Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  Grant swam away, pulling himself in on his line and coiling it as he moved upcurrent. He undipped the extra line at the anchor. From here in this gray gloomy water the car was almost invisible. Bonham was completely so. Grant felt a pang of loneliness, and suddenly realized he was cold. He recalled that, had he not come along, Bonham would have done this job alone, had done others like it alone. Tugging three times which was the signal for more slack, he took a turn of the line over his arm and let himself drift back down, his admiration for Bonham growing.

  Bonham had managed to get the door open on the driver’s side and to insert himself far enough to get his hands on the body of the man. But he was having trouble with the door. Grant watched fascinated for a moment, then hurried to help. Just as would a high strong wind, or gravity if the car were hanging by its front bumper on a chain, the current kept gently but persistently pushing the door shut against Bonham. In order to back out with the man he had to keep patiently pushing the door partway open again, then inch himself backward a bit before it pressed him again. Why hadn’t he waited on Grant? Grant didn’t know. In any case, with him to help it was easier. Paying out a few feet of his line till he could grasp the door, he hauled back in on the line until he held the door standing wide open in the current. Nodding vigorously at him, and holding up one hand in the thumb and forefinger circle salute for: Good! Okay! Bonham went on backing out with the man.

  Once outside, holding the body firmly in a sort of lifeguard’s cross-chest carry so as not to lose it to the current, he motioned for the extra line, warped it around him under the arms and knotted it in a perfect bowline. Then he tugged four times, and the dead Jamaican, his arms splayed outward from the rope and looking ridiculously helpless, went sailing off upward at a flat angle into the current, for all the world like some dead soul rising to some skim-milk heaven. Ten feet above them he grew dim, then disappeared in the murk.

  One down, Grant thought. He was glad he had not had to touch him. And one to go. But then Bonham did an incomprehensible thing. Worming his way back into the front seat of the car—which was certainly dangerous enough in any case, pressed against the wheel like that—instead of trying to get hold of her and work his way back out, he began meticulously and carefully with his sausage fingers to put the panties back on the body of the dead Jamaican girl. All of him now, except from his heels to the tips of his long professional flippers, which projected beyond the nearly closed car door, was cramped longitudinally into the car’s front seat.

  Grant had noted, while holding the door for him to get the man out, that the panties had disappeared from the former position where they floated a foot or so above the man’s head. And later, when he let go the door to pass Bonham the hauling-line, he had noticed that they were stuck into Bonham’s weight belt. They were white and showed up noticeably. But in the stress of working and of even being down there, he had not thought anything of that one way or the other. Probably Bonham was going to keep them as some kind of a gruesome souvenir of the job? But now he could hardly believe what his eyes were showing him, as he peered in through the door. Hauling in a little on his line, he swam around to the front and peered in through the windshield between the spider-webby cracked spots. What in the name of God could he be doing it for?

  Bonham was not having any easy time of it, either. His big behind was jammed in between the wheel and the seat, and his great shoulders pressed down between the dashboard and the belly of the girl. His chin and facemask pushed practically right down into her spiky crotch. He could not move anything at all except his arms. And with these he was doggedly trying to get her slippery right foot that was down on the floor through the right leg-hole of the panties.

  Grant watched from outside as success kept eluding him. Finally Bonham shrugged his whole tightly pressed body to try and get into a better position. Grant felt a suffocating faintness of terror at the thought of being in that position himself, of what would happen if the big diver should bump his mouthpiece against something and lose it. He would never get out. He would simply have to lay squeezed in there and drown. Even with Grant’s help he could not get out fast enough to do any good.

  What in the name of God was he doing it for!

  Again the big man shrugged his entire body irritably, and Grant could feel the car shake a little under his hand. Bonham had apparently succeeded with the right foot and was now turning his attention to the left.

  But this proved to be an even more obstinate obstacle than the right. Partially this was because his weight pressed down on her in this position he was in and would not allow her legs to come together. To Grant’s eye beyond the windshield it appeared grotesquely that even in death this girl was determined to keep her legs apart, a defiant unruly gesture to the, perhaps, whole of humanity.

