Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  Did John Samuel and Vicki Clara have children?

  They did. Juan Sotero would be two in June and Roger Samuel was now eight months old.

  Margarita smiled wider. “Pues, ya eres un abuelo, viejo.”

  A sad truth, John Roger said. A grandfather. Me. How is that possible?

  “Háblame de los gemelos,” she said. You speak so little of them.

  He said he hardly knew the twins. It was a terrible admission for a man to make about his sons. To make it worse, he couldn’t even tell which was which. They were eleven years old and he still couldn’t do it. All twins as they grow older became distinct from each other to some degree, but not these two. Not yet, anyway. They were mirror images. Still, a father should be able to recognize his sons, for Christ’s sake, no matter how alike they look.

  Nobody can tell them apart?

  Well, maybe the kitchen maids. A crone named Josefina and her helper, Marina. But then nobody else had spent as much time with them. He had thought about asking them how they knew one from the other, but that would be absurd. Shameful. Asking the kitchen help how to tell his sons apart.

  Margarita regarded him without expression.

  I know Blake’s nickname is Blackie, I’ve overheard James call him that. The crone and Marina have picked it up. Can’t say I much care for it. Too much of the thug in it. In English, anyway.

  “Blackie. A mi me gusta ese nombre.” Did Blackie have a nickname for James?

  Jake. But lately it’s more often Jeck. I suppose because it’s how the maids say it.

  “Jake,” Margarita said, pronouncing it with care. She liked that name too. Did they look like their big brother?

  No. Johnny had his mother’s green eyes and the same reddish hair, but they—

  Their hair is black and their eyes are brown with little dots of yellow, she said. Am I correct?

  Well, my hair’s not that black anymore, and judging by what I see in the mirror my eyes have picked up a lot of red.

  I bet they look just like you.

  I think they look more like my brother.

  Margarita laughed. Don Juan the twin has made a joke! “Qué milagro!” He smiled and bowed his head in acknowledgement.

  Were they close, the twins and their older brother?

  John Roger sighed. Not in the least. And it had always bothered him that they weren’t. He supposed it wasn’t really so strange. As twins, they would naturally be much closer to each other than to him, or to anyone else, for that matter. Plus there was a huge difference of fifteen years between them. Still, there seemed to be more to it than that, he wished he knew what. For some reason they just didn’t like each other.

  But they are close to each other, the twins, no?

  That, he said, was an understatement. He had thought he knew all there was to know about twinhood and had believed no brothers on earth could be closer than he and Sammy had been. But these two! They had a communion that was . . . what to call it? Mystical would not be an exaggeration.

  Margarita grinned. Really? So strange as that? Tell me, are they happy, these mystical twins?

  They seemed to be. They liked to laugh. That was another difference between them and Johnny. He couldn’t remember John Samuel ever laughing except for his first ride on a horse. The thing about the twins’ laughter, though, is that it usually seemed to come from some private joke between them, some joke about you. They were like that about everything. They rarely spoke in anyone else’s presence, even to each other. You might see them talking at a distance, but when you closed to within earshot they became clams. They were strange, there was no other word for it. They no sooner learned to walk than they were exploring every foot of the house and the patios and gardens. By the age of six they were climbing trees with the nimbleness of monkeys, they could scale rock walls like lizards. They were eight when they learned how to vanish within the house and not be found by the entire staff’s most thorough search. Nobody ever saw them come out of hiding, either, so you never knew where they’d been. It spooked the hell out of the maids when they disappeared like that—except for the crone and Marina, who only got irked that the twins knew the house better than they did, who had lived in it so many years more. After each such vanishing act, John Roger would reproach them for upsetting the household and demand to know where they had been, but they would only shrug, their eyes full of amusement. He would lock them in their room as punishment. Then hear them in there, wrestling, laughing, reading aloud to each other.

  Margarita grinned. How does the poem go? Stone walls do not make a prison? He said he was glad she found it all so amusing. She grinned at his sarcasm.

