I didn’t know what to say to that so I just shrugged.
Lynette delivered breakfast to a nearby table and then asked if we were ready for more coffee. I checked my watch and shook my head. “We have to get.” I left the money for the bill on the table, including a bigger tip than usual.
I took her hand again to cross the busy street and we didn’t let go of each other till we were back at La Colonia.
At the Avila front door I said I’d come by for her just after dark, about six-thirty. I told her to wear her bathing suit under her dress and bring a towel.
She said she’d be ready, then waggled her fingers at me and went inside.
I headed for the Club.
A s he had told his wife he would do on his way back from Galveston, Oscar Picacho stopped off in Corpus Christi to visit with his cousin Ernesto. They went fishing in the bay in Ernesto’s boat and caught snapper and dorado and they filleted and grilled the fish in Ernesto’s backyard. They smoked cigars and got happily half-drunk and told funny stories of their boyhood days in Reynosa. It had been an altogether fine time. And now, on this late Saturday morning more than three days after leaving the Avila house, Oscar Picacho steers his trusty green Model T onto the narrow dirt driveway alongside his Brownsville home.
He calls to his wife as he comes through the front door and into his small living room and catches only a glimpse of Teresa where she sits on the sofa—her eyes large and terrified, her hands gripping her knees—before Angel Lozano’s pistol barrel crashes into the side of his head and the room tilts and he hears Teresa’s scream as something distant and cut off almost as soon as it begins and he is only vaguely aware of hitting the floor on his face.
He regains consciousness to find himself beside his wife on the sofa, his hands tied behind him, his face and mustache dripping with water flung on him to bring him to his senses, his shirt soaked. The right side of his head feels misshapen and pains him from crown to jaw. Teresa now with her hands bound before her and a gag in her mouth, her face bright with tears.
Angel Lozano and Gustavo Mendez loom over them, their foul mood in their faces, a mood made worse by their having been cloistered in this little house for more than two days while they awaited Oscar’s return. In that time they have learned much from Señora Picacho: that the Picachos had known the girl as a child in Veracruz and always loved her and despised her parents for their miserable neglect of her, and in their letters to her over the years they constantly reminded her that she was always welcome in their home, which was why she had come to them on fleeing Las Cadenas; that the girl—Daniela, as the woman called her—had told the Picachos of her abduction from Veracruz by a rich but evil one-eyed man named César Calveras who had put her through a terrible ordeal over the following months at Las Cadenas before she was able to effect her escape, but she had not told them of her marriage; that the Picachos had offered to let her live with them for as long as she wished and that she had accepted—and accepted as well Oscar Picacho’s invitation to accompany him to Galveston Island on his annual trip to celebrate New Year’s Eve at a party with his favorite nephew, Roberto Avila; that they had departed for Galveston on the day before Angel and Gustavo showed up, and that with them had gone another Picacho nephew, Felipe Rocha, who had been a Brownsville policeman until he was fired last year for stealing several pistols from the station arms room and, though it was never proved, selling them across the river; that Señora Picacho herself had not gone with them because she did not like car trips, that she had never been to Galveston, and that she had no idea where in that town Roberto Avila lived.
Angel and Gustavo had had no choice but to wait for the trio to return. When they finally heard the rattle of the Model T as it pulled into the driveway, they told Señora Picacho to sit on the sofa and make no sound of warning or the last thing she would see in this life would be the deaths of her husband and nephew and dear friend Daniela. But the only one to come through the door had been Oscar Picacho.
Now Angel Lozano grabs Oscar by his wet hair and yanks his head around so he can see Gustavo holding a knife to the señora’s throat. The woman is close to hysteria.
Angel demands to know exactly where the girl is—and without hesitation Oscar tells him.
Shortly thereafter Angel and Gustavo slip out of the house and casually make away along the tree-shadowed sidewalks of the quiet neighborhood. At a Ford dealership a few blocks farther on they pay cash for a new sedan.
