by James Jones
“Don’t be too sure about that,” Jim said in a veiled voice, and looked at her quizzically. Grant watching them didn’t get it. He remembered only the time she had blown her stack over the killing of the big jewfish.
But Lucky did not do anything like that this time. After a while, and a number of reassurances that the shark was absolutely dead, she came aft to inspect the gruesome creature closely with a kind of awed, superstitious interest which was exactly the way Grant himself felt.
“Well, I’m impressed,” Ben Spicehandler said quietly. “I’m damned impressed. I would never had gone after him—even if he’d been in water shallow enough for my meager talent. Are there many of them like that around here?”
“Not so many that you need to worry any about it, Ben,” Jim said.
“Okay,” Ben said, “I’ll take your word for it,” and picked up his flippers to go back into the water.
“I’ll cut his mouth out for you, and you can keep it for a souvenir,” Jim said getting out his knife.
“No, wait a minute,” Grant said. “I want to take him back to the hotel and hang him up on the thing on the beach where the richies hang their marlin and have my picture taken with him first.”
Jim was sharpening his knife on an oilstone. “It won’t make any difference. It won’t show in the photo.” He grabbed the shark’s snout and raised it. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Grant said, fascinated by the opened mouth. “I ought to be able to get my head in that one, hunh?”
“Not quite without getting scratched,” Jim said, going to work with his knife. “But damn near.” He seemed to take some great, very deep, personal pleasure in the mutilation he was doing. He was gingerly about handling the teeth. There were about five rows of them, getting smaller and less distinct the farther back in the mouth they were. “Sharks have no bones,” he said, lecturing as he cut. “They’re all cartilage. It’ll take about a week or ten days for the mouth to dry out stiff. Then it’ll get like tough thick leather. You’ll have yourself a nice ornament for your desk.” With his hands he worked the cut-out mouth, opening and closing it to mesh the fairly well interlocking teeth. When it was full opened, a grown man could just about get his head through it. Jim left it that way, full open, and laid it up safely on the transom in the sun. Then he looked at it with a peculiar kind of bloodthirsty satisfaction.
Grant kicked lightly the inert meat of the shark’s corpse with his bare foot “How long will he last? I mean, before he begins to rot? I mean, I’d like to leave him hang long enough for Doug to see him tomorrow.”
“Oh, he’ll last longer than that,” Jim said. “We can leave him hang four or five days. We’ll leave him hang long enough for all the customers of the hotel to see him, anyway. It’s good advertisement.”
“I wonder what our friend the star will think?” Grant said.
“I don’t know,” Jim said shortly and crisply. “And I couldn’t care less. I’m going to make it a point to tell him where we got him, though.”
Jim was correct that the cut-out mouth did not show once the shark was hung by his tail from the hotel’s fish rack out on the beach by the water, and the almost nine-foot shark made quite a sight when the five-foot-nine-inch Grant stood beside it for his photograph. René proudly took the shark’s mouth and posed it on the end of the back-bar where it was shown by him to everyone, tourist or local, who came into the bar. But if Grant thought his manly feat would impress his wife enough to bring her back around to her duties of loving and obeying him, he was mistaken. She obeyed him well enough—and had done that even before the shark—if a little grudgingly. But love him she did not, she said. In the fact, Grant did not think about bringing his wife around to heel one way or the other much. His main reason for wanting to show the shark off to her after he had caught it was more to show her he didn’t give a damn what she thought than anything else. He had made up his mind; and he did not intend to give in. He was quite sure she would not like the idea of him shooting sharks, and he was quite right. And of course he and Jim did not tell her that that was what they had deliberately come out to this spot to do. But he had discovered a new mean, tough, almost reckless quality in himself since their trouble, probably because of it. He was not nearly as cautious, or overcautious, as he had been before. He was tougher, and he was more dangerous, because he just didn’t give a damn.
“Makes you feel like a man, don’t it?” Jim Grointon said, as they stood looking at the hanging shark. “You know, you’re the best free-diving pupil I’ve ever had. Ever.”
“Well, let’s say it makes me feel like a large boy,” Grant said cautiously. “I am, hunh?”
