Under the Skin (14 page)

spection of the slots—and they would take the necessary measures if
the machine tallies didn’t match the ones on the Red Shoes reports.
It was a job I normally would’ve been tending to.

he health club was always open to members—weekends and
holidays included—and there were already a dozen guys there,
the usual bunch who always showed up early. Club rats, Watkins the
trainer called them. As the morning wore on, still more members
would come in for their regular workouts or just to sweat last night’s
booze out of their system.

The large room echoed with the huffing and grunting of hard effort, with the slapping of jump ropes and the clanking of barbells,
punches smacking the heavy bags. The daily reek of sweat and liniment was already starting to build.

It had been a good while since my schedule let me have a morning workout, and Otis was glad to see me come in during his shift. I
figured he’d want to go a few rounds and I was ready to oblige him.
But he was booked solid with his club rat boxing lessons for the next
two days.

“I got a ten o’clock open on Saturday,” he said. “Don’t tell me
you’ll be out of town.”
I said I had to hang around town all week, so Saturday was fine.
“I’m locking us in at ten,” he said, writing “lesson to hotshot” in
ink on his big desktop calendar.
I took the pen from his hand and drew a line through the word
“to” in his notation and wrote “from” above it.
“Cocky sumbuck,” he said. “We’ll see. Three three-minute, no
headgear, Watkins refs?”
“You’re on,” I said.

I went to my locker and got into my shorts and T-shirt and ring
shoes. I’d never been in a gym before I got to Galveston, never fought
with gloves or according to any rules. I’d known how to fight—not
box,
fight
—since I was a boy. Nobody had taught me how, I just
knew. And I learned early that a real fight had no rules. And nobody
stopped it. A real fight wasn’t over until one of the fighters couldn’t
fight anymore, and even then it sometimes wasn’t over. Boxing wasn’t
real fighting, it was an exercise of skill and endurance, a test of your
self-control. It required you to hold to the rules no matter if you were
losing, no matter how hurt or angry you might be, no matter how
sure you were you could kill the other guy if you just said to hell with
the rules. Fighting in the ring exercised your discipline. It’s what I
liked about it.

I did a few sets of sit-ups on the slantboard, then skipped rope for
a while, breathing deep and easy. After that I put on the bag gloves
and pounded the heavy bag till my T-shirt was pasted to me. Then I
moved over to the speed bag.

I started slowly, building a smooth rhythm of alternating lefts
and rights. Little by little I increased the tempo until I had the bag
ricocheting in a steady racketing blur that sounded like a train
highballing by. I was aware of the attention I’d attracted, the guys
gathered behind me. Even Otis couldn’t work the light bag better
than I could. I kept at it until my arms felt packed with burning
concrete, then gave the bag a hard overhand that shook the boards
and I stepped away and gestured to the others that the bag was all
theirs.

A few of the guys applauded and somebody let out a whistle.
Otis had interrupted his boxing lesson to lean on the ropes and
watch me work the speed bag. I grinned at him and stripped off the
gloves, then mopped my face with a towel. He smiled and shook his
head and then went back to showing some husky guy in the ring how
to slip a punch.

Unlike the stores, most of the cafés were open for business. I went
into De Jean’s and had a T-bone and a bottle of beer. I finished up
with coffee and a cigarette as I watched the sparse pedestrian traffic
pass by the sidewalk window.

It was strange to be so idle. My days usually consisted of going
here and there to take care of this or that. The other Ghosts tended
to the routine jobs around the island, including the daily cash pickups, but the Maceos had dealings all over this region of Texas, and
sometimes Rose would hand me a list of jobs that took me out of
town for days or even a couple of weeks at a time. I frequently went
up to Houston, sometimes out to San Antone, now and then down
to Corpus. More often than not I took LQ or Brando with me, usually both.

Among my assignments were visits to guys who’d been slow to
make loan repayments or turn over the daily slot cuts. They usually
got their accounts up to date real quick after I gave them a warning.
Everybody knew one warning was all Rose ever gave, and few of them
were late with the money again. Now and then somebody would require a second visit but nobody ever needed a third.

The ones who’d been doctoring their books were another matter.
They never failed to correct themselves, either, but their transgression
was more serious than a late payment, and it had to be punished, even

as a first offense. A broken hand would usually do, but sometimes a
foot was also called for, maybe an arm or a leg, sometimes something
worse. It depended on how long they’d been at it and how much
they’d skimmed.

Then there were the robbers. The island clubs never got robbed—
they were much too well protected—but now and then some little
joint on the mainland or in a neighboring county would get hit, some
club or café or filling station with Maceo machines in it, and although the stickups were rarely for more than peanuts, they included
Maceo peanuts. Only the dumbest stickup guys would ever hit a
place without first making sure it had no Maceo connection. Next to
an outsider who tried to cut in on Galveston, nobody got Rose as hot
under the collar as a robber. Any business that had even one Maceo
machine in it was guaranteed protection, and Rose took his guarantees seriously.

