Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  Grant shrugged and made a face.

  “I know they were pictures of her, it was pictures of her, wasn’t it?” Carol demanded.

  “Now you’ll never know, will you?” Grant had said. He felt cruel. First red anger, than white fury boiled up inside his head and he struggled to contain it. If she was following some planned campaign to go—get back—to what had been before, and he wouldn’t put it past her, to have planned it all, she was certainly going about everything exactly wrong. They were almost to the lovely little coral-stone beachhouse. “I’m thinking of bringing her down and taking her to Kingston with me,” he said with deliberate malice. He had no intention of doing that. But he didn’t intend to take Carol either.

  Carol stopped. “You won’t! You’ll not! You will over my dead body!” She was almost screaming and her fists were clenched against her thighs. “I didn’t spend the best years of my life bringing you up and teaching you and making a man out of you for you to go off to Kingston with a little hot-assed floozy! I’ve got a big investment in you! I made you!”

  Grant had stopped, too. The tropical sun broiled down on both of them. They had both been so nice to him really, had really helped him so much—Hunt perhaps because he was forced to by Carol, at least at first; Carol because she believed in him and had been in love with him. He owed them a lot. But he didn’t owe them that. The truth was that while he had gone on working and learning and growing, all on his own because they couldn’t follow him, Carol had either given up or simply been unable to follow, and had moved on further and further into her lazy, easy-to-pretend-to-study mysticism. He had charge of his craft now. And the talent, such as it was, and it wasn’t at all too bad, was his. She worked by rote, chartclass ideas, usually ideas he had come up with, utilized, passed on to her, then abandoned for something newer while she clung on and on to them. And sold them like a philosophy to her little theater gang.

  “You’ll get your share,” he said thinly. “But you didn’t make me.” Stubbornly, like a man in a driving rainstorm, he had turned and plodded on for the beachhouse.

  It was that question of ‘courage’, what he had said to Lucky that last day in Miami, though he was sure he had worded it so obscurely that she didn’t understand and thought it applied to the diving. At least, he hoped so. He wasn’t even sure that he wanted to marry her. Sometimes he thought he did, and sometimes he didn’t. He didn’t know, that was the truth. He was still afraid she was too good to be true. But that was beside the point of courage. He had to do something about this, and he had to do it soon. But he wanted to do it graciously, if he could. That was why he had made that point of taking her out to the Indianapolis country club where he and the Abernathys belonged. If they hadn’t heard about it in a letter by now, they would soon. Honor had made him do that, anything else would have been sneaking and anyway people knew he had her there anyway. What the hell?

  He opened the door of the exquisitely appointed little beachhouse, which appeared very dark inside after the bright sun outside.

  It wasn’t the first time she had acted this way. She had pulled the same routine before, over other women. She didn’t like to sleep with him, but she didn’t want anybody else to. What he hated was her way, her trick of always making him appear morally wrong. It was moral for her not to want to sleep with him; but it was immoral for him to sleep with anybody else. Christ, that shit went out with Queen Victoria. She didn’t even believe it herself. Frustration and fury began to burn in him again. She couldn’t believe it! How could she believe it, when here she was still married to Hunt and living as his, Grant’s, mistress! For fourteen years! The irrationality of it was insane! Comparing Carol Abernathy with Lucky, there was no ground, no area—not by any possible stretch of the imagination—where Carol could even compete, let alone come off better. In the dim circular room he had begun to undress.

