Third Strike

by Philip R. Craig

  “Well,” he said when I was done, “you’ve got the names of some people who might be able to help you. That’s a start.”

  “It’s not much.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not.”

  Off West Chop we were smothered a bit by the highlands, but the sail still pulled, and then it filled again when we crossed the entrance to Vineyard Haven harbor. The water was crowded with boats, large and small, heading to and from the mainland. A big one, the Neptune, with four cars on her deck, bounced us with her wake. We fetched East Chop, then hauled in the sheet just a bit for the long reach to Edgartown.

  “You know any more about why Larry Bucyck wants to see you?” I asked Brady.

  “No more than I knew when I talked to you on the phone,” he said.

  “It’ll ruin my reputation if anybody finds out I’m a friend of Larry Bucyck’s lawyer,” I said.

  “Who said we were friends?” said Brady.

  Off the Chappy cliffs we came about and began tacking into Edgartown harbor. The rising tide helped, and we scooted between Chappy Point and the town dock with no problems. A half hour later the Shirley J. was back on her stake, sail furled, and we were all ashore on Collins Beach. I chained the dinghy, the Millennium Falcon, to the bulwark, so it wouldn’t be stolen by gentlemen yachtsmen trying to get back to their boats in the wee, small hours, and we all climbed into the Land Cruiser and headed out of town.

  “A successful sail,” said Brady, articulating the adage that any sail that gets you home is a successful one.

  We returned Jim to his mother and went on to the Jackson house.

  Zee gave Brady a kiss. “Put your gear in the guest room,” she said. “You know where it is.”

  Brady shook his head. “Thanks,” he said, “but my client wants me to stay with him, so I guess that’s what I better do.”

  She dropped her car keys in his shirt pocket and gave the pocket a pat. “If you change your mind, cocktails will be served at the usual time.”

  “You sure you won’t need your car?”

  “It’s yours for the duration,” she said, “as long as the duration isn’t too long.”

  “I don’t think it will be,” Brady said.

  “If your client throws you out of the house,” she said, “our guest room is yours.”

  “Thanks, both of you.” He kissed her cheek and shook my hand. “I’ll keep in touch.”

  He got into Zee’s Jeep and drove away. We watched until he was out of sight.

  “How about you?” said Zee. “Do you have any plans for the rest of the day?”

  “Somewhere the sun is over the yardarm,” I said. “Why don’t I make a couple of drinks, and while we sip them you can tell me about your morning shooting practice. Any new thoughts about trying out for the Olympics?”

  “No new ones,” she said, “but I liked the Feinwerkbau. I’ll get us some nibblies while you fix the drinks. The balcony awaits.”

  Chapter Four

  Brady

  I left the Jacksons’ house a little before five in Zee’s sporty little red Jeep Wrangler, heading west on the Edgartown–West Tisbury Road. J.W. said it would take about twenty minutes to get to Menemsha.

  I found myself smiling at J.W.’s and Zee’s casual generosity. Whenever I was on the island, they always had a bed for me, no matter how spur-of-the-moment my visit might be. They called their guest room “Brady’s Room,” though I suspected they also called it “Uncle Charlie’s Room” and “Cousin Tilda’s Room,” depending on who might be sleeping there. And they always made one of their cars available to me. They would’ve been insulted if I ever brought my own vehicle over on the ferry or rented one. They also made sure a spare house key dangled from the key chain along with the car key. Not only was their casa my casa, but their refrigerator and shower and TV set and computer were mine, too.

  Plus, no matter what they had going on in their lives, if I was on the island, one or both of them would drop everything to take me fishing.

  I did my best to match their hospitality. Once or twice in the winter, J.W. and Zee found a babysitter for the kids, came to America, and took in a B.S.O. concert. I drove to Woods Hole to pick them up, and they spent the night with Evie and me. And in the summer I finagled six Red Sox tickets, and Evie and I treated the Jackson family to a game at Fenway. We gave the grown-ups our guest room and put the kids in my office with sleeping bags.

  J.W. and Zee seemed happy with the bottle of Grey Goose vodka I’d remembered to bring. I gave Joshua a book about animal tracks and Diana a CD of bird-songs, and they smiled and said, Thank you, Uncle Brady.

