Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  Grant had always been of two minds about Doug Ismaileh. Doug, like most of the others, had come to the Hunt Hills Little Theatre Group on his own. But unlike the others he had some money. He had driven down on a whim from Detroit, where his father was a fairly wealthy hotelman whom he worked for sketchily, when Grant’s Son of Israphael was still in its first year’s run, with the idea that he wanted to write and that maybe Grant could help him. He had not heard of the Hunt Hills Little Theatre Group, but Grant was in New York at the time, and Carol Abernathy had taken him under wing and started him on the self-disciplines which she demanded of every member of the Group. However, since he had money, he did not have to live on the premises in the ‘barracks’, the living quarters which Grant had built around the Theatre which he had built, like the ones without money had to do. He had stayed there a couple of times for a short while, in summer when it was nicer, but after three weeks the restrictions on serious drinking and going out had him champing at the bit. He and Grant had become good friends, and he could have stayed in Grant’s house, but Carol thought this unfair to the other, broker members. So he stayed mostly in Detroit where he had a woman whom he subsequently married and divorced, writing on his play, coming down only when he was in trouble with it, and otherwise stayed away. One winter he rented an apartment in Indianapolis to be near them and stayed there five months with the woman while he was finishing up his play.

  He had had a fabulous career during the war in the OSS in Greece, Yugoslavia and Persia, where his Greek-Turkish-Armenian blood, knowledge of the language, and relatives who had not immigrated all helped him greatly, he said, and where he had become the youngest Lieutenant Colonel the Army ever made. He had once, after that, run an illegal gambling establishment on the West Coast, and apparently had all sorts of very interesting, and very helpful, underworld contacts. His play, however—his first one—Dawn’s Left Hand, was about Persia, and drew heavily on his war experiences there for its material. He had obviously had them. And yet one afternoon, while he was still working on the play, he had come to Grant and asked him to tell him all he knew about hand grenades, how they felt, how they worked exactly, how they were operated, how they sounded exactly. Grant, who had only thrown three hand grenades in his life and those three in training, told him and wondered how a guerrilla fighter of his experience and repute could not know about hand grenades.

  The play itself (Dawn’s Left Hand, the title Grant had given him once in a moment of inspiration while thinking about Persia, from the second stanza of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam) was in the end a love story—a love story intermingled with tough combat fighting and death—of an artistocratic Persian girl and an American colonel; and a love story curiously reminiscent of Grant’s Sailor and Whore in The Song of Israphael, albeit a much more exotic one. It was a huge success (Grant had taken him to Gibson & Kline) though not quite as big as Grant’s first one. But Grant felt he detected in it, and in Doug—had detected all along—elements of sentimentalities and gross romanticisms about life (as well as false toughness, which was only the other side of the same coin) which might make it hard for Ismaileh to carry any further into himself his study of himself. And then there was that curious echo of similarity to his own Sailor and Whore.

  That didn’t matter. Everybody imitated some when they started. But it was true that Doug loved him and his work doggedly, even slavishly—though the word would have angered him—to the point where it disturbed and embarrassed Grant. He was always trying to buy him rich presents, take him on trips, do things for him, help him with something, carry him places, all of which offers Grant kept declining with almost nervous severity, because some deep instinct he couldn’t formulate into words warned him it would be dangerous to accept.

  All of this had sorted itself out one night during the fall and winter Doug had spent in Indianapolis finishing up his play, when Doug had driven out to Grant’s house in Hunt Hills with a truckdriver he had picked up in a bar downtown. Doug had two tricks when he was drunk, tricks he had picked up from a fakir in Persia, he said, of walking barefoot on broken glass and eating light bulbs. These had apparently intrigued his pal the truckdriver, who was also drunk. But when he mentioned that he knew Grant and that Grant had written The Song of Israphael, the truck driver had become ecstatic. He had been in the Navy and had seen the film of the play (though, as he told Grant, he had never seen or read the play itself) and Grant was his sole literary hero.

