Chapter 4

For the next few days the weather remained clear and unusually calm. The wind came softly, steadily from the southwest, a gentle breeze that rippled the surface of the sea but

made no whitecaps. There was a crispness to the air only at night, and after days of constant sun, the earth and sand had warmed.

Sunday was the twentieth of June. Public schools still had a week or more to run before breaking for the summer, but the private schools in New York had already released their charges. Families who owned summer homes in Amity had been coming out for weekends since the beginning of May. Summer tenants whose leases ran from June 15 to September 15 had unpacked and, familiar now with where linen closets were, which cabinets contained good china and which the everyday stuff, and which beds were softer than others, were already beginning to feel at home. By noon, the beach in front of Scotch and Old Mill roads was speckled with people. Husbands lay semi-comatose on beach towels, trying to gain strength from the sun before an afternoon of tennis and the trip back to New York on the Long Island Rail Road's Cannonball. Wives leaned against aluminum backrests, reading Helen MacInnes and John Cheever and Taylor Caldwell, interrupting themselves now and then to pour a cup of dry vermouth from the Scotch cooler.

Teen-agers lay serried in tight, symmetrical rows, the boys enjoying the sensation

of grinding their pelvises into the sand, thinking of pudenda and occasionally stretching their necks to catch a brief glimpse of some, exposed, wittingly or not, by girls who lay on their backs with their legs spread.

These were not Aquarians. They uttered none of the platitudes of peace or pollution, or justice or revolt. Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty.

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file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt As their eyes were blue or brown, so their tastes and consciences were determined by other generations. They had no vitamin deficiencies, no sickle-cell anemia. Their teeth

--thanks either to breeding or to orthodontia --were straight and white and even. Their bodies were lean, their muscles toned by boxing lessons at age nine, riding lessons at twelve, and tennis lessons ever since. They had no body odor. When they sweated, the girls smelled faintly of perfume; the boys smelled simply clean. None of which is to say that they were either stupid or evil. If their IQs could have

been tested en masse, they would have shown native ability well within the top 10 per cent of all mankind. And they had been, were being, educated at schools that provided every discipline, including exposure to minority-group sensibilities, revolutionary philosophies, ecological hypotheses, political power tactics, drugs, and sex. Intellectually,

they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing. They had been conditioned to believe (or, if not to believe, to sense) that the world was really quite irrelevant to them. And they were right. Nothing touched them --not race riots in places like Trenton, New Jersey, or Gary, Indiana; not the fact that parts of the Missouri River were so foul that the water sometimes caught fire spontaneously; not police corruption in New York or the rising number of murders in San Francisco or revelations that hot dogs contained insect filth and hexachlorophine caused brain damage. They were inured even to the economic spasms that wracked the rest of America. Undulations in the stock markets were nuisances noticed, if at all, as occasions for fathers to bemoan real or fancied extravagances.

Those were the ones who returned to Amity every summer. The others --and there were some, mavericks --marched and bleated and joined and signed and spent their summers working for acronymic social-action groups. But because they had rejected Amity and, at most, showed up for an occasional Labor Day weekend, they, too, were irrelevant.

The little children played in the sand at the water's edge, digging holes and flinging muck at each other, unconscious and uncaring of what they were and what they would become.

A boy of six stopped skimming flat stones out into the water. He walked up the beach to where his mother lay dozing, and he flopped down next to her towel. "Hey, Mom," he said, limning aimless doodles with his finger in the sand. His mother turned to look at him, shielding her eyes from the sun. "What?"

"I'm bored."

"How can you be bored? It isn't even July."

"I don't care. I'm bored. I don't have anything to do."

"You've got a whole beach to play on."

"I know. But there's nothing to do on it. Boy, am I bored."

"Why don't you go throw a ball?"

"With who? There's nobody here."

"I see a lot of people. Have you looked for the Harrises? What about Tommy Converse?"

"They're not here. Nobody's here. I sure am bored."

"Oh, for God's sake, Alex."

"Can I go swimming?"

"No. It's too cold."

"How do you know?"

"I know, that's all. Besides, you know you can't go alone."

"Will you come with me?"

"Into the water? Certainly not."

"No, I mean just to watch me."

"Alex, Mom is pooped, absolutely exhausted. Can't you find anything else to do?"

