Dead Bait 2 Read online

  When the Glory Hound finally appeared, far away on the lip of the horizon, there was something distinctly different about it, something wrong with the way it moved. As it neared, the crowd saw that it rocked to and fro, back and forth, sometimes nearly halting altogether, staggering along like a dog on a leash dragging its owner behind. All the boats had been weighed and many people had left, but the few who remained hushed. Some of them were the old men who remembered Fontaine, binoculars raised to their newspaper-colored eyes. Tolliver, too, was there, weaving in and out of the spotty crowd, exchanging jokes with men at Fontaine’s expense, fingering the wax on his moustache with his thumb and forefinger like a man about to tie a woman to the railroad tracks. His loose cotton boat pants were almost frayed at the thighs from his nervous skittering.

  “Probably rammed his boat up on a sandbar,” he joked, elbowing someone near him.

  “Fontaine ain’t never rammed anything with that boat in his life,” the other man replied.

  “Guess we’ll see,” Tolliver said hungrily.

  The Glory Hound rocked with each pull of the great fish, sprays of water shooting like geysers behind her. Fontaine blared the horn and Caldwell made deep, guttural sounds from the bottom of his chest, still strapped to the fighting chair. They’d dragged it in alive, trying to make the time, grinding gears against the cords of muscle writhing beneath the water, angry whirlpools churning in their wake.

  Fontaine’s madness was far gone, his mind scoured clean by the salt on the wind. Head held high, he gunned the engine and dragged the shark directly into shore instead of docking, grounding his boat, the shark thrashing about in the shallow water.

  They screamed at him from shore and the other ships, calling him other names. Some children, holding balloons, slipped from their mothers’ hands and sprinted to the water’s edge, parents running after them and wailing. Heedlessly, Fontaine pitched over the gunwale into the shallow water, landing flatly on his heels in the sand. He waded toward the shore, then dared a glance back at the shark’s roiling jaws lunging out of the water, snapping at the air, swimming in circles.

  Fontaine wavered.

  Millions and millions of years ago, something slimy and pallid crawled up out of the sea, something that took short, nervous breaths of air and crawled with quick, heavy steps, something that left the dependability and bounty of the ocean behind for the hot, dry earth before it. There is no greater mystery than what may have happened if that creature had balked, wavering on its jelly-like legs, and turned and submerged itself back into the safe cradle of the ocean.

  He saw his boat rising like a pillar. He saw the shark, Caldwell, the crowds. All the things that had been and could be for him, here, on this ocean. Then he lifted his foot and slogged the final fifty yards to shore, tearing away his shoes and tossing them aside, picking up speed, finally running barefoot onto the beach and up to the road.

  Some people followed him crying out questions, but he jostled and elbowed away. Once he made the common he was clear, hurtling through the gazebo, still barefoot, wet prints across the walkway behind him. Long after they evaporated, years even, people would point and say “That’s the way Fontaine went.”

  A riotous uproar shook the docks. The crowd had rushed down to the beach, standing at the edge of the surf. A few men and children ventured up to their knees.

  “Watch it! Don’t know if I can hold him!” Caldwell called, giving the shark a little slack. Its tail clapped against the side of the boat as it sped toward the shore and people ran screaming out of the water.

  Those who saw it swore the foundations of wharf shook, the wooden posts wobbling, masts of the docked boats reeling. The harbormaster called the Coast Guard, who puttered in aboard a great orange chopper and circled uselessly. Channel 6 News showed up in a van from the ferry, and all the local papers were crowded around with telephoto lenses, scribbling words in little notepads.

  “That’s a Great White, that’s fucking Jaws,” the man next to Tolliver said.

  “That’s just an aggressive, oversized bottle-nose,” Tolliver replied with scorn. The other man laughed hard. “Didn’t you lend him your slip?”

  The grounded ship lurched as the tethered shark zigzagged, its belly scraping the sand. Caldwell secured the rod to the fighting chair, locked the reel, and stood, hands cupped to his ears. Some official-looking people were yelling something to him but he couldn’t hear. They weren’t official-looking enough to be police officers. He sat up and waved.

