Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  “You were right, old buddy,” Bonham grinned after all the introductions had been made. When he grinned, it was as if some huge black ominous cloud of foreboding covered his forehead, eyes and eyebrows. “Your new girl sure is a looker.”

  “You ain’t just shittin!” Orloffski bellowed.

  Lucky looked again at all of it, everything, and at the people. So; such was her introduction to her man’s diving world. And she’d probably see a lot more of it. She pulled up the waist of her tight-fitting slacks cockily, stuck out her breasts in the sweater, and grinned. “Me? He’s been telling you about me? Well, how about a beer for the looker?”

  “Hot damn! Comin up!” shouted Orloffski.

  “You’ll have to excuse the way things are,” Bonham told her very gently as he led her across toward the kitchen. “We just got back from a trip a few days ago. Did Ron tell you? And they’re,” he nodded at Orloffski, “they’re staying with us a few days till they can get settled. Don’t usually look like this.”

  Grant had come back to GaBay at just the right time, he said after things had settled down and he had gotten them beers, because tomorrow they were going out on the deep reef for a dive. He had three new customers at one of the hotels. And not only that, they’d be good for at least three or four more days after that. Lucky sat silent and listened. Bonham had swept the regulator and its pieces into a bowl and set it on the beer-can-crowded bureau, freeing the table.

  “Fine. We’d like to go,” she with partial disbelief heard Ron saying. She had been under the impression that they were leaving for Kingston tomorrow. But first, he went on, they were going to have to do something to see about someplace to stay.

  “Why don’t we just go down and register in at one of the big hotels on the beach?” Lucky asked. All three men turned to stare at her.

  “They’re terribly expensive,” Bonham said.

  “Yeah, well. Yeah, mainly it’s because I’m trying to save money,” Ron said, and then grinned. “Largely because I owe this big son of a bitch so much already.”

  “That’s true, he does,” Bonham said with a smile. “What happened to Doug? Anyway.”

  Grant explained about Terry September. “He’ll be along in a couple of days. Maybe he’ll bring her with him.” Anyway, the first thing, the main thing, he went on, was to see about someplace for them to stay tonight. He certainly didn’t want to go down to the rich hotels on the beach, and them probably booked up anyway.

  Bonham was looking at Grant with some kind of a private, knowledgeable look that Lucky could not read. She watched him immediately sort of take over: He would have loved to put them up himself, he said, but they only had one guest room and the Orloffskis were in it. However, there was a friend of his—only just a few doors down the street—little Jamaican guy—who sometimes took in roomers (couples, he corrected himself), in his extra bedroom during the season.

  “It’s close to here?” Ron said, a little nervously she thought.

  “Right down the street.”

  “That sounds fine then. We’ll be close to here.” He sounded curiously guilty, Lucky thought.

  “Come on,” Bonham said. “Get yourself another beer, and you and me’ll walk down there right now.”

  “Won’t they be in bed already?”

  “Naw. Hell, no. They never go to bed this early.”

  Lucky watched them leave. With the two of them gone, the air of conspiracy she had felt before, disappeared. The two women got up from the bawling record-player and brought their beer over to the table. Orloffski helped her to another beer and said cheerfully in his brutal voice, “They’ll be back in a few minutes.” She noticed that whenever he sat down he acquired a considerable paunch on his totally hairless torso that he did not have when he was standing up.

  “So you come from New York, hunh?” Wanda Lou Orloffski said. “Me and Mo used to go up there to New York quite a few times when we lived in Jersey.”

  “Yeah, but we never seen the New York Lucky knows, I’m sure,” Orloffski grinned, and belched.

  Lucky smiled. You bet your sweet ass you didn’t, baby, she was thinking.

  Letta Bonham, who had never been off the island of Jamaica, let alone to New York, kept looking with a bright, childlike, very female attention from one to the other and said almost nothing. She was the only one of them all that Lucky decided she might be able to like.

  They had a very difficult time making a conversation until the two men returned.

  And Lucky found her distaste for the whole scene, the whole operation, growing even greater. She realized these three were only trying to make her feel at ease, as much at home as possible, but they were doing a very bad job of it. Something about her—she hated to use the word, but there was no other word for it, and maybe she didn’t hate it so much after all— something about her ‘class’ put them off balance and made them nervous. She could not make them feel at ease, either. She already actively detested Orloffski and ‘his’ Wanda Lou. And there was something in her—especially toward the man— that kept them at a great distance, and she couldn’t help it, and she was glad she couldn’t. What in the name of God could Ron be doing with people like this? When you haven’t been around insensitive members of the lower classes for such a long time, you tend to forget how crude and brutal and insensitive they and their lives are.

  She was immensely relieved when the two men came back from their room-hunting. Bonham slammed the screen door behind them with a curiously exuberant finality. And conspiracy came back into the room again.

  “Well, it’s all set!” Grant said cheerily. “We can have the room for a week if we want it.”

  “A week!” Lucky was unable not to exclaim.

  “Well, we won’t stay that long of course,” he said. “What I meant to say was we can have it for as many days as we want to stay.” He laughed suddenly, “Ha! We had to rout them out of bed after all! I figured we would.” His face was flushed, and he looked to Lucky as if he might have had a couple more drinks, maybe down there, and he sounded as if he enjoyed having waked the people up. Her own two beers had relieved the last remnants of her hangover considerably.

  “Well! Now that that’s all settled, what do you say we all wrap it up here and adjourn to the good old Neptune Bar to hoist a few?” This was Bonham.

  “Haw! Great idea!” the almost equally massive Orloffski shouted.

  “I don’t really think I can,” Lucky said. “We’ve had a pretty hectic day of it. I’m just beat.” She looked at Grant. “But Ron can go if he wants to.”

  “No, no! No, no! I’ll go with you,” he said hastily. “She’s right,” he said to Bonham. “We’ve both had it. We need some sleep.” He looked disappointed though, she thought.

  “Okay,” Bonham said. “Well, all you have to do is back your car up back down the street. It’s only three doors down. Then pull it right up into the yard.” He had sat back down at the table. Apparently if Grant was not going, none of them was going either. Because of the tab, no doubt, Lucky thought icily.

  The little homemade-looking house, almost a replica of Bonham’s, was completely darkened when Ron backed the big car past it. There was no curbing, no street gutters, as he pulled the car up into the grassless, bare dirt yard. Above their heads palm fronds clattered softly in a breeze, and some straggly flowered bushes gave off tropic scents to them in the warm humid tropic night. Everything felt strangely quiet. Ron had been given a key and he let them in, showing her the way and carrying her bag, and with dutiful meticulousness turning off all the lights behind them as they went.

  The little room was horrible. A three-quarter bed (that, she didn’t mind), an ugly badly de-silvering mirror, two flamboyant chipping plaster-of-paris statues from Woolworth’s or some local festival, a Woolworth rickety floorlamp, an armoire whose plywood doors would no longer come near to closing, an uncomfortable modern chair, that was all. What a place for a honeymoon. As she climbed into the bed beside him, she heard someone turn peevishly in be
d just beyond the thin wall. Instinctively, they talked in whispered tones.

  “Take that damned thing off, goddam it.”

  “I can’t, Ron. Not here. Didn’t you hear?”

  “Take it off anyway. You got to.” She did.

  “What in the name of God are you doing with people like that, Ron?”

  “They’re the people I have to go to to learn what I want to learn. I didn’t pick them. I told you this wasn’t going to be an easy thing. I probly shouldn’t have brought you down, my first idea to leave you in New York was probly right. But I missed you so. And I got scared. I got scared I might be untrue to you. You wouldn’t want that, would you? So soon?

  “Look, I know it’s horrible here. But it’s only a place to sleep. We won’t spend any time here. And we’ll only be here a few days.”

  “A few days!”

  “I want to make a few more dives with Bonham before I go. He’s really good. You just have to believe me. And I want to wait for Doug to come back. Look, I’ve got to go and tell my idiot ‘foster-mother’ that we’re going off to Kingston. And I want Doug to go with me. The old cunt is going to kick up an awful fuss. She thinks every young woman in the world is out after my ha-ha money. If Doug is with me, she won’t raise such a scene.”

  “Are you scared of her?”

  “No I’m not scared of her!—”

  “? Shhh.”

  “You know how you felt with your mother.”

  “I left.”

  “Well, I’m leaving too. But I want to do it as nice as possible. Don’t you see?”

  “All right.”

  “But don’t you?”

  “All right.”

  “I probably shouldn’t have brought you down. But I . just. couldn’t. help it. . .”

  She had curled up against him, her left leg over his left leg, and was rubbing her left breast into the angle of his half-open armpit. His kiss now was as deep as sanity. Maybe deeper, she thought as he shoved her back and scrambled over her.

  After they had made love—(God, she loved fucking, loved it so much it was almost enough, it almost was enough, it was enough, most of the time, the weight on you pressing you down making you helpless holding you with your legs wide open, that big red angry thing filling you up and moving in you [they were all big when they were inside of you, unless they were actively deformed], slowly at first and then the increasing rhythm, increasing tension, the red face and bared teeth and crossed unfocused eyes as they came, came in you, you owned them then, at that moment they belonged to you)— after they had made love, she lay awake a long time thinking.

  What was it Ron and Bonham could have been conspiring about? And what was all this coy tickly business about renting a cheap room? She knew better than that. Something cold suddenly ran all over her.

  Could it be that Ron wasn’t straight with her after all? That he was holding something back from her all this time after all, like so many of the others, like all the others?

  A secret wife hidden away someplace? An alimony wife and alimony kids he couldn’t afford to give up to marry again? A lover or mistress he hadn’t told about, and didn’t want to give up? Was it this foster-mother who ran his life and wouldn’t let him?

  Jesus, a lone woman was so vulnerable.

  It was like an old bad dream coming back. How many possible situations were there? In her time she had been just about through the entire lot. He didn’t act like the kind of man who was dominated by his mother, his foster-mother. She had known one like that, too. Did this mother, this foster-mother hold that much power over him?

  Could it be, even, one of the other possibilities?

  One third sleeping, Lucky looked bleakly back over the whole long, long list of them in her life, suddenly half-smothered in real fright and jerked back awake. It stretched all the way back to the age of twenty-two when she had first come on to New York and the handsome society gynecologist—who wouldn’t even help her out with her first abortion after causing its necessity. Not one of them but who had lied to her about something.

  Even Raoul, who had told her he had a wife down there, and who was trying to get a divorce, had not told her the real dangerousness of his revolution activities. He had told her how they sat him naked on cakes of ice for hours, and how they had wired his teeth with electricity, but he had laughed about all that. And even under her questioning he would never admit that it could go so far that anybody would actually kill him. God! And all of them. All the others.

  No. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t. Not after the way he had been to her, the way they had been to each other all that time in New York. That had to be real. There couldn’t be any lie behind, underneath that. She had to believe in him. She just had to.

  So she did.

  She just would.

  Seeking warmth, she cuddled up and curled herself against him in the bed. In his sleep Grant moved away, and again she followed, curling up like a baby kitten blindly curling up against any warmth. Warmth. Warmth.

  She felt loose, at loose ends and out of place here with these people like Bonham. She had nothing really, no past experience of it, to judge by. She had always disliked sports. And ‘sportsmen’. And kept as far away from them as possible. There was something funny, sick about them, as if they did all these things because they didn’t like women.

  That Orloffski, for instance. Orloffski had made her think of somebody. In her senior year at Cornell she had gone with, been the girlfriend of, the Captain of the Football Team. For campus fame. For campus glory. And in that year, after losing her virginity—losing it? giving it away gladly!—the year before to a hometown non-college boy, she had had an affair with her football captain. Afterward he had gone on to play pro ball, and she had dropped him. For a year or two after that he had used to call her up in New York whenever his team was in town. He apparently couldn’t get her out of his mind, some kind of a challenge, although he was married by that time. But she had never gone out with him again, because he was a man who preferred the company of men to being with a woman. Being with a woman to him was essentially only something to talk about later with the fellows. You could even sense that in him, when he was with you. Like Orloffski. A Cornell graduate, he was still very much like Orloffski. He had been built exactly like Orloffski, in fact—except that he wasn’t hairless. He had, in fact, been very hairy. Her fingers remembered that. But that other, odd quality was there.

  What was it? It was not so much pro-male as it was anti-female. Or rather, it was pro-male. Super pro-male. Super-duper pro-male. But it wasn’t homosexual. Or not usually homosexual. Just the reverse, the type usually hated homosexuality with a fearful passion. But it was male. Male-to-male. Males together against the world. Shoulder-to-shoulder. Soldier-to-soldier. Male, male, male. Every-thing male. Everywhere male. Maybe it was only anti-female insofar as femininity encroached upon maleness. It fairly oozed out of Orloffski. It had oozed out of Tad. Tad Falker. God, she hadn’t thought of that name in so long. And Bonham had it too for that matter, as far as she could tell. The trouble with that was . . .

  Thick on the edge of sleep, an image kicked its way up into her head, squalling loudly. She tried to refine it and make it sayable, as she pressed her face against Grant’s armpit.

  It was like the Circle of Politique, she had learned so well during all the dreary, boring years of Political Science at Cornell. You could only go so far Right without becoming Left; and you could only go so far Left without becoming Right. The rabid extreme Right became Leftist; the rabid extreme Left became Rightist. The Clock Face of Politics. If 12 o’clock was extreme Right and 6 o’clock extreme Left, you could not pass above or below 9 or 3 without moving toward becoming your own opposite, what you hated, your enemy. And this pro-male, Masculinity thing was like that. The Circle of the Sexes. When you become more Masculine than Masculine, you could only become, move toward Feminine. You simply couldn’t go on becoming more and more Masculine than before. When you became more Masculine than no
rmal, than 9 o’clock, you automatically came closer and closer to the Feminine. There just wasn’t anywhere else to go. Whether you liked it or not. So they were all fags together, in a totally non-fag non-sexual physical way. With this clarified in her mind, when she thought of Orloffski it stuck out all over him. His physical vanity, his preoccupation with his own beauty (beauty?!), his posing, his preening, his instinctive dislike of women. But my God, did Ron have that problem too? And if he did, what could she do about it? Delicately, she slipped out the tip of her tongue, touched it lightly to the tips of the long hairs of his armpit, tucked it back in, and slept. Grant had borrowed an alarm clock from Bonham, and when he woke her at seventy-thirty it was as if she had been used to getting up that early all her adult life.

  It was a beautiful day. With the flat, glinting, silent sea stretching hotly away and away like a table, the hot, beating tropic sun in the small breeze, the little boat’s icechest full of beer and scotch, the multiple picnic lunch the hotel had prepared, it couldn’t have been a more beautiful day. The wives of Bonham’s three new clients were all hip, chic New Yorker types Lucky could talk to and be at ease with, and with the six of them plus herself and Ron, the two Orloffskis, Bonham and Ali, the little boat was crowded with gaiety and laughter.