The Damned (3 page)

On and on. “Hey, is this a cross-country hike?”

“Just to there, John. Just to that clump of trees.”

“That’s another half mile!”

“But it looks so pleasant,”

When they got to the trees, he saw that it was pleasant. These trees were taller, thicker. And the grass was green under them, not seared and dusty as back by the highway. They sat on the spread blanket and drank sparingly of the water. He looked up across a bend of the river. The toy ferry twinkled in distant heat. Cars waiting on the far bank sent blue-white dots of chromium fire across the distance.

“Cooler here, isn’t it?” she said.

“Mmmm. Much. You’re a bright girl.”

She lay back on the blanket and said, “Kith me quick. I’m thickthteen.”

He bent over her and kissed her, lightly. Her arm went around his neck and pulled his lips back again as he started to sit up. Her mouth enlarged and was moist. He liked the light dry kisses. These kisses were the ones that brought on the need of her, brought on the spinning craziness. She moaned and thrust against him.

“Now,” she said, deep in her throat. “Now, John Carter Gerrold. Here and now, in sunlight again.”

“Your dress,” he said haltingly. “It will be rumpled. And besides, I didn’t… I don’t have any of…”

Her eyes were closed. “That doesn’t matter.”

“But we were going to wait for a year before we…”

Tears squeezed out from under her closed lids. “I thought of that. I have a funny theory. Right now, with what we still have for each other, we can make a baby with eyes that will laugh, a baby to roll brown in the sun, and husky. A year from now, all we can make will be sad-eyed pale little children with… with the love left out.”

She sat up, frankly crying, hitched the skirt of the dress from under her hips, pulled the dress off over her head, and lay back again, dressed in the blue honeymoon wisps of fragilest nylon and lace.

He took her then, more roughly than ever before, with her responding tautly, with love a pulse like the measured beat of a drum, took her with an almost shocking quickness matched by her own readiness. And while it was happening, while all the world had focused down to the chant of bodies, a kind of singing, he knew that this was right and true and forever, that there was no nastiness, that Diana had been stone, and this was flesh to enclose him tightly.

And they lay side by side, her head tucked against his shoulder.

The uncomfortableness was seeping back, the feeling of having done something animal, reprehensible. The body that had been incredibly lovely only moments before was becoming overpoweringly of the flesh, sticky-soft, enervating.

He said quickly, thickly, “Now is when… it happens. I go sour inside. As if it had been wrong. I don’t know. Maybe you’re right about that lid. Something twisted wrong inside me.”

“How much money do we have left?” she asked, surprising him.

“Huh? Oh, maybe four thousand. A little more.”

“Darling, Uncle Dod can get along without you for a little time. We’ll drive your mother home, and then we’re going out to Santa Fe and call on your father and his lady.”

He sat up, conscious of nakedness, reaching quickly for his shorts, scissoring his long legs into them. “Mother would
never
permit that.”

“Don’t you see? This strange sort of reserve of yours comes from what happened. If it had hit you harder, I think you might possibly have turned into a queer, a fairy.”

“What a grotesque—”

“Let me finish. The idea was deeply implanted in you that women are something nasty. Loving a woman is faintly unpleasant to you. You love me. So far it has been strong enough, that love, to take good care of us. But unless we go and dig out the causes, we’ll never have a good life. Please, John.”

“I have nothing to say to him or to that woman. After what they did—”

“Nothing to say to them, but maybe something to learn from them. If their love, legalized or not, has been strong enough to last for fifteen years, I wouldn’t be surprised if we found something very special, very refreshing. And I’ve noticed one thing. You keep saying your father ran off with that woman. According to what I’ve heard about it, he left with her quite openly after trying for two years to get your mother to agree to a divorce.”

“Get your clothes on,” he said harshly.

“Cover up the nasty woman. Get her under wraps. I bet you’d put me in a Mother Hubbard if you thought you could get away with it.”

“Shut up!”

“You see, the angrier you get, the better my guess seems to be. And here is your ultimatum, John Carter Gerrold! Either we go out there, or I leave you.”

“You don’t mean that!”

“I mean it with all my heart.”

