Under the Skin (23 page)

queros had been at their supper but they all came out of the mess
shack to watch us get the herd into the corral. Then we turned our
mounts over to the stable boys for good rubs and a big feed.

When we came out of the stable, Uncle Cullen was at the corral,
still in his traveling suit and tie, studying the recovered horses. Over
at the house, Aunt Ava was watching us from the door with her arms
crossed.

“Luego,” Chente whispered to me, cutting his eyes at Uncle
Cullen and sidling off to the cookhouse, his cutdown shotgun tucked
under his arm.

We stood waiting for Uncle Cullen to say something. When he finally turned around to us, there was still enough light to see his face
under his hat brim. He was sixty-three but had never looked his age
until about eight months before, when he’d had a heart attack while
he was working with some new horses. Since then he’d slowed down
a hell of a lot and had acquired a slight stoop and had come to look
every day of his years and then some. But his eyes still held some of
their old fire.

“You disobeyed me,” he said. “Both you.”
“Yessir,” I said. “It’s all my fault.”
“Oh? You force him to go with you?” he said, nodding at Reuben.
“No sir, but—”
“I can talk for myself,” Reuben said. “I went on my own, Daddy.

I disobeyed you too. We done it to get the horses back.”
“I know why you done it.” Then he said to me, “You know the
brand on them others?”
“No sir. But I know they didn’t belong to them thieves.”
“So you figured we’d make them ours?”
“No sir. I figured you’d know what to do about them.”
“So happens I know the brand. Arthur Falcone’s, way up by the
Vieja oxbows. I’ll give him a call tonight. He’ll probably want to
come with some trailers.”

He regarded the sheathed Sharps under my arm and the revolver
under my belt and I wondered if he was remembering that I’d gotten
both weapons from Frank Hartung.

“How many was it?”
“Four.”
“Any of them like to steal again?”
“No sir.”
He stared off at the purple eastern sky. Then looked at Reuben and

I had a hunch what was on his mind, what he wanted to ask but was
afraid of the answer to. So I told him.
“It was just me dealt with them.”
“Just you all four?” He cut a look at Reuben.
“Yessir.”
He nodded at the Sharps. “With that.”
“Yessir.”
Until that moment I hadn’t really thought about how he might
react to the news that I’d killed four men. I had probably assumed he
would approve—after all, I’d only done what I had to do to get our
horses back. Who could object to that? Not until I saw the way he
looked at the Sharps did it occur to me how very differently he might
see the whole thing—how differently most people would.
“You got any idea what could’ve happened to you-all down there?
Not just from them thieves but from the police, from the goddamn
rurales? From some bunch of bandits you might’ve come on?”
“I guess we could’ve had a little trouble, yessir.”
“A little trouble. Yeah, you could call it that.”
He’d never told me or Reuben very much about his younger days,
but Frank Hartung had, and so I knew Uncle Cullen had never been a
shrinking violet. Many a time when Uncle Cullen wasn’t around,
Frank had entertained us with stories of the bar fights they’d been in,
tales of broken noses and lost teeth, blowed-up ears and black eyes and
the different times they’d been tossed in the El Paso or the Las Cruces

lockup till they sobered up and bailed out. But he’d never mentioned
a knife or a gun in any of the fight stories. The only story Frank ever
told us that involved a weapon was about Uncle Cullen’s older brother,
Teddy, who was found dead in an alley in Alpine one frosty morning.
He was nineteen years old and had been stabbed a bunch of times.
They knew it happened in a fight because his face was bruised and his
knuckles all skinned. There were rumors of a girl and of a jealous
boyfriend but nobody the local police questioned admitted to knowing anything about it, and whoever killed him was never found out.
Teddy had been something of a loner, Frank told us. “A man friendless as Teddy,” he said, “has got the least chance of all in this world.”

If either Frank or Uncle Cullen ever killed a man, they did a good
job of keeping it secret from us. But I really didn’t think there was
any such secret for either of them to keep.

In the last of the light before the closing gloom hid his face, Uncle
Cullen looked at me in a way he never had before, like he was staring
at somebody he wasn’t real sure he recognized.

