Peter Benchley's Creature

by Peter Benchley

  Most important, the shark would still be alive.

  They had lowered their tracking sensor and followed the white for a few more hours as she moved eastward into deeper water and then turned to the north.

  Under normal circumstances, Chase would have pursued the shark without interruption, for to break away meant risking losing her: she could wander out of range, and they might not find her again before the transmitter's batteries gave out—two days, three at most.

  But Max had been scheduled to arrive at the Groton/New London airport that evening, flying in from Sun Valley via Salt Lake and Boston. For the first time ever, Max was going to spend a solid month with his dad, and Chase was damned if he'd let the boy be met by a taxi driver from the nearby town of Stonington, and then ferried, alone and in twilight, out to a rock that would have looked to him about as appealing as Alcatraz.

  So he and Tall Man had abandoned the shark, praying that she wouldn't roam up to New Hampshire or Maine or out to Nantucket, and that with luck they could be back tracking the animal within six hours. Chase had no idea how close she was to giving birth, but the electronic sensor would record the event if it occurred, would transmit changes in body temperature and chemistry. They might even see the birth if it happened near the surface. No one—no scientist or sportsman—had ever witnessed the birth of a great white shark.

  Max had said he didn't need to unpack, and they hustled out of the airport, into the truck, onto the ferry, out to the island and onto the boat. Red-eyed, exhausted, the boy had also been deliriously excited at the thought of seeing a live white shark. When he called his mother from the cellular phone on the boat, the only adjective he could summon was "awesome."

  Corinne had been less than thrilled, had asked to speak to Simon, had lectured him to be careful. Max had settled the matter. He had taken the phone back from Chase and had said, "Chill out, Mom, it's okay. Great whites don't want to hurt people."

  "What do you mean?"

  Max had laughed and said, "They just want to eat them." But when he had heard his mother gasp, he had added, "Just kidding, Mom ... a little shark humor."

  "Do you have your windbreaker?" Corinne had asked.

  "We're fine, Mom, really . . . love ya." Then Max had hung up.

  Within an hour, they had relocated the shark, which Chase regarded as a fortuitous confirmation of one of his pet theories.

  He was particularly interested in—and in fact was considering writing his dissertation about—the question of territoriality in great white sharks. Researchers in South Australia, at places like Dangerous Reef and Coffin Bay, where the water temperature varied little from season to season, had concluded that the region's whites were definitely territorial. Their food source was stable—colonies of seals—and in the course of roughly a week each white would make a tour of its territory and return to begin again.

  Here on the East Coast of the United States, where the water temperature varied by as much as thirty degrees from winter to summer, and food supplies appeared and disappeared unpredictably, territoriality would seem to be impractical. Though no one knew for certain, Chase had been gathering evidence suggesting that these whites might be migratory: they seemed to go south in the winter, reappear in the spring or early summer (traveling, some of them, as far north and east as the Canadian Maritimes), stay till late September or early October and then begin to move south again.

  But what intrigued Chase most was that the records of years of tagging were beginning to show that some whites returned to the same area year after year and reestablished the same general territory during their stay in that area. If he could prove that there were patterns of repetition, he might be able to open up a new field of research into the navigational capacities and memory-engram imprinting in great white sharks.

  That is, as long as there were any great white sharks left to study.

  "She's goin' down again," Tall Man called from the cabin.

  "I guess she's one fickle lady," Chase said, disappointed. He looked toward shore. Napatree Point was abeam, the town of Waterboro just beyond, "Where to now?"

  "She's off to Montauk, looks like. But not with any great purpose. She's strolling."

  Chase walked forward into the cabin, hung up the camera and wiped sweat from his eyebrows. "Want a sandwich?" he called to Max.

  "Not one of those gross sardine-and-onion things."

  "No, I saved you a peanut-butter-and-jelly."

  "Crack me a beer," Tall Man said, looking at his watch. "This watch may say it's nine-fifteen, but it doesn't know diddly about what time it really is." They had been sleeping in erratic four-hour shifts for the past forty hours. "My guts tell me it's straight up on beer o'clock."