“That’s the only thing that would get me out there. The thought of losing you.”

“Then humor me.”

He forced a smile. “It looks as though I’ll have to. Shall we get back?”

“Soon as you zip me up in back, my friend “

He zipped her up, kissed the nape of her neck. They started back toward the distant highway, hand in hand.

DEL BENNICKE upended the tepid beer and let it fill his throat. He lowered the bottle and stared across at the young girl and boy walking along the high bank, headed for the river with blanket and thermos bottle.

A nice little bit. He liked the shape and size of her. A trim little figure and pointy little breasts and a neat way of walking. The kid with her was a pup. All hands and feet, gangly with heavy dark-rimmed glasses and a sort of girlish look around the mouth. Husky enough, though. Somehow he didn’t look as though he’d be able to take the right kind of care of that little
atsui kenju.

He scrubbed his lips with the back of a thick brown hand, tossed the empty bottle into the roadside dust. Ragged kids scrambled for it, eager for the deposit money. The victor gave Del Bennicke a white-toothed grin.

Suddenly, in spite of the heat, Bennicke shivered. Ye gods, what kind of man could start smacking his chops over a platinum blonde when all the time he was carrying around in the back of his mind the picture of that room in the gook’s house in Cuernavaca?

Boy, you really put it in a sling that time. These Latins can get impetuous, so the man says. He had been in jams before, plenty of them. But never a daisy like this. A man in his home town could hardly yak his way out of this one—and in a foreign county he’d have no chance at all.

He’d taken the only way out. Left them lying there and got in the car and headed for the border, the shortest, fastest way.

Bennicke was a short, compact man with thick shoulders, a wise and worldly tough-nut face, brisk tilted eyes, and a black brush cut, wiry as horsehair. Wars and rumors of wars in the earth’s far corners had nurtured him. He had the strut of the soldier of fortune, but too fond a regard for his own skin to wish to hear any shots fired in anger. A brisk line of patter and more brass than a dozen temple gongs had enabled him to worm his way into the homes of the weirder variants of the international set, and be adopted as mascot, drinking partner, or bed companion, depending on the circumstances.

He was a professional guest, and between times he had smuggled gold, worked on oil crews in Venezuela, pimped in Japan. Fists and tongue and knife had got him out of nearly every variety of trouble. He had an ungrammatical flair for languages, came from New Jersey, and thought of all other races as gooks.

And this time trouble had closed in on him, but firmly. Leaving the two bodies behind him, he had boomed up over the mountains through Tres Cumbres and down onto the plain of Mexico City, and the night wind at ten thousand feet had sobered him for the first time in three days. That’s where the party had started, in Mexico City. He’d started drinking alone, and by the third drink had picked up an
americano,
a correspondent for one of the news magazines. The
americano
knew of a big party going on among the embassy crowd. They decided to grace the party with their presence. The more tireless members of the party broke off and established a new party in a Chapultepec apartment. One of the drunker citizens was a good bullfighter named Miguel Larra, and he had with him a young item named Amparo, who had just enough
indio
blood in her to make Del Bennicke taper off on the drinking and start a series of oblique maneuvers intended to cut her loose from her bullfighter.

So when the party moved to the bullfighter’s Cuernavaca house, Del Bennicke went right along, all of them singing in the big car that swayed and roared across the mountains, with the girl conscious of what Bennicke was up to, and, warm beside him in the car, doing just enough teasing to keep his teeth on edge. It was a big party and it dwindled fast in the big walled house just north of Cuernavaca as people paired off and/or passed out. After Larra passed out, Del got to the little girl with neither more nor less difficulty than he had anticipated, and found it to be very good indeed, very unusual, and as torrid as an expert flamenco. And now he knew that he should have taken off right then and there, hopping a
turismo
back to the city. But it had been so good he was thinking in terms of just one more time.
“Solamente una vez más, por favor.”
But the bullfighter had bounced back from what should have been a clobbering hangover, and dragged Del with him down to Lake Tequesquitengo and initiated him into the art of fishing with goggles and harpoon gun for large-mouth bass. They picked up half a dozen bass and drank a large bottle of tequila in the process and drove back, tight, to Cuernavaca, and somehow the chance didn’t materialize. On the next day, the rest of the party having faded gently away, the three of them drove far on dusty roads to look at some bulls and drink acid pulque, and they got back at dusk, and Del, bushed and sodden, had hit the sack right way, only to be awakened perhaps an hour later by the warm and scented body burrowing against his side like a small furry animal seeking shelter.

