A grim shadow passed over the director’s face. He said something to Craig that Craig couldn’t hear again over the wind, and then looked up at Craig’s father and said, more loudly, “Unless the Great American Writer here can do something about the wind!”
Craig’s father strained to smile. He looked up to the sky. He tapped his fingernails on the glass top of the table, something he did when he was being criticized by Craig’s mother, and then shouted, “Cease, wind! I command you!” The director guffawed and looked over at Craig with a genuine sneer.
It didn’t happen right away, but it happened.
Within a half hour, the air had grown eerily calm. Craig was sitting cross-legged on the beach, staring glumly out at the crashing surf, when suddenly the churning bath of the wind around his head stopped. A pelican that had been pumping its wings strenuously through the air over the ocean began to glide effortlessly, and Craig could hear again. There was hearty laughter coming from somewhere behind him, and he turned to see the director clapping his father on the back hard enough that the impact of it registered on his father’s face as annoyed surprise.
“Let’s go, Miracle Guys!”
The old black man drove the boat over the placid pale blue ocean while Craig’s father and the director drank beer in the back. They seemed no longer to be on speaking terms. Craig sat up front, and the ocean sprayed him in the face with a fine, spitty mist. The Belizean man cut the engine in what seemed to be simply an undefined spot in the middle of the Caribbean, specific nevertheless, and then he turned to Craig and nodded. “Here,” he said. “Put on your snorkel equipment.”
“Have fun, pal,” the director said, raising a brown bottle to him. “Been nice knowin’ ya!”
Craig’s father laughed, but looked uneasy. He stood up with his beer in his fist and looked over the edge of the boat, and Craig, struggling to pull his fins over his feet, felt his enthusiasm for swimming with sharks drain out of him as the Belizean man reached into a cooler, pulled out a handful of bloody fish pieces, and tossed them into the sea.
The chunks floated along the surface for a few seconds, and then there was a roiling of the water beneath them, and then they were gone, and Craig saw beneath the unearthly aqua blue two long black shadows, side by side, moving in awesome silence, each one longer than a tall man. The Belizean man threw another handful of fish into the water, and it never even floated, just disappeared in an instant into a mob of shadows.
“Is this safe?” Craig’s father asked the Belizean man, who shrugged his bony shoulders.
The director said, “I’ve done it myself a million times. Never even been nipped.”
There was, Craig realized now, something sinister about the director.
(Was it possible that the irises of his eyes had no pupils?)
Craig looked away from him, swallowed, put on his snorkeling mask, and stood, but his father reached out and took him by the arm. “Whoa, wait a second there, son,” he said.
“Let him go!” the director shouted. “The boy wants to swim with the sharks!”
It was then that Craig understood what was going on, that the director had cast him in a role: impetuous, spoiled, foolhardy boy.
The sharks rose closer to the surface of the water again, their shadows made of flesh circling over and around one another, and Craig instinctively took a step back, into his father’s arms.
“Forget it, son,” his father said. “You don’t need to do this. I won’t let you do this.”
Craig turned around, and the Belizean man was looking at him with an expression that was impossible to read.
“Let’s go,” his father said, and the Belizean man started the boat, and Craig sat back down and took his flippers off.
Back at the resort, he drank rum punch by the side of the pool until everyone else had gone to bed, and got so drunk that the stars seemed to be blowing around in the completely windless black air over him, like moths or silvery ashes. He got up to replenish his punch only to find that someone had locked up the tiki bar, so he stood with his empty plastic cup under the stars and listened to the calm, distant pounding of the surf against its barriers. He tilted his head back and tried to drink the very last drops from his empty cup, lost his balance in the sand, and fell on his ass with a soft thud, and then he sat there for a few minutes and laughed at himself, held up the plastic cup to the stars the way the director had raised his beer bottle to him back on the boat. “Been nice knowin’ ya!” he shouted, and waited for an echo.
It didn’t come.
The tropical air was like cotton, soaking up his voice.
Craig shouted again, looking around to see if anyone was there to hear him, and saw then, at the edge of the boat dock, a light. He stood up, leaving the plastic cup on the sand, and stumbled toward it.
It was a kid. Maybe Craig’s age. He had a flashlight at his feet and a net. He cast the net off the end of the dock, and Craig stood behind him, watching it float loosely in the clear water and then sink under, and then the kid pulled it out, heavy with thrashing small silver-dollar-size fish, which the kid dumped into the bottom of the boat in which the Belizean man had taken them to the sharks that afternoon.
“Hey,” Craig said, feeling suddenly much drunker in the hallucinatory darkness. The boy was so completely ignoring him that Craig felt as if he might be dreaming the boy, or that the boy was dreaming him.
The boy cast his net back out into the water, although there was still a fish in it, caught in the strings, wriggling.
“What are you doing?” Craig asked, and then the kid turned to look at him. His dark skin made his eyes even brighter in the light shining up from the flashlight at his feet.
“Fishing,” he said.
“Yeah,” Craig said. “I guess so.”
The kid turned back to the net, which was sinking into the water again, and the two of them were silent for what seemed like a long time before the kid said, “My father said you wouldn’t swim with the sharks.” He was looking at his net instead of at Craig. “Even after your own father stopped the winds for you.”
Craig snorted with laughter, and began to walk backward, his legs feeling as if they were made of that wiggling fish stuff in the kid’s net, and also the bloody, inert muscle of stuff the kid’s father had tossed by the handfuls into the Caribbean. As best he could, he trotted away on those weak legs, laughing and snorting, back to the hut, where he dropped into bed and a waveful of stars and ocean closed over him. He slept like death. When he woke up, his father had already packed, and they left the resort without saying good-bye to the director.
It was back at home that Craig began to carry the cement block with him. He was so tired every morning from carrying it, and facing carrying it again all day, and utterly unable to articulate to his mother what was wrong and why he could hardly hold his head up at the breakfast table.
She assumed, of course, that he was on drugs, and she would scowl at him when he woke from the naps that lasted all day on the weekends and stretched from after school to dinner during the week. She sent him to a shrink, who prescribed some pills Craig never took because of the warning that he couldn’t get a hard-on if he took them, but after a couple of months, the cement block simply lifted, on its own, returning now and then with a change in seasons but disappearing after he got used to the rain, or the snow, or the falling leaves, or the first brilliant days of summer. He hoped this wasn’t the beginning of that again—here at school, in October, during midterm week.