"Can I go out on my raft?"

"Out where?"

"Just out there a little ways. I won't go swimming. I'll just lie on my raft." His mother sat up and put on her sunglasses. She looked up and down the beach. A few dozen yards away, a man stood in waist-deep water with a child on his shoulders. The woman looked at him, indulging herself in a quick moment of regret and self-pity file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt (20 of 131) [1/18/2001 2:02:21 AM]

file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt that she could no longer shift to her husband the responsibility of amusing their child. Before she could turn her head, the boy guessed what she was feeling. "I bet Dad would let me," he said.

"Alex, you should know by now that that's the wrong way to get me to do anything." She looked down the beach in the other direction. Except for a few couples in the dim distance, it was empty. "Oh, all right," she said. "Go ahead. But don't go too far

out. And don't go swimming." She looked at the boy and, to show she was serious, lowered her glasses so he could see her eyes.

"Okay," he said. He stood up, grabbed his rubber raft, and dragged it down to the water. He picked up the raft, held it in front of him, and walked seaward. When the water reached his waist, he leaned forward. A swell caught the raft and lifted it, with the boy aboard. He centered himself so the raft lay flat. He paddled with both arms, stroking smoothly. His feet and ankles hung over the rear of the raft. He moved out a few yards, then turned and began to paddle up and down the beach. Though he didn't notice it, a gentle current carried him slowly offshore.

Fifty yards farther out, the ocean floor dropped precipitously --not with the sheerness of a canyon wall, but from a slope of perhaps ten degrees to more than fortyfive degrees. The water was fifteen feet deep where the slope began to change. Soon it was twenty-five, then forty, then fifty feet deep. It leveled off at a hundred feet for about

half a mile, then rose in a shoal that neared the surface a mile from shore. Seaward of the

shoal, the floor dropped quickly to two hundred feet and then, still farther out, the true

ocean depths began.

In thirty-five feet of water, the great fish swam slowly, its tail waving just enough to maintain motion. It saw nothing, for the water was murky with motes of vegetation. The fish had been moving parallel to the shoreline. Now it turned, banking slightly, and followed the bottom gradually upward. The fish perceived more light in the water, but still it saw nothing.

The boy was resting, his arms dangling down, his feet and ankles dipping in and out of the water with each small swell. His head was turned toward shore, and he noticed that he had been carried out beyond what his mother would consider safe. He could see her lying on her towel, and the man and child playing in the wavewash. He was not afraid, for the water was calm and he wasn't really very far from shore --only forty yards

or so. But he wanted to get closer; otherwise his mother might sit up, spy him, and order him out of the water. He eased himself back a little bit so he could use his feet to help propel himself. He began to kick and paddle toward shore. His arms displaced water almost silently, but his kicking feet made erratic splashes and left swirls of bubbles in his

wake.

The fish did not hear the sound, but rather registered the sharp and jerky impulses

emitted by the kicks. They were signals, faint but true; and the fish locked on them, homing. It rose, slowly at first, then gaining speed as the signals grew stronger. The boy stopped for a moment to rest. The signals ceased. The fish slowed, turning its head from side to side, trying to recover them. The boy lay perfectly still, and

the fish passed beneath him, skimming the sandy bottom. Again it turned. The boy resumed paddling. He kicked only every third or fourth stroke; kicking was more exertion than steady paddling. But the occasional kicks sent new signals to the fish. This time it needed to lock on them only an instant, for it was almost directly below

the boy. The fish rose. Nearly vertical, it now saw the commotion on the surface. There was no conviction that what thrashed above was food, but food was not a concept of significance. The fish was impelled to attack: if what it swallowed was digestible, that was food; if not, it would later be regurgitated. The mouth opened, and with a final sweep

of the sickle tail the fish struck.

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file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt The boy's last --only --thought was that he had been punched in the stomach. The breath was driven from him in a sudden rush. He had no time to cry out, nor, had he had the time, would he have known what to cry, for he could not see the fish. The fish's head drove the raft out of the water. The jaws smashed together, engulfing head, arms, shoulders, trunk, pelvis, and most of the raft. Nearly half the fish had come clear of the

water, and it slid forward and down in a belly-flopping motion, grinding the mass of flesh

and bone and rubber. The boy's legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom.

