Death in Vineyard Waters

by Philip Craig

  “Nonsense,” said Skye, unintimidated. “The interesting thing, J. W., is that for the last thousand years everybody and his dog, except Shakespeare, has written about King Arthur. Shakespeare wrote about Romans and Italians and about Scotsmen and Lear and the War of the Roses and about this and that, but never about Arthur. I’ve always wondered why not, so when Marjorie told me about this find of hers, I took to it like a crow to a dead cat.”

  “A wonderful image, John,” said Dr. Summerharp.

  Skye grinned. “Image be damned. If you’re right about this manuscript, Marjorie, it’ll take a load off my mind that’s been there for thirty years or more.”

  “The load you’re carrying isn’t on your mind, John,” said Marjorie Summerharp. To my surprise, she gave me a devilish wink.

  Then, just as I was beginning to feel pretty good, the sound of Zee’s voice floated back into my consciousness and pulled my eyes around. “. . . There isn’t a Mr. Madieras,” she was saying. “There was a Dr. Madieras, but there isn’t anymore . . .”

  She and Ian McGregor were side by side on their muddy knees, digging in the dark sand and talking in an exploratory way that I didn’t care for very much. Worse yet, McGregor’s bucket was already fuller than it had any right to be. The bastard was a master clammer as well as a Greek god. I climbed to my feet.

  “I think we’ve got enough, Zee,” I said. “Between us we can feed a small army.”

  Zee looked at her clam bucket, her face averted from mine, then flowed up onto her feet like a dancer. “Okay, Jeff. I guess you’re right.” She smiled down at Ian McGregor. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

  “And you,” he said. “Thanks for the clamming lesson.”

  “You’re a natural.” She grinned. He grinned.

  “Nice to meet you” I said to Dr. Summerharp. I nodded to McGregor, the natural clammer. “If you two need any help around John’s place, just give me a ring. See you later, John. Have a nice trip west.”

  I restrained an impulse to grasp Zee firmly by the arm as we walked to the Landcruiser. As we went, she glanced back and waved. Then she looked up at me and blushed a bit, I thought. I could feel McGregor’s eyes following us.

  2

  What color is jealousy? Envy is green, you get red with anger, white with fear, blue with cold, and spotty with fever. I felt sort of purple but remembered that it, like red, was for rage.

  Not that I had any right to be angry. I didn’t own Zee; I wasn’t married to her; I wasn’t even living with her (if only because she’d declined my invitation). I was her wooer, her friend, a lover. Only those things . . .

  She wasn’t too far away from a bad marriage to the jerk of a doctor I’d never met. She was beginning to feel human again and to have some fun in life, to feel attractive and worthwhile and adventuresome. And maybe I was just part of the adventure. She wasn’t that to me, but maybe I was that to her. Certainly she owed me nothing.

  So now here she was, meeting a handsome, successful, charming man and apparently feeling tingles she liked feeling, even if she felt guilty about feeling them because I was there.

  I thought these thoughts and others like them as I prepared a bachelor lunch, Zee having gone home to West Tisbury to tend to private matters about which I, brooding as we had driven to my place from the beach, had not bothered to inquire. Zee, thinking thoughts of her own and no doubt knowing why I was saying nothing, had nothing much to say either. At my place she picked up her Jeep and left.

  But even those lorn of love must eat. So I cooked and listened to a tape of Pavarotti filling my house with a sound like emeralds and diamonds. While Pavarotti sang of grand Italian passions and I thought of Zee’s attraction to Ian McGregor, my hands were preparing a salad made from fresh vegetables from my garden and leftover bluefish from yesterday’s stuffed bluefish supper. My dry mouth began to water of its own accord. I got a Molson from the fridge and unbaggied a loaf of bread I’d made in the distant past, the day before yesterday, before Zee and McGregor ever met.

  The Molson wasn’t bad. Neither was the bread—Betty Crocker’s white bread from her old cookbook. I bake it four loaves at a time and usually eat the first one before it’s even cool. This was the last of the last batch, since I’d given a loaf to Zee and had eaten two by myself already. Betty C’s bread is dynamite stuff, but lacks staying power.

