Off Season (5 page)

“Okay, okay. Angie Bettencourt told me all about it the other day. She and Helene go way back, and I guess they still talk a lot.”

I could feel Zee get a little stiff. “I didn't know you and Angie were still seeing each other.”

I was suddenly irritated. “We met at the A & P, down by the fruit and vegetables where we always
have our passionate encounters. Nobody pays any attention to us there, and we can put our pants on the potatoes while we cuddle on the floor. You know how Angie is. She can't restrain herself, but she hates to have her clothes get dirty.”

Zee was not amused. “Don't be funny with me. Have you been seeing her?”

I tried to push my temper away. “Look, I see Angie about once in a blue moon. We bump into each other at the store or on the street now and then. We don't date and we haven't for years.”

“I'll bet she'd like to!”

“I don't know about that.” I was at once angry and worried. “Are you okay?”

“Let me go.” I did, and she got up and stood, rubbing one arm with her hand in a nervous way. “I don't know . . . All right, I'm sorry I said that about you and Angie. I don't know what's the matter with me lately. I guess I'm just nervous about . . .”

“About what? About getting married?” I stood up, too.

“Yes, I guess so. Look, I'm sorry . . . I think I'd better go on home.”

“Wait,” I said. I put my arms around her and she let me pull her to me. I held her taut body against mine for a moment, then kissed the top of her head and stepped back. I put my hands on her shoulders, and looked down into her great, dark eyes. When my voice seemed ready for words, I said, “I love you. I want to marry you. I know you must wonder how much your life will change if we get married, and I understand that the idea must be nerve-racking sometimes. I want you, but I don't want to push you, and I don't want you to do anything you're not sure you want to do. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Her voice seemed small.

“When we marry, I plan on having it last as long as we both live, so I want you to be sure.”

She shook her head, and the lamplight glittered on her long, dark hair. “Oh, I am sure. It's just that I get so touchy sometimes that I don't like myself.”

“I want you to be happy. I'd rather have that than to be married to you.”

She put her arms around my waist, and laid her head against my chest. Her voice seemed lost in my shirt. “I love you, but I'm going home. I don't feel like very good company tonight.”

I tried a joke. “Excellent. I'm not very good company.”

She tightened her arms around me. “Yes, you are.” She lifted her lips and gave me a kiss, then stepped away. “I'll see you later. Thanks for supper. It was super. A super supper.” She gave a wan smile and went out.

I felt empty as a new tomb. What had happened? A wonderful day had turned into mud in the blink of an eye. I walked around like a robot, picking up dishes, washing them, and stacking them in the rack beside the sink. I straightened up the living room, tried to read, then tried to sleep, then listened to the radio beside my bed far into the night. I put out my hand to touch Zee, but of course she was not there. I was awake a long time.

“it's just nerves,” said Manny Fonseca, pouring coffee from his thermos into a cup. “When I got married, I almost wet my pants, I was so nervous. It's normal to be jumpy. Don't worry about her.”

To the east, the sky was brightening over the Edgartown Great Pond. Our blind was west of the pond, and there were ducks out there in the middle of it, talking to each other in that way ducks have of quacking when they know they're beyond shotgun range. The brightening water and sky showed a flight of a dozen or so birds coming in from the south, but too far out to give us a shot.

It wasn't miserable enough to be a really good day for duck hunting, but there was a cold wind off the ocean, and some promising storm clouds upwind, so Manny and I were not without hope.

Manny had been married a long time, and considered himself an expert on the subject of matrimony. Maybe he was.

“I changed my mind a dozen times after Helen and me got engaged, and she did too,” said Manny, sipping his coffee while eyeing the sky in hopes of seeing a shootable duck. “I was having fun being single, you know, and I didn't want to give it up. But I didn't want to give Helen up either. You know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Anyway, I almost called it off, then she almost called it off, then we tied the knot.”

“Wet pants and all.”

“Yeah!” He laughed. “Fifteen years, now.” He paused and frowned. “Or is it sixteen? Geez . . .”