This new quality showed up in other ways too besides the shark. That same day after shooting the shark, that same afternoon, when nothing else of much interest showed up in the area where they were. Jim upped his anchor and took them out into deeper water. He acted as if he had suddenly made a vast and important decision.
“I want to show Ron something I don’t show to many people,” he explained to Ben and Lucky. “It’s kind of like a sort of special superstition, or a special possession, of mine. You can come along and look too from the surface, Ben, if you want. I don’t care. But Ron’s ready. I just hope the old bastard’s around today, that’s all,” he said, and swung the rudder bar to port with his foot to run south down along parallel with the coast. Watching a prominent headland as a measuring guide, he finally cut off the outboards and threw over the anchor.
“The water we’re in here now is about seventy-five to eighty-five feet deep. There are quite a lot of good big mangrove snapper out here, and you and me are going to shoot a couple. On the bottom.”
“You’re kidding me,” Grant said, but he could feel his face looked pleased. And he thought Why not?
“No I’m not kidding,” Jim said. “You’re ready to do eighty feet. As ready as you’ll ever be. You actually could do a hundred feet, if you wanted, just as easy. Once you get down to seventy feet, twenty or thirty feet more isn’t all that much difference. You’ll see.”
“Okay, I’ll have a go,” Grant said and grinned.
“But there’s also something else I want to show you,” Jim grinned back. “If he’s around today. Just so you’ll know, I make it a point never to bring anybody out here unless I know he can—and will—go the distance, and I’ve only brought four of my people out here since I’ve been in Kingston. One was the guy from New York I told you about who shoots the sharks. Another was the guy who I took, him and his wife, down to the Morant Cays. She wasn’t quite good enough, but I brought her too—like Ben here—because he was good enough. But there’s only been four. Just so’s you’ll know.”
“I take it this is a considerable compliment,” Grant said thinly.
“It is,” Jim said. “Come on, let’s get in the water.”
Lucky, who had listened to all of this, was saying nothing.
“What is this thing we’re going to see?” Grant asked.
“You wait,” Jim said. “If we don’t see him I’ll tell you all about it. If we do, I won’t have to tell you.”
The coral looked very far down, at least to Grant. The makeup of the bottom was considerably changed this far out, too, was the first thing that he noticed. Instead of the lush coral reef growths in the shallower water that he was used to seeing closer to shore, the coral here was all stunted, the rock on which it grew showing plainly beneath the various small growths. Instead of narrow sand channels running out between hills and cliffs of coral there were much larger patches of bare sand stretching away in all directions. Here and there on it a single seafan or black organ-pipe or basket sponge swayed softly with the movement of the bottom water. The effect was one of intense bone-cold loneliness. Green, pale-green, loneliness. Only a few fish nosed around the low rock outcrops which supported the meager coral.
Jim motioned to them, and they started off swimming away from the boat south parallel to the distant shore. In less than five minutes they had spotte
d a large-looking mangrove snapper on the bottom. Grant could not tell just how large since he had lost his ability to judge sizes in this deeper water. In any case, Jim pointed to it and motioned for Grant to go for it. Grant nodded and adjusted his snorkel with his left hand and clamped his teeth around it tighter and began to hyperventilate. He was quite convinced he would never reach this bottom, but he was going to get as near to it as he absolutely could. The trouble was you always had to swim all that way back up.
But just then out at the very limit of his visibility range Grant saw something move. Peering closely he could just make out—as though whatever it was was passing into and out of invisible transparency—the largest fish he had ever seen in his life. It was easily half again as big as the jewfish he and Jim had taken. When he blinked once, he lost it in the green fog of the visibility range. But in the meantime he was already pointing at it and motioning to Jim and Ben. Jim nodded back at him solemnly and slowly, pointed at it and motioned him to come on. After they swam a few yards slowly, his eyes picked the great fish up again. The high rounded head and the black spot on the tail as large as a man’s head were clearly visible. As if watching them from off there, the huge fish swam slowly away from them at just about their own speed, so that it remained just at the edge of their visibility. After a couple of minutes of this, Jim motioned to Grant and took off on a long slanting dive, kicking hard and his gun trailing behind him as he put both arms back to streamline himself. Grant and Ben followed suit. In this way they crept up on him and Grant got a good look at him, but then the fish, perking up, speeded up his own swimming and put himself back out at the edge of visibility, and there resumed his former pace. After surfacing they followed him for maybe four minutes more, then Jim motioned them over to him and raised his head out.
