The Damned

by John D. MacDonald

  And he was back in that tiled room again, with those hands pulling so gingerly on the cruel shaft. He knuckled his eyes and held his breath. Maybe they were waiting on the other side of the river. Or maybe the policía were screaming up the road from Victoria.

  Oh, baby, you’re really in the soup this time. Right up to your pointy little ears. Son-of-a-bitch wanted to nail me with that harpoon thing. Should have aimed higher. Hit him too hard. Knuckles still sore. Maybe I ought to move downstream and swim the river and to hell with the car. Wish there was some joker here who looked enough like me. Get him off in the brush and hammer him and lace him up and switch identification.

  He sat on his heels in the shade, atop the bank. On the other side he saw a big young girl in a yellow dress. A nice gutty-looking face, and red-bronze hair and a pair of them to make your eyes bulge like a tromped hop frog. He had vaguely noticed her when the blue Cad had joined the interminable line. With a guy old enough to be her daddy. Not married, that pair. Giving each other the stone face, too. He saw her tilt her bottle up, saw her throat work. She lowered the bottle and looked across at him, forty feet away. She set the bottle down, and fluffed at her back hair, and arched her back a little, just enough to push those things out farther than God intended. There wouldn’t be any of that in prison. Not a morsel of it. They’d let you dream about it, and that was all. Probably stop that too, if they could figure out how. Sure turned out to be the little dog on the railroad tracks this time.

  What the hell cooks with that ferry? He jumped up impatiently and walked down the shoulder of the road, setting his feet down hard.

  As he passed a black Buick sedan, he heard a funny sound. He went on for a few steps and stopped and listened. He heard the sound again. He followed it back to the Buick and looked in. The Buick was the car the platinum piece had come in. He stared at the old dollie in the back seat. Her face was gray and her eyes were open a little and all he could see was whites. Her hands were flexing spasmodically and cords in her throat stood out. The noise he had heard was a startling loud grinding of her teeth. Blood stood bright in the corner of her mouth.

  That old doll was really sick. Maybe dying. Bennicke wheeled and trotted through the heat, trotted down to the bank. People looked curiously at a man who would run on such a day. People stood around down by the bank, staring numbly, hopelessly across the river where slow-motion figures swung listless shovels.

  Del went over to the two queers who sat in the shade of the MG. One was blond and one was dark, and both of them were pretty. “You boys notice where the girl with the real blonde hair went? Her and her boy friend?”

  They stared at him with their shining eyes. The dark one giggled. He said, “They were carrying a blanket and they went thataway, pardner.” He pointed downstream.

  “Thank you sweetly,” Del lisped.

  “I suppose you think you’re really smart,” the blond one in the red silk shirt said.

  Bennicke moved down the river bank, keeping to the high ground, looking ahead of him. At last he saw the pair of them coming. He went directly toward them. When he was close enough, he could see that flushed tangled look about the girl, the look of love.

  “Say,” he said, as they looked at him oddly, “you go with the black Buick with the New York plates, don’t you?” The boy nodded. “The old lady in the car is sick or something. Maybe you better hustle and take a look at her.”

  Without a word the boy brushed by him and began to run, long-legged, fleet.

  The girl said, “Thank you very much.” She hurried away after the boy and Del trotted along behind her. Certainly a cute little figure.

  By the time they got to the car a group had gathered. The boy had the back door open. The woman had slumped over farther. She was still making that sound. The boy looked completely helpless, completely stricken.

  “Linda, she’s… she’s awful sick. I don’t know what…”

  Del tilted up his chin and in a brass voice he brayed, “Is anybody around here a doctor? Hay un médico aquí?” He tried again. The gathered laymen shifted uncomfortably, in guilt at not being doctors.

  The girl in the yellow dress came down off the bank. She addressed herself to Del. “No doctor, hey. I don’t know what I can do, but I was in training to be a nurse before it got too rugged for me.”

  “Take a look. What do you think?”

  The girl had a ripe heavy scent. She pushed by Del and looked into the car.

