by James Jones
Bonham proceeded to point out the various corals. They were all very beautiful and interesting to look at—in a slimy, repugnant sort of way—but you could only look at coral so long without getting bored. Apparently fully aware of this, Bonham—after pointing out a number of varieties (including two which he warned Grant not to touch by wringing a hand and shaking it as if stung)—chose the exact moment of Grant’s increasing restlessness to show him something else. At the end of the coral hillock they had been exploring he swam over to Grant and motioned for him to follow. He led him straight down over the steep side of the hillock to the sand channel bottom (here Grant’s depth gauge Bonham had sold him read 63 feet), and there he pointed out two large caves. It was apparently true that Bonham knew this area like Grant knew his backyard. It was also apparent that he was conducting his tour and displaying his treasures one by one with the dramatic sense of a veteran entrepreneur.
To Grant the caves were both exciting and frightening. The one on the left of the sand channel went back in under the coral hill they had just swum over; way back in there some hole running clear to the top of the coral allowed a shaft of sunlight to penetrate all the way to the bottom, illuminating greenly some strange coral shapes growing on the sand; outside, its entrance was huge, not a real cave mouth at all, but more an overhang that ran almost the entire length of the side of the hillock. From under this overhang Grant carefully stayed away, as he looked. By contrast, Bonham had already swum on in. Turning his head, he motioned Grant to follow. Biting hard on the two rubber tits of the mouthpiece between his teeth, tightening his lips over the whole, Grant descended a little and entered. Scared as he was, it was magnificently beautiful in there. The ceiling was only fifteen or twenty feet from the sand floor, much lower than it had looked from outside. Several good-sized tunnels showing sunlight at their ends led off from it and looked safe for exploring. But Bonham was already swimming back out, motioning him to follow.
The other cave, across the channel, was really no more than a fissure, running maybe thirty feet up an almost perpendicular dead-coral cliff, hardly wide enough to admit a man, and it was to this one now that Bonham led him.
Gesturing Grant to follow, the big man swam up the fissure to a point that appeared slightly wider than the rest, snaked himself through, and disappeared. When Grant followed, he found he had to turn his shoulders sideways to enter. When he did, his tank banged alarmingly on the rock behind him. He remembered reading stories of fellows who had cut their air intake hoses on sharp coral, and who had barely got out alive by luck, superior experience, and by keeping their heads. Trying to keep his air intake hose (without being able to see it) somewhere near the center of the cleft, Grant pulled himself along with his hands on the sucky, unpleasantly viscid living corals growing here. But when he was in far enough that he could no longer bend his knees to flutter his feet, the panicky breathlessness, the sensation of being unable to breathe, to get enough air, which panic brings, and which he knew from before, hit him debilitatively. Stopping, he forced himself to breathe deeply but it didn’t help. Suddenly his instinct was to throw off everything and run for the surface blindly, even though covered by coral rock, get to anywhere where there was air. Instead, he reached out with his hands and pulled himself further in, trying to keep his movements slow and liquid, unviolent, though by now he didn’t care whether the coral cut him or not.
Actually, he had only been inches away from freedom. The last pull with his arms brought him head and shoulders almost to his waist out into the open. One breast stroke with his arms and he was free, swimming almost forty feet above the bottom. Bonham, who Grant now realized had been directly in front of him watching and ready to help, had already rolled over head down and like an airplane in a full dive was swimming straight down toward the bottom, his flippers beating leisurely and slow, his arms holding camera and gun extended backward along his thighs to streamline. For a moment Grant was seriously angry at him, for taking such a chance with him on his first dive. Still breathing deeply, though slower and slower now as his heart and adrenal glands got back to normal, Grant watched in a kind of witless stupor as Bonham got smaller and smaller and smaller. A few feet above the bottom the big man leveled off over a huge coral toadstool and rolled over face up, and slowly sank to a cross-legged sitting position on it, his head back looking up, for all the world like some great, oneeyed humanoid alien frog from Alpha Centauri or somewhere. Still looking up, he motioned for Grant to come on down. Still staring, still breathing deeply from his fright in the narrow entrance, Grant suddenly realized with a start which brought him back out of his post-panic stupor that he was lying here all stretched out forty feet up in the air from this other man, relaxed, his arms out over his head like a man in a bed. Because it really could have been air. Seemed like air. The green-tinted water was crystal clear here inside, and Bonham by seating himself on the toadstool had avoided stirring up any sand clouds as they had done outside. For the first time with any real physical appreciation, Grant realized how delicious it was to be totally without gravity like one of the great planing birds; he could go up, he could go down, he could stay right where he was; in the strange spiritual excitement of it, his fear left him completely. Feeling ridiculous again because of his recent panic there, he glanced once at the narrow entrance fissure, then rolled over head down using exactly (though slower) the same body movements he once used to do a full-twisting half gainer, and corkscrewed gently down—relishing the leisurely control—into a vertical dive, his hands and arms straight back along his thighs palms up, his fins beating lazy and slow, as he had seen Bonham do. Only once did he have to clear his ears, and he did it now without pausing. Below him Bonham got larger and larger. Then, duplicating Bonham’s maneuver, he rolled over onto his back, exhaled and sank into a sitting position on the giant toadstool beside him, his knees clasped up to his chin. Unable to speak, or even to grin, he gesticulated wildly and waggled his eyebrows to show his enthusiasm. The big man nodded vigorously, then touching him gently, pointed upward, sweeping his arm across the view like a man unveiling a painting. For the first time since he had entered, Grant looked up.
