White Shark (31 page)
Authors: Peter Benchley
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Mystery, #Suspense, #Thriller, #Horror
29
Max saw her as soon as he rounded
Waterboro Point, and he felt his heart jump.
Though he still had to cross the entire
harbor — a quarter of a mile, at least — there was no mistaking her; a slender,
delicate figure standing alone at the end of the club dock, wearing blue, as
always.
In the ten days he had known
her, he had never seen her wear anything but blue:
blue sweaters, blue shifts, blue skirts with
blue blouses.
It was as if she knew how
much blue became her, reflecting the blue in her eyes and complementing the
shining gold of her hair.
He waved, though he was sure she couldn’t
see him, not through the maze of sailboats that clogged the harbor, all
bedecked with multicolored flags and pennants and burgees in honor of the
Blessing of the Fleet.
Even the fleet
vessels themselves — dark, rust-spotted behemoths laden with nets and
outriggers and radar domes and enormous winch drums — displayed rainbow
pennants as anniversary finery, as if eager on this once-a-year day to live up
to their absurdly precious names:
Miss Eula, Miss Daisy, Miss Wendy
.
Max wanted to ram the throttle forward and
zip between the boats, but he didn't, for he knew the marine police were on the
prowl, and the last thing he needed was a speeding ticket.
He had no
underage to be alone in a motorboat, and even if he were to be let off with a
warning, the news was certain to get back to his father, who would have no
choice but to ground him.
So he forced himself to putter slowly down
the harbor, checking, whenever he came into an open space, to be sure Elizabeth
hadn't left, given up on him and gone off to watch the Blessing on her own.
Every time he looked, she was there,
waiting.
To reading a
book or checking her watch or pacing.
Just waiting, as she had promised she would.
When Max passed the last of the big boats,
a hundred yards from the dock, and began to thread his way through the club's
small fleet of moored Bluejays, he waved again.
This time she saw him, and she raised a hand and smiled.
He was confused by the feelings rocketing
around inside him.
He had known girls
all his life, had been around them daily since nursery school.
He had been to parties with girls, and to
movies, though always in groups, with other boys.
He had friends who were girls.
But he had never had a girlfriend.
He had never suffered the awful aches of
jealousy and longing.
He had never
kissed a girl, and though he had seen a lot of kissing on-screen, and had often
fantasized about doing it more and more, he wasn't sure he would know how to go
about it.
Movie kissing looked easy and
fun, but then, movie kissers weren't twelve years old.
Max wasn’t even sure that what he was
feeling for
He
knew only that they were different from any feelings he had ever had for a
girl, and that
She was pretty — beautiful, even — but she
behaved as if she didn't know it... or if she did, she didn't use it as a
weapon the way some girls did.
She was
smart, she had read ten times as many books as Max had, including a lot of adult
books, but she never showed off.
She was
shy, but it wasn't a reclusive kind of shyness, not self-conscious or ashamed
of something; rather, it was a sweet shyness; serene and nonjudgmental, as if
she were simply happy with herself.
Maybe it had to do with being deaf —
surely, a major handicap like deafness had to be a determining factor in
someone's life — but Max didn't know enough about deafness to guess how it
could affect a personality.
She was always glad to see him, and he
found that he was feeling a kind of emptiness when he wasn't with her, which
led him to conclude that this probably
was
the beginning of a boyfriend-girlfriend thing.
The prospect alarmed him because it meant that a time would come when
he'd have to kiss her — or try to — because that was what boyfriends and
girlfriends did.
It frightened him, too, because he didn't
trust his own perceptions.
He was
already suffering from sensory overload:
the myths he had created about his father were being dispelled, replaced
daily by new realities — not in a bad way, for the truths about his father were
quite as fine as the fictions he had fashioned, it was just that everything was
new.
He had never doubted the stated
circumstances of his parents' divorce, but he had recently come to realize that
the fact that he had been living with his mother all these years was implicit
criticism of his father.
Why had he
never lived with his father?
Were money
and private schools and tennis lessons and summer homes really better for him
than peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and swimming with sea lions?
Then there was Amanda, about whom Max's
feelings were, as best he could describe them, weird.
She wasn't his mother and didn't pretend to
be, and she treated him more like an adult than his mother ever had, which made
him feel closer to her than to his mother.
He didn't know what his father felt about
Amanda,
or Amanda about his father.
They liked each other, that
was
for sure, they were friends.
It was all too much for Max to cope with,
and it made him question his itchy feelings toward
Maybe he was going crazy, he thought as he
motored slowly along the floating docks in search of an empty slip.
Maybe everything would sort itself out when
he went back West.
