Ray Cluley
When Darnell Jackson was a boy, a film crew came to the island where he lived and made a movie. The island was Martha’s Vineyard, and the movie they made was Jaws.
Forty years later, feeling like a tourist, Darnell came back to the Vineyard. He came back on the Wood’s Hole ferry like he was summer-people, only it wasn’t yet summer, it was early May, and there was a bite in the air that had him holding his coat closed at the throat as he stood on deck for the approach. They passed the West Chop lighthouse. It wasn’t on, but he felt its warning.
Stay away. Stay away.
It was cold, but as he remembered it the weather was much the same back when filming started all those years ago, actors and extras doing their best to pretend it was summer-hot. The aim had been to get most of the shoot done before the real tourists arrived and turned six thousand people into sixty thousand. For Darnell, though, this time? He had come straight from his father’s funeral, renting a car with little thought to where he was going until he was already most of the way there. Still wearing his black suit, his black shirt, his good shoes. Appropriate, in its own way, as something of Darnell had died here long ago. He’d mourned it his whole life.
He headed for his rental as the ferry began the docking process. He tried to ignore the appetite that had been building throughout his long journey. He didn’t want to spend much time in Oak Bluffs. There’d be no lobster roll from the Lookout, no Big Dipper ice-cream. No nostalgic visit to Inkwell Beach, either, as much as he’d loved the place as a child. His mother used to take him, before Jaws, because of how much he’d liked to swim, but his father had hated the place and the racist roots of its name. He thought going there was volunteering for segregation.
There were more people of color on the island these days, Darnell noticed that right away. Better off than he’d ever been—shit, they were downright affluent—but that was okay. That was probably good. The Black Hamptons, some people called it. His father would have found a way to be angry about that, and he would have found a way to blame white people, but that was okay, too. That was his right. The island had been home to the same families for centuries, and progress was always ever slow. You had to keep swimming against the current until the current changed, that was all, and as his therapist was fond of saying, it was swimming against a current that made you stronger.
He was swimming against the current in coming back. That’s how it felt, anyway, after years of moving deeper and deeper inland. As if things would get better depending on how far they removed themselves from the ocean. But jobs were scarce everywhere—or his father was bad at keeping one for long—and Darnell quickly discovered that the fears he’d started harboring on the island were carried with him, regardless of where they went. They were like memories that way, which are the wake you make in moving forward.
And all that moving didn’t mean shit because the sharks would always follow.
Sharks have a kind of sixth sense, thanks to a remarkable electroreceptive system. The black spots on a shark’s skin around the eyes and mouth and snout are the ampullae of Lorenzini, which allow the shark to sense the electromagnetic fields and movements of other animals. It means they are especially good at locating and homing in on prey.
On his way to Edgartown, Darnell stopped to walk the State Beach and look at the American Legion Memorial Bridge. Or ‘Jaws Bridge’, as it was better known. State Beach was where the Kintner kid was killed, where the camera so famously zoomed in on Brody while everything else seemed to zoom out behind. On State Beach you could run upon the same rocks as Brody on his way past the bridge to the pond—Sengekontacket Pond—where his own kid was playing, sent to the estuary because Brody had thought it safer than the open sea. It had been so cold for that scene. People on the beach and in the water were freezing their asses off in shorts and tees, swimsuits, bikinis, all of them dressed like it was already the 4th of July, all of them with jackets hidden in their beach gear for the time waiting between takes. The sun had rarely been out, and the water held its chill because the Gulf Stream didn’t shift until late May, early June, and unless you were in the Polar Bear Club you wouldn’t want to swim State Beach until then at least, but people went in the water anyway. You had to, if you wanted to be in the movie, and everyone wanted to be in the movie. Like everybody else, Darnell would loiter wherever there was filming, hoping for an opportunity to get involved. For many people that tactic paid off.
It never worked for him, though.
Darnell walked beside the rocks he could have run upon and watched the sea. He watched waves sweep up the beach, each one the result of some distant force, pushed and pulled to their inevitable destination. Building to violent force in some cases, smashing against whatever tried to stop them, often to their own mutual destruction. Not these ones, though. Not today. They merely hushed their way up the beach to dissolve and disappear back the way they’d come. Darnell wondered if it was a sign that he should do the same.
The sea withdrew, and the sea came again. Did it remember what it once lifted, carried, deposited on distant shores? Did it remember what it consumed or regret any of them it drowned? He didn’t think so. The tides were as cold and careless as time.
At the bridge, he remembered how he used to watch older kids jump from it, splashing into the water below. Judging by the warning sign on the rail it seemed they still did, probably even more so now it was Jaws Bridge. He imagined children joking about sharks before they jumped.
Jump the shark. Wasn’t that something people said these days? About taking things too far? Darnell wasn’t sure. And how far was too far, anyway? Hit back harder, that’s what his father used to say. Pay it back with interest. Darnell had rarely agreed with him but now that he was gone, he felt adrift. Not that his father had ever been any kind of anchor. More often than not he was that current Darnell swam against. He didn’t feel stronger for it, though.