What he saw very nearly took away the breath he had just regained. He was in an immense cavern at least sixty feet high. Apparently the bottom here inside was ten or so feet lower than the sand channel bottom outside. From where he sat at one end the other was almost lost in a hazy near-invisibility. In the dim ceiling a dozen holes allowed clusters of greenish sunrays to strike at varying angles across the interior until they shattered against the sand bottom or rock walls. Each beam wherever it struck against bottom or walls revealed weird outlandish coral sculptures. It was more than breathtaking, it was like having stumbled upon some alien cathedral on some other planet, which some otherworld race with their incomprehensible architecture and alien sculpture had ages past built, decorated and dedicated to their unknowable God. Grant was suddenly frightened again, not physically this time, but spiritually. For a moment he forgot he was diving underwater in an aqualung. Was that some four-headed Great Saint whom they worshipped, there on the side wall? Was that seventy-eyed monster, all head and almost no body, resting on the sand floor, the Great Being Himself? And as always, when he found himself alone in an empty church—as he had when a boy, as he had when visiting the great churches and cathedrals of Europe and found one or another of them deserted—Grant felt himself beginning to get an erection in the dim stillness. Was it the privacy? Was it the quiet? Or was it the highceilinged dimness? Or was it maybe the nearness of God? the nearness of Unknowable? Embarrassed, he shifted away sideways, afraid Bonham might notice what was happening inside his tight, scanty bikini, and the feeling began to subside. Anyway he knew one thing for certain. One day while he was here in Ganado Bay he was going to come out here alone—come alone if he had to rent a rowboat and aqualung from Bonham’s competitor—make a dive down here alone, strip off this damned bikini, swim around this cave stark naked with his erection, then sit on th
is toadstool and masturbate, come like a fury, and watch his milky semen swirl and mingle with the green water which itself swirled about his body with every tiniest movement.
Maybe he’d hire a nondiving native to handle the boat for him. The very secrecy of it, the native up there working the boat and him down here masturbating, made it a tinglingly exciting prospect. But, was this not a too-ambitious project for a neophyte diver just starting out: jerking off underwater? Well, he would find out. The idea of masturbating made him think of his new girl in New York. She, it had turned out, had loved that.
Bonham touched him gently again, on the shoulder, and Grant started guiltily. When he looked over, the other was motioning upward with one hand and beckoning with the other. When Grant asked “Why?” by shrugging up his shoulders and spreading out his hands, Big Al pointed to his watch. Looking at his own Grant saw they had been under 32 minutes, and could hardly believe it. And it reminded him of something else. During his last few breaths it had seemed to Grant that it was getting slightly harder to breathe each time, but the difference was so slight he had thought he was imagining it. Now he tried again and found it was distinctly harder to suck air from his lung. His neophyte’s nervousness returned to him suddenly. But neither man had yet pulled his reserve valve!? Grabbing his mouthpiece with one hand and pointing to his tank with the other, Grant made a heaving motion with his chest as if trying to breathe. Bonham nodded. But then he followed the nod by fanning his hands back and forth across each other in a gesture of “Take it easy; don’t worry.” Gesturing Grant to follow, and without pulling his reserve, he took off from the toadstool with a little leap upward like a bird.
But it was more like a foot-winged Mercury than a bird, Grant thought as he followed. He was no longer nervous. Underwater at least, he now trusted Bonham completely. Forgotten was the momentary anger at Bonham’s having taken him through the narrow fissure.
Ahead of him Big Al swam upward on a long diagonal straight across the length of the green cathedral. He did not turn off to the right toward the fissure. Grant assumed, rightly, that there was another entrance—which made him feel good, because he had no liking for the fissure. As he rose on the long diagonal, the air in his tank expanded as the pressure lessened and it became easier to breathe and he understood why Bonham had motioned him not to worry. Only if they had had to descend again into greater pressure, he remembered now from the books, would they have needed their reserve valves. Grant remembered to exhale frequently as he rose to avoid air embolism and when, as he swam, he looked at his Automatic Decompression Meter Bonham had sold him it showed there was no need to worry about decompression. So they were leaving, or—rather—returning.
Ten yards ahead of him Bonham swam into and then out of some of the slanting rays of sunlight which crossed the cave, strangely bright and glowing when he was in one, almost invisible when he was in the darker water inbetween. Grant could not resist pausing and turning for a look back. He felt a curious sad tranquillity, toward all inevitability, because he had to leave. But when he looked, he found he was already forty-five or fifty feet above the bottom and the toadstool was no longer visible from here. With a second’s tingling excitement in his groin he knew now more than ever that, eventually, he would come back here and descend into that invisibility and sitting on that same toadstool looking up, masturbate himself. Play with himself, he added, in the jargon of his parents. Then he swam on.
