Under the Skin

I left Rose and Sam talking business in the office and went into the lounge and ordered a bottle of beer. At that hour, there were only a few guys at the bar, a few couples at the tables. The place would start filling fast by suppertime and would as always be packed at midnight.

“Say, Kid!”

At the rear of the lounge, LQ stood in the doorway to the billiards room, a cue stick in one hand. He waved me over. Brando leaned into view around the door jamb and gave me a high sign, then stepped out of sight again.

I went to join them. They were shooting eight ball, best of three for five bucks, and had split the first two games.

“Got winners,” I said, and started searching the wall holder for my favorite cue.

“Why not just say you want to play me next?” LQ said. He was in good spirits. Brando had a fresh shiner under one eye.

“Quit the bullshit and shoot,” Brando said.

“Hard to tell who’s winning, aint it?” LQ said to me.

I found the cue I wanted and dusted my hands with talc and slicked up the stick.

The table was showing all of the stripes and only two solids other than the eight ball. LQ laid his cigarette aside and leaned into the light under the Tiffany tableshade and set himself to try banking the six ball into the side. He squinted in the shadow of his hatbrim, sighting and resighting on the six as intently as a surveyor peering through a transit.

He missed by half a foot. The six caromed off the cushion and went banging into several other balls and smacked the eight into a corner pocket.

Brando hooted and said, “Pay up, sucker.”

For all their bluster with a cue stick, neither of them could play worth a damn. I’d seen them knock the balls all over the table for more than half an hour before somebody finally scratched, which was the way most of their games were decided. It was rarely a matter of which of them would win, but who’d be the first to lose.

LQ peeled a five from a wad of greenbacks and flung it fluttering to the table. “Lucky bastard,” he said.

Brando laughed and tucked away the bill. “Like the man said, talent makes its own luck.” He turned to me and said, “Next!”

I fished the balls out of the pockets and racked them, then eased the wooden rack off the balls and returned it to its hook at the foot of the table. There had been a pool table at the ranch and over the years I’d become a fair hand with a cue. I was no match for the hustlers, but Brando and LQ wouldn’t play me for money anymore unless I gave three-to-one odds.

The strong point of Brando’s game was his break. As usual, he broke the balls with a crack like a sledgehammer. They ricocheted in a wild clatter, the seven falling in a corner, the four dropping in a side.

“Yes sir!” Brando said.

He called the two in the corner, straight and easy, and made it. Then cut the five into another corner. Then tapped the three in the side. He grinned at me and blew across the tip of his cue like he was clearing smoke from a rifle muzzle.

LQ groaned in his chair behind me and said, “Shooting out his ass.”

“One in the corner,” Brando called. It was a clear shot but he stroked it way harder than necessary and the yellow ball spasmed in the rim of the pocket before it dropped in.

Brando laughed and banged the heel of his cue on the floor. “Somebody stop me before I kill again.”

The only shot he had with the six was a cross-corner bank. He came close, but it didn’t fall.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

“Finally back to your normal game,” LQ said.

I sank seven in a row—bank shots, rail shots, combinations—and just like that, there was nothing left standing but Brando’s six and the eight ball.

But I hadn’t played the last shot well. The eight was positioned at one end of the table, near the center of the rail and an inch off the cushion, while the cue ball had ended up at the other end of the table and up against the rail.

“Got too cocky, hotshot,” Brando said. “Left yourself hard.”

“Five-buck side bet, two to one, says I sink it.” I tapped the corner pocket to my left. “Here.”

“Too much green and a bad angle,” Brando said. “You’re on.”

I formed a thumb bridge for the stick and set myself, then laid into the cue ball. It zoomed toward the eight and caught it just right and the black ball jumped off the cushion at an angle and came barreling down the table like it had eyes and vanished into the corner pocket.

“Whooo!” LQ hollered.

“Shit!” Brando said. He dug two fives out of his pocket and tossed them on the table. “That’s it. I aint playing you anymore. I don’t need this kind of humiliation.”

“Kind you usually get’s plenty enough, huh?” LQ said.

“Kiss my ass,” Brando said. “Let’s see you take him.”

I arched my brow at LQ and gestured toward the table.

“No thanks,” he said. “I’m short enough at the moment. I can just about make it to payday tomorrow.”

“Well hell,” I said, “if nobody’s going to play, let’s go park our asses in the bar and have a few.”

“Winners buy,” Brando said.

“It’s how come you always drink for free,” LQ said.

Out in the lounge I got us a pitcher of beer and we took a table in the corner. I filled the three glasses and we touched them in a toast and drank.

“Kinda surprised this morning when Momma Mia said we’d just us two be going to Alvin with a slot man,” LQ said. “I asked where you were and she just shrugs like she always does. Like she don’t know the time of day.”

“Poppa got you on a secret mission?” Brando said.

“Wish he did,” I said. I told them all about Rose’s talk with the Dallas guys and his suspicion that they might try to retaliate.

“You got to hang around all week?” Brando said. “Man, I like the Club, but I’d go crazy if I had to be here all the time for a week.”

“I agree with you and Sam,” LQ said. “Them Dallas peckerwoods aint gonna do a damn thing, not after how we done Willie Rags. They’d have to be the biggest dopes in Texas, and that’s saying plenty. Shit, let ’em try something. I could use the action.”

“Looks like you-all maybe got some action today,” I said, pointing at the bruise on Brando’s face.

“Oh man, the Shoes place,” LQ said. He cut a look at Brando. “Some fun, huh, Ramon?”

Brando shrugged and lit a cigarette.

LQ said that when they got to the Red Shoes Cabaret that morning, along with a slot mechanic named Freddie, the place was closed, of course, but there was an armed security guard at the door. LQ told him what they were there for and the guard said he couldn’t let anyone go in without permission from Mr. Dunlop or Mr. Garr, the partners who owned the place, and neither one of them was there at the moment. He expected them to show up sometime later but didn’t know exactly when.

“Jesus, what’s that?” LQ said, looking over the guard’s shoulder into the club. When the guard turned to look, LQ snatched the guy’s pistol from its holster and shoved him inside.

Brando took a quick look around the premises but there wasn’t anybody else around except a grayhaired Negro janitor. LQ made him and the guard sit down out of the way.

Freddie was almost through with his inspection of the machines when they heard a car drive into the lot. LQ pulled the guard up to the window and drew the blind aside just enough for them to peek out and see a Cadillac stop beside the Dodge. There were two men in the Caddy, and the guard said it was Dunlop and Garr.

The car doors opened and the men got out. They stood there looking at the Dodge a minute and then headed toward the cabaret’s front door. LQ told the guard to sit back down at the table and he and Brando took positions on opposite sides of the door with their guns ready.

The one named Garr came in first and stopped short when he saw Freddie standing at the bar with a toolbox beside a dismantled slot machine and the guard and janitor sitting there with their thumbs up their ass. He said “What the fuck you think—” and then shut up when LQ’s gun pressed against the side of his head.

The Dunlop guy had been a few steps behind Garr and stopped at the door when he saw what was happening. Before he could haul ass, Brando snatched him by the coat and pulled him inside. But the guy was no slouch—he grabbed Brando’s piece and tried to take it away from him.

“Son of a bitch snatched onto it like a damn bulldog on a bone,” Brando said. “We went banging against the tables and the bar, knocking over stools, both of us cussing a blue streak. He’s trying to get the piece and I’m mainly trying to keep it pointed away from me. Bastard was strong.”

“Ray finally jerks the gun away from the guy—but he was pulling straight back and hit hisself in the face with it,” LQ said, demonstrating the move. “About knocked hisself on his own ass. I’ve got the other fella by the collar with my piece to his ear and it’s a damn wonder I didn’t shoot him by accident I was laughing so hard.”

“Real funny,” Brando said.

“I gotta say, the old boy paid for it,” LQ said. “Ray just whaled on him with that gun—whap! whap! I expect the fella swallowed them top teeth he lost. I never did see them come out his mouth. When Ray got done with him the guy looked like he’d tried to stop a train with his face.”

“Son of a bitch,” Brando said softly, fingering his shiner.

But Dunlop’s troubles—and Garr’s too—had only just begun. When Freddie was done checking the machines, he handed LQ a piece of paper with a tally of the money the slots had taken in since they’d been rented by the Red Shoes Cabaret. LQ compared it to the slip of paper Rose had given him that showed the total slot receipts Dunlop and Garr had reported. The Red Shoes tally was way short.

“I told them fellas what the problem was,” LQ said, “and they started talking a mile a minute to try and explain things. The one with the busted mouth sounded like a retard, it was so hard for him to talk. I never did understand how these old boys who get caught with their hand in the jar figure they can say something that’s gonna make any damn difference.”

They made Dunlop hug one of the thick floor-to-ceiling support beams and made Garr hug another and they tied their hands around the posts with their own belts and gagged the men with their own neckties. Then Brando told the janitor to get him a hammer.

“Would’ve settled it for just a hand,” Brando said, “but that Dunlop bastard made me mad, so I did his foot too.”

“What about the Garr guy?” I said.

“Well hell, same thing,” Brando said. “They’re partners, aint they?”

“Share the profit,” LQ said, “share the loss.”

We all got nicely buzzed on another three pitchers while the afternoon dwindled away and the lounge windows turned pink with the sunset. When Brando asked what I’d done to celebrate the night before, I told them about having supper with Rose and then going to a cathouse, but I didn’t feel like talking about the fight, so I left that part out.

Brando said he would’ve been better off going to a cathouse too, considering the way things turned out for him with the French girl. When he’d arrived at Brigitte’s to pick her up for the party, she was already gone. She left a note saying she’d got tired of waiting and that the party was at such and such an address and she’d meet him there. So he went on over to the place, an apartment house by the wharves.

He said you could hear the shindig from three blocks away. The party took up the whole building, all eight apartments, with a different kind of music blasting in each one.

“Sounded like a goddam loony bin,” Brando said.

He searched through five apartments before he found her. She was dancing with two guys at once, one holding her from the front and one from the rear, and all three of them so drunk they weren’t really dancing as much as staggering around together.

Before Brando could make up his mind what to do—grab her away or start punching or what—the guy hugging her from behind suddenly puked a gusher over her shoulder, getting it all over her and the other guy both. That broke up the three-way dance in a hurry, Brando said. The puking guy backpedaled into the end of a sofa and fell over on a pair of necking couples who shoved him off on the floor and started kicking hell out of him. The other guy stood there staring down at his puked-on shirt and cussing. The Brigitte girl stumbled over to the wall and leaned against it and started doing some puking of her own.

“I have to say she pretty much lost all her glamour right there,” Brando said. “I left her to her fun and went on home, had a beer and hit the hay. Some New Year’s.”

“It’s what you get fooling around with them trashy women,” LQ said. “You got to find yourself a woman you can respect.”

“Oh man, if I have to hear about that Zelda again,” Brando said. “It’s all I’ve heard from this guy today—Zelda this, Zelda that.”

And of course he did have to hear it again, since LQ had to tell me all about her. His New Year’s Eve with the redhaired Hollywood Dinner Club hostess had been everything he’d hoped, although it had gotten off to a shaky start because she’d been miffed that he was late in picking her up. She’d heard enough about the Ghosts to accept his explanation that there was never any telling how long a job would take, but all the same she let him know she hated to be kept waiting. If a fellow were going to be tardy in arriving for a date, she told him, the least he could do was to call and let the lady know—it was the gentlemanly thing to do. LQ told her he agreed 100 percent and apologized for not having done the gentlemanly thing.

“From there on it was all smooth sailing,” LQ said. “Best time I’ve had in a while. Good dinner, nice dancing, a walk on the beach in our bare feet. Then over to her place for a little brandy and soft music. Then into the bedroom and off to the promised land.” He winked big. “She was worth the wait, I’ll tell you that much. Got a supper date with her again tonight.”

“Holy shit,” Brando said, looking alarmed. He leaned over the table to stare closely at LQ’s face. “What’s that in your eyes?”

“What?” LQ said, rubbing at his eyes and then checking his fingers.

“Oh…I see,” Brando said. “It’s only stardust.”

“Real funny,” LQ said. “I already told you, I’m just banging the woman, I aint courting her.”

“I bet that’s what he said both times before,” Brando said to me. “Dollar to a doughnut he marries her. Disaster number three, coming right up.”

“I don’t know if I should take that bet,” I said.

“Piss on both you,” LQ said. “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars apiece I never marry her. I’ll give you five to one I never.”

“What the hell kind of bet is that, you’ll never marry her?” I said. “Only way we can be sure you’ll never marry her is wait till you or her dies.”

“That’s right,” Brando said. “What if you wait to marry her when you’re sixty years old? You expect us to wait that long to collect? We got to have a time limit, none of this never bullshit.”

“Well, what about me?” LQ said, portioning out the remaining beer in the pitcher. “If I die before I marry her, I win the bet but I can’t even collect on it.” He paused in his pouring for a moment, frowning like somebody not real sure what he’d just said.

“Christ almighty,” Brando said. “Only some East Texas peckerwood would come up with a stupid-ass bet nobody can collect on.”

“Well now, he could collect if she died first,” I said. “He couldn’t marry a dead woman even if he wanted. I don’t believe it’s legal.”

“Can’t be, not in no civilized country,” Brando said. “So if she dies first, that settles it—he’ll never marry her and he can collect. But now hold on…what’s to keep him from killing her the minute he’s in need of two hundred bucks?”

I shrugged.

“You dickheads are drunk,” LQ said.

“Bet’s off,” Brando said. “I aint putting up a hundred bucks he can win by just shooting the bitch.”

“I knew you’d chicken,” LQ said.

“Chicken this,” Brando said, giving him the jack-off gesture.

While they were going at it I signaled the waitress for another pitcher. She brought it over as we were finishing the last of what we had on the table.

LQ squinted at his watch. “Goddamn, I’m supposed to be there already. I gotta get rolling.”

“Ah hell, have another beer,” Brando said. “You got plenty time.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She had such fun with you last night she won’t mind if you’re a few minutes late, not this time.”

“I aint gonna have no more such fun if she gets all out of sorts with me,” LQ said, collecting his cigarettes and lighter and putting them in his pocket.

“Christ sake, he gets it off her one time and already she’s got him pussywhipped,” Brando said.

That got LQ’s attention. “My ass,” he said. “You aint seen the day I been pussywhipped and you never will.”

“Here he comes again with never,” Brando said. He took a sip of his beer and turned so LQ couldn’t see his face and gave me a wink. He knew how to rile LQ as well as LQ knew how to rile him.

“Come on, pardner,” I said to LQ, pouring him another glassful. “Help us put a dent in this pitcher before you go.”

“Maybe you best give her a call,” Brando said. “Ask if it’s okay you have another beer.”

“Up yours,” LQ said.

I pushed the full glass over to him. “Here you go, bud. One for the road.”

“Pussywhipped,” LQ muttered, picking up his beer and giving Brando another hard look. “Every woman tried to pussywhip me I got my hat and gone. I’ve walked out on better pussy than you’ll ever see, pussy you’d beg for on your knees. I’ve turned my back on better pussy than you beat off to in your dreams.”

One for the road turned into two more pitchers before he finally left. Brando and I ordered steak sandwiches and stayed put.

The following evening, after I spent another boring day in town while Brando and LQ made collections around Pearland and Katy, we got together for supper again. Brando threatened to go sit at another table if LQ got started on the subject of his fiasco with Zelda the night before, but he only muttered “Here we go again” and rolled his eyes as LQ went ahead and told me about it.

Zelda had been so furious with him for being more than two hours late she wouldn’t even open her door to talk to him. She said she’d call the cops if he didn’t quit all his hollering and banging on the door and go away, and so he finally did.

“I keep telling you,” Brando said, “it’s what you get for fooling around with them snooty hostess types.”

“Goddammit, I don’t see why she couldn’t even let me explain.”

“Explain what?” Brando said. “How we put a gun to your head and made you get drunk on your ass?”

“Maybe I’ll go see her at the Hollywood. She can’t hide from me there.”

“Swell idea,” I said. “Rose and Sam always get a kick out of employees arguing in front of the customers, especially at their fanciest place. Make a big enough scene and Rose’ll probably give you both a bonus for being so entertaining.”

“Goddamn it,” LQ said.

“Hell with her, man,” Brando said. “Kick the bitch out of your mind.”