He waited for a gap in the traffic and crossed the street to look at the pond where Brody’s kid and his friends had been knocked from their dinghy. One of them—the Rebello boy—was nearly eaten. What was his name? Darnell had sort of known him once. He used his phone to Google. Chris. That was it. There’d been a time Darnell was envious of him, only to learn in later years that he’d been so scared of that fin coming at him over and over that filming needed to be cut short. Even knowing it was all fake, he’d been terrified. Darnell wondered if the experience still came to him at night the same way his own experience haunted him, or if he’d managed to reduce it to an amusing anecdote, something to dine out on. He Googled again, curious to see what the kid—what the man—was doing now.
He was dead.
Darnell looked again at the pond, remembering the kid’s face as the camera came at him in the water and wondering, shit, did the shark get you after all, man? Because your thirties are far too young for a heart attack, aren’t they? He scrolled down a few more links on his phone but found something disturbing about the younger Brody brother and put the phone away without reading more.
People were like oceans, he thought. Pushed and pulled by similar tidal forces. Prey to all the vicious things that swam within them.
He looked at the ocean and thought of all that lived there, sleek and secret beneath the waves. He thought, predictably, of sharks. Of bulls and blacktips, makos and hammerheads. Of tigers and threshers. He’d become something of a shark expert over the years, ‘a black Richard Dreyfuss’ as he’d explained it to a partner once, when he still trusted enough to confide such things. Learning all he could about sharks was the therapy he’d prescribed himself long before he ever had a professional session.
Hammerheads have 360-degree vision. Great whites can grow ten inches each year. A shark’s heart is an S with two chambers. These were some of the things he still remembered. He found comfort in the natural facts of them, albeit a cold one. Better to remember details like that than how a shark’s skin felt against your own, or how sharp their teeth could be.
How hard laughter could bite.
There was a churning in his stomach he’d hoped was a lingering effect of his ferry-crossing, but now his breathing came quicker and shallower and he knew that what was happening had little to do with the ferry and more to do with where it had brought him.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He knew what he had to do.
He looked and saw the sea. It was the same gray as the sky. He saw a boat. He saw gulls. He saw a distant buoy.
Okay.
The breeze. It carried the ocean with it as a thin mist that settled on his skin. He clutched the satiny lining of his pockets tight in his fists and held the coat open like twin sails to feel the cold.
Okay.
He turned an ear to the breeze and listened. Heard the gulls calling back and forth. Heard the clanking halyards of nearby boats. Heard his own slowing inhalations which brought to him a fishy odor and the ocean’s brine. The latter was so strong, he could taste salt on his lips.
“Okay.”
All those hours of therapy—all those dollars—and the best thing he’d learned was the 5-4-3-2-1 technique. The rest of it was all trite, soundbite wisdom. Like ‘face your fears’, that was a classic. Face your fears so as to better overcome them. But then that was what Quint did and look what happened to him. Days scared in the water waiting for sharks to eat him and the rest of his life hunting them in an effort to defeat that fear, only to have it come back monstrous and chomp him down whole. The shark was an instrument of karma, that was how Darnell saw it, because as far as he was concerned, Jaws was Quint’s movie. He’d watched it over and over—facing his fear—and the more he saw it the more he was convinced. Quint was the lead. Quint was the one with history and past trauma to overcome. That he fails just makes the film honest.
Fear never went away. Quint knew that, and so did Darnell. It accreted like coral. It built like a wave. Shit, there were people who still wouldn’t go in the water thanks to Jaws, that’s how strong fear could be.
Darnell turned away from the pond and headed back to the car. The breeze, as if to encourage him, strengthened into wind to push him on his way.
The color of a shark’s skin helps it hunt. The blues and greys of the ocean, combined with a pale underbelly like the sky, help render it near invisible when seen from above or below. Many are named for their colors, such as great whites, brown sharks, and blacks.
Spielberg had a thing about colour, but not the way Darnell’s father said. As far as Darnell could tell—and he’d followed the director’s career over the years—the man was not a racist. He was particular about colour, though. Like how he didn’t want the colour red in Jaws so that when the blood came it would really pop. If Darnell had realized, he wouldn’t have worn his lucky tee—the red one—every time he showed up for a part. He wouldn’t have worn his favourite—red—baseball cap. He supposed they could have given him a different shirt if they’d really wanted him. He could have taken off his hat.
Down-island, walking through Edgartown, he remembered that cars had been moved out of shot if they were red. He remembered the red had been replaced with orange in the bunting they’d put up all along Main Street for the 4th of July celebrations. He remembered the atmosphere, the excitement and expectation that came with the novelty of a movie crew on Main. Now, that same street was quiet. Much of it had changed, too, and yet at the same time it had not. Not really. The differences were mostly surface details. As if another film set had been erected in the time he was away, the buildings given new identities with false facades. He had a sense of floating between worlds, between past and present and something else. He recognized many of the clapboard and redwood buildings, the old whaling captains’ houses, but some of the businesses were new. He remembered the hardware store that had briefly become a music store so Quint could buy piano wire for fishing line. The scene had been cut. The store was a restaurant now.