“I always did believe,” he said, “that a fellow gets to be eighteen,
he’s old enough to make his own decisions, be he fool or be he wise.
But Jimmy, I want you to promise me that as long as you continue
living on the YB you won’t never go across that river again without
my permission.”

I promised.
He turned to Reuben. “And you best promise me the same, leastways till you’re a grown man too and decide for yourself what to do
and where to do it.”
Reuben promised.
“All right, then,” Uncle Cullen said.
He jutted his chin toward the porch, where Aunt Ava’s shadowy
figure still stood. “You boys go on and get you some supper,” he said.
“Miss Ava told Carlotta keep yall a warm plate in case you got back
tonight.”

ost of another year passed. Every day pretty much the same
except as marked by the turning of the seasons. Yellowing
days and chilly evenings turned into nights of frost and days of sharp

blue air and coatings of snow on the mountains, and then slowly
turned to days of wind and new warmth and foalings, then days of rising heat and dusty greenery along the river and the creeks.

We worked the roundups, Reuben and I, worked the brandings,
worked at trimming manes and tails and bundling the hair for shipping. We tracked down strays and mended fences. If anyone had
asked me what I expected to be doing in the years ahead I would’ve

thought it was a fool question. What else would I be doing but living and working at the YB? Uncle Cullen had done it all his life and
there was no reason to think Reuben and I wouldn’t do the same.

But things can change pretty damn sudden, of course. And one
night that summer they did.
Every year, the Veterans’ Club held a Fourth of July Firecracker
Dance at the old fairground just off the Marfa road, about halfway between the YB ranch and town, and that year Reuben and Chente and
Uncle Cullen and I drove up there in our old truck. My uncle had
been a devil of a dancer back before he had the heart attack and was
forced to start taking it easy, but he still liked to go to dances and tap
his foot to the music and watch everybody and criticize their dancing
styles, and he liked to have a drink or two with neighbor ranchers and
catch up on things. He tried to cajole Aunt Ava into going along
with us, but she never was one to socialize and she said for us to all
go ahead and have a good time.
It was the biggest turnout ever, at least two hundred people, lots of
them families, both Mexican and Anglo, and there were plenty of high
school girls from Marfa as well as girls from the local ranches. A pair of
bands took turns providing the music—a string band from Alpine and
a ranchera group from Marfa. The dance floor was a large patch of hardpacked dirt with rows of colored lightbulbs strung overhead. It was a
moonless night and the sky was crammed with stars. There were bleachers and tables and benches, openfire pits smoking with slabs of ribs, a
scattering of concession stands selling cold drinks and cotton candy and
hot dogs. The air was rich with the aromas of it all—and with a taint of
booze. Prohibition was on its last legs by then but was still in force and
the bootleggers were still doing good business, especially since the sheriff didn’t give a damn, being a drinking man himself. Almost every table
had a jug or three on it and the only ones making a secret of their drinking were men who didn’t want their wives to know and boys who’d been
told by their daddies they were too young yet.

We’d brought a jug of hooch too—me and Reuben and Chente—
and every once in a while we’d take a break from dancing and go out
to the truck in the parking lot and have a snort. I’d slipped the jug
behind the truck seat before Uncle Cullen came out of the house and
got in. Not that he’d say anything to me about drinking—hell, I was
only a month shy of nineteen—but he’d for sure climb all over me for
letting Reuben drink, and he might yet have tried taking a belt to
Reuben’s ass if he caught him at it. Uncle Cullen of course had his
own jug on hand—“to ward off the chill,” he said, of the July night.

After about an hour of whirling around the floor with different
girls, I settled on the one I wanted, a Mexican honey named Rosa
Elena. She was in the country illegally and spoke just enough English
to understand her duties as a housemaid for a prosperous Marfa family. They treated her well and had invited her to come with them to
the dance. She was round-hipped and bright-eyed and a dozen guys
were after her and had been cutting in on each other all through the
early evening. We were just starting our second dance together when
one of them came up to cut in on me, but she held to me and whispered that she wished we could stay partners. So I turned the guy
down—and all the others who tried cutting in after him, and I refused to surrender her between numbers. One of the cowboys I shook
my head at didn’t take it too well, and for a moment I thought the
fool might try to start something. But he didn’t do anything more
than give me a tough look and mutter under his breath before backing off. The word must’ve got around that we were paired for the
evening, because we were left pretty much unbothered from then on.

