Vineyard Fear (2 page)

“Gangbusters,” said Zee an hour later.

The fish had gone, but we'd gotten our share and the five of us were standing by the trucks drinking George's coffee since Zee and I had almost finished our own before the fish had hit.

“Not bad, not bad,” Iowa said. “Even a woman could catch 'em today.”

Zee pretended to peek into his fishbox. “How many did you get onto the beach? One? Two? A bent rod doesn't mean a thing. They don't count until you land them, you know.”

“You're hard,” said Iowa. He had at least ten fish in his box and was feeling good.

Geraldine Miles drank coffee with us, smiled, and was quiet. She moved in an unnatural, awkward way, as though some of her bones hurt. She was a pretty woman about Zee's age, with brownish hair and a milky skin. At first I thought that she was shy. After a short time, though, I suddenly realized she was more troubled than shy. I studied her when she wasn't looking and decided that her smiles were more polite than real, that she was trying to be happy rather than actually being happy. The fact that she'd gotten up in the wee hours to come to Wasque with Iowa when she knew nothing at all about fishing suggested two things: that Iowa, who normally went fishing alone or with his dog or very occasionally with his wife, Jean, who did not share his fanatical love
of surf casting, was trying to get his niece occupied with things other than those troubling her, and that she was agreeable to such distractions.

Maybe she had come to the island to escape problems at home. I knew something about that, having come to live on the island for the same reasons several years before. Now I felt a sympathy for her, but had my own desire for distraction. Zee would be away for the last month of the summer, and I wasn't really up to thinking about that yet.

“I see you hauled the
Mattie
and put her back in again,” said George. “Kind of early, isn't it? John Skye doesn't usually come down until the middle of June.”

John Skye was a professor at Weststock College who hired me to keep an eye on his house and boat in the winter and to get both ready for his arrival for the summer. If you're going to live on Martha's Vineyard year-round, you take jobs like that. The
Mattie
was his big old wooden catboat. She floated at her stake in the harbor all winter and sometimes I had to chop ice away from her hull. In the spring I hauled her, painted her bottom and topsides, and dropped her back in. An old wooden boat will last forever if you keep her painted and in the water. Haul her out and put her in the barn, she'll dry up and fall apart.

I looked away from Geraldine Miles. “I got a call from John,” I said. “Seems that he's making his house and boat available to a professor he works with. John does that sort of thing sometimes. If he's not here, he'll let other professorial types use his place. This guy and some students are coming down to the island to do a study of some sort. Everything's got to be ready and waiting for them.”

“More for you to do now, but less to do later,” nodded George.

“When are they coming?” asked Zee.

“Next week. They'll be here about ten days, I guess.”

“And then John and Mattie and the girls will be here.” Zee was fond of the Skyes.

“I don't think so. According to John, Mattie and the twins are going out to Colorado for the summer.”

“There's no ocean in Colorado,” said Iowa. “There's no bluefish. Why would anybody want to go there?”

“There's no ocean or bluefish in Des Moines, either,” Zee reminded him.

Iowa was a retired high school superintendent. “Yeah,” he said, “but I was smart enough to leave Iowa as soon as they'd let me go! Well, I suppose they can't fish for trout out there in the Rockies. That way the trip won't be a total waste of time.”

“Not everybody likes to fish,” said Zee.

Iowa's eyes widened. “Is that a fact? I never knew.”

“John came from out there someplace,” explained George. “Grew up on a cattle ranch before he came east. Mattie and the girls went out there to meet his mother after he and Mattie got married, and the three of them fell in love with the place.”

“The twins are horse crazy,” added Zee. “And they love the mountains.”

“Well, the mountains are okay . . .” grumbled Iowa.

In the warming morning sunshine, Geraldine Miles pushed the sleeves of her sweatshirt up, then caught herself and pulled them down again, but not before I saw the bruises on her upper arms. Her eyes flicked around and met mine. She looked away.

“Not a bad choice of summer vacations.” said George. “The mountains of Colorado or Martha's Vineyard. Too bad you can't be both places at once.”

“Maybe they'll split the season,” I said. “Half out there, half here.”

