by James Jones
Angry over the attitude of Carol Abernathy, angry over how much he was spending on this trip, angry over the free-diving lessons Bonham had promised but wasn’t giving, he swam around the area and near the boat, saw and explored his first sea hare which he had read of but never seen and which looked like nothing so much as limp pie dough folded into a tart, watching with a kind of awed distaste the brown ink that spilled from its brown interior as his poking speartip tore it open, practiced diving down to the sand or the sea grass and holding his breath, until bored to death he began to expand his circles and move away from the boat. When he did, he saw out at the extreme limit of his visibility Orloffski going after a fish, and swam over that way.
The big Polack had found a small thinly growing patch of coral. A fishstringer was tied to his bikini and on it were several small parrotfish, none of them a foot long. As Grant swam up, he went after another one. The man who looked like a pro football guard went after these small creatures with the same viciousness with which Grant had seen Bonham go after larger fish, only more so. With brutal, animal, totally selfish singlemindedness he dived down on another little parrotfish as Grant watched, and speared it just as it started to run. He now had six. Grant waved to him and swam off, back to his boring round. He didn’t have the heart to shoot the dumb, adenoidal-looking little fish, and wondered if he was weak. Mostly as he dove down and lay on the grass or sand holding his breath, he thought about Cathie Finer, and about how strange it was that after knowing her that one time and then never seeing her again in New York, he should meet her again in Godforsaken Grand Bank Island in the lower Bahamas, where her new husband was perhaps about to go into the schooner business with his new friend and diving teacher. Thinking of Cathie also brought him back to thinking wistfully of Lucky. He wondered if Cathie knew her? When he heard Bonham yelling in his full bull voice from the boat, he motioned to Orloffski who was still further out, and swam back to it.
It turned out the camera was busted. Not really busted, but the push-and-pull cocking mechanism which William had designed and built for it was not functioning properly and had gotten worse and worse until they could no longer cock the camera. Bonham had called them so they could go back in and he and William could work on it for tomorrow. The usually impassive Bonham looked highly irritable, and when Orloffski swam up with his string of little parrot fish and made as if to pass them up, he bawled, “What the hell are you doing with those goddamn things?”
“I hadda have somethin to do to pass the fucking time,” Orloffski said in his brutal way.
“Then throw them the goddam hell away!” said Bonham. “What do you want me to do with them?”
“Don’t give me orders. Maybe some of the niggers’ll want them,” Orloffski said bluntly, and instead threw them into the boat..
Treading water as he watched this small bucking of heads, Grant noticed something that he had observed before but never really noted: he had never heard Bonham use the word ‘fuck’ in any one of its many forms. He used it a lot himself, and so did most of the people in his more or less sophisticated world, though not with the totally vulgar brutality of Orloffski, and you would have thought Bonham would use it too. Saying nothing—and doing nothing, except to note that Sam Finer was carefully studying Orloffski with his rock-hard eyes —he climbed up into the boat.
“Go on ahead. I’ll swim back,” Orloffski said. “Probably won’t see nothin but it won’t hurt to look. Throw me your stringer.” Bonham tossed it to him.
The boat began to move away from him, and Grant watched his head get smaller and smaller behind them until it disappeared. They were pretty close to a mile from shore, and he would not have liked to stay there like that, without even a companion, to swim back alone. Even though the depth was only fifteen feet a shark or two could come cruising by any time. It didn’t seem to bother Orloffski. When he reached his room, he showered to wash all the dried salt off him and lay down on his one of the twin beds and immediately fell sound asleep.
It was while Grant was asleep, when Bonham was returning from William’s room to wash his grimy hands after working with William on the camera case, that Carol Abernathy stuck her head out cautiously from the door of her own room and stopped him in the dim hall.
“I want to talk to you a minute, Al, if I may.”
Bonham stopped and stared down at her anxious, darkeyed, and now-conspiratorial face. He had had enough trouble today already, with the damned camera not working. “All right, Mrs. Abernathy. What is it?”
