Death in the Polka Dot Shoes

by Marlin Fitzwater

  The boys at the Bayfront, realizing that Gunnels had no family or money, arranged to have him cremated. In a ceremony still honored in Parkers, they lined up their work boats, headed out to the Bay, and dumped Gunnels’ ashes right in the middle of the Holland Point oyster bed. The final irony of his life was that in the end, the oysters got to eat him.

  Gunnels is still honored at the Bayfront with a picture of him beside a stack of oyster shells. The picture comes down occasionally, when Mabel Fergus, who owns the place, becomes “tired of looking at his ugly face,” as she puts it. But after a few months, it always reappears in a different corner of the dining room.

  This story flashed through my mind because I knew I had seen that girl with the watermen before, and I think it was at the Bayfront. She was very attractive and I wondered if she knew my bother, or just came to be with the boys. Either explanation was possible. I knew most of the crabbers because they were either just behind me in school, or were men my father had worked with. There seemed to be a missing group, my class at South County High, but I knew no reason for it. Other than there were a couple of really bad crabbing years in the early 1980s, and most fathers simply discouraged their sons from staying on the water. In my case, I didn’t want to. I had a longing for fast cars, pretty girls, finely starched shirts, linen table cloths and long airplane trips to unknown places. Those dreams required getting out of Parkers.

  The memorial service ended, and my brother’s friends were standing around outside, smoking or talking. They started drifting back toward the church for a basement reception, which I was not looking forward to attending. That’s where the old women in floral print dresses and heavy shoes want to bestow a big kiss and a hug on the bereaved relatives, in this case, me. They seem to think a bosomy hug somehow eases the pain, when in fact it squashes the cigars in my breast pocket and leaves strange smells around my neck. I could do without that.

  I had smoked cigarettes in college in order to look cool, and once in the law firm, where the pressure to produce was palpable, my habit had grown to nearly three packs a day. I had ignored all the warnings, the television ads, the government studies, and the statistics on lung cancer. Growing up, everyone I knew smoked. Most of the watermen smoked, from long days of hard repetitive work on the water. So it seemed natural that I would pick up the habit. But one day my lungs started to ache, and worse, breathing actually made a noise. I could hear a low groan with every breath, and it scared me. It was impossible to ignore, or to rationalize away. Breathing should not make a noise. So I started the terrible process of trying to stop, cold turkey, then two cigarettes a day, then one cigar in the evening. The cigar seemed to work, although I knew of course that it was not good for me. Then I convinced myself that one cigar, no inhaling, was alright. And the noise in my lungs stopped. That’s how I came to always have a cigar in my pocket, even at my brother’s memorial service.

  In addition, my favorite place to smoke was in the car. I didn’t smoke at home because of the smell and dirty ash trays. But driving was like a personal smoking lounge, with the window cracked for fresh air and no passengers to offend. In this case, I knew it would be a long drive back to Washington from Parkers, and after the memorial service I would need the distraction of a good cigar.

  Bucking the tide of people and stumbling down the hill toward me was my father’s best friend and retired Field and Bay Magazine photographer, Mansfield Burlington, a strange but very proper duck who chose Parkers for a home some 40 years ago. He was tall, thin, constantly smoked a pipe, often wore a bow tie, and carried himself with a stiffness sometimes mistaken for aloofness. I once saw a picture of Mansfield in some magazine that showed him with his cameras slung around his neck in Venice, Italy while two pigeons tried to land on his head, apparently confusing him with a Michelangelo statue. There was no explanation for why Field and Bay had sent him to Italy. In fact, Mansfield was quite a warm fellow, a great listener and a craftsman. He could touch a piece of wood and turn it soft and brown, yielding the most beautiful flow of varnished grain imaginable. He could build things.

  “Neddie,” he called, “I’m so sorry about your bother. Almost went out on his boat once. How are you?”

