Under the Skin (10 page)

some in the railyard, some on the shrimp boats. A pair of brothers
named Lopez talked excitedly of their plan to own their own shrimper
one day.

In the group was a whitehaired old man named Gregorio who
owned a small boardinghouse. I asked if he had a vacancy, and he did,
and after we were done eating and had another beer, he took me over
there to see it. The building was the only two-story on the street, a
rundown clapboard at the end of the lane, its front yard bordered by
a weathered picket fence. He called the house the Casa Verde because
of its moldy-green roof shingles and the thick growth of vines on the
outer walls and around the porch columns.

Inside, the place smelled old but the parlor and hallway and
kitchen were neatly kept. Gregorio himself occupied the only bedroom on the ground floor and rented out the three bedrooms upstairs.
The vacancy was on a front corner, with one window overlooking the
lane and another facing the traintracks. A light bulb dangling from
the ceiling illuminated a battered wardrobe, a narrow bed, a small
wooden table and a straightback chair. Columns of numbers had been
scratched into the tabletop. The old man saw me fingering them and
said the previous tenant had been a gambler. I asked what had become of him, and Gregorio turned up his hands. One day the man
had been there, he said, and one day he had not, as had always been
the case with men and would be the case with us as well.

“Casero y filósofo tambien,” I said, and he showed a yellow grin
and said all men became philosophers if they lived long enough.
The bath was at the end of the hallway. An old telephone—the
only phone in the colonia, Gregorio said—was mounted on the wall
at the foot of the stairs. I asked for its number and wrote it on a piece
of paper to give to Rose. I moved in the next day and had been living there ever since.
LQ and Brando had thought it was a smart move on my part because wetback neighbors weren’t the nosy sort. Among the few things

LQ and Ray agreed on was that a guy—especially one in our business—shouldn’t own anything more than he could carry in a single
suitcase and should never live anyplace where the neighbors didn’t
mind their own business.

Sam couldn’t understand why I’d leave a beachside apartment with
new furnishings and appliances to move into a ramshackle place in
one of the worst sections of town. I didn’t even try to explain, and he
finally just shook his head and quit ragging me about it.

Rose didn’t say anything about the move. Except maybe he did, a
few days later, in a sort of roundabout way. I was driving him back from
some Houston business, and as we went over the causeway he said the
look of the water in the afternoon sunlight always reminded him of a
little lagoon in Palermo where his father had taught him to swim.

“It’s funny,” he said, staring out at the bay and the island on the
other side. “This place is so different, but there’s things about it that
remind me of Palermo when I was a boy. I tell you, if there was some
part of town called Little Sicily—Little Italy, even—I’d move in there
in a minute. I wouldn’t give a shit how beat-up it was. It’d be nice
hearing the language, you know, people talking to each other in it.
And the music. And smelling the food. I’d like... Ah hell.”

he fight at Mrs. Lang’s had boosted my spirits more than Feli cia had. I stopped in a place on Market Street and drank a beer
and then had another in a joint on Mechanic. But by the time I got
to La Colonia, I was feeling the same undefinable irritation that had
been nagging me earlier in the evening.

It was after two in the morning. Clouds were bunching over the
gulf, blocking out the stars. The slight wind had kicked up and was
gently stirring the treetops. The evening’s earlier warmth was giving
way to a rising chill. It smelled like it might rain.

Other than the Casa Verde at the far end of the lane, only the Avila
house showed light—a dim yellow glow against the pulled shade of
a front window. The Morales family had hosted a neighborhood party
earlier in the evening and I could make out the dark shapes of several
cars parked in the deeper shadows between the Morales and the Avila
houses. Overnight visitors, I figured.

A cloud of bugs was swarming around the Casa Verde porchlight.
I didn’t need a key because Gregorio had stopped locking the door
shortly after I’d moved in. I’d never told him or anyone else in La
Colonia what I did for a living, but before I’d been there a month
everybody on the block seemed to know who I worked for. I was
pouring a cup of coffee in the kitchen one morning when I heard
Señora Ortega, the next-door neighbor, talking to Gregorio in the
sideyard, telling him how her daughter had warned a coworker at
the oystersheds that if he didn’t stop pestering her she would complain to her neighbor, Don Santiago, who was a bodyguard for
Rosario Maceo. The man, the señora told Gregorio, had not bothered
her girl since.

