Under the Skin

by James Carlos Blake

  Angel passes through the curtain and sees the girl sitting on the edge of her bed, her sewing sliding off her lap, her eyes large. Before she can scream, Angel is on her, pinning her down, a hand on her mouth and a knife blade at her neck.

  He tells her he will ask her only once—where is the wife of Don César?—and tells her that if she lies he will see the lie in her eyes and he will cut her throat to the neckbone.

  He eases his hand from the girl’s mouth but she is terrified to incoherence. He tells her to calm down, for Christ’s sake, and she tries, but as she talks she continues to weep and partially choke on her mucus and he permits her to sit up so she can speak more clearly.

  She is at last able to tell him that la doña paid the stableman Luis Arroyo with jewelry to escort her to the border town of Matamoros. At the Monclova station, Maria Ramirez took leave of them and caught a train to Monterrey and from there took a bus to Apodaca.

  She doesn’t know—she swears she doesn’t—where in Matamoros la doña was going or why. She knows nothing more to tell except that, on the train trip to Monclova, Arroyo had spoken of a brother who owns a cantina in Matamoros, a place called La Perla.

  I left Rose and Sam talking business in the office and went into the lounge and ordered a bottle of beer. At that hour, there were only a few guys at the bar, a few couples at the tables. The place would start filling fast by suppertime and would as always be packed at midnight.

  “Say, Kid!”

  At the rear of the lounge, LQ stood in the doorway to the billiards room, a cue stick in one hand. He waved me over. Brando leaned into view around the door jamb and gave me a high sign, then stepped out of sight again.

  I went to join them. They were shooting eight ball, best of three for five bucks, and had split the first two games.

  “Got winners,” I said, and started searching the wall holder for my favorite cue.

  “Why not just say you want to play me next?” LQ said. He was in good spirits. Brando had a fresh shiner under one eye.

  “Quit the bullshit and shoot,” Brando said.

  “Hard to tell who’s winning, aint it?” LQ said to me.

  I found the cue I wanted and dusted my hands with talc and slicked up the stick.

  The table was showing all of the stripes and only two solids other than the eight ball. LQ laid his cigarette aside and leaned into the light under the Tiffany tableshade and set himself to try banking the six ball into the side. He squinted in the shadow of his hatbrim, sighting and resighting on the six as intently as a surveyor peering through a transit.

  He missed by half a foot. The six caromed off the cushion and went banging into several other balls and smacked the eight into a corner pocket.

  Brando hooted and said, “Pay up, sucker.”

  For all their bluster with a cue stick, neither of them could play worth a damn. I’d seen them knock the balls all over the table for more than half an hour before somebody finally scratched, which was the way most of their games were decided. It was rarely a matter of which of them would win, but who’d be the first to lose.

  LQ peeled a five from a wad of greenbacks and flung it fluttering to the table. “Lucky bastard,” he said.

  Brando laughed and tucked away the bill. “Like the man said, talent makes its own luck.” He turned to me and said, “Next!”

  I fished the balls out of the pockets and racked them, then eased the wooden rack off the balls and returned it to its hook at the foot of the table. There had been a pool table at the ranch and over the years I’d become a fair hand with a cue. I was no match for the hustlers, but Brando and LQ wouldn’t play me for money anymore unless I gave three-to-one odds.

  The strong point of Brando’s game was his break. As usual, he broke the balls with a crack like a sledgehammer. They ricocheted in a wild clatter, the seven falling in a corner, the four dropping in a side.

  “Yes sir!” Brando said.

  He called the two in the corner, straight and easy, and made it. Then cut the five into another corner. Then tapped the three in the side. He grinned at me and blew across the tip of his cue like he was clearing smoke from a rifle muzzle.

  LQ groaned in his chair behind me and said, “Shooting out his ass.”

  “One in the corner,” Brando called. It was a clear shot but he stroked it way harder than necessary and the yellow ball spasmed in the rim of the pocket before it dropped in.