  I found another beer, took bread and salad outside, and sat in my yard, under the hot June sun. There, I looked out upon the blue Vineyard Sound, where the sailboats leaned in the wind and the powerboats left white lines behind them across the pale blue water. I ate for a while, got yet another beer, and ate a bit more. It was good, but not as good as it should have been. I knew why. Yesterday, Zee had been with me for lunch under the noonday sun. Today, she was not.

  I went to the garden and picked weeds for a while. There, as I was on my knees between the kale and the cucumbers, I heard the phone ringing.

  It’s always a fifty-fifty proposition as to whether I’ll get to my phone just before it stops ringing or just afterward. Still, since I don’t get many calls, it’s worth my time, I figure, to make the dash. After all, one never knows, do one?

  So I dashed, thinking that maybe it might even be Zee calling to make things perfect again. And I got there in time. But it wasn’t Zee. It was Dr. Marjorie Summerharp.

  “I wonder if you will join us for supper,” she said. “John’s having a few people over and we’d like to add you to the group.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Ian has already phoned Mrs. Madieras,” she said with undisguised irony, “and I’m calling you. I do hope you can come.”

  I felt stiff. “Well . . .”

  “Roast beef and the fixings.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “Martinis at six.”

  “Urn . . .”

  “Women love him,” she said unexpectedly. “There’s nothing you can do about it. The damage is done, if there is any damage. Besides, you’re a big man. You can handle yourself.”

  I was silent.

  “We have a leaky faucet,” she lied.

  I almost had to laugh. “Okay,” I said.

  After that, I didn’t want to weed anymore. I rattled around the house for a while, was disgusted with myself, and thought about fishing. I checked my tide tables because my brain wasn’t functioning quite as well as usual and I wasn’t sure I remembered the time for low tide at Wasque. But I was, in fact, right: five P.M. on the dot. I looked at my watch—the $2.95 kind that you can get if you fill up your tank at the gas station. I had just time enough to catch the last two hours of the west tide. Fishing seemed to be a much better idea than staying home being stupid, so I got in the Landcruiser and rattled toward the beach.

  The principal hindrance to this plan was navigating past the eternal summer traffic jam between the Edgartown A & P on the one side and Al’s Package Store on the other. People in cars attempting left turns make this spot a leading contender, second only to the infamous Five Corners in Vineyard Haven, for the traffic jam championship of Martha’s Vineyard. Eventually I crawled through, fetched Pease Point Way, and headed for Katama, where, only short hours ago, the joy of clamming had turned unexpectedly somber. At the end of the pavement, I left the parking lot, lined with parked cars and alive with walkers and bikers still headed for South Beach, ground into four-wheel drive, and turned east toward Chappaquiddick. The clam flats were now covered with water, but there were people along the south edge of Katama Bay working away with their rakes in pursuit of quahogs. My own rake was on the rack atop my truck, but I scorned the prospect of quahogging, for I was going bluefishing.

  It was a chamber of commerce afternoon: warm, bright, with just enough breeze to let the kite fliers fill the sky with their brilliant-colored toys. The kites soared and looped above me as I drove down the beach. I’ve never been much of a kite man, myself, but there are a lot of them on the Vineyard in the summertime: fat men, thin men, men with boxer shorts, men with bikinis, young
men, old men, single men, family men. Occasionally a woman. Occasionally a child. But usually men. They love their kites and play with them all day long, launching them as soon as they get to the beach and winding them down from the sky at the very end of their day. The women of the kite-flying men seem to do everything else: lay out the blankets, set up the chairs, get out the inner tubes, find the food, find the sun lotion, watch the kids; and then pack all that up again while the kite men wind down their kites. I like to watch the kites, but I can’t imagine flying one for very long.

  But I can fish for a very long time and not get tired of it, and one of the best places in the world to catch bluefish from shore is at Wasque Point, on the far southeast corner of Chappaquiddick, where the rip tosses up bait and the blues come to pig out and, in their greed, regularly mistake artificial lures for genuine eatables. Fish are not very smart, in spite of rumors to the contrary. A fact for which we should all go to church regularly to thank whatever gods there may be.