Gregorio had mounted a small slateboard with a chalk holder next
to the hallway telephone, but the only messages I’d ever seen on it
were rare ones for me to call the Club. I’d never seen either of the
other two tenants use the phone or known them to receive a call. One
of them, Moises, was older than Gregorio and almost deaf. Even
though he had one of those old-time ear horns, you still had to shout
into it. The other resident was Sergio, a nervous little man who
worked as the night clerk for a motor hotel on the beach. He kept to
his room all day and was said to have no friends at all.

Tonight the slateboard was blank, as usual. At the far end of the
hall the kitchen door shone brightly. I wasn’t surprised to find Gregorio in there, sitting at the table, sipping a bottle of beer and reading a movie magazine, his wire-rim glasses low on his nose. It was his
habit to stay up all night and go to bed at dawn and sleep till noon.

The kitchen was big and high-ceilinged and a large heavy dining
table stood in its center. I helped myself to a beer from the icebox and
pried off the cap with an opener hung on the door handle by a wire
hook and sat across the table from him. I took a pack of Camels from
my coat and shook one out for myself and then slid the pack across
the table to him and we both lit up. He looked tired and a little glasseyed. There had probably been plenty to drink at the Morales party.

He tapped a hand on the article he’d been reading. He could speak
and read English much better than the rest of the residents of La
Colonia, not counting the kids. “Do you know what those Hollywood
assholes said after they gave Fred Astaire his screen test?”

Fred Astaire was Gregorio’s favorite movie star. The old man had
seen
Top Hat
three times already.
He looked down at the article. “They said he couldn’t act very
good and the women wouldn’t like him because he was ‘slightly
bald.’ But they said he could at least ‘dance a little.’ ”
He peered at me over the rim of his glasses. “That’s like saying Jack
Dempsey could punch a little, no?” He shook his head. “Assholes.”
I drank my beer and leafed through a magazine from the stack on
the table. Gregorio said I’d missed a good party. They roasted a kid
on a spit in Morales’ backyard and there were platters of every kind
of dish and enough beer and tequila for everybody to get as drunk as
he wanted. He’d never seen so many visitors to a Colonia party as this
time. Morales’ brother had come down from Beaumont. Ortega’s
brother and sister-in-law up from Lake Jackson. Avila’s uncle and
cousin and the uncle’s goddaughter, who was pretty but didn’t talk
much, had come all the way from Brownsville. And a cousin of the
Gutierrez brothers, a car mechanic from Victoria, had come too.
Turned out he was a hell of a singer and guitar player and he’d been
the hit of the party.

“Sorry I missed it,” I said. The wind was blowing a little harder
now, and tree branches scraped the side of the building. I finished the
beer and dropped the bottle in the garbage can.

“Happy new year, viejo,” I said, and headed for the stairs.
“Feliz año nuevo, kid,” the old man said.
My room was chilly, so I took the extra blanket out of the

wardrobe and spread it over the one already on the bed. I got undressed, then opened the briefcase and took out the guns. I put the
.380 on the bedside stand. The Mexican revolver went under the pillow. I turned off the light and got in bed and listened to the wind and
rasping branches for a while before I fell asleep.

woke in darkness to a sound I thought I recognized but I
couldn’t immediately place it. The wind had ceased. For a moment I thought maybe I’d been dreaming—and then realized I still
heard it. A car motor. Down in the lane and beginning to move
away.

A Model T.
I swung out of bed and went to the window, released the shade to
go fluttering up on its spindle, raised the window sash and pushed
open the screen frame and stuck my head out into a chilly drizzle.
In the light of the streetlamp, a lettuce-green Model T sedan without a left front fender was turning onto Mechanic Street. I saw the
dark form of the driver but I couldn’t tell if there was anyone else in
the car. The T rattled down the street and then its single taillight
went out of sight.
I stood at the open window a moment longer before I pictured
what I must look like—gawking out at an empty street, shivering in
my underwear, getting my head wet. I cursed and let the screen frame
down and closed the window. My wristwatch was on the table and I
struck a match to read the time. Almost six. From the time I was old

