Go to the Widow-Maker (49 page)

They did not however, because exactly at 11:10 the phone rang. They had all long since finished eating, and were now sitting around inside still drinking the red wine. When the phone rang Bonham looked around and then got up and walked over and picked it up, with his slow drunken movements.

“Who the hell could that be?” he said. “At this hour? Yes?”

He listened a long time and though pretty drunk his face got long and solemn. After a while he asked some short questions, like: “Where?” “What time was it?” “How many people?” What make of car was it?” Then finally he said: “I don’t know. Sure, I’ll try. But I can’t do anything about it now, tonight, for God’s sake!” After saying goodbye he hung up and came back to them. “There’s been a bad accident,” he said, and rubbed his sausage-fingered hand over his great face.

It was Saturday night and a local Jamaican businessman, apparently on his way back to Ganado Bay from a wild party in Ocho Rios with a local Jamaican girl, had gone through the bridge out east of town and into the river with his Chevrolet. Another car following along behind them had seen the whole thing. They had stopped, but no trace of the car showed on the placid surface of the river, and nobody swam up from it. They had driven on in and called the police. That was the police who had just called. They wanted Bonham to dive tomorrow to recover the car and the bodies.

Bonham rubbed his big hand over his still-drunken face again. “We all know the girl. She was a great sport. She was a receptionist at a local doctor’s. But always laughing. Always out on some party. The trouble is the guy is married—was married—with a wife and four kids at home.”

He paused. “It’s worth a couple hundred bucks. The county pays.” He picked up his glass of red wine, looked at it, and then with a twisted mouth put it back down. His wife Letta, who had only just got home from her restaurant job a few minutes before, came over and put her small arm around him.

“Who was it”

“Anna Rachel. Anna Rachel Bottomley.”

“Oh, no. I thought maybe. It’s so sad.”

“I’ve got a lot to do in the morning. We’ll have to get the big mobile derrick. They’ll have to weight it. It’s a hard dive. The river’s about 60, 65 feet deep there, and muddy. There’ll be current. Fortunately there haven’t been much rains lately.”

He looked over at Grant, as if just remembering he was there. “If you want to go along on a real, serious working dive, here’s your chance. I don’t know yet whether I’ll have to use a torch on it or not. I’ll have to look first. You want to come along?”

“Not me,” Orloffski said. “I’ll stick to spearfishin.”

Grant looked over at Lucky.

“You’re insane,” she whispered, her eyes widening.

“I wouldn’t take him anyplace where he could get hurt,” Bonham said solidly. “I like him, and his talent, too much to do anything like that. I’ll be doing all the work. He’ll just be observing.”

“You can see I have to go,” Grant said to Lucky. “It’s something like this I’ve been wanting to do since I started. I may never get another chance like this.”

Somewhat numbly, she thought, Lucky got up and went over to the bags to get one to unpack. Bonham would go with them down the street to his friend’s’ house to wake them up and ask them to let them stay another night, he said.

Doug, who did not want to go back to the villa and those women tonight since the lovers were not leaving, decided he would sleep on Bonham’s livingroom floor. That way he would be right here for the dive tomorrow, too.

T
HE SILENCE WAS ENORMOUS.
Only by taking a breath from his regulator could Grant reassure himself he still could hear. He had expected that; but only by thinking about it most seriously could he be sure which way was up and which way down. His only contact with the entire world really, was the thick chain to which he clung thirty feet down. It disappeared ten feet below him, and ten feet above him. And from it some gentle—terrifyingly gentle—omnipotent, ubiquitous force tried perpetually to pull him.

Looking around itself, his mind tried desperately to relate this to some experience he and it might have had together in the past, and failed. Physically, it was a little like being blind, or half-blind. Or, because of the “No Up and No Down,” like being an eyeless embryo floating in the womb maybe. Once as a child, to test his eyes, the doctor had put drops in them which dilated the pupils and when he tried to see with them everything was hazy and blurry and would not focus. This was like that. When he put his depth gauge against his facemask, he could by straining his eyes just barely read the luminous numbers. When he moved one hand away to full arm’s length, it all but disappeared into invisibility as a shadow. When he wiggled his fingers his eyes could not be sure they moved.

