Jaws by Peter Benchley.
Title: Jaws.
Author: Peter Benchley.
Genre: Fiction, nature.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1974.
Summary: The novel tells the story of a great white shark that preys upon a small resort town and the voyage of three men trying to kill it. When brutal shark attacks threaten to close the beaches at the resort town of Amity during their busiest time of the season, it's up to the conscientious town police chief, an ichthyologist, and a fisherman hunter to work together to bring the shark down, as the victims begin to pile up, along with the political and class tensions in the town.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail. The mouth was open just enough to permit a rush of water over the gills. There was little other motion: an occasional correction of the apparently aimless course by the slight raising or lowering of a pectoral fin-as a bird changes direction by dipping one wing and lifting the other. The eyes were sightless in the black, and the other senses transmitted nothing extraordinary to the small, primitive brain. The fish might have been asleep, save for the movement dictated by countless millions of years of instinctive continuity: lacking the flotation bladder common to other fish and the fluttering flaps to push oxygen-bearing water through its gills, it survived only by moving. Once stopped, it would sink to the bottom and die of anoxia.
The land seemed almost as dark as the water, for there was no moon. All that separated sea from shore was a long, straight stretch of beach-so white that it shone. From a house behind the grass-splotched dunes, lights cast yellow glimmers on the sand.
♥ Summers were bad times for Ellen Brody, for in summer she was tortured by thoughts she didn't want to think-thoughts of chances missed and lives that could have been.
♥ Hendricks started eastward. The wet sand felt crisp and cool on his feet. He walked with his head down and his hands in his pockets, looking at the tiny shells and tangles of seaweed. A few bugs-they looked like little black beetles-skittered out of his path, and when the wavewash receded, he saw minute bubbles pop above the holes made by sandworms. He enjoyed the walk. It was a funny thing, he thought, that when you live all your life in a place, you almost never do the things that tourists go there to do-like walk on the beach or go swimming in the ocean. He couldn't remember the last time he went swimming. He wasn't even sure he still owned a bathing suit. It was like something he had heard about New York-that half the people who live in the city never go to the top of the Empire State Building or visit the Statue of Liberty.
♥ The possibility that "other considerations" might be involved in this case hadn't occurred to Brody. Those considerations were the touchiest part of Brody's job, forcing him constantly to assess the best means of protecting the common weal without compromising either himself or the law.
It was the beginning of the summer season, and Brody knew that on the success or failure of those twelve brief weeks rested the fortunes of Amity for a whole year. A rich season meant prosperity enough to carry the town through the lean winter. The winter population of Amity was about 1,000; in a good summer the population jumped to nearly 10,000. And those 9,000 summer visitors kept the 1,000 permanent residents alive for the whole year.
Merchants-from the owners of the hardware store and the sporting goods store and the two gas stations to the local pharmacist-needed a boom summer to support them through the winter, during which they never broke even. The wives of carpenters, electricians, and plumbers worked during the summer as waitresses or real estate agents, to help keep their families going over the winter. There were only two year-round liquor licenses in Amity, so the twelve weeks of summer were critical to most of the restaurants and pubs. Charter fishermen needed every break they could get: good weather, good fishing, and, above all, crowds.
Even after the best of summers, Amity winters were rough. Three of every ten families went on relief. Dozens of men were forced to move for the winter to the north shore of Long Island, where they searched for work shucking scallops for a few dollars a day.
Brody knew that one bad summer would nearly double the relief rolls. If every house was not rented, there wouldn't be enough work for Amity's blacks, most of whom were gardeners, butlers, bartenders, and maids. And two or three bad summers in a row-a circumstance that, fortunately, hadn't occurred in more than two decades-could create a cycle that could wreck the town. If people didn't have enough money to buy clothes or gas or ample food supplies, if they couldn't afford to have their houses or their appliances repaired, then the merchants and service firms would fail to make enough to tide them over until the next summer. They would close down, and Amity's citizens would start shopping elsewhere. The town would lose tax revenues. Municipal services would deteriorate, and people would begin to move away.
