The Damned (7 page)

He felt as though this incident had caused an odd awakening. Something in his brain had shifted a bit, formed a new pattern. He wondered if he would continue to be as content as he had been before, content with the work and the planning at the
rancho.

Benson had wandered away. Pepe moved close to Bill. “I shall now die before my time,
amigo.
There is a damage to the heart.”

“To add to the damage already caused by a lady.”

“I do not believe it wise to tell your father, Beel.”

“I will tell him. It is a thing he should know.”

“Ai! A nice little trip for parts for the machines. I am quieting my nerves by observing the tall twins with the blonde hair. Such statues. Such splendor! How is it possible that they should belong to the little man with the crooked face?”

“Perhaps he has great wealth. Or it was not permitted to break up a set.”

“When the trouble came, the twin girls looked on with excitement, and yet a certain calmness. The little man with the crooked face disappeared behind a tree, very wisely, I thought.”

“And you?”

“There happened to be a wrench on the floor boards of the truck. It jumped into my hand. Believe me, I did not pick it up. I do not know why I held it. Had they killed you, it would have impeded the speed of my running. The two little darlings of the small automobile left quickly and have not returned. She of the yellow dress dodged between the cars. The hard little man with the wicked face dropped flat in the ditch at the sound of the shot. Everyone was wise except you, Beel.”

“And now I am a Friend of Atahualpa. Let us see if we can help the guard who was beaten.”

They went to him. Some children stood at a respectful distance, gravely watching the unconscious man. His face was a bloody ruin. They took his arms and dragged him well into the shade. He groaned and put his arms across his eyes.

“How do you feel?” Pepe asked.

The injured man uttered an obscenity.

“Obviously,” said Pepe, “his mind is undamaged. The pattern of his thoughts is unchanged.”

The man suggested in a ragged voice that both Pepe and Bill depart for the purpose of committing impossible acts on themselves. Pepe shrugged. They left him there, in the shade, the children still staring at him.

The two boys had come back to their MG. They looked cool, haughty, as though they had arrived at some new mental attitude that enabled them to feel completely indifferent to their surroundings. The face of the injured one had become swollen and dark in the area of the broken nose. It was evident that he would have, quite shortly, two stupendous black eyes.

Bill looked across the river. The planks had been set in place and he saw the second car dip cautiously down, gain the foot of the opposite road, and follow the other one up into San Fernando, in a swirl of dust.

“At last,” said Pepe, “it appears that we may one day cross this mightiest of raging torrents. And when we are old men, we shall reach Houston. And by the time I return, I will find that my beloved has married a rival and borne seven children.”

The two blondes in their denim play suits and red shoes approached Bill and Pepe.

“Do you speak enough English to tell us what was going on?” one asked.

“Just a little political discussion,” Bill said.

“Is anybody going to do anything for that man behind the bushes, or do they just let him lie there and bleed?” the other one asked indignantly.

“Let him bleed,” said the little man with the crooked face. “Friend, that sounded like Texas talk. Let me introduce myself. Phil Decker. These are my partners, Riki and Niki. We’re the Triple Deckers. Been playing the Club de Medianoche. Bet you’ve heard of us. Got a good play in the Mexico City papers.”

“We live out in the sticks,” Bill said apologetically.

“What was all the shooting about? Shooting makes me nervous.”

“Just a little mistake, Mr. Decker. My name’s Danton. Bill Danton.” He turned to introduce Pepe, but Pepe had wandered discreetly away. He stood by the truck looking fondly at the two sets of long slim legs under the blue play suits.

“We’re number twenty-three or so in line, Bill,” Decker said. “How long do you think we’ll be stuck here?”

“Looks to me like the river has stopped dropping. If the current doesn’t fill up those holes they’ve dug, they ought to get back on a regular schedule. Say, offhand, ten minutes for each trip.”

“Four hours, maybe? Say now, that’s all right. Listen, gals. It’s a little after four now. We’ll be across around eight, be in Harlingen by midnight, anyway.”

One of the blondes was staring across the river. Shouts came thinly through the air. Shouts of warning.

“What goes on over there?” the girl asked.

