“Christ sake, he gets it off her one time and already she’s got him pussywhipped,” Brando said.
That got LQ’s attention. “My ass,” he said. “You aint seen the day I been pussywhipped and you never will.”
“Here he comes again with never,” Brando said. He took a sip of his beer and turned so LQ couldn’t see his face and gave me a wink. He knew how to rile LQ as well as LQ knew how to rile him.
“Come on, pardner,” I said to LQ, pouring him another glassful. “Help us put a dent in this pitcher before you go.”
“Maybe you best give her a call,” Brando said. “Ask if it’s okay you have another beer.”
“Up yours,” LQ said.
I pushed the full glass over to him. “Here you go, bud. One for the road.”
“Pussywhipped,” LQ muttered, picking up his beer and giving Brando another hard look. “Every woman tried to pussywhip me I got my hat and gone. I’ve walked out on better pussy than you’ll ever see, pussy you’d beg for on your knees. I’ve turned my back on better pussy than you beat off to in your dreams.”
One for the road turned into two more pitchers before he finally left. Brando and I ordered steak sandwiches and stayed put.
T he following evening, after I spent another boring day in town while Brando and LQ made collections around Pearland and Katy, we got together for supper again. Brando threatened to go sit at another table if LQ got started on the subject of his fiasco with Zelda the night before, but he only muttered “Here we go again” and rolled his eyes as LQ went ahead and told me about it.
Zelda had been so furious with him for being more than two hours late she wouldn’t even open her door to talk to him. She said she’d call the cops if he didn’t quit all his hollering and banging on the door and go away, and so he finally did.
“I keep telling you,” Brando said, “it’s what you get for fooling around with them snooty hostess types.”
“Goddammit, I don’t see why she couldn’t even let me explain.”
“Explain what?” Brando said. “How we put a gun to your head and made you get drunk on your ass?”
“Maybe I’ll go see her at the Hollywood. She can’t hide from me there.”
“Swell idea,” I said. “Rose and Sam always get a kick out of employees arguing in front of the customers, especially at their fanciest place. Make a big enough scene and Rose’ll probably give you both a bonus for being so entertaining.”
“Goddamn it,” LQ said.
“Hell with her, man,” Brando said. “Kick the bitch out of your mind.”
A few more beers into the evening LQ decided on the age-old cure for getting a woman out of your mind—namely, by replacing her with another one. He and Brando had to make a collection run the next day, first to Baytown and then over to Port Arthur, a few miles south of Orange, where LQ had once had a girlfriend named Sheila. He hadn’t seen her in about six months, not since they’d had a bad argument about something, he couldn’t remember what.
“You reckon she’s still living there?” he said. “I wonder if she’s still red-assed at me. Could be she’s married, huh?”
“I know how you can find out all that,” Brando said. He nodded at a telephone booth in an alcove across the room.
So LQ gave Sheila a call. And discovered that she still lived in the same place and she wasn’t married. Yes, she was glad to hear from him, and yes, she would like to see him again too. Yes, tomorrow night would be just dandy—just be sure and bring a little something to drink because she was running low and payday was a long way off. And yes, she remembered his friend Ray Brando, and yes, she could get a friend for him.
“I aint heard so much of yes in a coon’s age,” LQ told us back at the table. His spirits were vastly improved.
Brando was as pleased about the phone call as LQ. “You think she’ll be goodlooking, the friend?” he said.
“She’d have to be a goddamn calendar girl to be any better looking than Sheila,” LQ said.
“I wouldn’t object any to a calendar girl,” Brando said.
“You know, if things go good tomorrow night,” LQ said, “we ought make a damn weekend of it.”
“Be all right with the office if we don’t turn in the pickup money till Monday?” Brando asked me.
“I’ll square it with Mrs. Bianco. Just leave me this Sheila’s phone number and don’t wander off from her place for too long.”
“Shitfire, man—if things go right, we won’t leave her place at all for the whole two days.”