On the beach the man with the child shouted, "Hey!" He was not sure what he had seen. He had been looking toward the sea, then started to turn his head when an uproar caught his eye. He jerked his head back seaward again, but by then there was nothing to see but the waves made by the splash, spreading outward in a circle. "Did you see that?" he cried. "Did you see that?"

"What, Daddy, what?" His child stared up at him, excited.

"Out there! A shark or a whale or something! Something huge!" The boy's mother, half asleep on her towel, opened her eyes and squinted at the man. She saw him point toward the water and heard him say something to the child, who ran up the beach and stood by a pile of clothing. The man began to run toward the boy's mother, and she sat up. She didn't understand what he was saying, but he was pointing at the water, so she shaded her eyes and looked out at sea. At first, the fact that she saw nothing didn't strike her as odd. Then she remembered, and the said, "Alex." Brody was having lunch: baked chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. "Mashed potatoes," he said as Ellen served him. "What are you trying to do to me?"

"I don't want you to waste away. Besides, you look good chunky." The phone rang. Ellen said, "I'll get it," but Brody stood up. That was the way it

usually happened. She would say, "I'll get it," but he was the one who got it. It was the same when she had forgotten something in the kitchen. She would say, "I forgot the napkins, I'll get them." But they both knew he would get up and fetch the napkins.

"No, that's okay," he said. "It's probably for me anyway." He knew the call was probably for her, but the words came reflexively.

"Bixby, Chief," said the voice from the station house.

"What is it, Bixby?"

"I think you'd better come down here."

"Why's that?"

"Well, it's like this, Chief... " Bixby obviously didn't want to go into details.

Brody heard him say something to someone else, then return to the phone. "I've got this hysterical woman on my hands, Chief."

"What's she hysterical about?"

"Her kid. Out by the beach."

A twinge of unease shot through Brody's stomach. "What happened?"

"It's..." Bixby faltered, then said quickly. "Thursday."

"Listen, asshole..." Brody stopped, for now he understood. "I'll be right there." He

hung up the phone.

He felt flushed, almost feverish. Fear and guilt and fury blended in a thrust of gutwrenching pain. He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime, an unwilling whore. He had to take the blame, but it was not rightly his. It belonged to Larry Vaughan and his partners, whoever they might be. He had wanted to do the right thing; they had forced him not to. But who were they to force him? If he couldn't stand up to Vaughan, what kind of cop was he? He should have closed the beaches.

Suppose he had. The fish would have gone down the beach --say, to East Hampton --and killed someone there. But that wasn't how it had worked. The beaches had stayed open, and a child had been killed because of it. It was as simple as that. Cause

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file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt and effect. Brody suddenly loathed himself. And just as suddenly, he felt great pity for himself.

"What is it?" asked Ellen.

"A kid just got killed."

"How?"

"By a goddamn sonofabitch of a shark."

"Oh no! If you had closed the beaches..." She stopped, embarrassed.

"Yea, I know."

Harry Meadows was waiting in the parking lot at the rear of the station house when Brody drove up. He opened the passenger-side door of Brody's ear and eased his bulk down onto the seat. "So much for the odds," he said.

"Yeah. Who's in there, Harry?"

"A man from the Times, two from Newsday, and one of my people. And the woman. And the man who says he saw it happen."

"How did the Times get hold of it?"

"Bad luck. He was on the beach. So was one of the Newsday guys. They're both staying with people, for the weekend. They were onto it within two minutes."

"What time did it happen?" Meadows looked at his watch. "Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. No more."

"Do they know about the Watkins thing?"

"I don't know. My man does, but he knows enough not to talk. As for the others, it

depends on who they've been talking to. I doubt they're onto it. They haven't had any digging time."

"They'll get onto it, sooner or later."

"I know," said Meadows. "It puts me in a rather difficult position."

"You! Don't make me laugh."

"Seriously, Martin. If somebody from the Times gets that story and files it, it'll

appear in tomorrow's paper, along with today's attack, and the Leader will look like hell.

I'm going to have to use it, to cover myself, even if the others don't."

"Use it how, Harry? What are you going to say?"

"I don't know, yet; as I said, I'm in a rather difficult position."

"Who are you going to say ordered it hushed up? Larry Vaughan?"

"Hardly."

"Me?"

