The Damned Read Free Page B

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