“Like with the stew?” says Crick.
Pete looks deeply now into Crick’s eyes.
“Go fetch me a harpoon,” says Crick, “and I’ll show you.”
Pete looks at the nurse shark just outside the cage. It gnashes and thrashes. Pete thinks. “Maybe,” he says, “we could send out Scraw.”
Scraw screams a crazy-girl-shaped holler.
“Shut up,” says Crick, and he kicks Scraw, and Scraw hunches toward the floor and screams even louder.
Crick looks at Pete. “I don’t think he has the nerves for it,” he says, but the noise of Scraw endures.
Pete nods agreement, shakes his head at the commotion. “He’s a killer anyhow,” he says. He takes aim at Scraw’s skull, pulls the pistol’s trigger and a shot erupts and Scraw’s head oozes open and he goes quiet, his body limping to the floor where a puddle of blood smears out around him. Pete holsters the gun. “How long does it last?” Pete asks pointing at the nurse shark.
Crick shrugs. “All of today,” he says. “Maybe some of tomorrow.”
The two men go to their respective bunks. They both sit. They quietly watch the shark.
Pete takes a plug of tobacco from his pocket and mouths a chew of it.
Outside the sharks charge the townsfolk into terrified clumps, the bulk of them like wads of fear, pock-marked with terror-stricken eyes. These cowering clusters breathe screams as a single organism would, low-droning shouts blend with pitch-pointed shrieks, and the music of it bellows as a bagpiper tuning may, only the lunging attacks of sharks plunging into the mess of folks like grey and toothed fists pop off the steadiness of the choir by subtracting voices from its congregation, and the strikes change the musicality or add to it depending—the wayward tones flittered with blood and the ache-noise of someone’s dying or dismemberment and the sea salt smell of the shark-shaped mastication.
Pete: That one looks mean.
Crick: They’re all mean.
An athletic-looking boy races down the road pursued by a hammerhead with evil-fuck eyes. Make believe you are the camera. The boy races toward you.
Now you are the camera above. The shark is after the boy.
You are beside the shark. Its dorsal fin whistles against the air as the fish races on.
Beside the boy. He huffs and pants, his feet skipping across the gravel, the sound of match sticks against striker pads.
Again above. The shark gains ground.
And in front again. The boy so close the fear on his face repulses you, the skin around his eyes red as fire, and then the hammerhead thrashes down upon the boy’s collar, and the two lift above your line of sight until the last you see of the boy is his sneaker cracking your camera lens.
You are now beside them both, high in the air, the boy’s neck gushing blood, vomit tossing from his mouth, tears streaking his face, and the shark is thrashing.
Pete: Know any jokes?
Crick: No.
A father and daughter race toward home. She is too slow and he raises her to his hip and makes his legs run faster than they ever have. They burn, his legs, but not like fire. It is as though his muscles are filled with saltwater instead of blood, and aching from the corrosion of trying to manipulate that liquid into fuel.
He loves his daughter.
She is his only living kin.
He didn’t know his people, and he just witnessed his wife’s annihilation, her body scraped open and emptied of its mess—globules and morsels and smidgens and niggles. Things like red marbles slick with oil and pink balloons deformed by age, just quaking from her walloped-around body.
He can’t let his daughter die.
He doesn’t look behind him.
He knows they are near, and he begs his legs, his lungs, his heart, through some physical prayer the mind makes to the body, to move faster still, to thwart the smarting back to corners and un-anguish in any way imaginable and give him more.
His daughter faints from fear in his clutch.
He makes it to the porch.
To the door.
Reaches for the knob.
Tries to turn it, but it is locked.
Terrified, he turns.
A great white is upon him and the cast-wide mouth sprawls its shiv-sculpted teeth at him, and in his last act, just a cowardly reflex really, he lifts his daughter at the shark, stuffing her body into its jaws, but the monster is so mighty, it bites them both in two.
Pete: There’s an alcoholic in a potato sack race.
Crick: Is this the joke?
Pete: Yeah.
An aging lady holds a crucifix in front of her.
Her entire frame is trembling, her wrinkly little face like a frightened prune.
A bull shark takes its teeth to her leg. She brings the cross down upon it over and over again. It does nothing.
She hears her flesh tear open—like a bed sheet being ripped at—and she just dies from the shock of it.
Pete: He’s hopping down the track in the lead, and he sees a bar.
A blind man stands still with his arms outstretched.
A gray whirr scurries by him.
Now his hands are gone and blood gushes from his wrists and his face looks confused—his impotent eyes as wide open as walnuts.
He thinks, ‘I’m so far ahead, I’ll just hop in here for a quick one.’
Murm walks the street unfazed.
He whips his tail all casual.
