by James Jones
That night around the campfire they discussed the whole thing again. There certainly had been some danger involved for Grant, especially if the shark had hit him by mistake, and even Jim admitted this. And, Lucky put in, she had been well aware of this. Very well aware. And it was that very awareness that had made her, after her first quick fright, so furiously angry at him, at Grant.
“But you notice he didn’t go for you,” Jim pointed out. “He went for your fish. The fact that he bumped you and scraped you up was not deliberate, it was a pure accident.” Jim had had a number of such encounters himself, though never, it was true, close enough for the shark to actually scrape him. “Probably because I’ve made it such a habit to keep looking behind me. I’ve always seen them coming in. We humans are naturally hampered by our particular kind of eyesight. Most fish can see forward with one eye and backward with the other, and register both impressions. Then we hamper ourselves further by our masks, which is exactly like putting blinders on a horse. And there’s no sound, no footsteps or crackling twigs in the sea to warn you. So you have to keep looking back.” Jim had had a number of fish stolen from him by sharks at close range. Never once had the shark tried to go for him too. Only twice had sharks ever come straight after him, and both times he had been down-current from wounded, bleeding fish so that the shark might well have mistaken him for the source of fish blood. Both times he had swum straight for the shark as if to attack him, once with a movie camera once with an unloaded spear gun, and both times the shark had veered off and started to circle. The moment he placed himself up-current from the bleeding fish, he was ignored. “Guys have tried all sorts of experiments with all sorts of blood, beef blood, hog blood, even human blood. None of them ever seemed to attract shark much. Only fish blood seems to do that. I’m not talking about the mob feedings that happened to guys off sunk ships durin the war, naturally, but about normal circumstances.”
Grant, lying on the warm sand before the red coals and flickering flames of the fire, could remember one of these, and for the first time in a long time thought of his old aircraft carrier, now lying rusting away somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He also thought of Jim facing down the two sharks with nothing but a camera or unloaded speargun to bump them in the nose if they came on in. He was not sure he would ever have the courage to do that.
“I’m convinced of two things,” Jim went on, “about shark. One, they’re total cowards and scavengers. And two,” he paused here and let the dramatic pause build up, “I’m convinced they know who we are.”
“We? You mean humans? Sharks know?” Grant said.
“Maybe not consciously. But I’m convinced that the word’s gone out in the sea, however consciously or unconsciously, in whatever manner fish communicate, and amongst the regular fish as well as shark, that there is a new predator loose in the sea. A predator which is a direct competitor to shark, and which has even been known to attack and kill shark themselves. And I think that’s why, divers at least, they’re very leary of.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Grant said.
“Not so hard. I’m damn sure they communicate in some fashion or other.” Jim rolled over and up to sit on his knees. “Well, shall we go out tomorrow?”
“Of course,” Grant heard himself say, and felt his neck and upper back becoming stiff again. “Why not?”
“No reasons,” Jim said lightly. “Anyway, we’ll have to make some provisions to look after you better, so this pretty wife of yours won’t worry.” He smiled a sort of private smile over at Lucky.
“I’d worry anyway,” Lucky said in a thin short voice.
“Just the same, you let me get in the water first after this, okay?” Jim smiled at Grant.
“Of course, if you say so,” Grant said evenly. “You’re the white hunter on this expedition.”
He had done other things like this before, Jim, made small dramatic appearances, usurped a sort of parental superiority—generally for Lucky’s benefit; had acted out small dramatic roles, almost always for her benefit too; and Grant had never called him on any of them. And there was still all that other business, the sailing lectures, the camping lectures, the tern egg hunts, the elaborately laid-on process of poaching her fish for her instead of frying it. And yet in spite of all of this, or perhaps even because of it, a curious closeness had been growing up, had grown up, among the five of them on this trip. Perhaps it was simply that there were no other humans anywhere around, nobody else at all to share or participate in any of it, and that this drew them together so closely and gave them the sense of sharing something nobody else would ever have a part of. In any case the close warmth among the five of them seemed to add to and enhance everything that happened. Doug noted it, and commented on it to Grant. And after the first couple of days even the crusty old captain was pulled into it and drawn out to talk, telling longwinded Conrad-like tales of his gunrunning days in Cuba and South America as they sat around the campfire in the night. It appeared quite probable that he might once have worked for Lucky’s ex-fiancé Raoul. He would not, he was moved to confess to them finally, the very last night they were there, be caught dead skindiving, and could not understand anybody who would. Then the next day they packed up everything, boarded the little ship, spent a last two hours spearfishing without spectacular adventure, and set sail for home, their cruise completed.
