And would Señorita Daniela, I asked Avila, be seeking a job as a seamstress?
I looked over my shoulder into the kitchen. She stood with her back to us, helping Avila’s wife do the dishes at the sink. If she’d heard my mention of her name she gave no sign of it. Her calves flexed as she went up on her toes to replace a dish in the overhead cabinet. Her hips were roundly smooth and slim. Her blouse was slightly scooped in the rear to expose a portion of her brown back and the play of muscle as she hung a cup on its hook on the wall. She dropped a dishcloth and bent to retrieve it and the light gleamed along the upper ridge of her spine. She’d knotted her hair up behind her head but a few black tendrils dangled on her neck.
I turned back around and saw Rocha staring at her too.
Most probably the girl would find work in a dress shop, Avila said. But he and his wife had told her she should rest herself for a few days more before she started looking for employment.
I took out my cigarettes and offered one to Avila, who politely accepted it, then shook up another one in the pack and extended it to Rocha. He hesitated a moment and then took the smoke with his free hand and gave me a grudging nod of thanks. Avila struck a match and lit us up.
We smoked and sipped at our coffee in an awkwardly growing silence. I was hoping Daniela would join us—but of course she would not, nor would Señora Avila. It wasn’t a social gathering at the table but an affair of men. After another minute, I snuffed my cigarette in the ashtray and stood up, saying I had to be on my way.
She was still at the sink with her back to the door, folding a dishtowel. Señora Avila came out of the kitchen, her expression somewhat uncertain. I thanked her for the coffee and apologized for any distress I may have caused her. Then I called to the girl in the kitchen, “Buenas noches, señorita. Mucho gusto de conocerle.”
She turned to look at me. “Buenas noches, señor.”
Avila escorted me to the front door. I put my hat on and looked back and saw her watching me from beside the dining table.
From the moment we’d been introduced I’d been wondering how I might go about seeing her again. And now, before I knew I was going to do it, I said, “Con permiso, señorita. Me gustaría invitarle a—”
“I speak English,” she said, with only a mild accent. And smiled at me for the first time.
I was so surprised, I said, “Yes, you do”—and felt like a moron.
Everyone was looking from me to her, her to me.
“Well,” I said, “I was wondering…there’s a café just a few blocks from here, over by the train station—the Steam Whistle, it’s called—and, ah, they serve a pretty good breakfast, and…I was wondering if you might want to go with me tomorrow. For breakfast.”
Smooth, I thought, really slick. You babbling jackass—what the hell’s with you?
“Qué le dijo?” Rocha said. He was looking from Avila to his wife, but they were both staring at me and ignored him.
“I would be pleased to accompany you to the café,” she said. “What time should I expect you?”
“Well, is…seven o’clock? That okay? I mean if that’s too early…”
“Seven o’clock is…o-kay,” she said, sounding the word like she hadn’t used it before and like she found it fun to say. “I shall be ready.”
I was tickled by the “shall” and grinned like a fool.
“Okay then,” I said. “Seven it is.”
Rocha looked angry. The Avilas seemed confused. I tipped my hat and said, “Buenas noches a todos,” returned her smile across the room, and took my leave.
I skipped down the front steps and practically danced all the way to the Casa Verde.
T hey find La Perla cantina on a muddy street in a ramshackle neighborhood on the swampy east side of Matamoros. A windless rain falls steadily from a black sky. They step out of the taxi and Gustavo curses the mud on his new shoes and the cuffs of his tan trousers, the rainwater spotting his Stetson. The air is heavy with the smells of muck and rotted vegetation. Angel tells the driver to wait for them and gives him the slightly smaller half of a torn bill of large denomination.
The place is dimly lighted and roughly furnished. A radio on the backbar plays ranchero music. There are only three customers on this miserable night, two of them at a table and a solitary drinker at the end of the bar. The bartender is reading a newspaper spread open on the bartop. He has a fresh black eye swollen half-shut and his lips are bruised and bloated. He doesn’t look up from the paper until they are at the bar—and then his battered face comes alert. La Perla receives few patrons so well dressed as these two.
