“It all looks very good,” Daniela said, examining the oozing sausage and the fried tomato slices, the eggs thoroughly scrambled the way Albert knew I liked them. She watched me pick up a crisp slice of tomato with my fingers and bite into it, and then she did the same.
“Oh this is delicious,” she said, and took a bigger bite.
Lynette grinned at Daniela’s pleasure and then went back to the counter and fetched a stack of thick-sliced toast moist with melted butter. She refilled our cups and said, “Yall enjoy your breakfast. I’ll keep an eye on your coffee, make sure you don’t go dry.”
Daniela thanked her and the girl went to tend to other patrons.
“Yall?” Daniela said.
“All of you. You all—yall.”
Daniela mouthed the word silently and looked over at Lynette who was at a back booth, taking an order. The other customers had quit eyeballing us and gone back to minding their own business.
She liked the sausage but thought the eggs needed more spice and sprinkled them with cayenne sauce. “So,” she said as we ate, “now you have learned everything of me. Tell me of yourself.”
“Not much to tell,” I said. “I grew up on a ranch in West Texas, then came here a couple of years ago and here I still am.”
“That is a very short story,” she said.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” she said. “Are you American or Mexican? Why do you have blue eyes? Tell me everything.”
I was born in San Antonio, I said. My mother was a blue-eyed American named Alice Harrison. Her parents managed a hotel in Laredo. My father was Mexican, a federal cavalry officer named Benito Torres. He met my mother at a fiesta, when he was on leave and visiting relatives on the American side. They married a week later.
“Oh my,” she said. “It must have been love at first sight.”
“Must’ve been,” I said. “But a few days after their wedding he had to go back to his troops in Mexico. About a month before I was born he was killed at a place called Zacatecas.”
Her face fell. “Ay, that is so sad. I am sure it broke your mother’s heart.”
“I guess so.” I told her that my mother’s heart had already been bruised pretty hard a few months before. There had been a cholera epidemic moving along the border, and because she was frail in her pregnancy with me, her parents wanted her away from the threat of the disease, so they sent her to live with family friends in San Antonio. Shortly afterward she got the hard news that both of them had been killed in a fire that destroyed the hotel.
“Dios mio,” Daniela said. “She lost so much in such little time.”
“Yeah, she didn’t have much luck and it didn’t get any better. She died giving birth to me.”
Daniela stared at me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s not like I ever knew her or anything.”
“But still, she was your mother. Who took care of you?”
My aunt, I said, my mother’s sister. She was something of a black sheep and had run away at an early age but she and my mother had always kept in touch. When my mother wrote and told her what happened to their parents, my aunt came to San Antonio all the way from El Paso to stay with her and be of help until I was born. She’d only recently gotten married herself. When my mother died, my aunt and uncle took me to live with them on their ranch in West Texas. That’s where I grew up. My uncle—whose name was Cullen Youngblood—gave me his family name, agreeing with my aunt that I’d be better off with an American name than with my father’s Mexican one. They christened me James in honor of one of Uncle Cullen’s dead brothers.
“James Youngblood.” She said the name like she was testing it in her mouth. “Do you have a middle name?”
“Rudolph,” I said. “I’ve never told it to anybody else, and if you repeat it I’ll call you a liar. My aunt gave it to me for no reason except she liked it.”
When I was two years old, I told Daniela, my aunt gave birth to a son, the only child she and Uncle Cullen ever had. He had blue eyes too, but darker than mine and my aunt’s. They named him Reuben, after my uncle Cullen’s father. We grew up like brothers. We learned to ride about as soon as we could walk and we worked as hands on the YB Ranch from the time we were boys. The only mornings we didn’t work were when we were at school.
“And that’s pretty much the story,” I said.
“Was it difficult for you in your childhood,” she said, “to be an American but to look so much Mexican? Did the other children, the American children—the Anglos, I mean—did they…make funny of you?”
“Make fun,” I said. “Oh, a few of the peckerwood kids made some cracks when I first started school—called me half-breed, blue-eyed greaser, things like that. I shut them up pretty fast.”
“The macho hombre was a macho boy.”
I scowled fiercely and put my fists up like a boxer—and she chuckled.
“There have only been one or two fools to say anything like that in the years since,” I said. “But hell, I wasn’t the only Mexican-looking American around there, you know. And around there the Anglos and Mexicans were pretty used to each other anyway. They pretty much got along okay.”
“Who taught you to speak Spanish? Your aunt?”
“No. She never knew more than a few words, and my uncle knew even less. I picked it up from the Mexican kids. It came to me pretty easy.”
“Well, you speak it very well,” she said, “for a gringo.” She was able to hold a straight face for about two seconds before breaking into giggles.
“Listen to you,” I said. “Your back’s still sopping wet and you’ve got the nerve to show that sort of disrespect to a naturalborn citizen of the United States.”
“Oh, you are so cruel to speak of wet backs,” she said, affecting a look of injury. She glanced around the room at the other diners busy with their own breakfasts and conversations, then turned sideways in her chair and said, “Does this back appear wet? Does it feel wet?”
