Go to the Widow-Maker (41 page)

Lucky snorted against his sleeve. She was still the helpless, scared and embarrassed little girl again. “What’s so wrong with all that?”

Such a strange one. “Nothing at all. I’m in favor. I deserve it!”

“You’re not like the oldest Khanturian, anyway. You never were a nobody.”

“Oh yes I was! I remember well.”

“Why do you think he never married?”

Grant felt a prick of start, of caution. He steeled his voice to a tone of analysis. “That’s easy. Did you ever see the mom? She believes in ‘Family’. Meaning,
her.
She’s not about to ever let one of those boys get out from under her thumb. And if she tells him to, even though he might not want to, the Old Man will cut their money off. They haven’t got a chance.” He waited, but Lucky did not make the obvious comparison.

“I hate my mother,” she whispered against his sleeve, instead. “And she hates me. We understand each other, only I admit it and she smiles with her hard stupid selfish eyes and claims she loves me. How can I prove to anyone she doesn’t? Everything she’s ever done to hurt me, she’d done ‘for my own good’. People believe it. The only thing she really loves is her own ignorant greedy stupidity. But that won’t be provable.”

“She doesn’t sound much like the kind of lady who’ll give us ten thousand dollars as a wedding present,” Grant said, suddenly remembering old Frank Aldane’s nod of drunken approval when told that very thing.

There was a small silence. “That was a lie,” Lucky said against his sleeve. “She’s more likely to give us one or two small pieces of the silver my daddy collected.” Another small silence. “I lied to you and told you that because I thought it might make you more inclined to marry me.”

The car had dropped down past the Racquet Club into the edge of the town. Grant didn’t answer for a moment. Then he laughed. “Well, don’t worry about that.”

“I’m not worried about it,” Lucky said. “But I am worried about us.”

At the hotel, after they were in the suite, she clung to him bodily, even more so than she had done in the car. “We mustn’t let them destroy us. They would, all of them, if we gave them half a chance. I can’t protect myself against ‘Them’. But maybe together we can. I’m a little drunk. I don’t like it here. Please, let’s get out of here. Please!”

‘Them’, Grant understood, was just about everybody, everybody who had ever made a dollar off another person, everybody who had ever put a bayonet in another, everybody who had ever demanded allegiance from another, everybody who had ever sustained life or limb or bank account or ego at the expense of another, just about everybody in other words, beginning with her mother, her playmates, her teachers and schoolmasters, her university professors and carrying on to the US House of Representatives, the United States Senate, the voters, especially the voters, who knew? even the President himself—if he knew about her. But then he didn’t have to know about her, did he? Nor did any of the others. They all knew she existed somewhere. And you could go on and include the Bankers of England, the Communist Presidium, every Army in Europe, all churches, the Arab League, the Israeli Army, the Red Chinese social structure, and every howling tribe in Africa. Plus the NAACP, Black Muslims, Klan, and John Wayne and the Birch Society. Grant understood, because it was a feeling he had had himself most of his life. And more than five years in the US Navy fighting for Democracy had not helped alleviate it.

Paranoia, Mr Analyst? You bet your life. You bet your sweet ass. The Condition of Modern Man. And you show me, Mr Analyst, the humanity you talk about that doesn’t have the need or the necessity to destroy, even down to the tiniest word and never mind the atom bombs.

“We’ll go,” he said. “We’ll go tomorrow. First thing in the morning. I promise you. Come to bed and let me hold you.”

They did not leave the next day, however. And it was strictly Grant’s fault. When they got up in the middle of the morning it was to find that Doug and Terry September had come back to the hotel and were there in the living room of the suite already having their own breakfast. The eldest Khanturian had gotten bored hanging around Sir John’s private paradise without a girl and had asked to be taken back to town and they had driven him. Then instead of going back they had come on here, where they could be by themselves. “A little bit of that shit goes a long way,” Terry said with a raucous laugh. “I’m more like you, Lucky. I’d rather make it with just one guy at a time who I enjoyed.” Doug beamed at her. They were both still half drunk and had slept practically none at all.—“Did you ever see anybody more in love than those two?” Doug asked her.—“Well, not since I got out of high school anyway,” Terry laughed. It was from them that Grant and Lucky learned about the picnic which Sir John planned for today.

