Under the Skin (5 page)

his impersonation of Rose, adjusting and readjusting his necktie
knot, eyes half-closed, mouth slightly pinched, saying in a heavy
Sicilian accent: “Goddamn, but I hate a fucken thief.” It made me
grin every time.

At first Rose was angry when I told him the strongarms were still
alive, but when I told him what we’d done to them he paced up and
down for a minute, thinking about it, and then laughed.

“You see why I love this kid?” he said to Artie Goldman, his
head bookkeeper. Artie just sat there and looked a little out of
sorts. He never did like to hear about my end of the business.
“Goddamn genius,” Rose said. “Every time those two punks even
think of how nice it’d be if they could walk into the kitchen for a
glass of water, every time they need to blow their nose or wipe
their ass, they’re gonna remember how stupid they were to try
thieving in Galveston.” He adjusted my necktie and then his own
and beamed at me.

The next day he saw to it that the money got back to the customers who’d been robbed. The strongarms had spent about three
hundred of it but he made up the difference from his own pocket.
That’s how he was.

Q told the owner at each place where Ragsdale had put his
slots that the machines now belonged to the Gulf Vending
Company and the standard fee for their use was 50 percent of the
take. A company representative would come by every night to collect.
If the owner had any complaints, any trouble from the cops or anybody else, he was to contact the main office on the island and the
company would deal with the problem.

None of this seemed to be news to the owners. Even the ones who
didn’t really want any machines in their joint weren’t about to argue.
They knew the score. What the hell—they got 50 percent of some

The joint had a jukebox, and “Blue Moon” was playing when we
came in. A Christmas tree in the corner was blinking with coloredglass electric candles, half of its needles already on the floor.

It wasn’t the sort of place to pull them in on New Year’s Eve. The
only customers besides us were a mushy young couple at a back table.
Brando and I went into the men’s room to take a leak while LQ went
to the counter and ordered the beer.

When we came out of the john, “Blue Moon” was playing again.
The cooler beside the front counter was out of order but the guy had
some beer on ice in the back room and had gone to get it. “Blue
Moon” played out and the mushy guy went over to the juke and
punched it up again. The girl stood up and they held each other close
and swayed in place to the music.

“Goddamn,” LQ said in a low voice, “I like the song myself, but
there’s such a thing as overdoing a good thing. There’s bound to be
other lovey stuff on that juke they can dance to. I bet ‘I Only Have
Eyes for You’ is on there.”

Brando said that was an all right love song but not nearly as good
as “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
LQ said that one sounded like a song about a bad disease. “I bet
the guy who wrote it was thinking about some dame who gave him
the worst case of clap he ever had.”
“Jesus, it’s no wonder your wives all left you,” Brando said.
“At least they wanted to marry me,” LQ said. “Only thing women
want from
you
is as far away as they can get.”

The counter guy came back with the beer and put it in a sack.
While LQ was paying him I went over to the juke and scanned the
titles, then put a nickel in the coinbox and pressed a number button.
I stood there till “Blue Moon” finished playing and I watched the selector arm pick up the record and replace it in its slot, then swing
over and pick up the one I’d punched and set it on the turntable. The
record began to spin and the tone arm eased into the starting groove
and the speakers started putting out “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.”

The lovebirds turned to see what was going on. The girl looked
confused and the guy was frowning. I nodded at them and touched
my hatbrim.

LQ and Brando were waiting at the door. As we went out to the
car LQ said, “That wasn’t very nice.”
“That’s Jimmy’s trouble,” Brando said to LQ. “He’s like you. Not
a romantic bone in his body.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “That’s the most romantic
song I ever heard.”
“Cowboy probably means it,” LQ told Brando.
For a time after we first met, LQ had called me Cowboy because
of my boots and the frontier Colt and the wide-brimmed hat I wore
back then before I switched to a fedora—and because I’d grown up
on a ranch, which was all I’d ever told him and Brando about my
past. As he got to know me better he eased off on the nickname and
it had been a long time since he’d used it. He was no cowboy himself—he came out of the East Texas piney woods, which made him
closer kin to Southern good old boys than to any Texan raised west
of Houston.
He slid behind the wheel and started up the Dodge. I sat up in
front with him. Brando uncapped three beers with a church key and
passed two of them up to me as LQ got us back on the road. I waited
till LQ shifted into high, then handed him a beer.

few minutes later we were on the causeway and looking at
the low stretch of lights ahead of us that marked Galveston
across the bay. Thirty miles long and some three miles across at its
widest point, the island had long been a haven to pirates and
smugglers, to gunrunners, gamblers, whores, to shady characters of
every stripe. Geographically it was completely different from the
place where I’d grown up, but I felt at ease with its character,
which Rose had described pretty well as “Live and let live unless
somebody fucks with you.”

Near the middle of the bridge we had to halt behind a short line
of cars while the lift span rose to let a large ketch go motoring
through. Its sails were furled and it trailed a small wake in the light
of the pale half-moon just above the water to the west. Even though
the calendar said it was winter and we had recently had a brief cold
snap, the evening was warm as spring. The breeze was gentle, the air
moist and smelling of tidal marsh.