A few more beers into the evening LQ decided on the age-old cure for getting a woman out of your mind—namely, by replacing her with another one. He and Brando had to make a collection run the next day, first to Baytown and then over to Port Arthur, a few miles south of Orange, where LQ had once had a girlfriend named Sheila. He hadn’t seen her in about six months, not since they’d had a bad argument about something, he couldn’t remember what.

“You reckon she’s still living there?” he said. “I wonder if she’s still red-assed at me. Could be she’s married, huh?”

“I know how you can find out all that,” Brando said. He nodded at a telephone booth in an alcove across the room.

So LQ gave Sheila a call. And discovered that she still lived in the same place and she wasn’t married. Yes, she was glad to hear from him, and yes, she would like to see him again too. Yes, tomorrow night would be just dandy—just be sure and bring a little something to drink because she was running low and payday was a long way off. And yes, she remembered his friend Ray Brando, and yes, she could get a friend for him.

“I aint heard so much of yes in a coon’s age,” LQ told us back at the table. His spirits were vastly improved.

Brando was as pleased about the phone call as LQ. “You think she’ll be goodlooking, the friend?” he said.

“She’d have to be a goddamn calendar girl to be any better looking than Sheila,” LQ said.

“I wouldn’t object any to a calendar girl,” Brando said.

“You know, if things go good tomorrow night,” LQ said, “we ought make a damn weekend of it.”

“Be all right with the office if we don’t turn in the pickup money till Monday?” Brando asked me.

“I’ll square it with Mrs. Bianco. Just leave me this Sheila’s phone number and don’t wander off from her place for too long.”

“Shitfire, man—if things go right, we won’t leave her place at all for the whole two days.”

“Things go right I aint even leaving the bed,” Brando said. “I aint coming up for air.”

“Better days,” I said, raising my glass.

“With no damn memories of Zelda,” Brando said to LQ as our three glasses came together.

“Zelda who?” LQ said.

Friday crawled by even more slowly than the previous two days. None of the Maceo informants had heard so much as a hint that the Dallas guys were planning any kind of move on us. Rose was starting to think Sam and I were probably right—they weren’t going to try anything. “Guess I’m getting jumpy in my old age,” he said.

I spent the rest of the morning in the gym. While I was going through my workout, Otis reminded me of our sparring session for ten o’clock the next morning.

“I could use that ten o’clock slot to make me some lessons money if you can’t make it for some reason,” he said.

“I’ll be here, Otis.”

He grinned big. “Well all right then.” He couldn’t wait to get me back in that ring.

I had lunch on the Strand again, then took in another movie, The Bride of Frankenstein, which mostly made me laugh. Then I went over to the beach and took off my coat and shoes and walked along the edge of the water for a while. It was about time for my twice-a-month swim. In winter the gulf usually got damn chilly, but I always made my swim anyway, even though I had to muster as much grit just to bear the coldness of the water as to swim way out and back in the dark. But the early part of this winter had so far been generally mild and the light surf on my feet felt only a little cooler than usual.

I took supper at a seafood joint across the street from the shrimp docks. They made the best red snapper in town, basting it with a sauce of garlic and lime. While it was being prepared I had a frosted schooner of beer and a platter of raw oysters on the half shell, dabbing each one with horseradish before slurping it down, then I finished off a mess of cold boiled shrimps the size of my thumb.

I checked in with Rose at the Club again, then ran into Sam at the bar and we had a drink together.

“Say, Jimmy. What do you call a girl who’s always got the clap, the syph, and a bush full of crabs?”

“I give.”

“An incurable romantic.”

He checked his watch and said with a wink that he had an appointment to keep and took off. I finished my drink and called it a night and headed for La Colonia.

On the past two nights, the whole neighborhood had been dark and asleep by the time I got in, but at this earlier hour the Avila house were still showing light in some of its windows when I came walking down the lane.

As I passed by the Avila place I sensed a movement in the shadows alongside the house. I stopped and pretended to be trying to read my wristwatch by the Mechanic Street lamppost’s weak glow of light through the trees, turning my wrist this way and that, all the while checking out the shadows across the street from under my hatbrim.

A dark shape moved by the bushes beside the house, and then I lost sight of it. It couldn’t be Avila or anybody in his family. What would they be doing out there in the dark? Even if it had been one of them, they would’ve seen me in the lane and recognized me and said something. A prowler, I figured, some passing tramp just in on a freight car and looking for an easy grab. The neighborhood had been without a watchdog ever since the Gutierrez brothers’ mutt had chased a stray cat out into the railyard and been run over by a train.

I strolled on down the lane until I came abreast of the hedge between the Ortega and Morales properties where a fat oak momentarily blocked my silhouette from the Casa Verde porch light—and then I ducked behind the hedge and ran in a crouch till I was out of the line of sight of the Avila house. I cut over into the Morales backyard through a break in the hedge where the kids always crossed, then paused low to the ground and listened hard, but I heard only the brief groan of a ship’s horn from the docks across the tracks. It was another cloudy night and the moon was a dim glow hard to spot through the trees. The darkness behind the houses was deep as a well.

I advanced slowly across the Morales yard to the shrubbery bordering the Avila sideyard, where I’d seen the prowler. I pulled the .44 from its shoulder holster and held it uncocked down against my leg.

I stood in a half-crouch and listened. Nothing. Maybe the guy had seen me duck behind the hedge and figured that I’d be doubling back. He could’ve hustled out of the Colonia while I was crossing the Morales yard. On the other hand, he would’ve had time to set himself for me. I stared through the shrubbery without trying too hard to fix on anything, letting my lax focus catch whatever movement it might.

Nothing.

I slowly stepped through the shrubs and into the Avila sideyard, the damp leaves brushing my hand, my face. I paused and listened again. I thought I heard something in the backyard. I eased over toward the rear of the house, then stopped at the corner and leaned around to look. Nothing but unmoving shadowy forms. I knew that the large bulky shape toward the rear of the yard was a toolshed. Could be he was hiding in its deeper shadow, looking my way as hard as I was looking his, having as much trouble making anything out clearly. I figured I’d cross the yard at an angle, then come around behind the shed.

Midway across the yard, I saw a low dark form ahead of me. Was that him? Crouching in wait for me to get closer so he could make out my shape a little better? See where my head was so he could take a swipe at it with a club? Take a slash at my throat?

I put my thumb on the Colt’s hammer and kept my eyes on the shape and edged up to it, ready to cock and shoot the instant it came at me. But it didn’t move. When I got up to it I could see it wasn’t a man but still couldn’t tell what it was. I crouched and touched it. A wheelbarrow.

I should have been watching the toolshed. He came out from behind it and said, “No te mueves, carajo.”

I stared up at his vague dark shape and froze in my crouch.

And then he was suddenly and starkly illuminated in a flood of light from behind me—thick-bellied, large-headed, and hatless, heavy-jowled, the muzzle of his double-barreled twelve-gauge a foot from my face. In the instant that he gaped blindly into the glare, I lunged up and snatched the shotgun barrel aside and both barrels discharged, the muzzles flaring yellow.

I hit him on the head with the Colt and he wavered but clung to the shotgun and I hit him again and he lost his grip and fell to all fours. I couldn’t believe he was still conscious. I was about to whack him once more but voices were hollering in Spanish, yelling my name and saying stop, stop, don’t hit him, he’s a friend.

I squinted into the blaze of the open kitchen door and saw Avila and his wife standing there. Then Avila ran down and started helping the guy to his feet. I tucked away the Colt and gave him a hand, still holding to the shotgun. The señora was urging us from the kitchen doorway to hurry because someone surely heard the gunblast and might be calling the police, but I wasn’t too worried about that. Nobody in La Colonia was going to report a shot, and even if somebody out on Mechanic had heard it, it was unlikely they’d notify the cops either. In this part of town people knew to mind their own business. The neighbors’ usual reaction to the sound of gunshots was to turn up their radios.

We got the guy upright and helped him over to the steps and up into the kitchen. Avila kicked the door shut. I propped the shotgun against the wall.

And there, standing beside Señora Avila, was the girl.

Her name was Daniela Zarate. Avila said she was the goddaughter of his aunt and uncle. Up close she was even prettier than she’d looked in the passing Ford, and my face went warm for a moment with the same inexplicable sensation I’d had the first time our eyes met.

I bowed slightly and said, “Encantado, señorita.”

I thought she was about to smile, but she didn’t. She nodded at me without saying anything. I guessed her age at about twenty. She seemed not to recognize me, though I’d been sure she had seen my face as clearly as I’d seen hers.

The guy I’d clobbered, Avila said, was his cousin, Felipe Rocha, who was visiting from Brownsville. Avila invited me to have a cup of coffee and I sat at the dining table with him and Rocha. He offered to take my hat, but I said that was all right and held it on my lap. It was all I could do to keep from turning around to watch the girl in the kitchen as she brewed the coffee.

Señora Avila had bundled some ice cubes in a dishcloth to make a clumsy ice pack for Rocha. He accepted it in place of the wadded towel he’d been pressing to his crown. I had hit him in almost the same spot both times and you could see the raw swelling through his hair. It was surprising there wasn’t more blood. Even minor scalp wounds usually bled so much they looked a lot worse than they were. The guy had a brick head. His nose was offset and he was missing the lobe on his left ear and a wormy white scar curved along the outer edge of his right eye socket and ended on his cheekbone. He’d been in some serious disagreements. Holding the ice pack like a man keeping his cap from blowing off in the wind, he scowled at me across the table. I gave him a look right back.

Avila repeatedly apologized to us both—to me for being accosted by Rocha’s shotgun, to Rocha for the knocks on the head.

“What were you doing out there, anyway?” I asked Rocha.

“Qué?” he said. He looked like he wanted to leap over the table at me.

“Felipe, he doesn’t understand English so good,” Avila said.

So I asked Rocha in Spanish.

What the hell was I doing sneaking up on the house, Rocha wanted to know.

I said I thought he was a prowler.

He said he thought I was one.

Felipe was a man of precautions, Avila said, and had insisted on checking around the outside of the house every evening before going to bed.

A guy who didn’t know everybody in the neighborhood, I said, had no business assuming that somebody was a prowler just because he didn’t recognize him. And a man should be damn careful about who he pointed a gun at.

Rocha said a man ought to be goddamn careful about who he hit with a gun too.

Señora Avila brought out more ice for Rocha’s pack and said for us to stop speaking so meanly to each other, for the love of God. Could we not be grateful that no one had been badly hurt?

Rocha cut a look at her as if to dispute her notion that no one had been badly hurt, and Avila narrowed his eyes in rebuke of her for intruding into men’s business. She made a face at her husband and retreated to the kitchen.

Daniela, Avila said, would be living with his family for a while. He told me her father had been a fisherman in Veracruz, where she’d been born and had lived all her life, but a year ago his boat had foundered in a bad storm in the gulf and he and his crewman drowned. And then some months later an outbreak of yellow fever took her mother among its victims. An orphan at seventeen and with no other living kin, the poor girl had made her way to Brownsville to live with her godparents—Avila’s aunt and uncle—who were now naturalized American citizens. They had become her godparents in Veracruz, where they’d lived for many years and had been best friends to Daniela’s mother and father before moving to Brownsville ten years ago to care for their only daughter, a young and childless widow in frail health who died the year before last.

Daniela was a fine seamstress, Avila said, and could have easily found work in some Matamoros or Brownsville dress shop, but she didn’t much like the border country and who could blame her? She and her godfather—and her godfather’s nephew, Felipe—had come to Galveston to celebrate the New Year with the Avilas. As soon as they arrived on the island Daniela decided that she preferred it to the Rio Grande Valley. When the Avilas learned of her situation they offered to let her live with them until she found work and could afford quarters of her own, and with her godfather’s permission she’d accepted. They had but one bedroom in their house, so she would sleep on their sofa.

There was something strained in the way Avila told all this, like somebody who’d memorized the words to a song but still hadn’t got the tune quite right. It didn’t make any sense for them to lie to me. I wasn’t somebody from outside La Colonia, somebody to whom there was good reason to lie—such as immigration agents or the police or any stranger at all.

Then again, maybe I was reacting out of professional habit, sensing untruth where there was nothing more than nervousness. Maybe the Avilas were simply rattled by the scrap I’d had with Rocha and still afraid cops might come around to investigate the shotgun blast. Whatever the case, I didn’t give their nervousness much attention, not with the girl so close by. Even as I listened to Avila and exchanged hard looks with Rocha, I wasn’t unaware of her for a second.

While Avila had been talking, his wife set out cups, saucers and spoons, a bowl of sugar. Now Daniela went around the table and poured coffee for us. As she leaned beside me to fill my cup I caught the smell of her, a faint scent like a mix of sea wind and grass. Her fingers looked strong. She appeared uninterested in what Avila had been saying, as if he were talking about somebody besides her. She finished serving and took the coffeepot back to the kitchen.

“What about this guy?” I said, nodding at Rocha.

“Qué?” Rocha said, glowering.

Felipe would soon be taking the train back to Brownsville, Avila said. The poor fellow had been sleeping on the floor. He had only stayed here in case Daniela changed her mind about living in Galveston after a few days and needed someone to accompany her back to the border.

And would Señorita Daniela, I asked Avila, be seeking a job as a seamstress?

I looked over my shoulder into the kitchen. She stood with her back to us, helping Avila’s wife do the dishes at the sink. If she’d heard my mention of her name she gave no sign of it. Her calves flexed as she went up on her toes to replace a dish in the overhead cabinet. Her hips were roundly smooth and slim. Her blouse was slightly scooped in the rear to expose a portion of her brown back and the play of muscle as she hung a cup on its hook on the wall. She dropped a dishcloth and bent to retrieve it and the light gleamed along the upper ridge of her spine. She’d knotted her hair up behind her head but a few black tendrils dangled on her neck.

I turned back around and saw Rocha staring at her too.

Most probably the girl would find work in a dress shop, Avila said. But he and his wife had told her she should rest herself for a few days more before she started looking for employment.

I took out my cigarettes and offered one to Avila, who politely accepted it, then shook up another one in the pack and extended it to Rocha. He hesitated a moment and then took the smoke with his free hand and gave me a grudging nod of thanks. Avila struck a match and lit us up.

We smoked and sipped at our coffee in an awkwardly growing silence. I was hoping Daniela would join us—but of course she would not, nor would Señora Avila. It wasn’t a social gathering at the table but an affair of men. After another minute, I snuffed my cigarette in the ashtray and stood up, saying I had to be on my way.

She was still at the sink with her back to the door, folding a dishtowel. Señora Avila came out of the kitchen, her expression somewhat uncertain. I thanked her for the coffee and apologized for any distress I may have caused her. Then I called to the girl in the kitchen, “Buenas noches, señorita. Mucho gusto de conocerle.”

She turned to look at me. “Buenas noches, señor.”

Avila escorted me to the front door. I put my hat on and looked back and saw her watching me from beside the dining table.

From the moment we’d been introduced I’d been wondering how I might go about seeing her again. And now, before I knew I was going to do it, I said, “Con permiso, señorita. Me gustaría invitarle a—”

“I speak English,” she said, with only a mild accent. And smiled at me for the first time.

I was so surprised, I said, “Yes, you do”—and felt like a moron.

Everyone was looking from me to her, her to me.

“Well,” I said, “I was wondering…there’s a café just a few blocks from here, over by the train station—the Steam Whistle, it’s called—and, ah, they serve a pretty good breakfast, and…I was wondering if you might want to go with me tomorrow. For breakfast.”

Smooth, I thought, really slick. You babbling jackass—what the hell’s with you?

“Qué le dijo?” Rocha said. He was looking from Avila to his wife, but they were both staring at me and ignored him.

“I would be pleased to accompany you to the café,” she said. “What time should I expect you?”

“Well, is…seven o’clock? That okay? I mean if that’s too early…”

“Seven o’clock is…o-kay,” she said, sounding the word like she hadn’t used it before and like she found it fun to say. “I shall be ready.”

I was tickled by the “shall” and grinned like a fool.

“Okay then,” I said. “Seven it is.”

Rocha looked angry. The Avilas seemed confused. I tipped my hat and said, “Buenas noches a todos,” returned her smile across the room, and took my leave.

I skipped down the front steps and practically danced all the way to the Casa Verde.

