Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  In the first place, the surgeon and his girl had decided to sleep on deck. Lucky and Grant had been given the master cabin that with its one-third-open bulkhead on the little companionway was on the starboard side just forward of the saloon. The surgeon (whose name was Richard Finestein, but who was hardly ever called anything but Surgeon during the whole of the trip) and his girl had been given the portside open bed that opened out just across the little companionway from the main cabin. When they decided to sleep on deck, they very kindly offered their space to Ben and Irma, who then could move aft and not have to sleep in the cramped crew’s bunks in the bows. They themselves, they said, would use these if it rained. This was fine, but it soon turned out that the reason they wanted to sleep on deck was to secure for themselves a certain bare minimal amount of privacy in order to drink and screw. By the time everybody was bedded down such rustlings and thumpings, whispering scrapings and thuddings were coming from the forward deck near the bow that it pervaded the entire belowdecks. This both irritated and angered both Irma and Lucky, both because of the (they felt) inexorably low-class bad taste of it, and because they themselves had no such privacy below. Neither of them, they told Ben and Grant, could have done it even up there on deck, the ‘minimal’ privacy was just too minimal, but down here it—and just about everything else—was impossible.

  In the fact, anybody with any brains should want to sleep up on deck—provided of course that it didn’t rain. There was the smell of paint below, uncomfortable in itself, but none of Bonham’s much-talked-about cleanings and freshenings-up were anywhere visible. Two walls of the saloon appeared to have been painted, but everywhere else the same old peeling paint and cracking varnish prevailed. The mattresses must have been, almost certainly had been, aired; but they did not smell like it. No sheets had been provided. So it was sleep on the old stained mattress-covers, with a blanket over you. Grant the camper (Grant the Great Sailor) didn’t care for himself, but Irma and Lucky, and even Ben, certainly did.

  He went below with them, when they finally first decided to go down, and helped to get them straightened out as best he could. He had already informed her of his intention to stay up all night and sail with Bonham, and Lucky had not objected and apparently understood, though she obviously didn’t like it. Now he pointed out to her with a smile that it was a good thing he was staying up, at least she could sleep some in the too narrow bed. Lucky sniffed the paint-ridden musty air.—“If I can sleep,” was all she said, and then added, “Hunh, you and your heroes.” A sudden inexplicable needle of rage shot through Grant, but he bit it off before it reached his mouth and talk. He turned to go.— “Don’t go,” Lucky said. “Stay with me for a minute.” He turned back, and sat down on the bunk’s edge. After a moment Lucky took his hand. After another moment she pulled him to her. He stretched out on the bed beside her.— “Hold me,” she whispered after still another moment. He put his arms around her.— “I’m scared on this damned boat,” she said after a while. Then, “Love me,” she whispered. “Please love me.”— “I do love you,” he said.— “There’s nothing we can do on this damned old boat. Everybody can hear everything everybody does. Can’t even go to the john without being heard. I hate that. Listen to them up there!” They listened for a while to the scrapings and thumpings coming from the deck up in the bows.— “Hold me more,” Lucky said, whispered. He did, squeezed her closer, although he was beginning to get hot, get a hard-on. Suddenly he thought of that little Jamaican house where they had had the room close by Bonham’s house. They had had to whisper there too, and make love quietly because of the thin wall. Suddenly he wanted to cry. Really weep. He had to cough and choke it back down. Lucky kissed his cheek. She hadn’t noticed.— “There. Go now,” she said and pushed him away. “Go on back up on deck.”

  In the hatchway up out of the saloon he stopped on the little stairs, rested both arms at shoulder height on the coach-roof and looked up at the sky, the stars. There it was. She had just completely changed. And so suddenly. But why, why, WHY? Why so suddenly? The faceless spectre rose up before him again, nude, with a tremendous hard-on. He was convinced now that she had done it. She really had; and was trying to make it up. How could he ever forgive her?

  Suddenly he realized, in a totally cold objective analytic way, that the knife of rage he had felt below (and had swallowed) a moment ago, when she had said something about Hunh, your heroes, had been caused by the plural, her plural usage, which of course included Grointon. He continued to stand, still resting on his arms on the coachroof, still looking up at the clear sky and the stars.