At the junction of Water Street and Main he saw where Brody had picked up his supplies for the ‘beach closed’ signs. Afterwards he had driven the wrong way down a one-way street because it was only Martha’s Vineyard that had the one-way system, not Amity, and back then, when Darnell was a boy, the topsy-turvy use of his hometown had amused him. Amazed him, even. It had shown him how rules he thought were fixed in place could be broken. Showed him how the world he thought he knew could change, or at least seem to.
“If he’s not racist, how come you ain’t got no part in his damn movie?”
His father’s voice, able to cross time to find Darnell wherever—whenever—he might be.
“Everybody else is in it, why ain’t you?”
Almost all of the other kids got parts, that was true. Some of them even got two; the Edgartown kids in the marching band were the same as the Boy Scout group swimming in the sea (even though the parade and the swim were meant to be happening at exactly the same time) because who was going to notice the same kid twice? Darnell was patient, though. He’d hang around the cast and crew, collecting autographs, making sure he was seen and hoping he’d be remembered. But . . .
“Shit, there ain’t no one black in that movie. No one.”
That wasn’t true. Darnell had checked. There were people of colour in the Wood’s Hole ferry scene, and on State Beach, right before that pasty-pale mayor started hogging the camera.
Not Darnell, though. Every time his father asked he had to shake his head no, not today, hating to see his father disappointed yet again, not just by him but by the world they lived in, and he’d move quickly to show him the new signatures in his autograph book, though his father never cared for it.
“Looks blank to me,” he’d once said. “Look at all them pages. They’re so damn white.”
The largest of the predatory sharks is the great white, or Carcharodon carcharias. It relies on its heavy-hitting power, sometimes leaping out of the water to attack.
The tiger shark, or Galeocerdo cuvier, is a stealthier animal. It hunts mostly at night, drifting slowly before suddenly striking.
It was a tiger shark they’d used for the scene on the docks. Thirteen feet long, or thereabouts, tied up by its tail and hooked through the mouth so it hung with its jaws gaping open. It wasn’t local. Best they’d managed to catch off the Vineyard was a load of threshers and blues that lacked the striking visual impact required for a summer blockbuster. With time running out, they’d sourced the tiger shark from Florida and FedExed it in a crate of ice. Darnell hadn’t known that at the time, though. He’d assumed Spielberg had said, ‘I need a shark,’ and someone had hooked the tiger right out of Vineyard waters. The idea had terrified him. Knowing there were sharks like that near Inkwell Beach? Shit, no wonder his father never went swimming.
While the hunt wore on in real life to find the right kind of shark, everyone else was filming the other hunt, the first of the chaotic dock scenes. All those different crews hurrying and jostling each other and getting in each other’s way. All of that, plus the film crew, too; it made for a lot to watch. The film crew was easy to spot because by then most of them were wearing those screen-print t-shirts Darnell had liked so much, an open-mouthed shark coming at you over JAWS, and the boat crews were easy to spot because they were locals, all of them stepping around each other and bumping left and right and swamping each other’s boats in their eagerness to get out there and catch a monster. Anyone and everyone who had a boat was in that scene, and getting paid twice for it, too: once as an extra, and once for the hire of their boat. Darnell’s father wasn’t into boats, so he missed out on that, but he could bullshit with the best of them and managed to land himself a background part. He still complained, though. “Doubt you’ll even see me,” he’d said, but Darnell had gone along to watch anyway, sitting in the cab of his father’s truck with the engine running for the heater.
It was May and it was cold, raining enough that there were long pauses between takes and a lot of hanging around. “Hurry up and wait,” was a joke Darnell had heard plenty of times without really understanding it, and with so many people to organize for this scene, and rain as well, there was even more waiting than usual. But then suddenly the docks would come alive with a cry of ‘action!’ and sure enough there’d be lots of it as men overloaded their boats and bumped each other and even fell into the sea in their haste. Then they’d cut and there’d be shouting through a bullhorn, “Rick! Rick! Get over here!” and there’d be pointing and taking new positions and nodding and a lot of standing around to wait all over again. Some of the men drank from flasks they’d brought along to keep the cold at bay—and Darnell had no doubt his father was one of those—but with the rain and the cold and no coats or waterproofs, because it was meant to be July, all that waiting and waiting and waiting became too much for some of them.
Darnell’s father had been one of those, as well.
“Look at this shit!”
Darnell had been staring at a truck opposite, one of the rentals the film people used. He’d been trying to figure out what they’d done to the AVIS logo to make it read JAWS, eventually seeing how lines of tape had been used to make a J, while another line from the V to the I made a W. It was clever, Darnell thought. Like the clapperboard he’d seen with its white stripes altered to a double row of teeth: snap! He smiled, thinking of that. Then the door beside him was wrenched open, startling him, and his father was shaking a flimsy fishing rod in his face.
“Look at this shit! Like this’d catch a shark. Shit, this wouldn’t catch nothin’.”
He threw it aside to reach in for his jacket.
“Catch a cold, though, you bet I can do that.”
He pulled his way out of the wet sweater he’d been allowed, put his jacket on, and yanked the sweater back down over it best he could before slamming the door closed again to stomp his way back to where everyone else was hurrying up to wait.
Safe in the truck, Darnell had laughed at how suddenly fat his father looked with the jacket under his sweater, stopping only when the new cold in the truck had him looking around for his own.