  It didn’t occur to him until a year ago that the only real punishment for them would be isolation from each other. So the next time they committed a serious infraction—he couldn’t recall what—he locked them into separate third-floor rooms without any books or toys, and congratulated himself for his cleverness when he heard no laughter from within either room. But when he checked on them after a couple of hours, the rooms were vacant. They had gone out the windows and negotiated a six-inch ledge all the way along the side of the house and around the corner and then leaped onto a tree and climbed down and made away. For three hours the staff searched the entire casa grande enclave in vain, scouring the courtyards, the patios, the gardens, the stable, even the cemetery. John Roger concluded they must have somehow slipped out into the larger compound and was about to order a wider search when one of the housemaids reported that the boys had been found in their room. When he got there they were playing cards on the floor. They looked up at him and smiled.

  The next time, he locked them in the armory. It was on the ground floor of the casa grande but had only one window, ten feet above the floor and with a hinged ironwork frame secured from inside by a padlock as big as a brick. The room was without furniture and the floor was of stone and he had the lamps removed. “Let’s see how much you feel like smiling after a night in here without light or supper,” he told them. He had a moment’s qualm after locking the door but managed to suppress it. What father could permit such defiance to go unpunished? In the morning the barred window was open wide and the padlock dangling from it by its gaping shackle. The lock had been picked so deftly it didn’t show a scratch. They had taken with them a pair of caplock pistols, a pouch of black powder and one of pistol balls, and two bayonets. It was five days before they were found in a forest clearing several miles upriver. They were slathered with mud against the mosquitoes and had built a lean-to of palm fronds and were maintaining a smokeless fire. With spears cut from saplings, they had killed birds and snakes and roasted them over the coals. Snake skins were drying on the sides of the lean-to and would be made into belts. They told the search party they could have fed on venison if they’d used the pistols but there wasn’t much sport in shooting deer and the gunshots would have made it too easy for the trackers to find them. They were ten years old, for God’s sake! They had never before been in the jungle. When they were brought back and I asked how they knew so much about living in the wild, they just shrugged, John Roger said, and smiled pretty much like you’re smiling now.

  Margarita laughed.

  Josefina had overheard his interrogation of them, and later told him in private that the answer to his question was plain as the nose on his face. They know about the wild and all the other things they know, she said, because they have their parents’ intelligence and you gave them the education to use it to learn things. The crone had a point, though he wasn’t about to tell her so. He and Elizabeth Anne had naturally wanted their children to have the best education available, short of sending them to a boarding school, and as soon as the twins learned to talk he engaged tutors for them. It was no more than he and Lizzie had done for John Samuel, although in his case his mother had given him his earliest instruction herself. The twins’ first teachers were brought from Veracruz, and by the age of five the boys could read and write in both English and Spanish.

  They wer
e six when he hired a tutor named James Dickert, who came with superlative recommendations from several prominent families in the capital. Educated in both his native South Carolina and in Mexico City, the bilingual Master Dickert was an eloquent man with a dulcet southern accent. For the next five years, until a windfall inheritance called him home to Charleston only a month before John Roger met Margarita, Master Dickert was the twins’ sole tutor. It was an ideal match of teacher and students, and he educated them to rare degree. He every week showed John Roger the twins’ compositions so that he could see for himself that their writing in both languages was cogent and lively and grammatically meticulous. Their recitations, Master Dickert reported, were fluent, their grasp of mathematics was sound. They were skeptical of history but they liked its stories and characters. They loved geography and were absorbed by the sciences, especially by the natural world and the workings of mechanisms. They learned that there was every kind of knowledge to be found in books and were quick to acquire the techniques for seeking it out in the vast library the Widow Montenegro had left behind, thousands of volumes, many of which had belonged to the Valledolids. Josefina sometimes thumbed through the books the boys kept piled by their bedside, and although she was illiterate the illustrations made clear enough what the books were about—guns, boats, the moon and stars, land and sea navigation, animal traps, rudimentary shelters, skinning and tanning, the human body. One anatomy text dog-eared at a graphic illustration of the female form. One book was all about locks.

