by James Jones
But by ten-thirty in the morning she had seen something that was to ruin the day for her, and began to ruin skindiving for her forever. Swimming around on the surface in the mask, snorkel and flippers Bonham had provided her and watching the lung-packing spearfishermen down below, she saw Ron—her Ron; her lover—spear a nice-sized fish, and then nearly have it taken from him by a shark before he could get it back to the boat. She could hardly believe her eyes. The fish looked like some kind of a snapper, though she couldn’t be sure, and no sooner had Ron speared it than this shark appeared from nowhere and made a grab for it with all his rows and rows of teeth. It wasn’t a very big shark, not as long as Ron himself, and it was black and swam with an ugly awkward undulating motion not at all like the fabled lethal torpedo, but still it was enough for her. Putting her head up to yell once, she started swimming toward the boat with her head down so she could watch Grant and the shark. Bonham, who was lying on the surface in a lung not far away looking after his charges, swam over to her, but did not offer to help Grant. With Bonham between her and the shark, she felt safe enough to stop and watch. What she saw astonished her even more, and then made her furious.
Ron was playing with the shark! Looking for all the world like a guilty sheep-killing dog, the shark would dart up and make a grab for the fish, and Ron, holding the speargun at arm’s length, would give it a little jerk. At the other end of the double length of line and spear, when the dead fish moved, the shark would veer off and flee, only to come back again a moment later. Once when he circled up and in between Ron and the fish, Ron, hauling in on his gun and line, turned back and swam directly at him—whereupon the shark turned and fled ignominiously in panic, only to reappear again in a few seconds. Then, as Ron swam on up and closer to them near the boat, the shark, apparently seeing reinforcements, turned away and swam off and disappeared.
When Grant boated the fish (“Mangrove snapper,” Bonham said) in the dinghy, unscrewing his spearhead, he was laughing in a bright-eyed, almost drunken way (though he hadn’t had a drink) that she had never seen him laugh before. And her fury turned into a kind of superstitious awe and fear. They were both crazy, he and Bonham.
“I was a little nervous,” Ron laughed. “Especially when he circled up to me that time.”
“You sure didn’t show it the way you handled him,” Bonham grinned, obviously proud of him. “Was real professional.”
“Do you think we can still find him?” He was reloading his gun.
“I seriously doubt it. If we do, we’ll never catch him now. He’s too spooked. But we can give it a try. Come on.”
From beside the boat’s ladder, where she kept one hand reassuringly, Lucky watched them until they faded out beyond the circle of visibility. When they came back, they were empty-handed. They hadn’t found him.
She did not spend much time thinking about it. She ate the delicious picnic lunch, had some drinks, sunbathed on the cabin roof, swam a little more, joked with the New Yorkers who were enjoying their vacation. By three o’clock they had used up all the air bottles Bonham had brought with them anyway, and so decided to go back in. But whenever she did remember it, accidentally, then and later, a heart palpitation of fear would run over her, to be followed by a fury of shock and outrage.
When she talked about it to him, on the boat’s long run back in to port, he only looked irritated. “He was more scared of me than I was of him. Hell, even I could see that.”— “But you liked it!”—“Yes. Yes, I did like it. That part. I can’t help it.”—“But a big one could come along at any moment.”—“I suppose one could. But it doesn’t happen very often. Obviously.” She did not tell him what she was also thinking, which was that a man who may go down in history as one of the greatest (if not the greatest) playwrights of his generation had no right to go taking chances with his life like that.
That night they all got drunk together at Bonham’s hangout The Neptune Bar with Grant and the New Yorkers picking up the tab, and Grant insisted on singing Summertime over the bar’s entertainment speaker system, embarrassing her intensely. She did not know what it was, but around Bonham, as around Doug, he seemed to become an entirely different personality.
The next day it was the same thing all over again, only this time without any sharks. Lucky, however, could not forget that one.
But that evening Doug Ismaileh came back from Montego Bay. Lucky had not thought she would ever be that glad to see him again. But she was.
