Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  It had been, they should understand, his intention all along, for this maiden cruise, to take Naiad to the Nelson Islands, a small British-controlled group not quite halfway between the Pedro Bank and the Rosalind Bank over toward the Honduras mainland. This was about 92 nautical miles from Ganado Bay, and about 165 nautical miles from Kingston, via the Pedro Cays. Why sail the ship all the way to GaBay and then have to come back that extra distance? The Nelsons, where Bonham had been once several years ago, were great spearfishing—and great living, because a number of wealthy Bahamians (as well as rich Americans) had winter houses there—and would be the perfect place for their initial cruise. He had spoken about all this to Sam Finer in New York yesterday by phone and Finer was in agreement with all of it. Assuming Grant had no complaints about it (Bonham had told Sam about Grant’s loan to the corporation), Finer and Cathie would fly down to Kingston, stay a couple of days at the Crount, and they would all start their voyage from Kingston Harbor. They would then be six: Bonham and Orloffski as crew, Finer, Cathie, Grant and Lucky.

  Now, Naiad would sleep eight comfortably, if they used the saloon as a double cabin, and Bonham and Orloffski bunked in the crew quarters forward. Bonham had therefore taken the liberty of asking along two paying guests. What the hell, why waste the space when you could pick up some money on it? Finer had agreed. These paying guests were a Baltimore brain surgeon and his girlfriend, both of whom Bonham had taught to dive two years ago and who had happened to be in Ganado Bay on a vacation. The brain surgeon had to be back in Baltimore for a big operation on the twelfth of next month; they could therefore leave here in around two weeks, cruise to the Nelsons, spend a week or even ten days spearfishing and exploring the little island group, be back in GaBay on the tenth or eleventh for the surgeon to catch the plane. Assuming always, of course, that all this fitted in with Grant’s own plans. Grant and Lucky could then stay on here at the Crount and save themselves all that plane fare to New York and back. If that was okay with Grant. It would even fit in with this Morant Cays trip, Bonham carefully pointed out with a look at Jim. But any way they did it, Bonham intended to see that Grant, as well as Sam Finer, was on that maiden cruise—to the Nelson Islands. It would be one hell of a great trip.

  “Boy, you’re right it would be one hell of a great trip!” Ben Spicehandler said enthusiastically. “I just wish me and Irma could go along on that trip! I’ve read about the Nelsons.”

  There slowly descended over Bonham’s eyes his normal and customary ‘commercial film’ which Grant had seen so many times before. It was exactly like watching a veil being drawn across a window. “As a matter of fact,” Bonham said, “we could actually take along another couple. Only trouble is, you would have to sleep forward in the crew’s quarters, which is a little bit more cramped than the other berths. Would that bother you?” He grinned with his stormcloud eyes and inflated his great chest and gut slowly: “On the other hand, I can sleep there and get rest.”

  Ben’s eyes were already bright. Now they got brighter. He looked over at Irma. Irma grinned, ducked, shrugged, and cackled. “How about it, Irm?” Ben said. “Okay? Okay, we’ll go!

  “But what about you and uh what’s his name? Orloffski,” Ben added.

  “We’ll sleep on deck,” Bonham said, the commercial film across his eyes once more.

  “What if it rains?”

  “We’ll sleep on deck.”

  “Okay, then!” Ben said in a warning voice. “We’ll sure go!”

  “Done,” Bonham said. “It’s a deal.” The really best news, though, he had to give, he said, was that Sam Finer had said he was willing to think about maybe putting another $10,000 into the corporation.

  “But that’s really great news!” Grant put in excitedly. “I mean really great! That means you’ll be all set up! You’ll have working capital and everything!”

  Bonham nodded. “We’ll be able to pay you back your loan. We’ll even be able to insure the ship. And I think a lot of his willingness is due to the fact that you made us that loan.”

  “You mean the ship isn’t insured?” Lucky asked.

  “They looked her over in the yard,” Bonham said. “She’s not a young ship, you know. The premiums they’re asking are too high. I wouldn’t pay them. I couldn’t pay them! Not now. Not then. Not yet.”

