Go to the Widow-Maker (63 page)

“Then why do you try to antagonize and alienate his woman?” Lucky said. “I’d think you’d be smart enough to know that’s not the way to handle any man—even if he’s
not
in love with his wife. And Ron is.”

Doug laughed suddenly, as Bonham stared at Lucky. Then the big man smiled his most winning smile, “But, honey, I’m not! I’ve been trying ever since I met you to find the key to you that would make you like me.” Behind his smile his stormcloud stare at her belied everything he said.

Lucky’s Italian anger was rising. She found she had gotten the bit in her teeth and couldn’t stop, though she wanted to. “You know what I think about you? I think you’re accident prone in your social relations. Not in your work, obviously. But in everything else I think you’re a loser. Because like all losers psychologically you want to punish yourself. As for finding the key to me, it’s easy enough. All you have to do is—”

They were interrupted by a shout from the water.

“Hey! Help!”

For a man of his enormous bulk Bonham could move incredibly fast. He was off his seat, back to the stern and had the huge long pole gaff over the side struggling with something, before Lucky, moving as fast as she ever had moved, had barely stood up. Her heart beating in her ears, the only thing she could think of at all was
shark.
God how she hated this fucking damned sport! For a moment she thought she was going to faint, the way she had used to do as a child whenever anything horrified her. Then Doug had his arm around her and was shouting in her ear: “It’s all right! It’s all right! Nothing’s wrong! I can see!” Then in a calmer voice, “Here. Come over here. It’s all all right. You can see. They’ve just got a big fish, that’s all. A
huge
fish!”

By leaning over the port-side seat she could see that Bonham had got the big gaff hook into an enormous fish. Grointon and Ron, their masks still covering their faces, their snorkels dangling by their straps, were shouting at Bonham and laughing with triumph, swimming in opposite directions to hold the big fish steady between them on their two spearlines. Seeing her, Ron yelled at her: “It’s a jewfish!”

“Hey, Doug!” Bonham gasped. “Come back here. I can’t get enough leverage. There’s another gaff under the starboard seat. Gimme a hand.”

Doug looked into her eyes clinically, like a doctor, then let her go and grabbed the other gaff. Between them, straining their faces red, the two of them got, hoisted, the monstrous flapping organism up onto the floorspace of the catamaran, the deck. While they held it with the gaffs Bonham reached under the port-side seat and got a short stout club and whacked it soundly on the spine, on the “neck,” just behind the head. The great fish’s entire body, its fins and its tail quivered and stiffened and it lay still. A strange purplish iridescence shot out from the spot where it had been hit and spread all over its body which was unpleasantly colored in many shades of off-red, red-brown. It lay still now but rolled its eyes all around and kept opening its mouth and gaping its gills trying to breathe. Lucky stared at it fascinated, horrified. It was beautiful. And its mouth was big enough to almost take in a man’s head and one shoulder. It must have been all of five feet long and twice that around. Behind her Ron and Jim climbed in over the bow end laughing and slapping each other on the back.

“Boy, you should have seen Ron!” Jim Grointon told them laughing. “He came down and in there like a real old pro, Al!” He slapped Ron on the back again. “Buddy, if you can make a dive like that and hold your breath that long you can dive eighty feet right now, and there’s no reason you can’t do a hundred feet. I made a miscalculation about you. I didn’t know you’ve got all you’ve got.”

Lucky watched her lover and husband blush shyly. “Aw, shit. It was the excitement of the moment,” he grinned. “I couldn’t do it again.”

“If you could do it once, you can do it again,” Jim said. Still half breathless, he told them the story. And as she listened, Lucky watched the reddish colors of the fish slowly fade away until its eyes were dull and its color a dun brown. That hurt her the most, the eyes going as it died. That and the vicious clubbing. They had been swimming maybe two hundred yards off the boat, Jim said. He had seen this big jewfish come out of a cave, and he had gone right for it without thinking about anything else except getting him. There never would have been time to get out a Brazilian rig anyway, and they would have lost it. They almost lost it anyway. He had speared it from in front in the head, maybe forty yards out from the coral overhang, but had not made a killing brain shot. After a monstrous flip like an explosion (Al had seen them kick), which would have broken a man’s back if it hit him, it started for the cave. The depth was probably sixty feet to the bottom, and the fish was maybe eight or nine feet up from that. Of course he couldn’t hold it. That was when Grant came down. Diving what must have been a full fifty feet from the surface, he put his spear into the fish’s head from the other side, he even had the presence of mind to think of that. He didn’t make a killing shot either. But between them they were able, by both swimming as hard as they could backwards and to each side, to halt the fish’s progress toward the cave where he could have cut the lines on the coral. Finally, they had been able to horse him up near enough to the surface where they could get their heads out and breathe.

