The Damned Read Free

mean it?”
    “If it isn’t a budget trip. If it lasts a little while. I don’t like my job. And there are lots of jobs nowadays. I’ve been thinking of a job in a plant. Aircraft. They make real money.”
    He remembered the credit card. “It won’t be a budget trip.”
    “How about your job?”
    “I come and go as I please,” he lied.
    “Big shot.”
    “Not really. Just almost. And my wife has long since given up wondering or caring where I am.” Forgive me, Moira.
    “I know some kids who went down. It’s no job getting the permit. I get a card and walk across the bridge. You get one for yourself and the car and drive across and pick me up.”
    He saw the hard flicker of excitement under her casual air. Tomorrow you can be dead. Hillary popped off last year. Heart. And only forty-six.
    There was a moment in San Antonio when he sat in the car on a back street and waited for her to come down with her suitcase. He started the motor, ready to drive away, ready to drive headlong back to sanity. He bit hard on his lip. He saw her coming down the walk toward the car, tall and bountiful, full of all her slow promises.
    They stayed what was left of the night at an air-conditioned court near Alice, signed in as Mr. and Mrs. Roger Robinson.
    The blindness started there, in her heavy arms. She laughed softly at his eagerness. With the driving, unthinking blindness, with his insatiable need for her, the days went by and the miles went by, and the Hotel del Prado in Mexico City was merely the annex to a tourist court near Alice, Texas. He used her with deadly persistency, and the times in between were merely a nothingness, a waiting. While he napped, she bought clothes in the Mexico City shops.
    And then, one morning, he awoke and it was as though he had walked out of a movie, stood blinking on the sidewalk, trying to remember which way to go.
    He looked at himself and he looked at her. He had tried to call it a deathless romance, a great love. And the rationalization had shattered suddenly, leaving him naked. He saw a gaunt foolish man of middle years spending his savings on a raw, big-bodied young girl with a limited IQ. The pores of her cheeks and nose were unpleasantly enlarged. In conversation she repeated herself interminably, expressing childish infatuations with movie actors, TV stars, disc jockeys. Her love-making was an unimaginative compound of all the movies she had seen, all the confession stories she had read. He stared in wonder at the meaty mass of her hips, at the lactic, bovine breasts, startled that he should have thought this worth the risk of destroying his world. He realized sourly that he could anticipate her every word, every sigh, every movement. And there was no longer excitement in the sight of her padding, heavy and naked, through the hotel suite. Merely an irritation that she did not cover herself up. The notes to Moira and to the company, notes that had seemed so clever at the moment, with their hints about some secret deal on a Mexican oil concession, now appeared, in retrospect, to be absurd, transparent.
    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