Jaws

by Peter Benchley

  The fish had moved away. It swallowed the woman’s limb without chewing. Bones and meat passed down the massive gullet in a single spasm. Now the fish turned again, homing on the stream of blood flushing from the woman’s femoral artery, a beacon as clear and true as a lighthouse on a cloudless night. This time the fish attacked from below. It hurtled up under the woman, jaws agape. The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water. The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly. The fish, with the woman’s body in its mouth, smashed down on the water with a thunderous splash, spewing foam and blood and phosphorescence in a gaudy shower.

  Below the surface, the fish shook its head from side to side, its serrated triangular teeth sawing through what little sinew still resisted. The corpse fell apart. The fish swallowed, then turned to continue feeding. Its brain still registered the signals of nearby prey. The water was laced with blood and shreds of flesh, and the fish could not sort signal from substance. It cut back and forth through the dissipating cloud of blood, opening and closing its mouth, seining for a random morsel. But by now, most of the pieces of the corpse had dispersed. A few sank slowly, coming to rest on the sandy bottom, where they moved lazily in the current. A few drifted away just below the surface, floating in the surge that ended in the surf.

  The man awoke, shivering in the early morning cold. His mouth was sticky and dry, and his wakening belch tasted of Bourbon and corn. The sun had not yet risen, but a line of pink on the eastern horizon told him that daybreak was near. The stars still hung faintly in the lightening sky. The man stood and began to dress. He was annoyed that the woman had not woken him when she went back to the house, and he found it curious that she had left her clothes on the beach. He picked them up and walked to the house.

  He tiptoed across the porch and gently opened the screen door, remembering that it screeched when yanked. The living room was dark and empty, littered with half-empty glasses, ashtrays, and dirty plates. He walked across the living room, turned right down a hall, past two closed doors. The door to the room he shared with the woman was open, and a bedside light was on. Both beds were made. He tossed the woman’s clothes on one of the beds, then returned to the living room and switched on a light. Both couches were empty.

  There were two more bedrooms in the house. The owners slept in one. Two other house guests occupied the other. As quietly as possible, the man opened the door to the first bedroom. There were two beds, each obviously containing only one person. He closed the door and moved to the next room. The host and hostess were asleep on each side of a king-size bed. The man closed the door and went back to his room to find his watch. It was nearly five.

  He sat on one bed and stared at the bundle of clothes on the other. He was certain the woman wasn’t in the house. There had been no other guests for dinner, so unless she had met someone on the beach while he slept, she couldn’t have gone off with anyone. And even if she had, he thought, she probably would have taken at least some of her clothes.

  Only then did he permit his mind to consider the possibility of an accident. Very quickly the possibility became a certainty. He returned to the host’s bedroom, hesitated for a moment beside the bed, and then softly placed his hand on a shoulder.

  “Jack,” he said, patting the shoulder. “Hey, Jack.”

  The man sighed and opened his eyes. “What?”

  “It’s me. Tom. I hate like hell to wake you up, but I think we may have a problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “Have you seen Chrissie?”

  “What do you mean, have I seen Chrissie? She’s with you.”

  “No, she isn’t. I mean, I can’t find her.”

  Jack sat up and turned on a light. His wife stirred and covered her head with a sheet. Jack looked at his watch. “Jesus Christ. It’s five in the morning. And you can’t find your date.”

  “I know,” said Tom. “I’m sorry. Do you remember when you saw her last?”

  “Sure I remember. She said you were going for a swim, and you both went out on the porch. When did you see her last?”

  “On the beach. Then I fell asleep. You mean she didn’t come back?”

  “Not that I saw. At least not before we went to bed, and that was around one.”

  “I found her clothes.”

  “Where? On the beach?”

  “Yes.”

  “You looked in the living room?”

  Tom nodded. “And in the Henkels’ room.”

  “The Henkels’ room!”

  Tom blushed. “I haven’t known her that long. For all I know she could be a little weird. So could the Henkels. I mean, I’m not suggesting anything. I just wanted to check the whole house before I woke you up.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “What I’m beginning to think,” said Tom, “is that maybe she had an accident. Maybe she drowned.”

