Jaws

by Peter Benchley

  “Like what?”

  “Like this. When you sit all day long and nothing happens.”

  “Some.”

  “And people pay you even though they never catch a thing.”

  “Those are the rules.”

  “Even if they never get a bite?”

  Quint nodded. “That doesn’t happen too often. There’s generally something that’ll take a bait. Or something we can stick.”

  “Stick?”

  “With an iron.” Quint pointed to the harpoons on the bow.

  Hooper said, “What kinds of things do you stick, Quint?”

  “Anything that swims by.”

  “Really? I don’t—”

  Quint cut him off. “Something’s taking one of the baits.”

  Shading his eyes with his hand, Brody looked off the stern, but as far as he could see, the slick was undisturbed, the water flat and calm. “Where?” he said.

  “Wait a second,” said Quint. “You’ll see.”

  With a soft metallic hiss, the wire on the starboard fishing rod began to feed overboard, knifing into the water in a straight silver line.

  “Take the rod,” Quint said to Brody. “And when I tell you, throw the brake and hit him.”

  “Is it the shark?” said Brody. The possibility that at last he was going to confront the fish—the beast, the monster, the nightmare—made Brody’s heart pound. His mouth was sticky-dry. He wiped his hands on his trousers, took the rod out of the holder, and stuck it in the swivel between his legs.

  Quint laughed—a short, sour yip. “That thing? No. That’s just a little fella. Give you some practice for when your fish finds us.” Quint watched the line for a few more seconds, then said, “Hit it!”

  Brody pushed the small lever on the reel forward, leaned down, then pulled back. The tip of the rod bent into an arc. With his right hand, Brody began to turn the crank to reel in the fish, but the reel did not respond. The line kept speeding out.

  “Don’t waste your energy,” said Quint.

  Hooper, who had been sitting on the transom, stood up and said, “Here, I’ll tighten down the drag.”

  “You will not!” said Quint. “You leave that rod alone.”

  Hooper looked up, bewildered and slightly hurt.

  Brody noticed Hooper’s pained expression, and he thought: What do you know? It’s about time.

  After a moment, Quint said, “You tighten the drag down too far and you’ll tear the hook out of his mouth.”

  “Oh,” said Hooper.

  “I thought you was supposed to know something about fishing.”

  Hooper said nothing. He turned and sat down on the transom.

  Brody held on to the rod with both hands. The fish had gone deep and was moving slowly from side to side, but it was no longer taking line. Brody reeled—leaning forward and cranking quickly as he picked up slack, hauling backward with the muscles in his shoulders and back. His left wrist ached, and the fingers in his right hand began to cramp from cranking. “What the hell have I got here?” he said.

  “A blue,” said Quint.

  “He must weigh half a ton.”

  Quint laughed. “Maybe a hundred fifty pounds.”

  Brody hauled and leaned, hauled and leaned, until finally he heard Quint say, “You’re getting there. Hold it.” He stopped reeling.

  With a smooth, unhurried motion, Quint swung down the ladder from the flying bridge. He had a rifle in his hand, an old army M-1. He stood at the gunwale and looked down. “You want to see the fish?” he said. “Come look.”

  Brody stood, and reeling to take up the slack as he walked, he moved to the side of the boat. In the dark water the shark was acrylic blue. It was about eight feet long, slender, with long pectoral fins. It swam slowly from side to side, no longer struggling.

  “He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” said Hooper.

  Quint flicked the rifle’s safety to “off,” and when the shark moved its head to within a few inches of the surface, he squeezed off three quick shots. The bullets made clean round holes in the shark’s head, drawing no blood. The shark shuddered and stopped moving.

  “He’s dead,” said Brody.

  “Shit,” said Quint. “He’s stunned, maybe, but that’s all.” Quint took a glove from one of his hip pockets, slipped his right hand into it, and grabbed the wire line. From a sheath at his belt he took a knife. He lifted the shark’s head clear of the water and bent over the gunwale. The shark’s mouth was open two or three inches wide. Its right eye, partly covered by a white membrane, gazed blankly at Quint. Quint jammed the knife into the shark’s mouth and tried to pry it open farther, but the shark bit down, holding the blade in its small triangular teeth. Quint pulled and twisted until the knife came free. He put it back in its sheath and took a pair of wire cutters from his pocket.

