Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  But he was saved from this chore by Orloffski himself. Leaning forward blandly with his elbows on the seat back, Orloffski said blatantly from behind Bonham’s right ear, “I think your pal Grant thinks I stoled his lousy camera.”

  Bonham glanced back over his shoulder, then back straight in front. “Well?” he said. “Did you?”

  “Are you kiddin?” Orloffski said belligerently “How could I have? I was right there with you all the time. Hells bells, you want to search me? I’ll stand search.”

  Bonham was very aware of Doug in the back seat. “Oh, come off it. You know as well as I do that anybody who stole that camera could have stolen it at the house and just hid it away, in the confusion. But I’m hoping it will turn up when we get back to the house. I’m sure nobody we know would steal it.”

  In the back seat Doug was saying nothing.

  “You want to help us look, Doug?” Bonham said, “when we get back to the house?”

  “Sure,” Doug said.

  “You know what I think?” Orloffski said. He leaned forward again, but spoke loudly. “I think it was one of them damned nigger porters who snitched it. I’m sure I saw it with the stuff in the back seat when we unloaded it. Then when I looked around a minute later it wasn’t there. But I know damn well I saw it. Did you see it, Al?”

  “No,” Bonham said honestly, “but then I wasn’t lookin for it.”

  “Did you see it Doug?” Orloffski asked.

  “No,” Doug said. “No, I didn’t.”

  “How about you, Wanda Lou?”

  “No, I didn’t see it out there,” Wanda Lou said. “But I’m sure I saw somebody stick it in somewhere when we were packing at the house.”

  “Well, I think that’s what happened,” Orloffski said. “I’m sure I saw it, and I’m just as sure one of them lousy black field nigger porters swiped it. They’re terrible thieves, those field niggers. Ain’t that so, Letta?”

  “Yes,” Letta said. “A lot of the field niggers are bad thieves.” It was a great hit, Bonham thought, for him to ask Letta, who cared so much for her bourgeois background. And it was true that a great many of the lowerclass field workers, ignorant, uneducated, were notorious thieves and proud of it.

  “I don’t think we’ll find the camera at the house,” Orloffski said.

  Bonham tried to keep his despairfulness out of his voice. So that was the line he was going to take. “Well, we’ll have a damned good look when we get home to make sure.” But of course they’d never find it. “And give me a slug out of that bottle you got back there whatever it is,” he added despairfully and put back his hand.

  “This is vodka,” Orloffski said and handed it to him.

  A stiff hot snort of the vodka that brought tears to his eyes and warmed his belly, nevertheless did not make him feel any better. Everything was going wrong. Everything was pressing in on him, squeezing him in from all sides until he couldn’t move a muscle. Timing was all off. With complete success just ahead of his nose like some damned carrot, he couldn’t reach out and grab it. And now this!

  About the only thing that wasn’t going wrong was Sam Finer and the money. The money had come in two days ago. He had not told anybody about it. He had taken the check to the Royal Canadian manager, who put it through for collection and would hold the ten thousand for him without putting it in any account. When they had formed the corporation, here in town, after the Grand Bank trip, the three of them, electing him president, it had given him that right. And he wasn’t taking any chances on anything happening to this money.

  At the meeting Sam Finer, who had wanted no stock but only a long-term loan at low interest was finally persuaded to take 2% of the stock, as a plain gift not as any kind of repayment. That had been Bonham’s idea. Orloffski had gone along. It left Bonham with 49% and Orloffski with 49%, and Finer with the deciding 2%. Bonham preferred it that way because he was pretty sure he could count on Finer to go along with him on any decision against Orloffski, rather than have him and Orloffski with 50% each and bucking heads.

  When the money had come in, he had called the marine agent who was handling the schooner for the owners and by stressing that he would pay cash managed to Jew them down from $11,500 to $10,200. On the strength of the check the bank manager had given him a thousand to send to the marine agent as earnest money.

  Bonham had looked up the owners. They were a small American oil corporation, who wanted badly for some reason to get rid of all their real property quickly so that they could liquidate their corporation. And the schooner, used only for deductible pleasure trips, was about the last of their real property. In spite of that the $10,200 was all he could get them down to. But he did get them to agree to put the boat up for him, their expense. As soon as Orloffski went north to bring the cutter down, he was going to take the money down to Kingston to settle up, and by showing them the cash try to get them to come down another thousand.

  But outside of that nothing else was going good. The yard in Kingston had called him to say that the dryrot damage in the starboard bow was much more extensive than anticipated and had even got into the deck planking; that they were going to have to pull a whole flock of hull planking they had not expected. Two thousand bucks wouldn’t anywhere near cover it. It would be more like six thousand. And Orloffski showed no signs of coughing up any of the dough he had promised. He was becoming increasingly vague about money, and about the sale of his sports shop. Where was that money going to come from? Bonham had been hoping Grant. He had told the yard to go ahead.

