Under the Skin

by James Carlos Blake

  But by the time they had been together two months she was wearying of the accounts of his youthful adventures and of his ordeals under the Revolution. She had grown bored with his talk of people she did not know, many of them long dead. For his part, he could but feign interest in her redundant schoolgirl memories and descriptions of the beach where she always went swimming and tales of the times when she went to sea with her uncle the fisherman. Unlike her, he had no interest in books other than ledgers. But he didn’t care. He derived unremitting pleasure from simply staring at her, from the knowledge that she was there and would still be there the next day and the day after that.

  He lavished her with gifts, with everything he thought might please her—jewelry, clothes, a beautiful black stallion and custom-made saddle, the newest model phonograph, affectionate pet dogs, a parrot that spoke her name. He sent a man to Jiménez to buy whatever recordings she asked for. He filled the house with her favorite flowers. He replanted the patio garden to suit her tastes.

  She told him she missed the sea and asked if they might go to the coast for a holiday so she could swim. He said he could not leave the hacienda, that there were many duties he must personally attend to, that he never traveled except when he absolutely must on essential business. The truth was that he was afraid she might desert him if they went to a town—any town, but especially one on the seacoast. He did not know how to swim, and he had never told anyone of his recurrent bad dream in which they were at the seashore and she fled him by swimming away. He built a spacious pool for her in the west-side patio and for a time she took pleasure in it. She tried to teach him to swim but his efforts had been comically inept and she had laughed at him. He came close to losing his temper but was able to restrain it. He would not, however, enter the pool again. She swam in it every day—and made daily complaint that it was not the same thing as the sea.

  The months passed. He was aware of her increased discontent. She turned moody. She rarely laughed anymore and never with him. He felt hopeless in his attempts to please her. One evening he caught her staring at him across the length of the dinner table and could see that she was beholding him as an old man. He was more deeply pained than he could say.

  And then barely three weeks ago she asked if she might ride her stallion beyond the walled confines of the casa grande grounds. She was bored with the round-and-round of the riding track and with the horsetrail through the mesquite thickets at the rear portion of the compound. He refused. He said the countryside was too dangerous for a woman alone. He could send a rider with her, she said, one of his pistoleros, if he was so concerned for her safety. No, he said—and knew instantly that she had perceived his mistrust of her, his fear that she might cuckold him with a younger and more virile man. You could send two of them, she said, to keep an eye on each other as well as on me. She retreated to her bedchamber and remained there the rest of the day.

  When he went to her door that evening he found it bolted and she refused to admit him. He might have walked away except he caught sight of a housemaid passing at the end of the hall and glancing at him. How many of the staff, he suddenly wondered, had heard him pleading with her like a whining boy? He tore the drapery off the hall window and piled it at the foot of her door and set it afire. In minutes the door was ablaze. There was no other door to the room and her windows were forty feet above the patio but she made no call for help or cry of fear. Servants appeared at the end of the hall and went racing away again, yelling at each other to bring buckets of water. When the door was a sheet of crackling flames he kicked at it until a portion fell away in a shower of sparks and then he covered his head with his arms and crashed through the burning wood and into the room. He slapped away smoking cinders from his clothes and hair, saw her staring huge-eyed at him. He took off his thick leather belt and doubled it and threw her facedown across the bed and stripped away her robe and pinned her with a knee between her shoulders. She was strong and kicking wildly but he was furiously determined and tore off her silk underpants and whipped her bare buttocks with the belt. He was elated by her shrieks and the servants’ arrival at the door to fling hissing bucketfuls of water on the fire and witness his punishment of her. She managed to break free after he’d laid on a dozen strokes. Her bottom was striped with red welts and she was crying in pain and outrage. She called him a bullying old bastard, she shouted that she hated him. He warned her that if she ever again bolted a door against him he would tie her to a tree in the patio and strip her naked to the waist and use a horse quirt on her back while everyone of the hacienda looked on. But he feared her will to resist and told the carpenter that the new door to her chamber should have no bolt.

  They saw little of each other over the following days. Whenever they came in sight of each other they did not speak. Their suppers were silent affairs but for the clink of dishware and the serving staff’s footfalls on the hardwood floors.

  His temper was now in constant confusion, a mix of anger, injured pride, and despair. He pined for her affections even as he refused to lower himself to apology. He yearned to touch her even as he refused to speak or even look directly at her. He was meting harsh punishments to his peons for the smallest infractions, ordering the whipping of a stableman for being slow to saddle a horse, of a pair of kitchen-boys for dicing in the pantry. He had a woman branded on the cheek on her husband’s charge of infidelity, though there was no proof of it and she swore it was not true.

  He was drinking heavily every night, pacing himself to exhaustion in his chambers, trying to understand how things had come to such a pass—his mind in a mad muddle, his emotions in chaotic tangle. When he thought of her naked beauty he had to bite his tongue against howling in desire for her. He thought he might be going mad.