He blinks at the beastly bits left behind by the sharks.
Steps over the bones and severed limbs, setting his hooves instead into puddles of blood and muck, shredded flesh and burst-open bladders. Shit and piss. Puss and ooze. Guts caught in potholes like buckets of chum.
Murm finds an onion cart overturned in the road.
He eats one of the maroon-skinned vegetables.
Chews patiently as sharks whiz around him.
He hops up to the bar and says, ‘Shot of whisky, please.’
Mom screams, “Follow me,” and leads three girls in an odd, stumbling progression through the dregs of the mudded-up street, now slippery with blood and threads of flung human flesh.
In Mom’s mind, a fear tone drones, the smack of shark jaws on human flesh providing a percussion ill-timed. Alongside that, the noise of their steps in the soup of the road, the plunking and slurping of their course illustrating their slow, steady migration away from the assemblages of herded townsfolk—in their ill-fated congregations just delaying for death—and toward a hopeful sanctuary of a storm cellar behind a pale-yellow house.
The smell of warm puddles, warm blood, and salt water. The smell of the mud, the fear, the sun.
The three girls shriek like steam fleeing teapots.
They are a chain of humans, fastened by hands.
They are all so terrified, you cannot tell the true age of them, but they seem to descend in maturity, starting with Mom.
A requiem shark sweeps down from the skies at the weakest link of them, shanking her away from the chain of females fleeing.
And then there were three.
Miraculously, mud-streaked, blood-soaked, the now youngest holding still the detached arm of the one they lost—the arm dangling queerly and flexing with nerves—they make it to the cellar.
“You girls first,” says Mom, and she pushes them down the steps.
Bartender just looks at him.
A whitetip is upon Mom. It has gripped her thigh through her denim dress just as Mom was about to descend into the cellar. She fights it, driving her elbows down against the dorsal fin, jabbing fists at the gills.
It was the nose she should have aimed for.
Realizing she can’t defeat it, won’t shake from its grip, Mom slams shut the cellar door, clamps the pad lock of it shut—all the time screams of the girls below ringing hot in her mind.
Once locked, a lucky strike is landed. Mom puts a fist down into the face of the shark, and the thing lets loose a moment, shakes its head.
Mom takes advantage.
&
nbsp; She turns.
Her leg is messed with wound, panging wildly, but she flees.
On bungled limbs she runnels forth, murking her way across the flood-gutted street and beyond the town’s perimeter into the adjacent spare-grass lands now swampy with standing wet, dotted green by patches of swaying St. Augustine grass.
‘I can’t serve you,’ the bartender says.
There is no more aggressive a shark than the tiger.
The great white might be king, but the tiger is the assassin.
The young are striped, hence the name.
Their noses blunted, their teeth wildly asymmetrical and serrated, their appetites undiscerning so they’ll eat the flesh of anything.
They can live fifty years, growing up to fourteen feet long and weigh on average one-hundred pounds per foot.
They swim in shoals, but will hunt alone.
If they see movement, they attack, and they don’t let go.
See now the tiger shark above the town where the hollers of those being attacked has quelled to murmurs, whispers, tones?
You see it, and it sees Mom.
It swims now toward her, and she has stumbled to a stop, falling upon soft earth where she pants for breath.
She rolls onto her back, hoists herself to her elbows to look at her town now waylaid by the vicious, impossible creatures.
She sees it, the tiger.
It howls steadily toward her, but Mom has nothing left. She is leaked out through the wound on her thigh, which is now numbed by shock and no longer feels the squelch of shred but instead feels packed away beneath stacks of weights, and it is this weight that stills her. She is pale fatigue on the back of a wooden spoon. She is slow nothing in a pocket of put-away pants.
She thinks: I bet it is a man, this shark.
She thinks: I’ll spread my legs at him.
With legs heaved open, Mom lays her head back, and a wild, electric lust spreads over her.
She thinks: We only die once.
She thinks: I will try to enjoy it.
She feels the force of the tiger’s speed upon her like a wind, and then the beast traps her pussy in his jaws, driving her back into the mud, and she gives over the smooth surface of it, her path leaving a slug trail of blood and slick, and the shark shakes viciously, and Mom throws her head back in agony, her vision filled with endlessness of sky, and just before the tiger undoes her she thinks: Who will free them from the cellar?
‘You’re already half in the bag.’
The screams from the street have faded entirely. The sharks amass around the cells. They swim constantly at the bars. Some of the smaller ones make it through. Crick and Pete grab them by the tails and beat them on the floors until they are barely sharks anymore. Even after their skin has been scraped away, and they are essentially piles of organs and yuk, they live in an undead way, wriggling their battered bodies against the floor violently. Pete spits at them.
Pete: I can see the veins in them.
