Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  “Man, I was never so glad to get a fresh breath of air,” Jim laughed.

  “Me either,” Ron said. “But you were down about twice as long as I was. I never could have stayed down that long.”

  “Buddy, you stayed down long enough,” Jim said. By the time they had got air, the jewfish had pretty much given up the fight. “One of the good things about them is they poop out fast.”

  Beside them Lucky had begun to cry. As the life had faded from the big fish so had all its colors faded too, as if the life itself were actually the color, and now it was only a piece of dead brown meat that stank of fish slime. “You’re bastards!” she cried suddenly. “All of you, bastards! What did you have to kill it for? It wasn’t bothering you! It was trying to get away! Bastards!”

  “Honey, honey,” Ron said soothingly. He put his arms around her. “It’s only a fish.”

  “Don’t think he don’t kill,” Grointon said mildly. “How do you think he eats?”

  “She almost fainted, when you guys hollered,” she heard Doug explaining to Ron. “She was scared. She thought there’d been an accident.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it!” she cried. “And as for you,” she said to Grointon, “what do I care whether he kills or not? You’re supposed to be men! Civilized men! Human beings! You’re not fish! Or are you?” But she was beginning to get herself stopped from the crying. “You might have gotten yourself killed,” she said to her husband. It was funny. Normally she didn’t think of him as ‘husband’.

  “Impossible,” Ron said, still holding her. “Honestly, I couldn’t possibly have. And look at all the fish we got. We got enough to feed the whole hotel for two or three days.”

  She was wiping her eyes on his bare shoulder now. “Let the fishermen get the fish,” she said, in a more subdued voice. “And buy them at the market. That’s what they’re for. They make their living that way. But no, you have to kill. It was beautiful, that fish. It was alive.”

  Jim Grointon was staring at her. “Men like to kill fish and game,” he said, and there was a strange, profoundly deep, totally icy quality in his voice. From Ron’s shoulder Lucky looked up at him fascinated. “They always have liked to kill fish and game. And I guess they always will. And women usually like them for it.”

  ”And, sometimes, they like to kill each other,” Ron said in an odd little voice. He, at least, understood what she meant, Lucky thought.

  “Yes. I guess,” Jim said. “But that’s what makes men. That’s what it is to be a man. That’s what a man needs to feel he is a man. I didn’t make the rules. I didn’t create this world. If I had, I’d probly have changed a lot of the things.”

  He seemed coldly furious. Lucky allowed Ron to sit her down on the port-side seat and accepted a beer. “Of course you’re absolutely right,” she said. “I was just upset. I thought somebody’d gotten hurt. Uh, incidentally, what would you have done if there hadn’t been anybody else on board but me?”

  Ron and Jim both stopped and looked at each other for a moment. Then both grinned. “I guess we’d have gone ahead and shot him anyway,” Ron said.

  “Oh, we could have got him killed some way or other,” Jim said. “In the water.” Then he smiled. “You don’t realize that you don’t get a chance at a fish that big every day.”

  “I guess that’s what upset me,” Lucky said. “He looked as big as a human being. And then I watched him trying so hard to breathe. And he rolled his eyes around at me as if asking me to help him.” She smiled at Grointon, why tell the oaf the truth? “That didn’t bother you,” she smiled, half asking.

  “No,” Grointon said.

  “Fish don’t feel,” Bonham said. She smiled at him too. She did not tell him what she wanted to say, That fish felt, why tell any of them the truth? Except Ron she’d tell. But nobody else: Their hunting was perverted. A fisherman’s wasn’t.

  “What do you think he’ll go?” Bonham said to Grointon.

  Grointon squinted at the jewfish. “I think he’ll go three hundred at least.”

  After that, she mainly watched them all, in silence, on the trip back home. It was soon clear why Bonham had pulled the fish up on the catamaran’s deck. Grointon towed a little plastic dinghy behind the boat and usually the fish they caught were kept in there, where the three fish Bonham had brought back earlier now were. But the enormous jewfish would have swamped the dinghy. So now it rode on the deck between them, and the four men kept looking at it from time to time. From time to time they talked about it affectionately, as if it were some kind of a goddamned friend, and they kept rehashing the story of the kill. She seemed, and felt, totally excluded.

