One of the shark catchers had long arms with muscles that braided back and forth beneath his skin. His bicep was painted in blues and sea-greens that blurred and glowed now that the moon was the chief light on the shore. His arms moved like waves, like undulating ropes, as he held onto the clear plastic thread that shot out to sea. One side of the thread, running through his hands, fed into a reel on a fishing line. The other side of the thread, stretched taut, pointing far across and then below the surface of the waves, had fastened itself, by way of a double -edged razor, in the lower lip of a shark.
The onlookers would remember the shark. When it came to shore at last, pulled in slowly, with patience, the shark catchers stumbling back and forth across the sand, the excitement building octaves in their voices, making them sound like cracking seals, telling each other now now NOW and whoa whoa, slow now, WHOA take it steady, hang on there, as they grasped for the shark while pulling it in against the ebbing neap tide, calling it momma, saying she’s a big one, stumbling diagonally across the sand in unison—when in a jump-like twist it crashed into the wet exposed sand, the earth reverberated beneath dozens of gathered feet.
The shark for a moment was still. Or maybe that moment, when it landed in the crowd of shark catchers, expanded like beach tar in the sun. Maybe the night had to build extra seconds into itself in order to take in the glistening, soft-cornered airplane yanked in from the starry waters. Its skin, smooth as cloudy dusk, pressed dark wet sand into crumbling colony peaks. Its pectoral fins lay as flat and flush against the beach as a cheeks slapped to glass. The head was small and pointy, with black and searching eyes. Could it see the trailing line that brought it here? Did sharks hear; did they hear the men shouting?
WHOA whoa got her, all right, all right, bring her in okay one more wave, OKAY, Jedgetthetackle, HOLD HER while he gets it—GET THE FIN, okay—
A boy, boy-size, not even yet readable for a tween or teen, stood at a gap in the ring of shark catchers with wide eyes. His face didn’t move. His mouth was minutely downturned in a dollish pucker. No one was at his side; he had appeared in a pair of swim trunks and cocooned in a towel, separate from the shark catchers and separate from the onlookers standing well behind.
GET THE FIN—it’s a fighter!--get the camera—
A man was wading in the froth, his cargo shorts and hoodie drenched. When the shark thrashed, he moved, too, twisting and jumping, his hips at its head. His hands sprang in and out of its mouth. Other hands—another catcher—held the shark’s nose up like peeling back the lid of a can. They stumbled around in the sand and the shark jerked. The man holding the shark’s nose shouted to someone on the shore for clippers and the one holding the dorsal fin hollered back Try without em! Keep it still! to save the hook embedded in the fleshy chin.
*
When the shark catchers arrived, it was in a caravan. If two cars can be called a caravan then that is how they came, a hatchback sedan and an SUV with a bumper plastered with rectangular stickers. They migrated east from North Dakota, almost at the border of their country, then turned south at the Mississippi and peeled down past the agri-industrial flat before crossing into the panhandle. They came with massive coolers, lightweight folding chairs, duffle bags, and bug spray. They came with sinkers and tackles, bolt cutters and bait rigs, headlamps and towels, extra batteries, and spare spools of line. They came with no women, except for the one they came to meet, out there somewhere in the water.
They caught sharks all week. In the fading light they kayaked the bait way out past where it was safe to swim, left it tied to the line and paddled back along the wire. They snapped open their folding chairs in the sand. They cracked beers and shot the shit with voices like claps. Sometimes they jutted a chin in each other’s direction, or glanced to the men left and right of them. But most of their gaze stayed set out on the water, out to the emptying horizon, as the sun lowered and blinked out of sight.
Six days after they showed up, they gathered their things to go. They hoisted the coolers into the cars’ open backs. Tossed their bags behind the coolers. Stacked the folding chairs wherever they would fit. They did all this with less order than how they’d packed to come, in their driveways north of the Badlands, where packing with precision looked like a competitive sport, where each move was a step toward the ocean, where each landlocked day bore the ache of waiting. Now things flew, jumbled, into the cars, and were followed by the men piling in, with soggy tired limbs that still remembered the adrenaline of battle.
