Off Season (2 page)

Other people wanted the land to be made available to human beings and their activities. The most extreme wanted no rules at all. Others wanted limited access: paths and walkways, benches installed at scenic spots, access for picnickers and bird-watchers, and such. Fishermen wanted to be able to get to customary angling spots; hunters wanted to keep using their
traditional hunting grounds. These were the People people, and there were more of them than No People people. Alas, they, unlike the highly unified No People people, were often at odds about just which human beings should be allowed use of the land. A classic case was the hunter\non-hunter conflict, with Mimi Bettencourt and Ignacio Cortez as representative zealots for their causes.

Sometimes the No People people didn't even argue their case, apparently believing that the People people had gone at each other so fiercely that the commissioners would have to decide to keep everybody off the land just so the fight would stop.

I didn't hunt deer much anymore, although I didn't mind eating the venison if I could get hold of some. The last time I had killed a deer I hadn't enjoyed the experience as much as I planned, so I hadn't done it again. As fate would have it, my last deer had been killed along a game trail in the fifty acres the Commission was planning to buy.

It was land owned by Carl Norton, a frugal New Englander and one of the numerous Martha's Vineyard Nortons, whose families have been on the island for centuries. As a young man, Carl had done his own hunting. Later, suffering with failing vision, he made a deal with hunters using his land. They could hunt, but he got some venison. He had gotten a hunk of my last deer, in fact. Eventually, continued ill health had led him to leave the island to stay with his daughter on the Cape.

His fifty acres had long been of interest to developers, but Carl had, instead, made it available to the Commission. For the right price, of course.

I had never liked Carl Norton. He had a quick, lacerating tongue, which would have been all right had it been accompanied by any sense of humor. But it was
not. It was a knife without a sheath, and, combined with a parsimony of both purse and spirit, made him a man I did not care for. His sole act of generosity was his willingness to let deer hunters walk his land, and even that, it was said, was because his father, a hunter, had forced him to swear that he would do it. Even for Carl Norton, an oath was an oath, and he had stuck to it.

The oath his wife had taken when she married him was not, on the other hand, enough to keep her with him. A few years into the marriage, she had taken their boy and girl and fled across the Sound to America, where she had gotten a divorce. Thereafter, Carl had lived alone, his tightfisted lifestyle apparently sufficiently unattractive to prevent any other woman from permanently entering his household, although there were rumors of certain women coming and going from the farm. As the local sages observed, men cannot resist beauty and women cannot resist money.

I had not been able to figure why Carl hadn't just sold out to a developer. Developers had more money than the Commission, and Carl, being a man who loved a penny, could probably have made more money from one of them. But he had not. He had offered to sell to the Commission for admittedly a lot of money, but for a lot less than he could otherwise have gotten. Why?

I could not imagine. But then I live in an old hunting camp and my checkbook has never been balanced in my life, so I obviously am not a guy who can hope to understand money or the people who actually believe it's important enough to think about very much.

I wondered if, now that I was going to get married, I should make a real effort to live a fiscally sound life. That would be a real challenge. Maybe I should let Zee take care of the money, if we ever got any.

Zee would not be visiting me tonight, but would be going right home from the hospital to her house on the West Tisbury/Chilmark line to do some womanly things that could not be done at my place, so I ate supper alone, after a Tanqueray vodka martini: Tanqueray vodka (kept, of course, in the freezer) and nothing else, in a frosted glass.

Supper was Oysters Rockefeller made from oysters from the Edgartown Great Pond and spinach from my own garden. I had considered making a rolled fillet of sole, but the idea of Oysters Rockefeller was so appealing that I made a whole meal of just that, and washed it down with a chilled St. Emelion. It was clear that life was good, and there was a God.

By the time I finished washing the dishes and stacking them beside the sink, I was already late for the Commission hearing. I am never distressed at being late for meetings, however, so I did not speed to this one. The meeting was in the Edgartown town hall, but this being late October I had no trouble finding a parking place right on Main Street.

