Under the Skin

by James Carlos Blake

  Under the Skin

  James Carlos Blake

  James Rudolph Youngblood, aka Jimmy the Kid, is an enforcer, a "ghost rider" for the Maceo brothers, Rosario and Sam, rulers of "the Free State of Galveston," who are prospering through illicit pleasures in the midst of the Great Depression. Raised on an isolated West Texas ranch that he was forced to flee at age eighteen following the violent breakup of his foster family, Jimmy has found a home and a profession in Galveston -- and a mentor in Rose Maceo.

  Looming over Jimmy's story like an ancient curse is the specter of his fearsome father. Their ties of blood, evident since Jimmy's boyhood, have been drawn tighter over time. Then a strange and beautiful girl enters his life and a swift and terrifying sequence of events is set in motion. Jimmy must cross the border and go deep into the brutal and merciless country of his ancestors -- where the story's harrowing climax closes a circle of destiny many years in the making.

  UNDER the SKIN

  a novel James Carlos Blake

  Everyone’s skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.

  —JIM HARRISON, Legends of the Fall

  The heart has reasons that reason cannot understand.

  —BLAISE PASCAL, Pensées

  Si el mundo es ilusión la perdida del mundo esilusión también.

  —CORMAC MCCARTHY, The Crossing

  Begin Reading

  A chill desert night of wind and rain. The trade at Mrs. O’Malley’s house has been kept meager by the inclement weather and the loss of the neighborhood’s electrical power since earlier in the day. Rumor has it that a stray bullet struck dead a transformer. For the past two days errant rounds have carried over the Rio Grande—glancing off buildings, popping through windowpanes, hitting random spectators among the rooftop crowds seeking to be entertained by the warfare across the river. Even through the closed windows and the pattering of the rain, gunfire remains audible at this late hour, though the latest word is that the rebels have taken Juárez and the shooting is now all in celebration and the exercise of firing squads.

  The house is alight with oil lamps. Its eight resident whores huddled into their housecoats and carping of boredom. Now comes a loud rapping of the front door’s iron knocker and they all sit up as alert as cats.

  The houseman peers through a peephole, then turns to the madam and shrugs. Mrs. O’Malley bustles to the door and puts her eye to the peeper.

  “Well Jesus Mary and Joseph.”

  She works the bolt and tugs open the door. The lamp flames dip and swirl in their glass and shadows waver on the walls as a cold rush of air brings in the mingled scents of creosote and wet dust.

  Mrs. O’Malley trills in Spanish at the two men who enter the dim foyer and shuts the door behind them. The maid Concha takes their overcoats and they shake the rainwater off their hats and stamp their boots on the foyer rugs.

  “Pasen, caballeros, pasen,” Mrs. O’Malley says, ushering them into the parlor.

  They come into the brighter light and the girls see that they are Mexicans in Montana hats and suits of good cut. One of the men has appeared in photographs in the local newspapers almost every day for the past week, but few of these girls ever give attention to a newspaper and so most of them do not recognize him.

  “Attention, ladies,” Mrs. O’Malley says, as the girls assemble themselves for inspection. “Just look who’s honoring us with a visit.” She extends her arms toward one of the men as if presenting a star performer on a theater stage. “My dear old friend—”

  “Pancho!” one of the girls calls out—Kate, whom the others call Schoolgirl for her claim of having attended college for a time before her fortunes turned. Only she and two of the other girls in the house—a small brunette they call Pony and a fleshy girl named Irish Red—were working at Mrs. O’Malley’s last winter when this man regularly patronized the place. The three waggle their fingers in greeting and the man grins at them and nods.

  “General Francisco Villa,” the madam enunciates, fixing the Schoolgirl with a correcting look and poorly concealing her irritation at being usurped of the introduction.

  The girls have of course all heard of him and they make a murmuring big-eyed show of being impressed. He is tall for a Mexican, big-chested and thick-bellied without conveying an impression of fatness. His eyes are hidden in the squint of his smile. The madam hugs him sideways around the waist and says how happy she is to see him again. He fondly pats her ample bottom and repositions her arm away from the holstered pistol under his coatflap.

