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"New Freedom" vows the package optimistically. The woman on its cover wears a tan pantsuit and turns over her shoulder, daring the camera to find a stain. She must be Newly Free. Matt shoves his hands in his pockets to wipe all the sweat from his palms. An aisle or two down he hears a woman's voice echoing so he idles for a good five minutes, just in case. Pretends he's very invested in comparing brands of toilet paper.
He had an extraction scheduled maybe two months back and he blew it off, called Dr. Feldman to say his own home injection regiment was doing the trick perfectly fine on its own thank-you-very-much. It wasn't a lie or the truth either. It was true that after years of self-administration he had a better handle on it than any of the Del Em clinics or endocrinologists he's had the misfortune of co-paying. It was a lie that any of it was going perfectly fine, including that part. But his hair's falling out of his temples now and blooming out his chin and nobody in the post office or the men's room calls him ma'am anymore; it's never turned easy but there are things he's gotten used to. He certainly didn't imagine his cycle could start itself up again in such a hurry. He hadn't even thought twice about the stomach cramps, Amity was a clam chowder sort of place.
Every package looks bizarre and expensive, the last time he had to purchase anything of the sort there was a system of clips to attach it to the belt. For minutes now, he's hunted for a brand that matches best on the axes of smallest container and smallest script boasting FEMININE, but as soon as he hears footsteps close, he makes a wild grab for the nearest pack and beelines for the cashier.
He'd thought before he left for Amity about whether he should bring the whole nine yards, the clean hypodermics and the vials he might not be able to replace if even one shattered on the way over. He smiles bitterly in the checkout line remembering he had concluded he wouldn't possibly be out of town long enough for it to be necessary.
He'd been so afraid of anyone getting suspicious -- of everyone getting suspicious all at once in a close-knit town -- that he hadn't even packed a single dose to take with him from the sheer threat of visibility. Now in some cruelly self-fulfilling oracle, he's holding up the line at a tiny local grocery, plonking down handfuls of candy bars at the register just so the pads aren't the only thing on the counter.
The cashier gives him a big, weird smile that jolts galvanic fear into his entire nervous system. He never knows quite what to do when he's been figured out in public.
"You must be such a good boyfriend," she sighs, "My George wouldn't dare pick these up for me! Let alone with chocolates."
Hooper mumbles something flustered that peters out in asking for a paper bag.
= = = = =
"I know you mentioned," Brody drawls, protractedly choosing a jacket, "that you intend to... report back to the Institute tomorrow..."
Hooper cuts him off with a snort, hammering the cork of the pinot grigio back in with his fist.
"Let me guess. This isn't going to be a twenty-four hour job like you promised."
"I wouldn't say that." Brody zips up worn leather. "I wouldn't say I promised anything. Hey, don't set that bottle down, we can take it along."
"And the potato salad," Ellen urges, swirling her glass.
She said over dinner Martin hates boats, doesn't want to go out on the water. Hooper doesn't want to spend tonight in a hard bed sweating through the sheets when he was supposed to be making plans to sail back, but sacrifices happen. He's already mentally cataloguing how much of his diving gear he might have in the trunk.
"Please, take that piece of chocolate cake in the fridge, before Sean or I can get to it." Ellen waves a single free hand at Martin while he packs a bin the size of a picnic basket.
"Uh -- I think we'll be..." Hooper shrugs under her gaze. "...dissecting a carcass."
She smiles, wearied and a little far-away. "You don't have to take the cake along."
Outside, the tide comes in dark under the stars, eating the shore slow and spitting it up. Hooper tightly squeezes his own crossed arms. He has at least two pairs of goggles in his trunk of gear. His wetsuit is coiled at the bottom. He can't decide if it's more dangerous to ask a woman he just met if she has any tampons in the house or to jump into the Atlantic ocean with nothing.
Martin vows to Ellen that he'll have the cake while they're driving.
"Is there anything else you boys need?" she says, a little wryly, when Chief Brody adds a whiskey bottle from the cabinet to their supply crate.
Hooper makes a face like he's swallowing his bottom lip.
"I wouldn't wear a leather coat, Martin," he says.
= = = = =
Before he sets foot on deck, Brody takes a brutally large swig of the whiskey plain. Chases it with a sheath of hardened chocolate icing.
"You hate the water," says Hooper. He hasn't forgotten, he just still can hardly believe it.
Brody peers at the slit of ocean between the dock and starboard as though he's looking inside a spittoon. From the deck of his boat, Hooper reaches a steadying arm out, waiting, waiting.
