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A chill desert night of wind and rain. The trade at Mrs. O’Malley’s house has been kept meager by the inclement weather and the loss of the neighborhood’s electrical power since earlier in the day. Rumor has it that a stray bullet struck dead a transformer. For the past two days errant rounds have carried over the Rio Grande—glancing off buildings, popping through windowpanes, hitting random spectators among the rooftop crowds seeking to be entertained by the warfare across the river. Even through the closed windows and the pattering of the rain, gunfire remains audible at this late hour, though the latest word is that the rebels have taken Juárez and the shooting is now all in celebration and the exercise of firing squads.

The house is alight with oil lamps. Its eight resident whores huddled into their housecoats and carping of boredom. Now comes a loud rapping of the front door’s iron knocker and they all sit up as alert as cats.

The houseman peers through a peephole, then turns to the madam and shrugs. Mrs. O’Malley bustles to the door and puts her eye to the peeper.

“Well Jesus Mary and Joseph.”

She works the bolt and tugs open the door. The lamp flames dip and swirl in their glass and shadows waver on the walls as a cold rush of air brings in the mingled scents of creosote and wet dust.

Mrs. O’Malley trills in Spanish at the two men who enter the dim foyer and shuts the door behind them. The maid Concha takes their overcoats and they shake the rainwater off their hats and stamp their boots on the foyer rugs.

“Pasen, caballeros, pasen,” Mrs. O’Malley says, ushering them into the parlor.

They come into the brighter light and the girls see that they are Mexicans in Montana hats and suits of good cut. One of the men has appeared in photographs in the local newspapers almost every day for the past week, but few of these girls ever give attention to a newspaper and so most of them do not recognize him.

“Attention, ladies,” Mrs. O’Malley says, as the girls assemble themselves for inspection. “Just look who’s honoring us with a visit.” She extends her arms toward one of the men as if presenting a star performer on a theater stage. “My dear old friend—”

“Pancho!” one of the girls calls out—Kate, whom the others call Schoolgirl for her claim of having attended college for a time before her fortunes turned. Only she and two of the other girls in the house—a small brunette they call Pony and a fleshy girl named Irish Red—were working at Mrs. O’Malley’s last winter when this man regularly patronized the place. The three waggle their fingers in greeting and the man grins at them and nods.

“General Francisco Villa,” the madam enunciates, fixing the Schoolgirl with a correcting look and poorly concealing her irritation at being usurped of the introduction.

The girls have of course all heard of him and they make a murmuring big-eyed show of being impressed. He is tall for a Mexican, big-chested and thick-bellied without conveying an impression of fatness. His eyes are hidden in the squint of his smile. The madam hugs him sideways around the waist and says how happy she is to see him again. He fondly pats her ample bottom and repositions her arm away from the holstered pistol under his coatflap.

“Hace siete o ocho meses que no te veo, verdad?” the madam says. “Que tanto ha occurido en ese tiempo.”

Villa agrees that much has happened in the eight months since he was last in El Paso, living as an exile in the Mexican quarter with only eight men in his bunch. Now he commands the mighty Division of the North. He is one of the most celebrated chieftains of the Mexican Revolution and a favored subject of American reporters covering the war.

Would he and his friend like a drink, the madam asks. Some music on the hand-cranked phonograph?

Villa flicks his hand in rejection of the offer and returns his attention to the women, a man come to take his pleasure but with no time for parlor amenities. The girls have thrown open their housecoats to afford the visitors a franker view of their charms in negligee or camisole, but Villa already knows what he wants. He has come with the express hope of finding the Irish girl still here, and now beckons her. He much admires her bright red hair and lushly freckled skin as pale as cream—traits not common among the women he usually enjoys. She beams and hastens to him.

Mrs. O’Malley pats his arm and says she just knew he’d pick Megan again.

“Y cual prefiere tu amigo?” she says, and turns to the other man.

“Pues?” Villa says to him.

He is taller than Villa, leaner of waist but as wide of chest, his mustache thicker, his eyes so black the pupils are lost in their darkness.

“Esa larguirucha,” he says, jutting his chin at a tall lean girl with honey-colored hair and eyes the blue of gas flames. The only one of them able to hold his gaze, her small smile a reflection of his own.

“Ava,” Mrs. O’Malley says. “Our newest.” She turns from the man to the girl and back to the man, remarking the intensity of the look between them. “My,” she says to Villa. “Parece que tu cuate se encontró una novia.”

“Otra novia mas,” Villa says with a laugh. Then says to the redhead, “Vente, mi rojita,” and hugs her against his side and they head for the stairway. The Ava girl takes the other man by the hand and they follow Villa and Irish Red up to the bedrooms.

The rest of the girls resettle themselves, some of them casting envious glances after the couples ascending the stairs, chiefly at the Ava girl, who has been with them but a week, the one they call the Spook for her inclination to keep her own company and her manner of seeming to be elsewhere even when she’s in their midst.

 

At dawn the rain has departed. So too the men. The few remaining clouds are ragged red scraps on a pink horizon. The light of the ascending day eases down the Franklins and into the city streets.

By late morning Mrs. O’Malley is away to her daily mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. The girls rouse themselves from their beds and descend to the sunbright kitchen for coffee and the pastries Concha has fetched from the corner panadería. They sit at a long table under a row of windows open to the late-November coolness and the croonings of Inca doves in the patio trees. The gunfire across the river has abated to faint sporadic fusillades, each volley prompting Concha to a quick sign of the cross.

As usual at the breakfast table most of the girls are closemouthed and drawn into themselves, absorbed in the ruminations that come with the light of each newrisen day. Only Kate the Schoolgirl, reading a newspaper, and Irish Red and Juliet—called Lovergirl—who are engaged in antic whisperings about Megan’s night with Pancho Villa, seem unaffected by the rueful mood that daily haunts this hour of the whore life.

Now the Lovergirl’s giggles rise keenly and Betty the Mule, longfaced and bucktoothed, says, “Why don’t you two take your snickering somewhere else? You sound like a couple of moron kids, for shit’s sake.”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” the Lovergirl says. “Nobody’s anyway talking to you.”

“She’s just jealous,” Irish Red says.

“Jealous?” the Mule says. “Of what? Some greaser who probably left you a case of clap and a furpatch full of crabs?”

Lightfoot Gwen chuckles without looking up from her coffee, but the Pony says, “Hey,” and gives Betty a look of reprimand and nods toward Concha standing at the stove with her back to them. The Mule glances at the maid and makes a face of indifference.

“Not much you aint jealous,” Irish Red says.

“Jesus,” the Schoolgirl says, gawking into her newspaper. She will sometimes share with the table an item she finds of particular interest, sometimes even read it aloud in spite of their inattention and feigned yawns. But now the timbre of her voice is such that few of them can ignore it. She glances from one item on the page to another and then back again, as if confirming some correspondence between them. “Sweet Jesus.”

“What now?” says Jenny the Joker.

“He killed three hundred men,” the Schoolgirl says. “Prisoners. Just yesterday.”

“Who did?” the Pony says.

“Hell, they’re always shooting them by the trainload over there,” the Mule says. “They’re shooting them right now, just listen.”

“It’s not the same,” the Schoolgirl says. She looks down at the paper and puts a finger to it. “They were in a corral and there was this wall and he said any man who could get over it could go free. He let them try it ten at a time. And he killed them all. He shot men for three hours.” She looks up from the paper. “And then he came here.”

“Pancho?” Irish Red says. “He shot—”

“No, the other. There’s a picture.”

Some of them gather around the Schoolgirl to look over her shoulder at the newspaper photograph. It shows Villa and a white-haired American general standing together on a bridge between Juárez and El Paso, smiling at the camera and flanked by their aides. The man directly next to Villa is the one who came with him to the house last night. The Schoolgirl puts her finger on the caption, on the name identifying him, then moves her finger to the small report about the three hundred federal prisoners and taps her nail on the name of their executioner.

“Be goddamn,” the Lovergirl says.

They turn their attention to the Spook, who was with this man last night. She sits at the far end of the table where she has been drinking coffee and staring out the window toward the sounds of the firing squads. None of them can read her face.

“It says here his name’s…” The Schoolgirl looks down at the paper again and in Anglicized fashion enunciates: “Fierro.”

“Padre, hijo, espiritú santo,” Concha says as she blesses herself.

The Spook turns to them and scans their faces, their big-eyed show of shock mingled with wet-lipped curiosity.

“I know,” she says.

And leaves the room.

 

She had been with other men of seemingly insatiable desire but their lust had no object beyond her naked flesh. This one’s hunger was of a different breed. He took obvious pleasure in her body, but it seemed to her that his urgent effort was toward something more than sexual release, toward something beyond the pulse and throb of their carnal flexions, as if what he sought after lay in some unreachably distant region of the soul itself. But whether the soul he strove toward was hers or his own she could not say. She could not have given words to any of this, she could but sense it, know it only by way of her skin.

On completion of their first coupling he sat with his back to the headboard and drank from a bottle he’d brought with him. She recognized the uncorked smell as the same one she’d tasted with their first kiss and it occurred to her that he might be a little drunk. He lit a cigarillo and offered her both the packet of smokes and the bottle and she accepted only the cigarillo. He lit it for her and she said, “Thank you,” the first words between them. In the dim light from the lantern turned down low on the dresser he looked to be carved of copper.

“Como te llamas?” he said.

The query was among the rudimentary Spanish locutions she had thus far learned from Concha. “Ava,” she said.

He chuckled low and repeated the name in its Spanish pronunciation, watching her eyes in the low light. Then said, “Es una mentira. Dime la verdad.”

“I don’t hablo español too very…bueno. Sorry.”

“No te llamas Ava. No es…is no true.”

She wondered how he’d known she was lying, and why she was not surprised that he’d known. His eyes on her were as black as the night of rain at the window and utterly unfathomable, but she felt as if they saw directly to the truth of her, whatever that might be.

“Ella,” she said. “Ella Marlene Malone.”

“El-la-marleeen-malooone,” he said in singsong. “Como una cancionita.”

“You’re making fun,” she said, and put her fingers to his mouth. He held her hand there and kissed each fingertip in turn. And then he was on her again.

This time he afterward got out of bed and paced about the small room, stretching, flexing, rolling his head like a pugilist, briefly massaging one hand and then the other. He drained the last of the bottle and set it on the dresser. The light was behind him and she could not see his face.

“Hoy mismo maté trescientos pinches Colorados.” He turned his gaze to the dark window. “Pues, puede ser que los maté ayer. Los días pasan.” He looked at her again. “Pasan a la memoria y la historia, los más enormes museos de mentiras.”

She stared at him in utter incomprehension. He stepped to the chair where his clothes were draped and from them extracted a pair of revolvers. She’d had no notion of their presence.

“Los maté con éstas.” He twirled the pistols on his fingers like a shooter in a Wild West show, then put one of them back into the coat. He held up three fingers of his free hand. “Trescientos. Los maté todos.” He struck his chest. “Yo, Fierro!”

She understood of this only the number three and what might be his name and that whatever he was telling her was attached to a ferocious pride.

“Your name…tu…llama…is Fierro?”

He laughed low in his throat and made a slight bow. “Rodolfo Fierro, a su servicio, mi angelita.”

“Rodolfo,” she said, testing the name on her tongue.

“Para algunos mi nombre es una canción tambien, como tuyo. Pero el mió es una canción de muerte.”

“Muerte,” she said. “I know that one. Death.”

“Si—death.” He laughed low. “Tienes miedo de la muerte? Tienes…cómo se dice?…fear?”

He stepped up beside the bed and raised the revolver so that the muzzle was within inches of her face. He slowly cocked the hammer and she heard the ratchet action as the cylinder rotated and even in the weak light she could see the bluntly indifferent bulletheads riding in their chambers.

Her breath caught. Her nipples tightened. Her blood sped.

She reached up and gingerly fingered the barrel. Then drew it closer, breathing its masculine smells of oiled gunmetal and burnt powder. And put her tonguetip to the muzzle and tasted of its taint. She could hear her own hard breathing.

His teeth showed. “Otra loca brava.”

She tried to disengage the pistol from his hand, which felt as much of iron as the weapon itself. He uncocked it and released it to her.

The metal frame was impressed with the Colt symbol and the grips were pale yellow and each was embossed with an eagle holding a snake in its beak.

“I want it.”

“La quieres?”

He seized her mouth in his hard fingers. She was unsure if he meant to kiss her or hit her or do something she could not begin to imagine. With an instinct she hadn’t known she possessed she pressed the Colt against his stomach and cocked the hammer.

He chuckled—then kissed her deeply. She slid the gun down his belly to his phallus and found it standing rigid and they broke the kiss in laughter.

“Christ Jesus, I aint the only one loco,” she said. She eased down the hammer as she had seen him do.

He made an expansive gesture of relinquishment. “Te la doy, güerita. Como un…pressen.”

“A present?” She giggled happily and slipped the gun under the pillow as he got on the bed and positioned himself above her, his grin white, black eyes glowing.

“Wait,” she said. “Momento.”

She could not have said then or ever after why she did what she next did. It was as if something of the man’s blood was calling to hers—some atavistic urge as primitive as a wolf howl—and she could not deny its pull, her own blood’s yearn to join with his. In that moment of primal impulse, she probed into herself and extracted her pessary and slung it away.

He chuckled as at some comic mummery. “Y mas loca todavía.”

And entered her.

 

Dr. Marceau is a bespectacled man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and the polite but reserved manner of a distant uncle. The most lucrative portion of his practice comes from clients who share the need of his discretion and his willingness to help women beset by an age-old trouble consequent of reckless passion.

He regards the girl seated across the desk from him and shows her a small practiced smile bespeaking sympathetic understanding. His long experience has taught him to recognize the demimondaines even when they do not honestly identify themselves but assume some tired guise to preserve an illusion of dignity. Besides, the fallen ones of good family rarely come to him unaccompanied. It’s almost always some young pony, green and given to mistakes, who arrives at his door all alone. Like this one.

“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.

 

Bullshit,” 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 night 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 there.”

“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.”

Hartung spits into the cuspidor. “I give up. There’s no making sense with a crazy man.”

He stares into his whiskey for a time, then sips of it. “Damn hopeless case.”

Youngblood grins. “Guess so.”

“No guess about it.”

“She’s really a sweet girl.”

“I’m sure.”

“Wait’ll you meet her.”

“I done met her.”

“No you aint, you just seen her and said howdy. I already told her you’re gonna visit us real often.”

“I am?”

“You damn right. You’re gonna have many a supper with us.”

Hartung drains his drink and contemplates the empty glass. “Supper, huh?” Then steps back from the bar and gives Youngblood a look of alarm. “Whoa! Is she gonna do the cooking?”

It takes Youngblood a second to catch the allusion to the hapless McGuane—and they burst into loud barking laughter.

 

If she is a mystery to others she is hardly less of one to herself, a fact that troubles her not at all. No one will ever learn anything of her life prior to her arrival at Mrs. O’Malley’s. There were witnesses to that earlier life, of course, but none are known to anyone who now knows her or will come to know her. Only her own memory can bear testimony to her past, but not in all the years to come will she permit herself even a passing thought of where she’s come from or who she’s been, and thus will her previous history disappear to wherever the world’s vast store of unrecorded past does vanish.