At one point while I was dancing with Rosa, I saw Chente and
Reuben sneaking off to the parking lot for another nip off the jug.
Reuben glanced back toward Uncle Cullen, who was sitting at a table
on the far side of the dance floor, sipping his hooch and talking to
some rancher friends, all of them grinning at the high sheriff, who’d
passed out with his head on the table. Reuben saw me and made a

I asked Rosa if she cared for a sip of whiskey but she said she’d better not. It wouldn’t do for her employers to see her sneaking off to the
parking lot or catching the smell of liquor on her breath. I wanted a
drink myself but wasn’t about to leave her unattended.

A little later, just as the string band finished up with a snappy
two-step number that left us in a sweat, Reuben and Chente came
shouldering through the mob of dancers to join us, Reuben with his
arm around a strawberry blonde and Chente holding hands with a
blonde of brighter shade. They introduced the girls as the Miller sisters, Laura Lee and Susan.

Their family owned a ranch up toward Fort Davis, the Susan one
said, and they and their two brothers were visiting with family
friends near Marfa. Did we know the Rogersons? She leaned back
against Chente, who was standing sort of half turned to her so nobody
but me and Rosa could see him stroking her bottom. All four of them
had been hitting the hooch pretty hard—you could see it in their eyes
and hear it in the silly way they laughed.

Reuben snickered and said, “Back in school one time Jimmy
kicked Larry Rogerson’s ass like a damn football.”
“Next time you do it let me know so I can watch,” the Susan
one said.
“Susan don’t much care for Larry all the time putting his hands on
her,” the Laura Lee one said.
Reuben hugged her tighter against him and she ran her tongue in
his ear. Some of the dancers around us saw that and were amused and
some were tight-faced with disapproval.
I’d never seen Reuben so close to drunk. I said excuse me to the
Laura girl and pulled him aside and said he’d best lay off the stuff
and sober up some before his daddy found him out. He said, “Right

you are, Jimbo”—then took hold of me like a dance partner and
tried to whirl me around. I cussed him softly and tugged his hat
down over his eyes but couldn’t help laughing along with Chente
and the girls.

I lost sight of them during the next few dances as I spun Rosa
around the floor, grazing against other dancers and them bumping
into us and everybody saying “Sorry” and laughing about it.

And then, just as the Mexican band took over and began playing
a loud rendition of “Tu, Solo Tu” and Rosa and I hugged close and
started swaying to the music, I caught a glimpse of Chente in the
center of the floor and saw the ready way he was standing and saw the
two cowboys in front of him, one of them pointing a finger in his face
and running his mouth in obvious anger. He was holding hard to the
arm of the Susan girl and she was trying to break free of his grip. The
other guy was holding a bottle of beer by the neck like a small club
and glaring at Chente too. Even at this distance I could see the similarity between the cowboys and I knew they had to be the Miller
brothers. And then Larry Rogerson stepped up beside them, giving
Chente a hard look and saying something too. Then the crowd of
dancers between us closed up and I lost sight of them all.

I stopped dancing and tried to spot them again through the swirl
of couples. Rosa Elena clung to my neck and said, “What?”
I saw Chente giving the cowboys the horns sign with his index and
little finger, then turning away and walking off through the crowd.
The cowboy with the beer bottle started after him, followed by his
brother and Rogerson. I yanked Rosa’s arms off me and roughly
shoved my way through the dancers, women protesting my rudeness,
guys cussing me.
I came out at one corner of the dance floor and saw Chente emerging at the other—and saw the Miller guy behind him swing the beer
bottle like he was throwing a baseball and hit Chente on the head.
Chente’s hat fell off and he staggered forward and fell to his hands and