Go to the Widow-Maker (26 page)

Carol Abernathy of course didn’t drink; but when Bonham politely offered it to her, she primly refused even the plain tonic water. This did not bother Bonham, or William, one bit; nor did it much bother Grant, though he was embarrassed for her. They had all had three Bloody Marys apiece at the Yacht Club, and they settled down to the warm gin and tonic and the exchange of diving stories to see them through the boring trip.

And that was the tone the whole flight took, the rest of them drinking and talking, and trying to ignore the unpleasant presence of Carol Abernathy who continued to sit screaming silent disapproval forward at everyone from the rearmost seat.

By the time Grand Bank Island hove into view off their starboard wing and the little seaplane sat down in the bright sun and sparkling water near the shore to taxi toward the hotel dock, they were all well on their way to being crocked. With William it didn’t matter so much, William wasn’t going to go diving for the rest of the afternoon. They were. Or so Bonham said.

Grand Bank Island was just about exactly 365 British statute miles from Ganado Bay as the crow flies. However, for safety’s sake and because of the ban on flying over Cuba, the pilot had routed them via Cape Dame Marie and Cap à Foux in Haiti. This added a hundred miles to the trip, but it kept them near to land in case of trouble. Cruising at 90 miles an hour, allowing for wind drift, it was a five-and-a-half-hour flight.

Normally the little plane was handled solely by its captain/pilot. But this time he had brought along a friend of his, a professional diver from Kingston whom Bonham knew, who also flew and had come along as co-pilot just for the ride to Grand Bank and some free spearfishing. The pilot, a South American who ran this flying-boat service for a big Venezuelan airline while waiting for assignment to jets, was also an ardent spearfisherman; and both men had brought their masks, flippers and guns with the intention of staying the full four or five days and spearfishing, rather than wasting the gas to return to Kingston and then come back.

Once they were up and cruising, the ‘co-pilot’ had come back to sit with them. He was a stocky, small, sandy-haired American with pale eyes and blond lashes named Jim Grointon. There was clearly no love lost between him and Bonham. They were competitors. But both men carefully kept their mutual antagonism within strictly limited civilized bounds, as if by some previously agreed-upon armed truce, and each pointedly made a point of not competing in telling bigger and better diving stories. Just the opposite, both leaned over backward in their modesties.

When Bonham went up to sit with the pilot Raoul, who had said he would let him fly a little in level flight, Grant talked to Grointon.

Jim Grointon, it came out slowly from both Grointon and William—like pulling teeth from Grointon; more effusively from the praise-filled William—was about as famous in The Trade as Villalonga, della Valle or the Pindar brothers. He owned his own boat in Kingston, which he had designed himself and had built there, a sort of sleek long catamaran which he could convert into a diving platform with a huge retractable waterglass for diving parties, and powered by two huge outboards. He specialized in free-diving and hardly ever used the lung anymore, though he kept them for clients, and could do a hundred to a hundred and ten or twenty feet free-diving.

“Just holdin his breath!” William added unnecessarily. “Just think of what that means! A hundred and twenty feet below the waves! You know how far down that is? With no aqualung nor nothing!”

Grointon smiled shyly, but not really shyly. He was obviously a hero of William’s. He did very well in Kingston, had a lot of diving clients who came back to him year after year, and was content to stay like that for the present.

“But it gets pretty boring, you know, after a while,” he smiled at Grant. He had a strange smile with his pale eyes and blond lashes, a totally self-centered, non-caring, selfabsorbed one, but with a strange secretiveness tucked away in it somewhere. There was almost an Irish cop quality about him. “Most of my clients just want to piddle around on the shallow reefs, spear a few parrotfish. There’s two or three wrecks for them to explore with aqualungs. After a while I get to feeling like a bus driver taking people over the same old route day after day.—

“And that’s not why I got into this stuff in the beginning.” He paused again. “And it’s why I came along on this trip.”

“Why
did
you get into it in the first place?” Grant asked.

“Oh, adventure. Excitement. Danger. Taking chances. There’s no frontiers anymore. The Caribbean, and maybe the Pacific, they’re the only frontiers left. It makes you feel you’re alive.” Grointon raised his pale eyebrows. “Like it was in the war. Have you ever felt as alive since the war as you felt during it?”

“No, I suppose not.” Grant said.

“Well, that’s it, you see. Course, I’m lucky, I guess. Because I seem to have a natural talent for freediving for which I don’t really deserve any credit.”