And she had to have a light on, because she was one of those who has to have a light on, and when she suddenly gasped and stiffened under him, Del turned his head and saw the bullfighter standing there, face twisted, eyes gone dead, aiming one of the guns they had used underwater. The short spear with the harpoon on the end fitted into a slotted tube, and fat rubber bands slammed it out of the tube. As the rubber bands made their vicious whacking sound, Del threw himself up and back, and the thing made a quick gleam in the lamplight and chomped into Amparo with a sound that was both hard and wet. It hit right under her left breast and she half turned toward the bullfighter. She made the smallest of gasps and put both hands on the shaft and pulled at it very delicately, but the barbed head had turned inside her, precisely as it was designed to do. She coughed in a most delicate and ladylike way, and shivered just a bit, and died very quietly, as though to make up by discreetness during her last moments for twenty years of bounding lustiness.

As Del came off the bed, the bullfighter hurled the gun itself and Del eeled away from it and came in fast, thinking only of putting the character out of action long enough to give him time to think. He caught the face with stone fists, and with all the precision he wanted, but with too much panic behind the blows and too much force, and the kiss-off punch lifted the bullfighter’s feet from the floor and the first part of him to hit the floor had been the back of his head, and the floor, unhappily had been tile. When Del rolled him over and fingered the back of his head, he felt the sickening looseness. Some piece of the bone must have cut into the brain in a strange way, because during the time of dying the lean bullfighter legs made the same hesitant running motions as a sleeping dog chasing rabbits up the dream hills. The bulls come out of the tunnel into the sun so black that they look like a hole cut from the night. And the running legs could not carry Larra away from the horns of this last bull.

So he had turned out the light and locked the door and later tossed the key into some roadside cactus. It would have been a mistake to take the big car, the one with the horns mounted on front, and the whole car all chrome and a paint the shade of raspberry ice. He had taken the small car and it was British and had no guts under the hood, so it was shifting, shifting, shifting, all the way over the hills and through the night, sober now, and figuring on getting to Matamoros and parking the car in the square and walking across the bridge before the alarm went out and things got warmer than he cared to think about. A jam supreme. Not only kill a bullfighter, which is headline stuff all over Mexico and South America, but chum up with a correspondent, no less, who can fix you precisely in the time and place where it can’t be anybody but you. And a servant fingering the brim of the vast hat as he opened the gate to let the little car out, a faint concern in his eyes, wondering if the
americano
was a
ladrón
stealing the
carrito
of the master.

He stood in the sun and smashed his knuckles into his palm and ice water ran out of his armpits and down his ribs. This ferry business made you feel that the hex was really on. By now he should have been across the border. He knew what would happen if he were picked up. Del Bennicke knew the score on Mexican prisons. The American consul would look fixedly in the opposite direction. Tortillas and beans for twenty years. They wouldn’t execute him. Slap him in and let him rot. And a funny angle there. The gook prisoners can do handicraft stuff and sell it and get the extra pesos that mean a change in the diet now and again. But American prisoners are forbidden to make any money in a Mexican prison. He knew he’d be one rough citizen to pick up. There was too much of life left. Too many women he hadn’t met yet. Too many bottles to uncork. Too many laughs. Too many brawls.

By now the word would be out. He moved into the shade and stood, still sweating. He had to get a good plan and fast. It was going to be dark, at this rate, before his turn came up to cross the river. Darkness might help a little. More freedom of action. The car was dangerous. In darkness, maybe he could switch some plates. Or maybe just take the plates off the Humber and toss them into the brush and abandon it right there. Move down and go across on the ferry as a pedestrian and try to get a ride to Matamoros with some tourists. And, at Matamoros, the hell with the bridge. The big river would be mostly mud bar. Be a wetback.

