Go to the Widow-Maker (97 page)

“You saw it then,” Grant said heavily. “Gimme a drink.”

“
No!
Irma saw it. I wouldn’t be caught
dead
seeing you make such a ridiculous spectacle of yourself!”

“Sure,” Grant said and sat down heavily on the bed. “But you’d send old Irm out as your spy to come and tell you. Oh, boy. What a happy marriage we’ve brought ourselves around to, hunh? What a happy marriage. I said gimme a drink.”

“You’ve had enough to drink,” Lucky said viciously. “Far, far too much.”

“That is not for you to decide,” Grant said. “Pass me that fucking bottle or I’ll tear this place apart! And I mean it!” Lucky handed it to him. “You’re drunk yourself, for God sake,” he said. “I can tell by that mean look you get in your eyes.”

“You should see yourself.”

“Yeah. I bet. I don’t want to.” Grant tipped the bottle back and drank down the straight scotch in what he knew was only a gesture, a bad, unhealthy, and stupid gesture, even as he did it.

Some more time got lost somewhere. He knew only that he accused her openly, this time, accused her flatly of having slept with Jim Grointon. She fought back, saying she hadn’t, but he couldn’t remember her exact words or her arguments. Once in there somewhere she said, “I didn’t! I told you I’d never tell you anything else, didn’t I? So worry about it! No, I didn’t fuck Jim Grointon! But whether I did or not, I should have! As far as you’re concerned.”

Then more time got itself lost. The last thing he remembered was her saying, “Get out! For God’s sake get out! Out of my sight! They’re going to throw us out of here! I can promise you!

“Listen, I’m leaving! I’ve had it up to here with you! If this is what being married to a great artist is, I don’t want it! I’m leaving! Tomorrow! There’s a seaplane from Kingston I can radio for! I inquired! I want to order that plane and leave on it tomorrow!”

“Then go,” he said. “Go, Captain Willis, and may God be with you on your journey downward! Go!
Go
!”

“I need money,” Lucky said.

“Ha!” Grant said and grinned a deeply drunken grin. “No money.
You
get the money. Get it anyway you can. But you’ll not get it from me!”— “You son of a bitch!” was the answer he got. “Just get out. Just get out of my sight” —“Gladly,” was his own answer.

Then he was walking alone down along the beach under those beautiful royal palms, plodding heavily in the deep sand. Where to go? There was a beautiful moon. A lover’s moon. Finally after walking until he was tired, he lay down on the sand fully clothed and went to sleep. When the cold night air woke him in the deep dark after the moon had gone down, shuddering and deep-frozen to the bone, he covered himself with sand. Where to go?
What
to do? Thirty-six years old and already a cuckold! Thirty-six years old, and
two months married,
and already a cuckold. Still a cuckold. As the sand he had covered himself with in selfdefense against the cold slowly warmed him, he drifted off to sleep.

When the first light of dawn woke him, he trudged back through all that deep sand (how in God’s name had he ever made it this far down here, for God’s sake!), and found Al Bonham already up and about on the
Naiad,
preparing to don an aqualung and go search for the $160 he had with such a magnificent gesture thrown away last night.

W
HEN
A
L
B
ONHAM
saw Grant trudging up the beach, he realized he was caught. That was his first thought. He was caught and he knew it. Caught right in the act. And since there didn’t seem to be any way to get out of it, lie himself out of it, he decided to do what all them military and political types did when they got in that situation: take the other side in on it, take the enemy—no, not enemy: antagonist; opposition—take the opposition in on the conspiracy. He grinned as Grant trudged up and came on board.— “Get yourself a lung and come on along,” he winked. “There’s one all rigged there. If we find it, we’ll split it fifty-fifty. You won it. And anyway there’s nothing like a good thirty, forty-foot dive early in the morning when you got a hangover,” he added.

Because Grant looked like the wrath of God. His white ducks which had been so white last night were grimy all over, and although he had obviously tried to brush himself off, sand clung to him everywhere. It was in his hair. He had come trudging along from the direction of the beach that led down to South Point, the southern end of North Nelson, where the new luxury hotel was being built, was in fact nearly completed. And that will settle those goddamned sons of bitching Greens, Bonham thought with happy meanness. Those bastards.