  Brando laughed and banged the heel of his cue on the floor. “Somebody stop me before I kill again.”

  The only shot he had with the six was a cross-corner bank. He came close, but it didn’t fall.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Finally back to your normal game,” LQ said.

  I sank seven in a row—bank shots, rail shots, combinations—and just like that, there was nothing left standing but Brando’s six and the eight ball.

  But I hadn’t played the last shot well. The eight was positioned at one end of the table, near the center of the rail and an inch off the cushion, while the cue ball had ended up at the other end of the table and up against the rail.

  “Got too cocky, hotshot,” Brando said. “Left yourself hard.”

  “Five-buck side bet, two to one, says I sink it.” I tapped the corner pocket to my left. “Here.”

  “Too much green and a bad angle,” Brando said. “You’re on.”

  I formed a thumb bridge for the stick and set myself, then laid into the cue ball. It zoomed toward the eight and caught it just right and the black ball jumped off the cushion at an angle and came barreling down the table like it had eyes and vanished into the corner pocket.

  “Whooo!” LQ hollered.

  “Shit!” Brando said. He dug two fives out of his pocket and tossed them on the table. “That’s it. I aint playing you anymore. I don’t need this kind of humiliation.”

  “Kind you usually get’s plenty enough, huh?” LQ said.

  “Kiss my ass,” Brando said. “Let’s see you take him.”

  I arched my brow at LQ and gestured toward the table.

  “No thanks,” he said. “I’m short enough at the moment. I can just about make it to payday tomorrow.”

  “Well hell,” I said, “if nobody’s going to play, let’s go park our asses in the bar and have a few.”

  “Winners buy,” Brando said.

  “It’s how come you always drink for free,” LQ said.

  Out in the lounge I got us a pitcher of beer and we took a table in the corner. I filled the three glasses and we touched them in a toast and drank.

  “Kinda surprised this morning when Momma Mia said we’d just us two be going to Alvin with a slot man,” LQ said. “I asked where you were and she just shrugs like she always does. Like she don’t know the time of day.”

  “Poppa got you on a secret mission?” Brando said.

  “Wish he did,” I said. I told them all about Rose’s talk with the Dallas guys and his suspicion that they might try to retaliate.

  “You got to hang around all week?” Brando said. “Man, I like the Club, but I’d go crazy if I had to be here all the time for a week.”

  “I agree with you and Sam,” LQ said. “Them Dallas peckerwoods aint gonna do a damn thing, not after how we done Willie Rags. They’d have to be the biggest dopes in Texas, and that’s saying plenty. Shit, let ’em try something. I could use the action.”

  “Looks like you-all maybe got some action today,” I said, pointing at the bruise on Brando’s face.

  “Oh man, the Shoes place,” LQ said. He cut a look at Brando. “Some fun, huh, Ramon?”

  Brando shrugged and lit a cigarette.

  LQ said that when they got to the Red Shoes Cabaret that morning, along with a slot mechanic named Freddie, the place was closed, of course, but there was an armed security guard at the door. LQ told him what they were there for and the guard said he couldn’t let anyone go in without permission from Mr. Dunlop or Mr. Garr, the partners who owned the place, and neither one of them was
there at the moment. He expected them to show up sometime later but didn’t know exactly when.

  “Jesus, what’s that?” LQ said, looking over the guard’s shoulder into the club. When the guard turned to look, LQ snatched the guy’s pistol from its holster and shoved him inside.

  Brando took a quick look around the premises but there wasn’t anybody else around except a grayhaired Negro janitor. LQ made him and the guard sit down out of the way.

  Freddie was almost through with his inspection of the machines when they heard a car drive into the lot. LQ pulled the guard up to the window and drew the blind aside just enough for them to peek out and see a Cadillac stop beside the Dodge. There were two men in the Caddy, and the guard said it was Dunlop and Garr.

  The car doors opened and the men got out. They stood there looking at the Dodge a minute and then headed toward the cabaret’s front door. LQ told the guard to sit back down at the table and he and Brando took positions on opposite sides of the door with their guns ready.