"No, no. I'm not going to say anybody ordered it hushed up. There was no conspiracy. I'm going to talk to Carl Santos. If I can put the right words in his mouth, we

may all be spared a lot of grief."

"What about the truth?"

"What about it?"

"What about telling it the way it happened? Say that I wanted to close the beaches

and warn people, but the selectmen disagreed. And say that because I was too much of a chicken to fight and put my job on the line, I went along with them. Say that all the honchos in Amity agreed there was no point in alarming people just because there was a shark around that liked to eat children."

"Come on, Martin. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't anybody's. We came to a decision, took a gamble, and lost. That's all there is to it."

"Terrific. Now I'll just go tell the kid's mother that we're terribly sorry we had to

use her son for chips." Brody got out of the car and started for the back door of the station

house. Meadows, slower to extract himself, followed a few paces behind. Brody stopped.

"You know what I'd like to know, Harry? Who really made the decision? You went along with it. I went along with it. I don't think Larry Vaughan was even the actual guy who made the decision. I think he went along with it, too."

"What makes you think so?"

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"I'm not sure. Do you know anything about his partners in the business?"

"He doesn't have any real partners, does he?"

"I'm beginning to wonder. Anyway, fuck it... for now." Brody took another step, and when Meadows still followed him, he said, "You better go around front, Harry... for appearances' sake."

Brody entered his office through a side door. The boy's mother was sitting in front

of the desk, clutching a handkerchief. She was wearing a short robe over her bathing suit.

Her feet were bare. Brody looked at her nervously, once again feeling the rush of guilt. He couldn't tell if she was crying, for her eyes were masked by large, round sunglasses. A man was standing by the back wall. Brody assumed he was the one who claimed to have witnessed the accident. He was gazing absently at Brody's collection of memorabilia: citations from community-service groups, pictures of Brody with visiting dignitaries. Not exactly the stuff to command much attention from an adult, but staring at

it was preferable to risking conversation with the woman.

Brody had never been adept at consoling people, so he simply introduced himself and started asking questions. The woman said she had seen nothing: one moment the boy was there, the next he was gone, "and all I saw were pieces of his raft." Her voice was weak but steady. The man described what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen.

"So no one actually saw this shark," Brody said, courting a faint hope in the back

of his mind.

"No," said the man. "I guess not. But what else could it have been?"

"Any number of things." Brody was lying to himself as well as to them, testing to see if he could believe his own lies, wondering if any alternative to reality could be made

credible. "The raft could have gone flat and the boy could have drowned."

"Alex is a good swimmer," the woman protested.

"Or... was... "

"And what about the splash?" said the man.

"The boy could have been thrashing around."

"He never cried out. Not a word."

Brody realized that the exercise was futile. "Okay," he said. "We'll probably know

soon enough, anyway."

"What do you mean?" said the man.

"One way or another, people who die in the water usually wash up somewhere. If it was a shark, there'll be no mistaking it." The woman's shoulders hunched forward, and Brody cursed himself for being a clumsy fool. "I'm sorry," he said. The woman shook her head and wept.

Brody told the woman and the man to wait in his office, and he walked out into the front of the station house. Meadows was standing by the outer door, leaning against the wall. A young man --the reporter from the Times, Brody guessed --was gesturing at Meadows and seemed to be asking questions. The young man was tall and slim. He wore sandals and a bathing suit and a short-sleeved shirt with an alligator emblem stitched to the left breast, which caused Brody to take an instant, instinctive dislike to the man. In his

adolescence Brody had thought of those shirts as badges of wealth and position. All the summer people wore them. Brody badgered his mother until she bought him one --"a two-dollar shirt with a six-dollar lizard on it," she said --and when he didn't find himself

suddenly wooed by gaggles of summer people, he was humiliated. He tore the alligator off the pocket and used the shirt as a rag to clean the lawn mower with which he earned his summer income. More recently, Ellen had insisted on buying several shifts made by the same manufacturer --paying a premium they could ill afford for the alligator emblem

--to help her regain her entree to her old milieu. To Brody's dismay, one evening he found himself nagging Ellen for buying "a ten-dollar dress with a twenty-dollar lizard on it."