  She felt the same way that night at dinner. Bonham ate with them at the hotel, and somehow amongst the four men she was a complete outsider. They talked, they laughed, they joked, but they left her out of everything, seemed almost to forget she was there. It was not that they were not polite, or that they actually turned their backs on her. And it was not that Bonham himself caused it, or even that Bonham’s advent caused it. But it was as if the four of them, being together, and being men, more: being spearfishermen (because even Doug was one in a small way), and having been on a successful hunt today, had developed instinctively some kind of a common feeling, a common personality, of which they believed that she could not be a part, or even understand. She did not mind it much, because she had had her evening nap and tender, deep, love-making session with Ron before cocktails. But it was hard to believe, sitting back and watching him with these other three men now, that this Ron was the same Ron who had loved her so well upstairs. He roared with the others, telling horribly terrifying stories about the war which they all laughed at. They guffawed, they slapped each other resoundingly on the back between drinks, they gave each other great ribcracking nudges with their elbows standing at the bar after dinner. The big fish had of course made a great to-do at the hotel and they kept congratulating each other on the taking of it, while expansively receiving the congratulations of the other clients. Of them all Jim Grointon was perhaps the quietest, but it was quite clear he was very definitely of the same persuasion. She suddenly remembered having been in London once with another lover, on a short trip, and he had taken her for a walk down Jermyn Street where he wanted to go to his shirtmakers and pick up some pipe tobacco. Jermyn Street, the “men’s street” of London: shirt makers, tailors, tobacconists, men’s hairdressers, men’s shoemakers, and of course the pubs. Everything for men. She saw one other woman, also looking very out of place, guilty almost like herself, in all the time she was there. She had felt the same way there in London then, as she felt now, here, tonight. She had hated men.

  She told him about it all afterwards, after they were alone and had gone up to their suite. But of course they were both quite a bit drunk by then, so probably she shouldn’t have.

  It was hard to explain to him, in the first place. Hard to explain to anybody. What did she really want to say? Brutality and insensitivity, was the upshot of it. Did men, when they got together in groups, have to become brutal and insensitive, to prove to each other they were manly? Did manliness and insensitivity have to go hand in hand? If so, it boded no good for the race or anybody. What kind of manliness was that? Not any kind she wanted.

  But it was more than that even. All this contemptuousness toward women, all this standing together in a block against the suffocating inroads of womenkind, this need to have a world apart that women could not enter, were incapable of understanding, all this had to come from a deep-seated dislike of women, a misogyny, that could only be the result of insecurity and lack of confidence.

  She didn’t like the way Bonham loved him so much. Was it only because she was jealous? Was it only that? She didn’t think so. But there was something strange and violent about Bonham. He was a violent man, even though he was an adept at covering it up. And only violence, something bad, a losing situation, could come from associating with him. And the same was probably true of Doug.

  When
she had said it all and finished, she found she still hadn’t said what she’d wanted to say.

  Her husband was looking at her with eyes that were having difficulty focusing, though he didn’t stagger at all. “Well, gee, honey, if I’d known you felt outside of everything, I’d have . . .” He made as if to put his arms around her.

  “No!” she cried. “Don’t do that! That doesn’t help anything! I’m trying to talk to you seriously. It’s not just Bonham. It’s you. I’m worried about you.”

  He had turned on his heel and sat down on the bed edge after she backed away from him. He sat there totally nude, his hands dangling between his knees, while she talked on. When she stopped he looked up at her, his eyes bright, his face an animal snarl almost, and his voice was the voice of a different person. What could have happened to him? In so short a time?

  “Okay. I’ll take it under advisement. I’ll think about it. But it’s my fuckin money. And if I want to put some of it into Bonham’s fuckin boat I’m fuckin damn well goin to. You fuckin got it?”

  Lucky had recoiled and was staring at him. She had never seen him like this. He was positively almost ravening, like an animal.

