Jaws

The boy was resting, his arms dangling down, his feet and ankles dipping in and out of the water with each small swell. His head was turned toward shore, and he noticed that he had been carried out beyond what his mother would consider safe. He could see her lying on her towel, and the man and child playing in the wavewash. He was not afraid, for the water was calm and he wasn’t really very far from shore—only forty yards or so. But he wanted to get closer; otherwise his mother might sit up, spy him, and order him out of the water. He eased himself back a little bit so he could use his feet to help propel himself. He began to kick and paddle toward shore. His arms displaced water almost silently, but his kicking feet made erratic splashes and left swirls of bubbles in his wake.

  The fish did not hear the sound, but rather registered the sharp and jerky impulses emitted by the kicks. They were signals, faint but true, and the fish locked on them, homing. It rose, slowly at first, then gaining speed as the signals grew stronger.

  The boy stopped for a moment to rest. The signals ceased. The fish slowed, turning its head from side to side, trying to recover them. The boy lay perfectly still, and the fish passed beneath him, skimming the sandy bottom. Again it turned.

  The boy resumed paddling. He kicked only every third or fourth stroke; kicking was more exertion than steady paddling. But the occasional kicks sent new signals to the fish. This time it needed to lock on them only an instant, for it was almost directly below the boy. The fish rose. Nearly vertical, it now saw the commotion on the surface. There was no conviction that what thrashed above was food, but food was not a concept of significance. The fish was impelled to attack: if what it swallowed was digestible, that was food; if not, it would later be regurgitated. The mouth opened, and with a final sweep of the sickle tail the fish struck.

  The boy’s last—only—thought was that he had been punched in the stomach. The breath was driven from him in a sudden rush. He had no time to cry out, nor, had he had the time, would he have known what to cry, for he could not see the fish. The fish’s head drove the raft out of the water. The jaws smashed together, engulfing head, arms, shoulders, trunk, pelvis, and most of the raft. Nearly half the fish had come clear of the water, and it slid forward and down in a belly-flopping motion, grinding the mass of flesh and bone and rubber. The boy’s legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom.

  On the beach the man with the child shouted, “Hey!” He was not sure what he had seen. He had been looking toward the sea, then started to turn his head when an uproar caught his eye. He jerked his head back seaward again, but by then there was nothing to see but the waves made by the splash, spreading outward in a circle. “Did you see that?” he cried. “Did you see that?”

  “What, Daddy, what?” His child stared up at him, excited.

  “Out there! A shark or a whale or something! Something huge!”

  The boy’s mother, half asleep on her towel, opened her eyes and squinted at the man. She saw him point toward the water and heard him say something to the child, who ran up the beach and stood by a pile of clothing. The man began to run toward the boy’s mother, and she sat up. She didn’t understand what he was saying, but he was pointing at the water, so she shaded her eyes and looked out at sea. At first, the fact that she saw nothing didn’t strike her as odd. Then she remembered, and she said, “Alex.”

  Brody was having lunch: baked chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. “Mashed potatoes,” he said as Ellen served him. “What are you trying to do to me?”

  “I don’t want you to waste away. Besides, you look good chunky.”

  The phone rang. Ellen said, “I’ll get it,” but Brody stood up. That was the way it usually happened. She would say, “I’ll get it,” but he was the one who got it. It was the same when she had forgotten something in the kitchen. She would say, “I forgot the napkins. I’ll get them.” But they both knew he would get up and fetch the napkins.

  “No, that’s okay,” he said. “It’s probably for me anyway.” He knew the call was probably for her, but the words came reflexively.

  “Bixby, Chief,” said the voice from the station house.

  “What is it, Bixby?”

  “I think you’d better come down here.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, it’s like this, Chief.…” Bixby obviously didn’t want to go into details. Brody heard him say something to someone else, then return to the phone. “I’ve got this hysterical woman on my hands, Chief.”

  “What’s she hysterical about?”

