Beast by Peter Benchley
Twenty thousand here, twenty thousand there—they used to joke—and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
It was a joke, because the money just kept coming in.
And then one day the tap was turned off. Griffin was laid off. A week later, Elizabeth was given a choice: half time at half salary, or quit.
Griffin’s settlement would have allowed them to live for a year, no frills, while he looked for another job. But another job (undoubtedly at less money) would have meant climbing onto the same treadmill, a few paces back of the pack.
The other option was to take their severance money and buy a boat and see if, in fact, there was more to the world than confit de canard and designer fizzy water.
They kept the house in Stonington, sold the apartment in New York and put the proceeds in a trust to fund the children’s education.
They were free, and with freedom came excitement and fear and—day after day, almost minute after minute—discovery. Discovery about themselves, about each other, about what was important and what was dispensable.
It could have been a disaster, two people confined twenty-four hours a day to a space forty feet long by twelve feet wide, and for the first couple of weeks they wondered. They got in each other’s way and carped about this and that.
But then they became competent, and with competence came self-assurance, and with self-assurance, self-esteem and appreciation for one another’s strengths.
They fell in love again, and, just as important, came to like themselves again.
They had no idea what they would do when they got home. Maybe Griffin would try for another job in the money business, though from everything they’d read— mostly in the Caribbean edition of Time—the money business was in the dumper. Maybe he’d try to find work in a boatyard. He loved tinkering, didn’t even mind varnishing and sewing sails.
And she? Maybe she’d teach sailing, maybe try to join the staff of an environmental group. She had been horrified by what they had seen of the destruction of the reefs in the Bahamas and of the wildlife in the Windwards and Leewards. They had snorkeled over barren bottoms littered with the sea-bleached shells of dead conchs and the shattered carapaces of spiny lobsters. Around island after island they had seen the ocean environment despoiled and destroyed. And because they had had time to think and observe, they had come to understand more fully the cycle of poverty breeding ignorance breeding poverty breeding ignorance. She had concluded that there might be something she could do, could contribute—as a researcher or a lobbyist. She still had contacts with a lot of the rich people she had dealt with at Chemical.
It didn’t matter. They’d find something. And whatever they found would be better than what had been before, for they were new people.
It had been a wonderful trip, with not a single regret.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. There was one regret— that they had had to turn on the engine. She hated its relentless rumble, the absurd gurgle as the exhaust pipe dipped in and out of the water, the vile smell of the fumes eddying over the stern and swirling in the cockpit.
The hole in the exhaust pipe had begun to grow, as tiny bits of rusty, weakened metal had flaked away. With each surge of the boat, with each slight heave from side to side, there was movement, not only of the hull but of everything within it—not much, not noticeable, but enough to cause strain, enough to aggravate weakness.
An eye could not have seen the hole grow, but now, as the boat’s bow stuttered between two short, choppy seas, the exhaust pipe was seized by a slight torsion. It buckled and tore, and then all the water from the cooling pump poured into the bilges. And because the pipe was broken, when the boat’s stern dipped and the exhaust outlet submerged, there was nothing to keep the sea from rushing in.
Elizabeth was sleepy. The boat’s motion was the worst kind of soporific: staccato enough to be unpleasant but not violent enough to force her to stay alert. Perhaps she should wake Griffin.
She looked at her watch. No. He’d been asleep for only an hour and a half. Let him have another half hour. Then he’d be fresh and she could get some sleep.
She slapped herself in the face and shook her head.
She decided to sing. Impossible to fall asleep singing. Scientific fact. So she sang the first few bars of “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?”
A wave lapped over the stern of the boat and soaked her.
No problem. The water wasn’t cold. It would—
A wave! How does a wave come over the stern of a boat when you’re heading into the sea?
She turned and looked.
The stern was four inches from being awash. As she watched, it dipped again, and more water rushed aboard and spread over the cushions.
Adrenaline shot up her back and down her arms. She sat still for a moment, willing herself to stay calm, to gather data. The annoying gurgle from the exhaust pipe had stopped. Fumes no longer swirled over the stern.
The seas on either side of the boat looked higher. The boat’s motion was sluggish, wallowing, ass-heavy.
She reached forward of the wheel, lifted a plastic cover and flicked the switch that turned on the bilge pump. She heard the electric motor start, but something was wrong with the sound. It was distant, faint and laboring.
“Howard!” she shouted.
No answer.
“Howard!”
Nothing.
A length of bungee cord was looped over the boom, and she hooked each end around a spoke of the wheel, securing it, and went down through the hatch.
A stench of exhaust fumes choked her and burned her eyes. It was coming up through the floor.
“Howard!”
She looked into the after cabin. Six inches of water covered the carpet.
Griffin was in a dark, foreboding dream when he heard his name called from what seemed a great distance. He willed himself awake, sensing that something was wrong, wrong with him, for his head hurt, his mouth tasted foul, he felt drugged.
