Nazi Sharks! (2 page)

“Dear Beans,

I would just like to point out
a major, but easily neglected fact that you seem to have missed in
your research. Namely, that you are a Neandertwat and possibly even
a Cro-Magdouche. Moreover, there are no Nazi sharks.

Sincerely,

Bartholomew Skinner, PhD,
LD”

Skinner tried to move on with
his life, but found himself reading and re-reading Beans’s
statement. He tried burning it, but as soon as he did, he had to
buy another copy just to be angry at it. Each day, he bought the
paper, reading the headlines he cared nothing about, pretending to
himself, and to confused neighbourhood children, that he wasn’t
looking for Beans’s inevitable response. It took three whole days
of misery, during which time he had consumed his bodyweight in
Hagen Daaz, before the response at last arrived.

“Dear Bart,” came the terse and
impudent reply.

“Couldn’t help noticing you
teach high school.

Regards,

John Maynard Beans PhD

P.S. There are.”

The keyboard!

“Dear Johnny Boy,

Don’t only self-taught
charlatans write for the History Channel?

Kind regards,

B. Skinner

P.S. There are not.”

Skinner called up his ex-wife
that night just to call her a slut. Also, had she seen last night’s
episode of
Supernatural
? He’d missed it.
Beans got back to him the next day.

“B.S.,

Would just like to reiterate an
earlier point in the discussion, to wit, your stupidity.

Best,

John Maynard Beans

P.S. Are.”

Before this exchange could
become even more asinine, the world of daytime television
gracefully intervened. And the world paid attention. Or at least
the small, unemployed percentage of the world that watches daytime
television. Before another flaccid line of prose could be
exchanged, the dignified scholars found themselves before the
audience of
The Malik Bloom Show
.

The aforementioned Malik sat on
a white leather chair between the antagonists. They faced one
another, from either side of him, like vengeful catfish in
three-piece suits. Their vibes of repressed white-guy anger sizzled
against Malik’s soul, almost undoing the colonic he’d had
yesterday.

“We got a great show this
morning,” Bloom stood and announced to his audience, “because we
have the two scholars at the center of the most debated issue of
our time. Did Hitler make a bunch of nasty ol’ sharks to get up in
our biz?”

Bloom did a pointless dance to
distract the audience. Perhaps there was a teleprompter
malfunction. Or perhaps he just needed to do a dance at the moment.
Malik was an enigma wrapped in a mystery trying to forget an
embarrassing past as a child sitcom star. He went on, at any
rate.

“Doctor John Maynard Beans
studied ecology at the University of Berlin and was one of the
original forty-five members of the Buttehoet Expedition that tried
to bring barstools to Arctic penguins. As one of the forty-seven
survivors, he returned to America, disillusioned. He studied
European history in India, because a swami owed him a lot of money.
With several groundbreaking documentaries in the past ten years,
including
Satanic Pasta
,
Elizabeth: True Inventor of the
Sandwich
, and now
The Nazi’s Secret Shark Research
Unveiled
, he has become the most prominent American historian
alive.”

The audience applauded and
hoped for another dance. Boy did they get one!

“And Professor Bartholomew
Skinner got his BA in mycology from the University of Maryland.
Growing weary of mushrooms and their inability to commit, he
studied German history at the Sorbonne. He returned to America and
wrote the bestseller,
Spores of Hitler: Ideology as a Bulbous
Fungoid
.”

The audience applauded again.
Their need was palpable; Bloom had them where he wanted them. He
delivered the dance—a modified Irish jig with soul, if you must
know—and they cheered.

“So, Doctor Beans first,” Bloom
began, “are there really Nazi sharks and why weren’t they in
Saving Private Ryan
?”

“Please,” Doctor Beans
demurred, “call me Doctor Beans. We have documents by Nazi
scientists. We have authenticated the hell out of these documents,
if I may put it politely. And the conclusion is this: they freaking
did it! They made attempts to reprogram the brains of the sharks,
as well as modify their bodies. And there is suggestion that they
had real succ—”

“If I may just interrupt,”
Skinner interrupted.

“You just did,” Beans noted,
his blue cravat puffing out with contempt.

“I would like to point out,”
Skinner continued, “that documents are not proof. Nazis are
a-holes. This is a fact. They could just be lying. Beans, too, is
an a-hole and so could just be lying.”

