Under the Skin

any damn good with a gun.”

“Jimmy here’s a cowboy,” Brando said.

“Not since we known him he aint,” LQ said.

That afternoon we reached the border at Del Rio. A dapper and neatly barbered Mexican named Lalo Calderon was at the station to greet us. He spoke good English and wore a white suit, dark sunglasses, and a mustache as thin as a line of ink. He smelled strongly of a flowery perfume. My face had healed up pretty well except for the shiner, and he gave it a look but made no remark on it. The only thing Rose had told me about him was that he was “a former associate” and very efficient. He now owned an import company with offices in Del Rio, Laredo, and San Antonio. I figured Rose hadn’t told him anything more than necessary about us.

We went into a cafe and took a table in a front corner by the window and ordered a round of beers. Calderon handed me our passports—mine in the name of Michael Chavez, LQ’s and Brando’s identifying them as George Thompson and Leon Buscar. He also provided a roadmap with a route marked for us in red ink all the way from Villa Acuna to a small town called Escalon, and a folded sheet of paper with a hand-drawn map of the way from Escalon to La Hacienda de Las Cadenas, a distance noted in pencil as about twenty miles. He said the estate was deeded to one Cesar Calveras Dogal. On another sheet of paper was a diagram of the hacienda itself, with several notations in Spanish.

“What about police?” I said.

“The nearest station of police is in Jimenez. That is fifty miles from Escalon. At Las Cadenas, Calveras is the police.”

He gave us directions to Sanchez’s filling station across the river in Villa Acuna and said a car would be waiting for us there. He stood up and apologized that he could not stay longer but he had another pressing engagement. He hadn’t touched his beer except to toast our health.

“Good luck with your business, gentlemen.”

He went out and crossed the street to an idling Chrysler waiting at the curb and got into the backseat and the car took him away.

“You get a good whiff of that fella?” Brando said. “About like a whorehouse parlor.”

It was an altogether different smell when we walked over the bridge and caught the Rio Grande’s ripe stink of shit and dead things.

“Fall in there and you’re like to die of poisoning or some godawful disease before you can even drown,” LQ said.

The town was a tangle of rutted dirt streets flanking a large plaza. Dogs and chickens dodged rattling burro carts and honking jalopies and grinding trucks. We went past an open marketplace full of hagglers and snarling with flies, hung with the butchered carcasses of calves and pigs and what Brando was absolutely sure was a dog. One stall held a row of skinned cowheads. The air was hazed with the smoke of cooking fires. Street vendors hawked sticks of meatstrips roasted on charcoal braziers. The sidewalks were full of squatting old women beggars in black rebozos.

“We damn sure aint in Galveston no more,” LQ said. “Sweet Baby Jesus, look at this goddamn place.”

“Wish all I had to do was look at it and not smell it,” Brando said.

The Sanchez filling station consisted of a small tin-roofed garage and two gasoline pumps. The ground all around the building was black and pungent with drained motor oil, littered with torn tires and rusted car frames and half-gutted engine blocks. Sanchez was a little guy in filthy overalls. I told him my name was Chavez and he said yes, yes, he had been expecting us. We followed him around to the back of the garage and there stood a black Hudson sedan. Gleaming from a fresh washing, it was the cleanest-looking thing in town.

Sanchez beckoned us to the rear of the car, saying, “Hay una sorpresa para ustedes en el portaequipaje.”

He worked the key in the trunk lock and took a squinting look all around, then raised the lid and gestured grandly into the trunk. It contained a pair of lever-action Winchester ten-gauge shotguns and a huge rifle of a sort I’d never seen.

“Son of a bitch,” LQ said. “That’s a BAR.” He took out the weapon—and Sanchez had another nervous look around.

A Browning Automatic Rifle, LQ said, U.S. Army issue, .30-06 caliber, with a magazine holding twenty rounds. He said he’d fired one many a time during his army days. He detached the loaded magazine and showed us how the weapon’s action operated, then snapped the magazine back in place and worked the slide to chamber a round and then set the safety.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, patting the rifle, “this here’s about half of any plan a man will ever need.”

There was also a shoulder-strap canvas packet holding five more loaded BAR magazines and a couple of cartons of ten-gauge shells.

I asked Sanchez who provided the weapons. He didn’t know, but Don Lalo had instructed him to be sure to show it to us. I told LQ and Brando what Sanchez said and LQ wondered how come Calderone would do us such a kindness.

“Rose is how come,” I said.

We went into a restaurant and had chicken enchiladas and beer and fought off the flies while we ate our supper and studied the roadmap. La Hacienda de Las Cadenas wasn’t on the map but its approximate locale had been marked with an X and we figured its distance from Villa Acuna at roughly 400 road miles. The only town of size on our route was Monclova, which lay almost due south about 200 miles. The map showed only a few scattered placenames along the way—all of them little villages, the waiter had told us, and none with electricity. At Monclova we’d turn west into what looked like even rougher country.

“It’s nothing but desert for at least a hundred miles to either side of the damn road,” Brando said.

“I bet this here says ‘Middle of Nowhere,’” LQ said, tapping his finger on a blank portion of the map labeled BOLSON DE MAPIMI. Back on the YB I’d always heard that the Mapimi was one of the meanest deserts anywhere, but I didn’t see any reason to mention it just now. The last fifty miles or so of our route would take us through the south end of it.

We then studied the diagram of the rectangular hacienda compound. It was enclosed by high walls and marked as 250 yards deep and a quarter-mile wide, its length running east-west. Its only entryway was a double- doored gate in the center of the south wall. Directly under the gate description was a penciled note in Spanish saying that the gate was always open and posted with an armed guard. The driveway into the compound ran straight for about seventy-five yards to a big courtyard. The casa grande was on the far side of the courtyard and faced south toward the gate. Another notation said the servants’ quarters were on the lower floor, the family’s rooms on the upper. There were various patios and small gardens all about the house, and a large garden directly behind it. Just past the big garden were a corral and a riding track, and, beyond them, a mesquite thicket that ran the length of the compound’s rear wall. An unbroken row of tiny penciled squares along the west wall was labeled as the peon living quarters. Over against the east wall, adjacent to the woods, a small square indicated the stable. A square at the southeast corner of the compound was the garage. Between them was the vaquero bunkhouse.

The way I saw it, everything depended on getting past the gate. If they were able to shut us out, the whole business could get pretty bitchy. Once we were inside the compound, all we had to do was get to the house, get Daniela, and then get out again.

“Sounds so damn simple,” LQ said, “I can see why you were ready to do it by yourself.”

“Unless the guy’s got a bunch of pistoleros, I figure there won’t be that much to it,” I said.

“That’s the thing,” Brando said. “What if he does have a bunch of pistoleros?”

“They might be smart enough not to argue with a BAR.”

“And if they aint smart enough?”

“Then we’ll play it any way we have to.”

They stared at me. Then Brando said, “That’s the plan?”

“You don’t have to have any part of it, either of you. You can cross back over the bridge and catch a train to