Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  Grant took the roll of adhesive tape (they had not had any themselves, he discovered) into the bathroom and worked on his nose before the mirror. That had been really thoughtful of Bonham, he thought, to bring tape. “I’d rather you didn’t watch this,” he said, “but you can if you want to.”— “I want to,” Lucky said. “I’ve never seen anybody make a nose out of a blob before.” He glanced at her quickly. She had said it bitterly, but she wasn’t being bitter. She was really interested. —“Okay. Come on,” he said.

  It took him about fifteen minutes. The pinching and squeezing, one forefinger pushing from each side. Then the tape, the first strip, up at the top of the bridge and the resqueezing with the thumb and forefinger of one hand on the outside of the tape. Then the same thing lower down, the same process, always moving lower down, until there were four overlapping strips of the tape, spreading out across and over his cheekbones under his eyes. Thank God neither cheekbone or sinus had been busted. He had to stop several times because of the tears the pain of it brought into his eyes so he couldn’t see, and also in order to relax his tensed-up diaphragm with a bit of the deep breathing that now came so naturally to him, as an experienced diver. Both nasal passages were all closed up naturally, with the coagulation, mucus, what-the-fuck-ever, and he had to breathe through his mouth.

  “That’s the best I can do,” he said finally. “It’ll be all right for tonight And I’ll have the Surgeon take a look at it tomorrow.”

  “I think it’s a pretty good job,” Lucky said quite coolly. “It even almost looks like a nose again.”

  “Wait’ll you see Orloffski tomorrow,” Grant promised.

  “To hell with Orloffski,” Lucky said.

  Then they went to bed together and made love in that skin-touching, electrical-skin-contact way they had once had, but had not now had together for quite a very long time.

  The inspection went off quite well, perfectly, the next day, as Bonham had predicted. The Administrator, in his white suit and white topee that was almost a uniform, and his one Green constable in his blue uniform with its red trouser stripes and red cap band, came aboard after requesting formal permission from the Master of the Vessel. The Administrator was precise, pleasant proper, and very polite. So was Constable Green, since he had been personally trained by the Administrator, or perhaps by his predecessor. The Constable (while the Administrator stood by) looked everywhere—including in the bilge under the sole, the lazarette, everywhere.

  “You understand of course that it was quite necessary,” the Administrator said, shaking hands with the Master of the Vessel. “I’m quite sorry to have had to have done it. You understand? Quite.”

  “But of course, sir,” Bonham said. “I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I’d hate to have my vessel put to sea under any kind of a cloud. I’ll want to return to the Nelsons, probably quite often, in the future.”

  “We will always look forward to seeing you here,” the Administrator said, and smiled, “and your clients,” he added, nodding pleasantly to the others. “We flatter ourselves that we have one of the future’s better spots in the Caribbean. Especially for cruises such as yours.” If he noticed the swollen taped-up nose of Grant or the cut swollen face of Orloffski, he gave no indication of it.

  Once they were under way and out at sea, the Surgeon looked at Grant’s nose.— “Not a bad job,” he said and with the grudging admiration of a professional, “not a bad job at all.” In spite of that, he got out his little medical kit (he always carried it, he said, would feel naked without it, and especially on cruises) and redid the job, pulling off the tape, remolding a little, and putting on his own new tape while Grant hissed and teared with the pain. Then he carefully swabbed the swollen nasal passages. “Of course, it all should be done again in a few days, as soon as that swelling goes down.” Badly hungover, shaky, worn out with rutting; he still had good hands, great hands; and when he had finished it was clearly a better job than Grant had done, or could have done.

  In the case of Orloffski he found he had to take four stitches in the cut on the Pole’s left cheek under the eye. He had all the gear and did it swiftly, sanitarily, and efficiently. For the smaller cuts above Orloffski’s two eyes which were not so bad and didn’t really need stitching, Grant took him aside and showed him how to make the boxer’s and boxer’s trainer’s ‘adhesive bridges’, something the Surgeon had for some reason never heard about, and again received his rather grudging admiration. The Surgeon then made these and applied them to both cuts over Orloffski’s eyes, but at no time did Grant or Orloffski speak to, or even come near, each other.