I reached across the table and placed my palm on the exposed top of her back. Her skin was warm and wonderfully smooth.
She gave me a sidelong look. “Well?”
I withdrew my hand. “Your back is very cleverly disguised as dry.”
“You see?” she said in a tone of triumph.
As she finished her eggs she said she was even more impressed by my English, which she thought I spoke better than most Americans she had heard. She said I must have attended a good school.
I had to chuckle at that. I told her how Reuben and I had ridden horseback to a two-room regional schoolhouse six miles from the ranch. Each room had its own teacher, one for the kids in first through the sixth grade, the other for the smaller number of kids in grades seven to twelve. Only a handful of students ever made it to the tenth grade or above. None of the first-graders—except for me and then Reuben—could read at the time they started school. My aunt had taught me to read and letter by the time I was five, then did the same for Reuben.
“So you and your cousin had a…how do you say ventaja? No, wait…advantage. That is correct? You had an advantage upon the other students. You must have achieved easily to grade twelve.”
“Not exactly,” I said—and immediately gave myself a mental kick in the ass. It would’ve been easier to say sure we did, and let it go at that. But now I’d roused her curiosity and had to explain.
“My aunt didn’t think the teachers at the school were educating us very well,” I said, “so she took over the job of teaching me and Reuben herself. Truth to tell, she was a better teacher than they were. She’d drill us in arithmetic every morning. She’d give us grammar tests. She’d make us read a few pages aloud from some book she’d pick at random from the shelf, and every time we came to a word we didn’t know, she’d make us look it up in the dictionary. Every week she assigned a different book to each of us and we had to write a report on it.”
“She deserves praise. What is her name?”
“Ava.”
I was glad for Lynette’s interruption—it got us off the subject of my school days. I’d told the truth about my aunt Ava’s decision to assume our education herself. I just hadn’t told the full reason for it…
I was fourteen, Reuben was twelve, and for weeks he’d been getting teased every day by a husky fifteen-year-old named Larry Rogerson. I’d kept out of it because Rogerson hadn’t laid a hand on him; his teasing was all verbal. Besides, a bully was something every kid had to deal with at one time or another, and Reuben knew as well as I did that he had to handle it himself. Then one day Reuben took a peppermint stick to school and at recess Rogerson snatched it away from him. I didn’t see that—I was tossing a football with some of the other boys—and I didn’t see Reuben try to kick Rogerson in the balls and only get him in the leg. But a lot of the other kids saw what was going on and their sudden shouting made me look over there to see Larry Rogerson holding Reuben in a headlock with one arm and beating him in the face with his other fist. Reuben was always on the skinny side but he never did lack for sand, and even as Rogerson was pounding his face he kept trying to kick him.
I ran up and punched Rogerson on the side of the head so hard I thought I broke my hand. He went sprawling but scrambled to his feet and came up with a buckknife, open and ready. He managed to cut me on the upper arm before I caught him by the wrist and tripped him to the ground and got the knife away from him. I straddled his chest and pinned his arms under my knees and held the tip of the blade to the base of his neck. My hand hurt like hell and blood was running down my arm and the sight of it had me in a fury.
“I oughta kill you,” I said. “I could do it easy.”
As soon as I said it I knew it was true. It would’ve been easy. It was one of those moments when you realize something about yourself that you hadn’t known just a second earlier, something as true as it can be and that changes the way you see yourself from then on, the way you see the whole damn world.
Rogerson knew I could do it too—it was in his eyes. That’s what saved his life. If I had detected the smallest doubt on his face I would’ve shoved the blade in his neck to the hilt and he would’ve died learning the truth. But he already knew it. He lay there staring at me in big-eyed terror, too afraid to even breathe. Maybe he was thinking how different a knife could be when it was in somebody else’s hand and at your own throat.
I became aware of the silence around us and looked up to see the other students gawking, and I saw that they all knew the truth too. Even the two teachers standing there with their mouths open. They knew.
I cocked my arm like I was getting ready to stab the blade into him. He made a half-whimper and turned his face to the side and I jabbed the blade into the ground next to his neck, close enough for the handle to press against his skin. I left it there.
I got up and stared around at the others and every pair of eyes cut away from mine, including the teachers’. My sleeve was sopped with blood. Rogerson kept his eyes on me and didn’t move. Reuben stepped up beside me and gave him the two-finger horns sign—fuck you.
Nobody said anything as we walked over to the open shed where our horses were tethered and I got a bandanna out of the saddlebag and ripped open my sleeve and Reuben tied the bandanna around my gashed arm. Then we mounted up and rode for the ranch.
Neither of us spoke till we were halfway home, and then Reuben said, “You’da damn sure done it too.”
I looked at him but didn’t say anything.
“You’da done it,” he said. Grinning.
When we got to the house and Aunt Ava saw our condition, she took us to the kitchen and told us to sit down, then fetched her small shoebox of medical supplies. She gave Reuben a handmirror and a bottle of iodine to treat the cuts on his face himself, and while she sewed up my arm I told her what happened.
