Go to the Widow-Maker (54 page)

A sort of deep unplumbed, unacknowledged gloom settled over Bonham in the car and he glanced over at her secretly. Had she found another boyfriend along the line somewhere that he didn’t know about was that it?
Boyfriend!
he thought contemptuously,
a lover!
Was that what had happened? He could still remember the first time she had reached over in the bed and put her hand on his leg and run it back and forth. Who had taught her that? Where had she learned that? It had worked, of course, that first time. And a few times after. He could still remember it with horror. He couldn’t really believe she had a lover. He had checked, in his own quiet way, very carefully. Well, they said tropical peoples, people who lived a long time in the tropics, were more carnal.

But it was just all too goddamned dirty. And it was a terrible shock to find your own beloved wife reacting like the black pigs you ran into at The Neptune Bar like Anna Rachel and sometimes, drunk, took out. If she liked it with you, why not with others? Aha, why not! He simply couldn’t help thinking like that. No man could. And that was enough to throw any man off his feed and keep his pecker down. The truth was he simply couldn’t stand that rapturous look she got on her face now. With her eyes shut like that it could be any man. “You
like
to make love! You
like
to make love!” he had wanted to shout at her accusingly. Just like the whores at The Neptune. But of course he never had.

Once right after the war, when he had come home still a young guy and unmarried, an old high school pingpong buddy—who was married—had offered him the opportunity to go ahead and make his, the buddy’s, wife. The offer was in private, of course; not in front of her. He never had understood what crazy psychological depths might have prompted such an offer! But him!
him!
he had gone ahead and
done
it! It was horrible. And, more horrible, the wife had liked it!

For no reason a picture of Cathie Finer in her swimsuit, her bikini she had worn in Grand Bank, came into his mind and he felt his pecker begin to swell between his legs as he sat in the car seat. Now there was really a sexy broad, and she wasn’t foul-mouthed like this Lucky. And she didn’t brag about her hundreds of lovers.

Sometimes he positively hated Letta. How dare she be like all the others? He also hated her because he needed her. And because she didn’t realize it, this, and took it all for granted.

In our generation—Today—we need women and hate them for it. But we
do
need them. Otherwise we’d destroy everything. The world. Women are nestbuilders and so they love property and protect it. Meanwhile they use us to satisfy their carnal desires—quite happily and selfishly—while attacking us for being dirty-minded. Well, it wasn’t like that in his mother’s generation.

Ah, he hated all of it. Everything in life was so dirty. Why couldn’t anything be pure? The only pure thing by God he ever knew was his mother by God, that he ever knew. They, her generation, they had been different.

What was she doing right now, Letta? Was she out fucking some guy maybe? While he was out here on the boat working? He got again suddenly that belly-pit excited feeling of inviting cuckoldry by leaving his wife at home alone. It both excited and infuriated him. Then he suddenly realized, of course, that she was sitting right here beside him on the car-seat.

Pleasurably, relievingly, to stop the savage tooth-edged seesawing of his mind back and forth, Bonham in the car watching carefully out at the fifty-yard cone of light the headlights made, thought about and went back over vividly the last time he had gone shark-shooting.

It had been one of the better days, not one likely to be equaled soon. Bonham had no idea why the sharks preferred to hang around this spot he called his old shark hole. Certainly it didn’t have sufficient fish to be called a feeding ground. It was down near the far, western end of the deep reef, about seventy-five feet deep. It did have a natural bridge of coral over a deep sand trough running out to sea through the reef and about ten feet wide. Over the centuries the corals growing out in overhangs on both sides of it had finally met and fused and gone on growing until now there was an arching solid rock bridge six feet wide across the ten-foot trough. Possibly the sharks felt safer resting under this natural bridge between feeding forays, though Bonham had only seen one or two ever actually lying under it. But no matter what time of day or night he went there, there were one or two or more sharks lying up under the various coral overhangs or swimming lazily around the area.

The last time he had been out there, which had been just a day or so after he first met Grant, he had gone over the side with his triple-rubber gun for a look around, leaving Ali in the boat to tend it and cursing his boss for a crazy fool like always.