Small flights of ducks flew in from the west and north, and landed out toward the middle of the pond. All out of range, of course. Most of duck hunting consists of sitting in a blind being cold and uncomfortable and not getting to shoot at ducks. They, like Canada geese, will let you come right up to them until the day hunting season starts, then they start hanging around out in the middle of ponds where you can barely see them. All of which once more raised the question: who were the real birdbrains out here, anyway?

I poured some more coffee to ward off the chill of sunrise. A single duck came over us from the west. Too high. Manny raised his gun, but didn't shoot.

“Anytime now,” he said, lowering the gun.

“Any news on the Norton land?”

“Nope. Saw Nash Cortez, though. A couple of days ago. He said he was thinking of suing Mimi Bettencourt for assault.”

“With a water pistol?”

“Hey, don't ask me. I'm no lawyer. You know Nash. He likes to give Mimi and her crowd a hard time.” He gave me a thoughtful look. “Tell me, did you ever get the impression that Nash is just putting on a show?”

In fact, I had. There was something contrived about Nash's ranting and raving about Mimi and her animal rights friends.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, you know, it's like he's showing off, or something. Like a kid who'll burn rubber driving his car out of a lot, or who'll risk his neck swinging from a tree, or some fool thing like that. You know what I mean?”

“Maybe.”

“On the other hand, maybe he really is going to sue Mimi.”

“Good grief, what next?”

“Well, archery season for deer is coming up in a couple of weeks. I think Nash is going to get himself a license, even though I don't think he ever shot an arrow in his life. He'll probably get himself a black powder license, too, just so he can give those animal rights people more to stew about in December.”

“Does Nash have a cap and ball rifle?”

“He came by my place and looked at my Hawken, and had me show him how to measure powder and like that, so maybe he's planning to get himself a black powder gun. Look there! Here they come!”

He pointed and I turned. Four ducks were coming past, flying low.

“I'll take the two high ones on the right,” I said, and swung my gun up. I led the first duck and popped my cap. The duck folded and fell, arching down toward the water. Beside me, Manny's gun barked, then barked again. I led the second of my ducks, but it swerved away as I shot, and was quickly out of range. Manny's two ducks curved into the water. Since Manny was about twice as good a shot as I was, I wasn't surprised that he'd gotten twice as many ducks.

We reloaded. Manny had a little six-foot dinghy that we'd brought out in the back of the Land Cruiser, and I got into that and rowed out to retrieve the three ducks. The wind was cold across the water, but I decided it was going to be a nice day after all, in spite of the storm clouds down off South Beach. It wasn't going to be a nice day for these three ducks, of course. Their nice days were over.

Between mid-October and mid-December, and then in late January and early February, there is a lot of hunting on Martha's Vineyard. Goose and duck seasons usually start in mid-October, and pheasant
season starts a week later. Normally, the archery season for deer starts in early November and runs for two or three weeks, then the regular deer hunting season replaces it toward the end of the month. In December you can hunt ducks and geese again, and in the middle of the month you can hunt deer with black powder rifles for a couple of days. Finally, you can try for geese again for a week or so in late January and early February. The more you like miserable weather, the more you like hunting. My appetite for being cold and wet was not as great as it once had been, so I only got out now and then.

“I had a bow and arrow once,” I said. “I made the bow out of a piece of yew, and made arrows out of willows. I used any feathers I could find. I was inspired by Errol Flynn as Robin Hood. I knew a guy who kept horses and who had baled hay in his barn. I used to sneak in there and shoot my arrows into the baled hay. It was a lot of fun. You're a noble redskin, so you should know all about that sort of thing.”

Manny Fonseca was a firearms enthusiast who for years had thought of himself as just another islander whose ancestors had come over from the Azores. However, he had recently discovered that he had just enough Wampanoag blood in him to qualify as an official member of the tribe, and he had made a rapid social adjustment. Now he tapped his Remington automatic.

