Break the Skin (8 page)

She was an itty bit of a thing, her back all humped up from years of leaning forward as she walked through the world, and though I couldn’t see her plain as she gripped the porch railing with her bony hands, I knew she’d have her face made up, the way she did every day and night until she cleaned it off and made ready for bed. She’d have those thin, arched eyebrows painted on, and those two little spots of rouge on her cheeks, and cherry-red lipstick on her mouth.

“Miss Baby, she was here looking for you tonight.” Emma was trying to keep her voice low now. “That Carolyn. I told her, ‘Scat. Go on now. Miss Baby don’t suffer your kind.’ ”

“You hadn’t ought to take a chance on making trouble for yourself, Emma.” I took Donnie’s hand and kept leading him up the walk, eager to get inside before she took a notion to ask who it was I had with me. I was standing between her and him, and I was hoping in the gathering dark, given her old eyes, she might not even spot him. “Carolyn’s mad as can be. There’s no telling what she might do.”

Just then, a flock of grackles came swooping down to settle in the trees. The glass bottles in the mimosa clinked together, and the birds screeched.

“She’s trash,” Emma said. “Don’t worry about me. I know her kind.”

“You can stand up for yourself. I know that for sure.” Donnie and I
were at the front door now, and I had the key in the lock. “Good night, Emma.”

I unlocked the door and swung it open. A few ticks more and we’d be inside.

Then Emma said, “Who’s that with you, Miss Baby? Is that Pablo? Has he come back?”

I gave Donnie a nudge, and he stepped into my house, out of sight. I felt the burden of having to decide what to do next—to call the police and say,
I found this man;
or to say to Donnie,
Cutie, let’s have some supper;
to lie down beside him in the dark and put my lips to his, to his neck, his chest, and say,
Remember this … and this … and this
.

“No, it’s Donnie.” What else could I do but say the story I was inventing? “I don’t know where Pablo is. He’s still in trouble.”

“Those cows. Him and that old boyfriend of yours.”

“It’s late, Emma. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Donnie,” she said. She was used to people coming to my house, looking for Pablo or else, drunk, wanting me to open up my shop, fire up my iron, and pound some skin because,
Miss Baby, there’s this tat I just got to have tonight
. I could tell Emma was searching her memory to see whether she could recall someone named Donnie. “Little fella?” she said, and I felt it was a sign, the fact that she’d gotten this right. “Fair-skinned?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Donnie True.”

Just like that I gave him a last name, said it before I even knew it was on my tongue, spoke that wish for how I wanted everything to turn out.

WHEN THE TROUBLE
first started for Pablo and Carolyn and they filed for a no-fault divorce, I told him he could stay with me. This was just after the New Year—Happy 2009!—and on April 1, the divorce was final. “April Fools’ Day,” Pablo said. “Baby, I hope I haven’t made a mistake.”

The story was simple, as old as Moses—a man with a woman no amount of money or love could ever satisfy. A
gringa
to boot. Little, blond priss of a thing who thought a Mexican boy would be to her taste. Carolyn. A name as white as that.

She wanted too much. I can’t say she’s any different than the rest of us in this regard, just more insistent, more apt to pitch a fit when Pablo didn’t come across with the goods. He was working an honest job then, hauling freight for Air-Ride Transport, and for a while he was flush with cash. Carolyn spent it as fast as he could bring it home, and before long he’d had enough of that.

Still, after the divorce became final, he couldn’t get her out of his head. He even called her up sometimes and took her out to dinner. If he only had a way of making more money, he thought he could satisfy her and everything would be the way it was when they first fell in love.

He saw his chance when I introduced him to Slam Dent. All he had to do was haul those stolen cows to Kansas. Slam had the tractor trailer, and Pablo knew how to drive it. He’d make enough extra cash to win back Carolyn’s heart.

From time to time, he sent her flowers, bought her jewelry. They swore the divorce had been a mistake. They started talking about getting back together. She said that if they did, she wanted a new ring. A Hearts on Fire diamond ring—a Seduction Solitaire. To mark her sweet surrender, she said. New day, new luck, new bride, new love.

