Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  “I don’t know.”

  “Wouldn’t he be much more likely to take off upward, to get out of there?” Grant persisted. He was beginning to get even more angry.

  “I don’t know,” Bonham said. “Yes, that’s true. He would,” he admitted thoughtfully. “But I still think you made a serious mistake in judgment.”

  “Where?”

  “By even deciding to go after him at all alone like that in the first place! You should have had help around.”

  “Help wouldn’t have helped. He was off and out of there so fast you couldn’t—Another diver up above backin me up would have had more chance to get hurt than me!”

  “The shot was too tough. Shooting from behind and below and forward, like that. Your own position was bad: for the shot. There was almost no real chance for a killing shot.”

  “But I told you I anticipated that. I planned for that.”

  “He was too big. He was just too big.”

  “Big!” Orloffski interposed. “I ain’t never seen a shark that big in my whole fucking life! Not even in a damned marineland aquarium! It had to be a white.”

  “Tigers can get that big,” Bonham said. “You say he was sort of brown, reddish brown?”

  “That’s right,” Grant said, angrily.

  “Tigers that get that big lose their spots that give them that so-called ‘striped’ look, but they’re usually grayish brown, not reddish brown. And you didn’t see his tail?”

  “I told you. I—”

  “And you didn’t see it?” Bonham asked Orloffski.

  “Hell, he was up and out of there so fast—And that cloud, you couldn’t see anything for that cloud—except this crazy guy sticking his head outta the top of it lookin aroun’ like some damned tourist!”

  “Well, this is all pretty academic anyway,” Bonham said. “I think you made a serious mistake in judgment. I’ll get some merthiolate for those nicks.”

  “Well, I say I didn’t. I say I didn’t because it all turned out exactly like I anticipated it would and like I planned it.” He was really mad now. All this fuss. He hadn’t wanted anybody to know about it. Orloffski had ruined his whole satisfaction that he had had.

  Bonham was staring at him. There had been a grave quality about his manner all this time, the captain and leader doing his job, his excellent leadership job; and yet at the same time underneath that there had been another quality, a sort of silent, secret, proud and pleased understanding of Grant’s act that somehow Grant didn’t like, didn’t like at all. It was a sort of feeling of approval and of brotherhood—unstated, and passing only between the two of them—and it had made Grant think while they were all talking—curiously enough—of Letta Bonham and what she had told Lucky about her husband, and naturally forced an immediate comparison with his own relationship with Lucky. Now Bonham suddenly grinned, and both bad feelings in Grant got stronger.— “Look,” the big man said, “I like to shoot sharks myself. I love shootin them. But there’s just certain chances that you don’t take, see? In that situation, and in that position, with that big a shark and that kind of a shot, you went just a little bit over the edge. You should have come back and got me. We could have taken a Brazilian rig and—”

  “Look,” Grant said thinly, “am I being punished? I mean, I know you’re the captain of the ship and that when you give orders we all obey at sea. But does that apply to the diving too? I mean, am I being confined to quarters? Am I not to have another lung? Or must I go in the big class with teacher?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, of course not,” Bonham grinned. “I only just—”

  “Then can I have the lung?” Grant said. “Because I’d like to get back in the water.”

  “Help yourself,” Bonham said, and then grinned that grin again.

  Grant nodded; “Thanks,” and went to get the lung.

  Lucky of course was furious with him. Over the shark incident. She had followed closely all the talk about it. Now she came over to him as he was getting another, full tank out of the row of tie racks. “I think you’re really crazy,” she said. Grant went on set-faced with the work, and she walked away. She went up forward where Irma was waiting for her, looking very much like the good Jewish mother who wants to help but can’t. He refused to even look after her.

