“What’s that for?” I asked in a weak voice.
Gus tied a rope around the handle and pulled on it a few times to make sure it was secure. “I’ll throw it overboard and the smell will leak out of those holes and attract sharks.” He tapped the bucket fondly. “I call it my chumsicle.”
“Sharks can smell blood up to a mile away and—” Ronald added, but was cut off by my heaving my bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich over the railing.
“Great!” Les said with a leer. “More chum!”
Ronald patted my back sympathetically.
Most of the deck was taken up by the four-by-four-by-seven-foot shark cage that Gus had welded himself. The cage could hold two people at a time, and the top operated on a hinge so divers could get in and out. The bars were six inches apart. When Gus first built it, he’d left a three-by-three-foot hole in the middle so people could photograph the sharks without having bars in the way. Then one day a blue shark swam into the cage with one of the divers and started thrashing around. No one was hurt, but afterward Gus filled in the space with bars that are about eight inches apart.
“So have any sharks gotten in since then?” I asked.
“Just a few mako sharks.” Gus shrugged. “But they usually just swim right out.”
Usually?
“So, uh, what do these makos look like?” I asked, but Gus was busy lowering the cage into the water at the back of the boat.
“They have long slender bodies,” Ronald piped up. “That’s how they can fit between the bars.”
Les held out his camera. “Here’s a picture of one.” It was fairly short, by shark standards. Its long thin snout gave the impression it was accusing you of something.
“That looks like my old boss,” I said.
SPLASH!
All eyes turned to the water where a dark silhouette glided ominously just beneath the surface.
“A blue shark,” Ronald observed. “About ten feet long, I’d say.”
“Noelle, come over and shark wrangle while I get the cage ready,” Gus said.
Wrangling entailed dangling a piece of string knotted with fish into the water, then when the shark went for the bait, pulling the string out of the water the way a matador rips the red flag from in front of a bull. It was pretty fun, actually. This move was designed to keep the shark near the boat, instead of taking the bait and flitting off. But the blue kept darting away.
“Am I doing it wrong?” I asked.
“Something is spooking her,” Ronald said knowingly. “Usually that means there’s a mako nearby.”
“Why would a smaller shark make the big shark go away?”
“Mako sharks are the fastest fish in the ocean and very aggressive. Sometimes they eat other sharks. In fact, mako embryos sometimes consume each other for nutrients while gestating in their mother’s body.”
“They eat their brothers and sisters before they’re even born?” I asked. “That’s cold.”
This biological detail didn’t faze Ronald, who was already climbing into the cage with Les, eager for some face time with Big Blue. She never returned, however, and after a half hour in the water, the two of them came back up looking disappointed.
“Dude, I told you guys when you signed up, there’s no guarantee how many sharks we’ll see on these dives,” Gus said, his tone defensive. “Sometimes there aren’t any at all. I just do what I can and hope for the best.”
Les started telling me personal stories to take my mind off the seasickness. He recounted the time he’d slugged his daughter in the face “to show her who was in charge,” at which point I announced, “I think I’ll go down in the cage with Mandy.” I snapped myself into a wetsuit and tried not to think about my lack of diving experience. Technically you don’t need to be certified if you aren’t going below twelve feet of water, but I’d never breathed with a respirator before. My mind kept returning to a Choose Your Own Adventure book I’d read as a kid. The main character in the story was a scuba diver on the hunt for sunken treasure, and at the end of the story the reader got to choose his fate. You could choose to risk the small amount of oxygen left in the tank and go for the treasure. Or you could play it safe and return to the boat, but risk never finding the treasure again. I kept my finger on the page and skipped ahead to see what happened. The one who took the chance ended up running out of air and suffocating on the sea floor. The one who turned back went on to live a happy, but presumably boring, life.
Gus gave me a three-minute tutorial on the correct way to use an air hose and how to empty my mask if water seeped in. My stomach turned over. This time it was nerves and not seasickness. Wait—the seasickness!
“What if I throw up underwater and start choking?” I asked.
“Vomit into your respirator,” Gus advised, and I looked at my respirator in disgust.