“Got this place over on the west end of the island he goes to, y’know,” Doug said with a quite accurate imitation of Sir John’s King’s English. He had always had a great ear. “Place called Negril Bay. Doesn’t own it. Place owned by a little sod of a farmer. Chap raises a few papaya and lives off his coconuts. Pays him a few quid a year to use the beach. Lovely beach. Great marvelous reef right off it. Takes along a special rum punch he makes, and coldcuts, cooks hamburgers on the little brick barbecue. Great fun. Swim all you want. Lie in the sun.”

Terry of course had to put in an appearance on the job, she and the other girls. “But we’re through after twelve o’clock noon. And we finish up tomorrow and leave the day after. I thought it would be a sort of nice you know finale.” There would just be the four couples of them, with Doug, Sir John, Ron and “the Spy from Home”.

Grant immediately wanted to go. Partly he wanted to get a chance to try out on the “great marvelous reef” the rented aqualung he’d brought which had been moldering in the trunk of the car ever since they’d gotten here. And partly, he suddenly discovered in him a great reluctance to do anything that would hurry up his departure and force him to get on with it, go on back to Ganado Bay and have his showdown with Carol Abernathy about going on to Kingston ‘alone.’ He had told her once that he was taking his ‘new girl’ down there with him, but he hadn’t really meant it, then, and he was pretty sure she hadn’t believed it. To avoid trouble, and yelling and screaming, he was going to tell her he was going down to Kingston alone but he knew it would still cause a lot of upset. God; in spite of all she had done to him so callously and selfishly, evilly, over the years (and to just about everybody else, including Hunt), he still acted as guiltily around her as if he were a goddamned weak little philandering husband. A regular unmanly little Rotarian. The image again: dark, mantilla-ed, and still standing on the church steps pointing, pointing at the great nail-studded, dark evil doors. It was that feeling that he’d started this whole damned diving junket to try and get over.

He told Lucky about wanting to go on the picnic as soon as Terry had left and they were alone together in the bedroom to dress for the day. “I’d like to see this Negril place. I’ve read about it. And I’d like to get one chance to try out this damned aqualung, which is really why I came in the first place.” She agreed to go without much argument, but again she looked at him strangely. “I really don’t like it here,” she said after agreeing. “And I don’t really know why. It’s just a feeling. Of something terrible hanging over us. Something horrible that’s liable to happen to us any moment.”

“Is it that you don’t like Sir John?” Grant said, guiltily.

“No. No, not really. I like him. I like him a lot—”

“A lot? You mean like that? Really a lot?” Grant said jealously.

“Don’t be silly. And I like Doug, too. I like him a lot. And those girls are really okay. Like you said, last night.” She paused, inconclusively. “I just don’t know what it is. But something’s wrong. And I’m scared.”

Grant decided not to answer this, and when they finished dressing and came out into the livingroom of the suite again, they found Doug waiting for them.

“Jesus, if you two aren’t a rosy-looking pair,” he said. “You look like an ad for the Great American Lovesong Industry. Right out of
McCalls.
Christ, I swear, when I look at you two I think I oughta fall in love again myself. And I thought I was through with that kind of shit-thinking forever.”

He put up his big arm and scratched his curly hair and strode with explosive energy back and forth across the room. “What do you think of that Terry girl? Underneath that façade of hers, she’s really quite a nice girl. And as shitless-scared as the rest of us, I guess.” He looked up at them. “Hunh?”

“I think she’s a great girl,” Grant said.

“Well. Anyway, we’re meeting them all at Doctor’s Cave for a beer at 12:15 and taking off from there.” He grinned at them with explosive delight.

It was, all told, 48 miles to Negril Bay. But it took an hour and a half to make the trip because the road, none too good anyway, ran alongside the sea and curved in and out of every little cove. Doug and Terry rode with Grant and Lucky, and “the Spy from Home” and his model with Sir John. Doug and Terry did little but neck and feel each other up in the backseat, and drink some of the beers Grant was carrying for the picnic. When they pulled off the road beside Sir John’s car, and then followed him in through the sand under the half-jungly growth of papaya trees and coconut palms, Grant could see through their back window that “the Spy from Home” and his girl had been doing pretty much the same.

