Under the Skin Read online

  “Well, ah…Mrs. Sullivan,” he says, consulting his record sheet. “It’s definite. The stork is on the wing. And has been for about three months, as nearly as I can determine.”

  She turns to stare out the window, her face revealing nothing of what she might be thinking. The doctor’s office building is set on a mountainside overlooking the two cities flanking the river. On this chilly winter morning the vantage affords a vista beyond a low blue haze of woodsmoke and past the near sierras and broad Mexican plain to a jagged line of long dark ranges deep in the distant south.

  The doctor removes his eyeglasses and cleans them with a handkerchief, permitting her a moment to ponder the verdict. The situation is worse for these soiled doves, he has come to believe, than for the innocent ones whose sin was to love too dearly some charming rogue who then abandoned them to the fates. He knows how abruptly some of these young cyprians can collapse into tears, their circumstance all at once an irrefutable testament to their ruined lives, to their far remove from the world’s respect, from the future they had envisioned in a childhood only a few years past but seeming as distant as ancient history. The doctor prides himself on a certain finesse on these occasions. He has found that the whole matter was usually somewhat mitigated if he was the one to broach the solution to the problem rather than oblige them to tender the request. He sets the spectacles back on his face and rests his elbows on the desk and stares at the laced fingers of his hands like someone who has forgotten everything of prayer but its posture.

  The girl continues to stare out the window.

  “Ah, Mrs…. Sullivan. I know very well that in some instances—more prevalent than one might think, I assure you—such news as this is not especially gladsome. There are, after all, any number of reasons why a young woman might not be fully prepared for, ah, such a medical condition. Perfectly understandable reasons. Reasons she need not feel compelled to explain to anyone. And because the, ah, condition may be remedied by a rather simple procedure, a procedure in which I am very well—”

  He is startled by the sudden look she fixes on him, blue eyes sparking, her aspect bright.

  “I’m sorry,” she says—and it takes him a second to understand that she is apologizing for her distraction. “I only came to be sure.”

  She rises from her chair. “Maybe I’ll be back. Maybe not.”

  She goes to the door and stands there until he overcomes his befuddlement and hastens forward to open it for her. She smiles and bids him good day.

  B ullshit,” Frank Hartung says. Cullen Youngblood’s smile is small.

  “Be damn if I don’t about believe you’re serious.”

  “That I am,” Youngblood says. He sips of his drink.

  “I damn well can’t believe it.”

  “If you believe it or not doesn’t change a hair on the fact of it,” Youngblood says. He catches the bartender’s attention and signals for another round.

  “Christ sake, bud.”

  “I know,” Youngblood says.

  “Bad enough to want to get married, but…well, goddam, aint there no decent women?”

  “She’s plenty decent.”

  “Hell, man, she’s a whore is what she is.”

  “Not anymore. Come next week she’ll be Mrs. Cullen Youngblood, so don’t go saying anything ungentlemanly about her or I’ll be obliged to kick your ass.”

  “Shit. There’s no end to your pitiful illusions.”

  “You might try congratulating me like a friend ought.”

  “I ought have you locked up in the crazyhouse till you get your right sense back, what I ought.”

  The bartender brings the fresh drinks to the end of the bar where they stand. Double bourbons with branch. Hartung picks up his and drinks half of it at a gulp.

  “Christ sake, bud.”

  “I aint the first to do it. I known others to do it.”

  “Me too. Larry McGuane married one used to work in that house in Fort Stockton. They weren’t married a month when he caught her at it with a neighbor boy.”

  “That one of McGuane’s—”

  “He whipped her ass bloody and she swore to him she’d never again. Thought he’d straightened her right out. Coupla days after, she cooks him a big fine dinner to show what a good wife she’s gonna be. Half hour later he’s near to dying of the poison. He just did get himself to Doc Wesson in time. Meanwhile she’s burning down his house and emptying the jar of greenbacks he kept buried behind the stable and thought she didn’t know nothing about. Took her leave on the midnight train. That was what, five, six years ago. You seen him lately? Looks like a old man. Living with his aunt and uncle. His stomach aint never been right since. Yeah, I known some to do it.”

