by James Jones
“Well,” she said, and white teeth appeared dimly in the silhouette also as she smiled. “The two prodigals are home. Did you have a good time in MoBay? and get laid and all?”
“He did,” Grant said stolidly. “Myself, I didn’t feel much like it. For some reason. So I didn’t.”
“Oh, la! My, my!” Carol Abernathy said sarcastically. “Really! Really?”
“I just come back to pick up a few things I left,” Grant said. “I’m off to Kingston tonight on the evening plane.”
“Alone?” Carol said.
“Alone,” he said. “Villalonga is no longer even there, I gather, as I guess you know. But Jim Grointon is, and others are. I understand the reefs are much more versatile there, and there’s a lot more of them to choose from. And,” he heard himself saying, the first time he had ever mentioned this secret to anyone at all, “I want to try to shoot a shark or two.”
“Shooting sharks!” Carol Abernathy exclaimed. “Quite the adventurer you’ve become already, isn’t it?”
“Sure have,” Grant said. “I plan to stay there two or three weeks, then I’m off back to New York.” He shouldn’t have said that, he knew, why wave a red flag at a bull, but he couldn’t help it.
Carol Abernathy laughed. “Oh, so that’s the way it is, is it? You’re off back to New York, are you?”
“I sure am,” Grant said. He wondered suddenly why he had thought he needed Doug to come with him at all anyway.
As if stung by some insect, Carol had jumped up from her chair. Now she seized a blank sheet of paper from the table and advanced on him with it, waving it. “Then there’s one thing you can do for me, if you will. Since you owe it to me. I want you to write out an acknowledgement, a dedication, to this new play telling just how much I helped you with it. Since I may never see you again, I better get it now. With you, out of sight is out of mind. And don’t say you don’t owe it to me.”
Grant could hardly believe he was hearing right. His latest play, the one called I’ll Never Leave Her, she had ‘worked’ on not at all; hardly even read in its entirety; and openly detested —and rightly so, since it was pretty clear it was herself and himself, and Hunt, he was writing about. Even if she had ‘worked’ on it, to openly ask for a . . .
“That’s what you want, is it?” he said thinly. “That’s all you want?” He took the paper and walked with it to the typewriter sitting on the desk at the other end of the room. Standing, bending over without even sitting down, he ran two sheets and a carbon in and tapped out a dedication which was substantially exactly the same words as the one he had written, years ago, when he had dedicated his first play to her and to Hunt sincerely. It took maybe thirty seconds.
“Hell, that’s easy,” he said bringing it back and thrusting the carbon at her where she had sat back down again in her chair by the window. Then, folding the original and putting it in his shirt pocket, he turned to Doug. “Well, Doug.” Doug got up out of the chair where he had placed himself when they first entered. “Come on,” Grant said. “Let’s go.”
“Why, that’s nice!” Carol said in a surprised voice from behind him. “That’s very nice!” There were tears in her eyes when he turned back to her. “I didn’t know you really felt that way about us any more! That’s sweet! Look, Doug!” Grant could hardly believe she was not being sarcastic, but she wasn’t. She really meant it. She couldn’t tell the difference.
Doug scanned it and handed it back. “Yeah,” he said shortly. “Nice.”
“I’ll mail it to Paul Gibson on my way out of town,” Grant said thinly.
“Listen, I just had an idea,” Carol said with an eager smile, “while you were doing that. A great idea! Why don’t we all three go to Kingston together. Hunt has to get back to the business in a few days anyway, and Doug hasn’t got anything to do at the moment. Doug and I will go with you to Kingston and we’ll make it a real vacation. Just the three of us. The three musketeers of the Hunt Hills Little Theatre Group. I think it’s a great idea!”
“I want to go by myself,” Grant said.
“Why? We’ll go out with you in the boat afternoons, and you can dive. At night we’ll eat, and go around, and we’ll go out to Port Royal and those other places and see all the historical stuff. It will be fun!”
“You won’t understand, will you?” Grant said.
