Go to the Widow-Maker (50 page)

Bonham wasted no time at all. On the bottom where the heavy anchor rested on what appeared to be mud-silted rock, he clipped his manila line onto a link of the anchorchain ten feet up, motioning Grant to watch. The other end with the loop he made a slipknot out of by pulling the rope back through the loop, and snugged this up tight over his right arm in his right armpit. Then motioning Grant to stay where he was, he took the coil of line in his left hand, let go of the chain and began paying the coil out with his right. Motionless except for his hands, his head toward Grant, he began to move away from Grant backwards, carried downstream by the current. Once, at just about the outer limit of Grant’s visibility, he stopped and swam off to his left, then back and off to his right, for all the world like the huge pendulum of some strange horizontal clock swinging in a horizontal gravity. Then he disappeared into the world of skim milk.

Grant watched the rope, hanging onto the chain with one arm, feeling very helpless, very much the neophyte. Twice more it did its pendulous arcing search, then Bonham reappeared in the murk, calmly recoiling the rope as he pulled himself back to the chain. By his gestures he communicated that the car was too far away to work on, that they would have to move the dinghy and anchorchain. Then, almost as an afterthought, he tapped Grant and motioned a question: did Grant want to go and do what he had done. Numbly, Grant nodded.

It was ridiculously easy. Lying relaxed in the water, he payed out on his line and watched Bonham and the anchorline fade from sight. He did not have to arc-search, since Bonham had indicated the wrecked car was at the very end of the manila line, and off to the left toward the bridge supports. When he reached the end of his line, with the slipknot tugging securely at his right armpit he swam thirty, thirty-five feet off to his left, and sure enough there it was, about six feet below him. It seemed sort of unbelievable. It had nosed down some into the layer of silt, but otherwise was sitting upright on its wheels on the slight slope. Two bright spiderwebs on the safety glass of the windshield showed where the people’s heads had struck. Staring at it, Grant stopped swimming; and immediately the current began to carry him away from it back to the center of his arc. When he swam a little, he stayed stationary; when he swam a lot, he moved back toward it. He could see what Bonham had meant about the impossibility of working from here. He stopped swimming and let himself be carried. Then he started coiling his line into his left hand. Soon Bonham and the anchorline appeared in the murk. When he was back onto the chain, Bonham motioned that they should go up. Using Bonham’s knowledge and techniques he had moved, blind, sixty feet downstream and back, thirty-five feet sideways and back, seen the car, and had expended very little energy. He was beginning to get cold.

Back on top in the boat Bonham gave instructions and then sat and relaxed, breathing deeply, while the boatman and two men on the bridge supports set about moving the boat to where he wanted it. Orloffski changed their tanks for them. They were using the large-size single tanks for this operation, because it was so shallow, but Bonham had brought along a lot of them. “No use having to worry about air too, while you’re working.”

In the sun-heated air and sunshine the wet suits very soon began to get uncomfortably warm. After splashing over the side to cool off and opening the zippers of the shirts, they climbed back into the boat and Bonham hauled out his gin bottle. “Well, what do you think of it? The dive?” he grinned. “Like it?”

“I can’t say I really like it,” Grant said cautiously, “with those people in there. Or even without them. But it seems ridiculously easy, the way you do it.”

“Experience, kid,” Bonham said and winked. He seemed very pleased with himself, very satisfied with his work, despite the tragic reason for it. “We’re in luck, actually,” he said. “The way it’s sitting I don’t think I’ll have to use a cutting torch on it. Some get so smashed up they look like accordions.” He paused and frowned strangely. “But I haven’t decided whether we ought to get the bodies out first or not. Well, we’ll have a look first. Hey!” he called to the boatman. “That’s about it! Right there! Let off easy now with that anchor!”

Up on the bridge the crowd appeared to have grown, when Grant looked. He waved up at Doug and Wanda Lou, who waggled a bottle back at him. “She set, boss,” the boatman said.—“Well?” Bonham said. “Shall we go?”

