Under the Skin (22 page)
Chente passed me the glasses. Three of the thieves were at a small
fire raising a thin smoke, roasting something on a spit. The fourth
was about fifty yards downstream, mounted and watching over the
stolen herd as it watered from the creek and cropped at a sparse
growth of bank grass. There looked to be about three dozen head. Either Esteban had been wrong about how many we’d lost or the
rustlers had hit one or two other ranches besides the YB.
“Don’t look too awful worried, do they?” he said. “Taking a
leisurely dinner right out in the wide open.”
“Guess they didn’t figure anybody would come over the river after
them.”
He handed the binoculars to Chente, who had another long look
through them and then looked at me and said, “Pues?”
Reuben was watching me too, the same question in his eyes.
Now
what?
I scrabbled backward out of the line of sight of the rustlers’ camp
and stood up and hustled over to the black and dug out the box of
cartridges and took the Sharps off the saddle horn and unbuckled the
heel of the buckskin sheath and slid the rifle out and tossed the sheath
over the saddle and hustled back to the cliff edge.
Chente was grinning. He moved over to give me more room and
flapped his hand at Reuben to do the same. I lay down between them,
Reuben on my right, a little big-eyed.
I looked at him. “
What?
You think they’ll give them back if we
just go down and ask real nice?”
Chente snickered.
Reuben’s face went red and he looked out at the rustlers on the
plain. “No . . . shit no.” He made a vague hand gesture. “It’s just...
they’re a hell of a way is all.”
He’d seen me hit watermelons with the Sharps at close to a halfmile on a downhill angle. But even though a man was a lot bigger
than a watermelon, these guys were at half again that distance. And
watermelons didn’t move around. And maybe he was thinking that
men anyway weren’t watermelons.
“Can’t get any closer except by going down the trail,” I said. “If
we do that they’ll spot us sure before we get halfway down. Got to be
from here.”
“Soon as you shoot, they’ll run, won’t they? Even if you hit one,
the others’ll run off with the stock.”
“No van a saber de donde viene el tiro,” Chente said. “Es demasiado lejos.”
“What?” Reuben said. “They won’t hear it?”
“They’ll hear it,” I said. “But they won’t know where it came from,
not at this range.”
I scanned the ground all around us and saw the rock I wanted. I
pointed and Chente sidecrawled over to retrieve it. He snugged it
into the dirt on the top lip of the slope in front of me. It was about
the size of a football and almost flat along the top.
I dumped a handful of the huge cartridges on the ground between
me and Reuben. “Every time I put out my hand,” I said to Reuben,
picking up one of the shells, “you put one of these in it. And don’t
keep me waiting.”
He nodded, but his face was tight and pale. He must’ve read my
eyes, because he said, “I’m okay—go on, do it.” He scooped up several
cartridges and held one up, showing me he was ready to hand it to me.
I squirmed around and set myself. Then levered the trigger guard
forward to drop the block and open the breech. I inserted the cartridge in the chamber and pulled the trigger guard back in place and
the breech slid closed.
Chente was watching the rustlers through the field glasses. I
thought about hitting the rider first, since he was the readiest to
make a getaway. But he’d probably fall somehow to spook his
mount—jerk the reins or slump against the horse’s head or get a foot
caught in a stirrup, something—and then the herd would spook too.
I didn’t want to scatter the jugheads all over hell’s half-acre if I could
help it. So I started with the guys at the fire.
I didn’t think about anything except making the shot. There was
no wind at all. The tricky part was the downward angle of trajectory. I put my eye to the vernier and gingerly adjusted the sight. I
took a bead on the guy squatting on his haunches who looked to be
tending the fire. Then moved the sight over to the one sitting on
the ground and facing my way. Then put the sight on the guy
standing over them, the one in the best position to run for cover. I
stayed on him. I rested the barrel on the rock for steadiness and
lined the sight on his head and thumbed back the hammer and set
the hair trigger.
The gunblast shook the air and rang up the mountain wall and
flew out over the prairie. The man’s hat jumped in the sunlight and
he went down like his bones had unhinged.
Reuben said.
