by James Jones
Liquidly and using no violent or wasted motion Grant hooked his thumbs into his bikini straps and slipped it down to his knees, then lightly took it off over his flippers, first one leg then the other. Immediatedly everything felt different, cleaner, more beautiful, as always in nude swimming. The water now reached the angles of his crotch and anus as it did the rest of him. As an afterthought he stuck the bikini underneath his weight belt so as to be sure not to lose it. Then he looked down at himself and was startled to see that, due to the refraction of the light rays passing through his mask, his hardened cock appeared to be sitting in the middle of his chest! He fingered himself, lightly, and then realized that he didn’t really want to masturbate. Instead, he took off and swam back and forth across the cavern delighting in the movement of the water against his naked crotch and organs. Then he came back and descending on an impulse to the sand floor near the toadstool, rubbed and flogged and ground his bare penis, testicles and crotch against the sand, raising a small cloud. It was just then that he looked up and saw a huge jewfish studying him quietly and curiously from twenty feet away.
It was enormous. As long as he was, it was more than twice as big around. It must easily have weighed at least 400, 450 pounds. It was the first one he had ever seen, and it looked like a grouper, which in fact it was, with the same big mouth. Only, this mouth was big enough to take in his head and shoulders with room to spare. And he had read that they occasionally attacked divers. All this had run through his mind in one flash and without even thinking he drew his knife from its sheath on his leg and swam up the few feet to put him on its level, ready to fight, but reasonably certain he would lose. He had not brought a speargun with him, not expecting to see fish, but even a speargun seemed a puny futile weapon against a creature such as this.
Fortunately he didn’t have to fight. When he reached its level, the huge fish with its great goiterous-looking perpetually startled eyes gave a flick of its body that was like a minor explosion and disappeared across the cavern into a dark area Grant had not explored. It had all happened so fast he had not even lost his hard-on.
Still fingering it, and feeling somehow quite pleased, he swam over to the area cautiously, to find that here was apparently still another exit. A long low tunnel seven or eight feet in diameter led away through the coral hillock over a rising, then falling, then rising again floor of rippled sand. No sunlight was visible at the other end of it, and Grant did not feel like exploring it. Swimming back, he sheathed his knife and put back on his bikini. He still had more than sixty feet of water and coral above him to get out of yet.
But if he worried about his erection remaining so that it might be noticed by Doug Ismaileh as he came back out of the cave, he needn’t have. As he swam back up toward the entrance and the sunlight it went away as quietly and mysteriously as it had come. And as he swam back out of the cave mouth into sunbright water, he felt curiously fulfilled. He had been down in there just a little over nine and a half minutes. Above him still lying on the surface, Doug Ismaileh was gesticulating at him nervously with both hands.
“Jesus Christ!” he protested when they were both back in the boat. “What the fuck were you doing in there all that time? I thought you’d gotten yourself killed!”
“Just exploring,” Grant said. “I told you at least six minutes.”
“You said five, or six minutes!”
“Well, I lost track of the time a little.”
“You lost track! I was gettin ready to swim back to the boat to get Ali!”
“He wouldn’t have helped any,” Grant grinned. “He doesn’t even dive.” He described the big cave to Doug but he did not tell him about the jewfish, largely because he would have felt honorbound to go back after it with a speargun if he had. He had done two dishonorable things today, he calculated. He had not gone in through the fissure like he should have, and he had not gone back after the big jewfish.
But he did tell Bonham about it, later on. The big man only grinned. “You mean you went down there alone without a speargun on your first dive alone? I aint worried about your guts!”—“I just didn’t think there’d be any fish. But shouldn’t I have gone back after it?” Grant insisted. “Wouldn’t you have?” Bonham rubbed his jaw. “Maybe. I’m not sure. He was probly long gone. I know that exit. Anyway spearin big fish in caves is ticklish business. They can drag you into a narrow hole and knock your mouthpiece out of your mouth. Can be very dangerous. Always remember that in divin the cautious decision is always the best one. It’s your life you’re playin around with,” he said with a solemn pious look—and Grant suddenly knew that that was not at all what Bonham really believed, or at least not all of the time, that Bonham was talking sop for customers. He had had to be content with that. He did not, of course, tell anybody about his erection.
