The Damned (8 page)

She stood up tentatively, and then went to him. “John!”

“Leave… me alone!”

“The doctor says there’s a man here who can take the body to Matamoros. You have your papers and hers, and you can get her across the border and arrange for the body to be shipped to Rochester. Can you do that? Are you listening?”

“I… I’ll go with her.”

“How about our car? I better go back and get it. Where will I meet you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell the Brownsville police where you register. I’ll check with them. Will you do that?”

He didn’t turn. “Yes,” he said, his voice muffled, mouth against the sheet.

“You gave that girl the car keys?”

“Yes.”

“Give me some money.”

He took his wallet out of his pants, handed it blindly back to her. She took it, opened it, took out several twenty-peso notes and fifty dollars in United States currency. She put the wallet on the edge of the bed beside his hand. She looked at his hand, then bent over and looked at it more closely, wondering why on earth he should be holding so tightly to a cheap yellow mechanical pencil. She hadn’t seen it before, in his pocket.

“Any Brownsville undertaker will ship the body to Rochester.”

“Please stop talking to me.”

“Maybe in Matamoros you’ll have to phone an undertaker to come across the river to get the body.”

“I’m not a child. I can do what has to be done.”

“Maybe you should come back with me and let the doctor’s friend handle it.”

“She’s dead now. You don’t have to be jealous of her any more.”

Linda turned and walked out. She went down the stone steps and out onto the narrow sidewalk. It was perceptibly cooler, and the buildings on the west side of the square cast shadows that touched the bases of the buildings on the opposite side. The black sedan had gone. From a corner cantina came the thin strains of a guitar, a nasal tenor singing
“María Bonita.”
A pup trotted sideways down the middle of the street. A ragged child appeared from nowhere, saying,
“Un centavo, señorita, un centavo, por favor.”

She turned toward the river. The child followed.

She felt insulated from all the world, as though she walked inside an invisible capsule through which all sound and vision came dimly. She guessed that it was the result of whatever the doctor had given her. It seemed good to be walking, and to be alone. Two young men leaned against the outside wall of a pink building. They followed her with their eyes. When she was ten paces beyond them, she heard the low whistle,
whee-whew,
the favor that all Mexican males seemed to feel obligated to award to any pale-haired girl.

It no longer seemed important to think of her marriage as a dilemma. She would go on with John, or she wouldn’t. She had been tricked. She had given her body to the white knight who had never been. Given it with a high eagerness.

The sidewalk ended and the wide shoulder of the road was hard-baked, pebbled. The chanting child gave up the pursuit. She passed a gas station, a soft-drink stand. She wished that she would never reach the river, would merely walk on through this dusking day. Women passed her balancing vast bundles of cotton clothing on their heads—clothing that had been washed in the mud of the river, dried and bleached in the sun.

The road circled down the edge of the river bank, and as she came around the turn she saw the truck on its side, oddly helpless, like a horse that has fallen on the ice. Men squatted in the water, grunting and sweating over jacks and blocks. There seemed no organization in their efforts, no one to direct the operation. Only four cars waited on this side of the river. Looking across, she saw that the road on the far side was now entirely in shadow, the sun having sunk low enough to be cut off by the crest of the hill, and soon this bank, too, would be in shadow. She could see that the MG and the pickup still headed the line and knew that this truck must have fallen from the planks into the river soon after the two black sedans had disembarked.

She stood a long time, placidly, just watching them. She was in no haste to make a decision of any kind. The effects of the sedative still clung, like cotton, to the fringes of her mind, and it was almost with a sense of loss that she felt the effect diminishing, fading, her head clearing.

A gnarled boatman came grinning up to her, gesturing, pointing to her, pointing across the river, pointing down to a flat-bottomed scow. He kept holding up three fingers, saying,
“Solamente tres pesos, señorita.”

She stared at him blankly for a time, and then nodded and followed him down to his boat. He steadied it as she got in. She sat on the middle seat as he directed, the skirt of the tan linen dress tucked around her knees. He sat in the stern and sculled it across with a single oar, keeping the blunt bow pointed upstream, so that the boat, angling across, made her think of the pup who had trotted down the middle of the San Fernando street. Bill Danton left the group he was with and sauntered down to meet her, his thumbs tucked under the belt of the khaki work pants. He pulled the bow up, gave her his hand, and helped her out. She turned and handed the boatman his fee. He bobbed his head and grinned. “What happened?” Bill Danton asked.

