Go to the Widow-Maker (27 page)

Grant had once several years ago casually picked up a copy of
Playboy
and discovered to his delight and astonishment that the Playmate of that Month was a young female poet he had only a couple of months before spent another such hard-loving New York weekend with; and this experience was rather like that one: He had studied the nude photos of her carefully and with lascivious possessiveness. His ego was so thrilled he wanted to run out into the streets of the Hunt Hill suburb of Indianapolis with the magazine and start accosting friends with it. Lamely, and belatedly, he realized his local pals would probably think he was lying, and if they didn’t would not care, and anyway would wonder what importance any of that had to them. It was a very frustrating kind of triumph; and so was this.

Nobody seemed to have noticed anything, and Grant next shook hands with the hotel manager.

He hardly glanced at Cathie Finer again. He did not want to hurt Cathie’s marriage, he did not want to hurt Finer, most of all he did not want to hurt Bonham’s chances of selling Sam Finer on the schooner. Of all the places in the world to run onto somebody you had laid!

He shot a quick glance at Carol Abernathy who, in spite of her vaunting of her much-publicized feminine intuition, seemed not to have noticed anything either. Immediately he was disgusted. They weren’t even lovers anymore. What a powerful force was habit.

The diving boat, an even larger dinghy than the one that picked them up, had already been prepared for them (Finer and Orloffski had had it out all morning with their ladies, in fact) and Bonham, Finer and Orloffski were already fussing with it. Hotel houseboys were there to look after their luggage. All they had to do was change to swim suits and take off.

Cathie Finer and Wanda Lou, which was Orloffski’s girlfriend’s name, had decided they would not go along on this short afternoon dive, having had too much sun already during the long morning, and they were telling this to Carol Abernathy behind Grant. And at this point Carol decided she would not go out either but would stay back at the hotel with the ‘girls’ she said. She seemed already to have taken a great liking to Cathie and her sensitive eyes and face.

But when Grant merely nodded and didn’t say anything, Carol called him over to one side. “You’re really going? Without me?”

Now what? he thought. “Of course I’m going! That’s what I came on this trip for, was to dive.” He thought perhaps he might have swayed a little. He was drunker than he thought.

“Well, then don’t expect me to look after your luggage and lay out your clothes for you,” she said viciously, “you
or
him!” She jerked her head toward Bonham.

“I don’t expect you to do
any
-goddam-thing!” Grant almost shouted. He was suddenly dangerously angry, and trying hard to avoid a public scene. “The houseboys are supposed to do all that. He just told us,” he said more quietly.

“I just want you to know that you don’t need to expect any help from me for anything, on this trip,” Carol said with a mean smile.

“Okay! I don’t!”

Bonham came over to them then.

“Ron, the manager wants to know about the rooms,” he said in the slow calm immutable style he employed when teaching. “William’s payin his own way, and he’s got a little room up in the back cheap; he knows the manager from before. Mrs. Abernathy will want a room by herself of course, but there’s no reason why you and me can’t bunk up together. Save you the price of one room.”

For a moment Grant couldn’t think, didn’t even hear, he was still so angry. “Okay,” he said shortly. “Fine. Sure. Why not?” He was thinking that bunking with Bonham would certainly save him from any chance of being importuned by Carol Abernathy’s coming into his room at night and what was more, she would know this.

“All right,” Bonham said. “I’ll tell him. Shall we go and change?” His eyes were still glassy from the gin he’d drunk. But he was gently and deftly elbowing Mrs. Abernathy right out of the play. It was what Grant would have liked to do, and in the same way.

“Sure. I’m coming,” Grant said, and turned on his heel and left.

The hotel was constructed of separate, chambered annexes around a central dining hall and bar. In the room he flung himself down stretched full length on one of the twin beds, and confessed how drunk he was. “What I really feel like doin is laying right here and going to fucking sleep.”

From beside the other bed where he had started to undress Bonham laughed. “Well, that’s up to you. But since you’re payin anyway, you ought to go. As an added inducement, I can tell you from experience the best way to sober up now—
and
to avoid an early evening hangover—is to go diving with us.” He swayed a little himself, as he got out of his Jockey shorts underwear.

“And besides, I’m scared.”

Bonham laughed. “There’s nothin to be scared of.”

“I’m scared anyway.”

The room was cool and dim and quiet, shaded from the eyeball-searing sun of the lower Bahamas by the vine-trellised walkway outside the windows. Bonham didn’t answer.

“In fact, I’m always scared when I dive. Didn’t you ever notice?”

Bonham still didn’t answer. It was just exactly as if Grant had not spoken, and for a moment he wondered if he had. He forced himself to get up onto his feet. “Well, then I guess I better have another drink right now. If I’m fucking going.”

Bonham’s laugh boomed. “Now that’s a
sensible
idea!”

Grant undressed languidly, feeling lazy and used-up and beat, while Bonham waited.

“You’re still new at it, you know,” Bonham said as they walked back under the shade of the trellises. It was Grant’s turn not to answer. When the sun hit them, it was like a physical blow. The women had disappeared. And Finer and Orloffski were waiting on the dock impatiently.

“Come on! I’m burnin my goddam motherfuckin feet off standin here,” Orloffski said in his blunt, brutal voice.

“Where’s your Jap slippers?” Bonham asked pleasantly.

“Anngh,” Orloffski answered.

All of them except him wore the Japanese style shower clogs, made in America with sponge rubber bottoms and the hard rubber coming up between the, toes, and which in fact Bonham had recommended that Grant buy for himself in Ganado Bay. ‘Gook boots’ they had used to call the real ones, the straw ones, back in the old days at Pearl, Grant thought.

“His fuckin broad stoled ’em off him, Al,” Sam Finer said in a curiously thin, high voice for such a chesty man, “that’s what.”

“She did no such a goddam thing,” Orloffski cursed.

“He lost one this morning on the boat,” Finer grinned.

Bonham shoved them off.

It was perfectly true that the diving and the swimming sobered them up, and in some mysterious way of its own precluded a hangover. And when they came back in, Grant felt much better physically. But that was just about the only good thing about the entire afternoon.

In the first place it was too late, when they finally got started, to go down around the point to the so-called ‘lagoon’, or to any of the other good spearfishing spots. So instead Bonham had run them straight out past the now-anchored and deserted airplane, almost a mile out from the hotel dock, and here he anchored them. The water was no more than fifteen feet deep, a flat sand bottom with almost no coral, and consequently almost no fish, and it appeared to run straight out to sea indefinitely at that depth. In fact, Bonham said, they would have to go out miles and miles in that direction to find any deeper bottom, almost to Inagua. Currents had made it a sort of dead area, piling up sand to make an uninhabited bank. But Bonham, it became immediately clear, didn’t care, because what he meant to do was to concentrate on Sam Finer and the little Minox camera and case he had brought over for him. And that was what he did. “Practice staying down as long as you can,” was all he said to Grant, and then he disappeared with Finer. If Finer liked the little camera, he said, he would give it to him.

Sam Finer appeared to be a pretty good sport. But of course he had been diving all morning, too. And he did have the camera to play with. He was the only one of them who had any real diving gear, having at great expense flown down a Scott Hydro-Pak with three filled sets of double tanks, since filtered air was not available on Grand Bank. In the boat he put this on, aided by Bonham and Orloffski, even though the depth was only fifteen feet, and leaped over the side. To save air he breathed only through the snorkel-like ‘air economizer’ on the side of the fullface mask. Bonham, using only a snorkel, went with him and handed him the camera. Orloffski, who was no good sport at all, took up his speargun and grumbling and cursing over the bad bottom went trudgeoning off by himself. In the water no more than twelve seconds, Grant suddenly found himself totally alone.

Fifteen feet was no deeper than the deep end of most swimming pools, the bottoms of a number of which Grant had prowled around holding his breath. It wasn’t even deep enough to bother clearing your ears. It certainly was no way to go about learning something about real freediving. And most swimming pool bottoms were more interesting than this. At least there you could pick up hairpins and a marble or two. A few needlefish torpedoed themselves along behind their long thin snouts here and there, a few tiny, brightly colored sergeant-majors explored the sand or the grass. That was all.

