Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  Ali, on the other hand, had his own reality. He thought they were both crazy. And who was to say he wasn’t right?

  Then there was Bonham’s reality. Bonham leaped at a blood challenge. It was as simple as that. And thought no more about it. Grant’s hero-worship for the big diver went up another notch. His love for Bonham had been increasing ponderously in three days’ diving, Bonham’s careful care of him, his accurate and thoughtful teaching, his so obviously serious mentorhood, who wouldn’t fall in love with all of that?

  It was said in the rich international set in Switzerland, where Grant had visited a couple of times, that everybody falls in love with his ski instructor. Or, in Manhattan, with his analyst.

  But the real truth was—the Grant reality was—he was still the same sad Grant. After all of this. That was the real truth. Nothing had changed. He had taken a big, fairly dangerous fish, but nothing had changed. Because he hadn’t liked it. He had done it, but he hadn’t liked it. He had hated every moment of it, actually, and would hate it again tomorrow. The thought of Lucky swam up into his mind. He much would have preferred to be in that tiny Park Avenue apartment fingering that lush body beside him and snugly watching the cold winter sunshine outside the window, and he almost hated her for that. The only thing that had really changed was that next time he would know better how to handle a big ray—and maybe he would shoot better! He could see it down the future, fifty rays, a hundred rays, until he became bored with knowing and shooting rays. And he would still be the same scared Grant.

  Well, if he did more and more dangerous things, sharks maybe, maybe then it would be better.

  Sharks. Did sharks worry about whether they were brave or not? They did not. They were in fact about the most cowardly creatures on God’s earth. Only when they had a wounded sitting duck to feed on, were they brave. Only then and when they had their blood up—‘mob feeding pattern’, the scientists called it! but why not call it ‘war’?—in which in their frenzy they would eat a wounded brother, a life preserver, a stick of wood. That was reality.

  His arms folded tautly across his chest his jaw muscles tight he stared out at the still dim but swiftly approaching shoreline, and a hot fury rose up in him, so furious and full of frustrated hate and loss, that he wanted to turn to Bonham and ask him to go back out right now and look for something else to hunt, something good this time, maybe sharks, something really good. He looked over. Beside him at the wheel Bonham was whistling happily.

  “See this!” he grinned, and leaned over the wheel to pick up from the dashboard the sharp-pointed sawtooth spine carefully by its butt. He held it up, and suddenly he seemed to take on the stance and look of a professional high school studyhall lecturer (which he has probably done some of too, Grant thought; for free; for the Chamber of Commerce and business goodwill). Grinning, he intoned: “This serrated barb with its own builtin poison-creating tissue attached has not changed, evolved or regressed in over sixty-eight million years. Imagine that? Can you imagine that? The venom it creates affects the vascular system and causes swelling and violent cramps and, if the victim’s abdomen has been punctured, may even cause death. This is the kind of wound it makes,” he grinned, and propped his foot up on the helmsman’s chair behind him to expose a corded scar two inches long on the inside of his right heel. “No dramatic attack and defense. No terrifying underwater battle. Simply stepped on him in the sand bottom of a lagoon in waist-deep water, and was laid up for three weeks.” He tossed the spine back onto the dashboard amongst the disarray of tools and heavy leather gloves and took his foot down.

  “Now he tells me!” Grant said with a bitter grin, made tougher and more bitter by his feelings of a moment ago. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” Curiously, the tough reaction made him feel some better, though deep down the depression stayed.

  “Not at all. You’re welcome,” Bonham grinned. He picked the stinger up again. “Primitive man throughout the world has been using these spines for needles and spear tips since before the dawn of history.” He turned it back and forth between his thumb and finger for a moment. “End of lecture,” he said and tossed it back. “Yes sir, we’re gonna work out all right together! Really all right!”

  It was, or so Grant felt, a considered compliment. “What about sharks?” he asked, to cover his pleasure. “Don’t you ever worry about them? Don’t you ever keep an eye out for them?”

  “Keep an eye out for them all a time.”

