“Yeah, it’s an old one,” I said, slowly sitting up and making a big show of the pain from the kicks I’d taken, probing my ribs gingerly and then easing a hand behind me and wincing big. “Christ almighty, he like to broke my back.”
The tramp pointed the gun at me but hadn’t cocked it. “Young fella like yourself don’t need no gun to defend hisself as much as a old fella like me. Reckon I’ll just hold on to it.”
“Sure. Keep it.”
“Well thankee, son. You real generous. Now do me just one more kindness and jump offa this train. I appreciate we’re moving along right quick now but you hit the ground running and then roll just right you probly won’t get busted up too bad.”
“Can I at least have my bedroll,” I said. “My last two dollars are in there.”
He turned to look at the bedroll and I pulled the Mexican Colt from my waistband under the back of my jacket, cocking it as I brought it around. He heard the racheting hammer and snapped his attention back to me just in time to see me shoot him through the wishbone. The gunblast was loud but got swallowed almost instantly in the rumbling of the train. He flopped backward and against the closed door and fell over on his side with his legs in a twist.
I got up and stood over him with the .44 cocked and pointed at his head and he looked at me without expression as the light drained out of his eyes and he died. I took the top-break from his hand and put it back in the saddlebag. I snugged the .44 at the small of my back again and then opened the door a little way. There was nothing to see but passing desert. I sat and cooled myself in the rushing air and watched the country go clacking by.
T he sun had set and a dull orange twilight was closing around us when the train made a whistle stop at some nowhere station. I peeked out the door on the depot side and saw the engineer leaning out of the chugging locomotive and talking to a guy in shirtsleeves on the platform. The town consisted of fewer than a dozen buildings and even at that early hour of the evening there were more darkened windows than any with light showing in them. On the other side of the train there was only open country. I shoved the dead guy out the door on that side and then jumped down and positioned him so that his head was under the boxcar and his chest wound was centered on the rail. I tossed his cap under the car and then I got back inside and closed the door. A minute later the train got rolling again.
W e pulled up into Del Rio before dawn. I hunkered in the darkest corner of the boxcar and kept alert for the yard bulls, having heard stories about what rough old boys they were. I was ready to show them what rough was. But the only guys to peek into the car were a couple of kids about thirteen or fourteen who asked if anybody was in there and when I said yeah they asked if they could share the car with me. I told them to get in and keep quiet and they tossed their bindles in and helped each other aboard and then I eased the door to till it was almost closed. They said they were brothers, Charlie and Fred, and as we passed the miles together I came to learn that they’d had enough of their damn stepdaddy and were going to Houston to live with their uncle Stephen. The uncle didn’t know they were coming but they were sure he would be glad to see them, him and Aunt Beulah both.
They each had a half-dozen peanut butter sandwiches in their bindles and they were quick to offer me one. I was so hungry I took it down in about four bites and they insisted I have another. I said it was a long way to Houston and they were going to need all the food they had but they said ah hell, we was hobo buddies, wasn’t we. So I took the sandwich. I asked if they had any money and they said they sure did, they had four bits apiece. I gave them two dollars, which they refused until I convinced them I wasn’t paying for the sandwiches, I was only helping out some hobo buddies who could use a little dough on their long trip. I said they could pay me back next time we ran into each other. “Well…in that case,” Charlie the older one said, “all right then.”
We went through Spofford, Uvalde, Hondo, the floor of the car vibrating so hard it was tough to get any sleep. When the train began to slow on its approach to the San Antonio yard, I shook hands with the boys and wished them luck. I secretly hoped they wouldn’t get robbed and maybe worse by the first wolves they ran into.
The train didn’t seem to be going all that fast now, but I didn’t know how deceptive train speed could be.
“They say you supposed to try and hit the ground running,” young Fred said.
“So I’ve been told,” I said. “Thanks for reminding me.”
I tossed out my saddlebags and bedroll, then crouched low at the edge of the car floor—and then jumped and tried to hit the ground running.
I went tumbling and flapping every which way and it was a wonder I didn’t crack my skull. I gashed a cheek and banged up a knee and cut my elbows and pretty much felt like I’d been stomped by a herd of horses. I sat up and saw Fred and Charlie looking back at me from the boxcar. I waved like the landing had gone just perfect and they waved back.