“She… died. Just as we got her up to the doctor’s and got her into bed she…”

And without clearly knowing the reason, she found that she was crying. And it was not the death, not that loss. It was another loss, a different thing entirely, that had been taken from her on this day, leaving her with an emptiness beyond description and beyond belief. And his arm was surprisingly light around her shoulders, and the soothing sounds he made only made the tears come faster.

FOR Darby Garon, the middle-aged adulterer, there was the torment of the sun, and the greater torment of remorse and self-disgust.

Moira was a crisp green island on a far horizon. He could see the far island while he strangled in a warm sea of smothering breast and massive clasping flank. Through the long hours of afternoon he sat alone and wondered how this thing, this so trite and ordinary thing, had happened to him.

All his life he had enjoyed crisp, clean, delicate things. As a boy he had collected butterflies, mint postage stamps, fossil rocks. His father had helped him build the display cases.

He had been a quiet, introverted boy, but with a tough streak of ambition that had brought him eventual success. He had made few friends, but those few were good friends, lasting friends.

During the afternoon he noticed the illness of the gray-haired woman, Betty’s new friendship with the stocky hard-faced man, the arrival of the blonde twins. He noted them, but they were not important. They were figures moving around in an unreal world. The realities were inside of him, and he knew that if he were ever able to live again with himself without shame, he would have to understand what had motivated this crazy escapade that could have already lost him home, wife, and position.

Clean things he had always loved. Piano fugues. The scent of pine. And when the kids were younger, the look of the way the hair curled at the napes of fragile necks, the sleepy warm scent of them.

In college there had been a cursory examination of philosophy, of psychology, and through those courses he had gained a necessary bit of self-knowledge. He had learned that each man has black and evil thoughts, and that those thoughts are not a proof of variance, but rather a proof of kinship with the rest of men. The mind forever contains lust and malice and hate, and when you can keep those instincts in their proper compartment, then you have become a reasoning animal, a man. Let them escape and you live on the instinctual level of a beast. But there is no shame in owning such instincts—only shame in giving them dominance.

How had this episode come to pass?

How had a hunger arisen that could be sated only by such a one as the full-bodied wench he had picked up on a city street?

Either it was a desire for self-abasement, something born of guilt, or else it was a real hunger, a genuine need.

Had life been sterile and unsatisfying? He knew that it had not. He was ambitious, and he had satisfied the full extent of his ambitions with a job paying forty thousand a year. He knew that he had the mental equipment to have gone higher, and yet did not because his ambition lacked that final edge of ruthlessness.

The kids were good. Basically good. They had made their full share of problems, yet in the home there had been enough love, enough security, so that they faced the world with that assurance which is real, rather than the false boldness that is the result of overprotection.

The key would have to be Moira. The answer would have to lie within his relationship to Moira. He could still remember how she was when he had first seen her on the campus. Not a tall girl, but, because of the clean good bones, looking taller than she was. Brown hair and the serious mouth and the eyes that were bottomless. Heavy stack of books in her arm.

In a first afternoon, during a first walk, talk had skipped rapidly from inconsequentialities to the larger matters of life and death, which were also, perhaps, inconsequentialities of another degree.

Both of them had come from rigidly conservative New England homes. They fought together behind the barricades of the radical outlook, and both of them were in healthy revolt against their very similar background.

In a week they knew they were in love. They said a million words to each other and knew they were in love. But this, of course, was a love that transcended all stuffy middle-class conventions. Love like this could only be stultified by ageless words said over them, by a slip of paper from the state that was merely official permission to sleep with each other. Should a child come of such a union, they could raise the child in an atmosphere of moral freedom and intellectual honesty that had been denied them. It was only due to their quite exceptional intelligences that, of course, they had seen through the constricting bonds on their immortal souls and had declared their freedom.

Sitting there in the shade, he almost smiled as he remembered the clumsiness.

