Under the Skin

by James Carlos Blake

  Reuben’s arms fell away from Rogerson and he sagged back against Uncle Cullen who was hugging him from behind. Uncle Cullen staggered under the sudden weight and fell to his knees with Reuben still in his arms. I ran up to them and Uncle Cullen was pressing a hand to the wound over Reuben’s heart and croaking, “Son, son…” Reuben’s eyes were open but they weren’t seeing anything anymore.

  Most of the people around us still had their attention on the fight between the Miller boys and Chente and some were cheering the fighters and some were still yelling to break it up and some were laughing at the attempts being made to stop them. Only the folk closest to us had seen what had happened to Reuben. Women were crying and somebody kept saying, “Oh my God oh my God…”

  Rogerson was gawking down at us, still holding the knife. He looked at me and his eyes showed a lot of white and he flung the knife away and stepped back with his open hands up in front of him. All the blabber and shouting around me suddenly sounded very far away. I took the pearlhandled switchblade out of my pocket and snicked out the blade.

  I had a vague sense of people drawing away from me as I walked up to Rogerson and he started to say something but I never heard a word of it. I grabbed him by the collar and jerked him toward me and stuck the blade in his belly all the way to the hilt. He made a sound like a small yawn and grabbed my shoulders as if he’d suddenly thought of something real important to tell me. I gave the knife a twist and jerked it sideways and blood gushed hot all over my lower arm. I pulled out the blade and stepped back and he put his hands to the wound and a bulge of blue gut showed between his fingers. His pants were dark with blood. I stabbed him again—in the chest, just like he’d stabbed Reuben—and he dropped to his knees and a bunch of women screamed at the same time as he fell on his face and lay still.

  I stared around at the horrified faces, and the shouting and crying and confusion rose back to normal volume. Maybe the other fight had finally been stopped, I didn’t know, but there were more people around us now, a lot of them yelling to know what happened and a bunch of others all telling them at once.

  I retracted the blade into the haft and put the knife back in my pocket and turned to see about Uncle Cullen. He had let go of Reuben and was clutching at his own chest, his face twisted in pain. I helped him to his feet and asked if he thought he could make it out to the truck and he nodded but his face clenched even tighter. I pointed to his hat and somebody picked it up and handed it to me and I put it on my uncle’s head and my fingers left smudges of Rogerson’s blood on it. I heard somebody shouting that the sheriff was too drunk to stand up and others yelling to know where a goddam deputy was.

  “Would some of you bring Reuben?” I said. There was a general hesitation and then three or four guys picked Reuben up and brought him along behind me as I half-dragged Uncle Cullen out to the parking lot, his grunting breath hot against my neck.

  It might have been different if the sheriff had been sober or there had been any other lawmen around, but nobody said anything to me, nobody tried to stop me. They laid Reuben in the bed of the truck and I settled Uncle Cullen into the passenger side of the cab and then got behind the wheel. I pulled the truck into the flow of vehicles leaving the lot and a minute later we were rolling back toward the ranch.

  I f I had any thoughts on the drive home I would never remember what they were. I must’ve known that the life I’d been living was done with. I must’ve expected to be arrested pretty damn quick. Arrested and jailed for the gutting of unarmed Larry Rogerson in front of dozens of witnesses. Then tried and convicted. Maybe I wondered what it was like to die in the electric chair. Maybe I didn’t think about much of anything.

  I could hear Uncle Cullen’s wet breathing in the dark as the truck bounced along over the rough dirt road. And then I couldn’t hear him anymore. He was slumped awkwardly against the door, his hat fallen off and down by his boots. I stopped the truck and pulled him upright and felt for a pulse on his neck but there wasn’t one anymore. I eased him back against the door and put his hat on him and got the truck going again.

  Pretty soon the house came into view and I saw that all the windows on the lower floor were lit up. For a minute I thought the law was already there and waiting for me. But there weren’t any unfamiliar vehicles in sight.

  Aunt Ava came out on the porch and watched me drive up. Over in front of the bunkhouse a few of the hands were gathered around a guitar player. I parked at the house and Aunt Ava came down the steps.

