“Nothing happened,” I said. “We both jumped into the water, that’s all.”
“Jumped into the water, eh? You both jumped into the water?”
“We were having a hot argument, so we jumped into the water to cool off.”
“With your clothes on.”!
“There was a lady present. We had to stay decent.”
Zee came up to me and put a finger lightly against the bruise on my jaw. “I can see I’m going to have to take you home alone before I get the truth out of you.”
I smiled over her head at Toni Begay. “She never beats me up in public. Only in private.”
“I understand,” said Toni. “I’m the same way. I’m just waiting for you guys to leave so I can pound the truth out of Joe.”
“In fear of my life, I plan to hold tight to Hanna as a human shield,” said Begay, bouncing his daughter on his knee.
Mondry, the only man there without a woman, looked from one of us to the other. He had an odd, almost covetous look in his eye.
“Do you have a wife to keep you in line?” I asked him.
Quick as a card sharp, he produced his wallet and a photo of a woman and a girl. “This is my wife, Emily, and our daughter, Carly. They’re out in L.A.”
“You should always keep your wife close at hand,” said Zee.
“I’ll be back there before too long,” said Mondry. He looked at the photo and then put it away.
“Meanwhile,” I said, “Toni can tell you all about Gay Head. She knows more about it than the rest of us do because she’s a genuine born-and-bred Vineyard native and we’re just off-island ginks—except for Hanna and Joshua, of course; they qualify as genuine islanders, too, but they’re not talking much yet.”
Joe Begay and I took Joshua and Hanna and a couple of beers outside so the babies could discuss their betrothal with their fathers.
Begay rolled himself a cigarette and lit up. Smoking was a habit he had not yet licked, but he was past buying ready-rolled cigarettes, at least.
“What’s with you and Ingalls?” I asked. “I don’t think I ever heard you mention him before.”
“I was trying to spare your tender sensibilities,” said Begay. “I’ve heard you saying nasty things about him over the last several years, and I didn’t want to get you all worked up. Anyway, he’s down here to give a talk to the Marshall Lea Foundation tonight. I met him the last time he came down to talk with them.”
“And you’ve been showing him the cliffs.”
He tried to blow a smoke ring, but the wind forbade it. “That among other things. We’ve got the same environmental problems here that the rest of the island has, and no long-range plans to take care of them. Larry has some ideas that might help, so he’s been talking and I’ve been listening. You two didn’t seem to hit it off.”
“I don’t like dictatorial bureaucrats.”
He smiled. “Especially when they close you off from your fishing grounds, eh?”
“Especially.”
He tried another smoke ring without more success. “I like a man who operates on high moral principles.”
His irony was clear, particularly since he knew that I distrust people who see themselves as acting on high moral principles. People acting on principle have probably done more damage to the earth and its creatures than all of the unprincipled people combined.
“When somebody finally shoots that guy,” I said, “there’ll be so many suspects that they won’t be able to solve the crime.”
“You’re a hard case,” said Begay. He laughed, and after a minute so did I. I wondered if life is absurd all by itself, or if we just make it that way. We meaning me. Begay and I drank our beers and watched Joshua and Hanna paw at each other and eat a little dirt, which they seemed to enjoy.
When the others came out of the house later, Mondry claimed to know more about Gay Head than he had known he could know. He and Zee and Joshua and I then climbed into the Range Rover and drove back down-island.
At our house, the Jacksons got out of the Range Rover and Mondry got into the driver’s seat.
“A good time was had by all,” said Zee, flashing her dazzling smile. She took Joshua’s wrist and waved his hand. “Say good-bye, Joshua.”
“Good-bye, Joshua,” said Mondry, waving back. “Thanks for coming along.”
Joshua and Zee went into the house.
“Thanks a lot for the tour,” said Mondry to me.
“There’s more you haven’t seen. The Vineyard doesn’t look very big on maps, but not many people, including me, have seen all of it.”
“Will you show more of it to me?”
“Sure.”
“And you’ll find a helicopter?” “Sure.”
“Great.” He hesitated. “And there’s one thing more.” “What’s that?”
He hesitated again, then said, “I want your permission to take your wife out to lunch. I want to talk to her about—”
He stopped as I held up a hand.
“You don’t need my permission to talk to Zee. She’s my wife, not my property. If you want to ask her to lunch, ask her, not me.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. Then he opened it again. “I just want to do this right. I don’t want to go behind your back.”
I wondered what my face was showing him. “I appreciate that,” I said, “but Zee is her own boss and decides what she’ll do or won’t do. I don’t own slaves.”
“But she’s your wife. Don’t you care what she does?”
I cared. “I want her to be happy. If having lunch with you makes her happy, I want her to have lunch with you. But she decides, not me.”
He stared at me. “Are you sure about this?”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, then, I’ll give her a call. Is this going to prevent you from showing me the island? I don’t want you to feel that—”
“The one thing has nothing to do with the other.” He took a deep breath and nodded. “Tomorrow morning, then?” “I’ll be here.”
He drove away, and I went into the house. One of my demons was the desire to keep Zee only to myself. There were other devils in me, but none were stronger than that one. Had I believed in God, I would have prayed daily to keep the imp in check; sometimes I prayed anyway.