  “Too late!” the man screamed. He wore a sleek blue suit and dark wraparound glasses. “You’re too late! Weigh-in ended six minutes ago!”

  A Maine lobsterman had taken the prize with a pair of four-hundred pound makos.

  “Like I give a damn!” Caldwell said brazenly, chest puffed out. Not to be outdone by Fontaine, he too hurdled the gunwale and braved the water so close to the shark. “Stuff that fucker. He’s going over my mantel,” he said when he got to shore.

  “You must have some mantel,” the chief of police said to him. Practically the entire island had showed up by then.

  “You have no idea.”

  A few miles down the road, in Vineyard Haven, a ferry was pulling away from the dock, all but empty. News traveled fast on such a small island and all the tourists and day-trippers had flocked to Oak Bluffs to see the shark. One man stood toward the stern of the ferry, watching the island recede. He had a ragged tan and silver eyes and saw the whole island at once disappearing from view.

  In the days that followed no one knew what to do with the giant fish. It labored in the harbor for days, thrashing, scaring children and gulls, until it grew silent and still, its twitching tail the only sign of life. There was a great protest from PETA, crying that the shark could not be killed and some activists barely escaped with all their parts intact when they tried to free it by night. Eventually it seemed the shark had spent all the life it had on the end of that line, and the point became moot. The authorities turned the situation over to Caldwell.

  “How’d you do it?” the guys from ESPN and Channel 6 asked, the local papers clutching to their backs like lamprey, their microphones thrust out like proboscis.

  “That’s Fontaine’s fish,” he said honestly. “I just did some of the legwork.” He told them everything about Fontaine’s episode from the bloody deck to dumping the chum and their wild rush for shore.

  A young blonde from the Globe sidled up next to him, looking for nuggets for a human interest piece.

  “Ian, are you a married man?” she clamored over the other reporters, a forest of microphones thrust in his face.

  Caldwell smiled and held up his hand, showing them the rings, and shrugged. They jabbered more questions at him but he remained silent.

  But when Caldwell’s day to collect the shark arrived it was nowhere to be found. The line was coiled on the ocean floor. The hook was clean, as if it had never been embedded in the cage of knifelike teeth.

  Experts from the Marine Biology Institute in Wood’s Hole discovered it was, in actuality, a tiger shark, likely the biggest living known specimen. Six rows of teeth in a mouth like a vortex that consumed seals, squid, and even turtles. They said that Tiger shark’s hunted by night and could navigate murky waters. They even said male tiger sharks hold the females with their teeth when mating, and, interestingly, were known as the sacred Auma Kua, or ancestor spirits, of Hawaiians.

  They could not, however, tell anyone how the damn hook got out of the shark after holding for a good five days until the shark was all but dead.

  The island emptied of its shark enthusiasts. Gradually, like always, other things became important, like the Jazz Festival or a party on the Kennedy Compound or Bill Clinton playing golf.

  Fontaine was never seen on Cape Cod or the islands again. His small boat was dragged out of the harbor with a winch and left to rot on the shore, since no one would pay to remove it. Not even Caldwell, who told them they should put a plaque on it and make it a monument. The boat got so b
leached and barren white that people came to call it the Ghost, the original name long faded from the hull and forgotten. It remained long after people forgot to call it anything. During a serious hurricane season the waves smashed it into driftwood and shattered plastic that looked like broken teeth in the sand.

  But Fontaine’s legend never died. When ships left the Swatch and followed some other more experienced sailor they still called it Fontaining. His spectacular exit impacted the darker superstitions that sailors are prone to carry and became canonical. On the decks of some ships, more than most would like to admit, when a great fish was hooked unexpectedly, out of nowhere, almost luckily, that it was in actuality the madness Captain Fontaine had shed that caught the line, and it must be cut immediately and the entire chum bucket be dumped behind the boat. A commercial schooner from New Bedford lost a great load of cod when they pulled up some unimaginable creature in their nets and a squat man swore in Portuguese Esta Fontaine! Mal, mal! They unhinged it and let it drop down toward the unimaginable depths, where everything foul and membranous lurked, mouths wide and full of teeth.