“Well, what do you think of it?” he asked Doug as they toweled themselves off in the hot sun on the boat. Doug thought a greal deal of it, he said, and would like to learn it. Especially he would like to see the inside of that cave.
“Well, I can teach you if you want,” Grant said. “Now that I know his methods, I can give you a pool checkout about as good as Bonham.”
Doug seemed to take quite a long time in answering. They were sitting in the cabin cockpit in the shade now, near the wheel, and all the windows and windshields were wide open. A warm soft little breeze swept through it carrying the smell of the sea, and occasionally smelling of the hot muck of the mangrove swamps that formed the extreme right side of the harbor. The tropical skyline there was mysterious and dangerously inviting as though they might be the first non-natives ever to make landfall here, and on the other side the skyline of sprawling hotels called luxuriously to modern pleasures of booze and broads, martinis and models. The noon jet from New York had just landed at the airport and was disgorging its vacationing passengers into the air terminal. The little boat rocked gently in the sea wash, and they could hear the hiss of water moving in the bilge. Grant was feeling the sense of vast relief he always got now, when the diving for the day was over and he did not have the prospect of it before him. Doug was looking out through the open windshield at the hotels and the high hill behind them with Evelyn de Blystein’s villa on it. “Is it safe?” he said finally. “I mean, I don’t mean safe. I mean is it easy to learn?”
“Well, it took me three days to learn all the techniques he wanted to teach me. Course I couldn’t do them as well as him. And still can’t,” Grant said. “I think it’s easy. Of course everyone is a little nervous at first, naturally.”
“Well, might’s well give it a try,” Doug said turning back, “I guess. Since I’m down here, and everything’s handy.”
Ali who had been sitting in the tail stowing gear came forward. “Ahre you rahddy to go in, Meestahr Ghrant, Sahr?” he said.
“No,” Grant said. “No, not yet. Let’s just sit here a little while, okay? It’s so pleasant.”
“It is pleasant, aint it?” Doug said with a sudden grin. He broke out a half bottle of scotch he had brought from the villa and they drank it together, mixing it with tepid water from the water jug without ice, sitting together in silence and just feeling—the movement of the boat, the shade and hot sun, the breeze on their faces, the smells of sea and mangrove swamp, the view of both banks of the harbor, the view of the airport, from which the big jet soon trundled out and took off going over their heads again with a whistling roar.
“Well, I guess we better be gettin back, hunh?” Doug said reluctantly. “We got to sing for our supper tonight yet, don’t we? Who’s old Evelyn havin for dinner?”
“Christ, I don’t know,” Grant said with a start. He got up and motioned to Ali to start the motor.
In the next two days Grant took him four times, twice mornings twice afternoons, to one of the hotel swimming pools and tried to teach him, suspending his own diving and taking him through the same training routines step by step that Bonham had put him through.
But Doug simply could not learn. Not
from him, anyway. He advanced swiftly through all the mask techniques, breath-holding techniques and suchlike, all of which he knew something about, but when it came to using the aqualung itself he simply could not do it. It was all right at the shallow end of the pool, but the moment he arrived at the deep end swimming along the bottom, he would be forced to rush coughing and spluttering to the surface. “I think it’s the goddamned shape of my mouth!” he said with angry disgust, but with a peculiar veiled look on his face. “No matter what I do water keeps leaking in around my lips!” On the third day, when Bonham got back from Grand Bank, Grant turned him over to Bonham.
But Bonham had no better luck, and could not teach him either.