  “Hello, kid,” Bonham said from behind the wheel, in the light from the binnacle.

  Grant sat down beside him behind the wheel, on the bench there with its new plastic cushions. It had gotten colder and Bonham had put on a jacket. Orloffski had made up his bed on the coachroof, apparently as far aft as possible to give the Surgeon privacy, and Grant could see him lying there crossways in his bag just aft of the mainmast under the boom. Cathie Finer, also in a big jacket now, was asleep tucked up in a stern corner of the cockpit near to Bonham, a whiskey bottle beside her. “You didn’t do very damned much with the downstairs, the ‘belowdecks,’” he said after a moment. One particular day he himself and Lucky had seen Bonham in town with Cathie and the Surgeon and his girl having a long leisurely lunch at the most expensive restaurant in town, which meant of course that Cathie was paying.

  “I told you we had a lot more interior work than expected,” Bonham said.

  “It doesn’t look like you did anything,” Grant said.

  “Painted two walls of the saloon,” Bonham said. He moved the big wheel one spoke, one exact spoke handle, to the starboard from where he slouched easily behind it.

  Grant looked at the lighted compass in its binnacle. They were still running a little bit west of southwest by south.

  “We’re passing over Mackerel Bank,” Bonham said. “Dived there couple of times. Fourteen to nineteen fathoms.” Grant automatically translated this into feet: eighty-four to a hundred and fourteen. “There’s nothing but open water between us and the Pedros now,” Bonham went on.

  Grant looked at the compass again. “You’re playing with fire,” he said after a moment or two.

  “Always have played with fire.”

  “What if Sam finds out?”

  “How’ll he find out?”

  “She might tell him.”

  “No. Why would she tell him?”

  “Christ, man!” Grant exclaimed angrily, but softly. “Sam loves you! You’re his hero!”

  “So?”

  “But that makes you the best choice, you dumbhead. And then she’d tell him to hurt him!”

  Bonham turned his head to look at him and screwed up his eyes. “I never thought of that!”

  “Because you don’t think much. Why’d you have to pick on her?”

  “Didn’t pick, I was picked.”

  “Even so. You ought to like Sam.”

  “Like Sam! Hell, I love Sam! I wouldn’t be here running this sweet smooth lady along like this if it wasn’t for Sam!”

  “Then how can you do his old lady?”

  “Every man has got to look after, handle, and take care of his own pussy,” Bonham said.

  “Is that the rule? Is that the way the big he-men do it?”

  “That’s the way life does it.”

  “Well, I sure wish you hadn’t picked on her. You’re liable to lose your whole—”

  “I told you, I didn’t pick. I was picked.”

  “Well, I wish you’d of unpicked yourself, then. You’re liable to lose schooner and all. Can he call in that loan? Foreclose it?”

  “I don’t know. Have to look. When we get back to GaBay But I don’t think so.”

  “Then there’s that other $10,000 coming up,” Grant said, shaking his head. “What about Orloffski? Does he know?”

  “He might suspect it. What about your wife?”

  “She was the one who told me
first,” Grant said with a sad smile. “But I already suspected it myself. You weren’t too terribly careful, Big Al.”

  Bonham turned his head away again from the binnacle, and looked at Grant, and suddenly those murky strange stormcloud eyes of his actually blazed. “There are times in a man’s life when he just doesn’t give a damn. About anything. Consequences, or anything else. And I guess that’s the way I am now.”

  “—But you’ve worked all your life for this; this ship, the company,” Grant put in. “It’s been your dream.”

  “I know it. But I like this too.” He inclined his head down toward the sleeping Cathie. “I like it a lot. And I’m gonna keep on with it. For the rest of this trip certainly. And afterwards, now and then, if I can.”

  He looked back at the compass. Suddenly, but easily, from his slouch, the big man moved the big wheel again, two spoke handles, then a further half spoke handle, to the starboard.

