Go to the Widow-Maker (35 page)

“She is,” he said crisply. “If I told you how nice, you’d say I’d lost my power of judgment.”

“Well, good for you. All I know is, a man’s gotta live,” Doug said gruffly. “If he can.”

“He sure does,” Grant said, and the sense of male conspiracy became stronger. He still didn’t like it.

Ali was loafing around the shop, obviously quite happy to be doing nothing, and while he looked chagrined at the idea of doing some work said Shar in his curiously flatted East Indian accent, he would take them out, if they was sure Misteh Bonham said it are all right. Grant assured him that he had. Would they both be wanting lungs, he asked. No, Grant said, just one.

Doug talked more about Carol Abernathy on the way out. She seemed really different this time, he thought, much more nervous and highstrung; but Grant was thinking about the diving now and didn’t say much in reply. When Ali anchored the little boat off the airport over the shallow reef, he went about dressing himself out nervously but quite proud in front of Doug, and made a very professional back entry, always an impressive sight. When he rolled over and looked down, he recognized the area and realized that Ali had anchored them above the big coral cave where Bonham had taken him down that first day.

Behind him he heard Doug splash in in his mask and snorkle and motioned for him to come on over, and when he did Grant who was showing off a little took off swimming straight down for the green sand bottom 60, 65 feet below. Now, it all felt so natural, comfortable. On the bottom, lying just a few feet above it so as not to disturb the sand into clouds, he rolled over on his back and waved up at Doug who waved back, a tiny figure now on the undulating silver of the surface. When he first had recognized the coral hillock which contained within it the big cave, the blood had risen in his ears with an odd excitement as he remembered his dream—dream, and half-promise—of coming back alone to this place someday and masturbating in it. Swimming along the bottom on around the hillock, he motioned Doug to follow him on the surface.

He did not intend to reenter it by the narrow fissure he and Bonham had gone in by, even though his sense of honor made him feel he ought to try it, plus the fact that it would be quite a spectacle for Doug on the surface; but he knew pretty well where the other entrance was, and as he swam on around to the other side of the coral hill to where a narrowing sand-bottomed trench ran shoreward, Doug followed him on the surface, watching, obviously intrigued. The other entrance was only fifteen or eighteen feet deep if he remembered right, and when he thought he had positioned himself correctly, he started swimming up the living coral cliff faces. At seventeen feet of depth it appeared, only a few feet off to his left.

From the brightly sunlit water outside it was impossible to make out anything within the black hole of the mouth, but he remembered the interior exactly. Motioning to Doug what he intended to do, then pointing at his watch and holding up first five, then six fingers with a shrug, Grant took a full, deep breath, let out half of it, and swam inside. From above him Doug had shrugged too and held his hands out helplessly.

The alcove-tunnel was still there, and when he swam around its corner into the main cavern, the shafts of sunlight from the ceiling holes still slanted down through the water to strike against the coral walls or sand floor. He remembered that the coral toadstool where they had sat was invisible from this high up, but after he had swum down ten or twelve feet it became visible, far down, resting on the sand floor. Breathing carefully and slowly from the lung Grant swam down toward it, 35, 40 feet below him. So still, so dim, so green and cool, so lonely. So uninhabited. All the cathedrals, all the churches, all the empty school buildings after five o’clock, all the childhood loneliness, came back to him and he could feel his penis hardening in the little bikini. Not breaking his kick-rhythm or his quiet calm of breathing, he swam on down what seemed endlessly then rolled up and turned over just above the giant toadstool and by exhaling to make himself heavier, let himself bump to rest sitting on its scratchy surface. The cathedral-cave was unchanged, looked exactly as it had the other time. But now he was alone.

Liquidly and using no violent or wasted motion Grant hooked his thumbs into his bikini straps and slipped it down to his knees, then lightly took it off over his flippers, first one leg then the other. Immediatedly everything felt different, cleaner, more beautiful, as always in nude swimming. The water now reached the angles of his crotch and anus as it did the rest of him. As an afterthought he stuck the bikini underneath his weight belt so as to be sure not to lose it. Then he looked down at himself and was startled to see that, due to the refraction of the light rays passing through his mask, his hardened cock appeared to be sitting in the middle of his chest! He fingered himself, lightly, and then realized that he didn’t really want to masturbate. Instead, he took off and swam back and forth across the cavern delighting in the movement of the water against his naked crotch and organs. Then he came back and descending on an impulse to the sand floor near the toadstool, rubbed and flogged and ground his bare penis, testicles and crotch against the sand, raising a small cloud. It was just then that he looked up and saw a huge jewfish studying him quietly and curiously from twenty feet away.