  “I mean, I thought once something was wounded and there was blood in the water . . .”

  “Well,” Bonham said expansively and rubbed his stomach, “you got to know your waters, and your terrain. Tide’s important. With that ray now it was incoming tide and I was watchin all the time, but there’s almost never any sharks around that area. I don’t know why.

  “If you want to go someplace where you’ll see sharks, now, I know a couple places. One of them, you’ll see all the sharks you’ll ever want to see.”

  Grant felt a small drill of excitement, an unwished-for and curiously unpleasant excitement, bore itself into his lower abdomen. He didn’t answer.

  “Yes sir! We’re gonna get along really all right together!” Bonham said happily, and began his happy whistling again.

  It was curiously odd, Grant realized suddenly, and another indication of that peculiar, almost-feminine sensitivity Bonham could evince for so seemingly extrovert a man, that he had strictly and without talking left Grant completely alone all that time he had wanted to be alone. Could he have known it was depression? Almost certainly not. He thought it was a pleasant savoring of the experience.

  But if Bonham was happy over the bag and over the total results of the day’s dive, he was taken aback and thrown off his stride when Grant told him that Carol Abernathy wanted to go along with them to Grand Bank Island.

  Bonham’s face got long, and his eyes flat. “Well, Christ!” he rumbled. “What’ll she do? I mean, there isn’t much there, you know. There’s just this one real hotel, and the town. A real drunken port town. Two fleabag hotels, and ten bars in it. I wouldn’t even stay in the town myself. And all we’ll be doin is divin.” He was trying hard to cover up his displeasure. “She don’t dive. What’ll she do with herself?”

  Grant was staring off through the starboard windshield. “Says she’d sit in the sun. She likes to swim. She swims very well you know. Better than me. And then there’ll be the other women, won’t there?”

  Bonham seemed to sense the implacability, though of course without knowing why. “Sure. But Orloffski’s wife—his girlfriend —is a pig,” he said unequivocally. “So is Orloffski for that matter. And she drinks like a fish. Mrs. Abernathy doesn’t drink, does she?” he said politely.

  “No,” Grant said.

  “And I’ve never met Sam Finer’s wife. I don’t have no idea what she’s like.” He shifted his stance behind the wheel. “I’m not tryin to be a wet blanket, you understand. But there won’t be much to do but dive. Dive, drink, and eat fish.

  “And this isn’t just only a diving trip, you know. It could be a very important business thing for me too.”

  “I understand,” Grant said. “Well, she’d like to come,” he said.

  “Then it’s okay by me,” Bonham rumbled.

  Grant nodded and gave him a smile, though he could feel that his own eyes were flat too. “Thanks.” Then he shrugged. He wanted to take away some of the sting of forcing him. “She says she’d like to see the place. Who knows? I don’t know why.”

  “I said it’s okay by me. It won’t make that much difference, I guess.” He occupied himself with the steering.

  Grant nodded again. He hadn’t told him all of it of course. He couldn’t. Not without telling him a lot of other things. He wished, suddenly, that he could tell him all of it. All fourteen years of it. Bonham would be a good confidant, he thought. It was the first time he had ever really wanted to tell anybody, he realized.

  It had been a terrible night, last evening. But every night was a terrible
night now. He was finally convinced that she was really crazy. But it was only part of the time. Just the same this of course stimulated all sorts of frenzied, frantic guilts. Or was she just pulling that, to create exactly that effect? How did you know?

  God, the guilts! Everything went back such a long way. When was responsibility fulfilled? Ever? They had really helped him so much. She had helped him so much. Even artistically, back at the beginning. Though that ended six or seven years ago. Even before the financial help became unnecessary. How much of the rest of your life did you have to give up for that? All of it?

  Before dinner—at cocktails—it had started. It wasn’t what Carol said, because Carol said almost nothing, but the air was so stiff it was like everybody was breathing overbeaten meringue. Evelyn of course could carry anything off, an atom bomb in the yard wouldn’t shake her, and she was plainly, and quite frankly, intrigued by what was going on.

