Under the Skin

I closed in very slowly, then stopped about thirty yards from the Caddy. I didn’t know how he was armed. If he had a rifle he probably would’ve used it before letting me get that close. Then again, maybe he was trying to get me in so close that he couldn’t miss. If he wanted to bargain I was willing: give her to me and we’d be quits. I was pretty sure I’d mean it.

I eased the Hudson forward, ready to wheel it sideways and take cover behind it if he opened fire. Twenty yards from the Caddy I stopped again. It was slumped forward on two front flats. I pulled up to within ten yards. Then closer. And then I was idling right behind it. The interior of the Caddy was too dark for me to see anything in there.

I put the Hudson in neutral and opened my door wide and waited a minute. Nothing from the Caddy. I had the Colt cocked in my hand. Then I switched on my headlights—if he’d been looking back at me, he’d have been blinded in that moment—and I slid out of the Hudson and ran in a crouch up beside the driver’s door and jumped up and stuck the Colt in the window, all set to blow his brains out.

He wasn’t there.

But she was—slumped against the passenger door—and in the same moment that I saw her I realized what a clear target I made in the shine of my headlights. I dropped down and scurried back to the Hudson and reached in and switched off the lights.

I went around to the Cadillac’s passenger side and tucked the Colt in my pants and eased the door open and caught her as she started to fall. Her eyes were closed and she groaned softly and her breath was warm on my face. She moaned louder as I eased her over on the seat and got in beside her. And I felt the blood.

I examined her by the light of the moon. Her elbow was smashed and her lower right arm was slick with blood. Her right side was sopped—blood oozing from a bullet hole just under her arm and from two more, close together, between the ribs and hip.

There was nothing to do about wounds like that. Not in our circumstance. I went back to the Hudson and got one of the bottles I’d filled with water. Some of it had spilled in all the bouncing around but there was still plenty. I put the water to her lips and maybe she sipped some of it but mostly it just ran out of her mouth. I wiped the dribble from her chin and set the bottle on the floor.

I put my hand to her cheek and said her name. I asked her to open her eyes and look at me, to say something, but she didn’t. I held her and crooned to her. I stroked her hair and spoke to her of everything that came to mind. I told her how beautiful she was, how wonderfully brave. I told her how my heart did a little flip the first time I’d seen her. I tried to sing “Red Sails in the Sunset” but forgot the words in both English and Spanish and told her I was sorry. I described the moon and said she really ought to take a look at it and I laughed for both of us at my attempt to trick her into opening her eyes. I talked to her until the sky turned gray at the rim of the mountains. Then I leaned down to retrieve the bottle of water to see if she might drink a little more and when I turned back to her she was dead.

He hadn’t done it, not wounds like that, not on the side away from him. I didn’t have to take the bullets out and see them to know they were .30–06 rounds from a BAR.

The Cadillac motor wouldn’t turn over. Maybe LQ had hit the oil pan and all the oil leaked out and the engine had finally seized.

I gently laid her on her side and told her I’d be back.

Then I went and got in the Hudson and set out into the deeper desert.

The sun was half-risen behind the jagged mountains and looking like a great raw wound when I spotted him a half mile ahead. At first I took him for another greasewood shrub and then understood what I was looking at. He was lying huddled on his side and the possibility that he was dead made my gut go tight.

I stopped the car ten feet from him and blew the klaxon and he stirred slightly. Praise Jesus.

I got out and walked up to him. His hat had fallen off and I saw the black strap of his eyepatch tight against the back of his head. His lank white hair hung over his face. His breathing was raspy but there were no obvious wounds on him, no bloodstains I could see. His coatflap hung down straight with the weight of something heavy in the pocket and I reached down and relieved him of a .38 revolver and slung it out into the scrub. A portion of his wooden leg was visible between the hem of his pantleg and the top of his lowcut Spanish boot. I gave it a hard kick.

He flinched and groaned. I said for him to look at me.

“Mírame, viejo,” I said. “Mírame bien.”

He struggled to push himself up on an elbow, grunting hard, and he finally managed to sit up. He brushed the hair from his eyes and turned his face up to me, sand clinging to his eyepatch, his good eye baggy and bloodshot.

The sun had just risen over the mountains behind him and it blazed full on my face. I was squinting against its glare. I told him again to have a good look at me, that I was the last thing he was going to see in this world. His eye fixed on me hard.

I pulled down my hat brim to shade my eyes and I took out the Colt. I put the muzzle against his forehead and cocked the hammer.

And the son of a bitch laughed.

Laughed and asked if I was a hallucination. “O eres un espanto?” he said—and laughed even harder, as if the possibility that I was a ghost was the funniest thing in the world.

All these years, he said, all these miserable years gone by and here I was again, threatening his life once more. Well, go ahead and shoot, he said—he was no more afraid of me now than he had been back then.

My finger quivered on the trigger. If he had gone insane he couldn’t appreciate the moment. Then what satisfaction could there be?

He laughed again and said, No, no, of course I wasn’t him. How could I be him, all these years later? I was just one more of his brute kind. There was no end to our kind. Our mongrel breed had robbed him of everything once before, and now, even now, we would rob from him yet again? We would have the girl too? Well, fuck the lot of us. Did I think he was afraid? He spat on my boots. That was how afraid he was. Go ahead, he said…shoot.

I saw the lie in his eyes. He was afraid. He was afraid I wouldn’t shoot him. He wanted to die but didn’t have the balls to shoot himself. Jesus. Who knew what the hell anybody was like under the skin?

I knew that to let him go on living would be greater punishment than to put a quick end to his misery. But it would also be punishment for all the people he would continue to make miserable as long as he was alive.

Or as long as he was able.

I put a hand on his shoulder and smiled at him and tucked the Colt away under my coatflap. His eye went wide with alarm as if he knew what was coming and he tried to break away but I seized a fistful of his hair and held his head fast as I brought out the icepick. He screeched and shut his eye tight and I swiped the tip of the pick through the pinched eyelid and a thin jet of bloody fluid caught the sunlight for one sparking instant—and then his hand was over his eye and blood was running between his fingers and he was screaming.

I left him there, screaming and screaming, staggering around in his darkness under the glaring white sun.

I carried her to the Hudson and then cut the seat-covers out of the Cadillac and used them for a shroud. I replaced the flat tire with the spare and then followed our earlier tracks as I drove back around to the south side of the mudpit. That’s where I buried her. I dug the grave with the tire jack and my hands, working shirtless. It was a long process even in that soft earth. My shoulder wound opened again and blood streaked my chest. When the hole was finally deep enough, I gently laid her in it. And then I covered her up.