So there was a common, though tacit, understanding in Amity, born of the need to survive. Everyone was expected to do his bit to make sure that Amity remained a desirable summer community. A few years ago, Brody remembered, a young man and his brother had moved into town and set themselves up as carpenters. They came in the spring, when there was enough work preparing houses for summer residents to keep everyone busy, so they were welcomed. They seemed competent enough, and several established carpenters began to refer work for them.
But by midsummer, there were disquieting reports about the Felix Brothers. Albert Morris, the owner of Amity Hardware, let it be known that they were buying cheap steel nails instead of galvanized nails and were charging their customers for galvanized. In a seaside climate, steel nails begin to rust in a few months. Dick Spitzer, who ran the lumberyard, told somebody that the Felixes had ordered a load of low-grade, green wood to use in some cabinets in a house on Scotch Road. The cabinet doors began to warp soon after they were installed. In a bar one night, the elder Felix, Armando, boasted to a drinking buddy that on his current job he was being paid to set supporting studs every sixteen inches but was actually placing them twenty-four inches apart. And the younger Felix, a twenty-one-year-old named Danny with a stubborn case of acne, liked to show his friends erotic books which he bragged he had stolen from the houses he worked in.
Other carpenters stropped referring work to the Felixes, but by then they had built enough of a business to keep them going through the winter. Very quietly, the Amity understanding began to work. At first, there were just a few hints to the Felixes that they had outworn their welcome. Armando reacted arrogantly. Soon, annoying little mishaps began to bother him. All the tires on his truck would mysteriously empty themselves of air, and when he called for help from the Amity Gulf station, he was told that the air pump was broken. When he ran out of propane gas in his kitchen, the local gas company took eight days to deliver a new tank. His orders for lumber and other supplies were inexplicably mislaid or delayed. In stores where once ha had been able to obtain credit he was now forced to pay cash. By the end of October, the Felix Brothers were unable to function as a business, and they moved away.
Generally, Brody's contributions to the Amity understanding-in addition to maintaining the rule of law and sound judgement in the town-consisted of suppressing rumors and, in consultation with Harry Meadows, the editor of the Amity Leader, keeping a certain perspective on the rare unfortunate occurrences that qualified as news.
The previous summer's rapes had been reported in the Leader, but just barely (as molestations), because Brody and Meadows agreed that the specter of a black rapist stalking every female in Amity wouldn't do much for the tourist trade. In that case, there was the added problem that none of the women who had told the police they had been raped would repeat their stories to anyone else.
If one of the wealthier summer residents of Amity was arrested for drunken driving, Brody was willing, on a first offense, to book him for driving without a license, and that charge would be duly reported in the Leader. But Brody made sure to warn the driver that the second time he was caught driving under the influence he would be charged, booked, and prosecuted for drunk driving.
♥ "They know they've got their pick of places this year. There's no shortage of houses for rent... anywhere. If I run a story saying that a young woman was bitten in two by a monster shark off Amity, there won't be another house rented in this town. Sharks are like ax-murderers, Martin. People react to them with their guts. There's something crazy and evil and uncontrollable about them. If we tell people there's a killer shark around here, we can kiss the summer good-by."
♥ Families who owned summer homes in Amity had been coming out for weekends since the beginning of May. Summer tenants whose leases ran from June 15 to September 15 had unpacked and, familiar now with where linen closets were, which cabinets contained good china and which the everyday stuff, and which beds were softer than others, were already beginning to feel at home.
By noon, the beach in front of Scotch and Old Mill roads was speckled with people. Husbands lay semi-comatose on beach towels, trying to gain strength from the sun before an afternoon of tennis and the trip back to New York on the Long Island Rail Road's Cannonball. Wives leaned against aluminum backrests, reading Helen MacInnes and John Cheever and Taylor Caldwell, interrupting themselves now and then to pour a cup of dry vermouth from the Scotch cooler.
