and conservative.” He grinned. “You’ve got these castles all over this island. There’s a lot of money in this world, and a fair part of it travels by small plane. Remember Fred, all those years ago down in West Palm?”
“Sure. I was just thinking about him yesterday, in fact.”
“Remember the cargo we brought home for him?”
“I do.”
“You know what was in those cartons?”
“I know they weren’t TV sets.”
“And that’s all you know, and all I know, but we both know those boxes contained something that was pretty valuable. Well, there’s a lot of freight being moved around these days, and if you don’t look in the boxes, you can do all right for yourself.”
“Sounds like it could be dangerous.”
He made a small dismissive gesture. “Not really. The secret is to play straight with the people you’re working for and to keep the authorities from getting interested in you. You do that by always having some legit reason to be flying where you’re flying or by having a boss who knows who to buy off.” He sipped his coffee. “You have to be careful, of course. You always have to be careful.”
“Is that the kind of work you want to do now?”
He looked into the fire. “I think I’m too old for some things I used to do,” he said, “but I still have some contacts and I can still fly.”
I said, “Well, we have two working airports during the summer and another one that small planes use from time to time on an informal basis. There’s a lot of air traffic to and from the island during the tourist season, but things slow down this time of year, so the Katama airport is closed until Memorial Day.”
He finished his coffee and looked at his watch. “I think I’ll stay on the ground for a while, until I work out a long-range plan. When I was a lad, we used to get out of school about this time. When do your kids get home?”
“Any time,” I said, looking out at the falling snow. “The bus drops them off at the head of the driveway. Zee should be coming home not too much later.”
“You the cook?”
“I am. Tonight is leftover night. We’re having yesterday’s black-bean chili again tonight.”
“It was good last night and it’ll be good again, but we used up the corn bread, so I’ll whip up some more. You have the makings?”
“I do.”
“Since you and I were young, I’ve become a world-renowned corn-bread baker, and I’m anxious to show off my skills.” He stood up. “Point me at the ingredients.”
Because chili and corn bread go together like Damon and Pythias, I got right out of my chair. “I never argue with someone who wants to do my work,” I said. “Follow me to the kitchen.”
He did, and when he discovered canned chili peppers in our cupboard, he announced that his corn bread would be the Mexican variety, which was even better than the normal kind. By the time Joshua and Diana came stomping into the living room from the screened porch, their jackets and boots wet with snow, Clay’s batter was mixed and he was ready to bake.
I helped the kids out of their storm gear and sent them to their rooms so they could get into their loafing clothes and slippers. I put the wet coats and boots behind the woodstove to drip and dry and got to work making warm cocoa for the youngsters and, in expectation of Zee’s arrival, heating cider for the big people to mix with rum, cinnamon, and cloves.
When Zee got home, the snow was falling in earnest and changing the landscape into a black-and-white world as the short winter day darkened toward night. She added her coat and boots to those already behind the stove, gave kisses to me and the kids and a smile to Clay, then sniffed the scents from the kitchen.
“Smells good.”
She disappeared into our bedroom and returned in sweats and slippers, walking like a panther out of her den. We sat in front of the fire and the children told us how things had gone in school that day. Diana’s day had been uneventful, but Joshua’s had included an altercation with another boy.
At this news a silence fell and stayed until I said, “Tell me what happened.”
“Oh, not much,” said Joshua, seeming surprised that the event merited further discussion. “Jim Duarte pushed me and I pushed him back, and then he pushed me again and I hit him in the nose just like you showed me, Ma, and he cried and I had to go to Patagonia.”
Patagonia, I knew, was a chair in the corner of the classroom where students served their terms as class disrupters. What I didn’t know was that Joshua knew how to punch someone in the nose. I looked at Zee, who lifted her chin slightly.
“Are you giving boxing lessons now?” I asked.
“I don’t want my children to be bullied,” said Zee coolly. “I just taught them a couple of things so they can protect themselves.”
“Diana, too?”
“Girls need to know self-defense.”
True. I turned to my children. “I just want to be sure that you don’t start fights. When you know how to hurt people, you have to be especially careful not to do it.”
“I didn’t hurt him,” said Joshua in a serious voice. “We’re still friends.”
“That’s good.”
“Pa?”
“What?”
“Did you ever hurt anybody?”
“Yes. But I almost always wished it hadn’t happened.”
“Did anybody ever hurt you?”
“Yes. But I never wanted that to happen, either.”
“Sometimes,” said Clay, leaning forward from his seat and speaking to the children, “people think they have to hurt other people. It’s usually because they’re afraid of them. If you’re not afraid, you’re usually better off.”
“Pa says being afraid sometimes is good,” said Diana, looking at Clay. “Like being afraid of a lion or a Tyrannosaurus rex.”