“The perfect solution,” said Zee. “I'd love to go to Colorado someday.”

“The Vineyard will do for me,” I said, wondering if that would still be true if Zee went off to medical school. How long did medical school take? Four years? And then there'd be a residency. How much longer would that be?

“Well, I'd like to go out there,” said Zee.

“Good idea,” said Iowa. “I'll be glad to help, if you'll just leave right now and stay away from my bluefish till the derby's over this fall. Now lemme see if I've got any money here . . .” He pretended to dig in his pocket.

Geraldine Miles smiled and the rest of us laughed. But I was wondering if Zee was developing a sugar foot. Was the wander-thirst on her? Was the island giving her cabin fever? First she was going to New Hampshire and now she'd like to go to Colorado.

As things turned out, I was the one who went to Colorado. I nearly died there, in fact.

Martha's Vineyard is verdant island surrounded by golden sand beaches. It lies about five miles south of Cape Cod and lives off its tourists. Ten thousand year-round islanders play host to a hundred thousand summer visitors who bring in the money which oils the island's gears. The year-rounders labor mightily in the summer, some working two or three jobs, some renting out their houses and summering illegally in tents or shacks; many then go on unemployment during the winter.

Island wages are low and everything else is expensive, but summer jobs are sucked up by college students who are looking for vacation jobs with access to sea, sun, surf, and sex, and who don't really care if they actually make any money before returning to school in the fall. More serious workers come from overseas, legally or illegally, and live wherever they can while working as hard as they can, since even low Vineyard wages are better than they can earn at home.

Day-trippers come across from Cape Cod, take tour bus
rides, buy knickknacks mostly made in Asia but sold with Vineyard logos in island souvenir shops, and go back to America having done the island in half a day. Other summer visitors come for their week or two of escape from the real world. The harbors are filled with yachts, and there are great summer houses owned by the people who come for the season.

John Skye was one of the house owners. He owned a part of what had once been a farm. The house had been built in the early 1800s, in the time before the island economy became dependent on tourism. In those days, islanders, like most coastal people, generally tried to make a living by combining farming and fishing, two of the toughest jobs imaginable. Tourism, by comparison, offered easy money, so when the island economy turned in that direction, farmers' sons and daughters left the farms for the towns and, years later, John had bought his house, outbuildings, and land pretty cheap.

Before I knew him, he and his first wife had come down every summer from Weststock, where he taught things medieval at the college. When she had died, too young, he had missed a season and gone instead back to southwest Colorado, where his people still lived. The next summer he was back on the island where, a year or so later, he and I had met on the beach and, in time, I became his caretaker, charged with closing his house in the fall, keeping an eye on it over the winter, opening it in the early summer, and caring for the
Mattie.

The
Mattie
wasn't the
Mattie
when I went to work for John. She was the
Seawind.
She became the
Mattie
when John married Mattie, whose young husband had left her a widow with twin daughters when he drove his motorcycle into a tree at a high rate of speed.

And now Mattie and the girls had fallen in love with Colorado and John had a dilemma: where to spend the summer? Out by Durango, near the mountains they all loved, or on the island they all loved?

“If Colorado had an ocean, it would be no problem,” John had said on the phone. “If they could just flood everything east of the divide, or maybe all of Texas, I could live out there for the rest of my life, but . . .”

“Everybody's got problems,” I'd said.

“Except you. You've got it made, J.W.”

“Who's this guy you're sending down, and when will he be here?”

“Jack Scarlotti. He'll be down May 25. He's our current hotshot junior faculty member. Sociology, Poli-Sci, or some combination of both, I think. Anyway, he's very dashing, very intense, very bright. The ladies all love him. Not a bad guy, actually. Teaches a grad seminar. Wants to take the whole class down to the island for a week so they can do field research among the locals, before the summer people really get there.”

“The island as a laboratory. Natives living in isolation from the mainstream. That sort of thing?”

“I think that's it. Something like the deafness bit, maybe.”

Presumably because of inbreeding, a lot of up-island people once suffered from a type of deafness. Some medical or academic type had studied the phenomenon and his conclusions had been written up and had attracted a good deal of comment.

