by James Jones
It was all as if it had been actively, physically ordained beforehand somewhere, in some administrative Heaven. The catamaran with its stretched tarp for shade, the hot afternoons, the cool green sea, dangerous but not seeming dangerous except as some quiet spiritual echo that kept warning you. Grant had an enormously strong feeling that not one of them could not have been here. Ben did not know about the shark-shooting objective of the trips, but then Grant and Jim hardly knew it either since they didn’t see a single shark. They did not, in fact, see one for the first three days. They free-dived on and swam under at sixty feet the coral arch where the sharks were reputed to hang out. There were plenty of other fish to take. Lucky kept busy with her binoculars. Then, to keep Grant occupied since no sharks appeared, Jim introduced them to a series of coral caves he knew about nearby at thirty-five feet. It was during these three days that Jim brought up again a subject he had mentioned many times before during their first stay in Kingston: a four- or five-day trip to the Morant Cays just about fifty-five nautical miles south of Jamaica; and it was also during these three days—on the third, to be exact—that Evelyn de Blystein called from Ganado Bay. Evelyn and Doug Ismaileh.
She called just at noon, hoping she would catch them in at lunchtime. Fortunately they were still up in the “Ron Grant Honeymoon Suite,” as it was now officially designated by René, so that Grant did not have to call or search out Lucky to come and listen. He was not about to receive any call from GaBay, especially from Evelyn’s villa, that Lucky was not there to listen in on.
“How are you both?” the calm wry gravelly voice said, coming clearly and unmistakably over the instrument.
He had been sitting in the chair beside the bed just putting on his white ducks and espadrilles. Quickly he motioned for Lucky to come over and listen too.
“I don’t need to listen in on your phone calls,” she told him coldly.
“Hello, hello! Just fine,” he said, then covered up the mouthpiece. “I don’t give a damn whether you need or not!” he said. “You come here and listen!”
She shrugged, but she came. Grant held the receiver slightly away from his ear and Lucky bent her head alongside of his until her hair touched his cheek and listened with her ear half against the earpiece like his own. As the talk went on, she placed one hand lightly on his shoulder for support, as though, Grant thought, she had forgotten momentarily in the interest of the information coming over the phone that she was supposed to hate him.
“I was hoping I’d be able to catch you just before lunch, dear boy,” Evelyn drawled. “Doug is here with me. I’ll put him on in a moment. But we were talking about you, and we wondered if you both wouldn’t like to come up and spend a week or two here with us now.”
“Are you kidding?” Grant growled.
“But no, dear boy! The Abernathys are gone. They’ve gone back to Indianapolis. Left on the noon flight yesterday for Miami. I wouldn’t have called you if they were still here. Heavens! But I did feel badly, we all did, about what happened. And we all wanted to invite you back for a pleasanter stay. It would be nice to see you again with the air cleared.”
“I don’t see how we can,” Grant said cautiously. “So they’ve left, have they?” He felt curiously relieved.
“And not in very good shape, I’m afraid,” Evelyn said in her gravelly way.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Hunt’s in trouble with his business affairs, I’m afraid, that’s what I mean. Carol and I both warned him, you know. Even before he came down he was in danger of losing managerial control of his lumber and brick businesses. And now it looks like the fait is accompli. I have lots of business contacts up there myself you know. It looks like there is no doubt he’ll lose his managerial control, if indeed he doesn’t lose it all.”
“But surely his stock—” Grant said.
“Yes, he still has that. But they can probably force him out, if they want to. And I suspect, my information is, that they want to.”
“He’ll have to retire,” Grant said.
“It would kill him,” Evelyn said calmly, like some gravelly oracle. “Especially the way he drinks. I wouldn’t give him two years. Well, I warned him.”
“Yes, I know,” Grant said. “So did Carol, except that Carol—”
“You’re quite right!” Evelyn said. “Curiously enough, while Carol warned him, warned him a lot of times, it was really she who brought him down here when they came, and it was she who kept him down here all that time when you—then you and Lucky—were here. Well, it’s a curious, sad tale. I don’t know what I can do about it. Or anyone. What about your coming up for a week or two?”
“I don’t see how we can, Evelyn,” Grant said. Lucky was nodding vigorously in approval of his answer beside him. “I’ve made some serious diving commitments for the next week or two. And then I’ll have to be getting back to New York for rehearsals. Is Doug there?”
“Yes. He’s right beside me trying to take my own phone away from me! Wait, I’ll put him on. Maybe he can make you change your mind.”
Again Lucky moved, this time to shake her head no just as vigorously. “Hello. Hello?” he said.
“Ron? Ron?” Doug’s voice came on. “Is that you, Ron? . . . Okay. Listen. Why don’t you two come on up here for a week or so? You know, the weather cleared as soon as you left, and Bonham’s got a lot of new customers now. We’re having fun parties on the boat every day now. And he wants to get back to work on those cannon, now the weather’s good.”
“How would you like to make a trip to the Morant Cays instead?” Grant said.
“Those islands down south of Jamaica?” Doug said. “Sounds like a good idea.”