“You see him?” he called, plucking his snorkel.
“Hell yes!” Grant said. “I’ve never seen anything so big!”
“You know what it is?” Jim said.
“It looks like a snapper. A red snapper. But—”
“It is a red snapper,” Jim grinned and nodded.
“But snapper don’t get that big.”
“You’re wrong,” Jim said. “This one did. You see him, Ben?”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “I couldn’t hardly believe it.”
“Well, let’s go get him,” Grant called.
“You’ll never get any closer to him than you are right now,” Jim said. “See how he’s stopped to wait for us? Start swimming for him. He’ll move right on, always at that same distance. Unless he gets bored and decides to go away. I’ve tried to spear him for over three years. Probably that’s one of the reasons he’s lived long enough to get that big.”
“Snappers don’t get that big,” Grant said again.
“He did,” Jim said. “You guys are two of probably only six people who have ever seen him. Nobody else ever dives here.”
“Did you ever try to get him with regular tackle?” Grant asked. “Chum him up?”
“I wouldn’t,” Jim said. “Several of the locals have tried, but nobody’s ever got a hook into him. But if I can’t spear him, I won’t take him.” He rolled over in the water twice as if loosening himself up. “Well, come on. Let’s get on to something we can take. Now you got to sing for your supper, Ron!” he grinned.
“Well, has he grown since you first saw him?” Grant asked.
“Not appreciably. Hell, how can you tell with a fish that big?”
The dive, when it came, was a strange experience. There were a number of scattered fairly large mangrove and mutton snappers nosing around the corals on the bottom. Grant chose the largest one of three that were fairly close. Then he commenced his hyperventilation. When he dove, it seemed that he was on his way down for an eternity, but somehow he didn’t mind and felt a curious and belligerent exhilaration instead of nervousness. He noted that his diaphragm heaved on him once uncontrollably even before he reached the bottom. And of course the fish kept getting larger and larger as he came closer. For some curious reason Grant had never felt freer, and physically freer, in his life. It seemed, whether true or not, that he had all the time in the world. He was suffused with a feeling of total well-being, and reveled in the slow lazy movements of his legs in their flippers. At some point he passed quite distinctly from a layer of warmer water into a layer of colder. Then he was down. The fish had been eyeing him, and finally he turned—too late—to run. Grant turned the angle with him, led him half a length and shot him squarely in the back behind the gills.
The fish was really huge, or would have been if he had not seen the really big one. Grant calculated he would go forty-five pounds. Even so, he nearly lost him by underestimating his size and thus underestimating the distance the fish was from him. Because of this the spear did not go all the way through him before it was pulled up short by the length of its cord. Taking his time, Grant paused to ram the spear into the sand once, pushing the spearhead and its flanges on through the flapping fish. Then he looked up and started the long trip back up there. Jim and Ben appeared incredibly tiny up there on the surface.
Slowly, he swam up. By the time he reached twenty feet his diaphragm was heaving uncontrollably every three or four seconds, but he had not let out any air and he knew he had it made. He even slowed down his kick the last twenty feet because he hated for it to end. Then he reached the surface and blew his snorkel so he could breathe again.
Not far away, after watching him, Jim himself took off down on a dive. It was an eerie and beautiful sight to watch the stocky diver leisurely kick his way down, down, down. It was as if Grant was seeing himself make his own dive from the viewpoint of Jim and Ben. Ben was grinning at him and shaking his head admiringly. Breathing on the surface, Grant watched Jim spear his fish and start back up. On the bottom, naturally, he looked as tiny as he had on the top from the bottom.
