Vineyard Chill (3 page)

“That was a while back. Our place has changed a bit. New rooms for the kids, another bathroom, a woodstove in the living room. The bunk room is the guest room now, and my dad's bedroom is the master bedroom.”

“Any work available this time of year?”

“If you build houses or wooden boats,” I said. “Not much else. Most people think of rich people when they think of the Vineyard, but the island is one of the poorest counties in the state. When the tourists aren't here, there's a lot of unemployment and all of the problems that go along with poverty. A lot of it's generational: fathers beat up their wives, and their sons beat up their girlfriends. Brainless parents produce brainless children. The same kid steals from his mother, gets his girlfriend pregnant, drives his car into a tree. That sort of thing. Five percent of the people cause ninety-five percent of the cops' problems.”

“Sounds like every small town.”

“Or city. The percentages don't change much. You looking for work?”

“Maybe. But don't worry. If I decide to do that and if I can find a job, I won't be mooching off you. I'll get a place of my own.” He laughed that good, infectious laugh of his, and I heard my own laughter in response.

“You can stay as long as you want,” I said. “Hell, it'll take a month just to catch up on what you've been doing since the last time you wrote.”

We passed the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary and a bit later, turned down our long sandy driveway. I parked in front of the house beside Zee's little Jeep, and we both got out and went through the screened porch into the living room.

Zee and the children came to meet us.

“You must be Zee,” said Clay. “I'm Clay.” He put out his hand and took hers, holding it just long enough. “It's very nice of you to allow me into your home.”

Her eyes danced. “It's a pleasure.”

“And you must be Joshua and Diana. Your father has told me of you in his letters.” He shook their hands and said, “He's very proud of both of you.”

They beamed.

I pointed to the guest room. “You can put your gear in there, Clay, and I'll fix us some drinks.”

He excused himself and disappeared into the guest room, and I went to the kitchen and got the Luksusowa out of the freezer. I poured three glasses, added two olives to each, put the glasses on a tray with crackers, cheese, and smoked bluefish, and came back into the living room just in time to find Clay introducing himself to Oliver Underfoot and Velcro and distributing small gifts: perfume to Zee (her favorite; how did he know? I must have mentioned it in a letter), a pocketknife to Joshua (his first; I'd only recently decided he was old enough for one, but hadn't told him so yet), and a tiny blue sapphire ring for Diana (just the right size, too).

“How about me?” I asked, putting the tray on the coffee table next to my delighted family members.

He gestured at them. “You already have everything here a man could want.”

I looked at Zee, who was smiling at everyone in the room. It had taken me years to capture her heart. Clay had done it in five minutes. Even the cats were rubbing against his legs.

I felt good. I picked up my glass and raised it. “Here's to us all,” I said. “God bless us, every one.”

The next morning, Zee was back at work in the hospital ER, and the kids were in school by the time Clay came yawning into the kitchen, where I was reading the paper and having another cup of coffee.

“If I had more character, I'd be embarrassed,” he said, finding himself a cup, filling it from the pot, and sitting down across from me.

“It's the Vineyard Sleepies,” I said. “You remember them. It happens to everybody. You come down to the island and the first thing you feel like doing is taking a nap, and the next morning you oversleep. Maybe it's the salt in the air. It even happens to me if I've been off-island for a while. What'll you have for breakfast?”

“I see some toast here and a couple of slices of bacon. I'll fry myself a couple of eggs to go with it.” He started to rise, but I put out a hand.

“You sit. I'll fry. You're a guest.” I fixed his eggs and sat down again.

While he ate, his eyes roamed around the room. He looked happy, and I was happy to have him there. Friends are scarce and rare.

“Place looks mighty fine. Not to criticize your housekeeping, J.W., but I think having Zee around has improved things quite a bit.”

“No doubt about it.”

“I imagine there've been a lot of changes since I was here last.”

“More than you know. After you finish eating, I'll take you on the two-wheel-drive tour and you can check things out for yourself. What you won't see is the hundred thousand tourists we get in the summer.”

“Mostly locals here now, I guess.” He finished his meal and rose before I could. “No, I remember the rule, and it's a good one: the cook doesn't do the dishes; the eater does. Makes for peace in the valley.”

He carried his dishes and my now empty cup to the sink, washed everything, and stacked it in the drainer. Like everything else he did, he worked smoothly and without wasted effort, as though every movement had been choreographed. When he was done, he came outside to where I was refilling the bird feeders. The two cardinals that sat in the catbrier between visits to the feeders were waiting for me to leave.

“Pretty birds,” said Clay.

