The Damned (14 page)

“Bill, that’s sweet of you, but I should at least stay with John until… everything is taken care of. That’s only decent.”

“Guess you’re right about that. But you could come back, couldn’t you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Pepe was sitting on his heels, politely out of earshot. Bill saw the man named Benson come down the road. He knew from the sway of the cocky walk that the man was drunk. But he was not prepared for the brutal kick, for Pepe’s gasp of pain, for the man’s crazy belligerence. He saw the other Mexicans drifting toward Benson and knew that the long boredom of the day had bred violence, knew that not long before there had been blood, and a brutal beating. Benson acted a little crazy.

So he made the joke about the fighting rooster and all the others laughed, because Benson’s attitude was comically like that of one of the strutting birds.

Bill had fought at college, and later in the Navy. He knew that a good bigger man could readily take care of a good smaller man. And the brutality of the kick, the philosophy behind it, sickened him. Linda, to his surprise, preferred to stay.

The butting almost caught him off guard. He gave Benson a chance to turn and come back in. He noted, even as he sucked his stomach away from a whistling hook and used the left to set the man up, that Benson knew what he was doing. He had no wish to break his hand, so he hit hard at the solid neck just under the ear. Benson tumbled like a doll thrown by a careless child. Bill Danton sucked his knuckles for a moment, watching to see if Benson would get up, then went over and sat on his heels where he had been before.

“Why did you want to stay around?” he asked.

“I was going to take off my shoe and hit him with it if he got you down. I never saw anything so dirty mean in my life, the way he kicked Pepe.”

“Pepe’s just another Mexican,” Bill said softly.

She cocked her head on one side. “Don’t try any of your tests on me, my friend. I’m one-eighth Cherokee. We Indians are a persecuted minority.”

“You know, that’s the first time I’ve really heard you laugh, Linda. Knew just how it was going to sound, too.”

“Not again, Bill!”

“Walk up the road with me. I want to talk just a little bit more. It won’t hurt you to listen.”

“The ferry looks about ready to start back.”

“Pepe will put the truck on. You’re meeting your husband in San Fernando?”

“No, he’s gone on with… the body. Maybe by now he’s got across the river with her.”

“You aren’t planning to take that Buick all the way to Matamoros?”

“I’m a big girl now.”

He spoke to Pepe. Pepe grinned slyly, bobbed his head.

“What did you say to him?”

“I told him which cantina to stay in in Matamoros and that I was driving you there.”

“Now, really, Bill, I’m perfectly capable of—”

“There are plenty of places in the States where I wouldn’t want to see a pretty girl have car trouble and have to stop and try to flag another car.”

“I’ll be
perfectly
all right!”

“Even driving up those planks? Pretty narrow.”

“Well… maybe that might be…”

“It’s all settled. Come on. Let’s see who’s singing. Sounds nice.”

The blonde twins were in the last car in line. Between songs one of them said, “Come on. Anybody can get in. This time another oldie. ‘Moonlight Bay.’”

They leaned against the car. Linda sang a clear alto part. The lights strung outside the store touched her face. Bill sang along with the three girls. In the shadow of the car he found Linda’s hand. Without interrupting her singing, she tried to pull it away. He held it tightly. And then he saw her smile as she sang, saw her shoulders lift in a tiny shrug. She left her hand in his, curled small. Bill sang in a rusty baritone that he tried to keep as inaudible as possible. There was a magic in the night, and in the old song, and in their voices. Some other tourists joined in, not coming closer, singing at a distance. Magic in having her close to him. Near the end of the song she moved unconsciously closer to him, her shoulder touching his arm. The song ebbed and they all laughed for no reason, and Linda choked off her laughter quickly. He knew that she was remembering the death, and thinking how callous it was to forget so easily.

Headlights went on at the front of the line and they heard motors starting up. The ferry came in and there was no need to shovel at the river bottom to work it close enough. But the planks still had to be used. It took much shouting and advice to get them spaced and blocked to everybody’s satisfaction.

Two cars came off the ferry and went up the road, horns bleating, people shouting from the cars and at the cars. They watched the MG drive aboard, and then the pickup truck. The planks and blocks were heaved aboard and the ferry moved slowly off across the river.

“It ought to move faster now,” Bill said.