“Come and walk over to the dining room with me.” She moved her head toward the next door. “Ron is sleeping.” She was already dressed for dinner in a flowered print frock.
Bonham took a moment to decide. He hadn’t been too upset by her so obvious dislike of him today on the plane, but it certainly hadn’t made things any pleasanter. “Okay.”
“I expect you’ve been wondering why I acted so strangely to you today on the plane,” she said as they came out into the trellised walkway. It was almost dark now. Soon the manager and one houseboy would be starting up the big outdoor gasoline-driven auxiliary generator in order to carry all the extra room, hall and outdoor walkway lights. It would continue to chug noticeably amongst the insect noises all through the rest of the night until the last one went to bed, when the watchman would turn it off till the next night.
“Well, no. Not so much,” Bonham said. “It seemed sort of strange and sudden after the fun we’d all been having at the Yacht Club, though.”
She nodded, a fast, primly eager nod. “I had a very special reason.” She did not continue and waited, but Bonham would not respond.
“You see,” she went on finally with a sly look, leaning toward him, “I have reason to think that Ron might be thinking about wanting to put some money into this schooner deal of yours.”
“You know about that?”
“Oh, everybody knows about that.”
“I don’t think they do,” Bonham said bluntly.
“Well, then, maybe Ron has told me. Does that matter?”
Bonham shook his head.
“Well, in any case, I think it would be a very good thing for Ron if he did do this. He could put up five thousand, even ten thousand dollars if he really wanted to, you know. And I think it would be good for him.”
“Then why—” Bonham began.
“Because that’s just the way he is,” Carol Abernathy said, obscurely. She went on. “He does just the opposite every time of what I want him to do. Therefore, my plan in being unkind and rude to you was all done in order to push him the other way. If Ron thinks I like you and would like to see him put money into your boat—”
Bonham’s nerves jangled at the way she called the big schooner a ‘boat’.
“—then he would automatically refuse to do it. On the other hand, if he thought I was dead set against you and your project, he would be much more inclined to want to do it with you.
“Now; don’t you think that was wise of me?”
“I guess so,” Bonham said. “But, tell me, why do you feel you want Ron to go into this thing with me? After all, you hardly know me.”
“For his health,” Carol Abernathy said. “For his health, and for his mental health. He works very hard at his plays, you know. It’s a very nervous-making, very wear-and-tearing kind of work. Because of that he needs all the pure relaxation he can get. I think your boat, and diving with you like that every so often, say three or four times a year, would be the best thing in the world for him!”
They had reached the door to the big diningroom-bar, and the voices of the others came out faintly to them through the screens where they stood among the mosquitoes. Suddenly the big generator began to chug and all the extra lights, all those not in the main building, went on all over.
“So if I pretend to be your ‘enemy’ now and again, every now and then, you’ll understand what my purpose is, won’t you?” Carol Abernathy said primly. “And you’ll know that I’m really on your side, and try
ing to help you with your deal.”
“I’ll think about it,” Bonham said, somehow perplexed. “You want me to go ahead and try to sell him on it?”
“Of course I do! Didn’t I just tell you! And now I’m going in and have a cocktail with that nice sweet Cathie.” Bonham watched her walk away from him with that hunchbacked, very selfsatisfied walk she sometimes got. Then he turned on his heel and went back to do his interrupted washing up. Grant was asleep on one of the beds as he came in, with only a towel thrown across his crotch and under it what was very obviously an enormous hard-on. Grinning, Bonham did his washing up before he waked him for dinner. When he touched the playwright gently on-the shoulder, Grant sat up like a flash, grabbed at the towel on his crotch and blushed. Bonham only laughed, roaring. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody! Come on and get dressed and let’s go eat.”
11
“WHERE IS EVERYBODY?” Grant said as he came back out of the bathroom. He had grabbed up his shorts and slacks and taken them in there with him and put them on in the bathroom.