19
GRANT TOO WAS GLAD to see Doug back again. It was true that he really wanted to make more dives with Bonham before going off to dive alone in Kingston, but he didn’t want to have to go on diving with Bonham forever. And while his little ruse with Lucky about the cheap room (mainly to avoid running into the de Blysteins or the Abernathys at one of the hotels) had worked well enough, he was bright enough to know in spite of his violent state, that it could not go on like that forever.
He really was, in a violent state. He seemed to have lost all power to act or think ahead. Something about that mantilla-ed she-witch who had been taking over small pieces of his soul bit by bit for so many years, or so he believed, had taken all moral force, all will out of him. It was ridiculous that he should be so concerned over his moral responsibility to her, when she so obviously didn’t give a damn about any moral responsibility she might owe to him. But there it was. He could no more go over there alone and beard her in her villa-den than he could take off and fly by flapping his arms. So he simply marked time, some mindless will-less chicken, waiting for Doug to come back. Any gratification he might have got out of his first shark encounter was more than ruined by this knowledge.
It was strange, Bonham seemed to have divined—and fallen in with—his “cheap room” ruse almost as if he had been briefed on it beforehand. But he had never told Bonham about Carol Abernathy. Had Bonham, then, guessed it? Doug could not have told him, because Doug had not seen Bonham since Grant himself had told Doug the story. Certainly Cathie Finer would not have told him. Yet Bonham had gone right along, conspiratorially conspiring, helping more than he had been asked to, just as if he knew exactly what was going on and what needed to be done about it. Grant was grateful to him, but at the same time it oddly irritated him.
When Doug pulled into the front yard in his own rented car that evening, they were all sitting out in the back yard around the barbecue where Bonham was making ribs again, his contribution to Grant and the three New Yorker fellas (as he said) for the dough they laid out on the party at The Neptune last night. It must have cost him a buck-seventy-five, five bucks if you counted the beer. Of course they all knew he didn’t have much money. Grant and one of the New Yorkers had brought whiskey. Grant was grateful for the New Yorkers. Lucky liked them, and they helped to keep her occupied. Slyly, he had noted that the three New York males had taken a great shine to Bonham, with the same almost boyish hero-worship he and Doug sometimes showed for the big, tough diver. For no good reason, Grant made a mental note and filed it away in the grabbag part of his mind where he kept his future material.
There was more of the Haw!-ing and hooting and back-pounding and armpunching from Bonham and Orloffski, under which Doug who was almost as big as they stood up at least as well as Grant. Lucky’s face showed her disdain for this physical-pounding kind of greeting, Grant noted. Then Lucky, who was sitting on an old hewn-log bench with the three New Yorker women, leaped up and ran over and gave Doug her own kind of greeting, which was to throw her arms around him and give him a big kiss as if he were her long-lost brother. Grant felt an irrational but nonetheless powerful twinge of jealousy move slowly all through him and then run on out of the ends of his fingers and toes. By the time he grasped Doug’s hand in his own all vestiges of the twinge had departed.
Later on in the evening, in the night rather, as they all sat around with cigarette butts glowing like echoes of the glowing, dying fire in the barbecue, when they had drunk sufficiently, Doug joined Grant in some close-harmony singing of old cow
boy songs like The Streets of Laredo, commoner folk ballads like Down in the Valley, and songs they had marched to in the war like I’ve Been Working on the Railroad and For Me and My Gal. To Grant’s surprise this time instead of being angry Lucky joined in. She knew all the songs. And she had a clear, perfectly pitched, not very strong soprano which was somehow very moving because of some oddly defenseless little-girl quality in it. But before any of this pleasant, illusory immortality got started Grant had already discussed with Doug and decided, what he was going to do tomorrow about Carol Abernathy.
He approached Doug while Doug was talking to Lucky. Lucky had left the three New Yorker women and gone off with Doug to sit on an old beatup wrought-iron loveseat, and as he came up to them he overheard Doug wryly and ruefully talking to her about Terry September. When he stopped in front of them they both looked up and smiled.
