I’m burning mail under the stove vent, watching some television news. They’ve got an old black man from Texas on there, hopping up and down and wild, like a country preacher juiced on Nicorette. It seems a Catholic nun — like the ladies in the movies with the black and white and the thing on their heads — her name was Sister Maria Concepcion. She borrowed this boat from the old man, called the Jeckle. And the boat just showed up on the beach, South Padre Island, in two pieces, all thoroughly chewed up. They say it’s the work of one big shark, due to teethmarks.
Here’s the kicker for me: A $30,000 reward to the man who can catch that shark.
That’s all in Corpus Christi, Texas, and I stand here in Arkansas, sizzling my fingers on all these stupid bills. I’m thinking: I’m a semi-professional freshwater fisherman. I’ve never seen the ocean, but fish are fish. You want to catch a bigger fish, you use a bigger hook. It ain’t brain surgery.
And I’m thinking: There’s few things as outright fun as reeling in a nine-pound bass. And that bass hasn’t killed a soul. There’s no revenge involved. Imagine the fun of catching a big nun-eating shark.
And I’m thinking: Thirty thousand dollars.
So, I’m no private eye, but I look real close at that old man’s bait shop. I’ve got this big TV. The store is just paint-flaky vertical boards, shooting out in all different directions like the building’s been stepped on, but there up top is the name: Olde Towne Baits and Sundries, Worms. I don’t waste time. I jump in the truck with a carton of cigarettes, smoke the sixteen hours to Corpus Christi, look him up in the phone book, and keep on going till I’m standing before that very same old man on the opposite side of the counter, staring at the side of his head.
“That religious lady,” I ask, “what was she using for bait?”
“What religious lady?” he says to the TV.
“I’m too tired to be playing games,” I say. My lungs hurt. “You know the one I’m talking about.”
“I don’t know no religious lady,” he says.
A woman walks up to the counter in the middle of this. She drops a pack of big barbs and a Payday on the counter. “Why are you being so coy, Bollin,” she says. “You told us all about it on the news last night.”
She’s a white woman so I’m assuming no relation, but you never know in a new place how they do things.
“I don’t mean nothin by it, Miss Layla,” Bollin says. He creaks on up out of his lawn chair. “My lawyer tole me to hush up my mouth. They could get me for negligence.”
I slide two tens across the counter. “Maybe this’ll oil your jaws,” I say. Bollin looks at the TV. The woman, Layla, adds a twenty. Not a twitch from the old geeze. I throw on a five, cool as a squash. I slide my wallet back into my pocket so he knows — last offer. He puts his hand over the money. “Cut whiting and rosarios,” he says.
I don’t know what either one of them is, and I notice that Layla’s looking blank herself.
“Cut whiting,” she says. “No surprise there.”
“Of course,” I say.
“Rosarios,” he says. “They necklaces with a little ole Jesus on them.”
“Good Lord,” Layla says. She looks up at the ceiling as if sharing a moment with little ole Jesus. “You mean rosaries.”
I say, “Aha.” I still don’t know what’s going on here.
“Bollin, you’re not going to charge me twenty bucks for that line of bull, are you?” she asks.
“That’s the God’s honest truth and I swear on it,” Bollin says. He turns back to the TV with a grim look, like it’s watching him instead of the other way around.
I walk outside with Layla. The weather is unpleasant, like someone’s holding a hot, wet hand to your face. “He’s been suffering from a lot of anxiety,” she says. “His wife passed a few months ago. He’s a Taurus. You know how they can be.”
Frankly, no I don’t, but I know what it means when a woman brings up the zodiac voodoo: Nothing good. My wife talks about it all the time. She says our birthdays are a bad match for each other. I’ve suggested she get a new birthday.
“Who are the hooks for?” I ask this Layla.
“Me,” she says, “I’m going shark fishing tonight. There’s room if you’re interested.”
It’s a nice offer, but I tell her I got my own boat.
“You’re not talking about that,” she says, pointing at the brand-new 250 horsepower Ranger on the reinforced, gooseneck trailer behind my truck.
“What if I am?”
“You’re not going to get very far out. Why don’t you come with me?”
