Go to the Widow-Maker (93 page)

In the very end, after all the goodbys and farewells and handshakes and quick little personal toasts, Jim Grointon came forward grinning and brought from behind his back where he’d been hiding it the big shark’s mouth of the twelve-foot tiger they had caught together. He had had it cut out when he removed the carcass at the hotel and it had been drying, and now he presented it to Grant.

“I thought you might like to have it,” he smiled with that slow, so slow smile of his. “This one you can nearly for damn sure get your head through. It’s true you didn’t take it entirely by yourself, but you did do at least half the work of taking it. And I’ll have plenty chances to take others. And since we did take it together, I also thought you might like to have it to remember me—us—” he gestured at the crowd “—by. It aint quite dry yet but you put it up on deck where the spray won’t hit it, it’ll be bone-dry in a couple more days.”

Grant took the still-leathery cartilage in his hand and felt along the sharp teeth with a fingertip. It meant absolutely nothing to him. He had been trying to avoid Grointon since they had arrived at the dock—without making it at all obvious —so that he would not have to shake hands goodby with him. And now here he was apparently going to be forced to. And yet he couldn’t. He remembered Jacques Edgar and the touch of his hand. He simply couldn’t.

Then he remembered something. It was how on the trip home from the Morants, after Jim had made his so generous and so flattering eulogy of himself (the same because of which he had had to sit down quickly because he was afraid of showing wet eyes! ha!)—how after that eulogy Jim had clapped him hard across the shoulders, for all the world like one Roman soldier saying hello or goodby to another Roman soldier. The resemblance to Romans had to have been deliberate? And even if he were wrong about them, the two of them, Jim and Lucky, he still simply could not shake his hand.

He looked up from the shark mouth. Jim, grinning, was just sticking out his hand. Taking a quick step forward, Grant reached quickly inside, and clasped Jim by his forearm muscle through the long-sleeve shirt.—” This is how
we
shake hands!” he grinned. Jim got the analogy, the reference, and clasped him, Grant by his own forearm in the Roman greeting. Then, grinning, he clapped Grant on the back with his other arm. Grant clapped him on the back. Then they broke apart, and Grant turned away.

All the gear and luggage had already been stowed away aboard, and Orloffski stood on the dock by the big mooring cleat forward, ready to lift off the big eye splice of the bow line. Almost all of the people were already aboard. All except Lucky who, he noted from an eye-corner, was shaking hands goodby with a smiling Jim Grointon. Well, what the hell? Why shouldn’t he be smiling? at a goodby, at an
ordinary
goodby? Grant turned and ran for the stern line. René, Papa René handed Lucky aboard. When Bonham bellowed, they two, he and Orloffski, lifted off the big eye splices pushed off with a foot each fore and aft, and then leaped on board. They were away.

“Hurry back to the hotel!” Bonham bellowed in his loudest voice. “Hurry back! We’ll signal you!”

They went out of the harbor under motor, hotels and cranes and tanks and buildings wheeling around them and changing their relative positions as they moved. It was much easier to go out under motor, if you had one, especially in a big boat, Bonham said, and especially in a long narrow harbor as crowded with shipping as this one was. Ben and Grant hung onto the shrouds watching everything in the harbor move and change. The girls all sat in the cockpit, where Bonham behind the wheel looked as solid and indestructible as one of those ages-old ninety-ton Indian Buddhas.

As soon as he rounded the Port Royal Point, he cut the motor—why waste expensive fuel, girls, ’ey?—and yelled forward for Orloffski to hoist the mainsail, then when it was up to hoist the jib. The surgeon helped Orloffski to heave on the halyards. Ben and Grant stood around watching excitedly, but afraid to try to help for fear they’d do more harm than good. Now they were under sail alone, and Bonham headed east-southeast down the Main East Channel. When he had passed between Rackham’s Cay and Gun Cay—where they had all dived so many times now, before moving on to better spots—he turned inshore a little. Soon the bulk of the hotel appeared to all of them, standing only slightly above the spit itself.

