Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  Anyway, in four or five days, he and William would be flying over to Grand Bank Island to test out still another new case which William had designed for the German Minox, and Grant was free to come on and go along if he paid his own expenses. The Minox case was Bonham’s idea. They had found that lots of vacationers, at least those that began learning diving with Bonham, owned a Minox, either by itself or as a subsidiary to their 35 mm. And of course it was much cheaper, both camera and case.

  “But why are you going to Grand Bank to test it?” Grant asked.

  Bonham grinned. “Because a rich guy I know is stayin there. And if it works, he wants to buy one right away; that one. Camera and all.” He seemed to pause, rather than to finish.

  Grand Bank Island was a small coral and sand atoll located at the very southern tip of the Bahamas, about halfway between Greater Inagua and the Caicos a hundred miles to the southeast. That put it only another hundred miles from both Mouchoir Bank and the Silver Shoals. Shaped rather like an exclamation point, it possessed one town at its wider end and a deep lagoon at the other where several ancient galleons were reputed to have sunk although so far nobody had ever found any trace of them. It was three miles long, was covered with brush and a few palms and pines, was hotter than hell, and had one road which ran from the town, a wide-open free port under the Bahamas Commission, to its one moderately luxurious hotel which was situated on the lagoon. It had no air strip and could be flown to only by a flying boat service which landed on the lagoon. Grant had never seen it but he had read about it in several treasure hunting—diving books.

  “But that’s not the only reason,” Bonham went on finally. He paused again, and in the breeze that had dried them rubbed a huge hand lightly over his vast expanse of hairy stomach. “See, there’s this great two-masted schooner just been put up for sale in Kingston a few months ago. Sleeps six plus two crew, sixty-eight feet overall. The Naiad.” He paused still again, and tried another tack. “See, I taught this rich guy—Sam Finer is his name—to dive last year when he was stayin in one of the big beach hotels here in Ganado Bay. And he fell madly in love with diving. So much that he’s thinkin of puttin money into my business, just to have a good boat available for him whenever he wants to go on divin trips.”

  It turned out to be a lot more complex than that as Bonham went on explaining, but the essential point in his trip to Grand Bank was to see Sam Finer about the schooner. Finer, who was not Jewish but a stocky little German (though that made no difference at all to Bonham), was from Milwaukee where he owned two good-paying bars as well as three tavern-hotel-fishing resorts up in northern Wisconsin. He spent his summers fishing in his own resorts and drinking in his own taverns, and he would eventually like to find something of the same sort in the Caribbean to go into, where he could spend his winters diving. Behind the bars and the resorts was something else about stone quarries both for cement and dressed stone which he owned. Anyway, he was willing—or just about willing—to put up $10,000 to go into Bonham’s business here. However, as everybody concerned knew, $10,000 wasn’t enough to buy and fix up a good boat big enough for two-and three-week diving cruises between islands. So in this connection, Bonham had come up with something else.

  Grant thought he had never seen such unconscious hunger on anyone’s face as appeared on Bonham’s big mug when he digressed a moment to talk about the schooner before going on to his ‘something else’ he had ‘come up with’. Obviously it had to be totally unconscious hunger, or Bonham would have hidden it.

  The something else was a potential partner named Frankie Orloffski. Bonham it turned out had been born and raised on the South Jersey Shore where he had sailed and fished all his life before becoming a skindiver after the war, and on a visit home to see his mother (a peculiar look came over his big tough mug when he mentioned his mother, whom he capitalized with his voice) he had met this Polack guy who owned a sporting goods and diving shop in Cape May. Orloffski also owned a thirty-eight-foot Bermuda cutter with which he was trying to build up a business of diving cruises, but it was tough sledding because even cruising as far south as Hatteras (which was really outside his comfortable range) the water was cold and murky, ugly diving water. Orloffski, when Bonham met him, was wanting to move south, maybe to Miami. Bonham, who had spent two years trying the same thing in Miami, was able to tell him the Atlantic waters off Miami were not really much better than Orloffski’s own, and suggested they might go in together in Ganado Bay, which was practically virgin territory compared to Miami or the Keys. They would have no competition, the single-master would make a good short cruise boat as well as a fine work boat for real underwater jobs, and if they could only swing the schooner through Sam Finer coming in on it they could cruise the Caymans and even beat up the Windward Channel to cruise the Inaguas, Grand Bank and the Silver Shoals, all really virgin territory. It would be the biggest charter thing on this island.

