Go to the Widow-Maker (2 page)

“She’s not my girlfriend, she’s my uh foster-mother,” Ron Grant said, falling immediately into the old protection routine. “But uh well, yes.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, excuse me,” Bonham rumbled politely, but went right on anyway. “Even so I can’t say I blame you. She sure is peculiar.”

It was always that way. Especially around men Grant knew to be real men. None of them ever liked his mistress. ‘Mistress’! Jesus! The apologetic embarrassment had become as much a part of him as his breathing. “She
can
be trying,” he murmured, conceded. He smiled at the giant. “Listen, when do you think we’ll be able to go out to sea? Now that you think I’m ready.”

“Go right now.”

“Now!”

“Sure, why not?” That same smile that seemed so like a foreboding cloud passed up over Bonham’s face again. It appeared to start at his heavy chin, pass up through his mouth with its bad teeth, then to his nose, eyes, eyebrows and forehead, warping and distorting infernally each in turn, before disappearing into his thinning hair. “That’s where I’m takin you right now.” There was a pause, and the smile again, this time directed straight at Grant. “Might as well get it over with this afternoon as wait till tomorrow morning and think, brood about it all night.” Eerily, he appeared to have looked—looked for the second time—right inside Grant’s head.

After a moment Grant snorted. The half laugh did not lessen his nervousness, but it pleased him that he could do it. “Yeah. But you’re sure you think I’m ready for that.”

“If I didn’t I wouldn’t take you out. It don’t do my business any good to kill off customers, or have dissatisfied ones.”

Grant felt a slight chill pass over his shoulders. Also, he suddenly noticed that his crotch and the head of his peepee were beginning to feel scratchy from the salt crystals in his drying bikini. Rather furtively, he stole a hand down to scratch and adjust himself inside his seat-wet pants. Bonham did not appear to be bothered at all by his own. Perhaps because of this, as much as anything, Grant made no answer and they rode on in silence. They were now down the hill, moving slowly through the crowded streets of the dusty town, and the freshfaced, so boyish sailor boys looked at them curiously and at the aqualung in the back. It was hard to believe he had once looked like that himself, in that same uniform.

More than fifteen, more than seventeen, years ago. At the shop Ali, Big Al’s narrow-chested, narrow-flanked East Indian helper, agreed bobbing and smiling to sell his foam rubber wet shirt to Grant for forty dollars, and Grant had a suspicion, more than a suspicion, that the shirt did not belong to him at all. Because he was so broad in the chest, it was an uncomfortably tight fit for Grant, and the green corrosion on the bronze zipper did not help in closing it. But Bonham managed. “Fits you fine,” he rumbled and the deal was done. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll put it on the tab with all the rest.” Grant nodded dumbly. It had all been done at the same time as Al and Ali were loading the gear and petrol cans for the dive into the stationwagon while Grant stood, as in some vague nervous apprehensive dream, watching them.

Bonham’s shop was on one of those narrow, roughly cobbled little streets between the dock area and bay itself and the town’s dusty, dirty little square called the ‘Parade’ by the Jamaicans, after the British. Badly built out of poorly mixed concrete and cheap plywood, it was one of a block of buildings painted bright orange. Next door a native greengrocer peeled his cabbage heads and threw the rotting outside leaves into the street’s deep runoff gutter. Inside, the shop itself was dominated by two huge hospital-type air compressors Bonham had brought down from the States. The other three walls were lined with aqualung bottles and regulators in racks. The boat was half a mile away, down at the bayside docks. Sometimes he docked her at the Yacht Club, Bonham said, where he was a sort of honorary member and had permission, but he hadn’t been lately. Grant, feeling dimly that it was all strangely commonplace and everyday for such a momentous and wondrous occasion, piled into the broken dirty front seat with the diver and his helper and creaked away in the aged Buick slowly through the tiny sunburnt streets toward his first dive in the sea with an aqualung.

It had been a long hard road, in some ways. But Grant didn’t want to go into that now. In the little boat (an eighteen-footer with a decked over cabin that was too small for anything but gear stowage), once they were aboard amid the dead seaweed, pieces of cardboard, old orange peels and other debris of civilization that floated against the hull and the dock, he could see high up on the side of the hill above town the villa—the estate—where his ‘mistress’ and her husband (and himself) were staying, visiting. He wondered if they were out on the patio. But even if they were, they wouldn’t know Bonham’s boat, or that Grant was on it going out.