Standing on the dock years later, he let his coat flap open in the wind, welcoming the cold—
an awareness of discomfort is proof of a desire to live
—and looking around at the boats and buildings. He was surprised at how little had been done to mark the Jaws legacy on the island, especially here. He’d half-expected a fiberglass replica of the shark to be dangling on the docks, a background prop for tourists’ selfies. In the absence of such a thing, he was able to better remember the real one.
“Looks like a lynching,” Darnell’s father had said when they first saw it, hanging there. “It’s the wrong way up, but that’s what it looks like. And look at them. Bunch of happy white folk.”
That had been some time after the first dock scene and by that point Darnell’s father had no desire to be in the film no more. He’d agreed to let Darnell keep trying, though. Maybe as a kindness, maybe to prove a point. Either way, that was how they found themselves at the docks again, approaching the dead shark hanging in the crowd. A hook through its mouth kept it open, its rows of teeth on gruesome display. It had been stabbed and cut, and something like a crossbow bolt or harpoon protruded from its side.
They could smell it long before they were close.
The meat of a shark is different from that of other fish. It decays quickly because it’s all just simple proteins and no bones, only cartilaginous tissue. For the 800lb tiger they’d strung up, that decaying process had begun in Florida, was slowed a little by ice, then hurried along again quick just as soon as it was out of its crate. When they hung it upside down, gravity went to work on its insides until the guts kept piling up in the fish’s throat. Darnell had been both delighted and repulsed to see them bulging out of the animal’s mouth, ready to drop and slop on the docks. As he watched, someone stepped close to push them back in, push them back up.
“Yuck,” said Darnell.
“It’s just a fish. You wanna be in the film, you gotta get closer.”
Darnell had felt his father’s hand on his back, guiding him forwards with a final, not gentle, push. He’d felt a similar thing at his grave, once the service was over. Something steering him away from where his father lay buried and pushing him towards Amity. Back towards the Vineyard.
Close up, the shark had reeked. It was dead, and doing what dead things do, which was rot. There could be no bringing it down between takes to store on ice because the more they handled it, the more it would fall apart, and so it stayed there, hanging in the sun. Unless you had to get close for a shot, you made sure you stayed upwind of it.
Many of the locals had complained about the hanging shark and its stench—for all those keen on the film and all it provided, there were plenty who resented the disruption of their normal lives—but whoever was running the docks back then was getting more money from the Jaws people than all of those complaining put together, so the shark hung there, rotting, stinking, spilling its guts and blood, while everyone waited and filmed and waited again.
Darnell had waited with them, making himself part of the crowd around the shark. He’d even had to step out of the way once so Richard Dreyfuss could measure the span of the open mouth, and he’d been there in the background as Dreyfuss explained to Brody it was the wrong shark, but he’d never yet spotted himself watching the scene back. They’d run that scene quite a few times, though, and much of the time he’d found himself distracted by the shark. He’d looked into that mouth, his hands over his own and over his nose, and he had been revolted. He had looked into those eyes, those dead, dark eyes—
lifeless eyes, black eyes
—and he had not liked what he saw there. Had not liked, either, what he couldn’t help imagining: the whole shark descending from its unravelling rope to swallow him whole.
More than once his nightmares had put him in that shark’s place. He’d be packed in ice and FedExed straight to the docks where he’d grasp and pull the sudden noose at his neck, gasping his last breaths while people in screen-print tees and hoods like teeth gathered ’round to watch. Someone would yank his legs and he’d wake with a clapperboard snap, freezing cold and sucking for air.
That was one of the better dreams.
Darnell heard some children laugh and the sound pulled the present into sharper focus while the past dropped away, like in that famous dolly zoom. Only there were no children on the docks, there was only him, leaning into the wind coming in off the sea and staring at where a shark used to be. The ghost of young laughter lingered, clinging to him like the smell from something dead and rotten.
As well as extraordinary electroreceptors and excellent eyesight, sharks have a great sense of smell. A great white can detect a drop of blood in an area the size of an Olympic pool.
Far from Martha’s Vineyard, two years after they’d moved away, Darnell’s mother convinced him to try swimming in the local pool. Not to face his fears, as any of his therapists might have put it, but because her little boy had once loved to swim, and she was keen to bring that joy back to him.
He’d been anxious, but they took some time for him to control his breathing and to quietly note his surroundings, and eventually she was able to lead him to the pool edge and into the shallows and never mind who might be watching, you’re doing real good, and with her help it had worked out all right at first. The water was cool and then comfortable, and the chlorine smell was nothing like ice or the briny scent of sharkskin, and the room was so big it echoed, throwing back the cries of other children and the occasional whistle-blow of a lifeguard keeping them safe. And the light! It was so bright, and the water was clear, and there were no sharks, not a single one.
Still, he stayed close, facing his mother, holding her hands until she eased him away to tread water on his own and told him that’s it, that’s good, see? You’re doing it, you’re doing it. And he was. He turned and saw adults swimming lengths of the pool and he saw children splashing each other, the youngest of them wearing inflatable bands around their arms to keep them afloat, and as he watched he saw . . .
He saw a shark.
