Go to the Widow-Maker (3 page)

And in the interim, during his ‘business’ trip to New York with his newest, his latest play, something else had happened. Grant had met a girl.

Big Al suddenly swung the wheel hard right, and the little boat made a sharp turn to starboard and headed off in that direction. They were far out on the open bay now. Directly ahead a mile away was the jet airstrip, one of three on the island, almost touching the blacktop road that ran along the water’s edge. “It’s right off the end of the airstrip, this reef,” Bonham said. “’Bout half a mile out. I got two or three reference points I line up to hit it exact.” As violently as he had made the turn, which Grant considered strangely unnecessarily violent, he suddenly cut throttle and Grant grabbed the gunwale to keep from falling forward, as did Ali. For three or four minutes Bonham jockeyed the boat backward and forward, peering down over the side. “There she is,” he said. “My special spot.”

Grant too looked over the side. Below him in the bluegreen water yellow and brown color-patches swirled and quivered under the water’s wash. Just beside these, and as if he were standing shoetips to the edge of a vertical high cliff, he could now and then as the sea flattened catch a glimpse of clear sand far below, dark-green colored through the surface. The sun hot on his back, Grant felt cold at the thought of being immersed in water which was not in a bathtub and whose lack of heat could not be controlled. “Let’s get you dressed out,” Bonham rumbled from just behind him, and began hauling tanks and gear around as if none of it weighed anything.

As he had before, Grant noticed that Bonham dropped his bad grammar whenever he was giving instructions. Now he kept up a running comment of instruction while the two of them, he and Ali, got the neophyte ready. Flippers first, then the mask spat upon rubbed till it squeaked rinsed and resting on his forehead, rubber wet shirt, weightbelt trimmed to exactly the right weight by Bonham, finally the tank his arms through the shoulder straps crotch strap attached to the weight belt. Grant simply sat, like an electrocutionee he thought, and let himself be handled. The running comment of instruction had to do with clearing his ears and equalizing the pressure in them as he and Bonham went on down, and with what Bonham wanted him to do with his mask, which was to remove it when they reached the bottom of the anchorline, put it back on full of water, and clear it. Grant was to go first, swim forward to the anchorline, descend it ten or twelve feet, and wait for Bonham. Then last, the mask lowered over his eyes and nose, the mouthpiece stuffed into his mouth, and he was falling backward onto the tank on his back while faces and boat wheeled out of sight to be replaced by nothing but bright blue sky, what was he doing here? Then the water closed over him, blinding him.

Still holding the mask to his face with both hands in the approved manner to keep the fall from dislodging it, Grant rolled over quickly but he still could see nothing. He was now lying on the surface. Masses of bubbles formed by the air he had carried under with him rose all around him, blinding him even more effectively than a driving rainstorm would have done up in the air. He waited, vulnerable, what seemed endlessly but was really only seconds. Then, miraculously, everything cleared as the bubbles rose on past him, and he could see. See at least as well as he could on land. Maybe more. Because to his congenital mild myopia everything looked closer. It was supposed to. Snell’s Law. (
n
Sin a =
n?
Sin
a?
). Oh, he’d studied all the books—and for years. But this was different. Below him the yellow and brown patches were now clearly delineated fields of yellow and brown coral but in amongst these, invisible from the boat, were smaller patches of almost every color and color combination imaginable. It was breathtaking. And, as far as he could tell, there was nothing dangerous visible.

Tentatively, cautiously, for the first time since he’d gone under, Grant let out a little air and took a tiny breath. By God, it worked! He became aware of the surface swell rolling him and banging the tank against his back. Bending double he dove down to where there was no swell as Bonham had told him, and swam slowly forward along the boat’s big shadow above him, toward the slanting anchorline. In the strange silence he could hear odd poppings and cracklings. With each intake of breath the regulator at the back of his neck sang eerily and gonglike, and with each exhale he could hear the flubbering rush of bubbles from it. Everything, all problems, all plans, all worries, ‘mistress’, her husband, new girl, the new play, sometimes even consciousness of Self itself, seemed to have been swept from his mind by the intensity of the tasting of this new experience, and new world.

At the anchorline, after he managed awkwardly to grab it, he pulled himself down deeper hand over hand until his ears began really to hurt, and then stopped. As Bonham had shown him, he put thumb and forefinger into the hollows in the mask’s bottom and pinched his nose shut, and blew. One ear opened up immediately with a loud squeak, but he had to try a second and a third time before he could get the other one completely opened. Then he pulled himself a little deeper, feeling the pressure start to build again, and stopped again. Wrapping his legs around the line, he peered at the diving watch Bonham had sold him and set its outside bezel dial with the zero point over the minute hand. Then he peered at the huge handsome depth gauge beside it which Bonham had also sold him and saw that he was eighteen feet down. On his right arm the enormous Automatic Decompression Meter which Bonham had sold him still read zero; its nitrogen-absorption-measuring needle had not yet even started to move. And so there he hung, having let go with his legs and grabbed the line with a hand, looking around. If Marty Gabel and Herman Levin could only see him now! His nervousness had left him, and he felt a kind of cautious rapture.

