Go to the Widow-Maker (53 page)

H
IS BIG HANDS PALMING
the wheel of the old Buick, his big feet moving delicately onto and off the three pedals in various combinations as he herded the old car up and over the hillroad from the airport, Bonham concentrated on feeling and enjoying what his body was doing and tried to ignore his mind, which was in a fury.

He was as convinced as Grant that Orloffski had stolen the Exacta. Probably it had shown on his face, damn it. And Grant had seen it. He had no proof but he had seen him do things like that before, up in Jersey. But even if he had proof he couldn’t bring it up here in the car with Doug here. And even if he did have proof what could he do with it. Without Orloffski there wasn’t any schooner deal, any corporation. Because without Orloffski’s cutter and money from his shop, Finer wouldn’t go. So his hands were tied. He had to protect Orloffski.

So he sat and drove the car in silence, seething. Beside him Letta his wife sat in silence also, sensing his mood. In the back the other three talked quietly and the gurgle of a bottle was heard now and then. Letta knew exactly what was happening, she hadn’t missed a trick. And she was backing him up in her way. Instead of pleasing him this irritated him.
Goddamn it!
he thought, why couldn’t women leave a goddamn man alone once in a while, why did they always have to try to be inside you, part of you, why couldn’t they understand there were things a man wanted to be with himself with, handle!

It was such a stupid idiotic thing to do. A stupid $200 camera, not very new. It might very easily alienate Grant from them for good. Stop him from being any use to them at all, with the schooner or anything else. All for a dumb camera. Once up in Cape May at a ships’ stores house Orloffski had stolen a twenty-dollar brass doorknob when they had gone there to see about appointments for the cutter. Orloffski had shown it to him after they got outside, jogging it in his hand and laughing. That had been like this. For some bit of an object, some cheap next to nothing, he took a chance on getting caught, with the resulting public embarrassment, the subsequent loss of credit, the loss of his local reputation. Bonham wasn’t against stealing so much, if you could steal something important and of real value to you, like a schooner, and be sure you got away with it. Only, you never could. But to risk so much for a lousy camera or brass doorknob, it didn’t make any sense. When he got him home after they got rid of Doug he was going to read him out good, and if he had the camera make him turn it over. If he shipped it to Grant, it might still save the situation.

But he was saved from this chore by Orloffski himself. Leaning forward blandly with his elbows on the seat back, Orloffski said blatantly from behind Bonham’s right ear, “I think your pal Grant thinks I stoled his lousy camera.”

Bonham glanced back over his shoulder, then back straight in front. “Well?” he said. “Did you?”

“Are you kiddin?” Orloffski said belligerently “How could I have? I was right there with you all the time. Hells bells, you want to search me? I’ll stand search.”

Bonham was very aware of Doug in the back seat. “Oh, come off it. You know as well as I do that anybody who stole that camera could have stolen it at the house and just hid it away, in the confusion. But I’m hoping it will turn up when we get back to the house. I’m sure nobody we know would steal it.”

In the back seat Doug was saying nothing.

“You want to help us look, Doug?” Bonham said, “when we get back to the house?”

“Sure,” Doug said.

“You know what I think?” Orloffski said. He leaned forward again, but spoke loudly. “I think it was one of them damned nigger porters who snitched it. I’m sure I saw it with the stuff in the back seat when we unloaded it. Then when I looked around a minute later it wasn’t there. But I know damn well I saw it. Did you see it, Al?”

“No,” Bonham said honestly, “but then I wasn’t lookin for it.”

“Did you see it Doug?” Orloffski asked.

“No,” Doug said. “No, I didn’t.”

“How about you, Wanda Lou?”

“No, I didn’t see it out there,” Wanda Lou said. “But I’m sure I saw somebody stick it in somewhere when we were packing at the house.”

“Well, I think that’s what happened,” Orloffski said. “I’m sure I saw it, and I’m just as sure one of them lousy black field nigger porters swiped it. They’re terrible thieves, those field niggers. Ain’t that so, Letta?”

“Yes,” Letta said. “A lot of the field niggers are bad thieves.” It was a great hit, Bonham thought, for him to ask Letta, who cared so much for her bourgeois background. And it was true that a great many of the lowerclass field workers, ignorant, uneducated, were notorious thieves and proud of it.