  Jack looked at him for a moment, then glanced again at his watch. “I don’t know what time the police in this town go to work,” he said, “but I guess this is as good a time as any to find out.”

  2

  Patrolman Len Hendricks sat at his desk in the Amity police station, reading a detective novel called Deadly, I’m Yours. At the moment the phone rang the heroine, a girl named Whistling Dixie, was about to be raped by a motorcycle club. Hendricks let the phone ring until Miss Dixie castrated the first of her attackers with a linoleum knife she had secreted in her hair.

  He picked up the phone. “Amity Police, Patrolman Hendricks,” he said. “Can I help you?”

  “This is Jack Foote, over on Old Mill Road. I want to report a missing person. Or at least I think she’s missing.”

  “Say again, sir?” Hendricks had served in Vietnam as a radio man, and he was fond of military terminology.

  “One of my house guests went for a swim at about one this morning,” said Foote. “She hasn’t come back yet. Her date found her clothes on the beach.”

  Hendricks began to scribble on a pad. “What was the person’s name?”

  “Christine Watkins.”

  “Age?”

  “I don’t know. Just a second. Say around twenty-five. Her date says that’s about right.”

  “Height and weight?”

  “Wait a minute.” There was a pause. “We think probably about five-seven, between one twenty and one thirty.”

  “Color of hair and eyes?”

  “Listen, Officer, why do you need all this? If the woman’s drowned, she’s probably going to be the only one you have—at least tonight, right? You don’t average more than one drowning around here each night, do you?”

  “Who said she drowned, Mr. Foote? Maybe she went for a walk.”

  “Stark naked at one in the morning? Have you had any reports about a woman walking around naked?”

  Hendricks relished the chance to be insufferably cool. “No, Mr. Foote, not yet. But once the summer season starts, you never know what to expect. Last August, a bunch of faggots staged a dance out by the club—a nude dance. Color of hair and eyes?”

  “Her hair is … oh, dirty blond, I guess. Sandy. I don’t know what color her eyes are. I’ll have to ask her date. No, he says he doesn’t know either. Let’s say hazel.”

  “Okay, Mr. Foote. We’ll get on it. As soon as we find out anything, we’ll contact you.”

  Hendricks hung up the phone and looked at his watch. It was 5:10. The chief wouldn’t be up for an hour, and Hendricks wasn’t anxious to wake him up for something as vague as a missing-person report. For all anybody knew, the broad was off humping in the bushes with some guy she met on the beach. On the other hand, if she was washed up somewhere, Chief Brody would want the whole thing taken care of before the body was found by some nanny with a couple of young kids and it became a public nuisance.

  Judgment, that’s what the chief kept telling him he needed; that’s what makes a good cop. And the cerebral challenge of police work had played a part in Hendricks’
decision to join the Amity force after he returned from Vietnam. The pay was fair: $9,000 to start, $15,000 after fifteen years, plus fringes. Police work offered security, regular hours, and the chance for some fun—not just thumping unruly kids or collaring drunks, but solving burglaries, trying to catch the occasional rapist (the summer before, a black gardener had raped seven rich white women, not one of whom would appear in court to testify against him), and—on a slightly more elevated plane—the opportunity to become a respected, contributing member of the community. And being an Amity cop was not very dangerous, certainly nothing like working for a metropolitan force. The last duty-related fatality of an Amity policeman occurred in 1957 when an officer had tried to stop a drunk speeding along the Montauk Highway and had been run off the road into a stone wall.

  Hendricks was convinced that as soon as he could get sprung from this God-forsaken midnight-to-eight shift, he would start to enjoy his work. For the time being, though, it was a drag. He knew perfectly well why he had the late shift. Chief Brody liked to break in his young men slowly, letting them develop the fundamentals of police work—good sense, sound judgment, tolerance, and politeness—at a time of day when they wouldn’t be overtaxed.