“They’re all over at the bar. I been workin on that damned camera with William and came back to wash up.” Then Bonham grinned. “Did you have a good pee?”
Grant looked embarrassed, and Bonham roared again. Grant reached for his shirt. “I guess I better hurry up.”
“It aint nothin to be ashamed of,” Bonham said, and a sudden fleeting dark look which Grant did not understand crossed his face.
“Has Ca—Has Mrs. Abernathy gone over yet?”
“Yeah. She’s already there. She seems to have taken quite a shine to Cathie Finer.”
Grant put on his shirt and a pair of rope-soled espadrilles. “I noticed that. Well, maybe it’ll be good for her. Come on, let’s go.”
They walked down the hall as far as the door outside in a sort of cautious silence. “What’s the matter with her?” Bonham said finally. “Is she some kind of nuts or something?”
“Well,” Grant said, “no. I mean, not the kind of nuts you’d have to lock up or anything. Or dangerous. She’s highly neurotic though, I think.”
“Where I come from somebody would up and knock her on her ass,” Bonham said unequivocally.
“It might do her some good. Then again, it might not do her any good at all. At least with Cathie Finer here she’ll have somebody to talk to. Wanda Lou’s not much of a talker.”
“The hell she’s not!” Bonham said.
“I mean, she talks. But she doesn’t say much of anything.”
“That’s fer damn sure,” Bonham growled.
“You seem to be having your troubles with her husband, too,” Grant said with a slight smile.
Bonham’s face looked suddenly weary, stoically weary. “Well, he’s got that cutter of his which we could sure use. And when he sells the building where he had his sports shop up in Jersey, he’ll have some money to put in. I just hope we can get old Sam to go for the schooner deal. I think we can get her for seven or eight thousand. But she’ll need a good bit of yard work.”
“What does he say about it?” Grant said casually.
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet. We’re going to talk to him tonight.”
“But he knows about it?”
“Yeah, he knows about it. You wouldn’t like to put some money in it yourself, would you?” Bonham asked, rather heavily Grant thought.
They had been walking along the walkway, an uncovered one now, between the widely spaced lights and between them you could see the star-studded sky, each star gleaming like a lightbulb in the clear, absolutely cloudless tropic canopy. Mosquitoes didn’t much bother Grant, and he had been enjoying it, the air smelling of sea, the insect noises in the slight breeze, the faint chugging of the electric generator off somewhere. Now he was suddenly startled, shocked even. He had been expecting this question to come, sometime, but now that it had he was still startled.
“Who, me? No, no; no, no. I haven’t got that kind of money. Shit, I wish I had.”
“As a part owner, you’d get all your diving cruises and trips free. Say three or four a year. Ten days. Or two weeks. We could cruise up here, cruise to Tortuga in Haiti, cruise to the Caymans, cruise to Cozumel and Yucatan even. Be a lot of fun. Lot of diving.”
“I don’t have that kind of money,” Grant said quickly. “It sounds great, but I don’t have that kind of money at all.”
“Wouldn’t have to put in as much as Finer. Say three thousand. Even two thousand. For starters. Well, think about it. We’ll talk about it later.”
They had reached the screendoor to the main building’s porch. Far inside, in the dim bar with its lights gleaming on local pine paneling, they could see the others, and a faint murmur of talk and laughter and glasses clinking came out to them. It sounded good, happy, as if they two were about to enter a group of people with no problems who had nothing to do but enjoy themselves and life. Bonham must have been trapped by the same illusion. He stopped with his big hand on the door handle and took a very deep breath, which he then let out in a long slow sigh. It seemed to take a full minute for him to complete his exhale. “Meantime,” he said, his eyes taking on a really fierce, ferocious look, “I’m gonna eat! And drink!” He went in.
