The Damned

by John D. MacDonald

  He wanted, near him, the clean astringency that reminded him of peppermint.

  And it had ended, that morning. In Mexico City. He had tried to put her on a plane. But even though she had immediately sensed his withdrawal, his distaste, she refused to fly back.

  Once, during a long-gone New Hampshire summer, he had been on his uncle’s farm. Ginger, a raw-boned setter pup, had killed a chicken. Darby’s uncle had tied the limp chicken around Ginger’s neck. Darby Garon remembered his pity for the dog, the evident misery and self-disgust in Ginger’s eyes.

  The cheap little romance had died on a cool sunny morning, but she was still tied to him. They had driven down out of the Sierra Madres into the baked plains. In an incredibly short time they had arrived at that smoldering bitterness which usually takes years of loveless marriage to produce.

  During their long silences he thought about himself and what he had done to his life. For twenty years of marriage he had been physically faithful. Twenty years to balance against three weeks of debauchery. Moira would know. It was not fear that shook him. It was the sense of loss, of having discarded something precious.

  He glanced at Betty Mooney again. Her yellow dress was dark-stained at waist and armpits. Ahead a ridge of rock slanted close to the shoulder of the road. His shoulder muscles tightened. One hard wrench at the wheel. The day would explode into nothingness and the eye in his mind saw it from the high lens of the cruel buzzard. Blue car crushed and smoking, and the yellow dress a vivid blotch against rock. The rock ridge rushed by and his shoulder muscles slackened again. It was something he could not do. It was too cheap a way to pay for it. The hard puritan streak within him demanded a more difficult expiation of this sin.

  The road dipped suddenly and he saw the long line of cars and trucks, frighteningly close, unmoving. The girl slammed hard against the dash as he thrust his foot against the brakes. The car swerved, tires screaming, and he fought the skid. He brought the car at last to a halt about a foot from the rear bumper of the car ahead. He received angry looks, heard laughter. “You all right?” he asked Betty. His hands were shaking with reaction, knees trembling.

  “Hurt my fingers,” she said dully. “You didn’t have to be going so damn fast, did you?”

  He didn’t answer. He got out and looked down the long line. At the foot of the shallow slope he could see a muddy river not more than eighty feet wide. The road was cut down through a high river bank. He could see where it curved up the opposite shore, see the cream and white buildings of a town beyond the opposite bank. It had that cemetery look of all small Mexican towns that drowse through midday heat.

  He reached in and took his road map out, unfolded it. “That’s San Fernando over there. And this is the ferry across the Río Conchos. We’re still eighty-five miles or so from Matamoros. It looks like something might be wrong with the ferry.”

  “You don’t say,” she said acidly.

  “I’ll walk down and see if I can find out what’s the trouble.”

  “You do that.”

  He counted the cars and trucks as he went down the slant of the road. They were empty for the most part. There were two small stores set back from the road on the right side, some dusty trees that gave meager shade. He was number twenty-two in line. And traffic was extremely light on the highway. He had seen two cars in the last hundred miles. American tourists, Mexican travelers.

  The lead car was a little green MG with Louisiana plates. A young man with a bronze tan, golden hair, and a red silk shirt sat cross-legged on a leather pillow in the shade cast by the little green car.

  “How long have you been here?” Darby Garon asked bluntly.

  The boy looked him over. He lifted a cigarette to his lips with a dainty grace that was as illuminating as an entire case record in Kraft-Ebbing.

  “Since ten-thirty this morning,” he said in a girlish voice.

  Darby stared at him. “That’s… better than four hours.”

  “Really, it seems more like four years. The boy I’m with is just terribly discouraged, believe me. You see, Aleman visited here recently and these dolts bought a new ferry to impress the presidente. The thing is too huge for the river and right now the level is dropping and every time they make a trip a lot of little men pounce into the water and scoop out the goo with shovels so they can get close enough to set planks from the shore to the ferry so people can drive up.”

  Darby thanked him and walked slowly back to the car. He remembered having checked the mileage from Victoria to Laredo. Three hundred and twenty-one miles. Add another hundred plus back to Victoria. Say four hundred and thirty miles. It might be better than waiting in the heat. And then he remembered the gas. The tank had been three-quarters full when he left Victoria. A shade less than three-quarters. He had been looking for a gas station on the road, hadn’t seen one, had planned on getting gas in San Fernando.

  Betty was standing beside the car. She raised her eyebrows in question.

  “The lead car has been here over four hours. Trouble with the ferry.”

  “We have to wait?”

  “It looks like it.”

  “I got to have a drink of something cold. See if you can find some beer in one of those stores, sweets. I’m dry as a bone.”

  “If I can find anything, I’ll bring it over to those trees. See if you can find some shade.”

  He walked slowly toward the nearer of the two grimy little stores. The stores were adobe, and smeared with the inevitable Coca-Cola and Nescafé signs that dapple Mexico like paint stippled from a vast, careless brush. Straw sombreros and scrapes, turista women in slacks and sun tops, the ragged polite children of the Mexican poor, the rude, screaming brats of the Mexican rich and of the americanos. Beer and deep slow laughter of Texans. Sun and dust and an odd flavor to the atmosphere. Darby Garon could sense it clearly. A faint edge of good humor that any minor disaster creates. Plus something moving beneath and behind the good humor. Something ancient and evil. In Mexico the sunshine can have a look of death, he thought.