“You know what you did?” Jim shouted laughing after he was back up. “You did eighty, eighty-five feet there, man! That’s easily eighty or eighty-five feet down. And you stopped to push the spear through him! That was cool! Hell, you could do a hundred feet, man, any time you want! You’re a real pro!” He stopped his hysterically happy laughing. “Come on, let’s get on back to the boat. It’s late.”
Back in the boat Grant showed Lucky his big fish, and sat quietly, smoking, while Jim lauded his eighty-five-foot dive.
“I’ll have a lot of things to tell and show to Doug tomorrow when he gets here tomorrow, won’t I?” he asked Lucky.
“You sure will,” Lucky said thinly. “I’m very proud of you.”
Grant threw his cigarette end over the side, thin-lipped, and felt his eyes flatten in his face like the real tough man he seemed to have become. “Thanks,” he said.
31
DOUG’S ARRIVAL DID nothing to heal the split between them. Rather it worked just in the reverse, since he brought with him, not the new girlfriend he had talked so excitedly about over the phone, but Al Bonham. It was almost exactly like the first time they two had appeared here at the Crount, enough so that Grant had that eerie feeling of having done something before and that something was happening in time for the second time. The two got out of what could have been the same taxi, and came up the same steep set of steps, in what was almost exactly the same way and order. Only the late lunchtime cast on the veranda was different. Ben and Irma were still there, but the lady musical comedy writer and her husband who had become such good friends were missing. Instead, the male movie star and his actress wife were there. And Jim Grointon. Jim Grointon was always with them now, whenever, and just about wherever they were, excepting only at night when they actually went to bed.
Lucky conducted herself with complete decorum toward Doug and Bonham—as she had with Jim, Ben and Irma, the star and his wife, and the others. Whenever any other people were around, she was the perfect wife and companion, even pal; it was only when they were alone together that she wasn’t. It was beginning to look like Grant was going to pass the
entire rest of his married life like this, just like almost every other son of a bitch he knew, and he was beginning to get damned tired of it. But there seemed to be no way to approach her, at all, to talk about it.
Bonham, it turned out, had considerable news for them— once Doug finished telling them about his new girl and why she was not with him. The first thing Doug said when he had arrived up the steps and been introduced to the star and wife was, “Say, did you guys know that that Les Wright was a lez?” He washboarded his forehead at them and wiggled his eyebrows above his grin.
Lucky’s eyes got brilliant and she made a small knowing grin at Grant. “Well, let’s say that we suspected that she might be,” she said.
“She was havin a goddam affair with Evelyn, for Christ’s sake!” Doug said. “I almost got my head in a real noose there!
“How are you?” he said with his most charming smile, which was a considerably charming one, and went around the table to shake hands with the star. “I’ve admired your work for a very long time.”
Les Wright, however, had nothing to do with his new girl, or why she had not come. The new girl was a wealthy married girl from Connecticut whose father was a bigwheel Supreme Court lawyer in Washington, and who was traveling with another married girl without any husbands along. Neither one was planning to get divorced, they just wanted to get away from their husbands for a while, and had come down to spend a few weeks in GaBay at the West Moon Over. She and Doug had made out from the very first moment they had met. The reason that, in the end, she had backed out and decided not to come down with him was that she did not want to—was sort of scared to—leave her married girl friend she was traveling with. “It’s a shame,” Doug said, grinning at the star and his wife, “because she was a great lay, a great—and very sophisticated—lay.” He turned to Lucky. “However . . .” He shrugged.
Bonham’s news, which he had politely remained silent about until Doug had finished, was—of course; naturally—about the schooner Naiad. She was going to be finished much sooner than expected, was in fact almost finished now. That was one of the reasons he was down here: to look at her. The other reason was to see Grant. About the cruise. Because of the early date of finishing her, plus the fact that Grant was in Kingston, he had been in touch with Sam Finer in New York about the maiden cruise. Both Grant and Sam were invited guests, with their ladies, on the maiden cruise of Naiad. And because of this it was Bonham’s idea, if it suited everybody, to just commence the cruise right here—in Kingston—once the ship was in the water, rather than sailing her up to GaBay first.
