A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard (3 page)

George pretended dismay. “You mean I don't get the lead?”

Drew Mondry's bright eyes swept back to Zee as though drawn by a magnet. “We will be hiring local people. How about you, Mrs. Jackson? Are you interested?”

Zee knows that people find her attractive, but has no idea why they do. She hesitated. “Well . . .”

I sniffed Joshua's behind, found the fragrance satisfactory, and returned him to his lounge chair. Then I took my rod off the rack and nodded to Mondry. “Nice meeting you. Good luck with your project.”

I went down to the surf. As I went, I heard him say, “May I call you Zee? Thanks. Are you in the book? I think you'd have a lot of fun being an extra, and that you'd photograph very well. Think it over. I'll phone you later.”

I made my cast. The lure arched far out into the water. No swirl surrounded it. No fish took it as I reeled in. I thought that Drew Mondry might be having better luck.

“Well, what do you think? Do I have a future on the silver screen?”

Zee sipped her Luksusowa martini, and looked out over the garden and the pond to the far barrier beach, where the very last of the day's swimmers and tanners were packing up and heading home.

I took more than a sip of my own drink (perfectly pre-pared, as usual: vodka and chilled glasses from the freezer, a splash of vermouth spilled into each glass, swirled, then tossed out; two green olives into my glass, two black ones into Zee's, and Luksusowa to the brim).

“You can probably have a lot of fun finding out,” I said. “And when Joshua is a little older, he can watch your reruns on the VCR.”

“I can see the headlines now,” said Zee, waving a languid arm. “Humble island housewife transformed into glamorous cinema queen, but Academy Award winner never forgets her simple island roots.” She sipped some more, then gave me her dazzling smile. “Really, what do you think?”

“As one who's ogled women since puberty, I bow to none as an expert on good-looking women, so you can take it from me that you're at least a ten in any man's book. And I've never known a woman who wasn't an actress part of the time. If that's what it takes to make a star, you've got it made.”

She reached out her strong brown arm and took my hand in hers. “I've got it made right here.”

We were on our balcony, and Joshua, after his long day on the beach, was snoozing down below in our bedroom. The window was open, and we took turns running downstairs to make sure that he was okay. We were still in the stage where we worried that he was dying when he cried or that he was dead when he was quiet. Like all beginning parents, we were amateurs at the job, and like all amateurs, we used up a lot of worry-energy to no useful end.

I liked having Zee's hand in mine. I liked being married to her, and having Joshua making us three. I didn't want to do anything to unbalance us.

One of the things I liked about our marriage was that it was stuck together without any coercion of any kind. There was no “We have to stay together because we said we would” or “You owe me” or “You promised me you'd love me” stuff or, now, any “Think of the children” stuff, either, even though we had said we'd stick together, and we did owe each other more than we could say, and we did love each other and, now, we did have Joshua to think about.

Basically Zee and I were married because we wanted to be married, and for no other reason.

I wondered why I was thinking such thoughts, and suspected that it was because of two things: the first was a sort of restlessness that had come over Zee since Joshua had made his appearance. Her usual confidence and independence were occasionally less pronounced, occasionally more; her normal fearlessness was sometimes replaced by an uneasiness that I'd not seen in her before, and at other times she became almost fierce.

A postpartum transformation of some kind? I didn't know. Maybe she saw the same things in me, and all that either of us was seeing was the fretting of new parents who didn't really know how to do their job and were worried that they were doing it wrong.

The second thing bothering me was more easily identified. It was Drew Mondry.

Him, Tarzan; Zee, Jane.

They even looked like Tarzan and Jane. Both were sun-tanned and spectacularly made, with his blond hair and brilliant blue eyes contrasting well indeed with her dark eyes and long, blue-black hair. Golden Tarz; bronze Jane.

And there was that little charged current that had run between them this morning.

May I call you Zee? I'll phone you later.

But why shouldn't there be electricity between them? She was a great beauty who left only blind men unscathed, and he was a handsome man with two bright eyes. And didn't I still eyeball female beauties while married to Zee? What was so different about Drew Mondry being fascinated by Zee and her being interested in him?