He saw a dark shape in water that suddenly breached, lifting one of the children shrieking into the air, shrieking with laughter, and he panic-splashed himself around again to face his mother but he couldn’t turn quick enough, remained frustratingly in the same place, his left hand slapping the water one way and his right hand the other, both too fast, too choppy, splashing like he was swatting at flies and that splashing would draw more sharks, he knew that, but he couldn’t stop. He saw the shadow of one coming for him along the bottom of the pool and another bumped him from behind and now he couldn’t breathe, he was drowning in the air while his legs kicked and his arms slapped and splashed and the water was so suddenly cold, freezing cold, gripping him around the chest, and the reason he couldn’t breathe was because all the breath he’d had was coming out in a scream. A shark fastened its teeth on his arm and pulled and his scream became so shrill that something of the sound broke and he could only expel air and suck in sobs as his mother’s fierce grip pulled him close and she waded to the edge of the pool with her son in her arms.
It was the first time his fears had taken hallucinatory shape in the waking world, surfacing from his nightmares to frighten him into a state that had him shaking so violently that his mother, holding him tight, trembled with him.
Darnell woke from that remembered terror, shivering. He was on the floor of his hotel room. He’d consumed the contents of his minibar and fallen asleep fetal by the open door of the refrigerator. He remembered listening to it hum until the sound dragged him into sleep, the cold seeping deliberately into his bones.
An awareness of discomfort is proof of a desire to live.
He groaned with the ache of straightening, sitting up and putting a hand to his head. It throbbed like a boat’s motor. A taste for alcohol was one of the things Darnell had inherited from his father and he’d liberated the tiny bottles from the minibar in an effort to drown the laughter that had followed him back from the docks, hoping to sleep so deep the dreams wouldn’t find him.
Only the powerless are at the mercy of their trauma.
He snatched up the bottles and threw them into the wastebin under the dresser, wincing with each knock of the metal and clink of glass. Was there anyone more powerless than a child? How can a man overcome trauma born at such an early, powerless age?
You can’t. That’s what Darnell had learned. Instead, you drag it behind like a trawler drags its net or a shark its barrels.
It was late but still light outside, so he splashed his face, ran his wet hands over the buzz of his hair, and left the hotel.
As a child, Darnell had lived in Oak Bluffs, but coming back he’d decided to stay down-island in Edgartown. Edgartown was where most of the film crew had stayed all those years ago because it was only 15 minutes away from Cow Bay, the area so perfect for Jaws, and just as Edgartown had been conveniently located for their needs, so it was for Darnell’s, too. He didn’t want to be driving all around the island any more than could be helped, even as small as it was. He’d do what he had to do and be gone.
He drove slowly, though. The cocktail of different drinks from the minibar was still foul in his mouth and swimming in his bloodstream. He leaned over the steering wheel to look left and right at the large, handsome houses as he passed.
A child was playing in the front yard of one of them, throwing a baseball straight-up high and watching, watching, ready to catch it with that flat, rifle-shot smack in his mitt when it came down. He was white, wearing the full baseball kit to go with his mitt. The Red Sox colours, not the purple of the Vineyard Sharks. The cap reminded Darnell of his old favourite, forever lost now.
“I know where they keep the real shark.”
A boy exactly like the one across the street had said that once. Darnell had thought he was talking to him but when he’d turned to ask, “Where?” he saw the boy was addressing his own group of friends, all of them talking about the shark hanging on the docks as they waited between takes. Darnell recognized a couple of them from school. The kid in the baseball shirt was Brad. Bradley Ladson. He was the one claiming to know where they kept the real shark. One of the others had at that moment reached forward to pull at the arrow sticking out the shark’s side and then the lot of them were ushered away by an angry adult, Darnell included, even though he hadn’t done nothing.
“My brother says he carved his name into it but he’s full of shit,” said one of the boys Darnell didn’t know and the others laughed and agreed, just so they could say “full of shit” themselves.
“It’s way bigger than that one,” said Brad, and pointed back at the hanging tiger. Someone was measuring its mouth again, but no one was filming. They measured the distance between the mouth and one of the actors.
Can’t be no shark bigger than that one, Darnell thought.
“What did you say?”
It had taken him a moment to realize that this time someone was talking to him, and only then because someone pulled him around by the shoulder. Not aggressively, but not exactly gently, either.
“You said something,” Brad said. “What did you say?”
“He said it wasn’t bigger than that one.”
Had he spoken out loud?
“I bet you haven’t even seen it,” Brad said. “I think only people in the movie get to see it.”
Darnell could feel something stirring in the air between them, something that even as a child he recognized as the vibrating thrum of violence waiting. Darnell wondered if he was going to have to fight and hoped the choice wouldn’t need making. His mother had always told him to walk away from fights, especially with someone white. His father’s advice, had he ever given any, would have been the opposite—he was a man of action—and of the two parents there was one he was more afraid of disappointing.
He looked for his father in the crowd around him.
“Nobody gets to see the shark,” he said absently. “It’s locked away and secret.”
Someone took his hat.
Darnell turned quickly and saw Brad wearing it. He snatched it back, too quick for Brad to dodge.
“Hey, I was just trying it on.”
Then he called Darnell a bad word.
