Peter Benchley - Jaws

“It’s…” Brody fumbled for words. “It’s a long story.” He felt wounded, incapacitated as surely as if he had been shot. He didn’t know if he could explain now. He wasn’t even sure he could speak.

“I bet it is,” said the woman. “Oh, you evil man. You evil, evil man. You…”

“Stop it!” Brody’s shout was both plea and command. It stopped her. “Now look, Mrs. Kintner, you’ve got it wrong, all wrong. Ask Mr. Meadows.”

Meadows, transfixed by the scene, nodded dumbly.

“Of course he’d say that. Why shouldn’t he? He’s your pal, isn’t he? He probably told you you were doing the right thing.” Her rage was mounting again, flooding, resuscitated by a new burst of emotional amperage. “You probably decided together. That makes it easier, doesn’t it? Did you make money?”

“What?”

“Did you make money from my son’s blood? Did someone pay you not to tell what you knew?”

Brody was horrified. “No! Christ, of course not.”

“Then why? Tell me. Tell me why. I’ll pay you. Just tell me why!”

“Because we didn’t think it could happen again.” Brody was surprised by his brevity. That was it, really, wasn’t it?

The woman was silent for a moment, letting the words register in her muddled mind. She seemed to repeat them to herself. She said, “Oh,” then, a second later, “Jesus.” All of a sudden, as if a switch had been turned somewhere inside her, shutting off power, she had no more self-control. She slumped into the chair next to Meadows and began to weep in gasping, choking sobs.

Meadows tried to calm her, but she didn’t hear him. She didn’t hear Brody when he told Bixby to call a doctor. And she saw, heard, and felt nothing when the doctor came into the office, listened to Brody’s description of what had happened, tried to talk to her, gave her a shot of Librium, led her — with the help of one of Brody’s men — to his car, and drove her to the hospital.

When she had left, Brody looked at his watch and said, “It’s not even nine o’clock yet. If ever I felt like I could use a drink… wow.”

“If you’re serious,” said Meadows, “I have some Bourbon back in my office.”

“No. If this was any indication of how the rest of the day’s going to go, I better not fuck up my head.”

“It’s hard, but you’ve got to try not to take what she said too seriously. I mean, the woman was in shock, for one thing.”

“I know, Harry. Any doctor would say she didn’t know what she was saying. The trouble is, I’d already thought a lot of the things she was saying. Not in those words, maybe, but the thoughts were the same.”

“Come on, Martin, you know you can’t blame yourself.”

“I know. I could blame Larry Vaughan. Or maybe even you. But the point is, the two deaths yesterday could have been prevented. I could have prevented them, and I didn’t. Period.”

The phone rang. It was answered in the other room, and a voice on the intercom said, “It’s Mr. Vaughan.”

Brody pushed the lighted button, picked up the receiver, and said, “Hi, Larry. Did you have a nice weekend?”

“Until about eleven o’clock last night,” said Vaughan, “when I turned on my car radio driving home. I was tempted to call you last night, but I figured you had had a rough enough day without being bothered at that hour.”

“That’s one decision I agree with.”

“Don’t rub it in, Martin. I feel bad enough.”

Brody wanted to say, “Do you, Larry?” He wanted to scrape the wound raw, to unload some of the anguish onto someone else. But he knew it was both unfair to attempt and impossible to accomplish, so all he said was, “Sure.”

“I had two cancellations already this morning. Big leases. Good people. They had already signed, and I told them I could take them to court. They said, go ahead: we’re going somewhere else. I’m scared to answer the phone. I still have twenty houses that aren’t rented for August.”

“I wish I could tell you different, Larry, but it’s going to get worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“With the beaches closed.”

“How long do you think you’ll have to keep them closed?”

“I don’t know. As long as it takes. A few days. Maybe more.”

“You know that the end of next week is the Fourth of July weekend.”

“Sure, I know.”

“It’s already too late to hope for a good summer, but we may be able to salvage something — for August, at least — if the Fourth is good.”

Brody couldn’t read the tone in Vaughan’s voice. “Are you arguing with me, Larry?”

“No. I guess I was thinking out loud. Or praying out loud. Anyway, you plan to keep the beaches closed until what? Indefinitely? How will you know when that thing’s gone away?”

“I haven’t had time to think that far ahead. I don’t even know why it’s here. Let me ask you something, Larry. Just out of curiosity.”

“What?”

“Who are your partners?”

It was a long moment before Vaughan said, “Why do you want to know? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Like I said, just curiosity.”

“You keep your curiosity for your job, Martin. Let me worry about my business.”

“Sure, Larry. No offense.”

“So what are you going to do? We can’t just sit around and hope it will go away. We could starve to death while we waited.”

“I know. Meadows and I were just talking about our options. A fish-expert friend of Harry’s says we could try to catch the fish. What would you think about getting up a couple of hundred dollars to charter Ben Gardner’s boat for a day or two? I don’t know that he’s ever caught any sharks, but it might be worth a try.”

“Anything’s worth a try, just so we get rid of that thing and go back to making a living. Go ahead. Tell him I’ll get the money from somewhere.”

Brody hung up the phone and said to Meadows, “I don’t know why I care, but I’d give my ass to know more about Mr. Vaughan’s business affairs.”

“Why?”

“He’s a very rich man. No matter how long this shark thing goes on, he won’t be badly hurt. Sure, he’ll lose a little dough, but he’s taking all this as if it was life and death — and I don’t mean just the town’s. His.”

“Maybe he’s just a conscientious fellow.”

“That wasn’t conscience talking on the phone just then. Believe me, Harry. I know what conscience is.”

Ten miles south of the eastern tip of Long Island, a chartered fishing boat drifted slowly in the tide. Two wire lines trailed limply aft in an oily slick. The captain of the boat, a tall, spare man, sat on a bench on the flying bridge, staring at the water. Below, in the cockpit, the two men who had chartered the boat sat reading. One was reading a novel, the other the New York Times .

“Hey, Quint,” said the man with the newspaper, “did you see this about the shark that killed those people?”

“I seen it,” said the captain.

“You think we’ll run into that shark?”

“Nope.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Suppose we went looking for him.”

“We won’t.”

“Why not?”

“We got a slick goin’. We’ll stay put.”

The man shook his head and smiled. “Boy, wouldn’t that be some sport.”

“Fish like that ain’t sport,” said the captain.

“How far is Amity from here?”

“Down the coast a ways.”

“Well, if he’s around here somewhere, you might run into him one of these days.”

“We’ll find one another, all right. But not today.”

Thursday morning was foggy — a wet ground fog so thick that it had a taste: sharp and salty. People drove under the speed limit, with their lights on. Around midday, the fog lifted, and puffy cumulus clouds maundered across the sky beneath a high blanket of cirrus. By five in the afternoon, the cloud cover had begun to disintegrate, like pieces fallen from a jigsaw puzzle. Sunlight streaked through the gaps, stabbing shining patches of blue onto the gray-green surface of the sea.