“Dip the mainsail!” Bonham yelled forward. Orloffski and the surgeon let go the halyard, and the big sail sank down slowly, edge flapping in the breeze until her head was halfway down the mast. They ran on like that on the jib alone past the hotel for a full minute. It was impossible to see any signals, waves, or people on the shore. “Hoist her!” Bonham called. Orloffski and the surgeon hauled on the halyard till the mainsail was full up. It had been a beautiful gesture, and although there was no answering signal visible from the hotel Grant for one was sure they had all seen it and appreciated it, and suddenly his heart came up into his throat.
Goodby, Kingston!
he wanted to yell foolishly.
Goodby, Jamaica!
He looked over at Ben with a sheepish grin, and saw that Ben felt exactly the same way. It was all going to be all right, he felt suddenly. It was going to be a fine trip, now. It was all going to have been worth it!

Naiad,
Bonham guiding her, came offshore a little and then ran on down the East Channel east-southeast until they had passed Plumb Point Light. It was almost dark by now. A little farther on Bonham swung her around to southwest by south.

Then the long night sail began, and with it the first of the trouble. It was just seven o’clock.

I
N TEN OR TWELVE
minutes the tiny white breakers of East Middle Ground showed up to starboard, then the low bushes of South East Cay beyond. First reference, Bonham grinned. When he had passed these, he swung her over half a point to the west and settled back.

Bonham was a different man on board ship. On board
his
ship, because there was no doubt that it was his ship. He had his Master’s papers to prove it, and he actually seemed to sink into the ship and become a wood or rope or metal part of it. At the same time, his Authority with a capital A increased several hundred percent. Although he made no overt effort to display this. Rather the reverse. But you could not help but feel it. He had been distant and much more reserved with Grant since Grant’s ‘bearding’ of him that day in the hotel, but this on board ship had nothing to do with that. He had always been authoritative with anything having to do with the diving or his pupils and his charges, but this new ‘Ship’s Master’s’ Authority was different totally in kind and texture.

For the first hour, two hours after their departure the excitement of leaving and of actually being at sea kept them all up high, and they all clustered around Bonham in the cockpit where he sat like that granite Buddha moving the wheel almost not at all, steering a course a few degrees west of southwest by south, taking advantage of the evening land breeze, the wind on his starboard quarter. He would, he explained to them all, sail that course for around eight hours or so to the Pedro Cays. They would hit these at around three
A.M.
in the morning. Then he would bring her around almost due west to pass inside the Pedros, crossing the end of the Pedro Bank, and then just sail her on a few degrees north of west to the Nelsons. They should sight the Nelsons around 2:15 tomorrow afternoon, anchor around 2:40. In the morning the trades would come up again. He was sailing by dead reckoning, but he would get a fix when he sighted Pedros Light. The currents here were all northwesterly, and he could guess the drift. He didn’t feel like sleeping, he loved to sail at night, but if he got tired Orloffski could spell him. Grant listened to all this fascinated, and it was then that he made up his mind that he would stay up all night, learning, listening.

He would learn, of course, later, that there really wasn’t all that much to learn. It was mainly just staying awake and sitting behind that binnacle and wheel.

The breeze was good. It was amazing how quiet, how
seemingly
silent, it could be without the sound of motors forever present on a ship. The breeze was good, and so were the drinks that they had lounging around the cockpit which despite its size wasn’t really big enough to hold all of them. Orloffski therefore stood in the saloon hatchway, its slide pushed all the way back, his feet on the little companionway, grinning and holding his bottle of Seven-Up laced with gin. The surgeon and his girl lay side by side—or rather, belly to belly—on the little side deck beside the cockpit, about as close together as two bodies could get, and murmuring. Yes, the breeze was good, the drinks were good; but the food was lousy. It consisted solely of cans of tunafish and cans of Spam— take your choice or have both—with a couple of loaves of bread that had been fairly seriously squashed. And a jar of mustard. Grant didn’t mind it too much, and in fact enjoyed it. More than enjoyed it. He was an old camper, an old Navy man (though he knew next to nothing about sailing and navigation), he was ravenous, the sea air was great, and he ate like a pig. But the ladies didn’t take to it too much. Except for Cathie Finer who didn’t seem to mind what she ate as long as she drank, and stayed near Bonham. A couple of murmured complaints like “Jesus, is this
it?”
from Lucky, Irma and the surgeon’s girlfriend, brought from Bonham the comment that Orloffski notoriously could not cook, and that he himself did not feel at this stage of the trip like turning the sailing over to Orloffski and going below to cook up a hot meal. He could do it, under way like this, though it was difficult a little bit, but he didn’t want to and tomorrow when they made landfall they would be eating their own catches incomparably cooked by himself. This statement, given in his new Authoritative manner, ended all complaints.

