Under the Skin

by James Carlos Blake

  “Casero y filósofo tambien,” I said, and he showed a yellow grin and said all men became philosophers if they lived long enough.

  The bath was at the end of the hallway. An old telephone—the only phone in the colonia, Gregorio said—was mounted on the wall at the foot of the stairs. I asked for its number and wrote it on a piece of paper to give to Rose. I moved in the next day and had been living there ever since.

  LQ and Brando had thought it was a smart move on my part because wetback neighbors weren’t the nosy sort. Among the few things LQ and Ray agreed on was that a guy—especially one in our business—shouldn’t own anything more than he could carry in a single suitcase and should never live anyplace where the neighbors didn’t mind their own business.

  Sam couldn’t understand why I’d leave a beachside apartment with new furnishings and appliances to move into a ramshackle place in one of the worst sections of town. I didn’t even try to explain, and he finally just shook his head and quit ragging me about it.

  Rose didn’t say anything about the move. Except maybe he did, a few days later, in a sort of roundabout way. I was driving him back from some Houston business, and as we went over the causeway he said the look of the water in the afternoon sunlight always reminded him of a little lagoon in Palermo where his father had taught him to swim.

  “It’s funny,” he said, staring out at the bay and the island on the other side. “This place is so different, but there’s things about it that remind me of Palermo when I was a boy. I tell you, if there was some part of town called Little Sicily—Little Italy, even—I’d move in there in a minute. I wouldn’t give a shit how beat-up it was. It’d be nice hearing the language, you know, people talking to each other in it. And the music. And smelling the food. I’d like…Ah hell.”

  He made a dismissive gesture and changed the subject.

  T he fight at Mrs. Lang’s had boosted my spirits more than Felicia had. I stopped in a place on Market Street and drank a beer and then had another in a joint on Mechanic. But by the time I got to La Colonia, I was feeling the same undefinable irritation that had been nagging me earlier in the evening.

  It was after two in the morning. Clouds were bunching over the gulf, blocking out the stars. The slight wind had kicked up and was gently stirring the treetops. The evening’s earlier warmth was giving way to a rising chill. It smelled like it might rain.

  T

  Other than the Casa Verde at the far end of the lane, only the Avila house showed light—a dim yellow glow against the pulled shade of a front window. The Morales family had hosted a neighborhood party earlier in the evening and I could make out the dark shapes of several cars parked in the deeper shadows between the Morales and the Avila houses. Overnight visitors, I figured.

  A cloud of bugs was swarming around the Casa Verde porchlight. I didn’t need a key because Gregorio had stopped locking the door shortly after I’d moved in. I’d never told him or anyone else in La Colonia what I did for a living, but before I’d been there a month everybody on the block seemed to know who I worked for. I was pouring a cup of coffee in the kitchen one morning when I heard Señora Ortega, the next-door neighbor, talking to Gregorio in the sideyard, telling him how her daughter had warned a coworker at the oystersheds that if he didn’t stop pestering her she would complain to her neighbor, Don Santiago, who was a bodyguard for Rosario Maceo. The man, the señora told Gregorio, had not bothered her girl since.

  Gregorio had mounted a small slateboard with a chalk holder next to the hallway telephone, but the only messages I’d ever seen on it were rare ones for me to call the Club. I’d never seen either of the other two tenants use the phone or known them to receive a call. One of them, Moises, was older than Gregorio and almost deaf. Even though he had one of those old-time ear horns, you still had to shout into it. The other resident was Sergio, a nervous little man who worked as the night clerk for a motor hotel on the beach. He kept to his room all day and was said to have no friends at all.

  Tonight the slateboard was blank, as usual. At the far end of the hall the kitchen door shone brightly. I wasn’t surprised to find Gregorio in there, sitting at the table, sipping a bottle of beer and reading a movie magazine, his wire-rim glasses low on his nose. It was his habit to stay up all night and go to bed at dawn and sleep till noon. He said he had not been able to sleep at night for the past thirty-two years. He’d never said why and I’d never asked.