*
At some point during the tussle, an old coot nudged the boy with his sweated-out warm beer and made a fat honking noise. The boy heard him only on his third try: “Ya’d like that, wouldn’t ya.”
The boy dropped down to the sand. His knees sunk into the wet grit. His butt landed between his ankles so his legs formed a W, and sand specks tickled their way up his swim trunks. Sitting cleared his sightline: Where knuckles wrapped around cans kept swinging in front of him before, now he had a clear low-level view of the shark thrashing against the waterline. He could see legs, whisper-hairy calves and sand dollar knees, but the only faces that existed were the shark’s, and his own.
The boy’s face was grainy after it slipped out of the moonlight, but it was clear that he believed he was the animal on the sand.
*
The men believed they were the shark. They saw it as a mirror: on one side, power taut behind silvery skin; on the other side, hard teeth inside predator’s mouths. Their incisors were remnants of a shark-life. The slick of their lips were meant for water. They were meat and bones like the shark was meat and bones. Nostrils and gills; rudder feet-fins and twisted spines.
Later, in the aftermath, the beach cold and silent and the sand at their feet still bearing the imprinted shapes of a long tail and smooth hard shark belly, the men would sit back in their folded chairs and not look at each other at all. They would think things, grand sweeping truths, feeling that they are sitting in a swirl of mystical knowledge, cavorting with gods.
—the eye of the predator—
—can never truly know what power is until you—
—can’t appreciate nature until . . . can’t truly appreciate the power of nature until it’s kicking in your hands—
--a real fighter--
—looked her right in one beady eye—
—no substitute for raw—
The imprint of the shark would sprawl out before them like paint splashed on canvas. The sand would bear their staggering footprints—GET THE FIN, get the camera, the line having flicked up little straws of sand like the work of a microscopic sea worm, the rounded points of the shark’s fins set at angles like origami in the dark wet. And somewhere, blood, but it would be too dark to see.
*
When the water called, the fish answered. The chill came cool on bellies, scales, and fins, and as it came it spurred them south. Schools of bony fish swam down the coast and the sharks followed them, snapping their jaws as they corkscrewed through the glittering buffet. They chewed nothing; they swallowed everything whole. Bigger sharks were always close behind.
In coteries they swayed through the speckled dim glow. They traveled with others their age; the mature with the mature; the young with the young. They traveled without potential mates, a single-sex cluster of pointed snouts and narrow teeth. Sometimes sheer energy--some untamed force within them, a bullet of exuberance--shot their bodies out of the water, explosions of muscles from the sea.
They kept close to the shallows, moving south and then swinging into the warm Gulf waters, feeling out the steps of the ritual, sensing towards the homecoming. They were born in this place, in the nurseries of beaches and estuaries, tucked safe in salty bays. It drew them back, a gravitational line to warmer waters, tugging them, irresistibly, toward the sandy shore.
*
As one of the catcher’s hands held the shark’s nose, peeling it back like rubber, the shark catcher in the hoodie and cargo shorts worked his fingers into the shark’s lip. His left hand was deep in the maw, visible only to the wrist, as his other fingers kneaded its wet outer skin.
Someone shouted the time. Another shark catcher repeated it, calling the play: “Twenty seconds, that’s it.”
The man at the shark’s mouth appeared motionless, paused, alone with the shark in a capsule of just two bodies.
Then he flew back. Got it! A tiny metal sickle sprang through the air. Shit, where’d it go—someone grab it—
A small hand plucked the tackle from the sand. The tackle that had touched the shark, that had touched its teeth--both hard and long. The boy brought the item to touch his own teeth. It made a damp clink.
