by James Jones
Go to the Widow-Maker
James Jones
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my daughter
Kaylie
With the information that the
Reason her father never tried to write
About a great love story before was
Because he had never experienced one
Until he met her mother.
Contents
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38
A Biography of James Jones
Acknowledgments
Special Note
This novel is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to any real people, living or dead, is completely coincidental, and totally outside the author’s intention. The characters are not real people; they belong entirely to the author, who created them slowly over a long period of time, with a great deal of anguish and parental care, and also with a great deal of love. There is no town of Ganado Bay in Jamaica. There is no Grand Bank Island. There is no island group called The Nelsons. There is no Grand Hotel Crount, and as far as I know there is no hotel at all on the seaward side of The Palisadoes spit. I think there ought to be one, though, and might be willing to invest with some far-seeing citizen who wanted to build one there. There is of course a town of Montego Bay in Jamaica, and I lived there for a year with a great deal of pleasure and of which year I have many fond memories, both of the time we spent there and of the many friends we made there. But everything else, characters, actions, incidents, and the internal speculations of the characters, are all mine alone, and I am solely responsible.
At Sea
On Board The Paquebot
S. S. Antilles 26 June 1966
Harp Song of The Dane Women
What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
She has no house to lay a guest in—
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.
She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you—
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.
Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken—
Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.
You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables—
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.
Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow, And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.
Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
Rudyard Kipling
1
ON A HOT FEBRUARY DAY, in the port town of Ganado Bay in the island of Jamaica in the Caribbean Sea, two white Americans stood by the side of an old, dilapidated hotel’s deserted and dilapidated saltwater swimming pool. One of them, who (though he was of medium height) appeared short because of his blocky muscular build, was dripping wet. He wore only a tight, scanty, black European-type bikini, and he was, in spite of the profoundly burning tropic sun on his back, shaking so hard that his teeth chattered whenever he allowed his jaws to relax. He commenced to do a little dance, jarring himself down hard on his bare heels while the crotchbulge of his bikini jiggled alarmingly, without ever taking his anxious eyes off the other man standing in front of him. His name was Ron Grant, and with the possible exception of Tennessee Williams he was the most famous playwright of his generation, was judged just about everywhere also to be one of the two or three best playwrights of that generation, probably the best generation—because of himself and one other—since O’Neill’s.
The other man was a veritable giant. At least six-foot-two, with an already enormous frame, from which suspended a huge belly, he was all over covered with inches-deep layers of muscle, the whole giving him the bulk—and the girth—of a minor mountain. On top of all this he wore an inch-deep layer of body fat like the blubber coat of some aquatic mammal, which hid all muscle definition and tied the enormity of him all together in one great mass while further increasing it. His tent-sized swimming trunks, worn hanging under the belly, were the longlegged boxer-type, and their loud Hawaiian print had been faded by the sun and the sea into a uniform blotchy yellow. Two snag tears showed on the front of them. Above the unbelievable expanse of chest and belly, attached to the front of a large-sized head, hung out a sharp-nosed face with furry eyebrows that met in the middle, two deepset blackly burning eyes, and an expression of perpetual, malevolent impatience as if sitting tranquilly were painfully intolerable to him—an expression with which he gazed at the still dancing smaller man before him. The giant’s name was Al Bonham and he ran a diving shop and underwater salvage business in the Jamaican port town of Ganado Bay.
Under his gaze Grant the playwright stopped his dancing. Between them on the busted concrete pooledge from which tufts of unkempt grass grew here and there in the cracks lay a glistening-wet aqualung tank and regulator with its mouthpiece dangling over the edge toward the water.
“Well, I think you’re about ready,” Bonham rumbled. He always rumbled, as if—or so Grant thought—he were trying to muffle the great power of his equally outsized voice to keep from frightening people.
“You mean, for the sea?” Grant said.
A smile like a cloud passed swiftly up over the great plain of Bonham’s face revealing his bad teeth and disappeared into his hair.
“Sure, why not?”
“Well, I— Okay, if you say so.” Grant had wrapped his arms around himself in an attempt to still his shivering and shaking, and was now slapping himself stingingly on both sides of his unusually broad back. “You understand,” he apologized, “this shaking is not just because I’m nervous. I haven’t got as much protection built onto me as you have. The cold always did get to me. I really get cold.”
A transparent film seemed to pass over Big Al Bonham’s eyes, and Grant knew him well enough to know by now that this was not due to any allusion to his protective fat. Instead it was his businessman’s look, a businessman who has smelled a sale and does not intend to let the victim get away. Grant had seen it before.
“We got a foam rubber wet shirt back at the shop that belongs to Ali my helper. My stuff wouldn’t fit you. You could wrap it around twice, and then some. But Ali might be willing to sell you his.—Or let you borrow it,” he added, enigmatically.