It would have been possible to say with some truthfulness that it was easier for Ron going down the second time, but it would not have been all the truth. He was prepared for certain things. He knew more about, and how to manipulate, the clip-on lines. He was prepared for the limited skimmilk visibility, ready to grab for the slow, stately moving anchorchain as it passed him. But the truth was, when Bonham said “Well? Shall we go?” like that he didn’t want to go down again. He had been down there, he had done it, he had seen the car. He wanted to rest on his laurels, and stay up here and not go back. But he could find no unabject way of stating this to Bonham, so silently and idiotically, he went.

This time the heavy anchor rested about twelve or fifteen feet from the car. They could just make out its bulk dimly through the murk as they hung on the chain. Bonham had judged well in his moving of the anchor. Also, it was almost directly upstream from the car now, thus reducing enormously the swimming arc necessary to move around at the ends of the clip lines. Side by side they calmly and easily drifted down on the car as they payed out on the lines. This time Bonham had clipped his line on much closer to the actual bottom, so that as they came alongside one on either side, drifting backward and peering over their shoulders, they were just level with the windows of the car.

The window on Grant’s side was closed. Peering in, he could see quite clearly the man and the girl, both black Jamaicans. Both had their heads thrown back and their mouths open with a look of sort of wondering stupefaction on their faces, but the man had slipped and slid down a little toward the girl while the girl had slid closer to her window. Grant could look straight down into her face. Her eyes were wide open; but he could not tell, further away, about the man. The girl’s long hair drifted slowly to and fro around her head as the water within the car moved to some rhythm of its own. And drifting in unison with it about a foot above the man’s head was an object which after several seconds Grant was able to make out as a pair of women’s panties. This struck him, in the words of some asshole poet or other, as “passing strange.” It was the only phrase for it. It was also somehow very sad. Looking down, he saw that the woman’s dress was clear up around her waist, and that from the waist down she was nude. He could see her navel and the black spiky hair on her vagina. Whether she had been like that before, or whether the crash and then the water rushing in had hiked it up, was impossible to tell.

It could not have been more than a few seconds that he stared at her through his facemask, breathing slowly to the sing of his regulator, but it seemed a long time. She certainly was dead. So was the man. A little fish of some kind darted out from somewhere as if anticipating an easy meal here, then as if sensing the presence of larger life than himself close by, darted away. Then Bonham, who had taken all this in from the other side, came swimming up over the top of the car on the end of his clip line. He had decided, he gestured, to take the bodies out of the car first, and he motioned Grant to go and get the hoisting- and signal-line which they had brought down with them this time and Bonham had clipped to the chain. Grant made a motion as of breaking the window on his side with something, but Bonham shook his head and held up a finger. The window on his side was already open, he informed Grant by pointing and making a cranking motion. And again he motioned for Grant to go get the line.

Grant swam away, pulling himself in on his line and coiling it as he moved upcurrent. He undipped the extra line at the anchor. From here in this gray gloomy water the car was almost invisible. Bonham was completely so. Grant felt a pang of loneliness, and suddenly realized he was cold. He recalled that, had he not come along, Bonham would have done this job alone, had done others like it alone. Tugging three times which was the signal for more slack, he took a turn of the line over his arm and let himself drift back down, his admiration for Bonham growing.

Bonham had managed to get the door open on the driver’s side and to insert himself far enough to get his hands on the body of the man. But he was having trouble with the door. Grant watched fascinated for a moment, then hurried to help. Just as would a high strong wind, or gravity if the car were hanging by its front bumper on a chain, the current kept gently but persistently pushing the door shut against Bonham. In order to back out with the man he had to keep patiently pushing the door partway open again, then inch himself backward a bit before it pressed him again. Why hadn’t he waited on Grant? Grant didn’t know. In any case, with him to help it was easier. Paying out a few feet of his line till he could grasp the door, he hauled back in on the line until he held the door standing wide open in the current. Nodding vigorously at him, and holding up one hand in the thumb and forefinger circle salute for: Good! Okay! Bonham went on backing out with the man.

