“In that case,” LQ said, “we got us the greatest goddamn plan in the world.”
W e took rooms in what was said to be the best of the hotels in town and went to bed early so we could get going before daybreak. But when we met downstairs at dawn LQ and Brando were red-eyed and full of complaints about the lumpy beds and the light of the full moon blazing in through the gauzy curtains and the ranchero music that blared incessantly through much of the night from the cantina across the street. It didn’t help their mood much when I said I’d had a pretty good night’s rest myself.
I said that just to needle them. The truth was, I dreamt all night, one dream after another—of being out in the deepwater sea with a giant shark circling around me; of Reuben lying in the dust with a terrible stomach wound and calling for me to help him; of Daniela standing naked on a brightly lit platform while a crowd of men in the surrounding darkness bids to buy her. And of Rodolfo Fierro, sitting in a high-backed chair on an elevated platform, dressed in a fine black suit and cloak and wearing a Montana hat at a cocky angle, his legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles and his coatflap fallen aside to expose a holster holding a Colt .44 with ivory grips of carved Mexican eagles. He was staring down at several long rows of clearly terrified men while a voice speaking in Spanish delivered verdicts of death. Then he looked over their heads at me, and in English I said, Hey Daddy…and he smiled…
W e put a five-gallon can of drinking water on the floor by the backseat and three cans of gasoline into the trunk and got on our way before daybreak. The sun rose out of the flatlands and shone red on the mountains to the west just under the setting silver moon. The sky was clear except for the dust we raised behind us on the packed dirt road.
The countryside reminded me of the YB Ranch—cactus of every kind and mesquite trees and creosote scrub, mesas and mountains on every horizon. But it was alien territory to LQ and different even to Brando, who came from a part of Texas with geography a lot tamer than this region of brute rock ground and thorns on damned near everything.
Now and then we’d see a small cross—sometimes a cluster of crosses—stuck in the ground alongside the road and we came to find out they had been placed by the families of people killed at those spots in motor vehicle accidents.
Two hours after leaving Villa Acuña we reached the junction road from the border town of Piedras Negras. There had been a rainstorm a day or so earlier and truck traffic had made a washboard of the road surface. The car jarred hard and sometimes jerked to one side or the other and Brando cursed and fought the wheel. There were plenty of stations within range of our radio, most of them playing ranchero music, which LQ and I liked but Brando had had enough of, and he searched the dial till he found one out of Eagle Pass broadcasting Texas string-band stuff.
As the morning grew warmer, pale dust devils rose in the open country and went whirling toward the dark ranges in the distance. Around midmorning we came to a ferry crossing at a river the color of caramel. The ferry was a rope rig and could carry only three cars at a time. There were four cars ahead of us, so we had to wait. There were three small crosses at the edge of the riverbank. LQ and Brando napped under a tree and I skipped rocks on the water until it was our turn to cross.
W e got to Monclova in the early afternoon and gassed the car at a filling station. I got directions from the attendant to get to the westbound road. Brando wanted to have a beer before moving on, so we parked around the corner from the main plaza and went into a cantina.
The place was cool and dim and a radio was playing mariachi music. Besides us the only other patrons were two guys at a table against the wall and another three standing together at the far end of the bar and laughing with the cantinero. You could tell by their clothes they were vaqueros—and by their laughter and gestures that they were drunk.
The cantinero came over and looked at each of us in turn, then asked Brando, “Qué quieren de tomar?”
“Cerveza,” Brando said with his gringo accent. He looked at me and said, “Tell him I want the coldest one in the joint.”
“Tres cervezas,” I said. “Bien frías.”
The cantinero stared at my eyes and then gave Brando another look before going to fetch the beer. He set the bottles in front of us and went back to his friends at the end of the bar and whispered something to them. They turned to look at us. One of them, the biggest, came down the bar, puffing a cigarillo.
“Buenas tardes.”
“Buenas tardes,” I said.
He asked to know where we were from, and I told him.
