Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (71 page)

It was a shark at least eleven feet long.

“A goddam Mako!” Qweep swore.

Qweep started reeling in line as fast as he could as the wall of water rolled closer and the shark rose higher in it. Gordon was terrified that Qweep would yank on the pole and haul the shark straight out of the wave and into the boat. It was that close to them. He could see everything now: the blue dorsal fin, the terrible white underbelly, the ghoulish pointed snout with its crooked saw-toothed grin and bottomless black, fist-sized eye. There was no recognizable human emotion in that eye. There was only hunger.

“Let’s cut the line!” Mal shouted, panicked.

“No way! I’m bringin’ her in,” Qweep shouted back. “She’ll make good shark fin soup, and we might save the leg of some poor surfer.”

Then the wall of water rolled under them, or the boat floated over it. Either way, the fishing line and the shark disappeared beneath the hull.

A few seconds later, the line started wrapping stiffly, crazily, around the boat’s outboard propeller. Qweep couldn’t control it.

Then almost everything stood still. Fear was crawling through Gordon’s scalp like a swarm of baby crabs. The only sound he could hear was the waves with their gentle lap and plop.

Mal picked up a baseball bat from the bottom of the boat. Qweep kept it there to club fish. It was stained with rust-colored patches of blood and crusty old scales. The fat end, Gordon noticed, had been machine-stamped with the now barely legible signature of Joe DiMaggio. Qweep picked up a long aluminum gaffing pole with a nasty hook on the end. And they waited….

…and waited.

The blue dorsal fin surfaced about five yards behind the boat and swiftly moved toward them as the water around it started to roil. Then, with a furious thrashing, the shark’s entire body broke the surface with its two-foot-wide jaws agape and drawing water.

The explosion of adrenaline made Gordon’s entire body go numb. He couldn’t even breathe, or feel the pee running down his leg.

Qweep jousted at the Mako’s snout with the gaffing pole, but that was worse than useless. He threw down the pole with a clang and lifted up one of the boat’s hinged seat covers. He emerged with a flare gun, which he fired straight into the shark’s still-gaping mouth. The flare’s phosphorous load hissed and sizzled as it hit the water. Its brilliant, spattering glow lit up the inside of the Mako’s cavernous gullet and all those big, bitey teeth surrounding it. Then the jaws snapped shut and the phosphorous light was swallowed.

“
That
’ll give you a case of indigestion, you sorry cunt,” said Qweep.

The shark thrashed and flexed half-out of the water as it swam closer to the boat. Then, with a lunge, it bit down on the boat’s propeller. The whole boat shook and seemed to move backward.

“Bite my boat, will you?” Qweep raged. He fired another flare right between the shark’s eyes, far back along the clenching snout where its tiny brain would reside.

(
Right in the third eye chakra
, thinks Gordon, recalling the scene from the safety of Lloyd’s Bentley.
A Catholic shark’s final blessing on Ash Wednesday….
)

As the second phosphorous charge dazzlingly burned, the shark convulsed and shuddered. Slowly, in increments that almost seemed measurable, it started to die. Mal hadn’t gotten his chance to whack it with the baseball bat of Marilyn Monroe’s famous ex-husband. He looked somewhat relieved.

Eventually, the Mako let go of the propeller and started to drift. The only sign it was still alive was an occasional twitch of its tail. Then, when even the tail was stilled, Qweep hauled the shark’s carcass alongside the boat and tied it to the cleats running along the gunwale with a stout nylon rope passed through its gill slits.

The shark was too big to fit in the boat. It would have to be towed.

When Qweep tried to start the boat’s engine, he found the propeller wouldn’t turn–either because it had been fouled by Mal’s fishing line or mangled by the shark’s chewing. Qweep radioed his old Coast Guard buddies for help. Gordon worried that the Coast Guard wouldn’t be able to find them. After all, the sea was so vast and Qweep’s boat–hidden among the high swells and endless sky–was so insignificant. But in less than an hour a red-and-white Coast Guard cutter appeared on the horizon.

For Gordon, that hadn’t been nearly fast enough. While they’d been waiting, two new fins had appeared among the whitecaps and started circling the boat. Each fin–scarred and dirty brownish-grey–was approximately two feet high. According to Qweep, they almost certainly belonged to Great Whites.

