Under the Skin

by James Carlos Blake

  “I’ll have Carlotta wrap food for you,” she said.

  “Thank you, mam, but I can’t wait. Those fellas are farther away every minute I’m standing here.”

  She placed a palm to my cheek for just a second and then folded her arms again. I couldn’t remember another time when she’d made such a gesture. I knew Reuben was thinking the same thing by the way his mouth hung open.

  I went out and slipped the loop of the rifle sheath over the saddle horn and stuck the packet of bullets into my saddlebag. Then I swung up on the black and started off—hearing Reuben saying that he wanted to go with me, her saying something I couldn’t make out.

  And then I was riding out the gate with Chente alongside me and we headed down the road and toward the ford.

  A bout two hours later we were reined up on a low rise, letting the horses blow, studying the Mexican downcountry and seeing a faint hint of raised dust miles ahead and just about where Chente figured the pass cut through the Grandes.

  “Allí están,” he said.

  I nodded—and cursed myself for having been in such a hurry I hadn’t thought to bring field glasses.

  Chente rolled a cigarette and passed it to me and then rolled one for himself. I struck a match on my belt buckle and cupped the flame and lit us up.

  As soon as we’d crossed the Rio Grande I’d felt strangely different in some way I couldn’t put my finger on. Even though I’d never set foot in Mexico before—this country Uncle Cullen called wild and dangerous and had so often warned us about—it somehow felt almost familiar. I wondered if some aspect of my father’s Mexican blood carried in my own, something that recognized…what?…the character of the country, maybe. The soul of it. Something.

  Our shadows were pulling in toward us. To our right the Grandes stood starkly red. The upland was thick with cactus—nopal, barrel, maguey. To the east the scrubland sloped away under the orange sun and toward the Rio Grande and the Chinati peaks were jagged and purple. The sky was hugely cloudless, its blue slowly bleaching. A hawk circled the bottoms. A pair of ragged buzzards sailed high and far over Texas.

  The rustlers had been easy enough to track until they drove the herd over onto the rockier ground closer to the foothills and I lost the trail. But Chente didn’t. They were moving the horses faster than I’d figured but Chente had been sure we were closing on them anyway, and now the thin cloud of dust ahead proved him right. He regarded the sun and figured we’d be through the pass and have them in sight by noon. “O poco antes.”

  Then he looked rearward and said, “Mira.”

  A horseman had come in view out of the rocky peppercorn breaks and was heading our way, riding hard as he started up the gradual slope of the higher ground.

  We sat our horses and watched him come. There was something familiar about the animal’s gait and the way the rider was leaned forward on him.

  “Tú hermanito,” Chente said. “Se escapó de la mamá.”

  He was right. Reuben on his Appaloosa, the tireless Jack.

  I looked at the thin dust cloud along the Grandes again. It was moving into the mountains.

  We each rolled another cigarette and smoked them slowly and were finished with them before Reuben got close enough for us to hear the clacking of Jack’s shoes. Then we could see Reuben’s white grin and hear him laughing. And then he was reining up beside us, the Appaloosa blowing but not all that hard.

  “You must’ve had an hour’s start on me,” Reuben said. “You don’t never want to bet good money against Jack in a distance race.”

  He hadn’t snuck away—his mother had relented to the argument that if we were lucky enough to get back the stock, we could return to the YB a lot faster if there were three of us to drive the herd. She’d made him wait, though, while the maid packed a sack lunch for him to bring.

  He had a pair of binoculars slung around his chest and I waggled my hand for them and he gave them over. I fixed the glasses on the dust cloud and then passed them to Chente.

  Reuben stood up in his stirrups and studied the vague dust ahead. “That them?”

  “It’s them,” I said.

  He sat down again and looked all around. “Jesus, Jimmy—Mexico! Don’t look all that different, but…hot damn, man! Feels like a thousand miles from home.”

  Chente gave him a look Reuben didn’t see and said we’d catch sight of them for sure on the other side of the range.

  “Well what the hell we sitting here for?” Reuben said. “Let’s go.”