It is almost noon when they reach the main highway and turn north, Gustavo driving, being careful not to exceed the speed limit, Angel studying the open road map on his lap and calculating mileage and driving time. Allowing for reduced speeds in most of the towns they will pass through, he estimates they will get to Galveston around midnight.
It will be more than a week before neighbors become sufficiently concerned about the Picachos—having seen neither of them in that time and their car unmoved from the driveway—to call the police. An officer will investigate and discover the bodies in the house, both of them with drapery cords tight around the neck.
H ad I told her the truth about my life on the ranch and how I came to leave the place, I would’ve had to tell at least a little about Frank Hartung. He was Uncle Cullen’s oldest friend. He had a ranch in New Mexico and had a good foreman he could trust to run things in his absence when every so often he’d come see us for a few days’ visit. We’d meet him at the Marfa station—Uncle Cullen and Aunt Ava, me and Reuben—and then take supper at a café before making the long drive back down to the YB in Uncle Cullen’s old Studebaker truck.
Frank had a funny habit whenever he sat down to a meal with us at the house. He’d never take the first bite of his food until Uncle Cullen had eaten a mouthful of his own. He’d watch Uncle Cullen chew and swallow, then they’d stare at each other for a moment, then Uncle Cullen would shrug at him and they’d both grin and Frank would start digging into his own plate. It was some kind of private joke between them that always made me and Reuben chuckle—even though we didn’t know why it was so funny. But Aunt Ava didn’t much appreciate their comedy. She always gave the two of them a tightmouth look and sometimes shook her head like she couldn’t understand how grown men could act so silly. I don’t recall that she ever said anything about it except one time when I was about eight years old. “For God’s sake, Frank,” she’d said, “do you think I’m out to poison the bunch of you?”
The remark set Frank and Uncle Cullen to laughing so hard they almost choked on their beef—and Reuben thought that was so funny his milk came out his nose.
In some ways Frank Hartung was more of an uncle to me than Uncle Cullen was. Maybe because no matter how hard Uncle Cullen tried to treat us the same, Reuben was his flesh and blood and it was only natural that he’d be the favored one. But Frank never had any children, was never even married, and since he was so close to Uncle Cullen I guess he probably saw me like a nephew, maybe even a little like a son. Whenever the four of us shot pool together at the house, it was always Uncle Cullen and Reuben against me and Frank, and we almost always won. Uncle Cullen taught me how to ride, but Frank Hartung taught me the most important things I came to know about horses and riding them well. Even when the four of us were out riding the backcountry together, Frank would be instructing me about reading the land and sky, about tracking a rider or a man afoot, about the proper way to make a camp or build a fire or dress game. He was always teaching me something. As often as not, Reuben would drift over to join us too and learn what he could. Uncle Cullen seemed content enough to let Frank provide most of our education in the ways of the natural world.
The first guns I ever fired were Uncle Cullen’s twelve-gauge double-barrel and his Winchester carbine, both of which he let me shoot as soon as I was big enough to steady them on a target. He did the same with Reuben. For my thirteenth birthday he gave me a .30–30 carbine of my own—then gave one to Reuben when he turned twelve. But it was Frank who really taught us how to shoot. He taught us
which shooting positions allowed for the steadiest aim with a rifle. Taught us to get a spot weld and to let out half a breath and hold it as we took a bead. Taught us to squeeze the trigger not jerk it. He taught us about sight adjustment, about Kentucky windage and Tennessee elevation, about shooting uphill and down.
Actually, he taught all these things to Reuben—I already knew them, although I had no idea how I did. I was a deadeye from the start and I could tell that Frank knew he wasn’t teaching me anything. He called me a naturalborn shooter and I supposed that was all the explanation for it.
As good as I was with a rifle, my real talent was with handguns. I was fifteen the first time I held one—Frank’s .38 Smith & Wesson top-break revolver—and it was like handling some tool I’d used all my life. It was a strange but comforting sensation. I busted a beer bottle at forty paces with each of the first six shots I took. Reuben yelled “Yow!” with every hit. It was like I didn’t really have to aim, just point the gun like my finger at whichever bottle I wanted to hit—and pow, I’d hit it. Frank then let me shoot his .380 Savage and I did just as well with it. I loved its semiautomatic action, the thrill of firing one round after another in rapid sequence, shattering a bottle with each shot. When I squeezed off the tenth and last round in the magazine, Frank stared at the litter of glass on the ground, then looked at me kind of curious but didn’t say anything.