He puts aside the paper and spreads his hands on the bar and asks their pleasure. Gustavo pulls open his coat just enough to let him see the pistol in its holster and tells him in a low voice not to move his hands from the bar or he will shoot him where he stands.
Angel turns to look at the three drinkers, who all cut their eyes away. “Oigan!” he says, and they return their attention to him. He tells them he and his partner are policemen and the bar is being closed for improprieties. Anyone still in the place in one minute will be arrested. The three men bolt out the door and Angel goes over and locks it.
Gustavo asks the bartender if he has a gun hidden anywhere on the premises and the man says no. He says that if this is a holdup they’re going to be disappointed with the take.
Gustavo tells him they are collectors for the Monterrey gambling house called La Llorona and they have been searching for him all over the states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. And now, thanks to a tip, they’ve finally found him.
Angel asks if he really thought he could get away with owing La Llorona ten thousand pesos.
The bartender’s face is pinched in fearful incomprehension. He swears he doesn’t know what they’re talking about, that he’s never been in La Llorona.
“Ah, Victor,” Gustavo says, “no me digas mentiras.”
Victor? the bartender says. Who the hell’s Victor? They’ve got the wrong guy. His name’s Luis. His brother Guillermo owns this place and maybe he knows this Victor son of a bitch. They can ask him when he comes in later in the evening.
Angel laughs and asks Gustavo if he can believe the nerve of this guy, denying he’s Victor Montoya.
“Pero yo no soy Victor Montoya,” the bartender says. He swears it on the Holy Mother. “Me llamo Arroyo, Luis Arroyo.”
Angel and Gustavo smile at him. And only now does Luis Arroyo begin to understand that he has been tricked—and to sense that he has seen these men before. And then he remembers. Yes. At Las Cadenas. They were driving up to the casa grande in a convertible with a dead man tied across the hood. He feels a sudden urge to urinate.
Gustavo goes around the counter and Luis Arroyo tries to turn to face him without moving his hands from the bartop. Gustavo hits him hard in the kidney and Arroyo collapses into a whimpering heap. Gustavo takes off his coat and hands it to Angel who drapes it over a barstool. Then Gustavo squats down behind the bar to interrogate Luis Arroyo.
The thing is done in less than ten minutes. Cursing softly, Gustavo stands up and wets a portion of a bar towel with water and dabs at a small bloodstain on his shirt. Angel gestures for a bottle of tequila and Gustavo sets it and a couple of shot glasses on the bar. Angel pours them both a drink and they toss them back and Angel refills both glasses.
They have learned that Arroyo agreed to help la señora effect her getaway and get over the border in exchange for several pieces of jewelry that she assured him would fetch a sizable price. She had given him part of his payment before they set out and the rest when he delivered her to a certain house in Brownsville, Texas, which he accomplished with the help of a smuggler acquaintance who showed them where to ford the river upstream of the international bridge. When he crossed back to Matamoros, however, Arroyo had been set upon by robbers who beat him up and stole his jewelry. He cursed the meanness of this goddamned world and the brute injustice of life until Gustavo painfully brought him back to the matter at hand and such germ
ane details as the address of the Brownsville house.
He described it as a yellow house on Levee Street, just off the main boulevard, with a short fat palm in the middle of the yard. La señora said the place belonged to friends of hers, but she had not told anything about them, not even their names.
Now Angel leans over the bar and looks down at Luis Arroyo. He says for Luis to have a drink and pours a stream of tequila into Arroyo’s upturned bloody face and open unseeing eyes, onto his head, comically angled on the broken neck.
A deep-orange sun was breaking over the trees and rooftops when I returned to the Avila’s front door. I’d shined up my boots and I was wearing a white suit fresh from the cleaners and a brand-new fedora. It had taken me a long while to fall asleep the night before, but it hadn’t occurred to me till I awakened that I should’ve gotten up earlier and gone to the Club to get a car. If Rose was already there he would’ve let me use the Lincoln.