They find La Perla cantina on a muddy street in a ramshackle neighborhood on the swampy east side of Matamoros. A windless rain falls steadily from a black sky. They step out of the taxi and Gustavo curses the mud on his new shoes and the cuffs of his tan trousers, the rainwater spotting his Stetson. The air is heavy with the smells of muck and rotted vegetation. Angel tells the driver to wait for them and gives him the slightly smaller half of a torn bill of large denomination.

The place is dimly lighted and roughly furnished. A radio on the backbar plays ranchero music. There are only three customers on this miserable night, two of them at a table and a solitary drinker at the end of the bar. The bartender is reading a newspaper spread open on the bartop. He has a fresh black eye swollen half-shut and his lips are bruised and bloated. He doesn’t look up from the paper until they are at the bar—and then his battered face comes alert. La Perla receives few patrons so well dressed as these two.

He puts aside the paper and spreads his hands on the bar and asks their pleasure. Gustavo pulls open his coat just enough to let him see the pistol in its holster and tells him in a low voice not to move his hands from the bar or he will shoot him where he stands.

Angel turns to look at the three drinkers, who all cut their eyes away. “Oigan!” he says, and they return their attention to him. He tells them he and his partner are policemen and the bar is being closed for improprieties. Anyone still in the place in one minute will be arrested. The three men bolt out the door and Angel goes over and locks it.

Gustavo asks the bartender if he has a gun hidden anywhere on the premises and the man says no. He says that if this is a holdup they’re going to be disappointed with the take.

Gustavo tells him they are collectors for the Monterrey gambling house called La Llorona and they have been searching for him all over the states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. And now, thanks to a tip, they’ve finally found him.

Angel asks if he really thought he could get away with owing La Llorona ten thousand pesos.

The bartender’s face is pinched in fearful incomprehension. He swears he doesn’t know what they’re talking about, that he’s never been in La Llorona.

“Ah, Victor,” Gustavo says, “no me digas mentiras.”

Victor? the bartender says. Who the hell’s Victor? They’ve got the wrong guy. His name’s Luis. His brother Guillermo owns this place and maybe he knows this Victor son of a bitch. They can ask him when he comes in later in the evening.

Angel laughs and asks Gustavo if he can believe the nerve of this guy, denying he’s Victor Montoya.

“Pero yo no soy Victor Montoya,” the bartender says. He swears it on the Holy Mother. “Me llamo Arroyo, Luis Arroyo.”

Angel and Gustavo smile at him. And only now does Luis Arroyo begin to understand that he has been tricked—and to sense that he has seen these men before. And then he remembers. Yes. At Las Cadenas. They were driving up to the casa grande in a convertible with a dead man tied across the hood. He feels a sudden urge to urinate.

Gustavo goes around the counter and Luis Arroyo tries to turn to face him without moving his hands from the bartop. Gustavo hits him hard in the kidney and Arroyo collapses into a whimpering heap. Gustavo takes off his coat and hands it to Angel who drapes it over a barstool. Then Gustavo squats down behind the bar to interrogate Luis Arroyo.

The thing is done in less than ten minutes. Cursing softly, Gustavo stands up and wets a portion of a bar towel with water and dabs at a small bloodstain on his shirt. Angel gestures for a bottle of tequila and Gustavo sets it and a couple of shot glasses on the bar. Angel pours them both a drink and they toss them back and Angel refills both glasses.

They have learned that Arroyo agreed to help la señora effect her getaway and get over the border in exchange for several pieces of jewelry that she assured him would fetch a sizable price. She had given him part of his payment before they set out and the rest when he delivered her to a certain house in Brownsville, Texas, which he accomplished with the help of a smuggler acquaintance who showed them where to ford the river upstream of the international bridge. When he crossed back to Matamoros, however, Arroyo had been set upon by robbers who beat him up and stole his jewelry. He cursed the meanness of this goddamned world and the brute injustice of life until Gustavo painfully brought him back to the matter at hand and such germane details as the address of the Brownsville house.

He described it as a yellow house on Levee Street, just off the main boulevard, with a short fat palm in the middle of the yard. La señora said the place belonged to friends of hers, but she had not told anything about them, not even their names.

Now Angel leans over the bar and looks down at Luis Arroyo. He says for Luis to have a drink and pours a stream of tequila into Arroyo’s upturned bloody face and open unseeing eyes, onto his head, comically angled on the broken neck.

A deep-orange sun was breaking over the trees and rooftops when I returned to the Avila’s front door. I’d shined up my boots and I was wearing a white suit fresh from the cleaners and a brand-new fedora. It had taken me a long while to fall asleep the night before, but it hadn’t occurred to me till I awakened that I should’ve gotten up earlier and gone to the Club to get a car. If Rose was already there he would’ve let me use the Lincoln.

She answered the door herself, and good as her word she was ready.

“Good morning,” she said. The sight of her set a butterfly loose under my ribs.

Señora Avila stood behind her, looking pleased. Whatever had been worrying her the night before, she was over it. Avila rose from his chair at the dining table and called hello. He was in visibly better spirits also. He invited me in for a cup of coffee but I said I had an appointment this morning and had just enough time for breakfast.

Rocha was still sullen, staring hard at me from the sofa where he sat with a cup of coffee. A white pad bandage on top of his head was held in place with a cloth strip knotted under his chin so it looked like he was wearing some kind of ridiculous bonnet. He knew what I was smiling at and gave me a rude hand gesture, which only made me chuckle.

It was another unseasonably warm morning. The only clouds were to the south, far over the gulf. She was dressed for the weather in a light yellow blouse much like the one she had worn the night before—without sleeves and with small scoops in front and back—a white skirt, open-toed leather sandals. As we started up the lane I apologized for not having a car, but she said she wouldn’t have wanted to ride anyway, she liked to walk, especially on such a lovely day. Her black hair hung long and loose and she swept it back over her shoulders.

I had spoken in Spanish, but she had answered in her slightly stilted English. I asked which language she preferred we use.

“In what country are we?” she said, giving me a sidewise look that made me laugh.

“Okay, girl. Whatever lingo you want.”

“Lingo?” she said. Then brightened and said, “Ah, lengua…lingo. Yes.”

We went along Mechanic and then turned toward the rail station, chatting all the while about what a pretty day it was and how the smell of the sea was especially sweet in the early morning. She said she loved the sea. She had grown up breathing its scent in Veracruz and she missed it when she went to Matamoros, which was more than twenty miles inland.

“In Matamoros the smell was always of dead things and the river mud,” she said.

In daylight her hair looked even blacker than it had the night before and it gleamed dark blue when the sun struck it at a certain angle. Her eyes seemed darker, brighter. Her skin was the color of caramel. I took her hand to cross the street to The Steam Whistle, which stood opposite the train station. She had a strong cool grip and she laughed as we scooted through a break in the traffic.

The café was small—a half-dozen tables, a row of stools along a short counter, four booths in the rear. Except for the rare mornings when I ate at the Casa Verde, this was where I always came for breakfast. I liked the place so much that I paid the owner, a balding guy named Albert Moss, fifteen dollars a month to reserve a particular table for me every morning from six to nine o’clock, in the corner by the big front window. All the regular customers knew whose table it was.

I hadn’t been in for the past few days, and when Albert saw us he raised his spatula in greeting from the grill behind the counter. I gave him a nod and held Daniela’s chair and then sat across from her. The table’s little hand-printed RESERVED sign couldn’t have looked more out of place except in front of a barstool but it was necessary for warding off strangers who stopped in. I turned it facedown. She didn’t remark on it—or on all of the sidelong attention we’d attracted from the other patrons. She was the first one I’d ever brought in here.

The café was a family business run by Albert and his wife, and on Saturdays their teenage daughter Lynette came in to lend a hand. The girl brought us coffee and checked-cloth napkins and sets of silverware. She said, “Hi, Jimmy,” but couldn’t keep her eyes off Daniela. I introduced them and they beamed at each other.

I knew the little menu by heart but Lynette had brought one to the table for Daniela in case she wanted to look at it. Daniela asked what I was going to eat. I said the fried tomatoes were pretty good—they were coated with bread crumbs seasoned with garlic and pepper—and I was going to have them with scrambled eggs and toast. “I’m eating light this morning but I recommend the smoked sausage to you,” I said.

“Then that’s what I will have,” Daniela told Lynette. The girl gave her another radiant smile and took our order to her father.

“Why do you eat…light…this morning?” she said.

“Gotta be quick on my feet today,” I said, and made a little running motion with two fingers along the tabletop.

She was about to say something to that, then checked herself. I asked where she’d learned to speak English and she said in a Catholic school called Escuela de Los Tres Reyes. She had practiced every day with her teachers and classmates, and with store owners along her route between home and school who spoke English well.

I asked if she’d mind if I smoked and she said no, then shook her head when I offered a cigarette. We looked out the window at the people passing on the sidewalk, the cluster of traffic in front of the train station, then turned to each other and started to speak at the same time—and both laughed.

I said, “You first,” but she said, “No, you,” and insisted on it.

“I only wanted to say I’m sorry about the loss of your parents,” I said. “Your mother…I mean, having lost your mother so recently must be hard for you.”

“Yes,” she said, with no tone at all.

It was obvious she didn’t care to talk about it, so I said, “Why did you leave Veracruz? Since you liked it so much, I mean. Didn’t you have kinfolk there, relatives you could’ve stayed with?”

“No, there was no one.” She looked out the window and then back at me. “I am happy to be here.”

“I can understand why. Galveston’s an interesting place.”

“Yes, I like Galveston, but I mean I am happy to be here.” She patted the tabletop.

“Oh. Well, I’m glad.” More Mr. Smooth.

“This town reminds me of Veracruz. Where we lived, you could see…el malecón?—the seawall?”

“Yes. Seawall.”

“The seawall,” she said. “You could see the seawall from the window of our house. You could see the beach. I went swimming every day, from the time I was a little girl. Do you swim?”

I told her of never having seen the ocean until two years ago and how I had learned to swim, and of my habit of going for a long swim every two weeks. I left out the part about how much the gulf had scared me when I first saw it.

She was awed by the idea that I’d not looked on the sea until I was grown, and was impressed that I had taught myself to swim. But she couldn’t understand why I didn’t go swimming more often.

“Every day since I have been here,” she said, “I have felt such…gana. Como se dice gana?”

“Urge,” I said. “Hankering. Desire…”

“Desire, yes. I have felt such desire to go swimming. I asked the señor and Señora Avila if they would escort me to the beach tomorrow when they do not have to go to work, and the señora said yes but the señor said no. He believes the women’s bathing suits are indecent. His face became red when the señora said he enjoys to look at the other girls on the beach but could not bear the shame if a woman in his company exposed her legs to the world.”

She turned her palms up and made a face of incomprehension.

The thought of her exposed legs deepened my breath. I cleared my throat. “What about Rocha? Why doesn’t he take you to the beach?”

“That one.” She rolled her eyes. “He will not go to the beach. He does not say why but I think he is afraid. I think he fears even the sight of the sea. Can you imagine?”

I shook my head and made a puzzled face to convey inability to imagine a man afraid of the sea.

“I suppose I will have to go to the beach by myself, if no one will accompany me.”

She gave me a look I’d seen from other women. From them it had been a clear invitation to an invitation, but with this one I couldn’t be sure.

“Well,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but…I mean, we just met and I don’t want to offend…”

She gave my shin a light kick under the table and said in a low voice, “Be brave!” She covered her smile with her hands but it was 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 American children—the Anglos, I mean—did they…make funny 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.”

“The macho hombre was a macho boy.”

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 Mexican-looking 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 our dishware. She complimented Daniela on her outfit, saying she 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.

“I oughta kill you,” I said. “I could do it easy.”

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.

Neither of us spoke till we were halfway home, and then Reuben 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, and Reuben and I would not be going back to the school anyway. She said she didn’t believe we were learning very much from the teachers and she had been thinking of tutoring us herself, and now she was decided on it.

Uncle Cullen grumbled a while longer during dinner about those Rogerson hillbillies out of Missouri, but the episode was closed. He was boss of the YB crews and range, but my aunt ruled the family and all matters in it…

“You see?” Daniela said, her hands braiding her hair behind her head, her breasts pushing tightly against her blouse. Lynette was watching Daniela’s hands and trying to do the same with her own hair. Albert called to the girl to quit pestering us and come get a ready order. Lynette made a face but Daniela told her she should get back to her duties, that she’d help her braid her hair some other time, when the café wasn’t so busy.

“Promise?” Lynette said. Daniela nodded and patted the girl’s hand. The girl poured more coffee for us and took up our plates and hustled off to take care of the waiting orders.

“Looks like you have an admirer,” I said.

“She’s nice,” Daniela said, undoing the braided length of her hair and shaking it free. “So. Tell me, why did you leave the ranch?”

“Oh, things changed. There was one of those epidemics that hit the border every so often, one disease or another. I don’t even remember what this one was, exactly, but both Reuben and Uncle Cullen got hit with it. They got sicker and sicker for almost a week and then died within a day of each other. It all happened pretty fast. Aunt Ava couldn’t bear to stay on at the ranch without them, so she sold the place and moved away to Denver. She had kinfolk there. She asked me to go with her, but a vaquero buddy of mine knew of a ranch just outside San Antone where we could hire on, so we did. A few months later I got a notion to come to Galveston, get a look at the sea. And here I am.”

I thought it was a pretty good lie. Up to now the only lie I’d told her was about my father—but hell, what did that matter? I had believed the same lie myself for most of my life and so what? But I hadn’t wanted to complicate things with her, and the truth about my leaving the ranch would’ve required a lot of explaining and maybe even confused her. So I’d lied. Not because I wanted to deceive her or because I was afraid of the truth—the reasons most people lie—but only to keep things simple.

“I am sorry for you,” she said. “There has been so much terrible misfortune in your family.”

“Hell, there’s probably not a family anywhere that hasn’t had its share of rough luck.”

“Do you and your aunt write letters to one another?”

“Not as often as we used to. She’s got a pretty busy life. I’m glad for her.”

She nodded, then looked out the window and sipped at her coffee. I lit a cigarette.

We sat in silence for a minute. Then she turned to face me and said, “I have seen you before. Four nights ago. You were in a car on the street when we went by. You looked directly at me. But when Señor Avila introduced us, you didn’t remember.”

“Yes I did. But I thought you didn’t remember, so I didn’t say anything.”

“Truly?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Truly.”

She stared down into her coffee cup for a moment. “After you departed last night, Señor Avila spoke about you.”

“Oh?” I’d figured he would have.

“He said you work for a powerful man named Don Rosario.”

I waited.

She looked up. “He believes you are a pistolero for this man.”

I looked out the window at people passing by on the way to the next part of their lives. Then turned back to her and shrugged and said, “People who gossip like to dramatize things. I collect money for my employers. I drive here and there and collect account payments and bring them back to the office. To tell the truth, it’s pretty dull work.”

“Do you always have with you the pistol you had last night?”

“I sometimes collect a lot of money in a day’s work, and the world’s full of thieves. I’ve gotten used to carrying it.”

All true.

She studied my eyes like she was trying to see behind them. “Señor Avila says everyone of La Colonia is pleased that you live among them. They feel protected by the nearness of you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that so I just shrugged.

Lynette delivered breakfast to a nearby table and then asked if we were ready for more coffee. I checked my watch and shook my head. “We have to get.” I left the money for the bill on the table, including a bigger tip than usual.

I took her hand again to cross the busy street and we didn’t let go of each other till we were back at La Colonia.

At the Avila front door I said I’d come by for her just after dark, about six-thirty. I told her to wear her bathing suit under her dress and bring a towel.

She said she’d be ready, then waggled her fingers at me and went inside.

I headed for the Club.

As he had told his wife he would do on his way back from Galveston, Oscar Picacho stopped off in Corpus Christi to visit with his cousin Ernesto. They went fishing in the bay in Ernesto’s boat and caught snapper and dorado and they filleted and grilled the fish in Ernesto’s backyard. They smoked cigars and got happily half-drunk and told funny stories of their boyhood days in Reynosa. It had been an altogether fine time. And now, on this late Saturday morning more than three days after leaving the Avila house, Oscar Picacho steers his trusty green Model T onto the narrow dirt driveway alongside his Brownsville home.