  “Well, if it’s like that,” Grant said. He was thinking about what Bonham’s wife Letta had told Lucky that time about Bonham. How did it all fit? How did it all hang together? He wished he knew. But he couldn’t see through it.

  “I could talk to her about it,” Bonham said in a very low voice. “Telling him, I mean.”

  “I wouldn’t talk to her. Openly. But you could feel her out about it a little bit. Of course, you could always quit. Now. Right now.”

  “It’s all done,” Bonham said in that same low voice. “Once is enough. So why quit? Anyway, like I told you—”

  “I know,” Grant said. “As an old painter friend of mine used to say, Man, I’ve been there.”

  “You want to take the wheel a while?” Bonham said with a grin, but he spoke in that same low, beat-down voice.

  “You think I could?” Grant said. He felt beat down and sad too, but the prospect of actually taking the wheel excited him anyway.

  “Sure. Nothing to it. Just keep her as she goes. Wind’s changing slowly so she’ll move off to port on you a little bit. Let her. Just bring her back with a spoke or two once in a while. Try to keep her right on that littlest marker. That’s southwest three-quarters south. Don’t worry about the degree markings, they’re too small to bother with.” Before moving he slacked the mainsheet a little bit, easing the mainsail a little, then the foresail sheets which led back to the cockpit. “Wind’s moving a little north now, but she won’t get so far north we’ll have to run dead off. Or jibe her. At least not for a while.” Then he moved over slowly, passing Grant the wheel, and then hunched over with elbows on his knees, looking down. Where he was looking was where Cathie Finer was hunched up sleeping. He looked in that same direction a long time. Then he reared up and leaned back on the cushioned bench against the stern decking with a long sigh that seemed to go on a very long time before he stopped it, let it die, kill itself to emptiness, a free-diver’s sigh. Grant recognized it.

  After a half-hour’s steering he turned the wheel back over to Bonham and got one of the heavy jackets and sat back down on the stern bench. Finally, though, after a couple of good stiff drinks (against the cold? ah, yes; but which cold?) he slid down onto the cockpit floor and stretched out.

  He was asleep when they passed the Pedros. But all the action of jibing to bring the wind on the other quarter waked him easily enough. Bonham was still at the wheel, where he had been when Grant dozed off. The wind had swung all the way around, slowly, from north by west almost to northeast, freshening as it hauled, and Bonham had already jibed once while he was asleep because they were now jibing back from port to starboard. From up front Orloffski and the Surgeon hollered back.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Grant asked, sitting up. “Can I help?”

  “It’s all done,” Bonham said, a little thickly. A gin bottle was clamped between his feet. But his eyes and hands were as bright and fast as ever. “We’ve made the jibe.”

  “But you jibed once when I was asleep, and it didn’t even wake me,” Grant said, feeling foolish, or guilty, or both.

  “No,” Bonham said in his slightly thicker voice. “No, because I did that one myself.”

  “Oh,” Grant said.

  “This one was a little harder. What the hell? Let the bums work a little. Know they’re on a cruise, that way. Do you think she would really tell him about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Grant said. “I honestly don’t know. I hope not. Maybe she won’t.”

  Bonham didn’t answer. And from up front Orloffski and the Surgeon came back cheerfully sleepy to have a shot of Bonham’s gin, and that ended the conversation.— “Well, I don’t give a damn anyway,” Bonham said to Grant. “Not anyway.” He said it in the others’ presence, but they of course didn’t know what it referred to.

  “You want me to spell you?” Orloffski asked cheerfully in his brutal way.

  “No,” Bonham said, “Maybe I’ll wake you later.” The wind had fallen off, but they still were moving along pretty good, he said, and anyway when morning came, they’d finally begin to get the Trades. “Might have to come about again, when the trades come up. But then again, maybe not.”

  That must have been two-thirty or three. Grant had himself a shot too and went back to sleep, as did the Surgeon and Orloffski. Bonham was still at the wheel.

  Grant woke at three-thirty. It was at four-thirty in the morning that the two women, Irma and Lucky, came running up into the cockpit from the saloon, both of them totally hysterical. More slowly, reluctantly, Ben came along behind them.

