Under the Skin

the YB.

I passed the binoculars to Reuben.

“Don’t look too awful worried, do they?” he said. “Taking a leisurely dinner right out in the wide open.”

“Guess they didn’t figure anybody would come over the river after them.”

He handed the binoculars to Chente, who had another long look through them and then looked at me and said, “Pues?”

Reuben was watching me too, the same question in his eyes. Now what?

I scrabbled backward out of the line of sight of the rustlers’ camp and stood up and hustled over to the black and dug out the box of cartridges and took the Sharps off the saddle horn and unbuckled the heel of the buckskin sheath and slid the rifle out and tossed the sheath over the saddle and hustled back to the cliff edge.

Chente was grinning. He moved over to give me more room and flapped his hand at Reuben to do the same. I lay down between them, Reuben on my right, a little big-eyed.

I looked at him. “What? You think they’ll give them back if we just go down and ask real nice?”

Chente snickered.

Reuben’s face went red and he looked out at the rustlers on the plain. “No…shit no.” He made a vague hand gesture. “It’s just…they’re a hell of a way is all.”

He’d seen me hit watermelons with the Sharps at close to a half-mile on a downhill angle. But even though a man was a lot bigger than a watermelon, these guys were at half again that distance. And watermelons didn’t move around. And maybe he was thinking that men anyway weren’t watermelons.

“Can’t get any closer except by going down the trail,” I said. “If we do that they’ll spot us sure before we get halfway down. Got to be from here.”

“Soon as you shoot, they’ll run, won’t they? Even if you hit one, the others’ll run off with the stock.”

“No van a saber de donde viene el tiro,” Chente said. “Es demasiado lejos.”

“What?” Reuben said. “They won’t hear it?”

“They’ll hear it,” I said. “But they won’t know where it came from, not at this range.”

I scanned the ground all around us and saw the rock I wanted. I pointed and Chente sidecrawled over to retrieve it. He snugged it into the dirt on the top lip of the slope in front of me. It was about the size of a football and almost flat along the top.

I dumped a handful of the huge cartridges on the ground between me and Reuben. “Every time I put out my hand,” I said to Reuben, picking up one of the shells, “you put one of these in it. And don’t keep me waiting.”

He nodded, but his face was tight and pale. He must’ve read my eyes, because he said, “I’m okay—go on, do it.” He scooped up several cartridges and held one up, showing me he was ready to hand it to me.

I squirmed around and set myself. Then levered the trigger guard forward to drop the block and open the breech. I inserted the cartridge in the chamber and pulled the trigger guard back in place and the breech slid closed.

Chente was watching the rustlers through the field glasses. I thought about hitting the rider first, since he was the readiest to make a getaway. But he’d probably fall somehow to spook his mount—jerk the reins or slump against the horse’s head or get a foot caught in a stirrup, something—and then the herd would spook too. I didn’t want to scatter the jugheads all over hell’s half-acre if I could help it. So I started with the guys at the fire.

I didn’t think about anything except making the shot. There was no wind at all. The tricky part was the downward angle of trajectory. I put my eye to the vernier and gingerly adjusted the sight. I took a bead on the guy squatting on his haunches who looked to be tending the fire. Then moved the sight over to the one sitting on the ground and facing my way. Then put the sight on the guy standing over them, the one in the best position to run for cover. I stayed on him. I rested the barrel on the rock for steadiness and lined the sight on his head and thumbed back the hammer and set the hair trigger.

The gunblast shook the air and rang up the mountain wall and flew out over the prairie. The man’s hat jumped in the sunlight and he went down like his bones had unhinged.

“Jesus!” Reuben said.

That was my first one ever, and what I felt was proud—proud of my own precision. I hadn’t expected to miss, but still it was a hell of a shot. Later on, when I had more time to think about it, I felt…I didn’t know what it was…a sort of quiver…way down under my skin like something in my deepest blood. If there really was a God, this had to be a feeling He knew everything about.

Reuben slapped a bullet into my palm and I reloaded faster than I knew I could.

The herd by the creek was churning in a near spook. Not man nor beast down there knew where the shot had come from. The rider was reining his mount in circles and the other two guys at the fire were on their feet and looking all around. Both of them seemed to be holding a pistol, and one of them was turning and turning in a low crouch like he thought he might duck the next round, wherever it came from.

My next shot clubbed his head backward and took him off his feet and the report rolled away into the open plain.

“Hijo!” Chente said.

Half the herd bolted in our direction and the other lit out to westward. The rider didn’t know where to go—he spurred his horse in one direction and then yanked it around and started in the other, then pulled up again and reined his mount around and round in tight close turns.

The last one afoot was running toward the outcrop with his arms covering his head like a man caught in the rain. I drilled him in the back and he flung forward and lay spread-eagled on his face, forming a small black X on the ground.

Now the horseman was galloping directly across my line of sight like a shooting-gallery target. I gauged a lead on him and fired—and both horse and rider went into a dusty rolling tumble. I’d meant to hit the mount anywhere just to bring it down, but either the shot killed it or the horse broke its neck because when it stopped rolling it lay stone still. The rider wasn’t moving either.

“Ay, Chihuahua!” Chente said. He put down the glasses and looked at me. “Que tirador!”

“Que rifle magnifico,” I said, patting the Sharps.

Reuben was gawking at the small dark figures littering the distant ground. Then he turned to me and said, “Jesus, Jimmy—all of them!”

“Not the rider,” I said. “Hated shooting the horse but I didn’t want to chance missing the guy and him getting out of range.”

“Hellfire, he probably broke his neck in fifteen places, the way he went flying. Jesus.”

“Or could be he’s laying there thinking things over. Let’s go see.”

We followed the winding trail down to the flats. I’d slipped the Sharps back into its sheath and moved the revolver to the front of my pants. The horses that had come our way had settled themselves and were feeding on the scrubgrass near the foot of the trail. Chente loose-herded them back toward the creek.

The rustlers were all Mexicans. The first one we came to was the first one I’d put down. He was on his side and we saw that a .50-caliber round treated a human head about the same way it did a watermelon—worse, actually, because a head was smaller and had less of itself to spare. The top part of the guy’s skull was gone and ants were swarming over what was left of his head. The look on his face was suspicious—like he’d just heard something he couldn’t believe.

Reuben leaned out from his saddle and puked. Chente glanced at him without expression and then headed off to the creek to round up the other horses still there. I thought the rustlers looked about how I had expected guys shot with a buffalo rifle to look. I’d seen other dead men, including one done in by a burst appendix and one drowned and one who’d passed out drunk on the tracks and got run over by a train, and the only difference among them was a matter of how neatly or how messily they’d died. Long before I ever pulled the trigger on these guys, I’d decided that dead was dead and there was no more reason to get sick at the sight of a messy dead man than there was in getting sick at the sight of a butchered beef. It was an opinion I pretty much kept to myself.

“I’m all right,” Reuben said, wiping at his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “Caught me by surprise is all.”

“The others aint likely to look any better.”