Don Webb
8122 Evadean Circle
Austin TX 78745
The shark had been stinking dead for several days when Eduardo woke us up, telling us that we had to bury it.
Eduardo ran the Blue Parrot, a beach bar for tourists with a taste for cinematic names. I worked there because my money had run out. I was in Buenos Ares to study painting, but had been careless. I figured my parents would bail me out, but they had heard of “tough love.” Two things were in the air that summer, the release of the Spanish-language Jaws, and the Peron regime. The staff slept in tents that Eduardo rented during the day for families wanting a place to get out of the sun.The tents always smelled of suntan oil.
The bar had no roof, so when it rained, everyone just left without paying. The staff peeled off their clothes and ran straight into the water. We always wore bathing suits underneath, and always prayed for rain because it was the only time we could swim. We always swam through the worst storms; great jagged lightning slashing at an angry sea. I had loved the storms since it gave me a chance to see Susan, another bad money manager that worked tables at the Blue Parrot. She was my idea of home, everything I wanted to get back to. But she was closed to me, to everyone.
One morning about three, Eduardo yelled at us to wake up. "You have to bury the shark!" he was yelling” ¡Entierre el tiburón!
A rotting huge carcass of a great white had washed up on the beach. A fisherman had caught it and pulled its jaws out of its body, the teeth and jaws of a shark are valuable-- especially since Jaws had become a big movie. The fisherman had tossed the jawless shark overboard, and it had washed to shore.
It stank like nothing has ever stunk. Everyone was puking. Susan gave me a bandanna and sprinkled her perfume on it. It was some cheap American perfume that you could buy in any mall. I was in love.
Eduardo kept yelling and lighting torches. "You have to bury it. No one must see it." I guess that if tourists realized that there were great white sharks in the waters off of Buenos Aires, the tent rentals would go down.
He didn't have enough shovels, so they went to those waiters, who were blood relatives of Eduardo. Susan and I scooped wet sand with pieces of board. We all dug and scraped and scooped at an immensely fast pace. When the hole looked like it must be deep enough, all of the waiters gathered on one side and rolled the smelly carcass in. It partially fell apart and Susan puked last night’s milanesa onto the rotting fragments.
There was too much shark for our shallow grave. But not by much. We tossed sand on top of it, and put boards across the sand and began jumping up and down on the boards. We could feel it squelch and spurt. The sand went dark with its rotting fluids.
It still smelled like hell, but no one would see the shark.
We went off to bathe in the sea. I talked to Susan, and for the first time she talked to me. We talked about Jaws. We had both seen it and been very scared when it first came out. I told her how a small child had grabbed my hair from behind during the scene when the head floats out of the sunken boat. I talked about the mall in Amarillo, Texas where I had seen the movie and the Orange Julius I drank afterward.
We talked about being sick and scared of Argentina, mainly because of people disappearing in the night. When I rode the bus on the Avenido Correntes, and the light was just right, I could read the ghosts of the graffiti that had been sandblasted off the buildings. These stony palimpsests of protest on the labyrinthine walls of downtown B.A. were scarier than seeing the people actually carted off.
One day a taxi driver had told Susan, "I saw them burying the bodies." To say that was to risk everything, you didn't tell anyone anything. But he had to talk. He had to tell.
He had fallen asleep in his cab, on the outskirts of the city Just at dawn; he woke up when a truck pulled up to a ditch half filled with refuse. Two men began pulling the bodies out of the truck; two more showed up later with a bulldozer and covered the bodies and the garbage together. The taxi driver had been too scared to move. If they had seen him, they would have killed him. So he just acted like he was asleep, slouched over his wheel with his eyes as tightly closed as could be.
"He probably told me," said Susan, "Because I was an American, and probably safe. I wanted to call my mother that night to have her get me out of here. But I was sacred. Did they have my lines tapped- So instead I told them that I was working my way back home, and that they were right I was stupid to have ever come."
"We'll make it," I said. I had no idea why I said it, but it seemed to be the manly remark. We would make it in about a year at our current wages.
The staff had gone back to their tents to sleep till noon when the customers would show up. We were alone on the beach, and the sun was coming up. It was the first time I had ever been in the water when it wasn't stormy. The other thing that was really obvious to me was that I needed to make love to Susan, because I wasn't very good at telling her how damn scared I was, and how afraid I had been of even the dead shark lit by the wavering torchlight. No one in my family had died, I'd never had a pet die other than a goldfish, and I had never buried anything. And now she was talking about real people dying. I was scared. She was beautiful. It was an easy equation.
It was an equation that she likewise had worked through. But privacy was at a premium. The tents were full of co-workers, the beach offered no cover.
"Lets' dig a little trough," she suggested, and we used Eduardo’s shovels.
We were far enough away from the Blue Parrot that we couldn’t be seen. Someone would have to be upon us to see our frantic activity.
Someone was.
An elderly American tourist walked by while we were making love, and gasped. It made it wonderful, or more wonderful since it was the best thing in either of our lives, but the sudden prudish gasp made it into a something we were doing in the park back home. She scurried away. We finished, went for another swim, and went back to our respective tents to grab an hour or two of sleep.
Noon came, and we were tired and sore.
For some reason there seemed to be about twice as many customers as usual and every one of them had a special drink order.
"Young man." It was the older woman who had seen us this morning. I didn't know what Eduardo would do if she complained. Jobs weren't easy to come by.
"Young man, are you an American-"
I thought about answering in Spanish, pointing out that we were all Americans, but I went with, "Yes'M."
I saw that she wore thick, almost coke bottle glasses.
"Young man do you know why the beach smelled so fishy this morning-"
"No."
"It was because of the mermaids. I saw a pair of them there."
She pointed to where Susan and I had made love.
You know they’re very rare,” she continued, “My father was a pair once mating off of the coast of Massachusetts. He was a captain in the Merchant Marine during the war, and you know what he told me-”
“No, M’am.”
“He told me that it was a good omen, that if you see it, no matter how dark things are everything will be all right.”
For Steven Hall