"I don't hate it," Brody concludes, after quite a moment of thought.
Hooper wiggles the fingers on his outstretched hand expectantly and urges, "My pants are soaked all the way through with tiger shark chyme..."
He can tell Brody's starting to get sloppy because the chief mutters a line that ends in a "happy to see me". The wooden dock creaks a pitiful goodbye behind him as he boards. Between the two of them, they already belted half of the whiskey together, at Brody's behest. He demanded it before they sorted through the shark's insides and Hooper obliged, just as eager to not remember the manual feel of a crushed child's skeleton. Instead he only pulled out fish heads and garbage and ruined a nice pair of jeans past the knee with hydrochloric acid.
By the time he resurfaces from wrestling into a new pair in the boat's narrow quarters, there's a hill of pretzel packets set like a shrine, a floral china plate of green beans and potato salad fixed in the captain's chair. Even after polishing off the rest of the bottle by himself, Brody thought to set out matching cutlery.
"Thanks," Hooper calls, edging the plate out of his seat.
Every expedition he's been on, he's had at least one other person present, but never anyone who brought food to share or particularly wanted to speak to him. Brody opens up like a scallop: all in wild bursts while they're on the water. He hates this woman on the board at Sean's school. Sometimes he wishes he hadn't given up piano lessons as a teenager. He's been afraid of drowning ever since he was four. Six years back, when he took Michael through the aquarium in Brooklyn, it gave him chills.
Hooper's eyebrows jump a mile.
"Six years ago? At the New York Aquarium?" He swallows thickly. "You, uh... see the sharks while you were there?"
Brody doesn't even nod, just worries a thumb back and forth across the ridge of his brow.
"Michael wanted to go look up close and then he screamed to high heaven as soon as one swam by. Couldn't stop crying. Poor girl giving the tour had to put a hold on her whole show while we squeezed out through the entire crowd..."
Brody makes a sound between a laugh and a sigh.
"She gave him a balloon. Shaped like a starfish."
Hooper consciously attempts to will his own heart back into his chest. He almost feels electrocuted.
"...Lemon shark?" he finally ventures, dry-mouthed.
Brody gives him a look. "Hey, yeah."
"I, uh..." Hooper gives himself a moment to reconsider. Then another, to try and get his breathing straight.
"Six years ago, I, um... I... was working there, actually."
"Huh! No shit." Brody's twisting into the white wine's cork with his car keys. "Small world."
Hooper closes his eyes. Tomorrow he will be raptured away to the Aurora with a roll of record-breaking Great White portraits and no reason to ever dock in Amity again.
"Martin. You wanna know something funny?" he asks.
When he first told his mother she screamed for an hour, without any words at all, just so many lethal shrieks he had to turn the police away from the door and spend the day reassuring the neighbors. His sister still doesn't let him see her kids anymore, not even in photographs.
Brody's unlike any reaction he's had yet. He just absorbs, mostly in silence. Hooper makes eye contact with the lighted navigation panel and the black ocean and pours out every tale that feels relevant.
The aquarium exhibit in New York.
Menstruating suddenly for the first time in ages while he's working on an island with a shark problem.
Several illuminating bullet points from the six giant years in between.
He's used to telling the tale in meticulous brevity, choosing the right words to wedge in edgewise before the questions about Christine Jorgensen and liberated women and the hospital and his uterus and Hell. All Brody wants to know is if he's kidding. Hooper assures him he couldn't make any of it up if he tried, then watches him stare out at the sea.
They're maybe half an hour from shore. Hooper can't get his heart rate slow enough to stop thrumming against the fabric of his shirt.
"Well, thanks." Brody ekes out. "For the starfish."
"Sure," Hooper breathes hoarsely.
He waits for whatever comes next, the jokes or the threats. It's been projectiles, more than once.
"D'j'you used to live in Brooklyn? You ever go into Mayhew's?" Brody drinks straight from the lip of the white wine. "Don't, if you haven't. Ellen had a cockroach run right across her fingers at the bar."
Hooper laughs until his lungs are empty and his head is in his hands.
= = = = =
"Let's tow it in," Brody says, anxiously manning the light across the bow of Ben Gardner's boat.
Hooper steadies the ladder and tells him not to worry, in between his own panting breaths. The ship's lights beam a sickly halo of big green circles beneath the water. Hooper promises to come up in two minutes but brings a distinctly multipurpose knife.
