Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  René threw up a hand. “H’I hex-plain. Eef ze compagnie ’ee go broke, ze schooner ’ee eez to going sold, right? And w’en ze schooner ’ee eez sold, he money ’ee go be assets for compagnie, hein? An’ ze compagnie, broke, ’ee use ’eem money to pay off debts, right?”

  All through this Bonham had been nodding. “Right”

  “Hokay, w’at Ronnie—”

  “But we’re not expecting the company to go broke,” Bonham grinned.

  “Mais non, of course not. Still, eez possibility. ’Ee mus’ be kosher. Hokay? Hokay, w’at Ronnie want ze first mort-gage of schooner, not compagnie, an’ ze sale of schooner pay Ronnie forty-five ’undred dollair before ze assets go to pay compagnie indebtedness.”

  ‘Oh, I see!” Bonham said finally. He looked a little surprised. “Sure. Okay. That’s fine with me. That’s the way we’ll do it then.”

  René moved his head. “Wait un moment. ’Ee must vote zee partnairs for zees decision, non? Za ozzers, ’ee weel vote like you?”

  “No,” Bonham said right away. “No, that aint necessary. As president and captain I got power-of-attorney for the company, all signed.”

  René nodded crisply. “Hokay. H’I ’ave my lawyer—” he chuckled— “my real lawyer, draw heem up like zat. You hunderstand me? Zees way eez zee real security for Ronnie make ze loan.”

  “Sure, I understand it now,” Bonham said. “And that’s fine by me. I wouldn’t want it any other way. And you tell him, too,” he said to René, jerking his head at Grant, “that he still has ten percent of the company. Yesterday he didn’t know if he wanted to take it.”

  René moved his head. “Zat eez between you two. Zat eez autre chose.”

  Bonham nodded and turned to Grant. “Like I told you before when we were in Grand Bank, as a member of the firm you get your divin vacations free once or twice a year, or almost free.”

  “Oh, I’ll take it, I’ll take it,” Grant said looking suddenly embarrassed. “It was just that I didn’t want to push you. On that.” He mutely admired René’s business precision and dispatch, but it embarrassed him to talk about the other fellow as though he didn’t want to, or couldn’t, pay.

  “Well, you can start considerin yourself a ten percenter, partner,” Bonham said. He got up grinning and shook both their hands. Then he stopped. “Say, listen, Ron. I worked myself up a little job while I’m down here. Pay expenses. One of the oil companies’s got an underwater oil and gasoline unloading pipeline here in the harbor. I inspected it for them yesterday, like I always do when I’m down here. Well, one of the gas line pipe sections is about to go so I’m going to replace it for them tomorrow. Would you like to come along? I’m renting a little boat. We could pack everybody up with food and booze and have ourselves a picnic in the harbor. You could bring Lucky, and Doug and his girl,” he nodded downward, “René and Lisa too. And Grointon if he wants.”

  “Yes, I’d like to very much,” Grant heard himself saying, “I’ll talk to the others.”

  “It’s a real working diver’s working dive,” Bonham grinned.

  “Sure,” Grant said. “Fine.” Now why had he said all that? He wanted to take himself by the arm and shut his mouth. He didn’t want to make a working dive with Bonham. He didn’t care if he never did any diving again at all, of any kind, at the moment. What he wanted was a break from diving right now. Except for that brass cannon job, he’d like to do that. He thought of his nightmare. And he thought of the other working dive they had done together, retrieving those bodies and the wrecked car. But he had had to make himself go ahead and say yes. “But what about the weather?” he hedged.

  “Weather never bothers you in this harbor,” Bonham smiled. He looked out across the porch at the sea. “And it’ll be too rough to go out with Jim tomorrow. And there’s going to be sun tomorrow.”

  “How deep will it be?” Grant asked.

  “Oh, only ten feet or twelve, maybe fifteen. Nothing exciting. But it’s interesting to see the layout they got. And you’ve never seen any underwater torch work. I helped put those pipelines in.”