  “Hace siete o ocho meses que no te veo, verdad?” the madam says. “Que tanto ha occurido en ese tiempo.”

  Villa agrees that much has happened in the eight months since he was last in El Paso, living as an exile in the Mexican quarter with only eight men in his bunch. Now he commands the mighty Division of the North. He is one of the most celebrated chieftains of the Mexican Revolution and a favored subject of American reporters covering the war.

  Would he and his friend like a drink, the madam asks. Some music on the hand-cranked phonograph?

  Villa flicks his hand in rejection of the offer and returns his attention to the women, a man come to take his pleasure but with no time for parlor amenities. The girls have thrown open their housecoats to afford the visitors a franker view of their charms in negligee or camisole, but Villa already knows what he wants. He has come with the express hope of finding the Irish girl still here, and now beckons her. He much admires her bright red hair and lushly freckled skin as pale as cream—traits not common among the women he usually enjoys. She beams and hastens to him.

  Mrs. O’Malley pats his arm and says she just knew he’d pick Megan again.

  “Y cual prefiere tu amigo?” she says, and turns to the other man.

  “Pues?” Villa says to him.

  He is taller than Villa, leaner of waist but as wide of chest, his mustache thicker, his eyes so black the pupils are lost in their darkness.

  “Esa larguirucha,” he says, jutting his chin at a tall lean girl with honey-colored hair and eyes the blue of gas flames. The only one of them able to hold his gaze, her small smile a reflection of his own.

  “Ava,” Mrs. O’Malley says. “Our newest.” She turns from the man to the girl and back to the man, remarking the intensity of the look between them. “My,” she says to Villa. “Parece que tu cuate se encontró una novia.”

  “Otra novia mas,” Villa says with a laugh. Then says to the redhead, “Vente, mi rojita,” and hugs her against his side and they head for the stairway. The Ava girl takes the other man by the hand and they follow Villa and Irish Red up to the bedrooms.

  The rest of the girls resettle themselves, some of them casting envious glances after the couples ascending the stairs, chiefly at the Ava girl, who has been with them but a week, the one they call the Spook for her inclination to keep her own company and her manner of seeming to be elsewhere even when she’s in their midst.

  A t dawn the rain has departed. So too the men. The few remaining clouds are ragged red scraps on a pink horizon. The light of the ascending day eases down the Franklins and into the city streets.

  By late morning Mrs. O’Malley is away to her daily mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. The girls rouse themselves from their beds and descend to the sunbright kitchen for coffee and the pastries Concha has fetched from the corner panadería. They sit at a long table under a row of windows open to the late-November coolness and the croonings of Inca doves in the patio trees. The gunfire across the river has abated to faint sporadic fusillades, each volley prompting Concha to a quick sign of the cross.

  As usual at the breakfast table most of the girls are closemouthed and drawn into themselves, absorbed in the ruminations that come with the light
of each newrisen day. Only Kate the Schoolgirl, reading a newspaper, and Irish Red and Juliet—called Lovergirl—who are engaged in antic whisperings about Megan’s night with Pancho Villa, seem unaffected by the rueful mood that daily haunts this hour of the whore life.

  Now the Lovergirl’s giggles rise keenly and Betty the Mule, longfaced and bucktoothed, says, “Why don’t you two take your snickering somewhere else? You sound like a couple of moron kids, for shit’s sake.”

  “Why don’t you mind your own business?” the Lovergirl says. “Nobody’s anyway talking to you.”

  “She’s just jealous,” Irish Red says.

  “Jealous?” the Mule says. “Of what? Some greaser who probably left you a case of clap and a furpatch full of crabs?”

  Lightfoot Gwen chuckles without looking up from her coffee, but the Pony says, “Hey,” and gives Betty a look of reprimand and nods toward Concha standing at the stove with her back to them. The Mule glances at the maid and makes a face of indifference.