It's like he predicted, the hull of Gardner's vessel is nearly destroyed, entire panels torn away and huge bites punched straight through the wood. He's hoping for comparative measurements but before he can get any gear out to take down the radius, he spies an unchipped tooth left in souvenir-shop condition.
The face of a corpse that must be Gardner's flaps down to peer at him.
Hooper blinks underneath his goggles and painstakingly only exhales.
Gardner's skin is stark white, without a hint of the telltale purple-blue the sea bestows on dead human flesh. Few parts of him seem to have bloated, his features all look intact. He's even got an eyeball left untouched. Gardner's lips have a hint left of pinkness. Before they pulled up alongside the sunken boat their sonar was reporting something so wide Hooper assumed it had to be a school.
He can't see an inch outside the range of his flashlight beam. The stretch of bay they're in goes thousands of feet deep.
Hooper shoots to the surface and swims a lopsided butterfly stroke. Brody panics, shines the boat's light directly into his eyes. Hooper doesn't realize until he's gripping the ladder with both hands that they're empty, he dropped everything.
There was a whole tooth, he tells Brody, and a corpse, and the shark responsible for leaving both behind must have been there ten minutes ago at the very most.
They make tomorrow's plan of action over yesterday's potato salad. Brody says he'll call the mayor as soon as light breaks.
"Oh, shit!" Hooper stands. "Sorry. I gotta go change out of the suit. I don't want it to, uh..." He pulls a face. Gentility is past him, tonight and in maybe this lifetime. "...stain."
He freezes, watching Brody's expression fall into total horror.
"You... you went--" Martin points, loosely, repeatedly, searchingly, between Hooper and the sea, "You're -- you mean right now you're...?! ...And you went in the water?!"
Brody throws open his arms in disbelief.
"You wouldn't have fit my gear," Hooper shrugs.
He hides an expanding smile with the last chunk of potato and physically waves Brody off as he yells his name, hardly calling, mainly scolding.
= = = = =
Off the coast of Malpelo there are regular swarms of sphyrnids, daily, hundreds thick. The island itself is millions of years old, all volcanic breccias and hardened pillow lavas from at least the Miocene epoch. Four different churning currents sweep in a veritable menagerie under the Malpelo ridge, thirty-foot eagle rays and huge schools of olive sharks feeding and breeding, giant billfish cutting through the water at more than sixty miles an hour. Save for five men on a military base, the island is empty of inhabitants, and any diving expeditions staying overnight are allowed exclusive entry, a single boat permitted access at a time.
The Aurora is set to circle Malpelo Island for a solid month. Then they head out for Hokkaido, near reported sightings of a blossoming communal bullhead nest.
The Aurora leaves port at one o'clock. Hooper lays on his side under an old thin blanket until the force of a wave tips him flat on his stomach. He spent the morning trying to dumb down the life cycle of every living thing in the ocean for a man dressed like Popeye's wealthy uncle. Starchy white anchor print on sky-blue. He's spent the afternoon in the bed of his boat's quarters, recalculating again and again how long it would take to sail to the mainland, unpack, shove everything he needs into a fresh suitcase, and haul ass down the highway to the docks where the Aurora's moored. It was already too late to be plausible when he first checked his watch three hours ago. Still, he finds himself checking again, every thirty minutes or so, reimagining: he could skip eating, skip a shower, wear the same clothes, speed on the interstate. Be the guy who shows up late and frazzled and reeking and, with his luck, miss the ship anyway. Tiptoe quietly out of Amity before it all gets swallowed up with his name attached as the outsourced expert. There's nothing Hooper wants to hear more than a news report that the mayor of Amity Island has been charged with criminal negligence. There's nothing he wants to hear less than the mangled body of another child serving as the tipping point.
Hooper looks at his watch again. Malpelo's one of the only places the smalltooth sand tiger's been observed and recorded alive. Amity smells like an old shoe.
Over the hissing throb of the water, he hears footsteps approaching. Hooper sits up. He purposely anchored off the docks, away from any fishermen.
"Mister Hooper!" with a knock on the stern that's impatient and domestic all at once. Brody.
"Hey! Yeah! Um--" he shouts back in fragments, searching the floor for a sweatshirt, his denim jacket, dinner jacket, lifejacket, anything.
"Matt! I need a word!" Before Hooper can breathe, Brody adds, "I am not boarding that thing!"
