Break the Skin (7 page)

T
his is the truth. Lordy Magordy. Listen. He was just there. He was standing on the corner of Fry and Oak, looking at the drum circle, a group of North Texas students who had gathered, as they usually did that time of evening, on the grass outside the Language Building across the street. It was mid-September, near dusk, and the grackles were flocking to the live oaks, screeching as they settled on the branches. Soon a campus maintenance crew would set up shop on the roof and put the propane cannons to work. Their blasts—a
boom boom boom
I always felt in my chest—was a humane way to disturb the grackles and send them off in search of somewhere else to roost.

But in the last moments before the noise came, it wasn’t bad at all. It was all right. Dusk coming on, and the drum circle setting a rhythm that went through my legs. A breeze rattled the leaves on the live oaks, a little cool air at the end of the day, a blessing after that blazing North Texas sun. The sky was all different shades of purple-blue with a haze of orange down low on the horizon, and I was just a woman, almost forty, pretending I was in love with my life, pretending I didn’t have a brother, Pablo Omar Maximillian Ruiz, who was in trouble and needed cash, who would eventually say to me at a time when I didn’t want to think what it would cost me to help him—when I was so close to having the life I’d always wanted—“Betts, do me this favor. I’m a dead man if I don’t get the money.”

That’s me, Betty Ruiz, but most folks know me as Miss Baby, owner of Babyheart’s Tats, a parlor right here on Fry. You want barbed wire on your bicep? A rose on your ankle? A heart with an arrow through it on your forearm? I’m your gal. I’ll even drill as much of the Lord’s Prayer as you want across your back:
And lead us not into temptation
. But don’t come asking for the nasty. No tats on your ta-tas. No rat-a-tat-tat anywhere near your bird or your back door. Go on down the street if that’s your kick. Miss Baby runs a classy place.

“Betts,” Pablo would finally say when he didn’t know what else to do, “you know I need the cash.”

Oh, but so much would happen before we got to that point. That night on the street, I had no idea what I was headed toward. I just knew it was an evening like all the other evenings ahead of me—time to pass on my own—and all of a sudden there he was, this man. Short, bowlegged man. He was wearing a derby hat, and that hat caught my eye. He took it off and fanned his face as he squinted into the last of the sun. He wasn’t from here. Least, that was my guess. His skin was too fair, and he looked too fresh. He hadn’t been here long enough to get beat down by the sun, to let it leather his face, dry out his lips. No, this man looked like he came from a land of water and lush green. A land of brooks and streams and shady woods. There was something about him that made me want to put my arms around him. Maybe it was the way he looked out of place, the way I’d felt nearly all my life, a Mexican girl who knew she wasn’t pretty like the
gringas
.

I was short and thick-legged, and I kept my black hair cropped close to my head and spiked with gel so it wouldn’t get in my way when I was drilling ink. I wasn’t the girlie sort who could turn a man’s head, but that never stopped me from trying. I imagined I could put my face up close to this man’s, and he’d smell like pine trees, hyacinths, lilacs. Just listen to me go on.

Then he looked at me as if he’d sensed I was watching. He put his hat back on. He gave me a shy smile, took a step in my direction, and
stopped. He had a little space between his front teeth, and something about the way that made him look—like a little boy, lost—caught me by the heartstrings.

Next thing I knew, I was there beside him, and I couldn’t help myself. I said, “Hey, good-lookin’.”

That’s me. Too forward sometimes. But you have to know what happened to me just minutes before I closed my shop, stepped out onto Fry, and saw him on the corner. You have to know that the phone rang, and it was Pablo’s ex, Carolyn, and she said to me, “You hootchie bitch.” Said, “You cow.” Said, “From the heart, Baby. From the heart.”

What was her gripe? Only that she blamed me for the trouble Pablo was in. Back in the spring, I’d introduced him to Virgil Dent, a ranch hand who went by the nickname “Slam.” He slammed shots of tequila, slammed his way through the world, slam-bammed-thanked-me-ma’am. From time to time, he came into the shop for some fresh ink. He favored eagles and wolves and cattle skulls, and whenever I drilled him, I could feel his eyes, deep-set and chestnut brown, taking me in. He wasn’t a beautiful man—he needed more flesh, and his face was pitted with acne scars—but he was a man who knew what he wanted, a wiry man all muscle and bone, and for a while he wanted me.