“Are you accusing me of forging
documents?” Beans inquired indignantly.

“I wasn’t, but that’s a good
point.”

“And the footage in the
documentary?”

“Faker than her heaving and
highly distracting bosoms!” Skinner exclaimed, his dry, white
finger pointing like death’s claw toward the audience. Malik’s gaze
followed the prophetic finger toward the blonde in the audience,
whose top struggled like a mongoose to contain the erupting
boobage. Malik nodded and supposed, yes, even beautiful and
extremely attractive things—as that bimbo’s magnificent rack, what
are those? E-cups?—can indeed be all illusion.

“But surely you must admit such
a fake has value?” Malik inquired, freshly inspired. “Perhaps the
footage is fake, but there is still truth and hours of enjoyment
beneath?”

The bimbo smiled and nodded.
Malik knew he’d be getting laid that afternoon.

“Then what of the surviving
sharks?” Beans asked.

“If you had surviving sharks,”
Skinner argued with a scoff, “they would have been featured in the
documentary.”

At this, Beans stood up,
adjusted his cravat like an evil hypnotist and raised his head in
arrogant wisdom. Either he was about to transcend this plain of
existence, or he had something to announce.

“Not so!” he proclaimed. “For
as our war of words waged on like two rutting cats in an alley, I
was motivated to mount a new search for surviving sharks and this
time I succeeded! Oh yes, the Nazi sharks are real, and alive, and
hungry—for your attention, that is. Should you deign.”

Skinner’s eyebrows danced like
caterpillars on LSD. They were filled with confusion and anxiety,
but there was nothing but pure scepticism and bitterness in the
eyes beneath.

“Uh-huh,” was all the learned
school teacher replied.

“I invite you, before all the
people of the esteemed
Malik Bloom Show
, to examine the
sharks and, with a marine biologist of your choice—so long as it’s
not Dr. Heisner of U Wisconson, to whom I owe a substantial sum—to
determine their authenticity.”

Skinner himself stood up with a
groan and declared, “I accept your dubious offer with a fake
smile,” which indeed he did as he shook Beans’s cold, moist hand.
“Now, if you don’t mind,” Skinner added with a slight blush, “I
should still like to unveil this satirical painting I took the
liberty of commissioning.”

Two production assistants
emerged with an enormous, framed portrait of an anthropomorphic
shark, its teeth gritting with masculine energy at the point of
release. The shark’s beefy biceps bulged beneath an unnecessarily
tight and homoerotic SS uniform. From the clouds, a mostly nude
Hitler extended a totalitarian finger and regarded the scant
cloud-cover on his genitals ambivalently. The shark extended a
finger up through the clouds to the divinized Hitler, where the
fingers touched in a nuclear Genesisplosion.
The Creation of
Nazi Shark
, ladies and gentlemen.

The audience gasped and
chuckled with embarrassment, while Skinner bowed gently in
response. His coattails fluttered emptily like the dorsal fins of a
sneaky flounder whose service is no longer required.

“That’s very amusing,” Beans
noted, “but the Nazi sharks are on their way as we speak. Right
now!”

As Malik went to the audience
for comments, he casually noted, “It’d be a shame if they escaped
en-route, though, huh?”

Chapter 3

This was the part, Jennifer
thought excitedly. Like the chorus of an otherwise bland and
forgettable song: the five girls arched their backs and thrust
their chests as far forward as anatomy would allow, their arms
supporting the smalls of one another’s backs. Like magnificent
buoys of flesh—flawless, tanned flesh, except for that mole on
Tiffany’s left tit that she has to keep plucking a black hair out
of—they rotated their bodies. This manoeuvre half the team wanted
to call the Circle of Cleavage and the other half—Jennifer
included—had been calling the Titty Twirl. Now, the Titty Twirl
seems to promise more than it really delivers, she admitted. But
the whole team was cognizant that they scarcely had the talent to
manage a circle. It was more of a Lopsided Ellipse of Cleavage.
They had tits, not talent—if such a distinction should be made—and
they thought they should play to their strengths.