He had to leave all his stuff in Mexico City. Hadn’t dared stop to pick it up out of that crumby room. But the sweaty money belt around his middle was hard-packed with a nice collection of the pictures of Grant. The bearded general added up to six thousand something. Just get across that border and drift west and pick out a good name and slowly get the documentation to back it up, and then stay out of any kind of jam because the prints are on file, have been on file ever since that extortion rap back in ’41. This was enough to give a man religion. Maybe it was the end of roaming. Get hold of a gas station or something and pick out some sturdy wench and raise enough kids to look respectable as all hell. Might be a bang in that, having kids. Something new, to do it on purpose.

And he was back in that tiled room again, with those hands pulling so gingerly on the cruel shaft. He knuckled his eyes and held his breath. Maybe they were waiting on the other side of the river. Or maybe the
policía
were screaming up the road from Victoria.

Oh, baby, you’re really in the soup this time. Right up to your pointy little ears. Son-of-a-bitch wanted to nail me with that harpoon thing. Should have aimed higher. Hit him too hard. Knuckles still sore. Maybe I ought to move downstream and swim the river and to hell with the car. Wish there was some joker here who looked enough like me. Get him off in the brush and hammer him and lace him up and switch identification.

He sat on his heels in the shade, atop the bank. On the other side he saw a big young girl in a yellow dress. A nice gutty-looking face, and red-bronze hair and a pair of them to make your eyes bulge like a tromped hop frog. He had vaguely noticed her when the blue Cad had joined the interminable line. With a guy old enough to be her daddy. Not married, that pair. Giving each other the stone face, too. He saw her tilt her bottle up, saw her throat work. She lowered the bottle and looked across at him, forty feet away. She set the bottle down, and fluffed at her back hair, and arched her back a little, just enough to push those things out farther than God intended. There wouldn’t be any of that in prison. Not a morsel of it. They’d let you dream about it, and that was all. Probably stop that too, if they could figure out how. Sure turned out to be the little dog on the railroad tracks this time.

What the hell cooks with that ferry? He jumped up impatiently and walked down the shoulder of the road, setting his feet down hard.

As he passed a black Buick sedan, he heard a funny sound. He went on for a few steps and stopped and listened. He heard the sound again. He followed it back to the Buick and looked in. The Buick was the car the platinum piece had come in. He stared at the old dollie in the back seat. Her face was gray and her eyes were open a little and all he could see was whites. Her hands were flexing spasmodically and cords in her throat stood out. The noise he had heard was a startling loud grinding of her teeth. Blood stood bright in the corner of her mouth.

That old doll was really sick. Maybe dying. Bennicke wheeled and trotted through the heat, trotted down to the bank. People looked curiously at a man who would run on such a day. People stood around down by the bank, staring numbly, hopelessly across the river where slow-motion figures swung listless shovels.

Del went over to the two queers who sat in the shade of the MG. One was blond and one was dark, and both of them were pretty. “You boys notice where the girl with the real blonde hair went? Her and her boy friend?”

They stared at him with their shining eyes. The dark one giggled. He said, “They were carrying a blanket and they went thataway, pardner.” He pointed downstream.

“Thank you sweetly,” Del lisped.

“I suppose you think you’re really smart,” the blond one in the red silk shirt said.

Bennicke moved down the river bank, keeping to the high ground, looking ahead of him. At last he saw the pair of them coming. He went directly toward them. When he was close enough, he could see that flushed tangled look about the girl, the look of love.

“Say,” he said, as they looked at him oddly, “you go with the black Buick with the New York plates, don’t you?” The boy nodded. “The old lady in the car is sick or something. Maybe you better hustle and take a look at her.”

Without a word the boy brushed by him and began to run, long-legged, fleet.

The girl said, “Thank you very much.” She hurried away after the boy and Del trotted along behind her. Certainly a cute little figure.

By the time they got to the car a group had gathered. The boy had the back door open. The woman had slumped over farther. She was still making that sound. The boy looked completely helpless, completely stricken.

“Linda, she’s… she’s awful sick. I don’t know what…”