The Deep

by Peter Benchley

  “Treece near went crazy, with grief and guilt and fury. He half-blamed himself, half-blamed the government.”

  “Did he ever find the man who killed her?”

  “No one knows . . . for sure. But about a week after she died, a man was found in St. George’s, high in the top branches of a tree. Every bone in his body had been broken at the joints. His fingers were all bent upward, his arms bent backward, same with his knees and his toes. His head was turned all around, like someone had tried to unscrew it. He was a bartender, mostly unemployed but always with ready cash. Nobody was ever prosecuted, and the only reason anybody connects it with Treece is that it had to have been some powerful man who splintered that fellow and hauled him fifty feet off the ground.

  “For about a month, Treece stayed drunk, morning, noon, and night, guzzling anything that had a charge to it. He sat in his house, and the only people who dared go near it were the folks delivering booze and food. Then one day he came out and started diving, did all manner of crazy-ass things: dove alone, in foul weather, went too deep and stayed too long. It was like he was trying to purge himself, or kill himself, and he damn near did that: got bent up like a pretzel and had to spend three days in a decompression chamber. A fisherman found him floating on the surface.”

  “What brought him down?”

  “Down? You mean back to normal? Time, I guess. But what’s normal? He’s never been the same as he was before she died. I doubt he ever will.”

  “Was Cloche involved?”

  Coffin paused. “I’d bet on it, but there’s no proof. Anyway, the important thing is, Treece sees the same thing happening again.”

  After a moment’s silence, Gail said, “Thank you.” She felt a sadness, a vicarious pain for Treece. She tried to form a mental picture of his wife, but the only image that fit was herself.

  Coffin held the scuba tank for her while she put on the harness and straightened the straps. He handed her the canvas bag she had brought up and said, “When you’re in, I’ll give you the other two. Take ’em down and set a rock on ’em so they won’t drift away. When they’re full, give three tugs on the line, and I’ll haul ’em up. Follow ’em, though, to make sure they don’t tip.”

  “Okay.” She stepped over the transom onto the diving platform, checked tank and mask, and jumped into the water.

  Pulling the ropes behind her, she swam for the bottom. Without weights, she tended to float, and she had to use both arms to aid her descent. She found her weight belt on the bottom, strapped it on, and made her way toward the cloud of sand.

  She had been gone longer than she thought. A mound of ampules more than a foot high and two feet wide rose in the sand beside David. She kneeled on two bags and opened the third. She found she could scoop handfuls of ampules off the mound and drop them in the bag; they floated safely to the bottom. She filled one bag, then another, then the third. She tapped Sanders to let him know she was going up, and tugged three times on the two ropes. As she unbuckled her weight belt, the two ropes tightened and the bags rose. She grabbed the ropes with one hand and, holding the untethered bag with the other, let herself be dragged to the surface.

  “You’re bleeding,” Coffin said.

  Gail crossed her eyes and saw bloody water washing around her nose. She tilted her head back and blew her mask clear. “I know. It’s nothing.”

  “Sure you don’t want me to take a trip?”

  “I’ll do one more.”

  Carefully, Coffin pushed the ampules out of the bags onto a tarpaulin he had spread on the deck. “I’ll count ’em while you’re down,” he said, passing the bags to Gail.

  She went down again, and this time she felt pain—a tight ache in the sinus cavities above her eyes. She stopped a few feet below the surface, struggling to maintain depth, and waited for the pain to subside. She descended farther, until the pain stopped her and forced her to wait. This is the last one, she thought: too many ups and downs.

  There was pressure now on her ears, too, and she made herself yawn. She felt two squeaky pops, and the pressure was gone. As she started down again, she saw something move—a grayish blur at the edge of the gloom beyond the reef.

  She looked harder, straining to see through the haze. Nothing. Then, farther to the left, another flicker of movement. She turned her head, trying to anticipate where it might appear next. Behind her, away from the cloud of sand, the water was clearer, and as she turned, she saw it: gliding out of the fog as if from behind a curtain was a shark. It moved with sure, unhurried grace, thrust through the water by smooth strokes of its crescent tail.

