Under the Skin (24 page)

A woman shrilled and people leaped up from the picnic tables
and rammed into each other as some tried to back away from the
fight and some tried to get closer. I was shouldering through the
crowd and catching glimpses of the Millers and Rogerson kicking at
Chente and even through all the yelling I heard one of the brothers
shouting something about the greaser sonofabitch putting his hands
on their sister. Then Chente had him by the leg and got him down
and started punching him as the other brother and Rogerson kept on
kicking and there was a haze of dust and women were shrieking and
men cussing and bellowing to break them up, break them up. The
lines of the overhead lights had been jostled somehow and the shadows were wavering and giving the whole scene an eerie look.

I shoved my way out of the crush of people and saw both Millers
locked up with Chente on the ground and the three of them punching and rolling around while a half-dozen men were jumping all
around them looking for an opening to grab one or another and pull
them apart. Uncle Cullen was struggling to pry Reuben away from
Larry Rogerson whose head was locked under Reuben’s arm. Rogerson was worming around in Reuben’s grip, and as I ran toward them
I saw that he had a knife in his hand. And saw him stab Reuben in
the stomach and in the chest.

Reuben’s arms fell away from Rogerson and he sagged back
against Uncle Cullen who was hugging him from behind. Uncle
Cullen staggered under the sudden weight and fell to his knees with
Reuben still in his arms. I ran up to them and Uncle Cullen was
pressing a hand to the wound over Reuben’s heart and croaking, “Son,
son . . .” Reuben’s eyes were open but they weren’t seeing anything
anymore.

fighters and some were still yelling to break it up and some were
laughing at the attempts being made to stop them. Only the folk
closest to us had seen what had happened to Reuben. Women were
crying and somebody kept saying, “Oh my God oh my God...”

Rogerson was gawking down at us, still holding the knife. He
looked at me and his eyes showed a lot of white and he flung the knife
away and stepped back with his open hands up in front of him. All
the blabber and shouting around me suddenly sounded very far away.
I took the pearlhandled switchblade out of my pocket and snicked out
the blade.

I had a vague sense of people drawing away from me as I walked
up to Rogerson and he started to say something but I never heard a
word of it. I grabbed him by the collar and jerked him toward me and
stuck the blade in his belly all the way to the hilt. He made a sound
like a small yawn and grabbed my shoulders as if he’d suddenly
thought of something real important to tell me. I gave the knife a
twist and jerked it sideways and blood gushed hot all over my lower
arm. I pulled out the blade and stepped back and he put his hands to
the wound and a bulge of blue gut showed between his fingers. His
pants were dark with blood. I stabbed him again—in the chest, just
like he’d stabbed Reuben—and he dropped to his knees and a bunch
of women screamed at the same time as he fell on his face and lay still.

I stared around at the horrified faces, and the shouting and crying
and confusion rose back to normal volume. Maybe the other fight had
finally been stopped, I didn’t know, but there were more people
around us now, a lot of them yelling to know what happened and a
bunch of others all telling them at once.

I retracted the blade into the haft and put the knife back in my
pocket and turned to see about Uncle Cullen. He had let go of
Reuben and was clutching at his own chest, his face twisted in pain.
I helped him to his feet and asked if he thought he could make it out
to the truck and he nodded but his face clenched even tighter. I

pointed to his hat and somebody picked it up and handed it to me
and I put it on my uncle’s head and my fingers left smudges of
Rogerson’s blood on it. I heard somebody shouting that the sheriff
was too drunk to stand up and others yelling to know where a goddam deputy was.

“Would some of you bring Reuben?” I said. There was a general
hesitation and then three or four guys picked Reuben up and brought
him along behind me as I half-dragged Uncle Cullen out to the parking lot, his grunting breath hot against my neck.

It might have been different if the sheriff had been sober or there
had been any other lawmen around, but nobody said anything to me,
nobody tried to stop me. They laid Reuben in the bed of the truck
and I settled Uncle Cullen into the passenger side of the cab and
then got behind the wheel. I pulled the truck into the flow of vehicles leaving the lot and a minute later we were rolling back toward
the ranch.

f I had any thoughts on the drive home I would never remember
what they were. I must’ve known that the life I’d been living was
done with. I must’ve expected to be arrested pretty damn quick. Arrested and jailed for the gutting of unarmed Larry Rogerson in front
of dozens of witnesses. Then tried and convicted. Maybe I wondered
what it was like to die in the electric chair. Maybe I didn’t think
about much of anything.

