Under the Skin

by James Carlos Blake

  I went around to the Cadillac’s passenger side and tucked the Colt in my pants and eased the door open and caught her as she started to fall. Her eyes were closed and she groaned softly and her breath was warm on my face. She moaned louder as I eased her over on the seat and got in beside her. And I felt the blood.

  I examined her by the light of the moon. Her elbow was smashed and her lower right arm was slick with blood. Her right side was sopped—blood oozing from a bullet hole just under her arm and from two more, close together, between the ribs and hip.

  There was nothing to do about wounds like that. Not in our circumstance. I went back to the Hudson and got one of the bottles I’d filled with water. Some of it had spilled in all the bouncing around but there was still plenty. I put the water to her lips and maybe she sipped some of it but mostly it just ran out of her mouth. I wiped the dribble from her chin and set the bottle on the floor.

  I put my hand to her cheek and said her name. I asked her to open her eyes and look at me, to say something, but she didn’t. I held her and crooned to her. I stroked her hair and spoke to her of everything that came to mind. I told her how beautiful she was, how wonderfully brave. I told her how my heart did a little flip the first time I’d seen her. I tried to sing “Red Sails in the Sunset” but forgot the words in both English and Spanish and told her I was sorry. I described the moon and said she really ought to take a look at it and I laughed for both of us at my attempt to trick her into opening her eyes. I talked to her until the sky turned gray at the rim of the mountains. Then I leaned down to retrieve the bottle of water to see if she might drink a little more and when I turned back to her she was dead.

  He hadn’t done it, not wounds like that, not on the side away from him. I didn’t have to take the bullets out and see them to know they were .30–06 rounds from a BAR.

  The Cadillac motor wouldn’t turn over. Maybe LQ had hit the oil pan and all the oil leaked out and the engine had finally seized.

  I gently laid her on her side and told her I’d be back.

  Then I went and got in the Hudson and set out into the deeper desert.

  T he sun was half-risen behind the jagged mountains and looking like a great raw wound when I spotted him a half mile ahead. At first I took him for another greasewood shrub and then understood what I was looking at. He was lying huddled on his side and the possibility that he was dead made my gut go tight.

  I stopped the car ten feet from him and blew the klaxon and he stirred slightly. Praise Jesus.

  I got out and walked up to him. His hat had fallen off and I saw the black strap of his eyepatch tight against the back of his head. His lank white hair hung over his face. His breathing was raspy but there were no obvious wounds on him, no bloodstains I could see. His coatflap hung down straight with the weight of something heavy in the pocket and I reached down and relieved him of a .38 revolver and slung it out into the scrub. A portion of his wooden leg was visible between the hem of his pantleg and the top of his lowcut Spanish boot. I gave it a hard kick.

  He flinched and groaned. I said for him to look at me.

  “Mírame, viejo,” I said. “Mírame bien.”

  He struggled to push himself up on an elbow, grunting hard, and he finally managed to sit up. He brushed the hair from his eyes and turned his face up to me, sand clinging to his eyepatch, his good eye baggy and bloodshot.

  The sun had just risen over the mountains behind him and it blazed full on my face. I was squinting against its glare. I told him again to have a good look at me, that I was the last thing he was going to see in this world. His eye fixed on me hard.

  I pulled down my hat brim to shade my eyes and I took out the Colt. I put the muzzle against his forehead and cocked the hammer.

  And the son of a bitch laughed.

  Laughed and asked if I was a hallucination. “O eres un espanto?” he said—and laughed even harder, as if the possibility that I was a ghost was the funniest thing in the world.

  All these years, he said, all these miserable years gone by and here I was again, threatening his life once more. Well, go ahead and shoot, he said—he was no more afraid of me now than he had been back then.

  My finger quivered on the trigger. If he had gone insane he couldn’t appreciate the moment. Then what satisfaction could there be?