Or was I only imagining things? Was I just being jealous?

“Come to think of it,” Zee now said, looking at me with a parody of a frown, “what do you mean when you say all women are actresses? What sort of a sexist thing is that for a nineties kind of guy to say?”

“I'm a
late
nineties kind of guy. I'm in my post-sensitive period.”

“I see. And when were you in your sensitive period?”

“It happened fast. You had to be watching for it.”

Her hand squeezed mine. “I don't think you've quite left it yet. But what's this actress notion you have?”

“How about women faking orgasms because guys fake foreplay?”

She sniffed. “Oh, that . . .”

I became conscious of silence in Joshua's room. “I'll be right back,” I said, and trotted downstairs.

Joshua was snoozing, not dead. He looked soft and sweet. I gave him a kiss on the forehead and went back upstairs.

I decided to change the subject while I had a chance. “I saw Manny Fonseca downtown when I was selling the fish, and we talked about this and that. He sends his regards and wonders if you might want to do some more practice tomorrow.”

To everyone's surprise, especially her own, Zee had fairly recently discovered that she had an amazing knack for shooting the very pistols she had always viewed with distrust and alarm. With Manny, the local gun fanatic, as her mentor, she had quickly become a far better shot than I had ever learned to be, in spite of my training in the military and the Boston PD, and had, in fact, started attracting attention at contests Manny had persuaded her to enter. As she continued to practice and compete, her enthusiasm had mounted. She was, as Manny often said, a natural, and after Joshua had been born, he'd not waited long before luring her to the pistol range once more.

Now she looked at me. “Tomorrow will be fine. I have to get ready for that October competition.”

“I'll stick cotton in Joshua's ears,” I said, “and we'll both watch you pop those targets.”

She gave me a smile. “Pistol-packin' momma?”

“When the other kids learn about your gunslinging, nobody at school will try to beat up our boy. I could have used a mom like you when I was a kid.”

Her smile got bigger, more genuine. “I'm sure nobody ever beat you up. You probably beat them up, if they tried.”

“Like my sister says: There's never a bronc that's never been rode, and never a rider who's never been throwed. I got pounded a few times.”

My sister Margarite lives near Santa Fe, and, like many Eastern transplants, prides herself on her knowledge of Western lore.

Neither of us had had a mom for long, ours having died when we were young, and our father, a one-woman man, never having remarried.

“I like shooting that forty-five Manny's got me using,” said Zee. “My only problem is that I feel I should be with Joshua all the time even though I know that I can't be. I keep hoping that if I keep shooting, it'll wean me. I have to be weaned sooner or later.”

Zee had taken a two-month maternity leave from the
hospital where she worked as a nurse, but now was back at work part-time.

“You don't have to shoot or go back to work if you don't want to,” I said. “We've got enough dough stashed away to keep us alive for a year or two, as long as we don't live too high off the hog. Besides, if I absolutely have to, I can get a regular job.”

In the years since I'd retired from the Boston PD and moved to the island, I had managed to avoid anything resembling a steady job. Like a lot of people on Martha's Vineyard, I had, instead, brought in money in a variety of ways: looking after other people's boats and houses during the winter, doing commercial fishing and shellfishing, and taking the occasional odd job. These incomes, combined with small disability pensions from the Feds and Boston (the first for shrapnel wounds contributed by a Vietnamese mortar, the second for a bullet, still nestled near my spine, the gift of a frightened thief trying to escape the scene of the crime), had allowed me to live as well as any bachelor needs to live. I ate a lot of fish and shellfish, grew a garden, which gave me fresh veggies all summer and canned and frozen ones all winter, got fed a lot of meals by women who thought it their duty to feed such as me, and thrived.

But now I was a married man and a father to boot, and maybe it was time for me to change my ways.

On the other hand, maybe not, because Zee now said, “But I want to shoot and I want to go back to work. I love my work. I'm not going to spend Joshua's college fund just so I can stay home and cuddle him.”

