Go to the Widow-Maker (44 page)

Usually Raoul gave her jewelry, most of which she subsequently sold or pawned, after his death. God, they were all so rich those South Americans, what with their great estates and peon peasants and no taxes at all, hardly even any law. An ordinary American couldn’t believe it. This time he had simply given her this money at the airport when she had ridden out with him to see him off. She had come home with a purse so jammed with bills she couldn’t completely close it. The very sight of it had panicked her. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she’d cried.—“I don’t care,” he’d said. “It’s a present. Buy yourself something with it.” When counted it had turned out to be $10,000. And it had lasted like a week. She had given hundred-dollar bills to all her friends. She had loaned hundreds and hundreds of dollars to people she knew damn well would never pay her back. She threw big parties. Once she had scattered twenty-dollars bills all around the apartment to her girlfriends like it was ticker-tape confetti. It just wasn’t real, and she couldn’t make it seem real. She herself wasn’t real holding it. Then it was gone. But she was still proud of herself for it. Of course, she didn’t know he was going to get himself killed down there.

She must have dozed because the sound of the car’s motor getting lower and lower until it was idling seemed a dream, and then the car itself rolling gently to a stop, and then it brought her back with a start. Grant leaned over her and said gently, “Well, sweetie, we’re here.” Sitting up, she saw a decrepit-looking kind of Charlie Addams house with high steep mansard roofs of corrugated tin.

Although it was after midnight, the little house was ablaze with lights. Rock and roll music poured from its windows. When Ron called, an enormous figure appeared in the screendoor literally filling it, and stood there silhouetted against the light like some huge terrible gorilla from the forests of Africa, bellowing.

“That’s Al Bonham,” she heard Grant say from behind her with almost boyish hero-worship. “The best damn aqualung diver in the Caribbean.”

“Haw! You son of a bitch! I thought you’d gone to China or someplace!” Bonham was roaring.

Once inside, the two men began beating each other on the back. A third man, naked to the waist and heavily muscled with that thin layer of protective lard just under the skin that she had seen professional football players have, came over from the table and gave Grant a punch on the arm that sounded like a butcher hitting a side of meat with a flathead hammer. She watched Grant wince, suddenly feeling a little sick in her stomach. But he came back with a punch to the belly swift and hard enough to make the other man whoof. “And this is Mo Orloffski,” he said with an apologetic grin, “sailor, diver, and owner of the biggest sporting goods store on the South Jersey Shore.” Orloffski roared with laughter. “Used to be, honey. But I’m sellin it. You want to buy one?” Two women, one of them a light-skinned Jamaican colored girl, sat by the trumpeting record-player holding cans of beer. One of them, the Jamaican girl, was knitting. Everything, every flat surface in the room except the floor was crowded with empty beercans and beer bottles. Around the edges of the floor and crowding the corners of the room were duffel bags packed with gear, rubber-hosed aqualung regulators and sets of tanks. On the table, crowding the beercans outward to the corners, was an aqualung regulator all opened up with its innards showing that the two men must have just been working on. On the floor beside the table was a haphazard pile of marine charts upon which several stuffed-out cigarette butts had fallen. Lucky felt a horribly strong distaste rising in her.

“You were right, old buddy,” Bonham grinned after all the introductions had been made. When he grinned, it was as if some huge black ominous cloud of foreboding covered his forehead, eyes and eyebrows. “Your new girl sure is a looker.”

“You ain’t just shittin!” Orloffski bellowed.

Lucky looked again at all of it, everything, and at the people. So; such was her introduction to her man’s diving world. And she’d probably see a lot more of it. She pulled up the waist of her tight-fitting slacks cockily, stuck out her breasts in the sweater, and grinned. “Me? He’s been telling you about me? Well, how about a beer for the looker?”

“Hot damn! Comin up!” shouted Orloffski.

“You’ll have to excuse the way things are,” Bonham told her very gently as he led her across toward the kitchen. “We just got back from a trip a few days ago. Did Ron tell you? And they’re,” he nodded at Orloffski, “they’re staying with us a few days till they can get settled. Don’t usually look like this.”