“What do I do if I’m in trouble and I need to come up?”
“Signal me by opening the top of the cage. I’ll see you from the surface and reel you in,” he said. “But don’t forget to close it immediately.”
“Why?”
“If the door is flapping open, I can’t grab the cage and lock you into the back of the boat when you get to the surface.”
“What happens then?”
“Then the cage goes underneath the boat,” he said.
I shuddered.
He added: “Oh, and keep an eye on your hands when you’re holding on to the bars. That’s an easy way to get bit.”
Once Mandy and I were securely in the cage, Gus shut the top, tied it closed with a bungee cord, and lowered us down twelve feet. Soon we were riding on an underwater roller coaster without seat belts. The choppy water jerked us back and forth, and we had to hold on to the bars to keep from crashing into the walls and ceiling. Mandy and I stood back-to-back. That way, if a shark approached, one of us would see it coming and signal the other. I clenched my respirator so hard my lips ached and then lost feeling entirely. Breathing underwater felt claustrophobic, as if the water actively wanted to get inside my body.
Mandy grew bored after twenty minutes of no action and signaled to Gus. He pulled the cage up to the boat to let her out.
“Had enough?” he asked me.
“I’ll hang out for a while.” The old Noelle would’ve quit while she was alive and followed Mandy, but I was determined to see this through.
“Rock on!” He flashed me the “sign of the horns” hand gesture and lowered me back down.
Now I stood in the middle of the cage, arms gripping bars on opposite walls to keep steady. I canvassed the murky water in front of me. I looked over one shoulder, then the other. I checked on my hands to make sure they were still there. Visibility was low. I wouldn’t be able to see the sharks until they were pretty close.
Suddenly, a flash of tail in the distance. Then nothing.
Oh shit.
I once read that Steven Spielberg had technical difficulties with the mechanical shark while making Jaws. The animatronic fish (nicknamed “Bruce”) kept shorting out, delaying production, so Spielberg compensated for Bruce’s absence by using it to create tension. Now I understood why his technique worked—not knowing was worse than knowing. The scariest parts of the movie were the times when you didn’t know where the shark was but felt its presence, loitering in the shadows.
Then I saw it, about seven feet long and winding its way over to the fish Gus was dangling in front of my cage. A mako. Naturally, this was the shark that showed up on my watch. When it was about a foot away from me, Gus yanked the fish out of the water. The mako, frustrated at having lost its meal, shoved its face through the bars of my suddenly too small cage. It shook its head back and forth. With a muffled scream, I let go of the bars and backpedaled against the current that was propelling me forward. Its long pointy snout reached about a foot into the cage, and it took all my strength to keep from cras
hing into it. Suddenly, the shark reared back and bit down on the bars. There was a grating clank of five rows of teeth hitting metal. My breath fired out of the respirator in panicky spurts.
As Ronald predicted, the mako was thin enough that if it tilted a bit and came at the bars on an angle, it could have fit between the eight-inch gaps. Death seemed inevitable. This was an animal that ate its own relatives, so I didn’t presume it would spare me. Looking down at my turquoise and purple rubber suit, I couldn’t believe I was going to leave this world dressed like a Star Trek character. I desperately wanted to signal for help and realized the sheer stupidity of Gus’s emergency plan. Opening the top of the cage right now would be like opening your front door when a killer was trying to break into your house. The mako poked its face into the cage again. In desperation, I reached up and clung to the ceiling as the waves urged me toward its snout. Suddenly, it extracted its head and took to circling around me, eating the steady supply of chum being tossed out. I lost sight of the mako only to be blindsided as it rubbed itself alongside the bars. A couple of times, Gus dangled a fish in front of me and did the matador move, causing the shark to ram into the cage.
After about twenty minutes, someone threw out another fish, about twenty feet away from the boat. The mako darted after it, its tail whacking into the cage as it made its exit, leaving me literally and emotionally rattled. Realizing there was no more food coming, the shark lost interest and left for good. As The Manatee hauled me back in, I sighed a bubble trail of relief. There were high fives all around as I climbed out of the cage.
“That was so hard-core!” Gus said. “Well done!”
