Death in the Polka Dot Shoes Read Free

oysters as fast as he could, then put them in a bottle of milk, threw back his head and let the whole concoction flow silently down his throat. By this method he could consume pounds of oysters in minutes. He won the Guinness contest, of course, coming home with enough prize money to keep him wet for months. But the strain of ready cash was too much for his heart. One Saturday afternoon, after the final round of the St. Michael’s oyster eating contest, he was bent over the gunnels of his work boat dispensing with the excesses of his competition, when he died.
    The boys at the Bayfront, realizing that Gunnels had no family or money, arranged to have him cremated. In a ceremony still honored in Parkers, they lined up their work boats, headed out to the Bay, and dumped Gunnels’ ashes right in the middle of the Holland Point oyster bed. The final irony of his life was that in the end, the oysters got to eat him.
    Gunnels is still honored at the Bayfront with a picture of him beside a stack of oyster shells. The picture comes down occasionally, when Mabel Fergus, who owns the place, becomes “tired of looking at his ugly face,” as she puts it. But after a few months, it always reappears in a different corner of the dining room.
    This story flashed through my mind because I knew I had seen that girl with the watermen before, and I think it was at the Bayfront. She was very attractive and I wondered if she knew my bother, or just came to be with the boys. Either explanation was possible. I knew most of the crabbers because they were either just behind me in school, or were men my father had worked with. There seemed to be a missing group, my class at South County High, but I knew no reason for it. Other than there were a couple of really bad crabbing years in the early 1980s, and most fathers simply discouraged their sons from staying on the water. In my case, I didn’t want to. I had a longing for fast cars, pretty girls, finely starched shirts, linen table cloths and long airplane trips to unknown places. Those dreams required getting out of Parkers.
    The memorial service ended, and my brother’s friends were standing around outside, smoking or talking. They started drifting back toward the church for a basement reception, which I was not looking forward to attending. That’s where the old women in floral print dresses and heavy shoes want to bestow a big kiss and a hug on the bereaved relatives, in this case, me. They seem to think a bosomy hug somehow eases the pain, when in fact it squashes the cigars in my breast pocket and leaves strange smells around my neck. I could do without that.
    I had smoked cigarettes in college in order to look cool, and once in the law firm, where the pressure to produce was palpable, my habit had grown to nearly three packs a day. I had ignored all the warnings, the television ads, the government studies, and the statistics on lung cancer. Growing up, everyone I knew smoked. Most of the watermen smoked, from long days of hard repetitive work on the water. So it seemed natural that I would pick up the habit. But one day my lungs started to ache, and worse, breathing actually made a noise. I could hear a low groan with every breath, and it scared me. It was impossible to ignore, or to rationalize away. Breathing should not make a noise. So I started the terrible process of trying to stop, cold turkey, then two cigarettes a day, then one cigar in the evening. The cigar seemed to work, although I knew of course that it was not good for me. Then I convinced myself that one cigar, no inhaling, was alright. And the noise in my lungs stopped. That’s how I came to always have a cigar in my pocket, even at my brother’s memorial service.
    In addition, my favorite place to smoke was in the car. I didn’t smoke at home because of the smell and dirty ash trays. But driving was like a personal smoking lounge, with the window cracked for fresh air and no passengers to