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Amity for a whole year. A rich season meant prosperity enough to carry the town through the lean winter. The winter population of Amity was about 1,000; in a good summer the population jumped to nearly 10,000. And those 9,000 summer visitors kept the 1,000 permanent residents alive for the whole year.
    Merchants --from the owners of the hardware store and the sporting goods store and the two gas stations to the local pharmacist --needed a boom summer to support them through the winter, during which they never broke even. The wives of carpenters, electricians, and plumbers worked during the summer as waitresses or real estate agents, to help keep their families going over the winter. There were only two year-round liquor licenses in Amity, so the twelve weeks of summer were critical to most of the restaurants and pubs. Charter fishermen needed every break they could get: good weather, good file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt (10 of 131) [1/18/2001 2:02:21 AM]
    file:///C|/My Documents/Mike's Shit/utilities/books/pdf format/Benchley, Peter - Jaws.txt fishing, and, above all, crowds.
    Even after the best of summers, Amity winters were rough. Three of every ten families went on relief. Dozens of men were forced to move for the winter to the north shore of Long Island, where they scratched for work shucking scallops for a few dollars a day.
    Brody knew that one bad summer would nearly double the relief rolls. If every house was not rented, there wouldn't be enough work for Amity's blacks, most of whom were gardeners, butlers, bartenders, and maids. And two or three bad summers in a row --a circumstance that, fortunately, hadn't occurred in more than two decades --could create
    a cycle that could wreck the town. If people didn't have enough money to buy clothes or gas or ample food supplies, if they couldn't afford to have their houses or their appliances
    repaired, then the merchants and service firms would fail to make enough to tide them over until the next summer. They would close down, and Amity's citizens would start shopping elsewhere. The town would lose tax revenue. Municipal services would deteriorate, and people would begin to move away.
    So there was a common, though tacit, understanding in Amity, born of the need to survive. Everyone was expected to do his bit to make sure that Amity remained a desirable summer community. A few years ago, Brody remembered, a young man and his brother had moved into town and set themselves up as carpenters. They came in the spring, when there was enough work preparing houses for summer residents to keep everyone busy, so they were welcomed. They seemed competent enough, and several established carpenters began to refer work to them.
    But by midsummer, there were disquieting reports about the Felix Brothers. Albert Morris, the owner of Amity Hardware, let it be known that they were buying cheap steel nails instead of galvanized nails and were charging their customers for galvanized. In a seaside climate, steel nails begin to rust in a few months. Dick Spitzer,
    who ran the lumberyard, told somebody that the Felixes had ordered a load of low-grade, green wood to use in some cabinets in a house on Scotch Road. The cabinet doors began to warp soon after they were installed. In a bar one night, the elder Felix, Armando, boasted to a drinking buddy that on his current job he was being paid to set supporting studs every sixteen inches but was actually placing them twenty-four inches apart. And the younger Felix, a twenty-one-year-old named Danny with a stubborn case of acne, liked to show his friends erotic books which he bragged he had stolen from the houses he worked in.
    Other carpenters stopped referring work to the Felixes, but by then they had built enough of a business to keep them going through the winter. Very quietly, the Amity understanding began to work. At first, there were just a few hints to the Felixes that they
    had outworn