I suppose that’s why Pablo decided to cross Slam Dent around the middle of June. Maybe he was thinking about new beginnings, and he saw a chance for a bigger payday. Maybe he wanted that extra share of the profits to help buy that ring, so he took the bank draft made out to him from the auction barn in Kansas, cashed it, and instead of giving half to Slam like he was supposed to, he pocketed the whole thing. He didn’t know that the Rangers would soon be on his tail, and he didn’t know that Slam would be ready to get his money back by force if need be.

Now Pablo was a fugitive from the law and a target for one
pissed-off Mr. Virgil Dent. Pablo would call me once in a while, but he wouldn’t tell me where he was. “Just checking in,” he’d say, and I’d tell him Carolyn was still pounding on my door trying to find him. “He’s my one true love,” she’d say, “and now he’s going to end up in jail or dead.”

Pablo couldn’t help it. He’d made a choice and crossed over into a world full of danger. He’d stolen for Carolyn’s sake, but now he was reluctant to talk to her except through me. “Tell her I’m sorry,” he said during one of his quick calls, and I could hear in his voice that he meant it. He couldn’t give her much thought because she was the least of his worries. She wouldn’t kill him, but Slam Dent just might.

One day in September, maybe a week before I found this man I named Donnie, Slam came into my shop. He had on his snakeskin cowboy boots, tight Wrangler jeans, and a freshly ironed white shirt with a bolo tie. He’d folded the shirt cuffs back, and I could see the last tat I’d drilled into his right forearm—the head of a longhorn bull, one eye closed in a wink.
Slam
, said one horn. The other one said,
Bam!

“Baby, you been missing me?” he said.

“Not for a second.”

He leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You can’t lie to me. I remember how much you liked the old Slam-Bam. Ain’t that right, Baby? You know you were crazy for it. Still are, I expect.”

“In your dreams.” The sex with Slam had always been rough and selfish, and nothing I ever wanted again. “You think you’re a big man, but you’re just dirt. That’s all you’ll ever be.”

He closed his hand around my arm, and his nails, untrimmed and sharp, dug into my skin. “You tell your brother,” he said, “we got business to finish.” Then he bent down and kissed me on my earlobe, let his lips linger there, just the lightest kiss, before he took the lobe in his mouth and bit down. “I mean it, Baby,” he mumbled with my earlobe clamped tight between his teeth. “You tell him I’m not to be fucked with. You tell him I got six ways to Sunday to hurt him, and, Baby, one of those ways is you.” He pulled away from me then, and he used his finger to wipe a
little dab of blood from my ear. He poked that finger to my lips, pressed hard until I had no choice but to open them. “Love you, Baby,” he said with a laugh.

Then he left my shop and I spit the taste from my mouth.

Pablo was lucky that he was one step ahead of Slam, and I was lucky that it was a house with Pablo’s things in it, but no Pablo, that Donnie and I walked into the evening I brought him to live with me.

I switched on a tea lamp just inside the door, and Donnie stood in the middle of my living room blinking his eyes. I tried to imagine what it would be like to see everything in my house for the first time and what someone would think of a woman who collected what I did: fairy figurines, some of them made from crystal, others from porcelain or ceramic, all of them as dear as the day they gave babies away with a half a pound of tea, which was something Mami used to say when Pablo and I asked who our father was. “I went down to the baby patch,” she said. “Oh, that was the best day—the day they gave babies away—and that’s how I got you both, and tea to boot, what a steal.”

That’s the way we came to think of any day, long coming, that finally arrived—the day they gave babies away—and here I was on one of those days, a man in my house, a man I’d latched on to and named.

I was glad I’d put on just a touch of lavender eye shadow that morning, that I’d had some auburn highlights added to my hair a few days before, that I was wearing the new purple Tommy Bahama halter top that made me feel sexy.

“This is something.” Donnie looked all around him, and his voice was hushed. “It’s like the Otherworld.”

It touched me, the fact that he knew the name for the land of the fairies, and I took it as a sign that he and I were meant to find each other. I slipped my arm around his and let my hand come to rest on his so we were touching, palm to palm. For a good while, neither of us spoke. We just stood there, and I laid my head on his shoulder. The fairies were all around us in the dim, soft light: fairies on toadstools, on tree limbs, with
unicorns, in snow globes; winged fairies with flowers wreathing their heads, sprites who could shake the human world in the most magical and mischievous ways. In the old stories, they could cast love spells or turn people into donkeys. Sometimes, like now, I could look around at all the figurines on my bookshelves, my television, my tables, and I could believe that nearly anything was possible.