  He laughed again and said, No, no, of course I wasn’t him. How could I be him, all these years later? I was just one more of his brute kind. There was no end to our kind. Our mongrel breed had robbed him of everything once before, and now, even now, we would rob from him yet again? We would have the girl too? Well, fuck the lot of us. Did I think he was afraid? He spat on my boots. That was how afraid he was. Go ahead, he said…shoot.

  I saw the lie in his eyes. He was afraid. He was afraid I wouldn’t shoot him. He wanted to die but didn’t have the balls to shoot himself. Jesus. Who knew what the hell anybody was like under the skin?

  I knew that to let him go on living would be greater punishment than to put a quick end to his misery. But it would also be punishment for all the people he would continue to make miserable as long as he was alive.

  Or as long as he was able.

  I put a hand on his shoulder and smiled at him and tucked the Colt away under my coatflap. His eye went wide with alarm as if he knew what was coming and he tried to break away but I seized a fistful of his hair and held his head fast as I brought out the icepick. He screeched and shut his eye tight and I swiped the tip of the pick through the pinched eyelid and a thin jet of bloody fluid caught the sunlight for one sparking instant—and then his hand was over his eye and blood was running between his fingers and he was screaming.

  I left him there, screaming and screaming, staggering around in his darkness under the glaring white sun.

  I carried her to the Hudson and then cut the seat-covers out of the Cadillac and used them for a shroud. I replaced the flat tire with the spare and then followed our earlier tracks as I drove back around to the south side of the mudpit. That’s where I buried her. I dug the grave with the tire jack and my hands, working shirtless. It was a long process even in that soft earth. My shoulder wound opened again and blood streaked my chest. When the hole was finally deep enough, I gently laid her in it. And then I covered her up.

  I was slow and careful driving back and the tires held up all the way. The sun was directly overhead when I emerged from the scrub trail and pulled up to the compound gate. LQ and Brando were sitting in ladderback chairs in the shade of the gate archway, staring at me. I turned off the motor and got out of the car.

  LQ’s left arm had been splinted and freshly bandaged and it was cradled in a clean white sling. He held the tommy gun under his good arm. Brando had the BAR slung on his shoulder and wore no visible bandage but he grimaced and pressed a hand to his side as he stood up.

  “Thought you might be dead,” he said.

  “Thought you might be,” I said.

  LQ gestured at my bloody shirt. “You bad?”

  “No. Who fixed you guys up?”

  “Bunch of peons,” Brando said. “Took me over to a hut and bandaged me pretty good. Then we come out here and found this peckerwood still alive and they patched him too.”

  “Where’re they now?”

  “Went home, I guess.” He gestured toward the peon housing on the other side of the compound. “They talked a whole bunch but I never got a word of it.”

  “From what I could make out, it was mostly bitching about Calveras,” LQ said. “What a son of a bitch he was and how they hoped he never come back and so on.”

  “Well, he aint coming back,” I said.

  “Glad to hear it,” LQ said. “Where’s—”

  “She aint coming back either.”

  They stared at me for a second. “Shit,” Brando said. “I’m sorry, Jimmy.”

  “He do her?” LQ said. His eyes gave away what he was really asking. I figured he’d been thinking things over, his mind replaying the exchange of gunfire with the guy in the car
.

  “Yeah. He did.”

  He rubbed his eyes with his fingertips and let out a long breath.

  Brando put his hand on my good shoulder. “Listen, Jimmy. What say we quit this goddamn country and go home?”

  “Let’s do it,” LQ said.

  “Let’s,” I said.

  L ate that night we were back in Villa Acuña. Sanchez’s filling station was closed, and we left the Hudson parked in the rear of it. The car looked a lot less snappy than it had two days ago. LQ wanted to take the Thompson with us, but I said we’d never be able to smuggle it past the border guards, and we left it in the car trunk with the BAR.

  A norther had kicked up and steadily strengthened. It gusted hard and cold. We turned up our collars and hugged our coats to us and squinted against the blowing sand. We held tight to our hats as we crossed the bridge. LQ yelled, “So long, Mexico!” and spat over the railing—but just then the wind turned and slung the spit on his hat. He cussed a blue streak and Brando laughed.