The others tried to laugh as if it had been ‘jerk’ or ‘butt-wipe’ but it was much worse than that and all of them knew it. They didn’t fully understand how, but they knew it was a bad word, awful, maybe a dangerous word, and their laughter reflected some of that confusion in trying to be something it wasn’t. Darnell even saw a flush of shame pass over Brad’s face, but it was only brief.
Without thinking—which frightened him a little then, and a lot in later years—Darnell took up a boxing stance, fists as tight as the sudden silence they made. One of the actors, the police chief, Roy, had shown him how. He used to be a boxer, and sometimes he liked to play with the kids between takes, throwing slow jabs or sweeping his whole arm for them to duck under while encouraging quicker, hard punches back from them, BAM!, into one of his open palms, WHAM! He called it the old one-two, WHAM-BAM! Once, he’d called Darnell ‘Tiny Tate’ while shaking out his palms and pretending Darnell had hit him too hard.
So Darnell put his fists up and though he didn’t know if he had it right he must’ve had it close because he saw Brad back down. Not physically—Brad still had one arm up himself, a fist cocked back—but something went out of his eyes. Darnell relaxed his own stance and straightened up a bit, the moment fading, and Brad threw a pretend slap at him with such exaggerated slowness and with such a comic-book sound effect that there could be no mistaking it was just a joke. “Ka-POW!” Darnell stepped back from it though, and one of the other boys pretended to be struck instead, spinning in slow motion with his hands at his jaw, eyes mock wide and mouth growling in feigned pain as he ricocheted from a bystander like a sluggish pinball. It led the others back into a more comfortable laughter.
Brad said, “Hey, remember when that lady hit him?” and he mimed a slap again—and again, and again—making a whip-crack noise with each one. There was no need to ask what lady, or hit who, because they’d all watched it. Take after take after take, a grieving mother had slapped the police chief, over and over. For real.
“His face was all pink!”
“She slapped him so hard his glasses came off!”
“I bet they use that in the film.”
Darnell said, “If you get attacked by a shark you should punch it on the nose and it will leave you alone.”
Everybody looked at him.
“What?”
“They’re very sensitive.”
Everybody laughed again, but it was okay. They weren’t laughing at him. They were laughing at the idea of punching a shark. And just like that, the rest of the violent tension they’d been wading through receded.
“Come on,” said Brad. “I wanna show you something.” He pushed his way through the crowd who were still hurrying to wait for the next ‘action!’ and his friends followed him down the dock. Darnell watched them go, feeling their fleeting acceptance slip away like a slow wave when you’re standing barefoot in the surf, sand sinking beneath your feet.
Brad turned, running backwards for a moment to throw a question back at Darnell.
“You coming?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. Just turned back to continue running.
Stunned for a moment by the invite, then giddy with inclusion, Darnell ran to catch up, grinning.
The thresher shark has a very long tail fin that measures half the length of its whole body. It uses this to lure prey, tricking it close only to swat it away and attacking once it’s stunned or otherwise disabled.
They gathered in one of the boathouses of Norton and Easterbrook dock, standing a short distance away from a large freezer. The docks had a walk-in refrigeration unit but whether for purposes of secrecy or perhaps permission, the film crew was using a large freezer like you’d find in a regular store—only bigger—to keep some of their potential props fresh. That’s what Brad said. A generator chugging nearby kept it running. A flap of cardboard torn from a box was stuck on the freezer with a piece of raggedy tape and the outline of an open-mouthed shark had been markered on the card as if to devour the sign’s instruction: KEEP CLOSED.
“What’s in it?” someone asked.
“What do you think?”
“The real shark?”
“The real shark is fake,” said Brad. “It’s all mechanical and fake and nowhere near here. But they caught lots of real ones like that massive son-of-a-bitch out there.”
This time there was no laughter at the swearing, no joking elbows to the ribs. They were too curious, too much in awe of what might be in the freezer. They were too afraid.
They shuffled one another forward as a group, leaning to look rather than get too close. The freezer lid wasn’t see-through, though, wasn’t frosted glass or nothing like that. It was flat, and metal. There was a clasp with a bolt to keep it closed.
“Get it open,” Brad said. “You’ll see. My dad told me.”
Someone pulled the bolt and flipped the clasp open and started to lift the lid and then other hands were helping. The freezer released a cold cloud that enveloped them as they bowed slightly to look inside.
Their gasped sounds of amazement and disgust drew Darnell closer, and he pushed his way amongst them like they’d been friends forever.
“Look at them all!”
A pungent smell came at him out of the frosty mist, but it was nowhere near as bad as the stink from what was hanging outside. Nor were the sharks he could see anywhere near as big. But there were so many!
“There’s more underneath!” someone said.
“Look at that one!”
“There are loads of them!”
The freezer was full of sharks, all of them twice the size of Darnell, easy. Head to tail and tail to head, rows of them stacked on more rows of the same, none of them suitable for some reason or another but kept anyway, all blue and grey with pale bellies. They had fins like half kites, and tails too on the blue ones; the others had tails so long to be nearly ridiculous, coiled or folded like something wilted. Their torpedo bodies glistened, frozen forever wet, and slit with gills like tallies counting recent kills. Darnell reached in to touch one. He ran his palm over the skin. It was smoother than he expected. He rubbed the other way and found it rough, like sandpaper. Eyes black as night stared docile through cataracts of ice. Their mouths were open sickles of teeth.