  “Not much you aint jealous,” Irish Red says.

  “Jesus,” the Schoolgirl says, gawking into her newspaper. She will sometimes share with the table an item she finds of particular interest, sometimes even read it aloud in spite of their inattention and feigned yawns. But now the timbre of her voice is such that few of them can ignore it. She glances from one item on the page to another and then back again, as if confirming some correspondence between them. “Sweet Jesus.”

  “What now?” says Jenny the Joker.

  “He killed three hundred men,” the Schoolgirl says. “Prisoners. Just yesterday.”

  “Who did?” the Pony says.

  “Hell, they’re always shooting them by the trainload over there,” the Mule says. “They’re shooting them right now, just listen.”

  “It’s not the same,” the Schoolgirl says. She looks down at the paper and puts a finger to it. “They were in a corral and there was this wall and he said any man who could get over it could go free. He let them try it ten at a time. And he killed them all. He shot men for three hours.” She looks up from the paper. “And then he came here.”

  “Pancho?” Irish Red says. “He shot—”

  “No, the other. There’s a picture.”

  Some of them gather around the Schoolgirl to look over her shoulder at the newspaper photograph. It shows Villa and a white-haired American general standing together on a bridge between Juárez and El Paso, smiling at the camera and flanked by their aides. The man directly next to Villa is the one who came with him to the house last night. The Schoolgirl puts her finger on the caption, on the name identifying him, then moves her finger to the small report about the three hundred federal prisoners and taps her nail on the name of their executioner.

  “Be goddamn,” the Lovergirl says.

  They turn their attention to the Spook, who was with this man last night. She sits at the far end of the table where she has been drinking coffee and staring out the window toward the sounds of the firing squads. None of them can read her face.

  “It says here his name’s…” The Schoolgirl looks down at the paper again and in Anglicized fashion enunciates: “Fierro.”

  “Padre, hijo, espiritú santo,” Concha says as she blesses herself.

  The Spook turns to them and scans their faces, their big-eyed show of shock mingled with wet-lipped curiosity.

  “I know,” she says.

  And leaves the room.

  S he had been with other men of seemingly insatiable desire but their lust had no object beyond her naked flesh. This one’s hunger was of a different breed. He took obvious pleasure in her body, but it seemed to her that his urgent effort was toward something more than sexual release, toward something beyond the pulse and throb of their carnal flexions, as if what he sought after lay in some unreachably distant region of the soul itself. But whether the soul he strove toward was hers or his own she could not say. She could not have given words to any of this, she could but sense it, know it only by way of her skin.

  On completion of their first coupling he sat with his back to the headboard and drank from a bottle he’d brought with him. She recognized the uncorked smell as the same one she’d tasted with their first kiss and it occurred to her that he might be a little drunk. He lit a cigarillo and offered her both the packet of smokes and the bottle and she accepted only the cigarillo. He lit it for her and she said, “Thank you,” the first words between them. In the dim light from the lantern turned down low on the dresser he looked to be carved of copper.

  “Como te llamas?” he said.

  The query was among the rudimentary Spanish locutions she had thus far learned from Concha. “Ava,” she said.

  He chuckled low and repeated the name in its Spanish pronunciation, watching her eyes in the low light. Then said, “Es una mentira. Dime la verdad.”

  “I don’t hablo español too very…bueno. Sorry.”

  “No te llamas Ava. No es…is no true.”

  She wondered how he’d known she was lying, and why she was not surprised that he’d known. His eyes on her were as black as the night of rain at the window and utterly unfathomable, but she felt as if they saw directly to the truth of her, whatever that might be.

  “Ella,” she said. “Ella Marlene Malone.”

  “El-la-marleeen-malooone,” he said in singsong. “Como una cancionita.”

  “You’re making fun,” she said, and put her fingers to his mouth. He held her hand there and kissed each fingertip in turn. And then he was on her again.

