All These Condemned by John D. MacDonald Page B

the top, you can’t fall that far, can you?
    But I’m just so tired.
    I want to curl up with a nice bear.
    I patted old friend—old flat tummy. I got into a pleated Irish tweed skirt and the floppy frayed old cardigan that goes everywhere with me for luck. I thought of how cold it was and so I headed for the other wing, for the kitchens. I found José and used some of the kitchen Spanish I picked up during that season in Mexico City. It seemed to please him. He knew the señora was dead. The fact had been examined and accepted. I didn’t think any one of the three of them would do any major weeping. I told him the men would be cold. I suggested he make a lot of coffee and take it down there. He said he would.
    I went out the back way. Paul came across the gravel toward me. Window light touched his face as he walked through it. Good sober face. I felt as if somehow I had been hung out in space for a long time away from a lot of good things. He was the trunk of a tree. I wanted to swing so I could reach him and untie myself and climb down to where there was a place to plant your feet.
    I stepped out of the shadows, startling him. I put my hands on his arm. “Look, Paul, I’ve been running in midair. It’s a good trick. It’s a clown trick. You make your feet go like crazy and … you make faces and …”
    Then something broke behind my eyes, and damned if I was going to cry, so I shut my teeth hard against it because there was no reason to cry, and out came this thin terrible sound from between my clenched teeth, a sound that came up through my throat like files. He took hold of me. I felt his uncertainty as I kept making those inexcusable misery noises, just going sort of “nnnnn nnnnn nnnnn” through my teeth, thinking, My God, Judy, you sing because a towel feels good and now you stand out here going crazy. He turned me and led me toward the cars. I walked along bent over, because crying without making noise, without making much noise, sort of doubled me up. I stumbled but his arm was around me. He got me into a new-smelling car and got the doors shut and rolled the windows up and put his hand on the back of my head, pushing my face against his jacket, and said, “Now let it go.”
    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