  T he sun was still shy of its meridian when we came out of the pass and onto a wide shelf. The trail swung around close to the mountain wall and dipped from view where it began its descent, but we reined over toward the cliff edge to have a look at the panorama of country below.

  And there they were down on the plain. Hardly more than little dark figures against the pale ground. They’d stopped to make a noon camp at a narrow creek shining in the sun and running along a thin outcrop and a growth of scraggly mesquites. A long red mesa stood about a half-mile north of them.

  It wasn’t likely that they’d spot us against the shadowed mountain wall, not at this distance and not even with binoculars, but we reined the horses back and tethered them in the shade. We moved up in a crouch and lay on our bellies between a pair of boulders a few feet apart on the rim of the cliff. The Smith & Wesson was digging into my stomach, so I repositioned it at my side.

  Chente checked the sun to make sure it wouldn’t be reflecting off the lenses and then took a look through the glasses.

  I asked how far off he thought they were.

  “Pues…más de un kilómetro.”

  I thought so too—maybe close to 1,300 yards.

  Chente passed me the glasses. Three of the thieves were at a small fire raising a thin smoke, roasting something on a spit. The fourth was about fifty yards downstream, mounted and watching over the stolen herd as it watered from the creek and cropped at a sparse growth of bank grass. There looked to be about three dozen head. Either Esteban had been wrong about how many we’d lost or the rustlers had hit one or two other ranches besides the YB.

  I passed the binoculars to Reuben.

  “Don’t look too awful worried, do they?” he said. “Taking a leisurely dinner right out in the wide open.”

  “Guess they didn’t figure anybody would come over the river after them.”

  He handed the binoculars to Chente, who had another long look through them and then looked at me and said, “Pues?”

  Reuben was watching me too, the same question in his eyes. Now what?

  I scrabbled backward out of the line of sight of the rustlers’ camp and stood up and hustled over to the black and dug out the box of cartridges and took the Sharps off the saddle horn and unbuckled the heel of the buckskin sheath and slid the rifle out and tossed the sheath over the saddle and hustled back to the cliff edge.

  Chente was grinning. He moved over to give me more room and flapped his hand at Reuben to do the same. I lay down between them, Reuben on my right, a little big-eyed.

  I looked at him. “What? You think they’ll give them back if we just go down and ask real nice?”

  Chente snickered.

  Reuben’s face went red and he looked out at the rustlers on the plain. “No…shit no.” He made a vague hand gesture. “It’s just…they’re a hell of a way is all.”

  He’d seen me hit watermelons with the Sharps at close to a half-mile on a downhill angle. But even though a man was a lot bigger than a watermelon, these guys were at half again that distance. And watermelons didn’t move around. And maybe he was thinking that men anyway weren’t watermelons.

  “Can’t get any closer except by going down the trail,” I said. “If we do that they’ll spot us sure before we get halfway down. Got to be from here.”

  “Soon as you shoot, they’ll run, won’t they? Even if you hit one, the others’ll run off with the stock.”

  “No van a saber de donde viene el tiro,” Chente said. “Es demasiado lejos.
”

  “What?” Reuben said. “They won’t hear it?”

  “They’ll hear it,” I said. “But they won’t know where it came from, not at this range.”

  I scanned the ground all around us and saw the rock I wanted. I pointed and Chente sidecrawled over to retrieve it. He snugged it into the dirt on the top lip of the slope in front of me. It was about the size of a football and almost flat along the top.

  I dumped a handful of the huge cartridges on the ground between me and Reuben. “Every time I put out my hand,” I said to Reuben, picking up one of the shells, “you put one of these in it. And don’t keep me waiting.”

  He nodded, but his face was tight and pale. He must’ve read my eyes, because he said, “I’m okay—go on, do it.” He scooped up several cartridges and held one up, showing me he was ready to hand it to me.

  I squirmed around and set myself. Then levered the trigger guard forward to drop the block and open the breech. I inserted the cartridge in the chamber and pulled the trigger guard back in place and the breech slid closed.