I’d never seen the ocean until I came to Galveston. The first time
I stood on the beach and stared out at the gulf it struck me as beautiful, but also damn scary—and I detested the feeling of being afraid.
I couldn’t remember having been truly frightened before except for
one time when I was fourteen. I’d been beating the brush for strays
all morning when I stopped to eat the lunch our maid Carlotta had
packed for me. It was a heavy meal and made me sleepy, so I lay down
for a nap in the raggedy shade of a mesquite shrub at the bottom of a
low sandrise. The shrilling of my horse woke me to the sight of a diamondback as thick as my arm and coiled up three feet from my face.
The horse snatched the reins loose of the mesquite and bolted over the
rise. If the damn jughead hadn’t spooked so bad the snake probably

would’ve slid on by with no trouble, but now it was scared too and
ready to give somebody hell for it. I figured if I tried to roll away it
would get me in the neck and that would be all she wrote. Its rattle
was a buzzing blur and I could see its muscles flex as it coiled tighter.
I knew it was going to strike me in the face any second—and I was
suddenly afraid. And then in the next instant I was furious at myself
and I thought,
To hell with it
—and made a grab for the snake. It hit
my hand like a club and I rolled away hard as the rattler recoiled. I
scrambled over the rise on all fours and whistled up my horse and got
the Winchester out of the saddle scabbard. The snake had started
slithering off but then coiled up buzzing again when I ran back to it.
I admired its courage even as I blew its head off. The bastard had
nailed me on the bottom edge of the hand, and I cut the wound bigger and sucked and spat for a while, then tied a bandanna tight
around my wrist. I draped the snake over my neck—I later made a
belt of the hide—and mounted up and headed for home. I was sick as
hell for three days, but I promised myself if anything even came close
to scaring me again, I’d go right up to whatever it was—man, beast,
or bad weather—and kick it in the ass. But nothing had ever really
spooked me again, not until I saw the Gulf of Mexico.

The day after my first look at the gulf, I bought a swimming suit
and returned to the beach. I watched the swimmers carefully for a
while and then started imitating their techniques in water no deeper
than my hips. And I taught myself to swim. I practiced and practiced
over the next few days until I could swim parallel to shore in shallow
water for a steady hundred yards.

Then one bright noonday I swam straight out from shore until I
was gasping and my arms were heavy and aching. I clumsily treaded
water and looked back at the tiny figures of the people on the beach.
I must’ve been out two hundred yards. The dark water under me
seemed bottomless and I couldn’t help thinking of all the shark stories I’d so recently heard. The most fearsome were about Black Tom,

a hammerhead more than twenty feet long that they said had been
prowling the waters around the island since before the World War.
They said its top fin was as big as a car door and spotted with pale
bullet holes.

I’d been terrified by the thought of being so far out in the water,
which of course was why I did it. It would be better to drown, better
to be eaten by sharks, than to be so afraid of the sea—or of anything
else. So I’d made the long swim. And it worked. I was still a little
scared, sure, but not as much as before, and I’d proved I could beat
the fear, that was the thing. As I started stroking back toward the
beach, I didn’t know if I’d make it, but I was feeling great. When I
finally tumbled up on the sand, I sprawled on my back, my chest
heaving, and stared up at the dizzy blue depth of the sky—and the
people sunning themselves around me must’ve thought I was a lunatic, the way I broke out laughing.

Ever since then, I’d made the same swim once every two weeks.
And after I found out that sharks fed mostly at night, I’d always made
the swim after dark. Always a little tight in the throat at the thought
of what might be swimming close by.

he causeway melded into the island and became
Broadway Avenue. We drove through the deep
shadows of palm trees and live oaks lining a wide

grassy esplanade that separated the opposing traffic lanes and
held the tracks for the interurban, the electric passenger train
that ran back and forth between Galveston and Houston.

We stopped at a red light, and a Model T sedan started
laboring across the intersection, its motor rapping in the
distinct Model T way. The old Ford was missing its left
front fender and had received a splotchy handbrush coat of
green paint as pale as lettuce.

“Look at that rattletrap,” LQ said. “Thing could use a
pair of crutches.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” I said. “Some of those old T’s
don’t look like much but they run like a Swiss watch.”
In the glow of the streetlamps I saw that the driver of
the heap was a Mexican with a drooping gray mustache
and wearing a straw hat. A burly guy sat beside him but
his face was obscured by the shadows. Another passenger
sat in the darkness of the backseat.
As the Model T passed by directly in front of us, the

passenger at the near window leaned forward to look out and the
lamplight fell full on the face of a girl. Blackhaired, darkskinned. Our
eyes met—and for that brief instant I felt naked in some way that had
nothing to do with clothes. Then the old car was clattering away
down the shadowed street.

“What?” Brando said from the backseat. His attention had been
elsewhere.
“That was some finelooking chiquita,” LQ said.
I busied myself lighting a cigarette. I wasn’t one to get caught off
guard by things, including some dopey sensation I didn’t understand,
and it irked me that the girl’s look had ambushed me like it did.
The light turned green and LQ got the Dodge rolling, looking to his
left at the fading single taillight on the Model T. I took a look too—then
told myself to cut the crap. The world was full of goodlooking girls.
“You shoulda hollered something at her in Mexican,” LQ said to
me. “Maybe get a little something going.”
“It’s Spanish, not
Mexican,
you peckerwood,” Brando said. “How
many times I got to tell you?”
“And how many times I got to tell
you,
” LQ said. “Spanish is what
they talk in
Spain.
Let me ask you something: what do they talk in
Germany? German, aint it? And in France? I do believe they call it
French. In China they talk Chinese. Get the picture? Anybody’s a
peckerwood in this car it’s you.”
“You are one ignorant hillbilly,” Brando said. “What do you call
what we talk in America, for Christ’s sake—
American
?”
“Goddam right,” LQ said. He gave me a sidelong wink.
“Jesus Christ,” Brando said.
“You shoulda seen her, Ramon,” LQ said, grinning at Brando in
the rearview. “
Fine
looking thing. I always heard them young beaner
girls prefer doing it with Americans on account of we know how to
treat their hairy little tacos so much better than you boys.”