Under the Skin (19 page)
still in her eyes.
I had to laugh at her boldness. “All right, then. Would you like to
go swimming with me?”
“I should very much like to go swimming with you,” she said.
“When?”
“Well, I’ve been going at night, but I can arrange for—”
She said she loved to swim in the sea at night. “It’s so beautiful at
night,” she said. “I have done it only one time but it was wonderful.
It was like... like all the sea belonged to me.”
“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking of taking a swim tonight.”
She leaned over the table and said in a whisper of mock conspiracy: “And I may join you in swimming in the darkness?”
“Yes you may,” I said. “But I’m warning you, the water can be
pretty chilly this time of year.”
She did a little bounce in her chair like an excited child. “I don’t
care. I am very brave.”
Lynette came to the table with a platter in each hand and set down
our breakfasts.
“It all looks very good,” Daniela said, examining the oozing
sausage and the fried tomato slices, the eggs thoroughly scrambled
the way Albert knew I liked them. She watched me pick up a crisp
slice of tomato with my fingers and bite into it, and then she did the
same.
“Oh this is delicious,” she said, and took a bigger bite.
Lynette grinned at Daniela’s pleasure and then went back to the
counter and fetched a stack of thick-sliced toast moist with melted
butter. She refilled our cups and said, “Yall enjoy your breakfast. I’ll
keep an eye on your coffee, make sure you don’t go dry.”
Daniela thanked her and the girl went to tend to other patrons.
“Yall?”
Daniela said.
“All of you. You all—yall.”
Daniela mouthed the word silently and looked over at Lynette who
was at a back booth, taking an order. The other customers had quit
eyeballing us and gone back to minding their own business.
She liked the sausage but thought the eggs needed more spice and
sprinkled them with cayenne sauce. “So,” she said as we ate, “now you
have learned everything of me. Tell me of yourself.”
“Not much to tell,” I said. “I grew up on a ranch in West Texas,
then came here a couple of years ago and here I still am.”
“That is a very short story,” she said.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” she said. “Are you American or Mexican? Why do
you have blue eyes? Tell me everything.”
I was born in San Antonio, I said. My mother was a blue-eyed
American named Alice Harrison. Her parents managed a hotel in
Laredo. My father was Mexican, a federal cavalry officer named
Benito Torres. He met my mother at a fiesta, when he was on leave
and visiting relatives on the American side. They married a week
later.
“Oh my,” she said. “It must have been love at first sight.”
“Must’ve been,” I said. “But a few days after their wedding he had
to go back to his troops in Mexico. About a month before I was born
he was killed at a place called Zacatecas.”
Her face fell. “Ay, that is so sad. I am sure it broke your mother’s
heart.”
“I guess so.” I told her that my mother’s heart had already been
bruised pretty hard a few months before. There had been a cholera
epidemic moving along the border, and because she was frail in her
pregnancy with me, her parents wanted her away from the threat of
the disease, so they sent her to live with family friends in San Antonio. Shortly afterward she got the hard news that both of them had
been killed in a fire that destroyed the hotel.
“Dios mio,” Daniela said. “She lost so much in such little time.”
“Yeah, she didn’t have much luck and it didn’t get any better. She
died giving birth to me.”
Daniela stared at me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s not like I ever knew her or anything.”
“But still, she was your
mother
. Who took care of you?”
My aunt, I said, my mother’s sister. She was something of a black
sheep and had run away at an early age but she and my mother had
always kept in touch. When my mother wrote and told her what
happened to their parents, my aunt came to San Antonio all the way
from El Paso to stay with her and be of help until I was born. She’d
only recently gotten married herself. When my mother died, my
aunt and uncle took me to live with them on their ranch in West
Texas. That’s where I grew up. My uncle—whose name was Cullen
Youngblood—gave me his family name, agreeing with my aunt that
I’d be better off with an American name than with my father’s Mexican one. They christened me James in honor of one of Uncle
Cullen’s dead brothers.
“James Youngblood.” She said the name like she was testing it in
her mouth. “Do you have a middle name?”
“Rudolph,” I said. “I’ve never told it to anybody else, and if you
repeat it I’ll call you a liar. My aunt gave it to me for no reason except
she
liked it.”