  But when he was back in the water, speargun in hand, knife strapped to leg, he thought about what she had said. His first doubt had come when he heard all that Orloffski—whom up to now Grant had always thought of as totally brave, totally physically brave, if stupid—had had to say about what he had done. What he had done with the shark. Now Lucky’s remark compounded the doubt. Was he really maybe going off his rocker a little? Some way? How did one know? If one was going off? Maybe he was; maybe he was going a little kooky with all his woman troubles, wife troubles, cuckold troubles, cruise troubles, skindiving troubles, Bonham troubles. Maybe he was. He felt totally reckless now, really reckless, fuck-it-all reckless, as he swam out toward another reef, further to the west than the circular one where he had seen the shark. He felt recklessly ready for anything, just about anything. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he found nothing. Or nothing of much importance. He did shoot four lobsters (four tails was all his little bikini could hold) and one large grouper, which he left dead on the bottom under a small rock while he himself went on. That was all though, and finally when his air began to run a little low, he came back and picked up the big grouper and dragged it by the eyeball sockets back to the ship. The others were all just returning. In a short time they were under way under sail, and in an hour they were back at the dock of all the Greens at North Nelson, all tied up, all sail secured, all ready to relax, drink, have fun, eat and the rest of it.

  “I’m going up to the Weather Station to send that radiogram,” Lucky said to him as soon as they were off the wharf and on the white crushed-coral path up to the hotel.

  Grant stopped, in the middle of the path. Ben and Irma were in front of them and moving on. Nobody was behind them. In spite of the tone of her words, which was tough, quite tough, there was a strange look of appeal on her face, her lovely Italian face. Grant felt suddenly as though he had never seen her before, as though he had never even met her before. He suddenly felt like, suddenly had the wild idea of, introducing himself to her. Instead he said nothing.

  “The Station is just up beyond the hotel,” Lucky said, as if he didn’t know where it was, “and I’m going to send it.”

  Grant nodded. “You do that,” he said with a set face. “And I, I, am going back down to the boat—to the ship—and have a few drinks with the boys.” He turned on his heel.— “No, I didn’t fuck Jim Grointon!” Lucky said after him. Without answering he went back on down the path toward the wharf. When he reached the ship’s rail across the long wooden length of the wharf without having turned his head one millimeter to look back once, and then stepped on board turning naturally as he did so and looked back up the path, she was no longer anywhere in sight.

  He had said he was going to have a few drinks with the boys, and that he did. That he did, in spades. The Surgeon and his girl were still there on board, with Bonham and Orloffski,and they had a few with them but soon they wandered off toward the restaurant. Then there were only the three of them, himself, Bonham, and Orloffski. Cathie had already gone up to the hotel to shower. In the end the three of them did not even eat dinner with the others at the hotel restaurant, but stayed aboard drinking while Bonham fried them up some of the fish that he could cook so deliciously, and after they ate they went on drinking.— “What the hell!” Bonham growled a little drunkenly, in the first even partially open reference Grant had ever heard him make to his relationship with Cathie. He lolled back in the cockpit. “I deserve a night off once in a while. With the boys. Even I deserve that!”

  Grant had done a fair amount of drinking all through the day of spearfishing, more certainly than he had the day before, and of course it was all accumulative: that drinking, the drinking before the fish, the dri
nking with the fish, the drinking after the fish. He was unable to remember later just when he became drunk. The three of them sat on board with the bottle —before long it was bottles—exchanging skindiving stories (a few of which of his own Grant now had from his days with Grointon)—ha! old Jim Grointon—talking about the old days in the war, in which Mo Orloffski had been a S/Sgt in the Quartermaster Corps and Bonham had been (because of his previous sailing training) a navigator on first a Flying Fortress and then a Superfort. Finally it got around to talking about women they had laid. Back in their youth of course, and all present company totally excepted.

  Grant never did know just when it got around to the point where Orloffski brought up the cache of whiskey which he had discovered on the island, on the island of North Nelson.

  Somewhere in there Ben came down to talk to him. He did remember that. Good old Ben.— “You mind if I talk to Ron?” he asked Bonham quietly. “In private?”— “Sure, hell, why not for Christsake?” Bonham grinned. But he gave it somehow the feeling that Ben was his enemy.— “Thanks,” Ben said, Ben in his old Middlewestern accent. He took Grant forward, almost to the bowsprit—“Lucky sent the wire,” he said. Grant nodded. “I figured.”— “She asked me for the money to pay for the plane,” Ben said. “I told her I’d give it to her. But that I wanted to come down talk to you first”— “You don’t have to,” Grant said. “I’ll give it to her myself.”

