Dead Bait 4

by Weston Ochse

  The day of the drama, he’d been following up a report of a beached shortfin Mako struggling in the surf, and he found the adolescent shark quickly, as well as the circle of a dozen or so aged surfers holding it up for selfies as its gills flexed in vain. They were jackassing and chasing each other around with it like a football when my brother walked up, and he could already see it was moments from expiring and long past saving. He calmly explained that interfering with protected fish or wildlife like this Mako was against the law in California, when one of them tried to snap the shark at him like a wet towel in a locker room, effectively turning the poor creature’s stomach and intestinal track inside out. My brother reeled in shock from this. Years of volunteer work had steeled his resolve at the sight of roadkill and oil spills along the coastline, but he was bad with confrontation, and combined with such a random act of cruelty, as well as the glistening purple ropes of innards vaulting over those needle teeth like spring-loaded snakes from a jar of nuts, it was just too much for him, and he collapsed. A random beachcomber called my brother an ambulance, but he was lying there getting sunburned for a while, and, of course, his encounter with the surfers ended up on YouTube, where it quickly went viral. This is where I saw it, like everybody else, backtracking to my computer after catching his name on a local news report. Reporters identified the gang as the “Bay Boys,” though news cameras circled a nearby beer-strewn, concrete-and-stone fort tagged “Warlords,” a name they apparently couldn’t get to stick. On the internet, everyone knew about the Bay Boys, and I even read about an El Segundo cop involved in a lawsuit to oust them, but none of the cases went anywhere. Most police actually sanctioned their shenanigans, and any tourists who complained were told, “Sorry, plenty of beach elsewhere.” Palos Verdes Estates cops, where their intimidation was by far the worst, even openly encouraged the Bay Boys, letting them off speeding tickets and other traffic infractions, according to some of the more coherent YouTube comments on my brother’s video, a place that turned into a support group of sorts where more and more people shared stories of their own run-ins, including dozens of members of the Aloha Point Surf Club, who were forced to disband after 20 years because of the abuse. They were the ones who first described seeing their fins.

  I guessed it was probably in the local fuzz’s best interests to keep the beaches thinned out. The Bay Boys were idiots, but law enforcement probably figured they were the lesser of two evils compared to a thousand vacationers and a rise in both types of “pollution.” So, with the cops secretly behind them, and confidence now flowing as fast as their cheap Saint Archers beer, the Bay Boys broke zoning laws building their clubhouse from earthquake rubble and driftwood. Then they broke laws against good taste by apparently slapping fins on their wetsuits soon after that. More videos cropped up in the following weeks, including drone footage orbiting the Bay Boys clubhouse, right up until the tiny helicopter was shotgunned out of the sky. One clip showed brawls in waist deep water and faces being held under for way too long. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, as a fist fight in the surf looked dangerously close to attempted murder.

  I tried to egg my brother into joining the class-action suit when it was all peaking in the news, but he was having none of it. He was a good Christian, turning the other cheek and all that shit. And he was off to his next mission, helping some other strangers or stranded beasts in some noble way. I wasn’t that into selfless acts so much, but this incident was driving me nuts, giving me some bad ideas, so when I stopped by to pretend I was helping him rip down the public housing, it was easy to scrounge the lumber pile. The next day I pulled on my jorts, threw my formidable door in the back of my pick-up, and headed down to the water cause some problems. My dog was in the window watching me go, head cocked, back leg scratching a chronic infestation around his ear. He seemed particularly confused, not just by his lack of name or discernible breed, but by this walking door. And though this probably doesn’t make as much sense out loud to dogs or humans, bringing a door to go surfing just felt like an obnoxious juxtaposition, like showing up to a wedding and dribbling a basketball down the aisle. I wanted it to be clear that I was there to cause problems, and hopefully this maximized the chances of someone documenting my own online sequel.

  I didn’t tell my brother any of this. He was a good guy and hated confrontation, remember, but those qualities didn’t run in the family.

