Vineyard Blues Read Free Page B

a deal,” said Zee. “Win-win for us.”
    â€œFor me, too,” said Corrie. “Things do work out at times.”
    We sold the extra fish and dropped Corrie off with the three he’d caught. I handed him a fillet knife, since I doubted that there would be one in the house.
    â€œI’ll use this on these fish and put them in the fridge, then I got to put in some practice,” said Corrie, leaning over the driver’s-side window and looking in at us. “Old fingers ain’t as limber as they used to be. Got to keep ’em loose.”
    â€œI’ll pick you up at five.”
    â€œWhat a dump,” said Zee as we drove away. “There ought to be a law against renting out places like that. They should make Ben Krane live in one of these slums he owns!”
    â€œThere is a law,” I said. “It’s just that there aren’t enough cops to enforce it. If they tried to keep track of every illegally occupied house in Edgartown, they wouldn’t have time to do anything else. Besides, where would the college kids live if they didn’t live in one of Ben’s outhouses?”
    â€œI know, I know. But it’s disgusting.”
    Someone, maybe God, agreed with that assessment, because in early spring someone had torched one of Ben’s houses and hadn’t been caught yet. The year before, the same thing had happened to Ben’s Oak Bluffs office. I didn’t have any more idea than the cops did about who had burned the house, but as for the Oak Bluffs job, I attributed that to some in-town fire starter.
    Oak Bluffs, one of the island’s three biggest towns, which doesn’t mean much in terms of population since only about twelve thousand people live on the whole island in the winter, is rightly famous for its Victorian gingerbread houses and its long-standing tradition of racial diversity, particularly as a summer resort for well-to-do Afro-Americans. As perhaps is unknown to its tourists and summer population, but is well known to year-round islanders, OB is also renowned for its hot-headed political factions. Typical small-town squabbles are squared or even cubed in Oak Bluffs, where no political decision is non-controversial and petty violence and vitriol are the norm: insults are exchanged in the newspapers and during town business meetings, cars of political figures are keyed and have their tires slashed and their windows broken, and occasionally someone gets a bloody nose.
    Ben Krane, being at once a lawyer, a realtor, and the owner of some of the most disgraceful summer rentals on the island, naturally had his share of enemies, and in my view some OB citizen had torched his office for public or private reasons. In any case, Ben had not rebuilt in Oak Bluffs, but had reestablished his office in Edgartown, where tempers might run as high but actions were much more restrained. They don’t burn people out in Edgartown, they chill them out.
    Like the office fire, the blaze that later had leveled Ben’s big old rotten rental house was very overtly a case of arson.
    From Zee’s point of view, the fire was just fine since no one had gotten hurt and Ben now had one less slum to rent out at exorbitant prices to summer kids. She wouldn’t have minded if all such buildings burned down. It was a widely agreed-upon assessment. Ben Krane, rich and getting richer, was not a beloved figure with the local health board, the police, the neighbors of his decaying buildings, or the kids who rented his places, who were getting ripped off and knew it but didn’t know what to do about it except trash the places when they left and leave them in even worse shape than they found them when they moved in. Ben publicly howled at their ingratitude and often refused to return the kids’ security deposits, but never fixed anything up more than he absolutely had to before renting the place out again the next summer for even more money. And he didn’t