Under the Skin Page 7

  Mrs. Lang flapped her hands at me like she was shooing something, and then Felicia had me by the hand and was tugging me the rest of the way up the stairs, saying, “Come on, baby, come on—long time no see.”

  As we got up to the landing, I looked back and saw the madam speaking in earnest fashion to the derby man, the bouncer standing with them and looking disappointed. Then we were in the hallway and out of view of the parlor.

  We went into her little room and she shut the door and glanced at a bedside chair holding a small stack of fresh hand towels. I set the briefcase down next to the bed and hung my hat on a bedpost and took off my coat and draped it on the chairback. She pulled off her camisole and tossed it on the chair, then stood naked in front of me and helped me unbutton my shirt, talking all the while, saying she’d been wondering what had become of me, had I got married or moved away or what, trying to sound casual but doing a poor job of concealing her eagerness to move things along and serve as many tricks as she could on this most lucrative night of the year. Then I was naked too and we got in bed and went at it.

  I was surprised at how worked up I was. She said, “Oh yeah, honey, yeah,” as I hammered away at her. The whole thing didn’t take but a minute. Then she was squirming out from under me, saying “That was great, baby—wooo, yeah.”

  She wiped herself with a towel and handed me one, then slipped her camisole back on and shook my foot by the big toe. “Hate to rush you, sweetie, but gosh, tonight it’s just busy-busy, you know?”

  I put my pants and shirt on, then sat on the bed to tug on my boots, sensing a familiar sadness. I’d heard or read somewhere that the French called sexual climax “the little death,” which was a pretty good description for the way it always felt to me. I wasn’t sure what it was that died each time, but I’d often wondered if the strange sadness that came afterward might be some form of grief for it, some special sort of sorrow rooted so deep inside of us that we didn’t even have a name for it. This time, for some reason, the melancholy was more insistent than usual.

  “Dream a Little Dream” was on the juke when we went out to the landing. Felicia gave me a so-long peck on the cheek, then turned to smile down at the guy in the derby hat who’d gotten up from the sofa and was heading for the stairs as I started down. Mrs. Lang was at the bar and looking at us. She cut her eyes to the bouncer, who was over by the juke, pointing out selections to a guy feeding coins into it.

  The derby man’s face was as easy to read as a fist. I figured him for a sailorman treating himself to a New Year’s Eve on the town in his best suit and hat, and he’d obviously been sitting there seething about me buying a turn ahead of him. Maybe he was drunk or maybe he was one of those guys who took everything personally, or maybe it was something else, I didn’t give a damn. But everything about the way he was carrying himself as he came up the narrow stairway said he’d worked himself up for a scrap.

  Mrs. Lang must’ve seen it too. She called out, “Hollis!” I caught a glimpse of her directing the bouncer’s attention to us, of other guys looking up to see what was going on.

  We were in the middle of the staircase and almost abreast when the derby man pointed his finger in my face and said, “Lemme tell you something, you mongrel sonofa—”

  I grabbed the finger and pushed it back so hard my knuckles touched his wrist, and even over the music the whole room probably heard the bone snap.

  He screamed and fell to his knees. I gave him a knee to the chin that cracked his jaws together and his derby twirled off and he went tumbling down the stairs, his head banging the steps. He landed in a heap at the foot of the stairway and didn’t move.

  Everybody in the parlor was on his feet. Some were gawking at me, some were clearing out fast. The bouncer hopped over the derby man and came up at me with his fists ready, happy for the chance at some action and in no mood to talk things over. Fine with me. But the fool should’ve waited for me to come down rather than give me the advantage of the higher stairs.

  I raised the briefcase like I was going to throw it at him—and as his hands rose to defend against it I kicked him in the chest. He sailed down the stairs and on his ass and his momentum carried him in a complete somersault over the derby man and he slammed the floor on his back so hard the vibrations came up through my feet. He lay spread-eagled with his eyes and mouth open wide, one leg twitching slightly like it had an electrical short in it.