The last recall of it she allowed herself was when Youngblood returned to her after a full night of pondering her disclosure that she carried another man’s child, returned to her with the morning light and held her hands and said it didn’t matter. And asked her again to be his wife.

She had searched his eyes for any hint of uncertainty but saw nothing in them but love.

Love. The very thing in Cullen Youngblood she had wagered on. A love whose power she dared not test against the truth but which proved equal to the lie. And in the moment of staring into his eyes and marveling at the blazing force of that love, she had the final thought she will ever have that touches on her earlier self:

And they used to call me crazy.

 

We wore good suits and hats and freshly shined shoes. Brando and LQ carried briefcases stuffed with old newspapers. Anybody who checked us out as we came through the Jacinto’s revolving door would’ve figured us for three more members of the East Texas Insurance Association attending the year-end convention.

The lobby was brightly lighted and well appointed with dark leather sofas and easy chairs and ottomans, embroidered carpeting and tall potted palms. Business types stood chatting in clusters and huddled around documents laid out on coffee tables. Most of the action at this hour was in the hotel dining room, which was jammed with conventioneers and other New Year’s celebrants and pouring out music and laughter and the loud garble of shouted conversations. The smell of booze carried out from the room. Even though Prohibition was two years dead and done with, you still couldn’t belly up to a bar in Texas and buy a hard drink, not legally, but you could bring in your own, and this bunch must’ve brought it in by the carload. Through the open double doors I caught a glimpse of the mob inside, and of a man and woman seated on a dais—the man grayhaired and wearing a white toga and a sash that read 1935, the woman young and goodlooking in a white bathing suit with a 1936 sash.

A couple was embracing at the bank of elevators as we came up, the man holding the woman close and nuzzling her neck, running his hand over her ass. The woman glanced over at us and pushed his hand away and hissed, “Will you just hold your horses?”

The little arrow over one of the elevator doors glided past the arc of floor numbers to stop at number one. The doors dinged open and another loud bunch of conventioneers came surging out and headed for the dining room. We moved fast to get into the car ahead of the couple and LQ turned and raised a hand to them and said, “Houston police business, folks. Yall take the next one, please.”

Brando smiled at the pretty blond operator and made a shutting gesture and she closed the doors on the couple standing there with their mouths open. She had nicelooking legs under her short skirt and wore her cap at a sassy tilt. Brando winked at her and said, “All the way up, honey.” She got us moving and said, “Yall policemen?”

“Don’t we look it?” LQ said.

“Yessir,” she said. “I guess so.”

LQ said he was Sergeant O’Brien and Brando and I were Detectives Ramos and Gallo. She wanted to know if we were going to arrest somebody. LQ said probably not, just ask some people some questions. She looked from one of us to the others. LQ was fairhaired and cleanshaven and spoke with an East Texas drawl, but Brando and I were darkskinned and had big mustaches, and I thought the girl might be wondering when the Houston PD had started hiring guys that looked like us.

At the top floor LQ set down his briefcase and he and I got out. Brando stayed with the elevator and kept the door open. I heard the girl say, “I wanna see,” but Brando told her to keep back from the door.

We’d figured on the watchdog in the hallway. He got up from his chair and dropped his magazine on it, tugged his lapels into place and planted himself with hands on hips. He held his coat flaps back so we could see the shoulder holster he was wearing.

“Stop right there,” he said.

We kept walking toward him. “Houston police,” LQ said. “Here to see William Ragsdale.”

The guy cut his eyes from one of us to the other. He was goodsized but so was I, and although LQ was on the lanky side, he had the height on us. The guy’s hands dropped off his hips.

“Let’s see some badges,” he said. You could almost hear the gears turning in his skull, thinking what might happen if he pulled a gun and we were really cops. That was the trouble with dimwits—in the time they needed to think it over, they were had.

“Sure thing,” LQ said, pulling the .380 out from under his coat and cocking it as he put the muzzle in the guy’s face. “Have a good look.”

I drew my revolver from under my arm and held it down against my leg. It was an old single-action .44 with high-power loads that could knock down a horse.

The guard looked heartbroken at being taken so easily. He held his hands away from his sides as LQ reached in his coat and stripped him of a bulldog.

“How many?” LQ said, jutting his chin at the door.

“Just him and Kersey, a pair of chippies.”

“Kersey a gunner?” LQ said.

“Naw, shit. Owns a truck company, some strip clubs.”

LQ told him what to say and warned him that if he said anything else he’d be the first to get it.

I stepped off to one side of the door and LQ stood on the other. LQ nodded and the guard gave the door two sharp raps, waited a second and then gave it one more.

A voice inside said, “What?”

“Got a package here for Mr. Ragsdale. The desk just sent it up. Didn’t say who from.”

We heard the dead bolt working and then the door opened a few inches on its chain. “Where’s it—”

LQ yanked the guard aside and I stepped up to the door and gave it a hell of a kick, snapping the chain and knocking the guy on the other side backpedaling and down on his ass. I went in with the revolver raised. LQ shoved the guard staggering past me and hustled in behind me and closed the door.

Ragsdale was gawking at us from the sofa where he sat in his underwear and with a girl on his lap. I knew him from a photograph Rose showed me. Husky, paunchy, thick head of oily hair, fleshy drinker’s nose. The girl scooted off him in a half-crouch, holding her shoulders in a shrug and her hands turned back at the wrist in a gesture that said she had nothing to do with this. You could see she wasn’t wearing anything under her white slip.

“What the hell?” Ragsdale said. He started to reach for his pants but I pointed the Colt at his face and shook my head. He raised his hands chest-high and sat back. I picked up the pants to make sure they didn’t have a gun in them and tossed them aside.

LQ ordered the other two guys to stand with their noses and palms against the wall and they were quick to do it. A girl in just bra and panties appeared at the bedroom door, looking scared but keeping her mouth shut. Another cool pony. I took a look in the bedroom to be sure there was no adjoining door, then waved both broads in there and shut them inside.

There was an open valise on the table against the wall and I sidestepped over to it and saw that it held a .380 semiautomatic and a few lean packets of greenbacks held together with rubber bands. One pack of hundreds, a couple of fifties, the rest all twenties and tens. Three, four grand at most was my guess.

“Listen, can I say something?” Ragsdale said. He was bouncing back fast from his surprise—and he’d figured who was running the show and was talking to me. Rose said they called him Willie Rags.

“Just let me say something, okay?” he said. I stood there and stared at him.

“Look, I know who sent you boys. Just tell me what them wops want. You aint wop, are you? Look Mex to me—no offense, hell, I like Mexes. Anyway, what they want? Money? Want to know whose slots I’m pushing? Well, all right, all right, we can discuss all that. We can straighten everything out, guys like us, right?”

He’d probably fast-talked his way out of plenty of jams before. Rose had spoken to him on the telephone once. “Talks like a guy on the radio,” he said.

“Listen, I know you guys aren’t gonna shoot me,” he said. “Not here. Hotel fulla people. Shit, it’s Houston but it aint Dodge City. They probably told you get the money I made off those slots, right? Plus a little interest on top? Probably said knock me around some, teach me a lesson. Okay, all right, won’t be the first ass-kicking I ever took. But look, the money on the table’s all I got on me. You want more than that you gotta wait till morning. I’m meeting a guy in the morning with lots more cash. But you don’t want me all beat up when I meet him, right? Might make him suspicious, know what I mean? Would you hand over a bunch of money to a guy all beat to shit? What you oughta do, you oughta hold off on the ass-whipping till after I get the dough from this guy. That’s good business sense, and you boys are businessmen, I can tell. So let’s talk a little business while we wait for the man with the money, what do you say?”

I stared at him with an expression like I might be thinking it over.

“Listen,” he said, “tell me what kinda deal you got with the Maceos. Maybe I can cut you something better, you know what I mean? I mean, no harm in talking, is there?” He pronounced their name MAY-cee-o, the same way the Maceos themselves said it, like Texans, which is what they considered themselves to be.

I looked at LQ. He pursed his lips and shrugged like What the hell.

Ragsdale caught LQ’s expression and took encouragement from it. He patted the sofa and said to me, “Come on, pal, sit down. No harm done. Let’s talk business.”

I lowered the gun, and he chuckled and patted the sofa again. I uncocked the .44 and slipped it into my waistband under my coat as I started to step past him to the other side of the sofa. Then brought the ice pick out of my inside coat pocket and drove it into his heart.

If you can get them off guard like that you can do it quick and neat and fairly quiet. They give a little grunt and that’s it. I yanked the pick out and he started to fall forward but I caught him and positioned him so he’d stay seated. A red spot the size of a quarter was all the blood there was. His head was slumped to one side and his eyes were open. He looked like he’d just been asked a stumper of a question. I closed his eyes and wiped the pick on his undershirt and put it back in my coat.

The other two still had their faces to the wall and looked like they were trying not to even breathe.

“Tell those Dallas assholes we know it’s their machines Willie Rags was pushing,” I said. “Tell them Rosario Maceo says don’t cross the line again.”

I picked up the valise and we hustled out of the room and over to the elevator. Brando patted the girl on the ass and said, “Let’s go, honey.”

She blushed and worked the levers and down we went. She looked a little disappointed we hadn’t brought anyone out in handcuffs.

 

It was normally an hour’s drive between Houston and Galveston, but we went back by way of Kemah and League City, a pair of burgs just inside the Galveston County line. We had a list of all the places where Ragsdale had put in his Dallas machines and we stopped at each one to have a talk with the owner—a dozen or so cafés and about as many filling stations and pool halls.

Ragsdale must’ve thought he was being smart just because he stayed away from any joint that already had our machines in it. Maybe he thought the Maceo brothers wouldn’t care that he was working in Galveston County so long as he dealt only with joints free of Maceo machines. Maybe he was so dumb he thought they wouldn’t even hear about it. But Sam Maceo had friends everywhere and they had eyes and ears all over. They reported everything they heard that might mean some outsider was working this side of the county line. Sam would then pass the information to Rose and Rose would decide what to do about it.

What set Rose off about Ragsdale and the Dallas outfit wasn’t just the money they were siphoning out of a few mainland joints. What galled him was their lack of respect. He couldn’t blame outsiders for wanting to get in on Galveston’s easy money, but he did blame them if they tried to get in on it without Maceo permission. Sometimes Rose would let an outside bunch work its game on the county mainland—never on the island—but only for a percentage of the gross. If the outside outfit thought the Maceo cut was too high, Rose would shrug and wish them luck and that was the end of the discussion. Only fools tried to work their game in Galveston County without Rose’s blessing. Those who did try it could count on Rose taking swift measures to set things straight.

I was one of the measures he could take.

So were about two dozen other guys, the bunch of us known as “Rose’s Ghosts.” We saw to it that Maceo territory was defended and Maceo will was done. We were a fairly open secret—even the chief of police and the county sheriff knew about us—but you’d never see a word about us in the papers except as “person or persons unknown.” Besides discouraging outside outfits from crossing the Galveston line, we protected the Maceo interests in neighboring counties. We collected the Maceos’ money—the daily take from Maceo clubs, the cuts from places renting Maceo equipment, the loan payments from businesses staked with Maceo cash. We kept the grifters out of the Maceo casinos. Hell, we kept them off the island altogether. We came down hard on drunkrollers and room thieves, even harder on strongarms and stickup men. Although few of the good citizens ever said it out loud, most of them knew that the real law enforcement in Galveston wasn’t the cops—it was us.

It was in the Maceo brothers’ interest to keep their gambling rooms honest and make sure the hotels and the city streets were safe. The “Free State of Galveston,” as everybody called it, was the most wide-open place in Texas, probably in the country, and what kept the highrollers and big spenders coming was the knowledge they wouldn’t be cheated at the tables or robbed on the streets. Like the cathouse district that had been doing business on the island ever since the Civil War, the Maceos ensured the town a steady prosperity—even now, while the rest of the country was getting hammered by the Depression. It was a benefit not lost on the islanders, who knew a good thing when they had it.

Rose was a master of backroom business with the local politicians and the cops. One recent morning when I’d gone to Rose’s office to deliver some cash I’d collected in Texas City, the secretary hustled me right in, even though Rose had the county sheriff in there with him.

I handed Rose the bag and he peeked in it and took out a half-inch pack of hundreds and dropped it on the desk in front of the sheriff.

“There you go, Frankie,” he said. “A little contribution for the Lawmen’s Association.”

I’d seen the sheriff coming and going from Rose’s office many a time and we had sometimes exchanged nods. But I doubted he’d ever accepted money from Rose in front of anybody, and he looked uneasy about it.

As the sheriff put the money in his coat, Rose pointed at me and said, “You know Jimmy here, don’t you, Frank? Let me tell you, they don’t come any better than this kid. A real whiz at taking care of business, you know what I mean? And he got a sharp eye. Don’t miss a thing. He sees something and click, it’s like his mind takes a picture of it.”

The sheriff gave me a careful once-over and we exchanged one of our nods. We all sat there without saying anything for a long moment before the sheriff made a show of checking his watch and saying oh Christ he was late for an appointment. He said so long to Rose and let himself out. When the door shut behind him Rose and I turned to each other and laughed.

The look the sheriff gave me had been both wary and somewhat impressed. Like everybody else, he knew Rose wasn’t one for openly praising anybody, not like Sam, who was always telling guys how swell they were, no matter if they were a crooked local judge or a visiting shoe salesman from Tulsa, some regular highroller from Houston or a whorehouse bouncer who came in once a week to drop ten bucks at the blackjack tables. It wasn’t any wonder Sam handled the public-relations end of things. Most city officials from the mayor on down were personally acquainted with both brothers, but it was Big Sam, as everybody called him, who dealt with them in public. He was the happy glad-hander, the drinking buddy with a thousand jokes—or, when it was called for, the gracious host of impeccable manners. He was the one to hand over the big contributions to the latest charity drives and to help local politicians cut the big ribbons with the outsized scissors, to bring in big-time celebrity entertainers to perform for free at civic events, to serve as the sponsoring host at sporting competitions and bathing beauty contests. He paid for smart orphan kids to go to college and made large weekly contributions to all the local churches. Sam used charm and generosity to promote the Maceo interests, and Rose used the Ghosts to protect them. They were a perfect team. And I knew that under his goodbuddy exterior Sam was no less serious than his big brother. Rose called the shots, but he always consulted with Sam first, always sought his advice. They were damn close brothers and partners to the bone.

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.

 

LQ 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?

 

By 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.

 

The 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 eyes, 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.

“With golddiggers,” he said, “the idea you got money works better than Spanish fly.”

“Too bad Mexican flies don’t work as good,” LQ had said. “You always got plenty enough of them on you.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Brando said.

“If I only could,” LQ said with a sigh. “I’d finally be doing it with the best there is and somebody I truly love.”

He stopped the car in front of the Club and Brando and I got out. I carried Ragsdale’s valise and one of the briefcases, in which I was carrying my revolver and the .380 I took from Ragsdale. LQ waved so long and drove off.

Brando punched me on the arm and asked if I was sure I didn’t want to go to the party with him. “Frenchy can prob’ly get a friend.”

“Thanks, anyway,” I said. “I’ll find my own fun.”

“Suit yourself, bud,” he said, and walked off to the parking lot in back where he’d left his car.