It was enormous. As long as he was, it was more than twice as big around. It must easily have weighed at least 400, 450 pounds. It was the first one he had ever seen, and it looked like a grouper, which in fact it was, with the same big mouth. Only, this mouth was big enough to take in his head and shoulders with room to spare. And he had read that they occasionally attacked divers. All this had run through his mind in one flash and without even thinking he drew his knife from its sheath on his leg and swam up the few feet to put him on its level, ready to fight, but reasonably certain he would lose. He had not brought a speargun with him, not expecting to see fish, but even a speargun seemed a puny futile weapon against a creature such as this.

Fortunately he didn’t have to fight. When he reached its level, the huge fish with its great goiterous-looking perpetually startled eyes gave a flick of its body that was like a minor explosion and disappeared across the cavern into a dark area Grant had not explored. It had all happened so fast he had not even lost his hard-on.

Still fingering it, and feeling somehow quite pleased, he swam over to the area cautiously, to find that here was apparently still another exit. A long low tunnel seven or eight feet in diameter led away through the coral hillock over a rising, then falling, then rising again floor of rippled sand. No sunlight was visible at the other end of it, and Grant did not feel like exploring it. Swimming back, he sheathed his knife and put back on his bikini. He still had more than sixty feet of water and coral above him to get out of yet.

But if he worried about his erection remaining so that it might be noticed by Doug Ismaileh as he came back out of the cave, he needn’t have. As he swam back up toward the entrance and the sunlight it went away as quietly and mysteriously as it had come. And as he swam back out of the cave mouth into sunbright water, he felt curiously fulfilled. He had been down in there just a little over nine and a half minutes. Above him still lying on the surface, Doug Ismaileh was gesticulating at him nervously with both hands.

“Jesus Christ!” he protested when they were both back in the boat. “What the fuck were you doing in there all that time? I thought you’d gotten yourself killed!”

“Just exploring,” Grant said. “I told you at least six minutes.”

“You said
five,
or
six
minutes!”

“Well, I lost track of the time a little.”

“You lost track! I was gettin ready to swim back to the boat to get Ali!”

“He wouldn’t have helped any,” Grant grinned. “He doesn’t even dive.” He described the big cave to Doug but he did not tell him about the jewfish, largely because he would have felt honorbound to go back after it with a speargun if he had. He had done two dishonorable things today, he calculated. He had not gone in through the fissure like he should have, and he had not gone back after the big jewfish.

But he did tell Bonham about it, later on. The big man only grinned. “You mean you went down there alone without a speargun on your first dive alone? I aint worried about your guts!”—“I just didn’t think there’d be any fish. But shouldn’t I have gone back after it?” Grant insisted. “Wouldn’t you have?” Bonham rubbed his jaw. “Maybe. I’m not sure. He was probly long gone. I know that exit. Anyway spearin big fish in caves is ticklish business. They can drag you into a narrow hole and knock your mouthpiece out of your mouth. Can be very dangerous. Always remember that in divin the cautious decision is always the best one. It’s your life you’re playin around with,” he said with a solemn pious look—and Grant suddenly knew that that was not at all what Bonham really believed, or at least not all of the time, that Bonham was talking sop for customers. He had had to be content with that. He did not, of course, tell anybody about his erection.

“Well, what do you think of it?” he asked Doug as they toweled themselves off in the hot sun on the boat. Doug thought a greal deal of it, he said, and would like to learn it. Especially he would like to see the inside of that cave.

“Well, I can teach you if you want,” Grant said. “Now that I know his methods, I can give you a pool checkout about as good as Bonham.”