  “I guess you’re paying me enough so I can afford to lose a hook and a little leader,” he said. He touched the wire cutters to the leader and was about to snip it. “Wait a minute,” he said, putting the cutters back in his pocket and taking out his knife. “Watch this. This always gives the folks a boot.” Holding the leader in his left hand, he hoisted most of the shark out of the water. With a single swift motion he slit the shark’s belly from the anal fin to just below the jaw. The flesh pulled apart, and bloody entrails—white and red and blue—tumbled into the water like laundry falling from a basket. Then Quint cut the leader with the wire snips, and the shark slid overboard. As soon as its head was beneath the water, the shark began to thrash in the cloud of blood and innards, biting any morsel that passed into its maw. The body twitched as the shark swallowed, and pieces of intestines passed out the hole in the belly, to be eaten again.

  “Now watch,” said Quint. “If we’re lucky, in a minute other blues’ll come around, and they’ll help him eat himself. If we get enough of them, there’ll be a real feeding frenzy. That’s quite a show. The folks like that.”

  Brody watched, spellbound, as the shark continued to nibble at the floating guts. In a moment he saw a flash of blue rise from below. A small shark—no more than four feet long—snapped at the body of the disemboweled fish. Its jaws closed on a bit of flapping flesh. Its head shook violently from side to side, and its body trembled, snakelike. A piece of flesh tore away, and the smaller shark swallowed it. Soon another shark appeared, and another, and the water began to roil. Flecks of blood mingled with the drops of water that splashed on the surface.

  Quint took a gaff from beneath the gunwale. He leaned overboard, holding the gaff poised like an ax. Suddenly he lunged and jerked backward. Impaled on the gaff hook, squirming and snapping, was a small shark. Quint took the knife from its sheath, slashed the shark’s belly, and released it. “Now you’ll see something,” he said.

  Brody couldn’t tell how many sharks there were in the explosion of water. Fins crisscrossed on the surface, tails whipped the water. Amid the sounds of splashes came an occasional grunt as fish slammed into fish. Brody looked down at his shirt and saw that it was spattered with water and blood.

  The frenzy continued for several minutes, until only three large sharks remained, cruising back and forth beneath the surface.

  The men watched in silence until the last of the three had vanished.

  “Jesus,” said Hooper.

  “You don’t approve,” said Quint.

  “That’s right. I don’t like to see things die for people’s amusement.” Quint snickered, and Hooper said, “Do you?”

  “It ain’t a question of liking it or not. It’s what feeds me.”

  Quint reached into an ice chest and took out another hook and leader. The hook had been baited before they left the dock—a squid skewered and tied to the shaft and barb of the hook. Using pliers, Quint attached the leader to the end of the wire line. He dropped the bait overboard, fed out thirty yards of line, and let it drift into the slick.

  Hooper resumed his routine of ladling chum into the water. Brody said, “Anybody want a beer?” Both Quint and Hooper
nodded, so he went below and took three cans from a cooler. As he left the cabin, Brody noticed two old, cracked, and curling photographs thumbtacked to the bulkhead. One showed Quint standing hip-deep in a pile of big, strange-looking fish. The other was a picture of a dead shark lying on a beach. There was nothing else in the photograph to compare the fish to, so Brody couldn’t determine its size.

  Brody left the cabin, gave the others their beers, and sat down in the fighting chair. “I saw your pictures down there,” he said to Quint. “What are all those fish you’re standing in?”

  “Tarpon,” said Quint. “That was a while back, when I did some fishing in Florida. I never seen anything like it. We must have got thirty, forty tarpon—big tarpon—in four nights’ fishing.”

  “And you kept them?” said Hooper. “You’re supposed to throw them back.”