I look at her real careful, and I ask if she’s fishing for that woman’s shark. She says she’s heading straight out from where the Jeckle washed up. She has nice long legs, the kind you want to get tangled up in. I think, what the hell.
She tells me to be at the marina at 7:30. The boat’s name is the Three Iron. “It’s eighty dollars,” she says. “Bait included.”
That’s when I realize I’ve reserved a spot on a charter boat, right when I’m thinking something good is going on, some sparking between us.
I go back into Bollin’s bait store and tell him to give me a pack of rosarios.
He says, “Rosaries.”
I say, “All right, a pack of rosaries.”
“You got to buy them from the gift shop at the Catholics’,” he tells me. “They up Yorktown on your left, right across from the Navy field.”
I pull out a fiver for the info, but he tells me to forget it. I suppose he’s already got twenty-five out of me today, but I take this as a sign that maybe he’s a man who can be trusted.
The monastery’s closed, and I’m dog-tired but can’t sleep. My heart thumps so loud it keeps me awake.
Part Two
On the boat that night, Layla comes up to me with a little boy by the hand. She holds out a white pill for me. “Bonine,” she says, “for motion sickness.”
“Is he taking any?” I ask her.
“He was raised on the Three Iron,” she says.
I tell her I’ll be all right, thanks anyway.
“O.K.” she says. She yanks the boy into gear, but I don’t want her to leave just yet.
“What are you going to do if you get the thirty grand?” I ask.
“I guess I’ll give it to the banks,” she says.
I tell her as dreams go, that’s a little pathetic.
“I want to go to Africa,” the boy howls, and I say, “That’s more like it. Go shoot an elephant.”
“Maybe, honey,” she says. She’s about to run off again, but she stops. “How about you?” she says.
I tell her I’d like to take a good-looking woman somewhere nice. Vegas.
“Well,” she says, and she drags the boy up to the steering room. Not exactly the response I was hoping for.
It looks like every boat in Texas is out here. We carve our way southeast through sailboats, and dodge scarabs tearing out into the dark, shooting up tail feathers of water. You get a lot of spray in your face on a boat like this. Layla honks at other fishing boats that honk back. Everybody’s treating this like a big party. The other guys on the boat are a bunch of bartenders, and they’re drinking beer like their guts are on fire. Not me. I stay focused. I sit as far away from them as possible and eat a can of vienna sausages.
About forty minutes in, Layla turns the boat around and idles the engine. She and the boy come down from the steering room. She asks me to give her a hand. She has this rig with one bucket inside another, and we lift the top one out. Water pours out of the holes in the bottom of it and some splashes on my pants. We throw the whole thing out into the sea. There’s a big orange float tied to the top, that sinks then pops back through the surface. That little bit that gets on my pants smells strong of fish.
“Chum,” she says. “Billy,” she says to the boy, “Come meet Mr…?”
“Wylie.”
“Hi, Mr. Wylie,” the boy says. “Do you want to be my chum?” He takes off, shrieking.
“That joke never gets old,” she says loud, more to him than to me.
“Kids” I say. I give her a wink.
“You a father?”
“No, not really,” I say. It’s a stupid answer, though it’s the truth. The wife thinks I’m shooting blanks.
We ride to three other places to drop off chum. She tells me we’re making a chum square. Then Layla drives over close to the first bucket and stops. She lines me and the bartenders up on one side of the boat and checks our poles. Now that we’re stopped, the boat takes on a life of its own, and I’m wishing I’d took that Bonine. I try not to think about that can of sausages. But I got this picture in my head — them wriggling free like fat worms. I choke down my throw-up a couple of times, but there’s no holding it back. I’m leaning over the rail. My scalp’s gone tingly, and my cheeks feel loose.
“Not so close to the edge,” Layla says. She’s got a hold of my shirt, pulling me back.
“I had some bad seafood for lunch,” I tell her. I skipped lunch. And suddenly I’m like the drunkest, highest man on the earth, but without the good feelings, and I say I’m fine, then I fall backwards and land right on my rear. Layla hooks me under the arm and drags me into the little room on the boat, sticks me on a dirty bench cushion. The boy comes in with a box of saltine crackers.
