Under the Skin Page 4

  Some of the Ghosts had been with the Maceos since back in the bootleg days. I’d been with them not quite two years—but I’d been Rose’s main Ghost from the time I joined him. Whenever he had to go out of town on business, I went with him, and if it was just the two of us, I did the driving. The other Ghosts got their orders through various captains but I took mine directly from Rose and I answered to nobody but him. And after he’d agreed to let me have them as my regular partners, Brando and LQ answered only to me.

  This had been a busy week. Just a few days before Rose sent us on the Ragsdale business, Brando and I had tracked down a pair of strongarms who’d been working the island for about two weeks. They’d been stalking big winners out of the Hollywood Dinner Club—the Maceos’ biggest and fanciest place. They’d follow them back to their hotel and jump them in the parking lot, in one case even busting into the guy’s room. A Ghost captain had put some boys on the problem but they hadn’t been able to get a lead on the thugs, and Rose was fuming. By the time he put me on it, six customers had been robbed and two of them beat up. I collected Brando and we started hunting.

  Two days later we found them on the mainland, in the Green Dolfin Motor Court just east of Hitchcock. They had a suitcase with twelve grand and were ready to cut for New Orleans. If they had settled for the eight thousand they got off the first few muggings, they would’ve made away clean, but they got greedy—just one more job, then just one more. It’s how it was with smalltimers. No discipline. No sense of professionalism. An hour after we caught up to them they were on a freight train bound for Kansas City. We’d had to load them aboard the boxcar because their hands and knees didn’t work anymore after Brando used a claw hammer on them.

  As we started back to the office with the suitcase, Brando did his impersonation of Rose, adjusting and readjusting his necktie knot, eyes half-closed, mouth slightly pinched, saying in a heavy Sicilian accent: “Goddamn, but I hate a fucken thief.” It made me grin every time.

  At first Rose was angry when I told him the strongarms were still alive, but when I told him what we’d done to them he paced up and down for a minute, thinking about it, and then laughed.

  “You see why I love this kid?” he said to Artie Goldman, his head bookkeeper. Artie just sat there and looked a little out of sorts. He never did like to hear about my end of the business. “Goddamn genius,” Rose said. “Every time those two punks even think of how nice it’d be if they could walk into the kitchen for a glass of water, every time they need to blow their nose or wipe their ass, they’re gonna remember how stupid they were to try thieving in Galveston.” He adjusted my necktie and then his own and beamed at me.

  The next day he saw to it that the money got back to the customers who’d been robbed. The strongarms had spent about three hundred of it but he made up the difference from his own pocket. That’s how he was.

  L Q told the owner at each place where Ragsdale had put his slots that the machines now belonged to the Gulf Vending Company and the standard fee for their use was 50 percent of the take. A company representative would come by every night to collect. If the owner had any complaints, any trouble from the cops or anybody else, he was to contact the main office on the island and the company would deal with the problem.

  None of this seemed to be news to the owners. Even the ones who didn’t really want any machines in their joint weren’t about to argue. They knew the score. What the hell—they got 50 percent of something as opposed to 100 percent of nothing, and they knew they could count on Maceo protection. What was there to complain about?

  B y the time we were done making our visits it was close to ten o’clock. We stopped at a diner to buy beer for the rest of the drive to town.

  The joint had a jukebox, and “Blue Moon” was playing when we came in. A Christmas tree in the corner was blinking with colored-glass electric candles, half of its needles already on the floor.

  It wasn’t the sort of place to pull them in on New Year’s Eve. The only customers besides us were a mushy young couple at a back table. Brando and I went into the men’s room to take a leak while LQ went to the counter and ordered the beer.

  When we came out of the john, “Blue Moon” was playing again. The cooler beside the front counter was out of order but the guy had some beer on ice in the back room and had gone to get it. “Blue Moon” played out and the mushy guy went over to the juke and punched it up again. The girl stood up and they held each other close and swayed in place to the music.

