Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  After a while they untied one of the two oilskin knapsacks lashed to the deck and took out a canteen and two of Josefina’s cornhusk-wrapped tamales filled with bits of goat meat and red chile. They sat cross-legged and ate the tamales and passed the canteen between them and studied the house on the bluff. After fourteen years of neglect and the poundings of sun and rain and at least four hurricanes, its only visible damage from where they sat were a few missing shingles and a front shutter hanging askew and patches of peeling paint. Beside the house was a small stable with a collapsed roof.

  After they ate they took ropes and machetes and went over to the Lizzie and examined her and found no holes or cracks in the hull. They hacked off the mast at the point where it was broken and dragged it out of the way, then attached one rope to the sloop’s bow and one to the stern and then pulled in tandem, first on one rope and then on the other, now dragging the bow closer to the water and now dragging the stern, and in this bit-by-bit manner they worked the boat into the water. Once the sloop was afloat they climbed up into her and went below and inspected the interior hull and found only two minor leaks. Even as weathered as she was, the boat was free of serious defect other than the broken mast, which would be simple enough to replace. New sails and rigging, new fittings, some sanding, some oakum, a coat of paint, and she’d be ready for the open sea again.

  Their confidence in the sloop’s seaworthiness was founded on their study of boating manuals and the experience of having built a boat themselves, a little gaffrigged pram. They named it for Marina, who fashioned its sail from flour sacks. It was a vessel of much mirth to the fishermen in their dugouts not only for its makeshift aspect but because the river breeze was frail at best and often nonexistent. A sailboat, even one this small, was simply out of place on the Río Perdido. Still, on its maiden try, the twins managed to sail it upriver for about a half mile with the weak breeze behind them before they came about and dropped the sail and rode the current back to the landing dock. The short trip took the better part of a day, and as they tied up at the dock they were aware of their father watching them from a high balcony of the house but did not let him know they had seen him. At that distance they could not see his smile nor anyway have known that he was recalling another small sailboat of another time and the young twins who often sailed it from Portsmouth Bay to the Isles of Shoals—and did so once in a squalling heaving sea.

  They gained facility at sailing in the river’s weak wind, but they hankered for the open sea they’d not yet laid eyes on and for a larger boat to sail upon it. When they learned of Ensenada de Isabel, their keenest interest wasn’t in the cove itself or in its house but in the sloop their father kept moored at the cove pier. They wondered if the boat was there still, and if it was, if it might be in reparable condition. Very likely it was in ruin or long ago sunk. There was one way to know for sure. They had anyway been wanting to try the rapids everyone spoke of in such ominous voice. And so began to construct a suitable raft.

  They were of course thrilled that the sloop was in reparable condition—and now that they’d seen the cove, were no less enthusiastic about the place itself, recognizing its manifold advantages. Its isolation and natural camouflage against detection. Its bounty of natural sustenance. And the house on the little bluff. They hauled the Lizzie out of the water again and up high on the beach, then went to retrieve their clothes and shook the sand from them and put them on. Then went back around the cove and up the bluff to have a closer look at the house.

  The pilings looked like they would stand till the end of time. The gallery steps were solid, so too the gallery floor. The front door had swelled from the humidity and they had to shoulder it open. There was a smell of mold and decay and something else, some stink they could not identify, and they opened all the shutters to air the place. Spiderwebs everywhere, but the ceiling showed only a few water stains. An oil lamp lay in shatters on the floor. Some of the wicker furniture was overturned and one of the chairs was in shreds, but most of the furniture and lamps appeared functional. In the kitchen a window was missing its shutter and the floor held the dry mudprints of a young jaguar. In the pantry were a tattered sack of beans and a bag of salt hardened to rock, strings of jerky like sticks of black wood. The stink was coming from behind the bedroom door and when they opened it they startled a colony of roosting bats and they yelled and crouched down with their arms clasped over their heads as the creatures fled the house in a shrilling dark cyclone of beating wings. The reeking layer of guano on the floor made their eyes water.

  They found the roof missing only a handful of shingles. The widow’s walk was still securely in place and they marveled at the view from it. They checked the cisterns and saw they would need a thorough cleaning, but the piping system into the house was in good order. A shed behind the house held a variety of tools, most of them coated with rust. “He couldn’t use much of this with just one hand,” Blake said. “Momma had both hands,” said James Sebastian.

  They went back around to the front of the house and sat on the verandah steps and stared out at the cove and neither of them said anything for a time. They had reason to believe John Samuel’s only time at the cove had been in his childhood and that their father had not been here since their mother’s death. There was no sign of anyone else having been there in all those years, either, proof of how well the inlet was hidden from gulf view.

  At length Blake said, “A fella could live out here real nice.”