  He moved, stiff-shouldered, through the crowd, and a faint chill seemed to brush the nape of his neck. There was tepid beer packed around a chunk of grainy ice in a lift-top chest. The beer was being sold before it could be chilled. The fat little proprietor was charging three pesos, fifty centavos a bottle. He seemed both frightened and chagrined by his own avarice and boldness.

  Chapter Two

  WHEN the blue Cadillac came to a smoking stop, John Carter Gerrold took his gaze for just a moment from the face of his lovely bride and glanced at the car sixty feet away. John Carter Gerrold and Linda sat on a car robe spread on the dusty grass in the shade of one of the meager trees that topped the banks of the cut that led down to the ferry.

  They had honeymooned in Taxco, walked the cobblestone streets by moonlight, hand in hand, slept in each other’s arms.

  There was magic about her. Magic that took his breath. The moment he had first seen her, he had known that he would either marry her or be haunted by loveliness unattainable the rest of his life.

  Now he looked at her and she seemed a stranger, withdrawn and enchanted, and it was incredible to him that in the long quiet nights she had been in his arms, with the long silk of flank, the warmth, the singing of her body. Always, in retrospect, the inward vision of the tumbling violence, the memory of sweet orgy, brought back to him a curiously objective image of his own greedy use of her, with galloping heart and thundering breath during the entwined delving for an utmost togetherness, and in retrospect he felt oddly shamed, as though there was an indecency about it all, and improperness. It brought to his mind a childhood memory of a day when, hidden in the bushes, he had seen a swart visitor to his uncle’s estate laugh coarsely and strike a kitchen match across the pure, perfect white marble belly of the garden statue of the goddess Diana. After they had gone, John had got a coarse brush and soap from the cook and had scrubbed away the yellow streak the match had left. It had made a queer stirring within him to touch the statue. And
later, on a summer night when he had been visiting his uncle, he crept down to the garden. She had been white and alive in the moonlight, the weathered coldness of breast smooth against his cheek, his hands atremble against the marble loins, and there, in the dewy night, with the crazy thickening, and then ignoring the cold eyes of God staring down the slant of moonlight, and forgetting the white milk eyes of the carven Diana, the secret and shameful act, the thing like a heat and a sickness, with the statue seeming to tilt as though it would fall, and he cried with his teeth against the grass, wishing it would fall and smash him utterly.

  He looked at his warm goddess beside him now, saw the utter smoothness of white hair falling thick and sleek—not precisely white, but with a faint glistening creaminess. Her brows were black and her face was oval, the brandied eyes spaced gravely, the lips wide and warm with instinctive wisdom, the throat and shoulders golden and fragile above the strapless nubby material of the pale tan linen dress. She half lay on her side, braced on her elbow, both knees drawn up, the skirt fanned over them. John Carter Gerrold did not like her in that position. It made more pronounced the mound of her hip, and the front of her dress fell away just enough so that he, sitting with arms locked around his knees, could see the upper hemispheres of the smallish breasts that he knew to be firm, yet not so firm as cool marble, remembered.

  Her position seemed to make her fleshier, more womanly. He thought of her often as standing, virginal, in billowing whiteness, her face lifted to a shaft of light that came down from an operatic sky.

  Had he never touched her then, she would have remained as in the beginning: remote, and with that slow and lovely enchantment that made all persons soften their voices when they spoke to her.

  He glanced at the thermos. “More water, darling?”

  “It’s over an hour since they took that last car across. I think we better ration it.”

  “Of course. Miserable place, isn’t it?” She turned her head slowly to look up and down the road. “I like it. I don’t know why. I was beginning to think we were… going back too fast. This is a little time to think. And maybe we can talk, John.”

  He gave her a startled look. She traced the car-robe pattern with her finger. Her hair swung forward, partly masking her face. “Talk! We’ve talked about everything under the sun.”

  “All the little things. None of the big things.”

  “I worship you, Linda. Is that a little thing?”

  She tossed her head with a motion that swung the glossy hair back. “I wonder if maybe I just want to be loved. Not worshiped. You… you sort of put me in a frame, darling. Or on a pedestal or something.”

  “Where you belong.”

  She frowned. “Do I? You know, all this talk about adjustments, about having to make them when you marry—I can feel myself turning into what you keep insisting that I am. Sort of stately or something. Like I might break. I’m made of meat and bone and muscle, like anybody else. Suppose sometimes I want to whoop or holler? Damnit, I don’t want to go through life being too ladylike.”

  He grinned teasingly. “But you’re a lady, aren’t you?”

  “You honestly don’t seem to get what I mean. Look, I can put it another way. Even before your mother flew down last week to drive back with us, something funny was happening to our love-making, my darling. Something I don’t think I care for. My God, is it going to degenerate eventually into a formal little ritual run on a time schedule with both of us not daring ever to change the words or the motions, as if it was a—a sacrament or something?”

