by Ray Cluley
“Not here,” says Bobby, “we use digital.”
“What is it?” asks Sheila.
“I’d rather just show you,” he says. “Let you clear something up for me.”
So far, so Columbo.
Sheila shrugs. “There’s a player in the warehouse set.”
“Warehouse?” The cop looks around but there’s no warehouse here.
“Warehouse set,” Sheila says. She points at the bait shop they’d used earlier. “It’s different inside.”
So they head over. Tony approaches with a small guy you only know as the dwarf or midget or vertically challenged man from Jaws.
“Later, Tony,” says Bobby. “Something needs clearing up first.”
Bobby doesn’t sound like Columbo when he says it. He sounds more like the Godfather or something.
Inside, the set is empty. There’s no shooting today. The warehouse is all old-looking boards and crates. In the middle of the room, though, is a large fish tank. As in the tank is large, but also as in it could hold a large fish. Both definitions apply. Anyway, beside this is the video player and a small TV and a few plastic chairs.
“What’s all this?” He’s a cop. He’s naturally curious.
“We got a guy with a baby shark in these scenes. He’s filming it, studying it. Feeding it. Lets us show the audience how a shark feeds in close up detail that won’t bring the rating up or get us censored. It’s also why people keep getting killed, the parents have come for it and are terrorizing the beach.”
“Parents, huh.”
“Yeah, there’s two. Only you’ll never see both together. One will get killed and you’ll think it’s safe and then wham, here’s the other one. It’s like our twist.”
The cop peers in. “Where’s the shark?”
Bobby and Sheila exchange a glance.
“We don’t have one.”
“It’ll be rubber or CGI or papier-mâché or something,” Bobby explains.
“But it’ll look real enough.”
“Oh.”
“So what’s the tape?”
The cop, let’s call him Travis, pops the tape into the machine and says, “You tell me.”
There’s no need for anyone to tell him anything, it’s clear immediately what it is. It’s security footage of the parking lot of the chalet motel where many of the actors are staying. It doesn’t play continuous footage but a sequence of stills taken at intervals. And here. Comes. A car. Parking. In the next shot the door is suddenly open. And heeeere’s—
Bobby.
“You went to the motel?”
Bobby looks at Sheila who is frowning. She even takes a step back away from him.
“Yeah,” Bobby says. He says it somewhat reluctantly. Then again to the cop. Travis. “Yeah. I did.”
“Why?”
“I just wanted to talk to her.” Bobby says this to Sheila. Her arms are crossed and her frown has deepened.
“She wasn’t alone, though, was she,” says Travis.
“No.”
“One of the other guests heard an argument.”
“That’s right. I wasn’t, we wasn’t, we weren’t, happy with one of their scenes. I told them so.”
“And then what?”
“Not what you think.”
“And what do I think?”
“That the next thing I did was kill them.”
“Actually, no. If I thought that, we’d be doing this downtown, as they say in the movies. The only screams I got from this neighbour are the ‘get the fuck out’ kind, and look.” He points at the screen and Bobby’s car is. One shot. At a time. Leaving the lot. Too soon for him to have done much of anything.
“Oh.”
“So?”
“Well, the next thing was Cassy quit.”
“You mean Brenda?”
“Yeah. She said she didn’t like having a pervert director and could earn more doing other films.”
“Weird,” says Sheila.
“Why’s that?” asks Travis.
Sheila looks at him and says, “Well I’ve seen her other films.”
Travis looks like he wants to ask something, then doesn’t, then does, but this time it’s probably different to what he wanted to ask. He’s a cop. He can figure out the films Brenda used to make for himself. “Then what happened?” is what he says to Bobby.
“Bodie quit too. Phil. Moral support I think. I left them to it, figuring they’d cool down and change their minds in the morning.”
“Is that all?” Sheila says.
“Yes.”
So she says it again to Travis. “Is that all?” and gestures to the empty parking lot on the screen to emphasize her point.
“Not quite. Hold on.”
They wait.
“I’d fast forward only I’d probably miss it and then we’d have to rewind again and it’s easier if—here we go.”
And here it is. Another. Car. Parking.
Sheila’s.
Sheila shows Bobby her palms and says, “I just wanted to talk to him.”
“Wasn’t there though, was he,” says Bobby.
“No.”
“Because he was with Cass—with Brenda.”
“Well I know that now, yeah.”
Travis, the cop, feels he should ask another question or two because he is, after all, the cop. “The question I have for you both is this . . .”
Both of them wait a moment.
“Any ideas who’d want them dead?”
S
Alright, nearly finished.
You hear that? Of course you don’t. You’ll have to imagine it. Imagine a soundtrack that sounds a bit like Jaws even though it’s trying really hard not to. An underwater moving shot along the ocean bed, coming up to where the sun dapples the surface of the water, glinting and sparkling. Cut into this brightness with the sleek dark body not of a shark but the underside of a boat. No mini motorboat this time but a proper big vessel. Not too big, as you’ll see as we come up out of the water, just big enough for a small crew and a shark cage and a dwarf. Okay, so the dwarf doesn’t need much room, but he’s there too so I need to mention him. The dwarf is Manny and he’s definitely a dwarf and not a midget. He’s not the guy they used in Jaws by the way, he just says he is to get more work. No one ever checks.