  “Well, sure, I’ll come along,” Grant said. What the hell, he couldn’t very well get into any kind of danger or trouble at only fifteen feet, could he? But as it turned out, he did get into trouble, anyway, and it was the worst trouble he had ever been in in diving up to then. But before that happened he was already in other trouble, domestic trouble, that took place that night. One might know. Or have known.

  His thought, the next day, as he lay on the bottom trapped in an old abandoned fishing net, was that it—trouble—always seemed to come in bunches.

  The night before had seen the worst fight, the bitterest feeling, he and Lucky had ever had. And it had all been his fault, really. Why couldn’t he control his damned jealousy? At the same time he realized very soon after it happened that he had triggered some kind of response, reaction, in Lucky that was all out of proportion to the cause. That would take some evaluating.

  He did not think about this too much while he was caught in the net, he had too much else to think about. But he did think about it before that, all the time they were getting ready for the picnic, all the time they were out on Bonham’s little rented boat. It was after two o’clock in the afternoon by the time they finally made the dive, and all that time Lucky would still hardly speak to him at all any more than was needed to maintain formal politeness in front of the others.

  It had all happened, once again, because of that fucking son-of-a-bitching Jacques Edgar, her ex-boyfriend. Ex-lover.

  They had all been sitting down at dinner, for the second night in a row without Bonham—René and Lisa, Doug and Françoise, Grant and Lucky—when Jacques the ex-boyfriend had arrived at the hotel with a party. He had stopped at the doorway much further down the huge half-open porch-terrace where they were eating, and smiled and waved. He took two steps toward them, smiling, said “Hello, all!” politely, then raised his hand, shook his head and backed off to rejoin his party, in the manner of the European politesse which never never interrupts anyone while dining. It had infuriated Grant, the very mannerly suaveness of it outraged him, and that magnanimous “All!”, snobbish and fake-highclass, aping the fucking British, and seeming directed straight at him, had angered him most of all. He had gone into a slow burn. Lucky had done nothing, had simply waved and smiled and called hello back like the others, but Grant’s slow burn smoldered on anyway, getting hotter. Finally, over coffee, he had retaliated.

  It was a joke he made, not a particularly insulting one, not insulting at all, if perhaps a little crude. Half-drunkenly, they were all talking about how drunk they had been the night of the wedding. “Christ, yes!” he said, leaning forward with his eyes squinting and his eyebrows arching wickedly, and told them how he had waked up, in the morning half-lying between the pushed-together double beds, in up to his shoulders. “We keep them pushed together, see. And there I was, in up to my shoulders and I couldn’t get out. For a minute I thought what the hell have I got myself married to? The Grand Canyon?” The others all laughed, a little nervously.

  It was directed straight at Lucky of course, and while maybe it was mean, the reaction it triggered in Lucky was enormously out of all proportion and totally unexpected. She looked at him for a moment, then leaped to her feet and all in the same motion struck him across the face with her handled purse. For a second he was blinded. The clasp of the purse had cut the bridge of his nose and he could feel the blood trickling down the side of it. He caught it with his finger and said with a whining falsetto, trying to make a joke out of it, “Hey, look what you done! You hurt me!”

  Her eyes had widened at the sight of the blood, but they narrowed again. “You no-good son of a bitch,” she said and walked off the porch without another word. Stemming the flow with his napkin, there wasn’t much, Grant had laughed and shrugged, but deep in his mind in the midst of his still stunned surprise he was already at work trying to figure out and analyze what there was in what he could have said
to create such an astounding reaction. What had made her change so suddenly, flip out like that? At the same time he was angry, embarrassed. He had stayed at the table. Later when he went over to their suite she was not there.

