by Dean Koontz
“Right in the head.”
“Scrambled his fuckin’ brains a little.”
“Shark’s got a brain like a pea.”
“Same as yours?”
“That thing dead?”
“Ain’t movin‘.”
“Bring it up.”
“Let’s have a look inside.”
“Find that rare coin.”
“Or the false teeth.”
Whiskey and beer.
Jack reeled in as much line as he could. The dead shark was bumping against the side of the boat.
“Damn thing’s ten feet long.”
“Nobody’s going to haul that baby up with just a gaff.”
“They have a winch.”
“It’s going to be a messy job.”
“Might be worth it if we find that rare coin.”
“We’re more likely to find a coin in your stomach.”
With five men, two ropes, three gaffs, and a power winch, they managed to hoist the shark out of the sea and over the stem railing, and then lost control of it a second before it was down, so that it crashed onto the deck, whereupon it came back to life unexpectedly, or half life anyway, for the bullets had hurt it and stunned it, but they had not killed it, and the beast thrashed on the deck, and everyone jumped back, and Pete grabbed a gaff and swung and slammed the hook into the shark’s head, spraying blood on several people, and the mighty jaws snapped, trying to get at Pete, and another man rushed forward with another gaff and embedded the long point in one of the shark’s eyes, and a third gaff found its way into one of the bullet wounds, and there was blood everywhere, so that Colin thought of the Kingman killings, and all the men in their swimsuits were spotted and streaked with blood, and Colin’s father yelled for everyone to stand back, and although Irv told him not to fire toward the deck, Colin’s father put one more round in the shark’s brain, and finally it stopped moving, and everyone was very excited, talking and shouting at once, and they got down in the blood and rolled the shark over and tore at its belly with the gutting knife, and the white flesh resisted for a moment but then gave, and out of the long rent spilled a putrid, slimy mass of guts and half-digested fish, and those still standing cheered while those on their knees pawed through the disgusting muck, looking for the mythical rare coin, the wedding ring, the cigar case, or the false teeth, laughing and joking, even tossing handfuls of gore at one another.
Suddenly Colin found the strength to move. He bolted toward the front of the boat, slipped in blood, stumbled, almost fell, regained his balance. When he had gone as far from the revelers and as far forward as he could, he leaned through the railing and vomited over the side.
By the time Colin finished, his father was there, towering over him, the very image of savagery, skin painted with blood, hair matted with blood, eyes wild. His voice was soft but intense. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I was sick,” Colin said weakly. “Just sick. It’s over now.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I’m okay now.”
“Do you try to embarrass me?”
“Huh?”
“In front of my friends like this?”
Colin stared, unable to comprehend.
“They’re making jokes about you.”
“Well...”
“They’re making fun of you.”
Colin was dizzy.
“Sometimes I wonder about you,” his father said.
“I couldn’t help it. I threw up. There wasn’t anything I could do to stop it.”
“Sometimes I wonder if you are my son.”
“I am. Of course I am.”
His father leaned close and studied him, as if searching for the telltale features of an old friend or milkman. His breath was foul.
Whiskey and beer.
And blood.
“Sometimes you don’t act like a boy at all. Sometimes you don’t look like you’ll ever make a man,” his father said quietly but urgently.
“I’m trying.”
“Are you?”
“I really am,” Colin said despairingly.
“Sometimes you act like a pansy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sometimes you act like a goddamned queer.”
“I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
“Do you want to pull yourself together?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you pull yourself together?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you?”
“Sure I can.”
“Will you?”
“Sure.”
“Do it.”
“I need a couple of minutes—”
“Now! Do it now!”
“Okay.”
“Pull yourself together”
“Okay. I’m okay.”
“You’re shaking.”
“No I’m not.”
“You going to come back with me?”
“All right.”
“Show those guys whose son you are.”
“I’m your son.”
“You’ve got to prove it, Junior.”
“I will.”
“You’ve got to show me proof.”
“Can I have a beer?”
“What?”
“I think maybe it would help.”
“Help what?”
“It might make me feel better.”
“You want a beer?”
“Yeah.”
“Now, that’s more like it!”
Frank Jacobs grinned and mussed his son’s hair with one bloody hand.
15
Colin sat on a bench by the cabin wall, sipped his cold beer, and wondered what would happen next.
Having found nothing of interest in the shark’s stomach, they heaved the dead beast over the side. It floated for a moment, then suddenly sank or was dragged under by something with a big appetite.
The blood-drenched men lined up along the starboard rail while Irv hosed them down with sea water. They stripped out of their swimsuits, which had to be thrown away, and they lathered up with bars of grainy, yellow soap, all the while making jokes about one another’s genitalia. Each received one bucket of fresh water with which to rinse. While they went below to dry off and change into their street clothes, Irv sluiced the deck, washing the last traces of blood into the scuppers.
