White Shark (14 page)

Max had nothing special to do, his father
and Tall Man were both busy, so he had decided to go exploring.
 
At low tide, Tall Man had said, you could
walk all the way around the island on the rocks, and he had already made it
nearly halfway around, had reached the far southern end of the island, before
skidding off the slimy boulder and soaking his sneakers.

He came to a small pool — a big puddle,
really — where the tide had receded from a basin in a boulder, and he knelt
down and bent close to the water.
 
He saw
tiny crabs scuttling among the stones, and periwinkles clinging motionless to
the bottom, as if patiently awaiting the next high tide.
 
He watched the crabs for a moment, wondering
what they were doing that made them look so busy —
feeding?
 
Fighting?
 
Fleeing
?
—
then
stood
up and continued on.

The larger rocks were spattered with guano
and littered with clam shells dropped from the air by gulls, which would then
swoop down and peck the succulent meat from the shattered shells.
 
The smaller rocks closer to the water were
coated with algae and weeds, and in niches between them Max saw matchbooks,
plastic six-pack holders and aluminum pop-tops from soda cans.
 
He picked up those he could reach and stuffed
them into his pockets.

He came to a spot where the rocks looked
too slimy and their faces too slippery for him to climb over them safely, and
so he walked up the hillside and crossed twenty or thirty yards of high grass
toward the biggest boulder he had ever seen:
 
at least twelve or fifteen feet high, probably twenty feet long, a
remnant of the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age.
 
He circled the boulder, looking up at it with
awe,
then
began to search for a way down the hill to
the rocks.

He walked between two bushes, tested his
footing and started down.

Something caught his eye, something in the
water, not far out, no more than ten yards away.
 
He looked, but saw nothing, and tried to
articulate for himself what it was he had seen; movement, a change in the shape
of the water, as if something big was swimming just beneath the surface.
 
He kept looking, hoping to see the dorsal fin
of a dolphin or the shimmering shower caused by a school of feeding fish.

Nothing.
 
He kept going,
walking slowly, stepping carefully among the wet rocks.

He heard a sound behind him:
 
a splash, but a strange kind of splash, a
plopping splash, as if an animal had risen out of the water and submerged
again.
 
He turned and looked, and this
time he did see something — a ring of ripples spreading from a spot just
offshore.
 
There was a vague hump in the
surface of the water, but as he watched, he saw it disappear.

He wondered if there were sea turtles
around here.
 
Or seals.
 
Whatever it was out there, he wanted to see
it.

But again, there was nothing.
 
He walked another few yards and looked up to
gauge the terrain ahead.
 
The rocks on
this side of the island seemed to be smaller, more cluttered with debris.
 
There were pot buoys and big chunks of plastic
and...

What was that?
 
Ten or fifteen yards away, something was
caught in the rocks, half in the water, half out.
 
An animal of some kind.
 
A dead animal.

He walked closer and saw that it was a
deer, or the remains of a deer, for the corpse had been savaged, its flesh torn
and stripped.
 
There was no sickly smell
of rot, no gathering of flies, which told Max that the deer had not been dead
for long; this was a fresh kill.
 
He
couldn’t imagine what had done this to so large an animal.
 
Hunters?
 
He looked for bullet wounds in the body, but
saw none.

He was about to turn away, when he saw
something in the head of the deer, something strange.
 
He stepped forward, bent down, reached
out.
 
His foot slipped; he flung out his
arms and tried to straighten up to regain his balance, but overcorrected and
fell backward into the water.

The water wasn't deep, only three or four
feet, and Max quickly found footing on the loose gravel.
 
He stood up.

Suddenly he sensed something behind him —
movement, a change in pressure, as if a mass of water was being shoved at
him.
 
He turned and saw the same vague
hump in the surface.
 
This time it was
moving toward him.

He splashed water to try to frighten it
away, but it kept coming.

A surge of panic washed over Max; he
turned back toward shore, leaned into the hip-deep water and paddled with his
hands.
 
He gained a yard, two yards, and
now he was scrambling up a slope on his hands and knees, scattering rocks and
gravel behind him.
 
He pushed with his
feet and reached for a handhold.
 
His
hand found the head of the deer, and he pulled.
 
Something sharp dug into his palm, cutting it, but he held on and kept
pulling.

He reached the dry rocks, lurched to his
feet and ran.
 
He didn't stop until he
got to the top of the hill.
 
Gasping
ragged breaths that were more like sobs, he looked down at the water.
 
The hump had vanished, and rings of ripples
were fading from the glassy surface.

Trembling from cold and fear, Max ran
toward the house.
 
He had covered half
the distance before he felt a stinging in his palm.
 
He looked at his hand and saw, protruding
from the fleshy bulb beneath his thumb, the thing that had cut him.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Chase looked up from his desk and saw Max
standing in the doorway, soaked from the shoulders down; a puddle was forming
on the floor around his sodden sneakers.
 
He was shivering.
 
His face was
gray, his lips nearly blue.
 
He looked
terrified.

"Max!"
 