“Well, of course,” said Clay. “You should always be afraid if you meet a lion or a Tyrannosaurus rex. And you should be afraid of other things, too, like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute or putting your hand in a fire. But if you get afraid of too many things or of other people, you risk becoming somebody who hurts other people and thinks it’s the right thing to do.” He paused and gave me a rueful, amused look. “I think I’m drowning here.”
“You’re not drowning,” said Diana. “You’re just waxing philosophical.”
“Waxing philosophical?” He laughed. “Is that what I’m doing?”
She and Joshua both nodded. “Pa says we’re waxing philosophical whenever we talk about something we don’t understand. You know, like God or gravity.”
Clay glanced at me, then back at the children. “Do you talk about God and gravity a lot?”
“No,” said Diana, “but we do sometimes and we have books about that stuff.”
“And a computer, too,” added Joshua. “We can look things up if we don’t have a book about it.”
“Ah,” said Clay. “An intellectual household.” He sipped his cider.
“Actually,” said Zee, “we talk more about food and fishing than about philosophy.”
“Smart,” said Clay. “I have a degree in philosophy, and food and fishing are a lot more interesting than most philosophizing. Speaking of f
ood, I think my corn bread must be ready to come out of the oven.” He got up and went to the kitchen and I followed to tend to the chili.
After we’d eaten and had washed and stacked the dishes, we went back to the fire. I poured cognac for the big people. Outside it was now too dark to see the falling snow, but I knew it was still coming down because it was so quiet. Silent snow, secret snow.
“So you had to go to Patagonia today, eh?” asked Clay, looking at Joshua.
“Only for five minutes,” said Joshua.
“That wasn’t too long,” said Clay. “I’ll bet you could serve that sentence standing on your head. I was in the real Patagonia once.”
“The real Patagonia is way down at the tip of South America,” said Diana, perking up. “They have penguins there. Did you see some? How did you get so far away?”
“It’s a long story,” said Clay.
“Tell us!”
And he did, for among his other talents, he had that of a teller of tales, who could weave words into a web that captured his listeners and held them until his story ended.
“Well,” he began, “I didn’t see any penguins, but it was a good adventure anyway. It started when I met a girl from Argentina who wanted to see America. I was driving from Florida out to Oregon, so I offered her a ride….”
And she had accepted and they’d had a splendid trip, at the end of which she offered to show him Argentina. He’d accepted the offer and had ended up in Buenos Aires, some coastal towns west of there, and finally in a nameless little village in the Andes. The girl, it turned out, was rich, so for his first few weeks in Argentina, he had lived in mansions and on yachts, but then he’d grown tired of luxury and of people who, though charming and well-educated, never worked, and he had thanked them for their hospitality and traveled on toward the Andes until, at last, his money was gone and he had no way of getting home. With his last coin, he’d gone into a bar and bought a beer to sip while he figured out what to do.
“It’s what I do whenever I’m at the end of my rope,” he explained to my wide-eyed children, “I take my last dollar and buy a beer while I decide what to do next and hope for a miracle.”
“Does it always work?” asked Joshua.
“So far,” said Clay, and he went on to tell how the Patagonia miracle had happened in the form of a man who sat down beside him and who, they discovered as they talked, needed a pilot to fly a cargo to Peru.
“So you see,” said Clay, “miracles do happen, even in these days.” He grinned that infectious grin.
“Gosh,” said Joshua.
“If you hadn’t met the man, you could have gone to church,” said Diana, who had friends who did that. “God lives there.”
“I guess I could have,” said Clay.
“God must live in bars, too,” said her brother.
“No more waxing philosophical,” said Zee. “It’s bedtime for you two. Off you go.”
Following the usual gee’s and gosh’s and do we have to’s, they left after getting the promise of another story from Clay the next night.
“Quite a tale,” said Zee when the kids were gone.
“And all true, too,” said Clay, “but that reminds me.” He went to his room and came out with a tiny leather bag. “I left out a few things that I didn’t think the kids needed to hear.” He sat back down beside Zee, loosened the drawstrings of the bag, and emptied its contents into his open palm. Jewels and gemstones glittered in the firelight.
“Take your choice,” he said to Zee. “And take one for Diana, too.”
“I can’t do that,” she said, catching her breath.
“You’ll give me great pleasure if you do, and make me sad if you don’t. The red ones are rubies and the green ones are emeralds. The yellow and white ones are diamonds. They’re very pretty, but I have no use for them, so help me out by taking two off my hands.”
She touched them. “Where did you get them?”
He smiled. “Well, without going into too much detail, let’s say I got them for flying into Peru. I brought them home in the heels of my boots. That was in the days before the shoe bomber, fortunately.”
Zee’s fingers roamed over the stones.
“Take what you want,” said Clay. “I personally favor the rubies and emeralds. Diamonds have never interested me very much.”