She answered the door herself, and good as her word she was ready.
“Good morning,” she said. The sight of her set a butterfly loose under my ribs.
Señora Avila stood behind her, looking pleased. Whatever had been worrying her the night before, she was over it. Avila rose from his chair at the dining table and called hello. He was in visibly better spirits also. He invited me in for a cup of coffee but I said I had an appointment this morning and had just enough time for breakfast.
Rocha was still sullen, staring hard at me from the sofa where he sat with a cup of coffee. A white pad bandage on top of his head was held in place with a cloth strip knotted under his chin so it looked like he was wearing some kind of ridiculous bonnet. He knew what I was smiling at and gave me a rude hand gesture, which only made me chuckle.
It was another unseasonably warm morning. The only clouds were to the south, far over the gulf. She was dressed for the weather in a light yellow blouse much like the one she had worn the night before—without sleeves and with small scoops in front and back—a white skirt, open-toed leather sandals. As we started up the lane I apologized for not having a car, but she said she wouldn’t have wanted to ride anyway, she liked to walk, especially on such a lovely day. Her black hair hung long and loose and she swept it back over her shoulders.
I had spoken in Spanish, but she had answered in her slightly stilted English. I asked which language she preferred we use.
“In what country are we?” she said, giving me a sidewise look that made me laugh.
“Okay, girl. Whatever lingo you want.”
“Lingo?” she said. Then brightened and said, “Ah, lengua…lingo. Yes.”
We went along Mechanic and then turned toward the rail station, chatting all the while about what a pretty day it was and how the smell of the sea was especially sweet in the early morning. She said she loved the sea. She had grown up breathing its scent in Veracruz and she missed it when she went to Matamoros, which was more than twenty miles inland.
“In Matamoros the smell was always of dead things and the river mud,” she said.
In daylight her hair looked even blacker than it had the night before and it gleamed dark blue when the sun struck it at a certain angle. Her eyes seemed darker, brighter. Her skin was the color of caramel. I took her hand to cross the street to The Steam Whistle, which stood opposite the train station. She had a strong cool grip and she laughed as we scooted through a break in the traffic.
The café was small—a half-dozen tables, a row of stools along a short counter, four booths in the rear. Except for the rare mornings when I ate at the Casa Verde, this was where I always came for breakfast. I liked the place so much that I paid the owner, a balding guy named Albert Moss, fifteen dollars a month to reserve a particular table for me every morning from six to nine o’clock, in the corner by the big front window. All the regular customers knew whose table it was.
I hadn’t been in for the past few days, and when Albert saw us he raised his spatula in greeting from the grill behind the counter. I gave him a nod and held Daniela’s chair and then sat across from her. The table’s little hand-printed RESERVED sign couldn’t have looked more out of place except in front of a barstool but it was necessary for warding off strangers who stopped in. I turned it facedown. She didn’t remark on it—or on all of the sidelong attention we’d attracted from the other patrons. She was the first one I’d ever brought in here.
The café was a family business run by Albert and his wife, and on Saturdays their teenage daughter Lynette came in to lend a hand. The girl brought us coffee and checked-cloth napkins and sets of silverware. She said, “Hi, Jimmy,” but couldn’t keep her eyes off Daniela. I introduced them and they beamed at each other.
I knew the little menu by heart but Lynette had brought one to the table for Daniela in case she wanted to look at it. Daniela asked what I was going to eat. I said the fried tomatoes were pretty good—they were coated with bread crumbs seasoned with garlic and pepper—and I was going to have them with scrambled eggs and toast. “I’m eating light this morning but I recommend the smoked sausage to you,” I said.
“Then that’s what I will have,” Daniela told Lynette. The girl gave her another radiant smile and took our order to her father.
“Why do you eat…light…this morning?” she said.
