The Damned Read online

  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 stat
e permission.

  No, there had been nothing wrong with their love. Her arms, over the years, had been what he had wanted them to be. The children were love children. And Moira had never lost that clean-lined look or her almost maidenly modesty.

  They snared friends and books and records. They had towering quarrels and made up, and were closer for having quarreled. And during the past five years they had reached that point of mutual understanding where little has to be said with words.

  When should he have become aware that this Mexican escapade was a possibility?

  He remembered the puzzled face of a secretary he had fired. He had been unable to give her a good reason, and, out of guilt, had found her a job that paid just a bit more than he was paying her. The firing had been precautionary, because he had found just a bit too much pleasure at looking at the ripe line of her flank, at the heavy curve of breast, and he had found himself wondering vaguely how he could arrange to give her overtime work so that they would be in the office together at night. And so he had fired her. That had been a clue, a warning.

  And he remembered the way the young girls had begun to look. They had changed somehow. Become more provocative. Loneliness and restlessness and an inexplicable hunger.

  Betty Mooney had fed that hunger.

  He flushed as he remembered the days and the nights with her. Never, even in the early days with Moira, had he been so blindingly sensual, so unremittant in his demands, so goatily persistent. It was as though sex were a candle that had burned with a steady flame through the years, and now, reaching the end, the wick flared up and guttered and burned twice as brightly during those last moments before flickering out entirely.

  It seemed almost as though, in sating this last hunger, he had consciously sought someone as unlike Moira as possible.

  Betty Mooney was flabby nightmare. And Moira would detect the sick scent of her on his soul. He did not know what it might do for Moira, for such an intensely loyal woman. He knew that any infidelity on her part was inconceivable.

  The image of the sick woman being carried out to the truck flickered across his brain, leaving no residue. He had seen Betty with the tough-faced man several times during the afternoon. He hoped she would go away with him, take her loot out of the car and get out of his life. He looked to be her sort. Shrewd, ignorant, acquisitive.

  Moments later, two black sedans went by at a reckless speed, roiling up the dust, passing all the other cars in line. The dust made him cough. He leaned more heavily against the tree, wondering what on earth he could say to Moira. Their relationship was irretrievably lost, gone forever.

  Far down the road there was some kind of scuffle, a man falling down in the dust, the pale-haired girl going to him. And then another man and a scuffle and someone falling.

  Suddenly his attention was ripped away from the distant scene when one of the children playing in the road hit him in the belly with a stone hurled so hard that it felt like a blow from a hammer.

  He glared around. The children were not playing any more. Some of them had drifted down the road. Others had been called back by their parents. Damn fools who couldn’t teach their children a little common consideration. The blow had given him an oddly hollow feeling.

  Suddenly he felt a warm wetness, a stickiness around his groin. He opened his shirt and looked at where the stone had hit him. There was a small hole, and blood ran slowly out of the hole and down under his belt.

  And he knew that there had been a shot and he said, aloud, “I’m shot!” It sounded like a remarkably stupid and self-evident thing to say. And he was filled with surprise rather than panic. Gangsters get shot. Soldiers get shot. Darby Garon, executive, does not get shot. But there was the hole, with little raw edges, and one cannot very well refute the evidence of a hole in one’s own belly. The shot, a wild one, had apparently come out of that scuffle down there by the river bank.

  One must be logical in all things. If one has a bullet hole in one, it is well to have it tended to. He remembered what he had read about being shot in the belly. In Civil War days it was invariably fatal. In World War I days, it had been damn serious. But now, with sulpha and penicillin and so on, it was just an abdominal operation, with the perforated intestines sewed up, and a handful or two of magic powder tossed in the incision, and a month of bed rest.

  A sudden cramp pulled his lips back from his teeth. He shook his head. It felt just like a bad case of gas. Suddenly the Mexican escapade diminished in importance, and Betty Mooney was not someone to hate. She was someone to help him. He looked around and saw her, far down the road.

  Might as well wait until I feel a little stronger, he thought, and then get close enough to yell to her. Said she did some nursing work once upon a time. She’ll know how to handle this.