  The night he’d wrecked his boat, Fontaine had snuck onto the ferry with little trouble. In Hyannis he walked home to Apple Blossom Road and extracted every item from his home. He piled them high beneath the swing-set, red and rusty, and doused it with gasoline. By the time he arrived at Hooters the underbelly of the sky was lit with his old life. He smiled to himself and entered. The bar was close to empty, some elderly folks picking at their food in the booths.

  “Come with me,” he said to Candy with a wild look in his eye that she had never seen. Candy walked outside with him.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked nervously. She thought he was being inappropriate. She worked at Hooter’s, but she wasn’t a whore. But she knew Fontaine, so she heard him out.

  Fontaine didn’t have any answer, but he took her hand anyway.

  “You got a car?” he asked. He waited for her to nod.

  He didn’t show her the wad of cash in his wallet, Caldwell’s ludicrous down payment for the trip. He wanted her to come of her own accord. He didn’t want to use any bait. “I just want someone to go somewhere with me,” he explained.

  Candy, in her sweet, earnest innocence, grasped the dream of every Hooter’s girl in Fontaine’s callused palm, and they were gone, her buxom orange shorts bouncing in the mounting darkness. Later, in Ohio, Fontaine watched the land roll away behind him. Candy spoke as she drove, but her words did not matter. He listened to the news about himself on the radio. Everything was about the shark.

  “We have to go back,” he said. Candy looked at him, upset.

  “Not for long,” he said.

  It was his debt to repay. Fontaine showed up at the night’s zenith, at its blackest, when the town was asleep. He’d had a couple of drinks in a bar on the corner before heading down to the beach, where he slipped off all of his clothes and slid into the water.

  Next to the boat the shark swirled its tail, resting. He walked up to it confidently, stroked its rough skin, felt ripples around him from its motion.

  Slowly, carefully, Fontaine’s hand crept toward its mouth. From his waistband he pulled the bone knife, flat and dull in the darkness, with the other hand. Then found the mouth, gently opened it and found the hook. In the end he didn’t need the knife, the hook slid gently out of its jaws, as if for days it had not been hooked, but clenching tightly on the line. The hook was bare, his ring gone.

  Fontaine watched it go, a soft wake trailing behind.

  One day years later, a rich man like Caldwell caught himself a tiger shark off of Oahu. The man, so far past the scope of this story that his name is unimportant, brought the shark to a great taxidermist, also with an unimportant name. The taxidermist took the shark hesitantly, like all the animals he stuffed. Gazelles and jackrabbits, black bears, armadillos, he’d stuffed them all. Now, during his Hawaiian retirement, he’d turned to fish. This taxidermist hated hunting and abhorred violence, but found that his profession gave him a kind of peace. He took solace in the respect he was paying to these animals that had been destroyed so cruelly and made quite a lot of money doing it. He had spectacles that sat on his nose. Many people thought he looked like Gepetto, from the old fairy tale.

  He imagined the hunt as he unzipped the shark’s belly and the organs slid out and onto the floor. Shark hunts, he’d come to know, were nothing more than dumping clouds of blood into the ocean and waiting for the sharks to inevitably show. Quickly, before their stink began to spread, he loaded the soft guts into a steel pail, their last stop before the pet food factory.

  Something clattered, like stones knocking together. He made a note of it and moved on.

  In the stomach, he found a license plate, a helium tank, and what could have been a sword. He found the remains of a smaller shark and the shell of a sea turtle. Still unsettled by the noise and the gleam he’d seen earlier, he searched the pail again, still coming up short. Wary that tiger sharks had reputations as man eaters, he looked diligently for signs of human anatomy but found none.

