Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,34

his last voyage north, he says, spreading his hands, and also some … let’s call it human error. A few pieces of cargo were lost. Word down at the docks is that one of those pieces found its way to land, and into the hands of—

He breaks off, laughs, and tells Timothy that he can probably guess the rest. Blackbeard is here to reclaim his property, and offer Timothy a small finder’s fee.

Timothy, to his surprise, finds that he is not nearly as frightened, standing at his new threshold with two seafaring drug-smugglers, as he was in the presence of Frank Sinatra. His breath remains regular. He shoves his hands into his pockets, and tells the truth.

“I sold it and bought this house.”

Blackbeard does not take the news in stride. He demands to be reimbursed in cash or cargo, and makes clear that his still-unintroduced colleague is conversant in the art of breaking legs.

Still, Timothy does not panic. He asks the men to follow him into his bedroom. From the top drawer of his dresser, he extracts an envelope, and from the envelope a thick wad of bills totaling five thousand dollars. This is all he has left from the sale, Timothy explains, and he offers the money to Blackbeard. In return for this gesture of good faith, he asks that Blackbeard be reasonable, and understand two things: first, that you cannot get water from a stone, and second, that a bale of marijuana is not a lost puppy, or an umbrella. When a man finds one, he can’t be expected to hold onto it until the rightful owner comes around.

Blackbeard’s face darkens, and Timothy adds that he will do everything possible to help the sailor recover his property from the man now in possession.

This man, Timothy assures him, is no stone.

Blackbeard stares at the professor for a moment, eyes narrow in the leathery pockets of his skin. Then he takes the envelope, hands it to his colleague, and growls, “Well?”

Haltingly, as if already regretting the deal, Timothy tells Blackbeard that the buyer is a man of tremendous wealth and discretion, whose name he does not know. But he is staying on a 168-foot yacht called The Southern Breeze; it is anchored in the middle of Vineyard Haven Harbor, between the drawbridge and the yacht club, accessible only by small craft. One must give the security guard a password in order to come aboard. The required phrase is “Cigar delivery from Mr. Castro.”

Blackbeard departs with threats and invective, pledging to return if Timothy’s rich customer gives him any trouble at all. That night, he and his colleague pilot a dinghy out to the yacht, equipped with a password, a plan, and a cache of small arms. They are not heard from again.

A wholly different version of the story holds that the entire bale of marijuana is eaten by goats. This is either accidental, or orchestrated. If orchestrated, the idea is to slaughter the livestock and sell the THC-laden meat, as a low-risk, high-reward method of alchemizing the marijuana into money.

This tale is always set in the mid-1980s, when recreational cocaine use is widespread, and hair-brained schemes abound. Most accounts claim the goats are killed as planned, and that for the remainder of the summer, the menu of a fine-dining establishment in Chilmark (long gone now, but infamous throughout the Reagan years for occasionally paying its kitchen staff in narcotics) features a fifty-eight-dollar braised goat stew. Despite the price, exorbitant even by the standards of Vineyard eateries, the dish sells out consistently.

An alternate telling has the goats, stoned out of their gourds, wandering off their owner’s property and laying tragicomic siege to a large outdoor wedding party being held on an adjacent plot. But such a thing is clearly too outrageous to be taken seriously.

PART II

SUMMER PEOPLE

BAD NIGHT IN HYANNISPORT

BY SETH GREENLAND

Hyannisport

I was dead. That was the main thing. And I never saw it coming. Maybe if I hadn’t been suffering from the worst hangover of my life I would have sensed something was amiss. The aftermath of a tequila bender can do that to you—dull your perceptions, make you a tad less sharp, create a membrane between you and reality that will keep your receptors from taking in the subtle signals that often spell the difference between survival and oblivion. That was the extent of the wisdom I had accrued over a lifetime: I was an expert on hangovers. But what do you expect from someone who had just turned