I feel crazy from no sleep, and I want to get up so bad from that cushion. But I can’t. And I can’t get a hold of my mind either, which is going off on its own, to all the bad places. The bad places are all about the difference in what my life was supposed to be like and what’s it’s actually like. When I was in high school — I know it’s pathetic, a grown man still talking about high school, but I was in high school and, back then, I was just like everybody else. Better in some way. I was a hell of a halfback and not bad at my studies.
Point is: there was a time when people saw something in me. I remember, because I could see it, too.
I wake up when I hear cheers or when the boat jars into gear. It’s not till we’re heading back that I can bear to sit upright. I push myself off the cushion. On the back of the boat, there’s twelve sharks and a big pink fish, a snapper, hanging on a pole. They’re all slit from anus to chin. The sharks look like machines. A set of teeth mounted on a tail. They’re the biggest fish I’ve ever seen — three feet long, some of them. But they can’t swallow a whole person. They’re just kids compared to the killer.
The bartenders look pretty satisfied with themselves. They might even be looking at me like I’m a dumbass, which is okay because this is a long race, a turtle-and-hare sort of thing, for sure. They carry their catches to the parking lot, slung over their forearms or grinning from their coolers. Layla and Billy thank them and then thank me for coming. “I’m sorry you didn’t have more fun,” she says. “I really appreciate the help.”
“My pleasure,” I say, and I tip my hat.
Part Three
The next morning, I go back to the monastery and into the gift shop. This old woman there smiles at everything I ask.
“Where are the rosaries?” I ask. She smiles at me and nods.
“Do you understand me?” She smiles a little more.
I’m thinking she’s deaf and dumb, so I find a sign that reads “Rosaries” hanging over one of the short aisles. There’s wood and pewter and silver necklaces drooped over dowels and below all that little boxes spilling over with plastic beads. There’s no mention of fishing — they just look like religious doodads. No hooks, rainbow colors, or any sparkle to speak of. There’s the distinct possibility that that old black man is pulling my leg, but the way he was looking at the TV, all grim — I don’t think so. I buy three dozen of the cheapest — twenty-five cents a piece.
My blood alcohol level is about fifty percent Bonine by the time I show up at the Three Iron, and I feel much better when we’re bouncing through the waves to our spot east of San Padre Island.
Layla’s looking more tired than she was the night before. She only charged me forty bucks tonight — she said she was making up for last night — and she’s being chatty. I help her again with the chum, and while she deals two loaves of bread into the buckets, she offers me a job.
“Temporary,” she says. She’s booked up for weeks. She’s going to die if she tries to do it by herself. I get seven an hour, and I fish for free. I have to learn how to set up a shark rig. I can start tonight. Wing it.
“You slept in the parking lot,” she says.
True, in the bed of my truck, and my back is killing me. But I want to get one thing straight. “What if I catch the thirty thousand dollar shark?” I ask her.
“We’ll split it fifty-fifty,” she says, and I’m thinking: Like hell.
“How ’bout ninety-ten,” I say.
“Fine,” she says, tossing some fish heads into the bucket. “You can sleep on the boat.” She asks me if I’m a Cancer. I say no, Pisces, and make her shake on the deal before we get way off into horoscope land. Then, we heave-ho a chum bucket into the water. I reach in my pocket and follow the bucket with a handful of rosaries.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“A little something special,” I tell her. I show her the beads.
“Next time,” she says, “just say nothing.”
I walk through the fishermen and check the sleeves on their cable leaders, like I’m the expert. At the end, where I’m going to fish, I twist-tie two rosaries to the wire near my hook.
Not ten minutes are over before the clients start pulling in black tip sharks. I keep an eye on my pole while Layla swings their catches onto the deck and I rebait their hooks. The fishing slows down, and she moves us closer to the coast in the chum square. As soon as she kills the engine my rod bows forward. I run over and yank it, but you can’t really set a big pole like this. You just have to hope the fish takes a big bite, and this one does. It isn’t what you call a fighter. It just seems to turn its weight on and off. I reel it in easy, and then it pulls my line back out to sea. On the third round, I get it close to the boat. We shine the light over and it’s six-foot long shark.
“Wow,” Billy says.
I’m breathing heavy and my arms are rubber. I reach for the big hook thing — the gaff — but Layla’s not having a big shark like that on the deck. “It could tear up the boat,” she says.