“No more of that bow and arrow crap for us original Americans. Look what that got us. Lost the whole damned country to a bunch of paleface outcasts from over the big sea water just because they had fire sticks and we didn't. Bad mistake. Next time the white eyes get the bows and arrows and we get the gunpowder. Were you any good?”

“No. Crooked arrows don't go where they're supposed to. If Crazy Horse, or whoever it was, had equipment as bad as mine, he'd never have whupped Custer.”

“Hey, you got it. Out there on the Little Big Horn, the U.S. Cavalry wasn't the only ones with rifles, and see what happened. Maybe if they'd had all this newfangled archery gear back then, compound bows and all, my relatives would have massacred yours just as easy as they did with guns. Modern archery equipment is really something.”

“Anglo technology,” I said. “We'll get you guys out of the Stone Age, yet. Pretty soon you'll be wearing regular clothes just like us, and you won't have to live in skin tents anymore, either. You'll like it.”

“Here comes one,” said Manny.

“it's yours.”

Manny lifted his gun, but the duck swung away and went off to the north. We heard a shot from another blind up that way, but the duck kept flying until it was only a dot in the sky.

Manny sat down again. “Mimi Bettencourt and her pals used to belong to an archery club or something, did you know that?”

“No. Must have been a long time ago.”

“They wore white uniforms and they shot at targets. I saw some pictures of them once. Maybe it was back when they were in college.”

“Where'd you ever see pictures like that?”

“At Mimi's house. Several years back. I was up there doing some cabinet work for her and Gus, and there was this album. Angie and Heather were looking at it. They thought their moms looked pretty funny in those uniforms. I didn't think they looked so bad, myself. Nice-looking young girls back then. I was married when I saw those pictures, but that didn't mean I
was blind.” He cocked an eye at me. “You don't get blind when you get married, you know.”

“I know. So you have a Hawken, eh?”

All I knew about a Hawken was that it was a muzzle-loading rifle that had been popular in the nineteenth century during the early hunting days out west. But for the time being, I had had enough advice about being married, and I knew that all I had to do was mention a gun to Manny, and he would forget everything else and entertain me forever with talk about firearms. He loved guns and all the equipment that went with them, and he did not disappoint me. He told me more than I wanted to know about powder, flint, caps, balls and other subjects of small arms conversation. By the time he was done, it was time for us to collect our decoys and go home. Manny had to go to work.

I dropped him off at his house, and went home and dressed out my duck and put it in the freezer. Then, because my house felt lonesome, I decided to go down to the Dock Street Coffee Shop for breakfast. I liked having an occasional meal there both because the food was good and reasonable, and because the cook was a master of his work whose every move was a model of efficiency, grace and beauty, although he no doubt would have been surprised to hear about it.

I was finishing up a second cup of coffee when someone slipped onto the stool beside me. I glanced up and found myself looking into the dark green eyes of, wouldn't you know?, Angie Bettencourt.

Angie was about five four, weighed about one ten, had yellow-brown hair and looked quite smashing in her neat skirt and blouse. Once I had seen a great deal of all of Angie, and though that had been some time ago, I had not forgotten.

“Hi,” she said in her throaty voice.

“Angela. Aren't you supposed to be working? How
can this great nation of ours be expected to prosper if its ace entrepreneurs hang around in coffee joints instead of keeping at the old cash registers?”

Angie owned Angie's Place, a snappy clothing store in Vineyard Haven which catered to youthful, wealthy and wild-dressing women, some of whom were year-rounders, but most of whom came to the island in the summer.

“It's Sunday,” said Angie. “The store is closed. I'm going to church when I leave here. You should come, too. Do you good. You're a lost soul.”

Sunday. When you live the way I do, it doesn't make much difference which day it is, so you don't keep track. I like it that way. I wondered if that would have to change when I got married. Probably, since Zee had a regular job. Then I wondered if I was still going to get married.

“You've got enough soul for both of us,” I said. “You can represent my spiritual interests and make my donation for me.”