 

The Turf Club was a three-story building where the Maceos kept their headquarters. Everybody just called it the Club. On the ground floor was a restaurant called the Turf Grill, and as restaurants go it was fairly flashy and the food was always good. On this night the place was packed and there was a line of diners out on the sidewalk, waiting to be seated. A hostess named Sally gave me a wink when I went in, and some of the harried waitresses smiled at me in recognition as I made my way across the room to a doorway leading to the real attraction on the lower floor—a large betting room where you could lay money on any horse race at any track in the country. The day’s major races were broadcast over the parlor’s wall speakers and the hollering in there could get pretty intense when a race was in progress.

Anybody could get into the betting room, but the upper floors were exclusive. The elevator and the narrow stairway were in a hallway at the rear of the room. The stairway doors on every floor locked automatically from the inside, and there was always a palooka posted at the elevator to make sure nobody but special customers or friends of the Maceos got on it. Rose and Sam had their offices on the second floor, which also contained a billiards room and the Studio Lounge—a small restaurant with a dance floor and a long bar and a backroom gambling hall for big-money card and dice action. The third floor was a health club equipped with a boxing ring and all kinds of exercise equipment.

The only raids the local cops ever pulled were of course just for show. They always let the Maceos know they were coming and they never hit anything but the ground-floor betting parlor. Whatever equipment they confiscated they returned on the Q.T. a few days later. Every now and then, however, the Texas Rangers would come calling. That’s when the elevator man would push a hidden button to buzz a warning to the upper floors. The band in the Studio Lounge would strike up a blaring rendition of “The Eyes of Texas,” which everybody knew was the signal of a Ranger raid. The staff in the gambling room would fly into action, covering the gaming tables with expensive tablecloths and setting them with dinnerware and platters of food. The back bars would swivel around to hide the booze racks and display nothing but seltzer bottles and tea sets and urns of fresh coffee. The elevator was also equipped with a secret switch that turned it into the slowest mechanical conveyance in Texas. By the time the Rangers arrived at the second floor the only booze they’d find was what the customers had brought in—which was legal to do—and there wouldn’t be so much as a poker chip in sight.

At this hour the day’s races were long over, and the betting parlor was pretty quiet. A few guys sat around with bottles of beer, gabbing and telling each other how close they’d come to winning big today in the first or the fifth or the last race at such and such a track.

Guarding the elevator tonight was an ex-pug named Otis Wilcox who’d once lasted six rounds with Tunney before the Gentleman Marine coldcocked him. Otis said he couldn’t remember his own name for an hour after he came to. He worked as both a Turf Club guard and a trainer in the gym. He gave boxing lessons to health club members and still liked to spar, but he wasn’t one to pull all his punches, so regular partners were hard for him to come by. I was his favorite sparring buddy because I could take it. Besides, I was a fast learner and had gotten good enough to make it interesting for him. The lumps I took were worth it to me for the chance to box against somebody who knew what he was doing. We rarely got a chance to work out with each other, though, because of our different schedules, and we hadn’t been in the ring together in a month. We’d gone three rounds the last time, and we got pretty serious in the third. With about a half minute left in the round he’d got careless and I nearly knocked him down with a right. For the rest of the round he went at me with everything he had. By the time the bell rang, my headgear was in a lopsided twist and my ribs felt like he’d used a ball bat on them. But Otis took a lot of kidding from some of the boys about the right hook I’d hung on him, and I knew he couldn’t wait for our next session so he could get back at me.

As I walked up to the elevator he feinted a left at my ribs and popped a lazy right into the valise I threw up to block the punch.

“Christ, kid, you getting too quick. You’ll knock me on my ass next time.”

“Count on it.”

“Name the day,” he said.

“Been out of town a lot. I’ll let you know.”

“Do that, kid.”

The old guy working the elevator nodded hello and took me up.

The Studio Lounge was loud and smoky and dimly lit, jammed with revelers, the band hammering out “Let’s Fall in Love,” the dance floor swirling with couples. The Maceo offices were in a hallway on the other side of the room and I made my way through the crowd between the dance floor and the bar. A lot of the customers knew who I was, and they pulled each other out of my way. No telling what kind of stories they’d heard about me except that all of them were scary and probably half of them bullshit, but that was all right with me. The more such stories got around, the easier it sometimes made my job.

As I entered the hallway, a door at the far end opened and Big Sam came out, adjusting a gardenia in his lapel. A blond cigarette girl I’d never seen before was with him, holding to her tray and straightening her pillbox hat over her slightly disheveled hair. She had the right body for the little shorts and low-cut vest of her uniform.

She’d missed a button on the side of her shorts and Sam pointed it out to her. Then he saw me and said, “Hey now…Jimmy the Kid!”

He’d started calling me that from the time we’d first been introduced and he heard how Rose and I had met in San Antonio. “You should’ve seen this guy in action, Sammy,” Rose told him. “Like fucken Billy the Kid or somebody.”

“Only this one’s Jimmy the Kid,” Sam said with a big grin—and that was his name for me from then on, though he usually just called me Kid. Then Rose took up the name, and Brando and LQ sometimes used it, sometimes Goldman the bookkeeper. But nobody else. Even people who knew me well enough to say hello—and there weren’t many—rarely called me by any name at all, but when they did, it was just Jimmy.

Sam gave the girl a smack on the ass and she hurried past me with a fetching blush. She gave off a sweet warm smell with a tinge of sex in it. I watched her disappear into the crowd, then arched my brow at Sam.

He laughed and said, “Just getting a happy start on the new year, Kid.”

Sam and Rose were both married, but you never saw their wives and children, and the brothers rarely spoke of them. Their business lives and their home lives were completely separate worlds—except that their families and luxurious homes were protected around the clock by a crew of Ghosts and special police patrols.

Sam put a hand on my shoulder and stood with his back to the lounge so no one who looked down the hall could see his face.

“So?” he said, his aspect serious. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

His face brightened again and he patted me on the arm. “You always do good work, Kid.”

He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder into the lounge behind him and said, “Listen, do yourself a favor and take a spin with that doxy was just here. New girl. Suzie Somebody, from…I don’t know, Hick City, Nebraska. She’s a regular carnival ride, I swear.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.

Sam liked to hire small-town girls who’d been brought up so straitlaced they couldn’t wait to run off on their own. Girls who’d been hit over the head with religion all their life, who’d been told over and over that if they let a boy so much as touch their tit they were no better than whores. But the girls would see broads like Harlow and Crawford having all that slutty fun in the movies, and some of them wanted to have that kind of fun too, wanted it bad. When they finally couldn’t take any more preaching, they’d run off to some big city and dive into sin headfirst.

“It’s like they wish Mommy and Daddy could get a load of them with a mouth full of cock,” Sam once told me. “Like they’d love nothing better than to give everybody back home a heart attack.” I’d heard a few Galveston madams say pretty much the same thing about a lot of the girls who worked for them.

Sam was husky and handsome and always impeccably groomed, every curly hair in place even now, just minutes after a roll in the hay. His teeth were as bright as a movie star’s. Hell, he could’ve been a movie star if he’d wanted. I’d never seen him in need of a shave or a haircut, and he always smelled of just the right touch of cologne. Nobody could make a suit look better. His usual good spirits were so contagious you couldn’t help getting caught up in them.

I accepted the Chesterfield he offered, then the flame of his gold lighter, and then he lit his own.

He told me Rose was up in the gym, and as he walked me back to the elevator he said, “Hey, you hear about the suicidal twin who killed his brother by mistake?”

I smiled politely.

“Yeah, yeah, okay. How about the nun and the oyster shucker? Sister Mary Antonia goes into this oyster bar, see…”

 

Rose was punching the heavy bag when I pushed through the frosted-glass door to the gym. You could tell on sight he was Sam’s brother. The same curly hair and beaked nose, the same dimpled and slightly double chin. At forty-nine, Rose was seven years older than Sam and he looked it, at least in the face. He almost always had blue half-moons under his eyes and his hair was already half gray. He was a little shorter than Sam and not as husky, but in truth he was in pretty good shape and he tried to stay that way with workouts in the gym. Sam was naturally strong and built like a halfback, but his only exercise was in humping the chippies.

A hulking, bushy-bearded health club worker named Watkins was bracing the bag with his shoulder as Rose threw hooks and crosses, bobbing and shuffling, showing good footwork, glaring at the bag like it was a flesh-and-blood opponent. He popped a few sharp jabs, cut loose with a roundhouse right, ducked and hopped back like he was dodging a counterpunch. Sweat ran off his face, and his sweater was dark around the neck and armpits. He saw me watching from the door and beckoned me over. Then pivoted and drove a right-hand lead into the bag like he’d caught his opponent off guard. He followed up with a pounding combination of steady lefts and rights before finally stepping back and dropping his arms, blowing hard breaths.

“Okay…thanks, Billy,” he said to Watkins. “That’ll do.”

“Good work, chief,” Watkins said. He exchanged nods with me and headed for the elevator.

Rose stripped off the bag gloves and tossed them on the table, then wiped his face and neck with a towel. He draped the towel around his neck and stepped over to the open locker where his white suit was hanging and reached into a coat pocket and fished out a pack of Lucky Strike. He put one in his mouth and I took out my lighter and lit it for him.

“Jab’s looking snappy,” I said.

“You think? How about that right lead?”

“You try it against somebody knows what he’s doing and he’ll take your head off with a counterpunch.”

“That’s what Otis says. He also tells me you landed a stinger on him the last time you guys sparred. Says he’s gonna tap you a good one next time, remind you who’s who.”

“I always expect him to try tapping me a good one.”

“I think he’s right—you’re getting too goddamn cocky.” He softly spat a shred of tobacco off the tip of his tongue and took a casual look around. We were the only ones in the gym. “So?” he said.

“Everything’s jake,” I said. I put the valise on the table and worked the snaps and opened it and he looked inside.

“It’s all he had with him,” I said. “Said he could get more from the bank tomorrow, but you said let it go, so I—”

“Fuck the money,” Rose said. “He down?”

“He’s down.”

“I don’t mean are his hands and knees busted. Not for a bastard I warned.”

“He’s down,” I said. “Two other guys were there. I gave them the word for Dallas.”

He nodded and smiled. His best smile couldn’t hold a candle to Sam’s, but then Rose rarely smiled with the intention of making someone feel warmly regarded. His usual smile was the one he showed now. The smile he wore when he won.

“There was a piece in the money bag too,” I said. “I took it.”

“Let’s see.”

I unzipped the briefcase and took out the .380 and laid it on the table. He picked it up and thumbed off the safety and pulled the slide back just far enough to see the round snugged in the chamber, then eased the slide forward again and reset the safety. He turned it over this way and that, regarding it from every angle. A .380 was the second kind of pistol I’d ever fired and I liked the model a lot. It didn’t have the punch of the army .45 automatic but was generally more accurate. Still, everybody knew an automatic could jam on you and a revolver never would. This piece was in mint condition, though, and I couldn’t resist it.

“Nice,” Rose said. He set it on the table and pushed it back to me. “Had supper?”

“I was about to.”

“Good.” He dropped the butt on the floor and stepped on it, then picked up a fresh towel and slung it over his shoulder. “I’ll take a shower and we’ll go for clams.”

“Don’t you have a party or something?”

“Because New Year’s? Hell, Kid, it don’t mean nothing but another year closer to the grave. What’s to celebrate?”

 

Forty minutes later we were in his private corner booth in Mama Carmela’s, a small Italian place on Seawall Boulevard. A picture window looked out on the gulf. The faint lights of shrimp trawlers moved slowly across the black horizon. I’d brought the briefcase with me, both pistols in it, so I wouldn’t have a gun digging into my belly while I ate.

The grayhaired waiter brought a basket of breadsticks and poured glasses of Chianti. Rose waved off his suggestion of minestrone and salad and ordered clams in pesto over capellini for both of us.

“Molto bene, Don Rosario,” the waiter said with a bow, and retreated to the kitchen. A Victrola behind the front counter was softly playing Italian songs.

As always, Rose wanted every detail, so I told him exactly how it had gone in Houston. And as always, he listened intently and without interruption.

 

F

When I was finished, he raised his glass and said, “Salute.”

The clams and pasta arrived and Rose ordered another bottle of Chianti. We tucked our napkins over our shirtfronts and dug in, twirling pasta on our forks, spearing fat clams dripping with pesto, sopping up sauce with chunks of warm buttered bread. Rose wasn’t one for conversation while he dined. He broke the silence only to ask how my clams were. “Damn good,” I said. He nodded and refilled our glasses and gave his attention back to his food.

When we were done and the waiter cleared away the dishware and poured coffee and bowed at Rose’s dismissal of dessert and left us again, Rose said he wanted me to stick around town for the next week or so.

It took me by surprise. He knew I liked making out-of-town collection runs, that I hated hanging around the Club with nothing to do.

“I’m supposed to make the pickups in Victoria tomorrow,” I said. “Then there’s the pickups across the bay in a couple of days.”

“I already put another man on the Victoria run. And your partners can handle the eastern collections. I want you close by for a little while.”

“How come?”

“I got a hunch about those Dallas guys. They might just be dumb enough to try something. If they do, they’ll probably try it pretty soon, and I want you here to deal with it.”

He read the question on my face. “I got a phone call,” he said. “One of the other two guys must’ve called Dallas as soon as you left the hotel room. Then Dallas called me, some guy named Healy—fucken mick. Says he represents the organization that owns the machines Ragsdale was pushing on this side of the line. Organization—like he’s talking about Standard Oil. Says he wanted me to know his organization had nothing to do with Ragsdale putting the slots in Galveston County, that it was strictly Ragsdale’s doing. Says the organization only contracted the machines to him. Says Ragsdale deserved what we gave him.”

“So what’s the problem?” I said. “Sounds like he was saying they got your message and they want no trouble.”

“That’s what I thought. He’s telling me it was all Ragsdale, his outfit’s hands are clean, right? So I tell the harp no hard feelings, Ragsdale crossed the line but the account’s all settled.”

“So? What’s the problem?”

“I’m getting to that. You know, that’s your problem, Kid, I told you before—you get in too big a hurry. The man in a big hurry is the man who misses something important. Always be sure you know what’s what before you make a move. You listening to me?”

“Yes, Daddy. So…what’s the problem?”

He gave me a look of mock reprimand and pointed a warning finger at me. A lot of people referred to him as “Papa Rose,” though never to his face—they didn’t dare get that familiar with him. The truth was, he didn’t mind the “Papa Rose” at all. He took it as a show of respect toward him as the head of a sort of business family. Calling him “Daddy” was my sarcastic way of ribbing him about it, especially when he’d lecture me like I was some schoolkid. I didn’t do it often, and rarely in front of anybody else, but one day I’d called him Daddy when Artie the bookkeeper was in the room, and Artie’s eyes got big as cue balls. He must’ve expected Rose to blow his top at my insolence. But all Rose did was roll his eyes and shake his head and say to Artie, “Young people today got no respect. My old man woulda taken a belt to my ass if I’d been so disrespectful, believe you me, no matter how old I was.”

LQ heard me one time too, and later that night when we were in a waterfront beer bar he said I was the only guy he knew besides Sam who could chivvy Rose like that. LQ was thirty years old and had been Rose’s main Ghost until I came along, but he swore he wasn’t jealous about me replacing him.

“I never was all that much at ease around the man,” he said. “Truth to tell, I never seen nobody at ease around him but you and Big Sam. I figure it’s on account of you and him are two peas in a pod.”

