Jaws

by Peter Benchley

  “And we’d tell him we’d send him an autographed copy of our report.”

  “We’d dedicate it to him!”

  They both laughed, and Ellen said, “What about after we registered?”

  “Well, we’d drive to wherever our room was, scout around to see if anyone seemed to be in the rooms nearby—unless we had a cabin to ourselves—and then go inside.”

  “And then?”

  “That’s when our options broaden. I’d probably be so turned on that I’d grab you, let you have it—maybe on the bed, maybe not. That time would be my time. Your time would come later.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The first time would be out of control—a slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am deal. After that, I’d have more control, and the second time I could prepare you.”

  “How would you do that?”

  “With delicacy and finesse.”

  The waitress was approaching the table, so they sat back and stopped talking.

  “Will there be anything else?”

  “No,” said Hooper. “Just the check.”

  Ellen assumed that the waitress would return to the bar to total the bill, but she stood at the table, scribbling and carrying her ones. Ellen slid to the edge of the seat and said as she stood up, “Excuse me. I want to powder my nose before we go.”

  “I know,” said Hooper, smiling.

  “You do?” said the waitress as Ellen passed her. “Boy, that’s what marriage will do for you. I hope nobody ever knows me that well.”

  Ellen arrived home a little before 4:30. She went upstairs, into the bathroom, and turned on the water in the tub. She took off all her clothes and stuffed them into the laundry hamper, mixing them with the clothes already in the hamper. She looked in the mirror and examined her face and neck. No marks.

  After her bath, she powdered herself, brushed her teeth, and gargled with mouthwash. She went into the bedroom, put on a fresh pair of underpants and a nightgown, pulled back the bedclothes and climbed into bed. She closed her eyes, hoping that sleep would pounce upon her.

  But sleep could not overpower a memory that kept sliding into her mind. It was a vision of Hooper, eyes wide and staring—but unseeing—at the wall as he approached climax. The eyes seemed to bulge until, just before release, Ellen had feared they might actually pop out of their sockets. Hooper’s teeth were clenched, and he ground them the way people do during sleep. From his voice there came a gurgling whine, whose tone rose higher and higher with each frenzied thrust. Even after his obvious, violent climax, Hooper’s countenance had not changed. His teeth were still clenched, his eyes still fixed on the wall, and he continued to pump madly. He was oblivious of the being beneath him, and when, perhaps a full minute after his climax, Hooper still did not relax, Ellen had become afraid—of what, she wasn’t sure, but the ferocity and intensity of his assault seemed to her a pursuit in which she was only a vehicle. After a while, she had tapped him on the back and said softly, “Hey, I’m here too,” and in a moment his eyelids closed and his head dropped to her shoulder. Later, during their subsequent coupling, Hooper had been more gentle, more controlled, less detached. But the fury of the first encounter still lingered disturbingly in Ellen’s mind.

  Finally, her mind gave in to fatigue, and she fell asleep.

  Almost instantly, it seemed, she was awakened by a voice that said, “Hey there, are you okay?” She opened her eyes and saw Brody sitting on the end of the bed.

  She yawned. “What time is it?”

  “Almost six.”

  “Oh-oh. I’ve got to pick up Sean. Phyllis Santos must be having a fit.”

  “I got him,” said Brody. “I figured I’d better, once I couldn’t reach you.”

  “You tried to reach me?”

  “A couple of times. I tried you at the hospital at around two. They said they thought you’d come home.”

  “That’s right. I did. I felt awful. My thyroid pills aren’t doing what they should. So I came home.”

  “Then I tried to reach you here.”

  “My, it must have been important.”

  “No, it was nothing important. If you must know, I was calling to apologize for whatever I did that got you upset last night.”

  A twinge of shame struck Ellen, but it passed, and she said, “You’re sweet, but don’t worry. I’d already forgotten about it.”

  “Oh,” said Brody. He waited a moment to see if she was going to say anything else, and when it was clear she wasn’t, he said, “So where were you?”