Later, the men did some skeet shooting. Charlie and Irv always carried two shotguns and a target launcher aboard the Erica Lynn, to entertain customers when the fish weren’t biting. The men drank whiskey and beer, blasted away at the whirling discs, and forgot all about fishing.
At first Colin winced each time the guns boomed, but after a while the explosions didn’t bother him.
Later still, when the men became bored with shooting clay pigeons, they opened up on the sea gulls that were diving for small fish not far from the Erica Lynn. The birds did not react to the roar of the shotguns; they continued to feed and to issue their strange shrill cries, apparently unaware that they were being cut down one by one.
The slaughter did not sicken Colin, as it once would have done, nor did it appeal to him. He felt nothing at all as he watched the birds being blown away, and he wondered about his inability to respond. He felt cool and perfectly still inside.
The guns fired, and the gulls burst apart in the sky. Thousands of tiny droplets of blood sprayed up like beads of molten copper in the golden air.
At seven-thirty they said good-bye to Charlie and Irv, and they went to a harbor restaurant for a steak-and-lobster dinner. Colin was starved. He greedily devoured everything on his plate, without a thought about the disemboweled shark or the gulls.
Well after the late, summer sunset, his father took him home. As always, Frank drove too fast and with no regard at all for other motorists.
Ten minutes from Santa Leona, Frank Jacobs turned the conversation away from the events of the day to more personal matters. “Are you happy living with your mother?”
The question put Col
in on the spot. He didn’t want to spark an argument. He shrugged and said, “I guess.”
“That’s no answer.”
“I mean, I guess I’m happy.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m happy enough.”
“Is she taking good care of you?”
“Sure.”
“Are you eating well?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re still so skinny.”
“I eat real well.”
“She’s not much of a cook.”
“She does okay.”
“Does she give you enough spending money?”
“Oh yeah.”
“I could send you something every week.”
“I don’t need it.”
“How about if I sent ten dollars every week?”
“You don’t have to do that. I have plenty. I’d just waste it.”
“You like Santa Leona.”
“It’s okay.”
“Just okay?”
“It’s really nice.”
“You miss your friends from Westwood?”
“I didn’t have any friends there.”
“Of course you did. I saw them once. That red-headed boy and—”
“Those were just guys from school. Acquaintances.”
“You don’t have to keep a stiff upper lip for me.”
“I’m not.”
“Know you miss them.”
“I really don’t.”
They swerved left, passed a truck that was already exceeding the speed limit, and pulled back into the right lane much too quickly.
Behind them the trucker angrily blew his hom.
“What the hell’s eating him? I left plenty of room, didn’t I?”
Colin said nothing.
Frank let up on the accelerator. The car slowed from sixty-five to fifty-five miles an hour.
The truck tooted again.
Frank pounded hard on the Cadillac’s horn, trumpeted for at least a minute to show the other driver that he wasn’t intimidated.
Colin glanced back anxiously. The big truck was no more than four feet from their bumper. Its headlights flashed.
“Bastard,” Frank said. “Who the hell does he think he is?” He slowed down to forty miles an hour.
The truck swung into the passing lane.
Frank whipped the Cadillac to the left, in front of the truck, blocking it and holding it at forty.
“Hah! That’ll piss the son-of-a-bitch! That’ll bum his ass, won’t it?”
The trucker used his hom again.
Colin was sweating.
His father was hunched forward, hands like talons on the wheel. His teeth were bared; his eyes were wide as they moved rapidly back and forth from the road to the mirror. He was breathing heavily, almost snorting.
The truck shifted to the right-hand lane.
Frank quickly cut it off again.
At last the trucker seemed to realize that he was dealing with either a drunk or a nut, and that extreme caution was the best course of action. He slowed to about thirty and fell steadily behind.
“That’ll teach the asshole. Did he think he owned the goddamned road?”
Having won the battle, Frank put the Cadillac back up to seventy, and they rocketed away into the night.
Colin closed his eyes.
They rode in silence for a few miles, and then Frank said, “What with your friends all down there in Westwood, how’d you like to come back and live with me?”
“You mean all the time?”
“Why not?”
“Well ... I guess that would be okay,” Colin said, only because he knew it was impossible.
“I’ll see what I can do, Junior.”
Colin glanced at him with alarm. “But the judge gave Mom custody. You’ve just got visiting rights.”
“Maybe we can change that.”
“How!”
“There’s several things we’d have to do, and a couple of them wouldn’t be exactly pleasant.”
“Like what?”
“For one thing, you’d have to be willing to stand up in court and say you’re not happy living with her.”
“I’d have to do that before they’d make a change?”