  Education is a good thing, Josefina had said to John Roger, but too much of it can lead to trouble. We must remember Adam and Eve. God warned them not to eat from the tree of knowledge because they already knew all they needed to know to be happy. But they ate the fruit anyway and we know what happened to them.

  Yes, John Roger said, they gained the knowledge that it is unwise to disobey one’s father, a lesson these two cannot seem to learn.

  Maybe they have not learned that lesson, Josefina said, because of the way you have been trying to teach it to them.

  And maybe, he said, you will some day learn how little interest I have in your opinion about anything outside of this kitchen.

  Josefina shrugged. She told him the twins had taught Marina to read and write—in Spanish, of course. Marina is very smart, she said, but I believe the reason she learned so quickly is that they are good teachers. Some are, some are not. Then busied herself at the stove as if John Roger were no longer there.

  He finished his coffee and left, keeping to himself his admiration for their tutorial achievement with a peon girl.

  They had a facility for language, the twins, just as John Roger did, except that they used theirs mainly for mimicry. They sometimes spoke Spanish with the singsong cadences of the crone’s Chihuahuan inflections, at other times with the clipped diction of Marina’s lowland dialect. In English they sometimes talked like Charley Patterson, who had died when they were eight, but they had known him long enough to emulate his locutions. It irked John Roger to hear them speak like Texan ranch hands, knowing they could exercise perfect grammar when they wished, and he had once admonished them for it. “Rightly or wrongly, others judge us by our mode of speech,” he told them. “It therefore behooves a cultured man to speak in a cultured manner. Can you two understand that?” One said, “You betcha,” and the other said, “Yessiree, good lingo’s right important.” They grinned—and he’d felt a sudden impulse to laugh, but managed to check himself and look away, shaking his head in disapproval.

  “Son muy inteligentes,” Margarita said. They have so many gifts.

  They have so many gifts it’s damned uncanny, John Roger said. In addition to their exceptional faculty for learning things from books, they had talents they were born with. Their skill with tools was something no one taught them. For the past three weeks they’d been building a little boat with no help but a manual, and what he had seen of it was an excellent job. And then there was their marksmanship. They had asked Reynaldo the mayordomo if they could use the armory pistols, and Reynaldo said he needed to think about it, then came to him. It displeased John Roger that they would not solicit his permission personally. As he had been aware for some time, they not only never asked him for anything, they never asked him anything at all. He had no idea why they had taken such a stance, but there was no mistaking they had. He was tempted to refuse them permission to use the guns until they came to him and asked directly, but the notion struck him as childish and he told Reynaldo to let them.

  But Don Juan, Margarita said, even though it irritates that they will not ask anything of you, is it not commendable that they are of such strong independence? That they are of such strong will? Forgive my presumption, but perhaps you respect them more than you realize.

  That they are of such hard heads would be nearer to the truth, he said. And you are indeed presumptuous, my dear. Have I ever told you how much you sometimes sound like the crone?

  Margarita cackled.

  The first time they fired the pistols, he heard them at it and went out on a balcony to watch. They were shooting at bottles they had set against the side of a dirt mound. So far as he knew, they had never held a gun except during their escape from the armory, and they had not fired them then. Yet they were scoring with every shot. At age eleven they were better shots than any man he knew. And come to think of it, better swimmers. Lizzie had been the best swimmer he’d ever seen until them. And what divers! Whenever they climbed a high riverside tree to make a dive, everyone in sight of the landing would stop to watch. He had often looked on from his window. From the highest branches they would execute perfect dives, plunging into the water with hardly more splash than a coconut. Sometimes they would not resurface for so long that some in the crowd would begin to cry out that this time they had surely drowned—and then their heads would pop up some thirty or forty yards up or down the river and the crowd would go wild with cheering. They are grand entertainers, John Roger said. Very popular with the folk.

