Vineyard Shadows (12 page)

Long ago, when I was in a hospital having Viet Cong shrapnel taken out of my legs, I had the opportunity to get past some of my earlier illusions and reduce life to its fundamentals. In my case they were, as far as I could determine, the need for work—it made no difference what kind as long as it brought me simple food; the need for shelter—any kind that would protect me from the elements; the need for a woman—because I was inescapably heterosexual; and the need for a male friend—because there are some human experiences that only people of the same gender can understand. Nothing else was really important; not wealth, not honors, not acclaim, not power, not a big house, not a fine car, not a prestigious profession, not dozens of friends; none of these. They were all only indulgences, fripperies, adornments—to be enjoyed but not to be taken seriously.

Over two decades later, I hadn't changed my mind about those fundamentals. I might be the man in Zee's life, but I knew she needed more than I could offer, so I was pleased that Toni was her friend. I thought Zee was looking better, more thoughtful and less moody, by the time we said our good-byes and headed back down-island, and I credited Toni for that.

Zee and the tots drove home, and I drove Rimini's car to John Skye's house. Rimini didn't open the door of
the house until I stepped out of the car and he could see from the window who I was.

I gave him the keys. “Your car is clean,” I said. “No bugs.”

“Oh, good.” Rimini seemed relieved, as well he should be.

“It's one less thing to worry about. Now, I'm trying to track down your friend Graham. If I can get in touch with him, we may be able to find a way for you to get out from under Whelen's thumb.”

The mention of Graham's name changed the expression on Rimini's face. It became furtive, like that of a cat caught eyeing the goldfish bowl.

“Graham? How can you find Graham? Why do you need to find him?”

His look perplexed me. “I know Graham hassled you,” I said, “but Sonny Whelen is the one who sent two enforcers after you, so if you have to choose between Graham and Sonny, you'll be smart to go for Graham. You saw his badge. He may wave jail in your face to get you to work with him, but he's not going to shoot off your kneecaps.”

He rubbed those hands of his. “I don't think you should try to deal with Graham. I don't trust him. I don't know what to do, but I don't think Graham can help me. You should leave him out of this. I don't want to go to jail.”

I studied him, wondering what was going on in his head, wondering what he wasn't telling me, wishing that he would be straight with me but doubting that he ever would, feeling sorry for Carla for having married him, but immediately backing off from that because I couldn't know what drew them together, what they saw or needed in each other.

“Look,” I said, “you may not trust Graham, but he's a player whether you like him or not. If you want me to try to help get you off this hook you're on, let me do it my way. If you don't, it's fine with me; you're on your own. You can leave right now.”

He collected himself. “I just need time to let things work out. While they do, I need to be someplace where Sonny can't find me for a few days. You've done enough for me already, and I thank you for it, but if I can just stay here for a while, things will be fine. I know they will.”

Such naïveté was irritating and almost incomprehensible to me. “Sonny Whelen isn't the forgive-and-forget type,” I said. “He's the kind who remembers.”

Rimini made sweeping gestures with his hands as I imagined he did when he was persuading his students to accept some notion alien to them. “Trust me, J.W. I know things are going to be all right. You go on home to your family. They need you. Just let me stay here alone for a few days. I'll get some groceries and I'll use the cell phone to talk with Carla, and everything will get worked out.”

I was tired of him, but still tied to him by the lie I'd told Whelen. “Give me a ride home,” I said.

“Of course, of course. I hope you're not angry.”

I tried not to be. “Anger is a useless emotion. I try to avoid it.”

He dropped me off in front of our house.

“Thanks,” I said. “If you need anything, give me a call. I'll check on you later.”

“Please telephone me before you come,” he said. “It spooks me when a car comes into the yard. Even yours.”

Timorous Tom. Still, I couldn't quite blame him for being nervous. For the immediate future, I expected to be wary of cars coming down my own driveway. It was
not the way I wanted to live. I watched him drive away, then went into the house.

Zee and the children were eating lunch. Bluefish salad. Yum. I joined them.

“A woman wants me to be on the
Today
show,” said Zee. “I said no.”

“Good.”

Afterward, we all went out to the garden, where Josh and Diana helped their mother and me do some weeding, with the big people instructing the little people about the difference between the little green plants we wanted to keep and those we didn't. Such choices were not always easily made, but since it was only June we could replant most of the erroneously plucked veggies. Gardening was a Vineyard activity much more to my liking than my morning's efforts. It was good to work shoulder to shoulder with Zee, getting dirt under our nails while the summer sun beat down on our backs, and it was good to wash up together afterward.

“If we can find a painter,” said Zee, reaching for a towel, “maybe we could pose for a
Modern American Gothic.
You can hold a hoe instead of a pitchfork, and I'll borrow some reading specs.”

