Bait and Switch

It was dark before I walked out of the ocean that night. I was starving. After some quick doctoring up, I headed to the local pub from my hostel. Girls in foreign countries shouldn’t go into bars alone. It was the quickest way to become an urban legend. But I was vacationing solo, and my only company was myself when I wanted a beer and a barstool and a television with Sports Center.

And food.

El Botín — “The Loot” — kept the front and the back door open, but even the cross breeze from the ocean couldn’t blow away the stench of old beer and back alley urine. The music was American, the vibe was local. All the patrons’ eyes grazed me, pretended not to look while looking. I ordered a Modelo and a taco, and focused on inhaling and exhaling evenly. Breathing still hurt, even with the athletic tape cinching my sides, wrapping my midsection like a mummy.

As I sipped my cerveza, I noticed in my periphery one of the patrons looking a little too intently, a little too long for mere curiosity. I knew the type. He approached me and smiled. Bold. Hair greasy from sunscreen. Eyes glazed from alcohol. He asked me (in Spanish) if I spoke Spanish. I did, of course, but I blinked, my face a blank sheet of paper.

Undeterred, he pulled up a bar stool. “Allo,” he said in his thick English. “You alone?”

“No,” I said, which, technically, wasn’t untrue. I was with Sports Center and my beer.

He looked around, lifted an eyebrow in challenge. I kept my eyes on the TV. “Where you from?”

“Not here.”

“Por supuesto.” He scooted closer. “Victor,” he introduced, emphasizing the “TOR” with volume and importance. I nodded once. He smelled of salt and dead fish. Most likely one of the pier fishermen who live on the dock at dawn and dusk, drinking their paychecks and casting their lines. “Buy you another?”

He didn’t say it like a question, and was already lifting a hand for the bartender. I held up my half full bottle, didn’t look at him when I said, “No, thank you.”

There was a pause. I could feel his dissatisfaction at my aloofness, sense it the way a shark senses blood. He wasn’t used to rejection. His original soft tone became clipped and acidic. “Your loss.” He stood, blocked my view of the television. “But then again,” he added, and stopped to sip his beer, his tongue flicking the rim suggestively, “maybe later.”

He walked away, his arms wide and away from his body, as if his chest were so massive, they couldn’t possibly hang flush at his sides. He strutted to the pool table, where he white-knuckle-gripped a pool stick and conferred with two friends. They looked my way as he spoke in secret, his eyes steel, their mouths forming half grins.

Great.

I paid my bill and ducked into the bathroom, not needing to look back to know that they were paying theirs, too.

In the stall, I pulled the blade from my sock, small enough to be concealed but too small to do any satisfying damage. Shame. With one flick, I used it to tear off my athletic tape. I gasped. It was always harder to breathe once the tape was off.

I balled the sticky mess of white tape into a crumpled wad, winced from the sharp agony in my midsection, then shot out of the bathroom, knowing the shoreline was close, but knowing they were closer.

I didn’t look over my shoulder, not when I stepped out into the warm night and staggered from the pain, not when I heard their footsteps padding intently on my trail as I broke into a jog. I couldn’t breathe, but I knew I didn’t have far to go. I heard their chuckles as I wheezed and gagged, fighting through blurred vision towards the crashing waves. They let me trot to the shoreline, probably assuming they had cornered me as I slipped in and swam deep. I heard their catcalls and their splashes as they followed, thinking I’d eventually come up for air. But I never did. Not near them, anyhow.

Back at the hostel, my mattress damp with sea water, I smiled, thinking of them still flailing around for signs of me. Two of the guys had stayed only waist deep, their eyes scanning the dark water for signs of my bobbing head. But the one who’d offered me a drink — Victor — he was a swimmer. A good one. I saw his long strokes, how steady he treaded water, even inebriated, as he searched for me, his prey that slipped away.

My breathing had finally settled, and I burrowed into my pillow. I was out of athletic tape, but I had cinched my flannel shirt into a makeshift tourniquet, tight as a corset around my ribs. It would do for tonight.

