Jaws (4 page)

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 to 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 stopped 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 he 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 contribution to the Amity understanding --in addition to maintaining the rule of law and sound judgment 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 file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt (11 of 131) [1/18/2001 2:02:21 AM]

file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt 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.

Brody's relationship with Meadows was based on a delicate balance. When groups of youngsters came to town from the Hamptons and caused trouble, Meadows was handed every fact --names, ages, and charges lodged. When Amity's own youth made too much noise at a party, the Leader usually ran a one-paragraph story without names or addresses, informing the public that the police had been called to quell a minor disturbance on, say, Old Mill Road.

Because several summer residents found it fun to subscribe to the Leader year-round, the matter of wintertime vandalism of summer houses was particularly sensitive. For years, Meadows had ignored it --leaving it to Brody to make sure that the homeowner was notified, the offenders punished, and the appropriate repairmen dispatched to the house. But in the winter of 1968 sixteen houses were vandalized within a few weeks. Brody and Meadows agreed that the time had come for a full campaign in the Leader against wintertime vandals. The result was the wiring of the forty-eight homes to the police station, which --since the public didn't know which houses were wired and which weren't --all but eliminated vandalism, made Brody's job much easier, and gave Meadows the image of a crusading editor.

Once in a while, Brody and Meadows collided. Meadows was a zealot against the use of narcotics. He was also a man with unusually keen reportorial antennae, and when he sensed a story --one not susceptible to "other considerations" --he would go after it

like a pig after truffles. In the summer of 1971 the daughter of one of Amity's richest families had died off the Scotch Road beach. To Brody, there was no evidence of foul play, and since the family opposed an autopsy, the death was officially listed as drowning.

But Meadows had reason to believe that the girl was on drugs and that she was being supplied by the son of a Polish potato farmer. It took Meadows almost two months to get the story, but in the end he forced an autopsy which proved that at the time she drowned the girl had been unconscious from an overdose of heroin. He also tracked down the pusher and exposed a fairly large drug ring operating in the Amity area. The story reflected badly on Amity and worse on Brody, who, because several federal violations were involved in the case, wasn't even able to redeem his earlier insouciance by making an arrest or two. And it won Meadows two regional journalism prizes. Now it was Brody's turn to press for full disclosure. He intended to close the beaches for a couple of days, to give the shark time to travel far from the Amity shoreline. He didn't know whether or not sharks could acquire a taste for human flesh (as he had heard tigers do), but he was determined to deprive the fish of any more people. This time he wanted publicity, to make people fear the water and stay away from it. Brody knew there would be a strong argument against publicizing the attack. Like the rest of the country, Amity was still feeling the effects of the recession. So far, the

summer was shaping up as a mediocre one. Rentals were up from last year, but they were not "good" rentals. Many were "groupers," bands of ten or fifteen young people who came from the city and split the rent on a big house. At least a dozen of the $7,000 -

$10,000-a-season shore-front houses had not yet been rented, and many more in the

$5,000 class were still without leases. Sensational reports of a shark attack might turn mediocrity into disaster.

Still, Brody thought, one death in mid-June, before the crowds come, would probably be quickly forgotten. Certainly it would have less effect than two or three more deaths would. The fish might well have disappeared already, but Brody wasn't willing to gamble lives on the possibility: the odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively

high.

He dialed Meadows' number. "Hey, Harry," he said. "Free for lunch?"

"I've been wondering when you'd call," said Meadows. "Sure. My place or yours?"

Suddenly Brody wished he hadn't called at mealtime. His stomach was still file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt (12 of 131) [1/18/2001 2:02:21 AM]

file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt groaning, and the thought of food nauseated him. He glanced up at the wall calendar. It was a Thursday. Like all their friends on fixed, tight incomes, the Brodys shopped according to the supermarket specials. Monday's special was chicken, Tuesday's lamb, and so forth through the week. As each item was consumed, Ellen would note it on her list and replace it the next week. The only variables were bluefish and bass, which were inserted in the menu when a friendly fisherman dropped his overage by the house. Thursday's special was hamburger, and Brody had seen enough chopped meat for one day.

"Yours," he said. "Why don't we order out from Cy's? We can eat in your office."

"Fine with me," said Meadows. "What do you want? I'll order now."

"Egg salad, I guess, and a glass of milk. I'll be right there." Brody called Ellen to

tell her he wouldn't be home for lunch.