The thing about the shape of his mouth being wrong was obviously an excuse. Hanging around with Bonham on his teaching rounds, Grant had by now heard four neophytes complain of the same thing, one of them being Carol Abernathy. None of them had ever succeeded in learning to dive. He had discussed with Carol her own feeling about being in the lung, and had about decided that the real trouble might be some kind of an underwater claustrophobia, perhaps augmented by the confinement of the facemask. Aware that a certain volume of water existed above her, she simply had to come up. It might even be that this claustrophobic fear, upon reaching near-panic proportions, caused them to relax their lips and let water get in. Or perhaps the water getting in the mouth thing was simply a face-saving lie. Tactfully he discussed this with Doug, and Doug admitted that on the bottom of the deep end of the pool he did get this panicky feeling of being closed in, pressed down. Grant himself had never had this feeling in a lung, though he had plenty of other fears, and on the contrary being in a lung underwater gave him a feeling of opening up panoramic vistas, as well as the delight in being gravityless. “It’s stupid!” Doug said angrily. “Because I’m not afraid!”— “Of course not. That’s not what it is. But if that’s it,” Grant said, “a claustrophobia, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Has nothing to do with being afraid.” Doug shook his head stubbornly. He tried several more times, always with the same result, and finally had to give it up and quit. “It’s the thought of never ever, never in my life, being able to see the inside of that damned cave of yours that bugs me,” he said despairfully. “I’m cut off from it.”
He continued to go out with them in the boat whenever Bonham took Grant out, which was almost every day, after he got back, snorkling along over them when they were on deeper dives, freediving down to them sometimes when they were on the shallow reef. He got so that finally—on the shallow reef—he could freedive twenty, even twenty-five or thirty feet down to the corals. He was therefore able to freedive to the cave entrance and peer in, but of course there was nothing to see until you swam far enough in to turn the corner, another twenty or twenty-five feet, and this he could not do. He tried the lung a couple of more times in a pool, but always with the same result, and Bonham advised him not to try it in the sea. He was very frustrated, especially whenever Bonham and Grant went back into the big cave, which they did from time to time.
Grant was fascinated by the cave, but it was more than that. Bonham, since getting back, had suddenly acquired quite a few new clients in the hotels from the big influx of tourists because of The Season, and the cave was one of his chef-?oeuvres. He took all of his neophytes there, as soon as he was sure they could handle the dive, and Grant and Doug usually went with him—paying much less for the trips when there were other clients, fortunately. Bonham’s policy was always to help his more permanent clients financially when he could.
They had taken to hanging around with Bonham a great deal more since his return, Grant because he wanted desperately to stay away from Carol Abernathy as much as possible. But Doug Ismaileh had taken a great shine to the big diver with his, to them, marvelous accomplishments—as Grant had known he would. Bonham had a favorite bar in town called The Neptune, where he had once introduced Grant to the two Jamaican girls, and where he hung out with his local pals when he wasn’t out diving or giving lessons. Naturally, this place had no social connection at all with the de Blysteins and their highclass social friends, and Grant and Doug spent a great deal of time there with Bonham, drinking. Also they met his wife and he invited them to his home.
Bonham’s home, which he had bought and like almost everybody in this age of credit and time payments apparently was having difficulty paying off, was a little clapboard house with two small bedrooms, kitchen, livingroom and bath, set in a tiny yard on one of the side streets in the middle of the town. It was a somewhat impoverished-looking place, not at all like the houses most white people lived in in Ganado Bay but more like the home of a colored bank clerk or assistant store manager, but Bonham’s wife Letta had done a lot with the inside, and Bonham had built himself an American brick barbecue outside in the little yard. When he had returned from Grand Bank, the Finers and the Orloffskis had flown back with him and William, the Finers immediately catching the jet to New York, and now—as they found out when he invited them up the evening of the first day he was back—the Orloffskis, Mo and Wanda Lou, were staying with him.
