Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  She wanted to hear more, but the hour was late and they were both tired, so they would have to wait until his next visit.

  When he returned to El Castillo two weeks later the house mistress greeted him with a somber face and the news that Margarita was dead. Six days earlier, the afternoon post had included a letter for her, the only one she received in the four and a half months she’d been there. The house mistress recalled that the envelope bore no indication of the sender or the point of origin. She sent the letter upstairs to her, and some hours later, when Margarita still had not come down to begin her evening’s duty, the house mistress went up to her room and found her on the bed, blue-faced and rigoring. On the bedside table was a nearly empty cup of tea and next to it the little vial of poison. A saucer held the letter’s charred residue. She left no note. She was buried in the city cemetery.

  The house mistress averted her eyes for a moment while John Roger regained his composure. He cleared his throat and asked if she knew why Margarita had done it. The woman shrugged. She said Margarita was not the first girl to work at El Castillo whose specific reason for being there or even her real name was known to no one in the house. She had shown up one day and said she sought employment. She gave her name as Margarita Damascos and admitted its falseness. It was obvious she was well-bred but she would reveal nothing of where she came from or even how she had learned of El Castillo de las Princesas. Then again, the house mistress said, it was not a profession that required the biographical facts of its practitioners.

  John Roger wanted to know how it could possibly be that no one she had lived and worked with knew who she was. The house mistress said such a circumstance was far more common in this world more than he might think. She suggested the possibility that the person who wrote the letter was someone Margarita had never wanted to see again, almost certainly a man—a father, a husband, a lover. Someone who had somehow found out where she was and what name she was using and had written to tell her something she could not bear.

  Like what? John Roger said.

  Who knows? Maybe that he was coming for her.

  If that were so, John Roger said, a lot of questions could be answered when that person showed up.

  Possibly, the woman said. If that were so.

  He went to her grave. The house mistress herself had paid to keep her remains out of the lowest ground in the cemetery—the mucky preserve of the criminal and the kinless and those without name—and had her buried in higher ground and under a simple stone tablet engraved with “Margarita Damascos” and “1880” below the name. He could not stop himself from imagining the unspeakable loneliness of the casket. The immutable darkness and silence of it. Her dead self within, so lovely and comforting and pleasurable in the warm living flesh and now but dark cold rot. He’d had similar thoughts and sensations at Elizabeth Anne’s funeral, and now as then he was appalled by his rank perversity and did not believe that anyone of sound mind could have such macabre graveside imaginings.

  He began calling at El Castillo once a week to see if anyone had come looking for Margarita Damascos. And was each time told that no one had. During the first weeks of this routine, he sometimes bought the services of a girl, but none of them was a listener such as Margarita had been and he soon gave up trying to talk to them as he had talked to her. Before long even his enjoyment of their flesh waned and he ceased patronizing them altogether, much to the annoyance of the house mistress. He persisted in his weekly inquiry for six months before concluding that no one was ever going to come in search of her—and whatever unendurable disclosure the letter had brought and she had put to the match would remain her eternal secret.

  He would not return to El Castillo, and knew he would not again lay with a woman. And if his sexual memories of Elizabeth Anne would sometimes become too much to ignore and compel him to a weeping self-abuse . . . well, so be it.

  DISCOVERIES

  They made their first trip to the cove when they were fourteen years old, and they went there by running the rapids on a raft of their own making. They had by that time made numerous excursions into the jungle and were sometimes gone longer than a week. Josefina had scolded them for disobeying their father by never telling her which way they were going and for how long, and Blake Cortéz had said Well, if he asks, tell him we went north. She asked if that was the truth and he grinned and shrugged, then dodged the swat of her cane. If you two think I’ll keep lying to your father for you, you’re very wrong, Josefina said. Then tell him the truth, James Sebastian said. You forgot what we told you because you’re too old to remember anything.

  “Ay, que desgraciado sinvergüenza!” Josefina said, swinging her cane.

  John Roger had never tried to enforce his provisos on the twins’ jungle ventures. But the raft was a different matter. Reynaldo the mayordomo had thought so too. He was not one to relay to John Roger the twins’ every peccadillo that came to his ear, but when his informants told him the twins were building a raft at the landing just above the start of the rapids and that it was nearly finished, he could guess what they intended to do, and he thought it his duty to tell their father. In all the collective lore of the hacienda, nobody had ever survived the rapids.

  That evening at the dinner table John Roger told the twins he knew about the raft and forbade them from attempting the white water.

  “Yes sir,” one said, and the other nodded and said, “Whatever you say, sir.”

  He knew they were lying. They were going to try it no matter his prohibition or what punishments he might threaten. He had thought of putting men at the landing to prevent them from shoving off. Of having the raft destroyed in the night. But if he did either of those things they would just build another raft in secrecy and on some other stretch of the river. He told himself he was a damned fool for even thinking of trying to stop them.

