Uncle Cullen grumbled a while longer during dinner about those Rogerson hillbillies out of Missouri, but the episode was closed. He was boss of the YB crews and range, but my aunt ruled the family and all matters in it…
“You see?” Daniela said, her hands braiding her hair behind her head, her breasts pushing tightly against her blouse. Lynette was watching Daniela’s hands and trying to do the same with her own hair. Albert called to the girl to quit pestering us and come get a ready order. Lynette made a face but Daniela told her she should get back to her duties, that she’d help her braid her hair some other time, when the café wasn’t so busy.
“Promise?” Lynette said. Daniela nodded and patted the girl’s hand. The girl poured more coffee for us and took up our plates and hustled off to take care of the waiting orders.
“Looks like you have an admirer,” I said.
“She’s nice,” Daniela said, undoing the braided length of her hair and shaking it free. “So. Tell me, why did you leave the ranch?”
“Oh, things changed. There was one of those epidemics that hit the border every so often, one disease or another. I don’t even remember what this one was, exactly, but both Reuben and Uncle Cullen got hit with it. They got sicker and sicker for almost a week and then died within a day of each other. It all happened pretty fast. Aunt Ava couldn’t bear to stay on at the ranch without them, so she sold the place and moved away to Denver. She had kinfolk there. She asked me to go with her, but a vaquero buddy of mine knew of a ranch just outside San Antone where we could hire on, so we did. A few months later I got a notion to come to Galveston, get a look at the sea. And here I am.”
I thought it was a pretty good lie. Up to now the only lie I’d told her was about my father—but hell, what did that matter? I had believed the same lie myself for most of my life and so what? But I hadn’t wanted to complicate things with her, and the truth about my leaving the ranch would’ve required a lot of explaining and maybe even confused her. So I’d lied. Not because I wanted to deceive her or because I was afraid of the truth—the reasons most people lie—but only to keep things simple.
“I am sorry for you,” she said. “There has been so much terrible misfortune in your family.”
“Hell, there’s probably not a family anywhere that hasn’t had its share of rough luck.”
“Do you and your aunt write letters to one another?”
“Not as often as we used to. She’s got a pretty busy life. I’m glad for her.”
She nodded, then looked out the window and sipped at her coffee. I lit a cigarette.
We sat in silence for a minute. Then she turned to face me and said, “I have seen you before. Four nights ago. You were in a car on the street when we went by. You looked directly at me. But when Señor Avila introduced us, you didn’t remember.”
“Yes I did. But I thought you didn’t remember, so I didn’t say anything.”
“Truly?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Truly.”
She stared down into her coffee cup for a moment. “After you departed last night, Señor Avila spoke about you.”
“Oh?” I’d figured he would have.
“He said you work for a powerful man named Don Rosario.”
I waited.
She looked up. “He believes you are a pistolero for this man.”
I looked out the window at people passing by on the way to the next part of their lives. Then turned back to her and shrugged and said, “People who gossip like to dramatize things. I collect money for my employers. I drive here and there and collect account payments and bring them back to the office. To tell the truth, it’s pretty dull work.”
“Do you always have with you the pistol you had last night?”
“I sometimes collect a lot of money in a day’s work, and the world’s full of thieves. I’ve gotten used to carrying it.”
All true.
She studied my eyes like she was trying to see behind them. “Señor Avila says everyone of La Colonia is pleased that you live among them. They feel protected by the nearness of you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that so I just shrugged.
Lynette delivered breakfast to a nearby table and then asked if we were ready for more coffee. I checked my watch and shook my head. “We have to get.” I left the money for the bill on the table, including a bigger tip than usual.
I took her hand again to cross the busy street and we didn’t let go of each other till we were back at La Colonia.
At the Avila front door I said I’d come by for her just after dark, about six-thirty. I told her to wear her bathing suit under her dress and bring a towel.
She said she’d be ready, then waggled her fingers at me and went inside.
I headed for the Club.
As he had told his wife he would do on his way back from Galveston, Oscar Picacho stopped off in Corpus Christi to visit with his cousin Ernesto. They went fishing in the bay in Ernesto’s boat and caught snapper and dorado and they filleted and grilled the fish in Ernesto’s backyard. They smoked cigars and got happily half-drunk and told funny stories of their boyhood days in Reynosa. It had been an altogether fine time. And now, on this late Saturday morning more than three days after leaving the Avila house, Oscar Picacho steers his trusty green Model T onto the narrow dirt driveway alongside his Brownsville home.
He calls to his wife as he comes through the front door and into his small living room and catches only a glimpse of Teresa where she sits on the sofa—her eyes large and terrified, her hands gripping her knees—before Angel Lozano’s pistol barrel crashes into the side of his head and the room tilts and he hears Teresa’s scream as something distant and cut off almost as soon as it begins and he is only vaguely aware of hitting the floor on his face.
He regains consciousness to find himself beside his wife on the sofa, his hands tied behind him, his face and mustache dripping with water flung on him to bring him to his senses, his shirt soaked. The right side of his head feels misshapen and pains him from crown to jaw. Teresa now with her hands bound before her and a gag in her mouth, her face bright with tears.
Angel Lozano and Gustavo Mendez loom over them, their foul mood in their faces, a mood made worse by their having been cloistered in this little house for more than two days while they awaited Oscar’s return. In that time they have learned much from Señora Picacho: that the Picachos had known the girl as a child in Veracruz and always loved her and despised her parents for their miserable neglect of her, and in their letters to her over the years they constantly reminded her that she was always welcome in their home, which was why she had come to them on fleeing Las Cadenas; that the girl—Daniela, as the woman called her—had told the Picachos of her abduction from Veracruz by a rich but evil one-eyed man named César Calveras who had put her through a terrible ordeal over the following months at Las Cadenas before she was able to effect her escape, but she had not told them of her marriage; that the Picachos had offered to let her live with them for as long as she wished and that she had accepted—and accepted as well Oscar Picacho’s invitation to accompany him to Galveston Island on his annual trip to celebrate New Year’s Eve at a party with his favorite nephew, Roberto Avila; that they had departed for Galveston on the day before Angel and Gustavo showed up, and that with them had gone another Picacho nephew, Felipe Rocha, who had been a Brownsville policeman until he was fired last year for stealing several pistols from the station arms room and, though it was never proved, selling them across the river; that Señora Picacho herself had not gone with them because she did not like car trips, that she had never been to Galveston, and that she had no idea where in that town Roberto Avila lived.