The knee was bloody and hurt like a sonofabitch and at first I was afraid I’d broken it. But I could stand up and hobble around so I knew it was just badly bruised. I picked up my hat and went back and got my saddlebags and roll and then gimped on out to the nearest road and found a bus stop. About an hour later a bus came along with a sign saying DOWNTOWN. I got aboard and went into San Antonio, where I hadn’t been since shortly after I was born.
I ’d picked San Antonio because it was far enough from Presidio County that I didn’t think anybody would hunt me there and big enough to hide in if anybody did. I checked into a residential hotel called Los Nopales a few blocks over from the river. The room was on the second floor and the ancient elevator took forever, but at least I didn’t have to take the stairs, which would’ve been hard labor on my bad knee. The carpeting was worn and the walls were water-stained and the room smelled of bug spray, but it was cheap and would do just fine. It was a good thing I had enough money from the sale of the horse to see me through for a while because I could hardly walk and I knew the knee would stiffen up and hurt even worse before it even began to get better. The place had one bellhop, a Mex kid, and I paid him to bring me a bottle of alcohol and bandages and, in the days to follow, to keep me in cigarettes and sandwiches and magazines.
I didn’t do much of anything during the next two weeks except sleep and read and let the knee heal up. When I wasn’t reading I’d sit in the tattered armchair by the window and smoke and watch the street and sidewalk traffic passing by. For exercise I’d do sitting pushups off the arms of the chair, raising and lowering myself till my arms were burning and about to cramp, then I’d rest a bit and then do another set until I couldn’t raise myself off the chair at all. Then I’d sleep some more. I kept both revolvers under the pillow.
I wanted to know how things were at the YB but I didn’t think it was a good idea to write to Aunt Ava directly. Even if I didn’t put a return address on the envelope, somebody at the post office could be keeping an eye on her mail, with instructions to let the sheriff know about any letter that looked suspicious. It wasn’t really very likely they’d go to all that trouble but I didn’t want to take any chances. It was even less likely, though, that they’d be watching the vaqueros’ mail, and after lying low for more than a month I finally wrote a note to Esteban. I asked how things stood and how my aunt was doing and said to tell her I was all right. I didn’t tell him where I was living but said to write me back in care of general delivery at the post office on Commerce, which was two blocks from the Nopales.
By then I was already getting around with a cane, and in another week or so I didn’t need it anymore. I took my meals at a little Mex café down the street. I went for a stroll every morning in a nearby park, limping less every day. I’d sit on a bench in the sun and read the local papers. Every afternoon I’d check in at the post office. One day Esteban’s letter was waiting for me.
He wrote in a scrawl and mostly in Spanish as bad as his English, but with a few English phrasings mixed in, pretty much the way he usually talked. He said t
he police had questioned him and some of the other vaqueros about me but the boys all said they had no idea where I might have gone, which was of course the truth. There was a warrant out on me for murder, he said, and there was a reward of five hundred dollars for information leading to my capture. He said he could be a rich man if only he knew exactly where I was living. Maybe he was joking and maybe not. And he said that, in case I didn’t know it, the señora had sold the ranch.
She had done so only a few days after the funerals of Don Cullen and Don Reuben. And then a week after the sale, she departed on the train from Marfa with only two bags of belongings. She told everyone she was going to live with a cousin in Albuquerque and gave her new address to a few people. But it was common knowledge that when her bookstore friend Mrs. Morgan had tried to contact her shortly after she moved, the Albuquerque post office said there was no such address in town. Where she had truly gone, Esteban wrote, no one could say.
As for Chente, he had been convicted of assault and sentenced to six months in the county jail. It was doubtful he would receive an early release for good behavior, as he was always fighting with the other inmates. The new owner of the YB—now called the Blue Range Ranch—was a kind man named Colfax who had become rich in the oil business but had always wanted to raise horses. Mr. Colfax had kept on all of the hands and retained Esteban as the foreman. Esteban said he was glad the Blue Range would be strictly a horse ranch, and he concluded with the hope that I was safe and in good health and advised me to go with God.
That was that.
And why I lied to Daniela about how I’d come to leave the YB.