  “Fine Burl,” I said, surprised at first that I even remembered the more familiar nickname, but then remembering that everyone called him Burl. Mansfield was far too formal for daily use, and it sounded so English. In fact, Mansfield Burlington was born in Minnesota, and was Scandinavian. After photographing the world for nearly twenty years, he had a minor fame of his own. Young photographers familiar with his pioneering use of color and a tenacious sense of purpose in getting the right picture, still dropped by his house for pointers. People said he liked the water so much because he descended from Viking warriors. Locals held him in reverence because he had the touch with wood, an almost mystical connection in which he could run his finger lovingly along a strip of walnut and it would become a table. When he started building a skipjack in his barn, people would drop by on Sunday afternoons just to see the progress, like viewing a sculptor in his studio.

  “Burl,” I repeated, “did you ever finish that skipjack?”

  “Yes,” he said with a pleased smile, “rolled her out of the barn at the turn of the century. She’s docked beside the Tonsund. Come see her.” The Tonsund was a forty-foot sail boat named for Mansfield’s Sherpa who had guided him safely up some Tibetan mountain more than thirty years before. Not insignificantly, Mansfield had saved Ton-sund’s life on the way down by amputating his frozen toes with a pen knife. For a fellow with such formal bearing, Mansfield made the deepest and most lasting friendships.

  “Sorry about your brother,” Mansfield said. “A good man. Knew the water.”

  He stopped to light his pipe, stepping back to avoid a falling ash that just missed his tweed coat. It was a knarled old pipe, black around the bowl from countless flames and as natural as the bark of an oak tree. He had fondled the briar, leaving so much oil and sweat on the bowl that it looked almost soft, like fine leather.

  “Too bad he got wrapped around that Resort,” Mansfield said as the flame from his match died out.

  I picked up on that immediately, knowing nothing about any resort. “What Resort?”

  “Oh, you haven’t heard about the big fight,” Mansfield said, almost with excitement. “They’re trying to build a hundred acre resort right here on the Jenkins. We call it the hijenks project,” Mansfield said. “Going to ruin the crabs. Pollute this whole Bay.”

  “Are you involved, Burl?” I asked. “Environmentalists up in arms?”

  “We’re doing what we can,” he said. “It’s the future of the Bay. No more skipjacks.”

  Mansfield started building his skipjack when I was in high school, cutting the wood himself from white cedar he had plucked from the forests of Maine and carried to Maryland on the roof of his car. As a boy, I will never forget the sight of a small gray station wagon, with two six-inch square, twenty-foot long pieces of lumber strapped to the top so they hung over the windshield like licorice sticks. He drove all the way from Maine to Maryland with his wife hiding her face in shame beside him. The police stopped him twice but never gave him a ticket. Mansfield was a man’s man who had traveled the world, engaging himself in exploits which always seemed to end in a near death experience. And I did indeed intend to stop by his home for a visit, if only to ask if he had heard any strange stories about my brother. Now we had a Resort to discuss.

  “Can I come by to see you, Burl?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Love to have you. Bring some wind and we’ll do a little sailing.”

  I wanted to get back to Washington before dark, just to be home and sort out my thoughts. I hadn’t spent much time at the church with my brother’s wife and baby, but we had already shed so many tears together, I just walked away. I wanted to make a quick pass by the Bayfront Inn and take a look at my brother’s boat, anchored next to the garden dock. The Bayfront didn’t have any rooms, but did have a
bar and restaurant beside seventeen slips for crab boats and charter fishing boats.

  Somehow, when death stops the world for you, you expect it to stop for everyone. It doesn’t. On Sunday afternoon at the Bayfront, a deejay named Footloose played heavy metal music for bikers, girlfriends, and locals who filled the six picnic tables on the dock. I used to move easily in this world. But now, instead of recognizing the biker babe in the black jacket and tattoos as the mother of an old friend, I saw her as slightly threatening, someone I didn’t know and shouldn’t make eye contact with. The cycles were lined up in front of the building. My God, I exclaimed to myself as I realized the biker babe was Hank’s mom, about to get on a maroon Harley Davidson with highly polished chrome and a small bumper sticker that said “Save the Bay.” She had to be sixty. And the identical maroon Harley parked next to her must mean that Hank Sr. was still in the building. Hank Jr. was my best friend in high school because he wanted to be an accountant. We had a natural friendship, based on a mutual ambition to get out of Parkers. Actually, he had done well in life, becoming a dot com millionaire of some kind, and probably buying those motorcycles for his parents. As far as I knew, they were still running crab pots out of the West River. But obviously, their lives had assumed a new flair.

