The Damned (4 page)

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.”

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.

Tree shadows were lengthening, and he squinted his eyes against a swirl of dust picked up by a breeze that had scudded across the river, ruffling the water.

Pepe came back and squatted beside him. He sighed elaborately. “One could grow a long beard while waiting.”

Bill grinned. “I think Carmelita will still be in Mante by the time we get back,
amigo.”

“Ai! I concern myself with this delay because I am a loyal employee, and become accused of the silliness of love.” He changed the subject. “That shouting some minutes ago was because one tourist lady has been taken ill, and has been carried into the store.”

“Too much sun?”

“Something else, I think. Something bad, with a grinding of the teeth. She is the mother of the young man we saw, the one with the glasses who walked with the beautiful girl with the light hair. After the mother was carried in, they spoke together and the man with the glasses struck the girl in front of everyone. It was very ugly and very curious. I did not understand it. If she is his wife, he has a privilege to beat her, but it is better done when alone, I believe. And the boy who swam, he was swimming for a doctor, and came back, you will notice, with none.”

“You are a veritable newspaper, a monster of curiosity. It does not concern us, Pepe.”

“One must move the hours by with more quickness. And you, I remember, Beel, applied a crude word to the young lady with pale hair. Thus, I thought you would wish to know of her problems.”

“I merely called her a
pollita.”

“But with a certain licking of the lips,
verdad?”

The others in the group laughed. Bill stared severely at Pepe. “But it was you, señor, who whistled,
verdad?”

“Ah, look!” Pepe said. “Approaching is the evil monster of a ferry.”

They all watched it, motionless. There was a concerted groan as it nuzzled against the mud when it was still thirty feet from shore. The laborers aboard stared moodily down at the water, then jumped off into mid-thigh water and began rolling it listlessly with their shovels away from the mud.

Bill said, “From now on the progress will be like that of Pepe hurrying to work. One meter each half hour.”

He turned his head and saw the thick-shouldered swagger of the hard-faced American with the bristling black hair. The man came down the road with a ripe-looking girl in a yellow dress. He gave the squatting group a casual, insolent glance and walked to the MG, planted his feet, and stared down at the two young men seated in the shadow of the car.

“Boys,” he said, “we’ve got a sick woman up there. You’re giving up your place in line so we can get her over to the doctor.”

The blond boy looked coldly at the chunky man, turned to his companion, and said, “Troy, dear, are we going to fall for a moldy old gag like that?”

“Come on up and take a look at her, if you think it’s a gag, boys.”

“It’s far too hot to go staggering up that bloody hill.”

The girl in the yellow dress stared at them with contempt. She said, “Benson, you aren’t going to get anyplace with them. To hell with them. The ferry takes two cars. Let’s find out who owns this pickup.”

“Betty, let me hammer on these boys a little.”

“You get funny with us,” Troy hissed, “and you’ll get something to remember us by.”

Bill, squatting nearby, was lifting a cigarette to his lips. He stopped the gesture as he saw the wink of sun on the knife blade in Troy’s hand. Two members of his little group stood up slowly and moved away. They wanted no part of any trouble.

The chunky man made as if to turn away. Then he whirled back and kicked hard. Bill heard the thud of shoe meeting wrist. The knife sailed over the little car and landed on the far side. The two boys scrambled up, chittering and mouthing delicate obscenities. As one of them dived to run around after the knife, the chunky Benson tripped him brutally so that he fell flat and hard in the dust. And Benson went after the blond one, brushing aside the ineffectual hands, hammering with cruelly accurate fists. Bill saw the nose pulped, saw the pink mist of blood spray in the sunlight, saw the boy fall back against the car, sagging.

Bill came up onto his feet, reached Benson in three long strides, deftly caught the arm, twisted it, and brought it up between the man’s shoulder blades, holding him helpless.

The man craned his neck to stare back over his shoulder. In crude, rattling, almost verbless Spanish he demanded to know what the hell Bill thought he was doing.

“Giving you a little chance to cool off, man.”

“I thought you were spick. Get your goddamn hands off me.”

Bill saw that the dark-haired boy called Troy had retrieved the knife. He pushed Benson away from him, releasing him as he did so.

Benson glanced at the knife, glanced at the contorted face of the boy, and backed uneasily away. The boy with the mashed nose was crying.

“You give him a chance,” Bill said softly, “he’s going to cut you a little.” He turned to the boy. “Put the knife away. I’ll keep him off you.”

