Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  “I’m takin you out to one of the coral reefs,” Bonham answered him from the wheel.

  “How deep will it be?”

  “Ten feet to sixty feet: ten feet at the top of the reef, sixty at the bottom on the sand. Be just right for your first dive, and it’s the prettiest reef this side the island.”

  That had to be a lie. Ocho Rios was supposed—“Are there any fish?”

  “Hell, yes! Lots of them.”

  “Any sharks?”

  “Sure. Sometimes. If we’re lucky.” The Navy tender, quite small as Navy ships go, now loomed up ahead of them in the deep main channel, appearing so huge from this close up that it filled the sky and threatened to fall on them. Bonham swung the boat slightly to pass it close by on his port side and increased his throttle. They were now out in the open bay. Bonham suddenly began to whistle merrily, if offkey, as if just being out on the water, headed for a dive, made him a different, happier man.

  On the other hand, Grant was finding it impossible to put into words exactly how he felt, but which was mainly—if it must be said in one word without nuance—cowardly. He did not want to go on. He would give anything he possessed, not to. He had worked and planned for this, had dreamed of it—and for quite a long time. Now he realized that if Bonham’s engine suddenly failed, he would not be disappointed. He hoped it would fail. He would be more than glad to wait, at least until tomorrow. Or longer, if it required repairs. And that was pretty cowardly. It was even pusillanimous. But he was too proud to say this, admit it out loud. “I was a little surprised at you taking me out so soon,” he essayed, finally. “Especially after—you know—after what happened yesterday.”

  Bonham’s bloodthirsty smile passed up over his huge face. “Oh, that happens to everybody. At least once. Usually more.” Again as if he were eerily looking right into Grant’s mind, he suddenly pulled from the drawer immediately in front of the wheel a half-full bottle of Beefeater’s gin (one of the two which Grant had bought yesterday), looked at it, and motioned with it to Grant. “Want a snort? No, you handled that very well yesterday I thought.”

  Grant took the bottle. Of course that eerie understanding undoubtedly came from so frequently handling people who reacted exactly like himself. But Grant hated to think he reacted like everybody else. Yesterday, which was supposed to have been his graduation day, during what was in fact supposed to be his graduation exam, he had made a serious booboo on the bottom of the pool. The result was that he had taken in a quick full-sucking breath of water instead of air from the tubes of the aqualung and, strangling and in total panic, had dropped everything and swum up blindly and choking to the surface, clawing mindlessly. While he clung to the pooledge desperately, strangling and whooping in terror to get air down his locked throat, Bonham standing just above him spraddlelegged in his sloppy faded trunks had thrown back his head and roared with laughter—a reaction which Grant when he finally could breathe again, though he grinned, found, if manly, nevertheless rather insensitive. Grant had always had this terrible fear of strangling, of not being able to get air. Also, whenever he looked up from the pooledge, all he could see were those two huge oaktree legs disappearing into the gaping legholes of Bonham’s trunks, within which he could see the shabby, raveled, somewhat ill-fitting edge of Bonham’s old jockstrap revealing a crescent-shaped section of hairy balls, all of which he found embarrassing and distasteful.

  The exercise he was attempting was not one he had not done before. He had already done it twice that same day, successfully. It consisted of diving to the bottom of the pool fully geared, divesting oneself of flippers, weight belt, mask and lung in that order and swimming back up; that was the first half. The second (after a few deep breaths) was to swim back down, near-blind because maskless, find the lung and clear it of water and then, once one was able to breathe through it again, redon all the other gear and come up. Now, all this would be comparatively easy if one had attached to one’s tubes a mouthpiece with ‘non-return valves’ which did not let water get into the tubes; but Bonham insisted implacably that all his pupils complete this exercise with the old-fashioned mouthpiece so that, to clear the lung, you had to hold it in a certain way with the air-intake tube up and the exhaust tube down. And then you had to exhale sharply all your precious air to blow the water out. That particular time Grant, hurrying, apparently had held the damned thing wrong, with the exhaust tube up, and instead of the quick relieving flow of air into empty lungs, he had sucked down water.