He calls to his wife as he comes through the front door and into his small living room and catches only a glimpse of Teresa where she sits on the sofa—her eyes large and terrified, her hands gripping her knees—before Angel Lozano’s pistol barrel crashes into the side of his head and the room tilts and he hears Teresa’s scream as something distant and cut off almost as soon as it begins and he is only vaguely aware of hitting the floor on his face.

He regains consciousness to find himself beside his wife on the sofa, his hands tied behind him, his face and mustache dripping with water flung on him to bring him to his senses, his shirt soaked. The right side of his head feels misshapen and pains him from crown to jaw. Teresa now with her hands bound before her and a gag in her mouth, her face bright with tears.

Angel Lozano and Gustavo Mendez loom over them, their foul mood in their faces, a mood made worse by their having been cloistered in this little house for more than two days while they awaited Oscar’s return. In that time they have learned much from Señora Picacho: that the Picachos had known the girl as a child in Veracruz and always loved her and despised her parents for their miserable neglect of her, and in their letters to her over the years they constantly reminded her that she was always welcome in their home, which was why she had come to them on fleeing Las Cadenas; that the girl—Daniela, as the woman called her—had told the Picachos of her abduction from Veracruz by a rich but evil one-eyed man named César Calveras who had put her through a terrible ordeal over the following months at Las Cadenas before she was able to effect her escape, but she had not told them of her marriage; that the Picachos had offered to let her live with them for as long as she wished and that she had accepted—and accepted as well Oscar Picacho’s invitation to accompany him to Galveston Island on his annual trip to celebrate New Year’s Eve at a party with his favorite nephew, Roberto Avila; that they had departed for Galveston on the day before Angel and Gustavo showed up, and that with them had gone another Picacho nephew, Felipe Rocha, who had been a Brownsville policeman until he was fired last year for stealing several pistols from the station arms room and, though it was never proved, selling them across the river; that Señora Picacho herself had not gone with them because she did not like car trips, that she had never been to Galveston, and that she had no idea where in that town Roberto Avila lived.

Angel and Gustavo had had no choice but to wait for the trio to return. When they finally heard the rattle of the Model T as it pulled into the driveway, they told Señora Picacho to sit on the sofa and make no sound of warning or the last thing she would see in this life would be the deaths of her husband and nephew and dear friend Daniela. But the only one to come through the door had been Oscar Picacho.

Now Angel Lozano grabs Oscar by his wet hair and yanks his head around so he can see Gustavo holding a knife to the señora’s throat. The woman is close to hysteria.

Angel demands to know exactly where the girl is—and without hesitation Oscar tells him.

Shortly thereafter Angel and Gustavo slip out of the house and casually make away along the tree-shadowed sidewalks of the quiet neighborhood. At a Ford dealership a few blocks farther on they pay cash for a new sedan.

It is almost noon when they reach the main highway and turn north, Gustavo driving, being careful not to exceed the speed limit, Angel studying the open road map on his lap and calculating mileage and driving time. Allowing for reduced speeds in most of the towns they will pass through, he estimates they will get to Galveston around midnight.

It will be more than a week before neighbors become sufficiently concerned about the Picachos—having seen neither of them in that time and their car unmoved from the driveway—to call the police. An officer will investigate and discover the bodies in the house, both of them with drapery cords tight around the neck.

Had I told her the truth about my life on the ranch and how I came to leave the place, I would’ve had to tell at least a little about Frank Hartung. He was Uncle Cullen’s oldest friend. He had a ranch in New Mexico and had a good foreman he could trust to run things in his absence when every so often he’d come see us for a few days’ visit. We’d meet him at the Marfa station—Uncle Cullen and Aunt Ava, me and Reuben—and then take supper at a café before making the long drive back down to the YB in Uncle Cullen’s old Studebaker truck.

Frank had a funny habit whenever he sat down to a meal with us at the house. He’d never take the first bite of his food until Uncle Cullen had eaten a mouthful of his own. He’d watch Uncle Cullen chew and swallow, then they’d stare at each other for a moment, then Uncle Cullen would shrug at him and they’d both grin and Frank would start digging into his own plate. It was some kind of private joke between them that always made me and Reuben chuckle—even though we didn’t know why it was so funny. But Aunt Ava didn’t much appreciate their comedy. She always gave the two of them a tightmouth look and sometimes shook her head like she couldn’t understand how grown men could act so silly. I don’t recall that she ever said anything about it except one time when I was about eight years old. “For God’s sake, Frank,” she’d said, “do you think I’m out to poison the bunch of you?”

The remark set Frank and Uncle Cullen to laughing so hard they almost choked on their beef—and Reuben thought that was so funny his milk came out his nose.

In some ways Frank Hartung was more of an uncle to me than Uncle Cullen was. Maybe because no matter how hard Uncle Cullen tried to treat us the same, Reuben was his flesh and blood and it was only natural that he’d be the favored one. But Frank never had any children, was never even married, and since he was so close to Uncle Cullen I guess he probably saw me like a nephew, maybe even a little like a son. Whenever the four of us shot pool together at the house, it was always Uncle Cullen and Reuben against me and Frank, and we almost always won. Uncle Cullen taught me how to ride, but Frank Hartung taught me the most important things I came to know about horses and riding them well. Even when the four of us were out riding the backcountry together, Frank would be instructing me about reading the land and sky, about tracking a rider or a man afoot, about the proper way to make a camp or build a fire or dress game. He was always teaching me something. As often as not, Reuben would drift over to join us too and learn what he could. Uncle Cullen seemed content enough to let Frank provide most of our education in the ways of the natural world.

The first guns I ever fired were Uncle Cullen’s twelve-gauge double-barrel and his Winchester carbine, both of which he let me shoot as soon as I was big enough to steady them on a target. He did the same with Reuben. For my thirteenth birthday he gave me a .30–30 carbine of my own—then gave one to Reuben when he turned twelve. But it was Frank who really taught us how to shoot. He taught us which shooting positions allowed for the steadiest aim with a rifle. Taught us to get a spot weld and to let out half a breath and hold it as we took a bead. Taught us to squeeze the trigger not jerk it. He taught us about sight adjustment, about Kentucky windage and Tennessee elevation, about shooting uphill and down.

Actually, he taught all these things to Reuben—I already knew them, although I had no idea how I did. I was a deadeye from the start and I could tell that Frank knew he wasn’t teaching me anything. He called me a naturalborn shooter and I supposed that was all the explanation for it.

As good as I was with a rifle, my real talent was with handguns. I was fifteen the first time I held one—Frank’s .38 Smith & Wesson top-break revolver—and it was like handling some tool I’d used all my life. It was a strange but comforting sensation. I busted a beer bottle at forty paces with each of the first six shots I took. Reuben yelled “Yow!” with every hit. It was like I didn’t really have to aim, just point the gun like my finger at whichever bottle I wanted to hit—and pow, I’d hit it. Frank then let me shoot his .380 Savage and I did just as well with it. I loved its semiautomatic action, the thrill of firing one round after another in rapid sequence, shattering a bottle with each shot. When I squeezed off the tenth and last round in the magazine, Frank stared at the litter of glass on the ground, then looked at me kind of curious but didn’t say anything.

When I turned seventeen Frank gave me a rifle that once upon a time had belonged to his grandfather—an 1874 Buffalo Sharps. It weighed twelve pounds and fired a .50-caliber round that could carry over a mile. It had double-set triggers and a folding vernier peep sight mounted on the tang. Frank said his granddad had used it when he was an army scout hunting Apaches. The rifle came with a protective buckskin boot fitted with a rawhide loop so it could be hung on a saddle horn.

A month after he gave me that present Frank was killed in El Paso. Two men tried to rob him when he came out of a whorehouse. He was sixty years old and half-drunk but still managed to bust one guy’s head against a rock fence before the other one stabbed him from behind. The one with the fractured skull survived and got sentenced to forty years. The killer was executed in the electric chair.

Frank was buried in the Concordia Cemetery in El Paso. Reuben and I accompanied Uncle Cullen to the funeral. It was our first train ride and we stared out the window the whole trip, not seeing much of anything except more of the desert country we knew so well and marveling at how big West Texas truly was. Aunt Ava had come down with a bad stomachache that morning and stayed home.

There were about two dozen people at the graveside service, half of them from Frank’s ranch, including his foreman, Plutarco Suárez. Frank had bequeathed the place to him. And left his Mexican saddle to Reuben, who had always admired it. To me he left his .38 top-break.

Everybody knew what close friends Uncle Cullen and Frank had been, and when the service was over they came up to offer their condolences. He introduced me and Reuben to several of them, including a wrinkled orangehaired woman who reeked of perfume and was red-eyed with crying, a longtime acquaintance, Uncle Cullen called her, named Mrs. O’Malley.

About a year later—and just a few days after I’d turned eighteen—we were hit by rustlers. Early one morning Reuben and I were saddling our mounts when the vaquero foreman Esteban came riding hard with the news that a dozen of our horses had been stolen in the night. Uncle Cullen was away on business and so Esteban had come to me with the report.

He had followed the tracks from the south range where the thieves had cut the horses out of a larger herd to a ford where the stock was driven across the river. The tracks told him that two thieves had done the work on this side, and when he crossed over to study the prints on the other bank he saw that there were two more men in the band. Judging by the droppings, he figured they’d made off about three or four hours earlier.

The YB Ranch was in Presidio County, a rugged region of desert country busted up with bald mountains and mesas and buttes—and with scattered scrubland holding enough grass to graze our herds. Uncle Cullen raised cattle and horses both, marketing beeves and horsehair and saddle ponies. A portion of the Rio Grande formed the ranch’s eastern boundary. Although rustling had been a constant problem all along the border in the old days, there hadn’t been trouble with stock thieves around this part of the river in years. Lately, though, we’d been hearing stories of a small Mexican gang stealing from both Mex and American herds along a stretch of border down below El Paso. We figured that maybe things had got too hot for them up there and they’d decided to move farther south.

Esteban said he’d heard that a buyer of stolen horses was operating at a pueblo called Agua Dura, just west of the Sierra Grande, a Mexican range visible to the south of us and running roughly parallel to the Rio Grande. Each time the Agua Dura dealer accumulated a worthwhile herd he drove it down the Conchos and over to Chihuahua City, where nobody gave a damn about U.S. brands. Esteban figured Agua Dura was where our horses were headed.

The only one of us familiar with that country was a vaquero named Chente Castillo, who’d grown up in a pueblo called Placer Guadalupe, about sixty miles south of the border and within view of the Rio Conchos. He was a breed—more like a three-quarter than a half-breed, since he had a Mexican daddy and Apache mother—and there was no telling from his looks how old he was. He might’ve been thirty years old or fifty. He didn’t speak much English but he seemed to understand it well enough. He anyway didn’t need a lot of English with the other hands, most of whom were Mexican, and even the American hands could speak a little Spanish. He was a damn good rider and liked to work with me and Reuben because we didn’t like cows any more than he did and we worked only with the horses. When Esteban mentioned Agua Dura, Chente said he’d been there and said it lay about forty miles to the south and the way there was through a pass in the Grandes. There was plenty of water and grass along the Grandes foothills to nourish the animals on the way to the pass, he said, and the forage was just as adequate on the other side of the mountains.

The way I saw it, the thieves wouldn’t be driving the horses hard—they’d want the stock to be in good shape and fetch the best price. They’d anyway probably think they were safe now they were back in Mexico. If they were feeling cocky enough, they might take a couple of days about getting them to Agua Dura.

The sky behind the Chinatis was turning red as fire but the sun hadn’t shown itself yet. If I started after them right away I thought I might catch up to them by noon. My black could do it. The only horse on the YB with greater endurance was Reuben’s appaloosa.

I knew Uncle Cullen would raise hell with me when he found out. He’d warned me and Reuben never to cross the border for any reason, and I had never set foot in Mexico. Uncle Cullen had repeatedly told us it was a whole different world down there.

“There’s nothing the other side of that river but meaner trouble than you can imagine. You get yourself in any of it and you’ll play hell getting out again.” He’d known two Americans who’d gone down there and were never heard from again. “Life aint worth spit to them people,” he said, and slid his eyes away from me.

One time when he was going on and on about what a murderous place Mexico was, Esteban was sitting within earshot on a corral rail behind him. The foreman widened his eyes and held his hands out and shook them in mock fright and it was all Reuben and I could do to keep from laughing. Uncle Cullen saw our faces and whirled around on his saddle to catch Esteban studying a buzzard way up in the sky like it was the most interesting creature he’d ever seen.

But Uncle Cullen was away in Fort Stockton and wasn’t due back till late in the day—and I couldn’t stand by and do nothing about a bunch of rustlers who thought they could help themselves to our stock as easy as you please.

I patted the black and waited for him to let out his breath and then I cinched the saddle tight. I mounted up and told Chente to pick out the best horse in the remuda for himself and get his rifle and meet me at the front gate.

As I heeled the black off toward the house, Reuben hupped his Jack horse up beside me.

“Where you think you’re going?” I said.

“With you.” He patted the Winchester he always carried in a saddle boot.

“Your daddy wouldn’t care for it.”

“We bring them horses back, I don’t guess he’ll be too awful red-assed with us.”

He wouldn’t quit his grin. What the hell, I thought—then smiled back at him and kicked the black into a lope and Reuben stuck right beside me.

I dismounted at the front porch and ran up to our room and took the Smith & Wesson from a dresser drawer and checked the loads and tucked it inside my shirt and under my waistband. I retrieved the Sharps in its buckskin boot from the closet and a box of cartridges off the shelf.

When I got back downstairs my aunt was standing just inside the open front door, her arms crossed, her face as impossible to read as always. Reuben was standing beside her, looking like somebody under arrest.

I’d wanted to avoid her, but there was nothing to do now except tell it to her straight, and so I did. I was hoping she wouldn’t forbid me to go because I was going to do it anyway.

She looked out the door in the direction of the river. “And you think you can overtake them?”

“Yes, mam.”

“And then what?”

“I’ll get the horses back.”

“How do you propose to do that, James Rudolph?” She was the only one who ever used my middle name.

“I just will.”

“You know Mr. Youngblood doesn’t want you crossing the river.” She always referred to him as Mr. Youngblood, even addressed him that way, when she addressed him by any name at all. He seemed pretty used to it.

“I know it, but…goddammit, they got our horses. Pardon, mam.”

She glanced down at the sheathed rifle in my hand, at the cartridges in my other, then looked at me for a long moment with those eyes that always made me feel like I was staring into my own.

“I’ll have Carlotta wrap food for you,” she said.

“Thank you, mam, but I can’t wait. Those fellas are farther away every minute I’m standing here.”

She placed a palm to my cheek for just a second and then folded her arms again. I couldn’t remember another time when she’d made such a gesture. I knew Reuben was thinking the same thing by the way his mouth hung open.

I went out and slipped the loop of the rifle sheath over the saddle horn and stuck the packet of bullets into my saddlebag. Then I swung up on the black and started off—hearing Reuben saying that he wanted to go with me, her saying something I couldn’t make out.

And then I was riding out the gate with Chente alongside me and we headed down the road and toward the ford.

About two hours later we were reined up on a low rise, letting the horses blow, studying the Mexican downcountry and seeing a faint hint of raised dust miles ahead and just about where Chente figured the pass cut through the Grandes.

“Allí están,” he said.

I nodded—and cursed myself for having been in such a hurry I hadn’t thought to bring field glasses.

Chente rolled a cigarette and passed it to me and then rolled one for himself. I struck a match on my belt buckle and cupped the flame and lit us up.

As soon as we’d crossed the Rio Grande I’d felt strangely different in some way I couldn’t put my finger on. Even though I’d never set foot in Mexico before—this country Uncle Cullen called wild and dangerous and had so often warned us about—it somehow felt almost familiar. I wondered if some aspect of my father’s Mexican blood carried in my own, something that recognized…what?…the character of the country, maybe. The soul of it. Something.

Our shadows were pulling in toward us. To our right the Grandes stood starkly red. The upland was thick with cactus—nopal, barrel, maguey. To the east the scrubland sloped away under the orange sun and toward the Rio Grande and the Chinati peaks were jagged and purple. The sky was hugely cloudless, its blue slowly bleaching. A hawk circled the bottoms. A pair of ragged buzzards sailed high and far over Texas.

