Go to the Widow-Maker (32 page)

Before he had gone very far, he noticed that there were no more grouper floating above any of the coral rockpiles ahead of him. As if by some signal, they had all just disappeared. A shock tingle of alarm charged through him, because he did not know the reason. Had maybe sharks come into the area? Then ahead of him on the left, inshore, at just the outer edge of visibility, he caught just a glimpse of a faint blue shadow descending. Taking a good grip on his speargun, which was practically worthless as any kind of a real defense anyway, he swam over that way, and saw that it was Orloffski he had seen.

Orloffski had a stringer of fish—or two stringers, because Grant didn’t believe one stringer could hold so many—so huge that he could hardly dive with it, and he was going after another. Grant watched fascinated as he speared the fish, surfaced, and set about adding it to the string like a man in a field shucking ears of corn into a wagon. Such brutal greed disgusted him. He was aware that he was seeing in action the quality in man which had destroyed the forests and the plains buffalo of America. Orloffski had not seen him and went swimming off looking for more fish, and Grant turned back toward finding Bonham.

As he swam on alone, he kept peering behind him every few seconds in the approved manner, to make sure no hungry shark was bearing down on him. These goddamned fucking masks, it was amazing how they cut down your side vision. It was like wearing blinders.

On one of these sweeps of his head he happened to raise his face far enough above the surface that he caught a glimpse of the three little islets sitting there behind him in a string, and on the nearest of which were Carol Abernathy and the two girls. This made him think of her briefly for a moment, but only for a moment and briefly.

G
REAT ROLLING BLACK
thunders in clouds and vivid crashing arrowshots of blinding lightning roared and wrassled inside her head, making her want to shout, as she leaped over the end of the boat into the sand and staggered away to fall in the ankle-deep water. That was the only way she could describe it. But she did not shout. Bravely, she kept her strong-willed, self-disciplined lips closed though no one knew of her heroism.

Well, she would not tell them.

The strong are sometimes tested almost beyond their capacity. Only the Strong are tested Strongly. And if they cannot encompass it, rise above it, rise above the Dead Ashes of their Selves, they only drop back down one level, one material evolutionary level. And to shout with Spiritual Rage before the ears of material men is to go unheard.

In the warm shallow water the bright sunlight turned her closed eyelids a warm pulsating red. A million bright bees buzzed in this red space, each with his tiny stinger glowing, a redhot wire ready to inflict upon the strong and magnificent, the true sacrificers, a hundred million burning fiery stings. It was not unjust. It was the Karma of all. The boat had already left, she had heard it go. And now she could hear the two women up on the sand beach behind her talking in the low tones people use in the presence of invalids. Carol Abernathy smiled to herself, but did not open her eyes. The warm sea water was vastly soothing, healing. The Sea as Great Mother. Slyly, she voided her bladder in her swimming suit, feeling in the warm water the greater warmth of her urine on her thighs and crotch, thinking how she had fooled them all. She had not really been sick at all. She had simply had to pee. But she could not come out and say that openly to a crowded boatload of men and women; crude men, and younger women.

Slowly she sat up, as though she was not quite sure where she was, looking all around.

“How are you feeling, Carol?” Cathie Finer called down to her. “Feeling better?”

“Oh!” she said. “Oh!” She put her hand to her head. “Yes. Yes, I am. The water is so soothing. The sea is healing. The Sea is the Great Mother. I think it’s helped me.”

“Would you like something to eat?”

“No. I couldn’t eat anything. The very thought of eating ...” She shuddered. Actually, she was ravenous. The sea air was certainly good for one, and for the appetite as well.

“What do you think it was?” Cathie Finer asked as she slowly climbed up the sand to them.

“I think it was some kind of intestinal
crise.
An acute colitis, perhaps. People with very sensitive nervous systems often get that, and I’ve had trouble with it before. But never anything like this.” She smiled wanly at the two women, who appeared to look relieved, especially Wanda Lou Orloffski, and then looked beyond them. “What do you say we explore our island?”