“They're even prettier when it's snowed,” I said. “Bright red against all that white. Christmas card stuff. If you're ready for the ten-cent tour, make sure you wear that coat. My heater has never worked right.”

Overhead the sky was gray-blue, with high, thin clouds moving down from the northwest, dimming the midwinter sun. The wind was chilly and the trees around the house were bare ruin'd choirs.

We drove up our long sandy driveway, where I turned left and headed into Edgartown.

“A lot of these buildings weren't here when I was last here,” said Clay, as we passed through the Y and went on. His eyes never stopped moving.

“True.” When I'd first come to the island, Edgartown's Main Street had been lined with useful stores and shops: drugstores, grocery stores, a paper store, hardware stores, and clothing stores. Now it was all T-shirt shops, pricey resort-clothing shops, and souvenir stores, most of which were closed during the off-season. If you needed anything useful, you often had to go to Vineyard Haven or Oak Bluffs to get it.

“Cannonball Park's still here, I see.”

“True again. And the cannons and cannonballs still don't match.”

“I remember when some drunk college kid tried to steal one of those cannonballs. The cops let him try to carry it for a couple of blocks before they arrested him.”

“It's challenging to purloin a ten-inch ball of iron.”

We drove down Main and to the docks, where we saw scallop boats going out toward the ponds, manned by fishermen thick with clothing.

“These guys earn their money,” I said. “I do some winter scalloping, myself.”

Clay nodded. “Fishing is a wicked way to make a buck. I fished out of Alaska one season, and a couple of times I didn't think we were going to make it back to land. Some of those guys go out in tubs that will hardly float.”

“They're probably a lot like the fishermen around here. They have to choose between fixing up their boats, buying insurance, or buying fuel. Most opt for the fuel because that's the only way they can get out to the grounds and maybe make a profit for a change. When were you in Alaska?”

“Oh, I thought you knew. A few years back. My second ex sicced the police on me and I had to get out of state, so I went north. I'd never been there, so I figured I'd be fine until the dust settled. And I was. Never missed a meal, although I'll admit I had to delay some.” He grinned. “Worked up above the Arctic Circle for a while. Wicked flies and mosquitoes up there. If you're out in the woods and you have to take a crap, you wait as long as you can because when you drop your pants, your ass is covered with mosquitoes faster than you can shit!” He laughed.

I drove up to North Water Street and out toward Starbuck Neck. To our right we could see the little three-car On Time ferry heading across the entrance to Edgartown Harbor over to Chappaquiddick.

“A floating gold mine,” I said. “If you ever decide to go back to sea, I recommend you buy that ferry. You've got a monopoly on traffic, and prices go up whenever you want them to. A lot of very happily retired people once owned that business.”

“And it's always on time because it doesn't have a schedule. My kind of boat.”

We passed the great captains' houses and the big Harbor View Hotel at the end of the street. “They have a Sunday brunch here with an open raw bar,” I said. “Even you could finally get your fill of littlenecks and oysters.”

“It hasn't happened often.”

“Why was your second ex mad at you?”

“Child support. I thought we had a deal. I signed over all of our money and property except for my tools. She even got the plane I owned then. It amounted to quite a bit and we agreed that it was enough to see our boy through high school. Then, a few months later, she changed her mind and wanted more that I didn't have. I'd almost finished building a nice little twenty-seven-foot cutter, but I had to abandon it and get out of state. I heard later that she got the boat, and then sold it.”

“You still a wanted man?”

He shrugged. “There are forty-nine other states. I'd like to see the boy, though.”

“Well, you can hunker down here as long as you need to.”

He gave me a swift look. “I may stay a few days, at least, if that's okay.”

“You can stay as long as you want.”

We drove back to Main, then out on South Water Street, passing under the giant Pagoda Tree, which had originally been brought to the island in a flower pot by a sailing captain and recently had dropped one of its huge, ancient limbs on top of an unfortunate automobile that, happily for its owner, was unoccupied at the time.

To our left the harbor was empty save for work boats, one of which was moored to the stake where we tie our eighteen-foot catboat, the
Shirley J.,
in the summer. At the end of the street we turned left toward Katama, where Clay had opportunity to comment that huge houses were growing like weeds in Eden.

“There's a lot of money floating around these days,” he said. “I see this happening in every pretty place in the country. Big money from out of state. Mansions built beside lakes, up on mountains, out in the desert. Most of them only used a few weeks out of the year. It's like the guys who buy the really big yachts. The bigger the boat, the less the owner uses it.” He shrugged. “I've helped build these kinds of houses and I've lived in them, and I've helped build those kinds of boats and I've sailed on them. It's wonderful to have a budget that lets you build with the very best materials and take the time to do the best possible work, and the products are magnificent. When you live in those houses or sail in those boats, it's like being in a movie.”

