'Where are the bow-legged women?' (A JAWS short story)
You can catch The Shark Is Broken from 25th July 2023 at the Golden Theater, New York, NYC.
Where are the bow-legged women?
I mulled this over sitting on the concrete bus stop bench outside Martha’s Vineyard airport, a sudden blast of sunshine stinging the jet lag in my eyes. The nice lady who’d shown me where to wait for the number nine bus to Oak Bluffs walked back across the small service road without so much as a limp, her lithe figure in designer jeans and shirt matching the sun bleached shingles of the airport shed. So that’s what Hippy Chic looks like.
And then I was alone, silence for the first time in twenty hours of sticky airports and flying tube trains, the last of which was no more than a van with wings; six seats, a forty minute roller coaster ride from boxy Boston over the silt to Martha’s, swamps and coves billiard table flat. At least what I could see of it through the haze - ‘It’s from Canada!’ - before we smacked into the runway.
Our toy plane sashayed past a giant from JFK; a minnow flapping its feeble fins in the wash of a liveried whale bigger than the airport building. And then more whales, great whites and great blacks from New York; wound up folk in spandex looking like a touring wrestling troupe thundering across the asphalt. So much flesh.
The lady sitting next to me on the Cape Air flight - an islander, she said - looked at the spectacle through the port hole and strapped a mask over her mouth as though it would block out the scene. I asked her if there was a virus on the island. ‘Canadians,’ she replied, unbuckling her seat belt as our tin can came to a stop at a chain link fence. She got up and made her way towards the door, hunched over double in the tiny fuselage. ‘The smoke from thirty eight million joints,’ her bum said.
That was then, this is now; from Cessna engine clatter that sounded like marbles being fried in a wok, to the twitter on a breeze blowing across the parched grass. Apart from a small bird that seemed to be trapped in the dustbin beside me at the bus stop the silence was crystal, a pipe threaded clean through one ear canal and out the other side. Twenty hours of man made noise had been cancelled out in a 30 second walk into the sun, whoosh! with a parting, ‘Enjoys Martha’s!’.
I flexed my jaw, thinking the silence might be a blockage from equalisation, and stood up to check the bus schedule on the post. A few extra feet of altitude might help.
‘Enjoy Martha’s!’ came the muffled voice as the SUV accelerated past, the tinted guillotine sliding up from the car door with a brief flash of me reflected in it. I pictured her decapitation, ‘Enjoy Marth-ugh!’, the severed head rolling down the road with the hollow sound of a coconut hitting the ground.
A flash of a memory. An underwater scene of a severed head bobbing into view through the wrecked hull of a boat, one eye missing.
Why hadn’t she offered me a lift? I’m a lost Englishman. I looked at my reflection in the sheet of glass on the bus stop. Would you have given her a lift under similar circumstances? You could be a serial killer for all she knows; shaved head, five o’clock shadow, bulging jet lagged eyes, unfamiliar accent...
I grinned at myself, happy with the thrill of my lot; a foreigner in a new place (can anything beat it?) and inhaled a deep breath of pale air, and an aphid. Thoo!
‘Martha’s Vineyard. Jaws: Shaw. Dreyfus. Scheider. Spielberg. Orca. Brody. Quint. Hooper,’ my reflection said. These are all real now. They’ve always been more than just names to anyone old enough to go to the cinema in 1975.
A gap in the smog above me, a mile wide patch of the blue sky, of promises to come, of old memories; coastal Kent and a hot summer long lost but clearer than the heavens above. A childhood holiday; the smell of hot concrete, my brother’s hay fever, our small rubber dinghy in the freezing English channel off a shingle beach. Wallowing inside it are two beanpoles wearing nylon trunks. A polyethylene boat that wouldn’t resist the peck from a seagull never mind a white pointer. We’re sitting in the Orca. From my position I can see everything, the whole beach, one of my teenage sisters sits under an umbrella with her boyfriend. Dad, a snoring lobster on a powder blue lilo, drifting steadily towards France. Mum coming down from the promenade with a handful of melting ice creams, the white emulsion running down her wrist like shit from a dive-bombing seagull.
We were safe; mum was on the land and Dad was covering the water, pretending to be asleep but we knew secretly watching for the flash of a fin darting through the oily calm.
Londoners on holiday at the coast.
And that film...How good was it? That question is answered by an eleven year old boy sitting in a bathtub on a council estate in London a week later. He moves the rubber shark through the soap suds, studying its wake the way a nautical engineer would the hull of a scale model ship. The shark has Made in Hong Kong stamped on its belly.
That same eleven year old boy from London is standing at a bus stop on Martha’s Vineyard forty eight years later waiting for the number nine bus. He’s composing a message to his elder brother and sisters halfway round the world on their packed commuter train in rain blackened London, telling them that the 50th anniversary of Jaws is only (only!) two years away so start thinking about annual leave.
Carcharodon Carcharias, I write as the headline. Even the named sounds noble, some great Gladiator a billion years in the making: “Hail Caesar! I bring news from the front. Carcharodon Carcharias has led the Roman army to its greatest victory. We feast on Monster Munch! Long live Carcharodon Carcharias!”
OK, so the mechanical shark looks fake - the Hollywood prop equivalent of a whoopee cushion - but it just shows how great the film itself is. Unlike today’s cinema fare it doesn’t rely on realistic special effects, just the audience’s imagination, and Bruce proved it like a custard pie in the face.