Teen-agers lay serried in tight, symmetrical rows, the boys enjoying the sensation of grinding their pelvises into the sand, thinking of pudenda and occasionally stretching their necks to catch a brief glimpse of some, exposed, wittingly or not, by girls who lay on their backs with their legs spread.
These were not Aquarians. They uttered none of the platitudes of peace or pollution, or justice or revolt. Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty. As their eyes were blue or brown, so their tastes and consciences were determined by other generations. They had no vitamin deficiencies, no sickle-cell anemia. Their teeth-thanks either to breeding or to orthodontia-were straight and white and even. Their bodies were lean, their muscles toned by boxing lessons at age nine, riding lessons at twelve, and tennis lessons ever since. They had no body odor. When they sweated, the girls smelled faintly of perfume; the boys smelled simply clean.
None of which is to say that they were either stupid or evil. If their IQs could have been tested en masse, they would have shown native ability well within the top 10 per cent of all mankind. And they had been, were being, educated at schools that provided every discipline, including exposure to minority-group sensibilities, revolutionary philosophies, ecological hypotheses, political power tactics, drugs, and sex. Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing. They had been conditioned to believe (or, if not to believe, to sense) that the world was really quite irrelevant to them. And they were right. Nothing touched them-not race riots in places like Trenton, New Jersey, or Gary, Indiana; not the fact that parts of the Missouri River were so foul that the water sometimes caught fire spontaneously; not police corruption in New York or the rising number of murders in San Francisco or revelations that hot dogs contained insect filth and hexachlorophine caused brain damage. They were inured even to the economic spasms that wracked the rest of America. Undulations in the stock markets were nuisances noticed, if at all, as occasions for fathers to bemoan real or fancied extravagances.
Those were the ones who returned to Amity every summer. The others-and there were some, mavericks-marched and bleated and joined and signed and spent their summers working for acronymic social-action groups. But because they had rejected Amity and, at most, showed up for an occasional Labor Day weekend, they, too, were irrelevant.
The little children played in the sand at the water's edge, digging holes and flinging muck at each other, unconscious and uncaring of what they were and what they would become.
♥ He eased himself back a little but 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 good; 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.
♥ 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."
♥ Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of-let alone in-water above his head gave him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and an ache in his stomach-essentially the sensation some people feel about flying. In Brody's dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned.
♥ "Do you have any idea why he's hung around here so long?" said Brody. "I don't know how much you know about the water here, but..."
"I grew up here."
"You did? In Amity?"
"No, Southampton. I spent every summer here, from grade school through grad school."
"Every summer. So you didn't really grow up there." Brody was groping for something with which to re-establish his parity with, if not superiority to, the younger man, and what he settled for was reverse snobbism, an attitude not uncommon to year-round residents of resort communities. It gave them armor against the contempt they sensed radiating from the rich summer folk. It was an "I'm all right, Jack" attitude, a social machismo that equated wealth with effeteness, simplicity with goodness, and poverty (up to a point) with honesty. And it was an attitude that, in general, Brody found both repugnant and silly. But he had felt threatened by the younger man-he wasn't really sure why-and the sensation was so alien that he had reached for the most convenient carapace, the one Hooper had handed him.
♥ Hooper said, "Look, Chief, you can't go off half-cocked for vengeance against a fish. That shark isn't evil. It's not a murderer. it's just obeying its own instincts. Trying to get retribution against a fish is crazy."
"Listen you..." Brody was growing angry-an anger born of frustration and humiliation. He knew Hooper was right, but he felt that right and wrong were irrelevant to the situation. The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives. Most of all, Brody needed it dead, for the death of the fish would be a catharsis for him. Hooper had touched that nerve, and that infuriated Brody further. But he swallowed his rage and said, "Forget it."
♥ The officer said he would dispatch a patrol boat at first light to search for the body.
"Thanks," said Brody. "I hope you find it before it washes up." Brody was suddenly appalled at himself. "It" was Ben Gardner, a friend. What would Sally say if she heard Brody refer to her husband as "it"? Fifteen years of friendship wiped out, forgotten. There was no more Ben Gardner. There was only an "it" that should be found before it became a gory nuisance.
