White Shark (6 page)

There, just there.
 
The dark and welcoming
world to which it must return.

It was bereft of knowledge but keen in
instinct.
 
It recognized few imperatives
but was compelled to obey the ones it knew.
 
Its survival depended on fuel and protection.

It had no powers of innovation, but it did
have enormous strength, and that strength was what it called upon now.

Trailing streaks of mucous slime, it moved
to the far end of the box and began to push.
 
Though increasingly starved for oxygen, its brain was able to generate
electrical impulses that charged its muscle fibers.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The bow of the ship buried itself in a
trough, then the stern rose.
 
The box
slid forward, pushing the creature with it.
 
But then the bow recovered and climbed toward the sky, and as the stern
fell rapidly, there was a tiny interstice when the box was weightless.

The box moved aft, teetered on the edge of
the fantail and tumbled into the sea.

As soon as it felt the cold, comforting
confinement of salt water, its systems responded with instantaneous
regeneration.
 
The creature soared
downward through the night sea, infused with the primitive perception that it
was once again where it should be.

The ship pitched and slewed its way toward
the lee of an island as a blood-spattered Nikon camera rolled back and forth
across the afterdeck.

Part Three

1996

Waterboro

9

Simon Chase leaned close to the television
monitor in the boat's cabin and shaded it with his hand.
 
The summer sun was still low in the sky, and
its brilliance flooded through the windows and washed out definition on the
green screen.
 
The slowly moving white
dot was barely visible.

With his finger Chase traced a line on the
screen, checked it against a compass and said, "Here she comes.
 
Swing around to one-eighty."

"What's she doing?" asked the
mate, Tall Man Palmer, as he spun the wheel to the right and headed south.
 
"Been out to Block for breakfast, coming
back to Waterboro for lunch?"

"I doubt she's hungry," Chase
said.
 
"Probably so full of whale
meat she won't eat for a week."

"Or longer," said Chase's
son.
 
Max sat on the bench seat facing
the monitor and meticulously copied its data onto graph paper.
 
"Some of the carcharhinids can go more
than a month without eating."
 
He
made the remark with studied casualness, as if such esoterica about marine
biology was on the tip of every twelve-year-old's tongue.

"Well, excuse me, Jacques
Cousteau," Tall Man said, chuckling.

"Don't mind Tall Man, he's just
jealous," said Chase, touching Max's shoulder.
 
"You're right."
 
He was proud, and moved, for he knew that Max
was reaching out, trying to do his part in building a bridge that, under other
circumstances, would have been built years ago.

Tall Man nodded toward shore and said,
"Let's go tell the folks on the beach that the lady ain't hungry.
 
They'd be tickled to hear it."

Chase looked through the window at the
rocky beach of
Watch Hill
,
Rhode Island
.
 
Though it was not yet nine in the morning, a
few families had begun to arrive with their picnic hampers and Frisbees and
inner tubes; a few young surfers in wet suits were bobbing on the miniscule waves,
waiting for a ride that might never come — not today, at least, for there was
wind and no forecast of any.

He smiled at the thought of the scramble,
the panic, that would ensue if the people had any idea why this
innocent-looking white boat was cruising back and forth out here, less than
five hundred yards from the beach.
 
People loved to read about sharks, loved to see movies about sharks,
loved to believe they understood sharks and wanted to protect them.
 
But tell them there was a shark in the water
anywhere within ten miles — especially a great white shark — and their love
changed instantly to fear and loathing.

If they knew that he and Max and Tall Man
were tracking a sixteen foot white shark that likely weighed a ton or more,
their affection would turn to blood lust.
 
They'd holler for it to be killed.
 
Then, of course, as soon as someone did kill it, they'd go right back to
mouthing off about how they loved sharks and how all
God's
creatures
ought to be protected.

"The shark's coming up," Max
said, reading digital numbers on the screen.

Chase bent to the screen again, shading
it.
 
"Yeah, she's been cooling off
at two hundred feet, but she's already at less than a hundred."

"Where'd she find two hundred feet
between here and Block?" asked Tall Man.

"Must be a ditch
out there.
 
I tell you,
Tall
,
she knows her territory.
 
Anyway, she's
coming up the slope."
 
From a hook
on the bulkhead Chase took a still camera with an 85-mm—200-mm zoom lens and
hung it around his neck.
 
He said to Max,
"Let's go see if she'll pose for us."
 
Then, to Tall Man, "Check the monitor now and then just to make
sure she doesn’t buzz off somewhere."

He went to the doorway and looked at the
shore again.
 
"I hope she doesn't
come up between us and the beach.
 
Mass
hysteria, we do not need."

"You mean like Matawan Creek,"
Max said, "In 1916."

"Yeah, but they had reason to be
hysterical.
 
That shark killed three
people."

"Four," Max said.

"Four.
 
Sorry."
 
Chase smiled and looked down — he could still look down, but barely; the
boy was already five-ten — at the gangly replica of himself, but skinnier and
better-looking, for he had his mother's sharp nose and narrow mouth.