Two men were sitting on a bench --the Newsday reporters. One wore a bathing file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt (24 of 131) [1/18/2001 2:02:21 AM]

file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt suit, the other a blazer and slacks. Meadows' reporter --Brody knew him as Nat something or other --was leaning against the desk, chat-ting with Bixby. They stopped talking as soon as they saw Brody enter.

"What can I do for you?" Brody said.

The young man next to Meadows took a step forward and said, "I'm Bill Whitman, from the New York Times."

"And?" What am I supposed to do? Brody thought. Fall on my ass?

"I was on the beach."

"What did you see?"

One of the Newsday reporters interrupted: "Nothing. I was there, too. Nobody saw anything. Except maybe the guy in your office. He says he saw something."

"I know," said Brody, "but he's not sure just what it was he saw." The Times man said, "Are you prepared to list this as a shark attack?"

"I'm not prepared to list this as anything, and I'd suggest you don't go listing it as

anything, either, until you know a hell of a lot more about it than you do now." The Times man smiled. "Come on, Chief, what do you want us to do? Call it a mysterious disappearance? Boy lost at sea?"

It was difficult for Brody to resist the temptation to trade angry ironies with the

Times reporter. He said, "Listen, Mr. --Whitman, is it? --Whitman. We have no witnesses who saw anything but a splash. The man inside thinks he saw a big silvercolored thing that he thinks may have been a shark. He says he has never seen a live shark in his life, so that's not what you'd call expert testimony. We have no body, no real

evidence that anything violent happened to the boy... I mean, except that he's missing. It

is conceivable that he drowned. It is conceivable that he had a fit or a seizure of some kind and then drowned. And it is conceivable that be was attacked by some kind of fish or animal --or even person, for that matter. All of those things are possible, and until we

get..."

The sound of tires grinding over gravel in the public parking lot out front stopped

Brody. A car door slammed, and Len Hendricks charged into the station house, wearing nothing but a bathing suit. His body had the mottled gray-whiteness of a Styrofoam coffee cup. He stopped in the middle of the floor. "Chief..." Brody was startled by the unlikely sight of Hendricks in a bathing suit --thighs flecked with pimples, genitals bulging in the tight fabric. "You've been swimming, Leonard?"

"There's been another attack!" said Hendricks. The Times man quickly asked, "When was the first one?" Before Hendricks could answer, Brody said, "We were just discussing it, Leonard. I don't want you or anyone else jumping to conclusions until you know what you're talking about. For God's sake, the boy could have drowned."

"Boy?" said Hendricks. "What boy? This was a man, an old man. Five minutes ago. He was just beyond the surf, and suddenly he screamed bloody murder and his head went under water and it came up again and he screamed something else and then he went down again. There was all this splashing around, and blood was flying all over the place. The fish kept coming back and hitting him again and again and again. That's the biggest fuckin' fish I ever saw in my whole life, big as a fuckin' station wagon. I went in up to my

waist and tried to get to the guy, but the fish kept hitting him." Hendricks paused, staring

at the floor. His breath squeezed out of his chest in short bursts. "Then the fish quit. Maybe he went away, I don't know. I waded out to where the guy was floating. His face was in the water. I took hold of one of his arms and pulled." Brody said, "And?"

"It came off in my hand. The fish must have chewed fight through it, all but a little bit of skin." Hendricks looked up, his eyes red and filling with tears of exhaustion

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file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt and fright.

"Are you going to be sick?" said Brody.

"I don't think so."

"Did you call the ambulance?"

Hendricks shook his head no.

"Ambulance?" said the Times reporter. "Isn't that rather like shutting the barn door

after the horse has left?"

"Shut your mouth, smart ass," said Brody. "Bixby, call the hospital. Leonard, are you up to doing some work?" Hendricks nodded. "Then go put on some clothes and find some notices that close the beaches."

"Do we have any?"

"I don't know. We must. Maybe back in the stock room with those signs that say

'This Property Protected by Police.' If we don't, we'll have to make some that'll do until

we can have some made up. I don't care. One way or another, let's get the goddam beaches closed."

Monday morning, Brody arrived at the office a little after seven. "Did you get it?"

he said to Hendricks.

"It's on your desk."

"Good or bad? Never mind. I'll go see for myself."

"You won't have to look too hard."

The city edition of the New York Times lay in the center of Brody's desk. About three quarters of the way down the right-hand column on page one, he saw the headline: