by James Jones
But emotionally, it made him think of something quite else. When he was five years old his father had tried to teach him to swim in a swimming pool by putting a float on his back and pulling him out into the water. He was all right as long as he could stand on the step, or hold onto the ledge on the side, but the moment that his arms and legs, moving in the water, seeking, could find no solid material to support him he began to scream, literally scream, with rage and fear. It was sheer blind animal cowardice and panic. No amount of explanation or aid by his father could change it. That was the way he felt now, and he tried hard to swallow it, put it down, down there somewhere in the region of his belly, of his trained abdominal muscles, where he might possibly control it. What in the name of God really, was he doing here? Lucky was right.
It had all begun auspiciously enough. Heroically, even picturesquely. The bridge here crossed a complex of shallow mangrove swamps, then just as it hit the deeper river channel bent left in a long sweeping curve inland and along the shore to cross the river—a curve the car had failed to make. The big mobile crane, with its huge additional truck of extra equipment and weights, could only be utilized by positioning it on the bridge itself, and it took up a good three feet more than half the roadway. This automatically required a cordon of local police constables to stop highway traffic a good distance off from the work area and then filter the cars one at a time through the narrow space remaining. That already made the whole affair something of an occasion, a lark. Many of the cars preferred to pull off the long bridge, park, walk back and watch. Many other cars, knowing beforehand of the big flap coming, had driven out from town to watch. So there was quite a considerable crowd hanging over the bridge balustrade or milling around.
Before this audience Bonham directed the positioning of the big crane, after calculating as best he could from the hole in the balustrade the arc of fall the car had taken. A diving dinghy for them to dress out in and dive from, was stationed out in the stream, attached by two hawsers to bridge supports to keep it in position. From it a heavy anchorline would be dropped to where Bonham thought the car was. A Jamaican boatman tended the boat. Orloffski would tend for the divers. Bonham’s authority in all of this was immense, formidable. Even police inspectors took orders from him. Then they two were dressing out in rubber wet suits because of the chill river water, and then the rest of the gear, under the eyes of the goggling crowd up above.
They had ridden out with their gear in the constabulary’s largest police van with the Chief Inspector in charge of the job. The five of them: himself, Bonham, Orloffski, Doug and Wanda Lou. Lucky and Letta Bonham had chosen to stay at home. On the way Bonham had hauled out a bottle of gin under the eyes of the Chief Inspector, helped himself to a large belt of it, and handed it to Grant. “And we’re gonna need at least one more of these snorts before we’re done with this,” he said grimly with his stormcloud smile; “make sure it’s in the boat.” Everybody drank, including Wanda Lou who was giggling and grinning like a kid on a picnic, the only one abstaining being the colored, rather prim Chief Inspector. But he made no comment. And it was like that with all the rest of it. Whatever they might all think of Bonham, publicly or privately, they needed him now. And he knew it. He was the only one who could do the work that must be done. And he could do it cheaper than any old-fashioned hardhat, diver from Kingston that they would have to fly up with his air hoses and compressors and special tender.
In the boat, after the anchorline had been placed to his satisfaction and they were dressed out, Bonham told Grant to go first. In the bow, pointed upstream, the water made a smooth heavy little curl against the forepeak, Grant noted. Bonham handed him a coil of light manila line with a heavy metal clip spliced expertly into one end, a loop of the rope spliced into itself at the other. “The water will be moving you. Look for the anchorline. If you miss it, don’t worry. Swim up to the surface to orient yourself in this muck, and swim back upstream to the stern to catch it. Go down it thirty feet and wait for me. I’ll be right behind you.”
Grant nodded. (He was afraid to speak.) He made a back entry and rolled over to look down, exhaling to make himself sink a little, and saw what he could only describe as a sea of gray skim milk, in which he appeared to be immersed. Then almost immediately on his right, so fast it surprised him, the anchorchain moved slowly past him in a stately way, a shadow-line which he grabbed for and caught. The catch brought him up short, like a running man grabbing a tree branch overhead. The line descended below him into nothingness, and when he looked up it ascended above him into nothingness. There was some light in the skim milk, but it did not seem to come from any particular direction and instead was omnipresent. That was when he first got scared. Only his bubbles mounting gave him a sense of direction. It took every ounce of will he possessed, each time, to haul himself another arm’s length down the chain in this cold soup. At thirty feet he stopped and waited, and that was where he still was. Where the hell was Bonham? ! Peering at the luminous bezel on his diving watch, he read that he had been down here a minute and twenty seconds. The luminosity of his watch bezel was as warm to him and as sane and as safe as a roaring fire in a fireplace. Where the fuck was Bonham?! What the fuck was he doing here?!
He remembered Lucky had told him practically the same thing about herself, last night as they were getting ready for bed, after they had gone to bed. They had both by now learned automatically to speak in whispers before the thin walls of the miserable little room. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here! I really don’t! You don’t want me! You don’t want a woman! You want some kind of a moveable beast, that you can hop on and fuck, after you’ve spent the day killing fish, and playing with sharks, and the nights getting drunk with your boy friends! Then you want to come home and get laid! I don’t like killing, and I don’t like dangerous games, or men who like danger, or sportsmen! And I don’t like you! I like people who are sensitive, and intelligent, and—and sensitive! . . . And you don’t want me! You want a Wanda Lou! That’s what you need!” He had lain, cold and silent, and heard her out. He wasn’t angry. He was miserable. Already miserable, before she started. Talk about sensitivity! How insensitive did she have to be not to know he was miserable, already as miserable as he could get? He hated the thought of the dive tomorrow. He didn’t want to make it. He would give anything not to make it. And it terrified him that he would have to force himself to go ahead and do it anyway. Of course he understood her tirade was only an attempt to relieve herself. After a while, after she quieted down finally, he tried to explain to her this thing about himself and idiot courage, lying with his hands clasped behind his head, his face white and cold, talking in the automatic whisper, staring at the idiot ceiling miserably. All his life he had been a coward. And just because of that, all his life he had had to force himself to do these things just to prove to himself that he wasn’t as much of a coward as he already knew he was. A ridiculous proposition. And it never worked. So that day after day it was to do over again. Pride, yes! Proud, he was. But not brave. Not courageous. That had been his life, day after day after day, all during the war. Could she imagine living like that day after day for four and a half years, except for one or two or three times when the bloodlust got up in him—what the scientists called “mob feeding pattern” when they referred to sharks, but preferred to label “heroism” when they talked of humans—could she imagine that? Some men were brave, and some just were not. He was one of the ones who weren’t. And he had to learn it. If he could, he had somehow to learn it.—“If you were a Cro-Magnon man, maybe!” Lucky cried out in the automatic whisper, “back then! But even they had their artists and their cave-painters, and their shamans!” And they killed their cripples. Warriors! Hunters! Warriors, warriors! In the war there were so many who had done so much more than he had. So many many. That was his memory of the war: so many many who had done so much more than he had.—“Every man I ever heard talk about the war said exactly the same thing!” Lucky yelled, still in the automatic whis
per. “I knew a boy at school—a man—who had the DSC, and he said the same damned thing! And with that same damned lugubrious look!” Did she think he wanted to make this dive? Finally she had said dully: “All right, you go! Go ahead! But I don’t have to! And I’m not going to! I’m not going out there and sit on some boat and suffer agonies! I’m going to stay at Bonham’s!—I’m going to stay at Bonham’s, and get drunk, by myself!” In the morning she had found she had an ally in Letta Bonham, who didn’t want to go either. For the same reasons. So the two of them, since it was Sunday and Letta Bonham’s day off from teaching school, stayed at the house, well fortified with a supply of beer.