When I was two years old, I told Daniela, my aunt gave birth to
a son, the only child she and Uncle Cullen ever had. He had blue eyes
too, but darker than mine and my aunt’s. They named him Reuben,
after my uncle Cullen’s father. We grew up like brothers. We learned
to ride about as soon as we could walk and we worked as hands on the
YB Ranch from the time we were boys. The only mornings we didn’t
work were when we were at school.
“And that’s pretty much the story,” I said.
“Was it difficult for you in your childhood,” she said, “to be an
American but to look so much Mexican? Did the other children, the
of you?”
“Make
fun,
” I said. “Oh, a few of the peckerwood kids made some
cracks when I first started school—called me half-breed, blue-eyed
greaser, things like that. I shut them up pretty fast.”
I scowled fiercely and put my fists up like a boxer—and she
chuckled.
“There have only been one or two fools to say anything like that
in the years since,” I said. “But hell, I wasn’t the only Mexicanlooking American around there, you know. And around there the Anglos and Mexicans were pretty used to each other anyway. They pretty
much got along okay.”
“Who taught you to speak Spanish? Your aunt?”
“No. She never knew more than a few words, and my uncle knew
even less. I picked it up from the Mexican kids. It came to me
pretty easy.”
“Well, you speak it very well,” she said, “for a gringo.” She was
able to hold a straight face for about two seconds before breaking into
giggles.
“Listen to you,” I said. “Your back’s still sopping wet and you’ve
got the nerve to show that sort of disrespect to a naturalborn citizen
of the United States.”
“Oh, you are so cruel to speak of wet backs,” she said, affecting a
look of injury. She glanced around the room at the other diners busy
with their own breakfasts and conversations, then turned sideways in
her chair and said, “Does this back appear wet? Does it
feel
wet?”
I reached across the table and placed my palm on the exposed top
of her back. Her skin was warm and wonderfully smooth.
She gave me a sidelong look.
“Well?”
I withdrew my hand. “Your back is very cleverly disguised as dry.”
“You
see?
” she said in a tone of triumph.
As she finished her eggs she said she was even more impressed by
my English, which she thought I spoke better than most Americans
she had heard. She said I must have attended a good school.
I had to chuckle at that. I told her how Reuben and I had ridden
horseback to a two-room regional schoolhouse six miles from the
ranch. Each room had its own teacher, one for the kids in first
through the sixth grade, the other for the smaller number of kids in
grades seven to twelve. Only a handful of students ever made it to the
tenth grade or above. None of the first-graders—except for me and
then Reuben—could read at the time they started school. My aunt
had taught me to read and letter by the time I was five, then did the
same for Reuben.
“So you and your cousin had a... how do you say ventaja? No,
wait...
advantage
. That is correct? You had an advantage upon the
other students. You must have achieved easily to grade twelve.”
“Not exactly,” I said—and immediately gave myself a mental kick
in the ass. It would’ve been easier to say sure we did, and let it go at
that. But now I’d roused her curiosity and had to explain.
“My aunt didn’t think the teachers at the school were educating us
very well,” I said, “so she took over the job of teaching me and
Reuben herself. Truth to tell, she was a better teacher than they were.
She’d drill us in arithmetic every morning. She’d give us grammar
tests. She’d make us read a few pages aloud from some book she’d
pick at random from the shelf, and every time we came to a word we
didn’t know, she’d make us look it up in the dictionary. Every week
she assigned a different book to each of us and we had to write a report on it.”
“She deserves praise. What is her name?”
“Ava.”
Lynette came to the table to replenish our coffee and clear away
really liked her sandals. Daniela thanked her and said she had been
admiring Lynette’s auburn hair and asked if she ever wore it in a
French braid, which she thought would look very attractive on her.
Lynette said she didn’t know what kind of braid that was, and so
Daniela showed her how to plait it, demonstrating the technique
with her own long hair.
I was glad for Lynette’s interruption—it got us off the subject
of my school days. I’d told the truth about my aunt Ava’s decision
to assume our education herself. I just hadn’t told the full reason
for it...
