Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  Almost immediately he saw the head turn, changing the reflection on the mask. He rapped again. The torch went out. Grant rapped and kept rapping, and in a moment Bonham appeared in front of him like some huge cyclopean walrus and he was never so glad to see anyone in his life. Shaking his head, the diver looked him over. It was only a matter of a couple minutes to cut him loose, then Bonham motioned toward his empty leg scabbard. Grant pointed down. The diver descended, looked around, apparently saw a glint of it, retrieved it and handed it to him. Then he motioned upwards with his thumb: did Grant want to go up?

  That was exactly what Grant was thinking, but after a moment he shook his head. Together they gathered up the dangerous net, hacked it into small pieces and stuffed it into the silt under the pipeline. Later Bonham explained why he did that instead of taking it up: he hadn’t wanted those in the boat to know about it. It was only a matter of five minutes to finish up his job and then when they went up he motioned Grant to the anchorline, instead of swimming to the stern like normal. As soon as their heads were out, he dropped his mouthpiece and said in a low voice, “I wouldn’t say anything about that to Lucky. Or anybody. What they don’t know won’t hurt them, and it would only make them nervous—mistakenly, and for no good reason.”

  Grant nodded, and they swam to the stern.

  Once back in the boat Bonham began to eat, since the two of them had not taken any food before the dive. But Grant didn’t feel much like eating. Instead he sat in the stern by himself. He wasn’t scared any more, but the somber thought of what actually could have happened was a little sobering. He could really have got deaded, as the kids used to say. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up and saw it was Lucky. She did not take the hand away.

  “What happened?”

  “What do you mean what happened?” he said.

  “Something happened. I don’t know what. I can just tell.”

  “Oh, I just got caught in an old net some idiot threw overboard.”

  “Was it dangerous?”

  “No. It could have been. But Bonham was right there,” he lied.

  “Did he ask you not to tell me?”

  “No,” he lied again. “Why should he? Christ, it wasn’t anything.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why should I? Anyway I was going to,” he lied a third time. “Later.”

  She looked deep into his eyes, and there was no more anger in her blue ones. “Oh, Ron, we’ve got to stop this.”

  “I know it,” he said. “I told you, it wasn’t anything.”

  “The babes in the woods,” she said. She looked out across the harbor at the Palisadoes. “If we lose each other, we’ll both have lost just about everything.”

  “I know that, too,” he said. Doug and Françoise, and René and Lisa, were all talking to Bonham in the tiny cabin. Since Jim Grointon had declined to come, Bonham had to do it all himself, and he had started the motor, steering with one hand while he ate a huge ham sandwich with the other. Lucky turned from the Palisadoes and looked up that way. “Even diving, and Bonham, aren’t worth that,” she said.

  Grant took her hand. “Of course they’re not. Nothing is.”

  “I can’t be responsible now for everything I did before I met you,” Lucky said conversationally.

  “I know that, too,” he said.

  “Don’t you want to eat?” she said conversationally.

  “I will in a minute. I’m a little tired.”

  “I’ll get you a sandwich and a beer,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  Back at the hotel he told her about the salvage job as he should have done before, the twelve brass cannon, and that he wanted to do it. “Then we’ll be through. We’ll go back north, to New York. Until they’re ready to make the maiden cruise on the schooner.” They had just finished making love and he had gone down on her to give her an orgasm in perhaps the best performance he had ever achieved. They were lying side by side across the sheeted, unblanketed, pushed-together twin beds.

  “And we can stay at Evelyn de Blystein’s and kill two birds with one stone,” he said.

  “But this uh this ‘salvage operation’ is the main reason we’re going back there, is it?” she asked.

  “Let’s say it’s one of the main reasons. That guy Heath stopped me—accosted me—again today.”

  And Bradford Heath had. He had stopped him on the porch after they had come home from the combination picnic-dive, and he had been particularly nasty, even for Heath.

  “Oh, hello there, Grant,” was the opener. And he placed himself squarely in front of Grant so that he had had to stop. “Well, I guess it looks like your older lady friend aint gonna talk. And I guess I can’t get the truth out of you, can I?” He smiled his sick smile.