  Bonham would put in his two small boats, all his gear, his building, his big compressors (the purchase and transportation of which was his biggest single investment, worth almost as much as the cutter), and last but not least his knowhow, the good will he had accrued here, and his already growing business.

  Frankie Orloffski would put in his Bermuda cutter, and a minimum of $6,000 for running capital from the proceeds of the sale of his sports shop.

  Hearing such knowledgeable business words and phrases come out of the mouth of the big diver made Grant feel distinctly peculiar, as if somehow he had not gotten himself outside the doors of Gibson & Kline after all.

  Bonham had arranged for Orloffski to meet Sam Finer in New York when Sam was on a business trip and now Orloffski and his wife (his girl really; since he was only living with her) were going to be in Grand Bank too for a few days spearfishing at the same time as Sam (and his wife), and they could all talk business over the bar. Apparently Sam and Orloffski had hit it off together in their New York meeting. The trip would be expensive for both Bonham and Orloffski, but Bonham had high hopes of them swinging the deal with Finer for the schooner.

  “Of course, that won’t take care of it all. We’ll have to mortgage to get the schooner going. But at least we’ll have it then. A year, two at the most, should pay it out in full.”

  Again that greedy, almost insane look of totally unconscious hunger—which would brook no interference, allow no stopping anywhere short of the goal: The Schooner—came over Bonham’s cloudlike countenance.

  He began to talk about it again. He had gone over her pretty carefully where they had her moored out at Sanderson’s near Port Royal on the spit. Had flown down to Kingston especially for that. She had some bad dryrot forward starboard against the stem which might entail reenforcing the bowsprit or replacing it, and some of the deck planking was going bad near the stern, but she was in pretty good shape—very good shape, for a ship that had been owned by an oil company to take out executive weekend sailors. Of course she would have to be pulled and her hull gone over completely. There would be a good bit of yardwork to pay for. But . . . “Do you know what I could do with a boat like that?” he said almost viciously after a pause, staring pale-eyed off across the never-quite-quiet sea. “I could—I’d be safe the rest of my life. Nobody could touch me. If I owned a boat like that. I hate companies. All they do is destroy. Destroy all the old ways and the old things. Destroy, and call it progress. They want to standardize everything and everything that aint standardized they don’t know how to handle. They gave her a very bad captain. A real bum. I know him. What did they care? They didn’t love her, all they wanted was to take their fat asses out (with a captain to sail her) and playlike they’us sailors ridin the bounding main. Impress a client now and then to close a deal.” He turned to stare flateyed at Grant. “He didn’t take care of her at all. There was no need for her to be in that kind of shape. But I’m sure her hull is sound.”

  Grant didn’t say anything. What was there for him to say? He knew next to nothing about sailing.

  What a crazy f
uckedup world we live in! he thought suddenly. Four men, four men from such widely separated and over-industrialized places as New York, New Jersey, Indianapolis Indiana and Milwaukee Wisconsin all converging on a tiny primitive grease spot of an island in the Caribbean Sea and why? To escape for a few days from the fettering conditions of their highly organized, boring lives—in the once primitive but now highly sophisticated sport of spearing fish. And while doing this, they would be discussing and planning ways to make money by bringing other people to it and destroying the very thing they sought there. And behind their trip, behind each pilot and hostess who would be bringing them there, there stood the ranked rows of bureaucratic workers, stewards, clerks, handling tickets in triplicate, numbered series of baggage checks to protect their luggage, weights and fuel allowances and tonnages— all things they all hated, but without which they would be unable even to get to their primitive island. And behind these, all the planning boards, engineering boards, air traffic control, the towermen, the radiomen—almost all of whom would never make the money to be able to afford such a trip themselves—working away their bureaucratized lives to get the four men there.