“We may do that with Grointon. Take sleeping bags and camp out down there for four or five days. The spearfishing is practically untouched.”
“That sounds great!” Doug said enthusiastically. “Listen, I’ve got a new girl. Can I bring her along?”
“Sure. We’ll hire a small sailing boat to take us down. The girls can sleep on the boat if they prefer.”
“You’re sure you won’t come up here?” Doug asked again. “Evelyn’d love to have you. And we’ve been having great fun.”
“Can I talk?” Grant said in a low voice. “Is Evelyn near?”
“No, not too. What?” Doug said conversationally.
“Well, I’ve just got too many bad memories of up there. And so has Lucky. I really don’t feel like coming back there,” Grant said.
“All right. Okay. I dig. Then I’ll come,” Doug said. “With my girl. Don’t leave without me, now!”
“I promise. We won’t.”
“I don’t want to take the midnight flight, and the next thing available is the three o’clock from New York tomorrow. Okay?”
“Okay,” Grant said. After a few farewells from and to both of them, shouted on both sides with that false heartiness that pretends noise can make up for triteness, he hung up. Lucky had already moved away from him to sit down on the bed.
“You really want to go on that trip? With Jim; and them?” she asked him in a strange voice.
“Sure. Why not?” he said lightly. “It’ll be pretty close quarters, probably. Not much privacy. But that won’t make any difference to me and you,” he said with a bitter smile. “Will it.”
On the bed Lucky straightened herself and raised her head high. From this position she looked at him strangely. “All right then, we’ll go,” she said, in a rather hollow, strange voice. “I’ve never been much of a camper. But I might enjoy it.”
Doug would not be coming until sometime in the afternoon tomorrow, so that left them two days more to go out in the catamaran and they went both days, with Ben. The star and his wife were back now from Ocho Rios, and much in evidence around the hotel, and while they all spoke whenever they met and occasionally had a drink together, the star did not offer to go out with them. He did not know, as far as Grant was aware, that they were going out to the last place he had dived. But befor
e they went out that afternoon of the day of the phone call, they discussed with Jim over lunch the Morant Cays trip.
Jim had been there once himself, and he was very enthusiastic over the idea of going back. He had in fact talked up this same trip a great deal during the first stay at the Crount, but they had not wanted to go then simply because they were very close and did not want to be that long without the privacy of their own bed. Now, the way they were together, that part didn’t matter, and Grant for one found himself highly enthusiastic, strangely enough. The three little islands lay just about fifty-five sea miles south-southeast of Morant Point, about a seven-hour trip by sail from Kingston, and were used principally only as guano islands. In May they were visited to collect the “booby” eggs of the sea birds, mainly terns, which nested there every year in great numbers. But the rest of the time except for a guano boat now and then, they were totally deserted. “Don’t worry about the guano,” Jim said cheerfully, “that’s only in a few separate places.” All of them were flat and covered with scrub like the wild mimosa. The northernmost two had good beaches for landing, although the third was rocky and difficult, and the most northerly of the group, called with typical British imagination “North East Cay,” had tall coco palms growing on it also, supposedly planted there around 1825 by some thoughtful Jamaican planters for the benefit of shipwrecked sailors. They had coral heads and good reefs all around and in between them, the best of these being in a northeasterly direction from the same North East Cay, which was to the windward of the island. But to leeward there were good reefs too. There were no mosquitoes and, when Jim had been to them two years before, no buildings except one beat-up old wooden shack, and he assumed there still weren’t any. They could charter for four or five days the same boat he had used when he had first gone there—with another “skindiving couple” he had guided. (“This couple is no ‘skindiving couple,’” Lucky put in succinctly.) And if Ben and Irma wanted to go along, they could hire a bigger boat Jim knew about in the harbor that was available.
But Ben opted out from the start. He would have liked to go, but he didn’t want to leave Irma for that long, and Irma the non-swimmer did not want to go and spend five days hanging around some essentially uninteresting, uninhabited islets. So that left the five of them, Doug and his girl, Grant, Lucky, Jim; and of course the captain. They could take sleeping bags and sleep on shore, or sleep on the boat if they preferred. The spearfishing was excellent because the area was practically untouched and the fish had not been shot at and spooked. They could take along some canned food, for variety, but plan mainly to live off the fish they caught, which—Jim said—they could cook on shore by a fire on the beach in the evening. The sunsets were delicious. What more could you ask for?
“You don’t care?” Grant asked later, as they got themselves ready to go out in the catamaran, “you’re willing to go?”
Again Lucky gave him that strange enigmatic look he had noticed before. “Not if you don’t care,” she said shortly, “not if you’re willing to have me go.” Grant could not figure out what that meant.
“What would you do if I said I wouldn’t go?” Lucky said in an odd voice.
“Then I wouldn’t go myself,” Grant said promptly. “You don’t think I’d go and leave you here, do you? With that goddamned Jacques hanging around?”
“Ha!” Lucky said thinly. “You’d do better to leave me here than take me,” she said enigmatically.