When they drove past the tiny house, set charmingly on its stilts in the shade of the sandy grove, the ‘farmer’ came out. Sir John stopped his car, got out and towering over the diminutive Negro man so that he had to bend almost double, walked off with him, listened for at least five minutes to whatever it was the ‘farmer’ was saying so smilingly, at one point put his arm over the small man’s shoulder, and then slipped him what could only be a banknote. Grant, sitting impatiently behind the wheel of the second car, wished he wouldn’t take so damned long and wondered how much hatred there might be under the small Negro man’s smiling exterior. If there wasn’t any (and Grant could not be at all sure of that), some organization like CORE or the NAACP or some Jamaican equivalent would be damned sure to agitate to create some, and rightly so, probably. One Negro could not be happy until all were happy. One human could not be happy until all were happy. Maybe. But for a brief moment he felt a keenly cutting envy for the diminutive Negro, with his grove of breadfruit, papaya and coconuts, his ramshackle house on stilts that needed no stove in winter, only protection from the rain, and his front yard of blindingly brilliant sea which from the car Grant could hear rubbing itself softly against his deep sand beach. What more could anybody want out of life? And for that moment Grant would gladly have traded places with him, color and all—provided, of course, he could have Lucky be here with him, he added, somewhat surprising himself. But then that Other Part of his mind said Sure, and if the two of you lived here you’d both drink yourselves to death in a year. Grant had once made liquor in the far Pacific by putting sugar in coconuts and fermenting them in the sun. Sir John came back after taking his own sweet time, and as they drove on in Grant saw in rising echelon four pairs of large white eyes staring at him over the rim of a windowsill from inside the house, and in that dark interior they appeared to have no faces. “What the hell were you doing all that time?” he asked Brace when they stopped and got out.

“Ahh,” Sir John said, grinning with his horserace. “Have to butter them up a bit, you know. Time to time.”

“But what was he talking to you about all that time?”

“Ah. About some life insurance he wants to buy.”

Grant had never seen such brilliant sunshine in his life, not even in the tropical Pacific. It seemed at least double that of Ganado Bay or Montego Bay, and was so bright, so hot, so white that it turned everything that was out in it no matter how dark or bright the color into a shade of off-white, and at the same time caused everything that was in shadow no matter what color to become dead black. After a while one’s dazzled and sun-scorched eyes ceased to see color at all. This extra-brilliant sunshine was due, or so Sir John Brace maintained, to the fact that this westernmost tip of the island was not, like the rest, on any of the what he called “cloud flyways,” and was never therefore shaded or soothed by them. He was able to point this out by showing them out at sea a long straight line of large white clouds sailing serenely along to the northwest in the general direction of the Cayman Islands like a flotilla of great white sailing ships in line. Grant found this hard to believe but visually, in the sky, it seemed to bear out Sir John’s contention: every cloud over the island seemed to channel itself into this long line moving northwest while on either side of this markedly noticeable line there was not a cloud in the sky as far as the eye could see.

Under this burning white-hot sunshine was a little four-sided unroofed room made of woven palm fronds and here the girls, murmuring among themselves, changed to their suits. On the beach in the blaze it was as still as death, and Grant with the hot sand burning the bottoms of his bare feet was suddenly made to think of summer Sundays back home in the Midwest and the special feel they seemed to have, in the very air itself, different from other days. The sea lapped at the sand with the tiniest of sounds. By the time the men had changed to their suits Sir John had his rum punch and the beer set up for utilization on a car hood.

Whether it was the sun, the water, the rum punch itself, or a combination of all three, they were all of them practically falling-down drunk in twenty minutes. The punch, Sir John bragged proudly, steadying himself with a hand on the car door and smiling with slightly glassy eyes at his motley crew, had five kinds of rum in it, some lemon juice and a little molasses syrup. It was even good warm, he maintained, though he had brought plenty of ice. In any case its effect, in this still hot sun, was somewhat like being rapped at the base of the skull with a white-hot sledgehammer. From this state it was only a short step again to nude swimming and sunbathing.