The idea that Rose and I were alike had never crossed my mind. “How so?” I said.

“Well, lots of ways. Like how the both you sometimes look at somebody you know like you never seen him before in your whole entire life and you aint decided yet whether you even like him or not. There’s never no telling what’s going on in you-all’s head, either of you. You and him both got this way of…aw, hell, you both can be creepy as a graveyard is how so.”

I gave him the two-fingered “up yours” sign, and he just laughed.

“The problem,” Rose said, “is this Healy guy said his organization wants fifty percent of what their slots in Galveston County bring in.” He signaled the waiter for a refill on our coffee.

“So,” Rose said after the waiter withdrew, “I told him that far as I’m concerned, his organization can have a hundred percent of what their machines take in.”

“Really?” I said. I knew a punch line was coming. “Bet he didn’t expect to hear that.”

“The only thing is, I says to him, his organization aint got no machines in Galveston County. The only slots in Galveston County are my slots. I said if his company was a little short of machines, I’d be happy to sell him some at bottom dollar, help them out, one businessman to another. Just be sure and don’t put them in Galveston County, I told him.”

“Well hell,” I said, “that’s a very generous offer. I hope he appreciated it.”

“Every mick I ever met got a potato for a brain. They don’t understand nothing, don’t appreciate nothing. Here I’m giving them a chance to buy back the slots at a bargain and all the guy says is they’re willing to negotiate the percent. I said to him he still didn’t get it, there’s nothing to negotiate. And he says, well then, I can just give the machines back. Said he could send his boys around to pick them up.”

“Give them back? He said that?”

“My hand to God. So I tell him again: any machine in Galveston is my machine, so there’s nothing for me to pay a percent on and nothing to give back to nobody. And, I tell him…anybody who tries to take any machine out of Galveston would be trying to steal from me. Know what that fucker said then?”

I arched my brow. I always got a kick out of his outrage at the rest of the world’s inability to understand things as clearly as he did.

“Said if I wanted my own machines in those joints I shoulda had them in there already. Then Ragsdale wouldn’ta had no place in Galveston County to put theirs. Like I’m to blame for them cutting in on me.”

“Brass balls, I’ll give him that.”

“Brass fucken brains. I told him it was none of his business how I run mine. He tells me I oughta think it over. I tell him I just did—and hung up. Fucken guy.”

“So? Now what?”

“Who knows? They might be stupid enough to think they got to get even somehow, and stupid people are the hardest to predict. They don’t think logical and they don’t plan careful.”

He shook out another cigarette and lit it. “So you stick around,” he said. “You don’t have to be at the Club, just stay in town and check in with the office every now and then. Let Bianco know where you are in case I gotta get you in a hurry.” Mrs. Bianco was his office secretary.

“You talk like I’m the only one on the payroll. There’s two dozen Ghosts in town every day, a half dozen always right there at the Club.”

“I only got one the best.”

“Oh, Christ, spare me the charming con, Don Rosario.”

“I’m just telling the truth, Kid, like always.” And we both laughed.

Then Caruso started singing about the clown who laughs to hide his sorrow, and Rose leaned out of the booth and gestured for somebody at the register to turn up the volume. I lit a cigarette and looked out at the distant trawler lights. Rose sat back and stared out at the gulf too, and softly sang along with the great tenor.

Before Prohibition came along and changed their lives the Maceo brothers had been barbers for years, and Sam told me they often harmonized with opera recordings on the Victrola while they cut hair. Sam’s favorite was The Barber of Seville, which I’d never heard until he played some of it for me one night. He said he’d work his scissors in quick, jumpy time to the music and laugh at the way the customer in the chair would cringe in fear of getting an ear snipped off.

They started out in the barbershop of the Galvez Hotel and then opened a little shop of their own downtown. They’d learned the haircut trade from their father, who brought them from Palermo to New Orleans when Rose and Sam were still children. Sam once told me that on the ship coming over from Sicily he’d gotten beat up and had his pocket watch stolen by an older boy, a big dark bully from Naples. The watch had been a present from his grandfather and he didn’t want to tell his daddy what happened. But he told Rose. They hunted all through the steerage sections but didn’t find the guy until Sam finally spotted him on the topside deck and pointed him out. The boy was about fifteen, Sam said, a couple of years older than Rose and much bigger, but Rose lit into him like a bulldog and got him down and beat the hell out of him while a crowd of kids cheered him on. He banged the bully’s head on the deck till he was almost unconscious, then dug through his pockets and found the watch, then started dragging him to the rail to shove him overboard, but a deckhand intervened.

Another thing the brothers learned from their daddy in the early Louisiana days was how to make wine. When they moved to Galveston they made it in tubs in a shed behind their rented house. At first they made it just for themselves and a few close friends, then they started selling jugs of it to some of their regular barbershop customers. When Prohibition became the law, they produced the stuff in greater quantity and sold it under the counter to anybody who wanted it. Pretty soon they became partners with one of the two main gangs fighting for control of the island’s bootleg business. Over the next few years there were gunfights in the streets and killings in broad daylight, but the Maceos were able to stay legally clear of the worst of it. Once the top dogs of the two gangs were all in prison or the graveyard, Sam and Rose brought the factions together and took over the whole operation. By then they were also in the gambling business, which swiftly became their most lucrative enterprise.

Most of the Maceo stories you heard were about Rose, of course, and no telling how many were true. That’s always how it is—the guy nobody really knows is the guy who gets the most tales told about him. Like the story about his first wife, who’d been murdered way back when the Maceos were just starting in the bootleg business. I heard it from LQ, who’d heard it from somebody else, who’d heard it from who-knows-who. The way the story went, one evening Rose invited three friends home for dinner on the spur of the moment—although he’d never invited anybody to his house before—and when the four of them got there, they found his wife in bed with another man, both of them naked and both of them dead.

“You could say they died of natural causes,” LQ said, “since it’s pretty natural to die when somebody shoots you in the brainpan.”

According to the witnesses, Rose wept like a baby, but there was a lot of secret curiosity about the true cause of his tears—whether he was crying because his wife was dead or because she’d put the horns on him. The police investigated but the killings were never solved.

“Way I heard it,” LQ said with a sly look, “the cops had no idea who mighta done it. About the only thing they knew for sure was that it wasn’t suicide. The old boy who told me the story did say real quiet-like that it was sorta like suicide, since a woman who’d cheat on Rose Maceo might as well wear a big ‘Kill Me’ sign on her back.”

Caruso finished wailing about the tragic clown. Rose dabbed at his eyes with his napkin, then blew his nose.

“Fucken guinea,” he said. “Voice like an angel.”

The waiter came and topped off our coffee. A moment later the window abruptly brightened with an explosion of light and sparkling skyrocket trails arcing over the gulf. There was a muted staccato popping of firecrackers, an outburst of car horns. Somebody in the kitchen began banging pots and shouted “Happy New Year!”

Rose raised his coffee cup and I clinked mine against it.

 

I drove Rose back to the Club and parked the Lincoln in the reserved spot by the back door of the building. The moon was down now, the stars larger and brighter. Rose said he had to take care of a few things before he went home. He slapped me on the back and said goodnight, then went into the Club.

I walked up the alley and into the bright lights of 23rd Street. The haze and smell of spent fireworks were still on the air. The theaters had let out and the line of people waiting outside the Turf Grill was even longer than before. I’d been vaguely edgy all through supper and wasn’t sure why—but as I stood there, watching the passing traffic in its clamor of klaxons and clattering motors, what I hankered for was to get laid.

I usually took my pleasure with one or another of the hostesses or waitresses who worked at the Maceo clubs, but then I’d have to wait for the girl to get off work, and I didn’t feel like waiting. Besides, I was in no mood for the banter and kidding around that was required for a free one. I just wanted to get to it.

It was an urge you could satisfy more easily in this town than probably anywhere else in the country and I was already in the neighborhood for it. Post Office Street—the heart of the red-light district—was right around the corner. With my balls feeling heavy as plums I headed on over there.

For a span of five or six blocks, Post Office—and portions of Market and Church, the two streets north and south of it—was mostly one cathouse after another. Most of the houses were narrow two-story buildings with latticework screens in front of the porches to give a little privacy to guys who didn’t want to be seen going in or out. I always wondered who they were afraid might see them, since anybody who was in the neighborhood sure as hell wasn’t shopping for shoes.

The houses were owned by a variety of different people but they were all managed by women. The madams paid rents that were practically robbery, but the district was so well established they didn’t have to pay off the cops to leave them alone—at least not as long as there was no bad trouble in the place. Most houses turned a nice profit by simply staying honest and clean. The madams wouldn’t stand for their girls getting drunk or fighting on the job, and they made them get regular medical checkups. A man might have to pay a house price of fifty cents for a dime’s worth of booze or a quarter for a nickel glass of beer, but he could be pretty sure he wouldn’t catch a dose from his three-dollar hump. And if he gave the madam his money to hold while he had his fun upstairs, he knew none of it would be missing when he got it back.

Tonight the district was as raucous as I’d ever heard it. Every house had a jukebox, and a crazy tangle of oldtime rags and recent big-band instrumentals streamed from the parlors to mix with the racket outside. Cars honking and jarring over the uneven brick pavement, the sidewalks full of soldiers and sailors and college boys, dockwallopers, businessmen off the leash from home, laughing and looking damn happy. Bad fights were uncommon in the houses—guys eager to get laid or who’d just had their ashes hauled weren’t usually in a fighting mood. There’d be some hothead every now and then, or some guy too drunk to know better, but every house had its bouncer to take care of them.

The best thing about the Galveston houses—and the most surprising to me when I first arrived on the island—was that so many of the whores were actually pretty. Where I’d grown up, there had been only two whorehouses inside a hundred miles, and of the handful of women who worked in them only one looked to be under thirty years old, and only if you’d had enough to drink would you call her fair of face. It was a widespread joke that most of the girls at both those houses were so ugly they ought to pay the guys who humped them. But it was also a common saying that you always paid for it with any woman, one way or another, and a whore was the only one honest enough about it to charge you a specific dollar price and give you what you paid for and leave the complications out of it. The steepest price for it was marriage, of course, and lots of men paid it. “The full freight,” LQ called it, and he’d already paid it twice. But he still preferred trying to woo a woman into bed rather than giving her cash.

“A man needs to feel like he’s getting it because the woman thinks he’s handsome or charming or can make her laugh,” LQ said. “Like he’s getting it for some goddamn reason other than he’s got three bucks in his pocket. A man’s got to at least feel that way every now and then, no matter it aint true.”

Not even Brando argued the point with him. But we all knew that sometimes a man wanted it the other way, too—straight and simple and without the bullshit. Here’s the money, honey, let’s get to it. Which is how I was wanting it just then.

I had intended to go into the first house I came to, but as soon as I turned onto Post Office Street I remembered a Mexican girl who’d been working at Mrs. Lang’s the last time I’d been there, about three months before. She wasn’t really Mex—she’d told me she was born in Colorado and that her grandparents had been the last real Mexicans in her family—and I knew she didn’t speak Spanish any better than Brando. But she looked every bit Mexican, and tonight that was what I wanted.

A skinny Negro maid with sullen eyes greeted me at the door. A loud jazzy version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” was playing on the juke, and the parlor was hazed with cigarette smoke. About nine or ten guys were in there, waiting their turn to go upstairs. They sat on sofas along the walls or stood at the small bar at the rear of the room, where they were served by a little gray man with a hangdog face. Some of the younger guys were talking low and snickering among themselves, but the older ones just sat and smoked and stared at the nude paintings on the wall or down at their own shoes. Even through the smoke and the scent of incense candles, you could detect the faint odor of disinfectant and a musky hint of sex.

Mrs. Lang came toward me with a bright red smile, blond hair braided in a bun at the back of her neck, gold hoops dangling from her ears. She gave me a quick hug and said happy new year and been so long and so forth. She had bright green eyes and a wide sexy mouth and looked pretty good for a woman in her forties. She gave my briefcase a curious look—not a lot of guys carried a briefcase into a whorehouse—but said nothing about it. As she led me toward the bar with her arm hooked around mine I asked if Felicia still worked there.

“She surely does, honey. She just this minute went upstairs. But sweetie, we’re just so busy tonight, you’re going to have to wait a bit. Another fella’s already waiting specially for her too.”

I wasn’t disposed to wait. I slid a twenty out of my pocket and slipped it to her.

“My, we are in a hurry, aren’t we?” She slid the bill up her sleeve. “But you know, baby, the other fella waiting on her is in a hurry too. It’ll be awful hard to explain things to him just right.”

I gave her another ten and said she ought to at least have the decency to pull a gun on me.

She laughed and patted my arm and discreetly tucked the money in a side pocket of her skirt. Then looked across the room at a big guy leaning against the wall with his thumbs hooked in his pockets. The bouncer, a different one from the last time I’d been here. A young guy wearing an open coat over a black T-shirt stretched tight across his chest. He caught Mrs. Lang’s look and straightened up, made a little nod and began cracking his knuckles.

Mrs. Lang fitted a cigarette to the end of a long holder and I lit it for her, then bought her a glass of sherry and had a beer for myself while we waited for Felicia to finish up with whoever she had upstairs. Over the next few minutes three guys, almost one right after the other, came out of the upper hallway and down the stairs and only one of them waved so long at Mrs. Lang before scooting out the door. Each time a guy came down, she nodded at another one in the parlor and he’d go up to the girl waiting at the top of the staircase. Most whores couldn’t remember your name from one minute to the next, but they had damn good memories for faces, and madams had the best memories of all, never losing track of their customers’ order of turns even on the busiest nights.

The girls wore short little camisoles, and one of the whores on the upper landing grinned down at everybody in the parlor and flicked up the front of hers to give us a glimpse of her trim brown bush, then busted out laughing and retreated into the hall with her next trick.

“That Carolyn is such a slut,” Mrs. Lang said, but she was smiling. Girls like Carolyn were great for business.

Now another guy came out of the upper hall, still adjusting his tie, and started down the stairs. And Felicia stood up there, her skin dark against the pale yellow camisole.

Mrs. Lang took me by the hand and hurried me to the stairs and gave me a little push up the first few steps. “Move it, honey,” she hissed at me. “You’re the one in such a rush.”

Somebody said, “Hey!” and I stopped on the stairs and turned.

A burly redfaced guy in a derby hat who’d been sitting on a sofa was coming toward us. But the bouncer cut in front of him, saying something I couldn’t hear over the loud volume of “Let’s Fall in Love” coming from the jukebox. I knew he was hoping the derby man would try something, if only to break the monotony. I’d been a bouncer in San Antonio for a time and knew how boring the job could get.

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.

 

When 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 nodded 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.

“Casero y filósofo tambien,” I said, and he showed a yellow grin and said all men became philosophers if they lived long enough.

The bath was at the end of the hallway. An old telephone—the only phone in the colonia, Gregorio said—was mounted on the wall at the foot of the stairs. I asked for its number and wrote it on a piece of paper to give to Rose. I moved in the next day and had been living there ever since.

LQ and Brando had thought it was a smart move on my part because wetback neighbors weren’t the nosy sort. Among the few things LQ and Ray agreed on was that a guy—especially one in our business—shouldn’t own anything more than he could carry in a single suitcase and should never live anyplace where the neighbors didn’t mind their own business.