A fter I got Esteban’s letter I gave some thought to hitchhiking out into ranch country and trying to get on as a hand somewhere, but the more I thought about it the less the idea appealed to me. Then one morning I woke up knowing I never wanted to work on a ranch again.
Over the next two months I worked at several different jobs in San Antonio and hated them all. I carried a hod for a construction gang, worked with a road-tarring crew, laid sewer pipe on a municipal project, drove a water truck for the city. I didn’t stick with any of them for more than a few weeks. I was busting my back for peanuts and choking on the boredom. I was drunk almost every night and getting into bar fights.
One night in an alley behind a saloon I beat the shit out of a tough-talking merchant sailor who had a couple of inches and about thirty pounds on me. He’d been bullying everybody in the bar and they were glad to see me cool him, and my drinks were on the house the rest of the night. Among the spectators was a guy who had a friend who owned a cathouse at the south end of town and was in need of a good bouncer. The last good one who’d worked there had got stabbed in his sleep by a jealous girlfriend, and the two he’d hired since had both got their asses whipped by rough customers. Was I interested in the job? Sure, why not? The next day he took me out to the place, the Bluebonnet Dance Hall, and introduced me to the owner, a Mr. Stanley, and told him about the way I’d handled the sailor. And I got the job.
The place called itself a dance hall and on the ground floor that’s what it was. The “dance hostesses” did their whoring on the second floor. I’d check in around five o’clock and usually not leave till three or four in the morning, depending on how much business the joint was turning. I’d sit in a chair at the foot of the stairs to the second floor and keep an eye on things in the dance parlor and I was within easy call of the floorwoman upstairs if any of the girls had trouble with a customer.
The only troublesome guys we had in there during my first weeks on the job were drunks who either couldn’t get it up or couldn’t get off for some other reason and thought their three dollars bought them all the time they’d need to get their satisfaction. But the house limit was fifteen minutes unless you ponied up another three bucks. If a customer got unreasonable about it the floorwoman would call down for me and I’d go up and persuade the guy to get his clothes on and take his leave. I hardly ever had to get rougher with any of them than an armlock. Only now and then did I have to punch somebody in the gut to put an end to the argument. I carried the Colt under my jacket but Stanley had told me I’d better never pull it unless some customer pulled a piece first. The job required long hours, but it paid well and had the added benefit of a free fuck at the end of the night.
I’d been there about a month when a guy hit one of the girls and the floorwoman called down for me. The guy was bigger than me but looked scared and said he was really sorry and he’d give the girl some money to make up for it and so on. I figured what the hell, the girl wasn’t really hurt, why rough him up? I told him to give her twenty bucks and don’t come back. Right, right, he said—and the moment I took my eyes off him he caught me with a hell of a sucker punch. He landed another good one before I got my footing and turned the thing around. Like everybody else in the place Stanley heard the commotion and came rushing upstairs and into the room, but by then it was all over. The guy was groaning on the floor, his nose broken and blown up, a front tooth somewhere under the bed. I had a shiner and was tempted to give him a kick in the balls for good measure but didn’t do it. But when Stanley saw him he said, “Oh shit.” Turned out the guy was some kind of assistant to the mayor, a regular customer who’d been coming to the Bluebonnet once a week for the past several months. He’d been a problem a few times before but not in a long while, and this was the first time he’d ever taken a swing at anybody. Stanley and a couple of the girls helped him up and tidied him somewhat but then the guy started threatening to make plenty of legal trouble for the club. The matter was finally settled when Stanley gave him a wad of money and fired me.
F or a week afterward I was in a fury. It was partly because of losing a job with good pay and free women, partly because of losing it the way I did. Still, that wasn’t the whole reason for my anger, or even the main part of it. But even if somebody had put a gun to my head I couldn’t have explained exactly what it was, and it made me even angrier that I couldn’t.
I started taking long walks every night and I always carried both guns. Then one chilly January night I was walking down a sidewalk bordering a large park thick with trees and shrubbery when I took notice of a fancy Spanish restaurant called Domingo’s across the street. The place was doing a brisk business and as I stood there it occurred to me how easy it would be to rob it.