“That’s a nurse shark,” the boy says. “It’s docile — that means nice.”
“See there,” I say.
“All sharks bite,” she says. She stands there not knowing if she should put her hands in her pockets or not, and I’m thinking: I’ve got her. “Wait till it starts to sink,” she says. “That means it’s dead.”
It’s not long before the big bastard rolls onto its side and starts going down. I find a couple of rednecks like me and with the gaffs we work the shark over the rail. Everybody stands back in safety. Layla hands me the old three iron, and I inch towards its blunt nose. Its tail swings around towards me — just a nerve twitch, but nobody knows that at the time — and I beat it on the head with the golf club while Billy and the clients scream.
“It’s dead. It’s dead,” Layla says with her arms out in front of her.
We hang the shark from the bar, and it’s so long its tail lays across the deck. This is the kind of beast that can butt through a boat and scarf down a full-grown woman, I think. I pat its rough belly.
“We better cut this open and let that woman out,” I say.
“Let me out. Let me out,” Billy says, running in a circle.
“Honey, that’s not nice,” Layla says.
After we finish the paying customers’ fish, we open my shark’s stomach over the cleaning table. Pieces of fish pour out with a white slush and something round that ends up being a cue ball. I run a pencil through the mush and pull up a rosary.
“This one’s not from my line,” I tell Layla.
I pull up another. And another. Ten. Twenty.
Layla sits down her knife and covers her mouth with her bloody glove. “You don’t think,” she says.
But I do think. I think thirty thousand dollars. Thirty thousand dollars. It’s a big beautiful pool of money, and I’m about to dive in.
But when we take the mess to the hospital, the people there tell us it’s just fish. They say we’ll be able to recognize human parts eaten only a few days ago.
“This is terrible,” Layla says.
I tell her not to worry. “Tomorrow is another day.”
Back on the boat I crack a beer in the cool air. I’m not sure why, but I feel lucky. I feel close. I’m on to something with those rosaries. And nobody but me, Layla, and a loonball old black man knows a thing about them. Sister Maria Concepcion knew. Out there in her wood boat, in the waves, with her rosaries and cut whiting — she knew. But did she know what was coming? When the bottom busted open and she was snatched into the sea, was she surprised?
Part Four
In the morning, I give my wife a call.
“Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing?” she says to me.
I tell her I’m working some things out.
“I suppose that’s different than actually working,” she says.
“It’s different,” I say. “And it’s the same.”
She says I’m a selfish asshole, and I say there’s no reason to raise her voice, but she hangs up.
Me and Layla go out every day for nearly two weeks, sometimes twice a day. As a business, things are good. The clients are raking them in. And I’m catching sharks longer and bigger by twice as much. An eight-foot tiger and a seven-foot hammerhead, which is close to the local record. Even a Great White, five-feet long. We gaff them, club them, slices their stomachs open, and I pull dripping rosaries out of every single one. But so far we haven’t found any human parts.
Tonight we end up loitering on the boat, drinking leftover beer. Billy’s at his grandmother’s. He’s been out too much, and he fell asleep in Spanish class.
Layla flips the tape over in the boombox. She’s dancing a little bit, looking very nice. She takes a long slug of her beer.
“Wylie, why’d you come down here?”
“To be honest,” I say. “I need the money.”
“But there’s more to it,” she says. “What’s the real reason? What’s the truth?”
This may be drunk talk, but she’s right. There’s more to it, and I try to tell it to her, but the truth’s got a short tail — it’s hard to catch hold of. I just see myself cruising in with that shark, the cameras flashing, the big check, everyone pumping my hand and slapping my back and sending my picture by satellite to every country in the world. I guess it’s glory, or fame. That and a carton of cigarettes got me down here. But something else has happened. Last night I had a dream that I slit open a shark and Sister Maria stepped out, finger in the air, addressing me directly. I woke up and I couldn’t remember what she said.
This is not the kind of thing you can mention.
“I guess the glory,” I say.
“That’s not very Pisces,” she says. “But your kind are slippery.”
“Like the truth,” I say.
“Exactly,” she says. She crooks a finger at me, and I think it may be seductive.
We go back to her place and take off our clothes. I get tangled up in those legs, and I have to say: it’s no regular roll in the hay. Nothing special in the acrobatics department, but it just feels different, better, realer. It’s like the first time all over again.