  And then one night, less than a week ago, he could bear it no longer. He smashed a brandy bottle against the wall and stalked to her chambers with a lamp in his hand and banged open her door, waking her in a fright. He set down the lamp and shrugged off his robe and flung himself on her. She resisted for only a moment before letting herself go limp and shutting her eyes, refusing him even her sight, refusing him everything but unresponsive flesh. He could not help but proceed, though it was like coupling with the newly dead. When he was finished and realized he was crying, he cursed her and struck her with his open hand. She flinched but did not open her eyes. He stormed from the room in a weeping rage.

  He kept to his chambers for most of the following day, heartsickened by his brute behavior, frantic with fear that her affections were forever lost to him. The next day was Christmas, and hoping to begin a process of amends and reconciliation, he presented her with an exquisite emerald brooch. He laid it before her on the supper table and she stared at it without expression and then ignored it. He asked if he might pin the brooch on her to see how it looked, and she picked it up and put it in her dress pocket. He’d had to restrain himself from striking her—and from bursting into tears.

  The next days passed like a time of mourning. He would see her from his window as she set out on her stallion onto the riding trail in the mesquite woods. On her return she would linger within the stable, no doubt seeing to it that the horse was properly tended, perhaps feeding it apples as she liked to do. Then she’d go for a walk in the garden and he’d lose sight of her. She would not return to the house until dusk. Sometimes she would take another wordless supper with him in the dining hall, sometimes she would retire for the night without eating, and he would dine alone at the head of the huge empty table.

  And then that morning, four days before the new year, she was gone. Her bed had not been slept in. She was not in her bath, on her balcony, in any of the reading or music parlors, not in the dining room nor the kitchen. The maids said la doña had not come down for her morning cup of chocolate. The household staff was called to assembly in the main parlor and it was discovered that her personal maid was also absent. None of the staff had seen either of them since the evening prior. Before he could send for his segundo, the forem
an himself appeared with the news that the stableman in charge of caring for la doña’s stallion had departed the hacienda last night in one of the trucks and had not returned. The man told the gate guard he was being sent to Torreón to pick up a new saddle for la doña. The women must have been hiding in the vehicle.

  Don César dispatched teams of searchers to the nearest towns, more than a hundred miles south to Gomez Palacio, to Torreón, to San Pedro de las Colonias, seventy-five miles north to Jiménez. But there was no need—they found the truck twenty miles away, where the hacienda road met the highway at the small railstation pueblo of Escalón, found it parked behind the depot. They roused the night clerk from his bed—a man they called El Manco Feo for his ruined arm and the ugly dogbite scars on his face—and learned that yes, a man and two women, all strangers to him, had boarded the night train to Monclova. His description of them was accurate. The clerk was taken to Las Cadenas to give his report to Don César in person, to tell him that the train had arrived in Monclova hours ago. Don César knocked him down and kicked him repeatedly before ordering him out of his sight.

  He had no notion at all whether she was still in Monclova or where she might have gone from there. He sent men to that city to seek her. He interrogated every member of the house staff, questioned all of his vaqueros. The missing stableman was Luis Arroyo, who had been on the payroll less than six months. None of the other hands knew where he was from, knew anything of his past.

  And then a short while ago it had been learned that the maid who fled with the party, one Maria Ramirez, had been born and raised in a village called Apodaca, just outside of Monterrey, and that her father was a baker there….

  El Segundo arrives on the balcony as Don César finishes his brandy. Segundo is a tall lean man of middle years and wears his black beard in a sharply pointed goatee of the grandee style, his long hair in a ponytail. His dress is impeccable and his manners courtly, but his dark hands are scarred from ropeburns and branding irons, with knife cuts, the knuckles large and prominent and scarred as well.

  “A sus órdenes, patrón,” Segundo says.

  Don César instructs him to send their best retrievers to the family home of this Maria Ramirez and question her about his missing wife. If the Ramirez girl should not be there, then the family must be questioned about her. The retrievers are to be given ample expense money and are to act upon whatever information they get that might lead them to his wife. If they are unable to find her, then that will be the end of it and he will be shed of the bitch.

  Segundo says he understands completely. He will dispatch Angel and Gustavo—and then softly inquires what Don César desires them to do if they should find her.

  “Quiere que se la traigan? O prefiere que…se desaparesca?”

  Don César considers the question as he stares out at the great desert beyond the hacienda.

  And finally says that they should bring her back, of course.

  I n the hours after the wind and drizzle quit, a thin fog rolled in off the gulf and the windows glowed pale gray in the morning light of New Year’s Day. I got dressed and tucked the Mexican Colt under my coat at the small of my back and went downstairs.

  As always, Gregorio had set out the makings of breakfast for his tenants before he went to bed. A big kettle of coffee was lightly steaming on the stove, next to a warm pot of refried beans and a large and ready frying pan. On the counter stood a wire basket of eggs, a fresh loaf of bread on a cutting board, a can of lard, some bulbs of garlic, a string of dried chiles, and a large roll of chorizo sausage. A gourd covered with a warm damp cloth held a stack of fresh corn tortillas. On the table were bowls of butter, sugar, grape jam, shakers of salt, red pepper, ground cinnamon.