♥ "I was always crazy about the ocean. When I was twelve or thirteen, my idea of a big time was to take a sleeping bag down to the beach and spend the nigh lying in the sand listening to the waves, wondering where they had come from and what fantastic thing they had passed on the way. What I got hooked on in college was fish, or, to be really specific, sharks."
Ellen laughed. "What an awful thing to fall in love with. It's like having a passion for rats."
"That's what most people think," said Hooper. "But they're wrong. Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful-God, how beautiful they are! They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth. No one knows for sure how long they live or what impulses-except for hunger-they respond to. There are more than two hundred and fifty species of shark, and every one is different from every other one. Scientists spend their lives trying to find answers about sharks, and as soon as they come up with a nice, pat generalization, something shoots it down. People have been trying to find an effective shark repellent for over two thousand years. They've never found one that really works."
♥ The past-like a bird long locked in a cage and suddenly released-was flying at her, swirling around her head, showering her with longing.
♥ "Those were fun times. I try not to think about them too much."
"Why?"
"The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future. It's depressing if you spend too much time reliving old joys. You think you'll never have anything as good again."
♥ Then he turned the corner and was gone.
A terrible, painful sadness clutched at Ellen. More than ever before, she felt that her life-the best part of it, at least, the part that was fresh and fun-was behind her. Recognizing the sensation made her feel guilty, for she read it as proof that she was an unsatisfactory mother, an unsatisfied wife. She hated her life, and hated herself for hating it. She thought of a line from a song Billy played on the stereo: "I'd trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday." Would she make a deal like that? She wondered. But what good was there in wondering?> Yesterdays were gone, spinning ever father away down a shaft that had no bottom. None of the richness, none of the delight, could ever be retrieved.
A vision of Hooper's smiling dace flashed across her mind. Forget it, she told herself. That's stupid. Worse. It's self-defeating.
♥ She took a sip of her drink and said, "Do you like being a policeman?"
Brody couldn't tell whether or not there was hostility in the question. "Yes," he said. "It's a good job, and it has a purpose to it."
"What's the purpose?"
"What do you think?" he said, slightly irritated. "To uphold the law."
"Don't you feel alienated?"
"Why the hell should I feel alienated? Alienated from what?"
"From the people. I mean, the only thing that justified your existence is telling people what not to do. Doesn't that make you feel freaky?"
For a moment, Brody thought he was being put on, but the girl never smiled or smirked or shifted her eyes from his. "No, I don't feel freaky," he said. "I don't see why I should feel any more freaky than you do, working at the whatchamacallit."
"The Bibelot."
"Yeah. What do you sell there anyway?"
"We sell people their past. It gives them comfort."
"What do you mean, their past?"
"Antiques. They're bought by people who hate their present and need the security of their past. Or if not theirs, someone else's. Once they buy it, it becomes theirs."
♥ They said their good-bys at the front door-perfunctory compliments, redundant thanks.
♥ Brody was ready for a fight, but he backed off, somber enough to realize that his only weapons were cruelty and innuendo, and that Ellen was close to tears. And tears, whether shed in orgasm or in anger, disconcerted him.
♥ She didn't know exactly when she had decided on this manifestly rash, dangerous plan. She had been thinking about it-and trying not to think about it-since the day she first met Hooper. She had weighed the risks and somehow, calculated that they were worth taking, though she was not entirely sure what she could gain from the adventure. She knew she wanted change, almost any change. She wanted to be assured and reassured that she was desirable-not just to her husband, for she had grown complacent about that, but to the people she saw as her real peers, the people among whom she still numbered herself. She felt that without some remedy, the part of herself that she most cherished would die. Perhaps the past could never be revived. But perhaps it could be recalled physically as well as mentally. She wanted an injection, a transfusion of the essence of her past, and she saw Matt Hooper as the only possible donor. The thought of love never entered her mind. Nor did she want or anticipate a relationship either profound or enduring. She sought only to be serviced, restored.