  There were about thirty assorted four-by-fours lined up along the beach at Wasque, and I could see some people down along the shore actually casting. But I could also see that most of the rods were standing straight in their holders or were leaning against vehicles. That meant that the blues weren’t really biting much at the moment. For if they were biting, none of those rods would be standing there; all of them would be working in the hands of fishermen.

  I found a spot almost where I wanted to be and pulled in. I took my rod off the rack, hooked on a three-ounce red-headed Roberts and checked both sides to see what kind of fishermen my neighbors were: were they really fishermen or were they pilgrims—summer ginks who, when they cast, were a danger to everyone within fifty yards? Al Prada’s Jeep was on my left, so that was okay. He wasn’t in it, but was about three cars down the line chewing the fat with some other regulars. I didn’t know the guy on my right, but he had seven years’ worth of Wasque Reservation stickers on his side window so I figured he must know something about fishing. Having scouted the terrain, I went down to the water.

  I use an eleven-and-a-half-foot graphite rod and twenty-pound black Ande line, so with a plug like the Roberts I can get some distance in my cast most of the time. I’d added a couple extra yards by learning to use a reel without a bail, so by and large I can throw it quite a ways, a useful ability if the fish aren’t close enough to shore. Now I put my back into it and really put the Roberts out there. If there was a fish there, I wanted to get it.

  I didn’t. I got nothing. I cast a dozen more times. Nothing a dozen times. Up and down the line of men, women, and children along the shore, nobody was catching anything. That was both good and bad—bad because nobody was catching anything, indicating that there were no bluefish to be caught right now, and good because it’s really disgusting to have fished as long as I have and get nothing and then to have a child or a hundred-year-old woman who has never held a rod before catch a fish right beside you.

  I tried a couple of other plugs. Nothing. Then, just in case they were feeding under the surface instead of on top of it, I put on a Hopkins with a triple hook. Normally, I knew, I’d not be doing this sort of thing; I’d be up there on the beach with all the other smart fishermen, saving my energy until there was some sign that there was a bluefish out there ready to be caught. But I was not in a normal mood and I needed something to keep me from thinking about Zee. So I put on the Hopkins and whipped it out as far as I could throw. Way out in the rip I saw it splash home, and three turns on the reel later I felt the fish hit.

  Geronimo! It’s really terrific to catch a fish in a crowd of people who aren’t catching anything. On both sides of me, inspired fishermen were quickly lining up and casting, but only I had a fish.

  Wonderful. I cranked him slowly toward shore, hoping that none of the pilgrims would cross my line and cut him off. He was a biggish fish and the current was still running pretty well, so I walked him down, ducking under rods, until he was close. I could see him in the last wave, and I waited until the moment was right and brought him onto the sand. A good fish, ten pounds or so. I got a hand in his gills and carried him to the Landcruiser. The regulars quickly noted that I’d taken him with metal and rigged up with the same. As I got the lure out of his mouth, I saw a rod bend, then another as the long casters began to reach the school. I put the fish in the shade of the truck and went back to try for another one. I fetched another on the second cast, and after that, in spite of the pilgrims, we had some good fishing until the rip flattened. I hardly had time to think about Zee at all.

  But as I gutted the fish at the Herring Creek, I had time. I dropped all of the fish but one at the market on my way home, keeping the last one as a gift for John Skye and company. Then I went home and showered and shaved, wondering once again whether I should grow some hair on my face. From the looks of it, it wouldn’t hurt to cover it up a bit. Maybe I’d start a beard tomorrow. It would save shaving time, if nothing else. Besides, it might serve to give me a new personality. I felt like I could use one.

  I had a beer and then it was time to go to John Skye’s farm. I checked my clams in their bucket of salt water, where they were dutifully spitting out sand in preparation to being eaten tomorrow. They were hard at it. Good old clams.

  For my visit, I wore Vineyard cocktail party clothes: sandals, faded red shorts (it was too warm to wear my faded red pants), and a blue knit shirt with a little animal over the pocket. Very stylish and almost new from the thrift shop. I thought that I would fit right in.

  I arrived fashionably late and went into the kitchen, where I deposited the bluefish on the counter and kissed Mattie Skye, who looked lovely as usual.