  This time he afterward got out of bed and paced about the small room, stretching, flexing, rolling his head like a pugilist, briefly massaging one hand and then the other. He drained the last of the bottle and set it on the dresser. The light was behind him and she could not see his face.

  “Hoy mismo maté trescientos pinches Colorados.” He turned his gaze to the dark window. “Pues, puede ser que los maté ayer. Los días pasan.” He looked at her again. “Pasan a la memoria y la historia, los más enormes museos de mentiras.”

  She stared at him in utter incomprehension. He stepped to the chair where his clothes were draped and from them extracted a pair of revolvers. She’d had no notion of their presence.

  “Los maté con éstas.” He twirled the pistols on his fingers like a shooter in a Wild West show, then put one of them back into the coat. He held up three fingers of his free hand. “Trescientos. Los maté todos.” He struck his chest. “Yo, Fierro!”

  She understood of this only the number three and what might be his name and that whatever he was telling her was attached to a ferocious pride.

  “Your name…tu…llama…is Fierro?”

  He laughed low in his throat and made a slight bow. “Rodolfo Fierro, a su servicio, mi angelita.”

  “Rodolfo,” she said, testing the name on her tongue.

  “Para algunos mi nombre es una canción tambien, como tuyo. Pero el mió es una canción de muerte.”

  “Muerte,” she said. “I know that one. Death.”

  “Si—death.” He laughed low. “Tienes miedo de la muerte? Tienes…cómo se dice?…fear?”

  He stepped up beside the bed and raised the revolver so that the muzzle was within inches of her face. He slowly cocked the hammer and she heard the ratchet action as the cylinder rotated and even in the weak light she could see the bluntly indifferent bulletheads riding in their chambers.

  Her breath caught. Her nipples tightened. Her blood sped.

  She reached up and gingerly fingered the barrel. Then drew it closer, breathing its masculine smells of oiled gunmetal and burnt powder. And put her tonguetip to the muzzle and tasted of its taint. She could hear her own hard breathing.

  His teeth showed. “Otra loca brava.”

  She tried to disengage the pistol from his hand, which felt as much of iron as the weapon itself. He uncocked it and released it to her.

  The metal frame was impressed with the Colt symbol and the grips were pale yellow and each was embossed with an eag
le holding a snake in its beak.

  “I want it.”

  “La quieres?”

  He seized her mouth in his hard fingers. She was unsure if he meant to kiss her or hit her or do something she could not begin to imagine. With an instinct she hadn’t known she possessed she pressed the Colt against his stomach and cocked the hammer.

  He chuckled—then kissed her deeply. She slid the gun down his belly to his phallus and found it standing rigid and they broke the kiss in laughter.

  “Christ Jesus, I aint the only one loco,” she said. She eased down the hammer as she had seen him do.

  He made an expansive gesture of relinquishment. “Te la doy, güerita. Como un…pressen.”

  “A present?” She giggled happily and slipped the gun under the pillow as he got on the bed and positioned himself above her, his grin white, black eyes glowing.

  “Wait,” she said. “Momento.”

  She could not have said then or ever after why she did what she next did. It was as if something of the man’s blood was calling to hers—some atavistic urge as primitive as a wolf howl—and she could not deny its pull, her own blood’s yearn to join with his. In that moment of primal impulse, she probed into herself and extracted her pessary and slung it away.

  He chuckled as at some comic mummery. “Y mas loca todavía.”

  And entered her.

  D r. Marceau is a bespectacled man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and the polite but reserved manner of a distant uncle. The most lucrative portion of his practice comes from clients who share the need of his discretion and his willingness to help women beset by an age-old trouble consequent of reckless passion.

  He regards the girl seated across the desk from him and shows her a small practiced smile bespeaking sympathetic understanding. His long experience has taught him to recognize the demimondaines even when they do not honestly identify themselves but assume some tired guise to preserve an illusion of dignity. Besides, the fallen ones of good family rarely come to him unaccompanied. It’s almost always some young pony, green and given to mistakes, who arrives at his door all alone. Like this one.