“Things go right I aint even leaving the bed,” Brando said. “I aint coming up for air.”
“Better days,” I said, raising my glass.
“With no damn memories of Zelda,” Brando said to LQ as our three glasses came together.
“Zelda who?” LQ said.
F riday crawled by even more slowly than the previous two days. None of the Maceo informants had heard so much as a hint that the Dallas guys were planning any kind of move on us. Rose was starting to think Sam and I were probably right—they weren’t going to try anything. “Guess I’m getting jumpy in my old age,” he said.
I spent the rest of the morning in the gym. While I was going through my workout, Otis reminded me of our sparring session for ten o’clock the next morning.
“I could use that ten o’clock slot to make me some lessons money if you can’t make it for some reason,” he said.
“I’ll be here, Otis.”
He grinned big. “Well all right then.” He couldn’t wait to get me back in that ring.
I had lunch on the Strand again, then took in another movie, The Bride of Frankenstein, which mostly made me laugh. Then I went over to the beach and took off my coat and shoes and walked along the edge of the water for a while. It was about time for my twice-a-month swim. In winter the gulf usually got damn chilly, but I always made my swim anyway, even though I had to muster as much grit just to bear the coldness of the water as to swim way out and back in the dark. But the early part of this winter had so far been generally mild and the light surf on my feet felt only a little cooler than usual.
I took supper at a seafood joint across the street from the shrimp docks. They made the best red snapper in town, basting it with a sauce of garlic and lime. While it was being prepared I had a frosted schooner of beer and a platter of raw oysters on the half shell, dabbing each one with horseradish before slurping it down, then I finished off a mess of cold boiled shrimps the size of my thumb.
I checked in with Rose at the Club again, then ran into Sam at the bar and we had a drink together.
“Say, Jimmy. What do you call a girl who’s always got the clap, the syph, and a bush full of crabs?”
“I give.”
“An incurable romantic.”
He checked his watch and said with a wink that he had an appointment to keep and took off. I finished my drink and called it a night and headed for La Colonia.
O n the past two nights, the whole neighborhood had been dark and asleep by the time I got in, but at this earlier hour the Avila house were still showing light in some of its windows when I came walking down the lane.
As I passed by the Avila place I sensed a movement in the shadows alongside the house. I stopped and pretended to be trying to read my wristwatch by the Mechanic Street lamppost’s weak glow of light through the trees, turning my wrist this way and that, all the while checking out the shadows across the street from under my hatbrim.
A dark shape moved by the bushes beside the house, and then I lost sight of it. It couldn’t be Avila or anybody in his family. What would they be doing out there in the dark? Even if it had been one of them, they would’ve seen me in the lane and recognized me and said something. A prowler, I figured, some passing tramp just in on a freight car and looking for an easy grab. The neighborhood had been without a watchdog ever since the Gutierrez brothers’ mutt had chased a stray cat out into the railyard and been run over by a train.
I strolled on down the lane unti
l I came abreast of the hedge between the Ortega and Morales properties where a fat oak momentarily blocked my silhouette from the Casa Verde porch light—and then I ducked behind the hedge and ran in a crouch till I was out of the line of sight of the Avila house. I cut over into the Morales backyard through a break in the hedge where the kids always crossed, then paused low to the ground and listened hard, but I heard only the brief groan of a ship’s horn from the docks across the tracks. It was another cloudy night and the moon was a dim glow hard to spot through the trees. The darkness behind the houses was deep as a well.
I advanced slowly across the Morales yard to the shrubbery bordering the Avila sideyard, where I’d seen the prowler. I pulled the .44 from its shoulder holster and held it uncocked down against my leg.
I stood in a half-crouch and listened. Nothing. Maybe the guy had seen me duck behind the hedge and figured that I’d be doubling back. He could’ve hustled out of the Colonia while I was crossing the Morales yard. On the other hand, he would’ve had time to set himself for me. I stared through the shrubbery without trying too hard to fix on anything, letting my lax focus catch whatever movement it might.