  Standing in the boat cockpit, holding the gin bottle in his hand and looking at the familiar Tower-of-London-Watchman label, Grant could feel all over again the rush of water into his throat, his throat itself locking, the blind rush upward, and then the long drawnout process while hanging on the pooledge of trying to get a tiny bit of air down into those heaving lungs whose heaving only locked his throat up tighter. Uncapping the bottle, he took a big swallow of the straight gin and waited for it to hit his stomach and spread out, warm and soothing. When he finally got his breath back yesterday, he had insisted on going back down and doing it again, right away, because he knew the principle from springboard diving that when you crack up on a dive, don’t wait: go right back while your back or your belly is still stinging and do it again before time and imagination can make you even more afraid. Bonham had apparently admired him for that, and the second time he had done it perfectly, but that did not relieve his memory of the strangling terror.

  Later, of course, Bonham had told him it happened because he hurried, that if he had tested it with just a little suction till he found water, he could have swum back up with his lungs empty: he had plenty of time. But for Grant it had required every last ounce of will he had each time to exhale into that tube down there. How could he have that much more control? Time, Bonham said; practice. And panic, panic, was the biggest danger, enemy, the only danger that there was in diving.

  Luckily, Grant thought, last night he had not told his mistress or her husband about the little accident—now that they were going out. But then they did not even know that they were going out. Almost furtively, he glanced up again at the villa where they were up on the hill and still visible even from here, and once again that black-draped, mantilla-ed, half-hidden-faced image standing on the church steps pointing swam over him. Sometimes he positively hated her guts. Politely wiping the neck of the bottle with the palm of his hand in the time-honored gesture of all bottle drinkers, he passed the gin back to Bonham at the wheel, grateful for the warming.

  “Look!” Bonham rumbled, rather sharply. “You aint gonna have to take your lung off down there out here. Only the mask, like I told you. Outside of that we’re just gonna swim around and look. I got this new camera case I wanta try out for a friend. So I’ll take some pictures of you.” It was a clear bribe. And as such, angered Grant a little. He didn’t need bribes to do it, or anything. Bonham slugged down a healthy dollop of the gin himself, and then, after a hesitation, as if he were not sure he ought to do this in front of Grant, wiped the bottleneck and passed it over to Ali—who bobbing and grinning took a drink himself and wiped the neck and capped it.

  Grant did not fail to note the hesitation, or its meaning, but he did not say anything—about that, or about Bonham’s rather sharp remark. He was, actually, after having looked up at the villa, at the moment much more interested in and concerned with himself. Why was he doing this? Reality? To find reality? Search out and rediscover a reality which all these past six or eight years and two plays he had felt was beginning to be missing from his life and from his work? Yes; a reality, yes. Because without his work he was nothing. A nothing. And work was vitality, vitality and energy, and—manhood. So go ahead and say the rest of it. Yes, reality; but also to search out and rediscover his Manhood. His Capital M Manhood, which along with reality and his work he was also losing. Yes, all that; and also to get rid at least for a while in a genteel way of his aging mistress, the black figure on the church steps, whom he had once loved, but whom now he both in a stra
nge way loved and did not love at all, equally and simultaneously, and whom he considered at least partially responsible for the loss of reality (and Manhood) that he suffered. Maybe he considered her, probably he considered her, totally responsible for the loss. But in the end he had not gotten away from her at all, because she had invited herself to come with him, along with her husband. Actually it was she who had found Al Bonham for him! She had come on down ahead, while he was in New York, had looked up and had waiting for him a diving teacher she considered reputable.

  And in the interim, during his ‘business’ trip to New York with his newest, his latest play, something else had happened. Grant had met a girl.

  Big Al suddenly swung the wheel hard right, and the little boat made a sharp turn to starboard and headed off in that direction. They were far out on the open bay now. Directly ahead a mile away was the jet airstrip, one of three on the island, almost touching the blacktop road that ran along the water’s edge. “It’s right off the end of the airstrip, this reef,” Bonham said. “’Bout half a mile out. I got two or three reference points I line up to hit it exact.” As violently as he had made the turn, which Grant considered strangely unnecessarily violent, he suddenly cut throttle and Grant grabbed the gunwale to keep from falling forward, as did Ali. For three or four minutes Bonham jockeyed the boat backward and forward, peering down over the side. “There she is,” he said. “My special spot.”

