Death on a Vineyard Beach (11 page)

I parked beside the Dodge, and we got out. The smell of the ocean washed over us, fresh and clean, blown ashore by the southwest wind coming around the cliffs.

The door of the house opened and a bronzed young woman stepped onto the porch, and looked at us, smiling. “Hello.”

She was the woman I'd seen through the binoculars yesterday.

“Mrs. Begay?”

She smiled some more. “Yes. I'm Toni Begay.”

“I know your sister,” said Zee, as we came up to the porch. “I'm Zee Jackson. I work at the hospital. This is my husband, Jeff.”

“How do you do?”

“I'm well,” I said. “I'm looking for your husband.”

“You've come to the right place,” said his wife. “Come in.”

We went in, and there was Joe Begay.

He flowed up from the chair he'd been sitting in, no less lithe than I remembered him from two decades before.

There was a faint scar on his forehead, a souvenir of that last patrol we'd taken, and there were lines on his face that had not been there before. But the bones of his face still had that chiseled look, his deep-set eyes still hid under black brows, and his hair was as black and straight as before.

“Young Mr. Jackson,” he said. “And Mrs. Jackson.” He shook my hand. “You've filled out a little in the last twenty years.”

“You've added a pound or two yourself, Sarge.”

He slapped his belly. “Solid muscle. Mostly.” He turned to Zee. “As you no doubt know, Mrs. Jackson, I stopped briefly at your wedding. Your husband is a most fortunate man.”

“Thank you. You should have stayed for the dancing.”

“I didn't have an invitation. I just went by to see if the J. W. Jackson my sister-in-law said was marrying her friend Zee Madieras was the same J. W. Jackson who saved my ass in Nam. Once I saw that it was, I pulled out.”

She shook his hand. “Jeff told me that you were the one who saved his life, not the other way around. Which one of you is the real hero?”

Begay and I looked at each other. “Probably neither one,” said Begay.

Zee looked at Toni Begay. “Did he ever tell you what actually happened on that patrol?”

“No,” said Toni, frowning at her husband. “He's never talked about the war. I did find some medals in a shoe box he brought with him from Arizona, but he said they were nothing.”

“I think you're in trouble,” I said to Begay.

“Speak for yourself,” said Zee. “I found some medals in the back of that drawer where you keep the socks and underwear that you think are too new to wear. I think it's time you guys try to tell us the truth, for a change.”

“See what you've done,” said Begay, giving me a wry look. “You get me in trouble in Nam, and now you get me in trouble in my own house.”

“Never mind that,” said Toni Begay. “We want to know the truth, and we want to know now. So sit down and talk. No, wait until I get us something to drink.”

“Beer,” said Begay, looking at her fondly.

Zee and I nodded, and Toni Begay brought out a half-gallon bottle of Ipswich Ale and four glasses. She poured, and I tasted. Not bad!

“I know a guy up on the north shore,” said Begay. “He brings me a case of this stuff when he comes down.”

“I've been through Ipswich,” I said. “But I didn't know they had a brewery. Now that I do, maybe I'll go back.”

“Enough beer talk,” said Zee. “Who saved who?”

Begay looked at the floor. His wife looked at me.

“Well,” I said, “like I told Zee, I met Sarge when I landed in Nam. How many tours had you had by then, Sarge, three? Anyway…”

I told her about how, on that last patrol, we were dropped off in the bush, and how very soon we'd come under fire from mortar men or artillerymen who seemed to be waiting for us and who put shells right on top of us. As I talked, things I'd forgotten came back to me.

The noise was what had surprised me the most. Nobody had told me about that part of an action. It was amazing noise that rattled your brain. Lucky Joe Begay was an early casualty, taking shrapnel in his head.

“I was blind as a bat,” said Begay, touching the scar on his broad forehead. “There were three men dead, and everybody else was hit, including the kid here. His legs looked like hamburger. How old were you, then? You looked like you'd never shaved in your life.”

I shook my head. “Seventeen. I lied about my age. Anything to get out of Somerville. Teenage stupid.”

“Amen to that,” said Begay. “Anyway, Mrs. Jackson, your hubby here crawled to the radio and called in the gunships, and they blasted away at the area the fire seemed to be coming from long enough for us to get back to where the choppers could pick us up. And that was about it, wouldn't you say, J. W.?”

“Yeah, that's about it.”

“No, it isn't,” said Toni Begay. “You're leaving things out. What about those medals?”

“I should have thrown them out long ago,” said Begay. “Medals don't mean anything, Toni. They give them away by the ton. All you have to do to get a medal is show up.”

“None of that talk,” said his wife. “You tell Zee and me what happened.”

Begay looked at me, then back at her. “Well, hell. It was just that J. W. couldn't walk, and I couldn't see, so he was the eyes and I was the legs. He told me where to go, and I sort of dragged him along in front of the others until we got out of there. That's all there is to it.”

The women looked at each other, and then at us. “So
you saved each other,” said Zee. “And the rest of the men. That's why you got those medals.”

“After they got us to a hospital, they made a joke,” I said. “Who has four arms, two legs, and one head? Mr. Jackson Begay.”

“OR humor,” nodded Zee.