  “Her kid. Out by the beach.”

  A twinge of unease shot through Brody’s stomach. “What happened?”

  “It’s …” Bixby faltered, then said quickly. “Thursday.”

  “Listen, asshole …” Brody stopped, for now he understood. “I’ll be right there.” He hung up the phone.

  He felt flushed, almost feverish. Fear and guilt and fury blended in a thrust of gut-wrenching pain. He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime, an unwilling whore. He had to take the blame, but it was not rightly his. It belonged to Larry Vaughan and his partners, whoever they might be. He had wanted to do the right thing; they had forced him not to. But who were they to force him? If he couldn’t stand up to Vaughan, what kind of cop was he? He should have closed the beaches.

  Suppose he had. The fish would have gone down the beach—say, to East Hampton—and killed someone there. But that wasn’t how it had worked. The beaches had stayed open, and a child had been killed because of it. It was as simple as that. Cause and effect. Brody suddenly loathed himself. And just as suddenly, he felt great pity for himself.

  “What is it?” asked Ellen.

  “A kid just got killed.”

  “How?”

  “By a goddamn sonofabitch of a shark.”

  “Oh no! If you had closed the beaches …” She stopped, embarrassed.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Harry Meadows was waiting in the parking lot at the rear of the station house when Brody drove up. He opened the passenger-side door of Brody’s car and eased his bulk down onto the seat. “So much for the odds,” he said.

  “Yeah. Who’s in there, Harry?”

  “A man from the Times, two from Newsday, and one of my people. And the woman. And the man who says he saw it happen.”

  “How did the Times get hold of it?”

  “Bad luck. He was on the beach. So was one of the Newsday guys. They’re both staying with people for the weekend. They were onto it within two minutes.”

  “What time did it happen?”

  Meadows looked at his watch. “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. No more.”

  “Do they know about the Watkins thing?”

  “I don’t know. My man does, but he knows enough not to talk. As for the others, it depends on who they’ve been talking to. I doubt they’re onto it. They haven’t had any digging time.”

  “They’ll get onto it, sooner or later.”

  “I know,” said Meadows. “It puts me in a rather difficult position.”

  “You! Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Seriously, Martin. If somebody from the Times gets that story and files it, it’ll appear in tomorrow’s paper, along with today’s attack, and the Leader will look like hell. I’m going to have to use it, to cover myself, even if the others don’t.”

  “Use it how, Harry? What are you going to say?”

  “I don’t know, yet. As I said, I’m in a rather difficult position.”

  “Who are you going to say ordered it hushed up? Larry Vaughan?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Me?”

  “No, no. I’m not going to say anybody ordered it hushed up. There was no conspiracy. I’m going to talk to Carl Santos. If I can put the right words in his mouth, we may all be spared a lot of grief.”

  “What about the truth?”

  “What about it?”

  “What about telling it the way it happened? Say that I wanted to
close the beaches and warn people, but the selectmen disagreed. And say that because I was too much of a chicken to fight and put my job on the line, I went along with them. Say that all the honchos in Amity agreed there was no point in alarming people just because there was a shark around that liked to eat children.”

  “Come on, Martin. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anybody’s. We came to a decision, took a gamble, and lost. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Terrific. Now I’ll just go tell the kid’s mother that we’re terribly sorry we had to use her son for chips.” Brody got out of the car and started for the back door of the station house. Meadows, slower to extract himself, followed a few paces behind.

  Brody stopped. “You know what I’d like to know, Harry? Who really made the decision? You went along with it. I went along with it. I don’t think Larry Vaughan was even the actual guy who made the decision. I think he went along with it, too.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “I’m not sure. Do you know anything about his partners in the business?”

  “He doesn’t have any real partners, does he?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder. Anyway, fuck it … for now.” Brody took another step, and when Meadows still followed him, he said, “You better go around front, Harry … for appearances’ sake.”