  “I told you, here!” The words came out more harshly than she had intended. “I came home and went to bed, and that’s where you found me.”

  “And you didn’t hear the phone? It’s right there.” Brody pointed to the bed table near the other side of the bed.

  “No, I …” She started to say she had turned the phone off, but then she remembered that this particular phone couldn’t be turned off all the way. “I took a pill. The moaning of the damned won’t wake me after I’ve taken one of those pills.”

  Brody shook his head. “I really am going to throw those damn things down the john. You’re turning into a junkie.” He stood and went into the bathroom.

  Ellen heard him flip up the toilet seat and begin to urinate—a loud, powerful, steady stream that went on and on and on. She smiled. Until today, she had assumed Brody was some kind of urinary freak: he could go for almost a day without urinating. Then, when he did pee, he seemed to pee forever. Long ago, she had concluded that his bladder was the size of a watermelon. Now she knew that huge bladder capacity was simply a male trait. Now, she said to herself, I am a woman of the world.

  “Have you heard from Hooper?” Brody called over the noise of the endless stream.

  Ellen thought for a moment about her response, then said, “He called this morning, just to say thank you. Why?”

  “I tried to get hold of him today, too. Around midday and a couple of times during the afternoon. The hotel said they didn’t know where he was. What time did he call here?”

  “Just after you left for work.”

  “Did he say what he was going to be doing?”

  “He said … he said he might try to work on the boat, I think. I really don’t remember.”

  “Oh. That’s funny.”

  “What is?”

  “I stopped by the dock on my way home. The harbor master said he hadn’t seen Hooper all day.”

  “Maybe he changed his mind.”

  “He was probably shagging Daisy Wicker in some hotel room.”

  Ellen heard the stream slow, then dwindle into droplets. Then she heard the toilet flush.

  9

  On Thursday morning Brody got a call summoning him to Vaughan’s office for a noon meeting of the Board of Selectmen. He knew what the subject of the meeting was: opening the beaches for the Fourth of July weekend that would begin the day after tomorrow. By the time he left his office for the town hall, he had marshaled and examined every argument he could think of.

  He knew his arguments were subjective, negative, based on intuition, caution, and an abiding, gnawing guilt. But Brody was convinced he was right. Opening the beaches would not be a solution or a conclusion. It would be a gamble that Amity—and Brody—could never really win. They would never know for certain that the shark had gone away. They would be living from day to day, hoping for a continuing draw. And one day, Brody was sure, they would lose.

  The town hall stood at the head of Main Street, where Main dead-ended and was crossed by Water Street. The building was a crown at the top of the T formed by Main and Water streets. It was an imposing, pseudo-Georgian affair—red brick with white trim and two white columns framing the entrance. A World War II howitzer sat on the lawn in front of the town hall, a memorial to the citizens of Amity who had served in the war.

  The building had been given to the town in the late 1920s by an investment banker who had somehow convinced himself that Amity would one day be the hub of commerce on eastern Long
Island. He felt that the town’s public officials should work in a building befitting their destiny—not, as had been the case until then, conducting the town’s business in a tiny suite of airless rooms above a saloon called the Mill. (In February, 1930, the distraught banker, who had proved no more adept at predicting his own destiny than Amity’s, tried, unsuccessfully, to reclaim the building, insisting he had intended only to loan it to the town.)

  The rooms inside the town hall were as preposterously grandiose as the exterior. They were huge and high-ceilinged, each with its own elaborate chandelier. Rather than pay to remodel the interior into small cubicles, successive Amity administrations had simply jammed more and more people into each room. Only the mayor was still permitted to perform his part-time duties in solitary splendor.

  Vaughan’s office was on the southeast corner of the second floor, overlooking most of the town and, in the distance, the Atlantic Ocean.