“We can do seasonal
Gothic
s, with Vivaldi scores sneaked into the background where you really have to look hard to see them. We can do summer with a hoe, fall with a scallop net, winter with a quahog rake, and spring with a shovel.”

“We'll be famous all year round. We can make prints and get rich.”

“Fame and wealth at last.”

“Does this mean I can have a bathroom of my own?”

“Do you want a bathroom of your own?”

“Every woman wants a bathroom of her own.”

“I didn't know.”

“There's a lot you don't know about women, your hunkiness.”

My hunkiness. That sounded good, even though it was an ignorant sort of hunkiness. Still, ignorant hunkiness was better than no hunkiness at all.

“My hunkiness is your hunkiness,” I said, leering down at her.

Her arms came up around my neck. “I'm glad.”

Joshua's voice entered my consciousness.

“Pa, when you finish kissing Ma will you play ball?”

I held Zee gently against me.

“Pa? Will you?”

“I want to play, too,” said Diana's voice. “It's not fair if I don't get to play!”

“See what fertility gets you?” I whispered in Zee's ear. “This is all your doing.”

“Not quite mine alone,” said Zee, dropping a hand below my belly and gripping. “This had something to do with it.”

“Oh my, I guess you're right,” I said in my best falsetto.

We went to play with our children. Life seemed simple and good and as it ought to be. But not for long. The phone rang, and I went in to answer it.

It was the Chief, calling from the courthouse. “There's an assistant D.A. here. He wants to talk with your wife about what happened. How's she feeling? If she's not up to it, maybe I can hold him off awhile.”

I glanced out into the yard and saw that Zee was laughing.

“I'll ask her. She already made her statement, didn't she?”

“He wants to talk with her himself. You know how it
goes. Whenever there's a homicide, there's the possibility of a trial. D.A.'s thrive on being crime fighters, and this is a pretty high-profile case. Housewife out-shoots big-city gunmen and all that. He's got some questions and sooner or later she'll have to talk with him. You got a lawyer?”

“The only lawyer I know lives up in Boston. Why? Does she need a lawyer?”

“Everybody needs a lawyer one time or another.”

It's an age of litigation. “Wait,” I said. I went out and told Zee about the call. “What do you want to do?” I asked.

Her bruised face had lost its laughter. “I'll talk with the Chief.”

She went in and I tossed the ball between Josh and Diana, neither of whom was quite ready to try out for the Red Sox. After a while, Zee came outside, carrying her purse.

“I'll go down. I don't have anything to hide, and I want to get this past me.”

“Even people with nothing to hide need lawyers. Maybe I should call Brady Coyne.”

“Brady is in Boston. The D.A. is right here in Edgartown.”

I was an American and therefore by definition leery of people in authority. “I think I'll call him anyway. Maybe he knows somebody down here who can go with you.”

“I don't need anybody to go with me,” said Zee. “You stay here with the kids and I'll be back pretty soon.”

“I'm going with you.”

“No, you're not! I don't need tending!” Her voice was sharp. She walked to her little Jeep, got in without another glance at me, and drove away.

“Pa, throw the ball!”

I tossed it toward Diana. “You two play together for a while.”

I went inside and phoned Brady Coyne's office. Julie, his receptionist/secretary/factotum, answered. I had never met Julie, but I knew her voice well. Her voice said that Mr. Coyne was out.

“With or without his fly rod?”

“He's never without his fly rod, Mr. Jackson. You should know that.”

“Call me J.W. Yeah, it was a dumb question.”

“What can Mr. Coyne do for you, Mr. Jackson?”

“You hear the girl-guns-goons story?”

“Everybody's heard it. The NRA and I are in agreement about this one, for a change. How's your wife doing?”

“That's why I'm calling.” I told her about the assistant D.A.

“She should have waited,” said Julie. “Mr. Coyne visited a client in Amherst this morning, but he had me reschedule a couple of appointments he had this afternoon. There are a lot of trout streams out west of Boston, so there's no telling when he'll be back. The man has no sense of business at all. He's lucky that he's smart and has me to give him reality checks from time to time. I'll leave your message and tell him to call you when he gets in. Your wife probably did as well without a lawyer as she would have with one, so don't worry.”

But I did worry. And I worried some more when Zee finally got home, because she looked tired and irritated.

“How'd it go?”

“I didn't like him,” she said. “He reminded me of a snake.”

Another serpent in Eden.

“How about a drink? It's almost cocktail time.”

“Make mine a double.”

I made two doubles.

A reporter from a women's magazine called during supper and was thanked for the call and told that we'd be giving no interviews. She hoped I'd change my mind. I said I didn't think we would. Brady Coyne called about seven-thirty. I told him about the meeting between Zee and the snake.

