Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  Nobody met them at the Ganado Bay airport. Doug had wired ahead that they were coming, but no car from Evelyn’s estate was there to meet them. Looking at her husband’s face to see if this was the sign of some bad omen, and finding nothing there at all, Lucky felt the butterflies start up in her stomach again, the way they had when she had spoken to Carol Abernathy on the phone. Mothers! she was thinking God damn all mothers! She had had enough trouble with her own. And now she had his. And a foster-mother yet, at that! And a powerful one. Grant on the other hand, though he showed nothing on his face, was convinced the absence of a car was a deliberate ploy on the part of Carol Abernathy. So was Doug, from the look on his face. And so it proved to be—or so Grant believed. It was so well handled that he never could be sure.

  “Well!” Doug said, as they stood in the heat amongst the surly, pushy Negro porters who served to make nervous every liberal who arrived at GaBay. “Aint no point in us rentin a car. There’ll be half a dozen layin around loose at Green Hall. So we might as well rent us a one-shot chauffeur job.”

  This they did. The colored chauffeur was quite impressed to be driving somebody to Green Hall. He had driven past it for many years, he said, but only once had he ever carried someone inside. “It ve-ry pret-ty, Mom,” he smiled. And Lucky was impressed too. Ron showed her where the estate began, then showed her the beach house and beach on the sea side of the road as they slowed and then turned in, up the hill, away from the sea, on the long winding drive that finally ended in a great loop at the manorhouse. Green Hall certainly lived up to its name. Grant tried as best he could to point out to his wife the various lush rare tropical trees and plants whose names he remembered being told by the Count Paul who had collected them, as they wound up the blacktop drive. “She must be very rich, the Countess Evelyn,” Lucky said.— “Rich?” Grant said. “She owns just about all the coal in Indiana.”—“But for God sake don’t call her that: Countess,” Doug said from the front seat. “It aint chic.”—“Oh for God’s sake shut up, Doug!” Grant said viciously from beside her. When the butler opened the great wrought iron and glass doors for them, they found the whole gang already all drawn up to meet them.

  Evelyn took the ball right away. “I’m terribly sorry! We did want to have someone there to meet you. But Doug neglected to tell us just which flight you were on!” Grant, who had not actually seen the wire, could not tell if this was the truth or not; and Doug, later, said he could not remember. “Come!” she said with all her cynical charm, “let me introduce you, Lucia! Lucky, is it? May I? Charming nickname!”

  They were: the Count Paul (simply called Paul). Evelyn herself, Hunt Abernathy, Carol Abernathy, and a girl named Lester Wright who worked for Sports Illustrated who was staying with them and had come down to do an article on Paul de Blystein’s amateur seaplane flying. Bloody Marys were served immediately. A cold buffet of mainly ham and chicken was already out, on the terrace.

  “Hello! Hello!” Carol Abernathy said to her when it came her turn. “But it isn’t really an introduction, is it? Ron has told us so much about you that I feel I know you already, Lucky!” The colored Time-guy it turned out had flown back to Kingston, apparently on orders from Heath, just the day before. He had had one last try at Carol before leaving.

  Evelyn put them halfway down the hill in “The Cottage.” “After all, you are still honeymooning, aren’t you? even though officially you’re not now! And I thought you’d much prefer to be alone!” “The Cottage” turned out to be no cottage at all but a marvelous, very modernistic small house built in such a way that the free-form outdoor swimming pool actually entered into the building in the place of one wall on its ground floor. Formerly it, or at least the ground floor, had been used for the big poker games Evelyn de Blystein loved so much. “Of course now while you’re here we’ll play up in the salon! or on the terrace! Doug of course can have his old room back up in the great house! And if you want to take any of your meals luncheon and dinner down here alone, which I’m sure you will! all you have to do is telephone up to Greg the butler!” There was one telephone in each of the four small rooms. “We almost never use the pool except at around five o’clock,” Evelyn said. “And seldom then.”

  “I like her,” Lucky said when they were finally left alone. “I liked her when I first met her, that time in the supermarket, and I still like her.”

