Go to the Widow-Maker (31 page)

As far as the eye could see in every direction stretched a vast plain of pure yellow sand that was absolutely flat. For the most part the sand was totally bare, except for a single sea plume or purple gorgonia here and there swaying gently as the water moved it, but every thirty or forty yards in all directions were what appeared to be piles of carefully prearranged rocks. Closer inspection showed these to be coral hillocks, too young in creation to have grown together to make themselves into a reef. And two or three feet above each hillock as far as the eye could see hung one or two or three big grouper, gently moving their fins to keep themselves exactly over the center of their pile. It was like looking down on the domain of some primeval dukedom from the air, a land tranquil, peaceful, alien and dangerous, ready to explode into killing war, into flight and pursuit, at any second; a land to—Grant couldn’t really say what it made him feel—a land to conquer. Half drunk as he still was, with his terrible great hangover, floating face down on the surface, he could hear his breath coming slow and steady through his snorkel tube, and a tingle of a sense of danger, of a forever alien misunderstanding, slithered around through his viscera and groin and finally settled itself in his scrotum.

Beside him Bonham touched him on the arm and when he looked over, wiggled his eyebrows in his mask proudly like someone showing off a friend’s art work to an interested collector. Grant nodded vigorously, and the big man rolled over easily till his mouth was out, plucked his snorkel, and said, “To the top of the rocks is thirty-six feet, to the sand itself forty-three.”

Grant raised his own head, much more awkwardly, and treaded water. “But what are they doing?” he gasped.

Bonham rolled on his side again. “Doing! How do I know? Who the hell cares? These grouper here’re almost always like that in the middle of the day.” He took a breath. “Watch.”

He lay on the surface taking several long deep breaths— ‘hyperventilating’; he had already explained this to Grant— then surface-dived and swam down kicking rhythmically and easily, left arm back along his side palm up, right arm extended with the gun. At maybe twenty feet Grant watched him snake his left hand up to his mask and clear his ears. Six or eight feet from the two grouper resting stationary above the pile he stopped kicking and coasted down, waited two or three seconds, speared the biggest of the pair, rolled over and headed back up, his head back, sunlight glinting on his mask, his arms at his sides and the fish trailing along wildly below him at the end of the spear and line. His heart in his mouth from the eerie beauty of it, Grant thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. It was like a ballet conducted in nongravity. It was twice as beautiful as when the bulky lung tanks were on the diver’s back.

Just as Bonham started down Sam Finer had touched Grant on his other side and swept his arm with excited appreciation across the underwater scene. He was again wearing his Scott Hydro-Pak (he was still on his first set of tanks) and at the moment was breathing through the snorkel-like ‘air economizer’ on the side of the fullface mask. He carried the little Minox Bonham and William had repaired for him last night in one hand and his speargun in the other.

Grant had spared him one quick glance, not wanting to miss any of Bonham’s dive, but now as the big man surfaced still trailing his gyrating fish Finer touched Grant on the arm again. “Great, hunh?” he said in a faint, strangely squeaky voice from inside his fullface mask, and spread his arm again over the underwater scene. Grant nodded. “Ever see anything like this? What a life! Okay. See you later,” Finer squeaked, and went swimming off.

“Okay, now you try it,” Bonham said, coming back from boating his fish in the nearby boat. Grant looked down. The other grouper, which had disappeared when Bonham speared his companion, had now returned to his exact same position above the center of the coral pile. He maintained himself there calmly with little movements of his pectorals, as if nothing had happened. Grant began to ‘hyperventilate’, himself. “Not that one,” Bonham said from beside him. “He’s spooky now. We’ll save him for later. Pick another pile.”

Grant nodded and swam off toward another one, which had its own grouper floating serenely above it as though he was not aware human predators had invaded his land. Looking down at him, wanting more than anything in the world to get down there to him and put a vicious, triumphant spear into him, Grant lost all sense of time. It took him at least four tries before he could finally get far enough down even to shoot, and when he did he was so nervously out of breath that he hurried his shot and missed by at least two feet. Bonham waved him on to another pile patiently.

“Relax more,” Bonham said, rolling over on his side and floating easily while he made a lecture. “Don’t kick so hard. Don’t try to go down fast. Take your time. You got plenty of time. Believe me. Don’t get scared down there. Don’t panic. It isn’t lack of oxygen that makes you want to breathe. It’s excess carbon dioxide that makes your diaphragm heave like that. Remember how I made you stay down in the pool till you couldn’t stay any more, and then made you turn and swim underwater across the pool? Relax more when you hyperventilate. Don’t work so hard at it. Relax. It’s not dangerous. Relax more.” It seemed to become a running comment that never left his ears. They moved on to another pile.

The very first time down the pressure on his ears had really begun to hurt at twenty feet, and he had stopped to clear them; by the time he did, his momentum was lost; he had given a few frantic kicks and then had to come back up.

On the second try he had been prepared for the ear-clearing problem, had kept on kicking as he cleared, gone on down, but the moment he realized how deep he was below the surface now his heart had begun to pound, he was suddenly out of breath, and he had to come back up.

He did not know how many piles he spooked before he finally shot a fish, two or three maybe. But when he did succeed and hit one, and turned, elated, to come back up, he thought for a moment the fish had anchored him to the bottom. Frantically trying to swim the other way below him, it effectively held him down. He considered letting go of the gun, but the shame would be too great. Remembering Bonham’s advice, trying not to let himself get scared and step up his carbon dioxide content, he worked his fins rhythmically and easily at the ends of his legs, and slowly he rose, the fish below him dragging heavily at the gun in his hand. Far above him, while his chest heaved uncontrollably, he looked up at the undulating sun-glowing surface as a haven the like of which he had never dreamed of before. When his head burst through it, and he blew out his snorkel and gasped, and then just lay floating and breathing, it was as much of a return to the Promised Land as he ever expected to feel. Twelve feet below him his fish swam around in slow circles on its side at the end of his spear and line.

“That’s the ticket,” Bonham said from beside him. “That was a pretty good dive. He’ll go twelve pounds.”

“They sure put a drag on you, don’t they?” Grant laughed, gasping. He looked down again at his trophy affectionately. The feeling that he had accomplished something, something that neither he nor his body had wanted to do, gave him a new elation.

“The really big ones really put drag on you,” Bonham said, and grinned at him. “Feels good, hunh?”

“Sure does.” This time Grant raised his head completely out, and treaded water. “Where’s the boat? I’ll go and—”

Bonham cut him short. “Too far. Here, give him here.” He pulled a cord fish stringer out of the crotch of his trunks. “If we swam back to the boat to boat every fish, we’d lose all our time. Look at it.”

Raising his head, Grant at first couldn’t see it. Finally he picked it out as it bobbed up on a wavelet. It was at least two hundred and fifty yards away. A kind of spear of loneliness pierced through him. He looked at his watch, and saw he had been in the water forty-five minutes!

The most he had ever swum before, swimming normally without flippers and snorkel, had been fifteen minutes when he had swum a hundred yards for a Red Cross life-saving test. And then he had been exhausted.

It was only the beginning. They moved on from pile to pile, Grant diving and diving, Bonham repeating over and over his lecture to relax.

“Okay,” Bonham said finally, after a dive. “I’m gonna leave you on your own awhile.” He now had three of Grant’s fish on the stringer. He pulled another stringer from the crotch of his trunks and passed it over. “If you want more fish, use that. I have to spend some time with Sam and the camera. Besides, Sam isn’t all that good to be off by himself like that, anyway. And we want some good pictures. We’ll be over this way,” he said, and pointed southwest and slightly out to sea. “Work your way over that way.”

Grant felt a small chill at the thought of being alone. “Where’s Orloffski?”

“He’s over that way too, I think. Now, did you see how I handled them fish?”

Grant nodded. Bonham had taken both of the two which were not dead by the eyeball sockets exactly as if he were picking up a bowling ball. The pain made them stiffen and cease to move. Then he had cut through the head into the brain with his knife. He had pulled a gill open with his fingernail to show Grant the sharp gill rakers that made it impossible to hold these fish by the gills. And when he pushed the metal tip of the stringer in through a gill to come out the mouth, he did it gingerly.

It seemed to Grant that there was never a minute that passed when he was not learning something. Sometimes it was hard on the ego. He rolled his own head out now, plucked his snorkel, and suddenly realized that he was getting the hang of that much, anyway. “But isn’t it dangerous? Carrying a fish stringer? Because of sharks?”

