Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  Yes, Bonham said, he had had more air left, because Grant didn’t conserve his. “You remember when you went through the rock fissure into the big cave? You used a lot of extra air there because you got a little panicky. And probly a couple of other times. Like when you first went in.” But that was nothing; after a while Grant would learn to save air both by relaxing and by never breathing until he really needed it.

  As for taking the bottle off over his head down below the swell, it was just easier. No, nobody taught it to him. He thought it up himself. But probly lots of other divers did it too. Just because it was easier. “And in this racket, anything that is easier, requires less effort and energy, is the better way to do a thing. Simply because saving energy saves air.”

  “Well, what about taking me through that narrow place like that? Isn’t that a pretty advanced maneuver? for somebody like me? on their very first dive?”

  Bonham shook his head no. “I don’t usually take people through there in their first sea dive. I don’t usually take them in that cave. That’s true. But you’re pretty cool. A lot cooler than you think you are, for some strange reason. Usually it’s just the reverse. People think they’re cool and they aint.

  “Anyway, I was right there watching. I could have got you out all right.”

  “Yeah, I saw that! After I got on through!”

  Grant laughed.

  Bonham grinned. He had decided, he suddenly interjected, to dock the boat at the Yacht Club tonight. He was getting bored with that crapped-up dirty commercial dock, even if it was closer to the shop. Something about his face, looking straight ahead out through the windshield, gave Grant a distinct impression that there was more to it than that, and that the something more had to do with himself, but Bonham did not admit more. Nor did Grant question him. And as they ran on in, his diction and his grammar began to undergo that peculiar change from educated and expressive to uneducated and laconic, which Grant had noticed now several times before. He was evidently preparing the personality he wished to present at the Yacht Club—for whatever reasons. When they came abreast of the Club, he swung the boat hard left at full throttle in that violent style of his, immediately and at once cutting throttle (as he had to do or crash), then skillfully and easily wove his way in amongst the small launches and sailboats to a mooring close to the dock. From there Ali rowed the two of them in to the long wooden dock in the bathtub-sized plastic dinghy which Bonham kept lashed down on the cabin roof, and returned for the tanks and regulators and to clean up. Bonham and Grant had already dressed on the boat, and went on to the bar. Bonham had covered his slicked back, thinning hair with a beatup, old, but expensively made and very salty looking yachting cap bearing a crusted gold Captain’s symbol, which he had pulled from the drawer where the gin bottle was.

  Grant had been to the Yacht Club twice before, both times late in the evening for a drink after dinner, both times with his ‘mistress’ and her husband. Both times he had found it nearly deserted and pretty dull. The only amusement was a European-type pool game with holes in the middle of the table protected by skittles which must not be knocked over, where for a shilling you could play for x number of minutes before the timer shut off and retained the balls. He and the husband had played. It was a pretty middleclass, pretty deadly place in a way which only certain British or British-Colonial institutions can be. Built modern of concrete in four stories (each with its veranda) up the side of a bluff from the water’s edge to the street, it was much prettier outside than in, which was not saying much. Now, however, at the cocktail hour, it was cheerfully crowded with a harddrinking crowd of local members, residents, and ‘winter visitors’. Bonham knew them all, and he introduced Grant to all of them. Most of them were sophisticated enough, and had money enough, to spend a couple or three weeks once or twice a year in New York, be knowledgeable of American theater, and so knew who Grant was, had heard he was in town, and were glad to have him down they said. Grant was personable and charming with all of them; but he would much have preferred getting off in a corner and talking diving, to being Bonham’s celebrity. This, however, was impossible since Bonham, after ordering the two of them drinks, was now engrossed in a conversation with two Club members about a 38-foot Matthews marlin boat which had been put up for sale over in Montego Bay. The gist was that Bonham, as he made plain in his deliberately bad diction and bad grammar way, wanted to buy it but was afraid it was not in good shape. The two Club members were assuring him that it was in good shape, that they had seen it, and then Bonham would only shake his head dubiously and it would all start over. When Ali came up from the boat and Bonham, after ordering them both still more drinks, sent him off on foot to go get the station-wagon at the commercial dock, Grant was glad. But by the time he got back, Bonham, after ordering them drinks a couple of times more, was heatedly discussing with the chairman of the PTA (of which organ Bonham it turned out was vice-chairman!) the meeting they were calling for next Thursday. And Grant was defending his old pal Tennessee Williams from three well-to-do ladies. By the time Ali had got the tanks and regulators loaded in the car, Bonham had ordered them one more round of drinks. Then Grant paid and they left.