All he can find are t-shirts so he layers three, short-sleeved, medium, long. By the time he comes out on deck Brody's seated at the opposite end of a wooden picnic table, watching the edge of the water. Hooper jumps the distance between the boat and the neighboring land.
"I have your wages," Brody tells him first, "one day's worth, plus the little extra I could wring from the budget. I wish I could, uh... make it at least two."
"Wish I could have done you any real help." Hooper holds the envelope uncertainly.
Brody drops any final trappings of decorum, folds his arms over the table and tucks his chin into them.
"Tomorrow morning the tourists hit this place like locusts," he groans into his sleeve. "I've got every boat the force owns in the water, standing watch, first thing. But that's just a handful, we're stretched to the end of our funding and there's nobody outside of town allowed to know there's even a problem."
Brody rubs his eyes in weary circles.
The Aurora is out somewhere on the open sea.
"Martin, are you asking me a favor?" Hooper says.
Brody draws his breath in laboriously, says, "I thought you were headed out tonight."
"This afternoon was the plan." Hooper shakes his head. "I would've been packing if we hadn't had to, uh, 'negotiate' the existence of a carnivore the size of a pontoon."
Brody says he's sorry, in a way that could be about the ship leaving, or Vaughn, or both.
He squints at the tide like he's sizing it up.
"You were right," Brody nods slow, "You're the only other rational man I know on this island." He draws a cigarette from his uniform's shirt pocket, mumbles, "and we had to import" while it's in his lips.
Hooper feels himself flush in the face a little. He suddenly can't help but start thinking of which pieces of radio equipment he remembered to bring.
"My plans for the next eighteen months did just sail away without me," he offers.
"In the interest of full disclosure," Brody says, low, "if you were to stay tomorrow, I couldn't give you another cent for it."
Hooper doesn't need another cent. He needs a good night's sleep, but then so does Brody, so does Alex Kintner's mother.
"How many police boats?" he asks, and Brody smiles, already knows he's got him.
= = = = =
Ellen opens the door in a swimsuit with Sean balanced on one hip and the base of a toy telephone shoved under her other arm, its cord scraping the floor.
"Oh," Hooper looks around uncertainly.
Martin told him yesterday to show up first thing in the morning. He wore his suit jacket and tie, unsure of what to expect.
"Mister Hooper! Come in," she shuffles out of the doorway, "Martin told me you had a phone call."
Sean eagerly reels in the toy's plastic receiver and proffers it with a sticky hand.
"Thanks," says Hooper.
"Sean..." Ellen warns.
He wasn't expecting any call. The only people who know his whereabouts are colleagues from the Institute and if they meant to get a hold of him, they certainly wouldn't try the police chief of the island first.
When they approach, Brody's seated at what looks like his desk, diplomatizing frantically into one telephone between his shoulder and ear, pressing the receiver of another into his chest. He beckons as best he can with a single elbow, holds the second phone out to Hooper, away from Sean, back out to Hooper again.
"There ain't no pancake mix!" Michael yells out from the kitchen.
Hooper leans against the windowsill to answer the phone. "Hello?"
"Hello? Is that you?" A high-pitched voice comes piercing through the static, "Mary-Beth Hooper?"
Matt makes a sudden, constricted sound he purposefully hides inside a cough. "Who is this?"
"It's Fran Davies, from school! Tammy called me the morning the Aurora left and told me you weren't going aboard anymore!" Fran laughs, loud, and in an unreadable way. "She says you're stuck, off of Massachussetts."
Hooper chews the inside of his cheek. "I'm out on Amity right now doing research."
"Oh, thank heavens, that's what I hoped you'd say! Sharks?"
"Yeah." he watches the empty beach, grey sky. "Still sharks."
"Good! Perfect. Because Melanie -- you know, Melanie who led the expedition near Florida -- she's supposed to head out tonight for a six-month dive observing whale sharks off Brisbane, but now her dog keeps getting sick again. Or her daughter, or something, I don't know. In any case, she's looking for somebody experienced to fill her spot! She says the ship leaves port at five tonight in Boston..."
Hooper takes so long breathing in and out Fran asks if he's still on the line. Eighteen hours ago he would have sold his soul for a chance at another shark dive, let alone one heading out right from the mainland.
"Dad," Sean tugs at the leg of Martin's pants, "are we going to the beach yet, Dad? Can we go out to the beach now, Dad?"
Hooper murmurs into the telephone, "I'm pretty embroiled in something time-sensitive."
Fran moans plaintively. "Mel really needs a favor and I told her I'd find someone! Come on, Mary-Beth. Be a sport."