  And lastly, most amorphous of all because largest of all, Government. Which none of them liked either, and were all trying to escape (but which itself allowed them their very opportunity to escape. “But, mind you, for a few days only!”), except that how can you escape from, or even dislike, something you cannot see, or perceive with any of your other senses. Shades of Frankie Aldane and his Harvard lawyer friend!

  He was rudely awakened from this pretty pointless revery by Bonham.

  “You ever do any free diving?”

  “Well, you know. Not very much. Only a very little bit, quite close to shore, in a lake.”

  “I thought maybe not. Well, you see, we’re not taking any equipment over with us. It’d cost too much overweight. And anyway, we’d have to take a portable compressor since there’s no facilities for refillin tanks.”

  “You’re not going to look for those galleons in the lagoon then?” Grant said, a little proud of his knowledge.

  “Are you kidding? Hell, it would take Ed Link and his Sea Diver II to even have a prayer of findin them, and even then it would be luck. If they’re there at all, I ain’t sure, they’re under about twenty feet of sand.”

  Bonham hitched himself up a little higher on the rail and reached for the gin bottle. “No, here’s what I was thinkin. Since we can’t afford to take equipment, and since you don’t know free diving, I thought if you’d be willing to pay my plane fare and my room over there, I would take you in hand while we’re there and teach you everything I know about free diving.”

  Grant thought once again—with a little worry—about his steadily mounting tab with Bonham, and then turned away to smother a smile. “Well, okay. I guess that’s fair enough,” he said looking off at the approaching docks. He knew he was being taken, but Bonham was obviously short of money, and he was really deeply excited about the prospect of the trip. Then suddenly there appeared before his eyes, like a color transparency overlaid on the view of the dockage, a memory picture of Lucky standing nude in the little Park Avenue ‘tenement’ apartment that first afternoon they had made love together, and the excitement about the trip fell down out of him leaving a sort of echoing hollow of emptiness and disinterest. He wished he had her here to go with him. The sun glints on the water, the fresh, salt sea air, the movement of the boat and the beautiful whisper of the wash all were suddenly unadventurous and unspecial.

  “It’ll only cost you about fifty bucks all told,” Bonham said.

  “I’m not a very good swimmer.”

  Bonham wrinkled his small nose in the large expanse of his face below the clear, flat eyes. “That don’t matter. With a snorkel and flippers anybody can stay in the water for hours.

  “Meanwhile, we can keep on goin out here the next few days, till it’s time to go. Same price. I know where there’s a good wreck—I mean a modern one—I can take you to tomorrow if you want to explore it.”

  Grant nodded and left it at that. But the truth was he didn’t feel like diving or doing anything with the thought of Lucky in his mind now. When Ali brought them deftly to dock in the messy tidewater, and they had climbed out onto the ancient wood jetty, he offered to take the diver over to the Yacht Club for a few blasts of gin.

  But Bonham shook his head. “No, I think I’ll stick around here.” He was already hauling in on the line to the plastic dinghy to get at the fish. Native workers on the tottery old dock came crowding around to look at the catch. “Anyway, after last night,” he said looking up from the fish with his bent-jawed incredibly sanguinary grin, “I got to get home tonight and see my little old lady.” He had not, Grant remembered suddenly, appeared to be the least bit hungover. He had already begun gutting the fish.

  “I’ll have Ali to run you up the hill,” he called. “But first you got to pick your fish you want”

  The Jamaican dock workers, all fiddling around with some small boat or other, had by now crowded up around him until their bare, greedy-looking toes were almost touching the fish, and Bonham suddenly let loose on them that thunderous voice Grant had always suspected him of having. “GO ON! GIT BACK AWAY FROM THERE, YOU BASTARDS, GODDAMN IT!” he bellowed at them, gesturing with the knife. The crowd moved back a reluctant two feet, grinning.

  Grant, who was always overly polite to Negroes, was embarrassed but the crowd itself didn’t seem to mind at all.