  This was at a time when all such uncritical adulation was beginning to wear very thin for Grant, though he had not long before (and occasionally would again) found it fun to get drunk in a bar and talk about the ‘Old Navy’. Also he was working very hard trying to finish up his own new play and wanted to get up early, having had just the right amount of drinks to let him sleep. After two dull and very unproductive bottles of beer sitting around the kitchen table with them, he got angry, feeling he had been imposed upon. Doug had never really seen him angry before. Grant had called him into the bedroom for privacy (Carol had come over from across the street, and was sitting with the truckdriver) and told him.

  “Listen. You get that fucking ape out of here. You brought him, now you get him out,” he said, with a cold, half-drunken fury. He could feel, from his heartbeats, that his face had gotten white all over. “I don’t want to embarrass you. But either you get him out of here, or I’ll ask him to leave in front of you. And you, too.”

  “Aw, cmon. What the hell? The guy loves you. He thinks you’re a king,” had been Doug’s somewhat drunken rejoinder.

  “I don’t give a fuck!” Grant said. “This is my house! This is where I live! And you are not welcome or free to come here drunk with strange drunks you picked up!”

  Doug’s face had suddenly contorted itself into a drunken, and strange, totally mea culpa expression. “Okay! I know I did wrong! Hit me! Go ahead! Hit me right in the mouth! I got it coming! Go ahead! I want you to!”

  “Are you crazy?” Grant had said coldly. “I’m not about to hit you! I’m not about to have a fight with you, here. What, and tear up the insides of my own house?”

  Doug had grinned, though there were still tears in the eyes of his still-contorted face. “Okay, then! Let’s go outside!” he raged. “Let’s go outside and have a real fight! A real one! A real good one! A real, oldfashioned, knockdown, dragout, no-holdsbarred, good old fight! Like we all used to do! Back in the old days! A real friendly, smash-em-up, break-their-teeth, buddy-friendly fight! Like we did in the Army!”

  Grant had simply stared at him. He was shocked to think that that was just exactly what he used to do.

  “A real oldfashioned, buddy-buddy fight!” Doug raged on. “We’ll beat each other’s fucking brains in! And then put our arms around each other and come back in and have a drink! We’ll come back in the bar and drink a toast! To men! Real men!”

  It was just barely freezing outside, and there was a thin skim of snow on the ground. And it was just then that Grant’s revelation about Doug Ismaileh hit him. Grant had boxed a lot, back in the so-called ‘old days’. He thought he could take him. Though Doug was a good bit bigger than he was, he was in better shape. None of that had anything to do with what he had suddenly understood.

  “Listen,” he said much more calmly. “I want to tell you something important. I’m not about to let you make some kind of a father figure out of me.” Doug had always hated (and loved) and had trouble with his father. And now he stopped raging and leaning forward, peered at Grant, his eyes screwed up shrewdly almost shut. He didn’t speak. “You know why? Because you don’t want a father.

  “You’re always talking about a father. But you want one and you don’t want one. You want to make a father out of somebody, anybody, simply so you can then set about destroying them, to prove to yourself that you’re a man.

  “Strong. Free. Horse shit!

  “Well, you won’t do it to me. Because I don’t care about you that much. And I never will.

  “I’ve got too many prob
lems of my own to take on your love, just so you can start destroying me.

  “And I’m not vulnerable, because I don’t need the adulation.

  “You want a hero to destroy, go and find somebody else. And get that drunken bum out of my house.”

  And that was the end of the story. Doug Ismaileh had said nothing. Either one way or the other. He had collected his truckdriver and left. The relationship between them went on pretty much as it always had, except that maybe he left Grant alone a little more than before. But not much. Probably he couldn’t help it. Probably it was a compulsion of some kind. But after that Grant was never able to feel much of anything about Doug Ismaileh except indifference, both to him and to his role he played.

  And now here was Doug, three years later, after taking his new-gotten, author’s wealth to Florida, and buying a house and becoming an ardent Everglades and backwater San Marco fisherman, standing on the dock of the Ganado Bay Yacht Club, in Ganado Bay on Jamaica. They shook hands quite warmly.