In the first place, it had been very difficult to arrange. They managed to fix it for Easter vacation. A fraternity brother of his promised to protect him on a fictitious vacation visit to the brother’s home in Hartford, and then made comments so lewd that Darby came within an inch of slugging him and spoiling it all. And Moira had made a similar arrangement with a good friend of hers.

In the kitty was an unspent Christmas fifty dollars from an aunt of Moira’s, and a hundred dollars taken by Darby with great guile from his own savings account.

On the train down to New York Moira had been hectically gay, flushed cheeks hiding what he learned later to be pure fear. And he remembered how the excitement came leaping into his throat each time he looked at her sitting beside him.

Together they had found a small cheap hotel in the Village, with the lobby on the second floor. A lobby full of jowled men reading papers and scratch sheets.

“Mr. and Mrs. D. G. Garon,” he had written in the register, having explained to her that such a fiction would be necessary, and though they could be contemptuous of such a formalized relationship, hotel people could not be expected to understand the newer freedom.

Their room contained a vast double bed, a truly stupendous and overpowering and embarrassingly beddy bed, the essence of all beds. The exact center of it was a good six inches lower than the surrounding edges. When they were left alone in the shoddy room, left with their two suitcases, the bed dominated the room and dominated them. It was a bed that made you want to tiptoe and speak in whispers. The single window looked out over a tarry roof littered with papers, and so one could not pretend to admire a view. They stood at the window, stood a careful foot apart, and were dominated by the bed of all beds.

And he had cleared his throat and said, “Moira, dearest, I think we should prove to ourselves that we didn’t come here… just to… just to…”

She turned shining eyes on him. “Of course! We’ll prove that we’re above the… the needs of the flesh.”

He was obscurely irritated by the eagerness with which she had grabbed at the straw. “For tonight, at least,” he said, a bit grumpily.

“Yes, my darling.”

And they had found a candlelight restaurant and some cheap red wine, and drowned mightily in each other’s eyes and gone back to the shadow of the imperious bed. It had been a difficult matter to arrange. In the end he had taken his suitcase down the hall to the bathroom, changed there into pajamas and robe, repacked his clothes, and, after giving her more than enough time, had trudged back to the room.

She lay, looking oddly small, on the far edge of the huge bed. He had turned out the light, put his robe aside, slipped in on his side.

“You could anyway kiss me good night, dearest,” she whispered.

They had met in the hollow of the great bed, his arms around her, hands on silk with warmth that came sleek through the silk. He kissed her and, holding her thus, realized with a sudden horror that despite all his serious attempts at spirituality the rebellious body was going to announce its presence in an unmistakable way. And so he had stabbed her lips with a hasty kiss, muttered a gruff good night, and clawed his way up the slope to his brink of the bed. And in the morning they had awakened, mashed together in the deep slope of the bed, and again he had escaped in time.

On the next night they had brought a bottle of red, red wine to the room, and he had managed to act extremely dense each time she made an indirect plea for the continuance of their task of proving that the flesh was subordinate.

He was not prepared, he remembered, for the task at hand. The rumble seats of roadsters and the roadside blankets and the few expert practitioners he had encountered had given him a false sense of his own abilities.

So she had gone all atremble and kept whispering, “No!” even while her arms clung to him, and at last there was a shriek, thin as bat sound, and the sobs, the brokenhearted flat sobbings, and the accusations and a quarrel that went on until, with dawn like a milk spray on the window, she had fallen into exhausted sleep in his arms. He knew that it could have ended there, with no fulfillment for either of them, but they were proud and they were stubborn, and she later found it possible to see if the damn thing could be done or if there was something wrong with her. And, remembering the way he had looked down at her pale stoic face, remembering the way she had said, “No, don’t stop. I might as well find out right now,” he relived that day and wanted to cry as he remembered.

For then, as all was lost, her face changed and her body changed and she shifted a bit and they were lost in each other, and found a new crazy world all their own. They got drunk on that world and overstayed until she had to go back on a coach while he hitchhiked.

And two months later they were married, telling each other that their parents, though deluded, were really old sweeties, and after all it was just a gesture, and they could live together just as freely, state permission or no state permission.