Under the Skin

“I said I’m all right.”

“Okay then.”

The next one had caught it just under the eye and the bullet had stove in that side of his face and you couldn’t see his eyes for the ants. He was lying faceup and the dirt under his head was a muddy red mess. Reuben made a good show of indifference to this one, leaning casually on his saddle horn and spitting off to the side.

The guy I shot in the back was lying on an even larger patch of bloody earth. He’d taken the round through a lung.

The horse I shot was dead too. The bullet had hit him just above the left ear and come out under its right eye.

The rider was still alive. He was on his back and his hat was mashed up under his head and his eyes were squinting against the overhead sun until my shadow fell over him and then they opened wider and fixed on me. He didn’t look any older than Reuben.

“Matame,” he said in a low rasp. “No me puedo mover. Matame, por amor de dios.”

Reuben’s Spanish was good enough to get the idea. “He say kill him?”

“He’s paralyzed.”

“Por favor…matame.”

Reuben looked all around like he might’ve been searching for somebody to ask for a better idea. Or like he was all of a sudden aware of just how right he’d been in feeling a lot farther from home than could be measured in miles.

It didn’t seem too complicated to me. The kid had been a horse thief but now he was somebody who would cook to death under the sun unless somebody saw to it that he didn’t.

I pulled the top-break from my pants and cocked it and aimed. The kid closed his eyes. Reuben said, “Jesus, Jimmy…”

I fired and the kid’s head jerked and his right eye vanished in a dark red hole and the dirt under his hair went bloody. Our horses shrilled and spooked and I reined the black tight and talked to him and Reuben soothed the Appaloosa and the animals shuddered and blew and then were all right.

I put the revolver back in my pants. Chente sat his horse by the herd at the creek and was staring off at the mountains. Reuben was staring hard at the kid.

“Would you rather a bullet or a couple of days getting roasted?”

He turned to me. “I know,” he said. “It’s just…ah hell, Jimmy, he wasn’t but a damn boy.”

So said Reuben Youngblood, not yet sixteen years old.

We set out to round up the runaways, leaving Chente with the other horses at the creekside camp. We were at it for over an hour and still may have missed a few, no telling, since we didn’t know exactly how many there’d been to start with. When we got them back to the camp and bunched them with the others and counted them up we had twenty-eight head, thirteen with the YB brand, the others wearing a brand that looked like a lopsided A with a flat top and one extralong leg. None of us had seen it before. They must’ve been stolen from somewhere north of the YB and been run farther than ours because they were the worse for wear.

Chente had searched the bodies and gone through the rustlers’ saddlepacks and laid out their belongings. There were only three firearms—an old cap-and-ball Dance, a Colt double-action five-shot, and a single-barrel twelve-gauge with both the barrel and the stock cut down so that the thing looked more like a giant pistol than a shotgun. Every man of them had some sort of knife on him, one of them a fine switchblade with pearl grips on the haft and a spring so strong the blade popped out like a magic trick. Chente had put all their money in a small pile. There was seven dollars in paper and another dollar thirty in silver. The rest of the cash was in paper peso denominations and Mexican specie.

Reuben said he didn’t want any of the money or anything else of theirs. I took the switchblade and gestured for Chente to help himself to the rest. He scooped up the money and stuck it in his pockets and picked up the cutdown and took it to his horse and wedged the short barrel into the saddle scabbard along with his rifle.

There was a skinny jackrabbit on the spit over the fire but it was charred beyond all possibility of being edible. Chente tried it anyway and chewed a mouthful for a while before spitting it out. I fetched the lunch sack Reuben had brought with him but Reuben didn’t want any of that either, so Chente and I split the three beef sandwiches and the six flour tortillas folded up over refried beans. There were some apples too, and we gave them to our horses.

While Chente and I ate, Reuben kept glancing over at the dead men. I knew what was on his mind.

“It’s gonna be slower going back, driving that bunch of jugheads,” I said. “We spare the time to dig four graves and we’ll never get back to the river before sundown. Your daddy’s gonna have a shit fit as it is, but it’ll be fifty times worse if we aint back by dark. And we’ll play hell getting these animals across the river at night.”

“It don’t seem right, leaving them lay to rot.”

Chente chuckled and said they wouldn’t have much of a chance to rot. He jutted his chin upward, directing our attention to a pair of vultures circling way up high—and still others were coming at a distance out of the sierras to the west. I’d always marveled at the mysterious way they got the news so fast.

“Los zopilotes tienen que comer tambien,” Chente said.

“Shit,” Reuben said. “How’d you like them to feed on you?”

Chente said they might very well do that someday, whether he liked it or not. Then he put his head back and yelled at the vultures overhead that today wasn’t the day.

And we all busted out laughing for no reason except the grandly certain feeling that today wasn’t the day for any of us.

Late in the day we got the herd across the river and onto YB land. By the time we arrived at the corrals the sun was almost set behind the sierras and the portion of it still visible was the color of melting gold. The western sky looked smeared with blood. The vaqueros had been at their supper but they all came out of the mess shack to watch us get the herd into the corral. Then we turned our mounts over to the stable boys for good rubs and a big feed.

When we came out of the stable, Uncle Cullen was at the corral, still in his traveling suit and tie, studying the recovered horses. Over at the house, Aunt Ava was watching us from the door with her arms crossed.

“Luego,” Chente whispered to me, cutting his eyes at Uncle Cullen and sidling off to the cookhouse, his cutdown shotgun tucked under his arm.

We stood waiting for Uncle Cullen to say something. When he finally turned around to us, there was still enough light to see his face under his hat brim. He was sixty-three but had never looked his age until about eight months before, when he’d had a heart attack while he was working with some new horses. Since then he’d slowed down a hell of a lot and had acquired a slight stoop and had come to look every day of his years and then some. But his eyes still held some of their old fire.

“You disobeyed me,” he said. “Both you.”

“Yessir,” I said. “It’s all my fault.”

“Oh? You force him to go with you?” he said, nodding at Reuben.

“No sir, but—”

“I can talk for myself,” Reuben said. “I went on my own, Daddy. I disobeyed you too. We done it to get the horses back.”

“I know why you done it.” Then he said to me, “You know the brand on them others?”

“No sir. But I know they didn’t belong to them thieves.”

“So you figured we’d make them ours?”

“No sir. I figured you’d know what to do about them.”

“So happens I know the brand. Arthur Falcone’s, way up by the Vieja oxbows. I’ll give him a call tonight. He’ll probably want to come with some trailers.”

He regarded the sheathed Sharps under my arm and the revolver under my belt and I wondered if he was remembering that I’d gotten both weapons from Frank Hartung.

“How many was it?”

“Four.”