♥ "I'm going to open the beaches for the Fourth."
"That makes me happy."
"Business bad?"
"Bad."
"Business is always bad with you."
"Not like this. If it doesn't get better soon, I'm gonna be the cause of a race riot."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm supposed to hire two delivery boys for the summer. I'm committed. But I can't afford two. Let alone I don't have enough work for two, the way things are. Sp I can only hire one. One's white and one's black."
"Which one are you hiring?"
"The black one. I figure he needs the money more. I just thank God the white one isn't Jewish."
♥ Hendricks had volunteered to spend the weekend on the public beach, as the third point in the triangle of watch. ("You're getting to be a regular beach bum," Brody had said when Hendricks volunteered. Hendricks had laughed and said, "Sure, Chief. If you're going to live in a place like this, you might as well become a beautiful people."
♥ "The town survives on its summer people, Mr. Whitman. Call it parasitic, if you will, but that's the way it is. The host animal comes every summer, and Amity feeds on it furiously, pulling every bit of sustenance it can before the host leaves again after Labor Day. Take away the host animal, and we're like dog ticks with no dog to feed on. We starve. At the least-the very least-next winter is going to be the worst in the history of this town. We're going to have so many people on the dole that Amity will look like Harlem." He chuckled. "Harlem-by-the-Sea."
"What I'd give my ass to know," said Brody, "is why us? Why Amity? Why not East Hampton or Southampton or Quogue?"
"That," said Hooper, "is something we'll never know."
Why?" said Whitman.
"I don't want to sound like I'm making excuses for misjudging that fish," said Hooper, "but the line between the natural and the preternatural is very cloudy. Natural things occur, and for most of them there's a logical explanation. But for a whole lot of things there's just no good or sensible answer. Say two people are swimming, one in front of the other, and a shark comes up from behind, passes right beside the guy in the rear, and attacks the guy in front. Why? Maybe they smelled different. Maybe the one in front was swimming in a more provocative way. Say the guy in back, the one who wasn't attacked, goes to help the one who was attacked. The shark may not touch him-may actually avoid him-while he keeps banging away at the guy he did hit. White sharks are supposed to prefer colder water. So why does one turn up off the coast of Mexico, strangled by a human corpse that he couldn't quite swallow? In a way, sharks are like tornadoes. They touch down here, but not there. They wipe out this house but suddenly veer away and miss the house next door. The guy in the house that's wiped out says, 'Why me?' The guy in the house that's missed says, 'Thank God.'"
♥ Brody looked across his desk at Hooper. The last thing he wanted was to spend days on a boat with Hooper, especially in a situation in which Hooper would outrank him in knowledge, if not authority. He could send Hooper alone and stay ashore himself. But that, he felt, would be capitulating, admitting finally and irrevocably his inability to face and conquer the strange enemy that was waging war on his town.
Besides, maybe-over the course of a long day on a boat-Hooper might make a slip that would reveal what he had been doing last Wednesday, the day it rained. Brody was becoming obsessed with finding out where Hooper was that day, for whenever he allowed himself to consider the various alternatives, the one on which his mind always settled was the one he most dreaded. He wanted to know that Hooper was at the movies, or playing backgammon at the Field Club, or smoking dope with some hippie, or laying some Girl Scout. He didn't care what it was, as long as he could know that Hooper had not been with Ellen. Or that he had been. In that case...? The thought was still too wretched to cope with.
♥ The sea was as flat as gelatin. There was no whisper of wind to ripple the surface. The sun sucked shimmering waves of heat from the water. Now and then, a passing tern would plunge for food, and rise again, and the wavelets from its dive became circles that grew without cease.