And here’s where Gordon’s memory must have become conflated with a daydream, because when the Coast Guard cutter drew up alongside them, a doughnut-shaped life preserver flew down to them on a long silvery cord, and looking up, Gordon saw that it had been tossed by Smokey the Bear.

Smokey was wearing his trademark yellow ranger’s hat and waving his great clawed forepaw from the ship’s high deck railing while hailing them in that stentorian grizzly bear voice of his:

“Only
you
can prevent shark attacks,” Smokey said.

Then, for some dream-like reason or another, rather than climbing aboard the cutter with Qweep and Mal, Gordon chose to stay behind in Qweep’s boat as it was towed at roller coaster speeds into Morro Bay harbor with the menacing twin fins of the Great White Sharks charging close behind it.

And as if all that weren’t nightmarish enough, the Flag Fish and the Red Snapper sloshing around in the five-gallon plastic bucket near Gordon’s feet started shouting at him in Hebrew along the way.
“Tzaruch shemirah!"
one of them nattered like an old rabbi, while the other one groaned:
"Hasof bah!"
And Gordon, without ever having learned a word of Hebrew, somehow knew what those words meant:

Everyone needs to account for themselves, because the end is near.

Qweep’s tiny boat started to get airborne on its tether, like a skipping stone, as the Coast Guard cutter towed it faster and faster.

Great… so what’s next?
Gordon thought. He looked over at Qweep’s halibut in the big Igloo cooler, half-expecting it to burst into song like a slimy flat Edith Piaf. Meanwhile, the other two fish were commanding Gordon to pray and study the Torah.

In an instant, the Coast Guard cutter docked at the end of a long pier, and Gordon found himself climbing up a rickety wooden ladder precariously tacked to one of the pier’s pilings while the Great White sharks lunged and wetly snapped their blood-stained jaws at him from the water below. He pulled himself up over a railing and hit the pier running–afraid the sharks would grow wings and keep chasing him on dry land.

There was a gate in a chain-link fence at the other end of the pier and Gordon ran through it, absolutely out of his mind with terror. He could hear the leathery wings of the Great White sharks beating the air behind him. He sprinted through a parking lot, past a saltwater taffy shop and a bar called the Tiki Lounge, where a long-nosed, Easter Island-inspired Tiki god sat out in front gathering dust. Dodging between parked cars, Gordon headed for the sand dunes at the far end of the lot.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the winged sharks descending on him with their jaws frozen in scary rictuses, like the faces painted on the World War II fighter planes of the Flying Tigers air squadron. There was no way he’d be able to outrun them. He zigzagged through the dunes until he tripped on a piece of driftwood and fell, landing on his back in the hot sand.

For a moment, the sun blinded him. Then, just as Gordon expected to feel the impact of several tons of teeth and cartilage slamming into his chest and savagely devouring him, a dark figure reeking of smoke and ashes leaned over him, temporarily blocking out the sun’s warmth.

“Gordon? Why are you so out of breath?” the dark figure asked him.

It was his mother, peering down at him from behind the splayed-open pages of a Harlequin Romance novel. The smoke was coming from another one of her infernal cigarettes.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

When Lloyd stops the Bentley to wait for a line of traffic at the junction where Highway 46 dead-ends with the Pacific Coast Highway, Gordon sits there trying to figure out what his weird daydream might have been trying to tell him.
Flying sharks, talking fish, end-of-the-world predictions in Hebrew… what’s it all mean?

The whole thing had seemed much more vivid than any ordinary memory. His heart is still thudding from the anxiety it caused him.
But had any of it been real?

Gordon knows there’s an old Polaroid in a photo album back at home that shows him standing in an orange canvas life jacket on a fishing dock next to a huge dead Mako shark with an ugly burnt-up hole in its forehead. He appears to be about five in the photo. So at least that much had been real–but as for the rest…
who the fuck knows?
Maybe the whole thing had been a bad
Bardo
experience from a previous incarnation that he just happens to be able to recall.

“Why would we deliberately choose to incarnate in an evil world?” Gordon finds himself wondering out loud. It’s only after the words have left his mouth that he realizes everyone else can hear him.