  Chase took a step toward the ladder that led to the galley below, when suddenly the boat lurched, lurched again and lost forward motion. The bow seemed to heave up, the stern to drop.

  "What the hell's that?" Chase said. "You hit something?"

  "In a hundred feet of water?" Tall Man frowned at the Fathometer. "Not hardly." The engine seemed to be laboring.

  They heard a sound, as of rubber stretching—a complaining screech—and then the television monitor and the signal receiver began to inch backward on their mounts. The connecting wire was stretched taut through the doorway.

  "Reverse!" Chase shouted as he ran to the door.

  Tall Man shifted into reverse; the connecting wire went slack and drooped to the deck.

  Outside in the cockpit, Chase saw that the coil of rubber-coated wire was gone; three hundred feet had spooled overboard. "The twine must've broken," he said. "The sensor's hitched in something on the bottom."

  Chase took the wire in his hand and began to pull, and Max coiled it on the deck behind him. When the wire tautened again, Chase jigged it, pulling it left and right, giving it slack then hauling it tight. There was no give; the sensor was caught fast.

  "I can't figure out what it's hitched in," he said. "Nothing down there but sand."

  "Maybe," Tall Man said. He put the engine in neutral, letting the boat drift, and joined Chase and Max in the stern. He took the wire from Chase and held it in his fingertips, as if trying to decipher a message from its vibrations. "That nor'easter last week . . . forty knots of breeze for a day and a half will kick up hell with the bottom. Sand'll shift. It could be anything: a rock, a car somebody deep-sixed."

  "It could be a shipwreck," Max said.

  Chase shook his head. "Not around here. We've charted every wreck in the area." To Tall Man he said, "We got any tanks aboard?"

  "Nope. I didn't plan on diving."

  Chase went forward, into the cabin, and adjusted the scale on the Fathometer to its most sensitive reading. When he returned, he was holding a face mask and snorkel.

  "Thirty meters," he said. "Ninety-five feet, give or take."

  "You gonna dive for that sensor?" Tall Man asked, his voice rising. "Free-dive! Are you nuts?"

  "It's worth a try. I've dived ninety feet before."

  "Not without a tank, you haven't. Not since you were eighteen. Hell, Simon, you'll black out if you try forty feet."

  "You want to try?"

  "Not a chance. This country's already got enough dead redskins."

  "Then we got a problem, 'cause I'm damned if I'm gonna lose three thousand bucks' worth of wire and three thousand more of transmitter."

  "Buoy it," Tall Man said. "We'll get some tanks and come back for it later."

  "By then we'll have lost the shark for good."

  "Maybe . . . but we won't have lost you."

  Chase hesitated, still tempted to try to free-dive for the sensor, or at least to go far enough down to be able to see what had snagged it. He was curious to know if he could still dive that deep. As youngsters, he and Tall had free-dived to bottoms invisible from the surface, had swum around the hulks of old fishing boats, had stolen lobsters from traps nestled in crevices in deep reefs. But Tall was right; he was no longer a teenager, an athlete who could party all nigh
t and swim all day. He might make it to the bottom, but he'd never make it back. Starved for oxygen, his brain would shut down and he would pass out—near the surface if he was lucky, far below if he was not.

  "Talk to the man, son," Tall Man said to Max. "Tell him you didn't come all this way just to take your daddy home in a box."

  Max started at Tall Man's bluntness, then put a hand on his father's arm and said, "C'mon, Dad. . . ."

  Chase smiled. "Okay, we'll buoy it," he said.

  "Can we get some tanks and come back and dive on it?" Max asked. "That'd be cool."

  "You know how to dive?" Chase felt a pang, almost of pain, as if the fact that Max had learned to dive without him, somewhere else, from someone else, was a reprimand for his failures as a parent. "Where'd you learn?"

  "At home, in the pool. Gramps got me some lessons."

  "Oh," Chase said, feeling better. At least the boy hadn't really been diving; he'd been preparing for his visit. "We'll put you in the water, sure, but I think we'll start a little shallower."

  Tall Man went to the cabin to disconnect the wire and waterproof the plug with O-ring grease and rubber tape. Chase lifted a hatch in the stern and found a yellow rubber buoy, eighteen inches in diameter, on which the initials "O.I." were emblazoned in red Day-Glo tape.