  As I came down the stairs the only two guys still in the room sped for the front door. The derby man was on his belly and out cold. Blood was seeping from his nose and open mouth, and his broken finger jutted awkwardly on a knuckle that looked like a purple walnut.

  The bouncer’s eyes were terrified. His mouth was working without sound and he probably thought he was going to die for lack of air. And then it came to him, a deep hissing inhalation, and he closed his eyes and gave himself over to the luxury of breath.

  I stepped around them and went to the bar. Mrs. Lang was enraged but I knew she wouldn’t call the police. A fracas like this didn’t happen often and was anyway a hazard of the trade, an inconvenience that would cut into the evening’s profits but wasn’t as much of a problem for her as the cops would be.

  “Beer,” I said to the old bartender. His morose expression hadn’t changed a bit. He drew a glass and put it in front of me and said, “Two bits.”

  I grinned at Mrs. Lang as I dug a quarter out of my pocket. “Jesus, I pay enough for ten turns and I entertain the joint, and I don’t even get a beer on the house?”

  Her mouth pinched tighter. Her good humor had fled with her customers. I flipped the coin to the old guy and he made a neat catch.

  “That stupid man was spoiling for a fight,” Mrs. Lang said. “And that damned Hollis didn’t give you much choice, I know. But I can’t have fighting here, it’s terrible for business. I’m afraid you’re not welcome here anymore. Neither is he.”

  I drained most of the glass in a swallow. One of the girls and her trick came slowly down the stairs. The man stepped carefully around the two guys on the floor and hustled on outside. The girl knelt beside the bouncer and helped him to sit up.

  I finished the beer and wiped my mouth. “Well,” I said, “all right. I just hope to hell I can find me another whorehouse somewhere around here.”

  The crack didn’t raise a smile from anybody but the skinny maid. I exchanged winks with her as I went out the door.

  W hen I’d first arrived in Galveston I lived in an apartment on Seawall Boulevard. Sam had gotten it for me on the day after I arrived in town. I liked the gulf view from the front windows and the sea breeze that came through them. I liked the nearby dance halls with their swell bands, the restaurants, the entertainment joints with their indoor swimming pools and penny arcades and shooting galleries. During my first few weeks on the island I explored the rest of the city little by little. I grew acquainted with the downtown streets—I especially liked the Strand, with its large buildings and old-time architecture. I went to the theaters and moviehouses, patronized all the cafés to see which ones I liked best. I took my ease on benches in the city parks and the German beer gardens. I wandered along the railyards, the ship port, the shrimp docks. I bellied up to the bar in waterfront saloons full of sailors speaking a dozen different languages.

  The main Negro quarter was just south of the red-light district, and in those early weeks I sometimes went there for barbecue and to listen to the blues and watch the couples dance to jazz. It was dancing to beat any I’d ever seen. One night I was in a place called the Toot Sweet Jazz Hall and a lean smoky girl with bloodred lipstick and an ass as round as a medicine ball asked me to dance. When I said I didn’t know how, not that way, she laughed and pulled me out on the floor and taught me.

  A little while later we were in her apartment and going at it. But then while we were resting up and having a cigarette the door crashed open and a guy big as a gorilla came charging in, cursing her for a no-good bitch and holding a straight razor. I rolled to the floor so
he’d have to stoop to try to cut me, but the fool only kicked me in the head and then went for the screaming girl—which gave me the chance to drive my foot into the side of his knee, breaking the joint and bringing him down with a pretty good holler of his own. I grabbed his blade hand and bit it, crunching bone and tasting blood, and he let the razor drop. I slapped it away under the bed and punched him in the neck and got to my feet and stomped my heel into his crotch. His eyes bugged out and he rolled onto his side and threw up.

  She was sitting on the bed and pressing a hand to her cheek, blood running from between her fingers and down her arm and dripping on the sheets. “Kill him!” she said. “Kill that lowdown nigger!”

  But since the lowdown nigger in question already had a busted knee and a chewed hand that would infect worse than a dog bite, not to mention a pair of swollen balls that would be hurting him for days, I didn’t see the need. I started getting my clothes on fast.