Sean starts toddling over and Ellen deftly scoops him up, instructing, "Mister Hooper's on the phone, honey, let's not bother him right now."
The dawn stabs long sheaths of sunlight in through the fog. Last night Chief Brody said the first taffy shops and hot dog stands start opening at seven o'clock.
Michael comes in to prove how empty the Bisquick box is by shaking it over the carpet upside down. Enough falls out to make at least a pancake. Martin says "damn it", then "sorry" when he realizes it was into the receiver.
"...there is no need for me to come to Brisbane," Hooper loses every shred of his conspiratorial tone, finds himself starting to pace the floor, "when I've got a Great White shark right here!"
= = = = =
The sun sinks so low it looks like it's going underwater. Every store on the wharf is closed. Two police boats bob up and down at opposite ends of the bay. There's a couple of gulls, and no swimmers.
Brody grinds his cigarette out in the hospital parking lot and unsheaths a fresh one.
"So now it doesn't matter what Vaughn says tomorrow, or an hour from now--" he comes to the tail end of a frenetic monologue, "--because I've got the contract in writing. Ten thousand dollars. And our guy comes with his own vessel, armed and outfitted."
"You're not going with him?" Hooper asks, and gets back exactly the look he expected.
He avoids Brody's eyes, rubs the back of his neck, rests his elbows on his knees.
"Martin, it's bigger than a motorboat. He can't... reel it in on a line."
"You haven't met Quint."
"I haven't met anybody who can catch an adult white shark while singlehandedly steering and crewing a ship big enough to carry one."
Brody draws on his cigarette. "You haven't met Quint."
Hooper worries that he'll meet him in the papers later and for all the wrong reasons. But he can only argue so much, Brody's looking back every other minute at the second floor of the hospital to see if the light in Michael's window has turned on.
"Would you come with me tomorrow? Just to deliver his contract." Brody gazes at him earnestly. "I could drive out to wherever you're anchored."
Hooper blinks. He thought surely he overstayed his welcome in Amity the moment a man got eaten alive on his watch, if not sooner. He hasn't smoked tobacco since he was fourteen but he accepts Brody's unfinished half, the moment he offers.
"I doubt I'd help you arbitrate," Hooper exhales a cloud towards the shoreline, "you're the one who just got city funding to kill a shark the city says legally doesn't live here."
The last pair of police boats trail gradually in towards the harbor. Brody sits next to him on the curb and closes his eyes.
"Hey, you've got your fisherman contracted, everything's settled on paper," Hooper pats his leg, attempting encouragement, "What do you need me for?"
"I'm exhausted, Matt," he says.
The wind tears through and clangs every bell-buoy in the water like chimes. The light in Michael's hospital room comes on and Brody stands.
= = = = =
Even with the door swung wide Quint's place reeks of mildew and copper and salt. There are specimens stretched open and tacked up against every wall. Trophies.
"I've crewed three Transpacs," Hooper says.
Quint stares him dead in the eyes and asks, "Transplants?" in what seems like a very purposeful misunderstanding.
Matt flounders a minute, furrows and unfurrows his brow.
"He's from the Oceanographic Institute," Brody assures.
Hooper didn't expect a welcome but he didn't expect to be looked past like the dog. Quint drawls and ambles like a shitty-moonshine New England John Wayne. For a man who says he intends to sail out alone, he sure seems instantly concerned with whether Hooper can catch heavy objects fast and tie a solid sheepshank. Quint boils two sets of Carcharhinus obscurus jaws in an old spaghetti pot brimming over with acrid steam, like Victor Frankenstein. Like Chef Boyardee.
Quint asks for his hands, and Hooper's so struck with the strangeness of it he doesn't even reply, just sort of holds up his wrists. Quint's palms are calloused, grasping, he jams his thumbs in under Hooper's like a pair of eels.
Crushed inside another man's, Hooper feels his own hands start distorting from the force of comparison alone. They're small enough Quint envelops them both without flexing his fingers. City hands, he says, with a smirk and a gleam in his eye that makes Hooper wrench his arms away and think all over again about leaving the island for good. He's perspiring through nearly three layers, starting to redden in the face. Martin physically steps between them.
"You--you... you're not going to do this aboard the ship, are you, Mr. Quint?" Brody stutters.