“What is it?” he said, and he rolled his legs over the edge of the bunk. He looked aft and saw, through a bluish haze, Elizabeth running toward him and shouting something. What was she saying?
“We’re sinking!”
“Come on… .” He blinked, shook his head. Now he could smell the exhaust, recognize the taste.
Elizabeth peeled back the carpet in the main cabin and lifted the hatch covering the engine compartment. By now Griffin was standing over her. They saw that the engine was half underwater. The batteries were still dry, but the water rose as they watched.
Griffin heard sloshing in the after cabin, saw the water and knew what had happened. He said, “Shut down the engine.”
“What?”
“Now!”
Elizabeth found the lever and choked off the engine. The rumbling died, and with it the circulating pump. No new water was being forced aboard, and they could hear the comforting electric whine of the bilge pump.
But there was still an open wound in the stern.
Griffin grabbed two dish towels from the sink and a shirt from a hook, and he handed them to Elizabeth. “Stick these up the exhaust pipe. Tight. Tight as you can.”
She ran up through the hatch.
Griffin reached into a drawer and found a crescent wrench. He knelt on the deck and adjusted the wrench to one of the bolts holding the batteries to their mounts. If he could get the batteries out of the engine compartment, raise them a couple of feet, a foot even, he could give the bilge pump time to stop the water from rising. He had meant to move the batteries, after he read a cautionary article in one of the boating magazines about how dangerously dependent modern boats had become on sophisticated electronics. But that would have involved some reconstruction beyond his talents, which would have meant dealing with island labor, which would have delayed them.
Delayed them from what?
He cursed and heaved against the first bolt. It was corroded, and the wrench skidded off.
With its way gone, t
He tightened the wrench and leaned on the handle.
The bolt moved. He managed half a turn, then the wrench handle butted against the bulkhead. He yanked the wrench off, refitted it and turned again. The water rose.
In the cockpit, Elizabeth lay facedown on the fantail, spread-legged, her feet braced against the roll. One of the dish towels was balled in her fist, and she felt along the hull for the two-inch opening in the exhaust outlet. She could barely reach it with the tips of her fingers, and she tried to jam the towel inside. The pipe was too big, the towel too thin. It slipped out of the hole and floated away.
She heard a new sound, and paused to decipher it. It was the sound of silence. The bilge pump had stopped.
Then she heard Griffin’s voice below. “Bermuda Harbour Radio … this is the yacht Severance … Mayday, Mayday, Mayday … we are sinking … our position is … Fuck!”
Elizabeth pulled the shirt from under her chest and balled it with the second dish towel, and again felt for the hole in the stern.
The boat yawed. Water rushed over the stern, and she skidded. Her feet lost their grip. She was falling. Her arms flailed.
A hand grabbed her and pulled her back, and Griffin’s voice said, “Never mind.”
“Never mind!? We’re sinking!”
“Not anymore.” His voice was flat. “We’ve sunk.”
“No. I don’t—”
“Hey,” he said, and he gathered her to him and held her head against his chest and stroked her hair. “The batteries’re gone. The pump’s gone. The radio’s gone. She’s gone. What we’ve got to do is get the hell off before she slips away. Okay?”
She looked up at him and nodded.
“Good.” He kissed her head. “Get the EPIRB.”
Griffin went forward and uncovered the raft lashed to the cabin roof. He checked to make sure all its cells were inflated, checked the rubberized box screwed to the deck plates, to reassure himself that no one in some out-island port had stolen their flares or fishing lines or cans of food. He felt his belt to make sure his Swiss Army knife was secure in its leather case.
A five-gallon plastic jug of fresh water was tied to the boat’s railing, and he untied it and set it in the raft. He debated going below to retrieve the small outboard motor stowed forward, then decided: Forget it. He didn’t want to be caught below when the boat sank.
As he undid the last of the raft’s lashings, Griffin felt a weird satisfaction: He wasn’t panicking. He was acting precisely as he should—methodically, rationally, thoroughly.
Keep it up, he told himself. Keep it up. And maybe you’ve got a chance.
Elizabeth came forward. She carried the plastic bag containing the boat’s papers, their passports and cash, and in her other hand the EPIRB, the emergency beacon, a red box covered with yellow Styrofoam, with a retractable antenna on one end.
The deck was awash now, and it was easy for them to heave the raft over the low railing into the sea. He held the raft with one hand and with the other steadied her as she jumped aboard. When she was seated in the bow, he stepped off the sailboat’s deck and dropped into the stern of the raft. He sat, flicked on the switch on the EPIRB, pulled out the antenna and fitted the device into an elastic strap on one of the rubber cells.
Because the raft was light and the northwest wind was brisk, it moved quickly away from the crippled sailboat.
Griffin took Elizabeth’s hand, and they watched in silence.
The sailboat was a black silhouette against the stars.
The stern sank lower, then slowly disappeared. Then, suddenly, the bow rose up like a rearing horse and slipped backward down into the abyss. Enormous bubbles rushed to the surface and burst with muffled booms.