  “Customers wanted ’em. For pictures, I guess. Anyway, they don’t make bad chum, chopped up.”

  “What you’re saying is, they’re more use dead than alive.”

  “Sure. Same with most fish. And a lot of animals, too. I never did try to eat a live steer.” Quint laughed.

  “What’s the other picture?” said Brody. “Just a shark?”

  “Well, not just a shark. It was a big white—about fourteen, fifteen feet. Weighed over three thousand pounds.”

  “How did you catch it?”

  “Ironed it. But I tell you”—Quint chuckled—“for a while there it was a question of who was gonna catch who.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Damn thing attacked the boat. No provocation, no nothing. We were sitting out here minding our own business, when whamo! It felt like we was hit by a freight train. Knocked my mate right on his ass, and the customer started screaming bloody murder that we were sinking. Then the bastard hit us again. I put an iron in him and we chased him—Christ, we must have chased him halfway across the Atlantic.”

  “How could you follow him?” Brody asked. “Why didn’t he go deep?”

  “Couldn’t. Not with that barrel following him. They float. He dragged it down for a little while, but before too long the strain got to him and he came to the surface. So we just kept following the barrel. After a couple hours we got another two irons in him, and he finally came up, real quiet, and we throwed a rope round his tail and towed him to shore. And all the time that customer’s going bullshit, ’cause he’s sure we’re sinking and gonna get et up.

  “You know the funniest thing? When we got the fish back and we was all tied up safe and sound and not likely to sink, that dumb fuck of a customer comes up to me and offers me five hundred bucks if I’ll say he caught the fish on hook and line. Iron holes all over it, and he wants me to swear he caught it on hook and line! Then he starts giving me some song and dance about how I ought to cut my fee in half because I didn’t give him a chance to catch the fish on hook and line. I told him that if I had let him try, I’d be out one hook, three hundred yards of wire line, probably one reel and one rod, and definitely one fish. Then he says what about all the valuable publicity I’ll be getting from a trip he’s paying for. I told him he could give me the money and keep the publicity and try to spread it on a cracker for himself and his wife.”

  “I wondered about that hook-and-line business,” said Brody.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What you were saying. You wouldn’t try to catch the fish we’re after on a hook and line, would you?”

  “Shit, no. From what I hear, the fish that’s been bothering you makes the one we got look like a pup.”

  “Then how come the lines are out?”

  “Two reasons. First, a big white might just take a little squid bait like that. It’d cut the line pretty quick, but at least we’d know he was around. It’s a useful telltale. The other reason is, you never know what a chum slick will bring around. Even if your fish doesn’t show up, we might run into something else that’ll take the bait.”

  “Like what?”

  “Who knows? Maybe something useful. I’ve had swordfish take a drifting squid, and with all the federal bullshit about mercury no one’s catching them commercially anymore, so you can get two fifty a pound for broadbill in Montauk. Or maybe just something that’ll give you a boot in the ass to catch, like a mako. If you’re paying four hundred bucks, you might as well have some fun for your money.”

  “Suppose the big white did come around,” said Brody.

  “What would be the first thing you’d do?”

  “Try to keep him interested enough so he’d stick around till we could get at him. It’s no big trick; they’re pretty stupid fish. It depends on how he finds us. If he pulls the same crap the other one did and attacks the boat, we’ll just start pumping irons into him as fast as we can, then pull away from him and let him wear himself down. If he takes one of the lines, there’ll be no way to stop him if he wants to run. But I’ll try to turn him toward us—tighten the drag way down and take the risk of tearing loose. He’ll probably bend the hook out pretty quick, but we might get him close enough for an iron. And once I’ve got one iron in him, it’s only a matter of time.

  “Most likely, the way he’ll come will be following his nose—right up the slick, either on the surface or just below. And that’s where we’ll have a little trouble. The squid isn’t enough to keep him interested. Fish that size’ll suck a squid right down and not even know he’s et it. So we’ll have to give him something special that he can’t turn down, something with a big ol’ hook in it that’ll hold him at least until we can stick him once or twice.”