  “Goddamn,” LQ said in a low voice, “I like the song myself, but there’s such a thing as overdoing a good thing. There’s bound to be other lovey stuff on that juke they can dance to. I bet ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ is on there.”

  Brando said that was an all right love song but not nearly as good as “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

  LQ said that one sounded like a song about a bad disease. “I bet the guy who wrote it was thinking about some dame who gave him the worst case of clap he ever had.”

  “Jesus, it’s no wonder your wives all left you,” Brando said.

  “At least they wanted to marry me,” LQ said. “Only thing women want from you is as far away as they can get.”

  “You don’t know a damn thing about me or women.”

  The counter guy came back with the beer and put it in a sack. While LQ was paying him I went over to the juke and scanned the titles, then put a nickel in the coinbox and pressed a number button. I stood there till “Blue Moon” finished playing and I watched the selector arm pick up the record and replace it in its slot, then swing over and pick up the one I’d punched and set it on the turntable. The record began to spin and the tone arm eased into the starting groove and the speakers started putting out “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.”

  The lovebirds turned to see what was going on. The girl looked confused and the guy was frowning. I nodded at them and touched my hatbrim.

  LQ and Brando were waiting at the door. As we went out to the car LQ said, “That wasn’t very nice.”

  “That’s Jimmy’s trouble,” Brando said to LQ. “He’s like you. Not a romantic bone in his body.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “That’s the most romantic song I ever heard.”

  “Cowboy probably means it,” LQ told Brando.

  For a time after we first met, LQ had called me Cowboy because of my boots and the frontier Colt and the wide-brimmed hat I wore back then before I switched to a fedora—and because I’d grown up on a ranch, which was all I’d ever told him and Brando about my past. As he got to know me better he eased off on the nickname and it had been a long time since he’d used it. He was no cowboy himself—he came out of the East Texas piney woods, which made him closer kin to Southern good old boys than to any Texan raised west of Houston.

  He slid behind the wheel and started up the Dodge. I sat up in front with him. Brando uncapped three beers with a church key and passed two of them up to me as LQ got us back on the road. I waited till LQ shifted into high, then handed him a beer.

  “Salud, amor, y pesetas,” I said, and we all raised our bottles in the toast.

  A few minutes later we were on the causeway and looking at the low stretch of lights ahead of us that marked Galveston across the bay. Thirty miles long and some three miles across at its widest point, the island had long been a haven to pirates and smugglers, to gunrunners, gamblers, whores, to shady characters of every stripe. Geographically it was completely different from the place where I’d grown up, but I felt at ease with its character, which Rose had described pretty well as “Live and let live unless somebody fucks with you.”

  Near the middle of the bridge we had to halt behind a short line of cars while the lift span rose to let a large ketch go motoring through. Its sails were furled and it trailed a small wake in the light of the pale half-moon just above the water to the west. Even though the calendar said it was winter and we had recently had a brief cold snap, the evening was warm as spring. The breeze was gentle, the air moist
and smelling of tidal marsh.