The idea got my blood rushing. The cashier’s counter was by the front door and out of view of the dining room. Just stick the gun in the cashier’s face and make him hand over the money. If anybody came in the door or out of the dining room while I was at it I’d point the piece at them and tell them to stand fast…then grab the dough and hustle across the street into the park…then pick any one of a dozen paths out to some other street and mix in with the Saturday-night crowds.
The more I thought about it the simpler the plan seemed and the tighter the hold it took on me. But the smart thing was to wait till the supper rush was over with—let the dining crowd thin out, let the till get a little fatter. Another hour would be about right. I went over and sat on a sidewalk bench deeply shadowed by the trees. There were cars parked along the curbs on both sides of the street but I had a clear view of the restaurant doors. I watched the well-dressed patrons come and go. I was charged up and maybe a little nervous but I was ready.
Over the next forty minutes, more and more people came out of Domingo’s and got in their cars and left. And then a light-colored Buick sedan came slowly down the street and wheeled into a parking spot almost directly across from the restaurant.
I figured them for late-night diners, but after the Buick’s engine shut off and its headlights went dark, nobody got out. Against the glow from the streetlight on the corner behind them I could see the hatted silhouettes of four men sitting in the car. They were looking across the street and had to be watching the restaurant, since it was the only place on the block open for business at that hour. I thought maybe they were waiting to pick up somebody and I hoped it wouldn’t take long. I w
as about ready to get to it and I didn’t want a car full of witnesses parked in front of the place.
Another twenty minutes or so went by and the guys in the Buick were still waiting. I was getting pretty irked about it. Why didn’t one of those guys go inside and tell whoever they were waiting for that they were there? A few more people came out and got in their cars and left. There were only a half-dozen cars still on the street, including the Buick.
The Buick’s motor suddenly started up and I thought, About time. But then the front and back doors swung open and a guy got out of each one—palookas, both armed, the front guy with a big automatic, the backdoor guy with a sawed-off double-barrel. The night was chilly enough for their breath to show against the light of the corner lamppost. The two men stepped out into the street and the Buick’s other back door opened and one more guy got out, this one holding a revolver.
Son of a bitch. I figured they were going to heist the place.
I stood up and put my hand to the Colt at my back. They obviously hadn’t seen me sitting in the shadows. I was furious that they were going to beat me out of the score. I thought about shooting out one of their tires and scooting into the park.
The guy behind the wheel was looking across the street and still hadn’t seen me either. I followed his gaze and that’s when I saw that the gunmen weren’t heading for Domingo’s but toward three men who had just come out of the restaurant. The three were walking away down the sidewalk and were unaware of the men closing in on them at an angle from behind and holding their weapons low against their legs.
I didn’t know I was going to do it until I hollered, “Behind you!”
The three men on the sidewalk all turned around as the shotgunner raised his weapon and cut loose with both barrels and the hat flew off one of the guys on the sidewalk with part of his head still in it. His buddies pulled pistols and one of them took cover behind a Studebaker as the street guy with the automatic started firing. The street guy closest to me was darkly Mexican and was raising his revolver at me when I shot him twice in the face. He fired a wild round and stumbled backward and dropped the piece and went down. The shotgunner had tossed away the sawed-off and was bringing a revolver out of his coat and I shot him in the side of the head and he did a little drunken sidestep and fell. The guy with the automatic was crouched in front of a Model A and replacing the magazine and looking from me to the guy behind the Studebaker who yelled, “Behind you!” I spun around as the driver came out of the Buick and fired at me twice—my coatflap tugged and there was a buzz past my ear—before I shot him with both revolvers, shot him and shot him as gunfire banged behind me and he slammed back against the open car door and slid down on his ass and slumped over with his head draining blood on the running board. I was punched hard under the arm and pivoted back around to see the guy by the Model A turning away to fire at the Studebaker guy and then he looked at me again like he was surprised to see me still on my feet. My revolvers snapped on empty chambers. He showed his teeth as he swung the automatic toward me—but then his head jerked to the side and he fell over with a hand clamped to the side of his head. The Studebaker guy—hatless, with curly gray hair—rushed over to him and bent down and shot him in the ear. Then hustled over to the guy I’d shot in the face and whose leg was moving slightly and gave him one in the head too.
Under the Skin Page 20