“Oh, I’d be glad to buy it,” Grant said quickly. “I’ll need one in Kingston.”
“If we ordered you a new one, it would take a month,” Bonham rumbled stolidly. “Well, let’s get into our pants,” he said, a
nd turned away to a concrete bench which like the pooledge had part of its internal support iron showing. He picked up a grubby pair of rumpled icecream pants and began pulling them right on over his faded wet trunks. A huge, equally faded Hawaiian-print sport shirt lay nearby. After watching him bemusedly a moment (he had seen him do the same thing before), Grant followed suit and did the same.
As they walked out through the decrepit, badly rundown hotel—which more resembled an over-large boarding house really, and was apparently customerless—the equally rundown Negro man at the desk (it was hard to tell if he was proprietor or clerk) exchanged a significant glance with Bonham, and the big man nodded. “Take care of it later,” he said, clipped. Outside he stowed the aqualung in the back of the badly battered, barely creepable, wartime US Buick stationwagon he had nursed over and then down the hill two hours before, and they started back up over and then down the hill toward the main town where his shop was.
Below them, on this particularly steeply falling hill road, wherever houses or villas or hotels did not block the view, the whole of Ganado Bay and the bay itself lay spread out before them. A Navy ship, a tender, was in from Guantanamo today, and the US sailors’ uniforms made myriad white bright dots in the dun colorless streets between the chipped, peeling, faded and almost equally colorless red, yellow and purple painted buildings of the town.
“I could of taken you to one of the ritzy hotels on that same beach. I work them too. But I thought you’d want the privacy with nobody around watching,” Bonham rumbled, “and knowing who you are. And, it’s a lot cheaper for me.”
Grant did not answer. The ‘hotel’ had been plainly enough a dump. The day before they had gone to a somewhat, but only slightly, better place. This one today was undoubtedly the cheapest joint in the town which could still be said to possess a pool. Indeed, it was almost one of those perennial settings of the Williams plays: hibiscus and other bright flowers Grant couldn’t name growing on and almost hiding the crumbling walls and rotting trellises; grassgrown, anklebreaker sidewalks; two untended straggly trees: he half expected to see Vivien Leigh come out of the bushes in a disarrayed skirt leading Truman Capote by the hand. Well, what the hell? Let Bonham make a few bucks off him.
Bonham was clearly feeling him out in some sort of way. The very first two days he had taken him to two of the ritziest hotels on the Ganado Bay beach. Then yesterday they’d gone to the cheaper place, and then today here. Each time Bonham charged him the same price, but had to pay the hotel manager less and so kept more.
But none of all that mattered. Grant was thinking about what Bonham had said about him now being ready to try the aqualung in the sea. He had been waiting, and in one way working toward, this moment a long time. His newest play was all finished and received with great elation by his producers in New York, so he had earned this time off. A certain intensely warm feeling at the thought of the play, there, safe and sound and all finished, ran all through him warming and easing him all over. God, how did he know he’d ever get through it? and give it all he knew it had to have? How did you know you could ever do it again? You didn’t. But he had. And this was probably the best of his work. So he had earned this. And fuck poor hotels. And fuck Art—‘Art’—too, for that matter, he thought, and with this thought there arose also in his mind a sort of dark-dressed, spectral, mantilla-ed figure, with the gloom-sealed dark face almost hidden, standing on the church steps pointing. That was the way he almost always thought of her now. And to think he had begun this, diving, to get rid of her. That was a laugh now.
“I still think you’re makin a mistake to go on to Kingston,” Bonham said. “I’ve dived both places. We got everything here they got there.” This was not strictly the truth and Grant knew it; but he also knew Bonham did not know he knew it, and hated to think of losing such a rich potential customer. It was all such a rude jolt, elbow jab, from what he’d just been thinking.
Grant didn’t answer for a moment. “Well, there’s lots of other things involved, Al,” he said finally. “Besides just the diving.”
“You mean that girlfriend of yours. Up at the villa. You want to get away from her.” Bonham said it very softly. There was a note almost of secrecy. Of complicity. It seemed strange he should say that just now just after what Grant had been thinking. It was as though he had looked into his mind.
“She’s not my girlfriend, she’s my uh foster-mother,” Ron Grant said, falling immediately into the old protection routine. “But uh well, yes.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, excuse me,” Bonham rumbled politely, but went right on anyway. “Even so I can’t say I blame you. She sure is peculiar.”
It was always that way. Especially around men Grant knew to be real men. None of them ever liked his mistress. ‘Mistress’! Jesus! The apologetic embarrassment had become as much a part of him as his breathing. “She can be trying,” he murmured, conceded. He smiled at the giant. “Listen, when do you think we’ll be able to go out to sea? Now that you think I’m ready.”
“Go right now.”
“Now!”
