Go to the Widow-Maker (100 page)

“From some of them? Why?” she said. “What difference does it make to any of them? Why would any of them want to tell Sam?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “No reason that I know. But gossip travels. And it still seems to me that that—what you did tonight—might be just the slightest bit uncautious.”

Cathie didn’t answer him—“Aren’t we going to play?” she asked after a moment or two.

“We sure as hell are,” he said huskily.

They had an invitational breakfast ashore the next morning with the resident manager, a superb breakfast at which even kippered herring was served in typical British style, and after a late start spearfished most of the day in the waters near Dog Cay and during which little Irma actually managed to spear a small grouper while diving in a lung with Bonham and Grant beside her. She was quite a kiddie, that Irma. Then they set sail once again for North Nelson. North Nelson, and the Greens. Lucky Grant had apparently decided to do nothing about radioing for a seaplane to come and pick her up. They pulled in just at dusk. The Greens treated them just as if nothing had ever happened. The Texans were gone. Only the young Green who had been the judge of ‘The Great Diving Contest’, the one who ran the restaurant, seemed a little bit surly. They ate there anyway.

After all the rooms had been arranged, and all the others had retired to them, Bonham hung around the ship a while and had a few drinks with Orloffski. Then he said he was going to take himself a walk and went off down the beach. After he was out of sight of the port he circled back and sneaked up to Cathie Finer’s room, where of course she was waiting for him. She had become like dope to him. Real dope. Real dirty, selfabandoned dope. God, was she dirty. He was glad she wasn’t
his
wife. Poor old Sam. Poor old
idiot
Sam. It made him even hotter.

F
INAL CALAMITY CAME
the next day. Or rather, in the evening, the night, of the next day. They had all of them, or just about all, suffered minor or major calamities, minor or near-major (even major) catastrophies, Grant mused, since the beginning of this adventure way back in November or December of last year when he had first gotten this crazy (or peculiar, strange) idea to learn skindiving, and when he had not yet even met Lucky Videndi. Lucia Angelina Videndi. All of them, all of them except maybe Ben and Irma (who were not really involved and who anyway had apparently gone through theirs a long time back that time when Ben had run off for a year, before finally returning), all of them had suffered some misery or other. But this calamity was real, true catastrophe. Terminal catastrophe. Like ‘Terminal Cancer’, as the euphemists of stage, screen, radio, and
Pravda
were so fond of saying now. Terminal catastrophe. End of cruise catastrophy. Five nights out of Kingston, on what could only be a seven or possibly eight-day cruise now anyway, because of inordinate (and perhaps unnecessary?) delays in getting the ship outfitted and ready to leave, catastrophe happened. So that, with only two days to go, at the
very
best two and a half, it came before the final sail back to Ganado Bay could even be begun and save it from the total, the bad-taste-in-the-mouth, feel-of-ruin catastrophe with which it ended.

And as always on this trip, nature, the sea, bad winds, storms, hurricanes, nothing, no other natural phenomenon such as even the Greens, nothing could be held responsible except the people.

It ended with Ron Grant having a broken nose (and being thus totally unable to dive anymore at all anyway for at least a month, or two), and it ended with just about everybody on board not speaking to everybody else on board. Thinking back on it, as he always liked to do, though he rarely gained anything, any knowledge at all from such practice, Grant thought that perhaps—during the middle of the day while they were out spearfishing still—he had had a premonition of it, when he did something so outrageous (though only to himself) that it made him suspect he was getting close to being insane. But like with all his poor premonitions he could—unlike Lucky—only view them as such a long time after events had proven them out, thus obviating them as any real premonitions.

The day began auspiciously enough, at dawn again—though the night before, the night of their return from Dog Cay, had not been all that fine, admirable.

Grant had tried very hard not to drink much that day, and that night, the night they returned to North Nelson, and had succeeded quite well. In spite of that, after dinner, when they had all retired early, he and Lucky had spent the best part of —the
whole
of—the night on the very opposite edges of the regular-sized double bed they had in the thin-walled, rickety, jerry-built hotelroom supplied (at premium, naturally) by the Greens.

Whatever pleasant sexual practices were going on between Bonham and Cathie in her room, or in the room of the Spicehandlers, or between the Surgeon and his girl who—like hamsters in their chosen-corner rutting place of a rather unprivate cage—were still in their same old spot on the deck; whatever was going on with any of these, there was nothing going on in the Ron Grants’ room.

Lucky had tried a couple of times, tentatively, earlier on, to make up with him from their big fight and accusation of two nights before, but Grant, self-convinced, self
-convicted
cuckold since the night he had stood in the coachroof hatch during the long sail, had been polite but distant. He simply could not get that curiously faceless, though obviously Jim Grointon, image out of his mind. And now when they lay in the bed, and she made a half-tentative gesture toward him, he repulsed her almost savagely. Because of the first night’s sail, the next night’s sleeping aboard at the islet anchorage, the third night’s big fight, then the night on the dock at Dog Cay, they had not had any sex at all for five nights; but Grant did not care.— “I’m too damned tired from all that spearfishing today to think about making love,” he said, almost brutally. Silently she had turned away toward the wall and her own bed edge. As a reciprocal gesture, Grant had moved himself over to his own bed edge.— “It’s funny,” he said after a while, “I find now that I’m much braver underwater, much more courageous now, since we’ve become ‘estranged’, as they say. Isn’t that funny?” He made it heavily ironic. Lucky did not answer. And so that was the way they lay. It was no hardship at all for them to get up at dawn when the first light came into the room, and dress to go down to the
Naiad.
— “I think,” Lucky said thinly as they were dressing, but in a strangely tired voice, “that when we come in today, I’m going to wire for that Kingston seaplane to come get me tomorrow. You’d better be prepared to give me the money. If you don’t, I’ll get it from Ben.” Grant merely nodded. But by the time she really could have done that, gone all the way through with it, it—‘the cruise’; as cruise—was already all over, and there was no need. Bonham was happily cooking bacon and eggs on
Naiad
with the bright red disc of the sun just letting go its last touch of the horizon as they came down. There was the delicious, normally so happy-making, homey, friendly smell of coffee in the fresh morning air.

And so the final day began.

He took them, Bonham took them, to a place about a half an hour’s sail from the dock out through the pass between North and South Nelson and off to the north-northwest, where there was a large collection of fairly small reefs over an area of several hundred yards, all separated by pure white sand, and all ranging in depth from fifteen to never more than forty or forty-five feet. It was a superb spot. And Bonham obviously knew it well, from before. And yet he had never brought them here. It was clear to Grant, at least, that Bonham could easily have docked them every night at North Nelson for two or even three weeks and never have run out of new and interesting, superb diving spots. And if that was so, it was clear that Bonham’s only reason for not wanting to was just simply to save himself money on dockage charges. And that was no way to run a ritzy, luxury, ‘rich-man’s’ cruise (especially with
Naiad’s
present accommodations!), which was the type of reputation, and clientele, Bonham wanted to acquire. Grant made a mental note to talk to him about this.

In any case, Bonham anchored them squarely in the center of this large patch of separated reefs, all richly teeming with all sorts of fish and undersea life large and small. Everybody at once put on free-diving gear and within a few minutes had collected enough fish and lobster tails to feed them all lunch, a huge lunch, and even dinner, a huge dinner—if any of them wanted it for dinner. After that they—those of them who wanted; those of them who could—all put on aqualungs and went off exploring the further, slightly deeper reefs.

And it was then that there occurred the strange experience, act, outrageous act, which Grant was later to rather lamely and half-heartedly refer to as what he
should
have recognized as his ‘premonition’. The ship as she lay was heading southeast, and Grant had swum off to the southwest where he had noticed a reef a hundred yards or so way. Orloffski had come off on that side too, but had turned off toward the southeast. It was true that it was not customary, or even accepted or recommended practice, to go off alone like that, but on dives as shallow and as short as these nobody well-acquainted with diving and the lung ever paid any attention to this ‘buddy’ principle—except of course in the case of little Irma, and even Ben, though Ben had now begun to go off by himself on little forays. But this was Bonham’s job, of course. This particular time he had taken Irma and Ben off to the northeast clear over on the other side of the ship, where the Surgeon and his girlfriend were also diving. So Grant was really alone when he came up to his little reef.

