The Damned Read Free Page A

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