Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  “What do you mean by good stuff?” Grant asked.

  “Oh, manta ray. Shark. Big jewfish.” “How big is big?”

  “With jewfish? Oh, four five hundred pounds.” Grointon smiled again.

  For some reason Grant felt distinctly uncomfortable. The little ‘Irishman’ was bragging without bragging. Grant reached for the bottles. “How about a little drink?”

  “I can’t. Not while I’m working’,” Grointon smiled. “But if you ever get down to Kingston for any reason, and want to go out, I’d be glad to take you out. You ever do any freediving?”

  “No. I never really did any lungdiving till I hooked up with Bonham.”

  Grointon nodded, and looked at him both appreciatively and speculatively. “You’ve got the chest for it.” Then he grinned, an open honestly cynical grin very different from his smile. Grant liked him again. “Understand, I’m not trying to rob Bonham’s customers.”

  “Okay,” Grant said. “I understand. You sure you won’t have one little drink?”

  “Sorry. Really can’t while we’re flying.”

  It sounded smug to Grant. Still, he knew it was the truth. Under no such compunction himself, he made himself another, rather defiantly. He wondered what other conversation he could make with this strangely reserved and yet unreserved man.

  “You know, I’ve read all your plays,” Grointon said. “I think they’re great. And I mean really great. You got the Navy and the wartime Navy man like none of those novels about it ever did.”

  “Well, thanks.” Embarrassment. Exactly the same embarrassment he had felt exposed to the cameras of the Yacht Club members with the big ray.

  “Is that your mother back there?” Grointon asked suddenly.

  Grant looked up from the gin bottle with which he had been pouring. My God, did she really look that old? “My foster-mother,” he said.

  “What’s eating on her?” Grointon asked bluntly.

  “Oh, she’s just in a mood,” Grant said, and looked back down at the Schweppes bottle he had exchanged for the gin bottle.

  “Well, I guess I better get back up front,” Grointon said in a peculiar voice. When Grant looked back up, the diver had a friendly smile on. “I got a couple of course checks to make in a little bit,” he explained in what Grant felt to be an overly warm way.

  But maybe that was just himself. He watched the too stocky but heavily muscled back walk away from him forward. Like most average athletes who were never really great at anything, he had always secretly admired superior athletes and at the same time disliked them too, perhaps because he envied them. He turned to William who was sitting beside him and asked which of the divers was the better one.

  “Well, they’re different,” William said. “You know? Old Jim Grointon’s one of the best freedivers and spearfishermen in the country. That’s sports. You know? But Al Bonham is one of the best workin divers anywhere. Underwater salvage, pipelaying, cutting and welding, demolition and blasting, he’s tops at them all. It’s just different. Ya can’t say which one’s better.”

  It turned out as they talked that it was Bonham who had talked William into selling his little shop in Miami and coming down to Jamaica. Bonham had promised him they would clean up. So far they wasn’t. But they was still a big chance they would. William couldn’t really complain. With a wife and four kids he could live half as cheap here as in Miami. They couldn’t of afforded no maid in Miami! William it turned out was no diver and had never even been in a mask, except once in a swimming pool, let alone no aqualung. It was dangerous, people like Bonham and Grointon who done it were crazy anyway, and William would not be caught dead underwater. All he wanted was to make a big cleanup down here on his cases with Bonham like Bonham had promised him. And if Bonham ever got this schooner thing off the ground, they would.

  When the big diver came back from the cockpit to concentrate on his drinking and interrupted this explication by roaring with laughter at William, Grant found himself looking at the big man with a new eye and in a new light. The new light was William’s information. It took a certain amount of something peculiar—what? moral irresponsibility?—to get another man to throw up his security and go off on a goose chase (with wife and four kids!) when you weren’t even sure you could deliver and back up your promises. And in the back Carol Abernathy still sat screaming silent and selfsatisfied disapproval at everyone from her lonely seat.

  They circled the hotel once, everybody looking down at the sprawling buildings and the docks and at the manager who came running out waving his arms. On the dock there was a group of four white people in swim suits and three colored in clothes who also waved their arms at them.