  I was hoping I could take care of Larry Bucyck’s mysterious business quickly and then spend a little time with the Jacksons.

  According to Larry, it had been five years since I’d been there, but as I approached Menemsha, it all started to look familiar, and after I crossed Middle Road, I recognized the left turn that would take me to his shack in the woods. In my memory, it was a dusty little country roadway with a few modest homes tucked back behind the trees. Now it had been straightened and widened and black-topped. Progress.

  Four or five big new houses perched uncomfortably in clearings close to the road where there had been a scrubby oak-and-pine forest the last time I was there, cookie-cutter McMansions with three-car garages and professionally landscaped lawns and gardens. You might expect to see aesthetically challenged homes such as these in some cluster development in Acton or Westwood, but not in bucolic Menemsha out at the far end of Martha’s Vineyard. Next thing you knew, there’d be Wal-Marts and Circuit Cities and multiplex theaters all over the island.

  A hundred yards past the last McMansion, I spotted the ruts angling off to the left. Larry’s driveway. Bushes crowded close along both sides, and knee-high weeds grew among the rocks in the ruts. It looked like nobody had driven a vehicle up Larry Bucyck’s driveway for years. I was happy to be in Zee’s Wrangler, with its high clearance and four-wheel drive.

  As I turned onto the ruts, I noticed a giant stack of rocks in the woods. When I looked again, I realized it was a stone sculpture, an objet d’art. It stood there like an eight-foot-tall sentinel guarding the entry to Larry’s property, and I was compelled to stop the car so I could absorb it. Its base was a waist-high boulder the shape of a crude flat-topped pyramid. A chunky, weather-beaten boulder at least three feet square was balanced atop the pyramid, and on top of that was a flat rock about five feet wide. The head was a smaller roundish boulder the size of a deformed beach ball.

  It represented—to me, at least—a woman. A primitive, Easter Island woman, dignified and powerful and elegant. It was obviously man-made—by Larry Bucyck, I assumed—but it fit so naturally into the landscape that it looked as if it had been there since before history.

  Larry had mentioned something about a stone sculpture. This was it. Awesome.

  A little farther down the driveway I spotted another rock assemblage in the woods. This one represented a squat animal of some kind. A hippo, maybe, or some kind of dinosaur. Two square rocks side by side with one enormous rectangular boulder balanced atop them. I couldn’t begin to estimate how much the hippo’s body weighed or to guess how it had been lifted atop its legs. It was the size of a small sofa.

  The roadway curved around to the right, and Larry Bucyck’s little house sat in a small clearing in the woods. Several other stone sculptures stood guard around it. A few of them were nothing more than two or three big boulders balanced atop another one like snowmen, deceptively simple structures that compelled me to notice the shapes and colors of the rocks and the way eons of weather had etched designs into them. Others suggested animals and ships.

  I pulled into what passed for a front yard—an area of beaten-down grass where about a dozen Rhode Island Red chickens were pecking gravel. A brown-black-and-white dog with floppy ears snoozed on his side in a patch of afternoon sunshine. An old balloon-tire bicycle with a rusty wire basket on the handlebars leaned against the side of the ho
use.

  When I got out of the Jeep, some of the hens came over to check me out. The dog lifted his head, looked at me, then dropped it back onto his paws and closed his droopy eyes.

  Since I’d been there last, Larry had added a small lean-to–shaped room onto the side of what I remembered as a square, one-room shack. Otherwise, it hadn’t changed. Vertical planks for walls, a few mismatched windows, a weathered oak door, an aluminum stovepipe sticking out of the roof.

  It was bigger than Thoreau’s hut on the banks of Walden Pond, fourteen or fifteen feet square. But its purpose—to simplify, simplify, to enable Larry to “front only the essential facts of life”—was the same. Thoreau wrote philosophy and stuck it out for a little more than two years at Walden. Larry Bucyck built rock sculptures. He had lived here in the woods of Menemsha for about fifteen years.

  The scent of salt air was strong, and I remembered that the ground sloped away behind the house so that you could see Menemsha Pond, just a few hundred yards away, and off to the right, Vineyard Sound.

  If you were determined to become a hermit, you could do worse than hole up here.

  I stood there for a minute, then cleared my throat and said, “Hey, Larry? You here?”