  That was the kind of sail it was. Because of the Administrator’s inspection, they did not get under way until pretty late, just about ten o’clock, so they did not sight Negril Point until around nine the next morning. Most of this time they were beating to windward into the trades, tacking often, so Orloffski stayed up forward to handle the jib and staysail while Bonham from the cockpit handled the main and fore sails. For this reason Grant chose to stay back near the cockpit. The land breeze at night did not help them much this time; for some reason it had shifted and came to them off Jamaica only a little more easterly than the northeast daytime trades. Grant and Lucky, who were together just about every minute now that they could be, tried to sleep a while below during the night but finally gave it up and came back up on deck, and Ben and Irm came up with them, where the sea and the sky of stars and the breeze were all so beautiful. Bonham remained at the wheel. Cathie Finer dozed in a corner of the cockpit. There was very little talk, now. At around ten in the morning when they rounded Negril Point they were two-thirds of the way home. Just about everybody was glad. Not too terribly long after, three or four hours, they passed Montego Bay. By six in the evening they were pulling into GaBay harbor and hauling down sail.

  Ben and Irma of course had never been to GaBay, except once for a day in a rented car, but Grant and Lucky knew it well. The first thing Grant did was to telephone the West Moon Over from the Yacht Club for reservations, for that night, which they got quite easily when Grant used his name. All any of them could think about right now was getting away from these people, all of them, and—perhaps—resting up a little, resting up from their ‘vacation cruise’.

  But if there had been little talk during the long voyage back, there was talk now when Bonham presented his charges to Ben and Irma for the trip. He asked them forty dollars a day per person. That made seven days, or so Bonham figured —although they had finished the cruise at six P.M. and would not be on board that night The total came to just five hundred and sixty dollars.

  “Well, Jesus!” Ben said in a pained but embarrassed voice. “You never did quote me charges, but I figured maybe twenty to twenty-five bucks a day. Per person, of course. I must say it seems kind of high to me.”

  “But don’t forget I reminded you all all them dockage charges,” Bonham said calmly and evenly.

  “But we only actually docked—I mean, docked where you had to pay—two nights!” Ben protested, with embarrassment.

  “Also,” Grant put in, who was embarrassed also now, “remember that Ben and Irm are pretty good friends of mine.”

  Bonham’s face remained totally inscrutable. “Them’s my charges,” he said, “and I think they’re fair. More than fair.” He had obviously fixed up his charges with the Surgeon and his girl before the voyage, and was sticking to them, but of course the others could not know what this arrangement was. And Bonham, in money matters, in anything having to do with money, remained always as inscrutable and as unreadable as a sphinx.

  In the end Ben paid him, rather than suffer the embarrassment of argument, writing out a check right there on the Yacht Club bar—just as Bonham (or so Grant suspected) had figured ahead of time that he would. On the way to the hotel in the taxi, Grant apologized for it. Ben only shrugged.

  They made quite a sight at the West Moon Over Hotel, Grant with his swollen taped-up nose, all of them sunburnt almost black with their salt
-saturated hair askew and sticking out all over, and looking very ‘salty’ indeed. But of course Grant was known there, by the manager as well as by just about everybody else, so there was no problem—especially when they learned they had just returned from a cruise to the Nelson islands with Big Al Bonham in his new schooner, which of course everyone had heard all about. They bathed and cleaned up, swam and floated a while in the fresh-water pool, all of them glad to be away from salt water and the sea for a while. Then they dressed for dinner, had some drinks in the bar, ate an excellent dinner which included no seafood at all, and went happily to bed, the two pairs of them.

  It was at one-thirty in the morning when Bonham called Grant, waking him out of a sound sleep, making him get up to walk across the room to answer the phone.

  It was about the worst thing in his life that could happen to him at the moment, he thought. For one insane, nightmarish, dreamlike, sleep-drenched moment he thought Bonham was calling him to tell him about his wife and Jim Grointon, that he had seen them, had caught them, together. Vigorously, he rubbed one hand harshly back and forth across the back of his neck, and then slapped himself there several times. He had made that decision. It hadn’t happened. It hadn’t happened. He had analyzed and judged all the evidence, and he knew it hadn’t happened. “What?” he kept saying into the phone, “what? I don’t understand. I don’t understand. What?”

