Off Season (7 page)

By noon I had a nice basketful of fair-to-middling-sized oysters. I shellfish professionally for quahogs and scallops, but I am only an amateur oysterer. My oysters are solely for me and my guests. I could eat oysters eight days a week. Fried, Rockefellered, stewed, on the half shell, any way at all.

Oysters, oysters, rah, rah, rah!

I put my basket of oysters in the boat and climbed in and sat there for a while in the quiet of the cove, feeling myself ebb comfortably—too comfortably, perhaps, for a man set upon marriage—into solitude. Then I motored out into the pond. The noon sun was in the south, giving much light but little heat. The wind was out of the southwest. I swung around to the point where once I had seen otters playing on a mud bank. No otters today.

I was putting an oyster sauce together in my mind, and trying to taste it with duck. Not much luck. Too many flavors for my imagination to handle. But it had real possibilities, that was for sure. I headed for shore.

Somewhere off to the west a distant shotgun fired, then fired again. At this time of day? High noon? With the sun high and bright? Who was fooling whom?

Out of the west two ducks came flying fast and low. They zipped across the water and then rose over the trees and disappeared.

Had there been four ducks before? Three? Had the gunner missed both times?

Life was full of mysteries.

I called the hospital and invited Zee for supper. She said she had a headache. Hmmmm. Tomorrow night, then? Okay, she said. She really did have a headache today and would see me tomorrow. Great.

I believed her about the headache. I had had one myself before I went oystering.

I spent some time working my way through my cookbooks, trying and failing to put oysters and duck together in one dish. I couldn't get the tastes right in my mind, and my cookbooks seemed to agree. So things sometimes go, in the cooking game.

But there are always other possibilities. I took some of yesterday's scallops, put them in a layer in a baking dish, covered them with fresh dill, a quarter cup of sugar and a bit of salt, and squished them down hard with a little plate topped by an old flatiron held in place by big rubber bands. I put the dish in the fridge to meld. A sort of scallop gravlax. Would that be gravollops? I only had a little over twenty-four hours to blend the flavors, instead of the seventy-two I would have preferred, but it would still be good when Zee arrived.

Maybe I should have a supper of seafood tapas. Lots of little plates of lots of good things: oysters on the half shell with caviar, gravollops, smoked bluefish with cream cheese and thin-sliced red onion, seviche and like that. All served with fresh, homemade French bread.

My mouth watered. On the other hand, I had that new hunk of bluefish fillet in the fridge and my fall veggie garden. Plenty of stuff for a major meal.

I had a Molson and thought about menus.

The phone rang.

It was Mimi Bettencourt. “My back steps just collapsed. Can you come over and fix them?”

“Anybody killed?”

“No, but almost. I was bringing in the laundry, and my foot went right through. I should have had you do them while you were doing the porch, but . . .”

“There's some wood left out in the studio. Maybe there's enough. I'll be right out.”

I got my woodworking tools together and drove out. There was still some laundry hanging on Mimi's line. Like me, she preferred to use the solar dryer whenever possible. It not only saved on electricity, but the laundry always smelled sweet and good when it was dry. You could put your nose in it and inhale it and you felt clean and happy.

I carried my toolbox around back of the house and examined the steps. There were three of them leading down from the little porch in back of her kitchen, and they were not only sick, but dead.

Mimi came out on the porch, crossed her arms over her flat stomach and looked first at me and then at the broken steps. “Well, doctor?”

“
C'est mort
, all right. I'll see what there is in the studio.”

Mimi used Gus's old studio as a barn. It was full of useful and not so useful stuff. Part of the useful stuff was a stack of boards of different sizes. I'd used most of them for the porch, but there were some left. I spotted a ten-foot two by twelve and got that out, then found some shorter hunks of two by ten and pulled out three of them. I carried the boards back to the porch, ran my heavy extension cord into the house and got to work.

I was about half done when I heard a car pull into
the yard. Then I heard voices at the front of the house, and then Mimi and Nash Cortez came walking around the corner of the house, headed for the garden. Nash was carrying an empty basket. He had seen my truck out front, so he was not as surprised at seeing me as I was at seeing him.

