A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard by Philip R. Craig Read Free Book Online Page B

traditions, but I consider it to be an unfriendly town because of its politics. I mean, you not only can’t park beside its roads to go fishing or lie on the beach, there are signs that forbid even pausing to unload passengers. Worse yet, the town parking lot charges two arms and a leg to park there, and the only public toilets are pay toilets. Any place with pay toilets is a place to avoid, such facilities being an affront to God herself.
    But Zee and I didn’t completely bypass that end of the island. The fishing was too good, and we had friends who lived up there and who let us park in their yards when we wanted to fish under the cliffs, thus allowing us to avoid the clutches of the ever avaricious Gay Head distributors of parking tickets.
    Two of these friends were Toni and Joe Begay. Joe, whose folks still lived out in Arizona, near Oraibi, had, long ago, been my sergeant in an Oriental war, but now, after a long and little-discussed career in odd parts of the world, he had settled down with island-born Toni in a house not far from the famous cliffs. They and their new girl-child Hanna lived a quiet life while Joe and Toni, likeZee and I, tried to figure out how to play the parenting game. Toni and Zee had grown close even before both had become pregnant, and now that they were the mothers of actual living and breathing children about whose care they knew not too much, they were even closer, and inclined, as new mothers often are, to participate in long mom talks about their babies and the trials and pleasures of motherhood. The failure of males to be enthralled by such conversations was, as Zee observed with tart sympathy, another liability of the Y chromosome.
    I took Drew Mondry first to Squibnocket Beach, where, after the daytime sun seekers have gone home, the bass fishermen love to prowl, then on to Lobsterville Beach, where there’s more good fishing (if you can find a parking place), then up to the cliffs themselves. There, after making three circles before I could find a free place to park, I led Mondry up between the fast-food joints and the shops selling Taiwan-made Gay Head souvenirs, past Toni Begay’s shop, which actually sold American Indian crafts, to the lookout at clifftop. From there, looking to our right, we could see the bright clay precipice, see across the sound to Cuttyhunk and, far away, the edges of America itself.
    To the south lay No Mans Land, that curious island which at one time had been a combination of bird sanctuary and navy bombing range. What a mixture of uses. Now the navy had gone away, but even before that the birds had thrived there in spite of the bombs. Recalling this, I immediately thought of wretched Lawrence Ingalls, who had closed Norton’s Point because of his misplaced conviction that ORVs were responsible for the dearth of piping plovers on those sands. Loathsome Lawrence.
    â€œYou’re clouding,” said Zee, looking up at me when I stopped talking. “What are you thinking about?”
    â€œNothing,” I said, pushing the cloud off my face and putting on an artificial smile.
    She frowned, not fooled. “It’s something.”
    â€œI’m thinking about Immanuel Kant,” I said. Immanuelhad once observed that the possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason. Maybe that was what had happened to Lawrence Ingalls. Maybe he’d been fine before he’d gotten to be a state biologist. If so, he wasn’t the first person whose brain shrank as his power grew. Old Immanuel’s generalization was a good one.
    Zee decided to let it go. She put a finger under Joshua’s chin and smiled down at him. “Immanuel Kant, eh? Well, if Immanuel can’t, who can?”
    Joshua laughed and drooled. Apparently he’d not heard that old one before.
    â€œWe’ll go there next,” I said to Mondry, pointing down to the narrow beach at the foot of the cliffs. “On the way I’ll introduce you to