But when we finish and we’re snuggled up like lovers she asks me what I’m going to do now that the fishing is over.
“What do you mean over?”
“I told you the last three parties cancelled.”
“Yeah, and so?”
“This is a money-making operation,” she says. “Or at least it tries to be.”
I push her back and look at her and I swear all I can see are her bones. Her skull and those long teeth, her arm bones and leg bones. All yellow, like she’s been dead for a hundred years.
I sleep in my truck again, and in the morning drive down to Bollin’s.
“Man to man,” I say, “there’s not one big shark that attacked the nun, is there?”
“El tiburon grande,” he says, “that what the holy sister called it.”
“El. Tiburon. Grande,” he says slowly to me.
“Layla told me the boat leaked,” I lie.
“There’s one across the island just like it if you want to see it,” he says. “Hell, I’ll take you like I took the sister.” He puts a padlock on the outside of the bait store and shuffles over to the dock. We purr to the island in his johnboat. He points across the island.
“The boat is airtight,” he says.
I slop through the mud around the scrub bushes, cross the road, duck under the fence, and walk down the solid sand to the beach. A white wooden boat that comes up to my waist is there, covered with a wet canvas. “Heckyl” is painted on the side. I run my hand over the canvas and kick the boat. It’s solid all the way around. A little mist creeps up. I walk down to the water and take off my shoes. I step out just far enough so that the cold water spreads over the tops of my feet. Off in the distance, the grey sky and the Gulf are closed like a pair of lips.
Next thing I know my feet are squishing into the monastery gift shop. I come up to the smiling woman and say, “Shark.” I lean forward, make a fin with my hand on the back of my head, and snap my teeth at a rosary in my other hand. This is the only time I ever see that woman not smile. “Shark,” I mouth. I hold out the beads to her.
“Rosario,” she says and smiles again.
All that time, she’s Mexican.
“El. Tiburon. Grande,” I say.
She stands straight up and wheezes out the door. I hear her panting down the hallway, into a room where drawers and doors are shut, and panting back up the hall. She stuffs a book and a sack into my arms, and herds me to the door, looking over her shoulder the whole while. I put down the sack and reach into my pocket for the last of my money, but she shoves me towards the truck. “Go,” she hisses.
The sack smells like chum, but it clicks together in a way I know — rosaries. I open the book in my truck. It says, “This Book Belongs To: Sister Maria Concepcion.” She’s got a way of writing that looks like she’s trying to tie her letters down to the line. I stare at it for a while before I realize I’m not looking at English.
Part Five
At Layla’s house, she says, “Look, I’m sorry if there was a misunderstanding…”
But she’s got me wrong: I just need help reading the book. “C’mon,” I say. “You grew up around here.”
“Billy’s Spanish is better than mine. What is this?”
I tell her it’s the nun’s diary. She pulls two beers out of the icebox and sits one in front of me. She looks at me over her can and asks me if I’m O.K.
O.K.?, I think. “I can’t read Spanish.”
“Billy,” she says. “Come in here and look at Mr. Wylie’s book.”
The boy says he’s watching TV, like we haven’t noticed, and I think I’m going to go crazy, but Layla tells him to get in here right away.
He drags into the room and says he can’t read this stuff. “Follow me,” he whines. We go back to his room, and he gives me a big glossy white book, a dictionary. “Don’t tell Mom,” he says. “It’s real expensive. ‘El’ and ‘la’ mean ‘the.’” He tells me to just look up the big words.
I park my truck on a turn-off of Yorktown Road, up from the monastery. There’s nothing happening at the Navy strip. I can’t remember any Spanish from my year in high school, and I can’t make heads or tails of the first page the diary. The words go blurry on me. I flip through the book. The entries get shorter and shorter and stop in the middle. The last date is the night before the nun disappeared. The words I can find I write down on the back of an old light bill. A lot of them are the same, and any word that comes up twice gets put on a best hits list:
bicycle — 21 times
silence — 6
boat — 30
lights — 18
city –19
night — 20
evil — 4
chocolate — 2
moon — 9
full — 3
god — 7
eyeglasses — 4
prayer — 15
woman — 10
old — 10
big shark (I get this one) — 60 times
bicycle silence boat lights city night evil chocolate moon full god eyeglasses prayer woman old big shark
Bicycle.