  Bonham was pretty sure that some “earnest money” had been paid Orloffski, say three or four thousand, and that was what the Orloffskis had made their trip down on. Orloffski had as much as told him so. And from the way they were living at Bonham’s, and paying so little on the food, there must be a good deal of it left. But now Orloffski denied any such deal had happened or that any such money had been paid, and claimed he would have to find a buyer, find him and sell him, when he went back north for the cutter. And now he had to pull this silly damnfool thing about Grant’s asshole camera. Just when Bonham was beginning to consider Grant as a serious contender for taking up the slack on the cash lag. The whole thing was damned insane!

  Bonham clamped his big palms down on the wheel, and eased the old car around a steeper curve on the dark hillroad so easily that his passengers hardly felt the change of direction. His jaws clamped together with frustration.

  The truth was, he thought, Grant was an enigma, now. An unknown quantity. Apparently, just now, while diving and vacationing in Jamaica, Grant had chosen that moment to make a major policy decision about his personal life. Bonham was pretty sure he could have handled the old broad crazy as she was. But this new girl was something else again.

  What a hell of a lousy damned place to make that kind of a decision! On vacation!

  Despite all her silly kooky politicking he could have handled the old one. No matter what she might say from one minute to the next she was basically in favor of Grant coming in. All you had to do with her was use flattery and keep larding it on. But the new one was a “diff’rent cup o’ tea” as his British pals would say. She was like a she-bear with cubs when it came to her man or, he thought, to her man’s money.

  Bonham had no qualms of conscience when it came to Grant and his money. The guy had come to him to learn to dive. He hadn’t even looked the guy up. It was true Grant was a fast, good learner. But he was teaching him as well and as fast and as safely and probably as cheaply as probably any diving teacher could teach anybody. Probably a lot more cheaply. This girl didn’t know that. She should meet some of the other professionals he knew.

  But apart from that Bonham simply did not like women like this girl. Too demanding, in the first place. She simply couldn’t let Grant out of her sight. Too beautiful, in the second place. Women that beautiful never had any character. They always expected to have everything handed to them on a silver platter. Going around showing off those tits of hers and that gorgeous ass
so cocky as if she expected every man who looked at her to fall down on his knees and worship her hairy shrine. It damn infuriated him. Men, at least sometimes, had other things to do.

  And he didn’t like her language, or the way she went around laughing about all the men she’d had in her life. He didn’t mind men cussing and using bad language if they wanted. The only reason he didn’t say fuck himself was because he didn’t like the way it came out of his mouth. But women who went around saying fuck and using four-letter words like men, and talked about their sex lives as if they were trying to be one of the boys, only made themselves look like whores instead of ladies, whether they were whores or not. Usually they were. He wasn’t surprised if this one had been a lez at some point in her hot career. Next to fairies, whom he detested completely, Bonham hated lesbians more than anything, kissing each other’s pussies, and all the other things they did. He knew all about it all; that you were supposed to be sophisticated and laugh about it; but he couldn’t. Involuntarily, Bonham cast a quick glance over at his wife as if she might be reading his mind.

  Living in mid-Jersey, with his old man in his law practice traveling to New York to Baltimore to Washington so much, Bonham going to school up in Montclair had seen a lot of that type of city broad in his time, enough to know them well. How any man could marry one of them was beyond him. And how Grant could marry this one he could not fathom. But he was willing to bet his bottom dollar Grant was going to. And that meant automatically that any friendship Grant and Bonham might probably have had, was out.

  They just couldn’t leave you alone. None of them could stand to see two men alone together liking each other and happy and having fun.

  The first time one of those so-called sophisticated city broads had hinted to him she would like for him to kiss her pussy, he had got dressed and left and never come back. And every one thereafter.

  Ah, Christ! It was all going to hell. He had about as much chance of getting any money out of Grant now as of getting blood out of a turnip. He was going to have to really bump Orloffski for some dough now, two thousand at the very least. Well, Orloffski deserved it. He sure did. More than. He had only himself to blame.

  In his agitation, in the sum of all his various agitations, a sudden deeply peaceful-making thought and picture came to Bonham. He saw the green-blue undersea out on the deep reef, reef coming perceptibly closer to him as he glided down, heard the calming eerie sing of his regulator in the all but silence. Alone. Alone and safe. Because safety was action. It was having to think all the goddamned time that ruined you, hamstrung you. Everybody in the world to bug you with their goddamned personalities or problems, your wife to pick and devil at you with her damned complaints. Complaints about nothing. Well, he knew what he was going to do. Tomorrow he was going out to his old shark hole out on the deep reef and kill himself a goddamned shark. He’d take the boat, all by himself (except for Ali), out through the harbor and down west to the deep reef, and it would all be there, and everything he saw would be his.

  Surreptitiously, he glanced over at Letta. She always seemed to divine when he was going to go shark-shooting. He hadn’t told her now for a long time when he went. But she always seemed to know and always kicked up a fuss.

  She was a problem, his wife. She had seemed so pure and so fine when he first met her. That was what had made him love her so. Jamaican or not “touched by the brush” or not, her upbringing had been of the strictest and most Christian kind, the upbringing a girl should have to become a lady. That she was not a virgin when he met her didn’t matter; nobody was. What mattered was that she had given herself to him without liking it, because she loved him. He had understood that and appreciated it. Properly brought-up ladies just were like that. Then along about a couple of years ago or so something had happened, she had changed.