“There isn’t very much to explore,” Cathie Finer smiled. “Just that clump of six pines there in the middle, and that heavy brush down at the end.”

“I think I’ll go over and lie down in the shade of the trees a while,” Carol said.

“You go ahead,” Cathie said. “We’ll stay here and get some sun and maybe eat something after a while. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m a little shaky,” Carol said and smiled at her, and suddenly felt tears well up in her eyes and turned away to hide them, but not before she was absolutely sure Cathie had seen them. One knew one’s friends. No word need be spoken. That young woman had much good Karma.

It was lovely in the pines. A light little breeze played under them, moving their long leaves softly, and the floor of brown needles where she sat and then lay down smelled deliciously of pine. But then the rolling black thunders and slashing lightnings began to clash and smash and roil in her head, effectively cutting off all her exterior senses, as she thought again of Grant.

Who the
fuck
did he think he was? She had not come all this long way all these long years from the back hills of Tennessee, to see herself muzzled and her power cut off, just when it was just
beginning
to have some serious national voice. She had not disguised her Self and her Motives all these years— for
twenty years
before she even
met
Grant—to have him think he could divest her of all she meant to accomplish in the world with a flick of his little finger. Did they think, all those selfish fools, that she had married Hunt Abernathy because she loved him? or because she merely wanted to be number-one social arbiter in a hick town like Indianapolis? Ha! She had suffered almost twenty years with Hunt Abernathy, biding her time, playing her little role, waiting. Him, with his drinking to such excess and chasing piggish waitresses, the more piggish the better. She had saved his Mind and his Soul; she had made his career for him in brick manufacturing just in her spare time, while she was preparing herself and waiting.

Of course the producers and publishers all hated her. They were terrified of her and of her force. They lived dirty little status quo lives behind the façade of which was their true degeneracy which they didn’t want exposed. They knew they could handle Grant. Because Grant was easy to handle.

But there were Forces on her side, Forces of Good and of Evolution in mankind, which were not to be toyed with. When she had deliberately burned all of her writing and play manuscripts that time years ago on that beach in Florida, accepting the role of Sacrifice of her talent and her selfish ambition, she had put into her own hands enormous power, psychic Power, which neither producers nor publishers, nor Grant, could even conceive the force of. And especially Grant, the ungrateful Grant. She had made him into a man. She had saved his Talent and his Soul; she had even given him her body to use, suffering in silence all the unpleasant—things so that he might concentrate on his great work toward the purpose—her purpose—of changing mankind. He would turn against such psychic Power as that at his peril, if he did.

Suddenly the black roarings ceased and she began to cry. Oh, Ron. Ron. You were so beautiful then. I was so beautiful.

After a while the crying ceased, but it brought no relief. She got up nervously from the unenjoyed bed of pine needles, looking anxiously for the two women, deciding to go back to them.

Well, at least Bonham was on her side. That little trick of telling him she would get Grant to put in money. That had worked good. She would decide more about whether to go ahead with that after this horrible, stupid trip was over and she got back to Ganado Bay and looked the situation over. But it was not inconceivable that the more and more Grant gravitated to these men, the less and less he could care about
any
woman. She had noticed about adventurers that the more they got their kicks out of adventuring and danger, the more they tended to consider all females as less and less important except for a quick fuck.

And anyway, quite apart from all that, she had another quick little trick up her sleeve, for as soon as they got back to GaBay.

As she came out of the trees and down the path to the beach where the two girls were still sitting, now amongst the eggshells, sandwich wrappers and empty beer bottles of a picnic, she carefully put on her face her expression of fatigue and depression and low energy. She would dearly have loved to have eaten something.

They were, of course, when she came into earshot, talking about their husbands. Carol looked out to where they could just make out the boat in the distance on the sea. There they all were, playing, playing, playing, kids playing games.

I
T DID NOT SEEM
like kids playing games to Grant. Playing yes, maybe. But not kids’ games. When he finally did find Bonham, Bonham was doing an—at least for Grant—unbelievable thing. Bonham and Sam Finer, with the camera and one spear-gun between them, were playing with a seven-foot nurse shark, trying to get closeup pictures of it.