But emotionally, it made him think of something quite else. When he was five years old his father had tried to teach him to swim in a swimming pool by putting a float on his back and pulling him out into the water. He was all right as long as he could stand on the step, or hold onto the ledge on the side, but the moment that his arms and legs, moving in the water, seeking, could find no solid material to support him he began to scream, literally scream, with rage and fear. It was sheer blind animal cowardice and panic. No amount of explanation or aid by his father could change it. That was the way he felt now, and he tried hard to swallow it, put it down, down there somewhere in the region of his belly, of his trained abdominal muscles, where he might possibly control it. What in the name of God really, was he doing here? Lucky was right.

It had all begun auspiciously enough. Heroically, even picturesquely. The bridge here crossed a complex of shallow mangrove swamps, then just as it hit the deeper river channel bent left in a long sweeping curve inland and along the shore to cross the river—a curve the car had failed to make. The big mobile crane, with its huge additional truck of extra equipment and weights, could only be utilized by positioning it on the bridge itself, and it took up a good three feet more than half the roadway. This automatically required a cordon of local police constables to stop highway traffic a good distance off from the work area and then filter the cars one at a time through the narrow space remaining. That already made the whole affair something of an occasion, a lark. Many of the cars preferred to pull off the long bridge, park, walk back and watch. Many other cars, knowing beforehand of the big flap coming, had driven out from town to watch. So there was quite a considerable crowd hanging over the bridge balustrade or milling around.

Before this audience Bonham directed the positioning of the big crane, after calculating as best he could from the hole in the balustrade the arc of fall the car had taken. A diving dinghy for them to dress out in and dive from, was stationed out in the stream, attached by two hawsers to bridge supports to keep it in position. From it a heavy anchorline would be dropped to where Bonham thought the car was. A Jamaican boatman tended the boat. Orloffski would tend for the divers. Bonham’s authority in all of this was immense, formidable. Even police inspectors took orders from him. Then they two were dressing out in rubber wet suits because of the chill river water, and then the rest of the gear, under the eyes of the goggling crowd up above.

They had ridden out with their gear in the constabulary’s largest police van with the Chief Inspector in charge of the job. The five of them: himself, Bonham, Orloffski, Doug and Wanda Lou. Lucky and Letta Bonham had chosen to stay at home. On the way Bonham had hauled out a bottle of gin under the eyes of the Chief Inspector, helped himself to a large belt of it, and handed it to Grant. “And we’re gonna need at least one more of these snorts before we’re done with
this,”
he said grimly with his stormcloud smile; “make sure it’s in the boat.” Everybody drank, including Wanda Lou who was giggling and grinning like a kid on a picnic, the only one abstaining being the colored, rather prim Chief Inspector. But he made no comment. And it was like that with all the rest of it. Whatever they might all think of Bonham, publicly or privately, they needed him now. And he knew it. He was the only one who could do the work that must be done. And he could do it cheaper than any old-fashioned hardhat, diver from Kingston that they would have to fly up with his air hoses and compressors and special tender.

In the boat, after the anchorline had been placed to his satisfaction and they were dressed out, Bonham told Grant to go first. In the bow, pointed upstream, the water made a smooth heavy little curl against the forepeak, Grant noted. Bonham handed him a coil of light manila line with a heavy metal clip spliced expertly into one end, a loop of the rope spliced into itself at the other. “The water will be moving you. Look for the anchorline. If you miss it, don’t worry. Swim up to the surface to orient yourself in this muck, and swim back upstream to the stern to catch it. Go down it thirty feet and wait for me. I’ll be right behind you.”

Grant nodded. (He was afraid to speak.) He made a back entry and rolled over to look down, exhaling to make himself sink a little, and saw what he could only describe as a sea of gray skim milk, in which he appeared to be immersed. Then almost immediately on his right, so fast it surprised him, the anchorchain moved slowly past him in a stately way, a shadow-line which he grabbed for and caught. The catch brought him up short, like a running man grabbing a tree branch overhead. The line descended below him into nothingness, and when he looked up it ascended above him into nothingness. There was some light in the skim milk, but it did not seem to come from any particular direction and instead was omnipresent. That was when he first got scared. Only his bubbles mounting gave him a sense of direction. It took every ounce of will he possessed, each time, to haul himself another arm’s length down the chain in this cold soup. At thirty feet he stopped and waited, and that was where he still was. Where the hell was Bonham? ! Peering at the luminous bezel on his diving watch, he read that he had been down here a minute and twenty seconds. The luminosity of his watch bezel was as warm to him and as sane and as safe as a roaring fire in a fireplace. Where the
fuck
was Bonham?! What the
fuck
was he doing here?!