Beside him a shadow appeared in the skim milk soup, and as it came closer—to half an arm’s length—he recognized it as Bonham. The big man came close to him, putting his mask almost against Grant’s, and studied his face. Grant pointed to his watch and grimaced inside his mask, and made a questioning gesture with his head toward the surface. Bonham frowned inside his own and made an irritable shrug. Some or other damn thing had detained him. Then motioning Grant to follow, he passed him, his coil of manila line over one arm, and started on down hand over hand on the chain. Grant followed, keeping him in sight just inside the circle of visibility, which here seemed to diminish to six or eight feet. It seemed to shrink some as they descended. From below Bonham stopped and glanced up at him once questioningly, a dim apparition, the mask appearing to be one huge Cyclopean eye in the middle of his great head. Grant had seen blind newts, eyeless, in caves in Kentucky. It must have been like this for their remote ancestors, when they began to lose their unneeded sight. The pervasive current had by now become such a part of his existence that his body automatically allowed for it in its movements, a sort of horizontal gravity along which at any moment he could fall.
Bonham wasted no time at all. On the bottom where the heavy anchor rested on what appeared to be mud-silted rock, he clipped his manila line onto a link of the anchorchain ten feet up, motioning Grant to watch. The other end with the loop he made a slipknot out of by pulling the rope back through the loop, and snugged this up tight over his right arm in his right armpit. Then motioning Grant to stay where he was, he took the coil of line in his left hand, let go of the chain and began paying the coil out with his right. Motionless except for his hands, his head toward Grant, he began to move away from Grant backwards, carried downstream by the current. Once, at just about the outer limit of Grant’s visibility, he stopped and swam off to his left, then back and off to his right, for all the world like the huge pendulum of some strange horizontal clock swinging in a horizontal gravity. Then he disappeared into the world of skim milk.
Grant watched the rope, hanging onto the chain with one arm, feeling very helpless, very much the neophyte. Twice more it did its pendulous arcing search, then Bonham reappeared in the murk, calmly recoiling the rope as he pulled himself back to the chain. By his gestures he communicated that the car was too far away to work on, that they would have to move the dinghy and anchorchain. Then, almost as an afterthought, he tapped Grant and motioned a question: did Grant want to go and do what he had done. Numbly, Grant nodded.
It was ridiculously easy. Lying relaxed in the water, he payed out on his line and watched Bonham and the anchorline fade from sight. He did not have to arc-search, since Bonham had indicated the wrecked car was at the very end of the manila line, and off to the left toward the bridge supports. When he reached the end of his line, with the slipknot tugging securely at his right armpit he swam thirty, thirty-five feet off to his left, and sure enough there it was, about six feet below him. It seemed sort of unbelievable. It had nosed down some into the layer of silt, but otherwise was sitting upright on its wheels on the slight slope. Two bright spiderwebs on the safety glass of the windshield showed where the people’s heads had struck. Staring at it, Grant stopped swimming; and immediately the current began to carry him away from it back to the center of his arc. When he swam a little, he stayed stationary; when he swam a lot, he moved back toward it. He could see what Bonham had meant about the impossibility of working from here. He stopped swimming and let himself be carried. Then he started coiling his line into his left hand. Soon Bonham and the anchorline appeared in the murk. When he was back onto the chain, Bonham motioned that they should go up. Using Bonham’s knowledge and techniques he had moved, blind, sixty feet downstream and back, thirty-five feet sideways and back, seen the car, and had expended very little energy. He was beginning to get cold.
Back on top in the boat Bonham gave instructions and then sat and relaxed, breathing deeply, while the boatman and two men on the bridge supports set about moving the boat to where he wanted it. Orloffski changed their tanks for them. They were using the large-size single tanks for this operation, because it was so shallow, but Bonham had brought along a lot of them. “No use having to worry about air too, while you’re working.”
