Make-Believe Shark

The turistas in the itty-bitty coastal city of San Pepito always blew their bucks chartering the boat captained by the guy with one leg. Then the boat captained by the guy with zero legs showed up.

Carla and I knew better and opted for the Sea U Later, a sturdy enough vessel captained by a haggard Bostonian by the name of Bud Plaquemine, who was still equipped with two fully functional legs. (Lucky for him, the maze of wharf we were entering still had plenty of wood to knock on.)

We waded through the Tropic of Cancer humidity, our dead friend’s eight-year-old daughter Joyita in tow. We walked cautiously, surveying the dilapidated boardwalk for any carpenter nails that might be trying to play Lazarus. The whole wharf smelled like mackerel innards and beer burps and freshly brewed Maxwell House coffee.

“You two been busy, eh?” Bud said, as we approached him and his vessel.

“Ain’t ours,” Carla said. “Daughter of a friend of a friend.”

“What’s your name, lass?” Bud said to Joyita, using the same kiddie voice he talks to his boat in.

“She’s deaf, Bud,” I said, doing that stupid thing where you repeatedly point at your own ear. “But watch out, man, she can read lips like a goddamn Apache League third base coach.”

“Loose lips don’t sink a goddamn thing,” Bud said, vaguely and grumpily.

The Gulf of Mexico was stiller than the Sea of Tranquility at 6:30 in the morning. I scoped its placid expanse for dorsal fins while Carla told Bud how little Joyita’s father, indeed a vague friend of ours since we began spending a loose quarter of our year in San Pepito, had disappeared in his 1977 Beachcomber while flying at low altitude from Miami to Port-Au-Prince last Tuesday, whenever that was.

“Y’all doin’ the usual? Riggin’ up for Spanish mackerel and bonita and that whole lot?” Bud said, troubleshooting with a rope as thick as a Burmese python. We’d been back in San Pepito for nine days, swimming, snorkeling, fishing, napping, eating, and watching the ecto-States variety shows that infested the local cable networks. (Old dudes with heroic mustaches patting impossibly boobed-out chicas on their fannies; then a song, then a contest, then a practical joke, finito, repeat ad nauseam).

“Well, no. This is gonna sound kooky as hell, but we’re looking for a Make-Believe Shark,” I said. No point beating around the bush, especially where there ain’t no bushes.

“Mako shark? Ah, you gotta skip across the states way over to the Atlantic to catch a Mako. And then you gotta go well out past the International Waterway, basically halfway to damn Bermuda… Mako’s the fastest fish in the ocean, you know. Slippery fuckers, quicker than a Kenyan.”

“Make-Believe Shark, not Mako,” said Carla. “Make-Believe, as in fictional and imaginary and not real.”

Bud, thoroughly confused now, looked at all three of us and said, “What are you talkin’ about?”

Carla offered to buy Bud a coffee and he accepted and they walked over to a particle board clad coffee kiosk helmed by a bored looking girl wearing a hot pink visor and a shirt with a sperm whale on it sayin’ Don’t Eat Us. Bud’s incredulous body language suggested Carla was explaining to him how Joyita has an extremely rare form of autism called Molecular Manipulating Autism (usually referred to by the used & abused acronym MMA) and that Molecular Manipulating Autism is precisely what it sounds like: a form of autism that can manipulate molecules. Joyita’s leftfield n’ way up in the bleachers imagination by way of the MMA has summoned what fringe scientists the globe over have already dubbed a Make-Believe Shark, henceforth colloquially known as the MBS (and in lesser social circles as “Mackie”).

Bud had known Carla long enough (“old friend of the fam”) to know she suffers neither fools nor foolishness and believed her impossible story with all of his heart and most of his brain.

By 7:20 the Sea U Later, containing Carla and me and Bud and Bud’s teenage deck swabber/rope tier/drink maker known only as La Cubanita, was a mile and a half off the coast of San Pepito.

“Can a Make-Believe shark kill you?” asked Bud. Good question. Neither Carla nor myself could summon a decent answer. “Maybe? I dunno. I imagine it could probably screw your day up pretty good, if you’re not careful.”

“Ten zillion ways to get bounced from this turdball planet, might as well go out doing somethin’ impossibly loony, eh?” said Bud.

“I don’t see why not,” Carla said. She had explained to Bud that we knew the Make-Believe Shark was within a square mile or so off the coast of San Pepito because Joyita, basically the Make-Believe Shark’s God, had pointed it out on a map and in salmon colored crayon had written today’s date on a piece of loose-leaf paper.