“Well,” said Brady, “being a lawyer myself, I naturally think that people should never talk with D.A.'s or cops or anybody else without having their own lawyers right there, but most of us do it anyway, even lawyers who should know better. Let me talk with Zee.”

I handed Zee the phone and went back to trying to teach Joshua and Diana how to play chess. After a while, needing R and R, we changed to Crazy Eights. At the outer edge of my hearing zone, Zee seemed to be doing more listening than talking. When she hung up, she came and watched the game until it was bedtime for the tads. After we'd read to them and gotten them cozy under their blankets, we sat beside each other on the living room couch. I put my arm around her shoulders. She leaned against me.

“Brady says a lot of assistant D.A.'s look like snakes and that this case had gotten a lot of publicity so the D.A., being a political creature, is definitely going to see if he can get some brownie points from it for himself. He
asked me what the snake said and what I said and told me not to talk with anybody again unless I have a lawyer with me. He said he'd get in touch with an island lawyer and have him contact me. He said he'd contact the D.A. and let him know that he and my island lawyer were representing me from now on. He said he was pretty sure that the D.A. will eventually call a press conference to announce that he's not bringing any charges, but that you never really know, so I should just keep my mouth shut and give no interviews and go on with my life. I told him I would.”

“Good.”

“He said his fee would be our guest room during the derby this fall and a fishing partner to show him the hot spots.”

“Good again. The price is right.”

“But I don't know if I can really just get on with my life. I wonder if I'll ever get over this.”

I thought of the men and women who come home from war and get right back to regular living in spite of what they'd seen and done. It's always amazed me that almost all of them are completely normal people living completely normal lives.

“You probably won't get totally over it, but you will get on with your life. It'll take a while.”

She took my hand in hers and pulled my arm tighter around her as if she were cold in spite of the warm summer night. “You still have that bad war dream sometimes, even after all these years.”

I knew which dream she meant. It was the dream of the mortar attack on my platoon. In it I again heard the tremendous sounds and felt the shocks and saw the bushes and trees exploding and saw the blood, and the dream would blow me, terrorized, out of sleep, cold
and sweaty, not knowing if I was really shouting or just imagining that I was.

“It doesn't happen very often anymore,” I said. “ Living with you has kept it away. If you have any dreams about this business, I want to keep them away from you.”

“I'm a nurse, so I'm used to the results of violence. What I'm not used to is being the violent one. It makes me sick to think that I killed that man and would have killed the other one without a thought.”

“You didn't do it without a thought. You did it because you could still think clearly in spite of being hammered by a man twice your size. If you hadn't killed Logan and shot Trucker, they'd have killed you and Diana too. I'll always be in your debt for what you did. You saved my wife and daughter.”

She squeezed my hand. “My head tells me that, but some other part of me feels sick.”

“That's your goodness. If you didn't feel sick, you'd be just like Logan. Logan never felt sick about any violent thing he ever did. He killed people and maimed people and probably raped women and never lost a minute of sleep over it. You're not like Logan or Trucker or Sonny Whelen or any of their kind.”

She moved restlessly. “How long did it take you to get over shooting that thief in Boston, when you were a policeman?”

“It took a while,” I said. “It's gotten pretty distant, but I really don't want to forget it, because you shouldn't forget a thing like that.”

“I think that, too, because what's happened to me is like what happened to you. She shot you first, and she'd have killed you if you hadn't killed her.”

“She tried pretty hard, and I'd do what I did again, but it's a hell of a thing. Like Clint said in that movie, I
took everything she had and everything she ever would have.”

“Yes.” She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “Here we are. Mr. and Mrs. Killer Jackson.”

I looked down at her face. She wasn't crying, she was just staring at the fireplace.

“No, you're no killer. You're a good woman who had to kill a very bad man. Logan and Trucker and Whelen are the killers in this story. You saved Diana and yourself the only way you could.”

I was saying the same thing over and over, because it was all I could think of to say. I held Zee against me until it was time for bed. There I held her some more until, at last, she drifted into uneasy sleep.

The next morning, as I fed a mushroom and onion omelette to the starving cubs, Zee came out of the bedroom wearing her white uniform.

“I'm going in to work. I've been out most of the week. It's time to rejoin the world. I called in, and they need me.”

She'd used her makeup well, but Logan's blows were still evident in that split lip, the swelling of her jaw, and the dark bruise around one eye.

I nodded and pointed at her chair. “Good, but eat first.”

“I'll grab something at work.”

She kissed the kids and me, and left.

I wondered how the people she worked with would treat her. I figured that she wondered the same thing. Would she be heroine or pariah or neither? I hoped they'd just be glad to have her back. I was pleased, in any case, that she was going to work. I took it to mean that she was trying to put the shooting where it belonged: in
that half-forgotten file where we store our misfortunes and our self-doubts so we can get on with our lives.