  Suddenly, furiously, as if driven beyond normal expectation, Bonham shook his whole body from top to foot rather the way a dog will shake himself from head to tail in separate sections. The result of that was to pop his body up out of the combined pressures squeezing it, and his tank rang alarmingly against the car roof. From outside Grant could only float at the end of his clip-line helplessly and watch. The girl had now slipped down in the seat, her two legs in the air in a position of copulation. From above her, floating against the car roof, Bonham, bending the left leg in from the knee, could slip the left foot through its panty-hole. But more than that he could not do. Carefully he worked the panties up her legs to above her knees, but having no leverage with which to lift her body, he could get them no further. He had made a herculean effort. Looking up furiously and ferociously at the windshield, he motioned Grant violently to get the door open.

  Grant, who had just looked at his watch wondering about air, nodded vigorously and then just as he turned to swim back to the door saw Bonham reach back with his left hand and pull his reserve wire! Grant felt no need to pull his own. But Bonham, having expended a great deal more energy, especially in his latest effort with the panties, had also used a great deal more air.

  So time was getting important. In spite of that, once he had her outside, which took at least a minute and a half of worming and snaking backward while pulling her, Bonham handed her to Grant.

  Grant, hanging in the water at the end of his own rope in the current, and now holding the girl too under the arms so that his two hands pressed her lush firm breasts in their bra, felt distinctly peculiar. He had seen her around town a few times, he remembered now, usually in bars. She had been peculiarly attractive sexually. The bare skin of her arms was very slippery when the backs of his hands touched it, and being so limp she was hard to hold. He did not get any sensation of corpse-coldness from her in the chill water.

  The current of course had immediately carried her dress down to its full length at her knees. Bonham was forced to push it irritably back up. He motioned for Grant to hold it. Then slowly and carefully he went about putting her panties properly back in place. He was breathing very slowly now, holding each breath a long time, to conserve his air.

  During Bonham’s struggle in the car the extra hauling-line had drifted back down toward them in the current, and Grant had swum up for it and attached it to the car bumper. Now Bonham got it and tied the girl to it, tugged four times, and they watched her ascend into skim-milk heaven as the man had done. Bonham immediately tapped his mouthpiece and heaved his shoulders in the signal that he was almost out of air. He took off swimming on a rising angle toward the anchorline. His air of course would come easier as they rose and as it expanded in the tank under the lessening pressure. Then slowly they came up the anchorline side by side, Bonham shaking his head disgustedly. When their heads popped out into that always-surprising, always-strange-looking world of sun and free air, he dropped his mouthpiece and pushed back his mask up on his forehead, and the first thing he said was: “If I’d known it was gonna be that hard, I wouldn’a done it.”

  “But why . . .” Grant began, dropping his own mouthpiece and pushing up his own mask. He got no furthe
r because Bonham motioned him to silence, jerking his head toward Orloffski and the boatman in the boat above them.

  Another small boat was just taking off the girl’s body, as they climbed in. Up above on the bridge the crowd watched in silence. The men in the other boat had immediately wrapped the body in a blanket as if they didn’t want to look at it, as if to do so would be obscene. Their gesture made Grant immediately think of his own act of holding the dead girl, her two breasts in his hands, the feel of her slippery wet skin. What would those guys have done in his position? “I’ll tell you all about it later,” Bonham said shortly, and stretched his arms out along the gunwale.

  “Tell who about what?” Orloffski demanded bluntly, as he went to work changing their regulators to new tanks.

  “None of your goddamned business,” Bonham said. “How do you like them apples?”

  Orloffski, unpredictably, suddenly grinned. “I like it well enough, I guess,” was all he said. “Can’t stand to be around dead people, hunh?”

  Bonham, leaning back against the gunwale and relaxing, grinned at Grant and then winked openly at him so that Orloffski could see it. “We’re down there doin the dirty work, ain’t we, Ron? You want to come down and do the dirty work with us, we’ll take you in on our secrets. Okay?”

  “I got your message, I got your message,” Orloffski said with half a mock scowl.

