Jaws

Brody sighed. “Shit,” he said. “I don’t like it. It doesn’t smell good. But okay, if it’s that important.”

“It’s that important.” For the first time since he had arrived, Vaughan smiled. “Thanks, Martin,” he said, and he stood up. “Now I have the rather unpleasant task of visiting the Footes.”

“How are you going to keep them from shooting off their mouths to the Times or the News?”

“I hope to be able to appeal to their public-spiritedness,” Vaughan said, “just as I appealed to yours.”

“Bull.”

“We do have one thing going for us. Miss Watkins was a nobody. She was a drifter. No family, no close friends. She said she had hitchhiked East from Idaho. So she won’t be missed.”

Brody arrived home a little before five. His stomach had settled down enough to permit him a beer or two before dinner. Ellen was in the kitchen, still dressed in the pink uniform of a hospital volunteer. Her hands were immersed in chopped meat, kneading it into a meat loaf.

“Hello,” she said, turning her head so Brody could plant a kiss on her cheek.

“What was the crisis?”

“You were at the hospital. You didn’t hear?”

“No. Today was bathe-the-old-ladies day. I never got off the Ferguson wing.”

“A girl got killed off Old Mill.”

“By what?”

“A shark.” Brody reached into the refrigerator and found a beer.

Ellen stopped kneading meat and looked at him. “A shark! I’ve never heard of that around here. You see one once in a while, but they never do anything.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s a first for me, too.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Really? Is that sensible? I mean, isn’t there anything you can do?”

“Sure, there are some things I could do. Technically. But there’s nothing I can actually do. What you and I think doesn’t carry much weight around here. The powers-that-be are worried that it won’t look nice if we get all excited just because one stranger got killed by a fish. They’re willing to take the chance that it was just a freak accident that won’t happen again. Or, rather, they’re willing to let me take the chance, since it’s my responsibility.”

“What do you mean, the powers-that-be?”

“Larry Vaughn, for one.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize you had talked to Larry.”

“He came to see me as soon as he heard I planned to close the beaches. He wasn’t what you’d call subtle about telling me he didn’t want the beaches closed. He said he’d have my job if I did close them.”

“I can’t believe that, Martin. Larry isn’t like that.”

“I didn’t think so, either. Hey, by the way, what do you know about his partners?”

“In the business? I didn’t think there were any. I thought Penrose was his middle name, or something like that. Anyway, I thought he owned the whole thing.”

“So did I. But apparently not.”

“Well, it makes me feel better to know you talked to Larry before you made any decision. He tends to take a wider, more overall view of things than most people. He probably does know what’s best.”

Brody felt the blood rise in his neck. He said simply, “Crap.” Then he tore the metal tab off his beer can, flipped it into the garbage can, and walked into the living room to turn on the evening news.

From the kitchen Ellen called, “I forgot to tell you: you had a call a little while ago.”

“Who from?”

“He didn’t say. He just said to tell you you’re doing a terrific job. It was nice of him to call, don’t you think?”

FOUR

For the next few days the weather remained clear and unusually calm. The wind came softly, steadily from the southwest, a gentle breeze that rippled the surface of the sea but made no whitecaps. There was a crispness to the air only at night, and after days of constant sun, the earth and sand had warmed.

Sunday was the twentieth of June. Public schools still had a week or more to run before breaking for the summer, but the private schools in New York had already released their charges. Families who owned summer homes in Amity had been coming out for weekends since the beginning of May. Summer tenants whose leases ran from June 15 to September 15 had unpacked and, familiar now with where linen closets were, which cabinets contained good china and which the everyday stuff, and which beds were softer than others, were already beginning to feel at home.

By noon, the beach in front of Scotch and Old Mill roads was speckled with people. Husbands lay semi- comatose on beach towels, trying to gain strength from the sun before an afternoon of tennis and the trip back to New York on the Long Island Rail Road’s Cannonball. Wives leaned against aluminum backrests, reading Helen MacInnes and John Cheever and Taylor Caldwell, interrupting themselves now and then to pour a cup of dry vermouth from the Scotch cooler.

Teenagers lay serried in tight, symmetrical rows, the boys enjoying the sensation of grinding their pelvises into the sand, thinking of pudenda and occasionally stretching their necks to catch a brief glimpse of some, exposed, wittingly or not, by girls who lay on their backs with their legs spread.

These were not Aquarians. They uttered none of the platitudes of peace or pollution, or justice or revolt. Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty. As their eyes were blue or brown, so their tastes and consciences were determined by other generations. They had no vitamin deficiencies, no sickle-cell anemia. Their teeth — thanks either to breeding or to orthodontia — were straight and white and even. Their bodies were lean, their muscles toned by boxing lessons at age nine, riding lessons at twelve, and tennis lessons ever since. They had no body odor. When they sweated, the girls smelled faintly of perfume; the boys smelled simply clean.

None of which is to say that they were either stupid or evil. If their IQs could have been tested en masse, they would have shown native ability well within the top 10 per cent of all mankind. And they had been, were being, educated at schools that provided every discipline, including exposure to minority-group sensibilities, revolutionary philosophies, ecological hypotheses, political power tactics, drugs, and sex. Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing. They had been conditioned to believe (or, if not to believe, to sense) that the world was really quite irrelevant to them. And they were right. Nothing touched them — not race riots in places like Trenton, New Jersey, or Gary, Indiana; not the fact that parts of the Missouri River were so foul that the water sometimes caught fire spontaneously; not police corruption in New York or the rising number of murders in San Francisco or revelations that hot dogs contained insect filth and hexachlorophine caused brain damage. They were inured even to the economic spasms that wracked the rest of America. Undulations in the stock markets were nuisances noticed, if at all, as occasions for fathers to bemoan real or fancied extravagances.

Those were the ones who returned to Amity every summer. The others — and there were some, mavericks — marched and bleated and joined and signed and spent their summers working for acronymic social- action groups. But because they had rejected Amity and, at most, showed up for an occasional Labor Day weekend, they, too, were irrelevant.

The little children played in the sand at the water’s edge, digging holes and flinging muck at each other, unconscious and uncaring of what they were and what they would become.

A boy of six stopped skimming flat stones out into the water. He walked up the beach to where his mother lay dozing, and he flopped down next to her towel. “Hey, Mom,” he said, limning aimless doodles with his finger in the sand.

His mother turned to look at him, shielding her eyes from the sun. “What?”

“I’m bored.”