  I began to fear that the psychological distance between Washington, where I had lived for more than ten years now, and Parkers is much greater than the geography suggests. When you drive to Parkers, the land begins to flatten out as you get closer to the Chesapeake Bay. There aren’t any housing developments torn into the side of the road with brick entrance markers, only wood frame homes of varying sizes, sometimes adorned with brick or stone, but always carrying that unmistakable design of the amateur owner architect who has added a room or two. They telescope down in size the closer you get to Parkers, and you realize this is a place nobody goes through. It’s not on the way to anywhere. You have to seek it out, or know someone who lives there or at least used to.

  The combination gas station and liquor store is the first commercial landmark that welcomes you to town with a handmade sign that says, “ATM Inside.” There are a half dozen bank branches tucked away in the corner of roadside buildings constructed for real estate offices and insurance agencies. But the gas station and liquor store comprise the economic center of the community. There is no town center in a traditional sense with community square, grocery store, hardware store, stoplight and main street. There is no main street, unless you call the road along Jenkins Creek the main one, which might be reasonable to assume because the Bayfront Inn and nearby turkey shooting range are along that road. Behind the Inn is a string of houses facing twenty different directions, indicating the randomness of local zoning requirements.

  The houses are tied to the Creek by boat slips that can be rented for nearly two hundred a month and represent the retirement nest egg for most of the families in residence. As long as the slips are filled, life is good in Parkers.

  But there is a hard edge to Parkers. Many of the small homes along the road have discarded refrigerators and cloth covered recliners in the yard with rusted old cars that hadn’t passed an emission inspection test in years. Yards are filled with boats in every stage of repair, with peeling paint, and gray motors hanging precariously from the stern. They are most often parked beside a garage, which has long since lost its door and allows even a drive-by visitor to see the crab traps and lawn mowers stacked inside. The only new element in most of these yards is the hand painted sign for SARP, “Stop All Resorts Please,” a protest group of mostly waterfront landowners who want to keep the resorts and any other development out. The SARP message is to keep Parkers in its present state of natural beauty, a somewhat obscure concept to those who use refrigerators as doorstops. Yet they are the first to accept yard signs to save the environment.

  The Bayfront was rocking but my mood was too blue for the music so I didn’t stop. The Martha Claire, my dad’s old bay-built crab boat, rolled gently at the pier behind the Inn, responding to the waves from small power boats on Jenkins Creek. Her seventeenth coat of white paint glistened with a red tint from the evening sun, and showed no evidence that my brother would not be returning to her helm on Monday morning. Jimmy had kept her in sparkling condition.

  I drove on back to Washington with the top down so I could smell the hay fields between Parkers and the City. I noticed when I left the church there were several frowns aimed at my car. I knew exactly what that was all about; the worst aspect of my small town life: envy. I remember in high school we used to have cliques that were always judging people by their possessions, their wealth, their clothes. As adults, it became a new car, new wife, new fur coat, a job in the city, a new house, or a Saab convertible. The socially preferable mode of transportation in Parkers was a pickup truck, preferably at least ten years old, with dents on every fender. I might have to get one of those.

  It was the hard edge I remembered from my youth. My friends were always fighting someone, whether it be individually at a bar, or collectively against the State over a dredging permit. There seemed to be an inferiority complex associated with living in the southern tip of Jenkins County. We were called South Countians in Parkers. And the watermen joked that all the crap in Baltimore and Annapolis would sooner or later be thrown on South County.