  “Okay,” Bonham said. Grant felt ridiculously pleased, and flattered. But then his naturally suspicious mind wondered if this might not all be a put-on act on the part of the two divers, for his benefit. It turned out, when they did talk about it later, the great panty-replacing episode, that Bonham—quite erroneously, obviously—had hoped to do it quickly enough and unobtrusively enough that Grant simply would not notice it. “Besides, I was afraid of losing them in the current, if I took her outside.”—“Them? The panties?” Grant asked.— “Yeah, damn it! And her! And/or her!” Bonham said irritably, and then added: “But I didn’t know it was going to be that hard to do!” But basically, he would have preferred that nobody know anything about it except for himself. And the main reason he had decided to do it: and here a simpleminded fatuous look of smug sexual propriety came over his big face: was because of the guy’s poor wife and four kids back home in GaBay, who would have to live all this down. It was true that: and here a schoolboy leer fleeted across his face, shredding momentarily the look of sexual decorum: he had taken Anna Rachel out a few times himself, sneaked her out on the sly so to speak, and she was a good kid. But mainly: and here the sweet decorum settled back in place heavily, and stayed: he was thinkin of the guy’s poor wife and four kids. No gossipy scandal like that ever helped anybody.

  All of this conversation took place some time later of course, at The Neptune Bar in fact, that evening, where the whole gang of them sat drinking innumerable gin-tonics and waiting for Grant’s and Lucky’s late plane to come in. Bonham had taken Grant to another, empty table to make his explanation privately. But by that time Grant had already learned something else about Bonham that forced him to re-evaluate his conception of the man, something Lucky had found out during her long day of beer-drinking with Letta Bonham.

  But they had finished the dive first. The last part was pretty anticlimax, after the removal of the bodies, but Grant would not have missed it now for anything.

  It was strange, he thought as they zipped shut their wet suit jackets and donned their tanks, but he was at home now with this kind of diving as he was before with the other, clear-water kind; and his fears of last night and this morning seemed ridiculous now. If Bonham had only explained everything to him beforehand, instead of taking him into it totally cold turkey and ignorant, he might never have been afraid at all, he realized, and suddenly shot a glance over at the big man. Bonham winked. And after it was all over and the dive completed, he had quite a bit to say on that same subject of Grant’s fears himself.

  There was very little to the dive itself. Except hard work. Bonham took with him a light line attached to the big crane’s heavy hawser which, when he tugged on the line down on the bottom, was lowered to them. While working on the girl he had thoughtfully opened the other cardoor window, and now with Grant helping with the awkward, heavy hawser, he simply passed the big metal rope under the frame just in front of the rear wheels and hooked its heavy hook back onto the line. When he tugged on his signal line, the crane began slowly, very slowly, to take up the slack and lift the car. Bonham had violently motioned Grant away, and Grant knew enough about heavy construction work to know that danger—except for falling objects, or falling people—usually comes when a taut chain or cable parts, or slips. Here nothing slipped and the hawser didn’t part. Slowly the car disappeared above them. Bonham, keeping down low at the front where if the cable did part it would probably miss him, rose with it guiding it with one hand until he reached the limit of his clip-line. Then he reeled himself back in to the anchorline and they came up. Back on the surface, they looked at the car hanging in midair, water streaming from it with its mashed front end in a long cascade. Slowly the big crane lifted it on up and deposited it on the roadway where the wrecker’s haul truck could take it over. The unpleasant job was over.

  It was while they were stripping off their wet suits, toweling themselves and putting on their clothes alone together on the riverbank, that Bonham spoke about Grant’s fear.

  “You’re a strange guy,” was his preamble. He looked off thoughtfully and then brought his candid stormcloud eyes back to Grant. “I never saw anybody as scared and nervous as you were this morning, and yet the minute we got underwater you were as cool as a cucumber. With most people it’s just the opposite: they’re cool and collected in the boat but the minute they get under they start to panic. Especially in a place like this. Yeah, I got to admit you’re a pretty rare type. What is it you think makes you so scared beforehand?” he asked bluntly. “Just imagination, hunh?”