“What
were
you in the war?” Grant asked.

“Merchant Marine; and then Coast Guard. I made the Murmansk run a couple of times.” He grinned. “Course, if diving was as dangerous as the war, I wouldn’t be doing
it,
either. Not voluntarily.”

“Still, people get hurt.”

“Not very many.”

“I’d love a chance to get to see you make one of those deep dives,” Grant said. But he didn’t really care. Instead, he was strangely resentful.

Grointon smiled his strange pale smile and shook his head. “You won’t. You probably won’t even see me and Raoul. There’s a big ethical question involved, and this is rather a ticklish situation. You’re Bonham’s client, and he’s coming to meet other clients. I can’t do anything that might make it look like I was trying to horn in on his customers.” Suddenly he shrugged, very muscular shoulders rippling under his clean white T-shirt. Again he smiled that smile. “So you won’t see much of us. I shouldn’t have come at all. But when Raoul asked me, I couldn’t resist. I’ve dived off Grand Bank and Mouchoir Reef. There’s some good stuff around there, if you know the spots.”

“What do you mean by good stuff?” Grant asked.

“Oh, manta ray. Shark. Big jewfish.” “How big is big?”

“With jewfish? Oh, four five hundred pounds.” Grointon smiled again.

For some reason Grant felt distinctly uncomfortable. The little ‘Irishman’ was bragging without bragging. Grant reached for the bottles. “How about a little drink?”

“I can’t. Not while I’m working’,” Grointon smiled. “But if you ever get down to Kingston for any reason, and want to go out, I’d be glad to take you out. You ever do any freediving?”

“No. I never really did any lungdiving till I hooked up with Bonham.”

Grointon nodded, and looked at him both appreciatively and speculatively. “You’ve got the chest for it.” Then he grinned, an open honestly cynical grin very different from his smile. Grant liked him again. “Understand, I’m not trying to rob Bonham’s customers.”

“Okay,” Grant said. “I understand. You sure you won’t have one little drink?”

“Sorry. Really can’t while we’re flying.”

It sounded smug to Grant. Still, he knew it was the truth. Under no such compunction himself, he made himself another, rather defiantly. He wondered what other conversation he could make with this strangely reserved and yet unreserved man.

“You know, I’ve read all your plays,” Grointon said. “I think they’re great. And I mean really great. You got the Navy and the wartime Navy man like none of those novels about it ever did.”

“Well, thanks.” Embarrassment. Exactly the same embarrassment he had felt exposed to the cameras of the Yacht Club members with the big ray.

“Is that your mother back there?” Grointon asked suddenly.

Grant looked up from the gin bottle with which he had been pouring. My God, did she really look that old? “My foster-mother,” he said.

“What’s eating on her?” Grointon asked bluntly.

“Oh, she’s just in a mood,” Grant said, and looked back down at the Schweppes bottle he had exchanged for the gin bottle.

“Well, I guess I better get back up front,” Grointon said in a peculiar voice. When Grant looked back up, the diver had a friendly smile on. “I got a couple of course checks to make in a little bit,” he explained in what Grant felt to be an overly warm way.

But maybe that was just himself. He watched the too stocky but heavily muscled back walk away from him forward. Like most average athletes who were never really great at anything, he had always secretly admired superior athletes and at the same time disliked them too, perhaps because he envied them. He turned to William who was sitting beside him and asked which of the divers was the better one.

“Well, they’re different,” William said. “You know? Old Jim Grointon’s one of the best freedivers and spearfishermen in the country. That’s sports. You know? But Al Bonham is one of the best workin divers anywhere. Underwater salvage, pipelaying, cutting and welding, demolition and blasting, he’s tops at them all. It’s just different. Ya can’t say which one’s better.”

It turned out as they talked that it was Bonham who had talked William into selling his little shop in Miami and coming down to Jamaica. Bonham had promised him they would clean up. So far they wasn’t. But they was still a big chance they would. William couldn’t really complain. With a wife and four kids he could live half as cheap here as in Miami. They couldn’t of afforded no maid in Miami! William it turned out was no diver and had never even been in a mask, except once in a swimming pool, let alone no aqualung. It was dangerous, people like Bonham and Grointon who done it were crazy anyway, and William would not be caught dead underwater. All he wanted was to make a big cleanup down here on his cases with Bonham like Bonham had promised him. And if Bonham ever got this schooner thing off the ground, they would.

