Billingsgate Shoal

Billingsgate Shoal

Rick Boyer
1982

For my parents,
Betty
and Paul Boyer,
and for Tiny

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The places in this book are real; the people aren't.

The author wishes to thank those who helped in the
various stages of the manuscript's development: Captain Leo Jordan
and his staff of the United States Coast Guard; Detective Lieutenant
Jack Dwyer of the Massachusetts State Police; Dana Booth, D.M.D.;
David Savageau, friend and advisor; and the numerous fishermen I
spoke with on the docks of New England. Any errors or
inconsistencies, deliberate or accidental, are mine.

I owe special thanks to Elaine for keeping the faith,
and the greatest gratitude of all to my training wheels: Larry
Kessenich and Bill Tapply.
 
 

LOOMINGS

CALL ME Doc.

I'm Charles Adams, a doctor who lives with his wife,
Mary, and two almost-grown sons in Concord, Massachusetts. I'm an
oral surgeon, a cross between a doctor and a dentist, who performs
tooth extractions and general and cosmetic surgery of the lower face
and jaw.

My most interesting recent operation was quick,
spontaneous, and without benefit of surgeon's tools or anesthetic. I
cut a human head in two, right down the middle. Deliberately. The
operation was a success because the patient died.

Listen: I didn't ask for any of it. If anyone had
told me that all the pain and killing would begin with my sneaking a
look at a stranded fishing boat I would have called them nuts. It
sure looked innocent enough. It was just sitting out there on the
sand flats. It looked like a Winslow Homer watercolor. . .
 

CHAPTER ONE

TWO AND A half miles directly offshore from our
cottage in Eastham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, lies Billingsgate
Shoal. It appears on nautical charts in a color between that of
either land or sea. This is because Billingsgate is a sunken island
and is visible only briefly, in all its soggy splendor, twice a day
at tide's farthest ebb.

The body of water that surrounds the island in this
corner of Cape Cod Bay is called Billingsgate Sound, and stretches
around the sunken island from Eastham on the south to the entrance of
Wellfleet Harbor on the north. The sound is a bank rich in mollusks,
especially the large marine clam called quahog, which is excellent in
chowder, and the small, delicate, and tasty bay scallop (not to be
confused with its larger cousin and sea scallop). Besides the proper
conditions to promote the growth of these mollusks, Billingsgate
Sound also has a large number of spider crabs, which dine almost
exclusively on starfish. Since the starfish is the primary predator
of the mollusks, one can see, by following the steps of this rude
syllogism, that there must be fewer starfish here and (ergo) more
mollusks. This is so.

At high water the small bay trawlers, dozens of them,
can be seen in the distance, crawling across the water hauling their
big metal chain-link drags on the ocean floor behind them. Sometimes
the wind shifts, bringing with it the faint growl and whine of their
diesels. Another constant sound is the hoot of the groaner buoy at
the foot of Billingsgate. It goes hoooo-ooooot! every fifteen
seconds, round the clock, and is saying keep away. . .

To the south, on the horizon in a direct line between
our cottage and the village of West Brewster, lies the wreck of the
James Longstreet. It was wrecked there deliberately by the United
States government. This old Liberty Ship from the Second World War
was towed in and sunk in the shallow water to be used as a target for
the navy and air force. Planes dive at it, pelting the ancient
concrete hulk with cannon and rocket fire. It is said that the
Longstreet is "a bunch of holes held together by their rims."
It's an apt description. The derelict ship sits immobile, ruined, on
the horizon.

Our cottage is situated on a bluff overlooking
Billingsgate Sound. At low tide it is a place of frightening
vastness, haunting noises, and optical tricks. No trees. Low sand
hills. Miles and miles of marsh grass and water weed. And most
desolate of all are the endless sand flats that grow for miles in the
slow wake of the receding tides. These are absolutely flat and
barren. People walk out on these vast stretches of damp sand. Some
carry odd-shaped bent garden forks—these to dig out the quahogs,
razor clams, and bay scallops. You could live off these flats with no
problem whatsoever; the only thing not provided is the chilled
chablis.

But most of the people aren't diggers—they're
beachcombers, people on vacation who wander out to see what there is
to find. From a mile away they look like moving specks. Tall, dark,
slow-moving lines are adults. Short specks that dawdle, or run on
winking legs, are children. Sometimes you can see low specks that
travel with incredible speed, and leap into the air. The faint
barking tells you they are dogs. Occasionally the wind will bring the
sound of laughter, or a mother calling a child, from miles away. And
it is weird, even unsettling, to hear the voices and laughter
clearly, coming from these tiny dots that move slowly to and fro on
the shimmering sand far, far away.

It is quiet when the tide is out. Gone is the crump
and hiss of breaking waves. The gulls don't shriek overhead; they are
out on the flats, waddling around officiously pausing, pecking,
squabbling, and gobbling up the tiny hermit crabs—no bigger than
garden spiders—that scamper in the shallow tide pools.

"Looming" is what Melville called it, an
optical phenomenon caused by thermal inversions in the atmosphere.
These thermal inversions have the effect of layering the air, and
these layers, like the elements of a lens, cause light waves to bend,
allowing objects beyond the horizon to seem to be visible. The object
floats high over the horizon upside down and shimmers ghostlike in
the dancing air currents. It happens a lot in our corner of the bay.