  Grant had half dozed off. He realized right away, as soon as he was full awake, which took four or five seconds, that he must have totally underestimated Lucky’s fear at being at sea aboard the sailing ship. She had told him she was scared, but he had thought she had meant it only rhetorically, or half-rhetorically. Now he ran to meet her as she came up out of the saloon hatchway hollering “Stop!” with Irma right behind her and yelling “Stop!” too. Grant grabbed her at the head of the little ladder, forcing Irma—and the distraught-looking Ben behind her—to stop in the narrow hatchway.

  “Cut it out! Cut it out!” Grant yelled, shaking her a little. “Now what the hell’s the matter?”

  “Look! Look!” she yelled back, pointing. Her eyes were so wide as to seem almost sightless. Grant followed her pointing arm, turning around and seeing as he did so Bonham still behind the wheel, and watching them—and as he turned saw what he and Bonham had been looking at for almost an hour: about a mile off their port bow a big freighter or tanker, a veritable Christmas tree of running lights, was slowly moving toward crossing their bows toward the north. They were in one of the main North and South American shipping lanes now, and had seen two other such vessels in the past hour, although both of these were much further north and had already crossed them before being sighted.

  “I told you this goddamned Bonham was crazy!” Lucky cried. “We’re going to hit that ship! We’re going to hit it!”

  “We’re not,” Grant yelled at her. “It’ll be a long time past us by the time we get to it, cross its course. Now sit down,” he said more quietly. “Sit down, all of you, and tell me what started all this off.” He was thinking privately that he wished she had not said that about Bonham. It should not have been said, not in Bonham’s hearing anyway. It would almost certainly make trouble later on. For the moment anyway Bonham said nothing. He continued on his course. The freighter (or tanker) continued on its, approaching the line of their course somewhere off in front of them.

  It was easy to see how it could have frightened them, even Ben too. They knew nothing about sailing, and did not realize that, with the relative movement of the two vessels, and the schooner’s slow speed, the ship would have crossed their course a long time before they got to its course. Finally he got a drink down them, and heard their story. Lucky had waked up, for no particular reason, and in getting out of her tiny cabin door had disturbed and waked up Irma, and naturally Ben. The three of them had come up to sit in the saloon for a while (Cathie’s bunk there had not even b
een made up)—and of course the first thing they had seen through the large ports was the lighted freighter (they could make out that it was a freighter now, not a tanker) appearing big as all hell, and looking as though it would run into them. It had panicked them all.

  “Well, it won’t,” Grant said. ‘Trust my word. And trust Bonham’s—Al’s—knowledge. And ability.” From the wheel Bonham spoke for the first time. But before he did he gave Lucky a long, burning look which, while it did or said nothing actually, made Grant nervous about the future of the cruise. He didn’t like it.— “I hate to have to remind anybody of this,” Bonham said mildly, “but I am actually, legally the captain of this ship. Any decisions that are to be made are my responsibility, and in fact—in law—are my decisions. And any orders that I give to anybody are orders, and have to be carried out. At least while we’re at sea.”

  “That wouldn’t help us if we ran into that great big goddamned ship,” Lucky said pertly.

  “No. But it would still be my responsibility,” Bonham said. “And it would also be my responsibility to save you, at the risk of—at the cost of—my own life. That’s my honor and my duty as a sea captain, as master of this vessel.” He moved the wheel a spoke or two to starboard, actually turning in the collision direction of the approaching freighter. “That freighter will have passed our course at least a half an hour before we reach his course. And in fact will probably be damn near out of sight to the north by the time we do reach his course.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Lucky said, in a crestfallen, sincerely contrite voice.

  “That’s okay,” Bonham said mildly. But there was an increased distance, coldness, in his voice. The damage, Grant thought, the damage of Lucky’s first—even if hysterical—remark, had been done. He got another drink down the three of them, pouring the whiskey into the already used, slightly muggy plastic cups in the cockpit. Cathie Finer had waked up with all the commotion and was now sitting up, and accepted a drink herself, but she said nothing except a hello with a small smile.