  “And while we’re on the subject of complaints, I’ve got a couple of complaints of my fuckin own. I’m the boss of this fuckin household, and I’m layin down a couple of rules. You stop flirting with that goddam fuckin Grointon—or I’ll push your goddam head in and his too. An’ the other one is that I’m not meetin any more of your goddam ex-boyfriends. Period. Jesus! I can’t stand shakin hands with the sons of bitches. I want to go wash my fuckin hands. It makes me sick in my stomach. I’m a very jealous man.”

  Lucky felt exactly as if she’d been slapped in the face, it even hurt up there, on her cheek, and her mind went totally blank. It was as if a block of hot, burning ice had formed all around her. She said, “You knew damned well you’d almost certainly meet Jacques here, when you came here. And as far as that goes you’ll probably meet a lot of others before your life is done. So you better get used to it,” she said coldly. “What would you have had me do, not even say hello to him?”

  Her husband grinned. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?” Then he laughed. “I want you to give me a list of every man you fucked. I want it tomorrow. That’s an order.” He giggled. “Then I’ll know who not to shake hands with. Christ, there may be a nuther fuckin dozen of ’em around here for all I know.”

  “Sweat it out,” Lucky heard herself say coldly. “You’ll never get it out of me, you son of a bitch.”

  “Aw, shut up and go to bed. Leave me alone.” And he stretched out on the bed and pulled the sheet up over him. Stiffly, like a person walking amongst unbroken eggs, she went around to her own side of the pushed-together double beds and got in and lay there, a stiff frozen block.

  “Shit, it’s like bein married to a goddam whore,” his pillow-muffled, stranger’s voice said, “for Christ’s sake.”

  “I never took any money,” she said coldly. Then she heard him move and added, before he could, “except for Raoul, and you know he was going to marry me.”

  “Aw, shut up and leave me alone.”

  “Gladly,” Lucky said. She had never felt so totally frozen up inside. He had deliberately hurt her in her most sensitive place. Deliberately. Or had it been deliberate? She lay in the bed thinking of what she could do to him. As she went off to sleep, finally, she remembered thinking it was their first real fight. As far as she cared, it could be the last, too.

  He woke her at four-thirty. He himself was still asleep, but he was moaning and gritting his teeth. He was rigid. His face was covered with sweat and his hands kept clenching and unclenching at his sides, while his feet jerked and made little fluttery motions every now and then.

  “Ron!” she said. “Ron!” and touched his shoulder. He sat bolt-upright in the bed, his eyes wild.

  “What is it? What is it?” she said.

  “Oh, that damned nightmare again,” he said in a muffled voice after a moment

  “About the fish?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think you’re crazy,” she whispered. Ron didn’t answer. “But you weren’t scared today. Were you?”

  “No. No,” he admitted. “No. I wasn’t scared today.”

  “Then what is it you’re brooding about so now?”

  “I guess it’s because I’m scared now,” he said. After a moment he lay back down, and then turning toward her put his hand lightly on her shoulder. After a moment, she covered his hand with hers. And after a while they made love and then lay clinging to each other in the darkness.

  25

  DAY THE NEXT MORNING came grey and damp, and the good weather had broken. The wind had shifted to south-southeast. Looking due south from the now cool porch of the Grand Hotel Crount, clouds—a heavy seldom-broken cloud layer with the slanting falling blue streaks of rain squalls scattered all along its length—stretched all the way to, stretched right on around, the sea’s horizon to the south and east. It darkened the high hills in the west. If the wind should freshen—and it did—Jim Grointon had already decided at eight o’clock to run his catamaran back around inside to the anchorage and not dive today. When the Grants came down for breakfast on the covered terrace at ten-thirty, the wind was already whipping the red and white checkered tablecloths and driving the less adventurous like Bradford Heath back inside, and Grointon and his boat had disappeared.

  At eleven it began to rain. Bonham appeared in a borrowed car soon after. He did not appear inclined to put the visit to the schooner off for a prettier, sunnier day so, piling in hastily to avoid the rain, into Bonham’s borrowed car and a hotel car which René loaned to Grant, the large, already slightly damp party pulled away from the hotel. No one of them seemed to have quite enough courage to tell Bonham they did not want to go.