  Walking aft, Tall Man coiled the wire around his shoulder and elbow. He had removed his sweat-soaked shirt, and the muscles in his enormous torso glistened as they moved beneath his cinnabar skin as if he had been oiled. He stood six feet six, weighed about two-twenty, and if he carried any fat, as his mother used to say as she pressed more food on him, it had to be between his ears.

  "Whoa!" Max said as he looked at Tall Man. "Rambo meets the Terminator! You work out every day?"

  "Work out?" Chase said, laughing. "His two exercises are eating and drinking; his diet's a hundred percent salt-fried grease. He's a cosmic injustice."

  "I'm the Great Spirit's revenge," Tall Man said to Max. "He's gotta do something to make up for five hundred years of white man's oppression."

  "Believe that," Chase said to Max, "and you might as well believe in the tooth fairy. His Great Spirit is Ronald McDonald."

  "So?" Tall Man guffawed. "A man's gotta pray to somebody."

  . Max beamed, loving it. It was men's talk, grownups' talk, and they were including him, letting him be a part of it, letting him be grown-up.

  He had heard of Tall Man all his life—his dad's best friend since childhood—and the huge Pequot Indian had become a mythic figure for the boy. He had almost been afraid to meet him, lest reality spoil the image. But the human being had turned out to be as grand as the myth.

  Chase and Tall Man had separated several times: while Chase had gone to college, Tall Man had served in the Marines; while Chase had gone to graduate school, Tall Man had tried his hand as a high-steel worker in Albany.

  But their lives had intersected again, when Chase had begun the Institute. He had known he would need an assistant proficient in the technical skills he himself lacked, and he had found Tall Man working as a diesel mechanic at a truck dealership. Tall Man didn't mind the work, he told Chase, and twenty dollars an hour wasn't a bad wage, but he hated somebody telling him when to come to work and when to leave, and he didn't like being cooped up indoors. Though Chase could offer him no fixed salary and no guarantees, Tall Man had quit on the spot and joined the Institute.

  His job description listed no specific duties, so he did whatever Chase wanted done and whatever else he saw that needed doing, from maintaining the boats to hydro-testing the scuba gear. He loved working with animals, and seemed to have an almost mystical gift for communicating with them, calming them, getting them to trust him. Seabirds with fishhooks embedded in their beaks would allow him to handle them; a dolphin whose tail had been snared and slashed by monofilament netting had approached Tall Man in the shallows, and had lain quietly while he removed the strands of plastic and injected the animal with antibiotics.

  He had freedom and responsibility, and he responded well to both. He arrived early, left late, worked at his own pace and took great, if unspoken, pride in being a partner in keeping the Institute running.

  When the coil of wire was secured to the buoy, they tossed both overboard and watched for a few moments to make sure that the wire didn't foul and that the buoy would support its weight. The wire was heavy, but in water it was nearly neutral—one pound negative for every ten feet—and the buoy was designed to support a dead weight of more than two hundred pounds.

  "No sweat," Tall Man said.

  "If nobody steals it. ..."

  "Right. Why would anybody want three hundred feet of wire?"

  "You know as well as I do. People are ripping carriage lamps off houses to get the brass; they're torching light poles down for the aluminum; they're stealing toilet fixtures for the copper. In this economy, specially thanks to the crowd your blood brothers have brought in with their casino up in Ledyard, a smart man walks down the street with his mouth closed so no one can steal his fillings."

  "There he goes again," Tall Man said to Max, grinning, "the racist blaming the poor Indians for everything."

  Chase laughed and walked forward to put the boat in gear.

  10

  "BIRDS," Tall Man called down from the flying bridge, pointing to the south.

  Chase and Max were on the foredeck—Max out at the end of the six-foot wooden pulpit that extended beyond the bow, from which he had been looking down into the water in hopes of seeing a dolphin. Chase had told him that dolphins sometimes frolicked in the bow wave of the boat.