  “Well, what the hell!” Grant grinned. “What a surprise! What brings you down here?”

  Doug was grinning happily, too. “Well, when I got—”

  But here Carol Abernathy intervened. “Yes, what a lovely surprise!” she said in the breathless rush of a selfconfident conspirator. “Did you just decide to come down for some fishing? But how did you know we were here?”

  Grant noticed that Hunt was looking at her with a peculiar look, his eyes all squinched up, his face expressionless, but as was usually his way he said nothing. Grant didn’t say anything either.

  “Well, Gibson and Kline always know where you are,” Doug Ismaileh said in an oddly muffled voice, and grinned again. Later on, as soon as they were alone together, which was not until the next day, he told Grant the full story, the true one.

  Grant had decided to go diving alone the next day, and Doug after hearing his glowing, impassioned descriptions wanted to go with him. Bonham had told him, on the dock at Grand Bank while they waited in the twilight for Raoul and Jim Grointon to return, that he could use Ali and the boat by himself if he wanted and go out alone, at the same normal regular price of course. “Ali will tend for you,” the big man said. “Just remember he’s no good in any emergency, that’s all. So you’ll have to look out for yourself.” He had paused, thinking, looking out at sea from the dock. “If you’re nervous about going out alone for the first time, just go out on the shallow reef and poke around. Don’t go to the deep reef.” Then he had slapped him heavily on the shoulder. “I aint worried about you. You’ll be all right. Hell, you could practically freedive that, now.” Grant seriously doubted that, but, cautiously, it was to the shallow reef that he decided to go, and he told this to Doug.

  “Well,” the big, swarthy ‘Turk’ said enthusiastically, “I’ll just snorkel around in a mask a bit on the surface and watch you down below. Okay?”

  Grant agreed. Certainly he should not try the aqualung until he had at least had a pool checkout. They were just coming down into the town off the hill, Grant driving one of Evelyn de Blystein’s several little British cars, and the humid heat of the island hit them just exactly as if they had driven into some lowlying invisible fog, popping the sweat out on them both. Down here the lush tropical island vegetation and palms, gray with the dust of the town, looked peaked and straggly.

  He had not wanted to lie last night, Doug said suddenly. But he figured it was the best way. The truth was that Carol had called him long distance in Coral Gables, apparently a couple of days before the Grand Bank Island trip, and had asked him to come down. Grant needed both their help, she said. “Apparently you got some little girl in trouble?” Doug grinned.

  Grant smiled. “Well. Let’s say some little girl’s got me in trouble.” Doug nodded, or rather ducked, his head vigorously; he understood that very well. Grant went on and told him about the knife-wielding episode in Grand Bank.

  Doug chuckled. “Well, she always was what you might call a forceful character. Remember the time she ran those three so-called intellectuals from the University of Arizona off the place with brickbats?” Both men laughed. One of the three had subsequently written a very disparaging article about the Hunt Hills Little Theatre Group in general, and about Grant’s talent in particular, for a Chicago literary quarterly.

  “Only this time it’s different,” Grant said. “It’s me.” He braked for a bandanna-headed woman with a great bundle of clothes on her head. “I think she’s losing some of her marbles. Seriously.”

  They had never discussed, or even tacitly acknowledged, between them that Carol was Grant’s mistress, and Doug did not bring this point up now. “Yes,” he said, his face looking graven. “She seems different. More erratic.”

  “You’ve always liked her.”

  “Sure,” Doug grinned, “and I’m payin her ten percent to prove it too, aint I? This was a fairly recent development in the Hunt Hills Little Theatre Group, and Grant had agreed to pay her ten percent of this one, his newest play.

  “I don’t know what she wants me to do about helpin to save you,” Doug said. “She hasn’t told me yet.”

  Somehow, Grant realized, suddenly a sort of male conspiracy had developed between them. A male conspiracy against the females.

  As if he too suddenly sensed this tacit feeling, Doug said, “Look. If anything happens, if it comes to some kind of a showdown, I want you to know I’m on your side. You’ve always helped me more than she has anyway, really.”