Most of the stickup men were such dopes they didn’t even leave
the local area after pulling their heist. They’d hole up with a relative
or a friend or a sweetheart. But the Maceos had a standing reward
offer for information about robberies—the reward sometimes more
than what was taken in a holdup—and the information always came,
as often as not from the people the robbers were hiding with. It never
took me long to track them down, and when I did, there was nothing to discuss. If they had the money with them, fine, and if they
didn’t, the hell with it. Not only was the money rarely very much, its
recovery wasn’t the point, not to Rose. As he once put it, “What I
want is those bastards removed from the living”—which made me
chuckle and say he sometimes had a touch of the poet in him. Which
made him give me a look and say he sometimes thought I was fucking touched. In any case, once the thieves were removed from the living, he made sure the news got around.

with, no matter how far he’d gone. But reliable information about a
guy who lammed the state was hard to come by, and even when Rose
thought the tip was solid he was reluctant to send more than one man
on the job. He believed one man had a better chance of getting
around unnoticed in unfamiliar territory and a better chance of getting back out if the job went bad. I agreed. The only two times he
sent me out of Texas I went alone.

I ran down the first guy in a rooming house in a rundown section
of St. Joseph, Missouri, exactly where the rat had said he’d be. I
slipped in after midnight. The stairs creaked but if any of the other
tenants woke up they stayed put and minded their own business,
lucky for them. The guy’s doorlock was even easier to jimmy than the
one in the kitchen. He didn’t wake up till I cut his throat. I’d killed
with a knife before but never cut a throat—although I’d come close
one time, when I was still a kid—but I’d seen Brando do it and knew
they didn’t make much noise that way, just a kind of gargle like water
going down a partly clogged drain. I thought I’d be able to avoid the
mess better than Brando had, but I wasn’t. I had to trade my bloody
shirt for a clean one of the guy’s, and I went out with my ruined coat
rolled under my arm. He’d made off with about five hundred dollars
but I found less than fifty in the place.

After that job I started using an ice pick for the close work. You
had to be more exact with a pick but it was a hell of a lot neater.
In the other case, the robber hit a Texas City club for three grand
and then went to hide at his brother’s house on the Pearl River, a few
miles south of Jackson, Mississippi. The place was so isolated I didn’t
have to be very clever about it. I waited till dark and then left the car
in among the pines and walked back up the road to the house. I found
his car parked around in back where it couldn’t be seen from the road.
I peeked in all the windows and saw that there was nobody in the
place except him and a girl. He was in his undershorts, the girl in Tshirt and panties. I couldn’t spot a gun anywhere.

I kicked open the door to the kitchen where they were having supper and shot him through his open mouth before he could even stand
up. The back of his head splattered the wall behind him and he
drained off his chair.

The girl shrieked and jumped away from the table and then
clapped her hands over her mouth like she wasn’t all that new to situations suddenly gone bad and knew that rule number one was shut
up. But her eyes were huge with fear. She was a slim bob-haired
blonde with freckles and nice legs. She looked about seventeen. One
of her cheeks had a pale purple bruise.

“Where’s the guns?” I said.
“He aint got but the one.” She nodded at the kitchen counter behind me. I picked it up—a snubnose five-shot .38—and dropped it
in my coat pocket. Then I stepped out the kitchen door to see if any
lights had come on anywhere, some nearby cabin, some neighbor in
the woods who maybe heard the .44’s blast, but there was nothing. I
went back in and shut the door.
“The money?” I said. And was pleasantly surprised when she led
me into the bedroom—being careful to keep from stepping in any
of the blood spreading from the guy’s head—and pulled a valise
out of the closet. She put it on the bed and opened it to show the
cash.
“I knew it had to be somebody’s,” she said. “I knew he didn’t win
it in no card game.” Her accent was swamp rat to the bone.
I riffled through the money. It looked to be almost all there.
“I don’t know how much all he spent of it,” she said. “I got about
four dollars in my shirt yonder. You want I should get it?”
“Never mind,” I said.
“You gonna hurt me?” She looked all set for a bad answer.
“You help him steal it?”
“No sir, I never did any such.”
“Then I’ve got no reason to hurt you.”

“Truth to tell, I didn’t never expect to see him again. Then he
shows up in Port Allen a coupla weeks ago and says he’s hit the jackpot and to come on if I was coming. Momma said he was no-count
and I was a harebrained fool to go with him and she was right both
times.”

She shook her head. “Probably his brother Carl. He was all the
time beating on Carl and finally run him off from his own house—
can you imagine? I wouldn’t blame Carl a bit if he told on him.”

She glanced toward the kitchen and her mouth tightened. “I told
him he hit
me
again I’d stick him with a butcher knife. I meant it too.
Momma always said they got to sleep sometime.”

I knew her story without having to hear it. I knew a dozen just like
it: sweet girl takes up with some mean bastard who mistreats her till
she goes sour and sometimes gets pretty mean herself. Some of them
might deserve a slap now and then—some of them needed it—but
none of them deserved to be made mean. This one was headed that
way but might still take a lucky turn.

“What’s your name, girl?”
“Sally. It’s Sally May Ritter.”
“Can you drive that car out there, Sally?”
“Yessir. I kinda can.”
I took about three hundred from the valise and gave it to her. I

told her to go to the second nearest depot, not the nearest one. “Park
a few blocks away and then walk to the station. Get yourself a ticket
to anywhere else.”

She stared at the money and then at me.
“And try to be more careful about the company you keep,” I said.
She said she aimed to be. Then said, “Where you from, anyway?”

“Someplace else. Now get a move on.”
She was packing a bag fast as I went out the door.
When we didn’t know where a robber had lammed, Rose would