Sam couldn’t understand why I’d leave a beachside apartment with new furnishings and appliances to move into a ramshackle place in one of the worst sections of town. I didn’t even try to explain, and he finally just shook his head and quit ragging me about it.

Rose didn’t say anything about the move. Except maybe he did, a few days later, in a sort of roundabout way. I was driving him back from some Houston business, and as we went over the causeway he said the look of the water in the afternoon sunlight always reminded him of a little lagoon in Palermo where his father had taught him to swim.

“It’s funny,” he said, staring out at the bay and the island on the other side. “This place is so different, but there’s things about it that remind me of Palermo when I was a boy. I tell you, if there was some part of town called Little Sicily—Little Italy, even—I’d move in there in a minute. I wouldn’t give a shit how beat-up it was. It’d be nice hearing the language, you know, people talking to each other in it. And the music. And smelling the food. I’d like…Ah hell.”

He made a dismissive gesture and changed the subject.

 

The fight at Mrs. Lang’s had boosted my spirits more than Felicia had. I stopped in a place on Market Street and drank a beer and then had another in a joint on Mechanic. But by the time I got to La Colonia, I was feeling the same undefinable irritation that had been nagging me earlier in the evening.

It was after two in the morning. Clouds were bunching over the gulf, blocking out the stars. The slight wind had kicked up and was gently stirring the treetops. The evening’s earlier warmth was giving way to a rising chill. It smelled like it might rain.

T

Other than the Casa Verde at the far end of the lane, only the Avila house showed light—a dim yellow glow against the pulled shade of a front window. The Morales family had hosted a neighborhood party earlier in the evening and I could make out the dark shapes of several cars parked in the deeper shadows between the Morales and the Avila houses. Overnight visitors, I figured.

A cloud of bugs was swarming around the Casa Verde porchlight. I didn’t need a key because Gregorio had stopped locking the door shortly after I’d moved in. I’d never told him or anyone else in La Colonia what I did for a living, but before I’d been there a month everybody on the block seemed to know who I worked for. I was pouring a cup of coffee in the kitchen one morning when I heard Señora Ortega, the next-door neighbor, talking to Gregorio in the sideyard, telling him how her daughter had warned a coworker at the oystersheds that if he didn’t stop pestering her she would complain to her neighbor, Don Santiago, who was a bodyguard for Rosario Maceo. The man, the señora told Gregorio, had not bothered her girl since.

Gregorio had mounted a small slateboard with a chalk holder next to the hallway telephone, but the only messages I’d ever seen on it were rare ones for me to call the Club. I’d never seen either of the other two tenants use the phone or known them to receive a call. One of them, Moises, was older than Gregorio and almost deaf. Even though he had one of those old-time ear horns, you still had to shout into it. The other resident was Sergio, a nervous little man who worked as the night clerk for a motor hotel on the beach. He kept to his room all day and was said to have no friends at all.

Tonight the slateboard was blank, as usual. At the far end of the hall the kitchen door shone brightly. I wasn’t surprised to find Gregorio in there, sitting at the table, sipping a bottle of beer and reading a movie magazine, his wire-rim glasses low on his nose. It was his habit to stay up all night and go to bed at dawn and sleep till noon. He said he had not been able to sleep at night for the past thirty-two years. He’d never said why and I’d never asked.

The kitchen was big and high-ceilinged and a large heavy dining table stood in its center. I helped myself to a beer from the icebox and pried off the cap with an opener hung on the door handle by a wire hook and sat across the table from him. I took a pack of Camels from my coat and shook one out for myself and then slid the pack across the table to him and we both lit up. He looked tired and a little glass-eyed. There had probably been plenty to drink at the Morales party.

He tapped a hand on the article he’d been reading. He could speak and read English much better than the rest of the residents of La Colonia, not counting the kids. “Do you know what those Hollywood assholes said after they gave Fred Astaire his screen test?”

Fred Astaire was Gregorio’s favorite movie star. The old man had seen Top Hat three times already.

He looked down at the article. “They said he couldn’t act very good and the women wouldn’t like him because he was ‘slightly bald.’ But they said he could at least ‘dance a little.’”

He peered at me over the rim of his glasses. “That’s like saying Jack Dempsey could punch a little, no?” He shook his head. “Assholes.”

I drank my beer and leafed through a magazine from the stack on the table. Gregorio said I’d missed a good party. They roasted a kid on a spit in Morales’ backyard and there were platters of every kind of dish and enough beer and tequila for everybody to get as drunk as he wanted. He’d never seen so many visitors to a Colonia party as this time. Morales’ brother had come down from Beaumont. Ortega’s brother and sister-in-law up from Lake Jackson. Avila’s uncle and cousin and the uncle’s goddaughter, who was pretty but didn’t talk much, had come all the way from Brownsville. And a cousin of the Gutierrez brothers, a car mechanic from Victoria, had come too. Turned out he was a hell of a singer and guitar player and he’d been the hit of the party.

“Sorry I missed it,” I said. The wind was blowing a little harder now, and tree branches scraped the side of the building. I finished the beer and dropped the bottle in the garbage can.

“Happy new year, viejo,” I said, and headed for the stairs.

“Feliz año nuevo, kid,” the old man said.

My room was chilly, so I took the extra blanket out of the wardrobe and spread it over the one already on the bed. I got undressed, then opened the briefcase and took out the guns. I put the .380 on the bedside stand. The Mexican revolver went under the pillow. I turned off the light and got in bed and listened to the wind and rasping branches for a while before I fell asleep.

 

I woke in darkness to a sound I thought I recognized but I couldn’t immediately place it. The wind had ceased. For a moment I thought maybe I’d been dreaming—and then realized I still heard it. A car motor. Down in the lane and beginning to move away.

A Model T.

I swung out of bed and went to the window, released the shade to go fluttering up on its spindle, raised the window sash and pushed open the screen frame and stuck my head out into a chilly drizzle.

In the light of the streetlamp, a lettuce-green Model T sedan without a left front fender was turning onto Mechanic Street. I saw the dark form of the driver but I couldn’t tell if there was anyone else in the car. The T rattled down the street and then its single taillight went out of sight.

I stood at the open window a moment longer before I pictured what I must look like—gawking out at an empty street, shivering in my underwear, getting my head wet. I cursed and let the screen frame down and closed the window. My wristwatch was on the table and I struck a match to read the time. Almost six. From the time I was old enough to do chores on the ranch until the day I left there in the hurry I did, I had always been up well before this hour.

But I wasn’t on the ranch now, and what I wanted was more sleep. I ran a towel through my hair and got back in bed.

And couldn’t get the green Ford out of my mind.

Bullshit, the Ford…I was thinking about the girl.

I wondered if she’d been in the car just now. I remembered her look under the traffic light, how it caught me flatfooted for one big heartbeat and got me rankled for some damn reason. Which, it occurred to me, probably had something to do with my edginess the rest of the evening.

The realization agitated me all the more because I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it earlier. Not much ever got under my skin, but when something did I damn well knew what and why and I knew how to get rid of it.

Little chippy. What’d she think she was trying to pull?

She had to be the one Gregorio had mentioned, the one at the party, the goddaughter of Avila’s aunt and uncle. All the way from Brownsville, Gregorio said. Had they just now been getting an early start on the long drive back? They sure as hell weren’t going to the movies at five in the morning or to a picnic on the beach. How far to Brownsville? Way more than three hundred miles, probably closer to four. All-day drive and then some—especially in that old T.

Christ’s sake, I told myself, who cared?

Some face on her, though.

Yeah, right—but there were pretty faces everywhere, hundreds in this town alone.

Not like that one.

Bullshit. It wasn’t that special. Besides, I didn’t see anything except her face. For all I knew she had an ass like an Oldsmobile.

Not likely.

For all I knew she was married.

A married woman came to Morales’ party with her godfather? How much sense did that make?

What’s sense got to do with anything? Besides, the old man said Avila’s cousin had come too. For all I knew he was her beau…

So it went, while I lay there staring at the ceiling and the New Year slowly dawned.

 

On the second-floor balcony of the casa grande of the Hacienda de Las Cadenas, César Calveras Dogal is taking his noon brandy and awaiting the arrival of his foreman, El Segundo.

The great house stands on a long low bluff, and the balcony affords a vista beyond the mesquite woods along the north wall of the hacienda compound. To the northeast Don César can see the meander of the shallow Río Cadenas whose origin is high in the dark sierras and whose flow through a venous array of irrigation ditches nurtures the estate’s tenacious pasturelands and its meager gardens. He can see all the way to the Ciénaga de las Palmas, glinting like a little glass sliver five miles away. In truth the ciénaga has no palms at all and is but a muddy marsh where the river drains and quits. Almost forty miles beyond the ciénaga, in the blue-hazed distance, lies the hard road from Escalón to Monclova. The surrounding country is dense with cactus and thickets of mesquite, and the mountains at the horizons are long and blue.

The years have not lessened Don César’s admiration of the natural beauty of this estate set on the border between the states of Durango and Chihuahua, a beauty the more remarkable for being at the southern edge of a vast desertland that includes a portion of the Bolson de Mapimí, perhaps the meanest desert of the earth’s western side. The hacienda’s beauty is as remarkable as the fact of its having survived the rage of the Revolution.

The bastard Revolution! A year before its outbreak, Don César had been a thirty-five-year-old captain in command of a company of Guardia Rural—the fearsome national mounted police of President Porfirio Díaz—and he had earned the lasting personal gratitude of Don Porfirio for his company’s heroic rescue of the president’s niece and her party of travelers besieged at a desolate Durango outpost by a band of Yaqui marauders. Captain Calveras and his men had killed a dozen of the savages and captured ten, including their chief. But one of the travelers had received a fatal wound and a pregnant woman among them had miscarried. Hence, rather than send the captives to the henequen plantations in the Yucatán as was customary, Captain Calveras hanged them in the nearest village square—all but the chief, whom he executed by tying one of the Indian’s legs to one horse and the other leg to another and then lashing the horses into a sprint in opposite directions. He telegraphed his report to the headquarters office at Hermosillo and by day’s end he received notice of Don Porfirio’s appreciation and of an immediate promotion to the rank of comandante.

Two months later, in still another battle with still other Yaquis, Comandante Calveras took an arrow through a thigh and up into the hip. It was three days before he could present himself to a surgeon and by then the infection was so deeply rooted that the surgeon spoke of amputation of the entire leg. The comandante rejected that procedure with a promise that if he should awaken from the surgery without his leg he would hang the doctor. He survived the operation with the leg intact but the hip was in permanent ruin. He would evermore walk with a limp and he could no longer sit a horse for more than a few minutes before the pain became excruciating. He was offered the command of a regional rurales headquarters but he disdained desk jobs and instead chose to retire. Though the decision delighted his wife and children, it was a difficult one, for he had been in the rurales since the age of sixteen, when he had turned his back on his father’s patrimony—a hacienda and vast cattle ranch in Zacatecas state—and enlisted in the national police.

On the day of his retirement he was received in the National Palace by Don Porfirio himself, who presented him with an unexpected prize—the title to La Hacienda de Las Cadenas, an estate which until recently had belonged to a political rival of the Porfiriato. The president slid the ornately embossed paper across the polished desktop and told Comandante Calveras to consider it a spoil of war, the sweetest of life’s possessions. But a man with title to a hacienda, Don Porfirio said, should of course have the means to maintain the place, and so he also awarded the comandante a trunk filled with silver specie, a prize of such weight that it required three strong men to load it onto the transport wagon. Comandante Calveras had by then already amassed a considerable sum of money by means of the rurales’ right to confiscate the assets of fugitives and of killed or convicted criminals—a sum which, together with el presidente’s cash award, now amounted to a small fortune.

But eight months after Don César’s retirement, there came the Revolution—and before another year passed, Porfirio Díaz was exiled in Paris, never to return.

The memory of the Revolution taints Don César’s tongue with the taste of blood. The name of “Revolution” was entirely undeserved by that lunatic decade of national riot and rampage by misbegotten Indian brutes and primitive bastard half-castes. The shit-blooded whoresons had razed his father’s hacienda and crucified the man on the front door of the casa grande before setting the house aflame. A few months afterward they murdered Don César’s own family as well. By means of an exorbitant bribe, Don César had secured passage for his wife and three children (his angelic trio of blond daughters!) aboard a federal troop-and-munitions train bound for Juárez, from where his beloveds were to cross the river to refuge in El Paso. But just south of Samalayuca, a bare forty miles from the border, the track under the train was dynamited.

The handful of survivors told of the slew and crash and tumble of the railcars one upon the other, the hellish screams, the great screeching and sparkings of iron, the explosions of the munitions that the rebels had desired for themselves but in their incompetence destroyed along with the train. (“Viva Villa!” they shouted—“Viva Villa!”—even as they looted the wreckage and the dead and robbed the survivors.) Don César had traveled to Samalayuca and was able to identify his daughters’ remains by their diminutive forms and take them back for burial at Las Cadenas, but his wife was unrecognizable among the array of charred and mutilated corpses and she was interred with the others in a mass grave.

In the years to follow he had endured the loss of his family as he endured the abuses and indignations of one raiding pack of mongrels after another, each calling itself an army of the Revolution and each claiming the sanctioning ideal of liberty—a word not one in every hundred of them owned the literacy to recognize in print. He had withstood the sudden emptiness in his life as he had withstood the degradations to his estate, his great house, his fields, his person, the spit in his face, the ridicule of his crippled leg. He endured their insults, their laughter, the ceaseless threats to shoot him, hang him, quarter him, burn him alive, endured it all with indifference. How could their threats of death make him afraid? Only a man with desire to live could be made afraid of death.

But one of them had perceived the truth of his lack of fear—the leader of one of the first gangs of invaders to arrive at Las Cadenas, the one they called El Carnicero and whose revolver muzzle had pressed to Don César’s forehead as the man asked if he had a last word. A large man whom he would hear described by some as handsome in spite of his dusky mestizo hide, his face hard but smooth-featured, his eyes black as open graves and untouched by his mustached smile. Don César stared hard into those eyes and waited for the blast to end his misery. But then the brute laughed and took the gun from his head.

You’re not afraid, the man said. You’re only miserable. You want to die, don’t you, patrón? Why is that, I wonder.

The man put a hand on Don César’s shoulder and leaned close to him in the fashion of a commiserating intimate. They tell me you were a comandante of rurales, patrón. Is that how your leg came to be maimed? Ay, what a hard life that must have been, the rurales. Tell me, patrón, has life been cruel to you? Have you been robbed of your possessions, of your comforts? Have you lost loved ones? Does your fine hidalgo mind hold memories too horrible to bear? Ay, don’t tell me, patrón…have you suffered injustice?

Some among the mob of onlooking peons snickered and some laughed outright and some called out to El Carnicero to shoot the gachupín son of a bitch. They who an hour before would have cowered in Don César’s presence, who would have obeyed his every command without hesitation and were ever in fear of displeasing him, they now laughed at him oh so bravely. How they had hastened to show their whip and branding scars—as if they hadn’t deserved them!—to this murderer, this notorious executioner and infamous right hand of Pancho Villa the bandit, Villa the mad dog, the king of all half-caste whoresons. Yet some few of the spectators wept in their witness of Don César’s ordeal.