= = = = =
Of all the things he imported from the mainland for the trip, sunscreen didn't make Hooper's list, and he's regretting it the more he peels. The three of them are baking in their skins, Brody keeps taking off his heavy gloves to tip them empty. Quint sweats torrential and bolts cans of beer and refuses to move from his seat on the deck. When they first left harbor he raised a toast, two mugs of the apricot brandy he'd been chartered in advance. Hooper wouldn't have gotten perturbed in the slightest except that Quint called it an honest man's drink. Clinked his cup aggressively to Brody's and grinned up at the helm, at Hooper's empty hands.
Now Brody's in the ship's kitchen tending to his own head wound with rubbing alcohol and Quint gets an awful lot quieter. He gives navigational orders, and hums something lilting, antithetical to the shanties he'd been yelling to wake the sea urchins.
"Caught a mako 'round this stretch not three weeks ago," he says. Barely even bragging. Remarkably docile.
"Yeah?" Hooper turns halfway over his shoulder. "How big?"
Quint says "ten foot" without the hint of a challenge implied.
Hooper thinks of the mako teeth pinned like butterflies on the walls of Quint's cabin; asks, "So do you sell 'em all, or... eat 'em?" because he's truly been wondering.
Before he gets the answer, there's the swing of a door hinge and Brody wanders out onto the deck, swabbing his forehead with gauze.
Quint laughs like a trumpet. "Kid, I don't know who pulled the goddamned string on your back!"
Hooper stares out at the sky, drumming his fingers against the wheel in a furor. The Orca's motor chugs too loud, the morning is too long, his patience is too thin.
Quint spends more than twenty minutes regaling Brody with tales of the biggest porbeagles he's hooked by himself, "before Hooper there could use a straight-razor!" Which was correct, in a certain sense. Brody goes back inside to search for his zinc oxide tube and Quint tells Hooper, in a quiet reverence, how he practically grew up over the Atlantic. Started out fishing mackerel off Rockport in a boat his grandfather built by hand. Brody comes within earshot and Quint asks what a grown man does with a wetsuit besides play at dress-up, cackles staccato, you gonna dress up for us, Hoop?
They've been on the water all day, left port around seven in the morning at the very latest. Hooper stays at the wheel while Brody paces, Quint casts, Brody eats, Quint dozes, Brody complains, Quint prattles, Brody tans, Quint sings. The shark won't touch the chum, the sun won't touch the horizon. Hooper buffs a crust of dried saltwater specks from the face of his watch. Quarter-past four, with the second hand crawling. He's dying to check his camera equipment. He's dying to rest his legs. He's dying to prove himself. He steers with one arm, bounces inconsolably on the balls of his feet.
"Hooper," Quint calls; waits, smirking, until Hooper turns all the way around to shout, "you look like you've gotta piss!"
Quint laughs, decides aloud what animal it is he keeps reminding him of.
Hooper cuts him off, disinterested, says, "Uh -- yeah, now that you mention it. Switch me out and steer a minute?"
Brody fiercely eyeballs his own boots.
"You know what they say, eh, Hooper?" Quint yells against the wind, "A real man never leaves his post to attend to his post!"
He sure cracks himself right the hell up. Hooper grits his teeth to try and keep out the memory of watching Quint eat an entire sandwich on deck. At six A.M. before they boarded, Hooper drank a raw egg to stave off getting dizzy from blood loss.
Brody throws his worried gaze back and forth helplessly between the bow and helm. Quint flaps his damn mouth more than a basking shark.
Hooper parks the boat definitively and lets the waves run under them.
"Listen..." he starts, seething so bad his tone's one-eightied back into an eerie calm, "...if you're invested in some hazing thing where you... 'emasculate' me in front of him," an indicating flail at an increasingly panicked Brody, "I've more than beaten you to the punch! Last night he drove me to the other end of the island to pick up a box of Tampax. And, very relatedly, I am gonna need you to steer for a minute because I have been wearing the same one for almost eleven hours!"
If nothing else, it buys him thirty minutes of quiet.
= = = = =
Brody keeps creeping up to the helm to check on him. Quint hasn't dared give any orders to the contrary. Hooper says he's fine, he's fine, he's fine, until Brody cans the formalities, asks directly if it's conscionable to stay out on the Orca another minute.
"Yeah, I know my way around a harpoon," Hooper answers flatly.
Brody repeatedly dredges up the plan to turn them back to shore until Hooper starts literally flinging playing cards at him. Brody just swats a couple hearts and spades aside mildly, urges, Matt.
Hooper peers over the wall of the helm at Quint's hat, pulled down across his face.