“I don’t think we’ll find the camera at the house,” Orloffski said.

Bonham tried to keep his despairfulness out of his voice. So that was the line he was going to take. “Well, we’ll have a damned good look when we get home to make sure.” But of course they’d never find it. “And give me a slug out of that bottle you got back there whatever it is,” he added despairfully and put back his hand.

“This is vodka,” Orloffski said and handed it to him.

A stiff hot snort of the vodka that brought tears to his eyes and warmed his belly, nevertheless did not make him feel any better. Everything was going wrong. Everything was pressing in on him, squeezing him in from all sides until he couldn’t move a muscle. Timing was all off. With complete success just ahead of his nose like some damned carrot, he couldn’t reach out and grab it. And now this!

About the only thing that wasn’t going wrong was Sam Finer and the money. The money had come in two days ago. He had not told anybody about it. He had taken the check to the Royal Canadian manager, who put it through for collection and would hold the ten thousand for him without putting it in any account. When they had formed the corporation, here in town, after the Grand Bank trip, the three of them, electing him president, it had given him that right. And he wasn’t taking any chances on anything happening to
this
money.

At the meeting Sam Finer, who had wanted no stock but only a long-term loan at low interest was finally persuaded to take 2% of the stock, as a plain gift not as any kind of repayment. That had been Bonham’s idea. Orloffski had gone along. It left Bonham with 49% and Orloffski with 49%, and Finer with the deciding 2%. Bonham preferred it that way because he was pretty sure he could count on Finer to go along with him on any decision against Orloffski, rather than have him and Orloffski with 50% each and bucking heads.

When the money had come in, he had called the marine agent who was handling the schooner for the owners and by stressing that he would pay cash managed to Jew them down from $11,500 to $10,200. On the strength of the check the bank manager had given him a thousand to send to the marine agent as earnest money.

Bonham had looked up the owners. They were a small American oil corporation, who wanted badly for some reason to get rid of all their real property quickly so that they could liquidate their corporation. And the schooner, used only for deductible pleasure trips, was about the last of their real property. In spite of that the $10,200 was all he could get them down to. But he did get them to agree to put the boat up for him, their expense. As soon as Orloffski went north to bring the cutter down, he was going to take the money down to Kingston to settle up, and by showing them the cash try to get them to come down another thousand.

But outside of that nothing else was going good. The yard in Kingston had called him to say that the dryrot damage in the starboard bow was much more extensive than anticipated and had even got into the deck planking; that they were going to have to pull a whole flock of hull planking they had not expected. Two thousand bucks wouldn’t anywhere near cover it. It would be more like six thousand. And Orloffski showed no signs of coughing up any of the dough he had promised. He was becoming increasingly vague about money, and about the sale of his sports shop. Where was that money going to come from? Bonham had been hoping Grant. He had told the yard to go ahead.

Bonham was pretty sure that some “earnest money” had been paid Orloffski, say three or four thousand, and that was what the Orloffskis had made their trip down on. Orloffski had as much as told him so. And from the way they were living at Bonham’s, and paying so little on the food, there must be a good deal of it left. But now Orloffski denied any such deal had happened or that any such money had been paid, and claimed he would have to find a buyer, find him and sell him, when he went back north for the cutter. And now he had to pull this silly damnfool thing about Grant’s asshole camera. Just when Bonham was beginning to consider Grant as a serious contender for taking up the slack on the cash lag. The whole thing was damned insane!

Bonham clamped his big palms down on the wheel, and eased the old car around a steeper curve on the dark hillroad so easily that his passengers hardly felt the change of direction. His jaws clamped together with frustration.

The truth was, he thought, Grant was an enigma, now. An unknown quantity. Apparently, just now, while diving and vacationing in Jamaica, Grant had chosen that moment to make a major policy decision about his personal life. Bonham was pretty sure he could have handled the old broad crazy as she was. But this new girl was something else again.

What a hell of a lousy damned place to make that kind of a decision! On vacation!