They all stared over. A gray truck was lumbering up the planks. The motor was racing, but it didn’t seem to be making any progress. Then, looking like a child’s toy in the distance, it swiveled a bit to one side. The back end dropped abruptly. They heard wood ripping and splintering. The front end of the truck lifted a bit, wheels turning slowly, and then the whole thing dropped over onto its side. Muddy water shot out in a high hard spray. There was silence and then more shouting.

“That really does it,” Bill said softly. “That does it good. Damn fool raced his motor and spun his wheels on the planks and she went off. Couple of tons of truck plunk on its side right in the way. Mr. Decker, you better add four or five hours to that estimate.”

Nearly all of the people who were waiting to get across came running down and crowded on the bank, staring across at this new catastrophe. Bill heard Benson cursing softly, torridly. On the faces of most of the rest was apathy, resignation. The feeling seemed to be duplicated on the far side of the river, where weary men stood and stared at the beast of a truck on its side in the water.

WHEN Linda had heard the grating crack of barrel steel on the skull of her young husband, had seen him turn with a dazed question in his eyes and go down heavily into the roadway, she had forgotten for a time the way his hand had cracked her across the mouth, forgotten his hysteria.

She went to him and turned him over, completely stunned by the casual brutality of the men who had struck him. It was a manner of life completely outside of her experience, and there was enough of the primitive in her so that she did not break down, but instead turned to the nearest possible source of help, the tall, wind-bitten man with the gray eyes, the quietness in his slow voice.

She looked at him in appeal and saw the wariness in his eyes, sensed his reluctance. For a time she thought he might turn away, and then he flipped the cigarette aside, squared his shoulders, and walked toward the armed men.

She knelt by her husband, reached out, groped for his glasses, put them in her purse without for a moment taking her eyes from the tall wedge of Texan back. As John Carter Gerrold sighed, as a child will in its sleep, she saw the aimed blow and cried out, but her cry came after Bill Danton had dodged the blow, came as his heavy hand swiped down and slammed the attacker into the dirt. It all happened with a frightening speed. She caught the wink of murder in the opaque eyes of another, heard the shot, flattened by space and heat, and did not know in that moment if the bullet had hit Bill Danton. She thought it had, and she remembered his reluctance, knew that the moral guilt was hers. And then they grabbed him and ran him against the side of the car, the two stocky men handling him easily, as though he were a long-legged rag doll.

For a time the man who was her husband, sitting up slowly, slack-faced, was forgotten. She saw the acts in the tableau, but she could not understand the words. John stood up, protesting as they took the stretcher gently from the truck. His face looked bald and naked without the glasses, the eyes peering and vague.

They were urged into the second sedan and it followed the first one up the braced planks onto the deck. There was the driver, and one guard, in the car with them. As soon as the wheels were blocked on the ferryboat deck, the driver and guard got out, leaving the three of them alone.

She saw how pale he was. “How do you feel, John?”

He. looked at her as though trying to remember who she could be. “All right. How did this happen?”

“Mr. Danton fixed it. He asked the man to do it.”

“He did better than I did.” John said bitterly. “Everybody goes better than I do. Danton, Benson, that Mooney girl.”

“You’re doing all you can, John.”

“Within the limitations of my ability.”

His mother was between them. Now she was a stranger to Linda. She had been a stranger before, also. A compact, merry woman with cool eyes, treating her daughter-in-law as a necessary evil. Treating her not as a person, but as something she disapproved of, yet thought was probably necessary to the well-being of John Carter Gerrold. Like the red bicycle at twelve and the catboat at fourteen and Dartmouth at eighteen. John was the picture, and a toy or a college or a wife were changing frames for the picture. Linda had felt strongly that Mrs. Gerrold had judged her purely on the basis of probable virginity at the time of marriage, and personal cleanliness. There had been the air of “I
do
hope she will amuse John.”

But this strangeness was different. She had ceased to be a human, had become an organism that sucked air.

Linda had neither hated nor resented her. In instinctive wiseness, she had merely been biding her time. John could be emotionally weaned, she had thought. There were years to come. Boy-child could become man. And there were more rewards in being married to a man than in having to take over the characteristics of proxy mother. Time was on her side, and proximity would be on her side. Not for a moment had she doubted her eventual victory until, in the store, his blow had stunned her.