“I could really use a real vacation myself,” Carol Abernathy said.
Grant could feel his breath get fast and light in his chest and there was a dull ringing in his ears. “Well, it’s impossible, you see,” he said stolidly. “My new girl is down here with me. My girl from New York is here, and I’m taking her with me.”
There was a continuing silence after this remark. It seemed to go on a long time. Then everything began happening so fast that it was hard to follow it all. Carol Abernathy was staring at him. “Your ‘girl’!” she screamed at him, twisting the word contemptuously. “Your ‘girl’! You’re thirty-six years old! You sound like a . . .” Then she screamed “Oh!” and jumped up, knocking the frail Empire chair over backwards.
She continued to scream that same sound, that short sharp “Oh!”, over and over again at almost exactly regular intervals, say, roughly, three to four seconds apart. It sounded more like “Ow!”, or “Ow-w!”. It was a very animal sound. She would stop one, apparently just have time enough to think, then just when you thought she might be desisting, do another. Or maybe it had to do with her rhythm of breathing. After several of these, standing half bent over from the waist like a downfield Mocker, she charged past Grant toward the door. Her shoulder hit the doorjamb exactly as if she could not see it, but Grant thought that she could. Then, straightening up in the doorway, her eyes wide and starting like a mad person’s, she placed her hand under her left breast and screamed at them: “My heart! My heart!” Then she disappeared. They could hear her caroming off first one wall then the other down the corridor toward the stairs, continuing to scream that “Oh!” or “Ow-w!” sound at the same three or four second intervals.
“Come on!” Doug said in a clipped voice, and made an imperative follow-me gesture with his arm. He ran out the door. Grant followed more slowly, listening to her ricocheting down the grand staircase from rail to rail. He arrived at the top just as she reached the bottom, still, he noted, on her feet. Doug was right behind her. She darted left, still running half bent over in that downfield guard position, still screaming “Oh!” or “Ow!”. Evelyn de Blystein had appeared from nowhere and caught her as she rounded the corner of the diningroom. As Evelyn seized her, Carol Abernathy allowed herself to fall heavily to the floor, Evelyn half-breaking the fall. Grant didn’t care. He didn’t care even if it was a real heart attack. Something cold and calm, cruel even, had descended over his mind. He walked on out of the big front door and got into his car and drove away, feeling rather pleased with himself.
Probably he had been too cruel to her, he was to think later. At the time he had been uncertain of his toughness, so that maybe he leaned over backwards in cruelty. But the truth was it had been easy, the cruelty, easier than he could ever have imagined.
He got the rest of the story from Doug, when Doug came back to Bonham’s house an hour after him. He had told them at Bonham’s, including Lucky, only that she had thrown a sort of fit, as he had thought she would. But Doug was under no such obligation to reticence. He told all in full detail, half-laughing and in a kind of giggling, breathless, excited way of a harbinger of truly malicious tale-telling. Real gooey gossip makes bedfellows of even the most antipathetical persons, and soon the whole household was giggling and laughing as breathlessly as he and the feeling that somehow a marvelous triumph had been achieved welded them all solidly together into a band, a group. Beers were passed around. Even Grant joined in, accepting a celebratory beer and laughing some himself, though he knew that this was really truly cruel. She had lain on the floor groaning and moaning and hollering about her heart, and yelling that “Oh!” or “Ow!” every now and then, until she r
ealized that Grant was actually gone, whereupon she got to her feet as calm as anyone present, calmer than the rest of them by this time as a matter of fact, and went upstairs to her room saying she thought she would be all right, it was just some kind of an attack, an indigestion maybe. In her room she had sat down on her bed quite calmly, and then had seized a large bottle of Miltown on the bedtable and taken a handful of them before anyone could stop her. In the fact, as Doug who was almost near enough to stop her saw, there were only seven of the pills in her hand though she tried to make it look like more. A call to a doctor reassured them that only seven Miltown would not really hurt anybody. She was now sleeping the sleep of the dead, the deserving dead, Doug grinned.