“Yeah, I guess it is,” Bonham said, and shrugged irritably. “But don’t worry about it
I’m
carrying it. If you don’t want to shoot any more fish, don’t. We got more than we need to eat. Work your way on over toward us, we might see something interesting.”

Then he was gone. It was all so matter-of-fact.

For a while Grant simply lay still in the water, looking down, moving his flippers idly only enough to keep him headed in the right direction. The blue and green world was eerie and beautiful. This way, floating with only the back of his neck out breathing slowly and easily through the snorkel, he was totally and completely relaxed.

After a while, he began swimming leisurely from one coral pile to another, making a dive now and then, but not trying to spear anything. It was the first time he had ever been really alone in the sea, and it gave him a peculiarly satisfying feeling. He even began to feel a little bit at home in it. He tried to remember where he had had this feeling of odd satisfaction before, and then realized that it had been at home as a kid, when he was alone in the big old house, totally alone and with nobody else there. If anybody else was there, it spoiled it, his parents, his kid sister, his two older brothers. But sometimes, once in a great while, his mother would be out, at one of her countless ladies’ club meetings, and everybody else would be off somewhere, and he would—age what? ten or twelve?—come home from school and know that he was going to be there alone for a certain number of hours. He would walk through the big old rooms in the stillness and quiet, the hallway, the kitchen, the diningroom with its big oval table, the middle parlor where they were allowed by his mother, the front parlor where they were not allowed by his mother (“Livingroom Number One and Livingroom Number Two,” his father sarcastically called them), all the bedrooms upstairs, all the bathrooms; and in the silence of aloneness everything, every object and every space, the air and light itself, would appear new and strange as though he had never seen it before. Knowing that eventually he would go up to his own attic rooms—attic apartment was more the word for it—and masturbate in tranquillity, he would touch this chair or that lamp with this odd satisfaction of entity. And that was the way Grant felt now in the sea.

But then honor came into it and disrupted all that. He had to spear a fish. He had to spear a fish, and he had to carry it on the stringer. If Bonham—and Mo Orloffski, and Finer—could swim around carrying bleeding fish on stringers, then he had to do it, too. Every book he had ever read about skin-diving warned against this. It was dangerous. It was an open invitation to sharks. Some sharks were known to have come from down-tide as far as a mile or two miles after the scent of fish blood, the books said. Grant didn’t even know whether the tide was coming in or going out at the moment. He had forgotten to ask. None of that mattered.

Picking the biggest grouper among all the ‘rockpile’ grouper within his visibility, he swam over to above it, hyperventilated enormously, surface-dived, and started down, although he didn’t want to.

It turned out the most beautiful dive he had ever made, with or without aqualung. It was very nearly perfect. Swimming down in the classic stance, clearing ear pressure as it built up, he could feel his legs beating easily and relaxed with their flippers against the water resistance, driving him, loose all over as goose grease. He watched the big fish come closer and felt he had all the time in the world. The grouper was resting two feet or so above his coral rockpile which meant he was diving, what? thirty-six feet? Stopping his kick, he waited just long enough, but not too long, calculating the angle of entry of the spear for a brain shot from behind and above, and shot the slowly moving fish exactly through his brain. The grouper quivered and became still, and Grant rolled over delighting in himself and his movements and started back up slowly, watching the glistening, never-quiet water-sky come down to meet him as he rose. He was—at least for as long as he could hold his breath—a free man, free of gravity, free of everything, and reveled in it. With only a couple of heaves of his diaphragm, he swam back up as slowly as he could, sorry that it was over. When his head broke the surface, he felt—erroneously or not—that he was a different man.

But then the anxiety returned. The fish was dead so there was no need to cut him, and being hit well in the head there was almost no blood. But he was anxious anyway. Constantly looking to right and left and behind, he got him off the spear and onto the stringer, tied it to the hip strap of his bikini and went swimming off in the direction Bonham had taken, looking all around and behind every few seconds. He wished now that he had not had to do it, but it was equally unthinkable to unstring the fish and drop him—an idea which had entered his head—just leave him and swim away. He swam on, alone and peering down into a world of water.