First Light

by Philip R. Craig

  We passed several long stretches of beach where there were no trucks and nobody was fishing. I asked Zee if these were barren areas, and she said not necessarily. Depending on the tide and wind direction, and at certain times of day or night with certain species of bait in the water, not to mention water temperature and time of year and, oh, there were a lot of other variables she couldn’t think of at the moment, not the least of which were the smell in the air and a certain feeling in her bones … depending on all those things, she knew some holes and troughs and drop-offs scattered all along this beach that could hold some monster bass.

  She didn’t say it, but I inferred that few other people knew these things, and I was thinking that I probably had two of the best guides on the island to fish with this week.

  With J.W. and Zee to find fish for me, maybe I’d catch a Derby winner. Why not?

  J. W. Jackson was a retired cop from the Boston PD. He’d been shot or something. He never talked about it, any more than he talked about his time in Vietnam, where, I gathered, he’d also been wounded.

  He lived year-round on Martha’s Vineyard. It wasn’t clear to me what he did for a living, if anything. He didn’t talk about that, either, and I had the good sense not to ask.

  I first met him four or five years earlier. He’d come to Boston for reasons he kept to himself, and a mutual friend, a Globe reporter named Quinn who knew J.W. from his cop days, had invited me to join the two of them for a night game at Fenway Park. J.W. and I hit it off right away. He liked history and fishing and baseball and classical music, and he disliked cities and high society and neckties and all newfangled technology except spinning reels. By the time the Sox blew a two-run lead in the ninth inning, J.W. had invited me down to the Vineyard to fish with him and his wife, Zee.

  I took him up on it the next summer, which was when I met Zee. She was a black-haired, dark-eyed, sleek-bodied stunner, and I might’ve been jealous of J.W.’s good luck in finding her if I didn’t admire what a great pair they made.

  On that first visit, J.W. and Zee drove me all over the island in her little Jeep. I’d been on the Vineyard a few times, but I’d never really gotten the lay of the land before then. We drove the roads from Chappaquiddick to Aquinnah, both the paved inland roads and the packed-sand beach roads. It was mid-August, and the bluefish and bass had mostly left the Vineyard to find cooler waters up north, although from time to time we stopped at a place where they’d had luck in the past and tried to catch something.

  We drank martinis on the Jacksons’ balcony while the sun went down, and we barbecued in their backyard. We raked quahogs and dug clams while J.W. sang “Oh, my darlin’ clammin’-time,” and we smoked bluefish in the smoker J.W. had made from an old refrigerator, and we sailed the waters in their little catboat.

  Pretty soon, the way those things go, we were friends, and after that, I always spent a summer weekend or two with J.W. and Zee on the Vineyard. We usually fished a little, and sometimes we did pretty well. We ragged on each other about our angling preferences. J.W. teased me about my flimsy fly-fishing equipment and my usual practice of putting back the fish I caught. I told him I didn’t need a stiff eleven-foot rod or a dead fish in the back of my truck to prove my manhood.

  He accused me of Rod Envy.

  I gave Zee some fly-casting lessons. She picked it up instantly. J.W. admitted it looked like fun, but declared himself too old and fumble-fingered to take it up. In fact, J.W. is several years younger than I, and he’s one of the least fumble-fingered men I know.

  So thanks to J.W. and Zee, I learned my way around the Vineyard. I didn’t know the water very well, or the shops or the restaurants or the art galleries. But I like language, and I like knowing where things are, so I made a point of noticing where the landmarks were and learning what they were called—those lovely Wompanoag Indian words like Squibnocket and Tashmoo and Sengekontacket, as well as the solid Anglo-Saxon place names like Aquinnah and East Chop and Oak Bluffs.

  Cape Pogue is a long, skinny finger that sticks straight up, pointing due north, at the very northeast corner of Chappaquiddick. A lighthouse perches on the edge of the sea, and when you’re there, it seems like it has to be the farthest-from-anything place on the entire Vineyard. Zee kept going past Cape Pogue Light and swung around a long curve of beach until we’d reversed ourselves and were heading south around the other side of Cape Pogue Pond. On our right, the sun was setting over the low greenish mound of the Vineyard, and the pond was off to our left.