At first there had appeared to be nothing at all down there. Then he had spotted a small four, four and a half foot ground shark cruising along the trough near the coral bridge. It hardly seemed worth the effort but he cocked two rubbers of the gun.

Then he saw what he had missed before: a Great Blue about twelve or thirteen feet long. It had been swimming slowly over a large mass of dark reef and he had missed it. Almost at the same moment he saw another good-sized shark (he couldn’t tell how big) swimming at mid-depth out at the edge of his visibility range. He had been trying to decide whether to go for the Blue with the triple-rubber gun, and this decided him. If the other was swimming at mid-depth he might be hungry. And they might have some fun. Swimming back to the boat he handed up the loaded speargun carefully and hollered to Ali for the Brazilian rig and his Hawaiian sling and free spears.

The Brazilian rig (which was no more than a spear with its free line attached to an innertube on the surface instead of to the speargun) was always kept ready in a double-rubber Arbalete on these trips. Ali handed it down to him. The Brazilian rig was great for situations like this, or for any big fish you weren’t sure you could handle by yourself with one spear. Then Ali handed him down the Hawaiian sling and its three free spears. The sling Bonham slid up over his left forearm and tucked the free spears into his weight belt. If the others didn’t want him, he’d get him with those. Then hurriedly he started loading the two rubbers of the Arbalete. Emotion and excitement boiled all through him so that his hand shook a little. Oh the fuckers, oh the cocksuckers! If only they don’t get away! But when he looked down, the loaded gun in his right hand, the coil of long line in his left, they were all still there, swimming back and forth and having moved hardly any at all.

Swimming on the surface and towing the innertube, Bonham had got above the Great Blue and dove almost straight down on him, the heavy line uncoiling smoothly from his left hand. He held his breath so that the regulator would not sing. But when he was within fifteen feet of him the shark turned and started swimming a little faster, out toward deep water. Immediately Bonham turned and swam away from him, to the shark’s left, as if frightened. And the shark turned back, to look at him, but swimming at his own depth without rising. Bonham swam along parallel to him. He was only ten feet from him now. With a sudden twist he turned back and swam out over the shark, diving as he did. The shark turned and darted again toward the deeper water but Bonham was already above him. As he darted by underneath Bonham put the spear in him just where he wanted it: alongside the spine over the gills, about halfway between the brain and dorsal fin.

Immediately the shark bucked in the water, bending almost double, then took off to run out toward sea. Above him the innertube on the surface was pulled under about six feet, but as soon as its drag slowed the shark it bobbed back up again, totally indifferent. Nothing could fight that. Down below a small green cloud of blood had begun to pour from the Blue shark’s right gill openings like smoke. Green smoke. Bonham had backed off. Letting the Arbalete hang from its wrist thong on his right wrist, he got the Hawaiian sling off his left and loaded it with one of the spears from his belt. Then swimming back away from the struggling shark and slightly upward toward the boat, he watched.

The bigger of the other two sharks was swimming in from his incessant cruising out at the edge of invisibility. He turned out to be about a seven and a half or eight foot mako. He swam in a cautious circle around the struggling Blue. Then, apparently deciding the fortuitous gift was on the up and up, he darted in, the great grim mouth opening for a bite. Don’t ever let anybody tell you sharks have to turn on their side to bite, Bonham thought. He was still swimming slowly and easily toward the boat. Down below the mako shook its head and body like a dog worrying a bone. When it came away a great empty black crescent gaped in the side of the Blue where there had been flesh and hide. From behind him the little ground shark darted in for a bite near the tail. Then the mako, having swallowed, returned. Bonham wanted to laugh so hard he was afraid of losing his mouthpiece and grasped it with his left hand. Go, you mothers! go, you cannibal bastards! Cannibals! Eat, cannibals! Eat, eat! He was almost to the boat now and when he reached it he shucked out of the aqualung and Arbalete and passed them to Ali, put on his snorkel and with one hand resting on the boat ladder so he could get out quick, he put his head under to watch the carnage, holding the Hawaiian sling ready.

Down below the cannibal banquet went on. Another, a third, shark had joined the two at their feast, swimming up the current. The three of them tore at the Great Blue in a kind of ecstatic frenzy. The mako went up and down one side of him like a man chomping corn on the cob. The Blue, still alive but dying now, only struggled feebly. But the driving attacks of the other three as they fed were enough to hobble and sink the innertube three feet under.