— 8 —
Joshua was nodding on my lap and I was sitting on the balcony with Zee. Across Sengekontacket Pond, car lights were moving back and forth along the road on the barrier beach between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs. Beyond them, on the far side of Nantucket Sound, the lights on Cape Cod gleamed at us, and to the southeast we could see Cape Pogue light. Above us, the summer stars glittered and the Milky Way arched from horizon to horizon. There was a soft wind that made the trees sigh and brought us the sounds of night birds and other nocturnal creatures.
Zee’s hand found my knee. “How’s the heir?”
“The heir is almost asleep. He’s a sweetheart, just like his old man. Never gives anybody any trouble.”
“That’s odd. I thought you were his father.” Zee’s fingers gave me a sharp squeeze. “What happened up there in Gay Head?”
I told her.
She sighed. “Men!”
“Let’s have no sexist remarks,” I said. “Remember Zenobia and Boadicea and Morgan le Fey and those other killer women. All I did was dunk Loathsome Lawrence in the drink.”
“Morgan le Fey was fiction.”
“How about Ma Barker, then? Or Belle Starr? Don’t give me this ’men are violent, but women are sugar and spice’ stuff.”
She snuggled nearer. “But I’m a woman and I’m sugar and spice. I know you can’t see them, but I’m fluttering my eyelashes even as I speak.”
I got one arm loose from now snoozing Joshua and put it around her. “Any woman with fluttering eyelashes can wrap me around her finger.”
We looked at the stars for a while, and I felt good, with Joshua in one arm and Zee in the other. After a while, we went downstairs and put the lad in bed.
; Zee beamed down at him. “It’s hard to believe that he’ll ever be a terrible two.”
“I was never a terrible two,” I whispered. “Maybe he’ll be like me: a perfect child all the way.”
“Didn’t some psychologist theorize that if we don’t get our childishness out of our systems while we’re little, we’ll be stuck with it when we’re big?”
“It’s a good theory. It’s true of everybody I know except me.”
We went out into the living room, where I sat down on the couch and Zee lay down and put her head in my lap.
“Drew Mondry’s coming by again tomorrow,” I said. “I’m going to continue the grand tour. He wants me to find him a helicopter, too, so he can look at things from the air.”
“I like him,” said Zee. “He seems like a nice guy.”
Great.
“Don’t you think he is?” she asked.
I couldn’t think of anything to make me think he wasn’t.
“Sure,” I said.
“I have to work tomorrow. Maybe you should get one of the twins to take Joshua for the day.” “No, I’ll take him with me.”
John and Mattie Skye’s twin daughters, Jill and Jen, doted on Joshua, and would care for him at the drop of a hat. But I didn’t drop the hat too often, since I figured that I was going to be Joshua’s father as long as I lived and I’d better get used to having him around. Besides, I liked being with him even though I knew little about babies in general and not much more about him in particular.
“Drew Mondry said he wanted to talk with you about something,” I said. “Oh? What?”
“I don’t know. Maybe this business about getting you into the movies.”
She laughed. “Oh, that. I think it would be fun to be an extra, though. Don’t you?”
“Maybe I could carry a spear or something.”
“I don’t think this is a spear-carrying film. A quahog rake, maybe. I know! You and I can be American Gothic, only we’ll stand in front of a clam shack and you can wear waders instead of coveralls and hold that quahog rake instead of a pitchfork. It’ll be great. We’ll be the back-ground for something that happens in the foreground. A steamy sex scene, maybe, with us standing there as contrast. What do you think?”
“Maybe we can do the foreground scene instead.”
“Ah,” she said. “Maybe we could, at that.”
“Of course, we’d need to rehearse.”
Later, as she lay beside me in the darkness of our bedroom, her voice was sleepy. “Maybe I could learn to do this in front of a camera crew, after all. Maybe there is a place for me in Hollywood. I feel like a star right now.”
I ran a lazy finger down over her face, tracing her fore-head and nose, getting the finger kissed as it crossed her lips, passing it over her chin and down her throat, down between her breasts, over her flat, sweaty stomach until my hand rested on her lower belly, damp and musky from lovemaking.
She put her hands on top of mine, then shivered and rolled toward me and wrapped me in her arms.
The next morning I made some phone calls and found a helicopter outfit on the mainland that would be glad to ferry Drew Mondry anywhere he wanted to go, as long as Drew didn’t mind paying for the pleasure. Since money seemed to be no problem to Drew, I told the guy on the phone that I’d get back to him. I imagine he had his doubts about whether I actually would, since he probably had gotten a lot of calls from people who couldn’t afford him but were too shy to admit it.
Drew Mondry showed up on schedule, and was openly disappointed by Zee’s absence.
“She’s a working girl,” I said. “If you want to spend more time with her, get yourself hurt enough to go to the emergency ward at the hospital.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” said Mondry.
“Of course, there are some other nurses up there, too,” I said, loading Joshua and his gear into the Range Rover. “You might get one of them instead.”
“Drat,” said Mondry. “I guess I’ll have to stay well.”