The far-off sounds, the wrecked ship, the ghostly and
desolate flats—all of these add to the general feeling of the
place. And if a vacation is a change, then Sunken Meadow Beach
overlooking Billingsgate Sound is a vacation indeed from the pine
forests, hills, and thick meadows of Concord.

One morning in late summer I got up a bit too early.
Three hours too early. It was getting to be a habit. I couldn't
sleep. Moe Abramson, my colleague, said it was only a midlife
reshuffling of values and not to worry. He gave me pills to help my
depression and insomnia. Mary said it was because I'm an idealist and
dreamer, and wanted everything to be perfect. She gave me loving and
scolding to help my depression and insomnia.

Gee, I had lots of help.

It wasn't working.

Every night for three weeks I had risen between three
and four A.M. Not rested. I had awakened exhausted and irritable. The
month-long vacation was supposed to cure all this.

It didn't. It seemed to intensify it. Mary, my
short-suffering wife, wasn't about to put up with much more of my
Weltschmerz.

"Shape up or take a hike, pal," was her
comment.

Who could blame her?

So there I was at five A.M., out on the deck of our
cottage gazing off over Cape Cod Bay. The tide was out; I was looking
mostly at the immense expanse of tidal flats. It was so early all
things were dim and blurry. Most of what I looked at was full of the
fuzzy little specks of nighttime vision. I was I still half asleep.
or was I asleep—fina1ly—and dreaming this? No. I was awake. I'd
almost forgotten what sleep felt like. I sat and propped my feet up
on the railing and stared at the vast gray emptiness before me. I
waited an hour. I could either take a downer and return to the sack
or have coffee and make it another early day. I decided on the
coffee. When it was perking I heard the bedroom door open and Many
came out in her robe. She comes to coffee like a buzzard to a bloated
carcass. She can see and smell it—sense it—a mile .away.

She sat down next to me with her mug and drew the
robe tight around her. In the semi-darkness she looked very dark,
like a black woman. When a Calabrian spends three weeks on the beach
the results are awesome.

"Again huh?"

"Uh huh."

There was a slow sigh.

"How far did you run `yesterday?"

"Seven miles."

"And you took two sauna baths. You had a split
of wine with a big dinner. And you can't sleep?"

"I think the running makes you sleep less. You
sleep harder or something. But that's not it. Basically, toots, I
don't want to be who I am."

She absorbed this minor detail in silence.

"You what?"

"I don't want to be Dr. Charles Adams,
tooth-puller."

"I'm so worried about you lately, Charlie. We
thought the month down here would help you, but I think it's made
things worse."

"I think you're right. And now I'm beginning to
see what the problem really is."

"What?" She looked at me, searching for a
ray of hope.

"Boredom. It's what you've been saying, Mary:
we've got it. We've done it. So what do we do now? I think what set
this whole depression off was a line I read in John Berryman's Dream
Songs."

"Who? What? Never heard of him."

"John Berryman was an alcoholic poet who ended
his life by doing a swan dive off a bridge at the University of
Minnesota and blasting himself to pieces on the rocks a hundred feet
below."

"Oh that John Berryman. Christ, no wonder you're
depressed."

"No. His death was the good part. The 'funsies'
at the end. It's the words he wrote, a line from Dream Songs that's
got me down. It's got me down because it's so damn true."

"And the line is'?"

" 'Life, friends, is boring. We must not say
so.' "

Another silence.

"That's it?"

"Yep."

"Well, Charlie, I think you should go and see
Moe Abramson on a regular basis."

"Nah. I already asked him about therapy and he
said I don't need it. But I'll tell you, this vacation has done me no
good and I don't want to return to my practice. I don't seem to want
to do anything, including sleep. It's all boring, Mary. BORING!"

She snuggled her fanny down on my lap and put her
arms around my neck. Thank God for her at least—

"What about Betsy Kelly?"

I luxuriated in the thought of Betsy Kelly (which is
not her real name). If I want anything on my tombstone (and I suppose
I'm bound to have one—another discouraging thought), it's the fact
that I performed a four-hour operation on a girl that changed her
appearance, personality, and her whole life.

Betsy Kelly was born, poor thing, with a prognathic
jaw so pronounced it made her look like a cross between a bulldog and
Tyrannosaurus Rex. Needless to say, she wasn't pretty. But four hours
under the knife, bone saw, chisel, and mallet had made her emerge
looking not only normal, but almost pretty. Her parents cried and
wrung my hands for three hours. That wasn't pulling teeth.

"If all my patients were Betsy Kellys I'd be the
happiest person on earth."

"But you're not."

"No. I'm dissatisfied and bored."

"Look: you can't keep being a dropout, Charlie.
You left medicine after two years—"

"When Peter died."

"When Peter died. Then you settled on
dentistry."

"That was really boring—"

"Fine. Then you compromised on oral surgery, a
profession that combined medicine, surgery, and dentistry. You're
good at it. You've provided for us well with it, you—What are you
staring at?"

"There's something out on Billingsgate. A dark
blob. See it?"

"Uh huh. But what I'm driving at is, that's two
dropouts in your life, Charlie. You can't do it again. You're almost
fifty. Especially when you're so good—"

"It looks small from here. But of course—it's
over two miles away. It's not a tent or trailer. It's gotta be a
boat—"

"I think Moe can have you squared away in no
time. And I think you should read Passages. It explains a lot about
these midlife crises."