  Grant too looked over the side. Below him in the bluegreen water yellow and brown color-patches swirled and quivered under the water’s wash. Just beside these, and as if he were standing shoetips to the edge of a vertical high cliff, he could now and then as the sea flattened catch a glimpse of clear sand far below, dark-green colored through the surface. The sun hot on his back, Grant felt cold at the thought of being immersed in water which was not in a bathtub and whose lack of heat could not be controlled. “Let’s get you dressed out,” Bonham rumbled from just behind him, and began hauling tanks and gear around as if none of it weighed anything.

  As he had before, Grant noticed that Bonham dropped his bad grammar whenever he was giving instructions. Now he kept up a running comment of instruction while the two of them, he and Ali, got the neophyte ready. Flippers first, then the mask spat upon rubbed till it squeaked rinsed and resting on his forehead, rubber wet shirt, weightbelt trimmed to exactly the right weight by Bonham, finally the tank his arms through the shoulder straps crotch strap attached to the weight belt. Grant simply sat, like an electrocutionee he thought, and let himself be handled. The running comment of instruction had to do with clearing his ears and equalizing the pressure in them as he and Bonham went on down, and with what Bonham wanted him to do with his mask, which was to remove it when they reached the bottom of the anchorline, put it back on full of water, and clear it. Grant was to go first, swim forward to the anchorline, descend it ten or twelve feet, and wait for Bonham. Then last, the mask lowered over his eyes and nose, the mouthpiece stuffed into his mouth, and he was falling backward onto the tank on his back while faces and boat wheeled out of sight to be replaced by nothing but bright blue sky, what was he doing here? Then the water closed over him, blinding him.

  Still holding the mask to his face with both hands in the approved manner to keep the fall from dislodging it, Grant rolled over quickly but he still could see nothing. He was now lying on the surface. Masses of bubbles formed by the air he had carried under with him rose all around him, blinding him even more effectively than a driving rainstorm would have done up in the air. He waited, vulnerable, what seemed endlessly but was really only seconds. Then, miraculously, everything cleared as the bubbles rose on past him, and he could see. See at least as well as he could on land. Maybe more. Because to his congenital mild myopia everything looked closer. It was supposed to. Snell’s Law. (n Sin a = n? Sin a?). Oh, he’d studied all the books—and for years. But this was different. Below him the yellow and brown patches were now clearly delineated fields of yellow and brown coral but in amongst these, invisible from the boat, were smaller patches of almost every color and color combination imaginable. It was breathtaking. And, as far as he could tell, there was nothing dangerous visible.

  Tentatively, cautiously, for the first time since he’d gone under, Grant let out a little air and took a tiny breath. By God, it worked! He became aware of the surface swell rolling him and banging the tank against his back. Bending double he dove down to where there was no swell as Bonham had told him, and swam slowly forward along the boat’s big shadow above him, toward the slanting anchorline. In the strange silence he could hear odd poppings and cracklings. With each intake of breath the regulator at the back of his neck sang eerily and gonglike, and with each exhale he could hear the flubbering rush of bubbles from it. Everything, all problems, all plans, all worries, ‘mistress’, her husband, new girl, the new play, sometimes even consciousness of Self itself, seemed to have been swept from his mind by the intensity of the tasting of this new experience, and new world.

  At the anchorline, after he managed awkwardly to grab it, he pulled himself down deeper hand over hand until his ears began really to hurt, and then stopped. As Bonham had shown him, he put thumb and forefinger into the hollows in the mask’s bottom and pinched his nose shut, and blew. One ear opened up immediately with a loud squeak, but he had to try a second and a third time before he could get the other one completely opened. Then he pulled himself a little deeper, feeling the pressure start to build again, and stopped again. Wrapping his legs around the line, he peered at the diving watch Bonham had sold him and set its outside bezel dial with the zero point over the minute hand. Then he peered at the huge handsome depth gauge beside it which Bonham had also sold him and saw that he was eighteen feet down. On his right arm the enormous Automatic Decompression Meter which Bonham had sold him still read zero; its nitrogen-absorption-measuring needle had not yet even started to move. And so there he hung, having let go with his legs and grabbed the line with a hand, looking around. If Marty Gabel and Herman Levin could only see him now! His nervousness had left him, and he felt a kind of cautious rapture.