Grant had come back to GaBay at just the right time, he said after things had settled down and he had gotten them beers, because tomorrow they were going out on the deep reef for a dive. He had three new customers at one of the hotels. And not only that, they’d be good for at least three or four more days after that. Lucky sat silent and listened. Bonham had swept the regulator and its pieces into a bowl and set it on the beer-can-crowded bureau, freeing the table.

“Fine. We’d like to go,” she with partial disbelief heard Ron saying. She had been under the impression that they were leaving for Kingston tomorrow. But first, he went on, they were going to have to do something to see about someplace to stay.

“Why don’t we just go down and register in at one of the big hotels on the beach?” Lucky asked. All three men turned to stare at her.

“They’re terribly expensive,” Bonham said.

“Yeah, well. Yeah, mainly it’s because I’m trying to save money,” Ron said, and then grinned. “Largely because I owe this big son of a bitch so much already.”

“That’s true, he does,” Bonham said with a smile. “What happened to Doug? Anyway.”

Grant explained about Terry September. “He’ll be along in a couple of days. Maybe he’ll bring her with him.” Anyway, the first thing, the main thing, he went on, was to see about someplace for them to stay tonight. He certainly didn’t want to go down to the rich hotels on the beach, and them probably booked up anyway.

Bonham was looking at Grant with some kind of a private, knowledgeable look that Lucky could not read. She watched him immediately sort of take over: He would have loved to put them up himself, he said, but they only had one guest room and the Orloffskis were in it. However, there was a friend of his—only just a few doors down the street—little Jamaican guy—who sometimes took in roomers (couples, he corrected himself), in his extra bedroom during the season.

“It’s close to here?” Ron said, a little nervously she thought.

“Right down the street.”

“That sounds fine then. We’ll be close to here.” He sounded curiously guilty, Lucky thought.

“Come on,” Bonham said. “Get yourself another beer, and you and me’ll walk down there right now.”

“Won’t they be in bed already?”

“Naw. Hell, no. They never go to bed this early.”

Lucky watched them leave. With the two of them gone, the air of conspiracy she had felt before, disappeared. The two women got up from the bawling record-player and brought their beer over to the table. Orloffski helped her to another beer and said cheerfully in his brutal voice, “They’ll be back in a few minutes.” She noticed that whenever he sat down he acquired a considerable paunch on his totally hairless torso that he did not have when he was standing up.

“So you come from New York, hunh?” Wanda Lou Orloffski said. “Me and Mo used to go up there to New York quite a few times when we lived in Jersey.”

“Yeah, but we never seen the New York Lucky knows, I’m sure,” Orloffski grinned, and belched.

Lucky smiled. You bet your sweet ass you didn’t, baby, she was thinking.

Letta Bonham, who had never been off the island of Jamaica, let alone to New York, kept looking with a bright, childlike, very female attention from one to the other and said almost nothing. She was the only one of them all that Lucky decided she might be able to like.

They had a very difficult time making a conversation until the two men returned.

And Lucky found her distaste for the whole scene, the whole operation, growing even greater. She realized these three were only trying to make her feel at ease, as much at home as possible, but they were doing a very bad job of it. Something about her—she hated to use the word, but there was no other word for it, and maybe she didn’t hate it so much after all— something about her ‘class’ put them off balance and made them nervous. She could not make
them
feel at ease, either. She already actively detested Orloffski and ‘his’ Wanda Lou. And there was something in her—especially toward the man— that kept them at a great distance, and she couldn’t help it, and she was glad she couldn’t. What in the name of God could Ron be doing with people like this? When you haven’t been around insensitive members of the lower classes for such a long time, you tend to forget how crude and brutal and insensitive they and their lives are.

She was immensely relieved when the two men came back from their room-hunting. Bonham slammed the screen door behind them with a curiously exuberant finality. And conspiracy came back into the room again.

“Well, it’s all set!” Grant said cheerily. “We can have the room for a week if we want it.”

“A
week!”
Lucky was unable not to exclaim.

“Well, we won’t stay that long of course,” he said. “What I meant to say was we can have it for as many days as we want to stay.” He laughed suddenly, “Ha! We had to rout them out of bed after all! I figured we would.” His face was flushed, and he looked to Lucky as if he might have had a couple more drinks, maybe down there, and he sounded as if he enjoyed having waked the people up. Her own two beers had relieved the last remnants of her hangover considerably.

