Gather at the River. David Joy

fish. He squinted over the breakers, his face freckled and sun-pinked. He had the easy grace of the gifted athlete, which I envied. He seemed born to wield baseball bats and golf clubs and fishing rods. I had watched him knock the red clay from his cleats and lift his Easton Black Magic bat swirling over his shoulder and rope the first pitch straight over the centerfield fence. Meanwhile, I was stuck in right field, last on the batting order.

      I envied Lee, but I respected him. We used to play one-on-one tackle football in his front yard, with his father for all-time quarterback. I remember Lee catching an accidental forearm shiver while going for a sack. We were maybe ten. Lee rose grinning, licking the blood from his mouth. You can only love a kid like that.

      Still, he wasn’t accustomed to striking out, even if he was up against the ocean. He was getting frustrated. His eyes had turned to firing slits. The muscles flickered in his temples and cheeks. Meanwhile, the sun was beginning to slip, falling slanted at our backs. Soon the tide would rise, slipping over this vast peninsula of sand. It already was. We’d moved our tackle farther up the beach, twice.

      Lee reeled in his line. The twin hooks were naked, like steely question marks.

      “What you think?” I asked.

      Lee’s gaze remained fixed on the surf, the dark valley beyond the breakers.

      “Ten more minutes,” he said, rebaiting his hooks.

      I shrugged. “Sure.”

      Ten minutes. Fifteen. I felt the tide crawling higher up my belly, but I wasn’t worried. The sun had lulled me, the roll of surf. I was not in pain. Still, I was about ready to go. I wanted to get started on the hike back to the car—to get past it.

      Twenty minutes. Lee reeled in his line, his teeth gritted. Defeat in his face. I was looking at him, hoping he was ready to leave, when the black antenna of my rod snapped double, nearly yanked from hands.

      “I got something, Lee! I got something!”

      Lee’s eyes jumped open. He came wading and splashing toward me, holding his rod over the water.

      “Big mother!” I told him.

      I could feel the strength of the creature through the line. A whip of muscle, cracking with power. The fury of a hooked jaw was wired right into my palms, zero distortion. The fish was talking to me, saying I am deep and mad and strong. The message was wordless and pure.

      A swell broke around my chest, that high, and I knew—quick as the stab of a knife—that I was out of my element, trapped in alien country. You were not supposed to get scared fishing, I thought. Not supposed to go squid-soft and pale.

      Lee looked at the tortured graphite, the singing line. I looked at him.

      “What should I do?”

      “Let him run,” said Lee. “Whenever he lets up, tighten the drag and reel like a sonofabitch.”

      “He ain’t letting up. He’s a whale, Lee.”

      “Whales ain’t got teeth, son.”

      Whatever this fish was, it was unbelievably strong. I pictured a big stingray, shooting along the bottom like a stealth bomber, trailing that spiked whip of tail. Or something else. I thought of the yellowy Polaroids tacked up in a nearby bait shop, showing the bloody red mouths of sharks caught off the municipal pier. People said that Saint Simons Sound—the strait between here and Jekyll Island, one mile south—was the largest shark breeding ground on the east coast.

      The fish streaked laterally across the horizon, pulling the line dangerously taut. Swells were rolling against my chest. I could reel only in jerks. I started staggering backward, backpedaling, dragging the fish toward shallower water. I was soft from the surgery, out of shape. The tendons of my arms burned like lit fuses. My breath was fast and hoarse, my saliva thick enough to chew. I could feel my heart in my ears, throbbing. Lee kept shouting instructions.

      “I’m trying, goddammit!”

      The tug-of-war continued. Five yards, ten. Fifteen. Then a long wave rose before us, rolling high and green into the sun. The line skittered up through the rising water, and there, silhouetted inside the sunshot greenhouse of the swell, was the fish I’d hooked.

      “Shark!”

      The silhouette was unmistakable: sharp as the point of a spear, finned like a jet fighter. Fear broke through my blood. I could feel my own kidneys dangling in the red sea of my blood. My newly-sutured foot felt small and twisted, my wasted calf glowing like a fish belly in the dark water, just asking for teeth. I’d heard of sharks attacking beachgoers in waist-deep surf.

      Still, I didn’t think to cut the line. It was not courage or fear or pride. It simply didn’t occur to me, as if I’d been hooked myself—a stainless barb in my own jaw or hands or heart. I could feel every twitch and throttle of the creature through the thin white sinew of the line. I could picture him whipping through the darkness, trailing a red string of blood from his mouth.

      I kept staggering backward in the surf, heaving the rod like a giant lever. I could hardly get enough air. My arms no longer burned. They felt willowy and strange, spent. But it was working. The surf crashed and foamed around our waists. Then our thighs, our knees. We were rising taller from the water, step after step. Retreating toward dry land. Supremacy.

      When my heel struck the exposed sand of the bar, I dug into a crouch, straining against the line. The fish had tired, but it seemed made of pure lead or iron now, like I was hauling in an anchor. I reeled and heaved, reeled and heaved. At the height of my pull, just when my tendons seemed ready to break, the line went sudden-soft, spiraling into a long curly-cue. At the other end, a panicked splashing in the surf. Lee jumped in place, sighting over the foam.

      “He’s grounded!”

      We approached on our tiptoes, the tide swirling around our ankles. The shark was beached in two inches of water. He flopped weakly, near-dead from the fight. He wasn’t as big as I thought—possibly four feet long. His iron-gray fuselage gleamed in the sun. His fins carried dark points, as if dipped in ink.

      “Blacktip,” said Lee.

      The fish lay flat on his belly, gills flared. Asphyxiating. The hook hung from a ragged cavity of mouth flesh. The black fins flailed like undergrown wings. The eyes were buttonlike, wide. This deadly creature, which I had torn from the surf, was dying at my feet.

      Guilt stabbed through my chest, sucking out my breath. I felt a sudden panic. Lee was squatting beside the fish, twisting the hook free with a pair of needle-nose pliers. Without thinking, I dropped to one knee and scooped my hands under the fish’s belly. Lee raised the freed hook like a question.

      “The hell?”

      Before he could stop me, I’d hefted the fish high from the beach and gone running back into the surf. I ran high-kneed, holding the fish at arm’s length, belly-up, like some offering to the sea kings. Neptune or Poseidon. Lee had told me about tonic immobility—the hypnotic state that sharks and rays entered when inverted. In the Farallon Islands, off San Francisco, killer whales were known to hold great white sharks upside down, killing them.

      It didn’t work. The shark exploded to life in my hands, whipping and thrashing with astonishing violence, his teeth flashing bright. I could hardly hold him. I was hardly knee-deep in the surf when I heaved the shark from my hands like a bomb. I remember the fish whirling toward me in midair, flashing his wicked grin, but I was already wheeling in the opposite direction. I ran for my damn life, imagining those selfsame teeth snapping my Achilles tendons like rubber bands.

      Back on the beach, I collapsed with dramatic effect. Lee squatted over me.

      “That, boy, was probably the dumbest shit I have ever seen.”

      When I got up, I saw that the tide had crept high up the bar, swirling and foaming around our tackle. Likely, it would have reached the shark in time. Likely. As for us, we now faced a mile-long hike to shore, the surf eating up the sandbar in our wake.

      We