  Brody entered his office through a side door. The boy’s mother was sitting in front of the desk, clutching a handkerchief. She was wearing a short robe over her bathing suit. Her feet were bare. Brody looked at her nervously, once again feeling the rush of guilt. He couldn’t tell if she was crying, for her eyes were masked by large, round sunglasses.

  A man was standing by the back wall. Brody assumed he was the one who claimed to have witnessed the accident. He was gazing absently at Brody’s collection of memorabilia: citations from community-service groups, pictures of Brody with visiting dignitaries. Not exactly the stuff to command much attention from an adult, but staring at it was preferable to risking conversation with the woman.

  Brody had never been adept at consoling people, so he simply introduced himself and started asking questions. The woman said she had seen nothing: one moment the boy was there, the next he was gone, “and all I saw were pieces of his raft.” Her voice was weak but steady. The man described what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen.

  “So no one actually saw this shark,” Brody said, courting a faint hope in the back of his mind.

  “No,” said the man. “I guess not. But what else could it have been?”

  “Any number of things.” Brody was lying to himself as well as to them, testing to see if he could believe his own lies, wondering if any alternative to reality could be made credible. “The raft could have gone flat and the boy could have drowned.”

  “Alex is a good swimmer,” the woman protested. “Or … was.…”

  “And what about the splash?” said the man.

  “The boy could have been thrashing around.”

  “He never cried out. Not a word.”

  Brody realized that the exercise was futile. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll probably know soon enough, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?” said the man.

  “One way or another, people who die in the water usually wash up somewhere. If it was a shark, there’ll be no mistaking it.” The woman’s shoulders hunched forward, and Brody cursed himself for being a clumsy fool. “I’m sorry,” he said. The woman shook her head and wept.

  Brody told the woman and the man to wait in his office, and he walked out into the front of the station house. Meadows was standing by the outer door, leaning against the wall. A young man—the reporter from the Times, Brody guessed—was gesturing at Meadows and seemed to be asking questions. The young man was tall and slim. He wore sandals and a bathing suit and a short-sleeved shirt with an alligator emblem stitched to the left breast, which caused Brody to take an instant, instinctive dislike to the man. In his adolescence Brody had thought of those shirts as badges of wealth and position. All the summer people wore them. Brody badgered his mother until she bought him one—“a two-dollar shirt with a six-dollar lizard on it,” she said—and when he didn’t find himself suddenly wooed by gaggles of summer people, he was humiliated. He tore the alligator off the pocket and used the shirt as a rag to clean the lawn mower with which he earned his summer income. More recently, Ellen had insisted on buying several shifts made by the same manufacturer—paying a premium they could ill afford for the alligator emblem—to help her regain her entrée to her old milieu. To Brody’s dismay, one evening he found himself nagging Ellen for buying “a ten-dollar dress with a twenty-dollar lizard on it.”

  Two men were sitting on a bench—the Newsday reporters. One wore a bathing suit, the other a blazer and slacks. Meadows’ reporter—Brody knew him as Nat something or other—was leaning against the desk, chatting with Bixby. They stopped talking as soon as they saw Brody enter.

  “What can I do for you?” Brody said.

  The young man next to Meadows took a step forward and said, “I’m Bill Whitman, from the New York Times.”

  “And?” What am I supposed to do? Brody thought. Fall on my ass?

  “I was on the beach.”

  “What did you see?”

  One of the Newsday reporters interrupted: “Nothing. I was there, too. Nobody saw anything. Except maybe the guy in your office. He says he saw something.”

  “I know,” said Brody, “but he’s not sure just what it was he saw.”

  The Times man said, “Are you prepared to list this as a shark attack?”

  “I’m not prepared to list this as anything, and I’d suggest you don’t go listing it as anything, either, until you know a hell of a lot more about it than you do now.”

  The Times man smiled. “Come on, Chief, what do you want us to do? Call it a mysterious disappearance? Boy lost at sea?”