In the sun-heated air and sunshine the wet suits very soon began to get uncomfortably warm. After splashing over the side to cool off and opening the zippers of the shirts, they climbed back into the boat and Bonham hauled out his gin bottle. “Well, what do you think of it? The dive?” he grinned. “Like it?”
“I can’t say I really like it,” Grant said cautiously, “with those people in there. Or even without them. But it seems ridiculously easy, the way you do it.”
“Experience, kid,” Bonham said and winked. He seemed very pleased with himself, very satisfied with his work, despite the tragic reason for it. “We’re in luck, actually,” he said. “The way it’s sitting I don’t think I’ll have to use a cutting torch on it. Some get so smashed up they look like accordions.” He paused and frowned strangely. “But I haven’t decided whether we ought to get the bodies out first or not. Well, we’ll have a look first. Hey!” he called to the boatman. “That’s about it! Right there! Let off easy now with that anchor!”
Up on the bridge the crowd appeared to have grown, when Grant looked. He waved up at Doug and Wanda Lou, who waggled a bottle back at him. “She set, boss,” the boatman said.—“Well?” Bonham said. “Shall we go?”
It would have been possible to say with some truthfulness that it was easier for Ron going down the second time, but it would not have been all the truth. He was prepared for certain things. He knew more about, and how to manipulate, the clip-on lines. He was prepared for the limited skimmilk visibility, ready to grab for the slow, stately moving anchorchain as it passed him. But the truth was, when Bonham said “Well? Shall we go?” like that he didn’t want to go down again. He had been down there, he had done it, he had seen the car. He wanted to rest on his laurels, and stay up here and not go back. But he could find no unabject way of stating this to Bonham, so silently and idiotically, he went.
This time the heavy anchor rested about twelve or fifteen feet from the car. They could just make out its bulk dimly through the murk as they hung on the chain. Bonham had judged well in his moving of the anchor. Also, it was almost directly upstream from the car now, thus reducing enormously the swimming arc necessary to move around at the ends of the clip lines. Side by side they calmly and easily drifted down on the car as they payed out on the lines. This time Bonham had clipped his line on much closer to the actual bottom, so that as they came alongside one on either side, drifting backward and peering over their shoulders, they were just level with the windows of the car.
The window on Grant’s side was closed. Peering in, he could see quite clearly the man and the girl, both black Jamaicans. Both had their heads thrown back and their mouths open with a look of sort of wondering stupefaction on their faces, but the man had slipped and slid down a little toward the girl while the girl had slid closer to her window. Grant could look straight down into her face. Her eyes were wide open; but he could not tell, further away, about the man. The girl’s long hair drifted slowly to and fro around her head as the water within the car moved to some rhythm of its own. And drifting in unison with it about a foot above the man’s head was a
n object which after several seconds Grant was able to make out as a pair of women’s panties. This struck him, in the words of some asshole poet or other, as “passing strange.” It was the only phrase for it. It was also somehow very sad. Looking down, he saw that the woman’s dress was clear up around her waist, and that from the waist down she was nude. He could see her navel and the black spiky hair on her vagina. Whether she had been like that before, or whether the crash and then the water rushing in had hiked it up, was impossible to tell.
It could not have been more than a few seconds that he stared at her through his facemask, breathing slowly to the sing of his regulator, but it seemed a long time. She certainly was dead. So was the man. A little fish of some kind darted out from somewhere as if anticipating an easy meal here, then as if sensing the presence of larger life than himself close by, darted away. Then Bonham, who had taken all this in from the other side, came swimming up over the top of the car on the end of his clip line. He had decided, he gestured, to take the bodies out of the car first, and he motioned Grant to go and get the hoisting- and signal-line which they had brought down with them this time and Bonham had clipped to the chain. Grant made a motion as of breaking the window on his side with something, but Bonham shook his head and held up a finger. The window on his side was already open, he informed Grant by pointing and making a cranking motion. And again he motioned for Grant to go get the line.