Under the Skin (36 page)

He hadn’t done it, not wounds like that, not on the side away from
him. I didn’t have to take the bullets out and see them to know they
were .30–06 rounds from a BAR.

The Cadillac motor wouldn’t turn over. Maybe LQ had hit the oil
pan and all the oil leaked out and the engine had finally seized.
I gently laid her on her side and told her I’d be back.
Then I went and got in the Hudson and set out into the deeper
desert.

he sun was half-risen behind the jagged mountains and look ing like a great raw wound when I spotted him a half mile
ahead. At first I took him for another greasewood shrub and then understood what I was looking at. He was lying huddled on his side and
the possibility that he was dead made my gut go tight.

I stopped the car ten feet from him and blew the klaxon and he
stirred slightly. Praise Jesus.
I got out and walked up to him. His hat had fallen off and I saw
the black strap of his eyepatch tight against the back of his head. His
lank white hair hung over his face. His breathing was raspy but there
were no obvious wounds on him, no bloodstains I could see. His coatflap hung down straight with the weight of something heavy in the
pocket and I reached down and relieved him of a .38 revolver and
slung it out into the scrub. A portion of his wooden leg was visible
between the hem of his pantleg and the top of his lowcut Spanish
boot. I gave it a hard kick.
He flinched and groaned. I said for him to look at me.
“Mírame, viejo,” I said. “Mírame bien.”
He struggled to push himself up on an elbow, grunting hard, and
he finally managed to sit up. He brushed the hair from his eyes and
turned his face up to me, sand clinging to his eyepatch, his good eye
baggy and bloodshot.

The sun had just risen over the mountains behind him and it
blazed full on my face. I was squinting against its glare. I told him
again to have a good look at me, that I was the last thing he was
going to see in this world. His eye fixed on me hard.

I pulled down my hat brim to shade my eyes and I took out the
Colt. I put the muzzle against his forehead and cocked the hammer.
And the son of a bitch laughed.
Laughed and asked if I was a hallucination. “O eres un espanto?”
he said—and laughed even harder, as if the possibility that I was a
ghost was the funniest thing in the world.
All these years, he said, all these miserable years gone by and here
I was again, threatening his life once more. Well, go ahead and shoot,
he said—he was no more afraid of me now than he had been back
then.
My finger quivered on the trigger. If he had gone insane he
couldn’t appreciate the moment. Then what satisfaction could
there be?
He laughed again and said, No, no, of
course
I wasn’t him. How
could I be
him,
all these years later? I was just one more of his brute
kind. There was no end to our kind. Our mongrel breed had robbed
him of everything once before, and now, even
now,
we would rob from
him yet again? We would have the girl too? Well, fuck the lot of us.
Did I think he was afraid? He spat on my boots.
That
was how afraid
he was. Go ahead, he said...
shoot
.
I saw the lie in his eyes. He
was
afraid. He was afraid I wouldn’t
shoot him. He wanted to die but didn’t have the balls to shoot himself. Jesus. Who knew what the hell anybody was like under the skin?
I knew that to let him go on living would be greater punishment
than to put a quick end to his misery. But it would also be punishment for all the people he would continue to make miserable as long
as he was alive.
Or as long as he was able.

I put a hand on his shoulder and smiled at him and tucked the
Colt away under my coatflap. His eye went wide with alarm as if he
knew what was coming and he tried to break away but I seized a fistful of his hair and held his head fast as I brought out the icepick. He
screeched and shut his eye tight and I swiped the tip of the pick
through the pinched eyelid and a thin jet of bloody fluid caught the
sunlight for one sparking instant—and then his hand was over his eye
and blood was running between his fingers and he was screaming.

carried her to the Hudson and then cut the seatcovers out of the Cadillac and used them for a
shroud. I replaced the flat tire with the spare and
then followed our earlier tracks as I drove back around to

the south side of the mudpit. That’s where I buried her. I
dug the grave with the tire jack and my hands, working
shirtless. It was a long process even in that soft earth. My
shoulder wound opened again and blood streaked my
chest. When the hole was finally deep enough, I gently
laid her in it. And then I covered her up.

was slow and careful driving back and the tires
held up all the way. The sun was directly overhead
when I emerged from the scrub trail and pulled up
to the compound gate. LQ and Brando were sitting in ladderback chairs in the shade of the gate archway, staring at
me. I turned off the motor and got out of the car.

LQ’s left arm had been splinted and freshly bandaged
and it was cradled in a clean white sling. He held the
tommy gun under his good arm. Brando had the BAR
slung on his shoulder and wore no visible bandage but he
grimaced and pressed a hand to his side as he stood up.