Grant followed. It was maybe another full hour before they sat down to dinner, and during that time they all except for Carol Abernathy put away an enormous amount of booze. The manager was entertaining, since it was the first night, and the drinks were all on the house. He was a heavy-drinking, half-English, half-white-Jamaican man with a penchant for telling very good, mildly dirty stories which no one had ever heard before, in a very King’s English voice. He had known Bonham, Grointon and Raoul the pilot for years, and had built his hotel here all by himself and was in fact more than half owner of it. He liked to talk about diving and listen to diving stories but had never done any of it and did not, he said, ever intend to. Sam Finer on the other hand could not talk about anything else except diving, and his overwhelming passion for it earned him a good deal of razzing from the others. His admiration and hero-worship for Bonham was even greater than Grant’s.
The drinks flowed freely, since the black barman had received instructions from the manager to keep all glasses filled, and when they went to dinner finally they were all except for Carol Abernathy more than a little pissed—as the British manager liked to say. “I’m pissed!” he said. The dinner was free too, anyway, since it was composed solely of seafood which they had caught themselves, and the manager as host was serving a very good white wine, a Muscadet which he imported himself via Nassau from Europe for his guests, and which, being served freely also, did not allow the ingestion of food to sober anybody up. By the time dinner was over they were all except for Carol Abernathy even more pissed than before it started. “More pissed!” the manager hollered. Finer and Orloffski had taken several big crawfish, or langouste as they were getting to be called more and more, which was served first in a Bahamian recipe with a very hot sauce. After that there were high-piled platters of batter-fried fish—grouper, snapper, hogfish, rockfish—enough to feed a small army. Finer and ‘Mo’ Orloffski, as he liked to hear himself called, had taken it all that morning.
Grointon and Raoul the pilot had made a point of coming into the bar much later, only a few minutes before dinner was served, and would have sat at a table by themselves had not the manager and Bonham invited them to join the larger group.
Grant, who had already been drunk once today, as had Bonham, did not know just when Carol Abernathy went to bed. All he knew was that suddenly he looked up and found she had gone; as had Orloffski and his loudmouth girlfriend, not intending to waste any more goddam valuable sacktime, as Orloffski so handsomely put it; he could imagine their stablelike sex life. Grointon and Raoul were just in the process of leaving, Bonham and Sam Finer were down at the far end of the room talking business in low voices, and he himself was sitting over coffee with Cathie Finer who was a little drunk too and the manager, who was very drunk. The ma
nager was just on the point of excusing himself sleepily to go to bed, which he did, and then cautiously got up and stiff and erect as the Guards Officer he said he once was, marched carefully from the room. Grant and Cathie were left alone.
“Thanks for this afternoon,” she said in a quiet voice with a small smile.
“Are you kidding?” Grant asked. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. Not if I could possibly help it.”
“I know that. But when they told us you were coming, and I knew you didn’t know I was here, I was afraid when you saw me that you might say something or let something out, just out of surprise.”
Grant shook his head with stubborn drunken bonhommie. “Bonham told me that Finer had recently married a good-looking New York model. But of course I didn’t connect it with you, or think I might have known you. It’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, it’s funny. Meeting down here like this.
“I like your husband,” he added gallantly, although the truth was he didn’t know Sam Finer well enough yet to like him or not.
Cathie Finer looked straight at him soberly for a moment before she answered. “He’s a nice man, Sam. And he’s worth a lot of money. He’s kind of crude maybe, by uh by New York standards; but underneath that he’s a very nice man. And he needs me,” she added simply.
“Well good for you,” Grant said. For no reason he could feel a kind of twisting gripe inside himself. He had never really known her, just that one long weekend together. He had never tried to explore her. Of course, she had probably changed some too in the past two years.
“God only knows why he needs me,” Cathie Finer said. “But he says he does. And after thirty-two, modeling gets to be slimmer and slimmer. And slimmer. Unless you’re a Dorian Leigh or somebody and can open up your own business.” She smiled. “He doesn’t step out on me, and I don’t step out on him. See, Sam’s a very jealous man. Anyway I wanted to thank you.”
“Hell.” Grant flushed. “Forget it.”