  It was more than Grant could stomach. “Mr Heath, why should I tell you the truth?” he smiled. “Why should I tell you the truth about anything? If you want to know about my life, read my plays. It’s all in there. Now if you’ll excuse me.” He had stepped around him. “As a matter of fact,” he said as a parting shot, “my wife and I are going up there to visit the Countess and Mrs Abernathy in a few days when we leave here.”

  “It certainly won’t hurt us to make a little show of friendship,” he said now to Lucky after explaining. “And I think she’ll probly be all right. It’s to her benefit to be.” Then he wondered. Was Bradford Heath really the motive? Did they really have to go because of Bradford Heath? Or was there some other, deeper motive pulling him back up there? Subconsciously maybe? Subconsciously for a showdown. Maybe. “Don’t you think?” he said.

  “All right,” she said calmly. “If that’s what you think. I know I can handle that mother shit all right.” She paused. “All I really want is a chance to love you.” She smiled, and then actually blushed a little. “You really did me beautifully today,” she smiled. “To love you, and to help you do the work you want to do. Have to do, maybe.”

  Grant had cupped a hand over her nearest breast. “As a matter of fact,” he said slowly, “I have got a new idea for a play. But it’s only a dim idea. I don’t really fully understand it yet.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Diving. Skin, not muff.” Then he shrugged. “I’ll tell you more about it when I know more.

  “Of course,” he added, “I got a dozen others too. This is just one more to the pile.”

  26

  IT WAS AMAZING how much time was required just to go through the mechanical processes of loaning a man forty-five hundred dollars. The whole next day was spent on business. Grant and Bonham spent most of the morning at the Royal Bank of Canada in Kingston, proving Grant was Grant, proving Bonham was Bonham, getting the money transferred from Grant’s name on the cable draft to Bonham’s Kingston account. And as soon as this was done, Bonham had to go round to the boatyard’s little business office in town and turn over a check for a thousand dollars to get them back to work on the schooner. The afternoon was spent drafting and signing with René’s lawyer a First Mortgage agreement for forty-five hundred dollars on the schooner. René signed as witness.

  The storm had completely gone (though the last seas from its winds were still slowly running down) and the heat in the sundrenched, dusty, unkempt streets of the town was fierce. There was one rather elegant air-conditioned bar on Tower Street (or was it Barry Street?), and Grant and Bonham (and in the afternoon, René) routed themselves on their journeys afoot about the business section so that they passed it every time, both coming and going. The popular drink of the moment was something called a Bullshot—vodka in a small glass of icecold consommé—and long before lunchtime Bonham and Grant had already more than consumed their lunches in the form of cold bouillon soup.

  And while they (and later René) were ramming around the town in the heat, Lucky played by the pool and held small court for Doug and all her newfound friends, which by now included Jim Grointon. It was becoming increasingly clear that Grointon was fascinated by Lucky in a wa
y he had never been fascinated by a woman before—at least, not at the Grand Hotel Crount, so Lisa said. He was known to have had (or rather, was suspected of having had) several affairs among René’s clients, so Lisa said, and had certainly had one they knew about because the irate husband (fortunately a client of another hotel) had threatened to shoot him (again fortunately, the husband had hustled his wife back to New York instead). But none of these ladies had ever so much as ruffled one feather of Jim’s, and certainly none had ever affected him as Lucky did, so Lisa said, with a sly grin, and she thought it was about time he got some of his own back. He simply could not stay away from Lucky, it appeared. Wherever she went he appeared or followed, and sat around with his slow smile, blushing, while she teased him with her outspokenness about sex and men and herself. Anyway he certainly wasn’t like Bonham, was he? Lisa giggled to Lucky.

  Bonham wanted to buy them all dinner that night when with Grant he returned from town a now affluent man. But Lucky begged off on the grounds that she had drunk too much champagne at the pool, was sick, and did not want any dinner. She would take to her room. Bonham affluent to her came on even worse than Bonham broke. “But Ron can if he wants to,” she said holding her head with more tenderness than was strictly necessary.