When I turned seventeen Frank gave me a rifle that once upon a time had belonged to his grandfather—an 1874 Buffalo Sharps. It weighed twelve pounds and fired a .50-caliber round that could carry over a mile. It had double-set triggers and a folding vernier peep sight mounted on the tang. Frank said his granddad had used it when he was an army scout hunting Apaches. The rifle came with a protective buckskin boot fitted with a rawhide loop so it could be hung on a saddle horn.
A month after he gave me that present Frank was killed in El Paso. Two men tried to rob him when he came out of a whorehouse. He was sixty years old and half-drunk but still managed to bust one guy’s head against a rock fence before the other one stabbed him from behind. The one with the fractured skull survived and got sentenced to forty years. The killer was executed in the electric chair.
Frank was buried in the Concordia Cemetery in El Paso. Reuben and I accompanied Uncle Cullen to the funeral. It was our first train ride and we stared out the window the whole trip, not seeing much of anything except more of the desert country we knew so well and marveling at how big West Texas truly was. Aunt Ava had come down with a bad stomachache that morning and stayed home.
There were about two dozen people at the graveside service, half of them from Frank’s ranch, including his foreman, Plutarco Suárez. Frank had bequeathed the place to him. And left his Mexican saddle to Reuben, who had always admired it. To me he left his .38 top-break.
Everybody knew what close friends Uncle Cullen and Frank had been, and when the service was over they came up to offer their condolences. He introduced me and Reuben to several of them, including a wrinkled orangehaired woman who reeked of perfume and was red-eyed with crying, a longtime acquaintance, Uncle Cullen called her, named Mrs. O’Malley.
A bout a year later—and just a few days after I’d turned eighteen—we were hit by rustlers. Early one morning Reuben and I were saddling our mounts when the vaquero foreman Esteban came riding hard with the news that a dozen of our horses had been stolen in the night. Uncle Cullen was away on business and so Esteban had come to me with the report.
He had followed the tracks from the south range where the thieves had cut the horses out of a larger herd to a ford where the stock was driven across the river. The tracks told him that two thieves had done the work on this side, and when he crossed over to study the prints on the other bank he saw that there were two more men in the band. Judging by the droppings, he figured they’d made off about three or four hours earlier.
The YB Ranch was in Presidio County, a rugged region of desert country busted up with bald mountains and mesas and buttes—and with scattered scrubland holding enough grass to graze our herds. Uncle Cullen raised cattle and horses both, marketing beeves and horsehair and saddle ponies. A portion of the Rio Grande formed the ranch’s eastern boundary. Although rustling had been a constant problem all along the border in the old days, there hadn’t been trouble with stock thieves around this part of the river in years. Lately, though, we’d been hearing stories of a small Mexican gang stealing from both Mex and American herds along a stretch of border down below El Paso. We figured that maybe things had got too hot for them up there and they’d decided to move farther south.
Esteban said he’d heard that a buyer of stolen horses was operating at a pueblo called Agua Dura, just west of the Sierra Grande, a Mexican range visible to the south of us and running roughly parallel to the Rio Grande. Each time the Agua Dura dealer accumulated a worthwhile herd he drove it down the Conchos and over to Chihuahua City, where nobody gave a damn about U.S. brands. Esteban figured Agua Dura was where our horses were headed.