The rustlers had been easy enough to track until they drove the herd over onto the rockier ground closer to the foothills and I lost the trail. But Chente didn’t. They were moving the horses faster than I’d figured but Chente had been sure we were closing on them anyway, and now the thin cloud of dust ahead proved him right. He regarded the sun and figured we’d be through the pass and have them in sight by noon. “O poco antes.”

Then he looked rearward and said, “Mira.”

A horseman had come in view out of the rocky peppercorn breaks and was heading our way, riding hard as he started up the gradual slope of the higher ground.

We sat our horses and watched him come. There was something familiar about the animal’s gait and the way the rider was leaned forward on him.

“Tú hermanito,” Chente said. “Se escapó de la mamá.”

He was right. Reuben on his Appaloosa, the tireless Jack.

I looked at the thin dust cloud along the Grandes again. It was moving into the mountains.

We each rolled another cigarette and smoked them slowly and were finished with them before Reuben got close enough for us to hear the clacking of Jack’s shoes. Then we could see Reuben’s white grin and hear him laughing. And then he was reining up beside us, the Appaloosa blowing but not all that hard.

“You must’ve had an hour’s start on me,” Reuben said. “You don’t never want to bet good money against Jack in a distance race.”

He hadn’t snuck away—his mother had relented to the argument that if we were lucky enough to get back the stock, we could return to the YB a lot faster if there were three of us to drive the herd. She’d made him wait, though, while the maid packed a sack lunch for him to bring.

He had a pair of binoculars slung around his chest and I waggled my hand for them and he gave them over. I fixed the glasses on the dust cloud and then passed them to Chente.

Reuben stood up in his stirrups and studied the vague dust ahead. “That them?”

“It’s them,” I said.

He sat down again and looked all around. “Jesus, Jimmy—Mexico! Don’t look all that different, but…hot damn, man! Feels like a thousand miles from home.”

Chente gave him a look Reuben didn’t see and said we’d catch sight of them for sure on the other side of the range.

“Well what the hell we sitting here for?” Reuben said. “Let’s go.”

The sun was still shy of its meridian when we came out of the pass and onto a wide shelf. The trail swung around close to the mountain wall and dipped from view where it began its descent, but we reined over toward the cliff edge to have a look at the panorama of country below.

And there they were down on the plain. Hardly more than little dark figures against the pale ground. They’d stopped to make a noon camp at a narrow creek shining in the sun and running along a thin outcrop and a growth of scraggly mesquites. A long red mesa stood about a half-mile north of them.

It wasn’t likely that they’d spot us against the shadowed mountain wall, not at this distance and not even with binoculars, but we reined the horses back and tethered them in the shade. We moved up in a crouch and lay on our bellies between a pair of boulders a few feet apart on the rim of the cliff. The Smith & Wesson was digging into my stomach, so I repositioned it at my side.

Chente checked the sun to make sure it wouldn’t be reflecting off the lenses and then took a look through the glasses.

I asked how far off he thought they were.

“Pues…más de un kilómetro.”

I thought so too—maybe close to 1,300 yards.

Chente passed me the glasses. Three of the thieves were at a small fire raising a thin smoke, roasting something on a spit. The fourth was about fifty yards downstream, mounted and watching over the stolen herd as it watered from the creek and cropped at a sparse growth of bank grass. There looked to be about three dozen head. Either Esteban had been wrong about how many we’d lost or the rustlers had hit one or two other ranches besides the YB.

I passed the binoculars to Reuben.

“Don’t look too awful worried, do they?” he said. “Taking a leisurely dinner right out in the wide open.”

“Guess they didn’t figure anybody would come over the river after them.”

He handed the binoculars to Chente, who had another long look through them and then looked at me and said, “Pues?”

Reuben was watching me too, the same question in his eyes. Now what?

I scrabbled backward out of the line of sight of the rustlers’ camp and stood up and hustled over to the black and dug out the box of cartridges and took the Sharps off the saddle horn and unbuckled the heel of the buckskin sheath and slid the rifle out and tossed the sheath over the saddle and hustled back to the cliff edge.

Chente was grinning. He moved over to give me more room and flapped his hand at Reuben to do the same. I lay down between them, Reuben on my right, a little big-eyed.

I looked at him. “What? You think they’ll give them back if we just go down and ask real nice?”

Chente snickered.

Reuben’s face went red and he looked out at the rustlers on the plain. “No…shit no.” He made a vague hand gesture. “It’s just…they’re a hell of a way is all.”

He’d seen me hit watermelons with the Sharps at close to a half-mile on a downhill angle. But even though a man was a lot bigger than a watermelon, these guys were at half again that distance. And watermelons didn’t move around. And maybe he was thinking that men anyway weren’t watermelons.

“Can’t get any closer except by going down the trail,” I said. “If we do that they’ll spot us sure before we get halfway down. Got to be from here.”

“Soon as you shoot, they’ll run, won’t they? Even if you hit one, the others’ll run off with the stock.”

“No van a saber de donde viene el tiro,” Chente said. “Es demasiado lejos.”

“What?” Reuben said. “They won’t hear it?”

“They’ll hear it,” I said. “But they won’t know where it came from, not at this range.”

I scanned the ground all around us and saw the rock I wanted. I pointed and Chente sidecrawled over to retrieve it. He snugged it into the dirt on the top lip of the slope in front of me. It was about the size of a football and almost flat along the top.

I dumped a handful of the huge cartridges on the ground between me and Reuben. “Every time I put out my hand,” I said to Reuben, picking up one of the shells, “you put one of these in it. And don’t keep me waiting.”

He nodded, but his face was tight and pale. He must’ve read my eyes, because he said, “I’m okay—go on, do it.” He scooped up several cartridges and held one up, showing me he was ready to hand it to me.

I squirmed around and set myself. Then levered the trigger guard forward to drop the block and open the breech. I inserted the cartridge in the chamber and pulled the trigger guard back in place and the breech slid closed.

Chente was watching the rustlers through the field glasses. I thought about hitting the rider first, since he was the readiest to make a getaway. But he’d probably fall somehow to spook his mount—jerk the reins or slump against the horse’s head or get a foot caught in a stirrup, something—and then the herd would spook too. I didn’t want to scatter the jugheads all over hell’s half-acre if I could help it. So I started with the guys at the fire.

I didn’t think about anything except making the shot. There was no wind at all. The tricky part was the downward angle of trajectory. I put my eye to the vernier and gingerly adjusted the sight. I took a bead on the guy squatting on his haunches who looked to be tending the fire. Then moved the sight over to the one sitting on the ground and facing my way. Then put the sight on the guy standing over them, the one in the best position to run for cover. I stayed on him. I rested the barrel on the rock for steadiness and lined the sight on his head and thumbed back the hammer and set the hair trigger.

The gunblast shook the air and rang up the mountain wall and flew out over the prairie. The man’s hat jumped in the sunlight and he went down like his bones had unhinged.

“Jesus!” Reuben said.

That was my first one ever, and what I felt was proud—proud of my own precision. I hadn’t expected to miss, but still it was a hell of a shot. Later on, when I had more time to think about it, I felt…I didn’t know what it was…a sort of quiver…way down under my skin like something in my deepest blood. If there really was a God, this had to be a feeling He knew everything about.

Reuben slapped a bullet into my palm and I reloaded faster than I knew I could.

The herd by the creek was churning in a near spook. Not man nor beast down there knew where the shot had come from. The rider was reining his mount in circles and the other two guys at the fire were on their feet and looking all around. Both of them seemed to be holding a pistol, and one of them was turning and turning in a low crouch like he thought he might duck the next round, wherever it came from.

My next shot clubbed his head backward and took him off his feet and the report rolled away into the open plain.

“Hijo!” Chente said.

Half the herd bolted in our direction and the other lit out to westward. The rider didn’t know where to go—he spurred his horse in one direction and then yanked it around and started in the other, then pulled up again and reined his mount around and round in tight close turns.

The last one afoot was running toward the outcrop with his arms covering his head like a man caught in the rain. I drilled him in the back and he flung forward and lay spread-eagled on his face, forming a small black X on the ground.

Now the horseman was galloping directly across my line of sight like a shooting-gallery target. I gauged a lead on him and fired—and both horse and rider went into a dusty rolling tumble. I’d meant to hit the mount anywhere just to bring it down, but either the shot killed it or the horse broke its neck because when it stopped rolling it lay stone still. The rider wasn’t moving either.

“Ay, Chihuahua!” Chente said. He put down the glasses and looked at me. “Qué tirador!”

“Qué rifle magnífico,” I said, patting the Sharps.

Reuben was gawking at the small dark figures littering the distant ground. Then he turned to me and said, “Jesus, Jimmy—all of them!”

“Not the rider,” I said. “Hated shooting the horse but I didn’t want to chance missing the guy and him getting out of range.”

“Hellfire, he probably broke his neck in fifteen places, the way he went flying. Jesus.”

“Or could be he’s laying there thinking things over. Let’s go see.”

We followed the winding trail down to the flats. I’d slipped the Sharps back into its sheath and moved the revolver to the front of my pants. The horses that had come our way had settled themselves and were feeding on the scrubgrass near the foot of the trail. Chente loose-herded them back toward the creek.

The rustlers were all Mexicans. The first one we came to was the first one I’d put down. He was on his side and we saw that a .50-caliber round treated a human head about the same way it did a watermelon—worse, actually, because a head was smaller and had less of itself to spare. The top part of the guy’s skull was gone and ants were swarming over what was left of his head. The look on his face was suspicious—like he’d just heard something he couldn’t believe.

Reuben leaned out from his saddle and puked. Chente glanced at him without expression and then headed off to the creek to round up the other horses still there. I thought the rustlers looked about how I had expected guys shot with a buffalo rifle to look. I’d seen other dead men, including one done in by a burst appendix and one drowned and one who’d passed out drunk on the tracks and got run over by a train, and the only difference among them was a matter of how neatly or how messily they’d died. Long before I ever pulled the trigger on these guys, I’d decided that dead was dead and there was no more reason to get sick at the sight of a messy dead man than there was in getting sick at the sight of a butchered beef. It was an opinion I pretty much kept to myself.

“I’m all right,” Reuben said, wiping at his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “Caught me by surprise is all.”

“The others aint likely to look any better.”

“I said I’m all right.”

“Okay then.”

The next one had caught it just under the eye and the bullet had stove in that side of his face and you couldn’t see his eyes for the ants. He was lying faceup and the dirt under his head was a muddy red mess. Reuben made a good show of indifference to this one, leaning casually on his saddle horn and spitting off to the side.

The guy I shot in the back was lying on an even larger patch of bloody earth. He’d taken the round through a lung.

The horse I shot was dead too. The bullet had hit him just above the left ear and come out under its right eye.

The rider was still alive. He was on his back and his hat was mashed up under his head and his eyes were squinting against the overhead sun until my shadow fell over him and then they opened wider and fixed on me. He didn’t look any older than Reuben.

“Mátame,” he said in a low rasp. “No me puedo mover. Mátame, por amor de dios.”

Reuben’s Spanish was good enough to get the idea. “He say kill him?”

“He’s paralyzed.”

“Por favor…mátame.”

Reuben looked all around like he might’ve been searching for somebody to ask for a better idea. Or like he was all of a sudden aware of just how right he’d been in feeling a lot farther from home than could be measured in miles.

It didn’t seem too complicated to me. The kid had been a horse thief but now he was somebody who would cook to death under the sun unless somebody saw to it that he didn’t.

I pulled the top-break from my pants and cocked it and aimed. The kid closed his eyes. Reuben said, “Jesus, Jimmy…”

I fired and the kid’s head jerked and his right eye vanished in a dark red hole and the dirt under his hair went bloody. Our horses shrilled and spooked and I reined the black tight and talked to him and Reuben soothed the Appaloosa and the animals shuddered and blew and then were all right.

I put the revolver back in my pants. Chente sat his horse by the herd at the creek and was staring off at the mountains. Reuben was staring hard at the kid.

“Would you rather a bullet or a couple of days getting roasted?”

He turned to me. “I know,” he said. “It’s just…ah hell, Jimmy, he wasn’t but a damn boy.”

So said Reuben Youngblood, not yet sixteen years old.

We set out to round up the runaways, leaving Chente with the other horses at the creekside camp. We were at it for over an hour and still may have missed a few, no telling, since we didn’t know exactly how many there’d been to start with. When we got them back to the camp and bunched them with the others and counted them up we had twenty-eight head, thirteen with the YB brand, the others wearing a brand that looked like a lopsided A with a flat top and one extralong leg. None of us had seen it before. They must’ve been stolen from somewhere north of the YB and been run farther than ours because they were the worse for wear.

Chente had searched the bodies and gone through the rustlers’ saddlepacks and laid out their belongings. There were only three firearms—an old cap-and-ball Dance, a Colt double-action five-shot, and a single-barrel twelve-gauge with both the barrel and the stock cut down so that the thing looked more like a giant pistol than a shotgun. Every man of them had some sort of knife on him, one of them a fine switchblade with pearl grips on the haft and a spring so strong the blade popped out like a magic trick. Chente had put all their money in a small pile. There was seven dollars in paper and another dollar thirty in silver. The rest of the cash was in paper peso denominations and Mexican specie.

Reuben said he didn’t want any of the money or anything else of theirs. I took the switchblade and gestured for Chente to help himself to the rest. He scooped up the money and stuck it in his pockets and picked up the cutdown and took it to his horse and wedged the short barrel into the saddle scabbard along with his rifle.

There was a skinny jackrabbit on the spit over the fire but it was charred beyond all possibility of being edible. Chente tried it anyway and chewed a mouthful for a while before spitting it out. I fetched the lunch sack Reuben had brought with him but Reuben didn’t want any of that either, so Chente and I split the three beef sandwiches and the six flour tortillas folded up over refried beans. There were some apples too, and we gave them to our horses.

While Chente and I ate, Reuben kept glancing over at the dead men. I knew what was on his mind.

“It’s gonna be slower going back, driving that bunch of jugheads,” I said. “We spare the time to dig four graves and we’ll never get back to the river before sundown. Your daddy’s gonna have a shit fit as it is, but it’ll be fifty times worse if we aint back by dark. And we’ll play hell getting these animals across the river at night.”

“It don’t seem right, leaving them lay to rot.”

Chente chuckled and said they wouldn’t have much of a chance to rot. He jutted his chin upward, directing our attention to a pair of vultures circling way up high—and still others were coming at a distance out of the sierras to the west. I’d always marveled at the mysterious way they got the news so fast.

“Los zopilotes tienen que comer tambien,” Chente said.

“Shit,” Reuben said. “How’d you like them to feed on you?”

Chente said they might very well do that someday, whether he liked it or not. Then he put his head back and yelled at the vultures overhead that today wasn’t the day.

And we all busted out laughing for no reason except the grandly certain feeling that today wasn’t the day for any of us.

Late in the day we got the herd across the river and onto YB land. By the time we arrived at the corrals the sun was almost set behind the sierras and the portion of it still visible was the color of melting gold. The western sky looked smeared with blood. The vaqueros 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, least-ways 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.”

As we headed for the house, I still felt the look he’d given me. A look you give a stranger.

Aunt Ava stepped out of the shadows to meet us at the top of the porch steps. She gave Reuben a hug and told him to wash up before he sat at the table. He said yes mam and went inside. Then she took my free hand in both of hers and went up on her toes to kiss me quick on the mouth. I stood there in astonishment and watched her go into the house, and after a moment I went in too. It was the only kiss she ever gave me.

She never mentioned the rustlers even once, and Uncle Cullen never referred to them again. As far as I knew Reuben never spoke of them to anybody. When Falcone came with the trailers for his horses the next day, Uncle Cullen told him they had came splashing from across the river onto YB land and when he saw their mark he thought it damn strange that Falcone’s stock was so far south and on the Mexican side. Falcone said he was sure the horses had been rustled. He figured the herd got loose of the thieves somehow. Uncle Cullen said that must be it and he told Falcone he should consider himself lucky. Falcone said if he was lucky the horses wouldn’t have been stolen in the first place.

Most 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 shooting gesture at me with his finger and thumb and then followed Chente into the crowd and out of sight.

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.

“We know them,” I said. “We’ve never much socialized.”

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 knees and the Miller guy kicked him in the ass and sent him sprawling in the dust.