  As they touched down and taxied in, a good-sized dinghy put out from the dock to take them off, and when Bonham with his stormcloud eyes now slightly drink-glazed offered his aid to help her climb down, Mrs. Carol Abernathy accepted it primly with a prim squeezed mouth. Grant could have booted her in the ass overboard. Suddenly he giggled to himself.

  When it came his turn, he saw that the two men in trunks and floppy hats in the boat, who were busily stowing gear and passengers here or there to keep the dinghy balanced, could only be Sam Finer and Orloffski by Bonham’s previous descriptions. Orloffski with a bullet head and butch haircut could indeed have been a guard on a pro football team, and anywhere but around Bonham would have been a big man. Finer was small and swarthy, deeply tanned, with a noticeable paunch but with broad strong shoulders. His eyes appeared as hard as two rocks, but surrounding them was a curiously weakly mobile face. Grant shook hands with them, his hand getting badly squeezed both times, and introduced himself, before sitting down where he was told to sit. They were having a great time being boatmen, it appeared; but they had not known that Jim Grointon and Mrs. Abernathy were coming, so their boat didn’t really have enough room to take everybody.

  “That’s all right! Don’t worry about us!” Grointon called cheerfully. “We’ll make out all right! Me and Raoul have to secure the plane first, anyway!”

  Raoul, Grant thought, and a memory of Lucky shivered through him for the first time in maybe half an hour. He felt a double twinge in his gut, one for the absence of Lucky and one for the existence—former existence—of Raoul, her Raoul. What the hell was he doing down here in the Caribbean with all these professional outdoor types anyway?

  It suddenly arose in his mind as a curiosity that while he had thought often of Lucky, he had not thought about sex or had a hard-on (except in the morning) for the past five or six days he’d been diving.

  It was the last he was to see of Grointon or Raoul really, until the next evening when they returned with a mess of smaller fish, and one six foot ten inch ground shark Grointon had taken all alone. A considerable prize, at least to Grant’s eyes.

  On the dock they were introduced to Finer’s and Orloffski’s wives. Finer’s wife was beautiful. And with a guilty start, when he looked into her eyes as they shook hands, Grant was suddenly sure that he knew her from before in New York. But he could not remember for the life of him whether he had fucked her or not.

  Bonham had told him Cathie Finer was a New York model, goodlooking, redheaded, and that Finer had met her on a business trip to New York two months ago. But that was like introducing somebody to a New York cabbie and asking if you had ever happened to ride with him. The odds were . . .

  Cathie Finer’s lovely gray eyes appeared to be pleading with him in silent appeal to keep his mouth shut.

  This was not their honeymoon he remembered Bonham saying, which they had spent in Miami Beach, but was by way of being a second honeymoon, and was the first time Sam had introduced her into his skindiving world.

  Then, as he was afterwards shaking hands politely with Orloffski’s sloppy (not fat; but with loose flesh hanging all over) loudmouthed ‘wife’, he remembered.

  It was a couple of years ago, when he had been in the city and was hanging around with another novelist (not Frank Aldane) and his sort of ‘midtown’ Village
set. The novelist had introduced him to this girl he had been taking out, a favor from one artist to another, at a Saturday night party. They had spent a hard-humping, do-it-every-way, love-sweaty weekend in her drab but not unpleasant little flat—which week-end, because she was not working the first part of the next week, lasted from Sunday through Wednesday. He remembered she told him no one had ever eaten her pussy so beautifully. But the weekend, though they both tried hard, had given neither of them more than a pleasantly sexual weekend so that they parted wistfully as friends. He had seen her at a couple of other parties afterwards. That was Cathie Finer.