Chase took a pair of binoculars from a
shelf and handed them to Max.
 
"Here, go see if you can find her."

Tall Man called to Chase.
 
"Never argue with a kid about
sharks.
 
Kids know sharks.
 
Sharks and dinosaurs."

It was true, Chase thought:
 
kids were dinosaur freaks, and most kids were
shark freaks.
 
But he had never met a
child who knew half as much about sharks as Max did, which pleased him and also
saddened and pained him, for sharks had always been the main, if not the sole,
bond between father and son.
 
They hadn't
lived together for the past eight years, had seen each other only occasionally,
and (phone-company TV commercials to the contrary) weekly long-distance calls
were no way to reach out and touch someone.

Chase and Max's mother had married too
young and too hastily.
 
She was an
heiress to a timber fortune, he an impecunious Greenpeacer.
 
Their naïve premise was that her money and
his idealism would interact synergistically, benefitting the planet and
allowing them to live in
Eden
.
 
They soon discovered, however, that while
they shared common ideals, their means of attaining ends were less than
compatible.
 
Corinne's notion of being on
the front lines of the environmental movement included giving tennis parties,
swimming parties, cocktail parties and black-tie dinner-dances to benefit the
movement; Simon's involved being away from home for weeks at a time, living in
the stinking fo’c’sles of ratty ships and confronting ruthless foreigners on
the high seas.

They tried to compromise:
 
Simon learned to play tennis and to give
speeches; she learned to scuba dive and to differentiate between the Odontoceti
and the Mysticeti.
 
But after four years
of drifting apart, they agreed to disagree... permanently.

The only
synergy that
come
from the relationship was Max — handsomer than either of them,
smarter, more sensitive.

Corinne got custody of Max:
 
she had money, a large and caring family, a
home (several, in fact) and, by the time the divorce was final, a stable
relationship with a neurosurgeon who had been the number one singles tennis
player in
Northern California
.

Simon was the only son of deceased
parents, and he had no steady income, no fixed residence and fleeting
relationships with several women whose prime assets were their looks and their
sexual fervor.

Through her lawyer, Corinne had offered
Chase a generous financial settlement — she was neither cruel nor vengeful, and
she wanted her son's father to be able to afford a decent home for Max to visit
— but in a fit of self-righteous nobility, Chase had refused.

Several times since, Chase had regretted
what he now regarded as a misplaced sexist lunacy.
 
He could have put the money to good use.
 
Especially now that the Institute —
his
institute — was teetering on the
brink of insolvency.
 
He had been tempted
to reconsider, to call Corinne and offer to accept that last beneficence.
 
But he couldn't bring himself to do it.

What mystified him, what he could not
fathom, was the fact that somehow, over the years and the thousands of miles,
his son had been able to see through the sheltering veil of private schools and
country clubs and trust funds, and to maintain an image of his father as a
figure of adventure... someone not only to long for, but to emulate.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

As Chase followed Max outside onto the
open stern of the forty-eight foot boat, he slid his sunglasses down from the
top of his head.
 
The day was bound to be
a scorcher, 95-plus degrees even out here on the ocean, one of those days that
used to be rare but in the past few years had become more and more common.
 
Ten summers ago, there had been only eight
days when the temperature had reached 90 degrees in Waterboro; three years ago,
thirty-nine days; this year, meteorologists were predicting fifty days over 90
and as many as ten over 100.

He used the zoom lens as a telescope and
scanned the surface of the glassy sea.
 
"See anything?" he asked Max.

"Not yet."
 
Max rested his elbows on the bulwark, to
steady the binoculars.
 
"What would
she look like?"

"If she came up to bask on a day like
this, her dorsal fin would stand out like a sail."

Chase saw a tire floating, and a plastic
milk jug, and one of the lethal plastic six-pack holders that strangled turtles
and birds, and globules of oil that when they reached the beach and stuck to
the soles of children's feet would be cursed as tar.
 
At least he didn't see any body parts today,
or any syringes.
 
Last summer, a woman at
the town beach had had to be sedated after her four-year-old son presented her
with a treasure he had found in a wavewash:
 
a human finger.
 
And a man had
taken from his dog what appeared to be a rubber ball but turned out to be a
perfect orb of sewage sludge.

He looked over the stern at the
rubber-coated wire that held the tracking sensor, and checked the knot on the
piece of twine that held the sensor at the prescribed depth.
 
The coil of wire on the deck behind him was three
hundred feet long, but because the bottom was shoaly and erratic, they had set
the sensor at only fifty feet.
 
The twine
was fraying.
 
He'd have to replace it
tonight.

"You still see the shark?" he
called forward to Tall Man.

There was a pause while Tall Man looked at
the screen.
 
"She's up to about
fifty," he said.
 
"Just
hangin’ out, looks to me.
 
Signal's nice and strong, though."

Chase spoke to the shark in his mind,
begging her to come up, to show herself, not only for him but for Max.
 
Mostly for Max.