Читать книгу Rage. The Legend of "Baseball Bill" Denehy онлайн

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The five of us lugged the smelly, oily, ugly, scary, toothy, leathery, three-hundred-pound sea creature over to our car and put it into the trunk. The shark’s head and tail hung out the back of the trunk, but it was so heavy that the shark was in no danger of falling out. We drove back to Homestead with the shark in tow.

We knew that Joe McDonald, the Mets’ director of scouting for the minor leagues, liked to get up early in the morning and swim in the hotel pool. Joe was very pale—we called him the “White Ghost”—but we liked Joe well enough. Tug decided—with my encouragement—to invigorate him for his swim. Under the dark of night we placed the lifeguard stand into the deep end of the pool and stood it up with the armrest just below the water. Then we dumped the dead sea monster, with the big, jagged teeth, into the water and sat it on the armrest of the submerged lifeguard stand. Satisfied with our work, we went to bed.

At seven o’clock the next morning, my three roommates and I were awakened by blood-curdling shrieks of horror coming from the pool area. We leapt up, expecting to see a frightened Joe McDonald, only to learn that a church bus filled with senior citizens had beaten him to the pool. The church folk had jumped in, and when they looked up, they were confronted by “Jaws” staring them in the face.