Yes, you have suffered much, patrón, El Carnicero said, holstering the revolver. He slid his hand behind Don César’s neck and held him gently and smiled at him. Then the hand clamped tight and Don César saw but an instant’s gleam of the knife before all in a single motion its point pierced the corner of his eye and the blade slid around the curve of the socket to core the eyeball from its mooring.

Don César screamed and clapped a hand to the emptied socket and flexed into a half-crouch of agony, biting his lip hard against further outcry. His remaining eye saw blood pocking the dust at his feet and staining his boots. Some in the mob laughed, some cried out, some blessed themselves and turned away.

El Carnicero grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up to face him. He had the bloody eye in his palm and held it for Don César to see. This thing, the man said, bobbing his palm as if assaying the worth of what it contained, has always been blind to justice, to the truth. He dropped the eye to the ground and made Don César look down at it and then ground it under his bootheel.

Maybe the other eye will now serve you better, El Carnicero said. If it does not, I will come back and remove it too.

He told the mob not to kill Don César, that killing would be too swift a punishment and kinder than he deserved. Then he wished Don César a long remaining life full of unpleasant memories and rode away with his gang of devils.

Still more thieves and scavengers fell upon the hacienda over the following years. Sometimes they came almost on each other’s heels, sometimes there were no raiders for months, but always they had come, pack after pack, each finding less remaining to pillage on Las Cadenas. But each had heard the story of how the patrón—the former rurales comandante—had come to wear the eyepatch. They had all heard of El Carnicero and knew better than to kill a man he had deigned to leave alive. What if the Butcher should come back to pleasure himself further with this gachupín once more and learn that someone had killed him? What if he should learn who had done it?

And so Don César lived and endured. It might be that the man who cut out his eye never knew that he had protected the patrón of Las Cadenas from other rebel bands, or that he had given Don César a reason to live. Don César withstood the remaining years of the Revolution in anticipation of the deaths of his tormentors—and of rebuilding the hacienda as best he could, if for no other purpose than to show that it could not be destroyed by such rabble as his tormentors.

Two years after the loss of his eye, he received word of El Carnicero’s death. The man had drowned in a horseback crossing of a lake in northern Chihuahua. Don César sang at the news, he did a little dance. But his celebrant joy was checked by the knowledge that Pancho Villa—the man who had unloosed El Carnicero on Mexican civilization—was yet alive. And the bastard managed to stay alive all through the Revolution. In 1920, when the government made its separate peace with Villa and granted him a hacienda, Don César’s rage was apoplectic. Then three years later came the news of Villa’s assassination by persons unknown—and Don César declared a three-day fiesta to commemorate the grand occasion.

Every year since then, he had made an annual hundred-mile trip to Hidalgo de Parral, the town where Villa had been killed and was buried, and there Don César had pissed on the monster’s grave. Three years after Villa’s death, unknown persons broke into his tomb and made away with his head, and Don César had been torn in his emotions—elated by the desecration to Villa’s remains, but dismayed not to have thought to commit the act himself. He fancied he would have used the skull as a dish to feed his dog. The headless cadaver had been reburied and the grave fortified, but even a concrete grave can be pissed upon, and so Don César continued to make his yearly visits to Parral.

The Revolution had reduced the breadth of his patronage and robbed the estate of an opulence it would never recover—not to speak of the caches of money the bastards had rooted out. Yet the hacienda had survived. Unlike his father’s estate, whose ownership had been usurped by a decree of the revolutionary government, Las Cadenas remained Don César’s property by prevailing legal title. The casa grande stood intact, and most of its outbuildings. Nor had all of Don César’s hidden strongboxes been discovered.

For all their plundering, the savages had been unable to thieve the beauty of the land nor drive away all of the hacienda’s peon population, who after all had nowhere else to go. Even many of those who had fled the estate during the years of greatest violence had begun to come back to Las Cadenas’ guardian walls, their hats in their hands, to ask Don César if they might serve him as before. And he had taken them back. And if some among them had returned with errant notions that the strict discipline of Las Cadenas had been ameliorated by the riot called the Revolution, well, his whips and branding irons were at hand to prove them wrong, and he again made routine use of those instruments of moral and political instruction. Occasionally he invented punishment on the moment, as when he unleashed one of his hunting dogs on a twelve-year-old boy who had flung a pebble at the beast for barking at him. The boy’s face was horribly disfigured and his left arm forever crippled, and well into his adulthood mothers would point him out to their children as an example of the consequence of transgression against Don César, or El Comandante, as he was commonly known among the peons.

His surviving gold and silver amounted to a fraction of his former wealth but it was sumptuous in comparison with what remained to so many of his caste. Many had seen their great houses reduced to rubble, their estates razed to charred earth. Many had lost every peso. Many had lost their lives. With his remnant money Don César was able to restore Las Cadenas to a semblance of its former splendor. He repaired the casa grande, re-tiled its roofs, re-landscaped its patios, refurbished its rooms. He put his peons to work on the estate’s damaged earth until portions of the fields again began to produce maize. He acquired some few horses of passable worth and the herd slowly grew to respectable size.

But without his family to inhabit it, the casa grande, for all its revived beauty, was like an empty husk, and his sense of isolation increased over the years. His sleep was ever fitful, visited nightly by frightful dreams. He was consumed by horrid spells of melancholy. His loneliness swelled to smothering size. Vaguely insidious yearnings stirred in him like a nest of vipers. He of course had his pick of the prettiest mestizo girls on the estate, but their gratifications were strictly of the flesh and left him in progressively greater despond for reasons he could not name. His heart itself felt like a house abandoned, a dwelling for none but creatures of the dark.

And then one day of the preceding summer, when he was on the Gulf Coast on business, he caught sight of the girl for the first time.

He saw her as she dashed across the beach road, the blue skirt of her school uniform swirling around her brown legs. He could not take his eyes off her as she strode down the streets of the city, a straw bag over her shoulder, her black hair wet from her swim and swinging to her hips. Men turned and stared as she passed them by.

Don César directed his driver to follow her. She made her way deep into an increasingly squalid neighborhood of stinks and strident voices and at last entered a courtyard containing two tiers of hovels. She vanished through the doorway of one on the lower floor.

He ordered his men to make discreet but thorough inquiries. By the following evening he knew that she was sixteen years old and lived in that dismal place with her mother and father and was their only surviving child. The father was a street cleaner for the city and given to drink, the mother did seamstress work at home and was herself drunk every night. The couple frequently and violently quarreled, common behavior in that shabby barrio. They were the girl’s only living kin. She’d had an uncle, a fisherman, whom she had clearly favored over her parents, but he had drowned in the gulf the year before. Despite her family’s poverty, she was enrolled in an excellent Catholic academy, attending on a scholarship she had won at age twelve in a statewide essay contest. She was required to maintain superior grades in order to renew the scholarship from year to year, and so far she had done so, despite, as her school record phrased it, “unconventional attitudes,” a proclivity for asking “mischievous questions” of the faculty nuns, and a reputation for occasionally “prankish behavior.”

Don César could not sleep that night but only lay in bed with the smell of the sea carrying into his hotel room and moonlight slanting through the open balcony doors. He was enraptured—feeling more alive than he had in more than two decades. A bat swooped into the room and circled it thrice and flew out again, and he, a lifelong disparager of all superstition, took it for an omen. At dawn he rang down for coffee and was sipping his second cup on the balcony when the edge of the sun broke red as blood at the far rim of the gulf. And he was decided.

He had first thought to buy her outright—to offer the parents a sum greater than they could conjure in their dreams, and he was certain they would greedily accept it. But then, on reflection, he was not so sure. One could not trust to the practicality of primitives, could not trust them to know what was best for themselves. Never whisper to the deaf or wink at the blind—an old adage and a wise one. They might in their stupidity reject his money and thus make the matter altogether more difficult. But even if they should accept the offer, only a fool would trust in brutes to honor their side of a bargain. The word of a brute was worthless. The rabble were slaves to their emotions, notorious for sentimental shifts of mind. The parents might sooner or later choose to create complications for him by way of protest to the authorities, a turn of events that would at the least oblige him to make an additional round of payoffs to a wider circle of hands. No! Despite his inclination to be fair, to pay a just price for what he desired, he knew it was folly to expect the girl’s parents to understand even the most fundamental notions of fairness and honor.

And so, later that day, after the girl was out of school and had taken her swim in the gulf and was making her way home through the rundown back streets, they drove up alongside her and one of Don César’s men asked if she could give them directions to an address they were unable to find. As she stepped up to the Cadillac the man jumped out and clapped a hand on her mouth and pulled her into the backseat and the vehicle gunned away. In seconds the car was around the block and out of sight. Whoever might have witnessed the kidnapping could not have noted very much, the whole thing happened so swiftly.

She was terrified of course—her eyes wild above the hand that stifled her efforts to scream, curse, plead, whatever she might have done. Don César leaned against the other back door and watched her. By the time they were out of town and on the open road she had ceased to struggle, but her eyes were streaming tears and she was snorting hard for breath through her runny nose. Don César gestured for his man to unhand her. She pulled away from the man but was careful not to come into contact with either of them—sobbing hard now, her arms crossed over her breasts, her knees together, her hand wiping at her eyes and nose. Don César held his silk handkerchief to her and she glanced at it and looked away. Don César shook the hankie gently and after another moment’s hesitation she snatched it from his hand and blew her nose and wiped her eyes.

He asked if she felt better now—and her face was suddenly as tight with anger as with fear. Who was he, she demanded to know. Where was he taking her? What did he want? As if she already knew the answer to that last question, she hugged herself even more tightly and drew her pressed knees still farther from him.

Don César said everything would soon be clear to her, and asked that she not agitate herself further. He promised she would not be harmed.

She wiped at her eyes and stared down at her lap.

He could hardly believe his grand fortune—she was even more beautiful up close than she had appeared from a distance.

They arrived at an isolated landing strip just north of the city and boarded a small chartered plane. He’d been afraid she might resist going aboard and would have to be carried bodily, but her awe of the aircraft was obvious—and her excitement, it amused him to note, was sufficient to distract her from her fears. When the engine roared and the craft began to move she clutched tight to the arms of her seat. She stared out the window at the landscape speeding past and he made soothing sounds at her as he would to a skittish horse. The plane lifted off and she gasped—and then gaped at the sinking, tilting view of the gulf. And then the sea was behind them and the dark green hill country appeared below, and then the sudden mountains like enormous heaps of crushed copper gleaming in the day’s dying light. Then they were in clouds and there was nothing more to see.

He told her his name, told her where he was from, told her of his past. When he told her he’d been an officer of the Guardia Rural her eyes widened. He told her of his heroic rescue of the president’s niece some thirty-six years ago and of the wounds he had suffered, of the honors he had been given by Don Porfirio, told her of La Hacienda de Las Cadenas and described its magnificence, told her of the barbarities inflicted upon it by the Revolution. He told her—his throat going hot and tight with the recollection—of the tragic loss of his family, and told how he had lost his eye.

Through the latter portions of his narrative, her attention had begun to wane, and she several times turned to the window, perhaps checking to see if the clouds had cleared. But when he described the life she would have at Las Cadenas she listened with greater heed. At Las Cadenas, he told her, she would lead a more wonderful life than she could ever have envisioned for herself. She would live like a princess, she would have servants, beautiful clothes. She would never again know want.

He saw his words touch her, saw in her eyes a sudden spark of imagination. Though her aspect was still uncertain, he could see that she was envisioning the life he had pictured. And that the vision excited her.

She asked again what he wanted with her.

He wanted her to live with him at Las Cadenas.

As what, she wanted to know. His whore?

No. As his wife.

She stared at him for a long moment as if he were some intricate message written in a difficult scrawl. Then asked why her.

Because she was so beautiful, he said. Because she possessed a wonderful spirit. Because he loved her.

Loved her? But how, she wanted to know, could that be?

He admitted he did not know. But then who, he said, can explain love?

She blushed and covered her mouth with her hand and turned to the window and the dark clouds sweeping by.

When she looked at him again her face was changed. There was no fear or wariness in it now, only a mien of careful calculation, as if she were assessing odds at a gaming table. He could not imagine what she was thinking.

And then she accepted his proposal. She said it as if she were agreeing to some irrefutable practicality.

He laughed with a mix of delight and relief and briefly touched her hand. She smiled and said she had heard of less dramatic and somewhat more extended courtships—and this time they laughed together.

His two men in the seats ahead of them never said a word and never turned around.

They landed at Torreón, where his car was waiting, and late that night arrived at the casa grande. He spoke with the head housemaid and then told the girl to go with her, that she would be fed and bathed and shown to her bedchamber. The girl trailed after the maid, casting looks everywhere as she went.

The following day he had a team of seamstresses from Torreón fit her for a silk wedding gown and a silver crown inlaid with three small rubies. A priest was fetched and that early evening they were wed in the garden alongside the casa grande. Some hours later, following a celebration party in the patio, the maids brought her to his open chamber door and knocked timidly. The girl wore a satin nightgown the color of pearl. Her unpinned black hair shone in the candlelight. Her eyes were uncertain. He dismissed the maids and beckoned the girl. From the pocket of his dressing gown he took out a necklace, a fine gold chain holding a small diamond pendant. He gestured for her to turn around and told her to raise the hair off her neck. She was facing a full-length wall mirror and their eyes met as he clasped the necklace at her nape and then tenderly kissed her bare shoulder. Her eyes widened and her lips parted, and whether she was looking at the diamond at her throat or his lips on her neck he could not have said. He held her breasts from behind, their nipples hard against his palms.

He turned her around and kissed her. He slid the straps of the gown from her shoulders and the garment streamed to a pale puddle at her feet. Whatever she might have been feeling, shame in her nakedness was no part of it. She was more beautiful than he had imagined. Lean, sleek, brown. He took her hand and led her to the bed. She was eager for it. Her mouth received his with a hunger the more arousing to him for its obvious lack of practice, her touches more exciting for their tentativeness. She was virgin—the bloodspot on the sheets would testify to it. Had she not been, he was prepared to annul the marriage in the morning. She cried at his entry but then was soon gasping from effect other than pain, writhing unartfully but urgently beneath him, digging her fingers into his back, inspiring him to heroic effort.

They made love on each of the first few nights of the marriage before he flagged utterly. He had not risen to such occasion with such frequency since his youth, and his expended vigor was slow to recoup. Thereafter he rarely visited her bedchamber more often than once a week. He desired her constantly in his imagination and the sight of her naked body never failed to excite his lust, but his aged flesh was recalcitrant and he was deeply humiliated by his frequent failures as a lover. He had secretly hoped that she might bear him a son, a successor to Las Cadenas—but if she were never to conceive he knew the fault would more likely lie in his old and sapless seed than within her young womb. Still, he believed he could endure the disappointment of a barren marriage as long as he could touch her.

But by the time they had been together two months she was wearying of the accounts of his youthful adventures and of his ordeals under the Revolution. She had grown bored with his talk of people she did not know, many of them long dead. For his part, he could but feign interest in her redundant schoolgirl memories and descriptions of the beach where she always went swimming and tales of the times when she went to sea with her uncle the fisherman. Unlike her, he had no interest in books other than ledgers. But he didn’t care. He derived unremitting pleasure from simply staring at her, from the knowledge that she was there and would still be there the next day and the day after that.