♥ ..Quint. He wore a white T-shirt, faded blue-jean trousers, white socks, and a pair of graying Top-Sider sneakers. Brody guessed Quint was about fifty, and though surely he had once been twenty and could one day be sixty, it was impossible to imagine what he would look like at either of those ages. His present age seemed the age he should always be, should always have been. He was about six feet four and very lean-perhaps 180 and 190 pounds. His head was totally bald-not shaven, for there were no telltale black specks on his scalp but as bald as if he had never had any hair-and when, as now, the sun was high and hot, he wore a Marine Corps fatigue cap. His face, like the rest of him, was hard and sharp. It was ruled by a long, straight nose. When he looked down from the flying bridge, he seemed to aim his eyes-the darkest eyes Brody had ever seen-along the nose as if it were a rifle barrel. His shin was permanently browned and creased by wind and salt and sun. He gazed off the stern, rarely blinking, his eyes fixed on the slick.
♥ "Is it the shark?" said Brody. The possibility that at last he was going to confront the fish-the beast, the monster, the nightmare-made Brody's hear pound.
♥ The frenzy continued for several minutes, until only three large sharks remained, cruising back and forth beneath the surface.
The men watched in silence until the last of the three had vanished.
"Jesus," said Hooper.
"You don't approve," said Quint.
"That's right. I don't like to see things die for people's amusement." Quint snickered, and Hooper said, "Do you?"
"It ain't a question of liking it or not. It's what feeds me."
♥ No more than ten feet off the stern, slightly to the starboard, was the flat, conical snout of the fish. It stuck out of the water perhaps two feet. The top of the head was a sooty gray, pocked with two black eyes. At each side of the end of the snout, where the gray turned to cream white, were the nostrils-deep slashes in the armored hide. The mouth was open not quite half-way, a dim, dark cavern guarded by huge, triangular teeth.
Fish and men confronted each other for perhaps ten seconds.
♥ His mind was full of images of a torpedo shape streaking upward in the blackness and tearing Christine Watkins to pieces; of the boy on the raft, unknowing, unsuspecting, until suddenly seized by a nightmare creature; and of the nightmares he knew would come to him, dreams of violence and blood and a woman screaming at him that he killed her son. "You can't tell me that thing's a fish," he said. "It's more like one of those things they make movies about. You know, the monster from twenty million fathoms."
"It's a fish, all right," said Hooper. He was still visibly excited. "And what a fish! Damn near megalodon."
"What are you talking about?" said Brody.
"That's an exaggeration," said Hooper, "but if there's something like this swimming around, what's to say megalodon isn't? What do you say, Quint?"
"I'd say the sun's got to you," said Quint.
"No, really. How big do you think these fish grow?"
"I'm no good at guessing. I'd put that fish at twenty feet, so I'd say they grow to twenty feet. If I see one tomorrow that's twenty-five feet, I'll say they grow to twenty-five feet. Guessing is bullshit."
"How big do they grow?" Brody asked, wishing immediately that he hadn't said anything. He felt that the question subordinated him to Hooper.
But Hooper was too caught up in the moment, too flushed and happy, to be patronizing. "That's the point," he said. "Nobody knows. There was one in Australia that got snarled in some chains and drowned. He was measured at thirty-six feet, or so said the reports."
"That's almost twice as big as this one," said Brody. His mind, barely able to comprehend the fish he had seen, could not grasp the immensity of the one Hooper described.
Hooper nodded. "Generally, people seem to accept thirty feet as a maximum size, but the figure is fancy. It's like what Quint says. If they see one tomorrow that's sixty feet, they'll accept sixty feet. The really terrific thing, the thing that blows your mind, is imagining-and it could be true-that there are great whites way down in the deep that are a hundred feet long."
"Oh bullshit," said Quint.
"I'm not saying it's so," said Hooper. "I'm saying it could be so."
"Still bullshit."
"Maybe. Maybe not. Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there's enough down there to support whales, there's enough to support sharks that big. Just because we've never seen a hundred-foot white doesn't mean they couldn't exist. They'd have no reason to come to the surface. All their food would be way down in the deep. A dead one wouldn't float to shore, because they don't have flotation bladders. Can you imagine what a hundred-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?"
"I don't want to," said Brody.
"It would be like a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives."
"Are you saying this is just a baby?" Brody was beginning to feel lonely and vulnerable. A fish as large as what Hooper was describing could chew the boat to splinters.
