Zee leaned against me and repeated something she’d said before: “I’m glad you’re not an adventurer.”
It wasn’t the first time that tension roused passion in us. “You’re all the adventure I can handle,” I said, feeling a familiar electrical charge pass between us.
I could sense her siren smile. “Oh? Can you handle me?”
I pulled her toward me and cupped her breast in my hand. “Sometimes I seem to have you under control. But maybe you’re just pretending.”
She put her hand over mine. “Sometimes I am,” she said. “But not always.”
Her fragrance filled my nostrils and my free hand drifted to the buttons of her blouse. As my hand entered her clothing, I heard her breathing change. When my own breathing seemed so loud that it filled the room, we got up and went into the bedroom. Blume and Monroe faded into a mist.
They were back in my consciousness again the next morning, though, along with Nadine Gibson, whose officially unidentified body had been found, according to the morning news on the radio. The reporter of this news, however, took note of the corpse’s strawberry hair and reminded his audience of Nadine’s disappearance just a year before.
The poet thought that April was the cruelest month, but March seemed to wear the crown this year.
“Be careful,” said Zee, as she prepared to depart for work after we’d seen the kids off on the bus for school.
“You, too.”
I watched her drive away in her little red Jeep, known lately as Miss Scarlet because we’d been playing Clue with the kids. My old Land Cruiser was the wrong color to be given any of the names in the game, although I thought its rust might qualify it to be Colonel Mustard. When Miss Scarlet was gone, I called Joe Begay to learn if he was home. He was and I told him I wanted to talk with him and that I’d be right up. Then I drove to John Skye’s farm, where I found Clay in the library reading a copy of the Code Duello.
“After you mentioned them, I thought I should catch up on the latest rules,” he said, “but this book was published more than a hundred years ago. Duels seem to be out of fashion these days.”
I believed the French still had them occasionally, remembering reading a story or seeing a photograph of an outraged pastry chef and somebody else having at each other with sharpened épées. Drawn blood was usually enough to settle passions and balance the demands of honor sufficiently for the participants to embrace and go off together to share a few glasses of wine.
“In America the killing rules have always been a little shaky,” I said. “Back in the days of the Wild West, people popped away at each other with smooth-bore pistols now and then, but mostly they preferred to shoot their enemies from ambush or catch them unarmed before they blazed away. Nowadays that’s how the gangs and angry lovers do it in the wild Eastern cities. Better by far to shoot somebody in the back or from a moving car. Fair fights are too dangerous.”
“Disputed honor seems to have been important in the old days,” said Clay, putting his book down on a reading table, “and I guess it still is, if you take dissing as the modern equivalent.”
I thought that it was and that the idea of honor has probably caused more grief than most notions. “If you’d like to come along, I’m visiting a friend of mine. He may be able to find out what’s going on out west.”
“No more ignorant armies clashing by night?” Clay shrugged into his coat. “That would be nice. Who’s your friend?”
I told him as we drove toward Aquinnah. How Joe Begay had been my sergeant in a long-ago war and how we’d been blown up by a mortar along with the rest of our patrol but had survived and met again years later right here on the Vineyard, where he had married and now lived with a Wampanoag woman he’d met in Santa Fe. How since our war days, he’d worked for some unnamed agency in Washington and still occasionally disappeared in that direction for a few days, although he was officially retired.
Clay listened and then said, “You trust him.” It wasn’t a question.
“He saved my life in Nam.”
“Does he subscribe to that old Oriental notion that if you save a man’s life you have to take care of him from then on?”
“It hasn’t been mentioned, but he’s helped me out several times in the past.”
“What does he do in Washington?”
It was a question I’d considered more than once but had not voiced. “I’ve never asked. Maybe that’s why we’re still friends. I met a woman once who’d seen him in Europe at some bigwig international political function, and I know he was overseas another time as part of a trade mission when some bad guys got killed. He knows a lot of people and he’s got a lot of contacts with a lot of agencies.”
“That’s a lot of lots.”
“I’m going to ask him to use some of those contacts to find out what’s going on with your friends Mark and Lewis and whether the Feds are on their case.”
“If the DEA is interested in them, it may be interested in me, too,” said Clay. “Even though I was mostly just a pilot, I was part of the gang.”
I’d thought about that. “We can ask Joe to look into that possibility, too, but only if you okay it. We’ll talk with him together and you can decide whether you want your name mentioned if he noses around. It’ll be hard to get the answers we need if we don’t tell him about Jack and Mickey looking for you.”
We came to West Tisbury and took South Road past the field of dancing statues and the general store. In the summertime the farmers market would be spread out in the yard of the old Ag Hall, but now the yard was empty and brown. West Tisbury is farm country, defined by fields and meadows, quite unlike Menemsha and the coastal down-island villages, where beaches, fishing, and yachting establish the ambiance. A lot of artists live there, and like the citizens of many other parts of the island, they socialize among themselves. In that respect the Vineyard is akin to large cities: a place made up of small neighborhoods quite separate from one another and from the whole, where people know one another and may live out their lives feeling little need to expand their horizons. I sometimes thought of the island’s towns as little mouse nests shoved together in a box, the mice eyeing one another carefully and rarely entering a neighboring territory.