  I got out of the cab, not knowing how to tell her what happened. She stepped around me and looked in the cab at Uncle Cullen for a minute, then stepped over and stared down at Reuben in the bed. She reached over the bed panel to brush his hair from his face.

  “I’m so god-awful sorry, mam, but—”

  “Helen Morgan telephoned a few minutes ago,” she said, referring to a woman who ran a small bookstore in Marfa where Aunt Ava liked to browse. “She was there and saw it. She told me about the fight and…about Reuben. She said Mr. Youngblood was all right. Ailing, she said, but all right.”

  Her tone was almost as matter of fact as the one she’d use in asking if I’d gotten all the items on her grocery list whenever I came back from town. Almost. But there was something else in it this time. It sounded like it might be anger.

  “He was, mam, but on the way home…well…”

  “Yes,” she said. “So I see.”

  I rubbed at my chin with the back of my hand and she stared at it and I saw that my whole hand was dark with dried blood and I stuck the hand in my back pocket.

  “That’s not all of it, mam. I believe I’m in trouble. I—”

  “You are in trouble,” she said. “Helen told me what you did.” She looked off in the direction of the county road, then turned back to me. “You did what you had to, James Rudolph. Now you’ve got to get away from here—right now. You can’t take the truck, they’ll be watching the roads. Take Reuben’s horse and ride the backcountry. Go saddle it—go. I’ll get you some food.”

  I said I wanted to get my leather jacket and the top-break revolver from under my pillow and she said, “I’ll get them. You hurry with that horse.”

  She rushed up the porch steps and into the house and called for Carlotta to put some food in a sack and I saw her go up the stairs.

  All the vaqueros were outside the bunkhouse now and watching me as I headed for the stable. Esteban came over and fell in beside me and asked if there was anything he could do. I told him Chente was probably in the Marfa jail for fighting and would need someone to bail him out.

  “Seguro que lo soltamos,” he said. But what could he do for me?

  I said for him to keep his eyes and ears open, that I would write to him to find out how things stood.

  “Muy bien, jefecito,” he said.

  I was swift about saddling the Appaloosa. Jack could sense my tension and his ears twitched with excitement. I swung into the saddle and reached down to shake Esteban’s hand and I saw his eyes take in the dry blood. Then I hupped the horse out of the stable and over to the house.

  She was waiting with a small sack of food and my jacket and a cloth bundle shaped like a half-deflated football. She handed me the jacket and I put it on and then took the food sack from her and reached around and stuffed it into the rightside saddlebag while she put the bundle in the left one.

  “What’s that?”

  “Something for you,” she said, buckling down the flap. She took the top-break from her apron pocket and gave it to me. I opened the breech and checked the loads and closed it up again and slipped the revolver into my waistband. I told her to give my Sharps rifle to Esteban and let him know he could have my horse. I couldn’t think of anything else I owned that I could bequeath to anybody.

  She was standing with the light of the house behind her and it was hard to see her face clearly. She turned suddenly toward the distant road and I looked and saw two sets of headlights coming our way and then heard the rasping of the motors. She’d al
ways had the senses of a cat.

  “Go,” she said. “Go.”

  I reined the Jack horse around and hupped off toward the backcountry to the east.

  When I turned to wave goodbye she was already out of sight.

  I rode steadily till a couple of hours before dawn, then reined up and tethered the Appaloosa in some scrub grass and rolled myself up in my bedroll and slept till sunrise, and then I got going again. I held to a course a half-mile or so south of the railroad. I rode through the day and into the night and stopped and made a fireless camp. Since riding off from the YB I had tried not to think about Reuben, but I finally couldn’t help it and I let myself remember everything about him—and my throat got hot and tight, my chest hollow. He had been more brother to me than cousin and I’d never have a better friend. And Uncle Cullen—that damn good man. Aunt Ava would miss them both terribly but I doubted she would make any show of her grief, and people would gossip about her lack of proper sorrow. But the vaqueros held her in great respect and I knew she could manage the ranch on her own.