A woman shrilled and people leaped up from the picnic tables and rammed into each other as some tried to back away from the fight and some tried to get closer. I was shouldering through the crowd and catching glimpses of the Millers and Rogerson kicking at Chente and even through all the yelling I heard one of the brothers shouting something about the greaser sonofabitch putting his hands on their sister. Then Chente had him by the leg and got him down and started punching him as the other brother and Rogerson kept on kicking and there was a haze of dust and women were shrieking and men cussing and bellowing to break them up, break them up. The lines of the overhead lights had been jostled somehow and the shadows were wavering and giving the whole scene an eerie look.

I shoved my way out of the crush of people and saw both Millers locked up with Chente on the ground and the three of them punching and rolling around while a half-dozen men were jumping all around them looking for an opening to grab one or another and pull them apart. Uncle Cullen was struggling to pry Reuben away from Larry Rogerson whose head was locked under Reuben’s arm. Rogerson was worming around in Reuben’s grip, and as I ran toward them I saw that he had a knife in his hand. And saw him stab Reuben in the stomach and in the chest.

Reuben’s arms fell away from Rogerson and he sagged back against Uncle Cullen who was hugging him from behind. Uncle Cullen staggered under the sudden weight and fell to his knees with Reuben still in his arms. I ran up to them and Uncle Cullen was pressing a hand to the wound over Reuben’s heart and croaking, “Son, son…” Reuben’s eyes were open but they weren’t seeing anything anymore.

Most of the people around us still had their attention on the fight between the Miller boys and Chente and some were cheering the fighters and some were still yelling to break it up and some were laughing at the attempts being made to stop them. Only the folk closest to us had seen what had happened to Reuben. Women were crying and somebody kept saying, “Oh my God oh my God…”

Rogerson was gawking down at us, still holding the knife. He looked at me and his eyes showed a lot of white and he flung the knife away and stepped back with his open hands up in front of him. All the blabber and shouting around me suddenly sounded very far away. I took the pearlhandled switchblade out of my pocket and snicked out the blade.

I had a vague sense of people drawing away from me as I walked up to Rogerson and he started to say something but I never heard a word of it. I grabbed him by the collar and jerked him toward me and stuck the blade in his belly all the way to the hilt. He made a sound like a small yawn and grabbed my shoulders as if he’d suddenly thought of something real important to tell me. I gave the knife a twist and jerked it sideways and blood gushed hot all over my lower arm. I pulled out the blade and stepped back and he put his hands to the wound and a bulge of blue gut showed between his fingers. His pants were dark with blood. I stabbed him again—in the chest, just like he’d stabbed Reuben—and he dropped to his knees and a bunch of women screamed at the same time as he fell on his face and lay still.

I stared around at the horrified faces, and the shouting and crying and confusion rose back to normal volume. Maybe the other fight had finally been stopped, I didn’t know, but there were more people around us now, a lot of them yelling to know what happened and a bunch of others all telling them at once.

I retracted the blade into the haft and put the knife back in my pocket and turned to see about Uncle Cullen. He had let go of Reuben and was clutching at his own chest, his face twisted in pain. I helped him to his feet and asked if he thought he could make it out to the truck and he nodded but his face clenched even tighter. I pointed to his hat and somebody picked it up and handed it to me and I put it on my uncle’s head and my fingers left smudges of Rogerson’s blood on it. I heard somebody shouting that the sheriff was too drunk to stand up and others yelling to know where a goddam deputy was.

“Would some of you bring Reuben?” I said. There was a general hesitation and then three or four guys picked Reuben up and brought him along behind me as I half-dragged Uncle Cullen out to the parking lot, his grunting breath hot against my neck.

It might have been different if the sheriff had been sober or there had been any other lawmen around, but nobody said anything to me, nobody tried to stop me. They laid Reuben in the bed of the truck and I settled Uncle Cullen into the passenger side of the cab and then got behind the wheel. I pulled the truck into the flow of vehicles leaving the lot and a minute later we were rolling back toward the ranch.

If I had any thoughts on the drive home I would never remember what they were. I must’ve known that the life I’d been living was done with. I must’ve expected to be arrested pretty damn quick. Arrested and jailed for the gutting of unarmed Larry Rogerson in front of dozens of witnesses. Then tried and convicted. Maybe I wondered what it was like to die in the electric chair. Maybe I didn’t think about much of anything.

I could hear Uncle Cullen’s wet breathing in the dark as the truck bounced along over the rough dirt road. And then I couldn’t hear him anymore. He was slumped awkwardly against the door, his hat fallen off and down by his boots. I stopped the truck and pulled him upright and felt for a pulse on his neck but there wasn’t one anymore. I eased him back against the door and put his hat on him and got the truck going again.

Pretty soon the house came into view and I saw that all the windows on the lower floor were lit up. For a minute I thought the law was already there and waiting for me. But there weren’t any unfamiliar vehicles in sight.

Aunt Ava came out on the porch and watched me drive up. Over in front of the bunkhouse a few of the hands were gathered around a guitar player. I parked at the house and Aunt Ava came down the steps.

I got out of the cab, not knowing how to tell her what happened. She stepped around me and looked in the cab at Uncle Cullen for a minute, then stepped over and stared down at Reuben in the bed. She reached over the bed panel to brush his hair from his face.

“I’m so god-awful sorry, mam, but—”

“Helen Morgan telephoned a few minutes ago,” she said, referring to a woman who ran a small bookstore in Marfa where Aunt Ava liked to browse. “She was there and saw it. She told me about the fight and…about Reuben. She said Mr. Youngblood was all right. Ailing, she said, but all right.”

Her tone was almost as matter of fact as the one she’d use in asking if I’d gotten all the items on her grocery list whenever I came back from town. Almost. But there was something else in it this time. It sounded like it might be anger.

“He was, mam, but on the way home…well…”

“Yes,” she said. “So I see.”

I rubbed at my chin with the back of my hand and she stared at it and I saw that my whole hand was dark with dried blood and I stuck the hand in my back pocket.

“That’s not all of it, mam. I believe I’m in trouble. I—”

“You are in trouble,” she said. “Helen told me what you did.” She looked off in the direction of the county road, then turned back to me. “You did what you had to, James Rudolph. Now you’ve got to get away from here—right now. You can’t take the truck, they’ll be watching the roads. Take Reuben’s horse and ride the backcountry. Go saddle it—go. I’ll get you some food.”

I said I wanted to get my leather jacket and the top-break revolver from under my pillow and she said, “I’ll get them. You hurry with that horse.”

She rushed up the porch steps and into the house and called for Carlotta to put some food in a sack and I saw her go up the stairs.

All the vaqueros were outside the bunkhouse now and watching me as I headed for the stable. Esteban came over and fell in beside me and asked if there was anything he could do. I told him Chente was probably in the Marfa jail for fighting and would need someone to bail him out.

“Seguro que lo soltamos,” he said. But what could he do for me?

I said for him to keep his eyes and ears open, that I would write to him to find out how things stood.

“Muy bien, jefecito,” he said.

I was swift about saddling the Appaloosa. Jack could sense my tension and his ears twitched with excitement. I swung into the saddle and reached down to shake Esteban’s hand and I saw his eyes take in the dry blood. Then I hupped the horse out of the stable and over to the house.

She was waiting with a small sack of food and my jacket and a cloth bundle shaped like a half-deflated football. She handed me the jacket and I put it on and then took the food sack from her and reached around and stuffed it into the rightside saddlebag while she put the bundle in the left one.

“What’s that?”

“Something for you,” she said, buckling down the flap. She took the top-break from her apron pocket and gave it to me. I opened the breech and checked the loads and closed it up again and slipped the revolver into my waistband. I told her to give my Sharps rifle to Esteban and let him know he could have my horse. I couldn’t think of anything else I owned that I could bequeath to anybody.

She was standing with the light of the house behind her and it was hard to see her face clearly. She turned suddenly toward the distant road and I looked and saw two sets of headlights coming our way and then heard the rasping of the motors. She’d always had the senses of a cat.

“Go,” she said. “Go.”

I reined the Jack horse around and hupped off toward the backcountry to the east.

When I turned to wave goodbye she was already out of sight.

I rode steadily till a couple of hours before dawn, then reined up and tethered the Appaloosa in some scrub grass and rolled myself up in my bedroll and slept till sunrise, and then I got going again. I held to a course a half-mile or so south of the railroad. I rode through the day and into the night and stopped and made a fireless camp. Since riding off from the YB I had tried not to think about Reuben, but I finally couldn’t help it and I let myself remember everything about him—and my throat got hot and tight, my chest hollow. He had been more brother to me than cousin and I’d never have a better friend. And Uncle Cullen—that damn good man. Aunt Ava would miss them both terribly but I doubted she would make any show of her grief, and people would gossip about her lack of proper sorrow. But the vaqueros held her in great respect and I knew she could manage the ranch on her own.

Toward the end of the second day I was a few miles south of Marathon. I watered the horse at a shady creek where a few kids were splashing and where I ate the last of the food Carlotta had packed for me. There was still about an hour of daylight left. When I finished the stale biscuit stuffed with a chunk of greasy ham I took the bundle out of the other bag to see what it held. It was tied with twine and was heavier than it looked.

I cut the twine with my switchblade. The cloth covering turned out to be a pillowcase wrapped around a revolver and a couple of tightly folded newspaper clippings. The gun was an old single-action .44-caliber Colt with grips of yellowed ivory carved with Mexican eagles.

I’d never seen her touch a gun, not even a rabbit rifle. Where had she gotten this? Her father? A brother, an uncle? I didn’t know if she had any brothers or uncles. She had always refused to talk about her family, no matter how often Reuben had asked about it when we were younger. But it was all I could figure, that some man—probably one in her family—had given it to her, back when. And now she’d given it to me.

It fit my hand like it had been made for me, felt as familiar as my own skin. The embossed eagles were worn smooth and the burring at the top of the hammer had been thumbed dulled, but the Colt was in fine condition. How many hands had held it? I wondered. How many rounds had it fired in its time? How many men had it shot? It was fully loaded. I worked its action, cocked and uncocked it, put it on half-cock and spun the cylinder. I opened the gate and dropped a round into my hand and felt its weight, then put the bullet back into the chamber and thumbed the gate closed and eased the hammer down. I took the Smith & Wesson out of my pants and replaced it with the Colt and tucked the top-break into the saddlebag.

The larger of the two clippings was from a 1914 Mexico City newspaper and was a report on Pancho Villa’s and Emiliano Zapata’s takeover of the capital during the Revolution. It included a large photograph of about two dozen Mexicans crowding around Villa, who was seated in an ornate high-backed chair. He was in a military uniform but I recognized him immediately. There were a half-dozen photos of him on display in a Mexican café in Marfa, and the town’s gun store had pictures of him on the wall too.

Everybody on the border knew Pancho Villa’s story—how at the age of sixteen he’d killed the hacendado who raped his sister, how he was forced to hide in the mountains and become a bandit. Then in 1910 the Revolution changed his life. He became commander of the great Division of the North and one of Mexico’s greatest heroes. The newspapers couldn’t get enough of him. The American press flocked around him every time he visited the border. It was said he had a dozen wives and was a hell of a dancer. He was a fearless fighter, they said, a natural genius at military tactics—and a fearsome man, a merciless executioner of his prisoners. He could have been president of the country but he said he was not wise enough to be its leader. He captured Mexico City but couldn’t hold it, and afterward, when his great army was beaten at last, he was forced to return to the mountains and once more live like a bandit. But then he did something that got the whole world’s attention—he invaded the United States. He raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico, and shot up the army camp there. A massive U.S. Army force, including airplanes, was sent across the border to find him and kill him. They tried for a year and couldn’t do it. The Yankee intrusion into Mexico only made him more of a hero to his countrymen. In 1920 he finally made peace with the Mexican government and—in a funny twist for a guy who had fought against hacendados all his life—he was given a hacienda as part of the deal. But even in retirement he was feared by many powerful men, and a few years later he was assassinated.

The caption under the photograph said Villa was sitting in the President’s Chair in the National Palace. It identified the hawkish-looking man on his immediate left as Emiliano Zapata and the man at his right hand as Tomás Urbina. But the guy who really caught my attention was a large man standing at the very edge of the picture, holding his white Montana hat in a dark big-knuckled hand, his hair neatly combed, his shirt buttoned to the neck under his open coat, his watch fob dangling from the coat’s breast pocket. His face had been circled in ink and he was looking at something or someone behind the photographer and off to the side. Judging by his expression, I’d have bet it was a woman.

He looked strangely familiar, but for a moment I didn’t understand why. And then I did. If I’d worn my hair a little shorter, if I’d trimmed my mustache a little neater, if my eyes had been black instead of bright blue…I could’ve been looking at a picture of myself. The caption said he was Rodolfo Fierro.

I’d heard of him too, of course. Who hadn’t? El Matador, they called him. El Señor Muerte. Manos de Sangre. El Carnicero—the Butcher. He had a dozen such names. He was Villa’s chief executioner. The border Mexicans spoke of him in the same tone they used in speaking of Death itself. There were dozens of stories about him. They said he shot three hundred prisoners one afternoon in a big corral in Ciudad Juárez, that he gave them a chance, ten at a time, to run to a stone wall and climb over it, and he shot every one of them except the last, whom he deliberately let get away. But I’d never seen his picture, nor had anybody I knew. Until now.

The other clipping was a newspaper picture of Fierro by himself. It was taken from only a few feet away and had no caption. It showed him sitting in a chair at a sidewalk table, his face turned to the camera, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his Montana hat, his coatflap hanging away from the holster on his hip and exposing the butt of the Frontier Colt and its ivory grip carved with a Mexican eagle.

I stared and stared at that picture as the sky turned the color of fresh blood and the darkness slowly rose around me.

She sure as hell knew how to keep a secret, my mother.

The way I figured it, he’d either given her the Colt or she had stolen it from him. And she’d clipped these pictures. And before she died she’d shared the secret with her sister and given her the clippings and the gun. I wondered if Aunt Ava would ever have told me the truth if I hadn’t had to run.

The light had gone so dim I could barely see his face in the photo.

“Hey Daddy,” I said.

On a gray and windy afternoon two days later I sold both the Jack horse and my saddle to a rancher in Sanderson who knew a good mount when he saw one, even one that had been ridden as hard as I’d been riding this one. I kept the saddlebags and my blanket. He asked me no questions except if I’d sign a bill of sale, which I did. I patted the horse and said so long to it. I turned down the rancher’s offer of a bed for the night but accepted a ride into town.

I hadn’t eaten since the night before when I’d cooked a skinny jackrabbit over a low fire. So I went into a café and ordered a thick steak with gravy and fried potatoes, green beans and cornbread, a big glass of iced tea, and a slab of pecan pie for dessert. When I was done eating, the two plates looked freshly washed. The waitress gave me a wink and said, “Appetite’s working just fine, hey?” I left her a half-dollar tip.

I went over to the railtracks and followed them eastward for about a hundred yards and then sat on my saddlebags in the meager shade of a mesquite and waited.

An hour later an eastbound train pulled into the Sanderson station for only as long as it took to load and unload mail, and then it started chugging on again. I had thought to wait till dark to jump a freight but I didn’t see any sign of the railroad bulls I’d heard so much about from YB hands who’d ridden the rails, so I said the hell with it and jogged out to the track and picked out a boxcar with a partly open door as it came rolling up, slowly gaining speed.

I ran alongside the open door and pitched the saddlebags and blanketroll through it and then grabbed hold of the iron rung on the door with both hands and swung a foot up and hooked a heel on the car floor. I brought up my other leg and started wriggling myself in feetfirst—and somebody in there kicked me hard in the leg and said, “Ass off, wetback!”

He was a tramp with dirt-colored teeth and he kicked me twice more in the side before I worked myself far enough into the car to brace myself. On the next kick I snatched hold of his pant leg and pulled him off balance and he fell on top of me and almost rolled out of the car. He tried to scrabble back from the open door but I grabbed him by the collar and yanked hard and he went sailing out of the car with a yell.

The door on the other side of the car was shut and another guy was kneeling close to it and next to my opened saddlebags. He was grinning at me and holding the S&W top-break. He wore a baseball cap over a stringy growth of hair that hung down to his collar.

“Good goddamn riddance,” he said. “I was awful tired of Weldon’s company. Same dumbshit stories all the time, you know what I mean?” He turned the gun in his hand, examining it from different angles. “Aint this a pretty thing, though? Aint seen one of these in a coon’s age.”

