Part Three
1996
Waterboro
9
Simon Chase leaned close to the television monitor in the boat's cabin and shaded it with his hand. The summer sun was still low in the sky, and its brilliance flooded through the windows and washed out definition on the green screen. The slowly moving white dot was barely visible.
With his finger Chase traced a line on the screen, checked it against a compass and said, "Here she comes. Swing around to one-eighty."
"What's she doing?" asked the mate, Tall Man Palmer, as he spun the wheel to the right and headed south. "Been out to Block for breakfast, coming back to Waterboro for lunch?"
"I doubt she's hungry," Chase said. "Probably so full of whale meat she won't eat for a week."
"Or longer," said Chase's son. Max sat on the bench seat facing the monitor and meticulously copied its data onto graph paper. "Some of the carcharhinids can go more than a month without eating." He made the remark with studied casualness, as if such esoterica about marine biology was on the tip of every twelve-year-old's tongue.
"Well, excuse me, Jacques Cousteau," Tall Man said, chuckling.
"Don't mind Tall Man, he's just jealous," said Chase, touching Max's shoulder. "You're right." He was proud, and moved, for he knew that Max was reaching out, trying to do his part in building a bridge that, under other circumstances, would have been built years ago.
Tall Man nodded toward shore and said, "Let's go tell the folks on the beach that the lady ain't hungry. They'd be tickled to hear it."
Chase looked through the window at the rocky beach of Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Though it was not yet nine in the morning, a few families had begun to arrive with their picnic hampers and Frisbees and inner tubes; a few young surfers in wet suits were bobbing on the miniscule waves, waiting for a ride that might never come — not today, at least, for there was wind and no forecast of any.
He smiled at the thought of the scramble, the panic, that would ensue if the people had any idea why this innocent-looking white boat was cruising back and forth out here, less than five hundred yards from the beach. People loved to read about sharks, loved to see movies about sharks, loved to believe they understood sharks and wanted to protect them. But tell them there was a shark in the water anywhere within ten miles — especially a great white shark — and their love changed instantly to fear and loathing.
If they knew that he and Max and Tall Man were tracking a sixteen foot white shark that likely weighed a ton or more, their affection would turn to blood lust. They'd holler for it to be killed. Then, of course, as soon as someone did kill it, they'd go right back to mouthing off about how they loved sharks and how all God's creatures ought to be protected.
"The shark's coming up," Max said, reading digital numbers on the screen.
Chase bent to the screen again, shading it. "Yeah, she's been cooling off at two hundred feet, but she's already at less than a hundred."
"Where'd she find two hundred feet between here and Block?" asked Tall Man.
"Must be a ditch out there. I tell you, Tall, she knows her territory. Anyway, she's coming up the slope." From a hook on the bulkhead Chase took a still camera with an 85-mm—200-mm zoom lens and hung it around his neck. He said to Max, "Let's go see if she'll pose for us." Then, to Tall Man, "Check the monitor now and then just to make sure she doesn’t buzz off somewhere."
He went to the doorway and looked at the shore again. "I hope she doesn't come up between us and the beach. Mass hysteria, we do not need."
"You mean like Matawan Creek," Max said, "In 1916."
"Yeah, but they had reason to be hysterical. That shark killed three people."
"Four," Max said.
"Four. Sorry." Chase smiled and looked down — he could still look down, but barely; the boy was already five-ten — at the gangly replica of himself, but skinnier and better-looking, for he had his mother's sharp nose and narrow mouth.
Chase took a pair of binoculars from a shelf and handed them to Max. "Here, go see if you can find her."
Tall Man called to Chase. "Never argue with a kid about sharks. Kids know sharks. Sharks and dinosaurs."
It was true, Chase thought: kids were dinosaur freaks, and most kids were shark freaks. But he had never met a child who knew half as much about sharks as Max did, which pleased him and also saddened and pained him, for sharks had always been the main, if not the sole, bond between father and son. They hadn't lived together for the past eight years, had seen each other only occasionally, and (phone-company TV commercials to the contrary) weekly long-distance calls were no way to reach out and touch someone.
Chase and Max's mother had married too young and too hastily. She was an heiress to a timber fortune, he an impecunious Greenpeacer. Their naïve premise was that her money and his idealism would interact synergistically, benefitting the planet and allowing them to live in Eden. They soon discovered, however, that while they shared common ideals, their means of attaining ends were less than compatible. Corinne's notion of being on the front lines of the environmental movement included giving tennis parties, swimming parties, cocktail parties and black-tie dinner-dances to benefit the movement; Simon's involved being away from home for weeks at a time, living in the stinking fo’c’sles of ratty ships and confronting ruthless foreigners on the high seas.