He remembered Lucky had told him practically the same thing about herself, last night as they were getting ready for bed, after they had gone to bed. They had both by now learned automatically to speak in whispers before the thin walls of the miserable little room. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here! I really don’t! You don’t want me! You don’t want a woman! You want some kind of a moveable beast, that you can hop on and fuck, after you’ve spent the day killing fish, and playing with sharks, and the nights getting drunk with your boy friends! Then you want to come home and get laid! I don’t like killing, and I don’t like dangerous games, or men who like danger, or sportsmen! And I don’t like you! I like people who are sensitive, and intelligent, and—and
sensitive
!
. . .
And
you
don’t want
me
! You want a Wanda Lou! That’s what you need!” He had lain, cold and silent, and heard her out. He wasn’t angry. He was miserable.
Already
miserable, before she started. Talk about sensitivity! How insensitive did she have to be not to know he was miserable, already as miserable as he could get? He hated the thought of the dive tomorrow. He didn’t want to make it. He would give anything
not
to make it. And it terrified him that he would have to force himself to go ahead and do it anyway. Of course he understood her tirade was only an attempt to relieve herself. After a while, after she quieted down finally, he tried to explain to her this thing about himself and idiot courage, lying with his hands clasped behind his head, his face white and cold, talking in the automatic whisper, staring at the idiot ceiling miserably. All his life he had been a coward. And just because of that, all his life he had had to force himself to do these things just to prove to himself that he wasn’t as much of a coward as he already knew he was. A ridiculous proposition. And it never worked. So that day after day it was to do over again. Pride, yes! Proud, he was. But not brave. Not courageous. That had been his life, day after day after day, all during the war. Could she imagine living like that day after day for four and a half years, except for one or two or three times when the bloodlust got up in him—what the scientists called “mob feeding pattern” when they referred to sharks, but preferred to label “heroism” when they talked of humans—could she imagine that? Some men were brave, and some just were not. He was one of the ones who weren’t. And he had to learn it. If he could, he had somehow to learn it.—“If you were a Cro-Magnon man, maybe!” Lucky cried out in the automatic whisper, “back then! But even they had their artists and their cave-painters, and their shamans!” And they killed their cripples. Warriors! Hunters! Warriors, warriors! In the war there were so many who had done so much more than he had. So
many
many. That was
his
memory of the war: so many many who had done so much more than he had.—“Every man I ever heard talk about the war said exactly the same thing!” Lucky yelled, still in the automatic whisper. “I knew a boy at school—a man—who had the DSC, and he said the same damned thing! And with that same damned lugubrious look!” Did she think he wanted to make this dive? Finally she had said dully: “All right, you go! Go ahead! But I don’t have to! And I’m not going to! I’m not going out there and sit on some boat and suffer agonies! I’m going to stay at Bonham’s!—I’m going to stay at Bonham’s, and get drunk, by myself!” In the morning she had found she had an ally in Letta Bonham, who didn’t want to go either. For the same reasons. So the two of them, since it was Sunday and Letta Bonham’s day off from teaching school, stayed at the house, well fortified with a supply of beer.

Beside him a shadow appeared in the skim milk soup, and as it came closer—to half an arm’s length—he recognized it as Bonham. The big man came close to him, putting his mask almost against Grant’s, and studied his face. Grant pointed to his watch and grimaced inside his mask, and made a questioning gesture with his head toward the surface. Bonham frowned inside his own and made an irritable shrug. Some or other damn thing had detained him. Then motioning Grant to follow, he passed him, his coil of manila line over one arm, and started on down hand over hand on the chain. Grant followed, keeping him in sight just inside the circle of visibility, which here seemed to diminish to six or eight feet. It seemed to shrink some as they descended. From below Bonham stopped and glanced up at him once questioningly, a dim apparition, the mask appearing to be one huge Cyclopean eye in the middle of his great head. Grant had seen blind newts, eyeless, in caves in Kentucky. It must have been like this for their remote ancestors, when they began to lose their unneeded sight. The pervasive current had by now become such a part of his existence that his body automatically allowed for it in its movements, a sort of horizontal gravity along which at any moment he could fall.