“Sure, why not?” That same smile that seemed so like a foreboding cloud passed up over Bonham’s face again. It appeared to start at his heavy chin, pass up through his mouth with its bad teeth, then to his nose, eyes, eyebrows and forehead, warping and distorting infernally each in turn, before disappearing into his thinning hair. “That’s where I’m takin you right now.” There was a pause, and the smile again, this time directed straight at Grant. “Might as well get it over with this afternoon as wait till tomorrow morning and think, brood about it all night.” Eerily, he appeared to have looked—looked for the second time—right inside Grant’s head.
After a moment Grant snorted. The half laugh did not lessen his nervousness, but it pleased him that he could do it. “Yeah. But you’re sure you think I’m ready for that.”
“If I didn’t I wouldn’t take you out. It don’t do my business any good to kill off customers, or have dissatisfied ones.”
Grant felt a slight chill pass over his shoulders. Also, he suddenly noticed that his crotch and the head of his peepee were beginning to feel scratchy from the salt crystals in his drying bikini. Rather furtively, he stole a hand down to scratch and adjust himself inside his seat-wet pants. Bonham did not appear to be bothered at all by his own. Perhaps because of this, as much as anything, Grant made no answer and they rode on in silence. They were now down the hill, moving slowly through the crowded streets of the dusty town, and the freshfaced, so boyish sailor boys looked at them curiously and at the aqualung in the back. It was hard to believe he had once looked like that himself, in that same uniform.
More than fifteen, more than seventeen, years ago. At the shop Ali, Big Al’s narrow-chested, narrow-flanked East Indian helper, agreed bobbing and smiling to sell his foam rubber wet shirt to Grant for forty dollars, and Grant had a suspicion, more than a suspicion, that the shirt did not belong to him at all. Because he was so broad in the chest, it was an uncomfortably tight fit for Grant, and the green corrosion on the bronze zipper did not help in closing it. But Bonham managed. “Fits you fine,” he rumbled and the deal was done. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll put it on the tab with all the rest.” Grant nodded dumbly. It had all been done at the same time as Al and Ali were loading the gear and petrol cans for the dive into the stationwagon while Grant stood, as in some vague nervous apprehensive dream, watching them.
Bonham’s shop was on one of those narrow, roughly cobbled little streets between the dock area and bay itself and the town’s dusty, dirty little square called the ‘Parade’ by the Jamaicans, after the British. Badly built out of poorly mixed concrete and cheap plywood, it was one of a block of buildings painted bright orange. Next door a native greengrocer peeled his cabbage heads and threw the rotting outside leaves into the street’s deep runoff gutter. Inside, the shop itself was dominated by two huge hospital-type air compressors Bonham had brought down from the States. The other three walls were lined with aqualung bottle
s and regulators in racks. The boat was half a mile away, down at the bayside docks. Sometimes he docked her at the Yacht Club, Bonham said, where he was a sort of honorary member and had permission, but he hadn’t been lately. Grant, feeling dimly that it was all strangely commonplace and everyday for such a momentous and wondrous occasion, piled into the broken dirty front seat with the diver and his helper and creaked away in the aged Buick slowly through the tiny sunburnt streets toward his first dive in the sea with an aqualung.
It had been a long hard road, in some ways. But Grant didn’t want to go into that now. In the little boat (an eighteen-footer with a decked over cabin that was too small for anything but gear stowage), once they were aboard amid the dead seaweed, pieces of cardboard, old orange peels and other debris of civilization that floated against the hull and the dock, he could see high up on the side of the hill above town the villa—the estate—where his ‘mistress’ and her husband (and himself) were staying, visiting. He wondered if they were out on the patio. But even if they were, they wouldn’t know Bonham’s boat, or that Grant was on it going out.
“We know this area underwater like you know your backyard at home,” Bonham said, like a pat spiel for nervous clients, from the helm as he peered out through the opened windshield. Ali had done all the casting off and they were now moving out into the bay channel, past the luxury hotels close on the right and so different from the dirty commercial docks and warehouses stretching around the curve of the bay behind them. The sun poured down on them making a strong light in the cockpit, and equally strong shade under the little roof where Bonham stood. It glinted off the water at them like steel points. The air had freshened noticeably already. “That’s the Yacht Club over there,” Bonham rumbled as he swung the boat away from it.
“Where are we going?” Grant asked. He knew the Yacht Club, had been there with his ‘mistress’ and her husband, but he looked at the eighteen or twenty small sailing boats and launches tied fore and aft and swinging between their rows of mooring buoys. From the Yacht Club veranda someone waved at them gaily. Bonham’s helper Ali waved back. Grant did not. Four days of training with Bonham had materially increased his sense of the dangers involved in diving, and the gay waver at the Yacht Club—who apparently thought they were going off on some kind of a happy sea picnic—had suddenly increased his irate nervousness and given him a gloomy sense of isolation.