“You have your bulletproof vest on today, Nash?”

“Now, J.W., you know me. Never one to hold a grudge. I just came by to get some of Mimi's good, green vegetables.”

Mimi gave him a sharp look, but nodded. “I can use his money to pay you, J.W.”

Nash gave me a large wink, and followed her. I stood up and stomped around to get the blood circulating in my legs, and wondered why Nash hadn't just gone to the A & P for his veggies.

The answer was not long in coming. I heard a shout of rage from Mimi, and looked up to see Nash, laughing, come running from the garden, his basket shedding brussels sprouts and greens. As he ran, his long legs striding high, he was tossing money over his shoulder, dollar bills that swirled in his wake like fall leaves behind a speeding car.

I looked at Mimi. She had her skirts bunched up with one hand and a garden rake in the other, and she was running after Nash, red-faced and furious. But her short legs were no match for his long ones, and she was losing ground with every stride.

“Yah hoo!” shouted Nash, and then he was gone around the corner of the house. Before Mimi even got to me, I heard his truck's engine roar into life, followed by the squeal of tires as he floorboarded it out of the yard.

Mimi steamed to a halt beside me.

“That son of a bitch!” she cried, panting. “Did you hear what he said?”

“No. Calm down, now. He's gone.”

“After he got his basket full, he told me—oh, the nerve!—that he wanted my vegetables because they were the very best on the island . . .”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Because he's gonna use ‘em to fatten up his rabbits, that's what! He wanted me to know that I was really helping him out and that from now on every time he kills a rabbit for supper, he'll include me in the blessing! That low-life creep! Can you imagine the nerve?” She threw the rake down so hard it bounced.

I looked down at the rake, and didn't say anything.

“And don't look like that! Don't you dare laugh! Don't you dare!” She kicked at the rake and ran around the corner of the house. She seemed to be crying.

I walked back toward the garden and picked up the dollar bills that lay scattered beside the path. There were quite a few of them. Nash had paid well for his joke, I thought.

I took the money to the front of the house, but Mimi wasn't in sight. Inside, probably. I put the money in my shirt pocket and went back to work on the steps.

I am not the finish carpenter that Manny Fonseca is, but I do all right as long as things don't get more subtle than two by fours, so when the steps were finished, they were fine. I walked up and down them a few times, just to be sure, then put my tools back into the truck, cleaned up the site and knocked on the back door.

Mimi, still a little red in the eyes, answered it, and I gave her the money. She thrust it back at me.

“I don't want to touch it. It's yours. Oh, that man! I am going to get him! You just wait and see!”

“Now, Mimi . . .”

“Don't you ‘now, Mimi' me, you cannibal! You're as bad as he is.”

“Now, Mimi . . .”

“You want a cup of tea before you go?”

“You bet.”

We went inside. Mimi already had a pot of tea going. Something made out of the leaves of the herbs in her garden. It was good. Not too bland, not too zingy. She pushed some cookies at me. I touched my shirt pocket. “This is really too much money for the work I did.”

“Keep it! I won't touch it! I saw Angie in church. She said she saw you this morning. She said you had woman problems. Do you?”

“Well, thanks for the tea,” I said.

“Sit. Well?”

“Nothing compared to your troubles with Nash Cortez.”

“Someday he's going to do the wrong thing to the wrong person. I just hope I'm there when it happens!” Then she sighed. Just what is that man up to? Why does he do these foolish things?”

“Maybe old Nash is just bored. Maybe being a bachelor is catching up with him.”

“Maybe it's catching up with you.”

“I want it to end with me.”

She leaned back, not displeased. Like most women, even the deliberately single ones, she basically thought that all decent men, and most of the others, should be married. There were only a few men so rotten that they didn't deserve to be married. I figured that maybe Nash Cortez was one of those, in her book.

“So you're ready to tie the knot. Good. Zee Madieras is a real catch. Smart, good-looking, sexy . . .”