  I’d never seen the ocean until I came to Galveston. The first time I stood on the beach and stared out at the gulf it struck me as beautiful, but also damn scary—and I detested the feeling of being afraid. I couldn’t remember having been truly frightened before except for one time when I was fourteen. I’d been beating the brush for strays all morning when I stopped to eat the lunch our maid Carlotta had packed for me. It was a heavy meal and made me sleepy, so I lay down for a nap in the raggedy shade of a mesquite shrub at the bottom of a low sandrise. The shrilling of my horse woke me to the sight of a diamondback as thick as my arm and coiled up three feet from my face. The horse snatched the reins loose of the mesquite and bolted over the rise. If the damn jughead hadn’t spooked so bad the snake probably would’ve slid on by with no trouble, but now it was scared too and ready to give somebody hell for it. I figured if I tried to roll away it would get me in the neck and that would be all she wrote. Its rattle was a buzzing blur and I could see its muscles flex as it coiled tighter. I knew it was going to strike me in the face any second—and I was suddenly afraid. And then in the next instant I was furious at myself and I thought, To hell with it—and made a grab for the snake. It hit my hand like a club and I rolled away hard as the rattler recoiled. I scrambled over the rise on all fours and whistled up my horse and got the Winchester out of the saddle scabbard. The snake had started slithering off but then coiled up buzzing again when I ran back to it. I admired its courage even as I blew its head off. The bastard had nailed me on the bottom edge of the hand, and I cut the wound bigger and sucked and spat for a while, then tied a bandanna tight around my wrist. I draped the snake over my neck—I later made a belt of the hide—and mounted up and headed for home. I was sick as hell for three days, but I promised myself if anything even came close to scaring me again, I’d go right up to whatever it was—man, beast, or bad weather—and kick it in the ass. But nothing had ever really spooked me again, not until I saw the Gulf of Mexico.

  The day after my first look at the gulf, I bought a swimming suit and returned to the beach. I watched the swimmers carefully for a while and then started imitating their techniques in water no deeper than my hips. And I taught myself to swim. I practiced and practiced over the next few days until I could swim parallel to shore in shallow water for a steady hundred yards.

  Then one bright noonday I swam straight out from shore until I was gasping and my arms were heavy and aching. I clumsily treaded water and looked back at the tiny figures of the people on the beach. I must’ve been out two hundred yards. The dark water under me seemed bottomless and I couldn’t help thinking of all the shark stories I’d so recently heard. The most fearsome were about Black Tom, a hammerhead more than twenty feet long that they said had been prowling the waters around the island since before the World War. They said its top fin was as big as a car door and spotted with pale bullet holes.

  I’d been terrified by the thought of being so far out in the water, which of course was why I did it. It would be better to drown, better to be eaten by sharks, than to be so afraid of the sea—or of anything else. So I’d made the long swim. And it worked. I was still a little scared, sure, but not as much as before, and I’d proved I could beat the fear, that was the thing. As I started stroking back toward the beach, I didn’t know if I’d make it, but I was feeling great. When I finally tumbled up on the sand, I sprawled on my back, my chest heaving, and stared up at the dizzy blue depth of the sky—and the people sunning themselves around me must’ve thought I was a lunatic, the way I broke out laughing.

  Ever since then, I’d made the same swim once every two weeks. And after I found out that sharks fed mostly at night, I’d always made the swim after dark. Always a little tight in the throat at the thought of what might be swimming close by.

  T he causeway melded into the island and became Broadway Avenue. We drove through the deep shadows of palm trees and live oaks lining a wide grassy esplanade that separated the opposing traffic lanes and held the tracks for the interurban, the electric passenger train that ran back and forth between Galveston and Houston.

  We stopped at a red light, and a Model T sedan started laboring across the intersection, its motor rapping in the distinct Model T way. The old Ford was missing its left front fender and had received a splotchy handbrush coat of green paint as pale as lettuce.

  “Look at that rattletrap,” LQ said. “Thing could use a pair of crutches.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” I said. “Some of those old T’s don’t look like much but they run like a Swiss watch.”

  In the glow of the streetlamps I saw that the driver of the heap was a Mexican with a drooping gray mustache and wearing a straw hat. A burly guy sat beside him but his face was obscured by the shadows. Another passenger sat in the darkness of the backseat.

  As the Model T passed by directly in front of us, the passenger at the near window leaned forward to look out and the lamplight fell full on the face of a girl. Blackhaired, darkskinned. Our eyes met—and for that brief instant I felt naked in some way that had nothing to do with clothes. Then the old car was clattering away down the shadowed street.

  “Whooo,” LQ said. “You see that?”

  “What?” Brando said from the backseat. His attention had been elsewhere.

  “That was some finelooking chiquita,” LQ said.