Then he offered Pablo a cash-making proposition rustling cattle and selling them to auction barns in Kansas. No brand laws there, he pointed out. They’d be in and out like a fiddler’s elbow. He winked at Pablo, and they both laughed. We were in Dallas one night late in April, sitting around a table at Club Dada in Deep Ellum, and under that table, Slam ran his hand up my leg and let the knuckle of his thumb press into the crotch of my jeans. He winked at me. “In and out,” he said, looking right into my eyes. “Just like that.”

Up to twelve hundred dollars a head for cows stolen from pastures and loaded into tractor trailers in the dead of the night. Easy money.

Then Pablo made the worst move of his life. It was sometime in the middle of June when he sold a load of cattle and instead of splitting
the $36,000 with Slam, he skipped town with it, and now he was on the run. No one knew where he was—not me, who worried over him, not Slam, who was determined to find him and get his money, and not Carolyn, who was convinced that if it hadn’t been for this trouble, she and Pablo would have worked things out, got married again, and lived happily ever after. “We were that close,” she told me, holding up her thumb and forefinger. “Then you got him hooked up with your trashy boyfriend and look what happened.”

He wasn’t my boyfriend anymore, and hadn’t been since well before Pablo cheated him. I was what Carolyn wasn’t—a woman who could make it just fine without a man. At least that’s what I told myself that night in September. Then I closed my shop early and stepped outside.

Like I said, there he was, this man, as if he’d been waiting all his life, hoping sooner or later I’d come along.

“Cutie.” I tapped him on the chest with my finger. “You looking for someone?”

“I don’t know.” He whispered as if he thought someone else might hear, as if he wanted to tell me something he couldn’t quite manage. “I’m not even sure who I am,” he said, and his voice shook so badly, I was convinced he was telling me the truth. Wherever he’d come from, he was spooked by something. “Please,” he said. “Can you help me?”

That’s when the propane cannons started firing. Blast after blast. He covered his ears, closed his eyes, and shook his head. He clenched his teeth, and his face was a face of anguish. I put my hands on his arms. It was the thing I wanted to do, and I did it.

“Hush, sugar, it’s all right,” I said, and it came to me, this whole other life, as if a curtain parted—Lordy Magordy—and I could see through to the other side. For whatever reason, this man was so much in trouble, so much at loose ends, I knew I could claim him, and he’d let me.

From where I stand now, would I do it again, given the chance? Sometimes you don’t have a choice. That’s what I’ve learned. Sometimes things happen, and there you are.

“You’ve been waiting for me,” I said, and he said yes. “You’re Donnie,” I told him. I grabbed the first name that came to me. “You’re my sweet Donnie. Come on. Let’s go home.”

HE WENT WITH ME
, this man I’d just named Donnie, and it suited him, that name, a name I grabbed out of the air because I thought I was doing magic—Houdini, Who-dun-it, my Donnie. Let’s get this straight. He was a sweet-natured man. Granted, he was a little younger than most people would have thought appropriate for a woman my age, but I truly believe that had the circumstances been different—if we’d met each other and dated, courted and wooed and fell in love the way folks do—our life together, preceding the one we were just starting, would have been grand. It’s just that now we were picking up in the middle of things. Very convenient, if you ask me. None of that awkwardness of the beginning, but with all the flash and thrill of first falling in love.

“Why don’t I remember you?” he wanted to know.

“Honey, you remember me,” I said. “I’m Betty.”

I meant to stop it before it went too far. I want that on the record. I fully intended to stop, to take this man to the police, to get him the help he needed, but then he took my hand. A thing as simple as that. He took my hand and he said, “Betty.” He said it like no man had ever said it to me. “Betty,” he said, like I was an angel, and that was enough to make me crazy.