  Earlier in the day Lucky had received at the hotel a local telegram from an older couple she had known in Syracuse, friends of her mother, who happened to be in the harbor for overnight on one of the Carribbean cruise ships. Word of her marriage had filtered back home through Time and the news services, and the older couple would very much like to see her and her new husband. When she showed it to Grant, he had grimaced, and she had agreed with him and decided not to go in to see them. Grant was sure now that that was where she had gone, and in fact it was where she had gone. She had walked out through the inner court of the hotel to the outer court near the road where two or three beat-up local taxis were always waiting, loafing around and gossiping as if they actively hoped they never would get a fare, and had taken one of them around into town to the pier where the big ship had docked for the night so that its ticket purchasers might see Kingston Jamaica, to see her mother’s friends. Cold fury and a kind of hollow ache of fear possessed her. There he was calling her a whore again, or practically doing so, and in front of people. In front of her friends. What did the son of a bitch expect her to do? She couldn’t do over again all the things in her life she had done, could she? Maybe there were some things in her life she didn’t enjoy so much, now. But that miserable pipsqueak son of a bitch. Fuck him. But when she met and talked with the middleaged couple from home, the hollow ache opened up even deeper in her, became almost bottomless. Their accents, the way they thought, their stupidity, their kindly stupidity, and insensitivity, overwhelmed her with sense and picture memories of that place and her life there. Who could go back there and live that kind of life? It was condemning yourself to deliberate slow death. She had left them earlier than she’d expected to, at eleven-thirty, and caught a cab back to the hotel, but of course by that time Grant was no longer there in the suite. He had sat a while, and then gone back over to the bar to get drunk with his friend Doug, and fuck her. Well, fuck him; she didn’t know he was in the bar; she had gone to bed. Gone to bed feeling once again as if encased in an inch-thick layer of hot, cold ice all over her body.

  It was one of those nights. Grant had noted, even before going up to the suite, that Jacques Edgar and his party had already left the Crount, and a kind of fearful terror swept all over him. If she did that, he’d beat her up within an inch of her life. Beat her up and throw her damned ass out. She was so goddamned fucking beautiful. How dare she be so beautiful! Doug was right there in the bar almost as if waiting, expecting him to come. His Frenchwoman had gone to bed. She only used Doug, with the same coldblooded carnality that he used her. Furious, hurt, as miserable and unhappy as he had ever been in his life, Grant had, with Doug’s expert connivance, taken to kidding, teasing René and Lisa about his injured nose. With a wink at Doug, he had begun by talking to them about how sorry Lucky would feel if she came back and realized that she had really seriously hurt him. From there it was just one logical step further to get out his little penknife and suggest to Doug in front of them that they two cut his nose—just a little bit—to make it worse for Lucky to see when she came back. It was crap but somehow in some strange way it made him feel better just the same. And all this time she was of course up there sleeping, and having bad disturbing dreams about him, but of course he didn’t know that. Doug of course complied, taking the knife and ostentatiously testing its sharpness. “You ought to see how this bum can sharpen knives!” he crowed. René of course knew how well Grant could sharpen knives, ever since Grant had gone through his kitchen honing up every knife until two of the Jamaican cooks cut themselves and he had to stop. “He can sharpen knives till you can shave with them! Come on! Come on over here, Ron! To the light! I don’t want to make any mistakes!” It was a shitty thing to do to them, because they really were both so sweet, and they believed he really meant it, really would do it, so that they both became near-hysterical in the almost empty bar. But he was drunk. And Doug was drunk. And he, for one, was teeth-grindingly miserable. Finally of course he let them talk him out of doing any such horrible thing to himself.

  Some time later, just how much later he did not know, he and Doug had gone out to piss among the palms in the moonlight and the now soft breeze from the sea. Leaning against a palm afterwards Doug had slipped slowly to his left and then fallen flat on his back. For several moments he lay still, and then as if the fall released some switch or opened some floodgate in him he suddenly jumped to his feet and began to caper madly like an idiot. “I’ve had your broad, Grant!” he bellowed in a high voice. “I’ve had your broad! I fucked your broad! I fucked your broad, Grant! I did!” Grant almost went for him. For a moment in his confused drunken mind he thought Doug was referring to Lucky. But of course it wasn’t Lucky. It was Carol Abernathy. And Grant found he didn’t give a good goddam about that one way or the other. What did Doug expect? that he would care? be mad? It had obviously happened after he and Lucky had left GaBay and it was a pitiful little jealousy to expose. He found he was embarrassed that Doug would even bring such a thing up. Not knowing what to do, he had simply stood and stared at him. After a while Doug stopped, and they stood and stared at each other. Then as if by a common consent they turned and walked back inside together and neither mentioned it again. Next day Grant did not even know if Doug remembered it.