“We know this area underwater like you know your backyard at home,” Bonham said, like a pat spiel for nervous clients, from the helm as he peered out through the opened windshield. Ali had done all the casting off and they were now moving out into the bay channel, past the luxury hotels close on the right and so different from the dirty commercial docks and warehouses stretching around the curve of the bay behind them. The sun poured down on them making a strong light in the cockpit, and equally strong shade under the little roof where Bonham stood. It glinted off the water at them like steel points. The air had freshened noticeably already. “That’s the Yacht Club over there,” Bonham rumbled as he swung the boat away from it.

“Where are we going?” Grant asked. He knew the Yacht Club, had been there with his ‘mistress’ and her husband, but he looked at the eighteen or twenty small sailing boats and launches tied fore and aft and swinging between their rows of mooring buoys. From the Yacht Club veranda someone waved at them gaily. Bonham’s helper Ali waved back. Grant did not. Four days of training with Bonham had materially increased his sense of the dangers involved in diving, and the gay waver at the Yacht Club—who apparently thought they were going off on some kind of a happy sea picnic—had suddenly increased his irate nervousness and given him a gloomy sense of isolation.

“I’m takin you out to one of the coral reefs,” Bonham answered him from the wheel.

“How deep will it be?”

“Ten feet to sixty feet: ten feet at the top of the reef, sixty at the bottom on the sand. Be just right for your first dive, and it’s the prettiest reef this side the island.”

That had to be a lie. Ocho Rios was supposed—“Are there any fish?”

“Hell, yes! Lots of them.”

“Any sharks?”

“Sure. Sometimes. If we’re lucky.” The Navy tender, quite small as Navy ships go, now loomed up ahead of them in the deep main channel, appearing so huge from this close up that it filled the sky and threatened to fall on them. Bonham swung the boat slightly to pass it close by on his port side and increased his throttle. They were now out in the open bay. Bonham suddenly began to whistle merrily, if offkey, as if just being out on the water, headed for a dive, made him a different, happier man.

On the other hand, Grant was finding it impossible to put into words exactly how he felt, but which was mainly—if it must be said in one word without nuance—cowardly. He did not want to go on. He would give anything he possessed, not to. He had worked and planned for this, had dreamed of it—and for quite a long time. Now he realized that if Bonham’s engine suddenly failed, he would not be disappointed. He hoped it would fail. He would be more than glad to wait, at least until tomorrow. Or longer, if it required repairs. And that was pretty cowardly. It was even pusillanimous. But he was too proud to say this, admit it out loud. “I was a little surprised at you taking me out so soon,” he essayed, finally. “Especially after—you know—after what happened yesterday.”

Bonham’s bloodthirsty smile passed up over his huge face. “Oh, that happens to everybody. At least once. Usually more.” Again as if he were eerily looking right into Grant’s mind, he suddenly pulled from the drawer immediately in front of the wheel a half-full bottle of Beefeater’s gin (one of the two which Grant had bought yesterday), looked at it, and motioned with it to Grant. “Want a snort? No, you handled that very well yesterday I thought.”

Grant took the bottle. Of course that eerie understanding undoubtedly came from so frequently handling people who reacted exactly like himself. But Grant hated to think he reacted like everybody else. Yesterday, which was supposed to have been his graduation day, during what was in fact supposed to be his graduation exam, he had made a serious booboo on the bottom of the pool. The result was that he had taken in a quick full-sucking breath of water instead of air from the tubes of the aqualung and, strangling and in total panic, had dropped everything and swum up blindly and choking to the surface, clawing mindlessly. While he clung to the pooledge desperately, strangling and whooping in terror to get air down his locked throat, Bonham standing just above him spraddlelegged in his sloppy faded trunks had thrown back his head and roared with laughter—a reaction which Grant when he finally could breathe again, though he grinned, found, if manly, nevertheless rather insensitive. Grant had always had this terrible fear of strangling, of not being able to get air. Also, whenever he looked up from the pooledge, all he could see were those two huge oaktree legs disappearing into the gaping legholes of Bonham’s trunks, within which he could see the shabby, raveled, somewhat ill-fitting edge of Bonham’s old jockstrap revealing a crescent-shaped section of hairy balls, all of which he found embarrassing and distasteful.