  Grant hadn’t minded the drinking, or even the paying. He was a good boozer himself, and he suspected Bonham was short of cash. But he was still high with elation over his dive, and he wanted to remain up there with it. It was all very strange, and quite hard to explain, and the only way he could word it was that it made him somehow feel more manly. More manly than he had felt in quite a long time. And he wanted Bonham to himself to talk about it. Not about that part of it, but about the dive itself, and about diving in general.

  “I didn’t know you had any kids,” he said across Ali in the car, in an oblique reference to the PTA. “How many have you got?”

  Bonham appeared suddenly to have become somewhat somnambulant, out in the air and the dark. “Aint got any,” he said, very shortly. “Wife teaches school,” and he motioned vaguely upward with his head toward what appeared to be the left front corner of the car roof, but which was in fact the mountainside along which they were driving and upon which, high up, Grant knew there nestled a school. A ritzy one.

  “I didn’t know you were married,” he said.

  Bonham did not answer right away. “Well, I am,” he said finally.

  Grant hesitated delicately, then made his voice cheery. “Your wife’s Jamaican?”

  “Yeah,” Bonham said immediately and without reservations. “But she’s very light.” He drove on a way before he added, “She’s Jewish axly. Mostly.” Then after a moment he again added: “Columbus gave most of Jamaica to his relatives. So it was mainly them, the Jewish, who were the first settlers.”

  “I’d like to meet her someday,” Grant said.

  Bonham visibly seemed to settle stolidly into some protected interior of his nigh-immovable bulk. From it he spoke calmly. But it, his marriage, was plainly something he didn’t like to talk about, or even think about, apparently. “Sure. You will. Someday. She’s a great girl.”

  “I’m sure,” Grant said. “You know, I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with those two guys at the bar about buying that boat. The Matthews. I don’t mean to stick my nose in. But can you afford—”

  Bonham snorted. “Shit, no. Wish I could. But I wouldn’t buy that boat if I could.”

  “But then why did you—”

  “Because you got to put on that kinda act, that’s why.”

  “But surely those other two g—”

  “Course they did,” Bonham rumbled slowly. “They know exactly how much I’m worth. Just like I know exactly how much they’re worth. And they know I’m not worth that kinda money.” Then his grammar and diction suddenly got precise and educated again. “But that’s the game. I pretend I can. Because that’s the way they all act. That’s the way they function. And when I act the same, it proves to them that I’m like them. I’m normal. Then they’ll accept me. Why do you think I joined that damned PTA?
Hell, I joined the Rotary, and the Kiwanis, and the Chamber of Commerce. If you want to be a part of any social group, you have to join in their little rituals.”

  “I’m not at all sure it’s all that easy,” Grant murmured. “I wish it were,” he added sadly.

  But they had reached the shop. Bonham had already stopped the car in the middle of Grant’s two sentences and gotten out, though pausing outside to listen to the end of it, and then began giving Ali his orders without answering Grant: everything was to be hosed down, fresh water, the regulators were to be laid out on the workbench and stripped completely down and washed (Bonham always tore his regulators down after every sea dive and checked them he said, especially the ones used by clients), Ali was to be there at eight in the morning because they had a young couple wanted a pool checkout at the Royal Loggerhead. Under the necessity to work, or at least give orders to work, his earlier somnambulance, if that was what it was, seemed to have left him.

  “I know a great little bar and restaurant where I hang out a lot,” he said as he climbed back in and slammed the door. “It’s not expensive and they got great steaks and a great bunch of guys hang out there. It’s called The Neptune Bar. What do you say we go there and do some serious drinkin and then have somethin to eat? If you really want to talk diving, that’s the place.”