  In fact, you could get so worked up about the problems of South County, it sometimes seemed a relief to get back to the city where nobody cared. In Parkers we had no chain grocery stores, so we had to drive to Annapolis for food, an inconvenience only the poor recognized as a discriminatory cost of living. Our banks were small branches where the young tellers didn’t fully understand how a money market worked, or how to transfer money electronically, and usually recommended passbook savings accounts paying less than three percent interest. There was no local government to respond to any public need, and whether it was police, medical or building permits, we always had to make the trip to Annapolis. Not a great distance, but psychologically it was a million miles. It was also money: every trip to the doctor or the store cost five dollars for gas and incidentals. It wasn’t necessarily cheap to live in Parkers.

  My townhouse in Washington is just behind the nation’s Capitol, recently renovated by a young couple who discovered the original bricks between the row houses. They tore out the ancient plaster and left a beautiful internal façade for the one big room that served all purposes, except sleeping. The bedroom was upstairs. That’s why, when the young wife got pregnant, they had to find a bigger house and I was lucky enough to find the perfect bachelor pad. Even at 34, I am still single.

  I opened the varnished front door, picked up the paper, and tossed my keys on the granite kitchen counter. It was dark because the only windows were on both ends of the house, and dusk was about to become night. I turned on the television because it provides better background noise than music, poured my first scotch on the rocks for the evening, plopped down in the stuffed armchair, and thought about the day. More specifically, I wondered why my deceased brother wanted me back in the waterman business, and why I might even consider it. There was, of course, the 147 acres of land on the Bay that my parents had left to my brother. In their will, they wrote that I had been given their cash for college, their dreams, and the brains to become a lawyer. Thus the land and the Martha Claire would have to take care of my brother. I think Jimmy deeply resented the intellectual implications of that provision, and perhaps that’s why he now presented me with this Faustian option. He never showed me any resentment, seemingly happy with his life. But Jimmy’s will was nevertheless strange: it offered me half the 147 acres if I would also accept our family workboat and return to the crabbing business for at least five years. The other half of the land was left to his wife and daughter.

  What the hell was he up to? You could argue that he knew my frustrations with the law and just wanted to give me the value of a simpler life, for him a better life. Or he just wanted to be fair, rectifying our father’s mistaken benevolence. Or you cou
ld argue that his final revenge was to force me out of the law and back on the water. He could never understand why I left the water. When I told him I was getting tired of the city, and often yearned for a return to the water, he could never understand why I didn’t do it. “Just give up the money, put on your blue jeans, and join me on the boat,” he would say. “To hell with the law.”

  I couldn’t figure out his motives, so I poured a second scotch, only for the purposes of mental clarity you understand, and fell back into my chair. I am Irish, as I suppose the name Neddie Shannon makes obvious. But I’m not freckled with light skin and all that. Rather, I have dark skin, dark eye brows and light brown hair that I will never lose because my father and grandfather lived into their eighties with enough hair to start a wig shop. I also enjoy a challenge, a good root for the ole underdog, a fine turn of events, and people who care for other people.

  Anyway, I don’t have to determine my future tonight. Just before going to sleep, however, I should add that my list of favorite things does not include the law. It’s just never been fun. The billing system, where you have to account for every hour spent on a client, has always seemed nuts to me. And I’ve never had a client who thought it was fair. It detracts from my sense of completion. Start a job and finish it, my dad used to say, and let the market set the price. As I finish this day of sadness and introspection, maybe it’s time to reinvent my life, or at least do a little restructuring.

  Chapter Two

  I hate digital alarm clocks because you can never make them alarm, or it’s a.m. when it should be p.m., or it’s radio when it should be buzzer, and the settings are too small to read in the dark or when you’re snockered. So I just leave those blinking red digits staring at me in the night and trust I’ll wake up to read them, remember my appointments for the day and respond accordingly. This morning I thought about my father getting out of bed at three o’clock in the morning to ready his crab boat for six hours on the Bay and I knew my returning to the water was folly. On the other hand, is it a law that you have to start crabbing that early? Why not nine o’clock? I decided to roll over until 8:30 and consider the matter again.