by James Jones
“Are you married, Jim?” she asked him pleasantly later on that same day, when they were finally all out together on the boat.
She was sitting back in the stern on the starboard side near the motors, which Grointon steered with his bare foot on their coupling bar while standing in his characteristic position leaning on the tarpaulin’s pipe frame to look ahead. Ron was almost across from her, talking to Bonham on Ron’s left and to Doug on Bonham’s left. When Jim had learned that Bonham was coming with them, he had immediately suggested that they go someplace other than their usual stamping ground, and Lucky thought she knew why. Ron had complained to her mildly that these near reefs they had been going to were not really very good diving since the reefs were too small for big fish and the banks were almost pure sand. She did not know why Grointon had kept taking them there unless it was pure laziness or the desire to save money on fuel. In any case, almost certainly because of Bonham, Jim had suggested that today they go down the coast to Morant Bay where he knew some better reefs. His excuse for not taking them before was that it was a much longer trip and anyway Ron hadn’t been ready to free-dive that deep yet, which was between fifty and sixty feet. Now he could—though they would take along a couple of lungs anyway just in case.
It was on this first leg, the long trip down, that she asked her question about his being married.
“Yes,” he said, without taking his eyes off the horizon. Quite a large number of large ships traced their way among these reefs and shoals into and out of Kingston harbor. Then he looked down at her with his blue cop’s eyes behind their pale lashes. “Yes, I am. To a local Jamaican girl. Got two kids by her. But we’re separated.” He looked back out at sea.
“Is that because as René says you’re such a ‘Don Huan’ around the Grand Hotel Crount?” she smiled.
Again Grointon looked down at her, and then grinned. “No. No, it isn’t. It’s because I just simply can’t stand to live with her anymore. She’s stupid, and ignorant, and she won’t learn— won’t try to better herself. She’s a hick. I like it at the hotel, like to spend time there, but I could never take her there. She wouldn’t fit in.” He looked back up again out over the sea. “And on top of that she’s almost totally neurotic. A nut.”
“But you must have known all that when you married her, hunh?” Lucky said.
Grointon made an embarrassed grin. Without looking down he said, “She was young. I thought I could teach her.”
Lucky made a provocative, provoking laugh. “When are you going to learn you can’t teach women anything?” she teased.
Again Jim looked down at her, penetratingly, with those strange eyes lined with blond fur. “I guess that’s right,” he said noncommittally, and looked back out to sea.
Across the way Ron, who apparently could listen to her conversation while engaging in another one with Bonham, suddenly looked back at her, slightly over his shoulder because of the way he was sitting, and jerked his chin at her pugnaciously, and flashed for one second at her such a deep stare of ferocious fury that it almost seriously scared her. Grointon was looking out at sea. Bonham and Doug were talking. So for answer she arched her back, threw back her shoulders and grinning, shook, wiggled her breasts at him, all in a second’s time, so fast none of the others saw. But it did not make him smile as she had hoped it would. God, she loved him so much more than all the rest of these weird, screwed-up types put together.
Apparently she was not alone in this. For after they had been anchored for about twenty minutes somewhere off Morant Bay (she couldn’t see any bay anywhere, only straight shoreline), Big Al Bonham came swimming back to the catamaran with several fish and climbed into the boat grinning and singing Ron’s praises to the point where it almost became embarrassing.
Before that Doug had come back even earlier. They were swimming in water too deep for him to even get anywhere near the bottom. And he and Lucky had sat for almost ten minutes in silence. At first he had seemed as if he wanted to talk, but she had discouraged him. He said, “I hope you don’t mind my sayin what I said, but I do really think Ron ought to go back up to GaBay.” She said, “Of course not. And we’ll go. If Ron decides that that’s what he ought to do,” and then went rather pointedly back to the book she was reading. So Doug was there too when Bonham came lumbering in over the side bragging about Ron.