  “You mean we’ll be sailing two hundred miles and back for a week on a ship that can’t get insured?” Lucky asked.

  “They’ll insure her,” Bonham corrected her. “They just want too much. Anyway, don’t worry about that.”

  “But what’s wrong with her, if they want such high premiums?” Lucky said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” Bonham said evenly, and patiently. “It’s just that she’s not a new ship, like I told you. But she’s as sound as any ship of her size anywhere in the whole damned world. Take my word for it.”

  “I’ll take your word for it!” Ben said enthusiastically.

  Lucky said nothing. And she did not bring the subject up again, then. But later on in the suite she talked to Grant about it. “You expect me to go off with you on a beatup old ship that can’t even get insured?” she said when they were alone in the suite.— “I do,” Grant said. “Hell, even Ben and Irma are going, for Christ’s sake.”— “Well, they’re crazy to do it,” Lucky said. “And I’m not going. I’ll stay here at the Crount and wait for you.”

  Grant waited a few moments before he went on. “Look, you’re willing to go off on a crapped-up, camping-out, stuck-together-with-chewing-gum cruise with Jim and Doug to the Morant Cays. With a captain we don’t even know.”

  “I am; but I’d rather not,” Lucky said. Her face took on that veiled look Grant had not yet been able to read.

  “I just don’t understand. Bonham is a man we know. We know he’s reputable. If he says the ship’s all right, it is.”

  “I don’t trust him,” Lucky said, with a sudden strange irritability. “I never did. He’s accident-prone.”

  “You trusted me to do serious diving on those cannon with him.”

  “That was diving. This is something else. I’m just not going.”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Grant said, and stretched out, without being kissed, without offering to kiss.

  It did not take Doug long to catch on to how things were between them. Grant could tell by the closed look on his face. But Doug said absolutely nothing about this, this time, as if their being married changed everything, including his right and/or his ability to give advice. But if he said nothing about them, he was enormously enthusiastic, and talkative, about the Morant Cays trip. So was Grant, and strangely enough, apparently, so was Lucky. They all talked about it with everybody for the two days it took Jim to set it up.

  In the end, though, after they had gone and come back and seen and done it all, it was not really all that different from any of the other diving trips they had made.

  In the end it was difficult, after a while, to see a reef or a beach or a coco palm that did not resemble generally the remembered aggregate of all the other reefs and beaches and coco palms one had seen. It was difficult, after a while, to see one mangrove snapper that looked any different from all the other mangrove snapper. The word about the Morant Cays was that there were lots of sharks of all varieties large and small in the waters around them, but then that was the “Word” about just about everyplace where someone else was going and oneself was not. It was said about the Cayman’s, the Nelsons, the Pedro Cays, it was even said by Montego Bay about Ganado Bay, and vice versa. Actually they saw only a few more sharks in their six-day trip than they would have seen in six days’ fishing at the place near Morant Bay, say twenty-five or thirty, and almost always out at the outer edge of visibility where they sort of just cruised around. There was only one potentially dangerous shark incident on the whole trip, although no one was seriously hurt by it. It would, of course, have to happen to Grant.

  There were all sorts and varieties of reefs available, all charged wi
th fish, from six and ten-foot reefs even Doug could fish easily, on down to eighty-foot ones that Grant now fished fairly easily with Jim. After the pleasant, short, fifty-five-mile sail, all sail was taken in and the captain moved them about from island to island and spot to spot by motor. The weather stayed fine, and the sea was flat and tranquil. Even Lucky was finally persuaded, under Jim’s expert tutelage, to go over the side and snorkel around exploring the very shallow reefs while Grant and Doug with spearguns ‘guarded’ her from nearby like the outriders of a cavalry column, as Jim would take her by the hand and dive her down four feet or six feet to look closely at staghorn, elkhorn, brain or fire coral. She had to admit to them it was beautiful.

