First Light (6 page)

“Can we help, Pa? Will it be done today? Can we come up the ladder? Shall I bring up this board?”

“No, no, no, and no,” I said, climbing down. “No more work today.”

I put the ladder on the ground to discourage temptation when the paternal back was turned. “I've got to drive up-island now, and you two have to come with me.”

They brightened. “Where are we going?”

“To get Brady and sign him up for the Derby. Then we'll come back in time to see your mother before she and Brady go fishing, and then we'll have supper.”

So we did that. At the house, Eliza Fairchild, Sarah's daughter, told me that Brady had gone fishing down at the cove, so I got back in my truck, went down the driveway, and turned through the open gate. The
stone cottage looked emptier than ever as we passed it and drove on down to the water.

Off to the left about a hundred feet down the beach I could see Nate Fairchild and Brady Coyne. They were standing nose to nose. As I got out of the truck and started toward them, Nate raised a big fist.

I shouted his name.

“I wouldn't make that mistake, Nate,” I said, coming up to them. “If you plan to do any fishing in this Derby, you'll be smart to keep your hands to yourself.”

“Who's gonna make me?” he sneered. “You?” But he hesitated.

“Not me,” I said. “But Brady, here, will take your casting arm off at the shoulder and hand it to you on a platter. He may be a lawyer now, but before that he was an instructor in unarmed combat at Quantico.”

“You're a damned liar.”

“If you think so, take a swing at him. You can spend the next six months in a body cast, and I can't think of one person who'll shed a tear.” I turned to Brady, who was eyeing me from an expressionless lawyer's face. “I'll hold your rod for you. I know you don't want to get sand in your reel.”

“Thanks,” said Brady, “but maybe it won't come to that.” He looked at Nate. “It's up to you. I think this beach is big enough for both of us, but maybe you don't.”

Nate glared at him, but said nothing.

“You're a lucky man, Nate,” I said. “If I hadn't showed up, you probably would have thrown that punch.”

Nate rubbed a rough hand across his mouth. “You'll push me too far one of these days, Jackson.”

“We're getting too old for fistfights,” I said.

“All right,” he said. “There's two of you and only one of me, so you've got the edge this time.” He turned and started up the beach, then spun around. “But you won't always have it. Remember that.” He whirled and walked on.

“Well, thanks,” said Brady. “You rescued me.”

“I've got orders to get you registered for the Derby,” I said. “Then I'm supposed to take you to our place so you and Zee can get to fishing.”

“All right,” he said, “but I intend to be back here when the tide is right.” He held a fly between his thumb and forefinger. “Old Nate, there, cut my line. It did not make me happy.”

“He probably won't try that again, now that he knows more about you. Besides, catching a big fish is the best revenge. When the tide is right, we'll come back here at first light and you can nail a winner from those rocks. Anyway, you aren't the only one with fishing problems. A guy named Bannerman has talked me into looking for his wife while I really should be concentrating on the Derby.”

“Unlike me, you've brought your grief on yourself,” said Brady, “so I don't want to hear any pissing and moaning about not having time to catch fish as big as the ones I'll be getting.”

We walked back to the Land Cruiser.

“I didn't know I was a Marine instructor in unarmed combat,” said Brady.

“The important thing is that Nate knows it,” I
said. “Brady Coyne, the battling Boston barrister. It has a nice ring to it.”

We drove first to Coop's Bait and Tackle, where Brady got his Derby button, and then to our house. Brady relaxed on the balcony with a drink, while I packed supper for two in a cooler.

At six, Zee's little Jeep came down the driveway. A half hour later it went back out carrying Zee and Brady away toward the beach.

Later, alone in our double bed, I stopped reading my nighttime book and thought about Katherine Bannerman. There were some things I could do, but none of them seemed promising. I envied Zee and Brady, who were out there on the beach chasing bass and bluefish. Looking for fish was certainly more enjoyable than looking for a missing woman. I was sure they were having happier thoughts than I was.

W
e were bouncing over a narrow strip of sand in Zee's little red Wrangler. She had two long surf-casting rods on her roof rack. My fly-fishing gear was in back, along with the cooler that held the supper J.W. had put together for us.