  In one way only (because there was no diving) was it a good day to visit Bonham’s new pride and joy. In every other way it was not. But this did not seem to bother Bonham.

  The boat—the ship—had been hauled at a small yard not far from the Royal Yacht Club around on the inland side of the harbor. Bonham led them there in the cars, and then they all ran for the shelter of the boathouse—all, that is, except Bonham. He walked, slowly. The musical comedy writer and her husband, and the young analyst and his designer wife, all close friends of the Grants by now, were not sailors and therefore were not used to walking around fully clothed and drenched, even in a moderate rain. They spent the entire visit in the big, musty old shed and only looked out at the schooner, upright in its cradle in the rain, through the big open doors. Only Grant and Bonham seemed impervious to the rain. Grant seemed even to enjoy it, as if climbing the ladder to the slippery deck and getting soaking wet put him in some closer communion with spray-drenched sailors. Doug went with them on board, and tramped all around with them, but both his face and figure had the look of a wet angry cat. He had by now found himself a blonde goodlooking middleaged Frenchwoman, a refugee from Haiti staying at the hotel, whom he had brought along. This lady stayed in the shed with the New Yorkers, not looking happy at all. But Lucky Grant went with the sailors. Wearing sneakers without socks, shorts and a sleeveless jersey, with an old yellow sou’wester hat of Bonham’s pulled down on her head to protect her hair, she climbed around the boat with the others, inspecting the foremast, looking at the enormous mainmast and its rigging, inspecting the interior, and got as wet as they did clearly determined not to be called anything but a good sport.

  Grant could read it in her. It was strange but in these few days since they’d gotten married, caused by some occult alchemy of close warm wet sexuality, it was as if the two of them had actually become one personality, the two separate eyes in one head as it were, so that each knew at any given second exactly what the other felt or was thinking. Grant grinned his appreciation at her and she smiled back.

  The old ship—for it was a ship, once you got up on its deck and looked at the size of the main boom; it was not a ‘boat’—
was not very much to look at, except maybe to the eye of an expert. 68 feet long overall, it was not beamy enough to be really comfortable, and this fact immediately became apparent once they got below and looked at the accommodations. From the cockpit a five-step ladder descended through a sliding hatch into the main saloon and the four of them in it all together crowded it. The big mainmast came right down through the center of it, and the table was built around it, with a drop-leaf on either side. With the leafs up there was no room to pass, or even to get up or down, and the whole thing turned itself into a sort of dinette. On the port side forward of the saloon separated off by a bulkhead, was an open single bunk which could be extended into the central alleyway to make a double, and on the starboard side, extending into the middle so that the central alleyway ran forward a little bit to port, was the “main cabin.” In this, which had its own door, was a three-quarter bed with barely enough room between it and the bulkhead to walk, provided you turned sideways. And while it had its own door—for ‘privacy’—the bulkhead, to provide aeration, only ran two-thirds of the way to the ceiling. Standing in the “main cabin” you could look right down on the portside bunk across the alleyway.

  “This is certainly not a boat built for lovers, is it?” Lucky said cheerily, after peering into this compartment. Bonham merely glared at her.

  Forward of the sleeping the rest was conventional: galley on the port side, the smaller head on the starboard to take less room from the “main cabin,” and in the forepeak two crew’s bunks and an open toilet. When Bonham said it slept eight he was correct technically, but they had better be a very tiny eight. Everywhere, as on the topside, paint was peeling and the old dark varnish cracked and flaking. Gear and moldy-looking sails were piled in the portside bunk and all around the saloon. A heavy musty odor of old canvas and long-since-dried sweaty socks pervaded everything, and was not lessened by the heaviness in the air caused by the rain outside. Indeed, the very rain itself seemed appropriate, seemed to lend itself to the gloomy smelliness of the entire inspection. All in all, at least to the neophytes, it was not very prepossessing looking.