  It was already getting late, and Sam was clearly getting anxious to close the bar. So they only had one more drink apiece. Back over at the suite he found Lucky was back and in bed asleep.

  If she woke, she said nothing. Neither did he. And that was just about the way it stayed—except for the necessary polite conversation they made in front of other people—all the next morning, and all through noon, and all through the picnic on board during the early afternoon, right up to the very moment he dropped over the side with Bonham to make the dive.

  And now here he was, though he wasn’t thinking about any of that, fifteen feet deep and trussed up in this fucking goddamned seine net thirty feet away from Bonham’s barely visible, winking Airco oxy-hydrogen torch. How in the name of God could he get himself into such fucking messes?

  In the murky debris-filled harbor water he couldn’t even see Bonham, only the torch, and that was partly the reason he had got himself trapped. Bad visibility. But the truth was he had been peering behind him to see there were no sharks or anything on his tail, when he swam into it. Maybe he would have seen it otherwise. He had felt just the lightest touch on his ear, and then on his shoulders, and then he was into it all wrapped up and his arms trapped at his sides. It was unbelievable how fast it had happened. One end trapped among some rocks on the bottom, its lead sinkers and cork floats removed, it had been floating three or four feet off the bottom where some idiot had thrown it overboard and abandoned it. It was strictly a dangerous and illegal thing they had done, but that did not help him any now. He had tried swimming away with it, only to be brought up short and have his feet and flippers trapped too. He had tried to cut himself out of it by working his right hand down carefully to get the knife out of the sheath on his leg, only to have it catch by the guard in the mesh, pull from his hand and sink away into the silt on the bottom. And that was when he really got scared. Because now there was nothing to do but lay here and wait for Bonham to see him.

  But what if Bonham didn’t see him? What if Bonham went right on working till he ran out of air and went up topside for another bottle? How in the name of fucking Christ could he get himself into these things? Who the hell wanted to be a diver anyway? God damn!

  There was no real reason why Bonham should try to look for him. Who could get in trouble over a flat sand and rock bottom in fifteen feet of water? Only Ron Grant, that’s who! He had started out by looking over the pipeline installation, had watched Bonham start the torch with the lighter, had studied how he went about making his first cut, t
hen had motioned he was going to go off and explore around. There was no reason for Bonham to think he wasn’t perfectly safe around here.

  Carefully, trying to keep his breathing from getting faster, he worked his right hand which was still trapped along his thigh around to the back and rapped on his tank with his knuckles. The sound was so feeble he could hardly hear it himself, and a tendril of panic crept through him accelerating amazingly his need to breathe faster. He concentrated on his breathing, trying to slow it down, stop gulping air. He had nothing else of metal to tap with, and no way of getting hold of it if he had. There was nothing else but to lay here, trussed up like a beef for the slaughterhouse, and hope that Bonham would think to look for him. From time to time he could see the light of the torch reflected on Bonham’s mask as the big man turned his head, but he could not see Bonham himself at all and so was sure the big diver could not see him. Christ! He could see the New York Daily News headlines now. BEAUTIFUL YOUNG ACTRESS WIFE MARRIED AND WIDOWED IN SAME WEEK BY DIVING ACCIDENT TO PLAYBOY PLAYWRIGHT!

  He knew he had enough air for about fifteen minutes. And Bonham, working, would almost certainly need air before he did—unless of course Grant himself panicked. And Bonham might then go back to the boat and find he had not returned and come look for him. But, by then, how the hell would he know where to look? And Grant wasn’t even sure how much time he had left since his watch was on his left wrist, trapped against his leg.

  A sort of marvelous stillness came over him as the idea came to him. He thought about it for maybe twenty full seconds. Watch. Aha! And what would you do, Mr. Interlocutor, in my situation? Then carefully he began working his left hand back around his thigh picking carefully with his fingers under the mesh. When he had it beside the tank and could feel the tank with his fingers, he made a cone with all his fingers in the little free angle between the tank and his back until he could twist his arm and turn his wrist over, and then he rapped with his metal watch against the tank.