“Yeah, it’s an old one,” I said, slowly sitting up and making a big show of the pain from the kicks I’d taken, probing my ribs gingerly and then easing a hand behind me and wincing big. “Christ almighty, he like to broke my back.”

The tramp pointed the gun at me but hadn’t cocked it. “Young fella like yourself don’t need no gun to defend hisself as much as a old fella like me. Reckon I’ll just hold on to it.”

“Sure. Keep it.”

“Well thankee, son. You real generous. Now do me just one more kindness and jump offa this train. I appreciate we’re moving along right quick now but you hit the ground running and then roll just right you probly won’t get busted up too bad.”

“Can I at least have my bedroll,” I said. “My last two dollars are in there.”

He turned to look at the bedroll and I pulled the Mexican Colt from my waistband under the back of my jacket, cocking it as I brought it around. He heard the racheting hammer and snapped his attention back to me just in time to see me shoot him through the wishbone. The gunblast was loud but got swallowed almost instantly in the rumbling of the train. He flopped backward and against the closed door and fell over on his side with his legs in a twist.

I got up and stood over him with the .44 cocked and pointed at his head and he looked at me without expression as the light drained out of his eyes and he died. I took the top-break from his hand and put it back in the saddlebag. I snugged the .44 at the small of my back again and then opened the door a little way. There was nothing to see but passing desert. I sat and cooled myself in the rushing air and watched the country go clacking by.

The sun had set and a dull orange twilight was closing around us when the train made a whistle stop at some nowhere station. I peeked out the door on the depot side and saw the engineer leaning out of the chugging locomotive and talking to a guy in shirtsleeves on the platform. The town consisted of fewer than a dozen buildings and even at that early hour of the evening there were more darkened windows than any with light showing in them. On the other side of the train there was only open country. I shoved the dead guy out the door on that side and then jumped down and positioned him so that his head was under the boxcar and his chest wound was centered on the rail. I tossed his cap under the car and then I got back inside and closed the door. A minute later the train got rolling again.

We pulled up into Del Rio before dawn. I hunkered in the darkest corner of the boxcar and kept alert for the yard bulls, having heard stories about what rough old boys they were. I was ready to show them what rough was. But the only guys to peek into the car were a couple of kids about thirteen or fourteen who asked if anybody was in there and when I said yeah they asked if they could share the car with me. I told them to get in and keep quiet and they tossed their bindles in and helped each other aboard and then I eased the door to till it was almost closed. They said they were brothers, Charlie and Fred, and as we passed the miles together I came to learn that they’d had enough of their damn stepdaddy and were going to Houston to live with their uncle Stephen. The uncle didn’t know they were coming but they were sure he would be glad to see them, him and Aunt Beulah both.

They each had a half-dozen peanut butter sandwiches in their bindles and they were quick to offer me one. I was so hungry I took it down in about four bites and they insisted I have another. I said it was a long way to Houston and they were going to need all the food they had but they said ah hell, we was hobo buddies, wasn’t we. So I took the sandwich. I asked if they had any money and they said they sure did, they had four bits apiece. I gave them two dollars, which they refused until I convinced them I wasn’t paying for the sandwiches, I was only helping out some hobo buddies who could use a little dough on their long trip. I said they could pay me back next time we ran into each other. “Well…in that case,” Charlie the older one said, “all right then.”

We went through Spofford, Uvalde, Hondo, the floor of the car vibrating so hard it was tough to get any sleep. When the train began to slow on its approach to the San Antonio yard, I shook hands with the boys and wished them luck. I secretly hoped they wouldn’t get robbed and maybe worse by the first wolves they ran into.

The train didn’t seem to be going all that fast now, but I didn’t know how deceptive train speed could be.

“They say you supposed to try and hit the ground running,” young Fred said.

“So I’ve been told,” I said. “Thanks for reminding me.”

I tossed out my saddlebags and bedroll, then crouched low at the edge of the car floor—and then jumped and tried to hit the ground running.

I went tumbling and flapping every which way and it was a wonder I didn’t crack my skull. I gashed a cheek and banged up a knee and cut my elbows and pretty much felt like I’d been stomped by a herd of horses. I sat up and saw Fred and Charlie looking back at me from the boxcar. I waved like the landing had gone just perfect and they waved back.

The knee was bloody and hurt like a sonofabitch and at first I was afraid I’d broken it. But I could stand up and hobble around so I knew it was just badly bruised. I picked up my hat and went back and got my saddlebags and roll and then gimped on out to the nearest road and found a bus stop. About an hour later a bus came along with a sign saying DOWNTOWN. I got aboard and went into San Antonio, where I hadn’t been since shortly after I was born.

I’d picked San Antonio because it was far enough from Presidio County that I didn’t think anybody would hunt me there and big enough to hide in if anybody did. I checked into a residential hotel called Los Nopales a few blocks over from the river. The room was on the second floor and the ancient elevator took forever, but at least I didn’t have to take the stairs, which would’ve been hard labor on my bad knee. The carpeting was worn and the walls were water-stained and the room smelled of bug spray, but it was cheap and would do just fine. It was a good thing I had enough money from the sale of the horse to see me through for a while because I could hardly walk and I knew the knee would stiffen up and hurt even worse before it even began to get better. The place had one bellhop, a Mex kid, and I paid him to bring me a bottle of alcohol and bandages and, in the days to follow, to keep me in cigarettes and sandwiches and magazines.

I didn’t do much of anything during the next two weeks except sleep and read and let the knee heal up. When I wasn’t reading I’d sit in the tattered armchair by the window and smoke and watch the street and sidewalk traffic passing by. For exercise I’d do sitting pushups off the arms of the chair, raising and lowering myself till my arms were burning and about to cramp, then I’d rest a bit and then do another set until I couldn’t raise myself off the chair at all. Then I’d sleep some more. I kept both revolvers under the pillow.

I wanted to know how things were at the YB but I didn’t think it was a good idea to write to Aunt Ava directly. Even if I didn’t put a return address on the envelope, somebody at the post office could be keeping an eye on her mail, with instructions to let the sheriff know about any letter that looked suspicious. It wasn’t really very likely they’d go to all that trouble but I didn’t want to take any chances. It was even less likely, though, that they’d be watching the vaqueros’ mail, and after lying low for more than a month I finally wrote a note to Esteban. I asked how things stood and how my aunt was doing and said to tell her I was all right. I didn’t tell him where I was living but said to write me back in care of general delivery at the post office on Commerce, which was two blocks from the Nopales.

By then I was already getting around with a cane, and in another week or so I didn’t need it anymore. I took my meals at a little Mex café down the street. I went for a stroll every morning in a nearby park, limping less every day. I’d sit on a bench in the sun and read the local papers. Every afternoon I’d check in at the post office. One day Esteban’s letter was waiting for me.

He wrote in a scrawl and mostly in Spanish as bad as his English, but with a few English phrasings mixed in, pretty much the way he usually talked. He said the police had questioned him and some of the other vaqueros about me but the boys all said they had no idea where I might have gone, which was of course the truth. There was a warrant out on me for murder, he said, and there was a reward of five hundred dollars for information leading to my capture. He said he could be a rich man if only he knew exactly where I was living. Maybe he was joking and maybe not. And he said that, in case I didn’t know it, the señora had sold the ranch.

She had done so only a few days after the funerals of Don Cullen and Don Reuben. And then a week after the sale, she departed on the train from Marfa with only two bags of belongings. She told everyone she was going to live with a cousin in Albuquerque and gave her new address to a few people. But it was common knowledge that when her bookstore friend Mrs. Morgan had tried to contact her shortly after she moved, the Albuquerque post office said there was no such address in town. Where she had truly gone, Esteban wrote, no one could say.

As for Chente, he had been convicted of assault and sentenced to six months in the county jail. It was doubtful he would receive an early release for good behavior, as he was always fighting with the other inmates. The new owner of the YB—now called the Blue Range Ranch—was a kind man named Colfax who had become rich in the oil business but had always wanted to raise horses. Mr. Colfax had kept on all of the hands and retained Esteban as the foreman. Esteban said he was glad the Blue Range would be strictly a horse ranch, and he concluded with the hope that I was safe and in good health and advised me to go with God.

That was that.

And why I lied to Daniela about how I’d come to leave the YB.

After I got Esteban’s letter I gave some thought to hitchhiking out into ranch country and trying to get on as a hand somewhere, but the more I thought about it the less the idea appealed to me. Then one morning I woke up knowing I never wanted to work on a ranch again.

Over the next two months I worked at several different jobs in San Antonio and hated them all. I carried a hod for a construction gang, worked with a road-tarring crew, laid sewer pipe on a municipal project, drove a water truck for the city. I didn’t stick with any of them for more than a few weeks. I was busting my back for peanuts and choking on the boredom. I was drunk almost every night and getting into bar fights.

One night in an alley behind a saloon I beat the shit out of a tough-talking merchant sailor who had a couple of inches and about thirty pounds on me. He’d been bullying everybody in the bar and they were glad to see me cool him, and my drinks were on the house the rest of the night. Among the spectators was a guy who had a friend who owned a cathouse at the south end of town and was in need of a good bouncer. The last good one who’d worked there had got stabbed in his sleep by a jealous girlfriend, and the two he’d hired since had both got their asses whipped by rough customers. Was I interested in the job? Sure, why not? The next day he took me out to the place, the Bluebonnet Dance Hall, and introduced me to the owner, a Mr. Stanley, and told him about the way I’d handled the sailor. And I got the job.

The place called itself a dance hall and on the ground floor that’s what it was. The “dance hostesses” did their whoring on the second floor. I’d check in around five o’clock and usually not leave till three or four in the morning, depending on how much business the joint was turning. I’d sit in a chair at the foot of the stairs to the second floor and keep an eye on things in the dance parlor and I was within easy call of the floorwoman upstairs if any of the girls had trouble with a customer.

The only troublesome guys we had in there during my first weeks on the job were drunks who either couldn’t get it up or couldn’t get off for some other reason and thought their three dollars bought them all the time they’d need to get their satisfaction. But the house limit was fifteen minutes unless you ponied up another three bucks. If a customer got unreasonable about it the floorwoman would call down for me and I’d go up and persuade the guy to get his clothes on and take his leave. I hardly ever had to get rougher with any of them than an armlock. Only now and then did I have to punch somebody in the gut to put an end to the argument. I carried the Colt under my jacket but Stanley had told me I’d better never pull it unless some customer pulled a piece first. The job required long hours, but it paid well and had the added benefit of a free fuck at the end of the night.

I’d been there about a month when a guy hit one of the girls and the floorwoman called down for me. The guy was bigger than me but looked scared and said he was really sorry and he’d give the girl some money to make up for it and so on. I figured what the hell, the girl wasn’t really hurt, why rough him up? I told him to give her twenty bucks and don’t come back. Right, right, he said—and the moment I took my eyes off him he caught me with a hell of a sucker punch. He landed another good one before I got my footing and turned the thing around. Like everybody else in the place Stanley heard the commotion and came rushing upstairs and into the room, but by then it was all over. The guy was groaning on the floor, his nose broken and blown up, a front tooth somewhere under the bed. I had a shiner and was tempted to give him a kick in the balls for good measure but didn’t do it. But when Stanley saw him he said, “Oh shit.” Turned out the guy was some kind of assistant to the mayor, a regular customer who’d been coming to the Bluebonnet once a week for the past several months. He’d been a problem a few times before but not in a long while, and this was the first time he’d ever taken a swing at anybody. Stanley and a couple of the girls helped him up and tidied him somewhat but then the guy started threatening to make plenty of legal trouble for the club. The matter was finally settled when Stanley gave him a wad of money and fired me.

For a week afterward I was in a fury. It was partly because of losing a job with good pay and free women, partly because of losing it the way I did. Still, that wasn’t the whole reason for my anger, or even the main part of it. But even if somebody had put a gun to my head I couldn’t have explained exactly what it was, and it made me even angrier that I couldn’t.

I started taking long walks every night and I always carried both guns. Then one chilly January night I was walking down a sidewalk bordering a large park thick with trees and shrubbery when I took notice of a fancy Spanish restaurant called Domingo’s across the street. The place was doing a brisk business and as I stood there it occurred to me how easy it would be to rob it.

The idea got my blood rushing. The cashier’s counter was by the front door and out of view of the dining room. Just stick the gun in the cashier’s face and make him hand over the money. If anybody came in the door or out of the dining room while I was at it I’d point the piece at them and tell them to stand fast…then grab the dough and hustle across the street into the park…then pick any one of a dozen paths out to some other street and mix in with the Saturday-night crowds.

The more I thought about it the simpler the plan seemed and the tighter the hold it took on me. But the smart thing was to wait till the supper rush was over with—let the dining crowd thin out, let the till get a little fatter. Another hour would be about right. I went over and sat on a sidewalk bench deeply shadowed by the trees. There were cars parked along the curbs on both sides of the street but I had a clear view of the restaurant doors. I watched the well-dressed patrons come and go. I was charged up and maybe a little nervous but I was ready.

Over the next forty minutes, more and more people came out of Domingo’s and got in their cars and left. And then a light-colored Buick sedan came slowly down the street and wheeled into a parking spot almost directly across from the restaurant.

I figured them for late-night diners, but after the Buick’s engine shut off and its headlights went dark, nobody got out. Against the glow from the streetlight on the corner behind them I could see the hatted silhouettes of four men sitting in the car. They were looking across the street and had to be watching the restaurant, since it was the only place on the block open for business at that hour. I thought maybe they were waiting to pick up somebody and I hoped it wouldn’t take long. I was about ready to get to it and I didn’t want a car full of witnesses parked in front of the place.

Another twenty minutes or so went by and the guys in the Buick were still waiting. I was getting pretty irked about it. Why didn’t one of those guys go inside and tell whoever they were waiting for that they were there? A few more people came out and got in their cars and left. There were only a half-dozen cars still on the street, including the Buick.

The Buick’s motor suddenly started up and I thought, About time. But then the front and back doors swung open and a guy got out of each one—palookas, both armed, the front guy with a big automatic, the backdoor guy with a sawed-off double-barrel. The night was chilly enough for their breath to show against the light of the corner lamppost. The two men stepped out into the street and the Buick’s other back door opened and one more guy got out, this one holding a revolver.

Son of a bitch. I figured they were going to heist the place.

I stood up and put my hand to the Colt at my back. They obviously hadn’t seen me sitting in the shadows. I was furious that they were going to beat me out of the score. I thought about shooting out one of their tires and scooting into the park.

The guy behind the wheel was looking across the street and still hadn’t seen me either. I followed his gaze and that’s when I saw that the gunmen weren’t heading for Domingo’s but toward three men who had just come out of the restaurant. The three were walking away down the sidewalk and were unaware of the men closing in on them at an angle from behind and holding their weapons low against their legs.

I didn’t know I was going to do it until I hollered, “Behind you!”

The three men on the sidewalk all turned around as the shotgunner raised his weapon and cut loose with both barrels and the hat flew off one of the guys on the sidewalk with part of his head still in it. His buddies pulled pistols and one of them took cover behind a Studebaker as the street guy with the automatic started firing. The street guy closest to me was darkly Mexican and was raising his revolver at me when I shot him twice in the face. He fired a wild round and stumbled backward and dropped the piece and went down. The shotgunner had tossed away the sawed-off and was bringing a revolver out of his coat and I shot him in the side of the head and he did a little drunken sidestep and fell. The guy with the automatic was crouched in front of a Model A and replacing the magazine and looking from me to the guy behind the Studebaker who yelled, “Behind you!” I spun around as the driver came out of the Buick and fired at me twice—my coatflap tugged and there was a buzz past my ear—before I shot him with both revolvers, shot him and shot him as gunfire banged behind me and he slammed back against the open car door and slid down on his ass and slumped over with his head draining blood on the running board. I was punched hard under the arm and pivoted back around to see the guy by the Model A turning away to fire at the Studebaker guy and then he looked at me again like he was surprised to see me still on my feet. My revolvers snapped on empty chambers. He showed his teeth as he swung the automatic toward me—but then his head jerked to the side and he fell over with a hand clamped to the side of his head. The Studebaker guy—hatless, with curly gray hair—rushed over to him and bent down and shot him in the ear. Then hustled over to the guy I’d shot in the face and whose leg was moving slightly and gave him one in the head too.