Harry Meadows was an immense man, for whom the act of drawing breath was exertion enough to cause perspiration to dot his forehead. He was in his late forties, ate

too much, chain-smoked cheap cigars, drank bonded Bourbon, and was, in the words of his doctor, the Western world's leading candidate for a huge coronary infraction. When Brody arrived, Meadows was standing beside his desk, waving a towel at the open window. "In deference to what your lunch order tells me is a tender stomach," he said, "I am trying to clear the air of essence of White Owl."

"I appreciate that," said Brody. He glanced around the small, cluttered room, searching for a place to sit.

"Just throw that crap off the chair there," Meadows said. "They're just government

reports. Reports from the county, reports from the state, reports from the highway commission and the water commission. They probably cost about a million dollars, and from an informational point of view they don't amount to a cup of spit." Brody picked up the heap of papers and piled them atop a radiator. He pulled the chair next to Meadows' desk and sat down.

Meadows rooted around in a large brown paper bag, pulled out a plastic cup and a cellophane-wrapped sandwich, and slid them across the desk to Brody. Then he began to unwrap his own lunch, four separate packages which he opened and spread before himself with the loving care of a jeweler showing off rare gems: a meatball hero, oozing tomato sauce; a plastic carton filled with oily fried potatoes; a dill pickle the size of a

small squash; and a quarter of a lemon meringue pie. He reached behind his chair and from a small refrigerator withdrew a sixteen-ounce can of beer. "Delightful," he said with

a smile as he surveyed the feast before him.

"Amazing," said Brody, stifling an acid belch. "Absofuckinlutely amazing. I must have had about a thousand meals with you, Harry, but I still can't get used to it."

"Everyone has his little quirks, my friend," Meadows said as he lifted his sandwich. "Some people chase other people's wives. Some lose themselves in whiskey. I find my solace in nature's own nourishment."

"That'll be some solace to Dorothy when your heart says, 'That's enough, buster, adios.'"

"We've discussed that, Dorothy and I," said Meadows, filtering the words through a mouthful of bread and meat, "and we agree that one of the few advantages man has over other animals is the ability to choose the way to bring on his own death. Food may well kill me, but it's also what has made life such a pleasure. Besides, I'd rather go my way than end up in the belly of a shark. After this morning, I'm sure you'll agree." Brody was in the midst of swallowing a bite of egg salad sandwich, and he had to force it past a rising gag. "Don't do that to me," he said. They ate in silence for a few moments. Brody finished his sandwich and milk, wadded the sandwich wrapper and stuffed it into the plastic cup. He leaned back and lit a cigarette. Meadows was still eating, but Brody knew his appetite wouldn't be diminished by any discussion. He recalled a time when Meadows had visited the scene of a bloody automobile accident and proceeded to interview police and survivors while sucking on a coconut Popsicle.

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"About the Watkins thing," Brody said. "I have a couple of thoughts, if you want to hear them." Meadows nodded. "First, it seems to me that the cause of death is cut-anddried. I've already talked to Santos, and –“

"I did, too."

"So you know what he thinks. It was a shark attack, clear and simple. And if you'd

seen the body, you'd agree. There's just no --"

"I did see it."

Brody was astonished, mostly because he couldn't imagine how anyone who had seen that mess could be sitting there now, licking lemon-pie filling off his fingers. "So you agree?"

"Yes. I agree that's what killed her. But there are a few things I'm not so sure of."

"Like what?"

"Like why she was swimming at that time of night. Do you know what the temperature was at around midnight? Sixty. Do you know what the water temperature was? About fifty. You'd have to be out of your mind to go swimming under those conditions."

"Or drunk," said Brody, "which she probably was."

"Maybe. No, you're right --probably. I've checked around a little, and the Footes

don't mess with grass or mescaline or any of that stuff. There's one other thing that bothers me, though."

Brody was annoyed. "For Christ's sake, Harry, stop chasing shadows. Once in a while, people do die by accident."

"It's not that. It's just that it's damn funny that we've got a shark around here when

the water's still this cold."

"Is it? Maybe there are sharks who like cold water. Who knows about sharks?"

"There are some. There's the Greenland shark, but they never come down this far, and even if they did, they don't usually bother people. Who knows about sharks? I'll tell you this: At the moment I know a hell of a lot more about them than I did this morning. After I saw what was left of Miss Watkins, I called a young guy I know up at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. I described the body to him, and he said it's likely that only

one kind of shark would do a job like that."

"What kind?"

"A great white. There are others that attack people, like tigers and hammerheads and maybe even makos and blues, but this fellow Hooper --Matt Hooper --told me that to cut a woman in half like that you'd have to have a fish with a mouth like this" --he spread his hands about three feet apart --"and the only shark that grows that big and attacks people is the great white. There's another name for them."