  He had been feeling this sense of foolishness about the twins for some time. Since the day when he was just about to restrict them to their room yet again for some infraction or other but suddenly saw no point to it, not even as gesture. The punishment was an illusion, after all. They would stay in the room for no reason except they agreed to. They could escape whenever they wished and they knew he knew it. That’s when it occurred to him that everybody knew it. Nothing of interest ever happened on Buenaventura that did not immediately become part of its circulation of gossip, and the twins’ previous escapes from his efforts to punish them had surely been bruited through the compound and even out to the villages. The gist of such talk—as he learned from Reynaldo after insisting that the man be entirely candid with him—was an amused admiration for the twins’ daring and resourcefulness, and a sincere sympathy for the patrón, a worthy man of great dignity except in contesting with his twin sons. John Roger had felt the embarrassment of it like a well-deserved slap. To be pitied by peons for his indignities with the twins—good Christ! Thus did he recognize the folly, the very ignominy, of trying to force them to his will.

  He excused himself to Vicki Clara as he got up from his chair, then left.

  John Samuel glared at them from across the table as Victoria Clara gave careful attention to her soup. Their brother’s censorious scowls had become so familiar to the twins that between themselves they had taken to calling him Mister Sourmouth. One evening in the library they had referred to him by that name before remembering Vicki’s presence, then saw her small smile even as she kept her eyes on the book in her lap.

  They grinned at John Samuel’s hard look. “What about you, hermano mayor?” one of them said. “Will you spare a tear when we are drowned?”

  “I’ll never understand why Father tolerates your insolence,” John Samuel said, rising from his chair. “Were I in his shoes, I would have packed you off to a military school years ago.”

  The twins laughed, and one said, “Father’s shoes would fit you like a pair of washtubs.”

  John Samuel reddened, then started for the door. Then stopped and looked back at Vicki Clara, who seemed unsure what
to do. “Señora?” he said. She dabbed at her lips with her napkin and gave the twins a fleet commiserative smile as she got up and then accompanied her husband from the room.

  Two days later they made the run, waiting till sunup before shoving off—the ride would be hazardous enough without attempting it in less than full light. They lashed their knapsacks tightly to the deck and checked and rechecked the tightness of the ropes engirdling the raft and once again rosined the pushpoles to ensure a good grip. They could faintly hear the rush of the white water where it began a half mile downriver. Each time they caught each other’s eye they grinned.

  When the sun was risen into the trees they threw off the lines and pushed off. They hadn’t gone fifty yards before the current began a swift acceleration. They slid the pushpoles under the deck lashings and took off their hats and crammed them under the knapsacks and lay down side by side on their stomachs and took firm hold of the cross-deck rope lashed taut over the planks. The raft was going faster yet and swaying from side to side and the river ahead grew louder. Then they saw the white water directly before them and saw too there was a small drop just ahead of it and then the raft seemed to leap off the river before smashing down into a snarling torrent and they were pitching and bucking and the jungle was a green blur to either side of them as the raft rocketed downriver and was jarring off one cluster of jutting rocks after another and rearing skyward and plunging headlong and tilting sidewise and almost overturning and then banging off one steep bank to go spinning across the deranged river and bang off the other as the boys held on with all their might and bellowed in wild glee as they were slung about with arms twisting and legs flapping and at times they were in weightless detachment from the raft entirely but for their grip on the crossrope before again being slammed against the deck so hard that for days after they would be dappled with bruises. They sped along on the wild water, yawing and lofting and plunging and wheeling through a drenching tumult for some six miles, by their later estimate, that passed under them faster than they could believe before the river vanished and they were aloft—having arrived at a small falls they’d had no idea would be there, that nobody on the hacienda knew was there. The raft fell for what seemed to them an eternity of terrified elation—and was in fact a drop of almost twenty feet—before they collided with the water below in a foaming crash that clouted their heads against the deck and nearly banged them unconscious and loose of the deck rope.

  They could not have said which fact was the more astonishing, that the raft was still right-side-up or that they were still on it.

  The falls marked the end of the rapids. The twins lay dazed and gasping as the raft carried in a slow swirl away from the crashing water. Blake Cortéz said something but James Sebastian couldn’t make it out and yelled, “What?”

  “I saaaaid, goddammit . . . it’s goood to be aliiive!”

  “You can say that again! Man, I saw stars!”

  They had knots under the hair plastered to their foreheads, and their mouths were bloody, but they had lost no teeth and their bones were intact. They hung over the side of the raft and slurped up water and rinsed out the blood, then looked at each other and started laughing again. And kept at it for a while for no reason but it felt so good to laugh.

  “Say, friend, tell me something,” James Sebastian said. “Who would you say are the best rivermen in the whole wide world?”

  “Well sir,” Blake said, “as it is contrary to my nature to engage in mendacity except when necessary to gain my objective or the plain damn fun of it, I’d say in no uncertain terms that it’s them there inimitable Wolfe brothers.”

  “You mean them two that kinda look alike except the Jake one’s better-looking?”

  “No sir. I mean them other two that sorta look alike except the Blackie one is by far the handsomer as any mirror will attest.”