  “I’m in trouble,” Bonham’s drink-thick voice said again. “I’m in real trouble. I need your help. Can you come? I’m at the Moonrise Motel. Can you come?”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll come,” Grant said rubbing his neck some more. “I’ll come.”

  “Are you sure you’re awake?” Bonham said.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I’m not,” Grant said. “Now tell me again.”

  “The Moonrise Motel,” Bonham said thickly. “It’s about ten miles in toward town from where you are at the West Moon Over. Have you got a car?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, we rented a You-Drive here,” Grant said. I can be there in twenty minutes or so.”

  “Please come,” Bonham said thickly. It was the first time Grant had ever heard him use that word ever. “Please.”

  “All right. I’ll be there,” Grant said, almost hating himself for saying it. “Twenty minutes. But what’s the trouble.”

  “If you can’t figure it out by the time you get here, you’re not as smart as I think you are,” Bonham said. “How many kinds of trouble are there if the weather’s good?”

  Grant was suddenly full awake. Cathie Finer! It had to be something to do with that. But what? “All right. I’ll be there,” he said and hung up.

  “Honey,” he said to Lucky in the bed.

  “Don’t wake me up,” Lucky said, in her sleep. “Let me sleep. Please. Please let me sleep. Please don’t wake me up. Is it hard? I’ll hold it for you. But please don’t wake me up. I promise I’ll make love to him tomorrow the best he’s ever had. I’ll kiss it for you. But please don’t wake me up. Now. I haven’t slept in so long.” And, in fact, she was still asleep. Even as she talked.

  He had sat down on the bed edge again, nude, and now he rubbed her shoulder in the shorty nightie, and the back of her head beneath her hair. “I’ve got to go out. For a while. Will you be all right if you wake up and find me gone? Can you hear me? I’ve got to go out. But I’ll be back. Hear? I’ll be back.”

  “Go,” she said, and turned herself violently over onto her side, away from him. “Go. I know you’ll be back. I’ll be all right. And I’ll be here when you get back. What is it? Bonham?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Cathie Finer?”

  “I think so,” he said.

  “Go. I know you have to go. I’ll be here when you get back,” she said. She wiggled her shoulders and settled herself into the bed.

  Grant sat looking at her for a moment. Then he reached for his bikini shorts. Had she? Hadn’t she? Had she? Hadn’t she? What couldn’t Jerome Kern or Cole Porter have done with that refrain? Had she? hadn’t she? had she? hadn’t she? Had she? Hadn’t she? He began collecting the rest of his clothes.

  It was quite a scene when he got there. They were all sitting around the motel room looking embarrassed, except for Cathie Finer, who was the most unclad of the group. She was still in her shorty nightie, not too different from Lucky’s. Bonham had put his pants and shirt on, but was barefooted. The others of course were fully clad. They were, altogether: Bonham, Cathie Finer, Orloffski, Letta Bonham, and an embarrassed-looking police sergeant in his uniform of very starched khaki shorts, khaki shirt and blouse, and the khaki cap with the red band.

  “Hello, Cathie?” Grant said.

  “Hello, Ron,” she said, and then actually smiled. “Do you think you can do anything about this mess?”

  “I’ll try,” he said. It was pretty obvious what had happened, and even Orloffski, with his banged-up face, looked a little embarrassed. But he also looked bullheaded and stubborn as hell. Letta Bonham was not embarrassed at all. She was just plain mad. Orloffski had told her where Bonham and Cathie were stashed up for the night, and she had insisted on going there, with Orloffski, and she herself had called the police sergeant. The laws on adultery in Jamaica were stringent enough, but the elders of Ganado Bay had added their own wrinkle. A person caught in the act of adultery with witnesses was subject to immediate jailing. He could of course post bond.

  Grant tried to reason with Letta Bonham, but she was indomitable.

  “How much is the bond?” Grant asked the sergeant finally.