I could hear Uncle Cullen’s wet breathing in the dark as the truck
bounced along over the rough dirt road. And then I couldn’t hear him
anymore. He was slumped awkwardly against the door, his hat fallen
off and down by his boots. I stopped the truck and pulled him upright and felt for a pulse on his neck but there wasn’t one anymore. I
eased him back against the door and put his hat on him and got the
truck going again.

Pretty soon the house came into view and I saw that all the windows on the lower floor were lit up. For a minute I thought the law
was already there and waiting for me. But there weren’t any unfamiliar vehicles in sight.

Aunt Ava came out on the porch and watched me drive up. Over
in front of the bunkhouse a few of the hands were gathered around a
guitar player. I parked at the house and Aunt Ava came down the
steps.

I got out of the cab, not knowing how to tell her what happened.
She stepped around me and looked in the cab at Uncle Cullen for a
minute, then stepped over and stared down at Reuben in the bed. She
reached over the bed panel to brush his hair from his face.

“I’m so god-awful sorry, mam, but—”
“Helen Morgan telephoned a few minutes ago,” she said, referring
to a woman who ran a small bookstore in Marfa where Aunt Ava liked
to browse. “She was there and saw it. She told me about the fight
and... about Reuben. She said Mr. Youngblood was all right. Ailing, she said, but all right.”
Her tone was almost as matter of fact as the one she’d use in asking if I’d gotten all the items on her grocery list whenever I came
back from town. Almost. But there was something else in it this
time. It sounded like it might be anger.
“He was, mam, but on the way home... well...”
“Yes,” she said. “So I see.”
I rubbed at my chin with the back of my hand and she stared at it
and I saw that my whole hand was dark with dried blood and I stuck
the hand in my back pocket.
“That’s not all of it, mam. I believe I’m in trouble. I—”
“You
are
in trouble,” she said. “Helen told me what you did.” She
looked off in the direction of the county road, then turned back to
me. “You did what you had to, James Rudolph. Now you’ve got to
get away from here—right now. You can’t take the truck, they’ll be

I said I wanted to get my leather jacket and the top-break revolver
from under my pillow and she said, “I’ll get them. You hurry with
that horse.”

She rushed up the porch steps and into the house and called for
Carlotta to put some food in a sack and I saw her go up the stairs.
All the vaqueros were outside the bunkhouse now and watching
me as I headed for the stable. Esteban came over and fell in beside me
and asked if there was anything he could do. I told him Chente was
probably in the Marfa jail for fighting and would need someone to
bail him out.
“Seguro que lo soltamos,” he said. But what could he do for
me
?
I said for him to keep his eyes and ears open, that I would write to
him to find out how things stood.
“Muy bien, jefecito,” he said.
I was swift about saddling the Appaloosa. Jack could sense my tension and his ears twitched with excitement. I swung into the saddle and
reached down to shake Esteban’s hand and I saw his eyes take in the dry
blood. Then I hupped the horse out of the stable and over to the house.
She was waiting with a small sack of food and my jacket and a
cloth bundle shaped like a half-deflated football. She handed me the
jacket and I put it on and then took the food sack from her and
reached around and stuffed it into the rightside saddlebag while she
put the bundle in the left one.
“What’s that?”
“Something for you,” she said, buckling down the flap. She took
the top-break from her apron pocket and gave it to me. I opened the
breech and checked the loads and closed it up again and slipped the
revolver into my waistband. I told her to give my Sharps rifle to Esteban and let him know he could have my horse. I couldn’t think of
anything else I owned that I could bequeath to anybody.

She was standing with the light of the house behind her and it was
hard to see her face clearly. She turned suddenly toward the distant
road and I looked and saw two sets of headlights coming our way and
then heard the rasping of the motors. She’d always had the senses of
a cat.