He lavished her with gifts, with everything he thought might please her—jewelry, clothes, a beautiful black stallion and custom-made saddle, the newest model phonograph, affectionate pet dogs, a parrot that spoke her name. He sent a man to Jiménez to buy whatever recordings she asked for. He filled the house with her favorite flowers. He replanted the patio garden to suit her tastes.

She told him she missed the sea and asked if they might go to the coast for a holiday so she could swim. He said he could not leave the hacienda, that there were many duties he must personally attend to, that he never traveled except when he absolutely must on essential business. The truth was that he was afraid she might desert him if they went to a town—any town, but especially one on the seacoast. He did not know how to swim, and he had never told anyone of his recurrent bad dream in which they were at the seashore and she fled him by swimming away. He built a spacious pool for her in the west-side patio and for a time she took pleasure in it. She tried to teach him to swim but his efforts had been comically inept and she had laughed at him. He came close to losing his temper but was able to restrain it. He would not, however, enter the pool again. She swam in it every day—and made daily complaint that it was not the same thing as the sea.

The months passed. He was aware of her increased discontent. She turned moody. She rarely laughed anymore and never with him. He felt hopeless in his attempts to please her. One evening he caught her staring at him across the length of the dinner table and could see that she was beholding him as an old man. He was more deeply pained than he could say.

And then barely three weeks ago she asked if she might ride her stallion beyond the walled confines of the casa grande grounds. She was bored with the round-and-round of the riding track and with the horsetrail through the mesquite thickets at the rear portion of the compound. He refused. He said the countryside was too dangerous for a woman alone. He could send a rider with her, she said, one of his pistoleros, if he was so concerned for her safety. No, he said—and knew instantly that she had perceived his mistrust of her, his fear that she might cuckold him with a younger and more virile man. You could send two of them, she said, to keep an eye on each other as well as on me. She retreated to her bedchamber and remained there the rest of the day.

When he went to her door that evening he found it bolted and she refused to admit him. He might have walked away except he caught sight of a housemaid passing at the end of the hall and glancing at him. How many of the staff, he suddenly wondered, had heard him pleading with her like a whining boy? He tore the drapery off the hall window and piled it at the foot of her door and set it afire. In minutes the door was ablaze. There was no other door to the room and her windows were forty feet above the patio but she made no call for help or cry of fear. Servants appeared at the end of the hall and went racing away again, yelling at each other to bring buckets of water. When the door was a sheet of crackling flames he kicked at it until a portion fell away in a shower of sparks and then he covered his head with his arms and crashed through the burning wood and into the room. He slapped away smoking cinders from his clothes and hair, saw her staring huge-eyed at him. He took off his thick leather belt and doubled it and threw her facedown across the bed and stripped away her robe and pinned her with a knee between her shoulders. She was strong and kicking wildly but he was furiously determined and tore off her silk underpants and whipped her bare buttocks with the belt. He was elated by her shrieks and the servants’ arrival at the door to fling hissing bucketfuls of water on the fire and witness his punishment of her. She managed to break free after he’d laid on a dozen strokes. Her bottom was striped with red welts and she was crying in pain and outrage. She called him a bullying old bastard, she shouted that she hated him. He warned her that if she ever again bolted a door against him he would tie her to a tree in the patio and strip her naked to the waist and use a horse quirt on her back while everyone of the hacienda looked on. But he feared her will to resist and told the carpenter that the new door to her chamber should have no bolt.

They saw little of each other over the following days. Whenever they came in sight of each other they did not speak. Their suppers were silent affairs but for the clink of dishware and the serving staff’s footfalls on the hardwood floors.

His temper was now in constant confusion, a mix of anger, injured pride, and despair. He pined for her affections even as he refused to lower himself to apology. He yearned to touch her even as he refused to speak or even look directly at her. He was meting harsh punishments to his peons for the smallest infractions, ordering the whipping of a stableman for being slow to saddle a horse, of a pair of kitchen-boys for dicing in the pantry. He had a woman branded on the cheek on her husband’s charge of infidelity, though there was no proof of it and she swore it was not true.

He was drinking heavily every night, pacing himself to exhaustion in his chambers, trying to understand how things had come to such a pass—his mind in a mad muddle, his emotions in chaotic tangle. When he thought of her naked beauty he had to bite his tongue against howling in desire for her. He thought he might be going mad.

And then one night, less than a week ago, he could bear it no longer. He smashed a brandy bottle against the wall and stalked to her chambers with a lamp in his hand and banged open her door, waking her in a fright. He set down the lamp and shrugged off his robe and flung himself on her. She resisted for only a moment before letting herself go limp and shutting her eyes, refusing him even her sight, refusing him everything but unresponsive flesh. He could not help but proceed, though it was like coupling with the newly dead. When he was finished and realized he was crying, he cursed her and struck her with his open hand. She flinched but did not open her eyes. He stormed from the room in a weeping rage.

He kept to his chambers for most of the following day, heartsickened by his brute behavior, frantic with fear that her affections were forever lost to him. The next day was Christmas, and hoping to begin a process of amends and reconciliation, he presented her with an exquisite emerald brooch. He laid it before her on the supper table and she stared at it without expression and then ignored it. He asked if he might pin the brooch on her to see how it looked, and she picked it up and put it in her dress pocket. He’d had to restrain himself from striking her—and from bursting into tears.

The next days passed like a time of mourning. He would see her from his window as she set out on her stallion onto the riding trail in the mesquite woods. On her return she would linger within the stable, no doubt seeing to it that the horse was properly tended, perhaps feeding it apples as she liked to do. Then she’d go for a walk in the garden and he’d lose sight of her. She would not return to the house until dusk. Sometimes she would take another wordless supper with him in the dining hall, sometimes she would retire for the night without eating, and he would dine alone at the head of the huge empty table.

And then that morning, four days before the new year, she was gone. Her bed had not been slept in. She was not in her bath, on her balcony, in any of the reading or music parlors, not in the dining room nor the kitchen. The maids said la doña had not come down for her morning cup of chocolate. The household staff was called to assembly in the main parlor and it was discovered that her personal maid was also absent. None of the staff had seen either of them since the evening prior. Before he could send for his segundo, the foreman himself appeared with the news that the stableman in charge of caring for la doña’s stallion had departed the hacienda last night in one of the trucks and had not returned. The man told the gate guard he was being sent to Torreón to pick up a new saddle for la doña. The women must have been hiding in the vehicle.

Don César dispatched teams of searchers to the nearest towns, more than a hundred miles south to Gomez Palacio, to Torreón, to San Pedro de las Colonias, seventy-five miles north to Jiménez. But there was no need—they found the truck twenty miles away, where the hacienda road met the highway at the small railstation pueblo of Escalón, found it parked behind the depot. They roused the night clerk from his bed—a man they called El Manco Feo for his ruined arm and the ugly dogbite scars on his face—and learned that yes, a man and two women, all strangers to him, had boarded the night train to Monclova. His description of them was accurate. The clerk was taken to Las Cadenas to give his report to Don César in person, to tell him that the train had arrived in Monclova hours ago. Don César knocked him down and kicked him repeatedly before ordering him out of his sight.

He had no notion at all whether she was still in Monclova or where she might have gone from there. He sent men to that city to seek her. He interrogated every member of the house staff, questioned all of his vaqueros. The missing stableman was Luis Arroyo, who had been on the payroll less than six months. None of the other hands knew where he was from, knew anything of his past.

And then a short while ago it had been learned that the maid who fled with the party, one Maria Ramirez, had been born and raised in a village called Apodaca, just outside of Monterrey, and that her father was a baker there….

El Segundo arrives on the balcony as Don César finishes his brandy. Segundo is a tall lean man of middle years and wears his black beard in a sharply pointed goatee of the grandee style, his long hair in a ponytail. His dress is impeccable and his manners courtly, but his dark hands are scarred from ropeburns and branding irons, with knife cuts, the knuckles large and prominent and scarred as well.

“A sus órdenes, patrón,” Segundo says.

Don César instructs him to send their best retrievers to the family home of this Maria Ramirez and question her about his missing wife. If the Ramirez girl should not be there, then the family must be questioned about her. The retrievers are to be given ample expense money and are to act upon whatever information they get that might lead them to his wife. If they are unable to find her, then that will be the end of it and he will be shed of the bitch.

Segundo says he understands completely. He will dispatch Angel and Gustavo—and then softly inquires what Don César desires them to do if they should find her.

“Quiere que se la traigan? O prefiere que…se desaparesca?”

Don César considers the question as he stares out at the great desert beyond the hacienda.

And finally says that they should bring her back, of course.

 

In the hours after the wind and drizzle quit, a thin fog rolled in off the gulf and the windows glowed pale gray in the morning light of New Year’s Day. I got dressed and tucked the Mexican Colt under my coat at the small of my back and went downstairs.

As always, Gregorio had set out the makings of breakfast for his tenants before he went to bed. A big kettle of coffee was lightly steaming on the stove, next to a warm pot of refried beans and a large and ready frying pan. On the counter stood a wire basket of eggs, a fresh loaf of bread on a cutting board, a can of lard, some bulbs of garlic, a string of dried chiles, and a large roll of chorizo sausage. A gourd covered with a warm damp cloth held a stack of fresh corn tortillas. On the table were bowls of butter, sugar, grape jam, shakers of salt, red pepper, ground cinnamon.

By this hour Sergio had already come in from his night clerk job and had eaten and cleaned up after himself and gone up to his room. I usually took breakfast at a café across the street from the train station but I wanted a word with old Moises this morning, so I figured I might as well eat while I waited for him to come down.

I

I lit the gas burner under the big frying pan and cut off a chunk of chorizo and put it in the pan and ground it with a fork. Then broke off a clove of garlic and peeled it smooth and dropped it in with the chorizo and used the fork to crush it up good. I chopped a big chile to fine bits and stirred it in with the sausage and garlic. The chorizo sizzled and darkened and the fragments of garlic and chile turned brown in the oozing grease. The sharp aromas mingled with the fragrance of coffee and refried beans. I turned down the burner a little and cracked three eggs into the pan and scrambled them with the chorizo and seasonings. When the eggs were almost done I pushed them with the spatula to one side of the pan and took two tortillas from the gourd and quickly heated them in the cleared side of the greasy pan. I laid the tortillas on a plate and scraped the chorizo-and-eggs onto them, then added some beans on the side and poured a cup of coffee and stirred in plenty of sugar. Then sat at the table to eat.

Gregorio had taken his magazines to his room with him but the morning paper was on the table. I was leafing through it and having my second cup of coffee when old Moises came down and looked surprised to find me there. “Buen año nuevo, joven!” he said.

I waited till he sat himself with a cup of coffee, then gestured for him to put the tin horn to his ear. He did, and I asked if he had been to the party at the Morales place last night.

“Como?” he said, pressing the horn harder to his ear. “Qué?”

I leaned over the table and asked the question louder.

“La fiesta de Morales? Sí, yo fui, claro que sí. Era muy buena fiesta.”

Had he met Avila’s relatives from Brownsville?

“Que?” he bellowed, twisting the horn like he meant to screw it into his skull.

With my mouth right at the ear horn, I loudly and slowly repeated my question. He listened hard, then said that there had been many people at the party, a few he had never seen before, but with the music and laughter and his bad ears he hadn’t caught their names.

Was there a pretty girl he hadn’t seen before?

“Ay, hijo!” But of course there had been pretty girls! Every woman in the world was a pretty girl in her own way, did I not know that? As a man ages he gains wisdom and comes to see the eternal beauty of all womanhood. Why, if he were only ten years younger…

I patted his shoulder and cursed myself for a fool to have thought he might be of any help, then took my plate and cup to the sink and washed them while he rambled on about all the women he’d known, large and small, darkskinned and fair, all of them lovely, all of them a wonderful mystery, although of course there had been a special one, a girl back in Michoacán whom he’d known for less than a month, when they were both nineteen, one whom Death the Bastard took from him but whom he had not failed to think about every day since…

He was still going on and on when I said goodbye and went out the door.

 

The holiday street traffic was of course much lighter than usual for a Wednesday. Most businesses were closed and a lot of people were still in bed with aching heads and new regrets.

The air was cool and heavy with the smell of the sea, but the wet and littered streets still carried tinges of the town’s hangover, the faint odors of booze and tobacco ash and rank bedsheets. A sickly yellow seadog still arced through the light mist over the Offatt Bayou.

But holidays were good for the gambling business. Even at this midmorning hour I found the betting room behind the Turf Grill already half-full and loud with talk of the day’s favorites and longshots at the Florida and California tracks. The Juárez and Tijuana races would get a lot of play too. The parlor betting would be heavy all day long.

Up on the second floor I went into Rose’s outer office and spoke with his secretary, Mrs. Bianco. A lot of the guys called her Momma Mia, and she seemed to enjoy it, but to me she was always Mrs. Bianco. She had a pronounced Italian accent and a motherly manner and could have been on an advertising poster for pasta or tomato paste. Portly and beginning to gray, always dressed in neat and matronly fashion. She lived alone in a boardinghouse down the street from the Club. Not many knew it but she was one of Rose’s highest-paid employees and among the handful of people he truly trusted, and there was no aspect of Maceo business she wasn’t privy to. She knew how I stood with Rose too and tended to be more direct with me than she was with others—and I’d caught glimpses of the .38 bulldog she kept in the bottom righthand drawer of her desk. I once asked Rose if she knew how to use it and he smiled and winked and left it at that.

She told me Signore Maceo had sent LQ and Brando and one of his slot machine mechanics to the Red Shoes Cabaret near Alvin. I knew the place. It was in Brazoria County, just west of the Galveston line, and it rented its machines from the Gulf Vending Company. The place had changed hands a few months before and the new guys had been consistently slow about toting up the daily take from the slots and handing over the Maceos’ cut. Artie Goldman suspected they were shaving their revenue reports, and Artie’s suspicions were good enough for Rose.

The Red Shoes guys would be surprised when the mechanic showed up that morning to check their machines. Each of the slots had been geared to keep a tally of the money it took in—a running tally that wasn’t erased each time the machine was emptied, as many of the joint owners had been led to believe was the case. LQ and Brando would ensure that nobody interfered with the mechanic’s inspection of the slots—and they would take the necessary measures if the machine tallies didn’t match the ones on the Red Shoes reports. It was a job I normally would’ve been tending to.

I told Mrs. Bianco I’d be in the gym if Rose wanted me, then went up to the third floor.

 

The health club was always open to members—weekends and holidays included—and there were already a dozen guys there, the usual bunch who always showed up early. Club rats, Watkins the trainer called them. As the morning wore on, still more members would come in for their regular workouts or just to sweat last night’s booze out of their system.

The large room echoed with the huffing and grunting of hard effort, with the slapping of jump ropes and the clanking of barbells, punches smacking the heavy bags. The daily reek of sweat and liniment was already starting to build.

It had been a good while since my schedule let me have a morning workout, and Otis was glad to see me come in during his shift. I figured he’d want to go a few rounds and I was ready to oblige him. But he was booked solid with his club rat boxing lessons for the next two days.

“I got a ten o’clock open on Saturday,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ll be out of town.”

I said I had to hang around town all week, so Saturday was fine.

“I’m locking us in at ten,” he said, writing “lesson to hotshot” in ink on his big desktop calendar.