“We’ve always loved them,” I finally said.

Donnie laced his fingers through mine and squeezed my hand. “Yes,” he said, and I knew then that he was buying what I was selling. Don’t think it’s so far-fetched, the fact that he could believe that he was in the right place. Maybe it’s as simple as this: Maybe, no matter what had happened to throw him off his pins, to leave him mixed up and searching for someone who knew his name, he wanted, like we all do, to be home. “Yes, Betty. We have.”

He believed—I wasn’t about to question why or how because I wanted to believe, too. If I’ve done anything wrong, it was only that. I wanted him to believe in the two of us and the life we were going to have.

Oh, I know it was crazy, but I suppose I was like my
mami
, looking for the next good thing, ready to seize the day my life turned around and I stepped into a world where my brother wasn’t on the run, and his ex-wife wasn’t phoning to call me a hootchie bitch, where I could be who I knew I was: Betty Ruiz, Miss Baby, tender in the heart and eager for love.

I could have stopped it then and there. I know that now. All right, I suppose I knew it even then. But he kissed me. He took his time. A sweet, soft kiss, his hand a light touch against my cheek, and I let him. I kissed him back, and when we were done we held on to each other. I heard his heart beating, and I’m not ashamed now, no matter all that’s gone on, to say I couldn’t have let him go to save my life.

“Betty?” He kissed the top of my head. He rocked me in his arms. “Betty, I’m so sleepy.”

I led him into the bedroom. “It’s been a day.” I unbuttoned his shirt and laid my hand against his bare chest. “It’s been quite a day,” I told him.

“Baby, you’ve got that right,” he said, like we’d been together for years.

He slipped out of his shirt and jeans. Then he lay back on the bed. He closed his eyes, and just like that, he was asleep.

I picked up his clothes from the floor where he’d left them, and I felt the weight of his wallet in his jeans pocket. I sat on the window seat, where the full moon was letting in light, and I opened the wallet and took a look at what I could find. It didn’t add up to much: a few bills, fifty-five dollars in all; a Greyhound ticket stub (one-way) to show he’d come from Mt. Gilead, Illinois, on September 14; a four-leaf clover, laminated in plastic; an Illinois driver’s license. When he couldn’t remember who he was, why hadn’t he taken out that license, or even that Greyhound ticket stub, and read his own name? He just hadn’t thought to do that—at least that’s what I told myself at the time; I hadn’t yet reached the point where I’d wonder whether he was only pretending to not know who he was.

I held the license up to my face so I could read his name—his real name and not the one I’d given him. Lester Stipp. I let it go. I didn’t want it in my head, because he was my Donnie, and I didn’t want any reminder otherwise. I didn’t want him to have one, either. I got a pair of nail scissors from my vanity, and with great care I clipped out his name and that address, just took them away. I would have cut up the whole thing, but I couldn’t bring myself to give up that photo of him looking so shy and sweet, the gap between his front teeth enough to charm me stupid. He looked a little scared and that only made him more precious to me.
Donnie
, I kept saying to myself.
He’s my Donnie
. Five feet six inches tall, so the license said, 130 pounds. Hair, brown. Eyes, blue. He’d come from Mt. Gilead. He’d come down from the mountain to rescue me. That’s the way I preferred to think of his appearance in my life and the fact that he was sleeping now in my bed—
our
bed—the moonlight on his face. He’d come down from Mt. Gilead to the hot, dry plains of North Texas
because in the Otherworld, the world somewhere we weren’t allowed to see, fairies cast their spells and he appeared, this man I needed.

Laugh if you want, but that’s what I wanted to believe that night, so I got my purse, and I slipped that driver’s license into my wallet so he couldn’t find it and maybe start to remember. I tore the Greyhound stub into pieces and dropped them into the trash. I know now I was buying time, as much as I could, all for the sake of how wonderful it felt to have a man in my bed. I understood what had sent my
mami
out night after night looking for someone to make her feel less alone. I wanted more than she ever had. I wanted a man to stay with me forever.

Then the phone rang, and, of course, it was her, Carolyn, and she said, “Who loves you, Baby? Huh? C’mon. Tell me. Who?”