“Sounds good.”

“It is good, and it's a lot of fun.” He paused. “But it's make-believe. It might not seem so to the people who live that way all the time, but I've lived with those people, and most of them have no idea about any other kind of life. Their money protects them from ever having to know. I always have to leave. The time comes when I go down to some bar and have a beer, then look for a job where I can use my hands.”

We drove out along Meetinghouse Way, the roughest corduroy street in Edgartown—guaranteed to shake your car to pieces if you go over fifteen miles an hour—until we came to the Edgartown–West Tisbury road, where I took a left and headed up-island.

I showed him the driveway down which then-president Joe Callahan and his family had lived while enjoying their summer island holidays.

“I think you wrote that you'd met the daughter,” said Clay.

“Cricket Callahan. Yes. Nice kid. I think she's in college or grad school now.”

“According to the magazines, this place is crawling with celebrities.”

“More every year, they say, but most of them stick to themselves. Every now and then you get one who wants to be seen, but that's pretty rare. I don't know much about the celebrity scene, I'm afraid. My friends are mostly neighbors, fishermen and people who sing in the community chorus. Not a celeb among them.”

A car came up behind us and Clay turned and studied it. Beyond the mill pond, the car went right, and I turned left and drove past the field of dancing statues. Even in January happy-looking people were out there imitating the poses of the statues and having their pictures taken beside them. I've been told that thousands of such photos have been mailed from all over the world to the gallery beside the field.

“I may come up here and pose, myself.” Clay grinned. “My kids might get a kick out of seeing me being a goof.”

“You pose and I'll take the picture.”

“It's a deal. Not today, though. Too cold. Later.”

“How many children do you have these days?”

“Three. Two girls and the boy. Different mothers. None of the marriages lasted. What about you and Carla? I know you split but you never said why. I liked her.”

“And she liked you and me, but she was a schoolteacher and finally couldn't take being a cop's wife because she never knew when I might end up in a box. When I got shot, it was the last straw for her. She waited until she knew I'd be all right, then divorced me and married another schoolteacher so she'd have a husband with a safe job. They have two kids now and live out west somewhere.”

He stared ahead as I turned up Music Street and headed for Middle Road. “It's rough when things fall apart, but what starts out good doesn't always end that way. You have no idea how I envy you. A wife and kids and all the house you need. I've known a thousand guys like me, and every one of them would trade all their travels and capers for what you've got.”

“They write books about those people but not about people like me.”

“Believe me,” he said, “you don't want people writing about you.” He slapped my knee and grinned. “You know: police blotters, IOU's, wanted posters, angry e-mails, and all like that!”

“Fame can be demanding,” I agreed, laughing. It was good to be with someone I didn't have to explain things to, and I thought he felt the same.

We passed the field where the long-horned oxen grazed. I was driving slowly so I could look at the land on both sides of the road and see new things, and it wasn't long before a faster car appeared behind me. I pulled over into the entrance to a driveway and let the car go by. Clay looked at it with interest until it was out of sight in front of us.

“Not much traffic this time of year,” I said, “but most of it is still faster than I am.”

“You've got the right idea. Slow and steady is best.”

Middle Road is the prettiest road on the island, with farms and fields and fine stone walls on either side. As we got toward its western end, we could see the Atlantic rolling south toward the horizon, cold and wintry under the darkening January sky.

We came to Beetlebung Corner and drove to Menemsha, a fishing village so cute it looks like Walt Disney designed it. Clay ordered me to stop so he could buy us two lobster rolls for a snack.

As he climbed back into the Land Cruiser, he said, “After we admire the Gay Head cliffs—or are they the Aquinnah cliffs these days?—a liquor store is the next stop. We need a bottle of Rémy Martin for after dinner.”

“For a homeless man, you've got expensive taste.”

“I've slept under the stars more than once, but right now I'm in the chips and staying in a nice little place in Edgartown. Other people's houses are the best, you know, just like other people's boats. You get all the benefits and none of the responsibilities or expenses, so you can blow your money on lobster and Rémy Martin.”

“It sounds like a plan.”

His eyes had surveyed the parking area and then the road ahead as I drove around Menemsha Pond and followed the highway to the top of the famous cliffs, at the westernmost point of the Vineyard. We were all alone at the observation area, and the wind was cold in our faces as we looked out across the whitecapped sound toward the huddled Elizabeth Islands.