Under the Skin (25 page)

He looked strangely familiar, but for a moment I didn’t understand why. And then I did. If I’d worn my hair a little shorter, if I’d
trimmed my mustache a little neater, if my eyes had been black instead of bright blue... I could’ve been looking at a picture of myself. The caption said he was Rodolfo Fierro.

I’d heard of him too, of course. Who hadn’t? El Matador, they
called him. El Señor Muerte. Manos de Sangre. El Carnicero—the
Butcher. He had a dozen such names. He was Villa’s chief executioner.
The border Mexicans spoke of him in the same tone they used in
speaking of Death itself. There were dozens of stories about him.
They said he shot three hundred prisoners one afternoon in a big corral in Ciudad Juárez, that he gave them a chance, ten at a time, to run
to a stone wall and climb over it, and he shot every one of them except the last, whom he deliberately let get away. But I’d never seen
his picture, nor had anybody I knew. Until now.

The other clipping was a newspaper picture of Fierro by himself.
It was taken from only a few feet away and had no caption. It
showed him sitting in a chair at a sidewalk table, his face turned to
the camera, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his Montana hat, his
coatflap hanging away from the holster on his hip and exposing the
butt of the Frontier Colt and its ivory grip carved with a Mexican
eagle.

I stared and stared at that picture as the sky turned the color of
fresh blood and the darkness slowly rose around me.
She sure as hell knew how to keep a secret, my mother.
The way I figured it, he’d either given her the Colt or she had
stolen it from him. And she’d clipped these pictures. And before she
died she’d shared the secret with her sister and given her the clippings and the gun. I wondered if Aunt Ava would ever have told me
the truth if I hadn’t had to run.

n a gray and windy afternoon two days later I sold both the Jack
horse and my saddle to a rancher in Sanderson who knew a good
mount when he saw one, even one that had been ridden as hard as I’d
been riding this one. I kept the saddlebags and my blanket. He asked
me no questions except if I’d sign a bill of sale, which I did. I patted
the horse and said so long to it. I turned down the rancher’s offer of a
bed for the night but accepted a ride into town.

I hadn’t eaten since the night before when I’d cooked a skinny
jackrabbit over a low fire. So I went into a café and ordered a thick
steak with gravy and fried potatoes, green beans and cornbread, a big
glass of iced tea, and a slab of pecan pie for dessert. When I was done
eating, the two plates looked freshly washed. The waitress gave me a
wink and said, “Appetite’s working just fine, hey?” I left her a halfdollar tip.

I went over to the railtracks and followed them eastward for about
a hundred yards and then sat on my saddlebags in the meager shade
of a mesquite and waited.

An hour later an eastbound train pulled into the Sanderson station
for only as long as it took to load and unload mail, and then it started
chugging on again. I had thought to wait till dark to jump a freight
but I didn’t see any sign of the railroad bulls I’d heard so much about
from YB hands who’d ridden the rails, so I said the hell with it and
jogged out to the track and picked out a boxcar with a partly open
door as it came rolling up, slowly gaining speed.

I ran alongside the open door and pitched the saddlebags and
blanketroll through it and then grabbed hold of the iron rung on the
door with both hands and swung a foot up and hooked a heel on the
car floor. I brought up my other leg and started wriggling myself in

He was a tramp with dirt-colored teeth and he kicked me twice
more in the side before I worked myself far enough into the car to brace
myself. On the next kick I snatched hold of his pant leg and pulled him
off balance and he fell on top of me and almost rolled out of the car. He
tried to scrabble back from the open door but I grabbed him by the collar and yanked hard and he went sailing out of the car with a yell.

The door on the other side of the car was shut and another guy was
kneeling close to it and next to my opened saddlebags. He was grinning at me and holding the S&W top-break. He wore a baseball cap
over a stringy growth of hair that hung down to his collar.

“Good goddamn riddance,” he said. “I was awful tired of Weldon’s
company. Same dumbshit stories all the time, you know what I
mean?” He turned the gun in his hand, examining it from different
angles. “Aint this a pretty thing, though? Aint seen one of these in a
coon’s age.”

“Yeah, it’s an old one,” I said, slowly sitting up and making a big
show of the pain from the kicks I’d taken, probing my ribs gingerly
and then easing a hand behind me and wincing big. “Christ almighty,
he like to broke my back.”

The tramp pointed the gun at me but hadn’t cocked it. “Young
fella like yourself don’t need no gun to defend hisself as much as a old
fella like me. Reckon I’ll just hold on to it.”

“Sure. Keep it.”
“Well thankee, son. You real generous. Now do me just one more
kindness and jump offa this train. I appreciate we’re moving along
right quick now but you hit the ground running and then roll just
right you probly won’t get busted up too bad.”
“Can I at least have my bedroll,” I said. “My last two dollars are in
there.”
He turned to look at the bedroll and I pulled the Mexican Colt

from my waistband under the back of my jacket, cocking it as I
brought it around. He heard the racheting hammer and snapped his
attention back to me just in time to see me shoot him through the
wishbone. The gunblast was loud but got swallowed almost instantly
in the rumbling of the train. He flopped backward and against the
closed door and fell over on his side with his legs in a twist.