  Jim, it seemed, was just about everywhere on this trip, and Grant dubbed him to himself, rather sourly: “Ubiquitous Jim.” And his ubiquity seemed always to place him in proximity to Lucky. He took her off to the other side of the cay to hunt for “booby” eggs, which he cooked for breakfast. During the hours on the ship, he continually took her off forward or aft or below to show her something, explaining to her the intricacies of sailing and the intricacies of its gear, something which hitherto (to Grant’s knowledge) Lucky had shown no interest in at all. On shore in the evenings he cooked her fish especially for her, since she preferred her fish poached to fried, not an easy trick to do over an open fire with no grill. He seemed to know at least as much about sailing as he knew about diving and flying, and he seemed to know at least as much about camping as he knew about sailing. And all of this was made personally available to Lucky, and, of course, to the others, if they wanted to come along and listen.

  Jim’s command of sailing lingo and camping lingo was formidable, as was his command of the flying lingo. (He was, for example, in the habit of always saying “Affirmative” for “Yes” and “Negative” for “No” like a pilot.) All of this knowledge was put at Lucky’s disposal. Even Grant, who had done a bit of sailing and had read lots more about it, and who had done quite a lot of camping and backpacking in the Michigan woods and in California, was often unable to understand Jim’s lingoes and had to ask for explanations.

  Through all of this Lucky flirted with him. But then she flirted with the captain, flirted with Doug, and even, on occasion, when she forgot herself, flirted with Grant. Grant might have been jealous had he not noted that she flirted with Jim only moderately—not half as outrageously as he had seen her flirt with other guys, or with Jim himself for that matter, back in the very first days in Kingston. Neither did it occur to him to think she might be deliberately moderating her flirting with Jim, curtailing it for his, Grant’s, benefit, or perhaps for nervous reasons of her own. He was incapable congenitally of thinking in such a way.

  Jim was obviously captivated by her. But Grant could not blame him for that. And Grant could not bring himself to believe that, even in her present state of fury, resentment and disillusion with himself, she would ever do anything like that to him. He had given her no cause, unless you wanted to count Carol as a cause, and he did not count Carol as a cause. Even if she did, she would not do that to him. (He found that the vague generality of “That” was as far as his mind would go; it balked at anything more specific.) And anyway, he thought rather biliously, she was certainly smart enough to know which side her future was buttered on when that future came to being with him or Jim Grointon. He was determined not to mention it to her. Especially in the light of what he now thought of as her “Fear-of-Whoredom Syndrome” it would be bad, and he was not even going to let on he noticed it. That carefully-studied-out and well-thought-over thing about her morbid overpreoccupation with anything having to do with Whore or Whores had changed a lot of things in his overall outlook.

  Besides, he had his own honor to think of. Grant believed that any man who was capable of falling in love with and marrying a woman who was capable of cuckolding him (when thinking generally rather than specifically of himself, the word came easily enough) was a man either guilty of gross misjudgment or indifference, or else very very sick; and in either case deserved what he got. He, Grant, was not any type like that of Raoul-the-South-American to yank his girl, or his wife, out from under a lover and pack her up and whisk her back to New York. He would just simply be long-gone. And he was not the kind of man to hang around and ride herd on his wife to make sure she didn’t do something to him. He would not undignify himself like that.