  To his right and left coral hills forty and fifty feet high stretched away in minor mountain ranges into bluegreen invisibility. Directly in front of him at the foot of the deep end of these rounded ranges, a pure white sea of virgin sand sloped away ever so gently out toward deep water. In between the coral hills he could see down into channels—glaciers; rivers—of sand which debouched onto the vast sand plain. In these channels, varieties of brightly colored fish poked their noses into holes in the coral, or rowed themselves gently along with their pectoral fins like small boats with oars. None of them seemed to be concerned with bothering any of the others, and Grant relaxed even more.

  Then, in the corner of his mask which acted like a horse’s blinders and cut his field of vision, he caught a flash of silver. Turning his head he saw through the plate of glass a barracuda which appeared to be at least four feet long. It was about twenty feet away. Slowly it swam out of sight beyond his mask and Grant turned again. This process went on until Grant realized the fish was circling him. Regularly, staring at him with its one big eye, it opened and closed its enormous mouth, exposing its dagger teeth, as if flexing its jaws preparatory to taking a bite of Grant. This was its method of breathing of course, he knew, but it didn’t look nice just the same. Grant had read that in cases like this you were supposed to swim straight at them as if you intended to take a bite of them whereupon they would turn and flee and run away, but he did not feel very much like trying this. Besides, he was not supposed to leave the anchorline. On the other hand he felt he ought not just sit here and let the fish have all the initiative. But before he could make up his mind to do something, and if so then what, another figure swam into his mask’s field of vision, further complicating matters till Grant realized what it was. It was Bonham. Looking like some antennaed stranger from another world, which in a way he was, he swam down on a long slant behind the barracuda, leisurely beatin
g the water with his flippers, his left arm with its hand holding the camera case stretched back at rest along his thigh, his right arm extended out straight before him holding the four-foot speargun. In the green water-air he was gravityless and beautiful, and Grant would have given anything to be like him. As he came on down getting closer, he stopped kicking and, hunching his shoulders in a strange way as if to make himself heavier, coasted down. Just as Grant saw his forearm tightening to squeeze the trigger, the barracuda gave an enormous flirt of its tail and simply disappeared. It didn’t go away; it just simply was no longer there, or anywhere visible, with an unbelievable speed if you hadn’t seen it. Bonham looked after it, shrugged, and swam on to the line.

  There was a great paternalism, protectiveness, about Bonham underwater. He looked Grant over carefully, turning him about and inspecting his gear, then with a violent hand motion downward swam on down the line toward the bottom. Grant followed, his nervousness returning. Twice he had to stop on the line to clear his ears and he suddenly noticed that Bonham apparently did not have to do this at all. On the bottom, like some huge calm great-bellied Buddha, Bonham seated himself crosslegged on the sand, took off his mask, blinked blindly, then put it back on and blew the water out of it by tilting his head to one side and holding the upper side of the mask. Then he motioned for Grant to do the same, as he had, upstairs, warned him that he would.

  Grant had done this in the various pools, but down here (his depth gauge Bonham had sold him now read 59 feet) he found it was more scary. It was all that water above you. Kneeling on the sand, he forced himself with the greatest reluctance to reach up and pull off his own mask. When he did, he immediately went blind. The salt water burned his eyes and the insides of his nose. He found himself gasping for breath. Bonham was now only one great blur to him. He made himself breathe deeply several times, and blinked. Then he put the mask back on and cleared it. Not as adept as Bonham, he had to blow several times to get all the water out. But when he looked at Bonham, the big man was nodding happily and holding up his thumb and forefinger in the old circle salute for ‘okay’. Then he motioned for Grant to come and went swimming off six or eight feet above the sand. Grant followed, his eyes still smarting. He was ridiculously pleased. At the moment he felt very much the son to Bonham’s massive paternalism. This did not irritate him. Instead, it gave him reassurance.