Under the Skin (33 page)

azine and showed us how the weapon’s action operated, then snapped
the magazine back in place and worked the slide to chamber a round
and then set the safety.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, patting the rifle, “this here’s about
half of any plan a man will ever need.”
There was also a shoulder-strap canvas packet holding five more
loaded BAR magazines and a couple of cartons of ten-gauge shells.
I asked Sanchez who provided the weapons. He didn’t know, but
Don Lalo had instructed him to be sure to show it to us. I told LQ
and Brando what Sanchez said and LQ wondered how come
Calderone would do us such a kindness.
“Rose is how come,” I said.

e went into a restaurant and had chicken enchiladas and beer
and fought off the flies while we ate our supper and studied
the roadmap. La Hacienda de Las Cadenas wasn’t on the map but its
approximate locale had been marked with an
X
and we figured its
distance from Villa Acuña at roughly 400 road miles. The only town
of size on our route was Monclova, which lay almost due south about
200 miles. The map showed only a few scattered placenames along
the way—all of them little villages, the waiter had told us, and none
with electricity. At Monclova we’d turn west into what looked like
even rougher country.

“It’s nothing but desert for at least a hundred miles to either side
of the damn road,” Brando said.
“I bet this here says ‘Middle of Nowhere,’ ” LQ said, tapping his
finger on a blank portion of the map labeled
BOLSON DE MAPIMÍ
. Back
on the YB I’d always heard that the Mapimí was one of the meanest
deserts anywhere, but I didn’t see any reason to mention it just now.
The last fifty miles or so of our route would take us through the south
end of it.

We then studied the diagram of the rectangular hacienda compound. It was enclosed by high walls and marked as 250 yards deep
and a quarter-mile wide, its length running east-west. Its only entryway was a double-doored gate in the center of the south wall. Directly under the gate description was a penciled note in Spanish
saying that the gate was always open and posted with an armed
guard. The driveway into the compound ran straight for about
seventy-five yards to a big courtyard. The casa grande was on the far
side of the courtyard and faced south toward the gate. Another notation said the servants’ quarters were on the lower floor, the family’s
rooms on the upper. There were various patios and small gardens all
about the house, and a large garden directly behind it. Just past the
big garden were a corral and a riding track, and, beyond them, a
mesquite thicket that ran the length of the compound’s rear wall. An
unbroken row of tiny penciled squares along the west wall was labeled as the peon living quarters. Over against the east wall, adjacent to the woods, a small square indicated the stable. A square at
the southeast corner of the compound was the garage. Between them
was the vaquero bunkhouse.

The way I saw it, everything depended on getting past the gate. If
they were able to shut us out, the whole business could get pretty
bitchy. Once we were inside the compound, all we had to do was get
to the house, get Daniela, and then get out again.

“Sounds so damn simple,” LQ said, “I can see why you were ready
to do it by yourself.”
“Unless the guy’s got a bunch of pistoleros, I figure there
won’t
be
that much to it,” I said.
“That’s the thing,” Brando said. “What if he does have a bunch of
pistoleros?”
“They might be smart enough not to argue with a BAR.”
“And if they aint smart enough?”
“Then we’ll play it any way we have to.”

“You don’t have to have any part of it, either of you. You can cross
back over the bridge and catch a train to Galveston.”
“You say that again I’m liable to take you up on it,” LQ said.
“You don’t have to have—”
“Go to hell, wiseguy,” LQ said.
“If anybody’s got a better plan,” I said, “I’m ready to hear it—as
long as it doesn’t mean waiting. I’m not waiting.”
Brando blew out a breath and threw up his hands.
“The best plans are always simple,” I said. “Everybody knows
that.”
“In that case,” LQ said, “we got us the greatest goddamn plan in
the world.”

e put a five-gallon can of drinking water on the floor by the
backseat and three cans of gasoline into the trunk and got on
our way before daybreak. The sun rose out of the flatlands and shone
red on the mountains to the west just under the setting silver moon.
The sky was clear except for the dust we raised behind us on the
packed dirt road.