Doug seemed to take quite a long time in answering. They were sitting in the cabin cockpit in the shade now, near the wheel, and all the windows and windshields were wide open. A warm soft little breeze swept through it carrying the smell of the sea, and occasionally smelling of the hot muck of the mangrove swamps that formed the extreme right side of the harbor. The tropical skyline there was mysterious and dangerously inviting as though they might be the first non-natives ever to make landfall here, and on the other side the skyline of sprawling hotels called luxuriously to modern pleasures of booze and broads, martinis and models. The noon jet from New York had just landed at the airport and was disgorging its vacationing passengers into the air terminal. The little boat rocked gently in the sea wash, and they could hear the hiss of water moving in the bilge. Grant was feeling the sense of vast relief he always got now, when the diving for the day was over and he did not have the prospect of it before him. Doug was looking out through the open windshield at the hotels and the high hill behind them with Evelyn de Blystein’s villa on it. “Is it safe?” he said finally. “I mean, I don’t mean safe. I mean is it easy to learn?”

“Well, it took me three days to learn all the techniques he wanted to teach me. Course I couldn’t do them as well as him. And still can’t,” Grant said. “I think it’s easy. Of course everyone is a little nervous at first, naturally.”

“Well, might’s well give it a try,” Doug said turning back, “I guess. Since I’m down here, and everything’s handy.”

Ali who had been sitting in the tail stowing gear came forward. “Ahre you rahddy to go in, Meestahr Ghrant, Sahr?” he said.

“No,” Grant said. “No, not yet. Let’s just sit here a little while, okay? It’s so pleasant.”

“It is pleasant, aint it?” Doug said with a sudden grin. He broke out a half bottle of scotch he had brought from the villa and they drank it together, mixing it with tepid water from the water jug without ice, sitting together in silence and just feeling—the movement of the boat, the shade and hot sun, the breeze on their faces, the smells of sea and mangrove swamp, the view of both banks of the harbor, the view of the airport, from which the big jet soon trundled out and took off going over their heads again with a whistling roar.

“Well, I guess we better be gettin back, hunh?” Doug said reluctantly. “We got to sing for our supper tonight yet, don’t we? Who’s old Evelyn havin for dinner?”

“Christ, I don’t know,” Grant said with a start. He got up and motioned to Ali to start the motor.

In the next two days Grant took him four times, twice mornings twice afternoons, to one of the hotel swimming pools and tried to teach him, suspending his own diving and taking him through the same training routines step by step that Bonham had put him through.

But Doug simply could not learn. Not from him, anyway. He advanced swiftly through all the mask techniques, breath-holding techniques and suchlike, all of which he knew something about, but when it came to using the aqualung itself he simply could not do it. It was all right at the shallow end of the pool, but the moment he arrived at the deep end swimming along the bottom, he would be forced to rush coughing and spluttering to the surface. “I think it’s the goddamned shape of my mouth!” he said with angry disgust, but with a peculiar veiled look on his face. “No matter what I do water keeps leaking in around my lips!” On the third day, when Bonham got back from Grand Bank, Grant turned him over to Bonham.

But Bonham had no better luck, and could not teach him either.

The thing about the shape of his mouth being wrong was obviously an excuse. Hanging around with Bonham on his teaching rounds, Grant had by now heard four neophytes complain of the same thing, one of them being Carol Abernathy. None of them had ever succeeded in learning to dive. He had discussed with Carol her own feeling about being in the lung, and had about decided that the real trouble might be some kind of an underwater claustrophobia, perhaps augmented by the confinement of the facemask. Aware that a certain volume of water existed above her, she simply had to come up. It might even be that this claustrophobic fear, upon reaching near-panic proportions, caused them to relax their lips and let water get in. Or perhaps the water getting in the mouth thing was simply a face-saving lie. Tactfully he discussed this with Doug, and Doug admitted that on the bottom of the deep end of the pool he did get this panicky feeling of being closed in, pressed down. Grant himself had never had this feeling in a lung, though he had plenty of other fears, and on the contrary being in a lung underwater gave him a feeling of opening up panoramic vistas, as well as the delight in being gravityless. “It’s stupid!” Doug said angrily. “Because I’m not afraid!”— “Of course not. That’s not what it is. But if that’s it,” Grant said, “a claustrophobia, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Has nothing to do with being afraid.” Doug shook his head stubbornly. He tried several more times, always with the same result, and finally had to give it up and quit. “It’s the thought of never ever, never in my life, being able to see the inside of that damned cave of yours that bugs me,” he said despairfully. “I’m cut off from it.”