“They could have added no brains,” said Begay. “It seemed fairly humorous at the time. Then they split us up, and we didn't see each other anymore. They worked me over, and after a while I could see again as well as ever.” He looked at me. “And I guess they got most of the metal out of you. How are the legs?”

“They won't win any prizes for looks, but they work okay. A little iron oozes out every now and then, but nothing serious.” I spread my hands. “And there you have it, ladies. Now let's forget it. It all happened a long time ago.”

Zee shook her head. “You two.”

“So,” I said, changing the subject to one women seem to enjoy talking about. “How long have you folks been married?”

Toni, who had been studying her husband, now smiled at me. “Six months, almost!” And she happily told us how it had all happened.

It was the strong bones and flat planes of his face that had first caught her attention when they'd met in Santa Fe. He had looked the way she had always thought an Indian should look: as though he could cross the desert without water, or walk so softly that he could catch birds as they perched on twigs and sang. She had seen all of that in his face before she really even looked at the rest of him. When she did look at his body, it went with his face so naturally that she didn't even have to think about it. He was a whole person, so whole that she wondered if she'd ever seen one before.

Then Begay told his side of it. He had seen a girl from the East. Tawny-skinned, dark-eyed, Indian maybe, maybe not. Pretty, clean, slender. Staring at him, then looking away, then looking back.

They had been at the Governor's Palace, two more tourists looking at the jewelry and pottery spread out on the
blankets. But when they saw each other, they had stopped looking at the arts and crafts, even though their eyes still seemed to be focused on them. They had moved toward one another, and when they were finally standing side by side, both were nervous but neither was surprised.

They had gone to a café and had coffee. She learned that he was from Arizona and was on vacation, and he learned that she was a Wampanoag from Martha's Vineyard, out West for the first time, on a buying trip for her shop on the Gay Head cliffs. They had spent the afternoon together, and had found talking easy although, had she noticed it, he learned much more of her than she did of him.

But her heart had learned what interested it, and for the next several days he had been her guide, driving her in his Dodge four-by-four up into the mountains to Bandelier National Monument, where he led her through the Frijoles Canyon ruins, and showed her the stone lions crouched within their antler circle. She had never seen such things, and marveled at them.

He had taken her to the pueblos in the area, and those on southwest toward Albuquerque. She had bought jewelry, pots, and blankets at the pueblos with the help of his gift of tongues, which had allowed her to speak, through him, with the artists in those ancient cities. She had returned to her hotel room with treasures she never would otherwise have found.

They had seen much of each other, and when it was time for her to return to her island, it had been agreed that he would come there soon, so she could play guide and hostess in return for those roles he had played in New Mexico.

And he had come, and they had walked the Gay Head cliffs and beaches, and sailed on Menemsha Pond in her little Widgeon, and walked the streets of Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, looking into the windows, and he had decided that the island was a place where he could live, could settle down.

“And then he proposed!” Toni Begay's smile was wide. “And of course I said yes, and of course everybody in my family loved him, too!”

“How romantic!” said Zee. The women beamed at each other.

“Actually,” amended Begay, looking amused, “some of her family weren't sure they totally approved until they found out that I was supposedly a Navajo. Native American blood, you know.”

“He's talking about Mom, of course.” Toni took a deep breath. “My mother, as you probably know if you read the
Gazette,
thinks being a Native American is about as important a thing as there is. She believes we all need to fight for our rights.”

That seemed like as good an opening as I was likely to get, but before I could raise the issue of the cranberry bog dispute, Zee began to tell Toni how we two had met. It turned into a two-beer story, since she remembered things I'd completely forgotten about. Having little to add, I sat back and listened. When, at last, Zee was done and Toni was telling her, in turn, how romantic our relationship had been and how nice it was to be married, I pointed out that in Zee's tale I sounded so much more wonderful than I knew I was that I wasn't sure Zee was actually married to me or to somebody else.

Zee sniffed and lifted her chin. “I was just trying to make you sound like a good catch. I take it all back.”

“Come on, J. W.,” said Begay, getting up. “I'll take you out for some air before your silver tongue gets you into more trouble.”

“It's too late,” Zee called after us.

As we went out the door into the yard, I could hear the running brook sound of the women laughing.

Begay walked to the Land Cruiser, and looked it over. Then he leaned against the front fender and crossed his arms.

“All right, J. W., what can I do for you? I don't think you came by just to talk about old times and the joys of marriage.”

“Actually, I like the joys of marriage part. The old times I can do without.”

“Ditto. But now the real reason.”

So I told him about my job with Luciano Marcus.

When I was done, he nodded. “So Marcus thinks that maybe there's some Wampanoag mad enough at him to want to kill him.”

“That's it.”

A small, dry smile played across Begay's face. “Could be that he's right about that. I don't know if my mother-in-law would pull the trigger, but she wants that cranberry bog so bad that I don't think she'd shed many tears if your boss, Mr. Marcus, got run over by a truck. And she's not alone.”

  
10
  

Begay took papers and a pack of Prince Albert out of his pocket and rolled a cigarette. He had good technique. I had rolled joints in my pot-smoking days back in the seventies, but even then I hadn't been particularly good at it, preferring a pipe.