  “Oh, she’s all right,” Grant said cautiously. He was still trying to feel his way around, get the lay of the land, because, in the overall, he had not wanted to do this—and would not have done it except for that son of a bitch Bradford Heath. Or would he? Anyway he did not feel at all smug, or manly, super-manly, or proud of himself, at having introduced his wife to an old lover.

  “She’s mean, probably,” Lucky said, answering him, “but in the end it’s all only for kicks. To get her kicks. And that’s not bad.”

  “She loves gossip,” Grant said. “And poker.”

  “She’s having an affair with that girl Les Wright from Sports Illustrated,” Lucky stated calmly.

  Grant was flabbergasted. “She is? Is she!”

  Lucky nodded calmly. “Normally I don’t like lesbians. But I like her.”

  “But, Christ! She must be sixty-five, anyway.”

  “So?” Lucky said.

  “Look,” he said. “What did you think of Carol?”

  “I didn’t really have a chance to form an opinion.”

  “Well, look. If any of these people start bugging you, like especially Carol, you just let me know.” He felt he really had to say that. “I really want to do this diving salvage job with Bonham. But I can scrap it. We don’t really have to stay here more than just a few days.”

  “Wouldn’t it look funny if we moved out and still stayed in Ganado Bay?”

  “Maybe, but to hell with it. Anyway, I don’t think Bradford Heath would hear of it.”

  “He might. If that guy of his left word with somebody in town to call him.”

  “Well, screw him.”

  “I’ll stay,” she said. “I can handle mothers. I’ve had experience.”

  It hurt Grant deeply to hear her say that, in just that way, and made him feel even more of a criminal. “Doug,” he said to change the subject. “Doug asked me at lunch today if I thought he could make out with that Les Wright.”

  “That’s funny!” Lucky said. “What did you tell him?”

  “I said why not? Maybe I’d better warn him.”

  “Tell him nothing,” Lucky advised. “If they’re really smart, he’ll make a good front for them.”

  “You’re really sure?” he said.

  Lucky nodded, “You watch. I do wish we could take most of our meals down here by ourselves, though.”

  “Certainly,” Grant said. “We certainly will. Except that tonight we’ll almost certainly have to make a command performance at the great house.”

  The trouble started the next day. Grant and Doug had telephoned Bonham the afternoon before, after the lunch, and today were going out with him to make an exploratory dive on the salvage site. All of Bonham’s great need for secrecy seemed to have disappeared once they had arrived in GaBay, and he did not even mind Doug going along for the dive. It was a great site. On smooth almost level sand stretching several hundred yards out toward the beginning of the deep water dropoff, and only about twenty yards from the deep reef itself, there they lay, green with verdigris, most of them much more than half buried in the yellow sand, at a depth of exactly one hundred and twenty feet. Grant was almost positive he once had swum over this same spot with Bonham on a deep dive and had seen nothing but sand. Bonham’s craving for secrecy in Kingston seemed a little theatrical now, here, since Doug, on the surface, could not even see the cannon from up there. Tomorrow they were going to rent the boat with the biggest winch in Ganado Bay harbor. The next day they would try to start diving. It was all very exciting. Lucky had decided to stay at home on the estate that day, largely because of her dislike of Bonham, and when her husband fi
nally got back home to the Cottage, she told him what had happened to her.