When the big diver came back from the cockpit to concentrate on his drinking and interrupted this explication by roaring with laughter at William, Grant found himself looking at the big man with a new eye and in a new light. The new light was William’s information. It took a certain amount of something peculiar—what? moral irresponsibility?—to get another man to throw up his security and go off on a goose chase (with wife and four kids!) when you weren’t even sure you could deliver and back up your promises. And in the back Carol Abernathy still sat screaming silent and selfsatisfied disapproval at everyone from her lonely seat.

They circled the hotel once, everybody looking down at the sprawling buildings and the docks and at the manager who came running out waving his arms. On the dock there was a group of four white people in swim suits and three colored in clothes who also waved their arms at them.

As they touched down and taxied in, a good-sized dinghy put out from the dock to take them off, and when Bonham with his stormcloud eyes now slightly drink-glazed offered his aid to help her climb down, Mrs. Carol Abernathy accepted it primly with a prim squeezed mouth. Grant could have booted her in the ass overboard. Suddenly he giggled to himself.

When it came his turn, he saw that the two men in trunks and floppy hats in the boat, who were busily stowing gear and passengers here or there to keep the dinghy balanced, could only be Sam Finer and Orloffski by Bonham’s previous descriptions. Orloffski with a bullet head and butch haircut could indeed have been a guard on a pro football team, and anywhere but around Bonham would have been a big man. Finer was small and swarthy, deeply tanned, with a noticeable paunch but with broad strong shoulders. His eyes appeared as hard as two rocks, but surrounding them was a curiously weakly mobile face. Grant shook hands with them, his hand getting badly squeezed both times, and introduced himself, before sitting down where he was told to sit. They were having a great time being boatmen, it appeared; but they had not known that Jim Grointon and Mrs. Abernathy were coming, so their boat didn’t really have enough room to take everybody.

“That’s all right! Don’t worry about us!” Grointon called cheerfully. “We’ll make out all right! Me and Raoul have to secure the plane first, anyway!”

Raoul,
Grant thought, and a memory of Lucky shivered through him for the first time in maybe half an hour. He felt a double twinge in his gut, one for the absence of Lucky and one for the existence—former existence—of
Raoul,
her
Raoul.
What the hell was he doing down here in the Caribbean with all these professional outdoor types anyway?

It suddenly arose in his mind as a curiosity that while he had thought often of Lucky, he had not thought about sex or had a hard-on (except in the morning) for the past five or six days he’d been diving.

It was the last he was to see of Grointon or Raoul really, until the next evening when they returned with a mess of smaller fish, and one six foot ten inch ground shark Grointon had taken all alone. A considerable prize, at least to Grant’s eyes.

On the dock they were introduced to Finer’s and Orloffski’s wives. Finer’s wife was beautiful. And with a guilty start, when he looked into her eyes as they shook hands, Grant was suddenly sure that he knew her from before in New York. But he could not remember for the life of him whether he had fucked her or not.

Bonham had told him Cathie Finer was a New York model, goodlooking, redheaded, and that Finer had met her on a business trip to New York two months ago. But that was like introducing somebody to a New York cabbie and asking if you had ever happened to ride with him. The odds were . . .

Cathie Finer’s lovely gray eyes appeared to be pleading with him in silent appeal to keep his mouth shut.

This was not their honeymoon he remembered Bonham saying, which they had spent in Miami Beach, but was by way of being a second honeymoon, and was the first time Sam had introduced her into his skindiving world.

Then, as he was afterwards shaking hands politely with Orloffski’s sloppy (not fat; but with loose flesh hanging all over) loudmouthed ‘wife’, he remembered.

It was a couple of years ago, when he had been in the city and was hanging around with another novelist (not Frank Aldane) and his sort of ‘midtown’ Village set. The novelist had introduced him to this girl he had been taking out, a favor from one artist to another, at a Saturday night party. They had spent a hard-humping, do-it-every-way, love-sweaty weekend in her drab but not unpleasant little flat—which week-end, because she was not working the first part of the next week, lasted from Sunday through Wednesday. He remembered she told him no one had ever eaten her pussy so beautifully. But the weekend, though they both tried hard, had given neither of them more than a pleasantly sexual weekend so that they parted wistfully as friends. He had seen her at a couple of other parties afterwards. That was Cathie Finer.