When we got to Beetlebung Corner, we took a left past the Chilmark Store, home of some of the best sandwiches on the island. If you blink as you drive through Chilmark Center, you’ll miss seeing it, which means, alas, you’ll also miss Chilmark Chocolates, makers of deluxe candies that have destroyed many a diet. Summer people who are customers never lose weight in spite of their intentions to go home slim and fit and tan in the fall.
In time we fetched Aquinnah, once known as Gay Head, which is famous for its colorful clay cliffs and, to fishermen, for its excellent bass fishing. On the other hand, it’s infamous to me because of the No Parking and even No Pausing signs that line its roads and make it hard for would-be fishermen to wet their lines on Lobsterville Beach, and also for its pay toilets, which require elderly tour-bus passengers to come up with fifty cents each to relieve their bladders and which are, like all pay toilets, an abomination in the eyes of God. I consider Aquinnah to be an unfriendly town and I bad-mouth it regularly. A pox upon its No Parking signs and its pay toilets, I say.
However, I do like to fish there and manage to do that without contributing to Aquinnah’s money-grasping hands by parking for free at the homes of friends, of whom Joe Begay is one. Joe and Toni and their children live in a house just north of the cliffs. A path leads from the house to the beach where, back in January 1884, frozen bodies from the City of Columbus, wrecked on Devil’s Bridge, washed ashore hour after hour in spite of the heroic efforts of the Wampanoag lifeguards, who rowed out in the storm and managed to save twenty-nine people from the stricken ship. Even now, in March, you wouldn’t last long in the cold waters surrounding the Vineyard.
In Aquinnah I took a right onto Lighthouse Road, then a left into the sandy Begay driveway and pulled to a stop in front of the house. Joe’s
car was there but Toni’s was not, probably because she was up at her shop on top of the cliffs, getting a jump start on organizing things for the summer trade. Toni sold American tribal arts and crafts, scorning the term “Native American” as being even more nonsensical than “Indian,” since the latter was based on a simple geographical error while the former was a conscious effort to name a whole continent and its many cultures of people after a tardy Italian explorer. She sold no Taiwan-or Chinese-made bows and arrows, but stuck strictly to genuine American tribal rugs, pottery, carvings, jewelry, and knickknacks.
As we got out of the car, Joe Begay stepped out onto his porch. He was a tall man with most of his weight above his belt. He had a broad chest, wide shoulders, and a face that looked like the one on the old nickels. His wife claimed that when they’d first met in Santa Fe, where she was on a buying trip, she’d been instantly smitten because he looked more like an Indian than anyone she’d ever seen.
We shook hands and I introduced him to Clay. Each of them took in the other with what seemed to be a casual glance. “Come in,” Joe said to me. “I’m inviting you even though you’re impolite. Out on the rez you stay parked in your car for a while so whoever’s inside can size you up before deciding how to deal with you.”
“Is that the Navajo rez or the Hopi rez?” I asked, since Joe was about half one tribe and half the other.
“Either,” said Joe as we went inside. “Be a good tradition for these parts, too, but around here people are in too much of a hurry. Sit down. I’ve got coffee going. Too early for beer.” He looked at Clay. “For me, at least. How about you?”
“Coffee’s fine.”
Joe waved us into chairs at the kitchen table and brought coffee and the makings. “Been a while since you came out here to Indian country,” he said to me. “There are no fish around, so it must be something else.”
“It’s something else. I’m looking through a glass darkly and I want to see face-to-face.”
Begay smiled. “I think Paul was saying that would happen only after death. Is that what you have in mind?”
“No, I just want some light and I’m hoping you can shed some for me.”
“Some off-island light, I presume. If it was local light, you’d know more than I do about how to shed it.”
“It’s off-island light that I need.” I glanced at Clay, who was looking into his coffee cup. “Here’s the situation,” I said, and I told him about my encounter with Jack Blume and Mickey Monroe. When I was done, I added, “I want to know who sent them and what they want with Clay. If we get that information, we may know what to do about them.”
“Maybe you should be thinking about what they’ll do to you,” said Begay. “You haven’t given me much to go on.” He looked at Clay. “You want to add anything to this story?”
“J.W. says he can trust you,” said Clay.
“Did he, now?” Joe lowered his cup from his lips. “He trusted me once in Nam and I led us right into a mortar attack. Got several men killed and damn near got us killed, too. He saved my ass. I’m the one who trusts him.”
“J.W. told me it was you who saved his ass.” Clay seemed amused, but Joe’s remarks also seemed to lead him to a decision. He flicked a glance at me, then took a drink from his cup and told Joe everything he’d told me about his work with Mark and the events that had brought him to the Vineyard. He concluded by telling how he’d departed from Eleanor and her brother and where he was staying now.
“Now you know everything that I know,” he said.