That was it. The whole fight didn’t take ten seconds. The sudden silence was enormous and there was a gunsmoke haze. Blood was spreading on the sidewalk around what was left of the shotgunned guy’s head. Curly’s other pal was sprawled on his back with his eyes open and his legs turned funny and his shirtfront shining red. Curly bent over him and dug a set of keys out of his pocket and yelled at me, “Come on if you’re coming!”

I ran after him. At the end of the street he got behind the wheel of a yellow Cadillac and the engine fired up as I got in on the passenger side. Before I could close the door the car shot backward and went swaying around the corner and braked sharply, snapping my head back against the seat and slamming my door shut. Then the Caddy leaped forward with the tires screaming.

A few minutes later we flashed past the city limits sign. By then he had asked my name and I’d told him—and he’d introduced himself as Rosario Maceo but said I could call him Rose.

We made Houston before dawn. At the outskirts of the city Rose turned off the main highway. I asked where we were going and he said to see a doctor.

My wound had crusted up pretty good and the bleeding was down to a seep. It still hurt but not as bad as before, maybe because I was slightly crocked from the bottle of rum Rose pulled out from under the seat. He had told me it was the shooter with the automatic who got me—just before Rose nailed him. I’d asked about the two guys on the sidewalk and he said, “Mangan and Lucas. Good men. Hate losing them.”

W

We hadn’t said much else on the drive. We’d watched the road steadily zooming under us as we sped through the night, splattering jackrabbits caught in the headlights, listening to whatever music we could pick up on coming-and-going radio stations, mostly Western swing stuff. We stopped at all-night stations to fill the tank. I didn’t know where we were going and I didn’t care, as long as it was away from San Antonio. The only thing I was sorry to leave behind was the roll of $250 I’d hidden in a baseboard niche under the bed. For most of the ride I just sipped at the rum and kept dozing off.

We drove down a ritzylooking residential street lined with high trees and wide sidewalks. The lawns were big and neatly trimmed, the cars all luxury models. He wheeled into the side driveway of a large two-story and parked deep in the shadows. He helped me out of the car and around to a small side porch and must’ve pushed a secret button or something because a minute later a light came on in the kitchen and the door opened and a neatly barbered and bespectacled man in a shiny black bathrobe said for us to come in.

His name was Dr. Monroe and he was a whiz. Less than an hour later we were back in the car and I was feeling no pain except for a mild rum headache. According to the doc the bullet had passed through the big muscle that ran along my side and had slightly scraped a rib but damaged nothing but tissue. He cleaned the wound and treated it with sulfa and bandaged it up, then gave me an injection to dull the pain and said to take it easy for a few days. He said any doctor or a good nurse could remove the stitches when they were ready to come out. Rose said, “Hell, they won’t be the first I took out.”

We stopped at a café overlooking the ship channel and I waited in the car and watched the reddening sky while Rose went in to buy a sack of beignets. He said the place made the best ones in Texas. It was the first time I’d heard the word and it must’ve shown on my face. As he stepped up to the bakery door he looked back at me and tapped a sign on the window: FRESH BEIGNETS. When he got back to the car he had already finished one and was licking his fingers. I took a look in the sack and saw little thick squares of fried dough covered with powdered sugar. They smelled wonderful. I was still a little dopey from the injection but I was hungry too. The things tasted great.

“It’s the same as a doughnut except it’s square and don’t have a hole in it,” Rose said. He took another one from the sack and held it in his mouth while he worked the steering wheel and gearshift and got us rolling again.

“Yeah,” I said. “Like a circle’s the same as a square except it’s round and got no corners.”

His smile was outlined with powdered sugar. “Got us a fucken wiseguy.”

He’d bought a newspaper from a hawker in front of the bakery and said for me to take a look at the bottom of the front page. The report must’ve just made it under the edition deadline: SIX SLAIN IN SAN ANTONIO GUN BATTLE. He’d already skimmed it but wanted me to read it to him, so I did. The report quoted several witnesses who came to the door of Domingo’s when they heard the gunfire but most of them ducked back out of sight when they saw the gunmen shooting it out in front of the restaurant. Only one patron and a waiter kept on taking peeks at the action from around the door. The patron told police he saw at least a dozen men blazing away at each other, all of them Mexicans, and then some ran away down the street and some drove off in a green Ford touring car. The waiter agreed that it had been about a dozen, but he said only one had run away while another three got in a gray DeSoto to make their getaway. He too was sure all the principals were Mexicans. Police had identified four of the dead as members of a local criminal gang and speculated that the gunfight was the result of a dispute over gambling jurisdictions.

“Eyewitnesses,” Rose said. “God love them.”

“What was it about?” I said.

“Money,” he said. “What else?”

I waited to hear more but that was all he ever said to me about it.

We were on the causeway and I was gawking at Galveston Bay gleaming like pink glass under the low sun when he asked if I wanted a job. I said doing what and he said making sure people didn’t fuck with him or his brother or get away with it if they did.

“Let me tell you, kid, I think maybe it’s the job for you.”

I said maybe it was.

A half-hour later we were in the Club office and he’d introduced me to Sam and Artie and Mrs. Bianco. And then, with just me and him and Sam in the office, he reenacted the gunfight for Sam’s benefit, showing how he’d ducked behind the car when he heard me holler a warning and flicking his fingers beside his ears to show what happened to Lucas’ head when the double load of buckshot hit him. He waved his arms around as he described the bullets ricocheting off the wall behind him and punching holes in the car windows. He made gunshot noises and slapped his hand to his head or chest when he described somebody getting hit. He mimicked pistols with his thumbs and index fingers as he showed how I stood in the middle of the street shooting right and left and how I whirled around to shoot the guy at the Buick about seven or eight times.

He told Sam it was like watching Billy the Kid in action.

“Only this one’s Jimmy the Kid!” Sam said—and he slapped me on the back and then hugged me hard.

Watkins was the referee and a club rat named Wagner was working the bell. It rang for round one and Otis and I came out of our corners and touched gloves and fast as a blink he lunged and hit me with a right lead that made the room wobble. I staggered backward and he stayed on top of me, working the jabs hard in my face, each one stinging pretty good, since we weren’t using headgear—and then bam-bam he drilled me with a left-right to the forehead and under the eye and I slid along the ropes and sat down hard.

The club rats were whooping and hollering and some were yelling for Otis to finish me and some for me to get up, goddammit, get up. They were five-deep around the ring. Otis went to a neutral corner and Watkins started the count over me. I got up on one knee, everything a little blurry at the edges. I took the count to eight and stood up.

Otis popped me some more good ones but I clinched him every chance I got—getting boos from the rats. Every time I hugged him, though, Otis showed how seriously he was taking things by giving me shots to the short ribs and awful close to the kidneys. The round seemed to last three days instead of three minutes before Wagner hit the bell. Otis worked his mouthpiece forward with his tongue and pinched it out with the thumb of his glove and grinned at me.

A rat named Hickey was working my corner. He rinsed my mouthpiece and sponged my face and said, “You got him now, Jimmyboy. He’s an old man, he’s already wearing out.”

I wanted to say that if he was wearing out it was from hitting me so much, but figured I’d be wiser to save my breath. My right cheek felt bloated and my ribs were half-numb.

The bell clanged and we got back to it. I was still a little fluttery in the legs. We circled and kept trading jabs and he now and then hooked me to the ribs to remind me that they needed protection too. He made me wish I had four arms. We were pretty close to the end of the round when he got careless and threw a lazy right hook behind a jab and I was able to whip a left over his right and catch him solid just above the jaw. He backpedaled into the ropes and I went at him with both hands and the club rats were howling like Indians but Otis covered up expertly and I couldn’t do any more real damage to him before the bell sounded.

“Whooo!” Hickey said, toweling me, giving me water, holding the bucket for me to spit into. “He’s all yours, Jimmy—you about crossed his eyes for good with that left. Wow!”

What I’d really done was make Otis steaming mad—just like the last time we’d sparred. But this time he had a full round left to exercise his displeasure on me.

He knocked me down four times in the next two minutes. I took an eight-count before getting up again each time. I was up on one knee after the fourth knockdown—hearing the club rats’ clamor and Watkins shouting the count as he swung his arm over me—and I looked over and saw Otis grinning at me from the other corner.

He yelled, “Some fun, hey?”

Son of a bitch.

“…Eight!…” Watkins shouted—and I stood up.

Watkins leaned in close like he was checking the laces on my gloves and said just loud enough for me to hear: “Christ, man, enough. It’s a minute to go. Stay away from him.” He stepped back and waved us at each other.

Otis came at me on his toes and rapped me with three hard jabs and easily dodged my hook. Bastard was playing with me, dropping his hands to his waist and juking from side to side like he was daring me to land a punch, smiling around his mouthpiece.

He popped me twice more with the jab and then drew his right hand way back and began whirling it all around like he was winding up a haymaker. He looked over at the rats in the front row and waggled his brows like he was saying Watch this now.

He shouldn’t have taken his eyes off me. I leaped and grabbed him in a headlock and started punching him in the face as hard and fast as I could.

For a second the rats went mute—and then all them were shrieking “Foul!…Foul!”

He twisted and pulled and we reeled around the ring every which way but I kept punching and punching, feeling his nose give way, vaguely aware of Watkins trying to pull me off him.

Otis tried to punch me in the balls and I hit him even harder. I forced his head lower and then clubbed him behind the neck and brought my knee up hard in his face. He sailed back into the ropes and flopped down, losing his mouthpiece, his nose pouring blood.

Like any pro fighter who gets knocked almost unconscious, his instinct was to get on his feet fast, to beat the count, his body trying to get off the canvas even while his brain was still bouncing around in his skull. He got to his hands and knees and fell over on his side, wallowing like a drunk, trying again to get up.

Watkins had me in a bearhug from behind, pulling me back from Otis and cussing me. I said to let go but he didn’t—maybe he couldn’t hear me for all the racket the rats were making. I stomped on his instep and that did the trick. He let out a yelp and hopped over to the ropes to keep from falling.

Our gloves weren’t taped, so I clamped one in my armpit and yanked my hand free of it, then pulled off the other glove. Otis was up now and he swayed against the ropes for a second and then his eyes focused on me. Blood was running over his mouth and off his chin.

I raised my taped hands and gestured for him to come at me. For a second I thought he’d do it—but he must’ve read my eyes, and he wasn’t stupid. He spat a mouthful of blood on the canvas between us and stayed put.

“Some fun, hey?” I said.

“Fuck you,” he said, his voice thick.

He managed to climb down from the ring without help, then walked stiffly across the gym and into his little office and closed the door.

Watkins was tearful with pain, sitting on the canvas and holding his foot. The rats had shut up and were gawking at me. They backed away as I stepped out between the ropes.

I got a towel from the stack and started for the showers—and caught sight of Rose turning away from the gym door.

When I went to the office a little later, Sam was in the outer room chatting with Mrs. Bianco. He grinned big when he saw me. Mrs. Bianco looked pained.

“Well hell, Kid, I can see why Otis got you a little peeved. You looked in the mirror lately?”

Of course I had. And seen my swollen ears and eyebrows, the large mouse under my right eye.

“I hear you might have a little trouble finding sparring partners from now on,” Sam said. He put up his fists and made a bob-and-weave motion, then slapped me on the shoulder. “Jimmy the Kid! By hook or by crook, goddammit, he don’t lose.”

Mrs. Bianco nodded toward Rose’s office and I went on in.

Rose looked up from some papers in front of him. His face had no expression—which meant he was mad as hell and trying to hide it.

“Good thing Otis had better sense than you and walked away,” he said. “We don’t need headlines about somebody getting crippled in our health club. A health club is supposed to be good for your fucken health. Guy gets the shit beat out of him in a health club in front of a bunch of witnesses—especially a guy supposed to be in charge of things—well, word gets around, people say, What the fuck kinda health club is that?—know what I mean?”

It wasn’t a question so I kept my mouth shut.

“You want to use the gym from now on, you do it at night, when there’s nobody else there—except maybe me. And no more sparring, not with nobody. Let’s give Otis and the squarejohns a chance to settle their nerves.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Heard anything that might connect to Dallas?”

He always could switch the subject that fast. One thing done with, on to the next.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’d say Sam called it right.”

“Maybe so. Stick around the Club for another coupla days. If Dallas don’t move by then, I got some out-of-town jobs need your attention.”

“Just say the word.”

Then I thought of Daniela, and the idea of leaving town for a while lacked its usual spark.

I was at the door when he called out, “Say, Kid,” and I turned.

“Next time we’re in the gym, teach me that move with the knee.”

“Sure thing, Don Rosario.”

She answered my knock on the Avila’s door at exactly six-thirty—and her smile fell away when she saw my face.

“Ay, dios. Qué…What happened?” Her hand started for my face and then withdrew uncertainly, as if she were afraid of causing me pain.

“Sparring at the gym,” I said, clarifying the word for her by raising my fists and tucking in my chin. “Boxeando. I should’ve known better than to spar with a pro.”

“Pro?”

“Professional.” I told her the sparring had gotten a little too intense, that an amateur should never get intense with a pro. I said I had used bad judgment. “It looks worse than it feels,” I said.

She gingerly touched the mouse under my eye. When she put a fingertip to my bruised lip I kissed it. Her eyes widened—and then she drew her hand away when Señora Avila called from the kitchen, asking if I was at the door.

The señora came into the room, drying her hands on a dish towel—and then saw me and said, “Ay, hijo—pero que te paso?”

I had to explain again about the sparring. She shook her head and said men should not fight for fun, that there was already too much real cause for fighting in the world. She asked if I would like something to eat, if my mouth did not hurt too much. I thanked her and said I’d already eaten. I’d seen her husband at the Casa Verde before I left. Gregorio was having his weekly neighborhood poker game in the kitchen, the radio tuned loudly to a Mexican station out of Houston, the icebox packed with beer, the counter full of bowls of fried chiles and chicharrones. Back during my first weeks in La Colonia, I’d accepted the group’s invitation to sit in on the game, but right from the start I sensed the other men’s nervousness and I could tell that none of them was playing his best—except for Gregorio, whose best wasn’t worth a damn anyway. They weren’t raising me when they should’ve, they weren’t calling my bluffs. After an hour of play I made some excuse and took my leave, and although I was invited to the game every week for weeks afterward, I always begged off, and finally they were able not to ask me anymore.

Daniela went to the sofa to fetch the straw bag containing her towel and other things. I was wearing my swim trunks under my pants and my towel was in the car. Just then, Rocha entered from the hallway, his head bandage freshly changed but still held in place by the sillylooking ribbon. He paused when he saw me—his eyes running over my beat-up face—and then busted out laughing.

“Felipe!” Señora Avila chided him for his amusement in my disfigurement. “No es cosa cómica. No seas tan bruto, por amor de dios!”

He just laughed harder. For a second I had an urge to go in there and bust his nose for him, see how funny he thought that was. He slumped against the wall and bumped his head slightly and winced and put his hand to the ridiculous bandage but kept on laughing.

And then I just couldn’t help it and started laughing along with him.

The women looked at us like we’d lost our minds. Daniela gawked at the señora and the woman shook her head and shrugged and the expressions on their faces made me and Rocha laugh even harder.

Mrs. Avila’s aspect became a little anxious. “Ya, locos!” she said.

Daniela’s eyes on me were large. I waved a hand at her like it was nothing to be concerned about, and I worked to get myself under control. Rocha wiped at his eyes with a dirty bandanna and straightened up. And then we looked at each other and broke up again.

It took another half-minute but we finally got a grip on ourselves. Rocha had to dry his eyes again and he blew his nose and tucked away the bandanna. He looked at me and we grinned but didn’t go into another laughing fit. He cleared his throat and asked if I’d like a bottle of beer.

I thanked him but said maybe later. He nodded and raised a hand at me and went off to the kitchen, chuckling low.

Mrs. Avila said we were both crazy as goats and then kissed Daniela on the cheek and said she should have a good time but to be home by ten o’clock. She gave me a tight look of maternal warning and I nodded, which I thought was vague enough to keep from being an outright promise. The señora stood in the doorway and watched us go out to the Terraplane convertible I’d borrowed from the Club. It was a warm night and I’d already put the top down.