  She said I didn’t have to worry about the cops, they never came to Niggertown unless a white person called them in. I wasn’t worried about cops—but if the gorilla had pals close by I didn’t want to fight them bare-assed too. She pressed a towel to her cheek with one hand and held her dress with the other and stepped into it and clumsily tugged it up over her hips.

  The guy had quit puking but he wasn’t about to stand up on that knee, not for a long time. He was holding his balls and glaring at me in a painful rage. “Kill you, mothafucker. Come back in Niggertown, man, I kill your ass.”

  It wasn’t a good time to talk to me that way—the knot he’d raised over my eye was starting to ache. I fetched him a bootkick to the ear that shut him up except for the moaning.

  As I went out the door she was cursing him and stamping on his head with her bare foot, still only half-dressed, her pretty tits jiggling as she let him have it.

  I returned to the Toot Sweet Club a few nights later. I didn’t see the girl or the gorilla anywhere, but hadn’t expected to, considering their condition. Some of the spades gave me pretty hard looks, and I supposed the story had got around. One girl finally sidled up to me and said if I was looking for Corella—I hadn’t even known her name, it had all been “baby” and “sugar” between us—she’d gone home to Lake Charles where she had a childhood sweetie who’d probably take her back, cut face and all. As for Zachary, the fella who cut her, his leg was in a cast and his hand looked like a boxing glove and all he could do was stay home drunk. I bought her a drink, but before she could take the first sip some guy in dark glasses and with a gold front tooth came over and whispered in her ear. She gave me an “I’m sorry” look and moved off with the guy, leaving the drink on the bar. I hung around long enough to let any of them who wanted to try me have the chance, but nobody made a move.

  Over the next few weeks I went to some of the other Negro clubs, but it was obvious the word was out. The guys never took their eyes off me, and for all their looking, the women kept their distance. No fun in that, so I quit going.

  Rough as it was, the Negro quarter wasn’t any rougher than the streets and alleys between Post Office and the railroad tracks. The area’s rundown tenements were home to Galveston’s poorest and most troublesome whites, and the town’s meanest coloreds lived in its alleyway shacks. On a section of Market Street called Little China, a Chinese family with a dozen or so members lived in the single back room of a laundry, and another Chinese bunch lived in a tiny restaurant down the street. Rumor had it that the two families had belonged to different tongs in China and brought their ancient feud with them to America. Which probably explained why every now and then somebody’d find a dead Chinaman stuffed in an alley garbage can with his throat cut, or floating in the channel with a wire garrote still around his neck. But they were only Chinamen, so you never read about them in the papers except now and then as a little filler on a back page, saying something like FOREIGNER FOUND DROWNED IN BAY.

  In this part of town too was an isolated street of a half-dozen houses and some three dozen residents, all of them Mexican. Though the residents called it La Colonia, the street had no sign and did not appear on the city maps. It was too small of an enclave to qualify as a quarter, but there weren’t all that many Mexes on the island to begin with, and this was one of the few neighborhoods of them.

  I’d been in Galveston about three months when I stumbled onto it. I was wandering the streets north of the redlight district one humid night and caught the peppery scent of Mexican cooking. I followed the smell to a dirt lane branching from Mechanic Street near a hazy amber streetlamp. The lane cut through a scrubby vacant lot before passing through a dark hollow of mossy oaks and magnolias to dead-end at the railtracks. In the shadows of the overhanging trees the little frame houses stood in a ragged row along the left side of the lane. Their porchlights were on and their windows were brightly yellow. Light also showed against the underbranches of the trees in a backyard about midway down the street and I heard music coming from behind the house. Accordion and fiddle and guitar playing “Tu, Solo Tu.” I’d heard the tune a hundred times but now it reminded me of a moment less than three years past that seemed like ancient history, reminded me of a packed-dirt dance floor under a desert night-sky blasting with stars, of dancing close with a pretty Mexican girl to this same song as my cousin Reuben and my friend Chente danced with a pair of blond sisters….