“The politics of isolation,” I said. “Professor Scarlotti's students do the legwork and write papers and he puts it all in a book with his name on it and uses it as a required text in all of his courses.”

Skye laughed. “Spoken like a true scholastic, J.W. Where'd you learn about that trick?”

“From listening to you and your academic buddies at those cocktail parties you throw.”

“I'll have to advise my colleagues to talk less about our trade. They'll give away all of our secrets. I'm going to have Jack come by your house for the keys. Then you can
take him over to the farm. Is that okay? I'll let you know what boat they'll be coming on.”

“Okay.”

“I think you'll like him. He's a good guy even if he is a whiz kid. I understand there'll be about ten grad students with him, both sexes. They should all fit in the house if they don't mind sleeping double. I want nothing to do with deciding who sleeps where, by the way.”

“I'll make sure the place is clean, that there are sheets and blankets and water and lights, and that the fridge has bacon and eggs and bread waiting for them. I'll show him where the A & P is, too. Can this guy sail?”

“He says he can. If he wants to go sailing, you can show him the
Mattie
and where the dinghy is on Collins Beach and where the oars and oarlocks are in the barn.”

“No problem.”

“I'll have him leave the keys with you when he leaves. I'll be down in the middle of June.”

“That'll give me time to clean the place up again. What do you mean, you'll be down? What about Mattie and the girls?”

That's when I learned that Mattie and the girls were going to Colorado to stay at John's mother's ranch.

“So you'll be living the jolly bachelor life, eh?”

“That's an oxymoron. The bachelor life is not the life for me. I have a theological crisis whenever Mattie has to be away. Sleeping alone in a double bed is evidence that there is no God.”

“Why don't you just go out to Colorado with your wife and avoid this existential predicament?”

“I thought you of all people would understand. Bluefish, my boy! Clams! Quahogs! I haven't had a fresh bluefish since last summer. I haven't had mussels. I haven't had a clam boil. I haven't had one single littleneck on the half shell. Life is not always easy, you know. We have to face tough choices.”

“Well, my favorite woman is right here, so I don't have to chose between her and fish.”

“You're a lucky man.”

A few days later, when Zee told me about her New Hampshire plans, I didn't feel so lucky, but at the time I could not but agree with John.

John's house was off the West Tisbury Road. In the wintertime, When the leaves were off the trees, you could catch a glimpse of the ocean from a couple of his upstairs windows. If some developer had gotten hold of it, he probably would have called it Ocean View Farm, or some such thing.

In preparation for the arrival of Dr. Jack Scarlotti and his band, I turned on the water and electricity, made sure there were no leaky pipes and that the toilets all flushed, and vacuumed and dusted the house, including the fine, big library where a few thousand of John's books tended to slow me down a lot as I examined titles and fingered through pages when I should have been working. I made sure there were blankets and sheets in the linen closets, opened screened windows so the place could air out, turned on the bottled gas for the stove, mowed the large lawn, and checked the barn and fences for needed repairs.

Behind the barn the grass was high in the field where the twins kept the horses that wintered at a farm up toward Chilmark. The horses would stay at that farm this summer, I reckoned, since Jen and Jill would be in Colorado with their mother instead of here. I liked the twins although I simply could not tell one from the other. I realized to my surprise that I would miss them. Was I becoming a sentimentalist?

I unlocked the tack room, where the twins kept their saddles and other riding gear and grooming supplies, enjoying, as always, the smell of leather and oils and the scent of horsehair and sweat that gets into tack, and the smell of hay and grain that is usually mixed in with it. Everything was fine, so I locked the door again and went
back to the house, closed the windows, locked up, and went home. As I drove I saw Geraldine Miles walking slowly toward me on the bike path that paralleled the road. The bike paths on the Vineyard are popular with walkers and joggers, and Geraldine was limping along with an intent look on her face. In the warm spring air, she wore long pants and a long-sleeved sweatshirt. I considered offering her a ride, but changed my mind. She was walking because she wanted to be walking. I drove past and she never glanced at me.