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Authors: Philip R. Craig

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BOOK: A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard
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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.”

I put a last plate into the drainer. “He said he wanted to talk to you.”

I looked at her, but her own eyes were lowered toward Joshua.

“He says he's going to try to talk me into being in the movie,” she said. “I told him he could talk about anything he wanted to, as long as he paid for lunch.”

She raised her dark eyes and looked at me. “You don't mind, do you? If you mind, I won't do it.”

“I don't mind,” I lied.

— 9 —

The next morning, Joshua and I were on the road minutes after Zee had driven off to work. At the head of our long, sandy driveway, she had gone right, toward Oak Bluffs, and we went left. It was early, so the dreaded A & P traffic jam had not yet formed, and we got through Edgar-town with no problems and went on south to Katama.

Joshua was being grumpy, and I couldn't talk him out of it, so it was a whiny ride all the way to Katama, where I got the Toyota into four-wheel drive and turned east onto Norton's Point Beach. When I reminded Josh of the No Sniveling sign above our kitchen door, he only sniveled more.

“Fussing won't help our fishing any,” I said.

He spit out his pacifier and cried.

“Look,” I said, “it's a beautiful day. You've had breakfast, your diaper is clean, we're going to have the beach to ourselves, and the fish are going to be there waiting for us. What more can you want?” I found the pacifier and returned it to him. “Here's your plug, kid.”

He wouldn't take it, and kept crying.

Demi-crisis.

I pulled off the jeep track, parked, and hauled him out of his car seat. Soaked pants. Good grief. I got him dried and powdered and into a new diaper. Still he cried. I put him on my shoulder and walked him down to the surf, patting him on the back. He burped a fair-sized burp. Aha! The old piss-in-your-pants-and-then-need-to-burp syndrome, eh? I should have guessed.

BOOK: A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard
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