On the other hand, he wasn't sure he
wanted to go back West.
He found a slip and stopped the engine and
tossed
"Hello," she said, and she
beamed.
"Hi."
He reached back and raised the engine so the
propeller was out of the water, and locked it in place.
"Hello," she said again.
There was a studied, deliberateness to the
word.
"Hello."
Only then did it strike him:
she had spoken to him, aloud, out in the open
where anyone could hear.
"Hey!" he said, smiling as he
turned to face her, speaking clearly so she could read his lips.
"Good for you.
That sounded real good."
When they had first met, she had not
spoken at all, though he recalled the eerie feeling that some sort of
communication had taken place.
When he
had found her again, after seeing her picture in the paper, she had written
notes on a pad she kept in her pocket, with a ballpoint pen that hung on a
chain around her neck, and had taught him to read a few rudimentary hand
signs.
As they had seen more and more of
each other, she had confessed that her speech embarrassed her.
Since she couldn't hear it, she had no idea
what it sounded like to others, but she could tell from people's faces that it
had sounded strange.
By now, there were times when she seemed
to know what Max was thinking before he said a word.
When he asked her about it, she dismissed it
as a simple skill, no big
deal, that
had developed
over the years since the strange fever had made her deaf.
She likened it to a dog's ability to hear
sounds that humans can't, and explained that a doctor had told her that when a
person loses a primary sense like hearing, often other senses will become much
more acute.
She said it didn't work all
the time, or with most people.
Max grabbed his camera and hopped up onto
the dock.
"Did you find a
spot?" he asked.
"Cool,"
Max's hand and led him up the road toward the borough.
She was barefoot — she never wore shoes, at
least he had never seen her in any — but she didn't flinch even on the roughest
stretches of the pebbly pavement.
The high school band was assembling in the
boat-storage yard at the foot of
Street
Drum majorettes in sequins and spangles practiced tossing their batons
in the air; trumpeters and trombonists
blared
cacophonous bars of nameless tunes; two boys were attempting to hoist a tuba
onto the shoulders of a girl built like a linebacker; an old gray dog sat in
the dirt and barked randomly.
Masons, Elks and Rotarians gathered in
cadres behind the band.
Members of the
Holy Ghost Society, decked out in colorful Portuguese costumes, admired one
another as they smoked their final cigarettes and, a few of them, shared a
paper bag containing a flagon of sustaining elixir.
The road into town had been closed to
automobile traffic, and hundreds of pedestrians swarmed over it and up toward
the Catholic
church
on
would emerge to lead the procession through town and to the docks for the
ceremonial blessing.
throngs jammed the sidewalks.
Little
children sat on the hoods of cars; teenagers perched in the branches of trees.
Max stopped
said, "We'll never see a thing."
She winked at him and touched her chest —
trust
me, she was saying — and dragged him onward.
A little saltbox house stood on a
corner.
gate into the yard and ushered him through.
She pointed to a hole in the base of the fence at the far side of the
yard — a big dog had probably dug it — and darted across the grass, dropped to
her stomach and squeezed through the hole.
Max followed her, and when he stood up on the other side of the fence,
he saw that they were in the courtyard of what had once been a church but was
now a private house.
The belfry or clock
tower or whatever it had been loomed high over the roof of the house.
stood before the massive double door.
She gestured to Max, cupping her hands in front of her and bending her
knees.
"Hey," he said, "I
don't—"
"Away," she replied.
"Yeah, but—"
"Okay," she said, and again she
touched her chest.
"Really."
Max shrugged and cupped his hands, bracing
his elbows on his knees.
She put a foot into his cupped hands,
braced one of her hands on his head and hoisted herself up until she could
reach the top of the lintel over the door.
She felt along the shelf,
then
jumped down.
Smiling, she held a key up to Max's face,
and said, "Cousins."
She opened the door, let Max and herself
in, then closed the door and locked it.
She led Max to the left, through a door and to a staircase that spiraled
up the tower.
They climbed for what
seemed to Max like an hour, until at last the stairs ended at a single door,
bolted top and bottom.
stepped out onto a narrow walkway.
His breath caught, and he heard himself
say, "Wow..."
It was like being in a plane or a
helicopter, like soaring above the town without moving.
They were higher than any tree or building; the
borough lay beneath them like a diorama, and beyond, Max believed, he could see
practically forever.
To the east were
Little Narragansett Bay and Napatree Point and the gray-green shapes of Osprey
and Block.
To the south, sailboats and
oceangoing freighters were framed against the low silhouette of
highway leading to
"Cool?
"
"
I'll
say."
Max opened the lens of his
camera and looked for sights to shoot.