“My God!” Lucky said grinning a little shamefacedly. She had forgotten her anger. “To do all that for just . . . And you’re not even her real son. Only a foster-son. If that, really. She really must be . . . A little . . .” Her finger went up to tap her temple.
“She is,” Doug said fervently.
There was a midnight plane out to Kingston, the last of the day, and after Lucky’s big spaghetti dinner that was the one they were taking. Her sauce was made, and while Grant was at the villa she had carefully packed them all up. This had been her peace offering. The bags now rested by the screendoor, ready to be hustled out to Bonham’s car in which Bonham would take them to the airport after Grant turned his in. Also by the door was a small, worn, green duffelbag of Bonham’s into which Bonham had packed all of Grant’s incidental diving gear, and beside it stood a two-tank rig with, unattached, a superior regulator hanging from it, which Bonham had put together and rigged up for Grant in exchange for his cheap equipment he had brought down from Indiana. The tanks had been filled (free) to maximum pressure, and though this was against airline regulations, Bonham had carried full tanks on planes many times and there was nothing to worry about. Down there in Kingston he could get them refilled at one place which handled filtered air for hospitals. Jim Grointon would know about that if Grant wanted to look him up, but Bonham would give him the address anyway. Jim, he smiled, didn’t do much lung-diving anymore. His bill, which when Bonham presented it to him came to something over $1100, was for everything: all the equipment he had bought, the trip to Grand Bank, all the trips out on Bonham’s boat, all the training and pool checkouts. It was itemized. It was also big enough to give Grant a moment of perturbation.
“You can give me half now,” Bonham smiled, “and the rest in two weeks when you get back from Kingston. If you want.”
“Well,” Grant said. “Of course we may not come back here from Kingston. I rather think we’ll go right on up to New York from there. I’m pretty sure.”
“Well,” Bonham smiled. A kind of hard steely look came into his eyes under the smile. “You can always send me the other half down from up there, if you do it right after you get back.”
“No,” Grant said, reluctantly. “No. That doesn’t make any difference to me. I only get paid on a quarterly basis anyway. Might as well give it all to you right now.” He wrote out a check on his New York bank. He didn’t mind paying for what he got, but he hated to see it go out like that, so fast. The steely look in Bonham’s eyes relaxed.
Grant had noted again, in his little talk with Bonham, that more and more lately—he didn’t know just when it had started—his mind had come to accept the unspoken, but tacit, position that he would stay with Lucky after Kingston, would wind up with her, possibly, probably, married. This, though his conscious mind balked and backed off from that idea whenever it came up. He picked up his camera, the expensive Exacta V William had not had time to make a case for, and put it with the bags by the door. He was to remember later that he did that. Then he looked over at her standing in the kitchen doorway, and went over to kiss her. From behind her the spaghetti sauce smelted delicious.
“When do we eat?” he asked.
“Whenever you want,” she smiled and tucked a hand into his armpit. “It’s ready now. All I have to do is cook the spaghetti itself. For seven minutes.”
A guy could do a lot worse, his mind was telling him. It was eight o’clock and still light “What do you say we wait a while and do some serious drinking first?” There was general agreement to this from almost all quarters. It was strange how everyone present now felt themselves to be, and enjoyed feeling, part of a lovers’ conspiracy. “Shall we figure around nine?”
So she served at nine. That would still give them two hours to eat leisurely and still easily make the plane. Grant had bought two big bottles of Chianti to go with the spaghetti. Bonham had gone ahead and built a fire in the barbecue anyway, because it looked so pretty after dark. They served themselves from the kitchen doorway and ate out in the yard, most of them coming back a second and even a third time. The spaghetti was delicious. Orloffski came back a fourth time. If they could leave by 11:15 they’d have plenty of time to make the airport.
They did not however, because exactly at 11:10 the phone rang. They had all long since finished eating, and were now sitting around inside still drinking the red wine. When the phone rang Bonham looked around and then got up and walked over and picked it up, with his slow drunken movements.