  ***

  “Landshark,” a voice whispered, and I squinted at the rainbow halo of ocean droplets orbiting the shadow looming over me. I was laid out on top of my door, knocker ring resting on my head like a crown, still reeling from the punch. Another shark high-fived the perpetrator, then they both ran toward the water as I sat up on my elbows and rubbed my bloody nose on my knuckle.

  I sat on my door and soaked up the rays for a bit, waiting for my next move. Truth was, I didn’t really have a next move. I’d forgotten to record the run-in on my phone, which I’d left in my truck, and I hadn’t thought too much past my plan of walking a beach with a door under my arm like an asshole and trying to coax surfers to harass me. But with me even sitting with my toes anchored in the sand and showing no incentive to head toward the water and steal their coveted waves, the Bay Boys still couldn’t help themselves, and dozens more shark-fin-sporting bros I hadn’t noticed rose up from the surf and high-stepped it back up the beach to give me shit.

  “You lost or something, Stu?”

  “Nope.”

  “Wrong place for you, guy!”

  “I thought this beach was for everybody,” I shrugged, shading my eyes for a better look.

  “Naw, man,” one shark smiled through his white handlebar moustache, tucking his gray hair behind his ear as he stepped up closer. “That’s where they lied to you. People around here hassle people, or even work your car.”

  “Really.”

  “Oh, yeah, and if you take it to court, that shit costs, what? Ten grand at least. Pain in the ass!” he laughed. “I sure don’t want to go through that again. I mean, I’ll waste so much money after kicking someone’s ass. But I’m stupid like that, you know?”

  “Right. So, are you the Aloha Point Surf Club?” I asked, knowing they were his nemeses.

  “Fuck no! We fucked them up.”

  “Good,” I said, and laid back on my door again, arms behind my head. The wizened surfer stared down at me a second, then extended a hand.

  “The name’s Noah,” he said as I shook it, flinching at the sand between his fingers. “You wanna come stand in the soup for a tick? Now, you’re a Jake, so I can’t let you in the real water, even for an ankle-buster, but you might get a treat seeing one of the boys tombstone it on a cruncher.”

  I wasn’t sure what any of that meant, but I was all about this “tombstoning,” since it sounded fatal. I stood up and started to brush off my knocker and blow sand out of the peephole.

  “Naw, leave the door, Jake.”

  “Hey, how’d you know my name wasn’t Jake,” I grinned, and Noah laughed back, clapping me on the shoulder.

  ***

  Standing in the surf boil and watching the Bay Boys bob around trying to line up a good wave, I cupped some water and sloshed a mouthful of salt, then spit to get the sun-baked blood off my teeth. I’d assumed that showing up to the beach with a goddamn door under my arm would be so ridiculous it would neuter the Bay Boys’ bluster, as I was clearly not competition. This was a new wrinkle, as I never expected I’d be so lucky as to get befriended by someone from their ranks. I decided to play out my hand, eager for things to escalate any way they could. Because if there was one thing I was good at, it was betraying a friendship, especially one only an hour old.

  I stood on the ocean for a long time. When the sun started sinking and it got harder to see their fins on the horizon zigzagging through their tubes, Noah invited me back to the clubhouse where they were stoking a fire. Their famous headquarters was tucked around the other side of a jetty, as shitty up close as it was online, barely a lean-to really, but
the merman shadows dancing around the flames made it seem much more sinister. With the sun down, the name “Warlords” almost didn’t seem ridiculous. Almost. I sat down on a milk crate next to Noah, and he nodded, clearly impressed with his scene. I noticed scattered piles of what appeared to be spent shotgun shells, and I stiffened. I jokingly asked what dead President mask was trendy for bank robberies that year, and two sharks stood up and left.

  “Hey, can I touch that?” I finally asked after a couple more beers, pointing to the dorsal fin on Noah’s back. One of the bigger sharks with black still streaking his beard stopped cracking driftwood for the fire and looked at Noah, skeptical.

  “Why not,” Noah said after a second, and I gave his fin a good squeeze.