“Thought you might be dead,” he said.
“Thought you might be,” I said.
LQ gestured at my bloody shirt. “You bad?”
“No. Who fixed you guys up?”
“Bunch of peons,” Brando said. “Took me over to a hut

and bandaged me pretty good. Then we come out here
and found this peckerwood still alive and they patched
him too.”

“From what I could make out, it was mostly bitching about
Calveras,” LQ said. “What a son of a bitch he was and how they hoped
he never come back and so on.”

“Well, he aint coming back,” I said.
“Glad to hear it,” LQ said. “Where’s—”
“She aint coming back either.”
They stared at me for a second. “Shit,” Brando said. “I’m sorry,

Jimmy.”
“
He
do her?” LQ said. His eyes gave away what he was really ask
ing. I figured he’d been thinking things over, his mind replaying the
exchange of gunfire with the guy in the car.
“Yeah. He did.”
He rubbed his eyes with his fingertips and let out a long breath.
Brando put his hand on my good shoulder. “Listen, Jimmy. What
say we quit this goddamn country and go home?”
“Let’s do it,” LQ said.
“Let’s,” I said.

ate that night we were back in Villa Acuña. Sanchez’s filling station was closed, and we left the Hudson parked in the rear of it.
The car looked a lot less snappy than it had two days ago. LQ wanted to
take the Thompson with us, but I said we’d never be able to smuggle it
past the border guards, and we left it in the car trunk with the BAR.

A norther had kicked up and steadily strengthened. It gusted hard
and cold. We turned up our collars and hugged our coats to us and
squinted against the blowing sand. We held tight to our hats as we
crossed the bridge. LQ yelled, “So long, Mexico!” and spat over the
railing—but just then the wind turned and slung the spit on his hat.
He cussed a blue streak and Brando laughed.

They slept as the train rocked through the night. I sipped coffee
and stared out at the moonlit landscape, catching sight of a lone coyote now and then, a solitary tumbleweed bounding alongside the
tracks. The country regained grass and hills and trees. Brando had
cleaned out my wound with tequila and bandaged it with a clean
cloth he got from somewhere, but the shoulder had stiffened through
the day and the ache of it ran deep under the muscle, down to the
bone.

We went through San Antonio, chugged through Seguin, Luling,
Columbus, and still I couldn’t sleep.
The day broke gray and very cold and the trees were shaking in the
wind. In Houston we changed trains. And then we were over Galveston Bay and at last I fell asleep for the few minutes it took to arrive
at the station.
We stepped down from the coach and here came Big Sam through
the crowd, smiling his movie star smile—then making a face of sympathy at the sight of LQ’s armsling. He shook our hands and said he
was happy to see us all back.
Rose was waiting at the station’s front doors.
“Welcome home, Kid.”
I nodded.
He smiled—and then led the way out, checking his watch as he
went, because there were things to tend to, as always. Deals to close,
payments to pick up, promises to collect on, warnings to deliver, accounts to settle...

“
Skin
knocks the wind out of you from the get-go. . . . Alluring, seductive,
and spontaneous. . . . A provocative novel. . . . A window into the soul of
man.”
—
USA Today

“Blake explores dark borderlands of the human spirit. He has rightfully
been hailed as one of the most original writers in America today and is
certainly one of the bravest.”
—
Chicago Sun-Times

“Blake has elevated bloodshed to a high art. . . .
Under the Skin
is a borderland noir about love and crime. The real borders it crosses, however,
are not just geographic.”
—
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“[A] gripping premise. . . . The historical detail is deftly deployed, and the
portrait of 1930s Galveston alone makes the book worthwhile. . . . A worthy addition to [Blake’s] growing canon.”
—
Publishers Weekly

“Blake knows how to tell an action-packed story. . . . His characters live
on the edge, seeking freedom and adventure, moving through a
Darwinian landscape in which life is nasty, brutish, and short. . . . The
fast-paced action keeps the pages turning.”
—
Dallas Morning News

“Blake has an uncanny knack for bringing our country’s violent past to life,
and for chronicling the arc of a character’s life . . . against the changing
backdrop of society.”
—
Poisoned Pen

“All Jim Harrison, James Crumley, and Jim Thompson fans—all
Peckinpah and Tarantino fans, too—this book is for you. Blake [is] a master of style and story . . . an acrobat with language, able to merge styles,
change moods, and evoke a rich variety of tones. This novel is full of stories within stories, passionate and heavy with the fragility, cruelty, heart,
and yearning of humanity.”
—
Square Books

“Blake clearly knows Texas and Mexican history and human nature. . . .
Jimmy Youngblood is at once terrifying and beautiful, a killer with a
poet’s soul.”
—
MostlyFiction

“Like his predecessors, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Blake
is a master of hard-boiled fiction. Like them, he depicts turbulent times
and the vicious ambience of the criminal underworld.”