“Well! Now that that’s all settled, what do you say we all wrap it up here and adjourn to the good old Neptune Bar to hoist a few?” This was Bonham.

“Haw! Great idea!” the almost equally massive Orloffski shouted.

“I don’t really think I can,” Lucky said. “We’ve had a pretty hectic day of it. I’m just beat.” She looked at Grant. “But Ron can go if he wants to.”

“No, no! No, no! I’ll go with you,” he said hastily. “She’s right,” he said to Bonham. “We’ve both had it. We need some sleep.” He looked disappointed though, she thought.

“Okay,” Bonham said. “Well, all you have to do is back your car up back down the street. It’s only three doors down. Then pull it right up into the yard.” He had sat back down at the table. Apparently if Grant was not going, none of them was going either. Because of the tab, no doubt, Lucky thought icily.

The little homemade-looking house, almost a replica of Bonham’s, was completely darkened when Ron backed the big car past it. There was no curbing, no street gutters, as he pulled the car up into the grassless, bare dirt yard. Above their heads palm fronds clattered softly in a breeze, and some straggly flowered bushes gave off tropic scents to them in the warm humid tropic night. Everything felt strangely quiet. Ron had been given a key and he let them in, showing her the way and carrying her bag, and with dutiful meticulousness turning off all the lights behind them as they went.

The little room was horrible. A three-quarter bed (that, she didn’t mind), an ugly badly de-silvering mirror, two flamboyant chipping plaster-of-paris statues from Woolworth’s or some local festival, a Woolworth rickety floorlamp, an armoire whose plywood doors would no longer come near to closing, an uncomfortable modern chair, that was all. What a place for a honeymoon. As she climbed into the bed beside him, she heard someone turn peevishly in bed just beyond the thin wall. Instinctively, they talked in whispered tones.

“Take that damned thing off, goddam it.”

“I can’t, Ron. Not here. Didn’t you hear?”

“Take it off anyway. You got to.” She did.

“What in the name of
God
are you doing with people like that, Ron?”

“They’re the people I have to go to to learn what I want to learn. I didn’t
pick
them. I told you this wasn’t going to be an
easy
thing. I probly shouldn’t have brought you down, my first idea to leave you in New York was probly right. But I missed you so. And I got scared. I got scared I might be untrue to you. You wouldn’t want that, would you? So soon?

“Look, I know it’s horrible here. But it’s only a place to sleep. We won’t spend any time here. And we’ll only be here a few days.”

“A few
days!
”

“I want to make a few more dives with Bonham before I go. He’s really good. You just have to believe me. And I want to wait for Doug to come back. Look, I’ve got to go and tell my idiot ‘foster-mother’ that we’re going off to Kingston. And I want Doug to go with me. The old cunt is going to kick up an awful fuss. She thinks every young woman in the world is out after my ha-ha money. If Doug is with me, she won’t raise such a scene.”

“Are you scared of her?”

“
No
I’m not scared of her!—”

“? Shhh.”

“You know how you felt with your mother.”

“I left.”

“Well, I’m leaving too. But I want to do it as nice as possible. Don’t you see?”

“All right.”

“But don’t you?”

“All
right.
”

“I probably shouldn’t have brought you down. But I . just. couldn’t. help it. . .”

She had curled up against him, her left leg over his left leg, and was rubbing her left breast into the angle of his half-open armpit. His kiss now was as deep as sanity. Maybe deeper, she thought as he shoved her back and scrambled over her.

After they had made love—(God, she loved fucking, loved it so much it was almost enough, it almost was enough, it
was
enough, most of the time, the weight on you pressing you down making you helpless holding you with your legs wide open, that big red angry thing filling you up and moving in you [they were all big when they were inside of you, unless they were actively deformed], slowly at first and then the increasing rhythm, increasing tension, the red face and bared teeth and crossed unfocused eyes as they came, came in you, you owned them then, at that moment they belonged to you)— after they had made love, she lay awake a long time thinking.