Bonham had, of course, expected Grant—or anybody—to come from the direction of the hotel. That was what had fooled him. He would have expected especially Grant to come from the direction of the hotel, where his room—and his wife—were. Lucky. Lucky, hell. Lucky my ass. She was about the most
un
Lucky thing that had ever happened to Bonham.

Orloffski, of course, was sound asleep below, sleeping off his hangover and his night of humping with that—or was it
those;
Bonham didn’t even know how many—Texas woman or women. And the Texans were now all quiet on their own ship, sleeping off their big drunk. They had still been ‘reveling’ wasn’t it they called it? on their own boat, when he had sneaked off to Cathie Finer’s room in the hotel. Naturally, he had to be back on board by daybreak. That meant his second whole night without sleep—though he had dozed a little upstairs it was true, between times, until she would wake him up again—(God, what a broad!). But since he did have to be back at daylight, what was a better idea than to have a look on all that sand bottom for that money at dawn when everybody else would still be sleeping off their booze, or sex —or both? He had, actually, folded it all up together last night with that express idea in mind.

And now goddam Grant had to come trudging along at the very crack of dawn, looking like death warmed over. He did not quite know whether to ignore the way Grant looked or not. And he decided not to mention it. But then, since it was so very damned obvious, he decided it was better to mention it than not.

“Where the hell’ve
you
been, and what happened to you?” he grinned. “You look like one of our proverbial hurricanes wiped up the island with you, but I don’t see no palm trees down anywhere.” He’d fallen completely back into his bad-grammar style again, he noted. Sometimes, of course, he did it on purpose, for business. But something about Grant made him do it, do that. Maybe it was because he was literary and a famous playwright. Or maybe it was because he, Grant, wrote plays about people who talked like that. Well, hell. What difference did it make?

“My old lady threwn me out. Told me to get out. So I did.” Grant managed a feeble grin. But it was a very thin one. “Slept on the beach. Slept on the beach before. In my time.”

“In the old Navy days, hunh?” Bonham grinned. “She mad at you over ‘The Great Diving Contest’, hunh? Well, come on and get out of those godawful lookin clothes and into that bikini of yours and we’ll see if we can find that dough. It might just still be down there. If it didn’t float off.”

He waited while Grant changed; if they did find it, now, he would certainly have to split it with him, damn it. Then they slipped over the side quietly, using the ladder and putting their flippers on underwater so as not to wake anybody, grinning conspirators together. Though it was just after dawn and the sun itself had not yet risen above the horizon, there was still plenty of light to see by in the thirty-to-thirty-five-feet-deep clear green water. And as he swam over the weedless, clean, rippled sand bottom marred only by an occasional rusting beercan or old whiskey bottle, looking for the wad of money, Bonham thought about Cathie Finer and his problem, his problems. His problems and what Grant had said about them, that night during the all-night sail.

That Grant was certainly smart about people. Course, that was probly why he was a playwright. Sam’s hero. Of course that was why she had picked him. And he knew it. Just because he
was
Sam’s hero. But it was smart of Grant to figure that out. On the other hand, Bonham didn’t care much why she’d picked him. And, in the true fact of it, she hadn’t really done all that much ‘picking,’ he had to admit. Not as much as he had let on to Grant that night at the wheel. He’d been in there doing a little picking himself. He’d been looking at her as far back as that first trip to Grand Bank, he suddenly remembered. But he hadn’t thought there’d been any chance, back then. And there hadn’t been. But he’d still had a little hots for her then, even so. He had thought even then that she’d be quite a piece of tail. But God! he hadn’t bargained for what he’d finally got! When he finally did get it! Wow! Hell! Peering this way and that through his mask among the sparse beercans and whiskey bottles as he swam but seeing no wad of money, or even one bill, he thought back to that first night, that very same night Sam had left.