  It wasn’t really trouble really, so much, but it was certainly nervous-making. “You know, I think she’s really crazy,” she said.—“I told you,” he said.— “No, but I mean really crazy,” she said.— “That’s what I meant,” he said. Well, Evelyn had called her after he and Doug had left, saying she knew she was alone and would she like to have lunch with them on the terrace. Paul was off with Les Wright to make a preliminary flight in his seaplane, Hunt had gone off as usual to the golf club, so there were just the three of them. It was all very decent, all very charming. Carol couldn’t have been more charming. And Evelyn was her same normal, witty, cynical, helpful self. “I think she’s on our side, rather than the side of your foster-mother, if she’s on any side,” she said.— “She almost certainly isn’t on any side,” Grant said. “She just wants to see what’s going to happen. That’s how she gets her vicarious living.” Lucky had changed from a tight jersey and crotchtight shorts to a prim cotton print before going up because she wanted to look proper, but the two of them were just sitting around in old beatup shorts and sleeveless men’s shirts. She grinned at Grant. “Of course I never could disguise my tits.” Anyway, all that part of it, the lunch, had gone off fine. She had come back down and changed to a swimsuit and hauled a chair out beside the pool and into the sun to read. After three Bloody Marys and almost half a bottle of Bordeaux with the lunch, she had fallen asleep. Something had waked her, she didn’t know after how long a time. When she opened her eyes, she was looking straight at a group of the Count Paul’s tropical shrubs about twenty yards away. As she watched, they moved, then moved again a little further on, as though something or somebody was moving stealthily through them. Scared, not even knowing whether it might be some kind of damned wild local animal, she had jumped up dropping the book and yelled for their maid Evelyn had given them, Mary-Martha. At that, even still further along the group of shrubs, Carol Abernathy had come swinging around the end of them as if out for a health stroll. “I know she was watching me,” Lucky said, “but I don’t know for how long.” Beside her when she said this Grant cursed. “Would she be likely to ever do anybody physical harm?” she asked.

  “No. No, no. Nothing like that. I’m sure.”

  “Well I’m sure she was watching me from behind those bushes. She wanted to know if she had startled me, and I was angry and I said yes if that was her rattling around in those bushes, and she said no, looking surprised, that wasn’t her. It must have been a mongoose. There were lots of mongooses around, did I know that?”

  “Maybe it was,” Grant said hopefully.

  “No it wasn’t. I know. Well, I asked her in and offered her a drink, which she refused, then, changing her mind, said she’d have a little mineral water.”

  “She doesn’t drink,” Grant said.

  “I know,” Lucky said. “Then she marched all around the place as if it were hers, looked in the bedroom, looked in the bathroom, then, seeing a pair of shoes of yours on the floor picked them up and said to me, ‘My God! does he still have those?’ Then she excused herself and left. Later I saw her driving out in one of Evelyn’s little cars without even a glance over in my direction, though she must have seen me standing by the pool. Now if that’s not crazy-acting, I don’t know what is.”

  “Well, I told you she was crazy,” Grant said. “She didn’t used to be, when I first knew them. It’s happened over the years. I really do owe them a lot. Look, if I can make this damned ‘visit thing’ work, if only because of the publicity, I’d like to do it. Don’t forget, we’re liable to be living across the street from them back in Indianapolis.”

  “I know,” Lucky said.

  “It all depends on this new play. Maybe you would like to come out with us on the boat tomorrow, instead of staying here?”

  Lucky thought this over. “No. No, I don’t think so. I don’t want to spend any more time around Bonham than I absolutely have to. It only makes for bloodshed.”

  “That’s something else I wish you’d think over,” Grant said. “This about Bonham. I don’t agree with you at all. I like him. I really do.”

  “Oh! That was something else! Just before she left Mrs Abernathy asked me if I wasn’t worried about Bonham’s influence on you? wasn’t I afraid you were too dependent on him, listened to him too much?”

  “Why, God damn her!” Grant exclaimed.

  Lucky held up a hand. “I didn’t tell her you loaned him the money for the schooner. No. No, I think I’d rather stay here tomorrow, just the same.” She paused. “But I do wish we could have our dinner down here alone. Do you think we could?”

  “Sure we could,” Grant said getting up. “I’ll go and call Greg about it. Tonight, anyway. But tomorrow night Evelyn’s got a huge party laid on, to introduce us—you—to all her rich social local friends and acquaintances. We’ll have to go to that.”

  Behind him Lucky sighed. “I suppose we will. Since we’re her guests. Well, let’s wait and see how tomorrow goes.”