I awoke a few hours later, the time of darkness when dawn hadn’t arrived, only a soft glow melting the edges of night. People were still silhouettes, shadow puppets — all outlines and no features. But I recognized him at the end of the pier, his arms like flotation devices lifting up and out from the sides of his puffed up chest. His long hair in a messy low ponytail, the sheen of grease against his scalp shiny even in the dark.

I had pegged him correctly. Victor was a pier fisherman.

There were usually a dozen people at the end of the pier fishing at this time. Strangely, today there were only three. Two were packing up as I sauntered toward them, the wind whipping at my bare arms, my upper body still clad in a bikini top with my thermal shirt tight as a noose across my ribcage. I nodded at the sea, a question in my eyes.

“Nada,” said one. The other had already walked away.

The fish weren’t biting. That’s why it was desolate from the usual crowds. I looked over the railing at the swirling ocean. There had to be a reason the water wasn’t teeming with the usual activity. I looked out at the end of the pier, at Victor, who turned as if on cue, as if he could sense me. He cocked his head —was it from rage or pleasure—at seeing me again. No amount of alcohol had stolen his memory of “the one that got away.” We locked eyes, not fifty yards separating us. He would have dropped his pole right there to pursue me had it not suddenly launched him toward the railing, temporarily dislodging from his hand before he retrieved it with a vice grip. His line had snagged on something ungodly.

The reason the fish weren’t biting.

The tip of his pole bent nearly in two, but it was designed for the fierce deep. Victor was out to get something big that morning, and his line held.

The one fisherman nearby saw what I saw. He paused, then walked to the railing and squinted. After a moment, he frowned, deep creases in his weathered face.

“Pendejo.” He shook his head angrily.

“¿Mande?” I inquired.

“Shark,” he said, as if the word held more power in English.

I leaned over the edge, saw it thrashing wildly, convulsing its whole body to break free of the hook that held it fast. It made waves of foamy white water —a centralized storm— as it rebelled from its captor.

Catching a shark was illegal. Everyone knew that. But I watched as Victor wrestled with it, proud of his giant snag, too proud to let it go quite yet.

I knew he would be.

I bent down, retrieved the knife from my sock, and walked boldly, closing the gap between us. He didn’t even see me approach until I was close enough to stab him.

I didn’t.

He noticed me standing by his side, and a cocky grin crossed his face, thinking I was enthralled by his catch, mesmerized by his brawn. He was sweating now, his biceps and forearms already pumped from only a few minutes of fight between him and the great beast.

In one swift motion, I reached out and sliced the line, his bent pole flinging up to ramrod straight. The line disappeared into the water below. The shark melted back into the deep waters, but not before slapping the surface of the water hard with its tail, a splash that reached up like a wave crashing on the pier.

I knew I had moments. Victor, now drenched, was already lurching my way, his face contorted in fury, but I leapt over the edge and dropped the twenty feet into the swirling abyss.

I heard his splash moments later. I knew he might hesitate. But I knew his pride would win. I waited for him to spot me maybe ten feet below. I knew he would open his eyes even though the salt would burn. He would still look for me. He was a flurry of legs and arms as he pursued. I untied the knots in my flannel just as he gripped my foot. His eyes squinted before going wide as they took in the flap of skin on either side of my ribs opening wide, the fleshy reddish pink that showed itself.

My gills, one on each side, looked as if someone had taken a filet knife from my hip to my armpit. I breathed deep, glorious deep breaths, flapping them wide as Victor’s eyes grew wider. He was horrified by me, so much so that he didn’t even see the shark, still agitated from the fierce battle, coming his way. The Great White most likely didn’t know it was attacking its nemesis, only that it was so angry after fighting, it was tearing into anything in its path.

I just made sure Victor was in its path.

He survived, I later found out. I had swum away, leaving nature to do what nature does. I heard stories about him years later, though, hundreds of beaches south. The man who was dragged into the sea by the girl with gills, the girl who could call on sharks and they would listen. The girl who pursued you in beachside bars at night, who lured you into the ocean, so that you never returned.