  Grant had once several years ago casually picked up a copy of Playboy and discovered to his delight and astonishment that the Playmate of that Month was a young female poet he had only a couple of months before spent another such hard-loving New York weekend with; and this experience was rather like that one: He had studied the nude photos of her carefully and with lascivious possessiveness. His ego was so thrilled he wanted to run out into the streets of the Hunt Hill suburb of Indianapolis with the magazine and start accosting friends with it. Lamely, and belatedly, he realized his local pals would probably think he was lying, and if they didn’t would not care, and anyway would wonder what importance any of that had to them. It was a very frustrating kind of triumph; and so was this.

  Nobody seemed to have noticed anything, and Grant next shook hands with the hotel manager.

  He hardly glanced at Cathie Finer again. He did not want to hurt Cathie’s marriage, he did not want to hurt Finer, most of all he did not want to hurt Bonham’s chances of selling Sam Finer on the schooner. Of all the places in the world to run onto somebody you had laid!

  He shot a quick glance at Carol Abernathy who, in spite of her vaunting of her much-publicized feminine intuition, seemed not to have noticed anything either. Immediately he was disgusted. They weren’t even lovers anymore. What a powerful force was habit.

  The diving boat, an even larger dinghy than the one that picked them up, had already been prepared for them (Finer and Orloffski had had it out all morning with their ladies, in fact) and Bonham, Finer and Orloffski were already fussing with it. Hotel houseboys were there to look after their luggage. All they had to do was change to swim suits and take off.

  Cathie Finer and Wanda Lou, which was Orloffski’s girlfriend’s name, had decided they would not go along on this short afternoon dive, having had too much sun already during the long morning, and they were telling this to Carol Abernathy behind Grant. And at this point Carol decided she would not go out either but would stay back at the hotel with the ‘girls’ she said. She seemed already to have taken a great liking to Cathie and her sensitive eyes and face.

  But when Grant merely nodded and didn’t say anything, Carol called him over to one side. “You’re really going? Without me?”

  Now what? he thought. “Of course I’m going! That’s what I came on this trip for, was to dive.” He thought perhaps he might have swayed a little. He was drunker than he thought.

  “Well, then don’t expect me to look after your luggage and lay out your clothes for you,” she said viciously, “you or him!” She jerked her head toward Bonham.

  “I don’t expect you to do any-goddam-thing!” Grant almost shouted. He was suddenly dangerously angry, and trying hard to avoid a public scene. “The houseboys are supposed to do all that. He just told us,” he said more quietly.

  “I just want you to know that you don’t need to expect any help from me for anything, on this trip,” Carol said with a mean smile.

  “Okay! I don’t!”

  Bonham came over to them then.

  “Ron, the manager wants to know about the rooms,” he said in the slow calm immutable style he employed when teaching. “William’s payin his own way, and he’s got a little room up in the back cheap; he knows the manager from before. Mrs. Abernathy will want a room by herself of course, but there’s no reason why you and me can’t bunk up together. Save you the price of one room.”

  For a moment Grant couldn’t think, didn’t even hear, he was still so angry. “Okay,” he said shortly. “Fine. Sure. Why not?” He was thinking that bunking with Bonham would certainly save him from any chance of being importuned by Carol Abernathy’s coming into his room at night and what was more, she would know this.

  “All right,” Bonham said. “I’ll tell him. Shall we go and change?” His eyes were still glassy from the gin he’d drunk. But he was gently and deftly elbowing Mrs. Abernathy right out of the play. It was what Grant would have liked to do, and in the same way.

  “Sure. I’m coming,” Grant said, and turned on his heel and left.

  The hotel was constructed of separate, chambered annexes around a central dining hall and bar. In the room he flung himself down stretched full length on one of the twin beds, and confessed how drunk he was. “What I really feel like doin is laying right here and going to fucking sleep.”

  From beside the other bed where he had started to undress Bonham laughed. “Well, that’s up to you. But since you’re payin anyway, you ought to go. As an added inducement, I can tell you from experience the best way to sober up now—and to avoid an early evening hangover—is to go diving with us.” He swayed a little himself, as he got out of his Jockey shorts underwear.

  “And besides, I’m scared.”

  Bonham laughed. “There’s nothin to be scared of.”

  “I’m scared anyway.”

