White Shark (9 page)

Walking aft, Tall Man coiled the wire
around his shoulder and elbow.
 
He had
removed his sweat-soaked shirt, and the muscles in his enormous torso glistened
as they moved beneath his cinnabar skin as if he had been oiled.
 
He stood six feet six, weighed about
two-twenty, and if he carried any fat, as his mother used to say as she pressed
more food on him, it had to be between his ears.

"Whoa!
"
Max
said as he looked at Tall Man.
 
"Rambo meets the Terminator!
 
You work out every day?"

"
Work
out?
"
Chase said, laughing.
 
"His two exercises are eating and
drinking; his diet's
a hundred
percent salt-fried
grease.
 
He's a cosmic injustice."

"I'm the Great Spirit's
revenge," Tall Man said to Max.
 
"He's gotta do something to make up for five hundred years of the
white man's oppression."

"Believe that," Chase said to
Max, "and you might as well believe in the tooth fairy.
 
His Great Spirit is Ronald MacDonald."

"So?
"
Tall
Man guffawed.
 
"A man's gotta pray
to somebody."

Max beamed, loving it.
 
It was men's talk, grown-up's talk, and they
were including him, letting him be a part of it, letting him be grown-up.

He had heard of Tall Man all his life — his dad's best
friend since childhood — and the huge Pequot Indian had become a mythic figure
for the boy.
 
He had almost been afraid
to meet him, lest reality spoil the image.
 
But the human being had turned out to be as grand as the myth.

Chase and Tall Man had separated several times:
 
while Chase had gone to college, Tall Man had
served in the Marines; while Chase had gone to graduate school, Tall Man had
tried his hand as a high-steel worker in
Albany
.

But their lives had intersected again, when Chase had
begun the Institute.
 
He had known he
would need an assistant proficient in the technical skills he himself lacked,
and he found Tall Man working as a diesel mechanic at a truck dealership.
 
Tall Man didn't mind the work, he told Chase,
and twenty dollars an hour wasn't a bad wage, but he hated somebody telling him
when to come to work and when to leave, and he didn't like being cooped up
indoors.
 
Though Chase could offer him no
fixed salary and no guarantees, Tall Man had quit on the spot and joined the
Institute.

His job description listed no specific duties, so he
did whatever Chase wanted done and whatever else he saw that needed doing, from
maintaining the boats to hydro-testing the scuba gear.
 
He loved working with animals, and seemed to
have an almost mystical gift for communicating with them, calming them, getting
them to trust him.
 
Seabirds with
fishhooks in their beaks would allow him to handle them; a dolphin whose tail
had been snared and slashed by monofilament netting had approached Tall Man in
the shallows, and had lain quietly while he removed the strands of plastic and
injected the animal with antibiotics.

He had freedom and responsibility, and he responded
well to both.
 
He arrived early, left
late, worked at his own pace and took great, if unspoken, pride in being a
partner in keeping the Institute running.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

When the coil of wire was secured to the
buoy, they tossed both overboard and watched for a few moments to make sure
that the wire didn't foul and that the buoy would support its weight.
 
The wire was heavy, but in water it was
nearly neutral — one pound negative for every ten feet — and the buoy was
designed to support a dead weight of no more than two hundred pounds.

"No sweat," Tall Man said.

"If nobody steals it..."

"Right.
 
Why would
anybody want three hundred feet of wire?"

"You know as well as I do.
 
People are ripping carriage lamps off houses
to get the brass; they're torching light poles down for the aluminum; they're
stealing toilet fixtures for the copper.
 
In this economy,
specially
thanks to the crowd
your blood brothers have brought in with their casino up in Ledyard, a smart
man walks with his mouth closed so no one can steal his fillings."

"There he goes again," Tall Man
said to Max, grinning, "the racist blaming the poor Indians for
everything."

Chase laughed and walked forward to put
the boat in gear.

10

"Birds," Tall Man called down
from the flying bridge, pointing to the south.

Chase and Max were on the foredeck — Max
out at the end of the six-foot wooden pulpit that extended beyond the bow, from
which he had been looking down into the water in hopes of seeing a
dolphin.
 
Chase had told him that
dolphins sometimes frolicked in the bow wave of the boat.

Chase shaded his eyes and looked to the
south.
 
A swarm of birds — gulls and
terns — was
wheeling over half an acre of water that seemed
to be aboil with living things.
 
The
birds dove and splashed in a flurry of wings and
rose
again, their heads bobbing as they hurried to swallow a prize so they could
dive for another.
 
The southwest breeze
carried the sound of frenzied screeching.

"What are they doing?
"
Max asked.

"Feeding," Chase said.
 
"On fry... tiny fish.
 
Something's attacking the fry from
underneath, driving them to the surface."
 
He looked up at Tall Man.
 

"Let's go have a look."

Tall Man swung the boat to the south,
leaving the distant gray hump of Block Island to the north and the closer, but
smaller and lower, profile of
Osprey
Island
to the east.

As the boat drew near the turmoil in the
water, Tall Man said, "Bluefish."

"You're sure?" said Chase.
 
He hoped Tall Man was right:
 
a big school of bluefish would be a good
sign, a sign that the blues were making a recovery.
 