“So how was it?” Ronald asked.
Mostly I was just relieved to be alive, but I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I mustered some enthusiasm and said dramatically, “I can still hear the sound of its teeth hitting the titanium . . .”
It was sunset when we motored into the Martha’s Vineyard marina. From far away the island looked slightly foreboding with craggy cliffs and steep bluffs, but the harbor was welcoming. There were enough fishing boats to feel cozy but not crowded.
As Mandy and I changed in the cramped sleeping quarters, she leaned in conspiratorially and said, “Let’s have a girls’ night!”
“Sounds great!” I enthused.
Ronald and Les headed into town while Mandy and I ambled past the Victorian gingerbread-style inns that lined the main street and settled on a burger joint. This is my kind of woman, I thought when she kicked off dinner by asking for a “bird-bath-sized margarita.” But it became increasingly clear that she was a time-release weirdo, who seems normal at first but whose freakishness unfolds over a matter of hours. At one point she launched into an extended screed against the Puerto Rican community.
“I don’t mean to be racist,” she began—a qualifier invariably followed by a racist statement—“but I just feel like they’re trashy.”
I thought, This is coming from a woman with an aquarium on her back?
After several drinks, her anecdotes about her boyfriend grew increasingly bizarre. It also turned out she was sleeping with Les, whom she met on a diving trip a few months before. In fact, he’d paid for her passage on this trip, but she wanted to break it off so she’d been ignoring him since they got here. Hence, her suggestion we have a girls’ night out.
It was after 11:00 P.M. when we returned to the boat and accidentally stepped on Gus, who was sleeping on deck. Traffic was bad and Bill had texted that he was still hours away, so he was going to grab a hotel room and meet us in the morning. I hosed off as best I could while still wearing my swimsuit. There was no saving my hair. It looked like it was not only styled by the mice and birds from Cinderella, but also serving as their primary residence. I eased down the ladder into our cabin, trying not to wake Les and Ronald, who was lightly snoring. I grasped at the darkness until my hands found my cushioned bench bed. Sleeping without a blanket felt almost as vulnerable as being in the shark cage. The encrusted salt bit into my skin every time I rolled over. I dreamed my body was being attacked by millions of tiny sharks.
“Hancock!”
I was sitting cross-legged on a padded seat on deck, reading the previous day’s newspaper, when I heard my name. I squinted into the morning light to see Bill climbing aboard, grinning his lopsided grin, brown curls barely contained beneath his White Sox cap.
“You’re here!” I exclaimed.
He came to a stop in front of me and raised one hand in a jaunty sailor salute. “Front and centies!”
“You’re in surprisingly good cheer for someone who got in at three A.M.,” I said as he tossed me his backpack. “Where did you sleep?”
“In my rental car in the marina parking lot,” he said with a laugh. “Didn’t seem worth it to pay for a motel.” He was wearing Birkenstocks, cutoff jean shorts, and a bright yellow T-shirt with JAMAICA ME CRAZY! printed across the front. That was essentially what he’d worn every day when I worked with him at the magazine, even though the office was in a corporate high-rise in Midtown Manhattan. There were introductions all around, and within minutes he was regaling the group with an anecdote about a narrowly missed ferry. They were instantly taken with him, as I knew they would be. Bill can—and will—talk to anyone.
The wind felt almost combative as we headed out of the harbor, and soon I was securing my matted hair in a ponytail to keep it out of my face. The sea was rougher than yesterday as well. The boat pitched mercilessly until the horizon resembled a possessed seesaw. Soon I was clutching the rail and throwing up again. Bill disappeared below to get me some Dramamine from his bag.
“Wow, it smells awful up here!” he said cheerfully when he returned, the smell of vomit having fully mixed with that of chum. “It smells like puke that puke puked.”
An hour later, it was time to dive again. I had no desire to get in that cage again, but it would take care of my scary thing for another day. And the others would think it was weird if I came all this way to dive only one time.