  The room was cool and dim and quiet, shaded from the eyeball-searing sun of the lower Bahamas by the vine-trellised walkway outside the windows. Bonham didn’t answer.

  “In fact, I’m always scared when I dive. Didn’t you ever notice?”

  Bonham still didn’t answer. It was just exactly as if Grant had not spoken, and for a moment he wondered if he had. He forced himself to get up onto his feet. “Well, then I guess I better have another drink right now. If I’m fucking going.”

  Bonham’s laugh boomed. “Now that’s a sensible idea!”

  Grant undressed languidly, feeling lazy and used-up and beat, while Bonham waited.

  “You’re still new at it, you know,” Bonham said as they walked back under the shade of the trellises. It was Grant’s turn not to answer. When the sun hit them, it was like a physical blow. The women had disappeared. And Finer and Orloffski were waiting on the dock impatiently.

  “Come on! I’m burnin my goddam motherfuckin feet off standin here,” Orloffski said in his blunt, brutal voice.

  “Where’s your Jap slippers?” Bonham asked pleasantly.

  “Anngh,” Orloffski answered.

  All of them except him wore the Japanese style shower clogs, made in America with sponge rubber bottoms and the hard rubber coming up between the, toes, and which in fact Bonham had recommended that Grant buy for himself in Ganado Bay. ‘Gook boots’ they had used to call the real ones, the straw ones, back in the old days at Pearl, Grant thought.

  “His fuckin broad stoled ’em off him, Al,” Sam Finer said in a curiously thin, high voice for such a chesty man, “that’s what.”

  “She did no such a goddam thing,” Orloffski cursed.

  “He lost one this morning on the boat,” Finer grinned.

  Bonham shoved them off.

  It was perfectly true that the diving and the swimming sobered them up, and in some mysterious way of its own precluded a hangover. And when they came back in, Grant felt much better physically. But that was just about the only good thing about the entire afternoon.

  In the first place it was too late, when they finally got started, to go down around the point to the so-called ‘lagoon’, or to any of the other good spearfishing spots. So instead Bonham had run them straight out past the now-anchored and deserted airplane, almost a mile out from the hotel dock, and here he anchored them. The water was no more than fifteen feet deep, a flat sand bottom with almost no coral, and consequently almost no fish, and it appeared to run straight out to sea indefinitely at that depth. In fact, Bonham said, they wou
ld have to go out miles and miles in that direction to find any deeper bottom, almost to Inagua. Currents had made it a sort of dead area, piling up sand to make an uninhabited bank. But Bonham, it became immediately clear, didn’t care, because what he meant to do was to concentrate on Sam Finer and the little Minox camera and case he had brought over for him. And that was what he did. “Practice staying down as long as you can,” was all he said to Grant, and then he disappeared with Finer. If Finer liked the little camera, he said, he would give it to him.

  Sam Finer appeared to be a pretty good sport. But of course he had been diving all morning, too. And he did have the camera to play with. He was the only one of them who had any real diving gear, having at great expense flown down a Scott Hydro-Pak with three filled sets of double tanks, since filtered air was not available on Grand Bank. In the boat he put this on, aided by Bonham and Orloffski, even though the depth was only fifteen feet, and leaped over the side. To save air he breathed only through the snorkel-like ‘air economizer’ on the side of the fullface mask. Bonham, using only a snorkel, went with him and handed him the camera. Orloffski, who was no good sport at all, took up his speargun and grumbling and cursing over the bad bottom went trudgeoning off by himself. In the water no more than twelve seconds, Grant suddenly found himself totally alone.

  Fifteen feet was no deeper than the deep end of most swimming pools, the bottoms of a number of which Grant had prowled around holding his breath. It wasn’t even deep enough to bother clearing your ears. It certainly was no way to go about learning something about real freediving. And most swimming pool bottoms were more interesting than this. At least there you could pick up hairpins and a marble or two. A few needlefish torpedoed themselves along behind their long thin snouts here and there, a few tiny, brightly colored sergeant-majors explored the sand or the grass. That was all.