  Maybe it was the cheap beer, but my heart was hammering, because it wasn’t the texture I expected. I thought maybe it would feel like plastic, or rubber, but this was leathery, spiny, like snakeskin boots if they had a pulse, like petting it the wrong way might be dangerous. I tried to bend the tip of the fin, and Noah’s shoulders suddenly hitched as he jerked away.

  “Sorry, man,” I said, wiping my hands on my trunks.

  “Careful, brother. It’s real.”

  It’s real?

  “What do you mean ‘real?’”

  Noah shared a glance with the bearded shark, who smiled and went back to cracking wood. Noah looked me up and down, then sighed.

  “Yeah, man, they’re real! Real, live shark fins,” he said, basking in my confusion. He leaned in to whisper. “See, a cop we know sniped a box of these off a truck during a drunk stop. Gave them to us as tribute. These fins were headed for some high-end soup in San Fran Chinatown. Cures boners, I don’t know.”

  I looked at his fin, black but sparkling in the firelight, studying the seam where it seemed to push through the thick skin of his suit, and I didn’t know which possibility was more horrifying. That they wore poached fins like trophies after still-living and sheared sharks were chucked overboard to starve by criminals pandering in superstition, or the suddenly more reasonable prospect that they had fins growing from their backs.

  Either way, I decided more drinking was the best option.

  ***

  Things I learned that night include...

  The clubhouse wasn’t littered with shotgun shells after all. Those were spent poppers, a.k.a. “anal” nitrates, a recreational inhalant, popular in the disco era, for enhancing sexual experience and facilitating anal intercourse by relaxing the sphincter muscles. And at first glance, it seemed the Bay Boys must love poppers, but not for the reasons I would have guessed. They loved them because hemorrhoids were the secret scourge of surfboarders. Sitting so long on those boards, or hunkering down on sandbars to take a shit, these were problems. And they weren’t spring chickens, of course, so this lifestyle wreaked havoc on their butts. Noah confessed his crew was once enlisted in a dubious scientific study, an upstart professor’s blatant attempt to gain notoriety equal to the Stanford Prison Experiment, though his study was the much-less-infamous Stanford Prolapse Experiment, which, if you watched the films, appeared to be nothing but 25 college students straddling surfboards in the Stanford biology department parking lot. Noah then confessed that the combination of swollen anal nerves and a desert climate like California resulted in an even more extreme condition very rarely discussed outside their circle, when his predecessor awoke one morning with an engorged sand flea nursing blood directly from his anus. Noah swore they saluted the flea’s tenacity and bore it no ill will, but a squatting over the bonfire to burn it off was the only real cure. Sadly, this resulted in “Warlord’s” retirement forever. They made me drink a toast to the man, nodding respect toward his spray-painted memorial, and I finally noticed the apostrophe.

  “Not to de-mystify the sport or anything…” Noah smiled, and I fought the urge to make a joke about insects crawling up a ramp into Noah’s ass, two by two.

  That night I learned all about water fleas, too, how they had a record 31,000 genes jam-packed into their DNA, making them the most adaptable thing on the planet, and that a “broceanographer” like Noah found beaches with the fewest fleas, but the most waves, and that the only way someone like Noah lost status as the reigning king of the Bay Boys was if “Neptune sent him packing.” Neptune did this by “stamping their passport,” which translated as any evidence of a bite mark on their boards or their bodies. Any visible proof of a shark attack and they started at the bottom of the hierarchy all over again, civilian status. Contrary to popular opinion, a shark bite on a surf board was not a badge of honor. It was bad luck, Noah cautioned. Worse than that. He said just one bite and no one would catch a wave on that break for a decade.

  ***

  I paced myself and tried to hang, but they out-drank me easily. They were staying up all night, too. Remember, these were ancient trust-fund toddlers, and without real jobs, their waking hours weren’t just reversed, they were perpetual. They’d be riding the waves again at dawn. They called this “going home.”

  I went down to the water alone, and walked through the cold salt and foam. The shoreline was like a skillet the morning after grilling surf and turf, and I sloshed another palmful around my mouth and spit. I didn’t avoid swallowing because of the dangers of dehydration. I avoided swallowing because the dreams of that skillet were making me ravenous.

  Then I saw the Mako, upside down and circled by birds, long streamers of viscera flaring from its mouth, like a cartoonist had sketched it singing a song. I gathered the shark up under my arm and took it with me into the water. I was pretty drunk, but I wanted my own fins. I was convinced I could truly infiltrate the gang with a fin on my back, and we swam together as I gingerly rolled up the guts and put the outsides back in. I’d read on the internet that sharks sometimes ejected their stomachs out of their mouths when hooked, so except for a few pieces the seagulls had snatched, it looked good as new. That’s the amazing thing about a dead shark. There was never an urge to brush a hand over its eyeballs so it rested in piece. Alive or dead, those eyes would always remain the same.

  You wouldn’t think swimming with a dead shark would be easy, but it’s actually the most natural thing in the world. So natural I began to wonder if we were made to be together. Our upper arms and pectoral muscles hugged perfectly under their pectoral fin, like we were part of the same puzzle, and the two of us cut through the water as intuitive as a motorcycle and sidecar.

  I looked back to their fading bonfire and through the drunken haze, and remembered my mission of getting payback for my brother. I thought maybe faking a shark attack might be the easiest thing ever. All you’d need is a shark, really, and I had that. Okay, I might need a shark and… maybe a bear trap? A bear trap stuffed into those jaws and the crucial part of this fish would be back in perfect working order. It almost felt wrong to supplement the muscle power of a shark with a mechanical trap, not to mention the troubling Dr. Moreau mash-up between the water and the woods I was now contemplating, but I decided that was probably just overthinking shit.

  It would teach Noah a lesson. It would teach them all a lesson. Just one snap and one stamp on their bodies, or their surrogate bodies, and that’s all it would take. They’d be banished from this spot.

  I rolled my body to swim on my back awhile, pulling the dead shark onto my belly, its dorsal fin dividing waves that filled my mouth and nose. My fin was small for now, and it was on my chest instead of my back, but I wore it proudly. I knew it would grow.

  ***

  Tipsy, I stumbled up to my truck, threw my shark and my door into the back, and drove to my brother’s house. I knew he’d be up. Though he worked for a living, unlike us, he didn’t keep normal hours either, mostly due to his film obsessions. My brother might have hated confrontations, but he sure loved movies about confrontations, especially in the middle of the night. And Peckinpah’s nasty fable Straw Dogs was one of his favorites. In fact, he loved that one so much that in order to honor its most important character, he went out and got
himself a bear trap and nailed it over his fireplace. I knew he was all about this movie because it was at its heart a cautionary tale about a timid guy rising up, but he swore he just liked the love story. Yeah, right. It’s crazy, but of all of the religious people I’ve known, the vast majority watched the most fucked up films.

  Years back, I helped him set the spring and hang the thing, and we christened it Chekov’s Trap, and my brother vowed that if he died before it went off, he had wasted his life.

  When I got to his house, I told him I was the answer to his prayers, but it still took a little convincing.

  “Why would I give you this?”

  “Because I’ll put it to good use, I promise.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Getting back at some assholes.”

  “Who did what?”

  I sighed, looked up, looked down, and finally just unloaded it all.

  “I want to use your bear trap to kinda reanimate a dead shark’s mouth and then maybe chomp it on those surfer punks who thought it was funny to turn an animal inside out and then piss on you while you were unconscious and immortalize that moment forever on the world wide web.”

  Ten minutes later I was walking to my car with a bear trap under my arm.

  “You could come with me, Jake,” I said, knowing full well my brother would never do this. I respected his pacifism, but I’d always had more backbone than him. And this was not a metaphor either. My last MRI revealed I was prone to ruptured discs because of the extra space around my spinal cord, which meant manual labor was a problem, even though that was all I could find on the West Coast, even with my nine years of college with an undeclared major. It was the ultimate paradox that I didn’t have the back for the only kind of work I’d ever be qualified to do. It sorta made sense in California though, where a word like “sick” meant at least three different things, just like Jake.