I stood up to nab a Coke from the ice chest right as the Sea U Later got rocked hard by something large and unseen to the eye. I hadn’t felt the cold wash of an attack dose of adrenaline in years and years but was now steeped in it. Miscellaneous shits and fucks and what the fucks from Bud and Carla and La Cubanita and then, bam, we got rocked again.

“Must be your goddamn shark,” Bud yelled, in a nervy tone that probably none of us cared for too much. He ran over the side of the boat and hung onto the rail and leaned over it and examined the point of impact on the boat’s hull. “This fella means business! Look at this… Smashed right through the wood… Dented the aluminum underneath.” All five of us looked at the wood and then the aluminum and Bud said, “Look, I didn’t wake up on a Thursday morning to have my boat get snacked on by some dickhead shark, imaginary or otherwise. I need to know what we are dealing with here.”

Before anyone could answer, something swished mightily in the water about sixty feet off the boat’s rear. I swiveled fast and caught a glimpse of a dorsal fin as big as a traffic cone. “Huge,” was all I could manage to say.

“Oi, Cubanita!—what’s the Mexican word for taxidermist?” Bud hollered.

“Get us the fuck out of here before it charges us again.” This was Carla now, trying to spur Bud out of the daze he had settled in. “I don’t wanna die dog-paddlin’.”

“Righto.” Bud gunned it and we all lurched as the Sea U Later committed to a fierce angle and made a wake big enough to make a surfer cream his wetsuit. We were a slender hundred yards from the wharf when we got rocked again, this time on the other side of the boat. “Jesus,” Bud hollered. “What’s in it for this thing?”

“Guess it don’t wanna get caught,” said Carla. “Can you blame it?”

We docked and jumped off the boat and sat down at a big wooden picnic table on the boardwalk. “I think our only solution,” I said to Carla, motioning to Joyita, “is for her to like dream up a porpoise or dolphin or killer whale or something big enough to muss this Make-Believe Shark’s mane.”

“That is the worst idea I’ve heard in three hundred years,” said Carla.

I tweaked like a spritzed cat and said, “What do you propose?”

“I propose nothing,” she said. “Let it be—or let it don’t be. We confirmed the thing exists—or doesn’t exist—and that’s good enough for me. You know what I mean.” I got a whiff of sex from one of us, even though it’d been three hours and two showers since we had had sex.

I said to her, “I have no clue what you mean.”

Joyita made a sound that could maybe masquerade as Look! and pointed out to the Gulf. Hovering about six feet above the water, maybe forty yards out, was the Make-Believe Shark. It was twisting terribly like some huge invisible hand was holding it around its torso. The shark was the most sharky-lookin’ shark I had ever seen. A caricature of shark. Basically the shark emoji rendered in three dimensions. Joyita pantomimed squeezing a banana. And then the shark was about 30% transparent… and then 40%, and then 80%, and then it was no more. Joyita had exiled it back into the murk of her imagination.

“Sayonara, shark.” For ten long seconds I stared at where the shark had been and took off my hat and scratched my head and said, “I’ve seen way too many Twilight Zone episodes for this... If she can just like create a shark out of nada and then just poof it away, what else can she do?”

“Who knows,” said Carla, cuing up a vape that said Lockheed Martin down the side of it. “Maybe she can make us some corned-beef hash and some fried eggs and some toast with apple butter and some plastic cutlery and a couple of paper plates and a bucket of coffee that don’t taste like mud chowder.”

“I’d settle for any bit of that.”

Bud walked over, having witnessed the whole thing with Joyita and the shark while tending to the brand new king-size dent in the Sea U Later. “Weirdest day of my life and it ain’t even noon yet. You think Broom Hilda here can conjure up a new hull for me?”

“No, but I can walk over to that ATM and pull out one thousand American dollars,” said Carla. “Will that cover it?”

“Yeah, and then some. Five hundred’s plenty,” Bud said. “I’ll buy about an acre of aluminum from that gypsy in Fair Oaks, patch it up myself.”

“Works for me,” said Carla.

We said bye to Bud and Bud’s helper and walked over to a diner that served ten dollar pancakes shaped like stingrays and drank enough coffee to wring out our waitress’s inner passive aggressor and then deposited Joyita at her auntie’s place and went back to our hotel and submerged ourselves in a glade of clean sheets and blankets and napped for endless hours and woke up in time to hear the drunkies slink back to their wherever and then eventually dozed back off and each dreamt our melodramatic dreams about everything and nothing until the sun did its thing and we awoke entangled and stayed that way until the tsunami siren started throwing its first and last tantrum.