We spent the day driving back roads and walking paths through reservation areas.
“I thought you were mad at the environmentalists and the conservationists,” said Mondry as we stood on a sandy trail beneath tall trees and admired a brook that tumbled over rocks at our feet, then disappeared beyond a grassy embankment. “I could have sworn that you dunked one of them in the Atlantic Ocean just yesterday.”
“If I could afford it,” I said, “I’d buy this whole island and keep as much as I could looking just like this. But I wouldn’t keep people locked away from it. Every beach would be public, and I wouldn’t keep people from hunting and fishing and blueberry picking and doing the things they’ve always done on the land.”
He jabbed the needle. “How about lumberjacking and building gas stations and more houses?”
“They farm trees in a lot of places,” I said. “They could probably farm them here, too. You plant them and grow them and cut them down and plant new ones, so you always have the trees you need. The same goes for shell-fishing. If I owned the place, I’d have shellfishing farms in some of the ponds. As far as the houses are concerned, everybody wants to be the last person to own here, but actually there’s a lot of room on this island for more houses. The problem is that I’m not so sure there’s enough water for too many more people. I guess I’d go for individual homes, but not for developments.”
“No constraints?”
I don’t like constraints. “No more than need be,” I said.
“What about those gas stations? What about more people coming every year and more cars coming and all that stuff I keep hearing about?”
“When I own the island, there won’t be any more of that stuff.”
“How about since you don’t own the island?”
One reason I’d given up being a cop and come to the Vineyard to live a quiet life was because I’d grown tired of trying and failing to make the world a better place. I’d decided to get away from society’s problems, but like the guy says, there is no “away.”
“How should I know?” I now said. “You don’t let go, do you?”
“I don’t get paid to give up,” he said, and I knew then that he would, indeed, be telephoning Zee to invite her to lunch.
We walked on along the trail with Joshua out of his backpack and in my arms, sucking on a bottle.
“Are there roads into these places where we’ve been walking? If there aren’t, I don’t know how we could do location work in them, even though they’re beautiful.”
“There are old roads all over this island, and the conservation groups that own these places always need money. If you offer them enough and can convince them that you can get your trucks or whatever in and out without damaging things, you might be able to make a deal.”
“Can you put me in touch with the people in charge?”
What an irony. Me contacting the very people whose policies I had criticized so often in the past.
“I can do that,” I said.
His smile revealed his awareness of the contrast between my feelings and my promise of action. “You don’t mind being a go-between for me and your enemies?”
It is a truism that we judge groups we don’t belong to by their least desirable characteristics, and hold their most extreme members as being typical of their fellows. I wasn’t immune to such stupidity, but I tried to fight it.
“I don’t mind,” I said. “Besides, they’re not my enemies.”
“Not even Lawrence Ingalls?”
“Every group has its jerks,” I said. “He’s theirs. I’ll talk to some other people, but if you want to talk to him, you can do it yourself.” But even as I spoke, I realized I was no longer angry with Ingalls. As sometimes happens, once blows had been taken and returned, anger had gone away. Loathsome Lawrence was no longer a person I hated, but only a guy who held views I couldn’t abide. The difference was a great one. Hatred is an exhausting emotion, and I was glad to find mine gone.
At the end of
the day, we drove back to our house. Zee came out and took Joshua, who was glad to see her. Madonna and child.
“Seen enough?” I asked Mondry.
“No,” he said, and I saw that he was looking at Zee. Then he realized that I was talking about the island, and forced his eyes away from her. “Enough from the ground. For the moment, at least. Can we fly tomorrow? Maybe after that, I’ll want to see some places I don’t know about yet.”
“I’ll call the helicopter outfit,” I said.
“Good. Have them meet us at the airport in the morning.”
Drew Mondry drove away.
“Well, how did it go?” asked Zee.
“Fine.” We went inside and I told her about our travels.
“And tomorrow you’re going to fly. I’ve never been in a helicopter. It must be fun!”
I had been in a few that weren’t fun while in Vietnam, but that had been long, long ago.
While Zee and Joshua exchanged gossip and hugs in the living room, I phoned the helicopter outfit and surprised the guy I’d talked to earlier by hiring one of his planes and a pilot. Then I called Drew Mondry and told him when to be at the airport. Then I got to work in the kitchen, finishing making the supper that Zee had already started: stuffed bluefish and fresh garden salad.
It was our last fresh bluefish, which meant that a surf-casting trip was at the top of our list of things to do. Not a bad duty, as I pointed out to Zee, as we polished off our meal.
“Well, blast and damn!” said Zee, looking at the tide tables. “The last two hours of the west tide at Wasque are after I go to work in the morning!”
“I, on the other hand, am free until ten o’clock,” I said. ’Joshua and I can be down there and back again in time to be at the airport when the helo comes in.”
Zee was telling Joshua about the unfairness of life, when the phone rang. She answered it, and I began washing the supper dishes. I was nearly through when she came back into the kitchen, Joshua on her hip.
“That was Drew Mondry,” she said, brushing at her son’s mostly imaginary hair. “He wants to have lunch with me.”
A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard Page 6