  At dinner she was positively twittery over the fish—twittery in a social, keep-the-evening-going way that let you know cynically that none of this reached her soul; or, “meant a goddam fucking thing,” as she would say, “who’re you?” It was positively the best fish she had tasted in Jamaica, Grant’s snapper. And her people got her hers right off the dock, not at any goddamned Market. Of course by the time the French chef, imported by herself and Paul from Paris, got through with it you wouldn’t have known it was fish, though it was delicious. Fish, fish, had to be cooked in cornmeal in a crusty black skillet on a swaying boat by a dirty Cherokee squaw and eaten crowded in with fishermen, Grant who had once worked on a fishing boat in the Keys at Marathon believed. He remembered suddenly the weeks, months, when Carol had come and visited—visited? come and stayed with him! lived with him! cooking, cleaning, marketing—when he was rewriting, rewriting hopelessly, the first big three-acter, The Song of Israphael.

  Jesus!

  And after dinner it was no better. Evelyn had asked some people in for poker, the almost-young couple who half owned and wholly managed the exclusive West Moon Hotel, and a couple of almost-as-rich-as-herself British friends who had driven over from Montego Bay for the night, expressly for the poker. They were all tough players. And Grant loved to play with them. But that night he couldn’t. He was half drunk but the air was still too stiff. Hunt, three quarters drunk, had determinedly stayed downstairs and played though he wasn’t a good player. Evelyn was an excellent player, when she had the cards, but when she didn’t have them she couldn’t throw in and stop betting hoping to draw out, and could lose a bundle. Still, she could afford it. Everyone waited for those nights, even the rich friends. But Grant couldn’t stand it. He had excused himself and gone upstairs. Carol followed him.

  “Don’t you think that’s a little unwise?” he asked as she came into his room. He had made himself a hefty drink and rolled up with Sir Algernon Aspinall’s Pocket Guide to the West Indies.

  “Probably,” she said. “I don’t care. That Evelyn knows everything about everybody in the whole world.” Then suddenly her voice broke tragically. “What do I care about anything any more?”

  Grant read.

  “Come on down to our room,” Carol said. “I want to talk to you. Seriously.” She swept out.

  He had put the book away and followed. She was being a woman tonight. Instead of the teacher-mentor-Master, who worried about careers. Hell hath no fury like a blah, blah, blah. He felt he knew every routine so well now. Still, this act was better than the other. Then his callousness made him feel guilty.

  He had told her all about the proposed Grand Bank trip the night before, after Bonham first broached it to him. He had not even said that he was going, only that he might, and she had said practically nothing about it all and had shown little interest. So when she suddenly, in Hunt’s and her room, said that she would like to go along with him, he was surprised into asking, “Why?” It was exactly the wrong answer.

  “Well,” she said, smiling softly, and tears welled up behind her eyes, “it’s probably the last trip you and I will ever make together anywhere. And I would kind of like to have it. Sort of a nice way, you know, of saying goodby.”

  Grant had exploded. “Oh, Christ!” Such an unfair way to take advantage.

  “A woman knows when she’s no longer wanted,” Carol said hollowly. Resigned sorrow had claimed her.

  “So does a man,” Grant said thinly.

  “But a woman, being what she is—more intuitive, more dependent, more forced to take the second place—knows it sooner than a man, I think.”

  This kind of thing could always drive him into a frenzy. “Look, goddamn it! You’ve always said yourself someday I’d have to get married. I’ve heard you tell your friends—tell Evelyn—back home that someday you’d have to pick out a good wife for me! Jesus!” Aware how ridiculous what he was saying was, he still couldn’t stop it. “Well, how about letting me pick out my own goddamned wife? What’s wrong with that? Even a thirty-six-year-old boy like me ought to have that right! Jesus!” he said again and clutched his hair. How could he get mousetrapped into these things.

  “But I never meant it,” Carol said. “That was just glib talk. I never thought it would really come about.—I guess one never does, does one?”