To his right and left coral hills forty and fifty feet high stretched away in minor mountain ranges into bluegreen invisibility. Directly in front of him at the foot of the deep end of these rounded ranges, a pure white sea of virgin sand sloped away ever so gently out toward deep water. In between the coral hills he could see down into channels—glaciers; rivers—of sand which debouched onto the vast sand plain. In these channels, varieties of brightly colored fish poked their noses into holes in the coral, or rowed themselves gently along with their pectoral fins like small boats with oars. None of them seemed to be concerned with bothering any of the others, and Grant relaxed even more.

Then, in the corner of his mask which acted like a horse’s blinders and cut his field of vision, he caught a flash of silver. Turning his head he saw through the plate of glass a barracuda which appeared to be at least four feet long. It was about twenty feet away. Slowly it swam out of sight beyond his mask and Grant turned again. This process went on until Grant realized the fish was circling him. Regularly, staring at him with its one big eye, it opened and closed its enormous mouth, exposing its dagger teeth, as if flexing its jaws preparatory to taking a bite of Grant. This was its method of breathing of course, he knew, but it didn’t look nice just the same. Grant had read that in cases like this you were supposed to swim straight at them as if you intended to take a bite of
them
whereupon they would turn and flee and run away, but he did not feel very much like trying this. Besides, he was not supposed to leave the anchorline. On the other hand he felt he ought not just sit here and let the fish have all the initiative. But before he could make up his mind to do something, and if so then what, another figure swam into his mask’s field of vision, further complicating matters till Grant realized what it was. It was Bonham. Looking like some antennaed stranger from another world, which in a way he was, he swam down on a long slant behind the barracuda, leisurely beating the water with his flippers, his left arm with its hand holding the camera case stretched back at rest along his thigh, his right arm extended out straight before him holding the four-foot speargun. In the green water-air he was gravityless and beautiful, and Grant would have given anything to be like him. As he came on down getting closer, he stopped kicking and, hunching his shoulders in a strange way as if to make himself heavier, coasted down. Just as Grant saw his forearm tightening to squeeze the trigger, the barracuda gave an enormous flirt of its tail and simply disappeared. It didn’t go away; it just simply was no longer there, or anywhere visible, with an unbelievable speed if you hadn’t seen it. Bonham looked after it, shrugged, and swam on to the line.

There was a great paternalism, protectiveness, about Bonham underwater. He looked Grant over carefully, turning him about and inspecting his gear, then with a violent hand motion downward swam on down the line toward the bottom. Grant followed, his nervousness returning. Twice he had to stop on the line to clear his ears and he suddenly noticed that Bonham apparently did not have to do this at all. On the bottom, like some huge calm great-bellied Buddha, Bonham seated himself crosslegged on the sand, took off his mask, blinked blindly, then put it back on and blew the water out of it by tilting his head to one side and holding the upper side of the mask. Then he motioned for Grant to do the same, as he had, upstairs, warned him that he would.

Grant had done this in the various pools, but down here (his depth gauge Bonham had sold him now read 59 feet) he found it was more scary. It was all that water above you. Kneeling on the sand, he forced himself with the greatest reluctance to reach up and pull off his own mask. When he did, he immediately went blind. The salt water burned his eyes and the insides of his nose. He found himself gasping for breath. Bonham was now only one great blur to him. He made himself breathe deeply several times, and blinked. Then he put the mask back on and cleared it. Not as adept as Bonham, he had to blow several times to get all the water out. But when he looked at Bonham, the big man was nodding happily and holding up his thumb and forefinger in the old circle salute for ‘okay’. Then he motioned for Grant to come and went swimming off six or eight feet above the sand. Grant followed, his eyes still smarting. He was ridiculously pleased. At the moment he felt very much the son to Bonham’s massive paternalism. This did not irritate him. Instead, it gave him reassurance.

Bonham proceeded to point out the various corals. They were all very beautiful and interesting to look at—in a slimy, repugnant sort of way—but you could only look at coral so long without getting bored. Apparently fully aware of this, Bonham—after pointing out a number of varieties (including two which he warned Grant not to touch by wringing a hand and shaking it as if stung)—chose the exact moment of Grant’s increasing restlessness to show him something else. At the end of the coral hillock they had been exploring he swam over to Grant and motioned for him to follow. He led him straight down over the steep side of the hillock to the sand channel bottom (here Grant’s depth gauge Bonham had sold him read 63 feet), and there he pointed out two large caves. It was apparently true that Bonham knew this area like Grant knew his backyard. It was also apparent that he was conducting his tour and displaying his treasures one by one with the dramatic sense of a veteran entrepreneur.