They tried to compromise: Simon learned to play tennis and to give speeches; she learned to scuba dive and to differentiate between the Odontoceti and the Mysticeti. But after four years of drifting apart, they agreed to disagree... permanently.
The only synergy that come from the relationship was Max — handsomer than either of them, smarter, more sensitive.
Corinne got custody of Max: she had money, a large and caring family, a home (several, in fact) and, by the time the divorce was final, a stable relationship with a neurosurgeon who had been the number one singles tennis player in Northern California.
Simon was the only son of deceased parents, and he had no steady income, no fixed residence and fleeting relationships with several women whose prime assets were their looks and their sexual fervor.
Through her lawyer, Corinne had offered Chase a generous financial settlement — she was neither cruel nor vengeful, and she wanted her son's father to be able to afford a decent home for Max to visit — but in a fit of self-righteous nobility, Chase had refused.
Several times since, Chase had regretted what he now regarded as a misplaced sexist lunacy. He could have put the money to good use. Especially now that the Institute — his institute — was teetering on the brink of insolvency. He had been tempted to reconsider, to call Corinne and offer to accept that last beneficence. But he couldn't bring himself to do it.
What mystified him, what he could not fathom, was the fact that somehow, over the years and the thousands of miles, his son had been able to see through the sheltering veil of private schools and country clubs and trust funds, and to maintain an image of his father as a figure of adventure... someone not only to long for, but to emulate.
* * * * *
As Chase followed Max outside onto the open stern of the forty-eight foot boat, he slid his sunglasses down from the top of his head. The day was bound to be a scorcher, 95-plus degrees even out here on the ocean, one of those days that used to be rare but in the past few years had become more and more common. Ten summers ago, there had been only eight days when the temperature had reached 90 degrees in Waterboro; three years ago, thirty-nine days; this year, meteorologists were predicting fifty days over 90 and as many as ten over 100.
He used the zoom lens as a telescope and scanned the surface of the glassy sea. "See anything?" he asked Max.
"Not yet." Max rested his elbows on the bulwark, to steady the binoculars. "What would she look like?"
"If she came up to bask on a day like this, her dorsal fin would stand out like a sail."
Chase saw a tire floating, and a plastic milk jug, and one of the lethal plastic six-pack holders that strangled turtles and birds, and globules of oil that when they reached the beach and stuck to the soles of children's feet would be cursed as tar. At least he didn't see any body parts today, or any syringes. Last summer, a woman at the town beach had had to be sedated after her four-year-old son presented her with a treasure he had found in a wavewash: a human finger. And a man had taken from his dog what appeared to be a rubber ball but turned out to be a perfect orb of sewage sludge.
He looked over the stern at the rubber-coated wire that held the tracking sensor, and checked the knot on the piece of twine that held the sensor at the prescribed depth. The coil of wire on the deck behind him was three hundred feet long, but because the bottom was shoaly and erratic, they had set the sensor at only fifty feet. The twine was fraying. He'd have to replace it tonight.
"You still see the shark?" he called forward to Tall Man.
There was a pause while Tall Man looked at the screen. "She's up to about fifty," he said. "Just hangin’ out, looks to me. Signal's nice and strong, though."
Chase spoke to the shark in his mind, begging her to come up, to show herself, not only for him but for Max. Mostly for Max.
They had been tracking her for two days, recording data on her speed, direction, depth, body temperature — eager for any information about this rarest of the great ocean predators — without seeing anything of her but a white blip on a green screen. He wanted them to see her again so that Max could enjoy the perfection of her, the beauty of her, but also to make sure the shark was all right, had not developed an infection or an ulcer from the tagging dart that contained the electronic signaling device. It had been perfectly placed in the tough skin behind the dorsal fin, but these animals had become so scarce that he worried about even the remote possibility of causing her harm.
They had found her almost by accident, and just in time to save her from becoming a trophy on a barroom wall.
Chase maintained good relations with the local commercial fishermen, carefully staying out of the increasingly bitter controversy over limiting catches because of depleted stocks. Since he couldn't be everywhere at once, he needed the fishermen to be his eyes and ears on the ocean, to alert him to anomalies natural and man-made, like massive fish kills, sudden algae blooms and oil spills.
His assiduous neutrality had paid off on Thursday night, when a bluefisherman had phoned the Institute (he'd had sense enough not to use his radio, which could be monitored by every boat in three states). On his way home, he told Chase, he had seen a dead whale floating between Block Island and Watch Hill. Sharks were already feeding on the carcass, but they were school sharks, mostly blues. The rare and solitary whites had not yet picked up the spoor.