I rooted around in the bin full of weight belts. “Is this the same weight belt I used yesterday?” I asked, holding one up. No one answered. Gus was busy helping Ronald and Mandy from the cage, and Les was fixing something on his camera and didn’t look up. I shrugged and tied it around my waist. When it was time for Bill and me to climb into the cage, he offered to hold my disposable underwater camera since I was getting in first. As I was easing my body into the chilly water, I heard a plasticky clicking sound. I looked up to see Bill holding up the camera, squinting one-eyed through the viewfinder.
“Smile, you son of a bitch!” he said in his best Roy Scheider voice.
I plugged the regulator into my mouth and slipped silently beneath the surface, followed by Bill a minute later. Gus shut the top of the cage with a clang and tied it shut with the bungee cord. I could feel the cage lowering around me, but I wasn’t going with it. Instead I was hovering in the middle of the cage, halfway between the ceiling and the floor. The weight belt. It must not have been the same one from yesterday, which had been heavy enough to keep me firmly on the floor. The ocean was more turbulent today. Suddenly, an enthusiastic wave pushed me upward. I bonked lightly against the rapidly descending ceiling. I shook my head to get my bearings and realized my matted hair was caught in the rubber bungee cord that held the roof shut. I was hanging from the top of the cage by my ponytail. My legs kicked out like a condemned prisoner on the gallows, fighting to the end. The weight belt was pulling me downward and the force of my hair being yanked upward lifted my mask and seawater trickled in. Trying to get leverage, I stepped on two of the cage’s horizontal bars to hold myself up while I untangled my hair. As my feet stuck out over the edge, I remembered Gus telling us not to stick our hands or feet outside the cage because “sharks will take a test bite out of anything.” I tore at my hair frantically. This would probably have been a good time to signal for help by opening the cage door if my
hair hadn’t been tied to it. After about five minutes, I ripped my ponytail free and joined Bill at the bottom of the cage, an inch of water lolling around the bottom of my mask. I tried the trick that Gus taught me to get the water out—looking up while gently pulling open the bottom of the mask—but instead more water rushed in. (Later I would find out I forgot to exhale though my nose at the same time that I’d lifted the mask.) I looked at Bill with pleading eyes. “I have water in my mask and I can’t get it out! What should I do?” I wanted to shout. I pointed to my mask and he shook his head, not comprehending.
I tightened my mask, but when I pulled the strap, even more water poured in. I tried to isolate my breathing and just inhale through my mouth, but every time I automatically breathed in through my nose, too. I was sniffing seawater at a fast clip and wondering if there was enough room on a death certificate for “died of complications from unmanageable hair.” By this point, the water in my mask had crept up past my nostrils. My eyes stared down the bridge of my nose like two flood victims on the roof of a house, wondering if the water was going to overtake them. If that happened, I was fucked. Not only would I be trapped in a cage, inhaling seawater, I’d be blind and trapped in a cage inhaling seawater. Instinct told me to swim to the surface as fast as possible, but there were sharks in the water. The question was: Did I want to drown or be eaten alive? Choose your own adventure!
I gave Bill the double thumbs-down, the international sign for “I am displeased” and motioned that I wanted to get out. I unfastened the bungee cord and opened the top of the cage, but the current was so strong that I couldn’t close it again. The cage door was swinging wildly when Gus pulled us up and he couldn’t grab hold of the roof. The cage slipped horizontally underneath the boat, thudding dully against the hull. It was on its side with the roof wide open so any shark could swim inside. I glanced over at Bill, who gestured helplessly. He hadn’t heard Gus’s speech from yesterday about needing to close the top of the cage. He had no idea what had gone wrong. I scrambled for the cage door and yanked it down but a strong wave ripped it free again, almost pulling me out of the cage. I braced the tops of my feet against the cage’s horizontal bars for leverage and pulled with all my strength. As the cage jerked around, the metal tore easily into the thin skin on the tops of my feet. Then we were moving, being slowly towed forward; Gus was reeling us in. When we reached the surface, he locked the metal cage in its place at the back of the boat. I exploded out of the water, dropping my regulator and dry heaving. Hands scooped me up underneath my shoulders from behind and dragged me into the boat. “Easy, take it easy,” voices urged.
My Year with Eleanor Page 5