The river-bank violence had been an oddly shaped wedge driven into her mind, letting in light where there had been no light before. Linda had thought herself wise in the world’s ways. She had successfully fought off her quota of amorous drunks, had competed for a living in a vicious half-world where the gentlest words were like knives for the unwary back. And when things get too rough, call a cop.

But that scene on the river bank had been outside her experience. No cop could be called. There was no last resource, except in yourself. Previously the world had been like the case of the two brave, charming kids, that delightful young couple living so valiantly on fifty bucks a week—but with Papa in the background to help out.

Light had entered where before there was no light, and, looking at her young husband across the unconscious body of his mother, she felt that she had come to a moment of decision. She had thought herself a tough little realist. Yet she had made the assumption that John Carter Gerrold was innately fine and brave and decent and tender and honorable. A rather idealized picture. And, with the new light that had entered her mind, she wondered if perhaps, once the mother image had been destroyed, she would find a man who, through selfishness, could become a petty tyrant. Perhaps she had confused weakness with sensitivity.

The ferry moved across the river with all the puffy dignity of a matron crossing against a red light.

She thought, there must be some formula you can use about people, some lens to look through. And suddenly she realized that there was one thing she had never considered. Her young husband had a very curious sense of humor. He could see wryness in the world, and he could enjoy irony, but he was absolutely incapable of laughing at himself, ever. She remembered the night in New York when the handle of the taxi door had devilishly insinuated itself into his trousers pocket and the departing cab had ripped the pocket away, exposing his leg through a great triangular tear. She remembered her instinctive laughter, and the stony look in his eyes that had silenced her at once. The damage to the suit could have meant nothing to him; he could afford a dozen. She remembered that his complaints, until he had gone back to the hotel to change, had been oddly close to whining. And she had excused him for that, on the grounds that to any person just learning to stand on his own feet, personal dignity was a bit too important.

And so the problem could be restated. She could ask herself calmly, Can any person lead a happy life with another person who finds it impossible to laugh at himself? That problem was less complicated, easier to state than to ask if she could live with a man who, out of fear and petulance, could strike her. She thought of the way they had gone away from the others, to the grove far down the river bank. All that had happened in another existence. It had been another girl who had taken her young husband to that place, who had seduced him—a rather silly girl who had believed at that time that the key to marriage was basically sexual. And the silly girl had wept and taken in her arms an unwilling boy whose honesty in love was forever diluted by a shallowness of spirit.

To all of the young girls of the world, she thought, the white knights come riding. They ride out of the story-page castles and the old line drawings, and from their lances waves milady’s scarf. And it is something you have to have so badly that you can take a talkative, easily hurt, mother-dominated, egocentric young man and cloak him in all the silver armor of the questing knight.

On this day she had reached out to her husband and found that the story-page Merlin had said his wry incantation, and the knight was forever gone, and she knew in sudden wisdom that the only way she could ever make a marriage of it was to replace the mother image, until, in a Dali horror, he dangled from her breast. Make him dominate her and he would do so, would learn to do so, and would do it with all the cruelty of the insecure, complaining about her before others, bringing a tyrant gloom into the home.

The clarity of her insight, the irrefutability of her understanding, and the desperation that came from knowing the true extent of the mistake she had made—all shocked her. She knew that she had grown older on this day, and that John Carter Gerrold would never grow older. It made her think of pictures she had seen of a savage tribe where the skulls of infants are encircled by metal bands, so that in adulthood their heads are a shape of horror. Mrs. Gerrold, with the help of her husband’s escape, had managed to bind John’s emotions so that though the body became a man, the mind remained that of a clever child. Children never laugh at themselves.

They had reached the far shore. The men worked furiously with shovels, and slowly the ferry was hauled closer until the planks could be set in place and blocked. The cars moved down the planks and roared up the winding road onto pavement that led into San Fernando.

“She seems quieter,” John said. “God, the way her hands were! I’ll never forget it.”

“She’ll be all right.”

“And what do you think you know about it?” he demanded, his voice growing shrill.

She could see him then, as a child, stubbing his toe on a chair, then kicking the chair with all his might, screaming at it. She was something to kick.

“Don’t take it out on me,” she said softly.