  But Grant did not want to either. “I’d better stay with her if she feels that bad,” he said dutifully. He was wise to the fact that she had had about as much of Bonham as she could stomach, at least for a while. And he was counting on her to make the maiden cruise of the Naiad with him. On the other hand he did not want to become categorized as a “dutiful husband,” either: the kind he detested back home in Indianapolis. In front of Bonham or anyone else. Today when Bonham had told him he was heading back to Ganado Bay tomorrow and would they like to take the same flight with him, then they could get started on the salvage job, he had answered that they wanted to stay on down here for three or four days more of honeymoon before coming up, because he knew Lucky would have detested making the flight up with Bonham. Probably his discomfort had showed on his face then, this morning. Probably it showed now, as he turned down the dinner. Anyway, Bonham did not press. Well the hell with it! he never had been a good liar. Bonham had received no answer from his wire to Orloffski in New Jersey, but he had had a wire from the new proprietor of Orloffski’s sporting goods shop that Orloffski was already en route down the inland waterway with the cutter.

  On their way to their suite Lucky squeezed his hand. “We’ll phone René on the sly and have him send us up a sumptuous spread and stay in!” she whispered, and Grant reflected that if he had appeared too “dutiful” just now, it was well worth it.

  “Stay in and play?” he whispered back.

  “Stay in and play dirty!” Lucky whispered.

  It was just then that they ran into Mr Bradford Heath, coming down the big, long porch.

  Only this time Mr Heath turned away, to make it appear he had not seen them. With Lucky on his arm, Grant hailed him. “Oh, Mr Heath,” he smiled.

  “Oh uh yes. Hullo there, Grant,” Bradford Heath replied, turning round. “Beautiful sea tonight, eh?”

  Grant halted. “I just wanted to ask you how long you intended to stay down here now?”

  “Oh, a week or ten days, I guess,” Heath smiled. “If they can spare me Up There. Why?”

  Grant smiled back. “Because my wife and I are going up to GaBay for a week or so, and we wanted to be sure and leave for there before you left. On the other hand, we wanted to put in three or four more days of honeymoon here before we left.”

  “Oh, I think you can feel safe in stayin’ that much longer,” Heath smiled. “I can guarantee you we won’t leave for a week.”

  Grant grinned. “Fine. Good. See you, then.”

  “I don’t think you ought to go out of your way to antagonize Heath like that,” Lucky said after they had walked away. “It only means that he and his pals will lay for you and knock you and your new play when it opens.”

  “They would anyway,” Grant said. “Whether I’m nice or not. So I might as well enjoy myself.”

  The dinner in the suite was exquisite. After they closed all the Venetian blinds, no one could see in to tell whether they were eating or just sitting and reading. The oldfashioned circular fan on the ceiling turned slowly and silently, and they were served by one of René’s oldest and most trusted waiters. They ate in their robes, and after they had eaten stripped off the robes and fell upon each other in the pushed-together twin beds.

  “Let’s do something special,” Lucky said.

  “What?”

  “Let’s play with ourselves. You play with yourself and I’ll play with myself and I’ll watch you and you watch me. Didn’t you ever do that with some little girl when you were little?”

  “No,” Grant said, feeling breathless and densely excited. “But I always wanted to.” It seemed to him there were so many things he had always wanted to do but never done, until he met her, met Lucky. Like walking into a joint knowing you had the best-looking girl in the place on your arm, for example. Like making love and knowing at the same time there was always more love-making there, still waiting for you, and you didn’t have to make excuses or explanations about it. Whenever he looked at her he felt like a miser in his bank vault counting his gold. It was like, after a long drought, long dearth in his life, a landslide goldrush had happened.

  They did not see Bonham again the next day before he left. He had come by early in the morning, René said, but had left to catch his plane before they came down. Later on, with a not very decent grin, Jim Grointon told them Bonham had been sleeping on board the schooner while he was here, to save money. When she heard this Lucky looked at Grant with a sad smile he completely understood. But, “Oh, the poor man,” was all she said.

  With Bonham gone it was as if an irritant had been removed. It was as if the old group closed ranks over the empty space and came back into their former closeness. Every day they went out with Grointon, with Doug, and with the musical comedy writer and her husband, or with the young analyst and his designer wife. The analyst, though not his wife (who could not swim), had become a fair diver now under Jim’s tutelage and could do twenty or twenty-five feet like Doug.