  “Aw, come on! Come off it! Are you kidding?” Grant hollered, waving his arms. “When I’m fifty, you’ll be nearly seventy. You took your chances!”

  “I know,” Carol said. “I’m asking you humbly, please take me with you on this trip. Please let me go. A parting gift. A farewell trip together. For a nice memory.”

  “All right,” Grant said thinly. “But on those conditions.— As long as it’s all right with Bonham.”

  “It’ll be all right with Bonham,” Carol said with a sharp smile. “As long as you’re paying his plane fare and his expenses.”

  Once again she had startled him. He had never ceased to be amazed by her. “What about Hunt?”

  “Hunt understands me very well. Better than you do,” Carol said sadly.

  “I’m sure he does,” Grant said. He wanted now only to get out of this. “Okay. As long as it’s okay with Bonham. And on those conditions. Your own conditions.”

  Carol Abernathy nodded. But he already knew somehow that she didn’t really mean it, or mean to stand by it, or even believe it. Jesus! “Thank you, Ron,” she said abjectly, and then she sighed. “When is your new girl coming down?”

  “That’s none of your business,” he said, furious again. “I don’t know yet. Not till after this Grand Bank Island trip anyway.”

  “And you’ll take her on to Kingston with you?”

  “That’s my intention. Yes,” he said cruelly. “Why not?” But he still didn’t really mean to.

  “I hope you’ll both have a very good time,” Carol said. “Just promise me one thing. That you won’t marry her until you know her better. You do owe me that. After all these years of helping you with your work and your career.”

  “O, Jesus!” Grant cried, clutching his fists in his hair again. Such abject self-abasement, even when this patently false, destroyed him.

  There was a big Empire desk in the room, which Evelyn had had moved in so Carol Abernathy could do her ‘work’ and ‘correspondence’ with the Little Theatre Group, though they all knew tacitly (except possibly Carol) that it was pretty much of a joke, and in front of it stood a large heavy modern metal executive’s swiveling office chair. Grant, standing by it and looking around like a child who has been tricked by adult illogic and cunning into giving up his most cherished flaws, to find something to vent his frustration on, reached out his foot and kicked it with all his strength, banging his toe painfully in the soft, ropesoled shoe. On the bare tiled floor the chair shot across the room on its rollers to where Carol was sitting on the dressing table stool and struck her on the ankle. The reaction from her was immediate and startling.

  Yelling “Ow!” automatically, she leaped to her feet, put her foot on the stool to rub the ankle, and eyes blazing almost sightlessly holler
ed, “You struck a woman! You hit a female! You struck a female!”

  “I didn’t!” Grant protested. He felt like wringing his hands. “I didn’t! I kicked the chair! The chair hit your ankle! But I didn’t mean for it to!” During this idiot speech he had become almost pleading.

  “You hit a lady!” Carol yelled right on nevertheless, her dark eyes blazing sightlessly and insanely. “I always knew you were a mean, evil, degenerate brute!”

  And at this moment Evelyn de Blystein came upon them. There was a discreet—but not so discreet as to be unheard and unnoticed—knock on the door.

  “May I come in?”

  “Of course!” Carol cried, still almost yelling, and sat down. The door had already opened.

  “What the hell are you two doing, for God’s sake?” Evelyn said in her deep whiskey voice. She had a seamed, tough, cynical businesswoman’s face with knowing hooded lids. They made her look wryly sated as if she had seen everything and been amused by it all. And she loved that role. But if this attitude was also her act, there was enough truth behind to give her a certain style. “All that racket! Having a fight? Good! Tell me!

  “I came to see how you were, dear,” she said pointedly, looking Carol straight in the eye.

  “We were arguing over this man Al Bonham,” Carol said, her face still angry. “This idiot here has fallen in love with him, and I’m trying to tell him he better watch out for them. They’re going to try to take him, I’m positive!”

  Grant listened, astounded. She had leaped into this consummate, absolute lie like a running broadjumper without looking back, utilizing her anger from before as if it were some kind of tool. And it appeared to be enough to convince Evelyn, the cynical Evelyn.