“Now just what the hell does that mean?” Grant demanded.
“Oh, nothing,” she said, and suddenly smiled at him.
He had, the night before, availed himself of his “fucking privileges” with her, as he now called it to himself. It had not been too terribly satisfactory.
They had had dinner with Jim, and Ben and Irma, at the hotel and then had driven into town to the private gambling club. For the first time Jim went with them, though he made few bets and did it very carefully. Everybody won a little bit, except Grant who lost a little bit. Nobody got hurt. Then they had several drinks at the air-conditioned bar on Barry Street (or was it Tower Street?) and talked about the Morant Cays trip and about the day’s spearfishing. Then they left Jim and went home. Grant waited, picking his time when she was completely nude between stepping out of her bra and panties and putting on the shorty nightgown she liked to wear, to put forth his demand—“I’d like to invoke my fucking privileges,” he said politely. “You remember? I’ve been getting pretty horny, I’ve got an enormous hard-on, and I’d like to get laid.”— “Sure,” Lucky said immediately. “Okay. Come on.” And she lay down on the bed and spread her legs ready to receive him, a tight little smile on her face, looking for all the world suddenly like one of the so many girls he had screwed in so many whorehouses across the world during his youth in the Navy. When he mounted her—and that was the only, and the exact, word for it—she worked her legs and pelvis and belly expertly, milking him as he moved in and out of her like any fist or any well-trained professional, until he achieved his orgasm. It was all pretty grim. Still, on the other hand it was a hell of a lot better than nothing.— “Was it good?” Lucky asked after he moved off of her.— “Well, yes,” he said. “But not as good as it has been.”— “Can I go to sleep now?” she asked.— “Yes,” he had said. “You can go to sleep now.”
In the catamaran running out he looked at her laughing and joking with Jim and Ben and was suddenly totally, absolutely furious with her. He was not going to give in. It burned all through his body like a white-hot flame. Then just as suddenly this was replaced by a depression so deep, so numbing that it almost made him physically, vocally inarticulate. There was his old “rejection syndrome” acting up on him again! Fortunately he was sober and so could swallow it all. This he did. And down inside him he could feel it begin to creep all throughout his system like some kind of poisonous acid, irritating tissue, burning cells and arteries and veins, and incidentally giving to the total organism that was Ron Grant a great deal of heroic belligerence. A half hour later he had shot—and killed—his first shark.
It very nearly got away from him. The creature measured eight feet nine inches when they got it into the boat and was, so Jim said, the large black-tipped shark but he wouldn’t be able to be sure until he checked the teeth with one of his books. Its fins certainly did not appear to have black tips to them.
They had only been in the water a few minutes and had been swimming near the set of caves Jim knew about but in water sixty, sixty-five feet deep when Grant had seen the shark swimming along the bottom over the sand between two coral cliffs. He motioned to Jim and pointed and took off after it, but as he closed the shark appeared to speed up just a little so that it kept the same distance. In front of it the coral appeared to close over making a cul de sac so that the shark would either have to swim up over the coral, allowing Grant to catch up, or else reverse himself and come back toward Grant. Unfortunately, invisible to Grant, there was a tunnel under the coral for perhaps twenty feet before sand appeared again, and the shark swam into it and disappeared. That was when he thought he had lost him. But Jim had turned immediately at the first signal and started swimming fast out to sea, and as the shark emerged from the other end of the tunnel, Jim was able to dive on him and scare him back through the tunnel toward Grant. It was almost exactly the same way Jim and Raoul the pilot had trapped the shark in Grand Bank, Grant seemed to recall. At any rate, he was ready for him when he came back through the tunnel. He dove straight for him down into the trough between the cliffs to maybe fifty-five or sixty feet, remarking that the shark now appeared huge as he got up close to him, and speared him exactly through the brain—or at least through the spinal column. The shark stopped swimming as if hit in the head with a club. And that was all there was to it. Grant swam upward for what seemed eternally, dragging the heavy animal up with him while his lungs beseeched him for air, and was reminded of his old nightmare. Triumphantly, he didn’t care. All he could think about was getting the thing back to the boat where
he could show it off to his damned snotty wife.
“That’s the same kind you shot in Grand Bank that time, aint it?” he said in the boat, pleased with his catch, after Jim declared it to be a black-tip.
Jim grinned. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I’ve shot so many.”
“Oho! you snooty son of a bitch!” Grant roared, and slapped him on the bare back. “You don’t remember because you’ve shot so many, eh? Well, fuck you, buddy!
“Hey, wife!” he called. Lucky was standing at the other end of the catamaran as far from the shark as she could get; she looked as if she would have liked to jump into the water but was scared to. “Hey, wife! Aren’t you impressed, wife?”
“Yes, I’m impressed,” Lucky said. “I’m not sure whether the impression is a good impression or a bad impression, but I’m impressed.”
Jim Grointon gave Grant a very openly private look. “There are some things about men women just don’t understand, and never will,” he said with a grin.
“That’s probably true,” Lucky said. “But then there are some things about women that men will never understand, too, so it’s even.”