“What the fuck’s going on here?” he growled with a lot of mock anger. But underneath that, he was childishly jealous.
Doug looked up at him, shrewdly. “I was just telling your Old Lady here that I think I’m fallin for Old Aunt Terry September. I’m ’onna look her up when I go up to New York.”
“If it’s private I’ll leave, if you want,” Grant offered, but suddenly felt melancholy.
“Horse shit!” Doug said.
“Are you kidding?” Lucky said.
“What I really came over for was to ask you what you think I ought to do about old Mom. Our ‘Mom’.” He twisted the word. “Would you be willing to go over there with me tomorrow while I tell her I’m going off to Kingston with my sweetheart here?”
“Why, sure,” Doug said after a moment. “Sure I would. I reckon. I guess my heart can stand the strain. And two targets is always better than one. If your side’s the side gettin shot at. One may survive.”
“What is it about this weird woman?” Lucky said. “Are both of you so terrified-scared of her?”
Doug grinned. “No, we ain’t scared of her.”
“Well, what is it then?” Lucky said. “What’s the hold she’s got over both of you? What’s her power?”
“There’s no denyin she’s got somethin,” Doug said. “I wisht I knew what it was.” He grinned cheerfully, with his large, mug’s face. He was playing up heavy the lousy English tonight, whatever it was his mood was. “I guess it’s because she believes—believed, in you when everybody else didn’t and thought you were fucking nuts to ever want to be a playwright.” He shrugged.
“What do you say?” Lucky turned to Grant.
“You know about me,” he said. “They practically supported me. Did support me. I feel like I’m adopted by them.”
Doug grinned. “Unfortunately, she’s got this thing about her boys. This fixation. She believes that every female in the world is out to marry them for their money—after she helped make them successful.”
“Well, maybe they are,” Lucky said. “So nu? What’s wrong with that? Men shouldn’t get married?”
The So nu brought back to Grant suddenly New York, Leslie, the little apartment, all the days he had spent there so happily, with a painful, pleasant rush.
“It certainly is strange,” Lucky said. ‘Two grown men running around like a couple of dogs with their tails between their legs, whenever they have to think of going to talk to this weird woman.” She sniffed.
Doug grinned at her and shrugged, and Grant broke in on her. “You’ll go with me then?”
“Sure.” Doug looked up at him with all the innocence on his face of a totally naive man who has never told even half a lie in his life. “I’ll help you tackle old ‘Mom’.” He too twisted the word.
So it was decided. They would go tomorrow. “Come hell or high water,” Doug grinned. And Lucky was apparently none the wiser, was completely taken in, accepted totally their untrue evaluation. She would wait for them at Bonham’s. But first they made the next day’s morning dive with Bonham. It was the last day for the three New York couples, they were leaving on the evening plane, and meeting and diving with Grant and Doug had been the big “Extra” of their whole vacation and they wanted them to come. Also, Doug wanted to go out with Bonham one more time, because after Grant and Lucky left for Kingston he was heading back for Coral Gables and then on to New York. For business. But also to see Terry. “What the hell? If you two can be that fucking lucky, why the fuck can’t I?” He grinned at them.
The dive that last day, as so often happens on last days of anything, was singularly unexciting. A few fish were taken, they explored around down on the deep reef, the three New Yorkers picked themselves some choice specimens of elkhorn and staghorn corals that Bonham had promised to dry and clean and send on to them, but nothing very unusual or exciting happened and Grant for the first time found himself bored with a dive. He would never be bored with the first part, the dressing out, the anticipation of—what? danger? miracle? something? the splashing back entry, the first singing breaths from the regulator in the sudden stillness, the first look down through the slanting sun rays as the bubbles cleared. But once on the bottom he found there was little to do that he hadn’t done to death, there were no big fish today, and so he occupied himself with knocking down with his heavy diving knife Bonham had sold him the long wavy rows of fire coral which grew profusely on the reef and could give a diver a seriously painful sting. And when he finally surfaced and poked his head out into the bright, hot, penetrating Caribbean sunshine he could not help wondering for a moment what the hell he was doing here? Then he ducked back under and with a now smooth expertise unstrapped and shucked the bottles off over his head while still breathing from the regulator, took one last look down into the mysterious realm which was no longer so mysterious when you were down there, and handed the rig up to Ali.