You've got to be a truly manly man to prepare a picnic for your wife and her male companion and then wave them off for a night of fishing while you stay home with the kids, I was thinking. Good for him. Good for Zee.

And tonight, good for me. Zee knew every inch of the Vineyard. She could find the fish. Chappaquiddick was our destination.

On Chappy we'd crossed the Dyke Bridge, scene of Teddy's terrible and mysterious accident, then driven down East Beach to Wasque, where we found a long row of pickup trucks and SUVs with deflated tires parked along the beach. A few people were down at the water's edge, casting far out into the sea. Their plugs made little water spurts when they landed, and the arcs of their monofilament lines glittered in the low rays of the setting sun. But most of the fishermen
were leaning against their front fenders drinking from bottles and talking and smoking and fiddling with their gear and watching the water.

“They're waiting for the rip to build,” said Zee. “It'll bring in the blues, for sure. There might be some big bass behind the blues, too, and maybe some bonito and albies will come in. It's good here. But everyone knows about Wasque. It's gonna be a zoo. It always is during the Derby.”

So we headed for Cape Pogue, and as we putted along the beach, the number of vehicles and fishermen that we saw thinned out. The soft tires on the Jeep crunched quietly over the packed sand. On our right, the ocean stretched all the way eastward to Spain. On our left was what Zee identified as Pocha Pond.

We passed several long stretches of beach where there were no trucks and nobody was fishing. I asked Zee if these were barren areas, and she said not necessarily. Depending on the tide and wind direction, and at certain times of day or night with certain species of bait in the water, not to mention water temperature and time of year and, oh, there were a lot of other variables she couldn't think of at the moment, not the least of which were the smell in the air and a certain feeling in her bones … depending on all those things, she knew some holes and troughs and drop-offs scattered all along this beach that could hold some monster bass.

She didn't say it, but I inferred that few other people knew these things, and I was thinking that I probably had two of the best guides on the island to fish with this week.

With J.W. and Zee to find fish for me, maybe I'd catch a Derby winner. Why not?

J. W. Jackson was a retired cop from the Boston PD. He'd been shot or something. He never talked about it, any more than he talked about his time in Vietnam, where, I gathered, he'd also been wounded.

He lived year-round on Martha's Vineyard. It wasn't clear to me what he did for a living, if anything. He didn't talk about that, either, and I had the good sense not to ask.

I first met him four or five years earlier. He'd come to Boston for reasons he kept to himself, and a mutual friend, a
Globe
reporter named Quinn who knew J.W. from his cop days, had invited me to join the two of them for a night game at Fenway Park. J.W. and I hit it off right away. He liked history and fishing and baseball and classical music, and he disliked cities and high society and neckties and all newfangled technology except spinning reels. By the time the Sox blew a two-run lead in the ninth inning, J.W. had invited me down to the Vineyard to fish with him and his wife, Zee.

I took him up on it the next summer, which was when I met Zee. She was a black-haired, dark-eyed, sleek-bodied stunner, and I might've been jealous of J.W.'s good luck in finding her if I didn't admire what a great pair they made.

On that first visit, J.W. and Zee drove me all over the island in her little Jeep. I'd been on the Vineyard a few times, but I'd never really gotten the lay of the land before then. We drove the roads from Chappaquiddick
to Aquinnah, both the paved inland roads and the packed-sand beach roads. It was mid-August, and the bluefish and bass had mostly left the Vineyard to find cooler waters up north, although from time to time we stopped at a place where they'd had luck in the past and tried to catch something.

We drank martinis on the Jacksons' balcony while the sun went down, and we barbecued in their backyard. We raked quahogs and dug clams while J.W. sang “Oh, my darlin' clammin'-time,” and we smoked bluefish in the smoker J.W. had made from an old refrigerator, and we sailed the waters in their little catboat.

Pretty soon, the way those things go, we were friends, and after that, I always spent a summer weekend or two with J.W. and Zee on the Vineyard. We usually fished a little, and sometimes we did pretty well. We ragged on each other about our angling preferences. J.W. teased me about my flimsy fly-fishing equipment and my usual practice of putting back the fish I caught. I told him I didn't need a stiff eleven-foot rod or a dead fish in the back of my truck to prove my manhood.