I got up and stood over him with the .44 cocked and pointed at
his head and he looked at me without expression as the light drained
out of his eyes and he died. I took the top-break from his hand and
put it back in the saddlebag. I snugged the .44 at the small of my
back again and then opened the door a little way. There was nothing
to see but passing desert. I sat and cooled myself in the rushing air
and watched the country go clacking by.

ready to show them what rough was. But the only guys to peek into
the car were a couple of kids about thirteen or fourteen who asked if
anybody was in there and when I said yeah they asked if they could
share the car with me. I told them to get in and keep quiet and they
tossed their bindles in and helped each other aboard and then I eased
the door to till it was almost closed. They said they were brothers,
Charlie and Fred, and as we passed the miles together I came to learn
that they’d had enough of their damn stepdaddy and were going to
Houston to live with their uncle Stephen. The uncle didn’t know they
were coming but they were sure he would be glad to see them, him
and Aunt Beulah both.

They each had a half-dozen peanut butter sandwiches in their bindles
and they were quick to offer me one. I was so hungry I took it down in
about four bites and they insisted I have another. I said it was a long way
to Houston and they were going to need all the food they had but they
said ah hell, we was hobo buddies, wasn’t we. So I took the sandwich. I
asked if they had any money and they said they sure did, they had four
bits apiece. I gave them two dollars, which they refused until I convinced them I wasn’t paying for the sandwiches, I was only helping out
some hobo buddies who could use a little dough on their long trip. I said
they could pay me back next time we ran into each other. “Well . . . in
that case,” Charlie the older one said, “all right then.”

We went through Spofford, Uvalde, Hondo, the floor of the car vibrating so hard it was tough to get any sleep. When the train began
to slow on its approach to the San Antonio yard, I shook hands with
the boys and wished them luck. I secretly hoped they wouldn’t get
robbed and maybe worse by the first wolves they ran into.

The train didn’t seem to be going all that fast now, but I didn’t
know how deceptive train speed could be.
“They say you supposed to try and hit the ground running,” young
Fred said.
“So I’ve been told,” I said. “Thanks for reminding me.”

I tossed out my saddlebags and bedroll, then crouched low at the
edge of the car floor—and then jumped and tried to hit the ground
running.

I went tumbling and flapping every which way and it was a wonder I didn’t crack my skull. I gashed a cheek and banged up a knee
and cut my elbows and pretty much felt like I’d been stomped by a
herd of horses. I sat up and saw Fred and Charlie looking back at me
from the boxcar. I waved like the landing had gone just perfect and
they waved back.

The knee was bloody and hurt like a sonofabitch and at first I was
afraid I’d broken it. But I could stand up and hobble around so I
knew it was just badly bruised. I picked up my hat and went back
and got my saddlebags and roll and then gimped on out to the nearest road and found a bus stop. About an hour later a bus came along
with a sign saying
DOWNTOWN
. I got aboard and went into San Antonio, where I hadn’t been since shortly after I was born.

I didn’t do much of anything during the next two weeks except
sleep and read and let the knee heal up. When I wasn’t reading I’d
sit in the tattered armchair by the window and smoke and watch
the street and sidewalk traffic passing by. For exercise I’d do sitting pushups off the arms of the chair, raising and lowering myself
till my arms were burning and about to cramp, then I’d rest a bit
and then do another set until I couldn’t raise myself off the chair
at all. Then I’d sleep some more. I kept both revolvers under the
pillow.

I wanted to know how things were at the YB but I didn’t think
it was a good idea to write to Aunt Ava directly. Even if I didn’t put
a return address on the envelope, somebody at the post office could
be keeping an eye on her mail, with instructions to let the sheriff
know about any letter that looked suspicious. It wasn’t really very
likely they’d go to all that trouble but I didn’t want to take any
chances. It was even less likely, though, that they’d be watching the
vaqueros’ mail, and after lying low for more than a month I finally
wrote a note to Esteban. I asked how things stood and how my aunt
was doing and said to tell her I was all right. I didn’t tell him where
I was living but said to write me back in care of general delivery at
the post office on Commerce, which was two blocks from the
Nopales.

By then I was already getting around with a cane, and in another
week or so I didn’t need it anymore. I took my meals at a little Mex
café down the street. I went for a stroll every morning in a nearby
park, limping less every day. I’d sit on a bench in the sun and read the
local papers. Every afternoon I’d check in at the post office. One day
Esteban’s letter was waiting for me.

He wrote in a scrawl and mostly in Spanish as bad as his English,
but with a few English phrasings mixed in, pretty much the way he
usually talked. He said the police had questioned him and some of
the other vaqueros about me but the boys all said they had no idea