  The second cramp was worse than the first. It banged his knees up against his chest. He slowly forced them down again, taking a deep breath, closing his eyes for a bit. Panic began to stir around in the back of his mind. He forced it aside. Hell, you could live for days with a hole in your belly. Or could you? Didn’t it have to miss important organs? He squinted down at the river bank and then looked at the hole again. He carefully pulled his shirt back over the hole, tucked it in gently. He wedged his hand under his belt so that the heel of his right thumb was pressed hard against the wound. It made it feel a little better. When he didn’t look at it, it felt as big as a dinner plate. He had to keep remembering the size of it, the exact size. Now, with a slug coming from that angle, where would it be? He used his left hand to feel around in back of himself. He felt no stickiness. So the thing was still in there. A little lead pellet. He remembered buying the older boy a .22, and how they had plinked at tin cans out near the woods. You had to keep telling a kid that those little things can kill a man, or a boy.

  Maybe it could lodge in a kidney or something. What would that do? Live for days. Just a case of getting attention.

  A man walked by. Darby started to call to him, but just as he opened his mouth the third cramp tortured him. He felt as though a big hand was grabbing his guts and twisting hard, holding tight, then slowly letting go. When he opened his eyes again and got his knees down, the man was gone.

  Damn silly situation. Make you feel a little stupid and helpless. Goddamn that girl! Why didn’t she come up and see how things were going? Be a hell of a joke on her if he died. Nice job explaining it. Executive goes on marital vacation. Dies on river bank in Mexico. Mistress implicated. Says she was not anywhere near Garon at time of death.

  Stop thinking that way. There’s a lot in this thinking business. Think of something long enough and hard enough and it happens to you. Every time. Like wanting that dream house. Moira got it, too, finally. Lot of work, lot of years. But she got it.

  Panic grew stronger and, with rat teeth, made lace of the edge of his mind. He got his feet under him, craned his left hand back, and braced it against the trunk of the tree. Now, one little push, Darby, and you’ll be on your feet. Then you can walk forty paces. Hell, you’ve been walking all your life. No trick to it. Just one foot in front of the other.

  He shoved mightily and rocked onto his feet, doubled over. He felt curiously weak. The strength didn’t run out of a man that fast. A cramp hit him before he could take a step. The cramp pressed his buttocks down against his heels and he rocked back, the tree striking him in the back again. The world tilted and slowly regained an even keel. The cramp faded, but this time it didn’t go away entirely.

  Take a little rest and then another try. This is a lot of silliness. More guts than this in the Garon clan. Remember Uncle Ralph? Chopped right through his boot and severed three toes and walked home. Nine miles, they said it was. Home with a grin and a white face and a boot full of blood, falling face down in the kitchen.

  And, waiting for the strength to try again, he knew sourly that he was going to die. The panic of a few minutes before had faded utterly. Dying was now a damn inconvenience. Bonds in bad shape. Never changed the insurance options like Harr
y suggested. Damn little in the checking account, too. Moira would have to get a loan until the insurance was paid off. Harry would fix it for her, but she wouldn’t like having to ask. Maybe he’d have sense enough to offer it to her.

  What are you talking about, man? There are a lot of years left. A lot of suns coming up. Grandchildren to spoil. And that trip to take, the trip Moira wants. Acapulco, Rio. Trip you’ve been saving for, as much as taxes will let you.

  Got to get the car back, drive that bitch to San Antone. Or did she come from Houston? Hard to remember which. So you had a merry three-week roll in the hay, and now you’re shot in the belly, and a very just little punishment it is. If that hole had been four inches lower, it would have been an even juster punishment. It would have done a good job on the equipment that got you into this jam. If thine eye offend thee…

  His chin was on his chest. He lifted it with great effort. The scene wavered a bit and then came clear. Startlingly clear. He could see the muddy river, the far shore. Ferry was on the other side. The black cars going up the road. And a small figure over there…

  Hell, what had been the matter with his eyes! Even at that distance, you could tell the brown hair, and that sweater and skirt. Bought that outfit for her for her birthday. God, that was a long time ago. Thought she’d worn it out and thrown it away, long ago. One thing about Moira. She always used her head. One sharp girl. Traced him somehow. Came riding, riding, riding up to the old inn door. No, wrong line. Came riding to the rescue.

  He grinned at the figure of his wife on the far shore. Now everything was fine. Sure, even at that distance he could read her eyes. He could read the sweet forgiveness, and the understanding. She knew the answers. She’d tell him why he’d done this thing to the two of them, and he would understand when she had told him.

  The sweet kid, she was standing over there with books held tightly in her arm, just like during campus days.

  That was her way of showing him that everything was all right. A nice symbol. A nice gesture.