  Toward the end of the second day I was a few miles south of Marathon. I watered the horse at a shady creek where a few kids were splashing and where I ate the last of the food Carlotta had packed for me. There was still about an hour of daylight left. When I finished the stale biscuit stuffed with a chunk of greasy ham I took the bundle out of the other bag to see what it held. It was tied with twine and was heavier than it looked.

  I cut the twine with my switchblade. The cloth covering turned out to be a pillowcase wrapped around a revolver and a couple of tightly folded newspaper clippings. The gun was an old single-action .44-caliber Colt with grips of yellowed ivory carved with Mexican eagles.

  I’d never seen her touch a gun, not even a rabbit rifle. Where had she gotten this? Her father? A brother, an uncle? I didn’t know if she had any brothers or uncles. She had always refused to talk about her family, no matter how often Reuben had asked about it when we were younger. But it was all I could figure, that some man—probably one in her family—had given it to her, back when. And now she’d given it to me.

  It fit my hand like it had been made for me, felt as familiar as my own skin. The embossed eagles were worn smooth and the burring at the top of the hammer had been thumbed dulled, but the Colt was in fine condition. How many hands had held it? I wondered. How many rounds had it fired in its time? How many men had it shot? It was fully loaded. I worked its action, cocked and uncocked it, put it on half-cock and spun the cylinder. I opened the gate and dropped a round into my hand and felt its weight, then put the bullet back into the chamber and thumbed the gate closed and eased the hammer down. I took the Smith & Wesson out of my pants and replaced it with the Colt and tucked the top-break into the saddlebag.

  The larger of the two clippings was from a 1914 Mexico City newspaper and was a report on Pancho Villa’s and Emiliano Zapata’s takeover of the capital during the Revolution. It included a large photograph of about two dozen Mexicans crowding around Villa, who was seated in an ornate high-backed chair. He was in a military uniform but I recognized him immediately. There were a half-dozen photos of him on display in a Mexican café in Marfa, and the town’s gun store had pictures of him on the wall too.

  Everybody on the border knew Pancho Villa’s story—how at the age of sixteen he’d killed the hacendado who raped his sister, how he was forced to hide in the mountains and become a bandit. Then in 1910 the Revolution changed his life. He became commander of the great Division of the North and one of Mexico’s greatest heroes. The newspapers couldn’t get enough of him. The American press flocked around him every time he visited the border. It was said he had a dozen wives and was a hell of a dancer. He was a fearless fighter, they said, a natural genius at military tactics—and a fearsome man, a merciless executioner of his prisoners. He could have been president of the country but he said he was not wise enough to be its leader. He captured Mexico City but couldn’t hold it, and afterward, when his great army was beaten at last, he was forced to return to the mountains and once more live like a bandit. But then he did something that got the whole world’s attention—he invaded the United States. He raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico, and shot up the army camp there. A massive U.S. Army force, including airplanes, was sent across the border to find him and kill him. They tried for a year and couldn’t do it. The Yankee intrusion into Mexico only made him more of a hero to his countrymen. In 1920 he finally made peace with the Mexican government and—in a funny twist for a guy who had fought against hacendados all his life—he was given a hacienda as part of the deal. But even in retirement he was feared by many powerful men, and a few years later he was assassinated.

  The caption under the photograph said Villa was sitting in the President’s Chair in the National Palace. It identified the hawkish-looking man on his immediate left as Emiliano Zapata and the man at his right hand as Tomás Urbina. But the guy who really caught my attention was a large man standing at the very edge of the picture, holding his white Montana hat in a dark big-knuckled hand, his hair neatly combed, his shirt buttoned to the neck under his open coat, his watch fob dangling from the coat’s breast pocket. His face had been circled in ink and he was looking at something or someone behind the photographer and off to the side. Judging by his expression, I’d have bet it was a woman.

