The Damned Page 8

  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 s
tarted 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.

  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 bee
n 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.

  Chapter Eight

  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.