said she didn’t know what kind of braid that was, and so Daniela showed her how to plait it, demonstrating the technique with her own long hair.
I was glad for Lynette’s interruption—it got us off the subject of my school days. I’d told the truth about my aunt Ava’s decision to assume our education herself. I just hadn’t told the full reason for it…
I was fourteen, Reuben was twelve, and for weeks he’d been getting teased every day by a husky fifteen- year-old named Larry Rogerson. I’d kept out of it because Rogerson hadn’t laid a hand on him; his teasing was all verbal. Besides, a bully was something every kid had to deal with at one time or another, and Reuben knew as well as I did that he had to handle it himself. Then one day Reuben took a peppermint stick to school and at recess Rogerson snatched it away from him. I didn’t see that—I was tossing a football with some of the other boys—and I didn’t see Reuben try to kick Rogerson in the balls and only get him in the leg. But a lot of the other kids saw what was going on and their sudden shouting made me look over there to see Larry Rogerson holding Reuben in a headlock with one arm and beating him in the face with his other fist. Reuben was always on the skinny side but he never did lack for sand, and even as Rogerson was pounding his face he kept trying to kick him.
I ran up and punched Rogerson on the side of the head so hard I thought I broke my hand. He went sprawling but scrambled to his feet and came up with a buckknife, open and ready. He managed to cut me on the upper arm before I caught him by the wrist and tripped him to the ground and got the knife away from him. I straddled his chest and pinned his arms under my knees and held the tip of the blade to the base of his neck. My hand hurt like hell and blood was running down my arm and the sight of it had me in a fury.
“I oughta kill you,” I said. “I could do it easy.”
As soon as I said it I knew it was true. It
Rogerson knew I could do it too—it was in his eyes. That’s what saved his life. If I had detected the smallest doubt on his face I would’ve shoved the blade in his neck to the hilt and he would’ve died learning the truth. But he already knew it. He lay there staring at me in big-eyed terror, too afraid to even breathe. Maybe he was thinking how different a knife could be when it was in somebody else’s hand and at your own throat.
I became aware of the silence around us and looked up to see the other students gawking, and I saw that they all knew the truth too. Even the two teachers standing there with their mouths open. They knew.
I cocked my arm like I was getting ready to stab the blade into him. He made a half-whimper and turned his face to the side and I jabbed the blade into the ground next to his neck, close enough for the handle to press against his skin. I left it there.
I got up and stared around at the others and every pair of eyes cut away from mine, including the teachers’. My sleeve was sopped with blood. Rogerson kept his eyes on me and didn’t move. Reuben stepped up beside me and gave him the two-finger horns sign—fuck you.
Nobody said anything as we walked over to the open shed where our horses were tethered and I got a bandanna out of the saddlebag and ripped open my sleeve and Reuben tied the bandanna around my gashed arm. Then we mounted up and rode for the ranch.
Neither of us spoke till we were halfway home, and then Reuben said, “You’da damn sure done it too.”
I looked at him but didn’t say anything.
“You’da done it,” he said. Grinning.
When we got to the house and Aunt Ava saw our condition, she took us to the kitchen and told us to sit down, then fetched her small shoebox of medical supplies. She gave Reuben a handmirror and a bottle of iodine to treat the cuts on his face himself, and while she sewed up my arm I told her what happened.
She’d never been one to make a display of her feelings. She rarely smiled or frowned, never raised her voice, never openly fretted about anything. I’d never heard her laugh and I couldn’t even imagine her in tears. She listened to our accounts of the fight without comment or any kind of look I could read—except when I was telling how I threatened to cut Rogerson’s throat, and for a flickering moment she looked like she might smile. I didn’t tell her the part about how I’d known I could do it as easily as I’d ever done anything, but I had a hunch she knew it. All my life I’d had a strange sense about her, a feeling that she knew things having to do with me that I didn’t know myself, like some gypsy fortune-teller who’s reading the cards she dealt you. It was like she could see through my flesh and bones and down into some part of me so deeply hidden I couldn’t even tell what it was.
Reuben told me once that he loved his mother very much but she always seemed like a stranger in some ways and he couldn’t help being a little afraid of her. He thought his father was kind of scared of her too. I didn’t know about that, but I was never afraid of her—I was only mystified. And always would be.
She’d baked a sweet potato pie that morning and she let us have a big slice of it with a glass of milk, which had us gawking at each other, since it was almost dinnertime. When my uncle came in from the range at noon and she told him what happened he was enraged. He wanted to ride over to the Rogerson place and kick the elder Rogerson’s ass for raising a boy who’d pull a knife in a schoolyard fight. My aunt dissuaded him. No real harm had been done, she said, and Reuben and I would not be going back to the school anyway. She said she didn’t believe we were learning very much from the teachers and she had been thinking of tutoring us herself, and now she was decided on it.
Uncle Cullen grumbled a while longer during dinner about those Rogerson hillbillies out of Missouri, but the episode was closed. He was boss of the YB crews and range, but my aunt ruled the family and all matters in it…
“You see?” Daniela said, her hands braiding her hair behind her head, her breasts pushing tightly against her blouse. Lynette was watching Daniela’s hands and trying to do the same with her own hair. Albert called to the girl to quit pestering us and come get a ready order. Lynette made a face but Daniela told her she should get back to her duties, that she’d help her braid her hair some other time, when the cafe wasn’t so busy.
“Promise?” Lynette said. Daniela nodded and patted the girl’s hand. The girl poured more coffee for us and took up our plates and hustled off to take care of the waiting orders.
“Looks like you have an admirer,” I said.
“She’s nice,” Daniela said, undoing the braided length of her hair and shaking it free. “So. Tell me, why did you leave the ranch?”
“Oh, things changed. There was one of those epidemics that hit the border every so often, one disease or another. I don’t even remember what this one was, exactly, but both Reuben and Uncle Cullen got hit with it. They got sicker and sicker for almost a week and then died within a day of each other. It all happened pretty fast. Aunt Ava couldn’t bear to stay on at the ranch without them, so she sold the place and moved away to Denver. She had kinfolk there. She asked me to go with her, but a vaquero buddy of mine knew of a ranch just outside San Antone where we could hire on, so we did. A few months later I got a notion to come to Galveston, get a look at the sea. And here I am.”
I thought it was a pretty good lie. Up to now the only lie I’d told her was about my father—but hell, what did
“I am sorry for you,” she said. “There has been so much terrible misfortune in your family.”
“Hell, there’s probably not a family anywhere that hasn’t had its share of rough luck.”
“Do you and your aunt write letters to one another?”
“Not as often as we used to. She’s got a pretty busy life. I’m glad for her.”
She nodded, then looked out the window and sipped at her coffee. I lit a cigarette.
We sat in silence for a minute. Then she turned to face me and said, “I have seen you before. Four nights ago. You were in a car on the street when we went by. You looked directly at me. But when Senor Avila introduced us, you didn’t remember.”
“Yes I did. But I thought
“Truly?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Truly.”
She stared down into her coffee cup for a moment. “After you departed last night, Senor Avila spoke about you.”
“Oh?” I’d figured he would have.