“Release my hand, sir. Ain’t fittin’ for a married lady.”

“Sorry.”

“Much obliged.”

They walked down the road. Cars were moving down to take up the spaces vacated. The whole line moved. Bill saw that Benson was having trouble with his car. He couldn’t seem to get it started.

He stopped and said, “Anything I can do?”

Benson was astonishingly cordial. “Hell, no. Should have had the fuel pump replaced before I tried the trip. Help me ease her out of the way and I’ll lock her up. Leave her here and come back
mañana
with the replacement, if I can find one.”

The car rolled easily on the grade. Benson tucked it in close to the bank, started rolling up the windows. “I guess I was a little crocked when I kicked your pal.”

“You want to watch that. It’s a good way to start looking like a pincushion.”

“Yeah. Fool stunt.”

“Need a ride?”

“No, I’m all fixed up. That you, Mrs. Gerrold? Didn’t see you in the dark. How’s your mother-in-law making it?”

“She died, Mr. Benson, just when we got her to the doctor.”

“That Mooney girl thought she would. Sorry to hear it. Say, here’s the keys to the Buick. I was going to move it down for you. Still will, if you want me to. Guess you want the keys back, don’t you?”

“Please.”

He got out of the car, handed them to her, turned, and locked the doors of the Humber.

Bill and Linda walked to the Buick. Bill moved it down two spaces. Linda said, “Who’s been talking to friend Benson? Dale Carnegie?”

“It’s a little fishy, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know the type. They get sweet as pie just before they pull something raw.”

“Then be careful of him, dear. What am I
saying?
Dear, indeed.”

“You don’t know how good it sounded.”

“I wonder who he’s riding with, Bill.”

“With the Mooney girl, I’ll give odds. And the Mooney girl’s overage boy friend. You know, he seemed very relieved that you’d take the keys back. Almost too happy about it. And I never saw anybody get taken sober so fast. Want to sing some more?”

“Let’s!” Then she sighed. “But I really shouldn’t.”

“I don’t think it matters too much.”

“But no hand-holding, huh?”

“If you insist.”

They walked toward the music, through the night magic. I, William, take thee, Linda. Rough, maybe, to be a second husband. Second in line. Maybe, after a bad marriage, you did better. He knew they would have met, sooner or later, somehow. And just a few weeks too late. Bless her. Take time, but sooner or later she would know, and it would hit her as hard as it had hit him.

BETTY MOONEY stood in the shallow ditch below the bank, a big frightened girl in a wilted yellow dress. She was horribly conscious of the body ten feet behind her, rigid in the tree shadows. God, what a desperate, miserable mess!

Del Benson had gone to get his car out of the way, leaving her with… it. Gee, he had seemed like such a cute, cute little guy with those big shoulders and the toughie face and that black bristly hair she wanted to feel of. A nice way to unhook from that stupe, Darby Garon. Darby Garon was gone. And the thing up on the bank had a new, evil sort of life for her.

Never liked bodies. Some people seem to be able to take them or leave them. Like undertakers.

An old memory came back and she shivered. That was the summer I was fifteen. Just turned fifteen. Anybody’d take me for eighteen. Well, that Graham girl, right down the road, we kept talking that spring about doing it, and what it would be like, and her big sister had told her how to stay out of trouble, and we would talk until we like to bust about how it would be, doing it with all the different boys we knew, talking about each one and maybe what he’d say, until that spring we giggled ourselves damn near silly, but getting that hot feeling, all sweaty, just thinking about it.

And we kept going over to the old Murphy place near the creek, where the house burned down and they moved away, and there was dry stale hay in the loft, and one day Sally Graham and I, we undressed and we were talking about it and we sort of fooled with each other until we got shy and creepy and funny-acting, and that was, I suppose, why I told Gubby Garfield, that hot day he asked me to go swimming, that there was a good hole in the creek near the old Murphy place, and he said he’d never heard of any hole over there, that it wasn’t much above your knees because he’d fished it all and he knew, if anybody knew.