  The one named Garr came in first and stopped short when he saw Freddie standing at the bar with a toolbox beside a dismantled slot machine and the guard and janitor sitting there with their thumbs up their ass. He said “What the fuck you think—” and then shut up when LQ’s gun pressed against the side of his head.

  The Dunlop guy had been a few steps behind Garr and stopped at the door when he saw what was happening. Before he could haul ass, Brando snatched him by the coat and pulled him inside. But the guy was no slouch—he grabbed Brando’s piece and tried to take it away from him.

  “Son of a bitch snatched onto it like a damn bulldog on a bone,” Brando said. “We went banging against the tables and the bar, knocking over stools, both of us cussing a blue streak. He’s trying to get the piece and I’m mainly trying to keep it pointed away from me. Bastard was strong.”

  “Ray finally jerks the gun away from the guy—but he was pulling straight back and hit hisself in the face with it,” LQ said, demonstrating the move. “About knocked hisself on his own ass. I’ve got the other fella by the collar with my piece to his ear and it’s a damn wonder I didn’t shoot him by accident I was laughing so hard.”

  “Real funny,” Brando said.

  “I gotta say, the old boy paid for it,” LQ said. “Ray just whaled on him with that gun—whap! whap! I expect the fella swallowed them top teeth he lost. I never did see them come out his mouth. When Ray got done with him the guy looked like he’d tried to stop a train with his face.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Brando said softly, fingering his shiner.

  But Dunlop’s troubles—and Garr’s too—had only just begun. When Freddie was done checking the machines, he handed LQ a piece of paper with a tally of the money the slots had taken in since they’d been rented by the Red Shoes Cabaret. LQ compared it to the slip of paper Rose had given him that showed the total slot receipts Dunlop and Garr had reported. The Red Shoes tally was way short.

  “I told them fellas what the problem was,” LQ said, “and they started talking a mile a minute to try and explain things. The one with the busted mouth sounded like a retard, it was so hard for him to talk. I never did understand how these old boys who get caught with their hand in the jar figure they can say something that’s gonna make any damn difference.”

  They made Dunlop hug one of the thick floor-to-ceiling support beams and made Garr hug another and they tied their hands around the posts with their own belts and gagged the men with their own neckties. Then Brando told the janitor to get him a hammer.

  “Would’ve settled it for just a hand,” Brando said, “but that Dunlop bastard made me mad, so I did his foot too.”

  “What about the Garr guy?” I said.

  “Well hell, same thing,” Brando said. “They’re partners, aint they?”

  “Share the profit,” LQ said, “share the loss.”

  W e all got nicely buzzed on another three pitchers while the afternoon dwindled away and the lounge windows turned pink with the sunset. When Brando asked what I’d done to celebrate the night before, I told them about having supper with Rose and then going to a cathouse, but I didn’t feel like talking about the fight, so I left that part out.

  Brando said he would’ve been better off going to a cathouse too, considering the way things turned out for him with the French girl. When he’d arrived at Brigitte’s to pick her up for the party, she was already gone. She left a note saying she’d got tired of waiting and that the party was at such and such an address and she’d meet him there. So he went on over to the place, an apartment house by the wharves.

  He said you could hear the shindig from three blocks away. The party took up the whole building, all eight apartments, with a different kind of music blasting in each one.

  “Sounded like a goddam loony bin,” Brando said.

  He searched through five apartments before he found her. She was dancing with two guys at once, one holding her from the front and one from the rear, and all three of them so drunk they weren’t really dancing as much as staggering around together.

  Before Brando could make up his mind what to do—grab her away or start punching or what—the guy hugging her from behind suddenly puked a gusher over her shoulder, getting it all over her and the other guy both. That broke up the three-way dance in a hurry, Brando said. The puking guy backpedaled into the end of a sofa and fell over on a pair of necking couples who shoved him off on the floor and started kicking hell out of him. The other guy stood there staring down at his puked-on shirt and cussing. The Brigitte girl stumbled over to the wall and leaned against it and started doing some puking of her own.