But they would, those few that still patrolled the bight between Montauk and Point Judith. And soon.
The word would reach the charter-fishing boats, whose captains would call their favored customers and promise them, for fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars a day, a shot at one of the most sought-after trophies in the sea — the apex predator, the biggest carnivorous fish in the world, the man-eater: the great white shark. They would find the whale quickly, for its corpse would show up on radar, and they would circle it while their customers camcorded the awesome spectacle of the rolling eyeballs and the motile jaws tearing away fifty-pound chunks of whale. And then, drunk with the dream of selling the jaw for five thousand or ten thousand dollars and blinded to the fact that they could make more money if they left the shark alone and charged customers for the privilege of filming it, they would harpoon the animal to death... because, they would say to themselves, if we don't do it, someone else will.
The would call it sport. To Chase, it was no more sport than shooting a dog at its dinner.
He and scientists from Massachusetts to Florida to California had been lobbying for years to have great white sharks officially declared endangered, as they had been in parts of Australia and South Africa. But white sharks were not mammals, were not cute, did not appear to smile at children, did not ‘sing’ or make endearing clicking noises to one another or jump through hoops for paying customers. The were omnivorous fish that once in a while — but rarely, much more rarely than did bees or snakes or tigers or lightning — killed human beings.
Everyone agreed that white sharks were marvels of evolution that had survived almost unchanged for scores of millions of years; that they were biologically wonderful and medically fascinating; that they performed a critical function in maintaining the balance in the marine food chain. But in an age of tight budgets and conflicting priorities, there was little public pressure to protect an animal perceived as nothing more than a fish that ate people.
Before long, Chase was sure, perhaps before the turn of the millennium, they would all be gone. Children would see white-shark heads mounted on walls, and filmed records of them on the Discovery Channel, but within a generation they wouldn't even be a memory; they would be no more real than the dinosaurs.
His first impulse after talking to the bluefisherman was to collect some explosives, find the whale and blow it to pieces. It was the best solution, the quickest and most efficient: the whale would disappear from the charter fishermen's radar, the sharks would disperse. But it was also the most dangerous, for destroying a whale carcass was a federal crime.
The Marine Mammal Protection Act was a masterwork of contradictions. No one — scientists, laymen, filmmakers or fishermen — was allowed to get near a whale, dead or alive. No matter that the entire save-the-whales movement (including the act itself) had been born of the excellent films made by dedicated professionals. No matter that a whale carcass could become an environmental catastrophe. If you messed with a whale, you were a criminal.
Chase's days as an environmental firebrand were over. Five years ago, he had made a decision to work within the system rather than from outside it. He had swallowed his anger and kissed some ass and wangled scholarships to graduate school, and had returned to Waterboro, with no specific idea about what he wanted to do. He could teach, or continue to study, but he was impatient to be free of the classroom and the laboratory; he longed to learn by doing. He could apply for a job at Woods Hole or Scripps or any of the other marine institutes around the country, but he was still a dissertation shy of his doctorate, and he had no confidence that anyone would hire him to be anything more than a drone.
The one certainty in Chase's life was that he would spend his life in, on, around and under the sea.
He had loved it from first memory, when his father had taken him aboard the Miss Edna on balmy days and let him savor the feel and the sounds and the smells of the sea. He had learned affection and respect, not only for the sea itself but for the creatures that lived in it and the men who harvested them.
He had become particularly (perversely, his father thought) fascinated by sharks. Sharks seemed to be everywhere in those days — basking on the surface in the sun, assaulting the nets balled full of thrashing fish, following the boat's bloody wake as fish were cleaned and their guts tossed overboard. At first, Simon had been enthralled mostly by their appearance of relentless menace, but then, as he read more and more about them, he came to see them as a wonderful representation of natural continuity: unchanged for millions of years, efficient, immune to almost all diseases that affected other animals. It was as if nature had created them and thought, Well done.
He still loved sharks, and though he no longer feared them, now he feared for them. Around the world, they were being slaughtered recklessly, wastefully and ignorantly — some for their fins, which were sold for soup; some for their meat; some simply because they were perceived as a nuisance.
By coincidence, Chase had returned to Waterboro at precisely the time a small island between Block Island and Fisher's Island had come on the market. The state of Connecticut had taken the island from a troubled bank and was auctioning it off to collect tax liens. The thirty-five-acre tract of scrub and ledge rock was too remote and too unattractive for commercial development and, because it had no access to municipal services, impractical for subdivision into private homesites.