“Even the chief couldn’t punch this many on the nose.”
Brad said it quietly, like it was only meant for Darnell, and the new intimacy of it was startling but welcome. Darnell glanced at him, smiling wide, then turned his attention back to the sharks. Imagine swimming into this many! He shuddered, imagining them alive and writhing around him, thrashing to bite, and for a moment he thought his imagination had flexed, like it was a muscle that could tense or spasm, because he felt something clamp around his legs and he cried out, thinking ‘Shark!’ as he was lifted like a caught kill, breaching. He soared high as Brad stood from a crouch behind him, his arms wrapped around Darnell’s calves, his shins. Darnell flailed his arms as the others laughed and he was carried, panicking for balance he’d never achieve as he twisted in Brad’s grip. His hat was knocked flying and then he was coming down, dropping, deposited backwards into the ice chest. Those gathered around it backed away fast, their laughing faces disappearing quick as his head struck the side of the freezer and the lid came down to plunge him into darkness.
The dark was so absolute that he thought he’d passed out, but he could feel the cold and he could hear the laughter that felt the same and he could smell the—
fish, it’s fish, just fish, lots of fish
—but he couldn’t move. He lay in a dark so deep it filled his mind like seawater rushing into a capsized boat and he felt himself sinking. He couldn’t move and he couldn’t speak but he could feel, and what he could feel was all the sharks beneath him and beside him, the sharks all around him in the cold pitch dark. Their hard bodies, tight with frozen muscle. The press of fins in his ribs, the scythe-blade sweep of a long tail against his neck. Prickling his skin were teeth, everywhere teeth, all of them seeming to bite as he tried to fight the fear that held him frozen amongst the sharks, so many sharks he was drowning in them, breathing the stink of them—he could breathe, he was still breathing, oh God, oh God—but he couldn’t do it properly, was doing it too quick, in/out, in/out, giving him nothing, like he might not be breathing at all, and waves of shock carried him so that his chest rose and fell like a fast tide and all the sharks swum out from him, out from within, and with each attempted breath they wanted back in, they wanted back in, and he couldn’t . . . he couldn’t . . .
The paralysis was dragged out of him, pulled like sand and stones by a receding sea, and taking its place before the sharks could fill him was a titanic burst of panic that made him mighty; he thrashed and turned and kicked, beating at a lid that wouldn’t open, and as he shoved and shook in his fit of fear the teeth around him opened his skin and cut a low noise out of him, stuttered grunts connecting for a keening growl rising in volume until he was screaming, screaming like the sound itself might free him as he tried to beat his way out of a cold darkness filled with sharks that wanted to drown him and eat the flesh that shivered from his bones.
A group of sharks is called a shiver.
Darnell thought of that now as he watched the boy across the road throwing his baseball, catching his baseball. He had the air conditioner running, keeping the temperature in the confines of the car purposefully low.
A shiver of sharks.
A shark’s skin was smooth in one direction, but if you rubbed it the wrong way you got that sandpaper roughness he’d felt as a child because a shark’s skin is made up of placoid scales that point back to the tail, tiny teeth-like formations called dermal denticles that help reduce friction as the shark swims.
Even its skin was all teeth.
The chill in the car had raised the hairs on Darnell’s arms. He rubbed them, one way and then the other. What was skin, anyway? The cells on the surface were dead already, shedding to replace themselves until no one was the same person they once were, not on the outside.
Some sharks shed and replace so many teeth that they get through 50,000 in a lifetime.
Darnell watched the boy play. He wondered if he had many friends and thought, of course he does. A white boy in Edgartown would have lots of friends. This whole place was once Amity, friendship by definition. A place where you could give a beach a racist name and watch it stick throughout the years. Where people like Darnell were only welcomed as friends if they had money to spend, and even then not for long, thank you. Hurry up, we’re waiting for you to leave.
The sky was sharkskin gray with held rain, and though he had the windows closed, the smell of the sea came to Darnell thick and tangy. It tasted like something spoiled. Like childhood.
He looked at the boy and then the house behind him. White clapboard facade, large windows, a white fence that might as well have been fucking picket, all of it ghostly in the fading light. He’d only known the upper floor of a shared house, growing up, and when they moved across to the mainland they downsized again while his father looked for work. It didn’t help that Darnell’s sessions with doctors had cost them, as had his medication, and they could never afford either for long. His father would rage about the film people and white people and everyone else he blamed for Darnell’s terrors, including Darnell himself once he’d blamed all the rest. “You gotta be strong, boy. You gotta hit back and hit back harder. Show them they’re messing with the wrong—”
With the wrong N-word.
Darnell’s father had been so angry, all of the time, right up until he was too old to hold it anymore and it killed him, that’s what Darnell thought. It ate him up from the inside.
If you cut a shark open and throw it back to sea, it will rip itself to pieces and devour itself.
A lot of the time, therapy had felt just like that. A self-feeding frenzy of anxieties and emotions once you’ve opened the box you locked them in.