Begay looked at him for what seemed a long time. Then he looked at me. “You want me to find out what’s going on. I’m not sure I can, but I can probably find out a few things.” He turned his eyes to Clay. “I’ll need the telephone numbers and the e-mail addresses and any other addresses you have and I’ll see what I can do. No guarantees.” He paused, then added, “I’ll try to keep you clear of things.”
Clay considered that, then nodded and dug a worn address book out of a buttoned shirt pocket. He tossed it onto the table in front of Joe. “When you’re through with that, I want it back. It’s got all the information you want and a lot more that you don’t want. It’s one of a kind. If I lose it, I’ll be out of touch with everybody I know.”
Joe picked it up and thumbed through it. “This will help,” he said. “And don’t worry; you’ll get it back.”
When we finished our coffee and Clay and I were headed out the door, Joe said, “If you think of anything or learn anything else that I might use, let me know.”
“Will do.”
Clay and I went out to the truck and drove back down-island.
14
“Is this a typical March on Martha’s Vineyard,” asked Clay, “or do you always have bodies and mob muscle turning up?”
“Atypical. Normally we have a lot of wind and rain, mud and cold weather, and some snow. It’s usually too miserable for criminals to be out working.”
“I feel naked without my address book. Tell me more about Joe Begay, since I’ve just put my life in his hands.”
“You know about as much as I do,” I said, but told him how Joe grew up in Arizona near Second Mesa, in Oraibi or close by. That his people are mostly Hopi and Navajo and still live out there. How we’d been blown up in Nam when our patrol got hit with mortar fire. How, after we got out of the hospital, he’d disappeared from my life until he showed up on the Vineyard married to Toni Vanderbeck, of the Gay Head Vanderbecks, who was a friend of my wife, and how he was supposedly but not really retired from whatever he’d been doing in Washington and elsewhere. “That’s about all I know about him,” I concluded. “I usually don’t ask people much about their work.”
“Why not?”
“It lets me see them better if I don’t know what they do for a living. If I know somebody’s a doctor or a minister or a truck driver, I make assumptions that I shouldn’t make. Actually, though, it doesn’t make much difference whether or not I ask them what they do, because most people tell you that right away. They define themselves by their jobs.”
“‘Hi, my name is George Smith. I’m a diamond smuggler.’ Like that?”
“Usually it’s not quite that straightforward, but sooner or later it slips out, especially if the person is proud of himself. I prefer to talk to him awhile before finding out what he does.”
“What do you say if you don’t say, ‘What do you do when you’re not talking to me?’”
“Sex, politics, and religion are always good subjects of conversation.”
“Taboo topics are the best topics, but most people don’t get to them until they know each other better.”
“Actually, I usually ask them where they live, how long they’ve been there, what they do when they’re not working, that sort of thing. What people do for fun tells a lot about them.”
“So you’re nosy even though you don’t want to know their professions?”
“I’ll make an exception for Jack and Mickey. I’d like to know more about their work.”
“Maybe Joe can find out about that. I don’t think you’ll get the information from Jack and Mickey.”
For variety I took Middle Road down to West Tisbury. It’s my favorite island road, winding between fields and woods and stone fences, having fine views of the Atlantic off to the south, and passing the pasture that’s home to the long-horned oxen who’ve been photographed almost as much as the rebuilt bridge on Chappaquiddick.
Clay admired the longhorns. “Impressive. I haven’t seen horns that long since I left Texas. Back when I had my own plane, I did some flying down around the border. I made pretty good money flying cargo through canyons under the radar. It was sort of like the job we had bringing the Lisa back to West Palm. Remember?”
“I remember.”
“If you don’t know what’s in a box, you can’t testify about it if you get squeezed. So I rarely asked what I was carrying. Well, what next?”
“I’ve been thinking of escape routes. There are only tw
o ways off the island: by sea or by air. You still have your pilot’s license?”
“I do. Why?”
“If need be, you can rent a plane. I doubt that’ll be necessary, but you should keep it in mind. Have you been to either of the airports since you got here? The big one, where the commercial planes land, is in West Tisbury—we came by it today—and the little one is at Katama—grass runways for small planes.”
“I haven’t been to either one.”
“You might want to drop by and let the regulars see you a few times so they’ll know who you are if you decide to rent a plane.”
“Good idea.”
“Nobody’s at the Katama airport this time of year, so I’ll take you to the big one now, if you want, so you can see what the place is like.”
“Forward the light brigade!”
The Dukes County Airport is right off the Edgartown–West Tisbury road, and is only a hop, skip, and a jump from the long driveway at the end of which then president Joe Callahan took his summer vacations. Huge cargo planes full of cars, Secret Service personnel, and other materials had landed there before, during, and after the presidential holidays, and the airport was getting busier every year as more and more mansion builders landed in their private jets. It was an attractive place, but I preferred the little Katama airport and enjoyed watching planes land and take off on the grass runway that paralleled Herring Creek Road. I had even given thought from time to time to getting a pilot’s license of my own, but nothing had ever come of it because my days were already full of things I liked to do, such as fishing and sailing and hanging around with my wife and children.
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