Chase jumped up from his desk, knocking his
chair back against the wall, and crossed the room.
 
"Are you okay?"

Max nodded.

Chase knelt down and began to unlace Max's
sneakers.
 
"What happened?
 
You fall off the rocks?"

"A deer," Max said.

"A deer?
 
What
deer?"

Max tried to speak, but stammered as a
spasm wracked his chest and shoulders and made his teeth clatter.

"Hey," Chase said, "
it's
okay."
 
He
removed Max's sneakers, socks, jeans and underwear, balled them up and threw
them out the front door onto the lawn.
 
He took two bath towels from a linen closet in the hall, dried Max off
with one and wrapped him in the other.
 
Then he led him to the sofa in his office and sat him down.

"Deer swim over here," he
said.
 
"Usually from Block Island
but sometimes all the way from town.
 
I don't
know why they bother, there's nothing here for them they can't find somewhere
else.
 
They're a nuisance:
 
they eat everything Mrs. Bixler
plants,
and they're loaded with ticks, Lyme ticks.
 
They—"

Chase stopped, for he saw that Max was
shaking his head.
 
"What?"

"It was dead," Max said.

"What?
 
In the water?
 
It drowned.
 
Yeah, they—"

"Something killed it... tried to eat
it...
did
eat it, a lot of
it."
 
Max spoke haltingly, for he
was still shivering.
 
"I was on the
rocks by the point... near that giant boulder Mrs. Bixler said her family
always called Papa Rock...
 
saw something
in the water, caught in the rocks... saw its head and part of the rest of
it...
 
I got closer...
 
saw there was nothing left behind about
here..."
 
Max touched his rib
cage.
 
"I thought maybe bluefish had
got it...
 
like they did to that
bird."

"It's possible, if it was
bleeding.
 
One of them might take a bite
out of it, and then the others see how easy it is and get in a frenzy
and—"

"No."
 
Again Max shook his head.
 
"I thought maybe a shark, but when I got
real close I saw... the deer had no eyes.
 
Everything around the eyes was all torn.
 
A shark wouldn't do that... couldn't."

"No.
 
So you were right the first time... bluefish, probably."

Max ignored him.
 
"I saw something sticking out of its
cheek...
 
something shiny...
 
I tried to reach for it but couldn’t, so I
took a step and slipped...
 
fell
in."

"What was it?"

Max opened his right hand.
 
The wound in his palm was small and shallow,
and already the bleeding had stopped.
 
He
passed the shiny thing to his father.

"Looks like a shark tooth,"
Chase said as he took the thing and turned out of the shadow cast by his own
torso.

"That's what I thought, too."

But then, as Chase moved to the light on
his desk and examined the thing in his hand, he started, and felt his pulse
leap.

It did look like a shark tooth, a great
white shark's tooth, perhaps fossilized, for it was a dingy gray color.
 
It was a triangle, about half an inch on a
side, and two of its three sides had finely serrated edges that, when Chase ran
his thumb along them, shredded his skin as swiftly as a scalpel.
 
The third side was slightly thicker and had a
flat base, and on each end of the base was a tiny barbed hook.
 
The two hooks faced each other.
 
One had been broken off just above the barb.

Chase took a ruler from his desk and
measured the triangle.
 
It was not half
an inch on a side but five eighths — exactly five eighths.
 
The thing was a magnificently machined,
perfectly precise equilateral triangle.

Chase rubbed it between his thumb and
index finger.
 
The gray patina felt like
slime, and as he rubbed it, it transferred to his skin.

Now the tooth, or whatever it was, shone
like polished silver.

Chase looked at Max.
 
"Is this a joke?" he said.
 
"Tell me you're jerking my chain."

"A joke?"
 
Max shivered
and gestured at the goose bumps on his arms and legs, and at the wound in his
hand.
 
"Some joke."

"Well,
then,..
 
what
kind of an
animal is there that's got stainless steel teeth?"

13

It was two-fifteen when Buck and Brian
Bellamy pushed off from the dock, nearly two hours later than Buck had wanted
to leave, and Buck was furious.
 
He had
told Brian to fill the two scuba tanks, but his brother had been so wrapped up
in helping his girlfriend put together her costume for Waterboro's parade for
the Blessing of the Fleet that he hadn't gotten around to it.
 
He had told Brian to be sure the boat was
full of gas, but Brian had forgotten, so they'd had to wait for forty minutes
in line at the fuel dock while some richbitch put two thousand buck' worth of
diesel into a Hatteras so big that it blocked off all the pump on the dock.

But Buck held his tongue.
 
It wouldn't do any good to give Brian a
chewing-out; Brian was immune to reprimands.
 
After his time in the Army, those two years down in
Texas
near the border with
Mexico
,
with all that cheap pot and tequila and God knows what else, Brian was pretty
much immune to life.
 
Nothing got to him;
he was perpetually mellow.
 
The last time
Buck had hollered at him, for forgetting all the bait on a fishing trip, Brian
had just said, "Aw, piss on it," and had jumped overboard and started
swimming.
 
They had been twelve miles
offshore.