I was fourteen, Reuben was twelve, and for weeks he’d been getting teased every day by a husky fifteen-year-old named Larry Rogerson. I’d kept out of it because Rogerson hadn’t laid a hand on him;
his teasing was all verbal. Besides, a bully was something every kid
had to deal with at one time or another, and Reuben knew as well as
I did that he had to handle it himself. Then one day Reuben took a
peppermint stick to school and at recess Rogerson snatched it away
from him. I didn’t see that—I was tossing a football with some of the
other boys—and I didn’t see Reuben try to kick Rogerson in the balls
and only get him in the leg. But a lot of the other kids saw what was
going on and their sudden shouting made me look over there to see
Larry Rogerson holding Reuben in a headlock with one arm and beating him in the face with his other fist. Reuben was always on the
skinny side but he never did lack for sand, and even as Rogerson was
pounding his face he kept trying to kick him.
I ran up and punched Rogerson on the side of the head so hard I
thought I broke my hand. He went sprawling but scrambled to his
feet and came up with a buckknife, open and ready. He managed to
cut me on the upper arm before I caught him by the wrist and tripped
him to the ground and got the knife away from him. I straddled his
chest and pinned his arms under my knees and held the tip of the
blade to the base of his neck. My hand hurt like hell and blood was
running down my arm and the sight of it had me in a fury.
As soon as I said it I knew it was true. It
would’ve
been easy. It was
one of those moments when you realize something about yourself that
you hadn’t known just a second earlier, something as true as it can be
and that changes the way you see yourself from then on, the way you
see the whole damn world.
Rogerson knew I could do it too—it was in his eyes. That’s what
saved his life. If I had detected the smallest doubt on his face I
would’ve shoved the blade in his neck to the hilt and he would’ve
died learning the truth. But he already knew it. He lay there staring
at me in big-eyed terror, too afraid to even breathe. Maybe he was
thinking how different a knife could be when it was in somebody
else’s hand and at your own throat.
I became aware of the silence around us and looked up to see the
other students gawking, and I saw that they all knew the truth too.
Even the two teachers standing there with their mouths open. They
knew.
I cocked my arm like I was getting ready to stab the blade into
him. He made a half-whimper and turned his face to the side and I
jabbed the blade into the ground next to his neck, close enough for
the handle to press against his skin. I left it there.
I got up and stared around at the others and every pair of eyes
cut away from mine, including the teachers’. My sleeve was sopped
with blood. Rogerson kept his eyes on me and didn’t move. Reuben
stepped up beside me and gave him the two-finger horns sign—
fuck you.
Nobody said anything as we walked over to the open shed where
our horses were tethered and I got a bandanna out of the saddlebag
and ripped open my sleeve and Reuben tied the bandanna around my
gashed arm. Then we mounted up and rode for the ranch.
said, “You’da damn sure done it too.”
I looked at him but didn’t say anything.
“You’da done it,” he said. Grinning.
When we got to the house and Aunt Ava saw our condition, she
took us to the kitchen and told us to sit down, then fetched her small
shoebox of medical supplies. She gave Reuben a handmirror and a
bottle of iodine to treat the cuts on his face himself, and while she
sewed up my arm I told her what happened.
She’d never been one to make a display of her feelings. She rarely
smiled or frowned, never raised her voice, never openly fretted about
anything. I’d never heard her laugh and I couldn’t even imagine her in
tears. She listened to our accounts of the fight without comment or
any kind of look I could read—except when I was telling how I threatened to cut Rogerson’s throat, and for a flickering moment she looked
like she might smile. I didn’t tell her the part about how I’d known I
could do it as easily as I’d ever done anything, but I had a hunch she
knew it. All my life I’d had a strange sense about her, a feeling that
she knew things having to do with me that I didn’t know myself, like
some gypsy fortune-teller who’s reading the cards she dealt you. It was
like she could see through my flesh and bones and down into some
part of me so deeply hidden I couldn’t even tell what it was.
Reuben told me once that he loved his mother very much but she
always seemed like a stranger in some ways and he couldn’t help
being a little afraid of her. He thought his father was kind of scared
of her too. I didn’t know about that, but I was never afraid of her—I
was only mystified. And always would be.
She’d baked a sweet potato pie that morning and she let us have a
big slice of it with a glass of milk, which had us gawking at each
other, since it was almost dinnertime. When my uncle came in from
the range at noon and she told him what happened he was enraged.
He wanted to ride over to the Rogerson place and kick the elder
Rogerson’s ass for raising a boy who’d pull a knife in a schoolyard
fight. My aunt dissuaded him. No real harm had been done, she said,
