Under the Skin

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 Senora Avila, was the girl.

Her 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, senorita.”

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.

Senora 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.

“Que?” 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.

Senora 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, Felipe—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.

“Que?” 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.

And would Senorita Daniela, I asked Avila, be seeking a job as a seamstress?

I looked over my shoulder into the kitchen. She stood with her back to us, helping Avila’s wife do the dishes at the sink. If she’d heard my mention of her name she gave no sign of it. Her calves flexed as she went up on her toes to replace a dish in the overhead cabinet. Her hips were roundly smooth and slim. Her blouse was slightly scooped in the rear to expose a portion of her brown back and the play of muscle as she hung a cup on its hook on the wall. She dropped a dishcloth and bent to retrieve it and the light gleamed along the upper ridge of her spine. She’d knotted her hair up behind her head but a few black tendrils dangled on her neck.

I turned back around and saw Rocha staring at her too.

Most probably the girl would find work in a dress shop, Avila said. But he and his wife had told her she should rest herself for a few days more before she started looking for employment.

I took out my cigarettes and offered one to Avila, who politely accepted it, then shook up another one in the pack and extended it to Rocha. He hesitated a moment and then took the smoke with his free hand and gave me a grudging nod of thanks. Avila struck a match and lit us up.

We smoked and sipped at our coffee in an awkwardly growing silence. I was hoping Daniela would join us— but of course she would not, nor would Senora Avila. It wasn’t a social gathering at the table but an affair of men. After another minute, I snuffed my cigarette in the ashtray and stood up, saying I had to be on my way.

She was still at the sink with her back to the door, folding a dishtowel. Senora Avila came out of the kitchen, her expression somewhat uncertain. I thanked her for the coffee and apologized for any distress I may have caused her. Then I called to the girl in the kitchen, “Buenas noches, senorita. Mucho gusto de conocerle.”

She turned to look at me. “Buenas noches, senor.”

Avila escorted me to the front door. I put my hat on and looked back and saw her watching me from beside the dining table.