“I’m pretty sure you would.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Colin said noncommittally. He relaxed a little because he didn’t intend to tell the court any such thing.
“You’ve got the guts to do it, don’t you?”
“Oh sure,” Colin said. Because it might help to know the enemy’s strategy, he said, “What else would we have to do?”
“Well, we’d have to show that she’s an unfit mother.”
“But she’s not.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I have a hunch we could prove a loose-morals charge to the satisfaction of any judge.”
“Huh?”
“That art crowd,” Frank said sullenly. “Those people she hangs around with.”
“What about them?”
“Those artists have different values from most people. They pride themselves on it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well ... weird politics, atheism, drugs... orgies. They sleep around a lot.”
“You think Mom—”
“I hate to say it.”
“Then don’t.”
“For your sake, I’ve got to consider the possibility.”
“She doesn’t... live like that,” Colin said, although he wasn’t sure if she did or not.
“You’ve got to face the facts of life, Junior.”
“She doesn’t.”
“She’s human. She might surprise you. She’s sure as hell no saint.”
“I can’t believe we’re talking about this.”
“It’s worth considering, worth looking into if it’ll get you back with me. A boy needs to have his father around when he’s growing up. He needs a man there to show him how to become a man himself.”
“But how would you ever prove that she... did things like that?”
“Private detectives.”
“You’d really hire a bunch of private eyes to snoop on her everywhere she goes?”
“I don’t want to have to do that. But it might be necessary. It would be the quickest and easiest way to find out about her.”
“Don’t do it.”
“I’d only be doing it for you.”
“Then don’t.”
“I want you to be happy.”
“I am.”
“You’d be happier in Westwood.”
“Please, Dad, I wouldn’t be happy if you put a pack of dogs on her.”
His father scowled. “Dogs? Who’s talking about dogs? Look, these detectives are professionals. They aren’t goons. They wouldn’t hurt her. She wouldn’t even know they were watching.”
“Please, don’t do it.”
All his father would say was, “I hope it isn’t necessary.”
Colin thought about going back to Westwood, about living with his father, and it was like having a nightmare without being asleep.
16
At eleven o‘clock Sunday morning, Roy arrived with his swimsuit wrapped in a towel. “Where’s your mother?”
“She’s at the gallery.”
“On Sunday?”
“Seven days a week.”
“I thought I’d get to see her in a bikini.”
“ ‘Fraid not.”
The house was what the real-estate people called “prime lease property.” Among other things, it had a sunken living room with a huge stone fireplace, three large bathrooms, a gourmet kitchen, and a forty-foot pool. Since they’d moved in, they’d used the living room less than two hours a week, for they’d had no company; they hadn’t entertained overnight guests and had no reason to use the third bath; and of all the fancy equipment in the kitchen, they’d used nothing but the refrigerator and two burners on the stove. Only the pool was worth the rent.
Colin and Roy raced the length of the pool, played
with inner tubes and inflated plastic rafts, made a game of retrieving coins from the bottom, splashed, splattered, and finally dragged themselves out onto the concrete apron to bake in the sun.
It was the first time Colin had been swimming with Roy, the first time he had gotten a look at him without a shirt—and the first time that he had seen the horrible marks that disfigured Roy’s back. Jagged bands of scar tissue slanted from the boy’s right shoulder to his left hip. Colin tried to count them—six, seven, eight, perhaps as many as ten. It was difficult to be sure, for they melted together at a couple of points. Where there was healthy skin between the ugly lines, it was well tanned, but the raised scars did not take the sun; they were pale and shiny-smooth in some places, pale and puckered in others.
• “What happened to you?” Colin asked.
“Huh?”
“What happened to your back?”
“Nothing.”
“What about those scars?”
“It’s nothing.”
“You weren’t bom that way.”
“Just an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Were you in a car wreck or something?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
Roy glared at him. “I said I don’t want to fucking talk about the fucking scars!”
“Okay. Sure. Forget it.”
“I don’t have to give you any reason either.”
“I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Well, you did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” Roy sighed. “So am I.”
Roy got up and walked to the far end of the pool. He stood there for a while, his back to Colin, staring at the ground.
Feeling stupid and awkward, Colin quickly slid into the pool, as if he wanted to hide in the cool water. He swam hard, trying to work off a sudden overcharge of nervous energy.
Five minutes later, when Colin climbed out of the pool again, Roy was still at the comer of the concrete apron, but now he was hunkered down. He was poking at something in the grass.
“What’d you find?” Colin asked.
Roy was so intent on whatever he was doing that he did not hear the question.
Colin went to him and squatted beside him.
“Ants,” Roy said.
At the edge of the concrete lay a teacup-size mound of powdery earth. Tiny red ants were scurrying around and over it.