They had done it. The titties
had twirled. ‘You served me well, girls,’ Jennifer told her
breasts, and not for the first time. Men, family, friends all let
her down, but her lady-lumps were not just firm and fulsome—they
were goddamn reliable.

The manoeuvre having been
executed, the girls broke formation and came bounding hypnotically
out of the frothing, white surf, Poseidon’s excited ejaculate.
Their matching blue bikinis—except Susan’s, which was a slightly
darker shade and this annoyed Jennifer to no end—fit their tanned
assets like raccoons in a trash bag, struggling to escape and
finally relinquishing to the smooth, conforming fit. Point is, they
looked good.

As the fine bimbos emerged onto
the white-hot beach, the sun beamed on their awesome, dripping wet
bodies just as the Good Lord intended. Time slowed down, ‘cause,
‘Imma enjoy this!’ The erections caused were many and their
individual tales cannot be told. Shades raised, trunks shifted, and
wives armed their slapping hands. Droplets flew from the bouncing
bosoms and others slid between the firm, round buttocks, never to
be seen again. Oh, to be a water droplet.

The girls’ trajectory was, at
any rate, to the flabby, Hispanic man in the comfortable shade of a
massive billboard. It read, “Kevin Costner’s Free-Form Synchronized
Swimming Competition.” The man had that sleazy look—the kind that
tells you he’s found many uses for a cucumber and none of them
nutritious. His stunning blazer and speedo combination does nothing
to diffuse this impression. But he was the man with the
microphone.

“Like to swim with your
girlfriends and look good in a bikini?” the man inquired into the
microphone, his accent no thicker nor thinner than a mild queso.
“Sign up for the Kevin Costner Free-Form Synchronized Swimming
Competition, sponsored by me, Kevin Costner. If you can float and
have huge talents, you can win!”

As Costner’s monologue reached
its riveting conclusion, the buxom babes, wearing trepidation upon
their nipples, reached the stage/billboard combination. Jennifer,
like the rest of her team, had no idea why it was important to them
to win or even compete. She only knew that they’d showed up in
bikinis with little knowledge of swimming and even less of
synchronicity.

“How were we, Mr. Costner?” the
giggling girls inquired. “Do we qualify?”

Costner gazed directly into the
canyons of cleavage with mesmerized approval. These were tits
unsullied by a multiplication table and they were the more
expressive for it. Their qualifications were abundant, yes, and the
color of a delicious flan.

“Do you ever,” he answered the
tits. “Welcome to the competition.”

“So, what’s the prize if—”

The microphone swung to
Costner’s mouth as he swallowed his excess saliva and resumed his
focus on a reality not composed of mammary glands. He announced,
“Free registration! Synchronized swimming, bikinis welcome, group
action—come on, ladies!”

The girls shrugged and ran off,
their breasts bouncing like crack-snorting midgets. Jennifer
mentally winked at her breasts as they did, as if to say, ‘Win!’
And they winked right back, bucko.

Where they were going and what
was the hurry didn’t much concern the impassive gaze of Sheriff
Babbage. He wore a black overcoat, despite the fierce summer sun,
his sheriff’s star pinned to the outside. He looked about ninety,
if one was being generous. He’d probably have difficulty outrunning
a turtle with Down syndrome. But no doubt his mind was sharper than
a Hun’s bayonet.

Babbage ignored the girls
running by him, more concerned with inhaling just the right dosage
of cherry tobacco from his cob pipe. This was a man with
priorities, clearly. Bad ones. But priorities nonetheless. He
approached Costner at a leisurely pace, because leisurely was the
only pace he had left.

Costner observed the
approaching sheriff incidentally, as he watched the bikini babes’
buttocks and sought out new talent for his synchronized tit
competition. Bingo! A bumble of blondes with full-on cantaloupes
had clearly been inspired to synchronize their—

“Water Melons,” the pallorous
Sheriff stated dryly.

“Yeah,” Costner answered
agreeably, although they were certainly cantaloupes in his mind.
“Aren’t they great?”

“Water Melons, Mr. Costner,”
the Sheriff repeated from the side of his mouth not occupied by
pipe. For a brief moment Costner was overwhelmed with his lifelong
terror of telepaths, but then regained his senses as the Sheriff
went on. “A swim team, I’m told. Five members. Four now. Missing
one. Melanie Johnson. Know anything?”