There were supremely rememberable moments. A sunset one particular evening with weatherheads and squalls of falling rain far to the southwest of them moving north and west and backlit by the reddening sun. The sound of the dawn breeze in the fronds of the tall coco palms on North-East Cay as they rolled out at daybreak in the bright dawn light to wash in salt water and eat and row out to the little ship. The first true coral ‘heads’ Grant and Doug had ever seen, rising before their masks from the bottom anywhere from thirty to sixty feet high and looking like nothing so much as the mushroom clouds of atomic bombs solidified in stone. A huge four-foot kingfish, silvery and torpedo-like, which Grant had found calmly tail-beating his way about for no good reason among the deeper reefs and speared, and from which Jim—in a dirty black greasy old skillet—made them the best kingfish steaks any of them had ever eaten. There was the particular evening, when after a hard day’s spearfishing they had rowed ashore from the anchored little ship and set about the evening chores in the late-afternoon light: Grant and Jim cleaning the fish: Doug and the captain kicking up dried brushwood and driftwood for the fire: Lucky sitting on the sand furiously brushing and combing out her wet hair from the day’s swimming. It was that particular evening that they all stopped what they were doing almost simultaneously and looked around at each other with a sudden acute awareness of the passing moment and of how pleasurable it was, and also of how inevitably, inexorably passing it also was, and then with ironic snorts of self-derisive antisentiment to hide all that and one wild whoop from Doug, returned without speaking to what they had been doing. Moments like this engendered the feeling they had for each other, or perhaps it was the feeling they had for each other that engendered the moments.
It was on the seven-hour sail back to Kingston that Jim came forward with his near-ecstatic eulogy of Grant. They were all sitting around in the cockpit around the captain at the wheel, drinking beer. Jim had gotten up and come around from the portside to where Grant was standing leaning against the starboard rail watching the bellying sails, a thing Grant never tired of. Once again, as he had done before that time in the Kingston airport, he clasped the slightly taller Grant around his now sweatshirt-covered shoulders, Roman-style.
“I just want to say, and I want you all to hear me say, that I have never had a diving client who was as good, or who was as much fun to dive with, or who learned as fast and as much—as this one! I think I can also say without embarrassing anybody that I have never had a diving client that I liked as much, or felt as much friendship for, or that I’ve formed as lasting a friendship with. I know, I know we all haven’t seen the last of each other. In the m
eantime this trip is over, you all will be going off with Bonham in a few days, and anyway if we do go out together again now it won’t be the same, not after this. I just want to say that this is the best trip I’ve ever made, bar none, and that includes that other trip I made to the Morants with that other diving couple I told you about. And as far as I’m concerned I want to say that this guy right here, this guy, is responsible for more than at least fifty percent of the fun and success this trip has been. I’ll never forget it, and I want him to know I’ll never forget him!”
It was a rather long speech to keep your arm clasped around another’s shoulders all the time, and it made Grant uncomfortable, and a little embarrassed, having to stand still under the embrace. He had an innate dislike of having most people touch him intimately. At the same time he was deeply moved because he had come to feel the same kind of friendship for Jim. Then Jim gave him a mighty clap across the shoulders, for all the world like one Roman soldier saying hello or goodby to another Roman soldier, and said, “And that’s my speech! If this guy ever needs or wants anything that I can do or give or get for him, all he’s got to do is ask!”
He crossed back over to his portside seat and sat, resoundingly, grinning and his face deeply flushed. Perhaps he was a little high on the three or four beers he had had since they had gotten under way. In any case it was a positive enough endorsement.
“Well, thanks,” Grant said shyly and feeling kind of silly. “And I want you to know the same thing goes for me, and that I feel the same way about you.” And it was true. Because in addition to the depth of his feeling of friendship toward Jim, as with Bonham he had an enormous, profound, near-boyish hero-worship for the things Jim could do in or on or above the sea, diving, sailing, flying, even the camping, all the romantic, and real, things that the bourgeois, small town, and now pseudo-intellectual, types like himself could not do and only dreamed about and sometimes, if they became pseudo-intellectual, wrote about. A really sweet smile passed over his face and goosebumps arose on his bare thighs, his arms and back, and when he realized suddenly that he might quite quickly be caught with tears in his eyes, he sat down quickly and preoccupied himself with getting another beer from the icechest.
It was a rather deep and touching final act curtain to Kingston, Grant thought, or at least it would have been had not Doug Ismaileh a little while later chosen to stir his own particular oar into the general stew.
This happened maybe half an hour after Jim had made his eulogy. Lucky had gone below to use the head. Jim had gone forward to trim sail for the captain. So they two were alone with the captain. Grant had gone forward to sit on the coachroof and lean his arm on the main boom. Doug came up and squatted beside him.
“That was a hell of a speech old Jim made you there, wasn’t it? I guess I was a little jealous,” he said with a sly Greek-Persian grin on his broad, sly-eyed Greek-Persian face. “Ask anything and he’ll do it for you. It’s a good thing you don’t have to ask him to take care of your wife for you, aint it?”
Grant was startled. He hadn’t thought Jim’s crush on Lucky had been that apparent. On the other hand he was certain Doug had tumbled to exactly what the actual situation was between them, himself and Lucky, though Doug had never once said a word about it, or asked a question. So what kind of a remark was that, then? He did not answer for a moment, and when he did, he grinned. “Yeah, it is, aint it? But I don’t think that’s likely to happen for some very good long time in the future.” He added, “Poor guy, he does seem to be pretty stuck on her, don’t he?”
