Under the Skin

By the time we were done making our visits it was close to ten o’clock. We stopped at a diner to buy beer for the rest of the drive to town.

The joint had a jukebox, and “Blue Moon” was playing when we came in. A Christmas tree in the corner was blinking with colored-glass electric candles, half of its needles already on the floor.

It wasn’t the sort of place to pull them in on New Year’s Eve. The only customers besides us were a mushy young couple at a back table. Brando and I went into the men’s room to take a leak while LQ went to the counter and ordered the beer.

When we came out of the john, “Blue Moon” was playing again. The cooler beside the front counter was out of order but the guy had some beer on ice in the back room and had gone to get it. “Blue Moon” played out and the mushy guy went over to the juke and punched it up again. The girl stood up and they held each other close and swayed in place to the music.

“Goddamn,” LQ said in a low voice, “I like the song myself, but there’s such a thing as overdoing a good thing. There’s bound to be other lovey stuff on that juke they can dance to. I bet ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ is on there.”

Brando said that was an all right love song but not nearly as good as “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

LQ said that one sounded like a song about a bad disease. “I bet the guy who wrote it was thinking about some dame who gave him the worst case of clap he ever had.”

“Jesus, it’s no wonder your wives all left you,” Brando said.

“At least they wanted to marry me,” LQ said. “Only thing women want from you is as far away as they can get.”

“You don’t know a damn thing about me or women.”

The counter guy came back with the beer and put it in a sack. While LQ was paying him I went over to the juke and scanned the titles, then put a nickel in the coinbox and pressed a number button. I stood there till “Blue Moon” finished playing and I watched the selector arm pick up the record and replace it in its slot, then swing over and pick up the one I’d punched and set it on the turntable. The record began to spin and the tone arm eased into the starting groove and the speakers started putting out “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.”

The lovebirds turned to see what was going on. The girl looked confused and the guy was frowning. I nodded at them and touched my hatbrim.

LQ and Brando were waiting at the door. As we went out to the car LQ said, “That wasn’t very nice.”

“That’s Jimmy’s trouble,” Brando said to LQ. “He’s like you. Not a romantic bone in his body.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “That’s the most romantic song I ever heard.”

“Cowboy probably means it,” LQ told Brando.

For a time after we first met, LQ had called me Cowboy because of my boots and the frontier Colt and the wide-brimmed hat I wore back then before I switched to a fedora—and because I’d grown up on a ranch, which was all I’d ever told him and Brando about my past. As he got to know me better he eased off on the nickname and it had been a long time since he’d used it. He was no cowboy himself—he came out of the East Texas piney woods, which made him closer kin to Southern good old boys than to any Texan raised west of Houston.

He slid behind the wheel and started up the Dodge. I sat up in front with him. Brando uncapped three beers with a church key and passed two of them up to me as LQ got us back on the road. I waited till LQ shifted into high, then handed him a beer.

“Salud, amor, y pesetas,” I said, and we all raised our bottles in the toast.

A few minutes later we were on the causeway and looking at the low stretch of lights ahead of us that marked Galveston across the bay. Thirty miles long and some three miles across at its widest point, the island had long been a haven to pirates and smugglers, to gunrunners, gamblers, whores, to shady characters of every stripe. Geographically it was completely different from the place where I’d grown up, but I felt at ease with its character, which Rose had described pretty well as “Live and let live unless somebody fucks with you.”

Near the middle of the bridge we had to halt behind a short line of cars while the lift span rose to let a large ketch go motoring through. Its sails were furled and it trailed a small wake in the light of the pale half-moon just above the water to the west. Even though the calendar said it was winter and we had recently had a brief cold snap, the evening was warm as spring. The breeze was gentle, the air moist and smelling of tidal marsh.

I’d never seen the ocean until I came to Galveston. The first time I stood on the beach and stared out at the gulf it struck me as beautiful, but also damn scary—and I detested the feeling of being afraid. I couldn’t remember having been truly frightened before except for one time when I was fourteen. I’d been beating the brush for strays all morning when I stopped to eat the lunch our maid Carlotta had packed for me. It was a heavy meal and made me sleepy, so I lay down for a nap in the raggedy shade of a mesquite shrub at the bottom of a low sandrise. The shrilling of my horse woke me to the sight of a diamondback as thick as my arm and coiled up three feet from my face. The horse snatched the reins loose of the mesquite and bolted over the rise. If the damn jughead hadn’t spooked so bad the snake probably would’ve slid on by with no trouble, but now it was scared too and ready to give somebody hell for it. I figured if I tried to roll away it would get me in the neck and that would be all she wrote. Its rattle was a buzzing blur and I could see its muscles flex as it coiled tighter. I knew it was going to strike me in the face any second—and I was suddenly afraid. And then in the next instant I was furious at myself and I thought, To hell with it—and made a grab for the snake. It hit my hand like a club and I rolled away hard as the rattler recoiled. I scrambled over the rise on all fours and whistled up my horse and got the Winchester out of the saddle scabbard. The snake had started slithering off but then coiled up buzzing again when I ran back to it. I admired its courage even as I blew its head off. The bastard had nailed me on the bottom edge of the hand, and I cut the wound bigger and sucked and spat for a while, then tied a bandanna tight around my wrist. I draped the snake over my neck—I later made a belt of the hide—and mounted up and headed for home. I was sick as hell for three days, but I promised myself if anything even came close to scaring me again, I’d go right up to whatever it was—man, beast, or bad weather—and kick it in the ass. But nothing had ever really spooked me again, not until I saw the Gulf of Mexico.

The day after my first look at the gulf, I bought a swimming suit and returned to the beach. I watched the swimmers carefully for a while and then started imitating their techniques in water no deeper than my hips. And I taught myself to swim. I practiced and practiced over the next few days until I could swim parallel to shore in shallow water for a steady hundred yards.

Then one bright noonday I swam straight out from shore until I was gasping and my arms were heavy and aching. I clumsily treaded water and looked back at the tiny figures of the people on the beach. I must’ve been out two hundred yards. The dark water under me seemed bottomless and I couldn’t help thinking of all the shark stories I’d so recently heard. The most fearsome were about Black Tom, a hammerhead more than twenty feet long that they said had been prowling the waters around the island since before the World War. They said its top fin was as big as a car door and spotted with pale bullet holes.

I’d been terrified by the thought of being so far out in the water, which of course was why I did it. It would be better to drown, better to be eaten by sharks, than to be so afraid of the sea—or of anything else. So I’d made the long swim. And it worked. I was still a little scared, sure, but not as much as before, and I’d proved I could beat the fear, that was the thing. As I started stroking back toward the beach, I didn’t know if I’d make it, but I was feeling great. When I finally tumbled up on the sand, I sprawled on my back, my chest heaving, and stared up at the dizzy blue depth of the sky—and the people sunning themselves around me must’ve thought I was a lunatic, the way I broke out laughing.

Ever since then, I’d made the same swim once every two weeks. And after I found out that sharks fed mostly at night, I’d always made the swim after dark. Always a little tight in the throat at the thought of what might be swimming close by.

The causeway melded into the island and became Broadway Avenue. We drove through the deep shadows of palm trees and live oaks lining a wide grassy esplanade that separated the opposing traffic lanes and held the tracks for the interurban, the electric passenger train that ran back and forth between Galveston and Houston.

We stopped at a red light, and a Model T sedan started laboring across the intersection, its motor rapping in the distinct Model T way. The old Ford was missing its left front fender and had received a splotchy handbrush coat