  “Here,” I said. “I know you and John can catch all the bluefish that you can eat, but I thought maybe the learned doctors could use one. When are you guys headed west?”

  “In a few days. Here.” She put a tray of hors d’oeuvres in my hands. “Take this out and put it on that table beside the one with the booze. Then fix yourself a drink. We should still have some Mount Gay if you didn’t drink it all the last time you were here. Dinner will be coming along later. No, I don’t need any help yet.”

  Through a window I could see Zee talking to John Skye and Marjorie Summerharp. No Ian McGregor in sight. Hmmmmm. I went out the door as one of Mattie’s twins came in.

  “Hi, J. W.,” she said.

  “Hi, whichever one you are,” I said. “Where’s the other one of you?” I simply could not tell them apart, no matter how easy it is to do so, according to John, their mother, and the girls themselves.

  “Oh, she’s showing Ian the chicken coops. She’s such a flirt, it’s disgusting.”

  “Well, Jen, that’s the way Jill is,” I said.

  “I’m Jill,” she said.

  “Well, Jill, that’s the way Jen is,” I said.

  “Hmmmph,” said Jill and went inside. I carried the hors d’oeuvres out to the table, tried a few, and found the Mount Gay. I poured a nice double slug over ice and looked around. Ian McGregor was still not in sight, but there were a couple dozen other people standing around, glasses in hand, carrying on cocktail conversations. I went over and joined Zee, John, and Marjorie Summerharp.

  “Hi,” I said. Zee looked terrific in a white dress that made her dark beauty even more startling than usual. “You look terrific,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said. “Thanks. You’re looking quite Vineyardish yourself. Very stylish.”

  “People come from miles around to ask me my opinion of haute couture. I owe it to them to always be perfectly attired.”

  She smiled. Wonderful teeth. Then her glance left me and went toward John Skye’s barn. I turned and saw—what else?—Ian McGregor and Jen, flirtatious and disgusting sister of Jill, coming out. Jen was smiling up at McGregor and chattering on about whatever it is that teenage girls say to handsome older men on whom they have a serious crush. I flicked a glance down at Zee. Did I detect a narrowed eye? I did. A missing smile? Yes, indeed. Zee jealous of a thirteen-
year-old? Could be. Me jealous of Ian McGregor? I turned back and said to John, “Who are all of these people? I don’t think I know a single one of them.”

  “I should hope not,” said Skye. “These are all academic types. This island crawls with them in the summertime. This particular selection consists of friends, more or less, of Marjorie and Ian.”

  “More Ian and less me,” said Marjorie Summerharp. “I know a lot of them, but I’d hardly call them friends. I don’t have many friends in academia.”

  “And no wonder.” Skye grinned. “You’re not nice to them when they bungle or do shoddy work. You get on their cases in public places.” He glanced at me. “In the learned journals,” he explained. “Many very impolite things are said in those journals, and Marjorie has said more than her share of them.”

  “Not more than my share. Just my share. And rarely a misdirected barb, I fancy. You have no idea, J. W., how stupid highly educated people can sometimes be, or how vain or petty or, worse yet, how sloppy and deceiving they can be in their thinking or in the quality of their research.” She allowed herself an icy smile. “I confess that I enjoy puncturing their balloons.”

  “And are there many such dimwits here?” I asked.

  She glanced around. “Some. Not all. Hooperman there, the one looking down the front of that young woman’s dress, barely got his Ph.D. Wouldn’t have gotten it, if I had my way. Second rater. Mediocre thesis, mediocre exams, mediocre man.”

  “How’d he get by?”

  “Mediocre examiners. I was outvoted. And I told him so.”

  “You often are outvoted, my dear,” said Skye.

  “Very true. And Barstone there, the woman with the bosom Hooperman is admiring. A genuinely third-rate mind. A Doctor of Education, no less. As John here knows, I maintain that no one who has been trained as an educator has ever had a single original or useful idea about education. The only interesting educators have been people trained in some other area of study. Still, Barstone commands the attention of many an institution of higher, they say, learning and is paid handsomely as a consultant on matters educational. A more sanctimonious fraud I’ve rarely met inside of academia. I take the whole notion of a school of education to be an oxymoron.”