To Grant the caves were both exciting and frightening. The one on the left of the sand channel went back in under the coral hill they had just swum over; way back in there some hole running clear to the top of the coral allowed a shaft of sunlight to penetrate all the way to the bottom, illuminating greenly some strange coral shapes growing on the sand; outside, its entrance was huge, not a real cave mouth at all, but more an overhang that ran almost the entire length of the side of the hillock. From under this overhang Grant carefully stayed away, as he looked. By contrast, Bonham had already swum on in. Turning his head, he motioned Grant to follow. Biting hard on the two rubber tits of the mouthpiece between his teeth, tightening his lips over the whole, Grant descended a little and entered. Scared as he was, it was magnificently beautiful in there. The ceiling was only fifteen or twenty feet from the sand floor, much lower than it had looked from outside. Several good-sized tunnels showing sunlight at their ends led off from it and looked safe for exploring. But Bonham was already swimming back out, motioning him to follow.

The other cave, across the channel, was really no more than a fissure, running maybe thirty feet up an almost perpendicular dead-coral cliff, hardly wide enough to admit a man, and it was to this one now that Bonham led him.

Gesturing Grant to follow, the big man swam up the fissure to a point that appeared slightly wider than the rest, snaked himself through, and disappeared. When Grant followed, he found he had to turn his shoulders sideways to enter. When he did, his tank banged alarmingly on the rock behind him. He remembered reading stories of fellows who had cut their air intake hoses on sharp coral, and who had barely got out alive by luck, superior experience, and by keeping their heads. Trying to keep his air intake hose (without being able to see it) somewhere near the center of the cleft, Grant pulled himself along with his hands on the sucky, unpleasantly viscid living corals growing here. But when he was in far enough that he could no longer bend his knees to flutter his feet, the panicky breathlessness, the sensation of being unable to breathe, to get enough air, which panic brings, and which he knew from before, hit him debilitatively. Stopping, he forced himself to breathe deeply but it didn’t help. Suddenly his instinct was to throw off everything and run for the surface blindly, even though covered by coral rock, get to anywhere where there was air. Instead, he reached out with his hands and pulled himself further in, trying to keep his movements slow and liquid, unviolent, though by now he didn’t care whether the coral cut him or not.

Actually, he had only been inches away from freedom. The last pull with his arms brought him head and shoulders almost to his waist out into the open. One breast stroke with his arms and he was free, swimming almost forty feet above the bottom. Bonham, who Grant now realized had been directly in front of him watching and ready to help, had already rolled over head down and like an airplane in a full dive was swimming straight down toward the bottom, his flippers beating leisurely and slow, his arms holding camera and gun extended backward along his thighs to streamline. For a moment Grant was seriously angry at him, for taking such a chance with him on his first dive. Still breathing deeply, though slower and slower now as his heart and adrenal glands got back to normal, Grant watched in a kind of witless stupor as Bonham got smaller and smaller and smaller. A few feet above the bottom the big man leveled off over a huge coral toadstool and rolled over face up, and slowly sank to a cross-legged sitting position on it, his head back looking up, for all the world like some great, oneeyed humanoid alien frog from Alpha Centauri or somewhere. Still looking up, he motioned for Grant to come on down. Still staring, still breathing deeply from his fright in the narrow entrance, Grant suddenly realized with a start which brought him back out of his post-panic stupor that he was lying here all stretched out forty feet up in the
air
from this other man, relaxed, his arms out over his head like a man in a bed. Because it really could have been air.
Seemed
like air. The green-tinted water was crystal clear here inside, and Bonham by seating himself on the toadstool had avoided stirring up any sand clouds as they had done outside. For the first time with any real physical appreciation, Grant realized how delicious it was to be totally without gravity like one of the great planing birds; he could go up, he could go down, he could stay right where he was; in the strange spiritual excitement of it, his fear left him completely. Feeling ridiculous again because of his recent panic there, he glanced once at the narrow entrance fissure, then rolled over head down using exactly (though slower) the same body movements he once used to do a full-twisting half gainer, and corkscrewed gently down—relishing the leisurely control—into a vertical dive, his hands and arms straight back along his thighs palms up, his fins beating lazy and slow, as he had seen Bonham do. Only once did he have to clear his ears, and he did it now without pausing. Below him Bonham got larger and larger. Then, duplicating Bonham’s maneuver, he rolled over onto his back, exhaled and sank into a sitting position on the giant toadstool beside him, his knees clasped up to his chin. Unable to speak, or even to grin, he gesticulated wildly and waggled his eyebrows to show his enthusiasm. The big man nodded vigorously, then touching him gently, pointed upward, sweeping his arm across the view like a man unveiling a painting. For the first time since he had entered, Grant looked up.