  “This beach is pretty good on this tide,” said Zee. “The fish work their way right along the edge, following the bait into the pond. Sometimes the bass come right into the wash. We can fish our way down into the Gut. That’s the narrow opening where the ocean pours into the pond. A pretty good current will be running there.”

  When we got to the Gut, three or four trucks were parked along the beach, and half a dozen widely spaced fishermen were casting into the water. Some were throwing plugs, and one guy was squatting by his rod, which he’d propped up on a spiked holder he’d stuck into the sand. Bait fishing with an eel, I guessed. A man and a woman, I noticed, were standing beside each other fly casting. Farther out, a few boats were chugging back and forth.

  “Not too bad,” said Zee. “A lot of people will probably come down to fish the Gut from the other side when the tide gets running. But we should have this place to ourselves—or at least as much to ourselves as you can get during the Derby.”

  While I set about rigging up, Zee snagged one of her surf rods from the top of her Jeep and strolled barefoot across the sand down to the water’s edge. I paused to watch her cast. She was wearing black shorts and a black T-shirt, and with her dark hair and tawny skin, she was a semi-silhouette against the pink western horizon. She cast her plug amazing distances with the effortless grace of a world-class athlete, and just about the time I got a fly tied onto my leader, I heard her shout.

  I looked up. Her rod was bent and something was splashing in the water in front of her. She was hauling back, then dropping her rod as she reeled up, all the while backing up the beach.

  I put my rod into the Jeep and jogged down to the water. “What’ve you got?” I said.

  “Oh, just a bass,” she said. “Not a keeper. I thought at first it might’ve been a blue.”

  Both J.W. and Zee preferred bluefish to stripers, mainly because there are no size restrictions on blues, while most of the bass you’re likely to catch run smaller than the thirty-two-inch legal minimum. Small bluefish won’t win any Derby prizes, but they can be killed and brought home and eaten. Like most Vineyard natives I know, the Jacksons think of fish as food, and they like to live off the land and the sea.

  I, on the other hand, grew up fishing for trout with a fly rod, and I think of fish as a source of entertainment and sport.

  I’m not sure how the fish feel about it.

  Zee had herself a fine striped bass. It looked to be just a few inches shy of thirty-two. She dragged it up onto the wet sand, then knelt beside it to back the hook out of its mouth.

  She held it upright in the shallow water to revive it. After a minute, it flapped its big tail, drenching Zee, and swam away. Zee laughed, then stood up and wiped the spray off her face. “Well, they’re here,” she said. “I had a couple other hits. You better get casting. You never know how long it’s gonna last.”

  I jogged to the Jeep for my rod. When I started back for the beach, I noticed that several of the other fishermen had edged closer to Zee so that they were all throwing their lures out into the same general vicinity. She didn’t seem to mind. I’d seen this before—the communal attitude of the surf casters. We fly fishermen are more secretive and antisocial and possessive of our hot spots. We resent being crowded. Surf casters seem to welcome it.

  I’m not sure what to make of this, but it’s tempting to observe that there are two kinds of people in this world: surf casters and fly fishermen.

  Of course, there really are two kinds of people: those
who think there are just two kinds of people, and those who understand that there are many more than that.

  Anyway, being a fly fisherman, I walked for about a hundred yards down the beach along the Gut until I’d put plenty of space between me and the last fisherman in line, and then I started casting a big white Lefty’s Deceiver out into the water. A little current had started running into the pond, so I cast a bit to my right and let the fly sink and swing past before I began to twitch it in.

  I soon got into the rhythm of it—throw it out there, swing it around, strip it back, take two steps to my left, throw it out again. Time becomes fluid and irrelevant out on a quiet beach in the evening twilight, and I may have been casting for an hour, or maybe only for ten minutes, when my fly stopped halfway through a swing. It just stopped, as if it had snagged a piece of sunken wreckage. I instinctively pulled straight back on my line, and I felt the hook bite into something. I raised my rod. It was on something solid, and whatever it was didn’t move.