  The kitchen was big and high-ceilinged and a large heavy dining table stood in its center. I helped myself to a beer from the icebox and pried off the cap with an opener hung on the door handle by a wire hook and sat across the table from him. I took a pack of Camels from my coat and shook one out for myself and then slid the pack across the table to him and we both lit up. He looked tired and a little glass-eyed. There had probably been plenty to drink at the Morales party.

  He tapped a hand on the article he’d been reading. He could speak and read English much better than the rest of the residents of La Colonia, not counting the kids. “Do you know what those Hollywood assholes said after they gave Fred Astaire his screen test?”

  Fred Astaire was Gregorio’s favorite movie star. The old man had seen Top Hat three times already.

  He looked down at the article. “They said he couldn’t act very good and the women wouldn’t like him because he was ‘slightly bald.’ But they said he could at least ‘dance a little.’”

  He peered at me over the rim of his glasses. “That’s like saying Jack Dempsey could punch a little, no?” He shook his head. “Assholes.”

  I drank my beer and leafed through a magazine from the stack on the table. Gregorio said I’d missed a good party. They roasted a kid on a spit in Morales’ backyard and there were platters of every kind of dish and enough beer and tequila for everybody to get as drunk as he wanted. He’d never seen so many visitors to a Colonia party as this time. Morales’ brother had come down from Beaumont. Ortega’s brother and sister-in-law up from Lake Jackson. Avila’s uncle and cousin and the uncle’s goddaughter, who was pretty but didn’t talk much, had come all the way from Brownsville. And a cousin of the Gutierrez brothers, a car mechanic from Victoria, had come too. Turned out he was a hell of a singer and guitar player and he’d been the hit of the party.

  “Sorry I missed it,” I said. The wind was blowing a little harder now, and tree branches scraped the side of the building. I finished the beer and dropped the bottle in the garbage can.

  “Happy new year, viejo,” I said, and headed for the stairs.

  “Feliz año nuevo, kid,” the old man said.

  My room was chilly, so I took the extra blanket out of the wardrobe and spread it over the one already on the bed. I got undressed, then opened the briefcase and took out the guns. I put the .380 on the bedside stand. The Mexican revolver went under the pillow. I turned off the light and got in bed and listened to the wind and rasping branches for a while before I fell asleep.

  I woke in darkness to a sound I thought I recognized but I couldn’t immediately place it. The wind had ceased. For a moment I thought maybe I’d been dreaming—and then realized I still heard it. A car motor. Down in the lane and beginning to move away.

  A Model T.

  I swung out of bed and went to the window, released the shade to go fluttering up on its spindle, raised the window sash and pushed open the screen frame and stuck my head out into a chilly drizzle.

  In the light of the streetlamp, a lettuce-green Model T sedan without a left front fender was turning onto Mechanic Street. I saw the dark form of the driver but I couldn’t tell if there was anyone else in the car. The T rattled down the street and then its single taillight went out of sight.

  I stood at the open window a moment longer before I pictured what I must look like—gawking out at an empty street, shivering in my underwear, getting my head wet. I cursed and let the screen frame down and closed the window. My wristwatch was on the table and I struck a match to read the time. Almost six. From the time I was old
enough to do chores on the ranch until the day I left there in the hurry I did, I had always been up well before this hour.

  But I wasn’t on the ranch now, and what I wanted was more sleep. I ran a towel through my hair and got back in bed.

  And couldn’t get the green Ford out of my mind.

  Bullshit, the Ford…I was thinking about the girl.

  I wondered if she’d been in the car just now. I remembered her look under the traffic light, how it caught me flatfooted for one big heartbeat and got me rankled for some damn reason. Which, it occurred to me, probably had something to do with my edginess the rest of the evening.

  The realization agitated me all the more because I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it earlier. Not much ever got under my skin, but when something did I damn well knew what and why and I knew how to get rid of it.

  Little chippy. What’d she think she was trying to pull?