  Vaughan’s secretary, a wholesome, pretty woman named Janet Sumner, sat at a desk outside the mayor’s office. Though he seldom saw her, Brody was paternally fond of Janet, and he was idly mystified that—aged about twenty-six—she was still unmarried. He usually made a point of inquiring about her love life before he entered Vaughan’s office. Today he said simply, “Are they all inside?”

  “All that’s coming.” Brody started into the office, and Janet said, “Don’t you want to know who I’m going out with?”

  He stopped, smiled, and said, “Sure. I’m sorry. My mind’s a mess today. So who is it?”

  “Nobody. I’m in temporary retirement. But I’ll tell you one thing.” She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “I wouldn’t mind playing footsie with that Mr. Hooper.”

  “Is he in there?”

  Janet nodded.

  “I wonder when he was elected selectman.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But he sure is cute.”

  “Sorry, Jan, he’s spoken for.”

  “By who?”

  “Daisy Wicker.”

  Janet laughed.

  “What’s funny? I just broke your heart.”

  “You don’t know about Daisy Wicker?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  Again Janet lowered her voice. “She’s queer. She’s got a lady roommate and everything. She’s not even AC-DC. She’s just plain old DC.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Brody. “You sure do have an interesting job, Jan.” As he entered the office, Brody said to himself: Okay, so where the hell was Hooper yesterday?

  As soon as he was inside the office, Brody knew he would be fighting alone. The only selectmen present were longtime friends and allies of Vaughan’s: Tony Catsoulis, a builder who looked like a fire hydrant; Ned Thatcher, a frail old man whose family had owned the Abelard Arms Inn for three generations; Paul Conover, owner of Amity Liquors; and Rafe Lopez (pronounced loops), a dark-skinned Portuguese elected to the board by, and a vocal defender of, the town’s black community.

  The four selectmen sat around a coffee table at one end of the immense room. Vaughan sat at his desk at the other end of the room. Hooper stood at a southerly window, staring out at the sea.

  “Where’s Albert Morris?” Brody said to Vaughan after perfunctorily greeting the others.

  “He couldn’t make it,” said Vaughan. “I don’t think he felt well.”

  “And Fred Potter?”

  “Same thing. There must be a bug going around.” Vaughan stood up. “Well, I guess we’re all here. Grab a chair and pull it over by the coffee table.”

  God, he looks awful, Brody thought as he watched Vaughan drag a straight-back chair across the room. Vaughan’s eyes were sunken and dark. His skin looked like mayonnaise. Either he’s got some fierce hangover, Brody decided, or else he hasn’t slept in a month.

  When everyone was seated, Vaughan said, “You all know why we’re here. And I guess it’s safe to say that there’s only one of us that needs convincing about what we should do.”

  “You mean me,” said Brody.

  Vaughan nodded. “Look at it from our point of view, Martin. The town is dying. People are out of work. Stores that were going to open aren’t. People aren’t renting houses, let alone buying them. And every day we keep the beaches closed, we drive another nail into our own coffin. We’re saying, officially, this town is unsafe: stay away from here. And people are listening.”

  “Suppose you do open the beaches for the Fourth, Larry,” said Brody. “And suppose someone gets killed.”

  “It’s a calculated risk, but I think—we think—it’s worth taking.”

  “Why?”

  Vaughan said, “Mr. Hooper?”

  “Several reasons,” said Hooper. “First of all, nobody’s seen the fish in a week.”

  “Nobody’s been in the water, either.”

  “That’s true. But I’ve been on the boat looking for him every day—every day but one.”

  “I meant to ask you about that. Where were you yesterday?”

  “It rained,” said Hooper. “Remember?”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I just …” He paused momentarily, then said, “I studied some water samples. And read.”

  “Where? In your hotel room?”

  “Part of the time, yeah. What are you driving at?”

  “I called your hotel. They said you were out all afternoon.”

  “So I was out!” Hooper said angrily. “I don’t have to report in every five minutes, do I?”

  “No. But you’re here to do a job, not go galavanting around all those country clubs you used to belong to.”