  Curiously enough, tomorrow went fine. And so did all the succeeding days, until finally the storm front came in, down from the north and the States, which caused Bonham and Grant to suspend their diving operations. But during all those days Carol Abernathy left Lucky alone, did not come near the Cottage, and indeed—on the night of the party—(at which Lucky was an unqualified, enormous, scintillating success, captivating everybody) went to bed early. It must have been pretty hard on her, Grant thought thinking about it, but on the other hand it was she who had asked for it herself. Anyway, as the fair-weather days full of sun passed, more than a week of them, Lucky stayed by herself, usually lunched by herself, swam in the pool, read all the new books Evelyn had had sent down from the States, and only appeared at the great house at cocktail time with Grant after he had come back from his diving. Then they would have their dinner alone, served by Greg’s number-one male helper Beverly, in the Cottage, and their evening in bed together. Neither of them could seem to get enough of the other. Several times late at night they swam nude together in the pool. Ron could now do two to two-and-a-half lengths of the fifteen-yard-long pool underwater just holding his breath, wearing flippers but without a mask. A couple of times, because Lucky had been such a success at the first one, they had to appear at Evelyn’s big parties but these hardly counted. Lucky became more and more happy, more and more contented with her, perhaps unfortunately, temporary lot. Once only she went out on the winch boat with Grant and Doug and Bonham on their salvage diving, and what she saw so frightened her that she refused to go again.

  There was no real reason for this. She had long ago tried mask and flippers, looked at the underwater-world reef life, and refused ever to look again. Ostrich-like, she would swim on the surface of the sea without mask (and without flippers) as long as she didn’t have to look. This meant that, in the unlikely possibility a shark or a ’cuda did make a pass at her, she would be unable to help or defend herself, and was totally silly. This made no difference to Lucky and nobody could convince her otherwise. This one time, after much argument on the part of Doug and Ron (Bonham stayed totally out of it), she was persuaded to don a mask and go out with Doug holding her hand and watch Ron and Bonham working on the bottom. She lasted exactly a minute and a half at it, and immediately decided both were insane. All she could see when she finally did see them was two tiny figures far, far below her, headdown and kicking around while sand boiled up around them, and a little off to one side the long, long chain of the anchorline descending, and beyond that the long, long line of the winch-line descending, and somewhere between her and them a few fish swimming around. It was like leaning out and looking down on the street from the roof of, say, about a nine-story building. She ran for the boat. And yet in spite of that, as she swam in the tropical pool of the Cottage or lay in the tropical sun beside it with the tropical herbage of the Count Paul all around her, she never doubted for one second that her husband would come home every night
safe and sound from his adventures. Somehow, though she didn’t like him, she trusted Bonham completely underwater, and knew that nothing could happen as long as he was there, though this might not apply above the surface on land. After all, he had been doing this shit for years, hadn’t he? It was just one of those things. She just didn’t want to have to look.

  It was Grant’s first experience with decompression. While he had made lung dives to a hundred and twenty feet before, and even below, he had never stayed at such a depth long enough to need to decompress. Now there was no choice, and Bonham explained it all to him very carefully, although he knew it (that is, had read it). But even Bonham had no idea in the beginning how much or how often they were going to have to decompress on this job. This was due to the fact that more than half of their brass cannon, bronze cannon—eight, to be exact, of the total number of twelve—were not lying free in the sand at all but were really attached to ancient, now-dead coral growths underneath the surface layer of sand. Apparently, back at the time the now-nonexistent ship carrying their cannon had for some reason or other sunk, what was now a flat sand bottom on the ocean floor had been part of a living coral reef, probably part of the one twenty yards behind them which Bonham called his ‘deep reef.’ Unpredictable, whimsical ocean currents had apparently carried sand slowly in over this one, or this part, since the shipwreck sometime in the mid- or late 1700s, choking off the life of the coral, a great deal of which nevertheless had lived long enough to attach itself solidly and infuriatingly to the ship’s indestructible cannon as the ship itself disintegrated. (Christ, nothing is stable, Grant thought, nothing in this world, not even the ocean bottom.) Now it lay, this dead coral, only a short distance below the sand, a dead gray mass but nevertheless firmly glued to two-thirds of their cannon, and the difference it made was enormous.