Benson cursed him. “You look like a man, at least. What’s the matter with beating up a pair like that?”

“They aren’t doing you any harm. They’re just different from you, man. The lady was right. You could have listened to her. That’s my truck. If somebody’s pretty sick, we can rig up a place in the bed of the truck and take her across that way.”

Bill looked at the girl. She was staring at him in very frank appraisal. There was a measuring boldness in her eyes that made him feel awkward.

“There sure is plenty of you, Texas. Weren’t you talking Mex a while back?”

“A buck says he’s half spick,” Benson said with contempt. “Look at the clothes.”

Bill stared mildly at Benson. “One more time you use the word, man, I’m going to pound on you a little.”

“Proves I’m right,” Benson said with contempt.

Bill addressed himself to the girl. “Miss, is he any kin to the lady that’s sick?”

“No, he was just helping out.”

“Then you send the woman’s kin down here and we’ll fix it up about how to get her across. Tell your friend there that we don’t need any more big wheeling around here.”

Benson and the girl went up the hill. She kept staring back over her shoulder. Bill rejoined the group. Benson’s back was rigid with anger as he walked beside the girl. Bill gave the group a complete report on the conversation, with only slight editing. The editing didn’t help in Pepe’s case.

Pepe said, “Did he use a word of insult, Beel?”

“Yes.”

Pepe pursed his lips. “That one is bad. A violent one. A cruel one. It is very clear in his face. You must watch him very carefully. And ah, the little darlings. Look how they share their sorrow.”

The one called Troy had brought water, taken a clean cloth from their luggage, and was just finishing tenderly swabbing the face of the one Benson had hit so sharply, the one who still wept, hopelessly.

Their voices came silver-thin through the afternoon air.

“It is broken, isn’t it?”

“A beast. That’s what he is, a beast. If he’s still here, darling, when it gets a bit darker, I shall…”

“No, it’s done. Don’t try to get even, Troy.”

“I don’t think it’s a bad break, Daniel.”

“You
know
it’s just pulp. Pulp.”

“Well, even if it can’t be perfectly set, perhaps it will give you an air… a jauntiness, perhaps.”

“I hate all of them, all of them. And that kind the most, Troy. They have to humiliate us to get even with themselves, you know. It’s because they have the same… slant on life and won’t admit it. So they have to go around being terribly ‘he,’ strutting and making women. I don’t hate him, I guess I’m sorry for him, dear.”

“I could just claw out his horrid eyes, really.”

“Now you stop fretting. I’m going to be all right. I just feel a little sick from the shock. And
look
at that pretty shirt! You ruined it when you fell.”

They lowered their voices a bit and Bill Danton could no longer hear what was said.

“You will take the sick woman across in the truck?” Pepe asked.

“If it will help them.”

“The truck can be backed up the hill to the store. Perhaps it will be easier that way.”

“Good idea, Pepe. See if you can get some sort of sticks so we can spread that tarp for shade for her.”

Pepe stood up. “Here comes the one with glasses, Beel.”

The boy was approaching, accompanied by the girl in the yellow dress. Bill stood up and saw her point him out.

The boy stuck his hand out, his air becoming just a bit patronizing as he saw the way Bill Danton was dressed. “Miss Mooney tells me you’re willing to help us. My name is John Gerrold.”

“Bill Danton’s mine. Thought we might rig up something in the bed of the pickup. It’s six feet long and she could be stretched out. My friend is going to rig a tarp for shade. Ferry ought to be close enough to shore in another half hour. How is she doing?”

“I… I don’t know. It’s terrible. Miss Mooney has been a lot of help. My… my wife is with her now. If only the doctor could have come over here!”

“I’ll back the truck up the hill and get her when it’s time.”

“I had to give the man in the store a hundred pesos to let her stay in there. He kept saying it was driving all the customers to the other store.”

“Don’t worry about it. That’s more profit than he’s made in the last three months.”

John Gerrold looked at the dusty truck with evident distaste. He walked over and stared into it. “I’d like to come along, of course, and bring my wife. But that leaves our car over on this side. I…”

“You’re ahead of me and my friend in line,” Betty Mooney said quickly. “Look, I can take that Buick across the river. No trouble at all.”

“That’s kind of you,” John Gerrold said.

“Where will I take it to?”

“They’ve told me the doctor’s office is on the public square, on the left. Apparently he has a sign out. Dr. Reinares. You could leave the car there and bring the keys up to the doctor’s office, and then your friend could stop there for you when he gets across. I hope it isn’t too much trouble.”