  They slept as the train rocked through the night. I sipped coffee and stared out at the moonlit landscape, catching sight of a lone coyote now and then, a solitary tumbleweed bounding alongside the tracks. The country regained grass and hills and trees. Brando had cleaned out my wound with tequila and bandaged it with a clean cloth he got from somewhere, but the shoulder had stiffened through the day and the ache of it ran deep under the muscle, down to the bone.

  We went through San Antonio, chugged through Seguin, Luling, Columbus, and still I couldn’t sleep.

  The day broke gray and very cold and the trees were shaking in the wind. In Houston we changed trains. And then we were over Galveston Bay and at last I fell asleep for the few minutes it took to arrive at the station.

  We stepped down from the coach and here came Big Sam through the crowd, smiling his movie star smile—then making a face of sympathy at the sight of LQ’s armsling. He shook our hands and said he was happy to see us all back.

  Rose was waiting at the station’s front doors.

  “Welcome home, Kid.”

  I nodded.

  He smiled—and then led the way out, checking his watch as he went, because there were things to tend to, as always. Deals to close, payments to pick up, promises to collect on, warnings to deliver, accounts to settle…

  About the Author

  Under the Skin is JAMES CARLOS BLAKE ’s seventh novel and eighth book of fiction. Among his literary honors are the Quarterly West Novella Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Chautauqua South Book Award, and the Southwest Book Award. He resides in Arizona.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Praise for Under the Skin and James Carlos Blake

  “Skin knocks the wind out of you from the get-go…. Alluring, seductive, and spontaneous…. A provocative novel…. A window into the soul of man.”

  —USA Today

  “Blake explores dark borderlands of the human spirit. He has rightfully been hailed as one of the most original writers in America today and is certainly one of the bravest.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Under the Skin is brutal and beautiful…. [There] are passages of pure poetry and haunting beauty.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Under the Skin [has] the seductive fascination of a beautiful song scrawled in blood.”

  —Denver Post

  “Blake has elevated bloodshed to a high art…. Under the Skin is a borderland noir about love and crime. The real borders it crosses, however, are not just geographic.”

  —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

  “A tough and tender story of lawlessness and retribution, exposing the human frailties of the hardest criminals. Blake is a great storyteller.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “[A] gripping premise…. The historical detail is deftly deployed, and the portrait of 1930s Galveston alone makes the book worthwhile…. A worthy addition to [Blake’s] growing canon.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Blake is a poet of violence…. This is a fine book [depicting] a powerful sense of place, a quest, and the incompleteness of victory.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Blake knows how to tell an action-packed story…. His characters live on the edge, seeking freedom and adventure, moving through a Darwinian landscape in which life is nasty, brutish, and short…. The fast-paced action keeps the pages turning.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “Blake has an uncanny knack for bringing our country’s violent past to life, and for chronicling the arc of a character’s life…against the changing backdrop of society.”

  —Poisoned Pen

  “Blake’s structural ploy is downright brilliant…. Few crime novels succeed in melding sheer brutality with literary finesse.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “All Jim Harrison, James Crumley, and Jim Thompson fans—all Peckinpah and Tarantino fans, too—this book is for you. Blake [is] a master of style and story…an acrobat with language, able to merge styles, change moods, and evoke a rich variety of tones. This novel is full of stories within stories, passionate and heavy with the fragility, cruelty, heart, and yearning of humanity.”

  —Square Books

  “All the Pretty Horses meets The Sopranos…. A spellbinding page-turner that captivates the reader from page one.”

  —Oxford Town

  “Blake clearly knows Texas and Mexican history and human nature…. Jimmy Youngblood is at once terrifying and beautiful, a killer with a poet’s soul.”

  —MostlyFiction

  “Like his predecessors, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Blake is a master of hard-boiled fiction. Like them, he depicts turbulent times and the vicious ambience of the criminal underworld.”

  —Texas Observer

  “Gritty, bloody, violent, and…a love story.”

  —Arizona Daily Star

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