  Tell me, Don Juan, have you ever said to them that they are admirable swimmers? That their boat is a fine one? That they shoot well?

  What for? They know what they’re good at. And they don’t lack pride about it, believe me. You can see it in their faces.

  “Ay, hombre,” she said with a reproving shake of her head.

  When he first heard they were good fighters it had pleased him to know they could defend themselves. Then he heard disturbing things about one of their fights. They had seen some boys pouring lamp oil on a cat trapped in a fruit crate and they were going to set it on fire for fun. In preventing the cruelty, the twins badly beat up several of the boys, all of them bigger than the twins, according to Reynaldo. A nose was broken, a few teeth. Understandable things that could happen in a fight. But it troubled John Roger to learn that one boy had an ear ripped off, and that the twins’ punishment of them didn’t end with the beatings. They pinned the leader of the group facedown and soaked the backside of his pants with oil and set it aflame and then laughed to see him run howling for the nearest water trough with his ass on fire. Reynaldo had assured John Roger the burned boy would recover, although for the next few weeks he would eat standing up and sleep on his stomach. It bothers me, John Roger said, that they can be so vicious.

  They were vicious only to punish the more vicious.

  You and the crone, you just have to side with them don’t you? Vicki Clara’s the same way. I would think women had better sense.

  You have a good heart, my darling, but you do not know women very well.

  The simple fact was that the twins excelled at everything they took a liking to. They had begun riding at the age of six, just as John Samuel had. But while John Samuel had been obliged to train hard to make himself into the excellent horseman he now was, they could ride with an easy grace from the day they first sat a pony. They did stunts no one else on the hacienda would even attempt. They would stand up on their galloping horses, riding side by side, and switch mounts in sidewise l
eaps. They would ride in pursuit of a chicken and position it between them and then one or the other would hang far down the side of his mount, clinging to the saddle with one hand, and snatch up the running bird by the head. John Samuel had witnessed some of these exhibitions and had been able to mask his resentment from everyone but his father. It’s natural that he’s a little jealous of their horsemanship, John Roger said, even if he’ll never admit it. He loves horses, you see, but I think he believes the twins use them as only another way to show off.

  Is that why he does not love them? Margarita asked. Because they are better horsemen? Because they are showoffs?

  I didn’t say he doesn’t love them.

  You did not have to.

  Look, you have to understand something about John Samuel. It’s hard for him to express his feelings. He loved his mother very dearly and her loss was very hard on him. They nearly died together when he was a baby. Twice they nearly died together. She used to sing to him at night—have I told you that? She sang him to sleep every night until he was eleven or twelve. She was his first teacher. He was fifteen when she died. I don’t think anyone can know how terrible it was for him to lose her.

  But the twins also lost her. That is terrible too.

  It’s not the same thing. They never knew her.

  Maybe that is more terrible.

  How could it be? You can’t miss somebody you never knew as much as somebody you did.

  “Pero que tontería, hombre!” she said. Of course you can! Even a child who never knew his mother knows what a mother is. To have no memory of her can be worse than to remember her at least a little.

  He sighed. I don’t know. If Lizzie had lived, then maybe all of them . . . ah hell.

  She asked if he still locked them up for punishment.

  Yes, sometimes. But he had reached an accord with them about it. If he put them in the same room they would stay there for as long as he decreed. He didn’t even have to lock the door, not that a lock would have much effect. They had also come to an agreement about camping in the jungle. They could go for five days at a time but had to tell him or Josefina the direction they were going and about how far. It was an agreement made of air, since he couldn’t enforce his conditions or even stop them from going short of chaining them to the cellar walls and posting guards at every portal—and even then he wouldn’t be surprised if they escaped. And yet they had held to their end of the bargain. So far, anyway.