  Chase shaded his eyes and looked to the south. A swarm of birds-—gulls and terns—was wheeling over half an acre of water that seemed to be aboil with living things. The birds dove and splashed in a flurry of wings and rose again, their heads bobbing as they hurried to swallow a prize so they could dive for another. The southwest breeze carried the sound of frenzied screeching.

  "What are they doing?" Max asked.

  "Feeding," Chase said. "On fry . . . tiny fish. Something's attacking the fry from underneath, driving them to the surface." He looked up at Tall Man. "Let's go have a look."

  Tall Man swung the boat to the south, leaving the distant gray hump of Block Island to the north and the closer, but smaller and lower, profile of Osprey Island to the east.

  As the boat drew near the turmoil in the water, Tall Man said, "Bluefish."

  "You're sure?" said Chase. He hoped Tall Man was right: a big school of hungry bluefish would be a good sign, a sign that the blues were making a recovery. Recently, their numbers had been dwindling—they were victims of overfishing and pollution from PCBs, pesticides and phosphates from agricultural runoff— and many of the survivors were manifesting tumors, ulcers and even bizarre genetic mutations. Some were being born with stomachs that ceased functioning after about a year, so the fish starved to death. The Institute and various environmental groups had helped clean up the rivers that fed the bays that led to the ocean, and the amount of pollutants had been reduced significantly though by no means completely.

  If the bluefish were breeding successfully again . . . well, it was a tiny step, but it was a step forward, at least, and not back.

  "Gotta be blues," Tall Man said. "What else kicks up a shower of blood like that?"

  A bird veered away from the flock and soared over the boat, and Chase saw the telltale signs of bluefish carnage: the white feathers of the bird's belly were stained red from fish blood. The blues were running amok in a vast school of panicked bait, chopping and slashing with blind fury, dyeing the water crimson.

  Tall Man throttled back, letting the boat drift in relative silence so as not to drive the school away. "Big bastards, too," he said. "Five-, six-pounders."

  The bluefish rolled and leaped and lunged, their gunmetal bodies flashing in the sunlight, and the birds dove recklessly among them, plucking fry from the bloody water.

  "Gross!" Max said, mesmerized. "Can we go have a look?"


  "You're having a look."

  "No, I mean, can we put on masks and go down there?"

  "Are you crazy?" said Chase. "No way. Those fish would cut you to ribbons. You didn't want to bring me home in a box . . . how'd you like me to send you home to your mother in a doggie bag?"

  "Bluefish attack people?"

  "In a frenzy like this, they attack any thing. A few years ago, a lifeguard in Florida was sitting on a surfboard when a feeding school came by. He lost four toes. They've got little triangular teeth as sharp as razors, and when they're feeding—"

  Tall Man interrupted, "—they're one mean-tempered son of a bitch."

  "Cool," Max said.

  As if on cue, a large gull swooped down, reached for a baitfish, missed, braked with its wings and landed on the water. It snatched up the fish and began its takeoff run, when suddenly a blue body rolled beside it. The gull stopped, jerked backward and shrieked—a blue-fish had it by its legs. The bird flapped its wings futilely and arched its neck forward, trying to peck at the tormentor.

  Another bluefish must have grabbed it then, for the bird lurched to the side, submerged and popped back to the surface. It shrieked again, and beat with its wings, but now other fish sensed savory new prey, and they flung themselves out of the water, onto the blood-soaked feathers.

  The bird's body was pulled below the surface tail-first. A final tug snapped its head back, and the last they saw of it was the yellow beak pointing at the sky.

  Chase looked at Max. The boy's eyes still stared at the spot on the water where, the bird had been, and his color had faded to a greenish gray.

  They continued toward the island, Max and Chase on the foredeck, Tall Man driving from the flying bridge. Now and then, Chase would signal Tall Man to slow down, and he would take a net and dip it into the water and bring up something to show Max: a clump of seaweed in which tiny Crustacea—shrimps and crabs—took shelter until they were mature enough to fend for themselves on the bottom; a fist-sized jellyfish with a translucent purple membrane on its topside that looked like a sail, and long dangling tentacles that, Chase explained, stung its prey to death—a Portuguese man-o'-war. Fascinated, Max touched one of the tentacles and recoiled with a yelp as it stung his fingertip.