  When there was no response, I knocked on the door and called Larry’s name again. I waited there for a minute, then went over to one of the windows and pressed my face against the glass. The inside of Larry’s house was one dimly lit room—a sink with a hand pump and what appeared to be an icebox at one end, a square table with a kerosene lantern on it, three mismatched wooden chairs, a couple of stuffed chairs, several bookcases bulging with books and magazines and loose papers, and one narrow bed.

  Larry wasn’t inside.

  I remembered that the outhouse was out back. Maybe that’s where he was. I headed for the rear of the house. Three or four of the chickens followed me.

  I turned the corner and paused there, admiring the view and looking around for Larry—and that’s when something slammed against the backs of my knees. My legs felt as if they’d been chopped off, and I toppled forward onto the ground.

  Then something round and hard jammed into my kidneys.

  “Don’t move,” growled a voice, “or I’ll blow a hole in you.”

  “Aw, Larry, Jesus,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “Brady?” he said.

  “Like you weren’t expecting me? Cripes. What did you do to my legs? Feels like you cut me off at the knees with a machete or something.”

  I felt his hand on my shoulder. He helped me to roll over and sit up. “Your legs’ll be okay,” he said. “I paralyzed the tendons, that’s all.”

  “Paralyzed,” I said. “Excellent. I think you crippled me for life.”

  “Naw. I coulda, but I didn’t. It’s a trick somebody showed me. Those tendons behind your knees, you can paralyze them, what I did, but it only lasts a minute. I’m sorry, you know? But you’ll be okay. I was afraid you were somebody coming after me.” He was holding what appeared to be a walking stick. It was a four-foot length of inch-thick sapling with the twigs cut off, an excellent weapon for knee-tendon whacking. Judging by the bark, it was from an oak tree. He put it to his shoulder, pointed it at me, grinned, and said, “Bang, bang. You’re dead.”

  “Oh, great,” I said. “So you got the drop on me with a stick.” I sat there with my arms wrapped around my knees and looked up at him.

  Larry Bucyck seemed taller and skinnier and more creased and wrinkled than last time I’d seen him—which, of course, is what happens to people as they get older. His hairline had receded quite a bit. His scraggly beard and the long hair that he’d pulled back into a ponytail were now more gray than blond. It was hard to see the pink-cheeked, broad-shouldered young major-league pitcher in this Larry Bucyck. Now he just looked like a sinewy old hippie in baggy jeans and a dirty T-shirt.

  “So is this how you normally greet your friends?” I said. “Loyal, concerned friends who come all the way from America because you told them you had a problem and needed their help? You try to disable them?”

  “Aw, hell, Brady. Really, man. I said I was sorry. I guess I’m a little edgy these days.”

  “Edgy? That what you call it?”

  “Nervous, that’s all.”

  “Full-blown paranoid,” I said. “Certifiably psychopathic, if you ask me. You gonna tell me why?”

  He held his hand down to me. “Come on. Stand up. Walk around a little, your legs’ll feel better.”

  I took his hand and hoisted myself to my feet.

  “Go on, walk around,” Larry said. “Stretch ’em out.”

  I did, and pretty soon my legs didn’t hurt anymore.

  Larry was watching me. “Better, right?”

  I nodded. “They were even better before you hit me.”

  He smiled, stepped toward me, wrapped both arms around my shoulders, and hugged me hard. “Man,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  I returned his hug, then stepped back from him. “So why don’t you tell me what it’s all about, you’re glad I’m here, urgent phone calls, whacking people behind their knees.”

  “You hungry yet?” he said. “Dinner’s about ready. Raked the quahogs this morning, low tide right at dawn, couldn’t be fresher, soaked ’em, shucked ’em, washed ’em, cut up the potatoes and onions and everything, had the chowder simmering all afternoon, man.”

  He pointed his walking stick at a steaming black kettle that was nestled in a bed of coals near the rear corner of the house. I went over, pried the cover off with a stick, and took a sniff.

  “Yum,” I said to Larry. “Saliva is dribbling off my chin. I could eat anytime.”

  “As soon as I hung up yesterday,” Larry said, “I remembered the ferry strike. I don’t pay much attention to the news. I mean, I avoid it if I can. But I should’ve remembered that. I felt terrible, asking you to come down here, no ferry.”