The first thing he noted was that it was almost circular in shape. For some reason the coral had grown that way, and while there were a few irregular entrances into it here and there, it made an almost perfect circle of coral, with a clean white sand field completely bare of any growth: weed, gorgonia, anything: in its center. A really strange formation in any case, something he had never seen before. It wasn’t deep; to the sand bottom in the center was maybe thirty to thirty-five feet, while the circle of coral around it rose up to maybe twenty and in places fifteen feet from the surface. Rather adventurously, or at least feeling rather adventurous, he decided to swim in over the coral and go down into the center and have a look.

It was true, as he had told Lucky last night, that since their ‘estrangement’ (what a word!) he had curiously grown more brave, more courageous underwater, in his diving. It had started back when she had gotten angry and had ‘estranged’ herself from him over Carol Abernathy. It had grown stronger, considerably stronger, after that horrifying ‘spaghetti dinner’ night—although he had not—or had he?—yet begun to ‘estrange’ himself from her. But after that moment during the allnight sail (he would never forget that moment), when he had stood in the open hatchway, one armpit resting on each side the coachroof while the ship communicated its so-delicious lilting movement to his body as it moved through the water, and him looking up at the so-bright stars and the masthead that moved back and forth in a great arc amongst them, and had suddenly known, realized, become convinced that she
had
in fact cuckolded him—after
that
moment, his courage, bravery (whatever you wanted to call it) underwater had suddenly grown at least two hundred percent. At least. Maybe more. It was not that he was reckless. Or at least he didn’t think it was: recklessness. It was just that he had become more aggressive, more belligerent, and being more aggressive became less thoughtful, and being less thoughtful was less cautious. It was as if in the diving he was relieving himself of some terribly intense, and yet at the same time equally terribly un
know
able, frustration over her and over all of it. Bonham and Ben had both commented on it, this new aggressiveness, during the cruise. And, well what the hell? why not? But just the same, and in spite of all of that, what he saw— on his right—when he swam slowly down into the sand center of the coral ring, made his heart literally stop beating. For several seconds. Or at least it seemed that long.

On his right in that part of the coral ring that ran all around him was a large deep overhang, like so many that you saw continually down on the reefs, but under it, just lying there, was the hugest fish he had ever seen in his life—including the giant snapper Jim Grointon had once shown to him and Ben from a distance. It was so big that it was as if his eyes refused to believe it for several seconds. They kept travelling up along it from tail to head strangely, as if trying to convince him not to believe what they were seeing for him.

It was partially hidden by parts of the overhang which drooped lower in some places than others, and he swam down further and levelled off, being careful not to disturb the sand and make a cloud, and then he saw that it was a shark. And at that moment he decided to shoot it.

He didn’t know why he decided to shoot it, and could not even have said. There was no audience. To perform for. He was totally alone. But so much the better. He did not know what it was doing there. He knew sharks could not float and sometimes were said to take rests on the bottom, but sharks of this size were supposed to live only out in the deep ocean. Weren’t they? He could not even make out what kind of shark it was. He could see enough of the snout, as he swam carefully and very slowly a few yards off, to see that it had no barbels and was no nurse shark, but then nurse sharks never got that big. It did not have the characteristic spots that mark the tiger shark, but tigers never got that big either, did they? It was at least three times his own length, and more. Maybe four times. Maybe even more. What would that be? Three times his own length was about seventeen feet. Four times was about twenty-three feet. The tail was almost entirely covered by an especially long overhang so that he could not see if it was the ‘lunate’ type tail which characterized the white shark and the mako, but the white shark—the real ‘man-eater’ —was the only shark he had ever heard of that attained such lengths. It was sort of reddish brown in color, and the huge dorsal fin, like a damned sail, was only two-thirds visible under the overhang. How the damned thing had managed to wriggle itself in under there was incredible anyway. And all the time all this was running through his mind, in really only a very few seconds, he was preparing to shoot it.