He would have been surprised, as he climbed the little sea ladder to where the New Yorkers had already congregated sadly after their last dive, to know that Lucky and Doug while he was futzing around unhappily down below had had a long, very serious conversation about him. He would probably not have been so surprised to learn that Lucky had in doing it, as she had with the Aldanes, and most of the rest of his friends, acquired another ardent partisan in Doug.
Lucky was a little surprised by it herself. She did not believe in having heart-to-heart talks about people with their intimates. It always made for bloodshed, and it was indelicately unprivate. So she was surprised to be doing it. Looking back later, she was able to understand that it was Doug who broached the whole thing, and to place exactly the point of conversation where he had done so.
The two of them, not diving, had snorkeled around on top for a while close to the boat, like the New Yorkers’ wives. Having seen what she had seen down below Lucky had no desire at all any more even to swim in the sea, and had to force herself to it. With Doug or Bonham or someone like that with her she was willing to snorkel around a little bit as long as she stayed close to the boat, but Doug wanted to follow the divers so she climbed back on board and stretched out on the blinding white cabin roof to sun. Sometime later with her eyes shut against the sun she felt someone come forward and sit down beside her on the edge of the towel she had spread on the hot cabin roof. It was Doug.
“Got tired of following after them,” he said in a somewhat dejected voice.
Lucky moved over to make more room for him. She always felt ticklish and uncomfortable about her boyfriend’s friends possibly touching her. “I wouldn’t do it for anything.”
“I just wish I could do it,” Doug said morosely.
“Oh, I don’t mean diving,” she said. “I mean just snorkeling along after them. Away from the boat”
Doug laughed. “You’re a girl.”
“Well, I hope so! Built like I am. I’d sure make a funny boy.”
Doug laughed again, moreso, this time throwing back his head. “You sure as hell would.” For several moments he plucked at the towel edge irresolutely. “But I didn’t come up forward to bother you with chitchat. There’s something I wanted to talk to y
ou about, and tell you.”
Lucky turned her head to look at him in the bright sun but didn’t answer, squinting her eyes behind the dark glasses against the light. Doug’s mug’s face stared back at her with great seriousness from the towel’s edge. But when he began to talk, he looked away and down. “See, I’ve known Ron quite a while now. Almost four years. I think I’ve formed a pretty accurate impression of him by now.” There was none of his deliberately lousy English now. “I think he needs a woman. His own woman. A wife. He’s not like me; I’m the kind of guy, I’m fairly certain, who’ll never find that; and I’ve accepted it.” He looked sad, but Lucky for some reason could not believe in it. “I’m uh I’m trying to say I think you ought to marry him.”
“What do you think I’m down here trying to do?” Lucky said, a little too thinly she thought.
But Doug nodded. “He’s really quite a guy, Ron is. He takes to this diving stuff like a duck to water. As they say. He’s as brave as a lion. I guess he’s probably the best man I’ve ever met. Physically, mentally, and uh and morally: spiritually. The best.”
“Well, don’t expect me to disagree with you,” she said. “I’m in love with him.” Big compliments to anyone always made her slightly uneasy and embarrassed.
“So it’s a shame. If he had only been bigger,” Doug concluded, “he could have been a great athlete.”
Lucky could hardly believe she’d heard right. “A great athlete! My God! Who in hell wants to be a great athlete?” Tad Falker. My God; Tad Falker.
“Just about every American—every man—who ever lived,” Doug said.
“More than being a great writer?”
“Well, of course, there’s that. But of course it’s possible to be both.”
“Like who?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Like Byron, maybe. Even Hemingway maybe, in a small way.”