  A sort of deep unplumbed, unacknowledged gloom settled over Bonham in the car and he glanced over at her secretly. Had she found another boyfriend along the line somewhere that he didn’t know about was that it? Boyfriend! he thought contemptuously, a lover! Was that what had happened? He could still remember the first time she had reached over in the bed and put her hand on his leg and run it back and forth. Who had taught her that? Where had she learned that? It had worked, of course, that first time. And a few times after. He could still remember it with horror. He couldn’t really believe she had a lover. He had checked, in his own quiet way, very carefully. Well, they said tropical peoples, people who lived a long time in the tropics, were more carnal.

  But it was just all too goddamned dirty. And it was a terrible shock to find your own beloved wife reacting like the black pigs you ran into at The Neptune Bar like Anna Rachel and sometimes, drunk, took out. If she liked it with you, why not with others? Aha, why not! He simply couldn’t help thinking like that. No man could. And that was enough to throw any man off his feed and keep his pecker down. The truth was he simply couldn’t stand that rapturous look she got on her face now. With her eyes shut like that it could be any man. “You like to make love! You like to make love!” he had wanted to shout at her accusingly. Just like the whores at The Neptune. But of course he never had.

  Once right after the war, when he had come home still a young guy and unmarried, an old high school pingpong buddy—who was married—had offered him the opportunity to go ahead and make his, the buddy’s, wife. The offer was in private, of course; not in front of her. He never had understood what crazy psychological depths might have prompted such an offer! But him! him! he had gone ahead and done it! It was horrible. And, more horrible, the wife had liked it!

  For no reason a picture of Cathie Finer in her swimsuit, her bikini she had worn in Grand Bank, came into his mind and he felt his pecker begin to swell between his legs as he sat in the car seat. Now there was really a sexy broad, and she wasn’t foul-mouthed like this Lucky. And she didn’t brag about her hundreds of lovers.

  Sometimes he positively hated Letta. How dare she be like all the others? He also hated her because he needed her. And because she didn’t realize it, this, and took it all for granted.

  In our generation—Today—we need women and hate them for it. But we do need them. Otherwise we’d destroy everything. The world. Women are nestbuilders and so they love property and protect it. Meanwhile they use us to satisfy their carnal desires—quite happily and selfishly—while attacking us for being dirty-minded. Well, it wasn’t like that in his mother’s generation.

  Ah, he hated all of it. Everything in life was so dirty. Why couldn’t anything be pure? The only pure thing by God he ever knew was his mother by God, that he ever knew. They, her generation, they had been different.

  What was she doing right now, Letta? Was she out fucking some guy maybe? While he was out here on the boat working? He got again suddenly that belly-pit excited feeling of inviting cuckoldry by leaving his wife at home alone. It both excited and infuriated him. Then he suddenly realized, of course, that she was sitting right here beside him on the car-seat.

  Pleasurably, relievingly, to stop the savage tooth-edged seesawing of his mind back and forth, Bonham in the car watching carefully out at the fifty-yard cone of light the headlights made, thought about and went back over vividly the last time he had gone shark-shooting.

  It had been one of the better days, not one likely to be equaled soon. Bonham had no idea why the sharks preferred to hang around this spot he called his old shark hole. Certainly it didn’t have sufficient fish to be called a feeding ground. It was down near the far, western end of the deep reef, about seventy-five feet deep. It did have a natural bridge of coral over a deep sand trough running out to sea through the reef and about ten feet wide. Over the centuries the corals growing out in overhangs on both sides of it had finally met and fused and gone on growing until now there was an arching solid rock bridge six feet wide across the ten-foot trough. Possibly the sharks felt safer resting under this natural bridge between feeding forays, though Bonham had only seen one or two ever actually lying under it. But no m
atter what time of day or night he went there, there were one or two or more sharks lying up under the various coral overhangs or swimming lazily around the area.

  The last time he had been out there, which had been just a day or so after he first met Grant, he had gone over the side with his triple-rubber gun for a look around, leaving Ali in the boat to tend it and cursing his boss for a crazy fool like always.

  At first there had appeared to be nothing at all down there. Then he had spotted a small four, four and a half foot ground shark cruising along the trough near the coral bridge. It hardly seemed worth the effort but he cocked two rubbers of the gun.

  Then he saw what he had missed before: a Great Blue about twelve or thirteen feet long. It had been swimming slowly over a large mass of dark reef and he had missed it. Almost at the same moment he saw another good-sized shark (he couldn’t tell how big) swimming at mid-depth out at the edge of his visibility range. He had been trying to decide whether to go for the Blue with the triple-rubber gun, and this decided him. If the other was swimming at mid-depth he might be hungry. And they might have some fun. Swimming back to the boat he handed up the loaded speargun carefully and hollered to Ali for the Brazilian rig and his Hawaiian sling and free spears.