"I'll be... safe," he mutters, watches out of his periphery as Martin's shoulders change.
"And if not, I'll make sure to shriek for your help," Hooper ends with maybe more than a fair share of bitterness.
Martin offers to stay near him at the wheel, to switch shifts if need be.
It's still more than eighty degrees out.
"Oh, don't start acting like you can skipper a boat now," Hooper scoffs, wipes his face with an empty glove. Starts setting the cards up for solitaire.
= = = = =
The first stars show their faces through the fog. The tracker and a single barrel are both trailing somewhere deep underwater. Brody's given up the boat spiel, given up a long phase of apologizing for the way the whole day and week and town panned out. He says sorry a few times more to Hooper, sorry for trapping him in Amity, let alone on the Orca.
"I could've gone home the day I arrived," Hooper tries assuaging his guilt, but it backfires by a mile.
Brody closes his eyes and says "I know" in a broken-gravel voice.
Quint calls out for the chief from inside the ship. Says he needs someone to come and keep an eye on the beef while it's cooking. Brody turns immediately toward Hooper in concern.
"Have fun, James Beard," Matt bids placidly.
Brody frowns. "You'll be all right if I--" he looks down, at the source of all the clanking pans and glasses, "--if he..."
Hooper shrugs, even smiles. He'd laugh if he had the energy but he's positive he doesn't. "I almost want to hear what he has to say."
"I'll save you a beer, if I can salvage one," Martin offers.
He opens his mouth to say something else but then Quint's shouting again, slamming cast iron.
Matt thanks him, quietly, and for a lot more than the hypothetical beer.
Brody hasn't developed sea legs, stumbles the whole way to the kitchen. Maybe because he keeps looking behind him.
The sky blackens slow and there's no hint of a beep from the barrel. Hooper chugs the ship forward, switching from foot to foot to try and keep himself awake. There's the sound of glass shattering and heavy, clumsy knife work as Brody chops, Quint admonishes, Brody sweeps, Quint laughs, Brody grumbles, Quint pours. The door swings on its hinges and waits, like it's thinking about it, too. Hooper lets his breath out of his lungs in carefully pre-ordained increments. The door shuts, and the footsteps start toward him.
"You can kill 'er here for the evening," Quint orders, "She needs the rest."
Hooper obliges readily, lets the boat whine to a halt. When he turns, Quint's extending a tin mug to him handle-first. Apricot wafts off the rim before he even brings it close.
Quint sits himself down cross-legged with a grunt and starts waxing on about sailor's astronomy, pointing out navigational stars. As though Hooper couldn't find Polaris if he needed.
The brandy isn't half bad. The break from standing up is ambrosial.
More so than cramping at the helm, more so than staring through the sun, Hooper is tired of the waiting.
"Is there something that you wanted to ask me about?" he levels, empties his cup down his throat in preparation.
Quint takes quite a while in finishing his, nursing atypical sips, silently consulting the ocean. He says Elnath, says Canopus. He says it's a strength of a man, not a weakness, to admit the things he doesn't know. Turns toward Hooper with a strange and searching gaze.
Matt laughs, throws his arms up helplessly and lets them slap back down against his legs. "Fuck, man."
He shakes his head, amused, exasperated, "Well, I, uh, started out as an A-cup and it's been long enough now that's everything's--" a messy, deflating gesture, "--redistributed... I finished having my name changed on paper years ago, before I ever moved out of New York... and holy shit am I going to schedule a hysto the second I get back to the mainland."
Quint's head bobs on his neck once or twice while he listens, distinctly not a nod, just a few sharp jerks of conversational whiplash. The same search stays in his eyes. He quickly aims it toward the bottom of his mug.
He pours himself another, the size of an octuple-shot, then waggles the bottle at Hooper in invitation while the cork's out.
"You know," Hooper starts, once both their cups are filled and emptied again, "it's kind of like... Corinthians."
He grins, makes himself laugh until his eyes shut: he'd been trying for minutes to think of a reference in Quint's wheelhouse, kept coming back to Robert Frost and ended up with Christ. Hooper doesn't know Peter from Philip but half-recalls a line that makes reference to "becoming a man", something simplistic enough to bridge a part of the chasm.
Quint considers the moon with a sidelong glance. From memory, he quotes a verse about the once-dim reflection of a mirror finally giving way to a true face, about coming to fully know things, being fully seen and known.
He graciously returns to identifying constellations, gives Hooper a minute to reach up under his glasses.
