The Bay Rats: Mermaids, Mayhem, and Murder

Copyright © 2014 by Evert Bay Scott.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 10/1/2014

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CONTENTS

Prologue

The Bay Rats

Throw Me a Line

It’s Gonna Happen

Mermaids

Cole’s Back

Mayhem

What’s New

Pinball and Balls

Uncle Mike

Go On, Go On

Call the Navy

Dead Eye

Memories in Blue

The Pinto

Eleven

Pinto II

The Arrival

Mr. Save the World

Read All About It

You Got ’Em

Three Legs

The Solo

Murder

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

From the back of a truck, his world sailed by…

I would like to dedicate this book to those who were out there; the ones that toted the weight of my memories. Whether old or young, still with us, or long gone; this story is a tribute to each one of them… those ‘Baymen’ that is. It makes no difference if you hauled up tongs each grab or pulled in a rake every drift; these pages have been written for you. After all, we are all connected. Surely the same salt water runs through all of our veins.

While my final days float by faster than the outgoing tides of a storm front, I can only sit and watch. The faces and places we all came to recognize are beginning to shrink in the distance mist of that bay… but I’ve tried my best to see them off with respect, dignity and a touch of humor.

With only pen and paper in hand these days my mind can only yearn for the t- handles and throttles of the past. But like the bay water that can’t seem to bring itself back… my body is unable to do so as well. So with the ink of my pen now as depleted as the clams of our bay, I can only hope the memories of our times together will survive…

EBS

Latitude N40.763370

Longitude W73.017868

Forecast

Light rain

Winds out of the east at six knots

Air temperature sixty-six degrees

For me… just another day in paradise!

When you find that moment,

that special moment,

have it last a lifetime…

—EBS

Prologue

It’s the seventies—1970s, that is. Go-gos were out, discos were in, and the King of Rock and Roll passed on.

Our world was changing as well as the music. Hard rock, soft rock, country rock, folk rock, and even punk rock began replacing the no longer Beatle boys. The decade that started with Richard Nixon waving good-bye to us while telling the world he wasn’t a crook ended with a peanut farmer in the White House. With our concerns for the southern half of that Asian peninsula fading fast, our interests in mood rings, pet rocks and, of course, sea monkeys soared.

Smiley-faced stickers were finally discovered, not to mention the Rubik’s Cube, Atari and platform shoes. It was a wild decade all right and the world was changing faster than most of us could comprehend. Folks were talking about some new kind of chips. But all I knew was that I couldn’t pack them in my lunch box and eat them. I don’t know, but there was just something about them and the microprocessors that came with them that seemed incompatible with us clam diggers. After all, and for the most part, we were simple, easygoing, leave-us-alone sort of people—men that didn’t care much about change. We—we baymen, that is—loved what we did and wished a lot of the change never happened. But unfortunately, it did and we could only watch as it approached. Our world, Long Island’s Great South Bay, was in the middle of these and its own change back then. The very thing so many of us islanders loved was becoming ill and overworked. Men, more men than ever before, could be heard working away behind their toothed steel rakes just as far as the winds of that island would take them. As we pulled and scratched away at these watery beds, that music—those ever-changing beats, lyrics, and sounds—rang out in sync to the changing of times. If Jackson Brown’s Running on Empty wasn’t setting the pace out there on the water, then Joe Walsh and his Life’s Been Good might have had us yanking and a-daydreamin’!

Yeah, transistor radios and eight-track players were what helped keep us bay rats entertained then, not to mention a lot of cursing, swearing, and joking. But hey, we were what we were, and not many of us held college degrees. Heck, for that matter, most of us were lucky to have finished high school.

The seventies also saw a change in the way most us clam-digging islanders moved about on the water. No longer were the boats under us powered by wind or slow-revving inboard engines. Outboard motors were now the way to go. Johnson Marine introduced a 135-horsepower engine. Wow! We clam diggers thought they can’t make ’em bigger than that." About three weeks later, Mercury sent out its six-cylindered 150-horse Black Max. The race was on, and from where I was standing, it couldn’t have been more exciting. Connies, cops, and clam diggers were all chasing about—some in search of what we poachers were doing and others in pursuit of what we were catching and selling. Guys from the big city were always willing to pay more for what we dug up. Some even went as far as dying for the stuff. But back then, a lot of things didn’t seem right. Hell, that farmer, the one that took up residency in the White House even started telling the draft dodgers to come home. Welcome back, Kotter!

There was no doubt about it, and to kinda quote Bob Dylan, things were a changing, all right and getting more expensive each day. Inflation was growing, jobs were hard to find and oil was even tougher. Yeah, gasoline had become scarce for a while back then and almost as hard to find as the clams we diggers were looking for. Our bay, the very place so many of us Long Islanders depended on, was starting to react to the surmounting negative environmental conditions our society had placed on her. Law enforcement decided something had to be done, so lines began showing up on our charts. Lines people like me and others were supposed to stay behind. Did we? Hell no! We had a living to make, so we kinda worked around the problem.

But those weren’t the only lines around back at that time. There were lots of others. It seemed all of America had to deal with one or two of the damn things. We were told to wait in our cars as we lined up for our allotted five gallons of gasoline. We could only hope that it was enough to get us to our jobs the next day. And if you weren’t one of them, someone fortunate enough to have a job at the time, then it would be another line. Oh yeah! People were lined up around the state unemployment offices like you wouldn’t believe. Things were a-changin’, all right. Work was scarce, and like I said, clams, the treasure I and the people around me sought, were getting scarcer. If you kept up with the news and read about some of the busts and arrests taking place during this era, you may have thought the only folks really doing well were the ones in the drug business. No, I’m not talking about Johnson & Johnson or Procter & Gamble. I’m referring to the other drug business. Selling stuff like cocaine, marijuana, and LSD seemed to be where the work was. And that crowd didn’t seem to mind the lines, at least not the fine powdery ones in front of them.

I suppose I was lucky in a way back then. I knew a lot of these entrepreneurs and what they did. But I tried my best to stay back away from the chum lines they’d often set. To this day, I’m proud to be able to say I never actually got snagged by the smell. Tangled up in a few of their nets, yes. But caught, never!

So come on, step up behind my truck and listen. After all, the