I reined the Jack horse around and hupped off toward the backcountry to the east.
When I turned to wave goodbye she was already out of sight.

rode steadily till a couple of hours before dawn, then reined up
and tethered the Appaloosa in some scrub grass and rolled myself up in my bedroll and slept till sunrise, and then I got going
again. I held to a course a half-mile or so south of the railroad. I rode
through the day and into the night and stopped and made a fireless
camp. Since riding off from the YB I had tried not to think about
Reuben, but I finally couldn’t help it and I let myself remember
everything about him—and my throat got hot and tight, my chest
hollow. He had been more brother to me than cousin and I’d never
have a better friend. And Uncle Cullen—that damn good man. Aunt
Ava would miss them both terribly but I doubted she would make
any show of her grief, and people would gossip about her lack of
proper sorrow. But the vaqueros held her in great respect and I knew
she could manage the ranch on her own.

Toward the end of the second day I was a few miles south of
Marathon. I watered the horse at a shady creek where a few kids were
splashing and where I ate the last of the food Carlotta had packed for
me. There was still about an hour of daylight left. When I finished
the stale biscuit stuffed with a chunk of greasy ham I took the bundle out of the other bag to see what it held. It was tied with twine
and was heavier than it looked.

I cut the twine with my switchblade. The cloth covering turned
out to be a pillowcase wrapped around a revolver and a couple of
tightly folded newspaper clippings. The gun was an old singleaction .44-caliber Colt with grips of yellowed ivory carved with
Mexican eagles.

I’d never seen her touch a gun, not even a rabbit rifle. Where had
she gotten this? Her father? A brother, an uncle? I didn’t know if she
had
any brothers or uncles. She had always refused to talk about her
family, no matter how often Reuben had asked about it when we were
younger. But it was all I could figure, that some man—probably one
in her family—had given it to her, back when. And now she’d given
it to me.

It fit my hand like it had been made for me, felt as familiar as my
own skin. The embossed eagles were worn smooth and the burring at
the top of the hammer had been thumbed dulled, but the Colt was in
fine condition. How many hands had held it? I wondered. How many
rounds had it fired in its time? How many men had it shot? It was
fully loaded. I worked its action, cocked and uncocked it, put it on
half-cock and spun the cylinder. I opened the gate and dropped a
round into my hand and felt its weight, then put the bullet back into
the chamber and thumbed the gate closed and eased the hammer
down. I took the Smith & Wesson out of my pants and replaced it
with the Colt and tucked the top-break into the saddlebag.

The larger of the two clippings was from a 1914 Mexico City
newspaper and was a report on Pancho Villa’s and Emiliano Zapata’s
takeover of the capital during the Revolution. It included a large
photograph of about two dozen Mexicans crowding around Villa, who
was seated in an ornate high-backed chair. He was in a military uniform but I recognized him immediately. There were a half-dozen photos of him on display in a Mexican café in Marfa, and the town’s gun
store had pictures of him on the wall too.

age of sixteen he’d killed the hacendado who raped his sister, how he
was forced to hide in the mountains and become a bandit. Then in
1910 the Revolution changed his life. He became commander of the
great Division of the North and one of Mexico’s greatest heroes. The
newspapers couldn’t get enough of him. The American press flocked
around him every time he visited the border. It was said he had a
dozen wives and was a hell of a dancer. He was a fearless fighter, they
said, a natural genius at military tactics—and a fearsome man, a merciless executioner of his prisoners. He could have been president of
the country but he said he was not wise enough to be its leader. He
captured Mexico City but couldn’t hold it, and afterward, when his
great army was beaten at last, he was forced to return to the mountains and once more live like a bandit. But then he did something
that got the whole world’s attention—he invaded the United States.
He raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico, and shot up the army
camp there. A massive U.S. Army force, including airplanes, was sent
across the border to find him and kill him. They tried for a year and
couldn’t do it. The Yankee intrusion into Mexico only made him
more of a hero to his countrymen. In 1920 he finally made peace with
the Mexican government and—in a funny twist for a guy who had
fought against hacendados all his life—he was given a hacienda as
part of the deal. But even in retirement he was feared by many powerful men, and a few years later he was assassinated.

The caption under the photograph said Villa was sitting in the
President’s Chair in the National Palace. It identified the hawkishlooking man on his immediate left as Emiliano Zapata and the man
at his right hand as Tomás Urbina. But the guy who really caught my
attention was a large man standing at the very edge of the picture,
holding his white Montana hat in a dark big-knuckled hand, his hair
neatly combed, his shirt buttoned to the neck under his open coat, his
watch fob dangling from the coat’s breast pocket. His face had been
circled in ink and he was looking at something or someone behind