The countryside reminded me of the YB Ranch—cactus of every
kind and mesquite trees and creosote scrub, mesas and mountains on
every horizon. But it was alien territory to LQ and different even to
Brando, who came from a part of Texas with geography a lot tamer
than this region of brute rock ground and thorns on damned near
everything.

Now and then we’d see a small cross—sometimes a cluster of
crosses—stuck in the ground alongside the road and we came to find
out they had been placed by the families of people killed at those
spots in motor vehicle accidents.

Two hours after leaving Villa Acuña we reached the junction road
from the border town of Piedras Negras. There had been a rainstorm
a day or so earlier and truck traffic had made a washboard of the road
surface. The car jarred hard and sometimes jerked to one side or the
other and Brando cursed and fought the wheel. There were plenty of
stations within range of our radio, most of them playing ranchero

music, which LQ and I liked but Brando had had enough of, and he
searched the dial till he found one out of Eagle Pass broadcasting
Texas string-band stuff.

As the morning grew warmer, pale dust devils rose in the open
country and went whirling toward the dark ranges in the distance.
Around midmorning we came to a ferry crossing at a river the color
of caramel. The ferry was a rope rig and could carry only three cars at
a time. There were four cars ahead of us, so we had to wait. There
were three small crosses at the edge of the riverbank. LQ and Brando
napped under a tree and I skipped rocks on the water until it was our
turn to cross.

e got to Monclova in the early afternoon and gassed the car at
a filling station. I got directions from the attendant to get to
the westbound road. Brando wanted to have a beer before moving on,
so we parked around the corner from the main plaza and went into a
cantina.

The place was cool and dim and a radio was playing mariachi
music. Besides us the only other patrons were two guys at a table
against the wall and another three standing together at the far end of
the bar and laughing with the cantinero. You could tell by their
clothes they were vaqueros—and by their laughter and gestures that
they were drunk.

The cantinero came over and looked at each of us in turn, then
asked Brando, “Qué quieren de tomar?”
“Cerveza,” Brando said with his gringo accent. He looked at me
and said, “Tell him I want the coldest one in the joint.”
“Tres cervezas,” I said. “Bien frías.”
The cantinero stared at my eyes and then gave Brando another
look before going to fetch the beer. He set the bottles in front of us

and went back to his friends at the end of the bar and whispered
something to them. They turned to look at us. One of them, the
biggest, came down the bar, puffing a cigarillo.

“Buenas tardes.”
“Buenas tardes,” I said.
He asked to know where we were from, and I told him.
“Ah, Tejas,” he said. He looked at LQ and said that a blond gringo

certainly had a good reason for not speaking Spanish. Then looked at
me again and said anybody who looked Mexican and could speak
Spanish as well as I did could be forgiven for having gringo eyes. But
what he was curious about, he said, turning to Brando, was why a guy
who looked so fucking Mexican couldn’t speak Spanish well enough
to ask for a cold beer.

The vaquero was looking for a fight but he badly underestimated
Brando’s readiness to give it to him. The insult was barely off the
guy’s tongue before Ray brought his knee up into his balls and hit
him in the mouth with the bottle of beer. Glass shattered and beer
sprayed and the vaquero went down on his ass and over on his side,
drawing his knees up and clutching his crotch. He puked through his
broken teeth.

The cantinero started to sidestep down the bar but LQ already had
the .380 in his hand and waggled it at him, and the barman brought
his hands up in view and stepped away from the counter. The two at
the end of the bar stood gawking. The pair at the table were beaming at the entertainment.

LQ put up his pistol and leaned over the bar to peer into the
shelf under it and came up with a cutoff single-barrel sixteengauge. The cantinero looked apologetic. LQ opened the breech and
took out the shell and flung it across the room, then stood the shotgun against the front of the bar.