  It was strange. Thinking back all those years to when it began, he did not even seem to be the same man. It hadn’t even started as a love affair. It had started as a lark, not a serious ‘affair’. He had been home on a short convalescent furlough from the Great Lakes Hospital and somebody had taken him down to their house. The war was not yet over even in Europe and she was entertaining all the wounded crapped-out vets, of which there was not such a huge preponderance as later. Naturally there was a lot of drinking. She did not drink, but Hunt did and seemed to like getting drunk with the kids, who contrary to the mythology were not only not taciturn about their war experiences but in fact talked about damned little else. She was already interested in ‘literature’ and ‘the theater’ and he read her some of his young, bad poetry about being blown off the carrier into the Pacific and a couple of lousy one-acters, and the third time out he had made her. They were in her car, driving home from somewhere in the afternoon, Hunt was in his office at work, and they had driven out of town and parked in a wood and done it for the first time in the back seat. But for him it had been only a temporary lark, not any kind of idea for a ‘permanent relationship’. He already had two girls going for him in Chicago, and was fucking everything he could get his hands on then. He had been too near dead too long, and he wanted everything he could get. And he didn’t care if everybody else felt that way, either. There was a young Navy fighter pilot, a jg named Ed Grear, who was home on leave too and hung around down there, and who also had the hots for Carol Abernathy. And Grant hadn’t cared if he had her. Though Grant was an enlisted man and Grear an officer, they hung around a lot together, drinking, because they had played bad football together in high school, and they had already traded off two or three other girls in town. Carol had a pregnant girl staying with her who was eight months along, a distant relative from somewhere who had come there to her to hide and have her baby, and she was one of the girls they had traded off with. One night lying drunk on the living room floor and necking with Carol, while Hunt was drunk in bed asleep, Grear (who was later shot down in the Philippines) had passed by on his way upstairs with the pregnant girl and Grant had signaled him to come back down and switch places if he wanted to. Grear did come down, but he didn’t stay. Carol wasn’t having any. She had seen Grant signal, and while she said nothing then, the next afternoon (while Hunt was again in his office at work) her weeping rage astounded Grant. He had had no idea that she didn’t feel as free and easy about it all as he did. It was an episode she had never let him forget, and on certain occasions recalled it to him as the basic cause for her later disinterest with sex. She implied she had slept with several other men besides him over the early years of their affair, usually in deliberate revenge, but by that time Grant (who in his heart could never be quite sure she wasn’t also sleeping with Hunt occasionally, too) didn’t care, since he was reasonably sure that if she did she still couldn’t be giving very much away. And yet he had loved her, later, loved her desperately. At one point. If he was to be totally coldblooded honest about it, and he wanted to, he had to admit that when he really loved her was when the economic factor became involved, and they were supporting him. It was all so strange.

  In the dim cool of the de Blystein beachhouse he had looked thoughtfully at the torn pocket of the gook shirt before he laid it aside. Carol had quieted down completely when she caught up to him and came inside. Silently, they undressed together like old intimates in the dim domelike room to put on their swimming suits, and she seemed quite friendly and kind. She actually talked and acted as if there had been no scene. That in itself was peculiar, wasn’t it? he thought.

  Then suddenly, standing nude in the center of the dim room, she looked over at Grant and spread her hands. “Look at my figure,” she said in a shy, half-embarrassed voice which carried a thin, and for Grant bitter, edge of hopefulness. “I lost a lot of weight for you. I—” Then she paused, embarrassment on her face. “But my breasts got smaller. I don’t know why. They never did before when I dieted.” Her face was very vulnerable.

  Grant was horrified by his own coldbloodedness, looking at her. He could not help but com
pare her to the beauty of Lucky, who not only had a lot of youth and years on her side but also natural endowment. Carol had been a beautiful, a very attractive woman when he first met her, but never anything like Lucky. And her breasts had shrunk.

  “They look just the same to me,” he had said shaking his head. What else was one to say?

  To his further horror, he saw a small smug selfsatisfied smile of secretive triumph come over her face as she lowered her eyes and began to step into her suit, as if she assumed automatically that he really meant what he had said and therefore that she had won back everything.

  “It wasn’t really so much diet,” she said primly, still looking down, “as worry.”