Joshua's college fund?

“How about staying home and cuddling me, then?” I asked.

“If you go out and get a steady job, you won't be home to cuddle either one of us,” said Zee. “It's better the way you do things now. You can take Joshua with you when-ever I'm not here, and vice versa.”

That was true. For centuries women have known how to handle work and babies at the same time, and I didn't see any reason why I couldn't do it too, so I had made some preparations to help myself out.

The baby pack I'd made, along with a knapsack full of baby stuff, allowed me to go anywhere I normally went on land and do all the things I normally do. If I had to temporarily put Joshua aside for any reason, I could put him in his snappy beach lounge chair. If I went shellfishing, I could put him in the mini-raft I'd rigged from inner tubes, and he could float beside me as I worked.

“No problem,” I said, meaning it. Unless Joshua cried for no reason, in which case I was in trouble.

I knew most of the cries: the hungry cry, the load-in-the-diaper cry, the need-to-burp cry, the mad cry, the I- need-to-be-cuddled cry, and the I'm-frustrated-about-something-but-I-can't-figure-out-what-it-is Cry; but the cry-for-no-reason was always a bummer and always scared me.

Fortunately, Joshua rarely resorted to his no-reason howl, and usually quieted down anyway, after some snuggling, so I hadn't yet been obliged to tear my hair out.

“I'm glad you like being a dad,” Zee now said.

“It's not bad,” I said. “How's momming?”

“If you were named Molly, I'd burst out in a chorus of 'My Blue Heaven.' ”

We listened to the sounds of the evening as darkness came at us from the east. There were birds in the air, and the wind hushed through the woods on three sides of us. On the far side of Nantucket Sound the lights of Cape Cod began to flicker.

We went down to eat. Grilled bluefish, fresh-made bread, a rice and bean salad, and the house sauvignon blanc. Delish. Such stuff does not go to waste in our house. We wolfed it down.

Zee patted her lips with her napkin. “And what else did Manny have to say to you this afternoon, other than
wanting me to pick up my trusty shooting iron and head for the target range? What's new in Edgartown?”

Manny's woodworking shop was on Fuller Street, and customers and friends were wandering in and out all day, so he was always more up on current downtown happenings than were we, who lived up in the woods and only went into the village when we had to.

“Well, it seems Edgartown is going to have a visitor from America,” I said, forcing myself to speak in an even tone and avoid expletives. “Maybe you'll want to go down and shake his hand.”

“Who might it be? Anyone I know? I understand the president is vacationing out west this year, so it's probably not him.” She narrowed her eyes and looked at me. “Do you plan to shake hands with this person, Jefferson?”

“I think not. I don't even want to get into spitting distance of him.”

She thought, then arched a brow, then frowned. “I can only think of one person who'd put that look on your face. You don't mean  . . . you know who?”

“Yes. Him.”

“Not Lawrence Ingalls, state biologist!”

“Shocking, but true. What gall. After keeping the beach closed for three summers, he has the nerve to show up in Edgartown!”

“What ever for? Doesn't he know that there are dart-boards in this town with his face on them?”

“I think he'd be glad if he knew. He'd take it as more evidence that people who disagree with him are crackpots like that wacko Zack Delwood. He's down here to talk to the No Foundation.”

Zee found a toothpick and stuck it in her mouth. “The No Foundation, eh? He'll have a friendly crowd, anyway.”

The No Foundation was really the Marshall Lea Foundation, and was composed of a private group of citizens who raised money and purchased pieces of Vineyard
property for the announced purpose of preserving the land for future generations to enjoy.

Cynics had given them their No name because of the signs the foundation erected on all of their territories, informing readers that there was to be no hunting, no fishing, no trapping, no picnicking, no use of bicycles, etc., and sometimes no trespassing at all.

It was, thus, no surprise to me that Loathsome Lawrence was to speak to the No's. They were his kind of people. The kind known to their critics as No People People, who didn't want any human beings walking around except where and when the No People People wanted them to walk. Naturally, the No People People also didn't want ORVs on the beach.