  “God!” she said softly, reverently. She backed out, looking pale. “I thought maybe it was heat exhaustion or something. I don’t know what that is. Sort of like a convulsion or something. Don’t think it’s a heart attack. Only thing I can say is to get her out of that oven in there. If we could fix up a stretcher, like. Then take her into one of those stores. She better have a doctor quick.”

  Del turned and found a boy of about thirteen, a boy whom he had seen in the store where they still had some beer.

  In his ungrammatical rapid Spanish he asked the boy if there was a doctor in San Fernando. The boy said there was a very marvelous doctor there who could speak excellently English.

  “Can you swim across the river?”

  “It is possible.”

  Del took out a twenty-peso note, tore it in half, gave the boy half. “When you bring the doctor back in one of those small boats on the far shore I will give you this other piece of the money. If it is very, very rapid, this thing, I will give you even more.”

  The boy raced off down the road. The boy with the glasses had come out of his trance of helplessness. He had taken two suit coats out of his luggage and he turned to Del, saying, “If we had some sticks to put through the sleeves…”

  A nearby Mexican got the idea and raced off toward a truck. He came back with two lengths of heavy bamboo. Del and the boy improvised a stretcher, and it was Del who got into the car, lifted her awkwardly, handed her out toward the boy’s arms. She slipped and her dress tore a bit and they got her onto the stretcher, awkwardly. Her white eyes looked up at the blazing sky and her hands still flexed.

  Del took one end of the stretcher and the boy took the other. They carried her up to the store. The crowd parted. A counter had been cleared. They hoisted her onto the long counter.

  The girl in the yellow dress said, “Maybe some real cold cloths on her head would help. She isn’t having those convulsion things, but if we could get a stick or something between her teeth, it might save her tongue a little when the next one comes along.”

  A short piece of dirty stick was produced. The girl in the yellow dress washed it carefully, and when Del held the woman’s jaw open, she got the stick in. The teeth shut hard on the stick, and it gave her a ridiculous look. An aged dog with an arid bone.

  The girl called Linda said, “John, darling, he’ll be here soon.” She went to him, laid her hand on his arm.

  Del Bennicke was not a man easily shocked. But what happened then made him feel almost ill. The boy wheeled on the girl and slapped her across the mouth with a full-arm swing, driving her back so that she would have fallen if the end of another counter had not caught her across the small of her back. Her lips were broken and her eyes were wide and dazed.

  In shrill hysteria the boy shouted, “You were making me do that while Mamma was here dying! You took me away for that while Mamma was here all alone.”

  The girl got her balance and pushed herself away from the counter. She gave him a long look, an oddly sober, unangered look. And then, with her straight back, with her model’s walk, she left the store.

  The boy called John gradually became aware that everyone was staring at him. There was contempt in all the glances, Del knew. He saw the sick look in the boy’s eyes. He put his face in his hands. He turned and moved closer to his mother.

  In the silence the teeth began to make a grinding sound against the stick. The boy took her limp hand held it throughout the convulsive flexings.

  “It’s going to be O.K., Mamma,” he said softly. “It’s going to
be fine, Mamma.”

  Del left the store, searched for the tan linen dress and white hair, saw her walking slowly toward the shade. He caught up with her. Her lips had begun to puff. She looked at him with eyes that had gone quite dead.

  Del said, “A guy can lose his head when it’s his old lady.”

  “Thanks for the try, my friend.”

  “Your husband, isn’t he?”

  “Let’s say wasn’t he.”

  “Don’t be too rough on the kid. Some guys take a long time to grow up.”

  “I can’t afford to wait for it, Mr.…”

  “Del Ben… son.”

  “I’m Linda Gerrold. Thanks for taking charge. John was useless.”

  The girl in the yellow dress joined them. “Hi, folks. I’m Betty Mooney, by the way. I’m trying to remember some of that stuff I tried to learn out of the nursing books. Honey, that jerk certainly teed off on you, but don’t let it get you down.”

  “Miss Mooney, Mrs. Gerrold. And I’m Del Benson. Remember anything out of the books?”