“Who the hell could that be?” he said. “At this hour? Yes?”
He listened a long time and though pretty drunk his face got long and solemn. After a while he asked some short questions, like: “Where?” “What time was it?” “How many people?” What make of car was it?” Then finally he said: “I don’t know. Sure, I’ll try. But I can’t do anything about it now, tonight, for God’s sake!” After saying goodbye he hung up and came back to them. “There’s been a bad accident,” he said, and rubbed his sausage-fingered hand over his great face.
It was Saturday night and a local Jamaican businessman, apparently on his way back to Ganado Bay from a wild party in Ocho Rios with a local Jamaican girl, had gone through the bridge out east of town and into the river with his Chevrolet. Another car following along behind them had seen the whole thing. They had stopped, but no trace of the car showed on the placid surface of the river, and nobody swam up from it. They had driven on in and called the police. That was the police who had just called. They wanted Bonham to dive tomorrow to recover the car and the bodies.
Bonham rubbed his big hand over his still-drunken face again. “We all know the girl. She was a great sport. She was a receptionist at a local doctor’s. But always laughing. Always out on some party. The trouble is the guy is married—was married—with a wife and four kids at home.”
He paused. “It’s worth a couple hundred bucks. The county pays.” He picked up his glass of red wine, looked at it, and then with a twisted mouth put it back down. His wife Letta, who had only just got home from her restaurant job a few minutes before, came over and put her small arm around him.
“Who was it”
“Anna Rachel. Anna Rachel Bottomley.”
“Oh, no. I thought maybe. It’s so sad.”
“I’ve got a lot to do in the morning. We’ll have to get the big mobile derrick. They’ll have to weight it. It’s a hard dive. The river’s about 60, 65 feet deep there, and muddy. There’ll be current. Fortunately there haven’t been much rains lately.”
He looked over at Grant, as if just remembering he was there. “If you want to go along on a real, serious working dive, here’s your chance. I don’t know yet whether I’ll have to use a torch on it or not. I’ll have to look first. You want to come along?”
“Not me,” Orloffski said. “I’ll stick to spearfishin.”
Grant looked over at Lucky.
“You’re insane,” she whispered, her eyes widening.
“I wouldn’t take him anyplace where he could get hurt,” Bonham said solidly. “I like him, and his talent, too much to do anything like that. I’ll be doing all the work. He’ll just be observing.”
“You can see I have to go,” Grant said to Lucky. “It’s something like this I’ve been wanting to do since I started. I may never ge
t another chance like this.”
Somewhat numbly, she thought, Lucky got up and went over to the bags to get one to unpack. Bonham would go with them down the street to his friend’s’ house to wake them up and ask them to let them stay another night, he said.
Doug, who did not want to go back to the villa and those women tonight since the lovers were not leaving, decided he would sleep on Bonham’s livingroom floor. That way he would be right here for the dive tomorrow, too.
20
THE SILENCE WAS ENORMOUS. Only by taking a breath from his regulator could Grant reassure himself he still could hear. He had expected that; but only by thinking about it most seriously could he be sure which way was up and which way down. His only contact with the entire world really, was the thick chain to which he clung thirty feet down. It disappeared ten feet below him, and ten feet above him. And from it some gentle—terrifyingly gentle—omnipotent, ubiquitous force tried perpetually to pull him.
Looking around itself, his mind tried desperately to relate this to some experience he and it might have had together in the past, and failed. Physically, it was a little like being blind, or half-blind. Or, because of the “No Up and No Down,” like being an eyeless embryo floating in the womb maybe. Once as a child, to test his eyes, the doctor had put drops in them which dilated the pupils and when he tried to see with them everything was hazy and blurry and would not focus. This was like that. When he put his depth gauge against his facemask, he could by straining his eyes just barely read the luminous numbers. When he moved one hand away to full arm’s length, it all but disappeared into invisibility as a shadow. When he wiggled his fingers his eyes could not be sure they moved.
