Under the Skin

fingers and bite into it, and then she did the same.

“Oh this is delicious,” she said, and took a bigger bite.

Lynette grinned at Daniela’s pleasure and then went back to the counter and fetched a stack of thick-sliced toast moist with melted butter. She refilled our cups and said, “Yall enjoy your breakfast. I’ll keep an eye on your coffee, make sure you don’t go dry.”

Daniela thanked her and the girl went to tend to other patrons.

“Yall?” Daniela said.

“All of you. You all—yall.”

Daniela mouthed the word silently and looked over at Lynette who was at a back booth, taking an order. The other customers had quit eyeballing us and gone back to minding their own business.

She liked the sausage but thought the eggs needed more spice and sprinkled them with cayenne sauce. “So,” she said as we ate, “now you have learned everything of me. Tell me of yourself.”

“Not much to tell,” I said. “I grew up on a ranch in West Texas, then came here a couple of years ago and here I still am.”

“That is a very short story,” she said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” she said. “Are you American or Mexican? Why do you have blue eyes? Tell me everything.”

I was born in San Antonio, I said. My mother was a blue-eyed American named Alice Harrison. Her parents managed a hotel in Laredo. My father was Mexican, a federal cavalry officer named Benito Torres. He met my mother at a fiesta, when he was on leave and visiting relatives on the American side. They married a week later.

“Oh my,” she said. “It must have been love at first sight.”

“Must’ve been,” I said. “But a few days after their wedding he had to go back to his troops in Mexico. About a month before I was born he was killed at a place called Zacatecas.”

Her face fell. “Ay, that is so sad. I am sure it broke your mother’s heart.”

“I guess so.” I told her that my mother’s heart had already been bruised pretty hard a few months before. There had been a cholera epidemic moving along the border, and because she was frail in her pregnancy with me, her parents wanted her away from the threat of the disease, so they sent her to live with family friends in San Antonio. Shortly afterward she got the hard news that both of them had been killed in a fire that destroyed the hotel.

“Dios mio,” Daniela said. “She lost so much in such little time.”

“Yeah, she didn’t have much luck and it didn’t get any better. She died giving birth to me.”

Daniela stared at me.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s not like I ever knew her or anything.”

“But still, she was your mother. Who took care of you?”

My aunt, I said, my mother’s sister. She was something of a black sheep and had run away at an early age but she and my mother had always kept in touch. When my mother wrote and told her what happened to their parents, my aunt came to San Antonio all the way from El Paso to stay with her and be of help until I was born. She’d only recently gotten married herself. When my mother died, my aunt and uncle took me to live with them on their ranch in West Texas. That’s where I grew up. My uncle—whose name was Cullen Youngblood—gave me his family name, agreeing with my aunt that I’d be better off with an American name than with my father’s Mexican one. They christened me James in honor of one of Uncle Cullen’s dead brothers.

“James Youngblood.” She said the name like she was testing it in her mouth. “Do you have a middle name?”

“Rudolph,” I said. “I’ve never told it to anybody else, and if you repeat it I’ll call you a liar. My aunt gave it to me for no reason except she liked it.”

When I was two years old, I told Daniela, my aunt gave birth to a son, the only child she and Uncle Cullen ever had. He had blue eyes too, but darker than mine and my aunt’s. They named him Reuben, after my uncle Cullen’s father. We grew up like brothers. We learned to ride about as soon as we could walk and we worked as hands on the YB Ranch from the time we were boys. The only mornings we didn’t work were when we were at school.

“And that’s pretty much the story,” I said.

“Was it difficult for you in your childhood,” she said, “to be an American but to look so much Mexican? Did the other children, the American children—the Anglos, I mean—did they…make funny of you?”

“Make fun,” I said. “Oh, a few of the peckerwood kids made some cracks when I first started school—called me half-breed, blue-eyed greaser, things like that. I shut them up pretty fast.”

“The macho hombre was a macho boy.”

I scowled fiercely and put my fists up like a boxer—and she chuckled.

“There have only been one or two fools to say anything like that in the years since,” I said. “But hell, I wasn’t the only Mexican-looking American around there, you know. And around there the Anglos and Mexicans were pretty used to each other anyway. They pretty much got along okay.”

“Who taught you to speak Spanish? Your aunt?”

“No. She never knew more than a few words, and my uncle knew even less. I picked it up from the Mexican kids. It came to me pretty easy.”

“Well, you speak it very well,” she said, “for a gringo.” She was able to hold a straight face for about two seconds before breaking into giggles.

“Listen to you,” I said. “Your back’s still sopping wet and you’ve got the nerve to show that sort of disrespect to a naturalborn citizen of the United States.”

“Oh, you are so cruel to speak of wet backs,” she said, affecting a look of injury. She glanced around the room at the other diners busy with their own breakfasts and conversations, then turned sideways in her chair and said, “Does this back appear wet? Does it feel wet?”

I reached across the table and placed my palm on the exposed top of her back. Her skin was warm and wonderfully smooth.

She gave me a sidelong look. “Well?”

I withdrew my hand. “Your back is very cleverly disguised as dry.”

“You see?” she said in a tone of triumph.

As she finished her eggs she said she was even more impressed by my English, which she thought I spoke better than most Americans she had heard. She said I must have attended a good school.

I had to chuckle at that. I told her how Reuben and I had ridden horseback to a two-room regional schoolhouse six miles from the ranch. Each room had its own teacher, one for the kids in first through the sixth grade, the other for the smaller number of kids in grades seven to twelve. Only a handful of students ever made it to the tenth grade or above. None of the first-graders—except for me and then Reuben—could read at the time they started school. My aunt had taught me to read and letter by the time I was five, then did the same for Reuben.

“So you and your cousin had a…how do you say ventaja? No, wait…advantage. That is correct? You had an advantage upon the other students. You must have achieved easily to grade twelve.”

“Not exactly,” I said—and immediately gave myself a mental kick in the ass. It would’ve been easier to say sure we did, and let it go at that. But now I’d roused her curiosity and had to explain.

“My aunt didn’t think the teachers at the school were educating us very well,” I said, “so she took over the job of teaching me and Reuben herself. Truth to tell, she was a better teacher than they were. She’d drill us in arithmetic every morning. She’d give us grammar tests. She’d make us read a few pages aloud from some book she’d pick at random from the shelf, and every time we came to a word we didn’t know, she’d make us look it up in the dictionary. Every week she assigned a different book to each of us and we had to write a report on it.”

“She deserves praise. What is her name?”

“Ava.”

Lynette came to the table to replenish our coffee and clear away our dishware. She complimented Daniela on her outfit, saying she really liked her sandals. Daniela thanked her and said she had been admiring Lynette’s auburn hair and asked if she ever wore it in a French braid, which she thought would look very attractive on her. Lynette