  “That one was crazy to begin with and everybody knew it. McGuane knew what she was like, he just didn’t have no caution nor a lick of sense. He always was a damn fool with women.”

  “I wouldn’t be calling nobody crazy nor a damn fool neither, I was you,” Hartung says. “Forty-five-year-old man.”

  “They aint all like McGuane’s. Jessup Jerome married his Louisa out of Miss Hattie’s in San Angelo. Been twenty-some years and a dozen kids. A man couldn’t ask for a better wife.”

  “One in a damn thousand,” Hartung says. He drains the rest of his drink.

  “It aint that uncommon. I had a old uncle used to say they make the best wives because it means more to them after working in the trade. They got a better appreciation, he said.”

  “That uncle sounds loony as you. Must run in the family.”

  Hartung catches the bartender’s eye and makes a circular motion with his finger over the bartop.

  “Everybody thought it was a joke,” he says. “You asking and asking and her steady saying no. Even Miz O’Malley thought you were only funning.”

  They have been friends, these two, since their boyhood in Presidio County, whose westernmost corner lies 150 miles downriver of the saloon where they now stand. Youngblood has owned the YB Ranch in Presidio since shortly after his father suffered a severe stroke fifteen years ago. Unable to walk or get on a horse or speak a coherent word, reduced to communicating by means of a small slateboard he wore around his neck, the old man endured his crippled state for four months before writing DAMN THIS! on his slate and shooting himself through the head. Youngblood couldn’t blame him, but the loss was the last one left to him in the family. His elder brother Teddy had been killed at age eighteen in an alley fight in Alpine, and his little brother James, whose birth their mother had not survived, was twelve when he drowned in the Rio Grande.

  Hartung’s daddy had died two years prior to Youngblood’s. The man was badly given to drink and one night on his way home from the saloon he stood up to piss from the moving wagon and lost his balance and fell out and broke his neck. He left the family so deeply in debt they’d had to sell their ranch, which neighbored the Youngblood place. Frank’s mother and sister moved to Amarillo to live with relatives, but Frank chose to go work on his uncle’s ranch near Las Cruces, New Mexico, some forty miles north of El Paso. The uncle was a childless widower and happy to take him in. When he died not long after, he left the place to Frank.

  For more than ten years now Hartung and Youngblood have been getting together in El Paso once a month or so for a Saturday-night romp. Their usual procedure on these rendezvous is to take rooms at the Sheldon Hotel, dine at a fine restaurant, do a bit of drinking in various of the livelier saloons, and then cap the evening with a visit to Mrs. O’Malley’s. They have on occasion arrived at her door in battered disarray, having obliged hardcases spoiling for a barroom fight, and she has in every such instance refused them admission until they first went to the pump shed at the rear of the house to wash the blood off their faces and tidy themselves somewhat. They can still get a laugh from each other with the recollection of the time she said they were too disorderly to be allowed to come in, and Hartung said, “Too disorderly? Hellfire, this is a disorderly house, aint it?”

  One Saturday nigh
t just three days into the year of 1914 they met the darkly blond Ava, the “new girl” as Mrs. O’Malley called her, though by then she had been with the house nearly two months. Youngblood went upstairs with her and was so thoroughly smitten that he gladly paid the steeply higher price of staying with her all night. For the next two weeks he had frequent thoughts of her as he worked at the ranch, as he tried to read after supper, as he lay in bed and waited for sleep. The following Saturday he was back in El Paso and again bought her for the night—and he had returned every weekend thereafter.