Ahead of him Bonham had turned the corner into an alcove-cum-tunnel almost at the ceiling of the cavern and was waiting for him. Ahead at the end of it was sunlight, and together in this more than comfortably wide space they swam toward it, then through it and back into the world.
But the dive was still not over. Emotionally, it was, perhaps; but they still had to get back to the boat. Bonham did not even bother to surface and look around but (he really did know this area like his backyard) struck off up and over the coral hillock they had just left the insides of, and which came to within less than ten feet of the surface. Grant could not see boat or anchorline ahead, but Bonham was obviously heading straight for them. Below them as they swam were the tangled, trashy staghorn-coral beds—the brown ones, their hunks of old fishing line caught here and there, rusting beer-cans in the low spots—which marked the hillock’s crest. But now after the cave all that was boring. It was hard to believe they had been inside this hill, and that it was damned near entirely hollow. Grant’s sadness at leaving it—out here in the sunlit, brightly coral-studded, open water—was slowly turning into a wild kind of elation. Above him the surface was only a few feet away, and every now and then—as in some silvered but unsolid mirror—he could see himself or Bonham, grossly distorted, reflected back from the underside of it as it moved. His air, without his pulling of the reserve lever but getting harder and harder to draw, lasted just exactly to the side of the boat. At the boat he had a bad moment when, trying to shuck out of his tank straps and pass the lung up to Ali, he went under gulping seawater and almost choked; but then he was over the side and in the boat safe from sharks, barracuda, Portuguese men-o’-war, the bends, air embolism, busted eardrums, and mechanical lung failure. Why the hell had Bonham tried to make it seem so hard? His elation continued to grow.
Behind him Bonham handed up his own lung easily and smoothly, moved his bulk smoothly up the little ladder and over the side and, dripping wet, started the motor. Ali ran forward to haul in the anchor. Before Grant could get himself out of Ali’s clinging wet shirt Bonham had sold him, the diver and his helper were headed back to shore full throttle like two men going home from the office, Bonham at the wheel and Ali dismantling the lungs. In the west the sun was still quite a few yards above the big mountain that jutted out into the sea.
Grant’s new elation lasted all the way back to shore, and longer. It lasted through the Yacht Club and then to Bonham’s shop in the dirty old station-wagon, where they left Ali. It lasted through all the drinking and eating they two did at Bonham’s favorite bar after that. It lasted, in fact, until around two-thirty in the morning, when he walked half-drunkenly up the path to the villa where his ‘mistress’ and her husband were staying, to go to bed. Then it completely disappeared, when he discovered his ‘mistress’ was still up.
In the boat he had been shaking and chattering uncontrollably as he rubbed himself down with the towel Bonham thoughtfully handed him from the wheel. He had not felt unduly cold ‘downstairs’, as Bonham called it, but up here in the air and speed-induced breeze he was freezing. When he stepped to the gunwale of the rolling cockpit after discovering he had to piss, his penis—so counter to the half-erection he had had down below—was shrunk up so from his cold chill that he had to search for it in his pubic hair and stretch it out by hand. None of any of that had stopped him from talking.
When he had turned from the rail, Bonham had been holding out the gin bottle to him with one hand and wiping his mouth with the back of the other, the wheel’s uppermost spoke held firmly in the crook of his arm. When the hand came away, the mouth was seen to be grinning widely over his bad teeth. “So you think you liked it, hunh?” he demanded. “Well, that’s only the start.”
Vicariously, though he obviously had none of his own really, he was able to share Grant’s elation. In contrast to Grant he had worn no wet shirt and had not toweled off and was letting the wind dry him, but he wasn’t cold. Trickles of seawater continued every now and then to run down his face from his hair as he spoke. He had ducked his head back into the water face up before climbing aboard, Grant had noticed, and the sea had slicked back his hair as well as any comb ever could, so that in contrast to Grant’s wildly disordered hair he looked positively well-groomed. He could not stop grinning apparently, as he accepted the bottle back, as though he really did share Grant’s enthusiasm, and Grant suddenly felt—(gratefully; though he did not know to whom, or to what)—that they two had established a rapport between them with this dive which almost no one—for instance Ali, a nondiver, or Grant’s mistress, or
her husband—could share who was not a diver himself. And maybe all of them couldn’t share it, unless they had been down in the cathedral cave with Bonham themselves.
“Here. Have another one,” Bonham grinned, extending the bottle after taking a second slug himself. “Warm you up.”
It was the second of a great many rounds they were to down before the day, and the evening, were over. Grant was plain full of all sorts of technical questions, and he kept them coming one after the other. For instance, when Bonham had taken off his lung at the boat, instead of hanging onto the ladder and trying to keep his head out of water in the swells, like Grant, he had descended to ten or twelve feet, below the swell, and shucked his tank off over his head like a man taking off a sweater, while never letting the mouthpiece out of his mouth, and then had swum back up to the boat with it. Why had he done that? It was a keen trick, and had somebody taught it to him? And did Bonham have that much extra air left? because he, Grant, had been completely out when they reached the boat—unless of course he had pulled the reserve.