Despite all her silly kooky politicking he could have handled the old one. No matter what she might say from one minute to the next she was basically in favor of Grant coming in. All you had to do with her was use flattery and keep larding it on. But the new one was a “diff’rent cup o’ tea” as his British pals would say. She was like a she-bear with cubs when it came to her man or, he thought, to her man’s money.

Bonham had no qualms of conscience when it came to Grant and his money. The guy had come to him to learn to dive. He hadn’t even looked the guy up. It was true Grant was a fast, good learner. But he was teaching him as well and as fast and as safely and probably as cheaply as probably any diving teacher could teach anybody. Probably a lot more cheaply. This girl didn’t know that. She should meet some of the other professionals he knew.

But apart from that Bonham simply did not like women like this girl. Too demanding, in the first place. She simply couldn’t let Grant out of her sight. Too beautiful, in the second place. Women that beautiful never had any character. They always expected to have everything handed to them on a silver platter. Going around showing off those tits of hers and that gorgeous ass so cocky as if she expected every man who looked at her to fall down on his knees and worship her hairy shrine. It damn infuriated him. Men, at least sometimes, had other things to do.

And he didn’t like her language, or the way she went around laughing about all the men she’d had in her life. He didn’t mind men cussing and using bad language if they wanted. The only reason he didn’t say fuck himself was because he didn’t like the way it came out of his mouth. But women who went around saying fuck and using four-letter words like men, and talked about their sex lives as if they were trying to be one of the boys, only made themselves look like whores instead of ladies, whether they were whores or not. Usually they were. He wasn’t surprised if this one had been a lez at some point in her hot career. Next to fairies, whom he detested completely, Bonham hated lesbians more than anything, kissing each other’s pussies, and all the other things they did. He knew all about it all; that you were supposed to be sophisticated and laugh about it; but he couldn’t. Involuntarily, Bonham cast a quick glance over at his wife as if she might be reading his mind.

Living in mid-Jersey, with his old man in his law practice traveling to New York to Baltimore to Washington so much, Bonham going to school up in Montclair had seen a lot of that type of city broad in his time, enough to know them well. How any man could marry one of them was beyond him. And how Grant could marry this one he could not fathom. But he was willing to bet his bottom dollar Grant was going to. And that meant automatically that any friendship Grant and Bonham might probably have had, was out.

They just couldn’t leave you alone. None of them could stand to see two men alone together liking each other and happy and having fun.

The first time one of those so-called sophisticated city broads had hinted to him she would like for him to kiss her pussy, he had got dressed and left and never come back. And every one thereafter.

Ah, Christ! It was all going to hell. He had about as much chance of getting any money out of Grant now as of getting blood out of a turnip. He was going to have to really bump Orloffski for some dough now, two thousand at the very least. Well, Orloffski deserved it. He sure did. More than. He had only himself to blame.

In his agitation, in the
sum
of all his various agitations, a sudden deeply peaceful-making thought and picture came to Bonham. He saw the green-blue undersea out on the deep reef, reef coming perceptibly closer to him as he glided down, heard the calming eerie sing of his regulator in the all but silence. Alone. Alone and safe. Because safety was action. It was having to think all the goddamned time that ruined you, hamstrung you. Everybody in the world to bug you with their goddamned personalities or problems, your wife to pick and devil at you with her damned complaints. Complaints about nothing. Well, he knew what he was going to do. Tomorrow he was going out to his old shark hole out on the deep reef and kill himself a goddamned shark. He’d take the boat, all by himself (except for Ali), out through the harbor and down west to the deep reef, and it would all be there, and everything he saw would be his.

Surreptitiously, he glanced over at Letta. She always seemed to divine when he was going to go shark-shooting. He hadn’t told her now for a long time when he went. But she always seemed to know and always kicked up a fuss.

She was a problem, his wife. She had seemed so pure and so fine when he first met her. That was what had made him love her so. Jamaican or not “touched by the brush” or not, her upbringing had been of the strictest and most Christian kind, the upbringing a girl should have to become a lady. That she was not a virgin when he met her didn’t matter; nobody was. What mattered was that she had given herself to him without liking it, because she loved him. He had understood that and appreciated it. Properly brought-up ladies just were like that. Then along about a couple of years ago or so something had happened, she had changed.