“Man, I was never so glad to get a fresh breath of air,” Jim laughed.

“Me either,” Ron said. “But you were down about twice as long as I was. I never could have stayed down that long.”

“Buddy, you stayed down long enough,” Jim said. By the time they had got air, the jewfish had pretty much given up the fight. “One of the good things about them is they poop out fast.”

Beside them Lucky had begun to cry. As the life had faded from the big fish so had all its colors faded too, as if the life itself were actually the color, and now it was only a piece of dead brown meat that stank of fish slime. “You’re bastards!” she cried suddenly. “All of you, bastards! What did you have to kill it for? It wasn’t bothering you! It was trying to get
away
! Bastards!”

“Honey, honey,” Ron said soothingly. He put his arms around her. “It’s only a fish.”

“Don’t think he don’t kill,” Grointon said mildly. “How do you think he eats?”

“She almost fainted, when you guys hollered,” she heard Doug explaining to Ron. “She was scared. She thought there’d been an accident.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it!” she cried. “And as for you,” she said to Grointon, “what do I care whether he kills or not? You’re supposed to be men! Civilized men! Human beings! You’re not fish! Or are you?” But she was beginning to get herself stopped from the crying. “You might have gotten yourself killed,” she said to her husband. It was funny. Normally she didn’t think of him as ‘husband’.

“Impossible,” Ron said, still holding her. “Honestly, I couldn’t possibly have. And look at all the fish we got. We got enough to feed the whole hotel for two or three days.”

She was wiping her eyes on his bare shoulder now. “Let the fishermen get the fish,” she said, in a more subdued voice. “And buy them at the market. That’s what they’re for. They make their living that way. But no, you have to kill. It was beautiful, that fish. It was alive.”

Jim Grointon was staring at her. “Men like to kill fish and game,” he said, and there was a strange, profoundly deep, totally icy quality in his voice. From Ron’s shoulder Lucky looked up at him fascinated. “They always have liked to kill fish and game. And I guess they always will. And women usually like them for it.”

”And, sometimes, they like to kill each other,” Ron said in an odd little voice. He, at least, understood what she meant, Lucky thought.

“Yes. I guess,” Jim said. “But that’s what makes men. That’s what it is to be a man. That’s what a man needs to feel he is a man. I didn’t make the rules. I didn’t create this world. If I had, I’d probly have changed a lot of the things.”

He seemed coldly furious. Lucky allowed Ron to sit her down on the port-side seat and accepted a beer. “Of course you’re absolutely right,” she said. “I was just upset. I thought somebody’d gotten hurt. Uh, incidentally, what would you have done if there hadn’t been anybody else on board but me?”

Ron and Jim both stopped and looked at each other for a moment. Then both grinned. “I guess we’d have gone ahead and shot him anyway,” Ron said.

“Oh, we could have got him killed some way or other,” Jim said. “In the water.” Then he smiled. “You don’t realize that you don’t get a chance at a fish that big every day.”

“I guess that’s what upset me,” Lucky said. “He looked as big as a human being. And then I watched him trying so hard to breathe. And he rolled his eyes around at me as if asking me to help him.” She smiled at Grointon, why tell the oaf the truth? “That didn’t bother you,” she smiled, half asking.

“No,” Grointon said.

“Fish don’t feel,” Bonham said. She smiled at him too. She did not tell him what she wanted to say,
That fish felt,
why tell any of them the truth? Except Ron she’d tell. But nobody else: Their hunting was perverted. A fisherman’s wasn’t.

“What do you think he’ll go?” Bonham said to Grointon.

