Джон Макдональд - All These Condemned

With those words, he kicked the bottom out of the dam. A hell of a lot of water came roaring down the valley. A mess I was. I clutched and slobbered and ground my face into his coat and moaned and yelped and blubbered, not knowing where it was all coming from or why. There was a good big chest and a good big pair of gentle arms, and a comforting murmur whenever the sound track gave him an opening. It all blubbered away and for a long time I was just nothing. Just yesterday’s leftover spaghetti. A sodden mass that, at increasingly rare and unexpected intervals, would give off an explosive snort. As awareness slowly returned, so did pride. I pushed myself up and away, and hunched over to the far side of the seat. There was a cleansing tissue in the cardigan pocket. I blew a nose that I imagined now looked like a radish. I dropped the tissue out the car window, rolled it down farther, and asked in a very marquise voice if I might have a cigarette. He provided same. I spoiled the first inhale with the terminal snort and nearly choked.

I resented him. Who was he to intrude on my privacy? What did he think he was doing, anyhow? Who wants his pity?

“I seem to have got a bit out of hand,” I said.

“You did a thorough job.”

I whirled toward him. “I’ll have you darn well know, friend, that I’m not crying because I’ve been licked.”

“How long since you’ve cried like that, Judy?”

“Oh, gosh. I can’t remember. Five years, six years. I don’t know... why I did.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it was just hydraulic pressure.”

I had to laugh. In laughing I saw how ridiculous I was to resent him. Poor guy. A female had fallen wetly into his arms and he’d done the best he could. And I thought of the black lake and stopped laughing.

It’s a good thing to cry like that. And even as I was enjoying the floating, drifting feeling of release, my mind was nibbling at the situation, trying to turn it and twist it into something usable, something that could become a routine. Perhaps a thing where I’d do three or four women, the way they cry... a duchess, a lady wrestler, an actress from the old silent movies, with different background music for each one.

How fake can you get? Can’t you even cry honestly? I wondered what was left of me. Just a strange device for turning everything into the grotesque. Like a machine that eats up tin, paper, and beans and spews out an unending column of cans of soup.

O.K., chalk it up to sudden death, sirens in the night, black water, and feeling alone. Not the tears. What happened next. Happened his hand rested on my left shoulder. He was behind the wheel. Happened his hand felt good. Happened I tilted my head to the left, laying my cheek on the back of his hand. Happened I turned my head a little so my lips touched the back of his hand. Should have been then an awkwardness. Too many elbows in the way, and noses in the way, and no place for your knees. But it was as if we had practiced. His arms opened up and I switched around so that my back was toward him, and then I lay back into his arms, my feet up on the seat toward the car door, and there were good places for all our arms as his lips came down on mine.

To me there has always been something contrived about love. It goes like a pendulum. I start enjoying myself and then the pendulum swings the other way and I get a look at myself and I want to giggle. Because there is something ridiculous about it, darn it. People pasting their mouths together. People sighing and panting as if they’d been running upstairs. Hearts going poomp-poomp. But this time the pendulum swung over and caught on a little hook and stayed over there and there wasn’t anything ridiculous at all.

A very rocky Judy Jonah untangled herself and sat up very straight and stared right ahead at absolutely nothing. I had pins and needles from my ankles to my ears. “My goodness,” I said. I sounded as prim as a maiden aunt. He touched my back and I went up on wires and landed a foot farther away from him.

“What’s the matter?”

“If you don’t know, brother...”

“I know. I mean I think I know. Once when I was a little kid my grandfather was up on a stepladder. I kept running up and giving it a little shake and running away, screaming with delight. He got tired of it and flailed away at me with his coat. He forgot he had a small wrench in the coat pocket.”

I turned around, my back to the door like Captain Hammer standing off nine Chinese bandits. I said, “I’m going to talk fast and get it all in and don’t interrupt, please. In spite of several grave mistakes, I am a very moral-type moral lady. That little kiss tore my wings off and I am highly vulnerable. You touch me and I shall shatter like they do to the wineglass with the violins. But being an entertainer, small print, doesn’t mean I play games. You are a married guy and thusly you are poison and so this is something I’d write in my diary if I kept one, but for the record it rocked me, if that pleases you, and now I leave on these rubber legs, full of chastity and regret.” I opened the door and got out.

He said, “Something can be done about the obstacle, Judy.”

“Don’t talk about it. Don’t think about it. Give me a ring next Decoration Day, at my apple stand.”

I got out of there. I looked back. I saw the red end of his cigarette. I went down onto the pier, onto the one that had nobody else on it. I sat cross-legged in the dew. I heard one of the men say, “Got a hell of a nice bass right there off these rocks three years ago. Went a little over four pounds. Got him on a frog.”

And the other man in the boat said, “Can’t use frogs, myself. They hold onto the line with their hands. Makes me feel sick, sort of. I use bugs.”

“Hold it. Hung up something.”

I held my breath. Then I heard him say, “Solid bottom. Rocks again. Swing it the other way, Virg.” And after a moment, “O.K. It come free.”

I had a hell of a mood. I wanted sad flamenco guitars and Spanish types singing through their noses while I swayed and snapped my fingers and let the big pearly tears roll down my damask cheeks. I sat there a long time and then went up to the house and went to the kitchen and begged a monstrous sandwich off Rosalita, she of the face like a family vault. Emotion gives me hunger.

It was nearly dawn when they got her. I went down to the dock. They did a fumbling job of getting her up out of the boat and they dropped her. I expected Wilma to sit up and give them hell for being so clumsy. But she was dead. Not a messy death. Not like on that South Carolina road when Gabby, in the sedan ahead of us, turned out into the path of the lumber truck. They were a mess. All of them. Mitch went into shock, I guess. I can remember him trotting up and down the shoulder of the road, picking up the sheets of the arrangements that were blowing all over, making a neat pile of them, looking at each one to see if he’d found any part of “Lady, Be Good,” because he’d paid Eddie Sauter to do that one for us in between those good Good-mans.

No, this one was a lot cleaner. Noel was there too. I wondered what she was thinking, looking at the body. That body was a trap that had caught Randy and Gilman Hayes without question, and probably Steve Winsan and perhaps Wallace Dorn. And Paul? That thought hit me and it did bad things to the digestion of my sandwich. If Paul belonged on the list too, it gave Wilma a perfect batting average on her house guests. No, I thought. Not Paul. The sandwich subsided. And I wondered why that sort of fidelity had suddenly meant so much to me. It was Mavis’ lookout, not mine. I had no claim. A kiss in a car? In Wilma’s set a kiss in a car was as consequential as combing your hair. But, damnit, I was not of that set. I was there only because it was bread and butter.