  A rock, I thought.

  Then it exploded, yanking my rod down and ripping the line out of my fingers.

  Then it was gone.

  I stripped in my line and saw what I expected to see. My fly had been bitten off.

  A bluefish.

  A big, razor-toothed bluefish.

  Small bluefish slash and crash at bait—and flies— but big bluefish sometimes just chomp down and hold on, the way stripers do. That’s what this one had done.

  Damn. A really big bluefish. Gone.

  Without a foot of wire at the end of your leader, bluefish of all sizes will bite you off.

  I sat down on the dry sand, laid my rod across my lap, and lit a cigarette.

  My hands, I noticed, were trembling. Hell, that was a big damn bluefish. I’d caught enough blues on the fly rod to know the difference, and I’d been attached to this one long enough to feel its weight. That was my Derby winner, right there, in the first hour of trying.

  I figured I’d blown my one chance by neglecting to add some wire to my leader, and I could fish my ass off for the rest of the week without hooking another fish that big. The Fishing Gods rarely gave you a second chance.

  I was glad that my bet with Billy required me only to go fishing, and not to actually catch anything.

  I was aware that the sun had set and darkness had settled over the beach. The breeze had died down, and some fog had begun to gather. The fishermen off to my right were faint, fuzzy shadows, and across the Gut from where I sat, the island was a dark, shadowy mound.

  After a while I stood up and trudged back to Zee’s Jeep. In my haste to get fishing, I’d forgotten to stick my box of extra flies and my flashlight into my pockets.

  When I got there, Zee was sitting on the front fender. Two smallish bluefish lay on the sand next to her.

  I sat beside her and pointed my chin at her fish. “Good going,” I said.

  “They won’t win any prizes,” she said. “But they’re perfect eating size. What’d you do?”

  I showed her the frayed end of my leader. “Blue, huh?”

  I nodded. “Guess so. Felt like a good one.”

  She smiled and shrugged, and I was grateful that she didn’t give me a lecture about using wire when there were bluefish in the water. “Hungry?” she said.

  I realized I hadn’t eaten since early afternoon. “Starved, actually.”

  Zee got out the cooler J.W. had loaded for us, and we sat there on the front bumper of her Jeep eating sandwiches and watching the ghostly fishermen cast into the misty black water. J.W. had made a salad of smoked bluefish, with mayonnaise and horseradish and chopped onions. Spread on thick slices of homemade bread, it tasted like tuna, except better.

  “So how’s Alex?” said Zee after a few minutes. “We split,” I said.

  She nodded. “I’m sorry. I liked Alex.”

  “Me, too.” I’d brought my then–lady friend Alexandria Shaw down for a weekend with Zee and J.W. the previous summer. Alex and Zee had hit it off.

  “So,” she said, glancing sideways at me. “You, um, dating anybody?”

  “Dating?” I laughed. “At my age, I don’t date. Haven’t for a long time. There is a woman …”

  Zee looked at me, shrugged, and said, “Oh.”

  “Her name is Evie Banyon,” I said. “She’s the assistant administrator at Emerson Hospital.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “Serious?” I looked out over the dark sea. “I don’t know where it’s headed. I’m here and she’s there, if that tells you anything. Why?”

  Zee was quiet for a few minutes. Then she said, “Well, I have a friend.”

  I laughed softly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No, no,” I said. “Tell me about your friend.”

  “She’s been through some tough times. Came down here to get away, start over. She’ll be heading back to America in a few weeks.”

  “Where in America?”

  “The South Shore somewhere. She’s bright and very pretty. Your age, I’d say. Maybe a few years younger. J.W. disapproves of me playing matchmaker. I think he’s worried that it would spoil our friendship. Yours and ours, I mean.”

  “Why would it spoil our friendship?”

  “I don’t think it would, or I wouldn’t’ve mentioned it.”

  “I don’t see how it would, either,” I said.

  Zee and I fished in the darkness for a few more hours, and neither of us caught anything. We quit a little after midnight.