The phone rang. I answered, listened, said thanks for the call but no interviews, and hung up.

After cleaning up the breakfast dishes I loaded the kids into the Land Cruiser and drove to the Edgartown police station, which not long before had been the envy of every other town on the island but which now was rivaled by the new Vineyard Haven station.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
I found the Chief in his office.

“Didn't I see you on television the other night?” I asked, while Joshua and Diana wandered around, looking at pictures on the walls and trying out chairs.

“I saw that myself, when I got home. I thought I looked very professional.”

“And all you told them was that the circumstances were under investigation. You were very cool.”

“Chief Cool, that's me. How's your wife doing?”

“She went to work this morning. How's the investigation going? I know Zee talked with somebody from the D.A.'s office yesterday.”

“If I were the D.A., I'd say it was self-defense and drop it, but I'm not the D.A. I'm only a simple small-town cop.”

Small-town, yes; simple, no.

“I'm trying to locate a fellow police officer of yours named Graham,” I said. “He's working up around Boston. I have a couple of other people looking for him, but I thought maybe you could help, too.”

“I work in Edgartown, not Boston. Who's this Graham guy?”

I told him what I'd been told. The Chief listened. When I was through, he said, “Haven't you had enough
trouble with Sonny Whelen? My advice to you is to get shuck of this whole business. Where's Rimini right now?”

Technically, I didn't know exactly where he was. Maybe he'd gone for a drive; maybe he was shopping at the A&P. “I don't know,” I said.

The Chief studied me, then shook his head. “You just can't leave things alone, can you?”

“Like I told you, Rimini is married to my ex-wife,” I said. “I'm only interested in him because of her. She's a good person and she and their kids don't deserve what's happening to them because of him.”

“You're not her husband anymore.”

“I know that.”

“You've got a family of your own to worry about.”

“I know that.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me. Then he shook his head. “You're a hopeless case, J.W. All right, I'll make a few calls and see if I can track down this Graham guy. But don't get your hopes up that I'll find him.” He reached into a drawer of his desk and brought out two lollipops. “Here, kids.”

“Thank you,” said my well-brought-up children, accepting his offerings.

We got back into the Land Cruiser and went home, where I opened some of the steamer clams Zee had stuck in the fridge, sliced up some onions, and deep-fat-fried an excellent high-calorie lunch for all three of us. Delish! I accompanied mine with two bottles of Sam Adams while the tads drank lemonade.

By the time I'd gotten things cleaned up, I was feeling pretty good, the way you do when your belly's just full enough, but not too full, of tasty food and drink. I put the rest of the clams in the freezer for future reference and,
it being a lovely warm day and the tide being right, informed Diana and Joshua that we were going to use the next couple of hours of the afternoon to get ourselves some mussels.

This plan proved popular, so we got into our bathing suits and I loaded buckets and gloves and life jackets for the kids into the old Toyota, and we drove to the landing at Eel Pond, where the mussels thrive.

When Joshua was only a babe, I'd built a floating kidholder for him out of inner tubes, so he could stay beside me, high and dry, while I went shellfishing. Later, when he was bigger and Diana was just a baby, I'd put her in this same kid-holder and had rigged up a single inner tube that would allow Josh to stand inside it but not fall through. Now both had graduated to regular kids' life jackets, which let them walk on the sand and mud and through the shallow water of the clam-flats, or float over the deep spots.

We walked to the right until we came to the narrows where the little island appears when the tide goes down, and crossed to the far side, me wading, the kids floating and paddling until their feet could reach the mud and sand again.

Eel Pond is full of shellfish: steamers, mussels, quahogs, scallops sometimes, and even some oysters. It has houses on three sides and a beach and an opening to Nantucket Sound on the east. Its entrance is too shallow for any boat with much draft, but small sail- and powerboats are anchored there all summer long, and it's such a popular spot for shellfishing that toward the end of summer the steamers get pretty hard to find. On the other hand, for reasons that elude me but for which I offer thanks to the sea gods, very few people gather mussels from the pond's banks. The result of this policy is
that I can get as many as I need anytime I need them, which is very fine since I hold mussels to be the sweetest and tastiest of all the Vineyard's shellfish.

It's easy to get them. All you do is pull them out of the mud beneath the grass that grows on the banks of the pond. They're smaller than most of the mussels you can buy in the A&P, and their shells aren't smooth, but they taste as good as any mussels ever made, and you can get all you want in a half hour.

Unless you have small helpers, in which case it takes longer because you have to keep an eye on them just in case they do any of the possibly dangerous things that you did when you were their age.

Such as wandering around a corner out of sight; or deciding that the far side of the pond, across a couple of hundred yards of over-a-kid's-head water, looks more interesting than the part you're standing on, and is worthy of a visit; or trying to extract a broken beer bottle sticking out of the mud.