Nothing.
I slowly stepped through the shrubs and into the Avila sideyard, the damp leaves brushing my hand, my face. I paused and listened again. I thought I heard something in the backyard. I eased over toward the rear of the house, then stopped at the corner and leaned around to look. Nothing but unmoving shadowy forms. I knew that the large bulky shape toward the rear of the yard was a toolshed. Could be he was hiding in its deeper shadow, looking my way as hard as I was looking his, having as much trouble making anything out clearly. I figured I’d cross the yard at an angle, then come around behind the shed.
Midway across the yard, I saw a low dark form ahead of me. Was that him? Crouching in wait for me to get closer so he could make out my shape a little better? See where my head was so he could take a swipe at it with a club? Take a slash at my throat?
I put my thumb on the Colt’s hammer and kept my eyes on the shape and edged up to it, ready to cock and shoot the instant it came at me. But it didn’t move. When I got up to it I could see it wasn’t a man but still couldn’t tell what it was. I crouched and touched it. A wheelbarrow.
I should have been watching the toolshed. He came out from behind it and said, “No te mueves, carajo.”
I stared up at his vague dark shape and froze in my crouch.
And then he was suddenly and starkly illuminated in a flood of light from behind me—thick-bellied, large-headed, and hatless, heavy-jowled, the muzzle of his double-barreled twelve-gauge a foot from my face. In the instant that he gaped blindly into the glare, I lunged up and snatched the shotgun barrel aside and both barrels discharged, the muzzles flaring yellow.
I hit him on the head with the Colt and he wavered but clung to the shotgun and I hit him again and he lost his grip and fell to all fours. I couldn’t believe he was still conscious. I was about to whack him once more but voices were hollering in Spanish, yelling my name and saying stop, stop, don’t hit him, he’s a friend.
I squinted into the blaze of the open kitchen door and saw Avila and his wife standing there. Then Avila ran down and started helping the guy to his feet. I tucked away the Colt and gave him a hand, still holding to the shotgun. The señora was urging us from the kitchen doorway to hurry because someone surely heard the gunblast and might be calling the police, but I wasn’t too worried about that. Nobody in La Colonia was going to report a shot, and even if somebody out on Mechanic had heard it, it was unlikely they’d notify the cops either. In this part of town people knew to mind their own business. The neighbors’ usual reaction to the sound of gunshots was to turn up their radios.
We got the guy upright and helped him over to the steps and up into the kitchen. Avila kicked the door shut. I propped the shotgun against the wall.
And there, standing beside Señora Avila, was the girl.
H er name was Daniela Zarate. Avila said she was the goddaughter of his aunt and uncle. Up close she was even prettier than she’d looked in the passing Ford, and my face went warm for a moment with the same inexplicable sensation I’d had the first time our eyes met.
I bowed slightly and said, “Encantado, señorita.”
I thought she was about to smile, but she didn’t. She nodded at me without saying anything. I guessed her age at about twenty. She seemed not to recognize me, though I’d been sure she had seen my face as clearly as I’d seen hers.
The guy I’d clobbered, Avila said, was his cousin, Felipe Rocha, who was visiting from Brownsville. Avila invited me to have a cup of coffee and I sat at the dining table with him and Rocha. He offered to take my hat, but I said that was all right and held it on my lap. It was all I could do to keep from turning around to watch the girl in the kitchen as she brewed the coffee.
Señora Avila had bundled some ice cubes in a dishcloth to make a clumsy ice pack for Rocha. He accepted it in place of the wadded towel he’d been pressing to his crown. I had hit him in almost the same spot both times and you could see the raw swelling through his hair. It was surprising there wasn’t more blood. Even minor scalp wounds usually bled so much they looked a lot worse than they were. The guy had a brick head. His nose was offset and he was missing the lobe on his left ear and a wormy white scar curved along the outer edge of his right eye socket and ended on his cheekbone. He’d been in some serious disagreements. Holding the ice pack like a man keeping his cap from blowing off in the wind, he scowled at me across the table. I gave him a look right back.