I took the pen from his hand and drew a line through the word “to” in his notation and wrote “from” above it.

“Cocky sumbuck,” he said. “We’ll see. Three three-minute, no headgear, Watkins refs?”

“You’re on,” I said.

I went to my locker and got into my shorts and T-shirt and ring shoes. I’d never been in a gym before I got to Galveston, never fought with gloves or according to any rules. I’d known how to fight—not box, fight—since I was a boy. Nobody had taught me how, I just knew. And I learned early that a real fight had no rules. And nobody stopped it. A real fight wasn’t over until one of the fighters couldn’t fight anymore, and even then it sometimes wasn’t over. Boxing wasn’t real fighting, it was an exercise of skill and endurance, a test of your self-control. It required you to hold to the rules no matter if you were losing, no matter how hurt or angry you might be, no matter how sure you were you could kill the other guy if you just said to hell with the rules. Fighting in the ring exercised your discipline. It’s what I liked about it.

I did a few sets of sit-ups on the slantboard, then skipped rope for a while, breathing deep and easy. After that I put on the bag gloves and pounded the heavy bag till my T-shirt was pasted to me. Then I moved over to the speed bag.

I started slowly, building a smooth rhythm of alternating lefts and rights. Little by little I increased the tempo until I had the bag ricocheting in a steady racketing blur that sounded like a train highballing by. I was aware of the attention I’d attracted, the guys gathered behind me. Even Otis couldn’t work the light bag better than I could. I kept at it until my arms felt packed with burning concrete, then gave the bag a hard overhand that shook the boards and I stepped away and gestured to the others that the bag was all theirs.

A few of the guys applauded and somebody let out a whistle.

Otis had interrupted his boxing lesson to lean on the ropes and watch me work the speed bag. I grinned at him and stripped off the gloves, then mopped my face with a towel. He smiled and shook his head and then went back to showing some husky guy in the ring how to slip a punch.

After I showered and dressed I checked in at Rose’s office again. Mrs. Bianco said he’d been dealing chiefly with phone business all morning. He’d received a few visitors, none of them strangers to her. He’d given her no messages for me. I told her I’d be out for a while and come back later.

 

I took a trolley over to the Strand, downtown’s main street. The clouds had broken and scattered and the sun was high and warm and had done away with last night’s threat of a cold spell.

Unlike the stores, most of the cafés were open for business. I went into De Jean’s and had a T-bone and a bottle of beer. I finished up with coffee and a cigarette as I watched the sparse pedestrian traffic pass by the sidewalk window.

It was strange to be so idle. My days usually consisted of going here and there to take care of this or that. The other Ghosts tended to the routine jobs around the island, including the daily cash pickups, but the Maceos had dealings all over this region of Texas, and sometimes Rose would hand me a list of jobs that took me out of town for days or even a couple of weeks at a time. I frequently went up to Houston, sometimes out to San Antone, now and then down to Corpus. More often than not I took LQ or Brando with me, usually both.

Among my assignments were visits to guys who’d been slow to make loan repayments or turn over the daily slot cuts. They usually got their accounts up to date real quick after I gave them a warning. Everybody knew one warning was all Rose ever gave, and few of them were late with the money again. Now and then somebody would require a second visit but nobody ever needed a third.

The ones who’d been doctoring their books were another matter. They never failed to correct themselves, either, but their transgression was more serious than a late payment, and it had to be punished, even as a first offense. A broken hand would usually do, but sometimes a foot was also called for, maybe an arm or a leg, sometimes something worse. It depended on how long they’d been at it and how much they’d skimmed.

Then there were the robbers. The island clubs never got robbed—they were much too well protected—but now and then some little joint on the mainland or in a neighboring county would get hit, some club or café or filling station with Maceo machines in it, and although the stickups were rarely for more than peanuts, they included Maceo peanuts. Only the dumbest stickup guys would ever hit a place without first making sure it had no Maceo connection. Next to an outsider who tried to cut in on Galveston, nobody got Rose as hot under the collar as a robber. Any business that had even one Maceo machine in it was guaranteed protection, and Rose took his guarantees seriously.

Most of the stickup men were such dopes they didn’t even leave the local area after pulling their heist. They’d hole up with a relative or a friend or a sweetheart. But the Maceos had a standing reward offer for information about robberies—the reward sometimes more than what was taken in a holdup—and the information always came, as often as not from the people the robbers were hiding with. It never took me long to track them down, and when I did, there was nothing to discuss. If they had the money with them, fine, and if they didn’t, the hell with it. Not only was the money rarely very much, its recovery wasn’t the point, not to Rose. As he once put it, “What I want is those bastards removed from the living”—which made me chuckle and say he sometimes had a touch of the poet in him. Which made him give me a look and say he sometimes thought I was fucking touched. In any case, once the thieves were removed from the living, he made sure the news got around.

Few robbers ever skipped the state, but if we got a sure tip on one that did, we went after him—no matter how little he’d made off with, no matter how far he’d gone. But reliable information about a guy who lammed the state was hard to come by, and even when Rose thought the tip was solid he was reluctant to send more than one man on the job. He believed one man had a better chance of getting around unnoticed in unfamiliar territory and a better chance of getting back out if the job went bad. I agreed. The only two times he sent me out of Texas I went alone.

I ran down the first guy in a rooming house in a rundown section of St. Joseph, Missouri, exactly where the rat had said he’d be. I slipped in after midnight. The stairs creaked but if any of the other tenants woke up they stayed put and minded their own business, lucky for them. The guy’s doorlock was even easier to jimmy than the one in the kitchen. He didn’t wake up till I cut his throat. I’d killed with a knife before but never cut a throat—although I’d come close one time, when I was still a kid—but I’d seen Brando do it and knew they didn’t make much noise that way, just a kind of gargle like water going down a partly clogged drain. I thought I’d be able to avoid the mess better than Brando had, but I wasn’t. I had to trade my bloody shirt for a clean one of the guy’s, and I went out with my ruined coat rolled under my arm. He’d made off with about five hundred dollars but I found less than fifty in the place.

After that job I started using an ice pick for the close work. You had to be more exact with a pick but it was a hell of a lot neater.

In the other case, the robber hit a Texas City club for three grand and then went to hide at his brother’s house on the Pearl River, a few miles south of Jackson, Mississippi. The place was so isolated I didn’t have to be very clever about it. I waited till dark and then left the car in among the pines and walked back up the road to the house. I found his car parked around in back where it couldn’t be seen from the road. I peeked in all the windows and saw that there was nobody in the place except him and a girl. He was in his undershorts, the girl in T-shirt and panties. I couldn’t spot a gun anywhere.

I kicked open the door to the kitchen where they were having supper and shot him through his open mouth before he could even stand up. The back of his head splattered the wall behind him and he drained off his chair.

The girl shrieked and jumped away from the table and then clapped her hands over her mouth like she wasn’t all that new to situations suddenly gone bad and knew that rule number one was shut up. But her eyes were huge with fear. She was a slim bob-haired blonde with freckles and nice legs. She looked about seventeen. One of her cheeks had a pale purple bruise.

“Where’s the guns?” I said.

“He aint got but the one.” She nodded at the kitchen counter behind me. I picked it up—a snubnose five-shot .38—and dropped it in my coat pocket. Then I stepped out the kitchen door to see if any lights had come on anywhere, some nearby cabin, some neighbor in the woods who maybe heard the .44’s blast, but there was nothing. I went back in and shut the door.

“The money?” I said. And was pleasantly surprised when she led me into the bedroom—being careful to keep from stepping in any of the blood spreading from the guy’s head—and pulled a valise out of the closet. She put it on the bed and opened it to show the cash.

“I knew it had to be somebody’s,” she said. “I knew he didn’t win it in no card game.” Her accent was swamp rat to the bone.

I riffled through the money. It looked to be almost all there.

“I don’t know how much all he spent of it,” she said. “I got about four dollars in my shirt yonder. You want I should get it?”

“Never mind,” I said.

“You gonna hurt me?” She looked all set for a bad answer.

“You help him steal it?”

“No sir, I never did any such.”

“Then I’ve got no reason to hurt you.”

“Truth to tell, I didn’t never expect to see him again. Then he shows up in Port Allen a coupla weeks ago and says he’s hit the jackpot and to come on if I was coming. Momma said he was no-count and I was a harebrained fool to go with him and she was right both times.”

“You the one to rat on him?”

She shook her head. “Probably his brother Carl. He was all the time beating on Carl and finally run him off from his own house—can you imagine? I wouldn’t blame Carl a bit if he told on him.”

She glanced toward the kitchen and her mouth tightened. “I told him he hit me again I’d stick him with a butcher knife. I meant it too. Momma always said they got to sleep sometime.”

I knew her story without having to hear it. I knew a dozen just like it: sweet girl takes up with some mean bastard who mistreats her till she goes sour and sometimes gets pretty mean herself. Some of them might deserve a slap now and then—some of them needed it—but none of them deserved to be made mean. This one was headed that way but might still take a lucky turn.

“What’s your name, girl?”

“Sally. It’s Sally May Ritter.”

“Can you drive that car out there, Sally?”

“Yessir. I kinda can.”

I took about three hundred from the valise and gave it to her. I told her to go to the second nearest depot, not the nearest one. “Park a few blocks away and then walk to the station. Get yourself a ticket to anywhere else.”

She stared at the money and then at me.

“And try to be more careful about the company you keep,” I said.

She said she aimed to be. Then said, “Where you from, anyway?”

“Someplace else. Now get a move on.”

She was packing a bag fast as I went out the door.

When we didn’t know where a robber had lammed, Rose would put out the word on him. If the bastard ever showed his face in Texas again, we’d hear about it.

Next thing the guy knew, there I’d be.

There were times, of course, when everything was running smoothly, when nothing was out of order and Brando and LQ and I didn’t have much to do but exercise in the gym or play cards or go to the police range and take a little target practice. Times when the only duty to come our way was to drive Rose to Houston or Corpus Christi to tend to some matter in person like he sometimes had to do.

But such times were pretty rare and never lasted more than a few days—praise Jesus, as LQ was prone to say in moments of gratitude.

 

After lunch I wandered along the Strand for a while, then went into a movie house showing A Night at the Opera. The Marx Brothers could always get a laugh out of me.

When I got back to the Club, Mrs. Bianco said to go on into the office. Rose was on the phone and Big Sam was in an easy chair, puffing a cigar and sipping a glass of wine. Sam gestured for me to sit in the chair beside his. I took a Chesterfield from the case on the desk. Rose did too and I leaned over and lit it for him. I sat down and Sam punched me lightly on the arm and said, “Jimmy the Kid.”

“Right,” Rose said into the phone. “Louisiana Street. They’re expecting you this afternoon. Just fill in the forms and get the signatures. I told them if they signed today the machines would be there tomorrow afternoon.”

He listened for a moment. “Yeah…Yeah…Right. Railyard warehouse got plenty in stock. Soon as they sign, let the warehouse know and they’ll get the shipment out to Houston…Okay. Yeah.”

He hung up and scribbled something on a sheet of paper, then leaned back and looked at me and Sam and gave a tired sigh that struck me as a touch theatrical.

“I swear to Christ, there’s times I wish I was still a barber,” he said. “A barber can whistle while he works, know what I mean? Can sing while he does his job. Shoot the shit with the customers. Talk about sports, pussy, stuff in the papers. This…” He gestured vaguely at the big desk in front of him. “Nothing but fucken deals all day. Phone calls. Arrangements. Nothing but business.”

Sam looked at me and winked. It wasn’t the first time we’d heard this complaint from Rose—but it was sentimental bullshit. He wouldn’t last two days back in a barber shop before he’d be scheming at how to outfox the big-time crooks at their own games, both the legal and the illegal ones, just like he and Sam had been doing all these years.

He saw how Big Sam and I were smiling. “Go to hell, both you.”

He poured me a glass of wine and refilled his own. Then held his glass across the desk and said, “Salute,” and Sam and I clinked ours against it.

He wanted to know if I’d picked up on anything today that might connect to the Dallas guys. I said I hadn’t.

“I keep telling you,” Sam said to him, “you’re worrying for nothing. I was on the phone with our ears in Dallas ten minutes ago. None of them have heard anything.”

“Everybody knows we got ears all over,” Rose said. “If they’re planning a move they’re keeping a tight lid on it.”

“They got no reason to make a move on us,” Sam said. “Ragsdale lost their machines to us, we didn’t steal them. They made a bet on Willie Rags and they lost.”

“Could be they’re sore losers,” Rose said. “Could be they don’t give a rat’s ass it’s Ragsdale’s fault.”

“What can they do, come get the machines back?” Sam said. “As soon as they tried it we’d hear about it and be there before they got the first slot loaded on the truck. They can’t do anything except forget the slots or buy them back. You got them over a barrel, Rosie.”

Rose arched his brow at me in question.

“I’m with Sam,” I said.

He nodded but didn’t look convinced. “Well…keep a close tab with the ears,” he said to Sam.

“And you,” he said to me, “just keep close.”

 

Lucio Ramirez is about to close his bakery for the day when the little bell jingles over the door and two men enter. One of them flips the sign hanging inside the glass door to the side that says CERRADO and then turns the doorlock.

Angel Lozano and Gustavo Mendez are large men in finely tailored suits and snapbrim fedoras. They could pass for brothers, their chief distinction in their mustaches—Angel’s thick and droopy, Gustavo’s thin and straight—and in Angel’s left eye, which is held in a permanent half-squint by a pinched white scar at its outer corner.

Apodaca is a small pueblo and these men in smart city clothes are obvious outsiders. Even as Ramirez asks how he may serve them, his apprehension is stark on his face.

Angel asks if he is related to Maria Ramirez, who until recently was in the employ of La Hacienda de Las Cadenas.

The baker can see that the man already knows the true answer—and sees as well that he is not a man to lie to—and so he admits that Maria is his daughter and asks what they wish with her.

At that moment his rotund wife emerges from a curtained doorway to the living quarters in the rear part of the bakery and stops short at the sight of the strangers.

Ramirez tells her who they are and she turns back toward the curtain but Gustavo catches her by the arm and yanks her to him and claps a hand over her mouth. Ramirez starts toward them but Angel grabs him by the hair and rams his forehead against the wall and lets the baker fall to the floor unconscious, his forehead webbed with blood.

Angel passes through the curtain and sees the girl sitting on the edge of her bed, her sewing sliding off her lap, her eyes large. Before she can scream, Angel is on her, pinning her down, a hand on her mouth and a knife blade at her neck.

He tells her he will ask her only once—where is the wife of Don César?—and tells her that if she lies he will see the lie in her eyes and he will cut her throat to the neckbone.

He eases his hand from the girl’s mouth but she is terrified to incoherence. He tells her to calm down, for Christ’s sake, and she tries, but as she talks she continues to weep and partially choke on her mucus and he permits her to sit up so she can speak more clearly.

She is at last able to tell him that la doña paid the stableman Luis Arroyo with jewelry to escort her to the border town of Matamoros. At the Monclova station, Maria Ramirez took leave of them and caught a train to Monterrey and from there took a bus to Apodaca.

She doesn’t know—she swears she doesn’t—where in Matamoros la doña was going or why. She knows nothing more to tell except that, on the train trip to Monclova, Arroyo had spoken of a brother who owns a cantina in Matamoros, a place called La Perla.