  The business shift was 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., and it called for experience and diplomacy. Six men worked that shift. One handled the summertime traffic at the intersection of Main and Water streets. Two patrolled in squad cars. One manned the phones at the station house. One handled the clerical work. And the chief handled the public—the ladies who complained that they were unable to sleep because of the din coming from the Randy Bear or Saxon’s, the town’s two gin mills; the homeowners who complained that bums were littering the beaches or disturbing the peace; and the vacationing bankers and brokers and lawyers who stopped in to discuss their various plans for keeping Amity a pristine and exclusive summer colony.

  Four to midnight was the trouble shift, when the young studs from the Hamptons would flock to the Randy Bear and get involved in a fight or simply get so drunk that they became a menace on the roads; when, very rarely, a couple of predators from Queens would lurk in the dark side streets and mug passersby; and when, about twice a month in the summer, enough evidence having accumulated, the police would feel obliged to stage a pot bust at one of the huge waterfront homes. There were six men on four to midnight, the six largest men on the force, all between thirty and fifty years old.

  Midnight to eight was usually quiet. For nine months of the year, peace was virtually guaranteed. The biggest event of the previous winter had been an electrical storm that had set off all the alarms linking the police station to forty-eight of Amity’s biggest and most expensive homes. Normally during the summer, the midnight-to-eight shift was manned by three officers. One, however, a young fellow named Dick Angelo, was now taking his two-week leave before the season began to swing. The other was a thirty-year veteran named Henry Kimble, who had chosen the midnight-to-eight shift because it permitted him to catch up on his sleep—he held a daytime job as a bartender at Saxon’s. Hendricks tried to raise Kimble on the radio—to get him to take a walk along the beach by Old Mill Road—but he knew the attempt was hopeless. As usual, Kimble was sound asleep in a squad car parked behind the Amity Pharmacy. And so Hendricks picked up the phone and dialed Chief Brody’s home number.

  Brody was asleep, in that fitful state before waking when dreams rapidly change and there are moments of bleary semiconsciousness. The first ring of the phone was assimilated into his dream—a vision that he was back in high school groping a girl on a stairwell. The second ring snapped the vision. He rolled over and picked up the receiver.

  “Yeah?”

  “Chief, this is Hendricks. I hate to bother you this early, but—”

  “What time is it?”

  “Five-twenty.”

  “Leonard, this better be good.”

  “I think we’ve got a floater on our hands, Chief.”

  “A floater? What in Christ’s name is a floater?”

  It was a word Hendricks had picked up from his night reading. “A drowning,” he said, embarrassed. He told Brody about the phone call from Foote. “I didn’t know if you’d want to check it out before people start swimming. I mean, it looks like it’s going to be a nice day.”

  Brody heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Where’s Kimble?” he said and then added quickly, “Oh, never mind. It was a stupid question. One of these days I’m going to fix that radio of his so he can’t turn it off.”

  Hendricks waited a moment, then said, “Like I said, Chief, I hate to bother …”

  “Yeah, I know, Leonard. You were right to call. As long as I’m awake, I might as well get up. I’ll shave and shower and grab some coffee, and on my way in I’ll take a look along the beach in front of Old Mill and Scotch, just to make sure your ‘floater’ isn’t cluttering up somebody’s beach. Then when the day boys come on, I’ll go out and talk to Foote and the girl’s date. I’ll see you later.”

  Brody hung up the phone and stretched. He looked at his wife, lying next to him in the double bed. She had stirred when the phone rang, but as soon as she determined that there was no emergency, she lapsed back into sleep.

  Ellen Brody was thirty-six, five years younger than her husband, and the fact that she looked barely thirty was a source of both pride and annoyance to Brody: pride because, since she looked handsome and young and was married to him, she made him seem a man of excellent taste and substantial attraction; annoyance because she had been able to keep her good looks despite the strains of bearing three children, whereas Brody—though hardly fat at six-foot-one and two hundred pounds—was beginning to be concerned about his blood pressure and his thickening middle. Sometimes during the summer, Brody would catch himself gazing with idle lust at one of the young, long-legged girls who pranced around town—their untethered breasts bouncing beneath the thinnest of cotton jerseys. But he never enjoyed the sensation, for it always made him wonder whether Ellen felt the same stirring when she looked at the tanned, slim young men who so perfectly complemented the long-legged girls. And as soon as that thought occurred to him, he felt still worse, for he recognized it as a sign that he was on the unfortunate side of forty and had already lived more than half his life.