  His enjoyment of her went beyond the carnal, was of a sort that had been absent from his life since age twenty when Connie Duderstadt of Alpine threw him over for a boy of more prosperous family. In the years since, he has gained much experience with whores and believes himself no fool about them. This Ava’s interest in his life—in his descriptions of the YB Ranch and the ruggedly beautiful country surrounding it, in the tales of his adventurous youth and of the last wild Indians that roamed the region in those days and the Mexican bandits that still did—seemed to him fully genuine. It soon became clear that she knew something of horses and rivers and weather, that she took as much pleasure in the natural world as he did. When he asked if Ava was her true name, she said it was, and on his promise to keep it to himself told him her full name was Ava Jane Harrison. She shared in the smile he showed on receiving such intimate information.

  He had of course early on asked the ineluctable question of how she’d come to be in this business, but her mute stare in response had carried such chill he did not ask again. Although she steadfastly refused to reveal anything of her own history, he formed an impression that she’d grown up a solitary child. Her accent carried the softer resonances of the South, though he could place it no more precisely than that. For all her guardedness, she did let slip a small hint of her past on the night she asked if he’d ever read Edgar Allan Poe. He had—and he was delighted to know that she too was a reader. They talked and talked about Poe’s poetry and such of his stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Her favorite tale was “The Imp of the Perverse,” which he had not read. She was fond as well of Stephen Crane, especially his poetry, though she liked The Red Badge of Courage for its glorious renditions of battle and tormenting self-doubt. Had she also read Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, he wanted to know. She said she had, but she would not be drawn into a discussion of it—and he reasoned that its subject lay too close to home. She then asked who had taught him to enjoy books and he said his mother. “Me too,” she said. And left it at that.

  It was in the course of these postcoital conversations that he grew aware of just how lonely he had been for many years now, and that he did not want to continue that way.

  By the time he and Hartung got together for their next monthly lark in El Paso, Youngblood had begun coming into town on Fridays so he could spend both nights of the weekend with Ava. Over supper he told Hartung of his interim trips into El Paso. His friend chuckled and said it sounded like he’d caught himself an expensive case of poontang fever and ought to try and get over it before he went broke.

  Youngblood told him he had already twice asked her to marry him and had both times been turned down. Hartung looked stunned for a moment—and then broke out laughing and slapped him on the shoulder, taking it for a grand joke. On their arrival at Mrs. O’Malley’s that evening, Hartung jovially asked the madam if she knew of his friend’s quest to marry one of her girls. Mrs. O’Malley had known a number of working girls who’d married men they’d met professionally, but the idea of a confirmed bachelor and funlover such as Youngblood wanting to marry a girl like the Spook—and even more, the idea of the Spook turning him down—well, it had to be their little jape on everybody, and she joined in Hartung’s laughter. The other girls suspected that the Spook had enlisted Youngblood’s help to make sly fun of their own hopes for marriage some day, and they indignantly ignored the matter altogether.

  For his part, Youngblood didn’t care whether anyone except Ava believed his sincerity. He continued to catch the train from Marfa every Friday to be with her. On the past two Saturdays he had taken her to an early supper at a nice restaurant and then they had gone for a walk along the riverside before returning to the house at sundown, at which time she was officially back on the job. He then paid Mrs. O’Malley and they ascended the stairs to Ava’s room.

  He every weekend asked for her hand and she every time turned him down. The first time she’d refused him he’d been too stunned to even ask why not, but after the second rebuff he did. She’d given him an exasperated look and said, “What difference does it make?”—an answer so baffling he didn’t know how to pursue his argument. He had settled for asking if it were possible she might change her mind one day.

  “They say you ought never say never,” she said.

  He chose to interpret her smile as encouragement. He secretly believed her refusal was more a matter of inexplicable willfulness than solid conviction, but he was not without strong will of his own.

  “In that case,” he said, “I guess I’ll go on asking.”

  And he had. And she had continued to say no. Until this morning.

  The bartender brings the fresh drinks and retreats.

  “If it wasn’t no joke,” Hartung says, “why’d she keep saying no?”

  Youngblood shrugs.