So we went on up the street. The UNT maintenance workers were still firing the propane cannons from the roof of the Language Building, and the grackles were lifting from the trees, dark clouds of them wheeling off and looking for some safer place to stay the night. Every time there was a concussion, Donnie squeezed my hand and I squeezed back, and after a while it was like our hearts were beating together, and we just kept walking down Oak where the street dipped and then, off in the distance, rose again, and at the top of the hill the neon sign outside the Civic
Theater glowed red and beyond that the dome of the courthouse sat just below the dusky sky.

I was doing it. I was taking him home the way I’d carried in stray cats when I was a kid and my
abuelita
said, “Bee-Bee, merciful God, what’s to become of you and your tender heart?”

She told me I’d be a prize for any man smart enough to claim me. I’d be just fool enough to never say no to whatever he wanted. Like my
mami
, who had me and then Pablo before she was eighteen. And no man—this was her story when we grew old enough to wonder about our father—no
papi
. “As if,” Mami said, “I was the Madonna.” Blessed with babies and never the misery of a man. Now she’d been dead four years, her heart stopped by her own reckless living, and Pablo and I were left with no
mami
to tell us anything. We were on our own,
mami
and
papi
to each other, the way it had been, really, most of our lives.

Sometimes I thought if we’d had a
papi
, Pablo wouldn’t have fallen into the trouble that he did. If there’d been a
papi
to teach him the right way to be a man in this world, maybe then he wouldn’t have been where he was that evening I walked down Oak with this Donnie—
mi hermano
, Pablo, hiding on the other side of trouble so big even I couldn’t see a way out for him. He had the cash from those bulls and bred heifers he’d sold in Kansas, but it was cash got with a big price attached. Not only had a Special Ranger from the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association started sniffing around, Slam Dent was also on Pablo’s trail.

I put it all out of my mind the best I could and concentrated on my own story. I was trying to convince this Donnie that we were husband and wife. Yes, it was crazy, but I didn’t care. I’d stopped thinking right. Was I ever scared of him? No. Like I said, he was a gentle man, and from the start, it was like I’d known him a long, long time.

“We’re going home,” he said, like he was trying hard to accept that this was his life that he had stepped into, the life that had always been going on even when he didn’t know it. I told him, “Yes.” I reached out
and touched his wrist. I stroked it the way I’d pet a stray cat, easing my way into its trust. “We’re going home.”

“Home,” he said. He had it now. He’d given into it, the fact that he had a home and that’s where we were going, and for just a moment I had a twinge of guilt because I wondered where his real home was and who was waiting for him there.

It was only three blocks up Oak, a block west on Scripture, and then we were at my little bungalow, the one with the sapphire blue gazing ball on its pedestal by the front steps, the clear glass bottles hanging from the branches of the mimosa tree, bottles meant to catch the evil spirits before they had a chance to enter my house, and for good measure a string of green chili peppers around my door frame.

Donnie touched one of the bottles on the mimosa as we came up the walk, gave it a little nudge and sent it to swaying.

“They’re pretty,” he said. “Those bottles. They catch the light.”

It was true. The gaslight along the walk was on in the dusk, and the bottles held its glow as if a low, warm fire burned inside them.

“They keep the devil away,” I told him. “Remember?”

He stood there awhile, tapping his finger against the bottle, and a pained look came onto his face as if he were close to recalling something important and if he just concentrated he could find it, something that meant the world to him.

“No,” he finally said. “I don’t remember, but it sounds like a good idea. Did you think of that? Did you …” His voice trailed off, and I realized then he was trying to recall my name. “Did you, Betty?” he said.

“You did,” I told him, hoping that little lie would make him feel better about where he was, would give him a sense of owning the ground he walked on, the house he was about to walk into. “You hung them there to keep us safe.”

My throat filled up on that last part, feeling, as I did, how desperate I’d always been for a good man to watch over me.

Just then, my neighbor, Emma Hart, came out onto her front porch and called to me. “Miss Baby, I’m home.”

She’d been gone since the Fourth of July, visiting her daughter in Mississippi, and I’d looked after her house and yard.

“Did you have a good visit?” I asked.

“Humidity near melted me. I felt like I was nothing but water.”

I didn’t want to be rude, but I needed to get Donnie inside and out of sight. “It’s been dry here.” I pulled him gently up the walk toward my front door, but he paused to take a look over at Emma. “Hot and dry,” I called to her.