His wife Letta was a small, superbly built, quiet-spoken, medium-dark Jamaican girl, who looked as much schoolteacher as she in fact was, and who apparently took a rather dim view of the Orloffskis in her house although she entertained them nicely. Not that the Orloffskis needed entertaining. They had already moved in and taken over, and appeared to be more the hosts than the guests. But, as Bonham told Grant, it wouldn’t be for long. The plans, as he told them both—or rather Grant, since Doug knew nothing about Bonham’s setup except what little Grant had told him—were that Sam Finer after a few day’s business in New York would be flying back out to Minnesota, where he would forward the money immediately. Then Bonham and Orloffski would go down to Kingston to look the schooner over once more (Orloffski had never seen it), buy it, and arrange to have it hauled. Orloffski would then fly to Jersey and bring the cutter down the inland waterway to Florida and sail it to GaBay. Meantime, the Orloffskis were house—or apartment—hunting. When they found a place Wanda Lou would move in there and Bonham and Letta would help her out and look after her. He told them all this as, with loving sausage fingers, he prepared his barbecue in the yard for steaks in the late evening light.
The steaks were excellent. So was the booze, though they all drank more of it than was probably good for them. Grant noticed that Letta was not above drinking a fair amount herself, which surprised him, even though it was apparently never enough to make her really drunk. William and his wife and four kids had come over too, so that with the Bonhams’ maid washing glasses and dishes there seemed to be almost more people ramming around the little house and yard than it could handle or contain.
And after that the two of them took dinner with the Bonham menage every night, and were little seen at the villa. The second night they ate at Bonham’s again with the mob—because even with the absence of William and family, who did not appear again, the six of them in that tiny house (especially with the two huge and hollering figures of Bonham and Orloffski) made it seem like a mob. The third night Letta was not with them and they ate at The Neptune, Grant and Doug picking up the tab. It turned out Letta worked as a hostess in an Italian restaurant five nights a week (excepting Mondays and Tuesdays, when the place closed for its ‘weekend’) to augment their meager income. It was run by an Italian (aided by his Jamaican wife) who had been maître d’ at one of the big hotels, and Grant had eaten there with Evelyn and the Abernathys, but he did not remember Letta. The fourth night they again ate at Bonham’s, again without Letta, when Bonham made them marvelous barbecued ribs. Every night everyone drank far more than was good for them, but it seemed to be the norm around Bonham—and Orloffski—and around Grant and Doug, for that matter.
It was surprising that Carol Abernathy (on behalf of Evelyn) left them alone that long without complaining. But the days were running down, and time was running out. On the morning of the fifth day after Bonham’s retu
rn, Carol Abernathy caught the both of them at breakfast coffee (they weren’t eating because they meant to dive that morning) and divulged her plan for the saving of Grant by Doug Ismaileh.
She started off by employing her role as den mother of the biggest cub scout pack in the county.
“You two guys have been pretty scarce around here the past few days.” She had come down to the terrace where they were in her pajamas and robe. It was not quite nine o’clock in the morning. “Here Evelyn’s got two of America’s biggest and handsomest playwrights staying in her place as houseguests and she can’t even utilize them. When are you going to stay home an evening?”
Grant decided he would not answer that, and let Doug do it. Doug said, “Tonight, I guess. We been seein a lot of this guy Bonham.”
“So I understand from Evelyn,” Carol said, “who got it from her maid, who got it from the jungle telegraph.” Having Doug around as a sort of third-party observer seemed to have straightened her out quite a bit, as though having an audience kept her remembering the right role. There had been no more crazy scenes like the knife-wielding episode in Grand Bank. “Also, you both look like you’ve been drinking a lot more than you should or is good for you.” She peered at Grant keenly. Grant filmed his eyes over for her.
“That’s usually the case, aint it?” Doug grinned. “Especially when we get together.”
“Anyway,” Carol Abernathy said, and smiled, “this is what I wanted to talk to you about: It turns out Doug has got relatives in Montego Bay, did you know that?” she asked Grant “And he wants to visit them while he’s down here.”