But I told him there certainly was a hole because I’d swum in it, and deep enough for diving, probably. That old car of his had no fenders and boxes to sit on instead of a seat, I remember, and no sides or top, and he called it the strip-tease job. In the little side pocket of the bag where I had the suit and the towel, I had two of the things Sally had stole off her sister, and I was scared and jumpy all the way out there. We changed to our suits off in the bushes, and I couldn’t joke around like always, and then I had to pretend I couldn’t find the swimming hole, while he got sort of mad. And we swam anyway, finally, with our fingers scraping the bottom all the time, and sometimes bumping a knee. It was a real hot day.

Just testing him out, sort of, I said we ought to be swimming without suits on a day so hot, and he gave me a look like he was going to hop in his car and run for cover, so I knew it had to happen a different way. Fifteen he was, too, and I remember that because of our birthdays being so close together.

We swam up the creek a way, like exploring, and he got over being mad that there was no hole to dive in, because he was a good diver. And then that storm came over the hill like a freight train, soaking our clothes before we could get back to them, and it was like it was all planned. Weather changed fast, and I said we ought to go in the Murphy barn and get our clothes dried out. We ran for it, and our teeth were chattering, and he kept yakking about his motor getting all wet. And we went up in the loft on the stale hay and hung the clothes on nails to dry, and he started kissing me, and then he got all jumpy too, and we took off our suits and did it, and he hadn’t ever done it before, but he knew how the little things worked. It didn’t hurt a bit, but it didn’t feel very good either, like I thought it was going to. We talked about doing it, and then we talked about swimming and diving, and then about his car, and then he got so he wanted to do it again and I said no and he said what difference did it make if it happened once anyhow, so I couldn’t see any good argument to tell him, so I let him start doing it again, and I was thinking how silly a damn-fool thing it was to do, and how dopey we’d look there to anybody watching, and then it started to be different than the first time and that fool barn like to tipped up and thrown me right up into the sky. It broke me all in little pieces and stirred up the pieces with a spoon. I came back to earth and he was griping about the way I’d stuck fingernails in him and chewed his shoulder and like to killed him. I knew I certainly couldn’t wait to get back to Sally Graham and tell her we were all wrong about it, because there weren’t any words for how it was, because nobody has ever made up the right words.

The clothes were almost dry and we came down out of the loft, and instead of going out the door we’d come in, he wanted to get a look at his car, and we went out the small door, past where there were beat-up box stalls, and there was Sally Graham in the blue dress I liked so much, turning slow because a little wind was coming in, and one of her shoes had fallen off near the keg she’d kicked over, her face turned sideways and a funny blue kind of black, and her tongue stuffed out of her mouth, swollen like the toe on a rubber boot.

I guess I just dropped my bag with my swimming suit in it and I ran with the screaming hysterics and I must have gone a mile before I fell down and skinned my knee good. Gubby Garfield came along in the car and I got in and we went to town and told Myron Hattley, the chief of police. I couldn’t stop thinking of her hanging and swinging down there while we were right up over her head, doing it. And I’d never get a chance to tell her, and anyway, it wasn’t Sally any more, just like that thing up on the bank behind me isn’t Garon any more.

Finally I found out from her big sister that the little tart had been getting it from the Granton’s hired man, and when she’d gone down to the city it was to see a doc who told her she was pregnant. They damn near lynched the hired man, but he got out in time.

Maybe if all that hadn’t happened, maybe I’d have got married the next year or so, and settled down like my sisters did. But seeing her swinging there, it made it seem like life is too short a thing to get yourself tied up with some jerk who wants you for the sleeping and the cooking. Anyway, a couple of weeks later, Gubby and I, we started doing it again, but I wouldn’t go back to the Murphy place and he found a shed near where a man was building a big place and ran out of money, and Gubby busted the lock on the shed and fixed it so that it still looked locked. We kept taking stuff in there after dark, and after a while it was fixed up nice. We were even figuring how we could heat the place when it got cold, and I guess probably we overdid it, because Gubby kept saying how his mother kept cramming food down him and complaining about how thin and jumpy he was getting, and finally they sent him to a doctor, and the doctor must have worried the hell out of Gubby somehow, because Gubby told him what we’d been doing and the doc talked to Ma and she laid it on my tail so good she took out pieces of hide. But we sneaked away again and got caught and Cubby’s family sent him to live with his aunt in the city, and word really got around that time. Ma just acted discouraged and I didn’t get laced after we got caught that way.