“I think you like all this. I think you hope she dies.”

“That isn’t worth answering.”

He looked at her, and the naked eyes filled with tears. “I… I don’t know what I’m saying.”

They stopped at the public square. The guard smiled and said something in Spanish and made a gesture that said, unmistakably, “Stay right where you are.”

He went into the building. He was back soon, with the doctor. The doctor was a small brown man with hollow cheeks and a lantern jaw. He said. “Please, you get out, I get in.”

She got out of the car and stood on the cobblestones and watched through the window as the doctor, cricket-spry, hopped in beside Mrs. Gerrold. He put claw fingers on her pulse, moving his lips as he counted. With his free hand he thumbed up her eyelid, then laid the back of his hand against her forehead.

He stepped out, smiling so gaily that Linda knew at once that the illness was not serious.

Smiling, the doctor said, “Very bad. Seek.”

“Is there a hospital here?” John asked, voice shaking.

The little doctor pointed vaguely toward the second story of the building. “Is hospital. My hospital.”

“What’s wrong with her?” John asked.

Again he smiled so very gaily. “Have not English. A thing in here.” He tapped his forehead. “Very bad.”

The guard talked to the doctor in brisk Spanish. The doctor kept smiling and nodding. Linda began to realize that his smile was one of nervousness, not gaiety.

The guards went upstairs and came back down with a canvas stretcher. On the canvas was a great stain, a dark reddish brown. Linda felt her stomach turn over as she realized it was blood.

They set the stretcher on the cobblestones. With the doctor still smiling, giving orders, the men carefully moved the woman out and stretched her out on the stained canvas.

John said, “This is no good, Linda. They must have a phone in this town. I’ll get somebody down from Brownsville. A doctor and an ambulance. Why does he keep smiling as if it was all a big joke?”

“Shall I try to phone?”

“You go up with her and I’ll see if I can phone. What’s the word?
Telefono?”

“Teléfono,
I think. There’s an accent on it somewhere.”

He started off. She saw one of the guards catch his arm and take him over to the lead car, where the toadlike man sat in the back seat. She followed the stretcher up the flight of stone stairs to the office. To her surprise, the office equipment looked gleaming, modern, expensive. Through an open doorway she could see into a small ward where there were four beds. A child was in one, apparently sleeping. The doctor had the men hold the stretcher level beside one of the beds. A pretty pale-skinned nurse came to help. She stripped the bed back and they eased Mrs. Gerrold off the stretcher and into the bed while Linda watched.

The men set the stretcher down, smiled at Linda, spoke to the doctor, and left. The nurse said something to the doctor. He bent over the bed. He came out to Linda, still smiling. “Sorry,” he said. “Señora is dead.”

The smile made it an obscene joke. Linda brushed past him and stood over the bed. The nurse eyed her gravely. Linda looked down at the damp gray face of the dead woman. There was no doubt.

The doctor appeared at her elbow with a glass. “Dreenk, please,” he said, smiling.

She drained the glass mechanically. It was water with something added that gave it a faintly bitter flavor. The doctor took the empty glass.

He said, “Body go to Estados Unidos, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Bad heat. Is better ice. Is a man here in San Fernando can fix and take body to Matamoros, yes?”

“My husband will decide.”

“Yes.”

And she heard his familiar steps on the stone stairs. She turned and met him as he came across the office. He tried to brush by her, saying, “Where is she?”

Linda caught his wrists. “Please, darling. She… died, just a minute ago.”

He looked at her vacantly. “Eh? What?” He snatched his hands away from her and went to his mother. He flung himself against the edge of the bed, kneeling on the floor, his face against the sheet beside her, one arm flung across her. He cried, vocalizing each sob as children will. His spasms shook her, so that in a horrid moment it seemed to Linda that the dead woman was suppressing laughter that shook her body. The doctor stood smiling. John’s sobs began to sound like laughter. She felt the emptiness and dizziness as the room darkened. It was the nurse who saw it. She came quickly to Linda, took her arm, led her into the outer office to a chair, made her sit down, pushed her head forward gently until Linda sat with her head between her knees. Darkness moved back and away from her, and the singing sound left her ears. She straightened up and listened to John weep and knew he was done, finished. He would make no decisions.