  I busied myself lighting a cigarette. I wasn’t one to get caught off guard by things, including some dopey sensation I didn’t understand, and it irked me that the girl’s look had ambushed me like it did.

  The light turned green and LQ got the Dodge rolling, looking to his left at the fading single taillight on the Model T. I took a look too—then told myself to cut the crap. The world was full of goodlooking girls.

  “You shoulda hollered something at her in Mexican,” LQ said to me. “Maybe get a little something going.”

  “It’s Spanish, not Mexican, you peckerwood,” Brando said. “How many times I got to tell you?”

  “And how many times I got to tell you,” LQ said. “Spanish is what they talk in Spain. Let me ask you something: what do they talk in Germany? German, aint it? And in France? I do believe they call it French. In China they talk Chinese. Get the picture? Anybody’s a peckerwood in this car it’s you.”

  “You are one ignorant hillbilly,” Brando said. “What do you call what we talk in America, for Christ’s sake—American?”

  “Goddam right,” LQ said. He gave me a sidelong wink.

  “Jesus Christ,” Brando said.

  “You shoulda seen her, Ramon,” LQ said, grinning at Brando in the rearview. “Finelooking thing. I always heard them young beaner girls prefer doing it with Americans on account of we know how to treat their hairy little tacos so much better than you boys.”

  “Go to hell,” Brando said. He kicked the back of my seat and said, “Why do you put up with that kinda talk?”

  I always got a kick out of how easily LQ could rile Brando with some crack about Mexicans, or even by calling him Ramon. It was funny because, despite his Mexican looks, Brando was a naturalborn American. He couldn’t even speak Spanish except for a few phrases of profanity, and he spoke those with a gringo accent. At twenty-four he was three years older than me, born and raised on a dairy farm just east of Austin, where his wetback parents had worked. They were the only Mexicans on the place, and because they’d wanted their son to be a good Yankee citizen they named him Raymond and encouraged him to speak English from the time he learned to talk. They’d made it a point to converse with him only in English, like everyone else on the farm, even though they themselves could barely get by in it, and so even though he never learned Spanish, his English had a touch of their accent, which only added to the impression that he was Mexican.

  People usually took me for Mexican too, until they got up close enough to see my eyes. Then they knew I was even more of a breed than most Mexicans—most of them being mestizos, of Spanish-Indian mix. There were Spaniards with blue e
yes, of course, and some of their kids by Indian women had the same eyes as daddy. But more often than not, when you saw blue eyes in a brown face they came from Yankee blood. Unlike Brando, however, I could speak Spanish pretty well, and my only accent in either language was a touch of border twang.

  We turned off Broadway onto 23rd and drove toward the neon blaze of the Turf Club a few blocks ahead at Market Street. The Club did good business late into the evening every night of the week, but tonight being New Year’s it was even busier than usual.

  LQ honked his horn at the traffic crawling along ahead of us. He’d started to worry that he was running late for his date with a redhead named Zelda. She worked as a hostess at the Hollywood Dinner Club and he’d already taken her out once but hadn’t been able to score. She was impressed that he was one of Rose’s Ghosts, but she’d been around some and she made it clear to LQ she wasn’t any pushover, that she expected to be wooed. She was pretty enough that LQ thought she was worth the effort. She came off her shift at ten-thirty and he was taking her for Chinese at a Maceo place called the Sui Jen that was on a pier jutting out into the gulf. Then down the street to the Crystal Palace to ring in the New Year with some dancing and champagne. Then to her place for a nightcap. He was sure tonight would be the night.

  Brando had a hot date too. He was going to a party with a long-legged thing he’d met at a dance the week before. She’d told him her name was Brigitte and she was French. He said she spoke with a slight accent but he suspected she was really just some bullshitting hustler out of New Orleans. Of course he had been bullshitting her too, claiming he was a partner in the Big Trinity Oil Company, which was about to be bought by Texaco.