“Okay, okay, this will do.”
Bobby has to shout it because he’s at the front of the boat looking in the water.
“You sure? We’re not very far out.” This comes from the boat owner, Smith. He knows the front of the boat is really called the bow but he’s not writing this story. He’s dressed as if he’s going to be in the movie; woollen sweater, tatty at the seams, a baseball cap with anchor insignia, shorts stained with fish-gut, sandals. He’s not in the movie. He’s not even in the story for much longer, and he certainly doesn’t have any more dialogue.
“He’s sure,” says Sheila. “He has a good sense for these things.” She gives the thumb-to-finger okay signal to her husband up front as Smithy kills the engine.
“I feel ridiculous.”
Manny is fidgeting with what looks to be breasts but is actually a stuffed sports bra he has on underneath his wetsuit. Some of the crew laugh again. They’ve laughed at him a lot.
“You’re Cassy,” Sheila reminds him, “troubled teenager, anxious to face the shark that took the man you loved.”
“I’m Cassy. Right.”
“Well, from a distance.”
Sheila thinks that for the close ups they’ll get one of the girls to wear the mask and be all wide-eyed with fright. She figures she may even have the girl spit out the respirator in panic so her underwater screams and the released oxygen give them a lot of bubbles to obscure things. And the
y’ll tear the suit in such a way that as she swims away she’s pretty much naked flesh and breasts so no one will notice the body double.
“You sure you wanna do this?” Bobby asks.
“Yeah, no problem,” says Manny, which is a bit embarrassing because Bobby was talking to Sheila. “Oh.”
“Yeah, we don’t have much choice but to kill her off now, do we?” she says.
Neither of them pay much heed to the fact she has been killed once already, for real. This is showbiz.
“I hear your girl got herself murdered,” says Manny. He’s stepping into the cage now, breasts and all. It’s a specially adapted cage, smaller than the usual.
“Sort of,” Bobby admits. He has come down to help.
“Shark attack,” says Sheila.
“Huh?” is as much as Manny can protest because Sheila calls to the winch guy and Manny-Cassy is hauled up into the air and over the side of the boat. He would like to call, “Wait!” and get some more details about the shark attack but he’s already being lowered and he needs to breathe so he puts the respirator in his mouth instead and disappears into the deep blue sea.
“Dinner is served.”
“Roll cameras.”
Bobby announces, “Time to chum the waters,” and returns to the front of the boat where a couple of tubs wait for him. Each is filled with fish heads and tails and guts in a soup of blood and scales. Bobby has a trowel in his hand and he shovels the stuff into the water. It’s sloppy splashy work, and smelly too. Look as one scoop of blood and chunks is slung over the side: sploosh! And another scoop that looks already chewed: sploop! And this one, red-wet and blood-slick, is an open flip-fold ID with a police badge and picture we know better upside down and without all the blood . . . .
Splash!
S
So what happened to the cop?
Well, you know what happened. He’s dead. But what actually happened, what are the details?
He wanted to talk to Bobby and Sheila, remember? He wanted to talk to them about some film footage. And after that he asked if they had any idea who might have killed them. (Of course they did, but they weren’t going to say so.) Well after that he said he wanted to shut them down.
“The thing is, it could be any one of your cast or your crew, and if it isn’t we’re still gonna need to talk to all of them. It’ll take a while.”
Bobby stands. “Out of the question, chum.”
Travis looks at Sheila with raised eyebrows. She shrugs and says, “He’s British,” by way of explanation.
“Your two main characters are dead, how are you still filming anyway?”
“They were the main characters. Now they’re bit parts.”
Sheila stands beside her husband. “We evolve.”
“And evolution never stops.”
“Well, this movie does.” Travis stands up too. He ejects the video cassette. “For a little while, anyway. Sorry.”
“If we stop filming the movie will die.”
“Like a shark, huh?”
“This movie is our baby.”
Travis looks from one to the other. He wants to touch his gun, just for the reassurance, but he doesn’t because that would be silly because this man is a British film director and this one’s a woman in a bikini, and anyway he has the video tape in his gun hand.
“What’s going on here?”
“A ruthless business,” says Sheila.
“Cutthroat, really,” Bobby agrees.
“It’ll chew you up and spit you out if you’re not careful.”
Finally beginning to see the significance of their comments, Travis glances at the cassette tape in his hand.
“We went back later,” Sheila explains. “Together. Parked down the street.”
Travis swaps hands with the tape and goes for his gun but Bobby is already smiling at him and there are a lot of teeth in that smile. A lot.
“What are you?”
Bobby’s mouth is open. It has expanded for all the teeth, so many teeth, too many teeth. They snap together as he tries to speak.
“Shust a monshter.”