Angry over the attitude of Carol Abernathy, angry over how much he was spending on this trip, angry over the free-diving lessons Bonham had promised but wasn’t giving, he swam around the area and near the boat, saw and explored his first sea hare which he had read of but never seen and which looked like nothing so much as limp pie dough folded into a tart, watching with a kind of awed distaste the brown ink that spilled from its brown interior as his poking speartip tore it open, practiced diving down to the sand or the sea grass and holding his breath, until bored to death he began to expand his circles and move away from the boat. When he did, he saw out at the extreme limit of his visibility Orloffski going after a fish, and swam over that way.

The big Polack had found a small thinly growing patch of coral. A fishstringer was tied to his bikini and on it were several small parrotfish, none of them a foot long. As Grant swam up, he went after another one. The man who looked like a pro football guard went after these small creatures with the same viciousness with which Grant had seen Bonham go after larger fish, only more so. With brutal, animal, totally selfish singlemindedness he dived down on another little parrotfish as Grant watched, and speared it just as it started to run. He now had six. Grant waved to him and swam off, back to his boring round. He didn’t have the heart to shoot the dumb, adenoidal-looking little fish, and wondered if he was weak. Mostly as he dove down and lay on the grass or sand holding his breath, he thought about Cathie Finer, and about how strange it was that after knowing her that one time and then never seeing her again in New York, he should meet her again in Godforsaken Grand Bank Island in the lower Bahamas, where her new husband was perhaps about to go into the schooner business with his new friend and diving teacher. Thinking of Cathie also brought him back to thinking wistfully of Lucky. He wondered if Cathie knew her? When he heard Bonham yelling in his full bull voice from the boat, he motioned to Orloffski who was still further out, and swam back to it.

It turned out the camera was busted. Not really busted, but the push-and-pull cocking mechanism which William had designed and built for it was not functioning properly and had gotten worse and worse until they could no longer cock the camera. Bonham had called them so they could go back in and he and William could work on it for tomorrow. The usually impassive Bonham looked highly irritable, and when Orloffski swam up with his string of little parrot fish and made as if to pass them up, he bawled, “What the hell are you doing with those goddamn things?”

“I hadda have somethin to do to pass the fucking time,” Orloffski said in his brutal way.

“Then throw them the goddam hell away!” said Bonham. “What do you want me to do with them?”

“Don’t give me orders. Maybe some of the niggers’ll want them,” Orloffski said bluntly, and instead threw them into the boat..

Treading water as he watched this small bucking of heads, Grant noticed something that he had observed before but never really noted: he had never heard Bonham use the word ‘fuck’ in any one of its many forms. He used it a lot himself, and so did most of the people in his more or less sophisticated world, though not with the totally vulgar brutality of Orloffski, and you would have thought Bonham would use it too. Saying nothing—and doing nothing, except to note that Sam Finer was carefully studying Orloffski with his rock-hard eyes —he climbed up into the boat.

“Go on ahead. I’ll swim back,” Orloffski said. “Probably won’t see nothin but it won’t hurt to look. Throw me your stringer.” Bonham tossed it to him.

The boat began to move away from him, and Grant watched his head get smaller and smaller behind them until it disappeared. They were pretty close to a mile from shore, and he would not have liked to stay there like that, without even a companion, to swim back alone. Even though the depth was only fifteen feet a shark or two could come cruising by any time. It didn’t seem to bother Orloffski. When he reached his room, he showered to wash all the dried salt off him and lay down on his one of the twin beds and immediately fell sound asleep.

It was while Grant was asleep, when Bonham was returning from William’s room to wash his grimy hands after working with William on the camera case, that Carol Abernathy stuck her head out cautiously from the door of her own room and stopped him in the dim hall.

“I want to talk to you a minute, Al, if I may.”

Bonham stopped and stared down at her anxious, darkeyed, and now-conspiratorial face. He had had enough trouble today already, with the damned camera not working. “All right, Mrs. Abernathy. What is it?”

“Come and walk over to the dining room with me.” She moved her head toward the next door. “Ron is sleeping.” She was already dressed for dinner in a flowered print frock.