  The roast-pepper aroma had grown stronger, and mingling into it were the smells of maize tortillas and refried beans. I went around to the lit-up backyard and found a small party going on.

  Couples were dancing on a wide patch of bare dirt, kicking and swirling and spinning each other around in the cast of light from lanterns hung on tree branches. A kid spotted me and told the people gathered at a long picnic table loaded with bowls of food, and they looked over at me. One of the men approached me, removing his hat, and I took mine off too.

  The lantern light was full on my face and I could tell by his look that he could see the color of my eyes. I’d seen such inquisitive stares more times than I could count.

  “Buenas noches,” he said, and added, “Good evening,” in deference to the possibility that I spoke only English.

  In Spanish I apologized for intruding and told him I’d smelled the food and heard the music and wanted to see what was going on.

  His face brightened and he beckoned me to join them, saying, “Pase, caballero, por favor. Nuestra casa es su casa.”

  His name was Arturo Alcanzas and he was host of the party. The others also welcomed me warmly, everyone speaking in Spanish. They introduced themselves all around and made room for me at the table bench. They admired my suit and boots, the briefcase I kept at my side. They tried not to stare too obviously at my eyes. The musicians finished the number and came over to the table and Arturo introduced them too, three brothers named Gutierrez. They called themselves Los Tres Payasos, and though they modestly professed not to be very good, Alcanzas said they were good enough to get hired to play at small fiestas and quinceañeras from Port Arthur to Bay City.

  Someone fetched me a bottle of Carta Blanca from a tub packed with ice. A bowl of fried jalapeños was set close to me on one side and a platter of chicharrones on the other. While I munched on the chiles and pork rinds some of the women passed around a plate for me, filling it with red rice, beans, spiced shredded pork. A young girl placed a wicker basket of corn tortillas within my reach.

  I told them my name and their faces showed curiosity about it, but their natural politeness restrained them from asking how I had come by it. One who spoke English told the others that James meant Santiago, and everyone was pleased by this and addressed me by that name from then on. When one of the men remarked that I spoke with the accent of the western frontera, some of the others made faces of reprimand for his breach of manners with such familiarity. He looked chastened and assured me he’d meant no disrespect. I assured him I’d perceived none. I told them I’d grown up along the Chihuahua and Texas border, and they said “Ah, pues,” and nodde
d at each other around the table as though I had clarified a great deal.

  They told me all about themselves. The first of them to settle here had named the little street La Colonia Tamaulipas, in honor of their home state, but over time it simply became La Colonia. Many of them were related by blood or marriage and were from Matamoros, just the other side of the Rio Grande. Others were from Victoria, Monterrey, Tampico. “Pero todos venimos con espaldas mojadas,” one of them said with a smile, joking about the wetback fashion in which they’d all crossed the river. Some of the men had found work on the docks, some in the railyard, some on the shrimp boats. A pair of brothers named Lopez talked excitedly of their plan to own their own shrimper one day.

  In the group was a whitehaired old man named Gregorio who owned a small boardinghouse. I asked if he had a vacancy, and he did, and after we were done eating and had another beer, he took me over there to see it. The building was the only two-story on the street, a rundown clapboard at the end of the lane, its front yard bordered by a weathered picket fence. He called the house the Casa Verde because of its moldy-green roof shingles and the thick growth of vines on the outer walls and around the porch columns.

  Inside, the place smelled old but the parlor and hallway and kitchen were neatly kept. Gregorio himself occupied the only bedroom on the ground floor and rented out the three bedrooms upstairs. The vacancy was on a front corner, with one window overlooking the lane and another facing the traintracks. A light bulb dangling from the ceiling illuminated a battered wardrobe, a narrow bed, a small wooden table and a straightback chair. Columns of numbers had been scratched into the tabletop. The old man saw me fingering them and said the previous tenant had been a gambler. I asked what had become of him, and Gregorio turned up his hands. One day the man had been there, he said, and one day he had not, as had always been the case with men and would be the case with us as well.