Doug did not answer this. Whether this was the reaction he had expected from Grant, or whether he had hoped for some totally opposite reaction, Grant could not tell. After a few minutes Doug got up and went aft and occupied himself with getting a beer from the icechest. Grant thought Grant had won that exchange. But the theme was to be repeated with variation, like some piece of 19th Century music, almost as soon as they got back to Kingston. This time it was Lisa.
Lisa had not changed much—externally—since the night of her big blowup at Grant, either in her ideas or her application of them. She still obviously felt, like some clucking motherhen, that her Lucky had been treated badly and that Grant was responsible, but now she kept it to herself. She did not keep it to herself so much that Lucky did not know it, though, and what the two girls—two women—talked about alone together he had no idea of. Lisa had never once said a word about her drunken blowup, treating it exactly as though it had never happened (René had apparently talked to her), and everybody else had treated it the same way, choosing to let well enough alone. Whether she had changed internally was another thing, but her own worries and her troubles that she had brought out and displayed so openly that night now remained clearly in the open and visible to anybody who had been concerned that night. René spent an awful lot of afternoons in town, doing work for the hotel, when Grant was absolutely sure there was no work for the hotel that needed to be done, though be did not mention this to Lucky.
In any case it was Lisa who variated on the theme of Lucky and Jim Grointon. And she did it—so much more subtly than Doug—almost entirely by indirection. She did it by talking about Jim’s other “skindiving couple” that he had taken to the Morant Cays.
She of course would not have done it had not just the three of them been alone, but the three of them were alone. Jim had gone on off with the captain to berth and batten down the little ship after the finish of the trip. René was in town. Doug had gone off to town too, to the Myrtle Beach Hotel where some guest staying at the Crount had told him a girl that he knew had checked in while he was away. So, after all the hellos and kisses and hugs and how-was-its had been given and accepted, the three of them were alone in the bar, the dim, cool, remembered bar with the remembered sea glinting susurrously outside beyond the white-hot beach.
Lisa’s story differed from Jim’s own only in one major stated point, and one unstated point. The wife of the “skin-diving couple” Lisa maintained, was by far the better diver of the two and was Jim’s main pupil of the couple, while Jim had stated plainly to them that it was the husband who was the better diver. No, Lisa said; the wife was an excellent skindiver, the husband a good bit less so. Lisa believed that Jim had told this lie deliberately for protective coloration because of the unstated point. And, the unstated point Lisa said, because naturally Don Juan-Gentlemen Jim would never say so (though he might and did, imply it), was that Jim was screwing the wife all that time. Both before the trip and after it, and apparently even during it. Here Lisa looked at Lucky with a sly look, and both women laughed, a sort of private but strangely obscene and raucous, special, women’s laugh. The story was, Lisa went on, that he took her off “booby” egg hunting, that this was how he accomplished it on the trip.
Grant very carefully forced himself not to look at Lucky, who (he nevertheless felt) was looking closely and hard at him. Didn’t he trust her? Sure he did. Well then?
In any case, Lisa wound her story up, the husband and wife had gone off happily back to New York or wherever the hell it was they lived, and nobody was the wiser.
Grant found himself growing flamingly. dangerously furious. This story had all of the worst element of cuckoldry, which was that the husband had been duped, had been so stupid or insensitive that his wife could horn him and he still went right on happily loving her. That was the worst nightmare of all. “But how do you know what kind of big fights they had when they got home?” he finally said. “And anyway how do you know he was screwing her?” he demanded, feeling somewhat in over his depth in this now. “Did you actually see them screwing? Did anybody?”
No, Lisa said, but she would be willing to bet her bottom ten-shilling note that he had. In any case, he got the credit for it everywhere around, which was just about as good. Again she looked at Lucky, and again she and Lucky laughed.
“Sure, and good for him,” Grant said brutally, “except that then he didn’t get the fucking.”
“Sometimes,” Lucky
said in a veiled voice, with that same veiled look Grant had learned to recognize now but still could not interpret, “sometimes I think Ron loves Jim better than he loves me.”
“Now what the hell kind of a remark is that?” Grant demanded, furiously.
“It’s not a remark,” Lucky smiled at him. “It’s a statement.”
Grant knew only that he had been 100 percent right up in GaBay, when he had suggested that to come down here to Lisa was the worst thing Lucky could do under the present circumstances. That night he availed himself of his “fucking privileges” again.
Jim had been present for dinner that night at the hotel (on Grant’s check of course) and so had Doug, but Al Bonham had not shown up. Bonham had apparently flown back to further prepare for the Naiad’s maiden trip. René and Lisa ate with them too. But in spite of that they were neither one very loaded when they finally went off to bed.
“I’m pretty hard up after that trip and not getting laid at all for a week,” Grant said, “I’d like to invoke my ‘privileges.’”
“Okay. Fine,” Lucky said. “I’m pretty hot myself.”
“Ooo,” she said after they had been at it for a while. “I do like it. I really like it.” In one way this made Grant feel good and in another it did not.
“I would like to point out to you,” he said afterwards, resting his forehead lightly on hers while he remained inside her, “that I love you very much.”
“Sure,” Lucky said, quickly and shortly, “me too. Now get off of me, will you?”