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Ben said. He then began a long rambling, and painful, effort to tell the story of the year he had spent away from Irma, right after they themselves had gotten married. It was all very inarticulate and pretty incoherent, Grant thought with that crystalline drunken clarity his mind sometimes achieved when loaded. The upshot of it all was that Ben had studied and studied and analyzed finally in himself that it was all really because he had been terrified of the responsibility of marriage and all that it entailed, and he thought that maybe that was Grant’s problem too. It was all so far from the truth that Grant found it almost laughable, although he did not laugh, and then he suddenly found himself telling Ben the whole story, incredibly. He had never thought he would ever tell anyone, the flirting with Jim Grointon (“But Lucky flirts with everybody,” Ben interjected, “it’s her nature, it’s her style, it don’t mean anything.”), Jim Grointon’s proposition to her in the Morants (“Christ, everybody—every fool—propositions Lucky!” Ben said.), Jim Grointon’s offer to marry her she had even told him (“But she dint take him up on it, did she?” Ben said.), and finally that horrible, horribly terrible ‘spaghetti dinner’ night, when she had not waked him, inconceivably had not waked him. She had to have cuckolded him. Though she claimed, said, shouted that she didn’t, hadn’t.

  (“And where were you then, Ben old fren, old buddy, with all your big offers of help?”— “I’m sorry about that,” Ben said, “we shouldn’t have taken that trip, but we didn’t know.”)

  Well, all that didn’t matter. What did that part matter? That was all just horse-shit. No, the way he saw it, she had to have cuckolded him. She just had to have.

  “Well, maybe she didn’t,” Ben said. “Have you thought of that. Maybe she’s tellin the truth?”

  “Sure,” Grant said. “And do you think she’d tell if she had? Shit, man.”

  Ben did not say anything for a moment. “Well, you know I don’t know anythin about what all the men Irm might have slept with while I was gone that year,” he said finally. “And I’ve never asked.”

  “Come on! This isn’t the same. Aint the same at all! I was right there! Asleep!”

  “You know, I once wanted to write a book about that time, a novel I mean, with me and Irm,” Ben said thoughtfully.

  Grant stared at him incredulously, and then suddenly giggled. “Why not a play? Make it a play. Then we could collaborate.”

  Ben’s eyes brightened. “Gee, that’s a great idea!” he said. “You mean you really would?” Then he remembered his serious role. “—Anyway, it’s Lucky we’re concerned about right now.”

  “It sure is,” Grant said.

  “But are you sure?” Ben said seriously. “Are you really sure?”

  “You damned right I’m sure. Why else wouldn’t she have waked me up?”

  “Maybe she just did it to hurt you,” Ben said. “Because of uh because of that Mrs Abernathy thing.”

  “And maybe she just screwed Jim Grointon for the same reason,” Grant said sharply.

  “Listen,” Ben said slowly, and seriously. “I want to ask you something. Something maybe very serious. Take your time and think it over. Before you answer. Do you think that maybe it could all be in your head?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you maybe think that just maybe you’re goin through all this torment about Lucky cuckolding you with Jim because of your own guilt over havin cuckolded Hunt Abernathy all those years with Mrs Abernathy?” Quickly he raised his hand. “Think it over. Take your time.”

  “Hunh,” Grant said.

  “Just think it over,” Ben said. “Do you think it might maybe be that? Or even partly that?”

  Grant did think, for several minutes. “Let me say this,” he said finally. “I would say that it might be that, might very well be that—if it were not for that one night when she didn’t wake me up. Because, see, she had lots of other opportunities to cuckold me with Grointon. (Christ, she even told me she had a kind of hots for him,” he put in parenthetically, “for Christ’s sake!) And she could have, lots of times. Like in the Morants. Or at the hotel. But I never thought she did, never doubted, never even considered that she would. Till that one night. So I don’t think your bright idea’s the answer. You see what I mean.”