But where were the gimmicks at Martha’s Vineyard? I’d got off the plane expecting a gigantic set of shark dentures at the entrance to the building, like the ones you see in that old photo of half a dozen scientists in lab coats sitting inside the jaws of a megalodon. Souvenirs; fridge magnets, t-shirts, shark dentures, cheesy memorabilia. Where were they? I like cheese! At the very least I was owed an airport building topped by a twenty foot shark weather vane.
Twenty-five; three tons of him.
And where was Quint’s Bar serving his infamous hooch?
Pretty good stuff. Made it myself.
Or the Last Bite café. Was I in the right place?
The first sign that I might be in for a damp squib came when I crawled into the Cape
Air coffin from Boston and remarked to one of the other five passengers, rather pithily I thought, ‘We’re gonna need a bigger plane’. It was met with a granite stare. ‘You know, Jaws?’ I opened my mouth in anticipation. Nothing. How could a middle aged man from the island where one of the most famous films ever made was shot (as far as I knew, the only famous film to be shot here) not know the most famous line from the most famous film?
Chief, put out the fire, will ya.
And now it was me and a bird in a bin at a bus stop on an island, the island. Amity.
‘“It’s only an island if you look at it from the water”,’ I said into the slot of the bin, wondering if migrating birds always nested in refuse containers on Martha’s Vineyard. Maybe the avian life here were so traumatised by stories of Bruce going through Robert Shaw like Pac Man they’d hidden in rubbish bins ever since; afraid they’d fall victim to a breach if they dared fly across the bay.
I’ll do my duty as a concerned citizen, reach in to help him out, I thought, gingerly poking my hand into the slot.
‘Can I help?’ I jumped up so fast my elbow whacked into the steel frame. The man looked at the bin then at me. ‘Have you dropped something in there?’
‘No, there’s a bird trapped in it,’ I said, rubbing my funny bone. ‘I’m trying to get it out.’
He bent down and looked in, tilting his head from side to side. ‘Oh yeah, I can see it.’ He introduced himself while fishing around in the bin by asking me what I was doing on the island, and I explained, mentioning the work that had brought me here, and the Jaws locations I planned to visit. ‘I was in that film,’ he said, now up to his shoulder, reaching into the shark’s sliced open gut for signs of the little Kintner boy.
Just like I thought, came up with the gulf stream...
‘Remember the scene on the dock where that woman slaps the policeman’s face?’ he said, looking up while rummaging, the way Matt Hooper did before pulling out a car number plate.
...From southern waters.
‘You can see me in the background, grinning like an idiot. I was about ten at the time.’ He pulled his arm out and stood up, placing a hand each side to unscrew the top off the trash can. He twisted, sweating, and it turned to the squeal of grinding metal, the noise of fingernails on a blackboard.
You all know me, know how I earn a living.
‘Seventeen takes. That’s how many times she slapped his face before they were satisfied with the shot.’
‘Perhaps Spielberg had something against Roy Schneider.’
‘Never thought of that.’ He bent forward and gave the bin a bear hug, holding his breath. ‘You hold the bottom and I’ll pull the top off.’ I did as I was told. ‘Ready? One...two...three...’
Come and get it!
We miss timed the count down; him pulling up followed by me pulling down rather than both at once. Up-down. Nothing.
‘Alright, again, on three,’ I said, now on my knees in a dustbin rugby tackle, warming to the task. I was a local now. An islander.
‘One two three go or just one two three?’
‘One two three go.’ He yanked it out of my arms before I was ready. ‘No, that wasn’t the que, that’s just...’ I fished for the right word in vain. ‘OK, ready? One...two...
‘Still here?’
We both turned around. It was the woman I’d met on the plane earlier, the same one who’d driven past with a hearty ‘Enjoy Martha’s!’ Now she’d sneaked up on us in her stealthy electric BMW and was glaring out the half submerged, sinister black window.
Lifeless eyes. Like a doll’s eyes.
‘My meeting was cancelled so I thought I’d see if you needed a lift.’ The passenger window disappeared completely into the door and she leaned across her passenger seat to get a better view. ‘What are you doing?’
‘There’s a bird trapped in this rubbish bin,’ I said, ‘we’re setting it free.’
‘”Rubbish bin”,’ she repeated, mimicking my accent and laughing. How d’you know it wants to be free? Might be nesting in it.’
The lid man and I looked at each other then at the bin then back at each other and finally at her. She had beautiful eyes.
‘Come on then, if you’re coming. Throw that in the back.’
I stood up, brushing off my hands and reaching for my backpack.
The lid man smiled. ‘See you around probably. It’s a small island.’
It’s only an island if you look at it from the water.
As I threw my gear in the rear seat of the car and got in there was a hiss of air breaks and the number nine bus came into the airport service road. She reached across me and for a humiliating second I thought I was going to be kicked out, but she was just showing me how to close a car door with the push of a button.
She put the car in gear and floored it, racing out onto the main road and nearly totalling us on a farm tractor coming the other way. As she moved up a gear the unbuttoned cuff of her shirt sleeve rode up her wrist revealing the edge of a small tattoo. All I could see was the base of three separate letters with a dot in between each, obviously an abbreviation, followed by the bottom of a whole word, also hidden by her shirt cuff.
To you, Mr Hooper, that’s the USS Indianapolis.
I smiled at the road ahead. Here’s to swimming with bow-legged women.
Words by John Harris
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