The only one of us familiar with that country was a vaquero named Chente Castillo, who’d grown up in a pueblo called Placer Guadalupe, about sixty miles south of the border and within view of the Rio Conchos. He was a breed—more like a three-quarter than a half-breed, since he had a Mexican daddy and Apache mother—and there was no telling from his looks how old he was. He might’ve been thirty years old or fifty. He didn’t speak much English but he seemed to understand it well enough. He anyway didn’t need a lot of English with the other hands, most of whom were Mexican, and even the American hands could speak a little Spanish. He was a damn good rider and liked to work with me and Reuben because we didn’t like cows any more than he did and we worked only with the horses. When Esteban mentioned Agua Dura, Chente said he’d been there and said it lay about forty miles to the south and the way there was through a pass in the Grandes. There was plenty of water and grass along the Grandes foothills to nourish the animals on the way to the pass, he said, and the forage was just as adequate on the other side of the mountains.
The way I saw it, the thieves wouldn’t be driving the horses hard—they’d want the stock to be in good shape and fetch the best price. They’d anyway probably think they were safe now they were back in Mexico. If they were feeling cocky enough, they might take a couple of days about getting them to Agua Dura.
The sky behind the Chinatis was turning red as fire but the sun hadn’t shown itself yet. If I started after them right away I thought I might catch up to them by noon. My black could do it. The only horse on the YB with greater endurance was Reuben’s appaloosa.
I knew Uncle Cullen would raise hell with me when he found out. He’d warned me and Reuben never to cross the border for any reason, and I had never set foot in Mexico. Uncle Cullen had repeatedly told us it was a whole different world down there.
“There’s nothing the other side of that river but meaner trouble than you can imagine. You get yourself in any of it and you’ll play hell getting out again.” He’d known two Americans who’d gone down there and were never heard from again. “Life aint worth spit to them people,” he said, and slid his eyes away from me.
One time when he was going on and on about what a murderous place Mexico was, Esteban was sitting within earshot on a corral rail behind him. The foreman widened his eyes and held his hands out and shook them in mock fright and it was all Reuben and I could do to keep from laughing. Uncle Cullen saw our faces and whirled around on his saddle to catch Esteban studying a buzzard way up in the sky like it was the most interesting creature he’d ever seen.
But Uncle Cullen was away in Fort Stockton and wasn’t due back till late in the day—and I couldn’t stand by and do nothing about a bunch of rustlers who thought they could help themselves to our stock as easy as you please.
I patted the black and waited for him to let out his breath and then I cinched the saddle tight. I mounted up and told Chente to pick out the best horse in the remuda for himself and get his rifle and meet me at the f
ront gate.
As I heeled the black off toward the house, Reuben hupped his Jack horse up beside me.
“Where you think you’re going?” I said.
“With you.” He patted the Winchester he always carried in a saddle boot.
“Your daddy wouldn’t care for it.”
“We bring them horses back, I don’t guess he’ll be too awful red-assed with us.”
He wouldn’t quit his grin. What the hell, I thought—then smiled back at him and kicked the black into a lope and Reuben stuck right beside me.
I dismounted at the front porch and ran up to our room and took the Smith & Wesson from a dresser drawer and checked the loads and tucked it inside my shirt and under my waistband. I retrieved the Sharps in its buckskin boot from the closet and a box of cartridges off the shelf.
When I got back downstairs my aunt was standing just inside the open front door, her arms crossed, her face as impossible to read as always. Reuben was standing beside her, looking like somebody under arrest.
I’d wanted to avoid her, but there was nothing to do now except tell it to her straight, and so I did. I was hoping she wouldn’t forbid me to go because I was going to do it anyway.
She looked out the door in the direction of the river. “And you think you can overtake them?”
“Yes, mam.”
“And then what?”
“I’ll get the horses back.”
“How do you propose to do that, James Rudolph?” She was the only one who ever used my middle name.
“I just will.”
“You know Mr. Youngblood doesn’t want you crossing the river.” She always referred to him as Mr. Youngblood, even addressed him that way, when she addressed him by any name at all. He seemed pretty used to it.
“I know it, but…goddammit, they got our horses. Pardon, mam.”
She glanced down at the sheathed rifle in my hand, at the cartridges in my other, then looked at me for a long moment with those eyes that always made me feel like I was staring into my own.
Under the Skin Page 16