Griffin said, “Jesus …”
3
IT WAS ALERT, had been for several moments, and its sensory receptors were processing signals of increasing danger.
Something large was approaching, from above, from where its enemy always came. It could feel vast quantities of water being displaced, feel the pressure waves.
It prepared to defend itself. Chemical triggers fired throughout the great body, sending fuel to the masses of flesh. Chromatophores ignited within the flesh, and its color changed from maroon to a lighter, brighter red— not a bloodred, for so permeated was its blood with hemocyanin that it was in fact green, but a red designed by Nature purely for intimidation.
It withdrew and cocked its two longest, whiplike arms, then turned and backed around to face the direction from which its enemy was coming.
It was not capable of fear; it did not consider flight.
But it was confused, for the signals from its enemy were unusual. There was no acceleration, no aggression. Most of all, there were none of the normal sounds of its enemy echolocating, no clicks or pings.
Whatever was coming moved erratically at first and then angled downward without pause.
Whatever it was, it passed and continued into the deep, trailing strange noises. Creaks and pops. Dead sounds.
The creature’s color changed again, and its arms uncocked and unfurled with the sea.
Random drift had brought it to within a hundred feet of the surface, and its eyes gathered flickering shimmers of silver from the stars. Because light could signal prey, it allowed itself to rise toward the source.
When it was twenty feet from the surface and its motion was beginning to be affected by the roll above, it sensed something new—a disturbance, an interruption in the flow of the sea, moving and yet not moving, floating with the current, on the water but not part of it.
Two impulses drove the creature now, the impulse to kill and the impulse to feed. Hunger dominated, a hunger that had become more and more urgent as it searched in vain for prey in the deep. Once, hunger had been a simple cue, a signal to feed, and it had responded routinely, feeding at will. But now food was a quest, for prey had become scarce.
Again the animal was alert: not to defend itself, but to attack.
4
THEY HAD NOT spoken.
Griffin had fired a flare, and, holding hands, they had watched the yellow arc and the burst of orange brilliance against the black sky.
Then they had returned their gaze to the spot where the boat had been. A few bits of flotsam had drifted by—a seat cushion from the cockpit, a rubber fender— but now there was nothing, no sign that the boat had ever existed.
Elizabeth felt a tightness, a rigidity, in Griffin’s hand, and she cupped it in both of hers and said, “What are you thinking?”
“I was doing the old ‘if only’ routine.”
“What?”
“You know: if only we’d left a day earlier or a day later, if only the wind hadn’t gone around, if only we hadn’t had to start the engine …” He paused, and then his voice was bitter. “… if only I hadn’t been too goddam lazy to get underneath the floor and check that pipe …”
“Don’t do this, Howard.”
“No.”
“It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
“I suppose.” She was right. Or even if she wasn’t, what he was doing was useless. Worse than useless.
“Hey!” he said, forcing brightness. “I just thought of something. Remember when Roger sold us the insurance? Remember we wanted the cheapest policy we could get, and he said no, we could never rebuild a wooden boat that big these days for anything like that amount, and he made us go the whole way? Remember that?”
“I guess.”
“Sure you do. The point is, the boat is insured for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We could never get that on a sale.”
Elizabeth knew what he was doing. She was glad, and she was about to say something, when the raft dipped off the top of a wave and slid into a trough.
They were capsizing. She knew it, they couldn’t stop it. She screamed.
“Hey,” Griffin said, and he edged over to her and put his arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay. We’re fine.”
“No,” she said into his chest. “We’re not fine.”
“Okay, we’re not fine. What are you scared of?”
“What am I scared of?” she snapped at him. “We’re in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night in a raft the size of a bottle cap… and you ask what am I scared of? How about dying?”
“Dying from what?”
“For God’s sake, Howard …”
“I’m serious. Let’s talk about it.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You got something better to do? Come on.” He kissed her head. “Let’s bring the demons out and crush them.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Sharks. Call me a wimp, but I’m terrified of sharks.”
“Sharks. Good. Okay. We can forget about sharks.”
“You can, maybe.”
“No. Listen. The water’s cold. The Japanese and the Koreans have fished most of them out anyway. And if some big shark does come around, as long as we stay in the raft we don’t look, smell or feel like anything he’s used to eating. What else?”
“Suppose a storm …”
“Okay. Weather. Not a problem. The forecast is good. We’re not in hurricane season. Even if a northeaster does come up, this raft is next thing to unsinkable. Worst can happen, it tips over. If it does, we right it again.”
“And float around till we starve to death.”
“Not gonna happen.” Griffin was pleased, for he found that the more he talked, the more he was able to push his own fears away. “One, the wind is pushing us back toward Bermuda. Two, there are ships in and out of here every day. Three, worst case, by Monday afternoon the kids and what’s-his-name from the brokerage will report us missing, and Bermuda Harbour Radio knows all about us. But it won’t get to that. This baby is beeping its heart out for us.” He patted the EPIRB. “First plane that goes over will call out the cavalry. Probably already has.”