  “I have to say she pretty much lost all her glamour right there,” Brando said. “I left her to her fun and went on home, had a beer and hit the hay. Some New Year’s.”

  “It’s what you get fooling around with them trashy women,” LQ said. “You got to find yourself a woman you can respect.”

  “Oh man, if I have to hear about that Zelda again,” Brando said. “It’s all I’ve heard from this guy today—Zelda this, Zelda that.”

  And of course he did have to hear it again, since LQ had to tell me all about her. His New Year’s Eve with the redhaired Hollywood Dinner Club hostess had been everything he’d hoped, although it had gotten off to a shaky start because she’d been miffed that he was late in picking her up. She’d heard enough about the Ghosts to accept his explanation that there was never any telling how long a job would take, but all the same she let him know she hated to be kept waiting. If a fellow were going to be tardy in arriving for a date, she told him, the least he could do was to call and let the lady know—it was the gentlemanly thing to do. LQ told her he agreed 100 percent and apologized for not having done the gentlemanly thing.

  “From there on it was all smooth sailing,” LQ said. “Best time I’ve had in a while. Good dinner, nice dancing, a walk on the beach in our bare feet. Then over to her place for a little brandy and soft music. Then into the bedroom and off to the promised land.” He winked big. “She was worth the wait, I’ll tell you that much. Got a supper date with her again tonight.”

  “Holy shit,” Brando said, looking alarmed. He leaned over the table to stare closely at LQ’s face. “What’s that in your eyes?”

  “What?” LQ said, rubbing at his eyes and then checking his fingers.

  “Oh…I see,” Brando said. “It’s only stardust.”

  “Real funny,” LQ said. “I already told you, I’m just banging the woman, I aint courting her.”

  “I bet that’s what he said both times before,” Brando said to me. “Dollar to a doughnut he marries her. Disaster number three, coming right up.”

  “I don’t know if I should take that bet,” I said.

  “Piss on both you,” LQ said. “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars apiece I never marry her. I’ll give you five to one I never.”

  “What the hell kind of bet is that, you’ll never marry her?” I said. “Only way we can be sure you’ll never marry her is
wait till you or her dies.”

  “That’s right,” Brando said. “What if you wait to marry her when you’re sixty years old? You expect us to wait that long to collect? We got to have a time limit, none of this never bullshit.”

  “Well, what about me?” LQ said, portioning out the remaining beer in the pitcher. “If I die before I marry her, I win the bet but I can’t even collect on it.” He paused in his pouring for a moment, frowning like somebody not real sure what he’d just said.

  “Christ almighty,” Brando said. “Only some East Texas peckerwood would come up with a stupid-ass bet nobody can collect on.”

  “Well now, he could collect if she died first,” I said. “He couldn’t marry a dead woman even if he wanted. I don’t believe it’s legal.”

  “Can’t be, not in no civilized country,” Brando said. “So if she dies first, that settles it—he’ll never marry her and he can collect. But now hold on…what’s to keep him from killing her the minute he’s in need of two hundred bucks?”

  I shrugged.

  “You dickheads are drunk,” LQ said.

  “Bet’s off,” Brando said. “I aint putting up a hundred bucks he can win by just shooting the bitch.”

  “I knew you’d chicken,” LQ said.

  “Chicken this,” Brando said, giving him the jack-off gesture.

  While they were going at it I signaled the waitress for another pitcher. She brought it over as we were finishing the last of what we had on the table.

  LQ squinted at his watch. “Goddamn, I’m supposed to be there already. I gotta get rolling.”

  “Ah hell, have another beer,” Brando said. “You got plenty time.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She had such fun with you last night she won’t mind if you’re a few minutes late, not this time.”

  “I aint gonna have no more such fun if she gets all out of sorts with me,” LQ said, collecting his cigarettes and lighter and putting them in his pocket.