  A knot of panic struck Gail’s stomach. She was more than halfway to the bottom, and she remembered David’s warning about not fleeing for the surface. She could not tell how big the shark was, for, in open water, there was nothing against which to measure it. Nor could she tell how far away it was; it cruised at the outer limit of her vision. But how far could she see? Fifty feet? Sixty?

  The shark swam in a wide circle, and as streaks of sunlight caught its back, Gail could see faint stripes along its sides, light brown slashes against the gray-brown skin. One black eye seemed to be watching her, but it registered no interest, no curiosity.

  Still holding the ropes, she continued down toward the belching air lift. She found her weights, strapped them on, and tapped Treece. When he looked at her, with her right hand she made a sinuous swimming motion, then, with her fingers, a biting motion. She pointed off to the right, where she guessed the shark would be by now. Treece looked in the direction she was pointing, but, surrounded by drifting sand, he saw nothing. He looked back at her, shook his head, and, with a curt wave of his hand, dismissed the danger.

  Sanders was not sure he understood what Gail had told Treece. He recalled her nervousness in the company of a barracuda and assumed she had seen another one. But seeing the wide-eyed fear on her face, he wondered. He put the heels of his hands together, spread his fingers, then slammed them closed—a fair approximation of a big mouth. He looked at her, raised his eyebrows, and spread his arms, asking, How big? She shrugged: Can’t tell. But she spread her arms as wide as she could: At least this big. Sanders noticed that half an inch of bloody water was washing around in her mask. He pointed to it and shook his finger, telling her not to clear the mask, not to put blood in the water.

  She nodded, but misunderstood. Before he could stop her, she pressed the top of her faceplate and exhaled through her nose. A stream of green, mucous water flushed from her mask and drifted off in the tide.

  Sanders smacked himself on the forehead and shook his head. He pointed to the drifting threads of blood.

  Gail’s eyes looked stricken. She touched his arm and pointed to the surface, asking if she should go up. He held her wrist and shook his head firmly: No. He pointed to an empty canvas bag, picked up a handful of ampules, and dropped them into the bag.

  The ditch Treece had excavated contained a major lode. There were ampules everywhere, poking up through the sand like raisins in a rice pudding. Picking carefully with the air lift among the artillery shells, Treece would touch a leaf of rotten wood and let the suction peel the leaf away, revealing forty-eight ampules, in eight neat rows of six.

  Sanders could not keep up with Treece. He plucked four, six, ten ampules from the sand at a time and passed them back to Gail, but always Treece would have uncovered more. He tried to lift a full box, but though it looked intact, it had no bottom, and the ampules fell away in the sand. He cupped his hands, scooped fifteen or twenty ampules, and turned to give them to Gail. Her hands weren’t there. He turned, angrily, to face her, and saw her staring at the reef.

  The shark was no more than ten feet away, moving from right to left between them and the coral. It was six or seven feet long, a sleek torpedo of muscle. It watched them, but made no move toward them, and Sanders wondered if it was seeking the source of the blood in the water. He reached to his calf and unsheathed the knife. He saw that Treece had not noticed the shark. He tapped him and pointe
d, as the shark swam away to the left, keeping a steady ten or twelve feet from the divers and four or five feet from the reef.

  Treece watched the shark pass Gail and turn, perhaps twenty feet away, disappearing behind the cloud of sand. He rapped his knuckles on the air lift and shook his head. He seemed to be saying, Stay calm.

  With the knife in his right hand, Sanders had only his left free to gather ampules, and that hand couldn’t accomplish much because Gail wouldn’t take any more ampules from him; she stayed rigid on her knees, clutching a half-full bag and waiting, panicked, for the shark to reappear.

  He saw it first. As before, it came from the right, still keeping its distance but, Sanders thought, slightly closer than on its previous pass. It approached the preoccupied Treece and moved toward Sanders, who crouched, holding the knife in front of him. Then Gail saw it, and, shocked, she flailed her arms. The shark saw the movement, and its head twitched, dipping toward Gail.