  She had to be the one Gregorio had mentioned, the one at the party, the goddaughter of Avila’s aunt and uncle. All the way from Brownsville, Gregorio said. Had they just now been getting an early start on the long drive back? They sure as hell weren’t going to the movies at five in the morning or to a picnic on the beach. How far to Brownsville? Way more than three hundred miles, probably closer to four. All-day drive and then some—especially in that old T.

  Christ’s sake, I told myself, who cared?

  Some face on her, though.

  Yeah, right—but there were pretty faces everywhere, hundreds in this town alone.

  Not like that one.

  Bullshit. It wasn’t that special. Besides, I didn’t see anything except her face. For all I knew she had an ass like an Oldsmobile.

  Not likely.

  For all I knew she was married.

  A married woman came to Morales’ party with her godfather? How much sense did that make?

  What’s sense got to do with anything? Besides, the old man said Avila’s cousin had come too. For all I knew he was her beau…

  So it went, while I lay there staring at the ceiling and the New Year slowly dawned.

  O n the second-floor balcony of the casa grande of the Hacienda de Las Cadenas, César Calveras Dogal is taking his noon brandy and awaiting the arrival of his foreman, El Segundo.

  The great house stands on a long low bluff, and the balcony affords a vista beyond the mesquite woods along the north wall of the hacienda compound. To the northeast Don César can see the meander of the shallow Río Cadenas whose origin is high in the dark sierras and whose flow through a venous array of irrigation ditches nurtures the estate’s tenacious pasturelands and its meager gardens. He can see all the way to the Ciénaga de las Palmas, glinting like a little glass sliver five miles away. In truth the ciénaga has no palms at all and is but a muddy marsh where the river drains and quits. Almost forty miles beyond the ciénaga, in the blue-hazed distance, lies the hard road from Escalón to Monclova. The surrounding country is dense with cactus and thickets of mesquite, and the mountains at the horizons are long and blue.

  The years have not lessened Don César’s admiration of the natural beauty of this estate set on the border between the states of Durango and Chihuahua, a beauty the more remarkable for being at the southern edge of a vast desertland that includes a portion of the Bolson de Mapimí, perhaps the meanest desert of the earth’s western side. The hacienda’s beauty is as remarkable as the fact of its having survived the rage of the Revolution.

  The bastard Revolution! A year before its outbreak, Don César had been a thirty-five-year-old captain in command of a company of Guardia Rural—the fearsome national mounted police of President Porfirio Díaz—and he had earned the lasting personal gratitude of Don Porfirio for his company’s heroic rescue of the president’s niece and her party of travelers besieged at a desolate Durango outpost by a band of Yaqui marauders. Captain Calveras and his men had killed a dozen of the savages and captured ten, including their chief. But one of the travelers had received a fatal wound and a pregnant woman among them had miscarried. Hence, rather than send the captives to the henequen plantations in the Yucatán as was customary, Captain Calveras hanged them in the nearest village square—all but the chief, whom he executed by tying one of the Indian’s legs to one horse and the other leg to another and then lashing the horses into a sprint in opposite directions. He telegraphed his report to the headquarters office at Hermosillo and by day’s end he received notice of Don Porfirio’s appreciation and of an immediate promotion to the rank of comandante.

  Two months later, in still another battle with still other Yaquis, Comandante Calveras took an arrow through a thigh and up into the hip. It was three days before he could present himself to a surgeon and by then the infection was so deeply rooted that the surgeon spoke of amputation of the entire leg. The comandante rejected that procedure with a promise that if he should awaken from the surgery without his leg he would hang the doctor. He survived the operation with the leg intact but the hip was in permanent ruin. He would evermore walk with a limp and he could no longer sit a horse for more than a few minutes before the pain became excruciating. He was offered the command of a regional rurales headquarters but he disdained desk jobs and instead chose to retire. Though the decision delighted his wife and children, it was a difficult one, for he had been in the rurales since the age of sixteen, when he had turned his back on his father’s patrimony—a hacienda and vast cattle ranch in Zacatecas state—and enlisted in the national police.