  “I got a ride on a catboat,” I said. “It was fun. I never would’ve done that if you hadn’t called.”

  He smiled. “Aw, you’re just saying that.”

  “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it.”

  “Right. Brady No Bullshit Coyne.”

  “That’s me,” I said. “So you gonna tell me what this is all about?”

  “I got some pigs,” he said. “Wannna go see my pigs?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to know what kind of trouble you think you’re in, what you want to show me, what I can do for you.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I don’t blame you. They’re just pigs, I guess. I call them Pig One, Pig Two, Pig Three, like that. I was afraid if I gave them people names, I’d never be able to slaughter them. I built a sty for them downwind in the woods. Want some wine?”

  I was beginning to remember how Larry’s mind worked. When he was fresh out of college, a hot-shot pitcher with a major-league contract and a pretty wife, he was smart and articulate and funny. Reporters loved him. But after living alone for all these years, avoiding human intercourse, his social skills had atrophied to the point where you could never be sure if he even heard what you said, and the easiest thing was to just go with his mind’s peculiar flow.

  “Wine,” I said, “would be nice.”

  “You stay here, have a seat, stir the pot,” he said, waving his hand at the black kettle.

  I went over and sat on a rock beside the cast-iron kettle. It was resting on a bed of red coals mixed with baseball-sized rocks. I guessed Larry had built a big hardwood fire there, and as it burned down to coals, the rocks themselves became red-hot. They would hold their heat for a long time, providing perfect simmering conditions for a vat of quahog chowder.

  I picked up the long-handled wooden spoon that sat in it and gave it a stir, and that released a new cloud of aroma.

  A few minutes later Larry came back with two jelly glasses three-quarters filled with a cloudy greenish-yellow liquid. He handed one of them to me, then sat on a rock beside me.

  I sniffed the wine, then look
ed up at him with my eyebrows arched.

  “Apple and pear and rose hips,” he said. “Made it myself. It’s really good. Take a swig.”

  I put the glass to my lips and let a little slide into my mouth. Tears instantly sprang to my eyes, and I had all I could do to resist the urge to spit it out. Larry’s wine tasted like Liquid Drano.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Larry said, “it’s pretty strong. It’s got more alcohol in it than regular wine. Robust, I call it.” He tilted up his glass, poured about a third of it into his mouth, rolled it from cheek to cheek, swallowed it, and smiled. “Nice, huh?”

  “I’ve had moonshine that went down smoother than this,” I said. “Jesus.” I put the glass down. “Come on, Larry. Let’s have it. What’s so important, I had to hitch a ride on a catboat to come down here to meet with you?”

  “Did you see my sculptures?”

  “Hard to miss them. They’re magnificent. Stunning.”

  He grinned. “Yeah? You think so? Really?”

  I nodded. “I really do. I’m Brady No Bullshit Coyne, remember? I don’t like your wine, but I’m very impressed with your sculptures. What kind of machines did you use to build them, anyway?”

  “Machines? Gas-powered machines, you mean? Like backhoes or something?” He shook his head. “No machines. No way. Machines would violate the woods, contradict the spirit of my sculptures.” He smiled. “Levers and pulleys and human muscles. That’s it for machines.”

  “Does somebody help you, at least? Those boulders must weigh tons.”

  “Don’t need help.” He tapped his head with his forefinger. “Just need to figure them out. Levers and pulleys and muscles and time. That’s it.”

  “How much time?”

  He spread his hands as if time didn’t matter. “You can’t rush it. You can’t think about how long it will take or how hard it will be. I never pay attention to time. The sun rises and sets, the tide comes in and goes out, the moon grows and shrinks, the seasons come and go. That’s all you need to know about time. Takes three seasons to grow a sculpture, I guess. Start in the springtime after the winter heaves up the rocks, finish in the fall. That’s usually how it goes. One sculpture a year. Looking at the rocks takes a long time, seeing what’s in ’em, figuring which ones belong together, understanding what they mean, what they want, what their destiny is, then visualizing how they’ll look. You can’t rush that. Then bringing them together, rigging the pulleys, all that.” He grinned. “I got all the time in the world.”