That was my first one ever, and what I felt was proud—proud of
my own precision. I hadn’t expected to miss, but still it was a hell of
a shot. Later on, when I had more time to think about it, I felt... I
didn’t know what it was... a sort of quiver... way down under my
skin like something in my deepest blood. If there really was a God,
this had to be a feeling He knew everything about.
Reuben slapped a bullet into my palm and I reloaded faster than I
knew I could.
The herd by the creek was churning in a near spook. Not man nor
beast down there knew where the shot had come from. The rider was
reining his mount in circles and the other two guys at the fire were
on their feet and looking all around. Both of them seemed to be holding a pistol, and one of them was turning and turning in a low crouch
like he thought he might duck the next round, wherever it came
from.
My next shot clubbed his head backward and took him off his feet
and the report rolled away into the open plain.
“Hijo!” Chente said.
Half the herd bolted in our direction and the other lit out to westward. The rider didn’t know where to go—he spurred his horse in one
direction and then yanked it around and started in the other, then pulled
up again and reined his mount around and round in tight close turns.
The last one afoot was running toward the outcrop with his arms
covering his head like a man caught in the rain. I drilled him in the
back and he flung forward and lay spread-eagled on his face, forming
a small black X on the ground.
Now the horseman was galloping directly across my line of sight
like a shooting-gallery target. I gauged a lead on him and fired—and
both horse and rider went into a dusty rolling tumble. I’d meant to
hit the mount anywhere just to bring it down, but either the shot
killed it or the horse broke its neck because when it stopped rolling
it lay stone still. The rider wasn’t moving either.
“Ay,
Chihuahua
!” Chente said. He put down the glasses and looked
at me. “Qué tirador!”
“Qué rifle magnífico,” I said, patting the Sharps.
Reuben was gawking at the small dark figures littering the distant
ground. Then he turned to me and said, “Jesus, Jimmy—
all
of them!”
“Not the rider,” I said. “Hated shooting the horse but I didn’t
want to chance missing the guy and him getting out of range.”
“Hellfire, he probably broke his neck in fifteen places, the way he
went flying.
Jesus
.”
“Or could be he’s laying there thinking things over. Let’s go see.”
W
e followed the winding trail down to the flats. I’d slipped the
Sharps back into its sheath and moved the revolver to the
front of my pants. The horses that had come our way had settled
trail. Chente loose-herded them back toward the creek.
The rustlers were all Mexicans. The first one we came to was the
The rustlers were all Mexicans. The first one we came to was the
caliber round treated a human head about the same way it did a
watermelon—worse, actually, because a head was smaller and had
less of itself to spare. The top part of the guy’s skull was gone and
ants were swarming over what was left of his head. The look on his
face was suspicious—like he’d just heard something he couldn’t
believe.
Reuben leaned out from his saddle and puked. Chente glanced at
him without expression and then headed off to the creek to round up
the other horses still there. I thought the rustlers looked about how I
had expected guys shot with a buffalo rifle to look. I’d seen other dead
men, including one done in by a burst appendix and one drowned and
one who’d passed out drunk on the tracks and got run over by a train,
and the only difference among them was a matter of how neatly or how
messily they’d died. Long before I ever pulled the trigger on these
guys, I’d decided that dead was dead and there was no more reason to
get sick at the sight of a messy dead man than there was in getting
sick at the sight of a butchered beef. It was an opinion I pretty much
kept to myself.
“I’m all right,” Reuben said, wiping at his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “Caught me by surprise is all.”
“The others aint likely to look any better.”
“I said I’m all right.”
“Okay then.”
The next one had caught it just under the eye and the bullet had
stove in that side of his face and you couldn’t see his eyes for the ants.
He was lying faceup and the dirt under his head was a muddy red
mess. Reuben made a good show of indifference to this one, leaning
casually on his saddle horn and spitting off to the side.
The guy I shot in the back was lying on an even larger patch of
bloody earth. He’d taken the round through a lung.
The horse I shot was dead too. The bullet had hit him just above
the left ear and come out under its right eye.
The rider was still alive. He was on his back and his hat was
mashed up under his head and his eyes were squinting against the
overhead sun until my shadow fell over him and then they opened
wider and fixed on me. He didn’t look any older than Reuben.