“Ah, Tejas,” he said. He looked at LQ and said that a blond gringo certainly had a good reason for not speaking Spanish. Then looked at me again and said anybody who looked Mexican and could speak Spanish as well as I did could be forgiven for having gringo eyes. But what he was curious about, he said, turning to Brando, was why a guy who looked so fucking Mexican couldn’t speak Spanish well enough to ask for a cold beer.
“Eres un pinche pocho, verdad?”
The vaquero was looking for a fight but he badly underestimated Brando’s readiness to give it to him. The insult was barely off the guy’s tongue before Ray brought his knee up into his balls and hit him in the mouth with the bottle of beer. Glass shattered and beer sprayed and the vaquero went down on his ass and over on his side, drawing his knees up and clutching his crotch. He puked through his broken teeth.
The cantinero started to sidestep down the bar but LQ already had the .380 in his hand and waggled it at him, and the barman brought his hands up in view and stepped away from the counter. The two at the end of the bar stood gawking. The pair at the table were beaming at the entertainment.
LQ put up his pistol and leaned over the bar to peer into the shelf under it and came up with a cutoff single-barrel sixteen-gauge. The cantinero looked apologetic. LQ opened the breech and took out the shell and flung it across the room, then stood the shotgun against the front of the bar.
“Let’s get a move on,” I said.
“Gimme another beer,” Brando said to the cantinero. “For the busted one.”
“Mándame?”
“Dale otra cerveza,” I said.
He went to the cooler and fetched three beers to the bar.
“Put them in a bag,” Brando said.
“Cómo?”
“Ponlas en una bolsa,” I said.
He looked around and found a paper sack and put the bottles in it. Brando picked it up and carried it out under his arm.
LQ and I paused at the door and eyeballed everybody in the room. I didn’t think any of them was likely to discuss us with the police. We went out the door and down the street to the car. Brando already had the engine running. We got in and he drove us off nice and easy and I gave him the directions out of town.
When we got on the open road, I opened the beers and passed them around and we took a few pulls without talking until LQ said, “You getting awful thin-skinned, aint you, Ramon? All the fella called you was a phony Mexican.”
He leaned so that Brando couldn’t see his face in the rearview and he gave me a wink.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Jimmy,” LQ said, “but aint that what pocho means—a phony Mex? A Mexican who talks and acts American?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
Brando kept his eyes on the road, steering with one hand and holding his beer with the other, but he was still pretty tight about the whole business—you could see it in his jaw and how he was gripping the wheel.
“I mean, you’re all the time saying you aint Mexican, no matter how much you look it, always saying how you were born in the States and all,” LQ said. “Seems to me he was saying the same thing. So what’s there to get blackassed about?”
“It’s how he said it,” Brando said.
“How he said it? Goddamn, you bust up a man ’cause you don’t like how he says something? Woooo, you even thinner in the skin than I thought.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Brando said.
&n
bsp; “Ah, Ramon,” LQ said with the usual big sigh, “if only I could. I’d be doing it with—”
“You’d be doing it with a dumb-ass redneck nobody but you can stand,” Ray said.
I smiled out at the road.
“Well golly gee, aint we in a mood?”
“Mood this,” Brando said—then caught sight of LQ’s grin in the mirror and couldn’t restrain his own.
Pretty soon they were talking about how they couldn’t wait to see Sheila and Cora Ann again and how much the girls would like it if they took them some Mexican sandals, maybe a sombrero.
“Hell, Kid,” LQ said to me, “you and your chiquita—we oughta call her Danny—you and Danny ought to come over and join us for a backyard barbecue or something.”
“Damn right,” Brando said. “I think we oughta do it as soon as we get back home.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
W e didn’t see anything but desert for the next hour and a half and then came to a wide spot in the road taken up with a few weathered shacks and a one-pump filling station and a tiny café with an open wall and a pair of bench tables. The guy who filled our tank said there wasn’t so much as another hut, never mind a place to get gas or a bite to eat, between there and Escalón, 165 miles away. We went to the café and had pork tacos and beer, then got back in the Hudson and drove on.