  “I don’t know, Saar,” the sergeant said. “We must have to go down to the Post and I will aither call the Inspector, or look it up in har book.” Grant noted, with that peculiar quality of overawareness of detail that so often crops up in tragedy, that he said ‘Post’ and not ‘Station’ or ‘Stationhouse’, and remembered that he was in fact a member of the Constabulary. “I had rahther hhate to call the Inspector, Saar,” the sergeant added. “At this hour.”

  “Well, will three hundred dollars be enough?” Grant said.

  “Oh, yes, Saar,” the sergeant said, and grinned. “I am sure that it would.”

  Grant wrote out the check. “Now, let’s all get out of this and get some sleep, what do you say?”

  “I, Saar, ham in fact on duty,” the sergeant grinned. “I can’t.” He said it cahn’t’, like an Englishman.

  “It would be rather difficult for me to call a taxi now, at this hour,” Cathie Finer said. “Would you mind giving me a lift back to my hotel, Sergeant? It’s in town. You could drop me off on your way back to the Station—the Post.” She was staying, in fact, it turned out, at the next ritziest hotel in GaBay, next ritziest to the West Moon Over.

  “Sartaintly not, Mom,” the sergeant said gallantly. “I be most hhoppy to.”

  “Then would you all mind getting out of here for a few minutes so I can get dressed?” Cathie said.

  They all stood outside in the court, including Bonham himself, while Cathie dressed. Grant tried once again to reason with Letta Bonham, but to no avail. The motel manager approached them, the group, for what was apparently the third or fourth time, and explained and protested that he was not responsible since they had registered as man and wife. How might he know? he asked with that flatted peculiar Jamaican-English accent.

  “You heard that, Sergeant?” Letta Bonham said. “You noted it?”

  “I did, Mom,” the sergeant said. “An’ I noted him. Each time hair.” Bonham said nothing. Neither did Orloffski.

  When Cathie came out, she went off blithely with the police sergeant in the police car without saying goodby to anyone particularly except Grant. Orloffski escorted Letta Bonham to her car, Bonham’s old Buick, with all the solitude of a man escorting a new widow. Which in a way, Grant supposed, she sort of, probably, was. Wanda Lou Orloffski, he noticed, was sitting in the back seat.— “I guess I’ll sleep here,” Bonham said. His half-drunken face was as sphinx-like, as cold and as stony, as it got when he t
alked about money. Grant nodded. He got in his You-Drive and drove back to the hotel. Lucky was still all curled up fast asleep. He looked at her for a long time after he got undressed, standing nude beside the bed. She really was so beautiful.

  During the next two days before their flight out, Ben and Irma and Lucky disported themselves at the hotel with its tennis courts, its miniature golf, and its pool. None of them bathed in the sea off the pretty beach on whose edge the hotel was built. They all had enough sea for quite a long while. Grant disported himself with them, when he could, feeling pretty much the same way. But a good deal of the time he was in town. He saw Letta Bonham three times. Nothing he could say would move her, even when he carefully and very exactly explained to her what Orloffski was trying to do, had done. He saw Bonham once, and Bonham had nothing particular to say. He was still staying at the motel.

  The day before they left a meeting of the Bonham-Orloffski-Grant-Finer-Schooner Corporation was held, with lawyers present. Grant did not attend. It was not necessary. There was nothing he could do. Orloffski had of course wired Sam Finer the news in New York, and quite legally and properly, the news also of the meeting. He had received back only an enigmatic wire saying only “WILL NOT VOTE TWO PERCENT.” It did not matter. Orloffski with his 44 percent and Letta Bonham with her 20 percent Bonham had assigned to her had plenty more than a sufficient majority. Bonham was voted out as captain of the schooner Naiad and as President of the Corporation. Orloffski was voted in. Bonham, Grant understood (from the manager of the West Moon Over, who like everybody else in town was following the case closely), did attend the meeting. Grant did not know if he voted. In any case, Bonham was out.

  In the taxi on the way to the airport the next day with all their luggage and Ben and Irma with them, they saw Bonham sitting on one of those dusty stone benches in the dusty square —the Parade, as it was called in Jamaica. He was looking at the dusty ground. Grant swung around in the front seat beside the driver, raised his hand, but then decided not to have the driver stop.