"No, this is a mature fish," said Hooper. "I'm sure of it. But it's like people. Some people are five feet tall, some people are seven feet tall. Boy, what I'd give to have a look at a big megalodon."
"You're out of your mind," said Brody.
"No, man, just think of it. It would be like finding the Abominable Snowman."
♥ "A life you would have loved," Vaughan had said. What would a life with Larry Vaughan have been like? There would have been money, and acceptance. She would never have missed the life she led as a girl, for it would never have ended. There would have been no craving for renewal and self-confidence and confirmation of her femininity, no need for a fling with someone like Hooper.
But no. She might have been driven to it by boredom, like so many of the women who spent their weeks in Amity while their husbands were in New York. Life with Larry Vaughan would have been life without challenge, a life of cheap satisfactions.
As she pondered what Vaughan had said, she began to recognize the richness of her life: a relationship with Brody more rewarding than any Larry Vaughan would ever experience; an amalgam of minor traits and tiny triumphs that, together, added up to something akin to joy. And as the recognition grew, so did a regret that it had taken her so long to see the waste of time and emotion in trying to cling to her past. Suddenly she felt fear-fear that she was growing up too late, that something might happen to Brody before she could savor her awareness. She looked at her watch: 6:20. He should have been home by now. Something has happened to him, she thought. Oh please, God, not him.
She heard the door open downstairs. She jumped off the bed, ran into the hall and down the stairs. She wrapped her arms around Brody's neck and kissed him hard on the mouth.
"My God," he said when she let him go. "That's quite a welcome."
♥ "You said something on the phone the other day about being smarter than fish. Is that all there is to it? Is that the only secret of success?"
"That's all there is. You just got to outguess 'em. It's no trick. They're stupid as sin."
"You've never found a smart fish?"
"Never met one yet."
Brody remembered the leering, grinning face that had stared up at him from the water. "I don't know," he said. "That fish sure looked mean yesterday. Like he meant to be mean. Like he knew what he was doing."
"Shit, he don't know nothing."
"Do they have different personalities?"
"Fish?" Quint laughed. "That's giving them more credit than they're due. You can't treat 'em like people, even though I guess some people are as dumb as fish. No. They do different things sometimes, but after a while you get to know everything they can do."
"It's not a challenge, then. You're not fighting an enemy."
"No. No more n' a plumber who's trying to unstick a drain. Maybe he'll cuss at it and hit it with a wrench. But down deep he don't think he's fighting somebody. Sometimes I run into an ornery fish that gives me more trouble than other ones, but I just use different tools."
"There are fish you can't catch, aren't there?"
"Oh sure, but that don't mean they're smart or sneaky or anything. It only means they're not hungry when you try to catch 'em, or they're too fast for you, or you're using the wrong bait."
♥ "Suppose you fell over with this fish. Is there anything you could do?"
"Sure. Pray. It'd be like falling out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping you'll land in a haystack. The only thing that'd save you would be God, and since He pushed you overboard in the first place, I wouldn't give a nickel for your chances."
♥ Quint hefted the harpoon and looked at the shark's fin.
The fish moved closer, still cruising back and forth but closing the gap between itself and the boat by a few feet with every passage. Then it stopped, twenty or twenty-five feet away, and for a second seemed to lie motionless in the water, aimed directly at the boat. The tail dropped beneath the surface; the dorsal fin slid backward and vanished; and the great head reared up, mouth open in a slack, savage grin, eyes black and abysmal.
Brody stared in mute horror, sensing that this was what it must be like to try to stare down the devil.
♥ "Suppose you miss by just a hair."
"That's what I'm afraid of."
"I would be, too," said Quint. "I don't think I'd like five thousand pounds of pissed-off dinosaur trying to eat me."
♥ Brody's emotions were jumbled. Part of him didn't care whether Hooper lived or died-might even relish the prospect of Hooper's death. But such vengeance would be hollow-and quite possibly, unmerited. Could he really wish a man dead? No. Not yet.
