Under the Skin

raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico, and shot up the army camp there. A massive U.S. Army force, including airplanes, was sent across the border to find him and kill him. They tried for a year and couldn’t do it. The Yankee intrusion into Mexico only made him more of a hero to his countrymen. In 1920 he finally made peace with the Mexican government and—in a funny twist for a guy who had fought against hacendados all his life—he was given a hacienda as part of the deal. But even in retirement he was feared by many powerful men, and a few years later he was assassinated.

The caption under the photograph said Villa was sitting in the President’s Chair in the National Palace. It identified the hawkish-looking man on his immediate left as Emiliano Zapata and the man at his right hand as Tomas Urbina. But the guy who really caught my attention was a large man standing at the very edge of the picture, holding his white Montana hat in a dark big-knuckled hand, his hair neatly combed, his shirt buttoned to the neck under his open coat, his watch fob dangling from the coat’s breast pocket. His face had been circled in ink and he was looking at something or someone behind the photographer and off to the side. Judging by his expression, I’d have bet it was a woman.

He looked strangely familiar, but for a moment I didn’t understand why. And then I did. If I’d worn my hair a little shorter, if I’d trimmed my mustache a little neater, if my eyes had been black instead of bright blue…I could’ve been looking at a picture of myself. The caption said he was Rodolfo Fierro.

I’d heard of him too, of course. Who hadn’t? El Matador, they called him. El Senor Muerte. Manos de Sangre. El Carnicero—the Butcher. He had a dozen such names. He was Villa’s chief executioner. The border Mexicans spoke of him in the same tone they used in speaking of Death itself. There were dozens of stories about him. They said he shot three hundred prisoners one afternoon in a big corral in Ciudad Juarez, that he gave them a chance, ten at a time, to run to a stone wall and climb over it, and he shot every one of them except the last, whom he deliberately let get away. But I’d never seen his picture, nor had anybody I knew. Until now.

The other clipping was a newspaper picture of Fierro by himself. It was taken from only a few feet away and had no caption. It showed him sitting in a chair at a sidewalk table, his face turned to the camera, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his Montana hat, his coatflap hanging away from the holster on his hip and exposing the butt of the Frontier Colt and its ivory grip carved with a Mexican eagle.

I stared and stared at that picture as the sky turned the color of fresh blood and the darkness slowly rose around me.

She sure as hell knew how to keep a secret, my mother.

The way I figured it, he’d either given her the Colt or she had stolen it from him. And she’d clipped these pictures. And before she died she’d shared the secret with her sister and given her the clippings and the gun. I wondered if Aunt Ava would ever have told me the truth if I hadn’t had to run.

The light had gone so dim I could barely see his face in the photo.

“Hey Daddy,” I said.

On a gray and windy afternoon two days later I sold both the Jack horse and my saddle to a rancher in Sanderson who knew a good mount when he saw one, even one that had been ridden as hard as I’d been riding this one. I kept the saddlebags and my blanket. He asked me no questions except if I’d sign a bill of sale, which I did. I patted the horse and said so long to it. I turned down the rancher’s offer of a bed for the night but accepted a ride into town.

I hadn’t eaten since the night before when I’d cooked a skinny jackrabbit over a low fire. So I went into a cafe and ordered a thick steak with gravy and fried potatoes, green beans and cornbread, a big glass of iced tea, and a slab of pecan pie for dessert. When I was done eating, the two plates looked freshly washed. The waitress gave me a wink and said, “Appetite’s working just fine, hey?” I left her a half-dollar tip.

I went over to the railtracks and followed them eastward for about a hundred yards and then sat on my saddlebags in the meager shade of a mesquite and waited.

An hour later an eastbound train pulled into the Sanderson station for only as long as it took to load and unload mail, and then it started chugging on again. I had thought to wait till dark to jump a freight but I didn’t see any sign of the railroad bulls I’d heard so much about from YB hands who’d ridden the rails, so I said the hell with it and jogged out to the track and picked out a boxcar with a partly open door as it came rolling up, slowly gaining speed.

I ran alongside the open door and pitched the saddlebags and blanketroll through it and then grabbed hold of the iron rung on the door with both hands and swung a foot up and hooked a heel on the car floor. I brought up my other leg and started wriggling myself in feetfirst—and somebody in there kicked me hard in the leg and said, “Ass off, wetback!”

He was a tramp with dirt-colored teeth and he kicked me twice more in the side before I worked myself far enough into the car to brace myself. On the next kick I snatched hold of his pant leg and pulled him off balance and he fell on top of me and almost rolled out of the car. He tried to scrabble back from the open door but I grabbed him by the collar and yanked hard and he went sailing out of the car with a yell.

The door on the other side of the car was shut and another guy was kneeling close to it and next to my opened saddlebags. He was grinning at me and holding the S&W top-break. He wore a baseball cap over a stringy growth of hair that hung down to his collar.

“Good goddamn riddance,” he said. “I was awful tired of Weldon’s company. Same dumbshit stories all the time, you know what I mean?” He turned the gun in his hand, examining it from different angles. “Aint this a pretty thing, though? Aint seen one of these in a coon’s age.”

“Yeah, it’s an old one,” I said, slowly sitting up and making a big show of the pain from the kicks I’d taken, probing my ribs gingerly and then easing a hand behind me and wincing big. “Christ almighty, he like to broke my back.”

The tramp pointed the gun at me but hadn’t cocked it. “Young fella like yourself don’t need no gun to defend hisself as much as a old fella like me. Reckon I’ll just hold on to it.”

“Sure. Keep it.”

“Well thankee, son. You real generous. Now do me just one more kindness and jump offa this train. I appreciate we’re moving along right quick now but you hit the ground running and then roll just right you probly won’t get busted up too bad.”

“Can I at least have my bedroll,” I said. “My last two dollars are in there.”

He turned to look at the bedroll and I pulled the Mexican Colt from my waistband under the back of my jacket, cocking it as I brought it around. He heard the racheting hammer and snapped his attention back to me just in time to see me shoot him through the wishbone. The gunblast was loud but got swallowed almost instantly in the rumbling of the train. He flopped backward and against the closed door and fell over on his side with his legs in a twist.

I got up and stood over him with the .44 cocked and pointed at his head and he looked at me without expression as the light drained out of his eyes and he died. I took the top-break from his hand and put it back in the saddlebag. I snugged the .44 at the small of my back again and then opened the door a little way. There was nothing to see but passing desert. I sat and cooled myself in the rushing air and watched the country go clacking by.

The sun had set and a dull orange twilight was closing around us when the train made a whistle stop at some nowhere station. I peeked out the door on the depot side and saw the engineer leaning out of the chugging locomotive and talking to a guy in shirtsleeves on the platform. The town consisted of fewer than a dozen buildings and even at that early hour of the evening there were more darkened windows than any with light showing in them. On the other side of the train there was only open country. I shoved the dead guy out the door on that side and then jumped down and positioned him so that his head was under the boxcar and his chest wound was centered on the rail. I tossed his cap under the car and then I got back inside and closed the door. A minute later the train got rolling again.

We pulled up into Del Rio before dawn. I hunkered in the darkest corner of the boxcar and kept alert for the yard bulls, having heard stories about what rough old boys they were. I was ready to show them what rough was. But the only guys to peek into the car were a couple of kids about thirteen or fourteen who asked if anybody was in there and when I said yeah they asked if they could share the car with me. I told them to get in and keep quiet and they tossed their bindles in and helped each other aboard and then I eased the door to till it was almost closed. They said they were brothers, Charlie and Fred, and as we passed the miles together I came to learn that they’d had enough of their damn stepdaddy and were going to Houston to