  It was a vast relief to get outside. In the eyecracking sun there was a lovely little sand terrace held in by a wall of coral-stone with steps down into the water. Back from the sand were two tall shady pines soughing in the trades breeze above a coral-stone picnic table, and on the sand itself was a tall royal palm. Evelyn de Blystein treated herself right with her money, and for a moment he envied her angrily. The water was green and ten or twelve feet deep over a sand bottom running out a couple hundred yards past three big rocks to a reef so shallow the troughs between the surface waves exposed it. It looked interesting but he had no mask with him and anyway he didn’t feel much like exploring it right now. When he did swim out to it and looked down through the sting and blur with unmasked eyes, he saw that the entire reef as far as he could see was alive with a forest of sea anemones waving their tiny tentacles in the wash hungrily. He didn’t want to get into that, even with a mask. In amongst them he could see here and there the long black spines of the black sea urchin, Diadema setosum, moving pugnaciously about like sharp black needles whenever something touched them. He swam back to the little wharf, where Carol was. It was a good place for a lazy, pointless, profitless swim. But it was not to end there.

  After showering, she had lain down nude on the big ample oversized bed and called to him. Grant felt he could not refuse her. It would be too terrible. Again he was struck with horror at his own coldbloodedness as he went to her. Her body felt alien to him as if he had never touched it before. She must have sensed this. But if she did, she said nothing.

  He slept with her only one more time after that, and that was the night after his first dive in the sea with Bonham, the day they went to the big cave.

  He had no idea of course, then, that first day in Evelyn’s beachhouse, that exactly twenty-one days later he would be desperately calling Lucky in New York to come down.

  But a lot of other things were to happen before that occurred.

  7

  ON HIS SECOND DIVE in the sea with Bonham he shot his first fish. Bonham had sold him a double-rubber Arbalete which he also put on Grant’s mounting tab, warning him that until they were after really big fish he should cock only one rubber. They went about three miles west along the coast, where Bonham said there were really fish. “You’ll find spearfishin a helluva lot more fun than just pokin around on the shallow reef,” he said with his bloodthirsty smile. A mile off shore there was a deep reef which was too deep for the native kids to spearfish, and since the depth was 75 to 100 feet neither of the other two pro divers in Ganado Bay took their clients there. Neither did Bonham usually, but since Grant was doing so well, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t take him. “You’re lucky you catch onto things so quick,” he rumbled.

  Grant remembered that Bonham had said there were lots of fish on the ‘shallow reef’ too, but he didn’t say anything. Bonham appeared to be doing everything in his power to make sure his rich playwright stayed interested. It was only a long time later, when Grant knew a lot more, that he realized Bonham might have been pushing the safety factor to a fine edge by taking him so deep on his second day out. But by then it didn’t matter anyway.

  He never did know just when he began to feel at ease underwater. Suddenly one day it was just there: confidence. But it was certainly not on that second day, when he was at least as nervous as he had been on the first day.

  Dressing out was more familiar now. So was the crushing fall over the side and under, and the descent. Poking his head around a coral hillock down on the bottom, he saw a large grouper (it turned out to be only 6 lbs) just sitting there in the water and staring at him. Pushing the spear gun slowly forward until it almost touched the fish, who simply stared at him mildly if a little apprehensively with large liquid eyes, he pulled the trigger and put the spear through him just at the lateral line behind the head breaking his back. The fish hardly moved, but with the spear through him and the hinged barbs holding him securely he rolled his eyes and opened and closed his mouth in some silent fish’s agony of his own. Holding the gun at arm’s length and trailing the fish at the end of spear and double length of line, just in case there were any sharks or other predators around, Grant swam up with him feeling like a brute and a murderer.

  But if he felt like a murderer, Bonham did not. He had towed along a small plastic dinghy in which to dump the fish (“Get them up and out of the water as fast as you can, and try for brain shots,” he grinned; “it’s the flappin around and the blood spoor that brings the sharks.”) and in it, by the time Grant got his one grouper, were already five fish larger than his own. And watching the big man from the surface, as he drove in viciously after still another, a large grouper, was like watching the predatoriness of some primordial sub-human hunter with his blood up going after a deer. It was a thrill, in a way, but it was scary.

  When the big man surfaced with the new fish (a 15 pounder, it turned out), he was grinning that bloodthirsty, blackcloud grin of his. He went back down immediately.