She’d never been one to make a display of her feelings. She rarely smiled or frowned, never raised her voice, never openly fretted about anything. I’d never heard her laugh and I couldn’t even imagine her in tears. She listened to our accounts of the fight without comment or any kind of look I could read—except when I was telling how I threatened to cut Rogerson’s throat, and for a flickering moment she looked like she might smile. I didn’t tell her the part about how I’d known I could do it as easily as I’d ever done anything, but I had a hunch she knew it. All my life I’d had a strange sense about her, a feeling that she knew things having to do with me that I didn’t know myself, like some gypsy fortune-teller who’s reading the cards she dealt you. It was like she could see through my flesh and bones and down into some part of me so deeply hidden I couldn’t even tell what it was.
Reuben told me once that he loved his mother very much but she always seemed like a stranger in some ways and he couldn’t help being a little afraid of her. He thought his father was kind of scared of her too. I didn’t know about that, but I was never afraid of her—I was only mystified. And always would be.
She’d baked a sweet potato pie that morning and she let us have a big slice of it with a glass of milk, which had us gawking at each other, since it was almost dinnertime. When my uncle came in from the range at noon and she told him what happened he was enraged. He wanted to ride over to the Rogerson place and kick the elder Rogerson’s ass for raising a boy who’d pull a knife in a schoolyard fight. My aunt dissuaded him. No real harm had been done, she said, and Reuben and I would not be going back to the school anyway. She said she didn’t believe we were learning very much from the teachers and she had been thinking of tutoring us herself, and now she was decided on it.
Uncle Cullen grumbled a while longer during dinner about those Rogerson hillbillies out of Missouri, but the episode was closed. He was boss of the YB crews and range, but my aunt ruled the family and all matters in it…
“You see?” Daniela said, her hands braiding her hair behind her head, her breasts pushing tightly against her blouse. Lynette was watching Daniela’s hands and trying to do the same with her own hair. Albert called to the girl to quit pestering us and come get a ready order. Lynette made a face but Daniela told her she should get back to her duties, that she’d help her braid her hair some other time, when the café wasn’t so busy.
“Promise?” Lynette said. Daniela nodded and patted the girl’s hand. The girl poured more coffee for us and took up our plates and hustled off to take care of the waiting orders.
“Looks like you have an admirer,” I said.
“She’s nice,” Daniela said, undoing the braided length of her hair and shaking it free. “So. Tell me, why did you leave the ranch?”
“Oh, things changed. There was one of those epidemics that hit the border every so often, one disease or another. I don’t even remember what this one was, exactly, but both Reuben and Uncle Cullen got hit with it. They got sicker and sicker for almost a week and then died within a day of each other. It all happened pretty fast. Aunt Ava couldn’t bear to stay on at the ranch without them, so she sold the place and moved away to Denver. She had kinfolk there. She asked me to go with her, but a vaquero buddy of mine knew of a ranch just outside San Antone where we could hire on, so we did. A few months later I got a notion to come to Galveston, get a look at the sea. And here I am.”
I thought it was a pretty good lie. Up to now the only lie I’d told her was about my father—but hell, what did that matter? I had believed the same lie myself for most of my life and so what? But I hadn’t wanted to complicate things with her, and the truth about my leaving the ranch would’ve required a lot of explaining and maybe even confused
her. So I’d lied. Not because I wanted to deceive her or because I was afraid of the truth—the reasons most people lie—but only to keep things simple.
“I am sorry for you,” she said. “There has been so much terrible misfortune in your family.”
“Hell, there’s probably not a family anywhere that hasn’t had its share of rough luck.”
“Do you and your aunt write letters to one another?”
“Not as often as we used to. She’s got a pretty busy life. I’m glad for her.”
She nodded, then looked out the window and sipped at her coffee. I lit a cigarette.
We sat in silence for a minute. Then she turned to face me and said, “I have seen you before. Four nights ago. You were in a car on the street when we went by. You looked directly at me. But when Señor Avila introduced us, you didn’t remember.”
“Yes I did. But I thought you didn’t remember, so I didn’t say anything.”
“Truly?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Truly.”
She stared down into her coffee cup for a moment. “After you departed last night, Señor Avila spoke about you.”
“Oh?” I’d figured he would have.
“He said you work for a powerful man named Don Rosario.”
I waited.
She looked up. “He believes you are a pistolero for this man.”
I looked out the window at people passing by on the way to the next part of their lives. Then turned back to her and shrugged and said, “People who gossip like to dramatize things. I collect money for my employers. I drive here and there and collect account payments and bring them back to the office. To tell the truth, it’s pretty dull work.”
“Do you always have with you the pistol you had last night?”
“I sometimes collect a lot of money in a day’s work, and the world’s full of thieves. I’ve gotten used to carrying it.”
All true.
She studied my eyes like she was trying to see behind them. “Señor Avila says everyone of La Colonia is pleased that you live among them. They feel protected by the nearness of you.”
Under the Skin Page 15