  “Okay. For the drinks part, anyway. But I got to be back to the villa for dinner.” He was supposed to dine at the villa with his mistress and her husband and their hosts the Count and Countess de Blystein, because there were to be two other couples, local ‘winter residents’ (which meant they owned places), whom the Countess had invited for the express purpose (more or less unstated) of meeting Ron Grant. However, it was only a little after seven, and he could easily be back by a quarter of nine to change. Couldn’t he? Of course he could. “Why not?” he said.

  In the end, though, he had not gone back for the dinner, and had probably known in the back of his mind that he wouldn’t. He had stayed with Bonham. It was probably a serious social breach, but he knew he could laugh the Countess—Evelyn—out of it. Not so his ‘mistress’. She would be furious, not only because she loved showing him off, but also because she loved and adored the Countess Evelyn and the Countess Evelyn’s standing, while going to great lengths to pretend not to. But it had been the thought of her, as much as of the dull evening itself, which had been the deciding factor in his saying to himself what the hell? I’ll stay out.

  Down below in the cave during the dive, when he had gotten stuck on sex and the thought of his new girl in New York, his mind had automatically brought up his mistress too, the old mantilla-ed witch-mother image standing on the church steps pointing, as it had done for years. But down there, sixty feet underwater in a cavern and in a faceplate and aqualung, for the first time he had shut that off, shut her off, as if with a special new interrupter click-switch in his brain. It was the first time this had ever happened to him, and it was a new sensation. Click-switch the witch. It felt almost exactly like the sensation he used to experience in a physical way when he would sit in the dentist’s chair and have his teeth ground and would click a switch in his head and turn off the pain. He had learned to do that years ago when, after his first play was a hit, he had had his whole mouth rebuilt by a marvelous dentist but who did not like to use the old-fashioned impure novocain they were using back then. But it had never happened to him before with a self-inflicted moral obligation. Something somewhere in his brain had changed maybe? Afterwards, feeling around cautiously inside his head, he had tried to find what was changed and had failed. Everything had seemed to be stored pretty much where it used to be. He was not really in love with his new girl (or was he?) any more than he had been in love with a lot of other girls over the past ten years, and anyway Grant no longer believed in love; he was (as he well knew) at that age. So it couldn’t be her, or could it? He was not, he was sure, a ‘changed’ man because of a few lessons and one dive in the sea in an aqualung. Or was it that: had such a little bit of diving that quickly made him into a man again? (Again?!) Whatever it was, he just no longer gave a damn about a dark-shrouded, mantilla-ed, hidden-faced figure standing on the church steps pointing. He didn’t have to think about her. He could just shut her off, and now he did not want to unlock the switch until he absolutely had to.

  It would be one of those long, conversational dinners, with good food and good wine whose enjoyment would be cut at least fifty percent by the nerve-tearing conversational necessities. Afterward they would play poker on the Countess Evelyn’s beautiful feltcovered mahogany poker table and/or backgammon on Evelyn’s beautiful inlaid boards with ivory counters. Most of them (all but his ‘mistress’) would drink. Her husband would drink a lot. And so would Grant. Grant was having too much fun with Bonham, and—also—learning too much about diving and divers.

  Grant had never seen anybody eat and drink as much without showing it at all, or any after-effects of it. When they first came in, Bonham had ordered a platter of six super-burgers which when Grant declined he ate all of as they drank. Later they each ate a huge imported American sirloin served with enough frenchfries to bury a battleship. Between them, with only a very few drinks given away here and there, they put away almost two bottles of gin and innumerable tonics. And finally around two in the morning Bonham had three more superburgers as a snack. Somewhere along the line they were joined by two very black, very handsome Jamaican girls whom Bonham knew, and when he left with the handsomer of these he walked as straight as a die. When Grant paid the bill, he found it was much less than he had expected.