Once outside, holding the body firmly in a sort of lifeguard’s cross-chest carry so as not to lose it to the current, he motioned for the extra line, warped it around him under the arms and knotted it in a perfect bowline. Then he tugged four times, and the dead Jamaican, his arms splayed outward from the rope and looking ridiculously helpless, went sailing off upward at a flat angle into the current, for all the world like some dead soul rising to some skim-milk heaven. Ten feet above them he grew dim, then disappeared in the murk.

One down, Grant thought. He was glad he had not had to touch him. And one to go. But then Bonham did an incomprehensible thing. Worming his way back into the front seat of the car—which was certainly dangerous enough in any case, pressed against the wheel like that—instead of trying to get hold of her and work his way back out, he began meticulously and carefully with his sausage fingers to put the panties back on the body of the dead Jamaican girl. All of him now, except from his heels to the tips of his long professional flippers, which projected beyond the nearly closed car door, was cramped longitudinally into the car’s front seat.

Grant had noted, while holding the door for him to get the man out, that the panties had disappeared from the former position where they floated a foot or so above the man’s head. And later, when he let go the door to pass Bonham the hauling-line, he had noticed that they were stuck into Bonham’s weight belt. They were white and showed up noticeably. But in the stress of working and of even being down there, he had not thought anything of that one way or the other. Probably Bonham was going to keep them as some kind of a gruesome souvenir of the job? But now he could hardly believe what his eyes were showing him, as he peered in through the door. Hauling in a little on his line, he swam around to the front and peered in through the windshield between the spider-webby cracked spots. What in the name of God could he be doing it for?

Bonham was not having any easy time of it, either. His big behind was jammed in between the wheel and the seat, and his great shoulders pressed down between the dashboard and the belly of the girl. His chin and facemask pushed practically right down into her spiky crotch. He could not move anything at all except his arms. And with these he was doggedly trying to get her slippery right foot that was down on the floor through the right leg-hole of the panties.

Grant watched from outside as success kept eluding him. Finally Bonham shrugged his whole tightly pressed body to try and get into a better position. Grant felt a suffocating faintness of terror at the thought of being in that position himself, of what would happen if the big diver should bump his mouthpiece against something and lose it. He would never get out. He would simply have to lay squeezed in there and drown. Even with Grant’s help he could not get out fast enough to do any good.

What in the name of
God
was he
doing
it for!

Again the big man shrugged his entire body irritably, and Grant could feel the car shake a little under his hand. Bonham had apparently succeeded with the right foot and was now turning his attention to the left.

But this proved to be an even more obstinate obstacle than the right. Partially this was because his weight pressed down on her in this position he was in and would not allow her legs to come together. To Grant’s eye beyond the windshield it appeared grotesquely that even in death this girl was determined to keep her legs apart, a defiant unruly gesture to the, perhaps, whole of humanity.

Suddenly, furiously, as if driven beyond normal expectation, Bonham shook his whole body from top to foot rather the way a dog will shake himself from head to tail in separate sections. The result of that was to pop his body up out of the combined pressures squeezing it, and his tank rang alarmingly against the car roof. From outside Grant could only float at the end of his clip-line helplessly and watch. The girl had now slipped down in the seat, her two legs in the air in a position of copulation. From above her, floating against the car roof, Bonham, bending the left leg in from the knee, could slip the left foot through its panty-hole. But more than that he could not do. Carefully he worked the panties up her legs to above her knees, but having no leverage with which to lift her body, he could get them no further. He had made a herculean effort. Looking up furiously and ferociously at the windshield, he motioned Grant violently to get the door open.

Grant, who had just looked at his watch wondering about air, nodded vigorously and then just as he turned to swim back to the door saw Bonham reach back with his left hand and pull his reserve wire! Grant felt no need to pull his own. But Bonham, having expended a great deal more energy, especially in his latest effort with the panties, had also used a great deal more air.