Darnell had come out of the dark of that freezer like he was surfacing from deep water, cold and gasping for breath. He didn’t remember the lid opening, or the sudden light, just that eventually he realized he was being carried. He didn’t remember being lifted out from that icy shiver of sharks, but he remembered being carried, knees to his chest. Like he’d fallen asleep in his father’s truck.
When a reporter managed to sneak a peek at the mechanical monstrosity to be used in the film’s finale, a security guard was fired. There was no such punishment for anyone after what had happened to Darnell. A prank gone too far, an accident, that was all, and where was Darnell’s father anyway when it happened? Of course, Darnell’s father had raged, threatening violence, and his mother had threatened legal recourse they couldn’t afford, and eventually they did receive a little keep-quiet money as compensation, but it didn’t last long. It certainly didn’t cover all of the help Darnell would need.
He was given a screen-print tee.
By the end of September, almost all signs that the film had ever been made were gone. Quint’s boat was still around, and the barge they’d used to film from, out on the water, but apart from that and a few newer cars on the roads, a few newer boats, the island went back to how it had always been, and life carried on as it always had.
Except for Darnell. Thanks to Brad.
“Hey, Dad.”
The kid across the street threw his ball to the man stepping out from the house who caught it effortlessly, as if he was always going to pluck a ball from the air right there.
“Hey, Roger Clemens. Better get your butt inside. Getting dark.”
The resemblance between father and son was striking. Not that Darnell had needed to see Brad again to confirm he had the right place; looking at his son was like looking back through time. Like looking at the same kid twice. They were ghosts of each other, in different ways.
Brad put his hands on his hips to watch his younger self pitch a ball to the sky and the gesture spread his jacket open. Darnell saw the uniform beneath and was not surprised because —
bull sharks were the most dangerous of sharks, the most aggressive
— because of course Brad was a cop. Of course he was.
But shit, it didn’t change nothing.
“How about we catch a few together tomorrow, you and me?”
The ball came back down; a star falling to the kid’s mitt.
“’K.”
He threw the ball back up to the dark.
“Maybe we could go down to the cages?”
The boy kept his eyes to the sky, mitt snug to his chest until he knew where to put it, and said, “’K.”
Darnell found he had as much hate for their easy relationship as he did for what was done to him all those years ago. The relationship he’d had with his father had never been the warmest, but after the sharks it was never anything, though the man forever directed the course of Darnell’s life. And though he understood how the world worked, how it belonged to the great white man—he’d endured countless discriminations his whole life, just as his father had—it was to this particular one that his hatred held fast. And there he stood, with no idea of what Darnell had lost because of him. He just waded through life, kicking up sand from the seabed and paying no attention to the mess he left behind.
As he passed his son, Brad swiped the Red Sox cap from his head —
“Hey!”
— and tossed it back, saying, “Inside, kiddo, before your mom gets home.”
I should have punched you, Darnell thought. Right on the nose.
A police cruiser pulled up at the sidewalk and someone inside called a greeting to the kid in the yard as Brad opened the door and dropped into the car. The kid waved and there was a blerp of siren in reply. A quick flash of the lights as they went, like bioluminescence in the wet air.
Darnell had managed to put a lot of what happened behind him, but it was always there. Coming back had not helped. You had to keep moving forwards to live. All he’d done was chum the waters and now something worse than his terrors had surfaced, dorsal-sleek and sharp with teeth. It fought to come out, bulging its way from his mouth until he grew tired of pushing it back in, pushing it back down.
He wasn’t here for revenge. He was an instrument of karma, that was all. A wave some 40 years building, ready to smash up against the shore.
The boy continued to play, even as a light rain began to fall. Darnell turned on the wipers so he could keep watching the boy throw and catch his ball. Up it went, and down it came. Inevitable.
The male great white matures at around nine, ten years of age. They have teeth as early as embryos and eat their siblings in the womb. From the outset, before they are even born, they are as dangerous as their parents.
Darnell looked into the rearview and saw, behind him, sitting upright in the back seat, his father. A chill, colder than the air con, settled over him and he closed his eyes. He felt the sharks pressing their icy bodies close, fighting to bite, to strip skin from flesh and flesh from cold, white bones.
When he opened his eyes and looked again his father was gone.
Grief was how you drowned. Better to be a shark.
He knew what he had to do.
Most shark attacks occurred in shallow water. Exactly where you thought yourself safe. Like in your front yard.
This time when he looked in the mirror all he saw was himself. His eyes were full. Lifeless eyes, black eyes. The descending dark filled his car and the cold shadows enveloped him, slipping over him like sharkskin he could wear as armour.
He who makes a beast of himself loses the pain of being a man.
The windshield wipers slowed—
thump-thump . . .
thump-thump . . .
—as a cloudy rime of ice crackled across the glass, and a quiet voice from somewhere behind him said, “Action.”
Darnell stepped out into the wet, the frosty drop in temperature following him from the car. The door shut behind him with the finality of a freezer’s lid.
Alerted by the noise, the boy paused in his play and looked at Darnell.
“I like your hat,” Darnell said as he approached.
He smiled.
He showed the boy his teeth.