Under the Skin (17 page)

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.

n 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.

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.

er 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

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.