  Her words sounded coarse and made him squirm inwardly. “I was under the impression that everything had been satisfactory,” he said stiffly.

  “Don’t get all hurt, now. In the beginning it was wonderful. And I trusted you and I began to get… a lot bolder, if you’ll remember.”

  He remembered and flushed. The crawling, the seeking, and a crazy pleasure that sidestepped across the line into an agony.

  “There could have been more and more, my darling. With you I’m a wanton, because I love you, and love can’t be pigeonholed into right and wrong. And love can’t be fooled, you know. You didn’t say anything. But in your body I could feel… oh, a sort of withdrawal, and a coolness, and… shock, I guess. I wanted us to go on and find a thousand ways to love each other, all of them perfect. But somehow you managed to make me shy again, just when I was getting over being shy, and instead of learning and doing new things, we’re getting into a rut, and that isn’t what I expected or wanted marriage to be.”

  “I don’t like that kind of talk, Linda.”

  “Makes you squirm or something, doesn’t it? Sex talk in the bright sunlight. Remember those first days in Taxco? You took me in the afternoon. Now the night has become the time for making love. As if it were something shameful to be hidden away in the dark. Don’t you like the look of my body by daylight? Are you ashamed of your own? You shouldn’t be. One afternoon the sun shone across our bed. Remember?”

  He remembered. He remembered his own stallion look and her white knees lifting and the crazy sun madness, and they had laughed.

  She moved close to him and touched his wrist. “Darling, it’s been worse since your mother came down. All sort of aseptic and nasty.”

  “I had no idea you felt—”

  “Now hush and don’t accuse me of anything. I just think, darling, that somewhere inside of you is a little lid that’s screwed down tightly on top of some very real honest lusty warmth. For the first days of our honeymoon we managed to loosen that lid a bit and it was very good, for both of us. Then you noticed that too much of you was escaping, so you fastened the lid back down again. And, my darling, I feel left out. I want us to find some way to… release you. Sex isn’t a nasty word. Neither is breast or buttock or nostril or left wrist. I think somebody gave you the wrong slant when you were a little boy. I certainly don’t want to have to learn to think of the sexual act as a rather quick and unpleasant little wifely duty to be endured in stoic silence. I want to be a wife, and a damn good mistress too.”

  “Please, Linda!”

  “Well, I do!”

  “And there’s such a thing as good taste, you might remember.”

  “Don’t try to feed me that pallid kind of philosophy, my boy. Just take my word that you’re wrong, and that you can do something about it. I’m nineteen and you’re twenty-two, but this is something you can’t patronize me about, because I think my instincts are right, John Carter Gerrold.”

  “Probably all women want the honeymoon to last forever. I hear it’s a sign of the immaturity of American women.”

  “Nuts! You know what kind of relationship I want with my man? Read a book by Hemingway. ‘To Have and Have Not.’”

  “He writes filth.”

  “Filth is in the mind of the beholder, darling.”

  “All his people are Neanderthal.”

  She looked at him angrily. “You bring up a point. Maybe I have a hunch that if you aren’t a whole and uninhibited man in this part of marriage, you might not be much of a man in anything else. And maybe you’d be better off trying to do something besides work for your Uncle Dod for twelve thousand a year when we get back.”

  “Linda,” he said brokenly, “I… I hate those things you’re saying, but I can’t stand quarreling with you.”

  She knelt and kissed him quickly, lightly on the lips. “Poor old Johnny. You just married a wench, that’s all. I look virginal as all hell. That’s how come I held my modeling job and how come your family finally relented. But believe me, honey, I’m going to straighten you out in this particular department. I want you to promise to try to help me.” She moved a bit closer, thrusting her breast against his upper arm, turning her body slowly back and forth, giving him a gamin grin. “You know, it has helped my shyness a little just to talk it out, Buster.”

  It made him want her, badly, and at the same time it made him want to move away from the warm insistency of the touch. This was something that she would probably ge
t over, in time. You had a right to be a little crazy on your honeymoon. That didn’t mean you had to keep it up forever. He glanced around guiltily to see if anyone were watching them. She sank back to her original position. He wished she would sit up straight. It made her look so damnably hippy to lie like that, even though she was so slim as to look almost fragile. That was another thing that had startled him. He had taken her the first time with almost a fear that he would hurt her, crush her. But her slimness had a muscled vibrancy that had almost shocked him.

  She would get over it after a bit and take a proper wifely attitude. If a man had a taste for the more alarming, overpowering indecencies, let him go see some whore. The marriage bed was certainly not an arena for the wanton display of versatility. And experimentation was only necessary to that degree which resulted in the discovery of an effective method. She seemed to enjoy it too much, and that didn’t seem right, somehow.

  He wished she would hate it. And then he could feel that almost pleasant guilt afterward, and apologize to her abjectly, and beg her forgiveness for dirtying her.

  He glanced down toward their black Buick sedan. “I can’t understand why Mother insists on staying in the car. It must be like a furnace.”