DESPERATE ISLAND

CHAPTER 1 The call came early, the words reverberating like a thunderclap across Vineyard Sound. Roused from her Ambien-sweetened slumber, Binnie Bartok struggled to make sense of the voice on the phone. It was the most awful news. Jib Nickerson was on life support at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. He wasn’t expected to live out the day. A vigil was already underway at the Chilmark Community Center. Bring a pie or something more fortifying. Everybody would be there. It was both her memory of the man and now the unseemly manner of his demise that so rattled Binnie Bartok’s brain. Jib Nickerson. Yes. The dark, muscled, princely-handsome lobsterman she once loved in a way she had loved few other men on the island. A warm tingle coursed through her lean body as she remembered Jib’s generously proportioned manhood and legendary staying power. They had been together for two years up at Jib’s camp in Aquinnah, supplied half the Island with cannabis from their clandestine crop in the late ‘70’s and finally moved on to other scenes, other lovers, the way long-timers on the Vineyard do. Years later they would share a hug at Cronigs, mumble something about the Island going to hell since back in the day, and then awkwardly disengage, backing away from each other down the produce aisle or doing serpentines over by the deli counter. Now Jib Nickerson was all but dead, victim of a mishap on a fishing trip he had captained the day before. More than a mishap, you might say. Jib had been harpooned by Samson Vanderpool, the hard drinking sixth generation Wampanoag fisherman known on the Island for his seashell jewelry and many midday DUI’s. They had gone fishing for blues, but Samson had somehow speared Jib in the neck. It was epically tragic. It was immeasurably sad. But mostly it was inconvenient. Binnie had no time today. She had missed her morning Yoga class the day before to make a book signing by Richard North Paterson, whom she secretly wanted to bed. She had never missed Yoga two days in a row. Her day ahead was a cluster bomb waiting to detonate. 8 AM Yin & Restorative Yoga, Chilmark 9:30 AM Just Say No to Shark Torture demonstration, Oak Bluffs 11 AM Women Against Wind Farms meeting, West Tisbury Library 12 30 AM Brazilian Pride Day Pancake Lunch, P.A. Club, OB 2:00 PM Greening the Steamship Authority hearing, Vineyard Haven 4:00 PM Island Women for Protected Sex bake sale and silent auction, Edgartown 5:30 PM Grace M. Lipscomb Memorial Fish Fry and Raffle, East Chop 8:00 PM Dinner with John Anderson It was a day like so many other days in Binnie’s life. She had been an Island gadfly for good causes since that life-altering night she dropped acid and bowed to Ramdas with Peter Simon so many years before -- but these days she was moving at warp speed, on a mission. Something very big was up for grabs, something that mattered a lot to Binnie Bartok. In three weeks, secret balloting would begin for the coveted, “Islander of the Year” award, given to the Island resident voted to have done the most good for the greatest number of people on Martha’s Vineyard Island. Binnie knew it was little more than a beauty pageant for virtue-signaling posers like herself…the Island’s equivalent of “Best in Show” for those whose consciousness had been raised and who wanted to be sure you to knew it Word was she had lost out by just a few votes the year before, seen the trophy slip away to one of the landed rich ladies of Seven Gates Farm. She wanted it this year. She wanted it badly. It was campaign season. Show time. Couldn’t Jib maybe have timed this thing a little better? Combing her long, henna-slicked hair in the mirror, Binnie surveyed the face and womanly form shining back at her. Not bad. Not bad for 56, she mused. A few crow lines, no neck fat to speak of, relatively tight body. True, she couldn’t turn the heads of the young men the way she once could, but she liked what she saw. She liked what was staring back at her. The whole vegan, organic, non-lactose, eat local, floss daily thing was working to her satisfaction, buoyed, of course, by the salubrious bonhomie of her daily breakfast: twenty milligrams of Lexapro over easy. Her whole mind-body alignment equilibrium thing was in balance. This morning, she liked herself a lot. Jib’s untimely end? Well, she thought, if you had to be harpooned by somebody, nice to be skewered by a blood descendant of the Island’s great whaling tribe, the Wampanoags. Something kind of poetic about that, thought Binnie. Something very old Vineyard. She knew that blowing off Jib’s vigil today would cost her a significant number of up-island votes in the coming weeks. It might cost her much of Chilmark, in fact. Binnie looked at the clock and did the math. She could sneak out a little early from the Brazilian Pride Day Pancake Lunch and arrive a little late at the Greening the Steamship Authority hearing. Maybe she’d bound into the hearing room looking harried and shouting concerns so her attendance would sure to be recorded. Just a few tweaks to her schedule and she’d have time to stop by the vigil and act devastated for the usual suspects.