  By this hour Sergio had already come in from his night clerk job and had eaten and cleaned up after himself and gone up to his room. I usually took breakfast at a café across the street from the train station but I wanted a word with old Moises this morning, so I figured I might as well eat while I waited for him to come down.

  I

  I lit the gas burner under the big frying pan and cut off a chunk of chorizo and put it in the pan and ground it with a fork. Then broke off a clove of garlic and peeled it smooth and dropped it in with the chorizo and used the fork to crush it up good. I chopped a big chile to fine bits and stirred it in with the sausage and garlic. The chorizo sizzled and darkened and the fragments of garlic and chile turned brown in the oozing grease. The sharp aromas mingled with the fragrance of coffee and refried beans. I turned down the burner a little and cracked three eggs into the pan and scrambled them with the chorizo and seasonings. When the eggs were almost done I pushed them with the spatula to one side of the pan and took two tortillas from the gourd and quickly heated them in the cleared side of the greasy pan. I laid the tortillas on a plate and scraped the chorizo-and-eggs onto them, then added some beans on the side and poured a cup of coffee and stirred in plenty of sugar. Then sat at the table to eat.

  Gregorio had taken his magazines to his room with him but the morning paper was on the table. I was leafing through it and having my second cup of coffee when old Moises came down and looked surprised to find me there. “Buen año nuevo, joven!” he said.

  I waited till he sat himself with a cup of coffee, then gestured for him to put the tin horn to his ear. He did, and I asked if he had been to the party at the Morales place last night.

  “Como?” he said, pressing the horn harder to his ear. “Qué?”

  I leaned over the table and asked the question louder.

  “La fiesta de Morales? Sí, yo fui, claro que sí. Era muy buena fiesta.”

  Had he met Avila’s relatives from Brownsville?

  “Que?” he bellowed, twisting the horn like he meant to screw it into his skull.

  With my mouth right at the ear horn, I loudly and slowly repeated my question. He listened hard, then said that there had been many people at the party, a few he had never seen before, but with the music and laughter and his bad ears he hadn’t caught their names.

  Was there a pretty girl he hadn’t seen before?

  “Ay, hijo!” But of course there had been pretty girls! Every woman in the world was a pretty girl in her own way, did I not know that? As a man ages he gains wisdom and comes to see the eternal beauty of all womanhood. Why, if he were only ten years younger…

  I patted his shoulder and cursed myself for a fool to have thought he might be of any help, then took my plate and cup to the sink and washed them while he rambled on about all the women he’d known, large and small, darkskinned and fair, all of them lovely, all of them a wonderful mystery, although of course there had been a special one, a girl back in Michoacán whom he’d known for less than a month, when they were both nineteen, one whom Death the Bastard took from him but whom he had not failed to think about every day since…

  He was still going on and on when I said goodbye and went out the door.

  T he holiday street traffic was of course much lighter than usual for a Wednesday. Most businesses were closed and a lot of people were still in bed with aching heads and new regrets.

  The air was cool and heavy with the smell of the sea, but the wet and littered streets still carried tinges of the town’s hangover, the faint odors of booze and tobacco ash and rank bedsheets. A sickly yellow seadog still arced through the light mist over the Offatt Bayou.

  But holidays were good for the gambling business. Even at this midmorning hour I found the betting room behind the Turf Grill already half-full and loud with talk of the day’s favorites and longshots at the Florida and California tracks. The Juárez and Tijuana races would get a lot of play too. The parlor betting would be heavy all day long.

  Up on the second floor I went into Rose’s outer office and spoke with his secretary, Mrs. Bianco. A lot of the guys called her Momma Mia, and she seemed to enjoy it, but to me she was always Mrs. Bianco. She had a pronounced Italian accent and a motherly manner and could have been on an advertising poster for pasta or tomato
paste. Portly and beginning to gray, always dressed in neat and matronly fashion. She lived alone in a boardinghouse down the street from the Club. Not many knew it but she was one of Rose’s highest-paid employees and among the handful of people he truly trusted, and there was no aspect of Maceo business she wasn’t privy to. She knew how I stood with Rose too and tended to be more direct with me than she was with others—and I’d caught glimpses of the .38 bulldog she kept in the bottom righthand drawer of her desk. I once asked Rose if she knew how to use it and he smiled and winked and left it at that.

  She told me Signore Maceo had sent LQ and Brando and one of his slot machine mechanics to the Red Shoes Cabaret near Alvin. I knew the place. It was in Brazoria County, just west of the Galveston line, and it rented its machines from the Gulf Vending Company. The place had changed hands a few months before and the new guys had been consistently slow about toting up the daily take from the slots and handing over the Maceos’ cut. Artie Goldman suspected they were shaving their revenue reports, and Artie’s suspicions were good enough for Rose.

  The Red Shoes guys would be surprised when the mechanic showed up that morning to check their machines. Each of the slots had been geared to keep a tally of the money it took in—a running tally that wasn’t erased each time the machine was emptied, as many of the joint owners had been led to believe was the case. LQ and Brando would ensure that nobody interfered with the mechanic’s inspection of the slots—and they would take the necessary measures if the machine tallies didn’t match the ones on the Red Shoes reports. It was a job I normally would’ve been tending to.