= = = = =
None of the boat's lights have come back on, but none of the boat's on fire anymore so it feels like they've at least broken even.
"There once was a young man from Leeds..." Quint begins in a salacious singsong, interrupts himself with a laugh that devolves quickly into coughing.
From out on the deck, the slurping of the manual bilge pump gurgles to silence, then thuds against the wood. Brody hollers that he wants to switch jobs for a minute. And that he's not a narc.
Quint's gathering his lungs, Hooper's holding his breath, Brody steps inside before he gets any answer.
"We patched most of the holes already," Hooper says with smoke curling incriminatingly out of his mouth.
Quint leans to rap two fingers against a forking split in the wall. "If you don't mind she's tall, Chief, you're welcome to come caulk the last one!"
Brody squints. "Where'd you find a dry box of matches?"
He sits between the two of them, takes a while to toe aside a floating island of debris and bend his rigid limbs. Quint says it's been years since he saw a dry box in Amity and Hooper tries to not encourage him by laughing but god damn it.
Brody's never been stoned before, he says, and Quint loads in a new and monstrous pipeful in remedy. The supply's all Hooper's, from the mainland. He thought to ship in the Johnson SMGs and the film rolls and a cigar box crammed full of Panama Red. The pipe is Quint's, hand-whittled more than two decades back. He lights it for Brody again and again in the insistence he's got to catch up. It only takes about twenty minutes of effort to get him rambling about how he can't stand that Winning Streak game show, Michael inexplicably loves it, Ellen says it raises her blood pressure.
Hooper zones out staring into the locks on the case he packed the strychnine nitrate in. He could put the cage together by himself, it would just take a long and heavy while. He rubs an anxious hand across the constricting ache in his abdomen.
"Oh, I was... I've gotta... fix! That. Uh, wall." Brody remembers, struggles to find the container of marine epoxy and then struggles even more ponderously to unscrew the top.
"Yeah, I can take care of the deck," Hooper brushes his sweaty palms off against his jeans.
Without moving from his seat atop the dining table, Quint orders them both to stand down. "I'll be up the rest of the night either way," he offers in explanation, strikes a new match.
"The rest of the night ended hours ago," Hooper says. "If we're staying out here, we've got to start sleeping in shifts."
Quint nods agreement, puffs like an industrial chimney. "And you'll be the first."
"There's inches of water on deck," Hooper looks out at the bilge pump, floating.
Quint says, "Shut your eyes, Mister Hooper."
"It shouldn't take me long to finish the job if I--"
Quint says, "Shut your mouth, Mister Hooper."
Daylight's starting to creep up on them. Brody keeps nodding off onto his own shoulder while he's working, ends up spackling three of his fingers together. Only upon Quint's direct instruction, Hooper lays across the dining table with his arms folded; watches with his glasses off as Quint's blurry figure goes to finish patching the Orca's splintering parts. First the sun's barely peeking over the waves, then it's beaming in every window and Hooper sits up out of a nightmare about water and blood, can't unstick his shirt from his back. Brody's asleep curled in the booth around the table, shoulders hunched, a red imprint of his glasses pressed into his forehead. The ship's holes are mended and hardened. The bilge pump hangs dormant on a rusted hook. Hooper looks out at the deck and the entire thing's dry, with Quint at the bow eating breakfast like he's cruising on a Cunard line.
= = = = =
The Orca cries out like a real one as the current sloshes through her shredded hull. Now and again Quint's face twitches with anguish at the sounds but he holds Hooper's tank straight for him all the same so he can untangle its straps.
The cage went up fast with the three of them working. Even the wetsuit was easy, Hooper's never been on a dive where he could change clothes without the added steps of crouching, guarding, vigilance, panic. He's never had raw sunlight on his back before, he realized only as it touched him.
Brody talks purposely over the sound of the waves, plans out where they'll anchor when they near the shore. He asks, fruitlessly and for the fifth time, if Matt brought his knife with him; if he's wearing the watch that's clearly on his wrist. Brody blinks through discomfort but won't break his gaze.
"At this point, would it matter one way or the other?" Hooper answers the wristwatch bullshit and the question Martin's too polite to ask aloud.
The minute hand is already bent beyond ruin, and they're trying to fucking lure the shark.
Hooper clambers eager into the cage's mouth. Brody and Quint both hold the rails and cables steady, both crane to scan the ocean, both let him use their arms for balance, both hand him everything he needs, both ease his weight into the water, both watch the waves behind his head.