  “I see,” Ben said. “But it’s still something to think about.”

  “It sure is,” Grant said. “How much are you charging me, Ben?”

  “I’m only trying to save you something,” Ben said. “You’ve got somethin very precious there in Lucky.”

  “She’s got something very precious—She had something very precious there in me,” Grant said.

  “I know,” Ben said quietly.

  “And she threw it away.”

  “Well,” Ben said, “do you expect everything in life to come to you without paying for it. You’re too big, too important, too much, not to know better than that. Are you too big and too important to even be willing to indulge in a little education? You refuse even to educate, teach a little? Of all you claim to know about life?”

  “She fucked him,” Grant said.

  “Maybe not. That aint for sure,” Ben said. “But if she did —and I aint sayin that—maybe she’s sorry. Maybe she learned something. Something about where the real importance lies. In things. That’s sort of what happened to me. That time.”

  “I can’t stand the thought that she could do that like that,” Grant said. “I just can’t stand it.”

  “But maybe she didn’t,” Ben Spicehandler said kindly. “There’s always that possibility. And then look at what you’ll be throwin away. Look, you’re a little drunk. Come on back up to the hotel with me, and go to bed. There’s always the chance that she might cancel it, the wire.”

  “There is,” Grant said. “And she can cancel it any time. Any time she wants to. But I sure as shit aint gonna ask her to!”

  “That’s as much as admittin that you want to keep her,” Ben said.

  “I don’t know whether I do or not, Ben, that’s the truth.”

  “Then come on back up with me,” Ben said, “and see how it goes then.”

  “No,” Grant said. “No, I won’t I’m going to stay here and have a few drinks with the boys. I think they understand more about women than you do, Ben.—What’s that old saw?” He laughed. “That they say out in our country, Ben: ‘He’s a hell of a guy around the poolroom, but he’s a son of a bitch at home!’” Grant laughed again. The spectre! The spectre! That damned spectre! Faceless spectre!

  “Don’t ever say I di
dn’t try,” Ben said.

  “I’ll never say you didn’t try, Ben,” Grant said.

  He walked back aft with him, to the opening through the lifeline railing against the wharf, and slapped him on the back as he stepped off the ship, then went on back to the cockpit. They were still talking about women they had fucked.

  He never did remember just when the subject of the whiskey cache came up. He did remember that when it did, Bonham growled, grinned, and accused Mo Orloffski of tailing him, ‘shadowing’ him. This was because the whiskey cache was located at South End, which was the route Bonham took when he went in his roundabout way to the hotel and Cathie Finer’s room, apparently.

  Orloffski only grinned. “What the fuck?” he growled back in his brutal way. “I got as much right to prowl around this fuckin island as anybody else has, aint I?”

  It was by prowling that he had found the whiskey cache. It was located in the ‘cellar’ of the new not-quite-finished luxury hotel that was being built, and was almost finished, down at South End. They used the word ‘cellar’ in quotes because to dig a real cellar on a sand island like this would be to have it seep itself full of water in a week. So the ‘cellar’ was above-ground, and what was more was closed only by an old makeshift wooden door and a padlock because the final door itself had not yet been mounted on. Orloffski had peeped in through the one barred window and seen the whiskey cache, and it was enormous. The owners, the new American syndicate, had apparently been shipping it in for quite some time for their gala opening which everybody aboard hoped would put the Greens, the entire clan of Greens, out of business.

  They were all drunk. By now. And it did seem like a boyish prank. Then. But Grant remembered that it was Orloffski who really first suggested it. Orloffski, the thief. Orloffski, the kleptomaniac. Orloffski, who in fact had once stolen Grant’s old Exacta V camera. It was Orloffski who suggested it, and he was high, high, high; high as a kite over the idea. He looked exactly like a man hot after a broad.