“Why does the Easter Bunny stick his foot up your tender anus, Grasshopper?” D.H. asks in mocking response with faked Oriental inscrutability.

“Earth to Gordon…” says Skip. “Do you think we had a choice? We’re just here, dude. Get used to it.”

Gordon doesn’t bother to explain that he was thinking about the
Bardo
, not life on Earth. He realizes there isn’t much difference, anyway–aside, perhaps, from flying sharks and talking fish. But even without those novelties, life on Earth seems plenty evil enough. Especially when illuminated by the Gospel According to Lloyd.

“Adversity teaches us lessons that serenity and comfort can’t,” Lloyd says, in answer to Gordon’s question. “A frightening world is an edifying world to live in. What did you ever learn when everything was going the way you wanted?”

“Nothing much,” says Jimmy, “except how to get laid.”

“Exactly my point.”

As Lloyd turns the Bentley right instead of left onto the Pacific Coast Highway–away from Morro Bay–Gordon gets a terrible feeling of whirling, impending doom. He almost tells Lloyd to turn the car back around, although he knows that driving north is the only way for them to get to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Still… he can’t shake the sick feeling that they’ve just made a wrong turn.

“Adversity is one thing,” says Gordon, “but I was talking about evil. I mean shit like kids dying from cancer, innocent people being tortured, John Lennon getting shot by that asshole Mark David Chapman–stuff like that.”

“Hey, shit happens,” Jimmy says with an insolent shrug.

“No, shit does
not
just happen,” Lloyd rebukes his nephew. “It’s intended. I may not be able to give you a solid metaphysical reason for the existence of cancer, but I have some definite ideas about Mark David Chapman and the torture of innocents, if you’d care to hear them.”

“Can’t we just listen to the radio?” Twinker gripes.

“No way! I wanna hear this,” Skip says.

“Yeah, explain evil, Lloyd!” D.H. chimes in. “Shooting John Lennon fucking sucked. How could any halfway decent God let that happen?”

“The CIA had more to do with it than God,” Lloyd blusters. “Did you know that before Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon, he likely spent time at a CIA-sponsored training camp for assassins in Lebanon?”

“No way! Where’d you hear that?” D.H. asks.

“The YMCA sent him to Beirut in 1975, under the auspices of their ICCP/Abroad program, just weeks before the situation there devolved into full-scale civil war. The largest CIA station in the Middle East is located in Beirut–or at least it
was
located there until the terrorist bombing at the American Embassy wiped most of it out last month, killing sixty-three people.
Suicide bombers
–what can you do?… It was likely payback from the Iranians. The CIA has had a colorful history of engineering coups throughout the region–and back in 1975, Chapman might have been getting a firsthand look at one of them.”

“Yeah, but just because the guy went to Lebanon, that doesn’t mean he got sucked into a CIA mind control program,” Gordon argues–even though, intuitively, the idea makes a great deal of sense to him.

“I’m not suggesting that such dire circumstances befall every young vagabond in Lebanon,” Lloyd explains. “I’m only suggesting that it happened to Chapman because of what came after. He was a simpering, born-again YMCA youth counselor who
just happened
to take up an interest in firearms upon his return from Beirut. Less than two years later, he sold all his belongings and moved to Hawaii, where he
just happened
to be hospitalized for mental illness after a suicide attempt–just as Lee Harvey Oswald was hospitalized after
his
suicide attempt in Moscow. Forgive me for suggesting that a brief stay in a mental institution might be a convenient cover for a little MKULTRA tune-up, a chance for further indoctrination and training, but Chapman
just happened
to be hired as a maintenance worker by that same institution–Castle Memorial Hospital. And after working there less than a year, he
just happened
to be able to afford to go on a six-week trip around the world. When he got back, he married his travel agent (an older Japanese woman, inevitably compared to Yoko) and then Chapman
just happened
to quit his job at Castle Memorial so he could take a low-paying job as a security guard at an apartment complex across the street from the Church of Scientology in Honolulu. And then he
just happened
to start taking flights into New York with a Charter Arms .38–the same type of revolver used by Arthur Bremer in his assassination attempt on George Wallace. And he
just happened
to make it past airport security every time.”

“Wait a second…” says Gordon. “What was that stuff about the Scientologists? Are you saying they’re mixed up in this assassination stuff, too?”