“Gotta be quick on my feet today,” I said, and made a little running motion with two fingers along the tabletop.
She was about to say something to that, then checked herself. I asked where she’d learned to speak English and she said in a Catholic school called Escuela de Los Tres Reyes. She had practiced every day with her teachers and classmates, and with store owners along her route between home and school who spoke English well.
I asked if she’d mind if I smoked and she said no, then shook her head when I offered a cigarette. We looked out the window at the people passing on the sidewalk, the cluster of traffic in front of the train station, then turned to each other and started to speak at the same time—and both laughed.
I said, “You first,” but she said, “No, you,” and insisted on it.
“I only wanted to say I’m sorry about the loss of your parents,” I said. “Your mother…I mean, having lost your mother so recently must be hard for you.”
“Yes,” she said, with no tone at all.
It was obvious she didn’t care to talk about it, so I said, “Why did you leave Veracruz? Since you liked it so much, I mean. Didn’t you have kinfolk there, relatives you could’ve stayed with?”
“No, there was no one.” She looked out the window and then back at me. “I am happy to be here.”
“I can understand why. Galveston’s an interesting place.”
“Yes, I like Galveston, but I mean I am happy to be here.” She patted the tabletop.
“Oh. Well, I’m glad.” More Mr. Smooth.
“This town reminds me of Veracruz. Where we lived, you could see…el malecón?—the seawall?”
“Yes. Seawall.”
“The seawall,” she said. “You could see the seawall from the window of our house. You could see the beach. I went swimming every day, from the time I was a little girl. Do you swim?”
I told her of never having seen the ocean until two years ago and how I had learned to swim, and of my habit of going for a long swim every two weeks. I left out the part about how much the gulf had scared me when I first saw it.
She was awed by the idea that I’d not looked on the sea until I was grown, and was impressed that I had taught myself to swim. But she couldn’t understand why I didn’t go swimming more often.
“Every day since I have been here,” she said, “I have felt such…gana. Como se dice gana?”
“Urge,” I said. “Hankering. Desire…”
“Desire, yes. I have felt such desire to go swimming. I asked the señor and Señora Avila if they would escort me to the beach tomorrow when they do not have to go to work, and the señora said yes but the señor said no. He believes the women’s bathing suits are indecent. His face becam
e red when the señora said he enjoys to look at the other girls on the beach but could not bear the shame if a woman in his company exposed her legs to the world.”
She turned her palms up and made a face of incomprehension.
The thought of her exposed legs deepened my breath. I cleared my throat. “What about Rocha? Why doesn’t he take you to the beach?”
“That one.” She rolled her eyes. “He will not go to the beach. He does not say why but I think he is afraid. I think he fears even the sight of the sea. Can you imagine?”
I shook my head and made a puzzled face to convey inability to imagine a man afraid of the sea.
“I suppose I will have to go to the beach by myself, if no one will accompany me.”
She gave me a look I’d seen from other women. From them it had been a clear invitation to an invitation, but with this one I couldn’t be sure.
“Well,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but…I mean, we just met and I don’t want to offend…”
She gave my shin a light kick under the table and said in a low voice, “Be brave!” She covered her smile with her hands but it was still in her eyes.
I had to laugh at her boldness. “All right, then. Would you like to go swimming with me?”
“I should very much like to go swimming with you,” she said. “When?”
“Well, I’ve been going at night, but I can arrange for—”
She said she loved to swim in the sea at night. “It’s so beautiful at night,” she said. “I have done it only one time but it was wonderful. It was like…like all the sea belonged to me.”
“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking of taking a swim tonight.”
She leaned over the table and said in a whisper of mock conspiracy: “And I may join you in swimming in the darkness?”
“Yes you may,” I said. “But I’m warning you, the water can be pretty chilly this time of year.”
She did a little bounce in her chair like an excited child. “I don’t care. I am very brave.”
Lynette came to the table with a platter in each hand and set down our breakfasts.
Under the Skin Page 14