  Gail’s arm touched Sanders’ side, and the sensation was a trigger that snapped him forward. His right hand was extended, the knife blade pointing up.

  The shark saw him coming and dodged, its head jerking to the right, its tail thrashing twice. But instinct told it to avoid the reef, and, apparently confused, it slowed enough to let Sanders jab the knife into its underside, a foot ahead of the tail.

  Sanders’ only conscious thought was how soft the flesh was; the knife went in up to the hilt. Then the body convulsed and tore the knife from his hand. Blood spurted from the wound in a thick green cloud.

  The shark darted away, swimming erratically, its body shuddering, tail twitching. The head turned and the jaws snapped at the bleeding belly. The shark was trying to eat itself.

  The knife had fallen a few feet away, and Sanders swam to retrieve it, worried that the shark would return and, in anger, attack.

  But it was not the shark that attacked. Sanders felt a hand grip his ankle and drag him backward. Lying on his back, he gazed into Treece’s furious eyes. He saw Treece’s lips moving, and he heard sounds, but no words.

  Treece grabbed Sanders’ arm and yanked him to his feet. His fingers completely circled Sanders’ upper am and, on the inside of the arm where they met, pinched painfully.

  Scared and confused, Sanders didn’t know what he had done to enrage Treece, and as he looked into the shouting face, he was genuinely afraid that Treece might kill him.

  Treece grabbed the knife from Sanders’ hand and rammed it into the air-lift intake. It rattled up the tube. Then Treece pointed at the surface and started up. He stopped, returned, and gathered up one of the artillery shells.

  Gail still crouched on the bottom. Sanders took her arm and helped her to her feet, pulled three times on one of the ropes, and guided her hand to it when the rope was tightened by Coffin’s pull.

  As he swam with Gail to the surface, Sanders saw a gray shadow moving in the distance. Hazy as it was, Sanders could see that it was big, much bigger than a man.

  When he neared the boat, he looked down and saw the wounded shark, twisting and rolling on the reef. Then the air stopped flowing into his mask.

  He kicked to the surface, exhaling the last of his air. He grabbed the diving platform with one hand, removed his mask, and said, “Hey, what . . .” The sound of Treece’s voice silenced him.

  “. . . dumb, goddamned, idiotic, crazy thing to do I ever saw in my life!” Treece was already in the boat, railing, Sanders assumed, at Coffin, who had turned off the compressor.

  Sanders dipped his face in the water to clean his nose, so he didn’t see the hand that reached for him. He heard the word “You!” and felt himself grabbed under one arm and hoisted out of the water and over the transom. His feet slammed onto the deck.

  Gail, hanging off the platform, watched Sanders fly out of the water, and a picture struck her: a man, wedged high in a tree, with his limbs splayed backward.

  Treece held Sanders by the arm and shook him, snapping his head back and forth. “What in the name of the gentle Jesus do you think you’re doing? You think you’re goddamned Tarzan? You’re a goddamned hazard, that’s what!”

  “What . . .”

  “Bugger up a day’s work . . . Jesus Christ!” Treece pushed Sanders away and turned to take Gail’s tank off the platform.

  Sanders nibbed the welts on his arm. “She was bleeding!”

  “Cat shit!”

  “She was! In her mask. She cleared it into the water.”

  Treece looked at Coffin and said, “Christ, spare me from idiots.” He turned back to Sanders and opened his mouth to shout, but apparently changed his mind. “All right,” he said, struggling against his temper. “First off, that little fish wasn’t about to eat us.”

  “Little!” Sanders said. “That thing was at least seven feet long.” Confident now that Treece was not going to hurt him, he felt embarrassed, aggressively resentful. He wanted to question Treece’s declarative cockiness.

  “If it was five feet, I’m the King of Spain. Water magnifies everything.”

  Sanders felt himself blush. “Even so . . .”