After seeing Orloffski that one time, Grant had swum alone slightly out to sea roughly in the direction Bonham had indicated, over the long flat field of coral ‘rockpiles.’ The rockpiles here had no fish floating above them either. Bonham and Finer had scared them away, had both taken quite a few fish—though nothing like Orloffski. They had laid their fish and the other speargun, Finer’s, on the forty-foot bottom for temporary safekeeping, much the same way a man might without worry leave a suitcase in a quarter locker at Grand Central, in order to deal with the nurse shark.

On his swim across the field of ‘rockpiles’ Grant had found a small ravine which sank maybe fifteen feet below the sand plain, and deepened as it ran out to sea. The far bank of this ravine did not rise as high as the rockpile plain, and beyond it instead of the pure flat sand was a jumble of black rocks and dead coral heads that looked ugly and uninviting and deepened gradually as it ran on south parallel to the coast. This was apparently the end of the ‘Lagoon,’ and Grant had turned and swum along the near edge of the ravine directly out to sea.

For some ridiculous reason he was nervous about swimming in water that was deeper than where he had been, though this was patently silly. But as he swam along the edge of it and got more used to it, he experimented with a few dives to try and reach the bottom of it. If his guess of fifteen feet was right, it would be about fifty-five to fifty-eight feet deep. He never reached it. On one dive, his best, he was able to touch the tip of his speargun to the bottom, which meant with the length of his arm added to that of the speargun, he had done maybe forty-five feet; but swimming back up from that dive his diaphragm was heaving so much that with his nose he sucked all the air out of his mask and made his eyes bug out. It was depressing.

It was at the seaward corner of the field of rockpiles where it ended against the bank of the ravine that he found Bonham and Finer, and the nurse shark.

It was the first nurse shark Grant had ever seen. It was the first shark he had ever seen, close up. But there was no mistaking that it was a nurse, with the two barbels hanging from its small mouth and the long thick single-lobed tail. He had read about it of course, and without exception all the writers on diving he had read warned that the nurse had bitten more skindivers than any other shark, largely because people insisted on playing with it just like now, though the bites were never massively serious. But if Bonham and Finer had read the same books, they didn’t show it.

What they appeared to be trying to do was to get a closeup of the nurse’s face head-on. To achieve this Finer, swimming in his Scott lung at a depth of fifteen feet, level with the nurse, would advance on the shark until, just as he was about to snap the picture, the nurse, waving its tail and pectorals, would suddenly shoot straight backwards ten feet And there it would wait. It showed no inclination to leave. And this was when Bonham entered the game. With Grant watching from a safe distance, ready to help if he was needed but afraid of disturbing the shark by getting into the act, Bonham, from the surface, swam down on the shark from behind, trying to scare him forward toward the wouldbe photographer, whom he had motioned to stay still. But instead of moving forward, the nurse shot off sideways, just exactly like a skittish horse, and then stopped again, looking at them. Bonham tried again and the same thing happened. He kept on trying, always with the same result, and every time he surfaced Grant could hear him roaring with maniacal laughter.

It was just then that Orloffski swam up from somewhere. Orloffski had none of Grant’s scruples about a third person scaring off the shark. Diving to the bottom he left his two enormous strings of fish (which he appeared just barely able to tow) at the other speargun with those of Bonham and Finer, and in the same dive then swam up directly under the nurse shark apparently intending to spear it.

Bonham waved him away. The two of them held a hurried conference on the surface. Then, this time, they swam down on the fish together, from behind and on each side, still trying to scare it toward Sam Finer. The nurse made a little dive, then shot suddenly around in a turn so fast it was only a blur, to reappear again stock-still at its old depth of fifteen feet, facing them, exactly ten feet behind the two of them. Grant had read that sharks, having no air bladder, were heavier than water and therefore had to keep swimming or sink; but this nurse shark seemed able to sit still. The two frustrated free-divers, out of air, surfaced, and Finer crept toward the fish again.