Under the Skin (18 page)

hey 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.

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.

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.

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 sea
wall
?”
“Yes.
Sea
wall.”
“The
sea
wall,” 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

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