  Grant did not find it all that easy the rest of the afternoon, and in a way he was just as glad. He could not get the picture of that liquid-eyed fish gaping in agony out of his mind. And yet underneath all that, he discovered a savage joy in it, too. The savage joy didn’t help him, however. He fired about six more times at fish and missed each time. The fish seemed to have a peculiar habit of flicking themselves away, with that incredible speed they all seemed capable of—if only for short distances, just at the exact moment when he pulled the trigger. Bonham seemed able to anticipate this and shoot a split second faster.

  When they had finished and were running home with Ali the helper at the wheel and had gotten the gin bottle out, Bonham seemed peculiarly tired, even depressed.

  “God, I love spearfishin!” he said with his thundercloud grin, leaning back against the gunnel after a pull at the bottle. “I didn’t mean to run off and leave you like that.” He paused luxuriously. “But you did all right by yourself, didn’t you?”

  “I got one,” Grant said. “I loved it. But it seems kind of a shame, kind of unsporting, to shoot them like that, in a lung, with so little on their side.”

  ”Are you kidding?” Bonham looked at him blackly, as if he’d been insulted. “We couldn’t even get down to them there at eighty-five feet without a lung. That’s why they’re so unspoiled and easy. But they wise up fast. The word goes out that there’s some kind of predator loose on the reef, don’t ask me how, and they all begin to run. They communicate, don’t ever worry about that. And anyway, if we didn’t get them, something else would, eventually. That’s the life of the sea. It’s worse than any ‘jungle’.”

  “It sure is. But I thought some divers could actually freedive that deep?” Grant asked.

  “Sure. And even more. You mean like the Pindar brothers. But they’re specialists. In just that. I can do sixty feet, but I’m not sure I can do eighty-five. Anyway, why give them a break?”

  He seemed totally disinterested in the fish, which now rode along behind them in the dinghy, and asked Grant if he wanted them. By rights they were his, since he was paying for the trip.

  “Christ, we couldn’t eat that many,” Grant protested. “But I would like two or three good ones to take home.”

  “They’re yours,” Bonham said.

  They would feast at the villa ton
ight, and not on boughten fish, on fish speared by Grant the hunter. “I’d like to have the one I shot,” he said with an embarrassed smile. It was the smallest.

  Bonham grinned suddenly, and then displayed that surprising sensitivity Grant found him capable of so often. “Hell, take three big ones and tell them you shot all three. What difference does it make?” Or was it just vast experience?

  Grant made an embarrassed shrug. “What’ll you do with the rest?”

  Bonham’s eyes filmed over slightly. “Sell ’em. In the Market. If you don’t want ’em. But understand that they’re yours if you want them. Lots of times clients don’t want that much fish, and then I sell them rather than waste them. Pick up a little change that way.”

  “I only shot one anyway,” Grant said modestly.

  “Doesn’t matter. They belong to you. Because you’re paying me for the trip, the use of the equipment, and the instruction.”

  Grant shook his head politely. He didn’t really understand this big man. Yet. Bonham shrugged. Okay, then he’d sell them. He wasn’t a bit above selling them.

  Bonham, it appeared, was having troubles of his own. And after the question of the fish was settled, he discussed them with Grant on the rest of the run back in.

  Unlike Grant, his troubles were not with women. The camera case he had tried out yesterday (the films of Grant weren’t developed yet) had been designed and built by a friend of his here in Ganado Bay, an American, who was one of the best underwater case makers in the whole of the Caribbean. Bonham sold them for him in his shop. But they were expensive to make, because he worked only in the best plastic plate and did it all by hand, and he couldn’t make very many except on order, and this limited Bonham’s chances at sales. Most beginning divers couldn’t afford to lay out that much for a case, especially if it also meant buying a new camera. Most vacationers already owned a camera, usually a model for which William had not yet designed a case; and they usually didn’t stay long enough for him both to design and make a case, thus losing Bonham other sales.