“That’s really some guy, your new husband,” he said shaking his head. “I never would’ve believed it. The son of a bitch is free-divin deeper than I can go already.”
“Aw, come on,” Doug said.
“I crap you not. He’s doin fifty-five and sixty feet out there today. Sixty feet is about all I can do on my best days. I never saw anybody pick it up so fast. He’s a goddam genius or something.”
“Then it ought to make him feel good,” Lucky said.
“That’s the funny thing,” Bonham said quizzically. “It doesn’t. He goes right on worrying and stewing and being gloomy. What is it with him, anyway? I can’t understand. Now he’s worrying because he can’t keep his diaphragm from heaving for air on the way back up. Says Grointon doesn’t do it.”
“Then he’s probably going too deep,” Lucky said, “for his experience.” She was suddenly nervous and felt a panic start to flutter in her stomach. “Doug, hand me a beer, will you?”
“No, he’s not,” Bonham said. “That’s not what I meant. That happens to just about everybody. What I meant was, I just can’t figure him out. Every time he gets ready to do something, he’s nervous, and moody, and high-strung, and scared. Then when he—”
“I think it’s just because he doesn’t happen to be an aggressive type,” Lucky said. She drank the beer down fast.
“Haw!” Doug called from where he was getting himself a beer. “The fuck he’s not!”
“Well, anyway,” Bonham said, “I think he deserves everything he’s got, and everything he can get. I never met anybody who ever deserved their success as much as him. He’s what I’d almost call the perfect human man—mentally, physically, everyway. Well, anyway,” he said, and then slapped his big hand down hard on his thigh with happy satisfaction. “You know,” he said, “I’ve got a theory. Would you like to hear my theory?”
“Sure. Why not?” Doug said.
“About Ron?” Lucky said, more cautiously. She didn’t want to have to hear any Bonham theories about Ron.
“No, not about him. Though he comes into it too. All of you do. I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania after the war,” he said directly to Lucky. “You didn’t know that, did you?” With his stormcloud eyes he was looking at her with that enigmatic, mocking look again that he turned on her so often. He didn’t wait for an answer.
“My theory is about what I call the Chosen Ones or the New Aristocracy. The Chosen Ones simply means celebrity-hood. If you’re worried, both of you qualify. So does Ron. Lucky qualifies because she’s married to Ron. In our own time this celebrity-hood jazz has become worldwide due to technological advances begun in World War II and expanded enormously since then. Lumped together these advances are called Mass Communications. Whatever the process, a Chosen One, once arrived, once ‘chosen’, becomes different from other people, actually lives by different laws almost. They are protected by everybody, they get better service, are treated with deference, are given better deals on everything, live off the fat of the land. All for the publicity. They become protected symbols of what everybody would like to be.
“Now the other phenomenon that has grown out of the technological advances begun in World War II is Mass Cheap Travel. In this age of ‘You-must-work-forty-hours-a-week-government-required’, the carrot under the nose of a ‘Citizen’ or a ‘Comrade’ is that for two weeks every year (or a month, if you’re an executive) he can live like a Chosen One lives all the time. Not really of course, but enough to make the pretense digestible. If he saves his money the other 48 or 50 weeks of the year, he can go just about anywhere in the world, be catered to, be treated as if he really were a Chosen One. T
his is known as the Tourist Industry. All the exotic places, the faraway romantic names, he can now visit and pretend (for a while) he is one of the New Aristocracy he has helped to choose, and preserve. The whole world is opening up due to Mass Cheap Travel egged on by Mass Communications—in the East as well as in the West. It’s an entirely new field, the Tourist Trade, a real ‘Frontier’ (probably the only one left), being ‘Pioneered’ by people who want to live like the Chosen Ones live all the time. And the Chosen Ones, the real Chosen Ones, are the kings of and key to it all.