Grointon squinted at the jewfish. “I think he’ll go three hundred at least.”

After that, she mainly watched them all, in silence, on the trip back home. It was soon clear why Bonham had pulled the fish up on the catamaran’s deck. Grointon towed a little plastic dinghy behind the boat and usually the fish they caught were kept in there, where the three fish Bonham had brought back earlier now were. But the enormous jewfish would have swamped the dinghy. So now it rode on the deck between them, and the four men kept looking at it from time to time. From time to time they talked about it affectionately, as if it were some kind of a goddamned friend, and they kept rehashing the story of the kill. She seemed, and felt, totally excluded.

She felt the same way that night at dinner. Bonham ate with them at the hotel, and somehow amongst the four men she was a complete outsider. They talked, they laughed, they joked, but they left her out of everything, seemed almost to forget she was there. It was not that they were not polite, or that they actually turned their backs on her. And it was not that Bonham himself caused it, or even that Bonham’s advent caused it. But it was as if the four of them, being together, and being men, more: being spearfishermen (because even Doug was one in a small way), and having been on a successful hunt today, had developed instinctively some kind of a common feeling, a common personality, of which they believed that she could not be a part, or even understand. She did not mind it much, because she had had her evening nap and tender, deep, love-making session with Ron before cocktails. But it was hard to believe, sitting back and watching him with these other three men now, that this Ron was the same Ron who had loved her so well upstairs. He roared with the others, telling horribly terrifying stories about the war which they all laughed at. They guffawed, they slapped each other resoundingly on the back between drinks, they gave each other great ribcracking nudges with their elbows standing at the bar after dinner. The big fish had of course made a great to-do at the hotel and they kept congratulating each other on the taking of it, while expansively receiving the congratulations of the other clients. Of them all Jim Grointon was perhaps the quietest, but it was quite clear he was very definitely of the same persuasion. She suddenly remembered having been in London once with another lover, on a short trip, and he had taken her for a walk down Jermyn Street where he wanted to go to his shirtmakers and pick up some pipe tobacco. Jermyn Street, the “men’s street” of London: shirt makers, tailors, tobacconists, men’s hairdressers, men’s shoemakers, and of course the pubs. Everything for men. She saw one other woman, also looking very out of place, guilty almost like herself, in all the time she was there. She had felt the same way there in London then, as she felt now, here, tonight. She had hated men.

She told him about it all afterwards, after they were alone and had gone up to their suite. But of course they were both quite a bit drunk by then, so probably she shouldn’t have.

It was hard to explain to him, in the first place. Hard to explain to anybody. What did she really want to say? Brutality and insensitivity, was the upshot of it. Did men, when they got together in groups, have to become brutal and insensitive, to prove to each other they were manly? Did manliness and insensitivity have to go hand in hand? If so, it boded no good for the race or anybody. What kind of manliness was that? Not any kind she wanted.

But it was more than that even. All this contemptuousness toward women, all this standing together in a block against the suffocating inroads of womenkind, this
need
to have a world apart that women could not enter, were incapable of understanding, all this had to come from a deep-seated dislike of women, a misogyny, that could only be the result of insecurity and lack of confidence.

She didn’t like the way Bonham loved him so much. Was it only because she was jealous? Was it only that? She didn’t think so. But there was something strange and violent about Bonham. He was a violent man, even though he was an adept at covering it up. And only violence, something bad, a losing situation, could come from associating with him. And the same was probably true of Doug.

When she had said it all and finished, she found she still hadn’t said what she’d wanted to say.

Her husband was looking at her with eyes that were having difficulty focusing, though he didn’t stagger at all. “Well, gee, honey, if I’d known you felt outside of everything, I’d have . . .” He made as if to put his arms around her.

“No!” she cried. “Don’t do that! That doesn’t help anything! I’m trying to talk to you seriously. It’s not just Bonham. It’s you. I’m worried about you.”

He had turned on his heel and sat down on the bed edge after she backed away from him. He sat there totally nude, his hands dangling between his knees, while she talked on. When she stopped he looked up at her, his eyes bright, his face an animal snarl almost, and his voice was the voice of a different person. What could have happened to him? In so short a time?