Under the Skin

“With you.” He patted the Winchester he always carried in a saddle boot.

“Your daddy wouldn’t care for it.”

“We bring them horses back, I don’t guess he’ll be too awful red-assed with us.”

He wouldn’t quit his grin. What the hell, I thought—then smiled back at him and kicked the black into a lope and Reuben stuck right beside me.

I dismounted at the front porch and ran up to our room and took the Smith & Wesson from a dresser drawer and checked the loads and tucked it inside my shirt and under my waistband. I retrieved the Sharps in its buckskin boot from the closet and a box of cartridges off the shelf.

When I got back downstairs my aunt was standing just inside the open front door, her arms crossed, her face as impossible to read as always. Reuben was standing beside her, looking like somebody under arrest.

I’d wanted to avoid her, but there was nothing to do now except tell it to her straight, and so I did. I was hoping she wouldn’t forbid me to go because I was going to do it anyway.

She looked out the door in the direction of the river. “And you think you can overtake them?”

“Yes, mam.”

“And then what?”

“I’ll get the horses back.”

“How do you propose to do that, James Rudolph?” She was the only one who ever used my middle name.

“I just will.”

“You know Mr. Youngblood doesn’t want you crossing the river.” She always referred to him as Mr. Youngblood, even addressed him that way, when she addressed him by any name at all. He seemed pretty used to it.

“I know it, but…goddammit, they got our horses. Pardon, mam.”

She glanced down at the sheathed rifle in my hand, at the cartridges in my other, then looked at me for a long moment with those eyes that always made me feel like I was staring into my own.

“I’ll have Carlotta wrap food for you,” she said.

“Thank you, mam, but I can’t wait. Those fellas are farther away every minute I’m standing here.”

She placed a palm to my cheek for just a second and then folded her arms again. I couldn’t remember another time when she’d made such a gesture. I knew Reuben was thinking the same thing by the way his mouth hung open.

I went out and slipped the loop of the rifle sheath over the saddle horn and stuck the packet of bullets into my saddlebag. Then I swung up on the black and started off—hearing Reuben saying that he wanted to go with me, her saying something I couldn’t make out.

And then I was riding out the gate with Chente alongside me and we headed down the road and toward the ford.

About two hours later we were reined up on a low rise, letting the horses blow, studying the Mexican downcountry and seeing a faint hint of raised dust miles ahead and just about where Chente figured the pass cut through the Grandes.

“Alli estan,” he said.

I nodded—and cursed myself for having been in such a hurry I hadn’t thought to bring field glasses.

Chente rolled a cigarette and passed it to me and then rolled one for himself. I struck a match on my belt buckle and cupped the flame and lit us up.

As soon as we’d crossed the Rio Grande I’d felt strangely different in some way I couldn’t put my finger on. Even though I’d never set foot in Mexico before—this country Uncle Cullen called wild and dangerous and had so often warned us about—it somehow felt almost familiar. I wondered if some aspect of my father’s Mexican blood carried in my own, something that recognized…what?…the character of the country, maybe. The soul of it. Something.

Our shadows were pulling in toward us. To our right the Grandes stood starkly red. The upland was thick with cactus—nopal, barrel, maguey. To the east the scrubland sloped away under the orange sun and toward the Rio Grande and the Chinati peaks were jagged and purple. The sky was hugely cloudless, its blue slowly bleaching. A hawk circled the bottoms. A pair of ragged buzzards sailed high and far over Texas.

The rustlers had been easy enough to track until they drove the herd over onto the rockier ground closer to the foothills and I lost the trail. But Chente didn’t. They were moving the horses faster than I’d figured but Chente had been sure we were closing on them anyway, and now the thin cloud of dust ahead proved him right. He regarded the sun and figured we’d be through the pass and have them in sight by noon. “O poco antes.”

Then he looked rearward and said, “Mira.”

A horseman had come in view out of the rocky peppercorn breaks and was heading our way, riding hard as he started up the gradual slope of the higher ground.

We sat our horses and watched him come. There was something familiar about the animal’s gait and the way the rider was leaned forward on him.

“Tu hermanito,” Chente said. “Se escapo de la mama.”

He was right. Reuben on his Appaloosa, the tireless Jack.

I looked at the thin dust cloud along the Grandes again. It was moving into the mountains.

We each rolled another cigarette and smoked them slowly and were finished with them before Reuben got close enough for us to hear the clacking of Jack’s shoes. Then we could see Reuben’s white grin and hear him laughing. And then he was reining up beside us, the Appaloosa blowing but not all that hard.

“You must’ve had an hour’s start on me,” Reuben said. “You don’t never want to bet good money against Jack in a distance race.”

He hadn’t snuck away—his mother had relented to the argument that if we were lucky enough to get back the stock, we could return to the YB a lot faster if there were three of us to drive the herd. She’d made him wait, though, while the maid packed a sack lunch for him to bring.

He had a pair of binoculars slung around his chest and I waggled my hand for them and he gave them over. I fixed the glasses on the dust cloud and then passed them to Chente.

Reuben stood up in his stirrups and studied the vague dust ahead. “That them?”

“It’s them,” I said.

He sat down again and looked all around. “Jesus, Jimmy—Mexico! Don’t look all that different, but…hot damn, man! Feels like a thousand miles from home.”

Chente gave him a look Reuben didn’t see and said we’d catch sight of them for sure on the other side of the range.

“Well what the hell we sitting here for?” Reuben said. “Let’s go.”

The sun was still shy of its meridian when we came out of the pass and onto a wide shelf. The trail swung around close to the mountain wall and dipped from view where it began its descent, but we reined over toward the cliff edge to have a look at the panorama of country below.

And there they were down on the plain. Hardly more than little dark figures against the pale ground. They’d stopped to make a noon camp at a narrow creek shining in the sun and running along a thin outcrop and a growth of scraggly mesquites. A long red mesa stood about a half-mile north of them.

It wasn’t likely that they’d spot us against the shadowed mountain wall, not at this distance and not even with binoculars, but we reined the horses back and tethered them in the shade. We moved up in a crouch and lay on our bellies between a pair of boulders a few feet apart on the rim of the cliff. The Smith & Wesson was digging into my stomach, so I repositioned it at my side.

Chente checked the sun to make sure it wouldn’t be reflecting off the lenses and then took a look through the glasses.

I asked how far off he thought they were.

“Pues…mas de un kilometro.”

I thought so too—maybe close to 1,300 yards.

Chente passed me the glasses. Three of the thieves were at a small fire raising a thin smoke, roasting something on a spit. The fourth was about fifty yards downstream, mounted and watching over the stolen herd as it watered from the creek and cropped at a sparse growth of bank grass. There looked to be about three dozen head. Either Esteban had been wrong about how many we’d lost or the rustlers had hit one or two other ranches besides