♥ He glanced downward, started to look away, then snapped his eyes down again. Rising at him from the darkling blue-slowly, smoothly-was the shark. It rose with no apparent effort, an angel of death gliding toward an appointment foreordained.
Hooper stared, enthralled, impelled to flee but unable to move. As the fish drew nearer, he marveled at its colors: the flat brown-grays seen on the surface had vanished. The top of the immense body was a hard ferrous gray, bluish where dappled with streaks of sun. Beneath the lateral line, all was creamy, ghostly white.
Hooper wanted to raise his camera, but his arms would not obey. In a minute, he said to himself, in a minute.
The fish came closer, silent as a shadow, and Hooper drew back. The head was only a few feet from the cage when the fish turned and began to pass before Hooper's eyes-casually, as if in proud display of its incalculable mass and power. The snout passed first, then the jaw, slack and smiling, armed with row upon row of serrate triangles. And then the black, fathomless eye, seemingly riveted upon him. The gills rippled-bloodless wounds in the steely skin.
Tentatively, Hooper stuck a hand through the bars and touched the flank. It felt cold and hard, not clammy but smooth as vinyl. He let his fingertips caress the flesh-past the pectoral fins, the pelvic fin, the thick, firm genital claspers-until finally (the fish seemed to have no end) they were slapped away by the sweeping tail.
The fish continued to move away from the cage. Hooper heard faint popping noises, and he saw three straight spirals of angry bubbles speed from the surface, then slow and stop, well above the fish. Bullets. Not yet, he told himself. One more pass for pictures. The fish began to turn, banking, the rubbery pectoral fins changing pitch.
♥ The fish broke water fifteen feet from the boat, surging upward in a shower of spray. Hooper's body protruded from each side of the mouth, head and arms hanging limply down one side, knees, calves, and feet from the other.
In the few seconds while the fish was clear of the water, Brody thought he saw Hooper's glazed, dead eyes staring open through his face mask. As if in contempt and triumph, the fish hung suspended for an instant, challenging mortal vengeance.
♥ "Catch the fish. And kill it."
"Do you believe that?"
"I'm not sure. But Quint believes it. God, how he believes it."
"Then let him go. Let him get killed."
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"It's my job."
"It is not your job!" She was furious, and scared, and tears began to well behind her eyes.
Brody thought for a moment and said, "No, you're right."
"Then why?"
"I don't think i can tell you. I don't think I know."
"Are you trying to prove something?"
"Maybe. I don't know. I didn't feel this way before. After Hooper was killed, I was ready to give it up."
"What changed your mind?"
"Quint, I guess."
"You mean you're letting him tell you what to do?"
"No. He didn't tell me anything. It's a feeling. I can't explain it. But giving up isn't an answer. It doesn't put an end to anything."
"Why is an end so important?"
"Different reasons, I think. Quint feels that if he doesn't kill the fish, everything he believes in is wrong."
"And you?"
Brody tried to smile. "Me, I guess I'm just a screwed-up cop."
♥ The fish came closer. It was only a few feet away, and Brody could see the conical snout. He screamed, an ejaculation of hopelessness, and closed his eyes, waiting for an agony he could not imagine.
Nothing happened. He opened his eyes. The fish was nearly touching him, only a foot or two away, but it had stopped. And then, as Brody watched, the steel-gray body began to receded downward into the gloom. It seemed to fall away, an apparition evanescing into darkness.
Brody put his face into the water and opened his eyes. Through the stinging saltwater mist he saw the fish sink in a slow and graceful spiral, trailing behind it the body of Quint-arms out to the sides, head thrown back, mouth open in mute protest.
The fish faded from view. But, kept from sinking into the deep by the bobbing barrels, it stopped somewhere beyond the reach of light, and Quint's body hung suspended, a shadow twirling slowly in the twilight.
Brody watched until his lungs ached for air. He raised his head, cleared his eyes, and sighted in the distance the black point of the water tower. Then he began to kick toward shore.