  “I got a vague idea of a word. Some kind of hemorrhage in the head.”

  “Cerebral?” Linda asked.

  “Honey, that’s exactly it! A stroke, kind of. And if I’m right, there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do except wait and see if she comes out of it. They go into a kind of coma, and you want to feed glucose and so on, you can keep them going until they either kick off or wake up. Lots of times it’s better if they kick off when they have a daisy like that one, because they come out of it paralyzed. Only I wouldn’t tell that kid in there what I’m telling you. He’s nearly lost all his marbles now, it seems like.”

  “Thank you very much, Miss Mooney.”

  “I could be wrong, honey.”

  Linda sighed. “I better go back and give him a chance to slap me again. Maybe I can help a little.”

  She turned back toward the store. Betty watched her go. “There’s quite a gal, Mr. Benson.”

  “A little beauty, and well set up in the guts department.”

  “If I’d been tagged like that, that crumby little store would be upside down by now.” She turned and slanted her eyes at him. They were almost of a height. “Hello, Benson,” she said.

  “Hi, Mooney. Where’s your fella?”

  She gave a suggestion of a sneer. “You mean where’s old sourball? Sitting over there trying to decide whether to bite himself and die of the infection.”

  “Those kind go sour when they get enough.”

  “How about your kind?”

  “For my kind there isn’t enough.”

  “We must have gone to different schools together, Benson.”

  He gave her a flat-lipped grin, and his mind was ticking over, very carefully. The old lady’s sickness had opened things up a little. There might be three cars to play with: the Gerrolds’ Buick, the Cad that this Mooney gal was traveling in, and the Humber he’d taken from the bullfighter. Maybe a nice judicious trade, just for the sake of convenience, would let off some of the pressure. And a guy with a girl, even this flooze, would look better than a guy alone. Maybe it could be worked out so that he and Betty Mooney would eventually wheel into Matamoros in the black Buick. If he was any judge, Betty’s friend looked just as anxious to unload her as she was to walk out on him. “Is that a glint in your eye?”

  “I was wondering how a deal like you got tangled up with that Chamber of Commerce type over there.”

  “It was a mistake, Benson. San Antone was hot and I was bored and I thought well, just once in my life, I might as well kick up my heels.”

  “Take him good?”

  She ran her tongue tip along her lower lip. “I’ve got about twelve hundred bucks’ worth of clothes stashed in that Cad, Benson.”

  “From me you won’t get twelve bucks’ worth of clothes.”

  “We won’t call that news, will we? You’re too smart to take.”

  “You got a place in San Antone?”

  “Such as it is, and it isn’t much.”

  “Well?”

  “Benson, maybe you move a little too fast, huh?”

  “Deal it this way. I spring for rent, food, and liquor. Can you cook in your place?”

  Her eyes turned wise. “You wouldn’t be trying to drop out of sight or anything? I mean if you’ve got trouble, don’t try to hand me any.”

  “I might have a little, but nothing I can hand you. You’d be clear all the way. This is Mex trouble. Across the line I’m fine. Only I might have to get across the hard way. You know Brownsville?”

  “Not too good.”

  “Two miles north of town on the main drag is a motel called El Rancho Grande. Maybe the old boy could drop you there. I won’t have a car.”

  “Then maybe we walk to San Antone?”

  “Maybe we do.”

  “I’ve been crazy all my life, so why change now?”

  He looked toward the river. Someone was rowing a boat across. Just one person in the boat. Bennicke cursed softly when he made out that it was the boy. He walked down the road with Betty Mooney and got to the bank as the boy pulled the boat up. The boy looked worried.

  He said, “Señor, the Dr. Reinares waits for a child to be brought to him. A snake has bitten the child and so he cannot leave. So he suggests that the señora be taken across in this boat and carried to him.”

  “Does he know it is a rich señora?”

  “I spoke of the Buick and of the gems in her rings, señor. He is a man who considers his duty, however.”

  “What’s he saying?” Betty demanded. Del Bennicke told her.

  She stared at the filthy boat, at the fish scales, at the floor boards awash. “She can’t ride in that, Benson.”

