The floor was scrubbed and grease-free; the walls were missing their usual spider-webs; that one lightbulb that outright refused to work had been bullied into submission and replaced; and there was a big broad beautiful weekend stretching out in front of the building unrolled all the way to Monday.
Sheila breathed in, tasted oil and salt, and breathed out with a smile. Yes, it was a beautiful day in the garage. And not to be a lonely one either – down the way came the flash and shine and sheen of someone driving in a hurry because they weren’t quite sure if they’d be able to start again if they stopped.
“Morning Ms. Palmridge!” she whistled out happily as her daughter’s fourth-grade teacher powerslid into the building on top of her battered old whitetip. “Troubles?”
“Oh hello I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong but I was taking the turn on fifth street and it just started pulling to the right and wouldn’t stop and then it got worse and worse and then it started slamming into things all on its own and I think it lost some teeth down on Fenton!”
“Lemmesee,” said Sheila in her professional mumble, and she popped the whitetip on the nose gently. “Open up, please.”
The oceanic whitetip tried to bite her. She slid the jawjack into its mouth smooth as butter. “Thank you, sir. Nah, don’t worry about the teeth – you didn’t even lose the whole top row, see? Those’ll grow back in no time.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. Everyone always overthinks how much damage is being done when they see teeth everywhere: those practically fix themselves before you even know they’re gone. Better they absorb the impact than something less replaceable, like the liver.”
“Oh dear. Is that bad?”
“Yeah, practically a third of these things are liver. You take a real bad hit there sometimes you just have to get a new shark.”
The jawjack creaked.
“Whoops, someone’s impatient up there. Give me a second to…ah, I see your problem! Blocked nostril on the left side!”
“Is that bad?”
“If you don’t like uncontrollable pull to the right it is! See, the shark tracks prey long-distance by swinging its head from side to side and veering to the direction the smell is strongest – if one nostril’s blocked, then everything it smells seems like it’s coming from the other side, and it’ll start turning. No wonder you were pulling to the right.”
Ms. Palmridge eyed the oceanic whitetip as dubiously as it did her. “I’ve never known much about these things. My girlfriend handles the mechanical issues around the house and so on.”
“Oh?” said Sheila, putting down the nasal swab and giving the shark’s snout one last polish with her rag. “Tell me: has she done any maintenance work on this lady recently?”
“I’m – well – I don’t know WHAT you’re-”
“The shark.”
“Oh. I think so? Last weekend, maybe. Yes, last weekend.”
“Ahhh….I think we have our culprit. I bet when your better half was cleaning off the hood here she inadvertently brushed some debris into the nostril. Well, it’s less polished now but it’s clear as a whistle in there. No more veering, the teeth’ll grow back soon.”
“Oh thank you, thank you! How much does this-”
“Just call it a consultation; there’s plenty of time left for me to make money on the weekend. Barely five minutes and the cost of a swab? Nothing to bill for. Didn’t even have to pull out any teeth shards. Now let’s get this thing out of its mouth and you back on the road before it gets any angrier – you’ve both got places to be!”
“Yes, yes. Thank you so much!”
The oceanic whitetip tried to take a chunk out of Sheila’s foot on its way out of the garage, but she was ready for it. A reliable model, but they were crabby as hell. Then it balked at the parking lot’s exit and she wondered if she’d missed something but oh. Oh, that explained it.
In through the exit cruised little Penny Westridge on her father’s great white, fins barely moving, each soft push of the tree-trunk-thick tail shoving the animal forwards like a lesser fish going at full throttle. It softly lumbered up the hill and collapsed right in front of the door with a grunt.
“Shit!”
“Don’t worry about it, we’ve got a tow cable if we need it. Problem?”
“No fucking kidding!” said Penny, eyes twitching.
“The problem in detail, please,” said Sheila patiently.
“My mom’s gonna fucking ice me fucking fuck fuckity FUCK” elaborated Penny. She made to kick at the great white’s side, then paused, foot wobbling, as its eye rolled back in its head to pure white. “Oh god is it meant to do that FUUUUUC-”
“That’s normal,” soothed Sheila. “Here, have a seat. Have a drink. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Everything! I just wanted to take one little ride to show Mandy I really could drive it and then we went down to the Greasy Bait to grab a drink and when I came back out it was twitching and by the time I dropped her off it was cramping at the gills and now it can barely move and it’s not even two years old mom is going to KILLLLLLLLL MEEEEEEE-”
Sheila gently prodded at the gills. They twitched. “Uh-huh. Anything else happen while you were out?”