“Take the Grand Hotel Crount, for example. It’s a Chosen Ones’ hotel. Hell, if you’re not a Chosen One it’s hard as hell to even get in there. But where the Chosen Ones go, the unchosen ones want to go. Did you know that when Kingston became popular with the Chosen Ones because of the Crount, the tourist business and the hotel business boomed all over the area?
“No, it’s all comin on fast. All over. Everywhere. And for the U.S., at least for the next twenty years, it’s going to be the Caribbean. It’s all being prepared for. Soon the big advertising will start.
“And that’s where guys like me and Jim come in. We cater to the tourists—with our ‘special skills’—mainly the unchosen ones, but preferably the Chosen Ones. Because that’s where the loot is. Look at René. What can an unchosen one do with his lousy little two-week vacation? You think he can really learn skindiving in two weeks? Of course you don’t tell him that. But the Chosen Ones have time, and the money. Jim’s got himself a booming business in Kingston, not only at the Crount but all over the town. Yet he makes most of his real money at the Crount.
“And that’s what I hope to do in GaBay, once I get my schooner out and to going.” He slapped his leg again, hungrily. “I want to live with, and like, the Chosen Ones.”
He had seemed to get carried away as he talked, and both of them had listened, fascinated by the businessman inside Bonham the adventurer.
“But,” Doug said now, “you haven’t got any Grand Hotel Crount in GaBay.”
“Sure we have. We’ve got one,” Bonham said. “The West Moon Over Hotel. They get lots of celebrities there, and it’s still comin up. Some of the Kennedy family stayed there last year.” Again he slapped his leg, a sound like a hungry pistol shot. “But don’t you see, with my schooner I’m not committed to any one town or one hotel. I can make the entire Caribbean my ‘work area’.”
“And what’s gonna happen to your lovely primitive seas and pristine unfished reefs after several thousand other guys like you do the same thing?” Doug grinned. “You’re contributing to the desecration and destruction of the very thing you love.”
Bonham grinned back. “I don’t care. I’ll be dead when that happens. Meanwhile I can escape ‘Civilization’.” Then suddenly he sat back and relaxed. “But you people, you’re already members of the New Aristocracy, you’re already Chosen Ones. All you got to do is sit back and enjoy the gravy. Enjoy our, my, services.”
Lucky had been wondering all this time what this big spiel was all about, and she suspected that it was directed directly at her. “Yes,” she said with asperity. “Yes, all we have to do is maintain that high level of success. Did you ever try it? If Ron Grant has one big flop, he won’t have enough money left to be one of your Chosen Ones. And I imagine that’s true of Doug, too.”
“Haw!” Doug said. “It sure as shit is. But he’s right about most of those film people, though. Liz Taylor. Burton. John Wayne. Kirk Douglas. Mr Zanuck.”
“Well, maybe it’s not true all the way of Doug and Ron,” Bonham said. “But I think Ron really is one of the Chosen Ones, and of all the people I’ve ever met he is the one who deserves it the most.” Then he grinned. “But for my purposes it’s true enough, anyway. Besides this guy Sam Finer, Ron is the only one of the Chosen Ones, or nearest to being one, that I’ve ever had as a client.” He grinned again, winningly. “If he likes me, maybe he’ll tell other Chosen Ones among his friends.”
“Then why do you try to antagonize and alienate his woman?” Lucky said. “I’d think you’d be smart enough to know that’s not the way to handle any man—even if he’s not in love with his wife. And Ron is.”
Doug laughed suddenly, as Bonham stared at Lucky. Then the big man smiled his most winning smile, “But, honey, I’m not! I’ve been trying ever since I met you to find the key to you that would make you like me.” Behind his smile his stormcloud stare at her belied everything he said.
Lucky’s Italian anger was rising. She found she had gotten the bit in her teeth and couldn’t stop, though she wanted to. “You know what I think about you? I think you’re accident prone in your social relations. Not in your work, obviously. But in everything else I think you’re a loser. Because like all losers psychologically you want to punish yourself. As for finding the key to me, it’s easy enough. All you have to do is—”
They were interrupted by a shout from the water.