Recently, their numbers had been dwindling —
they were victims of overfishing and pollution from PCBs, pesticides and
phosphates from agricultural runoff — and many of the survivors were
manifesting tumors, ulcers and even bizarre genetic mutations.
 
Some were being born with stomachs that
ceased functioning after about a year, so the fish starved to death.
 
The Institute and various environmental groups
had helped clean up the rivers that fed the bays that led to the ocean, and the
amount of pollutants had been reduced significantly though by no means
completely.

If the bluefish were breeding successfully
again... well, it was a tiny step, but it
was
a step forward, at least, and not back.

"Gotta be blues," Tall Man
said.
 
"What else kicks up a shower
of blood like that?"

A bird veered away from the flock and
soared over the boat, and Chase saw the telltale signs of bluefish
carnage:
 
the white feathers of the
bird's belly were stained red from fish blood.
 
The blues were running amok in a vast school of panicked bait, chopping
and slashing with blind fury, dyeing the water crimson.

Tall Man throttled back, letting the boat
drift in relative silence so as not to drive the school away.
 
"Big bastards, too," he said.
 
"Five,
six-pounders."

The bluefish rolled and leaped and lunged,
their gunmetal bodies flashing in the sunlight, and the birds dove recklessly
among them, plucking fry from the bloody water.

"Gross!
"
Max
said, mesmerized.
 
"Can we go have a
look?"

"You're having a look."

"No, I mean, can we put on masks and
go down there?"

"Are you crazy?" said
Chase.
 
"No way.
 
Those fish would cut you to ribbons.
 
You didn't want to bring me home in a box...
how'd you like me to send you home to your mother in a doggie bag?"

"Bluefish attack people?"

"In
a frenzy
like this, they attack
any
thing.
 
A few years ago, a lifeguard in
Florida
was sitting on a
surfboard when a feeding school came by.
 
He lost four toes.
 
They’ve got
little triangular teeth as sharp as razors, and when they're feeding—"

Tall Man interrupted, "—they're one
mean-tempered son of a bitch."

"Cool," Max said.

As if on cue, a large gull swooped down,
reached for a baitfish, missed, braked with its wings and landed on the
water.
 
It snatched up the fish and began
its takeoff run, when suddenly a blue body rolled beside it.
 
The gull stopped, jerked backward and shrieked
—
a bluefish had it by its legs.
 
The bird flapped its wings futilely and arched its neck forward, trying
to peck at the tormentor.

Another bluefish must have grabbed it then, for the bird lurched to the
side, submerged and popped back to the surface.
 
It shrieked again, and beat with its wings, but now other fish sensed
savory new prey, and they flung themselves out of the water, onto the
bloodsoaked feathers.

The bird's body was pulled below the surface tailfirst.
 
A final tug snapped its head back, and the
last they saw of it was the yellow beak pointing at the sky.

Chase looked at Max.
 
The boy's
eyes still stared at the spot on the water where the bird had been, and his
color had faded to a greenish gray.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

They continued toward the island, Max and
Chase on the foredeck, Tall Man driving from the flying bridge.
 
Now and then, Chase would signal Tall Man to
slow down, and he would take a net and dip it into the water and bring up
something to show Max:
 
a clump of
seaweed in which tiny crustacean — shrimps and crabs — took shelter until they
were mature enough to fend for themselves on the bottom; a fist-sized jellyfish
with a translucent purple membrane on its topside that looked like a sail, and
long dangling tentacles that, Chase explained, stung its prey to death — a
Portuguese man-o’-war.
 
Fascinated, Max
touched one of the tentacles and recoiled with a yelp as it stung his
fingertip.

"It's early for them to be
around," Tall Man remarked.
 
"The water must be warming up fast."

When they were half a mile from the
island, Chase pointed to a small Institute buoy bobbing off the starboard
bow.
 
Tall Man took the boat out of gear,
letting it coast up to the buoy, as Chase picked up the boat hook and held it
over the side.
 
Chase snagged the buoy
and brought it aboard.
 
It was attached
to a length of rope.

"Pull," he said to Max.

Max grabbed the rope and began to haul it
aboard.
 
"What is it?" he
asked.

"An experiment," Chase said
,
dropping the boat hook and helping Max pull on the
rope.
 
"A big problem around here is
lost lobster pots.
 
Boat propellers cut
the buoys off, or storms carry them away or the ropes just rot and fall
apart.
 
Anyway, there are pots lost all
over the bottom."

"So?"

"They're killers.
 
All sorts of creatures, not just lobsters —
fish, crabs, octopuses — go inside after the baits and can't get out.
 
They die and become bait themselves, so more
and more of the creatures come in and die.
 
The pots keep killing for years and years.

The pot bumped against the side of the
boat, and Chase leaned overboard and heaved it up onto the gunwale.
 
It was a rectangular wire cage, reinforced
with wooden slats.
 
On one end was a wire
funnel — the way in; on the other, a square door made of a flimsy mesh material
and secured with twine.

"What Tall and I've been trying to
do," Chase said, "is design a biodegradable door.
 
Pots should be pulled at least once a week,
preferably twice, so we've been looking for a cheap material for the door
that'll degrade after about ten days.
 
The lobsterman can change the door every week, but if the
pot's
lost, the critters can get free before they die."