  He looked strangely familiar, but for a moment I didn’t understand why. And then I did. If I’d worn my hair a little shorter, if I’d trimmed my mustache a little neater, if my eyes had been black instead of bright blue…I could’ve been looking at a picture of myself. The caption said he was Rodolfo Fierro.

  I’d heard of him too, of course. Who hadn’t? El Matador, they called him. El Señor Muerte. Manos de Sangre. El Carnicero—the Butcher. He had a dozen such names. He was Villa’s chief executioner. The border Mexicans spoke of him in the same tone they used in speaking of Death itself. There were dozens of stories about him. They said he shot three hundred prisoners one afternoon in a big corral in Ciudad Juárez, that he gave them a chance, ten at a time, to run to a stone wall and climb over it, and he shot every one of them except the last, whom he deliberately let get away. But I’d never seen his picture, nor had anybody I knew. Until now.

  The other clipping was a newspaper picture of Fierro by himself. It was taken from only a few feet away and had no caption. It showed him sitting in a chair at a sidewalk table, his face turned to the camera, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his Montana hat, his coatflap hanging away from the holster on his hip and exposing the butt of the Frontier Colt and its ivory grip carved with a Mexican eagle.

  I stared and stared at that picture as the sky turned the color of fresh blood and the darkness slowly rose around me.

  She sure as hell knew how to keep a secret, my mother.

  The way I figured it, he’d either given her the Colt or she had stolen it from him. And she’d clipped these pictures. And before she died she’d shared the secret with her sister and given her the clippings and the gun. I wondered if Aunt Ava would ever have told me the truth if I hadn’t had to run.

  The light had gone so dim I could barely see his face in the photo.

  “Hey Daddy,” I said.

  O n a gray and windy afternoon two days later I sold both the Jack horse and my saddle to a rancher in Sanderson who knew a good mount when he saw one, even one that had been ridden as hard as I’d been riding this one. I kept the saddlebags and my blanket. He asked me no questions except if I’d sign a bill of sale, which I did. I patted the horse and said so long to it. I turned down the rancher’s offer of a bed for the night but accepted a ride into town.

  I hadn’t eaten since the night before when I’d cooked a skinny jackrabbit over a low fire. So I went into a café and ordered a thick steak with gravy and fried potatoes, green beans and cornbread, a big glass of iced tea, and a slab of pecan pie for dessert. When I was done eating, the two plates looked freshly washed. The waitress gave me a wink and said, “Appetite’s working ju
st fine, hey?” I left her a half-dollar tip.

  I went over to the railtracks and followed them eastward for about a hundred yards and then sat on my saddlebags in the meager shade of a mesquite and waited.

  An hour later an eastbound train pulled into the Sanderson station for only as long as it took to load and unload mail, and then it started chugging on again. I had thought to wait till dark to jump a freight but I didn’t see any sign of the railroad bulls I’d heard so much about from YB hands who’d ridden the rails, so I said the hell with it and jogged out to the track and picked out a boxcar with a partly open door as it came rolling up, slowly gaining speed.

  I ran alongside the open door and pitched the saddlebags and blanketroll through it and then grabbed hold of the iron rung on the door with both hands and swung a foot up and hooked a heel on the car floor. I brought up my other leg and started wriggling myself in feetfirst—and somebody in there kicked me hard in the leg and said, “Ass off, wetback!”

  He was a tramp with dirt-colored teeth and he kicked me twice more in the side before I worked myself far enough into the car to brace myself. On the next kick I snatched hold of his pant leg and pulled him off balance and he fell on top of me and almost rolled out of the car. He tried to scrabble back from the open door but I grabbed him by the collar and yanked hard and he went sailing out of the car with a yell.

  The door on the other side of the car was shut and another guy was kneeling close to it and next to my opened saddlebags. He was grinning at me and holding the S&W top-break. He wore a baseball cap over a stringy growth of hair that hung down to his collar.

  “Good goddamn riddance,” he said. “I was awful tired of Weldon’s company. Same dumbshit stories all the time, you know what I mean?” He turned the gun in his hand, examining it from different angles. “Aint this a pretty thing, though? Aint seen one of these in a coon’s age.”