There had been some sort of something, some sort of unseen—ungiven and unreceived but still there—signal between them ever since that same afternoon, when Sam had suggested that she stay on and make the cruise and she had so cheerfully agreed. Bonham hadn’t looked at her. She hadn’t looked at him. But it had been there, and he had let her know it. Let her know it in some unseen, unsmelled animal way he couldn’t even describe. He only hoped Sam hadn’t seen or smelled it himself. It had made him hot right then and there,
doubly
hot, with Sam sitting right there beside him. Why was that? The intrigue, of course. Wasn’t it? It had to be that. Suddenly for the first time in a very long time, adjusting his mask, Bonham thought about that old highschool pingpong buddy who, after they both had returned from the war, had without ever actually saying it offered him his wife and him, he had taken him up on it. He had been ashamed of
that; then.
But not this. This Cathie Finer brought something out in him he could never remember having felt before. Except once or twice. He could never have that kind of hots for that Lucky, now—that
un
Lucky—not like this hots. But
un-
Lucky really loved her man. Or at least Bonham thought she did. Worse luck for his cruise,
and
his corporation.

She really was a cool customer. That Cathie. That night, that same night after Sam had only just left how many minutes after? just one drink, anyway, she had coolly disinvited herself from dinner at the hotel with the Grants and the Spicehandlers, and taken that same, Sam’s selfsame limousine and driven him and Orloffski into town for dinner. And then, then, after the dinner, for which she’d slipped him the money to pay, she had just as coolly had the limousine (which she had coolly told off to wait) drive Orloffski back to the docks.— “I want to do a little gambling,” she told him quite calmly and coolly, “and you’re not really dressed for going to a place like that, so Al will look after me.” She had told him that, that coolly, while quite plainly Bonham himself wasn’t dressed a damn bit better than Orloffski was. Orloffski had got out quietly.

“Well, what’ll it be?” she smiled at him coolly from her corner without even touching him, without even touching his hand, after the chauffeur had driven them off from the dock. “Are you game to try the hotel?”

“Well, won’t they still all be up, there?”

“If they are, they’ll certainly be in the bar. And there’s a back way in, around by the beach.”

“It’s kind of risky, isn’t it?” he had said.

“Oh, aren’t you the scaredy-cat though!” she’d said. “All right then, the Myrtle Beach it is!” and had leaned forward and told the chauffeur to go there. When they got out, she told the chauffeur she would not need him until five-thirty in the morning, and when he had tried to argue, told him not to worry she’d pay him double but just be there. And then she had walked into that lobby as if she owned it and registered them as man and wife and coolly told the clerk she wanted to leave a call for five-fifteen sharp because they were going out fishing; and the clerk had treated her like a queen. So did the bellboys. He had followed her to the elevator speechless. It paid to have money. You knew how to use it. You learned. In the room she had said, “I’m only doing this because of Sam, you know. Because he loves and admires you so.”— “I don’t really care why you’re doing it, Mrs Finer,” he had answered.— “I didn’t think you would. Well, just so that you know,” she had smiled and begun to take her clothes off. And what a body. She was the kind of rich man’s wife Bonham had dreamed of ever since he had first gotten into this profession, way back there in the States. He had done things with her that night he had never done with any woman, had sworn he never
would
do. It was just a shame he had to be her husband’s friend, was all.— “I just wish Sam was here, tied to that chair, watching all this,” she had smiled sweetly once. “Then it would be
perfect.
Of course,” she added sadly, “if he were, once he ever got loose he’d kill me.”— “You mean he takes a dim view of this sort of thing?” Bonham said.— “He most certainly does,” Cathie Finer had smiled. “Why else would I be doing it?”

Through his mask, from maybe thirty feet in front of him, Bonham saw Grant swimming toward him with spread-out arms and shaking his head. He made a despairing shrug. Bonham stopped thinking about his love life, and stopped looking too. The money just wasn’t there. Being light, it might just have drifted off, especially if it had come unwadded into separate bills. It was just bad luck. He shook his head also, back at Grant, and pointed upstairs, and back at the boat which by now was a good ways away from them. They hadn’t found it. And if they hadn’t found it by now, they wouldn’t.

Mo Orloffski was already up, and waiting for them, when they climbed back on board. “Well, aint you the couple of smart-ass types though,” he grinned in his brutal, so unpleasant way but which Bonham had gotten pretty much used to by now. “Had the same idea myself. But you beat me to it Okay, fork over.”

“Except we didn’t find it,” Bonham said. “Not a wad, not nary a bill even.”

“Come on,” Orloffski growled. “Don’t try to con
me
! I had eight bucks in that pot myself!”