  It was difficult for Brody to resist the temptation to trade angry ironies with the Times reporter. He said, “Listen, Mr.—Whitman, is it?—Whitman. We have no witnesses who saw anything but a splash. The man inside thinks he saw a big silver-colored thing that he thinks may have been a shark. He says he has never seen a live shark in his life, so that’s not what you’d call expert testimony. We have no body, no real evidence that anything violent happened to the boy … I mean, except that he’s missing. It is conceivable that he drowned. It is conceivable that he had a fit or a seizure of some kind and then drowned. And it is conceivable that he was attacked by some kind of fish or animal—or even person, for that matter. All of those things are possible, and until we get …”

  The sound of tires grinding over gravel in the public parking lot out front stopped Brody. A car door slammed, and Len Hendricks charged into the station house, wearing nothing but a bathing suit. His body had the mottled gray-whiteness of a Styrofoam coffee cup. He stopped in the middle of the floor. “Chief …”

  Brody was startled by the unlikely sight of Hendricks in a bathing suit—thighs flecked with pimples, genitals bulging in the tight fabric. “You’ve been swimming, Leonard?”

  “There’s been another attack!” said Hendricks.

  The Times man quickly asked, “When was the first one?”

  Before Hendricks could answer, Brody said, “We were just discussing it, Leonard. I don’t want you or anyone else jumping to conclusions until you know what you’re talking about. For God’s sake, the boy could have drowned.”

  “Boy?” said Hendricks. “What boy? This was a man, an old man. Five minutes ago. He was just beyond the surf, and suddenly he screamed bloody murder and his head went under water and it came up again and he screamed something else and then he went down again. There was all this splashing around, and blood was flying all over the place. The fish kept coming back and hitting him again and again and again. That’s the biggest fuckin’ fish I ever saw in my whole life, big as a fuckin’ station wagon. I went in up to my waist and tried to get to the guy, but the fish kept hitting him.” Hendri
cks paused, staring at the floor. His breath squeezed out of his chest in short bursts. “Then the fish quit. Maybe he went away, I don’t know. I waded out to where the guy was floating. His face was in the water. I took hold of one of his arms and pulled.”

  Brody said, “And?”

  “It came off in my hand. The fish must have chewed right through it, all but a little bit of skin.” Hendricks looked up, his eyes red and filling with tears of exhaustion and fright.

  “Are you going to be sick?” said Brody.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did you call the ambulance?”

  Hendricks shook his head no.

  “Ambulance?” said the Times reporter. “Isn’t that rather like shutting the barn door after the horse has left?”

  “Shut your mouth, smart ass,” said Brody. “Bixby, call the hospital. Leonard, are you up to doing some work?” Hendricks nodded. “Then go put on some clothes and find some notices that close the beaches.”

  “Do we have any?”

  “I don’t know. We must. Maybe back in the stock room with those signs that say ‘This Property Protected by Police.’ If we don’t, we’ll have to make some that’ll do until we can have some made up. I don’t care. One way or another, let’s get the goddam beaches closed.”

  Monday morning, Brody arrived at the office a little after seven. “Did you get it?” he said to Hendricks.

  “It’s on your desk.”

  “Good or bad? Never mind. I’ll go see for myself.”

  “You won’t have to look too hard.”

  The city edition of the New York Times lay in the center of Brody’s desk. About three quarters of the way down the right-hand column on page one, he saw the headline:

  SHARK KILLS TWO

  ON LONG ISLAND

  Brody said, “Shit,” and began to read.

  By William F. Whitman

  Special to The New York Times

  AMITY, L.I. June 20—A six-year-old boy and a 65-year-old man were killed today in separate shark attacks that occurred within an hour of each other near the beaches of this resort community.

  Although the body of the boy, Alexander Kintner, was not found, officials said there was no question that he was killed by a shark. A witness, Thomas Daguerre, of New York, said he saw a large silver-colored object rise out of the water and seize the boy and his rubber raft and disappear into the water with a splash.