Crick: They’ll be gone soon.
VIII 1/2
Pete wakes to find Crick staring at him. “What is it?” he asks.
“They’re gone.”
Pete pries himself off his bunk, shaking his body into some capable configuration, and he steps to his feet awkwardly, bumbling around with haphazard movement until he finds his balance. He puts his hands over his head. Yawns. Scratches his back. He looks around. He listens. “You sure?” he asks.
“Positive,” says Crick. “Watched ’em vanish while you were sleeping.”
Pete thinks. He smiles. He fishes the cell keys from his pants pocket, feeds them through the bars and awkwardly unlocks the cage. He pushes the door and it creaks rustily open. He steps out cautiously. It is ungracefully silent. He heads toward the door.
“Ain’t you gonna let me out?” asks Crick.
Pete looks back at him. “Why would I?” he asks, and he walks to the doorway and out into the street.
Once he’s gone, Crick produces a metal pick from beneath his tongue. He goes to the cell door and jimmies it open. He follows Pete out into the world.
Pete stands dumbfounded. The sun is high and angry, and the gore of the aftermath shines irrationally like a gem. There’s a glimmer to the butchering. The puddles, the slick bones, the flung flesh, the wobbled away eyes.
Black birds are hoisted upon everything like flight-gifted rot, tearing scattered death into smaller bits which they fumble ineptly while seeking solitude from their brethren birds.
The homes and buildings, never entirely well put together, are busted and battered from the ungainly patterns of the sharks’ feeding frenzies. Splinters of timber are tossed with the bone bits, the debris of destruction like a gravel of death.
Crick walks to his wagon and plucks a harpoon from the bunch of them. “Ain’t a pretty sight is it?” he asks Pete whose back is to him.
Pete turns in awe. “How’d you get out?” he asks.
“Magic,” says Crick.
Pete’s eyes find the blade of the harpoon leveled at him.
He reaches for his pistol, but as he does, Crick flings the harpoon, and before Pete has unholstered the gun, he is impaled by the weapon, which lifts him from the ground and drives him back, stapling him against the wall of the sheriff’s building, where he dangles by the heart upchucking blood down his chest.
Crick goes to him with a knife. “People like you,” he says, “they don’t ever listen.”
IX
Howard and Gall sit in the living room playing checkers. It is a battered world, and family members falter. A woman is a woman if she says she is. A man, if he can prove it. Howard’s father has been dead three years. His best friend Gall has been helping with the ranch. They are both fourteen, but markedly different. Gall knows horses, has big strong shoulders. Howard still chews his lip, would rather whittle than work.
Gall moves a piece. “King me,” he says.
Howard’s mother looks into the room. She sees the game at play. “Who’s winning?” she asks. She had Howard when young and is still pristine. Her blonde hair is pulled behind her ears. She’s been washing in the kitchen, and her white cotton blouse is tight on her breasts, near see-through where wet.
Howard looks at her. “Gall is,” he says.
Gall looks at her. “Like always,” he says.
She smiles at him and rubs her hands together. “You let me know when you’re tired of that kid’s game,” she says.
“Why come?” asks Gall.
“Well,” she says, “thought you and I might play something else.”
It is as though Howard is not there entirely, and it has been this way for weeks. He’s been listening to their fucking from his bedroom confusedly, and he has seen this foreplay banter displayed in front of him ad nauseum.
“I’m gonna go check the horses,” Howard says, and he stands to leave the house.
“Ah, c’mon,” says Gall. “You might still come back. Game’s not over.”
“We’ll pick it up later,” says Howard, “just leave the board as it is.”
As Howard makes his way out of the house and onto the front porch, he hears his mom tell Gall, “Get your little ass in my bedroom, boy. I got something special for you.”
Howard steps into the yard just in time to see the wayward traveler, who leads a one-eyed mule. The mule drags a wagon brimming with harpoons and nets, and shambling behind the rickety wooden carriage, on tethers of varying lengths, are the naked jaws of sharks, their multitudes of teeth chipping and chirping along the dirt. There is a music to it all, a sort of macabre waltz or a hysterical dirge. All percussion. All noise. Bloodcurdling. Amusing. Daffy. Absurd.
The traveler looks up, contemplates Howard. “What are the people here like?” he asks.
Howard thinks a moment. “They’re motherfuckers,” he says.
The traveler nods. “Then you’ll need one of these,” he says. He takes a harpoon from his wagon, walks it to Howard and sets it in his hands.
Howar
d is confused.
“You’ll understand when the time comes,” says the traveler. He smacks his mule’s hindquarters and the mule drags forward.
Just as he’s leaving, Howard sees, in the front seat of the wagon, sitting on a pillow, a decapitated head with a cut on its cheek.
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