We were pushing deep into nowhere, just like it looked on the map, and the road got worse. It was full of cracks and potholes and the Hudson sometimes thumped into one so hard it was a wonder we didn’t blow a tire. The gas-pump guy had said we were lucky to be making this drive in the good weather of the year, that the heat of summer was unbearable, but even now you could see heat waves where the highway met the horizon.
We rolled through a vast pale desert of scraggly brush and rocky outcrops and long red mesas. Far to the southwest black thunderheads sparked with silent lightning and dragged purple veils of rain over the jagged ranges on the horizon. We saw no other living thing but a pair of vultures circling high over the sunlit wasteland to the north.
“Jesus,” Brando said. “Where the hell are we?”
“I believe we took a wrong turn and come to the moon,” LQ said. He reached over to the front seat and got the hand-drawn map from beside me and sat back and opened it.
“According to this,” he said, “that hacienda place is straight thataway”—he pointed south—“about thirty–forty miles.”
“I know it,” I said. “But there’s no way to get there except by way of the Escalón road—and that’s…what…twice as long, all told?”
“At least that, according to this map. Fella sure lives out of the way, don’t he? Say, what’s this here, where the river runs out?”
LQ leaned over the seat to point out the little clump of penciled tufts labeled “ciénaga” just north of the hacienda.
“Sort of a swamp,” I said. “This close to the desert it’s probably just a mud patch.”
I didn’t say much for a while after that—just smoked and stared out at the passing landscape. I couldn’t have explained it, but there was something about this country that pulled at me. In some inexplicable way it felt like a place I’d once known but had forgotten all about.
The sun was almost down to the ridge of distant mountains in the west and glaring hard against the windshield when the road angled off to southward. The map showed the angle and we calculated that we were less than forty miles from Escalón.
And then, shortly after dark, the road ended at a junction with another highway and we were there.
E scalón was nothing but a tiny railstation and a small rocky cemetery and a dozen scattered houses along a single dirt street. No motor vehicles. No telephone or even a telegraph line.
The road ran north to Jiménez and south to Torreón, which lay even farther away. The fat creamy moon had just risen over the black mountains. A light wind kicked up and carried the smell of charcoal cooking. A dog barked and barked but hung back in the shadows beside the depot. The station door was open and showed soft yellow light. A man in a rail agent’s cap stepped into the doorway and peered out at us.
“Cállate,” he said, and the dog shut up and slunk off. “Buenas noches, señores. Les puedo ayudar?”
I told Brando to keep a lookout and LQ and I went into the station. The agent stepped aside for us and then went around behind the narrow counter. In the light of a pair of kerosene lanterns I saw that his face was badly scarred, as if it had been torn open in several places and then badly sutured. His left arm had been ruined too and he held it at an awkward twist.
“Christ amighty, amigo,” LQ said, “you look like you been in a hatchet fight and everybody had a hatchet but you.”
“Perdóname, señor,” the clerk said. “No hablo inglés.” His face twisted even more awfully and I supposed he was smiling in apology for his inability to speak English.
I told him my friend didn’t speak Spanish, and he gestured with his good arm in a manner to imply that life was full of complications.
I took out the map of the hacienda and spread it open on the counter between us. I asked if he could vouch for its accuracy, if there were any local roads that the map did not show.
He bent over it and considered for a minute and then said it looked correct to him.
So the road a couple of miles south was the only one connecting the Hacienda de Las Cadenas to the Jiménez-Torreón highway?
“Sí,” he said. “Es el único camino.” He asked if we were new employees of Don César. “O no más son amigos de el?”
There was no way he could warn Calveras of our coming and so I said no, we weren’t the man’s employees or his friends, either. I handed the map to LQ. “It’s jake. Just the one road.”