“What?” Travis asks Sheila. It’s a pretty big question that could simply be an abbreviated repeat of what are you, or what is he, or it could be what shall I do, or maybe it’s all he can manage of a good plain what the fuck.
Sheila chooses to think of it as what did he say and answers accordingly.
“He’s trying to say, ‘just a monster.’”
It shouldn’t be a surprise to you, there were plenty of clues. I mean, I mentioned his teeth a lot, and his smile. Plus there was that “fish out of water” line near the beginning, and that “warmer climate” reference. A few others. And shame on you if you thought it was the shark man from the beginning, the one with the fake fin, because I told you he wasn’t in it again.
There’s a tearing sound as Bobby’s fin, a very real fin, splits the fabric of his shirt. But like I said, you shouldn’t be surprised.
Travis, the cop, the symbol of law and order in a world that’s just gone all messed-up otherworldly, is surprised. He’s not used to this. He’s used to the butler did it, or a jealous mistress. So faced with a man with an elongating head, a greying head, a head with an open maw of teeth and receding beard, Travis can only stand paralyzed. He thinks it has to be a special effect or something, and he has a goofy smile on his face when he looks at Sheila to say, “Alright, joke’s over.”
But Sheila says, “You know what scares me most about Jaws?”
Travis can only shake his head, but it might be in disbelief rather than as an answer.
“It’s that such a magnificent creature was stopped by an everyday seaside cop.” Her eyes are fully black now, as oily dark as her swimsuit. “The joke’s not over until you smile, you sonofabitch.” She shows him how. Then her own mouth stretches and opens, opens, as it fills with teeth, lots of teeth, so many many teeth.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to you, there were plenty of clues. I mean, there’s the twist in their own film, for one thing, with the two sharks and their baby and all. And look at the title; it’s not just Shark! is it, it’s “Shark! Shark!” (I was going to go with “Somewhere, Beyond the Scene” but a pun sets the wrong tone, don’t you think? Like this is a funny story or something, and not serious horror.)
Travis can only watch, gun useless in one hand and video tape in the other, as the husband and wife step closer. They’ll eat anything, even a cop, especially if it threatens their movie.
Sheila’s jaw is hanging right down to her chest now, impossibly large and open, and Bobby’s is the same. If this were a film then one of them would come right at you, quick, an extreme close up down the throat as the jaws close and the screen goes suddenly black.
Imagine that in 3D.
S
Back on the boat, Bobby is still scooping a bloody swill of chum into the sea. Evidence, really, but some genuine fish chum too.
“How’s the little guy doing?” Sheila asks her crew. The camera crew, not the boat crew.
While everyone’s attention is on the cross-dressing dwarf, Bobby scoops a handful of bloody guts from the barrel and tucks it quickly into his mouth.
“How we doing up there?” Sheila shouts to him.
He wipes his mouth clean and scoops the next lot overboard like he’s supposed to.
“Getting hungry,” he says, thinking maybe she saw him.
“As soon as we’ve got some shots of our fishy friends we’ll break for lunch.”
She shouts it to everyone but Bobby knows better: she saw him for sure.
He turns to the ocean, shovelling chum and eager for the promised break, calling, “Shark! Shark!”
- Fin -
Roll credits. (Rock music optional.)
Bl
oodcloth
Tanya drew circles in the dust on the floor while she waited for her father to come home from the caves. She drew a smile in one of them, intending to make a face, but it didn’t look right so she made it another circle within the circle. She looped them together with another one, turning a half circle herself when the floorboards nearest her knees were full. She was humming something half-remembered but didn’t know until Mother called for her to be quiet. So she was.
She could hear Mother’s breathing now, long and slow, and it made her think of Grandma, which made her look at the curtain hanging in front of her. She didn’t like the curtain because of what it did to Grandma, but she liked to sit by it for the same reason. Mother hated it. She hated it because of Grandma, but for lots of other things as well. And she was scared of it. Tanya would understand when she was older but she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
The curtain was pale at the moment, except for a fading pink near the middle where Father had wiped his hands. It was still creased and bunched a little in that area, but mostly it hung straight and heavy, its faint meaty smell barely noticeable. Folds of its flesh piled upon themselves on the floor at the corner, the rail still crooked because Father was too used to it now to make fixing it a priority. There were two dead flies in the creases there, their bodies dried husks, legs curled in tight. Tanya wondered if there were any entombed within the folds, if they would disintegrate into flakes and add their dust to the rest of it on the floor.
“Hummingbird?”
Tanya stopped humming again but asked, “Yes Ma?” in case there was more. She heard her mother shift in bed, the creak of the wood.
“What time is it?”
Tanya stood and brushed her skirts clean. She went over to the mantle and checked the clock there. It didn’t tick, it only tocked, offering a moment of quiet remembrance for each missing sound between. Tanya would sometimes get a big tick at the schoolhouse if her work was right but Father said just because the clock didn’t have any didn’t make it wrong. Mother had smiled, but to Tanya it always sounded like something was missing, when she noticed it at all. Usually it tocked like she hummed; without knowing and barely heard. When she noticed it, though, she noticed it all the time.