  “Here, come on, Grant! Before these buggers rob me blind.” But when Grant chose two of the biggest grouper to go with his own small one, Bonham shook his head and began instructing him about fish. “Those two there are mangrove snapper,” he said pointing with the knife to the two already gutted fish; “they’re the best in the batch, take them.” Beside them he laid Grant’s now gutted grouper.

  “But I like grouper,” Grant protested.

  “Okay, take this medium-sized one. Instead of one of the snapper,” he added pointedly. “But not the big ones. They’re grainy.” He proceeded to gut the grouper.

  While he talked to Grant, the crowd had begun to edge forward again, and one long slender adolescent boy with appreciably visible ribs had come forward far enough to have one splayed foot on either side of the end fish in the line Bonham had laid out on the pier. “GODDAMN YOU, CYRIL, I SAID GIT BACK!” Bonham hollered, as the feet slowly came closer and closer together around the fish, and threw the knife which stuck in the wood pier six inches from the fish’s tail. Reluctantly the boy, his hands still behind his back and still grinning, moved back away.

  Grant had already moved away, still embarrassed. At the car he threw the three fish in the back, their iridescent colors now faded and gone as if they had dried up inward.

  As Ali climbed in behind the wheel, Grant looked back once and Bonham who had retrieved his knife, as if sensing the look, glanced up and grinned and waved the knife at him.

  Then they were grinding up the hill in the old station wagon.

  Grant the hunter was coming home with his catch. But he would rather have taken a beating than go back to that goddamned unhappy miserable but beautiful villa where he had to go, even with the fish.

  Down below on the dock, Bonham watched them thoughtfully until they were out of sight.

  8

  THE EXQUISITELY HONED knife cut into the last fish, at the vent, easily and pleasurably and Bonham idly watched his hands go expertly, knowledgeably and delicately about their work as if his mind had nothing to do with it. He loved his knife and always sharpened it himself, never allowed anybody else to touch it.

  The knife slid up the exact center of the belly to the chin as soft and easy as if moving through water, or into a cunt, and the slippery, slightly sticky guts slithered out on the dock like prisoners released from confinement. This one had been eatin right good. Four completely whole shiner minnows could be seen through the thin belly membrane. Bonham slit the membrane and shucked them out. One of the
m was still alive. Laughing, Bonham showed it to the Negroes, who laughed too, and tossed it back in the water. “Lucky,” he called. “He day no come up.”

  Automatically his fingers probed around inside the cavity making sure everything was out. Then, pulling them out clean, right up to the chin, he sliced all the guts off neatly at the gill. In fact his mind was not on what his hands were doing. It was on Ron Grant.

  As he resharpened the knife on the big soft-Arkansas oilstone, he whistled inaudibly under his breath some idiot tune.

  You didn’t find a good easy touch like that every day in the year. Most of them who got passionate about diving didn’t have the money to do more than take a complete pool checkout and go out a couple times. And the ones who had money never got interested. In his four years in Jamaica, Grant was only the third. Sam Finer had been the second. Last year. Then, this year, Grant.

  He had been sittin in the shop with his feet up on the desk. There was some rocknroll on the radio and he listened to it picking his teeth, feeling the little wood instrument slide stealthily between two of his ivories searching meat. He had sensed rather than seen the shadow fall upon the open door up front, and sat up immediately and began studyin some regulator sales diagrams which lay on the desk for that express purpose. He really knew them by heart. Anyway regulators weren’t all that much different from each other once you understood them except maybe the Northhill which only had one adjustable part compared to the eight to seventeen of the others.

  She was a tall broad, fairly, with her hair cut short around her ears and back of her neck. Light behind her couldn’t see her face. Not a bad corpus, and she didn’t have any slip on. Kind of light in the tits department. And she walked funny; lumpish. Then he got up and she turned and he saw her face and saw that she was old, fifty-three, fifty-five. And there was something else. He at once didn’t like it. Smile—prissy; and highly self-conscious. Pinched in at the corners to make two sort of self-righteous jowls. Was there a make there? Maybe; it was too soon to tell. But she was old enough he didn’t really care.