“Ah, pues, son enemigos,” the clerk said. He put his hand to a scarred cheek and smiled his awful smile. “Espero que lo castigan bastante bien. Mejor si lo matan.”
“What’s he yammering about?” LQ said.
“He hopes we kick Calveras’ ass but he’d be happier if we killed him. I don’t think he cares much for the man.”
“Bastard probably give him that face. Ask him does he know how many guns the place got.”
I asked, and he said, “De pistoleros? No estoy seguro. Como una dozena, yo creo.”
“He say a dozen?” LQ said.
“Maybe a dozen, he’s not sure.”
“Y cuantos son ustedes?”
“Tres.”
“Tres?” His ruined mouth twisted and he shook his head.
“Go to hell, Jack,” LQ said as we started for the door. “Odds like that, the sumbitch best send for more guys.”
T he road was about as wide as a big truck and went snaking through high dense brush and tall stands of mesquite trees. The hacienda’s pasturelands were somewhere far to the east. We drove without headlights and very slowly, raising no dust, making our way by the small patches of moonlight that filtered through the trees. We’d been on the move for the better part of an hour when we went around a long curve through the heavy scrub and saw the lights of the hacienda in the distance ahead.
When we figured we were within a mile of the place, LQ and I got out of the car. He carried the BAR and the shoulder bag of extra magazines; I had one of the shotguns and one coat pocket full of extra shells for it, the other pocket full of .44 cartridges. The road was still closely bounded and deeply shadowed by brush and mesquite. I headed up the road with LQ ten yards behind me and Brando easing the Hudson along behind LQ, far enough back that I couldn’t hear the motor.
About eighty yards from the compound the trees and taller brush abruptly ended. LQ came up beside me and we crouched in the road’s last portion of darkness. We had a clear view of the compound gate and the guard posted there, but between us and the compound it was all moonlit open ground and there was no shadow at all on the long front wall. Brando was still in the car, about thirty yards behind us.
The wooden gate was tall and double-doored, the left door
open inward, the right one shut. The guard sat in a straightback chair in front of the closed door. We could see the red flarings of his cigarette and it looked like there was some kind of long gun propped against the gate beside him. The wall was about twelve feet high and we could see the glitter of the broken bottles cemented along the top of it, a safeguard common to every walled residence, large or small, we’d seen in Mexico. The open gate door was dimly yellow with light from the courtyard within.
We talked it over in a whisper and came up with a plan. I went back down the road to tell it to Brando and then stood on the running board as he very gingerly brought the Hudson up to about fifteen yards from the shadowed end of the road and stopped. We could see LQ’s crouched silhouette up ahead.
“Keep your eye on me,” I told Brando, then I hustled back up to LQ.
“Okay,” LQ said, handing me his hat and the BAR. “Here goes nothing.” He slipped into the brush to the right of the road and vanished. I slung the BAR over one shoulder, the shotgun over the other.
It took nearly half an hour for him to move around to the east side of the compound. I kept watching the far end of the front wall and finally saw his blond head poke out from behind it.
The guard was sitting with his back to him. He’d been chain-smoking and he lit another cigarette as LQ started toward him, walking steadily and sticking close to the wall, his shadow short and leaning a little ahead of him. If the guard turned around and saw him coming LQ would probably have to shoot him—and the ones inside might get the gate shut on us.
LQ was almost to him when the guard jerked around in his chair—maybe he heard LQ’s footsteps. He jumped up and spun around to grab for the long gun but then LQ was on him, clubbing at him with his pistol. I heard the guy hollering—and figured they sure as hell heard him inside—and then LQ had him down and shut him up.
I was already running for the gate and beckoning Brando to come on. I heard the Hudson roaring behind me and I looked back as it shot out into the moonlight and swerved around in a tight circle and Brando gunned it back into the narrow mouth of the road and braked hard—the car now facing back the way we came and blocking the mouth of the road. The door flew open and Brando came on the run, shotgun in hand.
Under the Skin Page 26