  “Listen, mister, you’re not paying me. I can do whatever the fuck I want!”

  Vaughan broke in. “Come on. This isn’t getting anybody anywhere.”

  “Anyway,” said Hooper, “I haven’t seen a trace of that fish. Not a sign. Then there’s the water. It’s getting warmer every day. It’s almost seventy now. As a rule—I know, rules are made to be broken—great whites prefer cooler water.”

  “So you think he’s gone farther north?”

  “Or out deeper, into colder water. He could even have gone south. You can’t predict what these things are going to do.”

  “That’s my point,” said Brody. “You can’t predict it. So all you’re doing is guessing.”

  Vaughan said, “You can’t ask for a guarantee, Martin.”

  “Tell that to Christine Watkins. Or the Kintner boy’s mother.”

  “I know, I know,” Vaughan said impatiently. “But we have to do something. We can’t sit around waiting for divine revelation. God isn’t going to scribble across the sky, ‘The shark is gone.’ We have to weigh the evidence and make a decision.”

  Brody nodded. “I guess. So what else has the boy genius come up with?”

  “What’s the matter with you?” said Hooper. “I was asked for my opinion.”

  “Sure,” said Brody. “Okay. What else?”

  “What we’ve known all along. That there’s no reason for that fish to hang around here. I haven’t seen him. The Coast Guard hasn’t seen him. No new reef has popped up from the bottom. No garbage scows are dumping stuff into the water. No extraordinary fish life is around. There’s just no reason for him to be here.”

  “But there never has been, has there? And he was here.”

  “That’s true. I can’t explain it. I doubt if anyone can.”

  “An act of God, then?”

  “If you like.”

  “And there’s no insurance against acts of God, is there, Larry?”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Martin,” said Vaughan. “But we’ve got to make a decision. As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one way to go.”

  “The decision’s been made,” said Brody.

  “You could say that, yes.”

  “And when someone else gets killed? Who’s taking the blame this time? Who’s going to talk to the husband or the mother or the wife and tell them, ‘We were just playing the odds, and we lost’?�
��

  “Don’t be so negative, Martin. When the time comes—if the time comes, and I’m betting it won’t—we’ll work that out then.”

  “Now, goddammit! I’m sick of taking all the shit for your mistakes.”

  “Wait a minute, Martin.”

  “I’m serious. If you want the authority for opening the beaches, then you take the responsibility, too.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that as long as I’m chief of police in this town, as long as I’m supposed to be responsible for public safety, those beaches will not be open.”

  “I’ll tell you this, Martin,” said Vaughan. “If those beaches stay closed over the Fourth of July weekend, you won’t have your job very long. And I’m not threatening. I’m telling you. We can still have a summer. But we have to tell people it’s safe to come here. Twenty minutes after they hear you won’t open the beaches, the people of this town will impeach you, or find a rail and run you out on it. Do you agree, gentlemen?”

  “Fuckin’ A,” said Catsoulis. “I’ll give ’em the rail myself.”

  “My people got no work,” said Lopez. “You don’t let them work, you’re not gonna work.”

  Brody said flatly, “You can have my job any time you want it.”

  A buzzer sounded on Vaughan’s desk. He stood up angrily and crossed the room. He picked up the phone. “I told you we didn’t want to be disturbed!” he snapped. There was a moment’s silence, and he said to Brody, “There’s a call for you. Janet says it’s urgent. You can take it here or outside.”

  “I’ll take it outside,” Brody said, wondering what could be urgent enough to call him out of a meeting with the selectmen. Another attack. He left the room and closed the door behind him. Janet handed him the phone on her desk, but before she could depress the flashing button to release it from “hold,” Brody said, “Tell me: Did Larry ever call Albert Morris and Fred Potter this morning?”

  Janet looked away from him. “I was told not to say anything about anything to anybody.”

  “Tell me, Janet. I need to know.”

  “Will you put in a good word for me with Golden Boy in there?”

  “It’s a deal.”