The exercise he was attempting was not one he had not done before. He had already done it twice that same day, successfully. It consisted of diving to the bottom of the pool fully geared, divesting oneself of flippers, weight belt, mask and lung in that order and swimming back up; that was the first half. The second (after a few deep breaths) was to swim back down, near-blind because maskless, find the lung and clear it of water and then, once one was able to breathe through it again, redon all the other gear and come up. Now, all this would be comparatively easy if one had attached to one’s tubes a mouthpiece with ‘non-return valves’ which did not let water get into the tubes; but Bonham insisted implacably that all his pupils complete this exercise with the old-fashioned mouthpiece so that, to clear the lung, you had to hold it in a certain way with the air-intake tube up and the exhaust tube down. And then you had to exhale sharply all your precious air to blow the water out. That particular time Grant, hurrying, apparently had held the damned thing wrong, with the exhaust tube up, and instead of the quick relieving flow of air into empty lungs, he had sucked down water.

Standing in the boat cockpit, holding the gin bottle in his hand and looking at the familiar Tower-of-London-Watchman label, Grant could feel all over again the rush of water into his throat, his throat itself locking, the blind rush upward, and then the long drawnout process while hanging on the pooledge of trying to get a tiny bit of air down into those heaving lungs whose heaving only locked his throat up tighter. Uncapping the bottle, he took a big swallow of the straight gin and waited for it to hit his stomach and spread out, warm and soothing. When he finally got his breath back yesterday, he had insisted on going back down and doing it again, right away, because he knew the principle from springboard diving that when you crack up on a dive, don’t wait: go right back while your back or your belly is still stinging and do it again before time and imagination can make you even more afraid. Bonham had apparently admired him for that, and the second time he had done it perfectly, but that did not relieve his memory of the strangling terror.

Later, of course, Bonham had told him it happened because he hurried, that if he had tested it with just a little suction till he found water, he could have swum back up with his lungs empty: he had plenty of time. But for Grant it had required every last ounce of will he had each time to exhale into that tube down there. How could he have that much more control? Time, Bonham said; practice. And panic,
panic,
was the biggest danger, enemy, the
only
danger that there was in diving.

Luckily, Grant thought, last night he had not told his mistress or her husband about the little accident—now that they were going out. But then they did not even know that they were going out. Almost furtively, he glanced up again at the villa where they were up on the hill and still visible even from here, and once again that black-draped, mantilla-ed, half-hidden-faced image standing on the church steps pointing swam over him. Sometimes he positively hated her guts. Politely wiping the neck of the bottle with the palm of his hand in the time-honored gesture of all bottle drinkers, he passed the gin back to Bonham at the wheel, grateful for the warming.

“Look!” Bonham rumbled, rather sharply. “You aint gonna have to take your lung off down there out here. Only the mask, like I told you. Outside of that we’re just gonna swim around and look. I got this new camera case I wanta try out for a friend. So I’ll take some pictures of you.” It was a clear bribe. And as such, angered Grant a little. He didn’t need bribes to do it, or anything. Bonham slugged down a healthy dollop of the gin himself, and then, after a hesitation, as if he were not sure he ought to do this in front of Grant, wiped the bottleneck and passed it over to Ali—who bobbing and grinning took a drink himself and wiped the neck and capped it.

Grant did not fail to note the hesitation, or its meaning, but he did not say anything—about that, or about Bonham’s rather sharp remark. He was, actually, after having looked up at the villa, at the moment much more interested in and concerned with himself. Why was he doing this? Reality? To find reality? Search out and rediscover a reality which all these past six or eight years and two plays he had felt was beginning to be missing from his life and from his work? Yes; a reality, yes. Because without his work he was nothing. A nothing. And work was vitality, vitality and energy, and—manhood. So go ahead and say the rest of it. Yes, reality; but also to search out and rediscover his Manhood. His Capital M Manhood, which along with reality and his work he was also losing. Yes, all that; and also to get rid at least for a while in a genteel way of his aging mistress, the black figure on the church steps, whom he had once loved, but whom now he both in a strange way loved and did not love at all, equally and simultaneously, and whom he considered at least partially responsible for the loss of reality (and Manhood) that he suffered. Maybe he considered her, probably he considered her,
totally
responsible for the loss. But in the end he had not gotten away from her at all, because she had invited herself to come with him, along with her husband. Actually it was she who had found Al Bonham for him! She had come on down ahead, while he was in New York, had looked up and had waiting for him a diving teacher she considered reputable.