  It was a long drive over the nighttime beach, back all the way around Cape Pogue, across the Dyke Bridge to Norton Point Beach and then across the island to the Fairchild place in West Tisbury. It was around one-thirty when Zee dropped me off at the front door.

  “One of us will pick you up at cocktail time tomorrow,” she said as I climbed out of the Jeep and gathered my gear from the back. “It’s J.W.’s turn to fish. Maybe he’ll be a better guide than I was.”

  “You put me on to a big fish,” I said. “I had my chance.”

  “J.W. might keep you out all night,” she said. We were talking in whispers, standing in front of the Fairchild house, which was dark except for the glow of an orange bulb over the front door that they’d left on for me. “He loves to fish at first light.”

  “Suits me,” I said. “Fish till you puke, I always say.”

  “Fits right into the Derby mentality,” she said.

  She waved and putted up the driveway. I raised my hand, then went into the house.

  I suddenly realized I was exhausted. One night of fishing had about done me in, and I had six more to go to win my bet with Billy.

  Maybe he was right. Maybe I was getting old.

  I slept late on Sunday and spent the morning doing paperwork. When I took my coffee out to the patio early in the afternoon, Eliza and two men I didn’t recognize were sitting at the table passing around a pitcher of Bloody Marys. Eliza was wearing a white sleeveless blouse, a short white tennis skirt, and sandals. The two men, who appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties, wore pastel polo shirts and shorts and wraparound sunglasses and admirable tans. One had black hair and a big mustache, the other had straw-colored hair and a pronounced widow’s peak.

  Eliza waved me over. “Have a Bloody,” she said.

  I held up my coffee mug. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Brady,” she said, “I want you to meet a couple friends of mine. This,” she said, indicating the dark-haired guy with the bushy mustache, “is Luis Martinez.”

  I shook hands with Luis Martinez. He had great white teeth and a manly handshake.

  The other guy’s name was Philip Fredrickson. He had nice teeth and a good grip, too.

  “Sit with us, Brady,” said Fredrickson.

  I remained standing. “I’ve got work to do, Mr. Fredrickson.”

  “Oh, don’t be a poop,” said Eliza. “I’ve been telling Philip and Luis about you.”

  “What about me?”

  “
That you’re Mother’s lawyer,” she said, batting her long eyelashes and flashing her seductive smile. “That the future of the Fairchild estate rests squarely on your gorgeous shoulders.”

  “Why should Philip and Luis care about that?” I said.

  The three of them exchanged who-wants-to-tell-him glances, and then Martinez cleared his throat. “Actually, Brady,” he began, “Eliza asked us over to meet you. We—”

  I held up my hand. “Whoa,” I said. “Stop right there. I meet with people when I schedule a meeting. Otherwise, I don’t do business. Period.” I turned to Eliza. “Don’t ever do this again. Do you hear me?”

  She shrugged. “You don’t have to get all bristly, darling. No one’s trying to do anything underhanded. Luis and Philip”—she put her left hand on Philip’s leg and her right hand on Luis’s shoulder—“are friends of mine, and they’re up from Hilton Head to play some golf and tennis, do some sailing, get some sun.”

  “Then why did you invite them over to meet me?” I wondered if she was screwing them both at the same time, or if they were taking turns. “This doesn’t have anything to do with turning the Fairchild estate into the Fairchild Country Club, perchance?”

  She smiled wickedly. “Well, of course it does. You know perfectly well that I’d love to see that. Philip and Luis represent the Isle of Dreams Development Corporation. They’ve put together some lovely courses on Hilton Head and in Florida. They’ve brought some financial projections and computer models, and we were hoping—”

  I waved my hand. “Good-bye. Nice talking with you.” And I went back into the house.

  A woman carrying what looked like a doctor’s black bag was walking through the living room as I was walking into it. She was tall and slender and had short curly blonde hair. She wore a pink-and-white-striped blouse and a blue skirt that stopped at her knees. She looked to be in her late thirties or early forties.

  I said hello, and she stopped and nodded and smiled.

  I jerked my head at the bag she was carrying. “Are you the doctor?” I said.