The movements of the shark catchers changed. A shiver rustled through them, converging upon the grey body on the sand, stacking themselves up next to it sideways, holding its fins like handlebars, straddling its back. The shark’s movements had slowed. It had ceased to throw its body against them. It held itself quietly, dark eyes round against its damp skin.
Get it? Get the shot? – Get it back in, time to get it back in – Did you get the teeth?
A wave came in high, coating the men and their catch. The saltwater glittered skidding over the shark’s skin. Its gills flapped to take in the wet as it gave a twisting jerk.
—Make the turn—get it in—
The shark catchers’ bodies rippled with the shark’s movement, crackers on its whip, their limbs flicking when it tossed. Three of them retreated, backing up and away, eyes on the shark’s eyes as their feet found the sand. Two stayed, bent over the shark: a man in a soaked button-up shirt and shaved head pressed against the shark’s broadside, as another man fought to catch hold of the shark’s fins to steer the animal’s direction.
In bursts, they turned the shark to face the water. When the wave came, they steered and heaved. The shark flopped with increased urgency, water reaching its gills, gravity releasing to a float. When it caught purchase in the water, its thrash became a smooth undulation, its twist an anxious swim, and it shivered into the black.
The shark catchers jumped back. They watched the water while they panted and their shoulders throbbed. It was too dark to watch the shark flee; the moon only sent them pools of glow on the water’s pulse. They turned, looking at one another and being looked at. The gathered crowd murmured and sighed.
A whimper, a sound like a muffled duck, began to draw attention. The boy was on his knees in the sand, his hands alternately shaking at the air and fumbling at his mouth.
The shark catchers sought out the source of the noise, annoyed and curious. When one of them saw the metal hook jutting through the child’s skin, he turned from the water and ran at the boy.
The shark catchers surrounded the boy, swift but silent as the onlookers. The man with painted arms pinned the boy’s hands to his sides to keep him from touching the blood on his face. The man in a soaked hooded sweatshirt, had fingers in the boy’s mouth as another man held his jaw. There passed an unspoken argument—they shot looks at one another, shaking their heads and twisting lips in a scoff—as they swayed on the beach with the boy. The moon had found his face again: He shone like a wet statue, open-mouthed, eyes wide and staring at the men on either side of him. When he jerked in pain, the jerk swept through the men’s bodies, each of them like tentacles on a creature of the sea.
With the argument’s end, one of the shark catchers’ hands wrapped around a tool at their feet and brought the device up to the boy’s face. There was a loud snap and a last fumble at his lips. Then the men fell back.
The boy stood in the sand, his hands still stiff against his sides, his mouth soft and slick and darkly stained. A bystander moved toward him, with the expected questions—Sweetie, where are your parents? Is your mom here? Where are you staying?—
He stared at the woman trying to steer him into a chair, at the weight-shifting people, and at the shark catchers. He turned and ran into the dark, toes kicking up spurts of sand.
*
In the aftermath, the men sit back in their folded chairs and do not look at each other at all. They revel, enthroned in a swirl of mystical knowledge. They think grand sweeping truths.
—flesh and blood, that’s all—
—can never truly know what power is until you—
—true beauty, that’s taking your life in your own hands—
Their muscles twitch with motor memory. Their fingers slip over wet grey skin. Half in a dream, muscles give sudden spasms, reliving the jolts amid the known steps of the dance on the shore.
The imprint of the shark is on the sand before them. The sand marks where their feet staggered, where they touched at once both earth and sea. They feel life and death as it courses through their muscles. They look out at the water and, above it, to the black-painted sky.
—if you’re gonna meet your maker you’d better be able to say—
—no substitute for raw—
—yessir I lived—
They cavort with the gods.
Margaret Redmond Whitehead's work has appeared in publications including the Atavist, the Boston Globe, the Millions, and Joyland. She was a 2017 Literary Journalism Fellow at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, and a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Fellow. She won the Puritan's 2018 Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence in Fiction. Twitter and Instagram: margredwhite
Photo by Benjamin Suter from Pexels