Under the Skin (21 page)

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 topbreak.

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.

bout 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.

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.

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 redassed 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.

bout 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.

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.

he 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.