“Of course that's a perfect description of me, too. Zee and I have those attributes in common, along with character, terrific personalities and the other qualities that make our nation great. That's why we're such a fabled match.”

She rolled her eyes. “You don't deserve that girl. Poor thing. Imagine having to live with such crap for the rest of her life!”

“She's got a steady job, too. Don't forget that. A beautiful, sexy woman with a dependable income doesn't come along every day, you know. A man can't let a chance like that go by when he encounters it. It wouldn't be fair to their children.”

“You've explained all that to Zee, of course.”

“Of course. She holds my reasoning in high esteem. As, naturally, she should. I imagine Just Ted has explained things to Angie in much the same way. Women appreciate candor.”

Ted Just was an accountant and Angie Bettencourt's current beau. He had once been asked his name, and having just completed a bunch of those forms where you put your last name first, had answered, “Just, Ted.” Thereafter, island humor being such as it is, he had become Just Ted.

'Just Ted would never try anything like that with Angie,” said Mimi.

“Maybe he should, so you can get started on some more grandchildren.”

“Oh, dear, I don't know if I'm ever going to have any more grandchildren. You know, none of Angie's gang, the girls she grew up with, have gotten married. Heather Manwaring, Helene Norton and Angie. Three bright, attractive young women, and not one of them married. It wasn't like that in my day. I suppose I'm just not in step with modern times, but, here they
are, all pushing thirty, all with good educations and good jobs, and not one of them married.”

“Maybe they're trying to decide whether they should become nuns.”

She laughed. “It sure isn't that. They've got men in their lives, they're just not married to them! Maybe that's smart! They can shake the dust from their shoes when it gets too thick.”

“If dust comes with the marriage, I want it to pile up,” I said.

Mimi approved. “That's the way to think. But there won't be much dust in a house with you and Zee. One time, you know, I thought that you and Angie might make it together, but I guess that was not to be.”

“Just Ted is a nice guy, although I imagine he eats meat.”

“Can't leave it alone, can you? You're as bad as Nash Cortez. Well, Angie eats meat too, just like her dad did. I'm the only one who doesn't.”

“I hear Helene Norton has a guy on the string. I haven't seen her since she moved over to the Cape to get closer to her mom and farther from her father.”

“Not that her plan worked. Carl's over there living with her, you know.”

“So they say.”

“I understand that Helene's going with a real estate developer. Some guy with big ideas, deep pockets and her mom's blessing.”

“They don't always go together.”

“Rumor has it, by which I mean that Angie tells me, that Helene is beginning to think that her greatest charm, as far as her mom and beau are concerned, is the fact that she may be able to talk Carl into selling his land to the boyfriend instead of to the Commission.”

“Aha. Skullduggery instead of true love, eh? Well, now that Carl is over there with Helene, the boyfriend can sweet-talk them both at the same time.”

Mimi arched a brow and smiled a wee smile. “My sources tell me that Helene might be switching beaus before that can happen. Chug Lovell has been catching the
Island Queen
over to Falmouth several times a week, it seems.”

Chug Lovell? Chug Lovell, who this very morning I'd seen sharing his canoe and his oysters with Heather Manwaring?

“Chug Lovell? I thought that Chug Lovell was . . .” I shut my mouth.

“ . . . Wasn't the type to attract a woman like Helene? Well, apparently he is.” Mimi did not seem displeased.

I was mystified. “You're a woman, so maybe you can tell me. What is it about Chug Lovell? He lives in a shack that he's letting fall down around him, he never shaves, he's got that crazy giggle and he looks like a pumpkin. I mean, I get along with Chug just fine, but he doesn't fit the Romeo mold. So what is it about him?”

“You men!” said Mimi, shaking her head. “He's lovable. He's roly-poly, and childish and lovable. He's also got enough money so he doesn't have to work, he's got an education, and he likes women and they know it. You and a lot of other men could learn a thing or two from Chug Lovell, Mr. Jackson.”

“You mean that if I was more like Chug, I might have had a chance with you, Mimi?”