  Grant rather disliked him for saying it. “Well, thanks,” he said.

  They had come to the plane trees that stood alongside Bonham’s shop, and Grant pulled the little car in under them into the welcome shade and parked it.

  “Is she nice?” Doug grinned. It was, tentatively, one of those sort of evil grins males give each other over cunt. And Grant didn’t like that either.

  “She is,” he said crisply. “If I told you how nice, you’d say I’d lost my power of judgment.”

  “Well, good for you. All I know is, a man’s gotta live,” Doug said gruffly. “If he can.”

  “He sure does,” Grant said, and the sense of male conspiracy became stronger. He still didn’t like it.

  Ali was loafing around the shop, obviously quite happy to be doing nothing, and while he looked chagrined at the idea of doing some work said Shar in his curiously flatted East Indian accent, he would take them out, if they was sure Misteh Bonham said it are all right. Grant assured him that he had. Would they both be wanting lungs, he asked. No, Grant said, just one.

  Doug talked more about Carol Abernathy on the way out. She seemed really different this time, he thought, much more nervous and highstrung; but Grant was thinking about the diving now and didn’t say much in reply. When Ali anchored the little boat off the airport over the shallow reef, he went about dressing himself out nervously but quite proud in front of Doug, and made a very professional back entry, always an impressive sight. When he rolled over and looked down, he recognized the area and realized that Ali had anchored them above the big coral cave where Bonham had taken him down that first day.

  Behind him he heard Doug splash in in his mask and snorkle and motioned for him to come on over, and when he did Grant who was showing off a little took off swimming straight down for the green sand bottom 60, 65 feet below. Now, it all felt so natural, comfortable. On the bottom, lying just a few feet above it so as not to disturb the sand into clouds, he rolled over on his back and waved up at Doug who waved back, a tiny figure now on the undulating silver of the surface. When he first had recognized the coral hillock which contained within it the big cave, the blood had risen in his ears with an odd excitement as he remembered his dream—dream, and half-promise—of coming back alone to this place someday and masturbating in it. Swimming along the bottom on around the hillock, he motioned Doug to follow him on the surface.

  He did not intend to reenter it by the narrow fissure he and Bonham had gone in by, even though his sense of honor made him feel he ought to
try it, plus the fact that it would be quite a spectacle for Doug on the surface; but he knew pretty well where the other entrance was, and as he swam on around to the other side of the coral hill to where a narrowing sand-bottomed trench ran shoreward, Doug followed him on the surface, watching, obviously intrigued. The other entrance was only fifteen or eighteen feet deep if he remembered right, and when he thought he had positioned himself correctly, he started swimming up the living coral cliff faces. At seventeen feet of depth it appeared, only a few feet off to his left.

  From the brightly sunlit water outside it was impossible to make out anything within the black hole of the mouth, but he remembered the interior exactly. Motioning to Doug what he intended to do, then pointing at his watch and holding up first five, then six fingers with a shrug, Grant took a full, deep breath, let out half of it, and swam inside. From above him Doug had shrugged too and held his hands out helplessly.

  The alcove-tunnel was still there, and when he swam around its corner into the main cavern, the shafts of sunlight from the ceiling holes still slanted down through the water to strike against the coral walls or sand floor. He remembered that the coral toadstool where they had sat was invisible from this high up, but after he had swum down ten or twelve feet it became visible, far down, resting on the sand floor. Breathing carefully and slowly from the lung Grant swam down toward it, 35, 40 feet below him. So still, so dim, so green and cool, so lonely. So uninhabited. All the cathedrals, all the churches, all the empty school buildings after five o’clock, all the childhood loneliness, came back to him and he could feel his penis hardening in the little bikini. Not breaking his kick-rhythm or his quiet calm of breathing, he swam on down what seemed endlessly then rolled up and turned over just above the giant toadstool and by exhaling to make himself heavier, let himself bump to rest sitting on its scratchy surface. The cathedral-cave was unchanged, looked exactly as it had the other time. But now he was alone.