  After two more hours he remembered the clatter and found the ring, round and green.

  The taxidermist held them in his hand, tested their weight, scraped away their film to see the colorless metal underneath. As he did so he dreamed that the shark had found Atlantis and devoured a great princess there, with kelp for hair and breasts of abalone, and a voice like the ocean wind.

  THE MER-MONKEY

  Paul A. Freeman

  In the storage room of the City Museum, Simon Murdock, the diminutive, dark-skinned curator, led his visitor through a clutter of long forgotten exhibits. They stepped over the barrel of a sixteenth century cannon and they circumvented a twenty-fifth dynasty Egyptian sarcophagus. Finally, the two men arrived at their destination—at the object of their sortie into what Murdock termed the museum’s ‘dingy dungeon’.

  “It’s a mer-monkey,” said the curator, indicating a shriveled up little corpse inside a display case. “You’d be amazed at what you sometimes come across in the neglected backwater of the main museum.”

  The visitor was Professor Charles Renfrew, a young Oxford don often described in the press as an ‘extreme anthropologist’. His expeditions to the most far-flung parts of the globe were legendary.

  Renfrew squinted through the dust-smeared glass of the display cabinet. Unhappy with the view, he took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, wiped away a circle of grime and peered in. The desiccated specimen inside certainly had the head of a monkey—a small, tree-dwelling primate by the looks of it. The teeth however, were totally unlike any monkey or ape he had ever seen. They were sharp, pointed, fearsome looking.

  “The mer-monkey survives on a piscivorous diet,” the curator announced, as if he had read the anthropologist’s mind. “It’s a fish feeder, living in freshwater lakes—which explains the evolution of the tail.”

  “Ah! Yes! The tail?” said Professor Renfrew, still not entirely convinced by the exhibit. His keen eyes searched the midriff of the mummified creature for signs of stitching where the torso joined the scaly tail section. There were none, however.

  The curator’s face took on a predatory grin. He knew he now had the undivided interest of a world famous anthropologist, a man renowned for his discoveries of obscure animal species.

  “Where exactly would I find a live specimen of a mer-monkey?” Renfrew asked, his eyes glinting avariciously in the near darkness of the dingy dungeon.

  Simon Murdock scratched his chin and considered the anthropologist’s question. “Have you heard of Professor Henry Armitage, the Victorian explorer and adventurer?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “Well, on Armitage’s third trip to Africa he detailed the discovery of this mer-monkey in his journal. In fact, he even mentions the creature’s exact location.”

  The Oxford don again stared through the glass-sided display case at the mysterious m
er-monkey. Finally his mind was made up. “Supposing one wished to acquire Professor Armitage’s journal. The one from his third African expedition. Where would one obtain such a document?”

  The curator coughed discreetly into the one hand and meaningfully held out the other, palm upwards. “I locked Armitage’s journal away in the museum safe after I found it during an earlier storeroom foray.”

  “Isn’t it a bit of a coincidence, though,” said Renfrew, his incredulity difficult to dismiss. “I mean, it’s strange that the mer-monkey specimen and the journal are both discovered down here in the storeroom, isn’t it?”

  Murdock stooped over the display cabinet and looked down ruefully at the withered, century-and-a-half old corpse lying within it. The leathery hide was drawn tight over a simian skull, and a rib poked out through the moth eaten hide. The lower part of the body was better preserved though, the scaly skin still retaining its silvery sheen.

  “The reason the mer-monkey and the journal were both discovered in my little dungeon,” explained the curator, “is because Professor Armitage donated both items to the City Museum on his death in 1901. They’ve been here in the storeroom ever since. However, as I intimated to you during our correspondence, the journal’s yours—for a price.”

  Since receiving the curator’s letter a week ago, Renfrew had more than half expected such a scenario. It wouldn’t be the first time the anthropologist had paid to gain a decisive edge over his academic competitors. So he produced the wad of money he carried around with him for just such an occasion and slapped it into the other man’s open palm.