As I walked in the front door I was met with a cacophony of human sound coming from the meeting room down the hall. Strident voices were raised in anger and dispute. I thought I recognized Mimi Bettencourt's voice among other feminine shouts and cries. These were mixed with masculine bellows and yells. Unimaginative curses were pronounced, and voices shouted in vain for order. Someone identified himself as a policeman and called for quiet which he did not get. I walked down the hall and into the room just in time to see Ignacio Cortez, tall and lean, and wearing a moth-eaten coonskin hat and coat, bend toward Mimi Bettencourt, shake a bony fist in her face and call her the worst name he could think of.

“Off islander! That's what you are! A damned off islander! Trying to come down here and tell us how to live! Go back to where you came from, and take all of your kind with you! Get out!”

“That does it!” shouted Mimi. “Here! This is what you and your sort deserve!” She reached into her huge purse and her hand came out with a pistol. A gasp of fear and astonishment rose from the throats of those citizens who saw the gun.

Before Nash Cortez could react, she shot him in the head. He staggered back and slapped a hand to his forehead. The hand came away red. Someone in the crowd saw the red hand and screamed. One of the people at the table in front of the room was banging with a gavel. I was moving, but before I could get to the pistol and wrest it away, Mimi had shot Nash again, right in the heart.

Nash Cortez stared at his hand. Then he stared down at the red fluid trickling down his raccoon coat. The room was in turmoil. Someone fainted. Those nearest Nash and Mimi seemed bewildered. I looked at the gun in my hand. Plastic. I looked at Mimi Bettencourt. She was pale-faced and furious. I saw Tony D'Agostine, one of Edgartown's finest, come pushing through the crowd from the table in front of the room. He looked serious, and I wondered how much he'd seen.

Nash Cortez put one hand on his dripping head
and the other on his dripping chest. Mimi stuck her face up at him.

“Now you know what it feels like to have somebody shoot at you, you ape man!”

Nash looked at his hands again, then sniffed one.

“Cherry soda. Cherry soda! Cherry goddamned soda!” His eyes dropped to Mimi's. “You got me covered all over with cherry soda! Why you . . . !”

I stepped between them, but Mimi stood on her tiptoes and stuck her head over my arm. “Just be glad it isn't red paint, you lummox! That's what you and your raccoon coat deserve! And who do you think you are calling me an off islander? There've been Bettencourts on this island for a hundred years!”

Tony D'Agostine finally got through the crowd. He was red-faced. “All right,” he said in a controlled voice, “I want you two out of here right now. You can come quietly or I'll arrest you both. One way or another, you're going.” Then he noticed the soda all over Ignacio. “Jesus, Nash, what happened to you? Is that blood?”

“Cherry soda,” I said, handing him the water pistol. “Here's the murder weapon.”

“Cherry soda and some red vegetable dye, and I'm your killer. I confess!” Mimi looked at Tony over my arm. “It'll do Mr. Nimrod good to know how some poor deer or duck feels when it gets shot at. And I'm not sorry!”

“Assault!” yelled Nash, over his initial shock and back into his theatrical mode. “Assault with a dangerous weapon! Arrest her, officer. She's dangerous!”

Tony got Mimi by the arm. “All right, Mrs. Bettencourt, you're coming with me.”

“That's it, that's it!” cried Nash. “Take her away! Anybody from the press here? Anybody got a camera? This should be on the front page!”

Tony pushed the water pistol under his belt and grabbed Nash with his other hand. “You too, Mr. Cortez. You're coming, too.”

“Me?” exclaimed Nash. “Me? I'm the victim. I haven't done anything.”

“You've been disturbing the peace for the last half hour,” said Tony firmly. “And I imagine I can come up with some other charges, if I have to. Now come along, both of you.”

He led them away. I became aware of the gavel still being pounded on the table at the front of the room. Everyone was talking. The woman who had fainted seemed to have been revived. She was slumped in a chair while a friend fanned her pale, moist face with a white handkerchief.

“Order! Order!” cried the gavel thumper, but it was a while before things quieted down. I found a chair beside Phyllis Manwaring.

“Exciting times,” I said. “Did you know Mimi was packing iron?”