  Chente was watching the rustlers through the field glasses. I thought about hitting the rider first, since he was the readiest to make a getaway. But he’d probably fall somehow to spook his mount—jerk the reins or slump against the horse’s head or get a foot caught in a stirrup, something—and then the herd would spook too. I didn’t want to scatter the jugheads all over hell’s half-acre if I could help it. So I started with the guys at the fire.

  I didn’t think about anything except making the shot. There was no wind at all. The tricky part was the downward angle of trajectory. I put my eye to the vernier and gingerly adjusted the sight. I took a bead on the guy squatting on his haunches who looked to be tending the fire. Then moved the sight over to the one sitting on the ground and facing my way. Then put the sight on the guy standing over them, the one in the best position to run for cover. I stayed on him. I rested the barrel on the rock for steadiness and lined the sight on his head and thumbed back the hammer and set the hair trigger.

  The gunblast shook the air and rang up the mountain wall and flew out over the prairie. The man’s hat jumped in the sunlight and he went down like his bones had unhinged.

  “Jesus!” Reuben said.

  That was my first one ever, and what I felt was proud—proud of my own precision. I hadn’t expected to miss, but still it was a hell of a shot. Later on, when I had more time to think about it, I felt…I didn’t know what it was…a sort of quiver…way down under my skin like something in my deepest blood. If there really was a God, this had to be a feeling He knew everything about.

  Reuben slapped a bullet into my palm and I reloaded faster than I knew I could.

  The herd by the creek was churning in a near spook. Not man nor beast down there knew where the shot had come from. The rider was reining his mount in circles and the other two guys at the fire were on their feet and looking all around. Both of them seemed to be holding a pistol, and one of them was turning and turning in a low crouch like he thought he might duck the next round, wherever it came from.

  My next shot clubbed his head backward and took him off his feet and the report rolled away into the open plain.

  “Hijo!” Chente said.

  Half the herd bolted in our direction and the other lit out to westward. The rider didn’t know where to go—he spurred his horse in one direction and then yanked it around and started in the other, then pulled up again and reined his mount around and round in tight close turns.

  The last one afoot was running toward the outcrop with his arms covering his head like a man caught in the rain. I drilled him in the back and he flung forward and lay spread-eagled on his face, forming a small black X on the ground.

  Now the horseman was galloping directly across my line of sight like a shooting-gallery target. I gauged a lead on him and fired—and both horse and rider went into a dusty rolling tumble. I’d meant to hit the mount anywhere just to bring it down, but either the shot killed it or the horse broke its neck because when it stopped rolling it lay stone still. The rider wasn’t moving either.

  “Ay, Chihuahua!” Chente said. He put down the glasses and looked at me. “Qué tirador!”

  “Qué rifle magnífico,” I said, patting the Sharps.

  Reuben was gawking at the small dark figures littering the distant ground. Then he turned to me and said, “Jesus, Jimmy—all of them!”

  “Not the rider,” I said. “Hated shooting the horse but I didn’t want to chance missing the guy and him getting out of range.”

  “Hellfire, he probably broke his neck in fifteen places, the way he went flying. Jesus.”

  “Or could be he’s laying there thinking things over. Let’s go see.”

  W e followed the winding trail down to the flats. I’d slipped the Sharps back into its sheath and moved the revolver to the front of my pants. The horses that had come our way had settled themselves and were feeding on the scrubgrass near the foot of the trail. Chente loose-herded them back toward the creek.

  The rustlers were all Mexicans. The first one we came to was the first one I’d put down. He was on his side and we saw that a .50-caliber round treated a human head about the same way it did a watermelon—worse, actually, because a head was smaller and had less of itself to spare. The top part of the guy’s skull was gone and ants were swarming over what was left of his head. The look on his face was suspicious—like he’d just heard something he couldn’t believe.