But it wasn’t the food which started the trouble part, everybody could stomach (if the word applied) that. It was the accommodations. After a couple of hours or so the excitement of departure wore off for most of them, though not for Grant. Orloffski and the surgeon had long ago hoisted the staysail and foresail, and there was little to do but sit in the cockpit, watch the dimly lighted binnacle, listen to the sea slip by, listen to the cordage slapping and the wind move past the sails, and look at the stars. This sufficed for Grant, but not for any of the others, even including Ben. And when finally the excitement of leavetaking and being at sea left them, and they decided to bed down, this was when the execrable conditions of the accommodations belowdecks become only too openly apparent. This terrible condition of the accommodations was compounded by several factors.

When there was trouble, when trouble finally came, and it always did come, it was never the ship, never the weather, never the sea—it was always the people who brought it on, and carried it through, and kept it going. Always the people. On this voyage at any rate it was never the elements that were at fault; it was the people.

In the first place, the surgeon and his girl had decided to sleep on deck. Lucky and Grant had been given the master cabin that with its one-third-open bulkhead on the little companionway was on the starboard side just forward of the saloon. The surgeon (whose name was Richard Finestein, but who was hardly ever called anything but Surgeon during the whole of the trip) and his girl had been given the portside open bed that opened out just across the little companionway from the main cabin. When they decided to sleep on deck, they very kindly offered their space to Ben and Irma, who then could move aft and not have to sleep in the cramped crew’s bunks in the bows. They themselves, they said, would use these if it rained. This was fine, but it soon turned out that the reason they wanted to sleep on deck was to secure for themselves a certain bare minimal amount of privacy in order to drink and screw. By the time everybody was bedded down such rustlings and thumpings, whispering scrapings and thuddings were coming from the forward deck near the bow that it pervaded the entire belowdecks. This both irritated and angered both Irma and Lucky, both because of the (they felt) inexorably low-class bad taste of it, and because they themselves had no such privacy below. Neither of them, they told Ben and Grant, could have done it even up there on deck, the ‘minimal’ privacy was just too minimal, but down here it—and just about everything else—was impossible.

In the fact, anybody with any brains should want to sleep up on deck—provided of course that it didn’t rain. There was the smell of paint below, uncomfortable in itself, but none of Bonham’s much-talked-about cleanings and freshenings-up were anywhere visible. Two walls of the saloon appeared to have been painted, but everywhere else the same old peeling paint and cracking varnish prevailed. The mattresses must have been, almost certainly had been, aired; but they did not smell like it. No sheets had been provided. So it was sleep on the old stained mattress-covers, with a blanket over you. Grant the camper (Grant the Great Sailor) didn’t care for himself, but Irma and Lucky, and even Ben, certainly did.

He went below with them, when they finally first decided to go down, and helped to get them straightened out as best he could. He had already informed her of his intention to stay up all night and sail with Bonham, and Lucky had not objected and apparently understood, though she obviously didn’t like it. Now he pointed out to her with a smile that it was a good thing he was staying up, at least she could sleep some in the too narrow bed. Lucky sniffed the paint-ridden musty air.—“If I
can
sleep,” was all she said, and then added, “Hunh, you and your heroes.” A sudden inexplicable needle of rage shot through Grant, but he bit it off before it reached his mouth and talk. He turned to go.— “Don’t go,” Lucky said. “Stay with me for a minute.” He turned back, and sat down on the bunk’s edge. After a moment Lucky took his hand. After another moment she pulled him to her. He stretched out on the bed beside her.— “Hold me,” she whispered after still another moment. He put his arms around her.— “I’m scared on this damned boat,” she said after a while. Then, “Love me,” she whispered. “Please love me.”— “I do love you,” he said.— “There’s nothing we can do on this damned old boat. Everybody can hear everything everybody does. Can’t even go to the john without being heard. I hate that. Listen to them up there!” They listened for a while to the scrapings and thumpings coming from the deck up in the bows.— “Hold me more,” Lucky said, whispered. He did, squeezed her closer, although he was beginning to get hot, get a hard-on. Suddenly he thought of that little Jamaican house where they had had the room close by Bonham’s house. They had had to whisper there too, and make love quietly because of the thin wall. Suddenly he wanted to cry. Really weep. He had to cough and choke it back down. Lucky kissed his cheek. She hadn’t noticed.— “There. Go now,” she said and pushed him away. “Go on back up on deck.”