Under the Skin

witnesses. Then tried and convicted. Maybe I wondered what it was like to die in the electric chair. Maybe I didn’t think about much of anything.

I could hear Uncle Cullen’s wet breathing in the dark as the truck bounced along over the rough dirt road. And then I couldn’t hear him anymore. He was slumped awkwardly against the door, his hat fallen off and down by his boots. I stopped the truck and pulled him upright and felt for a pulse on his neck but there wasn’t one anymore. I eased him back against the door and put his hat on him and got the truck going again.

Pretty soon the house came into view and I saw that all the windows on the lower floor were lit up. For a minute I thought the law was already there and waiting for me. But there weren’t any unfamiliar vehicles in sight.

Aunt Ava came out on the porch and watched me drive up. Over in front of the bunkhouse a few of the hands were gathered around a guitar player. I parked at the house and Aunt Ava came down the steps.

I got out of the cab, not knowing how to tell her what happened. She stepped around me and looked in the cab at Uncle Cullen for a minute, then stepped over and stared down at Reuben in the bed. She reached over the bed panel to brush his hair from his face.

“I’m so god-awful sorry, mam, but—”

“Helen Morgan telephoned a few minutes ago,” she said, referring to a woman who ran a small bookstore in Marfa where Aunt Ava liked to browse. “She was there and saw it. She told me about the fight and…about Reuben. She said Mr. Youngblood was all right. Ailing, she said, but all right.”

Her tone was almost as matter of fact as the one she’d use in asking if I’d gotten all the items on her grocery list whenever I came back from town. Almost. But there was something else in it this time. It sounded like it might be anger.

“He was, mam, but on the way home…well…”

“Yes,” she said. “So I see.”

I rubbed at my chin with the back of my hand and she stared at it and I saw that my whole hand was dark with dried blood and I stuck the hand in my back pocket.

“That’s not all of it, mam. I believe I’m in trouble. I—”

“You are in trouble,” she said. “Helen told me what you did.” She looked off in the direction of the county road, then turned back to me. “You did what you had to, James Rudolph. Now you’ve got to get away from here—right now. You can’t take the truck, they’ll be watching the roads. Take Reuben’s horse and ride the backcountry. Go saddle it—go. I’ll get you some food.”

I said I wanted to get my leather jacket and the top-break revolver from under my pillow and she said, “I’ll get them. You hurry with that horse.”

She rushed up the porch steps and into the house and called for Carlotta to put some food in a sack and I saw her go up the stairs.

All the vaqueros were outside the bunkhouse now and watching me as I headed for the stable. Esteban came over and fell in beside me and asked if there was anything he could do. I told him Chente was probably in the Marfa jail for fighting and would need someone to bail him out.

“Seguro que lo soltamos,” he said. But what could he do for me?

I said for him to keep his eyes and ears open, that I would write to him to find out how things stood.

“Muy bien, jefecito,” he said.

I was swift about saddling the Appaloosa. Jack could sense my tension and his ears twitched with excitement. I swung into the saddle and reached down to shake Esteban’s hand and I saw his eyes take in the dry blood. Then I hupped the horse out of the stable and over to the house.

She was waiting with a small sack of food and my jacket and a cloth bundle shaped like a half-deflated football. She handed me the jacket and I put it on and then took the food sack from her and reached around and stuffed it into the rightside saddlebag while she put the bundle in the left one.

“What’s that?”

“Something for you,” she said, buckling down the flap. She took the top-break from her apron pocket and gave it to me. I opened the breech and checked the loads and closed it up again and slipped the revolver into my waistband. I told her to give my Sharps rifle to Esteban and let him know he could have my horse. I couldn’t think of anything else I owned that I could bequeath to anybody.

She was standing with the light of the house behind her and it was hard to see her face clearly. She turned suddenly toward the distant road and I looked and saw two sets of headlights coming our way and then heard the rasping of the motors. She’d always had the senses of a cat.

“Go,” she said. “Go.”

I reined the Jack horse around and hupped off toward the backcountry to the east.

When I turned to wave goodbye she was already out of sight.

I rode steadily till a couple of hours before dawn, then reined up and tethered the Appaloosa in some scrub grass and rolled myself up in my bedroll and slept till sunrise, and then I got going again. I held to a course a half-mile or so south of the railroad. I rode through the day and into the night and stopped and made a fireless camp. Since riding off from the YB I had tried not to think about Reuben, but I finally couldn’t help it and I let myself remember everything about him—and my throat got hot and tight, my chest hollow. He had been more brother to me than cousin and I’d never have a better friend. And Uncle Cullen—that damn good man. Aunt Ava would miss them both terribly but I doubted she would make any show of her grief, and people would gossip about her lack of proper sorrow. But the vaqueros held her in great respect and I knew she could manage the ranch on her own.

Toward the end of the second day I was a few miles south of Marathon. I watered the horse at a shady creek where a few kids were splashing and where I ate the last of the food Carlotta had packed for me. There was still about an hour of daylight left. When I finished the stale biscuit stuffed with a chunk of greasy ham I took the bundle out of the other bag to see what it held. It was tied with twine and was heavier than it looked.

I cut the twine with my switchblade. The cloth covering turned out to be a pillowcase wrapped around a revolver and a couple of tightly folded newspaper clippings. The gun was an old single-action .44-caliber Colt with grips of yellowed ivory carved with Mexican eagles.

I’d never seen her touch a gun, not even a rabbit rifle. Where had she gotten this? Her father? A brother, an uncle? I didn’t know if she had any brothers or uncles. She had always refused to talk about her family, no matter how often Reuben had asked about it when we were younger. But it was all I could figure, that some man—probably one in her family—had given it to her, back when. And now she’d given it to me.

It fit my hand like it had been made for me, felt as familiar as my own skin. The embossed eagles were worn smooth and the burring at the top of the hammer had been thumbed dulled, but the Colt was in fine condition. How many hands had held it? I wondered. How many rounds had it fired in its time? How many men had it shot? It was fully loaded. I worked its action, cocked and uncocked it, put it on half-cock and spun the cylinder. I opened the gate and dropped a round into my hand and felt its weight, then put the bullet back into the chamber and thumbed the gate closed and eased the hammer down. I took the Smith & Wesson out of my pants and replaced it with the Colt and tucked the top-break into the saddlebag.

The larger of the two clippings was from a 1914 Mexico City newspaper and was a report on Pancho Villa’s and Emiliano Zapata’s takeover of the capital during the Revolution. It included a large photograph of about two dozen Mexicans crowding around Villa, who was seated in an ornate high-backed chair. He was in a military uniform but I recognized him immediately. There were a half-dozen photos of him on display in a Mexican cafe in Marfa, and the town’s gun store had pictures of him on the wall too.

Everybody on the border knew Pancho Villa’s story—how at the age of sixteen he’d killed the hacendado who raped his sister, how he was forced to hide in the mountains and become a bandit. Then in 1910 the Revolution changed his life. He became commander of the great Division of the North and one of Mexico’s greatest heroes. The newspapers couldn’t get enough of him. The American press flocked around him every time he visited the border. It was said he had a dozen wives and was a hell of a dancer. He was a fearless fighter, they said, a natural genius at military tactics—and a fearsome man, a merciless executioner of his prisoners. He could have been president of the country but he said he was not wise enough to be its leader. He captured Mexico City but couldn’t hold it, and afterward, when his great army was beaten at last, he was forced to return to the mountains and once more live like a bandit. But then he did something that got the whole world’s attention—he invaded the United States. He