Avila repeatedly apologized to us both—to me for being accosted by Rocha’s shotgun, to Rocha for the knocks on the head.
“What were you doing out there, anyway?” I asked Rocha.
“Qué?” he said. He looked like he wanted to leap over the table at me.
“Felipe, he doesn’t understand English so good,” Avila said.
So I asked Rocha in Spanish.
What the hell was I doing sneaking up on the house, Rocha wanted to know.
I said I thought he was a prowler.
He said he thought I was one.
Felipe was a man of precautions, Avila said, and had insisted on checking around the outside of the house every evening before going to bed.
A guy who didn’t know everybody in the neighborhood, I said, had no business assuming that somebody was a prowler just because he didn’t recognize him. And a man should be damn careful about who he pointed a gun at.
Rocha said a man ought to be goddamn careful about who he hit with a gun too.
Señora Avila brought out more ice for Rocha’s pack and said for us to stop speaking so meanly to each other, for the love of God. Could we not be grateful that no one had been badly hurt?
Rocha cut a look at her as if to dispute her notion that no one had been badly hurt, and Avila narrowed his eyes in rebuke of her for intruding into men’s business. She made a face at her husband and retreated to the kitchen.
Daniela, Avila said, would be living with his family for a while. He told me her father had been a fisherman in Veracruz, where she’d been born and had lived all her life, but a year ago his boat had foundered in a bad storm in the gulf and he and his crewman drowned. And then some months later an outbreak of yellow fever took her mother among its victims. An orphan at seventeen and with no other living kin, the poor girl had made her way to Brownsville to live with her godparents—Avila’s aunt and uncle—who were now naturalized American citizens. They had become her godparents in Veracruz, where they’d lived for many years and had been best friends to Daniela’s mother and father before moving to Brownsville ten years ago to care for their only daughter, a young and childless widow in frail health who died the year before last.
Daniela was a fine seamstress, Avila said, and could have easily found work in some Matamoros or Brownsville dress shop, but she didn’t much like the border country and who could blame her? She and her godfather—and her godfather’s nephew, Fel
ipe—had come to Galveston to celebrate the New Year with the Avilas. As soon as they arrived on the island Daniela decided that she preferred it to the Rio Grande Valley. When the Avilas learned of her situation they offered to let her live with them until she found work and could afford quarters of her own, and with her godfather’s permission she’d accepted. They had but one bedroom in their house, so she would sleep on their sofa.
There was something strained in the way Avila told all this, like somebody who’d memorized the words to a song but still hadn’t got the tune quite right. It didn’t make any sense for them to lie to me. I wasn’t somebody from outside La Colonia, somebody to whom there was good reason to lie—such as immigration agents or the police or any stranger at all.
Then again, maybe I was reacting out of professional habit, sensing untruth where there was nothing more than nervousness. Maybe the Avilas were simply rattled by the scrap I’d had with Rocha and still afraid cops might come around to investigate the shotgun blast. Whatever the case, I didn’t give their nervousness much attention, not with the girl so close by. Even as I listened to Avila and exchanged hard looks with Rocha, I wasn’t unaware of her for a second.
While Avila had been talking, his wife set out cups, saucers and spoons, a bowl of sugar. Now Daniela went around the table and poured coffee for us. As she leaned beside me to fill my cup I caught the smell of her, a faint scent like a mix of sea wind and grass. Her fingers looked strong. She appeared uninterested in what Avila had been saying, as if he were talking about somebody besides her. She finished serving and took the coffeepot back to the kitchen.
“What about this guy?” I said, nodding at Rocha.
“Qué?” Rocha said, glowering.
Felipe would soon be taking the train back to Brownsville, Avila said. The poor fellow had been sleeping on the floor. He had only stayed here in case Daniela changed her mind about living in Galveston after a few days and needed someone to accompany her back to the border.
Under the Skin Page 13