  “It’s a shitload about her you don’t know.”

  “I won’t argue that. But what more you need to know than how you feel?”

  “Miz O’Malley says maybe you just figure it’s cheaper to marry it than keep spending as much on it as you been. She says you’d be dead wrong if that’s what you think.”

  “O’Malley’s no fool, but I wouldn’t lay too big a bet on her knowing everything.”

  They sip their drinks.

  “So how come she changed her mind?”

  “That’s something I do know,” Youngblood says. He looks sidelong at his friend, then stares down into his drink. “Fact is, she’s in the family way. Only ones to know it are her and me. Now you.”

  Hartung stares at him. And then looks around the saloon at the scattering of other patrons engaged in low conversations spiked with sporadic laughter. He clears his throat and says, “Let’s see if I got this straight. She says you knocked her up and so now she’s willing? Now how in the purple hell can a whore even know who—”

  “It’s not like that,” Youngblood says. “And I said to quit calling her that. She aint that no more.”

  Hartung leans and spits into the cuspidor at their feet and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He stares at Youngblood in the backbar mirror. “How’s it like then?”

  “She don’t know whose it is except she’s sure it aint mine. She wanted me to be real clear on that before I asked again.”

  “When she tell you?”

  “Last night. Wanted me to know it’s a chance it was a sixteen-year-old kid from Chihuahua City. Boy’s daddy wanted to give him an American girl for his birthday.”

  “The daddy might be Mexican?”

  “She recollects having a problem that night with her whatchacallit…that thing they use to keep from having this kind of trouble.”

  Hartung sighs and stares into his glass. Then clears his throat. “Don’t you think this whole thing calls for maybe a little more consideration?”

  “It’s all I did last night was consider it. The news didn’t set too good with me, let me tell you, none of it, especially the part about it’s probably Mexican. She said the first thing she thought to do was go see somebody…you know, somebody who could…eliminate the problem. But she rather not do it. Said it’s hers, no matter what. Said she never knew before how much she wanted to be a momma, have her a normal life. Said if I was still wanting to get hitched she’d be willing to lay low someplace till it’s born. Back home we can say it’s her sister’s, say she died borning him. Say the husband was a Mexican armyman and got killed in all that mess down t
here.”

  “Sweet Baby Jesus.” Hartung shakes his head and studies his drink.

  “She said she’d sure enough understand if I said no. Said she wouldn’t have no choice then but to go see somebody about it.”

  “She’ll get rid of it if you won’t marry her, but she won’t marry you unless she can have it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Hartung lets a long breath and stares at him in the mirror.

  “I walked all over town and thought about it till sunup.”

  “Then went ahead on and asked her again.”

  “I’ll rent a place in San Antone where she can stay. I’ll go see her every weekend till it’s born. Then I’ll take them home and tell the neighbors meet the new wife and her baby nephew whose momma died. Or maybe niece, I guess.”

  “What about its name?”

  “We talked about that. Decided it’d be better to let him be Youngblood than have a Mexican name. I mean, he’ll be my nephew too. No harm he can have my name.”

  Hartung rubs his face and sighs. He takes off his hat and runs a hand through his hair and stares into the hat as if it might hold some sensible explanation for the ways of men and women and the whole damned world. Then puts the hat back on and looks at Youngblood in the mirror.

  “I don’t even know what to say anymore. I been standing here thinking you were crazy but this goes way past crazy. This takes crazy all the way to the end of the goddamn line.”

  Youngblood meets his friend’s eyes in the mirror and sips his drink.

  “Jesus, bud. I never knew anybody to have it so bad.”

  “I know. But that’s the whole thing, don’t you see? The plain and simple of it is I love her. Can’t help it, I just do. And if it’s the only way to have her for my wife, then it’s how I aim to do it.”

  He turns from the mirror to look at Hartung. “I’m tired of how I been doing, Frank. And I aint getting any damn younger. Which by the way neither are you, but that’s your business.”