  On the other hand, while he would not undignify himself, the shark incident that he had came very close to undignifying him all by itself. This happened on the fifth or next to last day, when the breeze having fallen, they were diving on the windward reefs to the north and east of North-East Cay. The captain had anchored them over a likely spot, and being already still dressed out from the last dive while the others were not, Grant had gone over the side alone, feet first and holding his mask against his face in the approved manner with his left hand, his double-rubber Arbalete in his right hand. When the bubbles of his entry cleared, he saw below him in water about forty-five feet deep a “rockfish” (that was the only name he had ever heard them called) nosing around some sparse coral growth. He had hyperventilated and gone for him, spearing him with a head shot which while not a killing shot left the fish flapping his tail only very feebly. He remembered noting at the time that because of the head shot there was no blood spoor in the water. Then something shot past him on his right, heading for the fish. Through his mask he could tell that it was a shark even before its hide began to sandpaper his right side along the ribcage, although he was so close he could not even see the dorsal fin. The only way to describe it was that a totally silent express train was passing him inches away at speed. It was at least half as big again as the one he had taken, up above Morant Bay. The curved, muscled, faintly muscle-pulsating sandpaper sheet of its flank continued on past him, on, and on, and on. It was abrading his side. For one insane moment he thought it might just not ever stop, as though its length was in fact endless. Then the gun was jerked from his hand with numbing force. Instinctively he moved both hands, the good one and the numbed one, to push the thing away from him where it was hurting him; but by then the shark was gone. So were his fish, spear and line. He watched the shark plane slightly left, then pass out of sight in the green fog beyond visibility range. The shock of the force was so great it had snapped the stout line, and his gun—which was supposed to float but which was waterlogged from so much use—was sinking slowly to the bottom below him. Grant was astonished, amazed, disbelieving, and somewhat in a state of physical shock. He hit for the surface as hard as he could swim.

  It seemed to him afterward that he swam up so hard that he literally swam himself right up out of the water until he was only knee-deep. Whether this was true or not, he was hollering “Shark! Shark!” as loud as he could as soon as his head was out. Then he started to swim for the boat, only a few yards away, looking behind him between his feet every few strokes. When he reached the ladder and grabbed it, he looked up and saw that Doug, Lucky and Jim were all looking over the side and laughing at him, laughing uproariously. Automatically he stopped himself from climbing up.

  “What the fuck are you laughing at?” he said. “The biggest shark I ever saw just stole my fish, and damn near rubbed off my whole right side doing it.”

  “You came up out of that water all the way to your waist before you fell back,” Jim said. Grant saw him glance with amusement at Lucky. “Where’s your gun?”

  “He yanked it out of my hand,” Grant said. “As a matter of fact my hand’s still numb from it. It’s on the bottom. The line snapped.”

  “Well, climb on in,” Jim said with amusement. “I’ll go and get it for you.” Then they all three began laughing again.

  “I can get it myself,” Grant said stiffly. “Thanks.”

  “Well, here. Take my gun,” Jim grinned. He handed his loaded but uncocked triple-rubber gun over the side butt first.

  “I don’t need a gun for that,” Grant said. “There’s no more fish down there now anyw
ay.” He swam away from the boat, hyperventilating, looked once all around the wide circle of his visibility range, then dove for the gun lying openly and bright blue on the bottom, and looking strangely incongruous among the coral and sparse gorgonias. When he climbed into the boat, he became aware that his knees were shaking violently and tried to hide this as they all started laughing again. He turned away to get a beer out of the icechest, aware that his back and neck were stiff with hurt pride which he could not relax.

  He was aware that Jim thought he had panicked. He himself did not think he had. On the other hand he had certainly been shocked by the suddenness and unexpectedness of what had happened. He sat down with the beer, so that the shaking in his knees would not show, and tried to grin at them, and at least partially succeeded.

  “You certainly looked funny,” Lucky said and there was a malicious glint in her laugh. (Later, when they were alone, she would tell him coldly: “Well, if you’re going to do these stupid silly things, you’ve got to expect things like that and take your chances.”— “You don’t exactly seem to feel that way about Jim,” Grant would counter guardedly. And she would come back with, “That’s his profession. You, you’re supposed to be a playwright.”)

  “I guess I did,” he said, answering her now, in the boat. “But you should have seen that shark.” He raised his arm to show them his side. It was exactly as if someone had taken a metal comb with file teeth and raked several series of parallel lines horizontally across the tender skin of his side below his armpit. Jim Grointon grinned at him amusedly and said, “I’ll get some merthiolate for that.” Then all three of them looked at each other and burst into laughter again. “It’s only because you looked so funny,” Jim grinned apologetically. Grant found he was able to laugh a little with them. But it hurt.