  On the day of his retirement he was received in the National Palace by Don Porfirio himself, who presented him with an unexpected prize—the title to La Hacienda de Las Cadenas, an estate which until recently had belonged to a political rival of the Porfiriato. The president slid the ornately embossed paper across the polished desktop and told Comandante Calveras to consider it a spoil of war, the sweetest of life’s possessions. But a man with title to a hacienda, Don Porfirio said, should of course have the means to maintain the place, and so he also awarded the comandante a trunk filled with silver specie, a prize of such weight that it required three strong men to load it onto the transport wagon. Comandante Calveras had by then already amassed a considerable sum of money by means of the rurales’ right to confiscate the assets of fugitives and of killed or convicted criminals—a sum which, together with el presidente’s cash award, now amounted to a small fortune.

  But eight months after Don César’s retirement, there came the Revolution—and before another year passed, Porfirio Díaz was exiled in Paris, never to return.

  The memory of the Revolution taints Don César’s tongue with the taste of blood. The name of “Revolution” was entirely undeserved by that lunatic decade of national riot and rampage by misbegotten Indian brutes and primitive bastard half-castes. The shit-blooded whoresons had razed his father’s hacienda and crucified the man on the front door of the casa grande before setting the house aflame. A few months afterward they murdered Don César’s own family as well. By means of an exorbitant bribe, Don César had secured passage for his wife and three children (his angelic trio of blond daughters!) aboard a federal troop-and-munitions train bound for Juárez, from where his beloveds were to cross the river to refuge in El Paso. But just south of Samalayuca, a bare forty miles from the border, the track under the train was dynamited.

  The handful of survivors told of the slew and crash and tumble of the railcars one upon the other, the hellish screams, the great screeching and sparkings of iron, the explosions of the munitions that the rebels had desired for themselves but in their incompetence destroyed along with the train. (“Viva Villa!” they shouted—“Viva Villa!”—even as they looted the wreckage and the dead and robbed the survivors.) Don César had traveled to Samalayuca and was able to identify his daughters’ remains by their diminutive forms and take them back for burial at Las Cadenas, but his wife was unrecognizable among the array of charred and mutilated corpses and she was interred with the others in a mass grave.

  In the years to follow he had
endured the loss of his family as he endured the abuses and indignations of one raiding pack of mongrels after another, each calling itself an army of the Revolution and each claiming the sanctioning ideal of liberty—a word not one in every hundred of them owned the literacy to recognize in print. He had withstood the sudden emptiness in his life as he had withstood the degradations to his estate, his great house, his fields, his person, the spit in his face, the ridicule of his crippled leg. He endured their insults, their laughter, the ceaseless threats to shoot him, hang him, quarter him, burn him alive, endured it all with indifference. How could their threats of death make him afraid? Only a man with desire to live could be made afraid of death.

  But one of them had perceived the truth of his lack of fear—the leader of one of the first gangs of invaders to arrive at Las Cadenas, the one they called El Carnicero and whose revolver muzzle had pressed to Don César’s forehead as the man asked if he had a last word. A large man whom he would hear described by some as handsome in spite of his dusky mestizo hide, his face hard but smooth-featured, his eyes black as open graves and untouched by his mustached smile. Don César stared hard into those eyes and waited for the blast to end his misery. But then the brute laughed and took the gun from his head.

  You’re not afraid, the man said. You’re only miserable. You want to die, don’t you, patrón? Why is that, I wonder.

  The man put a hand on Don César’s shoulder and leaned close to him in the fashion of a commiserating intimate. They tell me you were a comandante of rurales, patrón. Is that how your leg came to be maimed? Ay, what a hard life that must have been, the rurales. Tell me, patrón, has life been cruel to you? Have you been robbed of your possessions, of your comforts? Have you lost loved ones? Does your fine hidalgo mind hold memories too horrible to bear? Ay, don’t tell me, patrón…have you suffered injustice?