Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,30

man that you are, and more than just a little broken. That might be enough for me.

Maybe later tonight, I’ll take you by the hand, the one that’s shaking even now when it’s taped behind your back, and we’ll take a walk together out into the water, the very same water. But it’s not the same water, it’s different. Maybe that’s okay.

So maybe we’ll walk out there, past the jetty, up to our waists in water, and just stand there and feel the cold all around us. Then maybe, at the very least, you’ll admit who you are and what you did to him and what you did to me.

VARIATIONS ON A

FIFTY-POUND BALE

BY ADAM MANSBACH

Martha’s Vineyard

It is generally agreed upon that at some point during the last several decades, a fifty-pound bale of commercialgrade marijuana, sealed in plastic and lashed with burlap, was found bobbing no more than a thousand feet off Menemsha Beach, in the calm waters separating Martha’s Vineyard from the privately owned, unpopulated Elizabeth Islands.

No consensus is to be had regarding the discoverer of this child-sized brick (child-sized in the sense of weighing as much as a ten-year-old, not in the sense of being an appropriate portion for a preadolescent), nor its fate. The consistency with which otherwise divergent tales pinpoint the size and location suggest a singular event, much as the persistence of flood myths across the whole of the world’s indigenous cultures is taken as evidence that some such cataclysm did occur. The bale is never forty pounds, or sixty; it is never found floating off Lucy Vincent Beach in Chilmark by nudist Jews, or spotted undulating in the frothy surf of Edgartown’s South Beach by salmon trouser–clad Republicans.

No version accounts for how a solitary swimmer—it is always a solitary swimmer, and the bale is always sighted from the beach, never a boat—managed to maneuver this ottomanshaped prize back to the island’s most public beach without attracting the kind of attention he would doubtlessly seek to avoid.

There are two possibilities. One is that the bale was not spotted during the summer months, and thus the beach was deserted, the boat slips empty, the Hatfield-and-McCoy bloodfeuding fish stores closed. Launching oneself into the ocean in the dead of winter or the dying of fall would have required far greater curiosity or bravery or foolishness or intuition on the part of the swimmer, or else previous experience in large-scale drug trafficking. Perhaps he had one of those. Perhaps he had several.

But if it was summer—as seems likely, that being when people go to the beach—the swimmer would have decided to come ashore somewhere more private. Menemsha Beach ends a few hundred yards east, past a stone jetty. The coastline bunches, like a piece of fabric caught in a sewing machine, and all the land is private. Probably, the swimmer found an inlet or a dock, stashed his bale, and came back for it later with a car. Presumably, the teenage lifeguard on duty was too busy flirting or applying zinc oxide to his nose to notice any of this, or he didn’t care, or he was a friend of the swimmer’s and it was his car in which the bale rode home. Or else the swimmer was the lifeguard himself, which would make a lot of sense: binoculars, elevated chair, nautical aptitude.

It is also possible that it was simply 1973 when all this happened, and nobody raised an eyebrow at a bale of weed, so the swimmer just hauled it straight up onto the sand, where everybody slapped him on the back and said things like “Far out, man,” and grabbed fistfuls to take home.

In one popular version of the story, the guy—let’s call him Zonk—decides the best way to maximize profits (or the only way to make any sales) is to move the load piecemeal, smallbore, eighth-ounces, quarters, dime bags. Who cares how long it takes? Hell, the longer the better so long as it means he doesn’t have to work.

Zonk is an islander, knows everybody, does a little carpentry and a little fishing and plays guitar in a bar band just like fifty or a hundred other still-young-but-getting-older catch-as-catch-can good-time Island Charlies. It’s the 1970s, and Zonk’s got a beat-to-shit Ford pickup he tools around in, only it’s broken at the moment, needs a new fan belt, so he’s been hitching. Luckily, the mechanics at Up-Island Garage are all stoners, so by the weekend Zonk is up and running. He throws the whole bale into