Phyllis was, as always, impeccably dressed. I had never seen her otherwise. She was one of those well-to-do women who summered on the island and shared weekends there with a husband who flew off island on Monday morning and flew back again on Friday evening. He was a Connecticut commuter, and whatever he did over there in America brought in the big bucks. Phyllis, like many women in her circle, was involved in causes. She was on committees and was interested in various charities. She was a neighbor of Mimi's and shared her sentiments about killing animals, having even gone so far as to give her furs to her daughters when she herself had converted and joined the animal rights crusade. A long, lovely fall had kept her on the island later than usual this year, so she was here for this meeting
instead of wherever she would normally have been on the mainland.

“Heavens, no!” said Phyllis. Then she allowed herself a tiny conspiratorial smile. “Actually, yes. Some people throw paint on people who wear furs, you know. One of my friends actually had that happen to her cousin! Can you imagine? Well, naturally we didn't want to do anything like
that,
but cherry soda and vegetable dye will wash out, so that seemed all right. We just knew that Ignacio Cortez would make some kind of a scene, so we decided that we'd give him tit for tat. Do you think that Mimi's really going to be arrested? Not that she'd mind. She'd be glad to go to jail for the cause!”

“Gee,” I said, “they might get you, too. Accessory before the fact.”

Phyllis's smile went away. “Me? Why, I didn't do anything. I couldn't. . . . I mean, I wouldn't think of ruining someone's clothes. Do you really think that the police might . . . Oh, dear.”

“it's something to think about,” I said, as the gavel at the table finally pounded the audience into silence.

Actually I imagined that once Tony got Nash and Mimi outside, he would try to talk both of them into going home and staying out of trouble. If a cop can do that, he usually will. On the other hand, if they gave him any grief, he might decide that a night in the county jail might not hurt either of them. He could PC them and let them go in the morning.

I saw Manny Fonseca on the other side of the room with some other guys who hunt. They looked determined, but it was clear that their man Nash had seriously undercut their hopes of presenting a calm, rational argument for their right to shoot on the fifty acres the Commission was in the process of buying. On the other hand, Mimi hadn't done a lot for the animal
rights cause, either. In the audience only the No People people looked happy.

Happiest of all was Chug Lovell, who owned an acre beside Carl Norton's place, and had gone back to nature several years earlier. His once pleasant little shack was now surrounded by high grass, overgrown bushes, thriving scrub oak and encroaching evergreens. Chug was about forty. He was round and bearded and was said to live on berries, nuts and bread. He was deliberately uncivilized and apparently believed everyone else should be, too. His critics argued that Chug was a perfect illustration of the maxim that a developer is a guy without a house and a conservationist is one who already has his. They also pointed out that Chug could afford to live as he did because he didn't actually have to work for a living, being, reputedly, the heir of some tobacco king in South Carolina. Chug and I occasionally met, and he had always treated me okay, so I had no opinion of him one way or another. At the moment, along with a few other identifiable No People people, he had a wide, beatific smile on his face.

At the front table, a member of the Commission advisory board leaned forward and gave a final rap of his gavel.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please! This must be a rational process. Everyone who so wishes will have an opportunity to speak, but we must have order. Please keep in mind that the Commission has not yet completed the purchase of the Norton land, and that, as is often the case in these matters, the purchasing process is a delicate one. Until that process is finalized, our discussions about possible use of the land should be constrained. So, please, if you have something to say, and we hope you all do, say it calmly. Thank you.”

I sat and listened to the familiar arguments. I sometimes think that people are born with certain predispositions that incline them to points of view which are foreordained and not, in any way, the result of the logic and study that they think they bring to issues. Some people seem doomed to be liberal and others conservative and others indifferent. They seem to have little control over their beliefs or their philosophic and emotional inclinations. Thus, while I listened to the hunters and anti-hunters argue their positions, I had the sense that it was the doom of each individual to hold the views he or she held. Reason had less to do with their conclusions than did their genetic strains. What would keep them from each other's throats, if tensions rose? Would a shooter one day shoot the protester carrying an animal rights sign? Would a paint thrower one day throw acid or poison at the lady wearing mink?