“No. No! I wrecked mom’s shark and I don’t even know what I did and she’s going to ki-”
“Nah.”
“Wha?”
“Nah, she won’t. Mrs. Westrid – your mom, she keeps this baby in a nice garage, right? Demagnetized, rubber flooring?”
“Yeah. Oh god I borrowed her keys without her asking she’s going to KI-”
“Nah she won’t. That makes sense. Does the Greasy Bait have rubberized parking spaces?”
“Wha? No. They barely have ASPHALT.”
“Gotcha. And are the hitching posts concrete?”
“No? No. No. Metal, I think.”
Sheila chuckled and rubbed at the great white’s great nose. It grunted at her. “That’s it then. She’ll be fine by the time she’s home.”
“How? What’d I do?”
“You parked her outside her comfort zone. These big babies, they’re a little more sensitive than they look, and they get used to their environment. She’s used to resting in a nice stable environment with absolutely no stray electrical impulses at ALL, and you left her in the open with a bunch of strange sharks and attached to a metal pole. She probably picked up on the ambient voltage through that and it’s just a tiny bit more than she’s used to, and if you and your girlfriend –”
“No no no she’s not my-“
“-your not-your-girlfriend took your time in there she worked herself into a tizzy over it. This is all just aftermath of that. She’ll be right once you get her back home and a bit of time to process it. And tell your mom she might want to consider introducing metal elements into the garage: a shark that can’t be parked outside a sealed environment is a little bit of a sad vehicle, isn’t it?”
Penny slumped with the force of someone whose entire body had been kept upright by nervous tension. “Ohmygod. OHmygod. Ohmy. God.”
“Breathe, girl. Breathe.”
“Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome, we all do this shit at your age. Stuff. And don’t worry about money: that wasn’t even a consult. You just get home now before your mom notices, eh?”
“She sleeps in on Saturdays,” said Penny weakly. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” said Sheila. And she watched the great white back gently out of her lot with affection. Beautiful animal. Pity they were so expensive these days.
Well, there’d be time to make money over the rest of the weekend.
Like right now, for instance. ‘Right now’ was Lacey Newman on her shortfin mako for the sixth time in as many months, its big black eyes roiling and rattling in their sockets as it mouthed and fought against her steering.
“Hey again, Lacey.”
“Heya Sheila. It’s off its feed again and won’t stop fighting me when I turn it on.”
“Well, guess we’d better check the stomach first,” said Sheila as she pulled out her jawjack. “Again.”
“Stupid thing thinks it’s a tiger shark. This better not be another license plate it swallowed.”
“Well, could it be anything else? These look like gastrointestinal symptoms.”
“Came home late last night and parked it on the street; could’ve been anything from that to a stray cat.”
“If it was that it’d be perfectly happy. A little stray cat never hurt a shark.”
“Right. Unless it was diseased. Or a piece of metal that looked like a stray cat. Or a tasty-looking rock. Swear to FUCK I’m giving it the best fuel I can afford and it’s always on the lookout for more and more and MORE!”
“That’s the trouble with mackerals,” said Sheila conversationally, peering past the long finger-like fangs and into the mako’s gullet. “Fast cruising, great acceleration, amazing top speed, but the metabolism means they guzzle fuel. Ah, I think I see the problem: looks like it swallowed a bit of chain-link fence and it can’t regurgitate it properly. Gonna need to do a bit of fancy work here. Mind passing me my long-handled pliers? No, no, no. The longer ones. Longer than that. Yes, perfect.”
“Oh these goddamned things,” hissed Lacey as Sheila worked. “These things! They’re such…such bullshit! I don’t know why we put up with them like we do!”
“Can’t live without ‘em.”
“True. And I guess it could be worse. Just a little bit of a pain in the ass isn’t the end of the world, is it? That’s not so bad.”
“Yes indeed,” said Sheila, staring directly at the reader, “it sure would be irresponsible to keep driving sharks around if they were directly and provably leading to some sort of vast disaster that would cause irreversible harm to us and every other living thing on the planet’s surface.”
The shortfin bit her hand.
“Ow! Fuck! ‘Scuse me. That’s going to need stitches, won’t be a sec.”