“I already have a diamond,” said Zee, wiggling her ring finger. “All right, I’ll take this emerald for me and this ruby for Diana. She’ll lose it if I give it to her now, so I’ll put it away until she’s older.”
“Good!” He cupped his hand and poured the remaining stones back into the bag.
“What did you take into Peru?” asked Zee, holding the stones in a clenched hand.
“I’m not quite sure. We’d sewed small packages into the lining of my suitcase. After I landed in Lima, I left the airport in a taxi and went to a hotel where we’d agreed I’d go. A man was waiting for me in the lobby. I about wet my pants because I was sure he was a cop, but he wasn’t. He took me and my suitcase to a mansion outside the city. The next morning, when I got up, I had a new suitcase and my old one was gone.”
“Who was the guy you met in Patagonia?”
“He said his name was Bill. He was a Frenchman, if I got his accent right.”
He yawned and finished his cognac. “I’m getting to be an old man. I can’t stay up the way I used to.” He rose and said good night and went into the guest room.
Zee opened her fist, and two eyes, one green, one red, gleamed up at us.
“You have interesting friends,” she said to me. Then suddenly she put her arms around me and pulled me to her. “I’m glad you’re not an adventurer,” she said, putting her lips to mine.
5
The next morning the snow was six inches deep and still coming down. It was the wet, heavy kind that’s so good for making snowballs, snowmen, and snow forts. When I looked through the falling flakes, the woods around our house were black and gray and my sense of distance was vague and uncertain. My ancestors, when they lived in caves, probably worried about what gray-black things were out there looking back at them. The sound of the falling snow was the sound of silence, and the sounds of the woods were muffled and hard to locate. There was no wind.
I liked it.
We were all standing in the screened porch, where I’d come after shoveling the steps and the walkway and cleaning the snow off of Zee’s Jeep. She was going to drive Diana and Joshua up to the bus stop on her way to the ER. The kids were bundled up for school and Zee was wearing her big furry hat and her other winter garb.
“This reminds me of the time I got lost in Alaska,” said Clay.
“Tell us, tell us!” cried the children.
“Not now,” said Zee. “You’re going to school.”
“Tonight,” said Clay. “After you do your homework.”
Zee and the children waded out to Zee’s little red Jeep and drove away, leaving clean tire marks in the snow. Fortunately for us, both the Jeep and my Land Cruiser did well in the white stuff.
“Well,” I said, “I imagine I have to go to work, too.”
“What’s the job?”
“I drive a snowplow for a guy who cleans driveways. He’s got two trucks with plows, and he drives one and I drive the other. He prays for snow every winter, but lots of years we don’t get enough to plow, so when a storm like this comes, he’s anxious to be out there raking in the dollars before the snow melts.”
“I drove a plow one winter,” said Clay. “Up in Montana. I was working on a ranch and one of my jobs was to keep the snow off a runway and five miles of private road that led to the state highway. I didn’t think that winter was ever going to end, but I liked the work while it lasted.”
“Come on in while I call Ted to see if he needs me.”
We went inside, but before I could call Ted, the phone rang. It was Ted calling me. He was frustrated. Wouldn’t you know, he’d broken an arm and couldn’t drive his plow? Worst time of the year to break
something. Dad blast it! I’d have to do the plowing by myself, so I should come on over right away and get started.
I told him he was in luck. I had a visiting friend who was a Montana plowman. All he needed was somebody to show him where to go to work. Ted said that was good news, and that he’d ride shotgun and show the Montana plowman where to plow.
“I just got you a job,” I said to Clay. “You can say no if you don’t want it.”
“I’ve never minded working,” he said. “Let me get my coat.”
When we got to the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven road, we found it plowed. The Highway Department at work. The town guys didn’t mind the work because it meant a lot of overtime. They did the school parking lots and all the other official lots, but they didn’t do private driveways, at least, not very often. Every now and then such a driveway got plowed but just who did it was an official mystery. Mostly, private driveways were plowed by people like Ted Overhill.
“When he isn’t plowing snow, Ted uses his trucks in his landscaping business,” I said as we drove to his place. “His sister works part-time for the Steamship Authority and keeps him informed about cars and passengers. He sees himself as the island’s eye on tourism. Too little is bad for businesses; too much is bad for everybody else; just right has never been defined.”
“Wasn’t it Davy Crockett who said, ‘Make sure you’re right, then go ahead’?”
“Something like that.”
“The problem is knowing when you’re right.”
“You might want to take a peek into Ted’s barn. For as long as I can remember he’s been building a boat in there. Right up your alley.” I turned on to Ted’s side street—not yet plowed—and saw the earlier tracks of a couple of vehicles whose owners had to get somewhere, snow or not.
At the end of Ted’s drive, I parked the Land Cruiser in front of the barn, beside two big pickups armed with plows, then we took our coffee thermoses and stomped and kicked our way to the house. I performed introductions on the farmer’s porch as Ted came out to meet us.
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