  “I guess so,” Grant said. This was both a rare and rich fare of praise he was receiving, and he felt shy and embarrassed. Besides, his hero-worship of Bonham had gone up another large number of points on the graph today.

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you more about what to expect before we went,” Bonham said, “in case you wondered. I figured it would be better to show you right there, on the scene.”

  “It might have helped me if I’d known,” Grant said mildly.

  “I don’t think so,” Bonham said shortly. “Anyway, you’re a pretty goddamned good man, I think,” Bonham went on placidly. “Overrich imagination or no. When you’re down there, you put out when it counts. Just between you and me I wouldn’t have trusted Orloffski not to get panicky on that job.”

  Grant coughed in his embarrassment and lit a cigarette. He was already dressed and standing waiting for Bonham to don his tent-sized shirt. “I didn’t really do anything though,” he said.

  “Oh yes you did. And you did exactly what we needed just exactly when it was needed. If you weren’t already rich, and didn’t have a compulsion to go on writing them damned lousy plays,” Bonham grinned, “I’d offer you a job to work for me—”

  “—and I’d have taken it,” Grant put in.

  Bonham jutted his chin. “Come on, let’s get back up to that fat old Chief Inspector’s paddy wagon.”

  Grant followed him up the long steep bank toward the road. In spite of his embarrassment, he was feeling pretty expansive, pretty cocky. He was, in fact, exactly like a kid whom the coach had bragged on in front of the rest of the squad. And in fact Bonham had no shyness about making his feelings known to the rest of the gang. He told them substantially what he had told Grant about Grant, except that of course he did not repeat what he had said about Orloffski. Grant tried not to bask. Doug’s reaction was to grumble again about how he wished he could do the stuff, and then slap Grant on the back. Doug and Wanda Lou were both a little loaded from the bottle they had had on the bridge. “What was it like?” he asked.—“Eerie,” was all Grant would say. “But Bonh
am was marvelous,” he added; “I’ll tell you about it later”; and both of them looked over at their occasionally mutual hero.

  Bonham obviously enjoyed that role. And why not? Grant thought to himself; today he had certainly earned it. And that mood, of hero-worship, stayed with him, stayed with all of them, all the way back into town and through the quick lunch of sandwiches they ate at The Neptune before Bonham went off with the Chief Inspector to get paid. As a result, when Grant did get back to the house, and Lucky did impart to him the new information she had learned about Bonham from Letta, it was more of a surprise, more of a shock, more difficult to accept, understand and evaluate, than it might otherwise have been. It was always harder to come down from a high mood of admiration for somebody, and get back into the normal prosaic everyday feet-of-clay way of looking at everybody that one employed usually in one’s world.

  The upshot of it was that Bonham could not get it up with his wife.

  Letta Bonham had told this to Lucky. The two girls on their beer were at least as high as Doug and Wanda Lou had gotten with their bottle on the bridge. They had made themselves sandwiches, but neither had been able to eat more than a bite. So they had played gin rummy and gone on drinking beer. They discovered they had a mutual dislike, fear and hatred of skindiving. All this Lucky told Grant while they were alone in their ugly little room down the street packing their toilet articles and the one little bag she had reopened last night And as she told him, she gazed level-eyed straight into his face.

  There was more than a little triumph in Lucky’s telling of it. She tried to hide that, but it probably showed. She had debated a long time whether to tell Grant at all or not. But since he was so obviously, and Doug along with him, getting himself personally involved with the man, she thought it was her duty to tell him. To her, it could only mean that there was something seriously wrong with Bonham. She never had liked him. She had felt vaguely that he was somehow trying to come between herself and Ron. But more than that there was the feeling that he was—how to say it?—that he was “accident-prone,” in his personal life if not in his work. Witness his taking up with the Orloffskis like he had. And how could you know that that accident-proneness mightn’t lap over, crop up, at any time into the work, his dangerous work? She didn’t think that was an unreasonable supposition on her part. And after all, why hadn’t he been more successful in his life?