  Those few last long sun-bright, sun-hot afternoons diving in the glassy, tranquil-colored green sea gave Grant such a sense of security and pleasure in and under the water that several different times he almost entirely forgot to be afraid. He loved the going down especially, hyperventilating then rolling over and heading straight down, kicking slow and easy, effortlessly, totally without gravity sucking at him, sure and confident that he had enough air in holding his breath to take him just about as deep as he would want to go, then drifting back up slowly, almost reluctantly, with a struggling fish on the end of his line, toward the dappled moving never-quiet surface to breathe. He had become an expert with the speargun now. But Lucky steadfastly refused to put on a mask and look below. She would swim around the boat without a mask, practicing her sidestroke and her crawl, but she absolutely would not put on a mask and look down and see what was below her. Grant, and just about everybody else, tried to explain that this was absolutely silly. It made no difference.

  On the last day, their last day out, something happened which gave to their leavetaking the next morning a marvelous flavor, a marvelous aftertaste. They had already come in, from the last dive, and were all sitting around the bar in their swimsuits having a drink with Jim Grointon, when a sudden squall had come in from the west, leapfrogging the green western hills. Sentiment was high in all of them because it was Last Day, and Jim had anchored the catamaran off the beach and brought the fish in in the dinghy, while the rest of them had swum in. One of his constant chores when parking the boat off the hotel was to keep always one eye out for the first signs of weather and be prepared to rush over to the Crount at any time of day or night to sail it around into the harbor anchorage if some weather came up. Now, in what seemed like only seconds, rain was lashing the porch and
the big glass doors along the covered terrace, and in the sudden wind the sea was building up three to four to five-foot waves and sending them smashing against the beach and the catamaran anchored off it. The patent anchor couldn’t possibly hold it in the sand, and in mid-drink, in mid-swallow almost, Jim was off trudging, half-running, down through the sand to swim out, board the little boat and sail it around.

  “Do you want me to come along and help you?” Grant called after him.

  Jim stopped and turned. He looked both tired and disgusted. Then he shrugged. “No. No, it’s my job. And my boat. I can manage it all right. I’ve done it often enough.” Then he turned back and trudged on. The cold rain was already making him shiver, and he looked so forlorn half-running down the beach that Grant on the porch suddenly stripped off the sweater and dungarees he had put on because he was cold and took off running after him. “Get René’s car and come around and meet us on the other side!” he yelled back at Lucky.

  The worst thing about it was the cold, but it could have been dangerous, as Jim pointed out. From the hotel’s beach on down to the harbor entrance at Port Royal the shore was mostly sharp volcanic rock which could have cut them to ribbons had they capsized and been forced to swim ashore in these waves and with that wind behind them. Out further, where Jim immediately ran them and where the four-foot waves were not yet breaking over into five-foot surf, the little catamaran still had to take quite a jostling and knocking about from the waves which it had to take broadside on, and they both had to hold on every moment. At one point Jim (who was really doing all the work anyway) suddenly put on a mask with snorkel attached, pushing it up on his forehead in the heavy rain and pulled a pair of flippers near and advised Grant to do the same. It seemed a bit histrionic to Grant at the time, and proved to be an unnecessary precaution, but later when they were around the bend and in calm water the diver explained: “I know what I did seems silly,” he said with a shy, Irish cop’s smile, “but I just suddenly remembered that I had one of America’s best writers—best playwrights—with me, and realized I had no business letting you come. It would have been very hard to swim in over that rock, even with a mask, and while if anything happened to me it wouldn’t matter, it would certainly have mattered about you. And I would have been responsible.” Grant, embarrassed, could only grin and shrug; it still seemed a bit theatrical to him, but he thought it sweet. And it wasn’t any easy trip. Though the Point Royal spit was less than two miles from the hotel it took them over an hour and a half to make the entire voyage. When they arrived at the anchorage around inside, the entire gang from the hotel led by Lucky was standing under a lean-to shed roof in the rain waving at them happily, and they all had a hot toddy together at the anchorage bar because they were almost as frozen as Jim and Grant. It was then that Jim Grointon clasped Grant with his arm across his back and squeezed his bare shoulder and said: “You’re a hell of a guy, Ron. And you’re one of the very best free-divers I know. And that’s no bull!” He said exactly the same thing and clasped him the same way again the next day at the airport, where he had come with René and Lisa to say goodby, though now Grointon was wearing his white linen summer suit, and grinned his white-eyelashed Irish smile. Then he kissed Lucky gently on the cheek. Grant found this thoughtful, and even sweet. Lucky, on the other hand, was not so sure.