Under the Skin

Galveston.”

“You say that again I’m liable to take you up on it,” LQ said.

“You don’t have to have—”

“Go to hell, wiseguy,” LQ said.

“If anybody’s got a better plan,” I said, “I’m ready to hear it—as long as it doesn’t mean waiting. I’m not waiting.”

Brando blew out a breath and threw up his hands.

“The best plans are always simple,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”

“In that case,” LQ said, “we got us the greatest goddamn plan in the world.”

We took rooms in what was said to be the best of the hotels in town and went to bed early so we could get going before daybreak. But when we met downstairs at dawn LQ and Brando were red-eyed and full of complaints about the lumpy beds and the light of the full moon blazing in through the gauzy curtains and the ranchero music that blared incessantly through much of the night from the cantina across the street. It didn’t help their mood much when I said I’d had a pretty good night’s rest myself.

I said that just to needle them. The truth was, I dreamt all night, one dream after another—of being out in the deepwater sea with a giant shark circling around me; of Reuben lying in the dust with a terrible stomach wound and calling for me to help him; of Daniela standing naked on a brightly lit platform while a crowd of men in the surrounding darkness bids to buy her. And of Rodolfo Fierro, sitting in a high-backed chair on an elevated platform, dressed in a fine black suit and cloak and wearing a Montana hat at a cocky angle, his legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles and his coatflap fallen aside to expose a holster holding a Colt .44 with ivory grips of carved Mexican eagles. He was staring down at several long rows of clearly terrified men while a voice speaking in Spanish delivered verdicts of death. Then he looked over their heads at me, and in English I said, Hey Daddy…and he smiled…

We put a five-gallon can of drinking water on the floor by the backseat and three cans of gasoline into the trunk and got on our way before daybreak. The sun rose out of the flatlands and shone red on the mountains to the west just under the setting silver moon. The sky was clear except for the dust we raised behind us on the packed dirt road.

The countryside reminded me of the YB Ranch—cactus of every kind and mesquite trees and creosote scrub, mesas and mountains on every horizon. But it was alien territory to LQ and different even to Brando, who came from a part of Texas with geography a lot tamer than this region of brute rock ground and thorns on damned near everything.

Now and then we’d see a small cross—sometimes a cluster of crosses—stuck in the ground alongside the road and we came to find out they had been placed by the families of people killed at those spots in motor vehicle accidents.

Two hours after leaving Villa Acuna we reached the junction road from the border town of Piedras Negras. There had been a rainstorm a day or so earlier and truck traffic had made a washboard of the road surface. The car jarred hard and sometimes jerked to one side or the other and Brando cursed and fought the wheel. There were plenty of stations within range of our radio, most of them playing ranchero music, which LQ and I liked but Brando had had enough of, and he searched the dial till he found one out of Eagle Pass broadcasting Texas string-band stuff.

As the morning grew warmer, pale dust devils rose in the open country and went whirling toward the dark ranges in the distance. Around midmorning we came to a ferry crossing at a river the color of caramel. The ferry was a rope rig and could carry only three cars at a time. There were four cars ahead of us, so we had to wait. There were three small crosses at the edge of the riverbank. LQ and Brando napped under a tree and I skipped rocks on the water until it was our turn to cross.

We got to Monclova in the early afternoon and gassed the car at a filling station. I got directions from the attendant to get to the westbound road. Brando wanted to have a beer before moving on, so we parked around the corner from the main plaza and went into a cantina.

The place was cool and dim and a radio was playing mariachi music. Besides us the only other patrons were two guys at a table against the wall and another three standing together at the far end of the bar and laughing with the cantinero. You could tell by their clothes they were vaqueros—and by their laughter and gestures that they were drunk.

The cantinero came over and looked at each of us in turn, then asked Brando, “Que quieren de tomar?”

“Cerveza,” Brando said with his gringo accent. He looked at me and said, “Tell him I want the coldest one in the joint.”

“Tres cervezas,” I said. “Bien frias.”

The cantinero stared at my eyes and then gave Brando another look before going to fetch the beer. He set the bottles in front of us and went back to his friends at the end of the bar and whispered something to them. They turned to look at us. One of them, the biggest, came down the bar, puffing a cigarillo.

“Buenas tardes.”

“Buenas tardes,” I said.

He asked to know where we were from, and I told him.

“Ah, Tejas,” he said. He looked at LQ and said that a blond gringo certainly had a good reason for not speaking Spanish. Then looked at me again and said anybody who looked Mexican and could speak Spanish as well as I did could be forgiven for having gringo eyes. But what he was curious about, he said, turning to Brando, was why a guy who looked so fucking Mexican couldn’t speak Spanish well enough to ask for a cold beer.

“Eres un pinche pocho, verdad?”

The vaquero was looking for a fight but he badly underestimated Brando’s readiness to give it to him. The insult was barely off the guy’s tongue before Ray brought his knee up into his balls and hit him in the mouth with the bottle of beer. Glass shattered and beer sprayed and the vaquero went down on his ass and over on his side, drawing his knees up and clutching his crotch. He puked through his broken teeth.

The cantinero started to sidestep down the bar but LQ already had the .380 in his hand and waggled it at him, and the barman brought his hands up in view and stepped away from the counter. The two at the end of the bar stood gawking. The pair at the table were beaming at the entertainment.

LQ put up his pistol and leaned over the bar to peer into the shelf under it and came up with a cutoff single- barrel sixteen-gauge. The cantinero looked apologetic. LQ opened the breech and took out the shell and flung it across the room, then stood the shotgun against the front of the bar.

“Let’s get a move on,” I said.

“Gimme another beer,” Brando said to the cantinero. “For the busted one.”

“Mandame?”

“Dale otra cerveza,” I said.

He went to the cooler and fetched three beers to the bar.

“Put them in a bag,” Brando said.

“Como?”

“Ponlas en una bolsa,” I said.

He looked around and found a paper sack and put the bottles in it. Brando picked it up and carried it out under his arm.

LQ and I paused at the door and eyeballed everybody in the room. I didn’t think any of them was likely to discuss us with the police. We went out the door and down the street to the car. Brando already had the engine running. We got in and he drove us off nice and easy and I gave him the directions out of town.

When we got on the open road, I opened the beers and passed them around and we took a few pulls without talking until LQ said, “You getting awful thin-skinned, aint you, Ramon? All the fella called you was a phony Mexican.”

He leaned so that Brando couldn’t see his face in the rearview and he gave me a wink.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Jimmy,” LQ said, “but aint that what pocho means—a phony Mex? A Mexican who talks and acts American?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

Brando kept his eyes on the road, steering with one hand and holding his beer with the other, but he was still pretty tight about the whole business—you could see it in his jaw and how he was gripping the wheel.