But I wasn’t on the ranch now, and what I wanted was more sleep.
I ran a towel through my hair and got back in bed.
And couldn’t get the green Ford out of my mind.
Bullshit, the Ford... I was thinking about the girl.
I wondered if she’d been in the car just now. I remembered her
look under the traffic light, how it caught me flatfooted for one big
heartbeat and got me rankled for some damn reason. Which, it occurred to me, probably had something to do with my edginess the
rest of the evening.
The realization agitated me all the more because I hadn’t been able
to put my finger on it earlier. Not much ever got under my skin, but
when something did I damn well knew what and why and I knew
how to get rid of it.
Little chippy. What’d she think she was trying to pull?
She had to be the one Gregorio had mentioned, the one at the
party, the goddaughter of Avila’s aunt and uncle. All the way from
Brownsville, Gregorio said. Had they just now been getting an
early start on the long drive back? They sure as hell weren’t going
to the movies at five in the morning or to a picnic on the beach.
How far to Brownsville? Way more than three hundred miles,
probably closer to four. All-day drive and then some—especially in
that old T.
Christ’s sake, I told myself, who
cared
?
Some face on her, though.
Yeah, right—but there were pretty faces everywhere, hundreds in
this town alone.
Not like that one.
Bullshit. It wasn’t
that
special. Besides, I didn’t see anything except her face. For all I knew she had an ass like an Oldsmobile.
Not likely.

A married woman came to Morales’ party with her
godfather
? How
much sense did that make?
What’s sense got to do with anything? Besides, the old man said
Avila’s cousin had come too. For all I knew he was her beau . . .
So it went, while I lay there staring at the ceiling and the New
Year slowly dawned.

n the second-floor balcony of the casa grande of
the Hacienda de Las Cadenas, César Calveras
Dogal is taking his noon brandy and awaiting the
arrival of his foreman, El Segundo.

The great house stands on a long low bluff, and the balcony affords a vista beyond the mesquite woods along the
north wall of the hacienda compound. To the northeast
Don César can see the meander of the shallow Río Cadenas
whose origin is high in the dark sierras and whose flow
through a venous array of irrigation ditches nurtures the
estate’s tenacious pasturelands and its meager gardens. He
can see all the way to the Ciénaga de las Palmas, glinting
like a little glass sliver five miles away. In truth the ciénaga
has no palms at all and is but a muddy marsh where the
river drains and quits. Almost forty miles beyond the ciénaga, in the blue-hazed distance, lies the hard road from
Escalón to Monclova. The surrounding country is dense
with cactus and thickets of mesquite, and the mountains at
the horizons are long and blue.

the states of Durango and Chihuahua, a beauty the more remarkable
for being at the southern edge of a vast desertland that includes a portion of the Bolson de Mapimí, perhaps the meanest desert of the
earth’s western side. The hacienda’s beauty is as remarkable as the fact
of its having survived the rage of the Revolution.

The bastard Revolution! A year before its outbreak, Don César had
been a thirty-five-year-old captain in command of a company of
Guardia Rural—the fearsome national mounted police of President
Porfirio Díaz—and he had earned the lasting personal gratitude of
Don Porfirio for his company’s heroic rescue of the president’s niece
and her party of travelers besieged at a desolate Durango outpost by
a band of Yaqui marauders. Captain Calveras and his men had killed
a dozen of the savages and captured ten, including their chief. But
one of the travelers had received a fatal wound and a pregnant woman
among them had miscarried. Hence, rather than send the captives to
the henequen plantations in the Yucatán as was customary, Captain
Calveras hanged them in the nearest village square—all but the chief,
whom he executed by tying one of the Indian’s legs to one horse and
the other leg to another and then lashing the horses into a sprint in
opposite directions. He telegraphed his report to the headquarters office at Hermosillo and by day’s end he received notice of Don Porfirio’s appreciation and of an immediate promotion to the rank of
comandante.

Two months later, in still another battle with still other Yaquis,
Comandante Calveras took an arrow through a thigh and up into the
hip. It was three days before he could present himself to a surgeon and
by then the infection was so deeply rooted that the surgeon spoke of
amputation of the entire leg. The comandante rejected that procedure
with a promise that if he should awaken from the surgery without his
leg he would hang the doctor. He survived the operation with the leg
intact but the hip was in permanent ruin. He would evermore walk
with a limp and he could no longer sit a horse for more than a few