I get out of my truck and walk to the monastery. It’s deserted all around, and my boots sound like an army coming up the road. I got the sack of rosaries, and a rod and reel I borrowed from Layla’s boat. I go over to the edge of the monastery’s yard, where I’m pretty hidden by a row of little, bare trees. I find a short bike tangled up behind an oak tree. I snap two branches pulling it out of the woods and crouch low to watch the windows in the monastery, but nothing stirs.
The bike’s a girl’s bike — banana seat, streamers in the handlebars. It’s a rusty number, and I strain down the road with my sack and my pole to the tune of metal on metal. A dog jumps out of the ditch and nips at my ankles. Dog isn’t on the list, but I just assume Sister Maria must’ve made friends with him. I tell him to get and whip him with my rod.
I stop in front of Bollin’s door and knock. There’s a rustle inside, and then the click of a shotgun folding shut. “We’se closed,” he says.
“Bollin, it’s me, man,” I say. “I want to go to the island.”
The light over the door comes on, and he steps out in his pajamas. He smells old and not too clean.
“That’s a big girl’s bike,” he says. “You steal that?”
“It’s the nun’s, ignoramus,” I say.
“No it ain’t,” he says. “Her bike ’round the corner.”
I’m thinking: I hope I didn’t just blow it right there. I buy a bucket of whiting, and we get in the johnboat.
“That old woman used to pay me a coin for the crossing,” he says.
“How about a quarter,” I say, “that’s a coin.”
On the other side, I make my way across the mud to the beach, the rosaries in one hand, the bucket of fish in the other. I’ve got the rod tucked under my arm. I lay the canvas on the sand. The boat has deep sides. There’s two paddles, a spotlight, and a battery in it. I throw in my gear, and give the boat a little shoulder down to the water. The waves pat it sideways and push it back up on the beach. I pull the boat out into the water till I’m wet up to my thighs. I think I feel something brush against my legs, and I climb into the boat as fast as I can. The water is black. I can’t see anything.
I go due east through the waves till the pink haze of Corpus Christi disappears behind the horizon. I’m thinking: Lights, city. The moon’s just about full, and its reflection wobbles on the moving water. I pour the fish halves around the front and sides of the boat and sling fistfuls of rosaries into the Gulf. My legs are still wet, and now they’re cold.
I scan the water with the hi-beam. I put some bait on my hook, pour the rest out in the water, and toss in what rosaries I have left.
I think about Layla’s skeleton. And my own, too. And Billy’s and Bollin’s and my wife’s.
I drop to my knees. I spread my arms out, palms up to the sky.
“God is great,” I say. “God is good. Thank him for this real good food.” It’s all I can think of. I say it again. I rhyme it. Good fud. Gude food. I try other starts: “Thank you, Father for…in Your blessing…I accept You…Forgive…” But after the first few words I’m lost.
I kneel like that for a long time before there’s a knock on the boat. I shine the hi-beam over the water, but I don’t see anything.
Then the rod jumps, and the wheel of nylon line is shrinking fast. I crouch, get a good footing, and lock the reel. I’m jerked into the sidewall. The boat whooshes across the water. I push around in the hull, trying to get some traction, but the boat leans over low, like it’s about to flip.
I let out the line, reel it back in. Let it out, reel it back in. Out in the distance, there’s a cracking noise like a great big hand slaps the water.
Then everything stops. The boat tips back up. I can hear the sea again. I reel the line in slow. There’s a heavy weight on the end, not like a living thing. I get it in close enough, and I switch on the hi-beam. A few yards out, there’s a black triangle — a ray — big as the boat, like nothing I’ve seen. It ripples and starts rising, an inch at a time. Its head breaks the water. I can see its eyes.
Now, this will sound like madness, but I want to ask it a question. I’m not sure what. But I get this feeling that I don’t have a hold of him, but that he’s got a hold of me. And it’s not a bad feeling. Really not bad. In fact, it’s good. He’s got a hold of me. Me.
And that’s the question: Are you just some fish, or are you hiding something? Is she in there? Can I lift up that black cape and find her face beneath?