  Bonham knew everybody in the place, of course. Mostly they were a mixture of working people running from boatmen and fishermen, plumbers and electricians, all the way up to small-fry white collar people who worked for the government, for local businessmen, or for the big hotels. Of the two Jamaican girls who joined them one worked as a nurse-technical assistant to a dentist and the other ran a gift shop in the Royal Loggerhead. And yet in spite of so much seduction talk to the girls, so many greetings, jokings, drink acceptings (and offerings), the big man managed to impart to Grant quite a bit of interesting learning about diving. In the car driving over Grant had mentioned his notice of Bonham’s two distinct sets of language and diction. The big man had only grinned and said, “You notice a lot, don’t you?” That was all he offered. Here, in this place, he spoke a very carefully very low-class lingo, excepting only the times he was speaking seriously to Grant about the technical aspects of diving. He went into at some length the various aspects of his work as a real working diver, as contrasted to his teaching and taking out of tourists. The trouble was there just weren’t that many working-dive jobs around all the time to keep you going. Grant listened, and kept nodding. And finally, when they had both drunk a lot and he had got his courage up high enough with booze, Grant got in his question about sex, about orgasm in the aqualung.

  “Did you ever fuck anybody underwater, Al?” Both the girls giggled.

  “Hell, yes!” Bonham said and put his arm around the ass of the nearer girl, who just happened to be the prettier one. “I would be willin to bet that anybody who’s ever done any divin at all has screwed at least once underwater. It ain’t hard. The only thing is, one of you has got to hold on or you float right apart.” He grinned. The two girls were fascinated.

  “Well, how deep?” Grant asked.

  “Oh, fifty feet. Seventy-five. Easy. Depth don’t matter at under a hundred and fifty feet Why? You got some ambitions?”

  It was Grant’s turn to grin. “Oh, well, sure. Naturally. Eventually. But don’t you uh get out of breath?”

  “Hell, yes. It’s great.” Here the girls both laughed out loud. “But that don’t make no difference. Matter of fact, if you just roll over on your back so’s your regulator’s lower than your mouthpiece, the difference in pressure’ll flush your lungs right out for you. All the girl divers I ever knew loved to get laid underwater.”

  So Grant had his answer. He could mastur
bate at seventy feet if he wanted. It was the increased breathing rate which comes with sexual exercise that had worried him. Relaxing, a little drunkenly now, he knew again that great private excitement of pleasure which always came with the rediscovery, the reutilization, of the fact that the interior of one’s own mind can always be kept secret, that nobody can ever really tell what you’re thinking if you don’t want them to. In happy silence, he sat back and looked around the bar at all the people who didn’t know the interior of Ron Grant’s mind.

  It was only shortly after this that Bonham announced his intention of leaving with the girl whose ass his arm encircled. He announced it in a rather odd way, which was a sudden lowpitched, bass giggle that erupted from him. “Me and Enid are gonna take off fum here in that goddam ole station-wagon of mine and go and park it somewhere in some glorious quiet canefield. Aint we, sweetie?”

  “Hell, yes! You dam right!” the handsome girl said. She was the dentist’s assistant.

  “You’re perfectly welcome to come along,” Bonham said. “Susie there would be more than glad to have you for her fella for tonight.”

  “I most shurely would,” Susie smiled. “I’d enjoy to know you a deal betteh, Misteh Grant. You’re very famous in Ganado Bay. I’d like to love with you.”

  Grant shook his head. He liked her. She was just almost as goodlooking and attractive as the other girl. There was very little to choose. But suddenly, working somewhere deep inside him, was the thought of his new girl in New York holding him back. Suddenly it was hard to believe it was only not quite five days since he had been with her. They had been together only a little over three weeks, and that was hard to believe, too. It was like some kind of talisman he had in her, that he would lose if he stepped out on her. For a sudden moment he thought of taking a cab out to the Royal Loggerhead or the West Moon Over and calling her. But the lousy phone service here took so damned long, at least an hour, and half the time the connection was so bad you couldn’t hear or be heard except for a word or two. It would be more frustrating than good. And anyway what did he want to call her for? He begged off charmingly with Susie, not wanting to hurt or insult her, on the grounds of fatigue, too much booze, and a deep depression. To him it sounded lame. But if it was, Bonham came to his rescue.