  “If the hook’s too obvious,” said Brody, “won’t he avoid the bait altogether?”

  “No. These things don’t have the brains of a dog. They eat anything. If they’re feeding, you could throw a bare hook down at ’em and they’ll take it if they see it. A friend of mine had one come up once and try to eat the outboard motor off his dinghy. He only spat it out ’cause he couldn’t get it down in one swallow.”

  From the stern, where he was ladling chum, Hooper said, “What’s something special, Quint?”

  “You mean that special treat he can’t turn down?” Quint smiled and pointed to a green plastic garbage can nestled in a corner amidships. “Take a look for yourself. It’s in that can. I’ve been saving it for a fish like the one we’re after. On anything else it’d be a waste.”

  Hooper walked over to the can, flipped the metal clasps off the sides, and lifted the top. His shock at what he saw made him gasp. Floating vertically in the can full of water, its lifeless head swaying gently with the motion of the boat, was a tiny bottle-nosed dolphin, no more than two feet long. Sticking out from a puncture on the outside of the jaw was the eye of a huge shark hook, and from a hole in the belly the barbed hook itself curled forward. Hooper clutched the sides of the can and said, “A baby.”

  “Even better,” Quint said with a grin. “Unborn.”

  Hooper gazed into the can for a few more seconds, then slammed the top back on and said, “Where did you get it?”

  “Oh, I guess about six miles from here, due east. Why?”

  “I mean how did you get it?”

  “How do you think? From the mother.”

  “You killed her.”

  “No.” Quint laughed. “She jumped into the boat and swallowed a bunch of sleeping pills.” He paused, waiting for a laugh, and when none came he said, “You can’t rightly buy them, you know.”

  Hooper stared at Quint. He was furious, outraged. But he said only, “You know they’re protected.”

  “When I fish, son, I catch what I want.”

  “But what about laws? Don’t—”

  “What’s your line of work, Hooper?”

  “I’m an icthyologist. I study fish. That’s why I’m here. Didn’t you know that?”

  “When people charter my boat, I don’t ask questions about them. But okay, you study fish for a living. If you had to work for a living—I mean the kind of work where the amount of money you make depends on the
amount of sweat you put in—you’d know more about what laws really mean. Sure, those porpoise are protected. But that law wasn’t put in to stop Quint from taking one or two for bait. It was meant to stop big-time fishing for them, to stop nuts from shooting them for sport. So I’ll tell you what, Hooper: You can bitch and moan all you want. But don’t tell Quint he can’t catch a few fish to help him make a living.”

  “Look, Quint, the point is that these dolphins are in danger of being wiped out, extinguished. And what you’re doing speeds up the process.”

  “Don’t give me that horseshit! Tell the tuna boats to stop snaring porpoise in their nets. Tell the Jap long-liners to stop hookin’ ’em. They’ll tell you to go take a flying fuck at the moon. They got mouths to feed. Well, so do I. Mine.”

  “I get your message,” said Hooper. “Take it while you can, and if after a while there’s nothing left, why, we’ll just start taking something else. It’s so stupid!”

  “Don’t overstep, son,” said Quint. His voice was flat, toneless, and he looked directly into Hooper’s eyes.

  “What?”

  “Don’t go calling me stupid.”

  Hooper hadn’t intended to give offense, and he was surprised to find offense taken. “I didn’t mean that, for God’s sake. I just meant …”

  On his perch midway between the two men, Brody decided it was time to stop the argument. “Let’s drop it, Hooper, okay?” he said. “We’re not out here to have a debate on ecology.”

  “What do you know about ecology, Brody?” said Hooper. “I bet all it means to you is someone telling you you can’t burn leaves in your backyard.”

  “Listen, you. I don’t need any of your two-bit, rich-kid bullshit.”

  “So that’s it! ‘Rich-kid bullshit.’ That rich-kid stuff really burns your ass, doesn’t it?”

  “Listen, damn you! We’re out here to stop a fish from killing people, and if using one porpoise will help us save God knows how many lives, that seems to me a pretty good bargain.”