  Reuben leaned out from his saddle and puked. Chente glanced at him without expression and then headed off to the creek to round up the other horses still there. I thought the rustlers looked about how I had expected guys shot with a buffalo rifle to look. I’d seen other dead men, including one done in by a burst appendix and one drowned and one who’d passed out drunk on the tracks and got run over by a train, and the only difference among them was a matter of how neatly or how messily they’d died. Long before I ever pulled the trigger on these guys, I’d decided that dead was dead and there was no more reason to get sick at the sight of a messy dead man than there was in getting sick at the sight of a butchered beef. It was an opinion I pretty much kept to myself.

  “I’m all right,” Reuben said, wiping at his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “Caught me by surprise is all.”

  “The others aint likely to look any better.”

  “I said I’m all right.”

  “Okay then.”

  The next one had caught it just under the eye and the bullet had stove in that side of his face and you couldn’t see his eyes for the ants. He was lying faceup and the dirt under his head was a muddy red mess. Reuben made a good show of indifference to this one, leaning casually on his saddle horn and spitting off to the side.

  The guy I shot in the back was lying on an even larger patch of bloody earth. He’d taken the round through a lung.

  The horse I shot was dead too. The bullet had hit him just above the left ear and come out under its right eye.

  The rider was still alive. He was on his back and his hat was mashed up under his head and his eyes were squinting against the overhead sun until my shadow fell over him and then they opened wider and fixed on me. He didn’t look any older than Reuben.

  “Mátame,” he said in a low rasp. “No me puedo mover. Mátame, por amor de dios.”

  Reuben’s Spanish was good enough to get the idea. “He say kill him?”

  “He’s paralyzed.”

  “Por favor…mátame.”

  Reuben looked all around like he might’ve been searching for somebody to ask for a better idea. Or like he was all of a sudden aware of just how right he’d been in feeling a lot farther from home than could be measured in miles.

  It didn’t seem too complicated to me. The kid had been a horse thief but now he was somebody who would cook to death under the sun unless somebody saw to it that he didn’t.

  I pulled the top-break from my pants and cocked it and aimed. The kid closed his eyes. Reuben said, “Jesus, Jimm
y…”

  I fired and the kid’s head jerked and his right eye vanished in a dark red hole and the dirt under his hair went bloody. Our horses shrilled and spooked and I reined the black tight and talked to him and Reuben soothed the Appaloosa and the animals shuddered and blew and then were all right.

  I put the revolver back in my pants. Chente sat his horse by the herd at the creek and was staring off at the mountains. Reuben was staring hard at the kid.

  “Would you rather a bullet or a couple of days getting roasted?”

  He turned to me. “I know,” he said. “It’s just…ah hell, Jimmy, he wasn’t but a damn boy.”

  So said Reuben Youngblood, not yet sixteen years old.

  W e set out to round up the runaways, leaving Chente with the other horses at the creekside camp. We were at it for over an hour and still may have missed a few, no telling, since we didn’t know exactly how many there’d been to start with. When we got them back to the camp and bunched them with the others and counted them up we had twenty-eight head, thirteen with the YB brand, the others wearing a brand that looked like a lopsided A with a flat top and one extralong leg. None of us had seen it before. They must’ve been stolen from somewhere north of the YB and been run farther than ours because they were the worse for wear.

  Chente had searched the bodies and gone through the rustlers’ saddlepacks and laid out their belongings. There were only three firearms—an old cap-and-ball Dance, a Colt double-action five-shot, and a single-barrel twelve-gauge with both the barrel and the stock cut down so that the thing looked more like a giant pistol than a shotgun. Every man of them had some sort of knife on him, one of them a fine switchblade with pearl grips on the haft and a spring so strong the blade popped out like a magic trick. Chente had put all their money in a small pile. There was seven dollars in paper and another dollar thirty in silver. The rest of the cash was in paper peso denominations and Mexican specie.

  Reuben said he didn’t want any of the money or anything else of theirs. I took the switchblade and gestured for Chente to help himself to the rest. He scooped up the money and stuck it in his pockets and picked up the cutdown and took it to his horse and wedged the short barrel into the saddle scabbard along with his rifle.