  “Second,” Treece said, “there wasn’t enough blood in the water to make him more than a little nosy. He was having a look-see. If he’d have got serious, you’d have seen the excitement ripple along his body; he’d’ve got real agitated. And soon as I spotted that, all we had to do is gather together in the air-lift cloud. Sharks won’t go in it, or if they do, they’ll get the hell out in a hurry without waiting to bite anything. The sand clogs their gills, and they hate that: it can kill ’em. I had his grandfather try to eat me once—a big bastard of a tiger shark, all of fifteen feet long—and I just waited him out in the cloud. But sticking him with a knife is the last bloody thing in the world you want to do. The last! When you’ve got no other choice, when it’s either stick him or be dinner, then you stick him. But not before.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s liable to bite you. They’re not supposed to have enough brains to get angry, but I tell you, I’ve seen ’em do a right fancy imitation of being pissed off. You want to see another reason, get in the water.”

  “What? Where?”

  Treece tossed him a face mask. “Put this on and hang off the platform.” He said to Gail, “You, too. But for Christ’s sake, don’t go tooting off somewhere.”

  Tentatively, not knowing what to expect, David and Gail slipped off the platform and clung to the chains that attached it to the boat. They held their breaths and put their faces in the water.

  The scene thirty feet away, on the reef, looked like a gang fight. All that remained of the shark Sanders had stabbed were a few mutilated pieces, and those were being fought over, with savage frenzy, by countless other sharks. Half a dozen large tiger sharks flailed in a blurred ball around a piece of offal. A smaller shark chased a shred of flesh to the bottom, took it in his mouth, and sped away, pursued by two others. There were sharks everywhere, swimming in frantic bursts, responding to smells and sounds and commotion in the water, searching for prey. Some were gray, some brown, some striped. Large sharks took random swipes at smaller ones, who darted out of reach—or, when they were not quick enough, were wounded and set upon by the mob.

  As the Sanderses watched, more and more dark, sinuous shapes glided out of the twilight blue. One cruised directly beneath the boat, and, seeing something on the surface, rose toward them. They hoisted themselves onto the platform and climbed into the boat.

  Treece and Coffin were counting ampules on the deck. Treece did not look up. “See what you did?” He was not gloating; his tone of voice said simply: Now you understand.

  “I see.”

  Gail said, “How long will they stay around?”

  “Till the food runs out. But if they’re beating up on each other like they usually do, the food won’t run out. They’ll be there a good long while.”

  “So today’s wiped,” Sanders said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Aye.” Treece relented. “It’s no great tragedy. We got a fa
ir load for today, and one thing about those beasts: They’ll keep anybody else from messing around down there.”

  Gail shivered. She removed her wet-suit top and dried herself. “How many have you got?”

  “Four thousand”—Treece looked at Coffin—“eight hundred and seventy,” Coffin said, wrapping the last plastic bag of ampules.

  “Not enough.” Treece looked at the shore. “And not much bloody time. I imagine Cloche has had people on the bluffs all day.”

  Coffin said, “He can’t make ’em into good divers in two days. And he’ll have to build an air lift. Can’t send a bunch of bunnies out here to pick around in the sand with their fingers.”

  “Two days, no. But not much more than that, to make ’em middling competent. And when he’s ready, they’re going to come fast. I think maybe we’ll be working nights, too.” He saw a look of chagrin on Gail’s face, and he said, “Not tonight. We’ll give your bugle a rest.”

  “What will you do with this?” Sanders rested his hand on the artillery shell.

  “Nothing, for now. I just wanted to get it out of there. Later on, I’ll clean it up and sell the brass.”

  “Is it really live, after thirty years?”

  “Aye,” Treece said. He set the shell in a vise bolted to the starboard gunwale. From a locker he took a huge wrench which he fit to the bottom of the shell. He tugged on the handle, but the wrench didn’t budge. “Corroded into a bloody weld.” He braced his foot against the bulkhead, wrapped both hands around the wrench, and leaned back. His biceps balled into tight knots; the sinews in his neck strained against the skin, and a red hue suffused his face.

  There was a metallic squeak, then the sound of a crack, and the wrench handle moved. Treece heaved again and broke the seal. He unscrewed the bottom of the shell and dropped it on the deck. “Look here.”