Under the Skin

“I mean, you’re all the time saying you aint Mexican, no matter how much you look it, always saying how you were born in the States and all,” LQ said. “Seems to me he was saying the same thing. So what’s there to get blackassed about?”

“It’s how he said it,” Brando said.

“How he said it? Goddamn, you bust up a man ’cause you don’t like how he says something? Woooo, you even thinner in the skin than I thought.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Brando said.

“Ah, Ramon,” LQ said with the usual big sigh, “if only I could. I’d be doing it with—”

“You’d be doing it with a dumb-ass redneck nobody but you can stand,” Ray said.

I smiled out at the road.

“Well golly gee, aint we in a mood?”

“Mood this,” Brando said—then caught sight of LQ’s grin in the mirror and couldn’t restrain his own.

Pretty soon they were talking about how they couldn’t wait to see Sheila and Cora Ann again and how much the girls would like it if they took them some Mexican sandals, maybe a sombrero.

“Hell, Kid,” LQ said to me, “you and your chiquita—we oughta call her Danny—you and Danny ought to come over and join us for a backyard barbecue or something.”

“Damn right,” Brando said. “I think we oughta do it as soon as we get back home.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

We didn’t see anything but desert for the next hour and a half and then came to a wide spot in the road taken up with a few weathered shacks and a one-pump filling station and a tiny cafe with an open wall and a pair of bench tables. The guy who filled our tank said there wasn’t so much as another hut, never mind a place to get gas or a bite to eat, between there and Escalon, 165 miles away. We went to the cafe and had pork tacos and beer, then got back in the Hudson and drove on.

We were pushing deep into nowhere, just like it looked on the map, and the road got worse. It was full of cracks and potholes and the Hudson sometimes thumped into one so hard it was a wonder we didn’t blow a tire. The gas-pump guy had said we were lucky to be making this drive in the good weather of the year, that the heat of summer was unbearable, but even now you could see heat waves where the highway met the horizon.

We rolled through a vast pale desert of scraggly brush and rocky outcrops and long red mesas. Far to the southwest black thunderheads sparked with silent lightning and dragged purple veils of rain over the jagged ranges on the horizon. We saw no other living thing but a pair of vultures circling high over the sunlit wasteland to the north.

“Jesus,” Brando said. “Where the hell are we?”

“I believe we took a wrong turn and come to the moon,” LQ said. He reached over to the front seat and got the hand-drawn map from beside me and sat back and opened it.

“According to this,” he said, “that hacienda place is straight thataway”—he pointed south—“about thirty–forty miles.”

“I know it,” I said. “But there’s no way to get there except by way of the Escalon road—and that’s…what… twice as long, all told?”

“At least that, according to this map. Fella sure lives out of the way, don’t he? Say, what’s this here, where the river runs out?”

LQ leaned over the seat to point out the little clump of penciled tufts labeled “cienaga” just north of the hacienda.

“Sort of a swamp,” I said. “This close to the desert it’s probably just a mud patch.”

I didn’t say much for a while after that—just smoked and stared out at the passing landscape. I couldn’t have explained it, but there was something about this country that pulled at me. In some inexplicable way it felt like a place I’d once known but had forgotten all about.

The sun was almost down to the ridge of distant mountains in the west and glaring hard against the windshield when the road angled off to southward. The map showed the angle and we calculated that we were less than forty miles from Escalon.

And then, shortly after dark, the road ended at a junction with another highway and we were there.

Escalon was nothing but a tiny railstation and a small rocky cemetery and a dozen scattered houses along a single dirt street. No motor vehicles. No telephone or even a telegraph line.

The road ran north to Jimenez and south to Torreon, which lay even farther away. The fat creamy moon had just risen over the black mountains. A light wind kicked up and carried the smell of charcoal cooking. A dog barked and barked but hung back in the shadows beside the depot. The station door was open and showed soft yellow light. A man in a rail agent’s cap stepped into the doorway and peered out at us.

“Callate,” he said, and the dog shut up and slunk off. “Buenas noches, senores. Les puedo ayudar?”

I told Brando to keep a lookout and LQ and I went into the station. The agent stepped aside for us and then went around behind the narrow counter. In the light of a pair of kerosene lanterns I saw that his face was badly scarred, as if it had been torn open in several places and then badly sutured. His left arm had been ruined too and he held it at an awkward twist.

“Christ amighty, amigo,” LQ said, “you look like you been in a hatchet fight and everybody had a hatchet but you.”

“Perdoname, senor,” the clerk said. “No hablo ingles.” His face twisted even more awfully and I supposed he was smiling in apology for his inability to speak English.

I told him my friend didn’t speak Spanish, and he gestured with his good arm in a manner to imply that life was full of complications.

I took out the map of the hacienda and spread it open on the counter between us. I asked if he could vouch for its accuracy, if there were any local roads that the map did not show.

He bent over it and considered for a minute and then said it looked correct to him.

So the road a couple of miles south was the only one connecting the Hacienda de Las Cadenas to the Jimenez-Torreon highway?

“Si,” he said. “Es el unico camino.” He asked if we were new employees of Don Cesar. “O no mas son amigos de el?”

There was no way he could warn Calveras of our coming and so I said no, we weren’t the man’s employees or his friends, either. I handed the map to LQ. “It’s jake. Just the one road.”

“Ah, pues, son enemigos,” the clerk said. He put his hand to a scarred cheek and smiled his awful smile. “Espero que lo castigan bastante bien. Mejor si lo matan.”

“What’s he yammering about?” LQ said.

“He hopes we kick Calveras’ ass but he’d be happier if we killed him. I don’t think he cares much for the man.”

“Bastard probably give him that face. Ask him does he know how many guns the place got.”

I asked, and he said, “De pistoleros? No estoy seguro. Como una dozena, yo creo.”

“He say a dozen?” LQ said.

“Maybe a dozen, he’s not sure.”

“Y cuantos son ustedes?”

“Tres.”

“Tres?” His ruined mouth twisted and he shook his head.

“Go to hell, Jack,” LQ said as we started for the door. “Odds like that, the sumbitch best send for more guys.”

The road was about as wide as a big truck and went snaking through high dense brush and tall stands of mesquite trees. The hacienda’s pasturelands were somewhere far to the east. We drove without headlights and very slowly, raising no dust, making our way by the small patches of moonlight that filtered through the trees. We’d been on the move for the better part of an hour when we went around a long curve through the heavy scrub and saw the lights of the hacienda in the distance ahead.