Bonham was almost as frenziedly ecstatic as the sharks. Hatred seemed almost to boil from his every pore, making gooseflesh rise on his skin. Evil bastards! Evil, horrible, worthless bastards! Cowards! Scavengers! Sneak attackers in the night! Cannibals! He knew they were only mindless instinctive animals but it didn’t make any difference. There was life for you! Look at that! There is what life on this planet consists of, all you preachers, all you affirmative yea-sayers! Look at it! And you think humanity is exempt? Ha! They’re the worst, I say! Or at least as bad. Trembling from his ecstasy of hate, excitement, revulsion and rage, Bonham let go of the boat ladder and swam out over the struggling fish. He knew it was a foolish thing to do but he didn’t care. God, how he hated them. Them and everything they stood for on this earth.

Down below the mindless fish snapped on. The Great Blue was by now reduced to a mere lump of flesh and gristle, cartilage. Only the spear in the back of his head held him there and kept his dead carcass from sinking. From above them Bonham hyperventilated, took an enormous breath then dove down toward them where they were fifty feet down, the Hawaiian sling with its free spear extended out in front of him. The three of them were so insane they didn’t even see his approach. But he didn’t get too close. From about twelve feet above, which meant that his spearhead was seven and a half feet from the shark, he put a spear squarely into the head of the mako, then turned and streaked for the surface watching the action from between his feet. The mako jerked as if hit with an electric current, then started swimming all around in wild circles. In seconds the other two were on him. And the same process occurred that had occurred before. Bonham back at the boat and breathing quickly over his own recklessness, kept his hand on the boat ladder and stayed in the water to watch. Because the mako was not attached to any line to the surface like the Blue he began drifting away downcurrent, the other two sharks darting in to strike at him again and again. At the rim of visibility Bonham saw the shadow of another shark join the melée. Then they all passed from sight.

Exhausted beyond saying, emotionally exhausted, he climbed back into the boat and they went to pick up the Brazilian rig and its line and spear.

“You got one, hunh, Boss?”

“Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I got one.” How could he tell him any more than that?

“You crazy. You really crazy. You know that?”

Bonham got out the gin bottle. What would he say if he knew about the second one? He drank. He really shouldn’t have done that. Well, he had lost a free spear, that was all, and he had expected that. But he really shouldn’t have done that second thing. That was really foolish. He was glad he’d done it, anyway.

Back in the car, thinking it all over again and remembering it all with painstaking detailed relish, Bonham was still glad. Out of all the many sharks he had killed over the years that was the only time he had ever instigated, or even seen, a mob-feeding. The same situation had been there often enough, true. But sharks were really much more cautious cowardly creatures than most people believed. God! he wanted to laugh out loud when he saw in his mind that mako swimming wildly around, and the other two turning and going for him. I bet he wondered what the hell had hit him. Suddenly he became aware that his wife was watching him.

He looked over at her and smiled. “We’re almost there.”

“Is it as bad as all that?” Letta said quietly.

“Is what what?” he said.

“I say, is it that bad? The camera and Grant? All that?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said sullenly.

“Your eyes very bright, my love,” Letta said.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “Cut it out.”

“Hokay,” Letta said. She turned her pokerface toward the window and looked out.

She knew, goddamn it. Now how could she know? God damn. Ahead of them the town appeared. Its high streetlamps hung above the dusty grubby streets, each one an apex of a cone of dust. Then their own dusty little street with all its high mansard-roof homes of corrugated tin. Their own was still brightly lit up. Could she have told that Lucky anything about their own uh their own private problems today? When they were alone together all that time? He remembered the funny feeling he had had about that at The Neptune, from Lucky and Grant both. Well, screw them all. They didn’t know anything. About anything. So what if she did? Bonham clamped his big jaws together in their storm-weathering position and the dark stormcloud look came back over his eyes and forehead. What the hell did any of them know about ladies? The main thing now was that he had to get that goddamned Orloffski out of here and on his way back north, so he himself could get on down to Kingston.