White Shark

by Benchley-Peter

  "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 d
ay, 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 plung
ed 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.