  “Oh him! The simple one with the poor eyesight who tries so hard to hide his ignorance behind a lot of fancy words. That poor fella.”

  “In point of actual fact, sir, the gent to whom you allude has got the visual acuity of a hawk and the intelligence of Aristotle, qualities so obvious to one and all that only the mentally deficient can fail to perceive them.”

  They carried on in this way even as they took up the pushpoles and steered the raft along the center of the current’s easy glide. The trees down here were even taller and more densely leaved than above the falls, their shadows deeper. The light held a green haze. The boom of the falls began to fade as soon as they rounded the first meander, and soon the only sounds besides the twins’ voices were bird cries and the high chatter of monkeys. The riverbanks here were of altered character. No longer blunt and lined with reeds like most of the banks above the falls but low-sloped with narrow beaches.

  And roosting all along them, like a littering of dark and rough-barked logs, were crocodiles.

  They could derive no explanation for them. Upriver of the rapids, a crocodile was a rarity, though alligators common. But no alligator that had ever been brought back to the compound landing had exceeded thirteen feet, while most of the crocodiles here were longer than that. They saw several that exceeded fifteen feet before Blake said, “Christ amighty, Jeck, lookee there!” He directed his brother’s attention to the bank ahead where lay a monster of no less than seventeen feet. “That’s a goddam dragon!” As the raft went gliding by, some of the crocs slid into the water and vanished but most remained still as stone on the narrow beaches. There were more of them around the next bend. The twins agreed they looked like money just waiting to be skinned off and rolled up.

  They then began to notice skeletal fragments of sundry sorts littering the banks. A section of horned cow skull. Segments of ribcages large and small. “That’s how come there’s so many here,” Blake said. “Everything that goes into the river up there ends up down here.”

  “That’s right,” James Sebastian said. “Think of all the guts and scraps the slaughterhouse sweeps into the river every damn day. And no telling how many cows and burros and pigs and dogs fall in and get washed down to all these waiting jaws.”

  “Falls in or gets thrown in, dead or alive,” Blake said. And pointed at a portion of human cranium on the bank. “Whatever goes in alive is sure as hell dead by the time it gets here, and good thing, too.”

  “It’s how come these fellas are so big and fat. They don’t hardly have to work to eat their fill.”

  “Hacendados of the river,” Blake said.

  For most of the next hour of their slow downriver glide they saw no lack of crocodiles. But as the raft went farther downstream, where less and less of the river carrion carried, their number dwindled until there were no more to see. Then the raft went around yet another bend and they saw bright light ahead, where the trees gave way. And arrived at the cove.

  They whooped as they cleared the trees and glided onto the sunlit water. “Ensenada de Isabel! We’re there, brother!” Blake shouted. “You smell it? You smell that sea?”

  James said he smelled it and heard it too, just beyond the palms across the way. They spied the house on the low bluff where they knew to look for it, and were surprised to see the dock still standing off its beachfront. Farther down the beach, at the south end of the cove where it had been landed by some great storm and who knew when, the Lizzie lay on its side, its broken mast angled awkwardly but not completely sheared.

  As they poled toward the dock, they directed each other’s attention to this or that part of the cove, to the clarity of the water and the green wall of jungle and the mouth of the inlet they were now at an angle to see. They eased up to the end of the dock and made the raft fast to the same posts on which the Lizzie’s snapped mooring lines still hung into the water. They leaped onto the dock and ran to the beach and raced around its south end and past the Lizzie and to the far side of the cove and through the stand of palm trees to the rocky shore and hollered in exultation at their first sight of the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Look at it, Jake! Just look at it!”
Blake yelled, hair tossing in the wind, arms spread wide as if he would embrace the entire sea. They stood there for a time, beholding the sunbright breadth of gulf, then went back through the trees to have a closer look at the rocky inlet.

  They saw it was a tricky passage but told each other they could do it, they who had never yet sailed anything larger than a homemade twelve-foot pram on any water other than the nearly windless Río Perdido. Blake said the thing to do if you sailed up from southward was to go past this point a ways and then turn landward and run up just as close to shore as you could before heeling her over to come at the pass dead on.

  “That’s how I see it,” James Sebastian said. “I’ll man the tiller and you work the lines.”

  “That’s exactly the opposite of how we’ll do it.”

  “That so?”

  They grappled and fell in the sand in a grunting tangle, and as usual neither was able to pin the other and they called it a draw. Blake then wondered how fast a fella could swim across the cove to the raft about eighty yards away. James grinned back at him and they threw off their clothes and crouched side by side on the bank and agreed to a count of three. In unison they counted “One”—and dove in. They cut through the water side by side with the smoothness of sharks homing on prey and did not slow down until they reached the raft and it was impossible to say which one’s hand was the first to slap against it, the two slaps sounding like one. They argued in gasps about who had won and tried to dunk each other, then finally pulled themselves up on the planks and flopped onto their backs, chests heaving.