  Bennicke heard a shout from the far side of the river. The ferry had at last unloaded. A passenger car and a pickup truck crawled up the planks and were blocked on deck. The ferry began to move toward them.

  “So maybe we get her into a car and take the head of the line,” Bennicke said softly.

  Betty looked at the waiting cars. “That,” she said, “is going to be a good trick.”

  Chapter Four

  BILL DANTON sat on his heels, sombrero pushed back off his forehead, tiny end of cheap Mexican cigarette pinched carefully between thumb and forefinger. In threadbare khaki work pants and T shirt with a rip in the shoulder, thonged sandals on brown bare feet, he looked no different than the Mexican farm workers he was chatting with. He and his father owned and ran, as partners, a big place near Mante. Cotton and rice. Work on the place had baked him dark. When he stood up, however, there was a rawboned Texan looseness about his big frame that differentiated him from the others.

  They sat near the river bank and he had taken a quiet amusement from the turista comments on Mexicans in general. He knew that none of them had picked him out as being as much Texan as Mexican. His pickup truck was the second vehicle in line. He had been on his way from Mante to Houston, accompanied by Pepe Hernández, his good friend, to pick up farm-equipment parts from the wholesaler.

  When he thought of it at all, which was seldom, Bill Danton sometimes wondered that one person could be, so completely, two people. Dad was responsible for that. Bill’s mother had died a year after he was born. At that time Dad had a place in the valley. Mostly citrus, and some land in vegetables. And the house had needed a woman in it, mostly to take care of the little guy. So Dad had hired a slim, timid, wide-eyed Mexican gal named Rosa. Bill guessed that, at that stage, Dad had most of the usual valley prejudice. You used wetback labor when you could get it. It was cheap labor and it made good sense to take them on and hope you could keep them. If you were a “white man” in the valley, it was O.K. to sleep with Mex gals, if your taste ran that way, but you surer than hell didn’t marry them.

  And so it had taken Dad about two years to get over the loss of his wife, fall in love with Rosa, and marry her. Now Dad could be amused in a quiet way about the way the valley had treated him after that little social error. But he had told
Bill in recent years that, at the time, he was pretty bitter about it. And he didn’t want any mark left on Bill, or on Rosa’s kids. So he had sold out and moved down into Mexico with Bill and the pregnant Rosa. He had bought the spread near Mante, and made application to become an immigrante, and after a few years the papers came through, and Dad was a Mexican citizen. It had taken quite a bit of trouble to get Bill established on a residente basis, with special permission to work, while still retaining his United States citizenship.

  Dad had prospered in Mexico. Rosa gave birth to five children. The big house had always been full of the warmth that comes only from love. Music and much laughter and hard work. Dad had always spoken to Bill in English, and so, when Bill had been sent up to a private school in Houston, and later had gone to Texas A. and M. for the agriculture courses, he had but slight trouble with languages.

  And now, at twenty-five, he was perfectly content with his life, perfectly adjusted. His eldest half-sister had recently married and they were building a house on the Danton land. Rosa, at forty-two, was slim as a girl. Dad, burly, white-haired, was head of the local association in Mante, and was looked up to throughout the area.

  Bill imagined that one day he would marry. The girl would undoubtedly be Mexican. But he was in no hurry.

  Bill had two personalities. As he sat on his heels in the little group, his mobility of face, the quick gestures of his hands were completely Mexican. When he spoke English it was with a lazy slow drawl, with a certain impassivity of face, with slow infrequent gestures of his big hands. He made the switch from one personality to the other without effort, without conscious thought. When he listened to the tourists complain about the reluctant ferry, he was aware that in his American frame of mind, he would be almost equally irritated. But, as a Mexican, he knew that since one obviously couldn’t carry the pickup truck across the river on one’s back, and since the men of the ferry were doing as well as they could, it was wise to relax, to make small jokes. It could take another hour, or another day. Quién sabe? The cultivator and the largest tractor would remain idle for a longer period. So? When one must wait, it is well to accept the fact.