  Summers were bad times for Ellen Brody, for in summer she was tortured by thoughts she didn’t want to think—thoughts of chances missed and lives that could have been. She saw people she had grown up with: prep school classmates now married to bankers and brokers, summering in Amity and wintering in New York, graceful women who stroked tennis balls and enlivened conversations with equal ease, women who (Ellen was convinced) joked among themselves about Ellen Shepherd marrying that policeman because he got her pregnant in the back seat of his 1948 Ford, which had not been the case.

  Ellen was twenty-one when she met Brody. She had just finished her junior year at Wellesley and was spending the summer in Amity with her parents—as she had done for the previous eleven summers, ever since her father’s advertising agency transferred him from Los Angeles to New York. Although, unlike several of her friends, Ellen Shepherd was hardly obsessed by marriage, she assumed that within a year or two after finishing college she would wed someone from approximately her own social and financial station. The thought neither distressed nor delighted her. She enjoyed the modest wealth her father had earned, and she knew her mother did too. But she was not eager to live a life that was a repetition of her parents’. She was familiar with the petty social problems, and they bored her. She considered herself a simple girl, proud of the fact that in the yearbook for the class of 1953 at Miss Porter’s School she was voted Most Sincere.

  Her first contact with Brody was professional. She was arrested—or, rather, her date was. It was late at night, and she was being driven home by an extremely drunk young man intent on driving very fast down very narrow streets. The car was intercepted and stopped by a policeman who impressed Ellen with his youth, his looks, and his civility. After issuing a summons, he c
onfiscated the keys to Ellen’s date’s car and drove them both to their respective homes. The next morning, Ellen was shopping when she found herself next to the police station. As a lark, she walked in and asked the name of the young officer who had been working at about midnight the night before. Then she went home and wrote Brody a thank-you note for being so nice, and she also wrote a note to the chief of police commending young Martin Brody. Brody telephoned to thank her for her thank-you note.

  When he asked her out to dinner and the movies on his night off, she accepted out of curiosity. She had scarcely ever talked to a policeman, let alone gone out with one. Brody was nervous, but Ellen seemed so genuinely interested in him and his work that he eventually calmed down enough to have a good time. Ellen found him delightful: strong, simple, kind—sincere. He had been a policeman for six years. He said his ambition was to be chief of the Amity force, to have sons to take duck-shooting in the fall, to save enough money to take a real vacation every second or third year.

  They were married that November. Ellen’s parents had wanted her to finish college, and Brody had been willing to wait until the following summer, but Ellen couldn’t imagine that one more year of college could make any difference in the life she had chosen to lead.

  There were some awkward moments during the first few years. Ellen’s friends would ask them to dinner or lunch or for a swim, and they would go, but Brody would feel ill at ease and patronized. When they got together with Brody’s friends, Ellen’s past seemed to stifle fun. People behaved as if they were fearful of committing a faux pas. Gradually, as friendships developed, the awkwardness disappeared. But they never saw any of Ellen’s old friends anymore. Although the shedding of the “summer people” stigma earned her the affection of the year-round residents of Amity, it cost her much that was pleasant and familiar from the first twenty-one years of her life. It was as if she had moved to another country.

  Until about four years ago, the estrangement hadn’t bothered her. She was too busy, and too happy, raising children to let her mind linger on alternatives long past. But when her last child started school, she found herself adrift, and she began to dwell on memories of how her mother had lived her life once her children had begun to detach from her: shopping excursions (fun because there was enough money to buy all but the most outrageously expensive items), long lunches with friends, tennis, cocktail parties, weekend trips. What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise.