The Tank

by Rick Chesler

  TWENTY-FOUR

  There had to be at least a hundred people in the warehouse that night. The tank had been filled to a depth of four feet, and the mako had been fed the leftovers of the dolphin fish José filleted so that it wasn’t ravenously hungry. It plowed through the water in the tank, circulating it with its own movements. An air bubbler had also been placed into the tank to ensure the fish had ample oxygen for its night in captivity.

  Most of the same people from the previous matches were in attendance, as well as plenty of new faces. Kane and his three roommates circulated around the concrete floor, meeting and greeting, sizing up who was ready to stand in with the shark. Parker was here, standing right up to the tank and watching the fish, the tribal tattoos on his arms a lot more readable than his expression.

  Boyd and his partner in screens was here, too, relating the tale of how he and some friends had made multiple trips to the coast to fill the metal drums with seawater to fill the tank. “It’s a one-night stand, this shark,” he told the knot of people clustered around him. “Tomorrow, we’re going to release it back into the ocean, so this is it. You want to step up, tonight’s your chance.”

  “I might do it,” a short guy carrying a motorcycle helmet announced. “Can we have weapons? The guy with the panther had a pole.”

  Kane held up a hand, meaning he wanted enough quiet to be heard. “About weapons: Remember, you just have to make it for ten minutes. You don’t have to go on offense. We don’t want the animals to get hurt, including the shark. But to give you some self-defense, a small knife will be allowed for this match.”

  That triggered a ripple of conversation in the crowd, with some guys nodding in agreement, others shrugging like they didn’t feel it was important.

  Kane held up a white life ring tied to a length of yellow rope. “You get in trouble, shout ‘help’ and we’ll come get you out. We’ll also toss this into the ring. If you can, grab it and we’ll pull you to the ladder. It might make your rescue faster.” The word ‘rescue’ was deliberately intended by Kane to bring home the reality of this match. This was no joke. Mako sharks were fearsome predators, and this particular individual could no doubt severely injure a human, if not kill one.

  Vehicles continued to stream into the property. A few guys were working out off to the side, doing pushups, sit-ups, stretching exercises. But most of them simply stood in front of the tank and watched the shark.

  #

  The first contestant was a local spear fisherman who said he felt comfortable enough in the water to give it a try. But he said he’d rather have a dive mask on than have a knife. Happened to have one in his car. Kane consulted with Boyd, who shrugged it off.

  “He’d rather have a mask than a knife, fine. Let him do it.”

  They passed the hat around and it quickly filled higher than ever. Boyd secured the cash and they put it around again.

  “You sure you want to do this?” a woman said to the guy with the mask. His name was Craig, and although he wasn’t overweight, he didn’t appear all that fit, either. He worked as a windshield installer for an auto glass company in Miami.

  “I’ve been waiting for the next match, and when I heard it was a shark, I knew this was my shot,” he told the woman. “I’ll be okay.”

  She gave him a doubtful look and he walked over to the platform and climbed the stairs. Atop the platform, he donned the dive mask and shook hands with Kane, who asked him if he was ready. Craig insisted he was and turned around to face the shark. The big mako cruised in lazy circles, effortlessly moving about the confined space. But then suddenly, Craig turned around. He took his mask off.

  “Actually, no, I don’t think I can do it. I’m not ready.” He started to climb down the ladder and the crowd booed. Insulting shouts echoed across the warehouse.

  Kane waved everybody down. “It’s okay. He doesn’t want to do it. Maybe we just need a bigger pot?”

  “I’ve got a few more bucks,” somebody said. More bills were thrust in the air. Kane looked to Craig.

  “What do you say? The pot just got a little sweeter.”

  Craig thought about it, looking back into the tank while holding his mask. But then he shook his head. “Sorry, I’m out. I know what that fish can do.”

  “I’ll go.” A new voice, from a man who looked so young Kane doubted he could legally buy a beer. He was big, though, burly in a football linebacker sort of way. Kane sized him up, thinking he wouldn’t be that fast, but in the water, nobody was that fast.

  “Looks like we have a taker!’ Kane shouted. “You guys want to see this or what?”

  A rowdy cheer reverberated through the building.

  “Then show him!” He pointed to the hat, which made its way around again.

  “Make it rain, show him some love!” Boyd added.

  The linebacker guy came up to Kane and introduced himself as Billy, from Homestead. Said he’d just graduated high school and worked at his father’s landscaping business pruning trees and hauling away yard waste.

  “Why do you want to fight a shark?” Kane asked. With most of the guys, he already knew why they would risk life and limb to get into the ring with a lethal wild animal. Simple: to see if they could do it, to counterbalance their mundane existences with something that made them feel alive again; something with some real risk, and also a real reward. Kane understood that perfectly well. But this guy, he was too young to have reached that point.

  “A shark attacked me once surfing at New Smyrna Beach, about five years ago.” He picked up his leg and turned it so that Kane could see his left calf, where an impressive scar ran most of its length. He looked up and over to the tank. “I thought maybe this could be my way of, I don’t know…coming to grips with it or something. But no…”

  The mention of surfing put Kane on edge, and also it did something else to him…he rode a wave of nostalgia for a moment, surprised at how utterly strange the memories felt, at how incredibly distant they seemed to him now. Does this guy recognize me, is that why he’s bringing up surfing? But he was still going on about himself, how he still surfs now and then but the fear is still there…

  Kane patted him on the back. There was no action to be had from this kid. He didn’t even want to see him get into the tank. “Don’t sweat it. You paid your dues already,” Kane said, pointing to Billy’s leg. The kid made eye contact with him once, checking for signs of insincerity, then nodded and walked away.

  Boyd ambled up to Kane, watching Billy leave as he did. “He still on?”

  Kane shook his head. “Chickened out.”

  Boyd raised a hand for quiet. “Okay, everybody. The last guy says he doesn’t want to go through with it.”

  A chorus of rowdy boos swept through the air. Boyd continued.

  “C’mon, c’mon. If y’all are so badass, then who’s up to take his place?”

  A voice issued from the tank platform, where Parker Combs had just climbed the ladder. “I’ll do it. Ten minutes, but I get this.” He held up a small knife, the blade glinting once in the overhead warehouse bulbs.

  A roar of approval spread through those in attendance. Boyd turned to Kane. “Looks like we’ve got a reigning champion in the making.”

  #

  Parker watched the shark swim its lazy circles for five minutes before descending the ladder. When he reached the bottom, he slipped into the tank with as little disturbance to the water as possible. He didn’t want to put the shark on edge with a huge splash, or signal himself as injured prey. So he held onto the ladder to steady himself and dropped his body into the saltwater slowly and deliberately, wincing with the starting buzzer as it began its countdown from ten minutes.

  The shark didn’t seem to notice the sound, though, or at least it seemed not to care if it did. Parker clutched his knife, a dive knife he’d brought along for this very purpose, in his right hand, which he kept out of the water in order to ensure a quick strike should it become necessary. As he had done with the alligator, his initial strategy wa
s to stand still near the edge of the tank and avoid antagonizing the beast.

  But soon, the shark’s behavior changed. It began swimming faster, coming a little closer to Parker with each pass it made around the tank. The size of the fish as it passed by Parker became all too apparent, too. Eight feet of sleek, sinewy muscle that existed for the sole purpose of pushing a set of razor sharp teeth through the water. That, versus six feet of air-breathing human armed with a few inches of steel. Parker had the brains, but the shark had instincts and superior sensory abilities—it possessed senses humans didn’t even have, including the detection of faint electrical impulses, even those given off by warm-blooded muscle.

  Parker thought of none of this, though. He watched the mako glide through the watery arena, head on a swivel as he tuned out the occasional catcall from the peanut gallery around the tank. Some of them were wannabe contestants, but others were merely spectators, there for the show. All of them felt something now, though, through the common experience of witnessing an ordinary man face off against a dangerous creature in a tank.

  The next pass around the tank was the one where the mako decided to take what shark experts called an “exploratory bite.” The movement that took the piece of Parker’s left thigh wasn’t a particularly brazen one, or even all that fast or powerful. In fact, the way the shark was moving just before it struck, it didn’t look to Parker like it intended to attack at all. It did slow its pace some as it neared. That was really the only sign. There was no bulldog rush, no steady buildup of speed or anything like that. The mako bent itself into a lazy turn that took the head away from Parker, and then it turned back around—still not all that fast.

  Parker didn’t even take a step back, that’s how confident he’d been that the fish would pass him by as it had done on the other laps around the octagon. He stood there with his eyes on the shark right up until the moment it turned back around and lifted its head up, bumping him in the leg. That was all it felt like, at least at first. A little bump. Rough like sandpaper against his bare leg, but nothing to cause him undue alarm. But the tank water was clear, and when he saw the shark swim off to do another go-around, he was confused to see a little blood in the water, and worse—bits of meat, floating chunks twirling through the water.

  The crowd grew strangely quiet, as if now that they had seen what they had thought might happen all along, they didn’t know how to react. But regardless, Parker was now missing a baseball-sized chunk of flesh from his left outer thigh. Though he refused to take his eyes off the shark as it made its way around the tank again, he made the mistake of trailing his fingers down to feel his leg where it felt a little strange. When his hand disappeared into his leg, his gut turned sour with adrenaline.

  Overcome with a sudden dizzy spell, Parker fell back against the side of the tank and leaned there while Kane’s voice dimly registered saying, “Six minutes to go.” When he slumped, it caused a splash and a little wave rolled out around the tank.

  Then a voice was calling to him. He wasn’t sure whose it was; couldn’t divert what little mental energy he had to discern that, but he heard, “Parker: do you want help out?”

  He shook his head in a daze. “I got this,” he said weakly. More blood swirled around him now; not a staggering amount like in a horror movie, but enough to be unsettling to any normal person.

  And the mako was coming his way again. Faster this time. Gone were the wide arcs of the head, replaced with rapid short-distance butts of the snout to the right and left. Like a snake crawling or even a sperm cell swimming. It made a beeline right for him and Parker raised his knife in anticipation. Again, the shark hit low, but this time Parker was ready and expecting the strike. He twisted sideways and kicked into the shark’s gill area. The mako retreated, darting off to the center of the octagon.

  “Five minutes, halfway mark!”

  Parker grinned maniacally and gestured to the crowd encouragingly, like a wrestler in an arena who’d just delivered a major blow to his opponent. The rush of the event was taking over now, replacing his judgment with adrenaline-fueled bravado. He could reach the ladder now and climb out, but that thought never even entered his mind.

  The shark started to move more erratically, darting to and fro, travelling shorter distances in a straight line before it would turn back around again. Parker crouched lower in the water, so that only his head above his nose was above the waterline. He held the knife underwater this time, ready to fend off an attack.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  The shark suddenly reversed course from the edge of the octagon and barreled toward its human prey, eliciting a collective gasp from the crowd. Parker flexed his leg muscles against the tank floor, and more blood pumped from his open wound.

  This time, upon reaching Parker, the predator swooped upward at the last second. It buried its snout in the man’s solar plexus. Parker grunted with the impact and brought the butt end of the knife down on the fish’s head in a hammer blow. In response, the shark inverted itself, its crescent-shaped tail protruding from the water and lashing Parker in the face. The bartender reared back and pushed the shark away with his left hand, the one not holding the knife.

  But the mako wasn’t done yet. As Kane called out the two-minute warning, the shark twisted itself into a ball of feeding frenzy fury and exploded like a pent-up muscle spasm on Parker’s midsection. He jutted outward with the knife, felt it come into contact with the mako’s raspy hide and slide harmlessly off. He bashed the shark in the gills with the closed fist of his left hand, and that had an effect. The mako swam off in a straight line toward the opposite side of the octagon, slanting down toward the bottom.

  When it reached the other side, it slowed down and resumed a swimming pattern more similar to what it had been doing before the match began. Parker stood straight in the water and backed up toward the ladder.

  The buzzer sounded, and a raucous chorus of shouts went up from the crowd as Parker climbed out of the tank, blood streaming from his ravaged leg.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Parker grinned atop the platform, fist raised triumphantly, while Kane and Boyd held him steady. Parker looked like he was giddy enough to stand here forever, like he’d just won the heavyweight boxing title of the world or something, so Kane got in front of him and said, “Parker, we’ve got to get you down and take a look at your leg.”

  That sobered him up just enough to get him moving down the stairs, still aided by Kane and Boyd. As soon as he put pressure on the leg to start down the ladder, a pulse of blood arced out, causing a woman to scream from somewhere down below. Parker winced in pain, reality now starting to erode the euphoria of the moment.

  They carried him down to the floor and sat him down a little ways away to have a look at the leg. It was missing a baseball-sized chunk of meat from the calf, a horrible wound. Worse, it was truly missing, as in there was nothing to reattach or stitch back up.

  Kane shook his head. “You’re going to need some kind of surgery on this. We can’t do it ourselves.”

  Parker looked up at him. “But if I go to the hospital…”

  Kane and Boyd exchanged glances. Kane mentally counted his savings, including the estimated take from tonight’s match. Need a couple more matches still, then I’ll be ready…he snapped out of it and addressed what Parker was getting at.

  “Look, it was a shark. Say you were in the ocean, you got bit. It happens.”

  Boyd nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, it’s not like the panther where that would be super-rare.”

  Parker glanced down at his leg and then quickly looked away. “I need someone to drive me.”

  #

  In the aftermath of Parker being taken to the hospital, Kane was stunned to find that there was still no shortage of would-be entrants to the tank. A guy in a tank top with a shark-tooth necklace approached Kane and Boyd.

  “Can I go next?”

  Boyd looked to Kane, who shook his head. “Match is over for tonight. Shark’s tired—wouldn’
t be a fair fight for it now—and it’s getting late. Also, we don’t want to attract too much attention to this location.”

  The man looked extremely disappointed. “When’s the next match? And will it be a shark?”

  Kane shrugged. “Don’t worry, you’ll hear about it.”

  The guy nodded, only a little less dejected at the prospect of not being able to test his manhood in the tank right this very moment, and stalked off. Kane asked Boyd, “Lot of people here tonight. Do you know all of them?”

  Boyd looked about, scanning the faces. “I recognize most, but not all.”

  Neither man said anything as they exchanged glances. They both knew it was only a matter of time before someone reported them, before law enforcement became involved. But Kane only wanted two or three more matches. He wasn’t sure what Boyd wanted, but he decided not to press the issue. He needed Boyd to help coordinate the next couple of matches so that Kane would have sufficient funds to skip town, to skip the country, hopefully.

  “Help me move the shark, will you?”

  #

  With the mako wrapped once more in wet towels in the back of Kane’s truck, he and Boyd made the drive to the nearest coast, which happened to be in the Everglades near Flamingo. Mako sharks were reef dwellers, not usually found on the backcountry saltwater flats, but Kane doubted the shark would survive being transported all the way to the Atlantic coast. He would release it into the saltwater of northern Florida Bay, that was the best he could do. Boyd was in favor of killing and eating it, but Kane wouldn’t have it.

  “No way. It deserves to live. We had our fun with it, it did its time, and now it should get its freedom back.”

  “We should get more sharks for the next match,” Boyd said in response. “The shark went over bigtime, the take was huge.”

  Kane had no argument against that. “Another mako? Seems like we should mix it up a little, get something different.” He stared out at the Australian pine trees lining the road, yet another invasive species that found it could survive well in the subtropical humid atmosphere of South Florida.