He accused me of Rod Envy.

I gave Zee some fly-casting lessons. She picked it up instantly. J.W. admitted it looked like fun, but declared himself too old and fumble-fingered to take it up. In fact, J.W. is several years younger than I, and he's one of the least fumble-fingered men I know.

So thanks to J.W. and Zee, I learned my way around the Vineyard. I didn't know the water very well, or the shops or the restaurants or the art galleries. But I
like language, and I like knowing where things are, so I made a point of noticing where the landmarks were and learning what they were called—those lovely Wompanoag Indian words like Squibnocket and Tashmoo and Sengekontacket, as well as the solid Anglo-Saxon place names like Aquinnah and East Chop and Oak Bluffs.

Cape Pogue is a long, skinny finger that sticks straight up, pointing due north, at the very northeast corner of Chappaquiddick. A lighthouse perches on the edge of the sea, and when you're there, it seems like it has to be the farthest-from-anything place on the entire Vineyard. Zee kept going past Cape Pogue Light and swung around a long curve of beach until we'd reversed ourselves and were heading south around the other side of Cape Pogue Pond. On our right, the sun was setting over the low greenish mound of the Vineyard, and the pond was off to our left.

“This beach is pretty good on this tide,” said Zee. “The fish work their way right along the edge, following the bait into the pond. Sometimes the bass come right into the wash. We can fish our way down into the Gut. That's the narrow opening where the ocean pours into the pond. A pretty good current will be running there.”

When we got to the Gut, three or four trucks were parked along the beach, and half a dozen widely spaced fishermen were casting into the water. Some were throwing plugs, and one guy was squatting by his rod, which he'd propped up on a spiked holder he'd stuck into the sand. Bait fishing with an eel, I guessed.
A man and a woman, I noticed, were standing beside each other fly casting. Farther out, a few boats were chugging back and forth.

“Not too bad,” said Zee. “A lot of people will probably come down to fish the Gut from the other side when the tide gets running. But we should have this place to ourselves—or at least as much to ourselves as you can get during the Derby.”

While I set about rigging up, Zee snagged one of her surf rods from the top of her Jeep and strolled barefoot across the sand down to the water's edge. I paused to watch her cast. She was wearing black shorts and a black T-shirt, and with her dark hair and tawny skin, she was a semi-silhouette against the pink western horizon. She cast her plug amazing distances with the effortless grace of a world-class athlete, and just about the time I got a fly tied onto my leader, I heard her shout.

I looked up. Her rod was bent and something was splashing in the water in front of her. She was hauling back, then dropping her rod as she reeled up, all the while backing up the beach.

I put my rod into the Jeep and jogged down to the water. “What've you got?” I said.

“Oh, just a bass,” she said. “Not a keeper. I thought at first it might've been a blue.”

Both J.W. and Zee preferred bluefish to stripers, mainly because there are no size restrictions on blues, while most of the bass you're likely to catch run smaller than the thirty-two-inch legal minimum. Small bluefish won't win any Derby prizes, but they can be killed and brought home and eaten. Like most
Vineyard natives I know, the Jacksons think of fish as food, and they like to live off the land and the sea.

I, on the other hand, grew up fishing for trout with a fly rod, and I think of fish as a source of entertainment and sport.

I'm not sure how the fish feel about it.

Zee had herself a fine striped bass. It looked to be just a few inches shy of thirty-two. She dragged it up onto the wet sand, then knelt beside it to back the hook out of its mouth.

She held it upright in the shallow water to revive it. After a minute, it flapped its big tail, drenching Zee, and swam away. Zee laughed, then stood up and wiped the spray off her face. “Well, they're here,” she said. “I had a couple other hits. You better get casting. You never know how long it's gonna last.”

I jogged to the Jeep for my rod. When I started back for the beach, I noticed that several of the other fishermen had edged closer to Zee so that they were all throwing their lures out into the same general vicinity. She didn't seem to mind. I'd seen this before—the communal attitude of the surf casters. We fly fishermen are more secretive and antisocial and possessive of our hot spots. We resent being crowded. Surf casters seem to welcome it.