Chase, however, saw tiny OspreyIsland as the perfect spot for oceanographic research. Armed with the proceeds from the sale of his parents' house and fishing boat, he put a down payment on the island, financed the balance and established the Osprey Island Marine Institute.
He had no trouble finding projects worthy of study: dwindling fish stocks, vanishing marine species, pollution — all demanded attention. Other groups and institutes were doing similar work, of course, and Chase tried to complement their work with his, while always reserving time and what money he could muster for his specialty: sharks.
So now, much as he hated to admit it, at thirty-four and as director of the Institute, he was a card-carrying member of the Establishment. He was attaining a respectable reputation in the scientific community for his research on sharks; his papers on their immune systems had been accepted by leading journals and were received as interesting, if somewhat eccentric. And he himself was regarded as a scientist worth watching: a comer.
If he were to be caught blowing up a whale, however, he knew he would be instantly discredited, as well as fined and probably jailed.
And so he had opted for compromise. He had faxed the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington and the state Department of Environmental Protection in Hartford, requesting emergency permission not to destroy the whale but to move it before it could wash up on a public beach. He had no idea what direction the carcass was moving in, but he knew that the threat would be persuasive: no government — federal, state or local — wanted to be stuck with the cost, possibly as much as a hundred thousand dollars, of removing fifty tons of putrefying whale from a beach. He gave inaccurate coordinates for the whale's current position, placing it where he wanted to two it, so that if he was denied permission he could claim that he hadn't moved it, and if permission was granted, he could two it even farther away, into deep ocean where no sportsfishermen would be likely to come upon it.
He hadn't waited for a reply from either agency. He and Tall Man had loaded grappling hooks and a barrel of rope into the Institute's boat and gone looking for the whale. They had found it right away, and, at around midnight, in the glow of the moon, they had sunk the hooks into the rotting meat and begun to tow the carcass out into the Atlantic beyond Block Island. The vile stench of decay followed them, and the horrid grunting sounds of sharks leaping out of the water to rip at the fatty flesh.
The whale was a young humpback, and at first light they saw what had killed it. Fishing nets floated like shrouds around its mouth and head. It had blundered into huge commercial nets, had ensnared itself further by thrashing in its struggle to escape and had strangled to death.
The white shark had arrived just after dawn. She was a big mature female, probably fifteen or twenty years old, of prime breeding age. And she was pregnant, which Chase had discovered when the shark rolled on her back as she plunged her massive head deep into the pink meat of the whale's flanks, exposing her swollen belly and genital slit.
No one knew for sure how long great whites lived or when they first began to breed, but current theory favored a maximum age of eighty to a hundred years and a breeding cycle that began at about age ten and produced one or two pups every second year.
So, to kill her, to hang her head on the wall and sell her teeth for jewelry, would not be to kill a single great white shark. It would be to wipe out perhaps as many as twenty generations of sharks.
They had inserted the transmitter dart quickly and easily. The shark had never felt the barb, had not interrupted her feeding. The had watched her for a few minutes, and Chase had taken pictures. Then, as they prepared to leave, Tall Man had turned on the radio and heard charter fishermen talking back and forth about the whale. Clearly, the bluefisherman had gone to a bar and, feeling that he had done his duty by phoning the Institute first, had been unable to resist making points with his mates by talking about the whale.
Where had it gone? the fishermen would have wondered. Who took it? The goddamn government? Those bleeding hearts from the Institute? East. They had to have taken it East of Block.
The fishermen were coming, coming to slaughter the pregnant shark.
Chase and Tall Man had had no discussion. They had fetched some explosives from below — a brick of plastique left over from the building of the Institute's docks — and had carefully inserted charges into parts of the whale farthest from where the shark was feeding. They had detonated the charges one by one, blasting the whale carcass into pieces that immediately began to disperse and sink. The fishermen's radar target was gone; now they could never find the remains of the whale — or the shark.
The shark submerged, following pieces of blubber down into the safety of the deep.
If the EPA or the DEP wanted to try to make a case against them, Chase thought, let them. There had been no witnesses, the evidence would be flimsy and if any of the charter fishermen were smart enough to figure out what he'd done and why, and fool enough to lodge a complaint, they'd be hanging themselves by admitting they'd been intending to get closer to the dead whale than the law allowed.
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 SaltLake 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 abandoned the shark, prying 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 up 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 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 CoffinBay, 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, s 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 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 and 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 go down 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 night 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, 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 the 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 MacDonald."
"So?" Tall Man guffawed. "A man's gotta pray to somebody."
Max beamed, loving it. It was men's talk, grown-up's 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 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 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 no 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 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.