“Mátame,” he said in a low rasp. “No me puedo mover. Mátame,
por amor de dios.”
Reuben’s Spanish was good enough to get the idea. “He say
kill
him?”
“He’s paralyzed.”
“Por favor...
mátame
.”
Reuben looked all around like he might’ve been searching for
somebody to ask for a better idea. Or like he was all of a sudden aware
of just how right he’d been in feeling a lot farther from home than
could be measured in miles.
It didn’t seem too complicated to me. The kid had been a horse
thief but now he was somebody who would cook to death under the
sun unless somebody saw to it that he didn’t.
I pulled the top-break from my pants and cocked it and aimed.
The kid closed his eyes. Reuben said, “Jesus, Jimmy...”
I fired and the kid’s head jerked and his right eye vanished in a
dark red hole and the dirt under his hair went bloody. Our horses
shrilled and spooked and I reined the black tight and talked to him
and Reuben soothed the Appaloosa and the animals shuddered and
blew and then were all right.
I put the revolver back in my pants. Chente sat his horse by the
herd at the creek and was staring off at the mountains. Reuben was
staring hard at the kid.
“Would
you
rather a bullet or a couple of days getting roasted?”
He turned to me. “I
know,
” he said. “It’s just... ah hell, Jimmy,
he wasn’t but a damn
boy
.”
So said Reuben Youngblood, not yet sixteen years old.
W
e set out to round up the runaways, leaving Chente with the
other horses at the creekside camp. We were at it for over an
hour and still may have missed a few, no telling, since we didn’t know
exactly how many there’d been to start with. When we got them back
to the camp and bunched them with the others and counted them up
we had twenty-eight head, thirteen with the YB brand, the others
wearing a brand that looked like a lopsided
A
with a flat top and one
extralong leg. None of us had seen it before. They must’ve been stolen
from somewhere north of the YB and been run farther than ours because they were the worse for wear.
Chente had searched the bodies and gone through the rustlers’
saddlepacks and laid out their belongings. There were only three
firearms—an old cap-and-ball Dance, a Colt double-action five-shot,
and a single-barrel twelve-gauge with both the barrel and the stock
cut down so that the thing looked more like a giant pistol than a
shotgun. Every man of them had some sort of knife on him, one of
them a fine switchblade with pearl grips on the haft and a spring so
strong the blade popped out like a magic trick. Chente had put all
their money in a small pile. There was seven dollars in paper and another dollar thirty in silver. The rest of the cash was in paper peso denominations and Mexican specie.
Reuben said he didn’t want any of the money or anything else of
theirs. I took the switchblade and gestured for Chente to help himself to the rest. He scooped up the money and stuck it in his pockets
and picked up the cutdown and took it to his horse and wedged the
short barrel into the saddle scabbard along with his rifle.
charred beyond all possibility of being edible. Chente tried it anyway
and chewed a mouthful for a while before spitting it out. I fetched the
lunch sack Reuben had brought with him but Reuben didn’t want
any of that either, so Chente and I split the three beef sandwiches and
the six flour tortillas folded up over refried beans. There were some
apples too, and we gave them to our horses.
While Chente and I ate, Reuben kept glancing over at the dead
men. I knew what was on his mind.
“It’s gonna be slower going back, driving that bunch of jugheads,”
I said. “We spare the time to dig four graves and we’ll never get back
to the river before sundown. Your daddy’s gonna have a shit fit as it
is, but it’ll be fifty times worse if we aint back by dark.
And
we’ll play
hell getting these animals across the river at night.”
“It don’t seem right, leaving them lay to rot.”
Chente chuckled and said they wouldn’t have much of a chance to
rot. He jutted his chin upward, directing our attention to a pair of
vultures circling way up high—and still others were coming at a distance out of the sierras to the west. I’d always marveled at the mysterious way they got the news so fast.
“Los zopilotes tienen que comer tambien,” Chente said.
“Shit,” Reuben said. “How’d you like them to feed on
you
?”
Chente said they might very well do that someday, whether he
liked it or not. Then he put his head back and yelled at the vultures
overhead that today wasn’t the day.
And we all busted out laughing for no reason except the grandly
certain feeling that today wasn’t the day for any of us.