“Hey! Help!”
For a man of his enormous bulk Bonham could move incredibly fast. He was off his seat, back to the stern and had the huge long pole gaff over the side struggling with something, before Lucky, moving as fast as she ever had moved, had barely stood up. Her heart beating in her ears, the only thing she could think of at all was shark. God how she hated this fucking damned sport! For a moment she thought she was going to faint, the way she had used to do as a child whenever anything horrified her. Then Doug had his arm around her and was shouting in her ear: “It’s all right! It’s all right! Nothing’s wrong! I can see!” Then in a calmer voice, “Here. Come over here. It’s all all right. You can see. They’ve just got a big fish, that’s all. A huge fish!”
By leaning over the port-side seat she could see that Bonham had got the big gaff hook into an enormous fish. Grointon and Ron, their masks still covering their faces, their snorkels dangling by their straps, were shouting at Bonham and laughing with triumph, swimming in opposite directions to hold the big fish steady between them on their two spearlines. Seeing her, Ron yelled at her: “It’s a jewfish!”
“Hey, Doug!” Bonham gasped. “Come back here. I can’t get enough leverage. There’s another gaff under the starboard seat. Gimme a hand.”
Doug looked into her eyes clinically, like a doctor, then let her go and grabbed the other gaff. Between them, straining their faces red, the two of them got, hoisted, the monstrous flapping organism up onto the floorspace of the catamaran, the deck. While they held it with the gaffs Bonham reached under the port-side seat and got a short stout club and whacked it soundly on the spine, on the “neck,” just behind the head. The great fish’s entire body, its fins and its tail quivered and stiffened and it lay still. A strange purplish iridescence shot out from the spot where it had been hit and spread all over its body which was unpleasantly colored in many shades of off-red, red-brown. It lay still now but rolled its eyes all around and kept opening its mouth and gaping its gills trying to breathe. Lucky stared at it fascinated, horrified. It was beautiful. And its mouth was big enough to almost take in a man’s head and one shoulder. It must have been all of five feet long and twice that around. Behind her Ron and Jim climbed in over the bow end laughing and slapping each other on the back.
“Boy, you should have seen Ron!” Jim Grointon told them laughing. “He came down and in there like a real old pro, Al!” He slapped Ron on the back again. “Buddy, if you can make a dive like that and hold your breath that long you can dive eighty feet right now, and there’s no reason you can’t do a hundred feet. I made a miscalculation about you. I didn’t know you’ve got all you’ve got.”
Lucky watched her lover and husband blush shyly. “Aw, shit. It was the excitement of the moment,” he grinned. “I couldn’t do it again.”
“If you could do it once, you can do it again,” Jim said. Still half breathless, he told them the story. And as she listened, Lucky watched the reddish colors of the fish slowly fade away until its eyes were dull and its color a dun brown. That hurt her the most, the eyes going as
it died. That and the vicious clubbing. They had been swimming maybe two hundred yards off the boat, Jim said. He had seen this big jewfish come out of a cave, and he had gone right for it without thinking about anything else except getting him. There never would have been time to get out a Brazilian rig anyway, and they would have lost it. They almost lost it anyway. He had speared it from in front in the head, maybe forty yards out from the coral overhang, but had not made a killing brain shot. After a monstrous flip like an explosion (Al had seen them kick), which would have broken a man’s back if it hit him, it started for the cave. The depth was probably sixty feet to the bottom, and the fish was maybe eight or nine feet up from that. Of course he couldn’t hold it. That was when Grant came down. Diving what must have been a full fifty feet from the surface, he put his spear into the fish’s head from the other side, he even had the presence of mind to think of that. He didn’t make a killing shot either. But between them they were able, by both swimming as hard as they could backwards and to each side, to halt the fish’s progress toward the cave where he could have cut the lines on the coral. Finally, they had been able to horse him up near enough to the surface where they could get their heads out and breathe.