  “Make himself a little money, too,” James said. “What with all those hides just up the river.”

  They were there for three days, exploring the area around the house and clearing out the guano, shoveling several wheelbarrow loads before finishing the job on hands and knees with trowels and buckets, gagging even through the bandanas over their lower faces.

  They slept on the verandah. The large hammock on which their parents had passed so many enjoyable nights was still suspended from the rafters, its craftsmanship and treated hemp resistant to the attritions of time and weather, and they took nightly turns sleeping on it and on a smaller hammock they hung beside it. They fed on coconut milk and mangos, on fish they caught on handlines and roasted over open fires, on oysters gathered from the shallows and pried open with their knives and eaten raw or after baking in the fire. And all the while, they talked about the enterprise they thought to operate from this place once they had fixed up the house and boat. They made a list of the materials they would need to make the repairs—the kegs of pitch and oakum and caulking and solvents, the buckets of paint, the shingles, the sails, the fittings, the special tools and so on.

  There was of course a problem. One so obvious they had been skirting it and whose only solution was also so obvious that neither of them had to say it. A solution that held no appeal, requiring them as it would to renege on a vow of long standing. On the other hand, they told each other, things changed, and vows sometimes had to change with them. It was a matter of common sense.

  “No matter how you cut it, it’s gonna be double humiliating if the answer’s no,” Blake said.

  “Yeah,” James said. “I’d rather take an ass whipping. But there’s no other way.”

  “Hell with it. He says no, we’ll come anyway.”

  “And if some bunch comes after us, we’ll go in the bush. Like to see them find us in there.”

  “And we’ll re-mast that boat some kinda way and rig some kinda sail and—”

  “—we’ll start taking croc hides and—”

  “—load em on the boat and—”

  “Damn right.”

  They returned to the compound by way of the vestigial wagon track on which no one had passed since their father’s last visit. Where it had not overgrown the track completely, the rampant foliage had narrowed it to an indefinite footpath and they had to hack their way through in some places. The jungle steamed, droned, shrieked as in some primeval madness. They daubed mud on their faces to fend the mosquitoes but the sweat kept washing it off and the bug
s fed on them between applications. The brush slashed at their faces. At night they made a pair of small campfires on the trail and hung their hammocks low between them and under a drape of mosquito netting, and at every low growl from the surrounding darkness tightened their grips on their machetes.

  They were two full days on that rugged track and arrived at the compound at a late hour of the second night. The guards opened the gates to admit them, and they crossed the plaza and vanished into the shadows and snuck around to the dark alamo grove adjacent to the casa grande’s garden wall. In childhood they had dug various tunnels between the casa grande enclave and the main compound—and even one under the compound wall itself, running from the back of a stable stall out to a growth of brambles. Josefina and Marina had long suspected the existence of the tunnels and were sure that one of them ran under the garden wall, but the inner walls were lined with thorny shrubbery too dense for the women to search closely for the tunnel opening, and no telling where in the outer alamo grove the other end of the tunnel might be. It was a wonder to them the twins could pass through those thorns without a scratch.

  They crawled through the tunnel and out into the shrubbery and then lay motionless, listening hard, making sure no one else was in the garden. Then crossed as silent as shadows to the kitchen door.

  As soon as they entered the kitchen, where a lantern always burned through the night, Josefina came out of her room, belting her robe, her colorless hair hanging loose and her dark face pinched with sleep. She shook a finger at them and whispered reproofs for their rashness with the rapids. You’re very lucky to be alive, she said. One of them made to hug her but she recoiled with a face of disgust and told them they stank to high heaven and their clothes looked like they were made of dirt. And your faces! You look like you’ve been trying to kiss cats!

  “We have, but I’d rather kiss you, you temptress,” James Sebastian said, reaching for her again.

  She slapped him away with her skinny hand and said, “Cállate con ese inglés! Ya les dije mil veces!” She had never learned English nor cared to and had long since forbidden them from speaking it in her presence, yet they anyway sometimes did, either to keep her from knowing what they were saying or just to rile her for the fun of it.

  Blake Cortéz said it had been easier to kiss the cats than to kiss her. She berated them for their disrespectful tongues and said not even to dream of sitting at her table without at least washing those filthy hands. Then she lit two more lamps and stirred up the oven fire and set about making tortillas and a skillet of eggs scrambled with grated sausage. Marina came from across the hall and made a small sound of dismay at the sight of their ravaged faces. She called them fools and hugged them, one with each arm. Then went upstairs with a lamp to inform their father, as he had instructed her to do if they should show up. He had been notified of their departure, the entire hacienda had known of it—the twins were trying the white water!—and had decided that if they were not back in ten days he would lead a party of men downriver along the old wagon trace to search for their bodies below the rapids.

  He woke to Marina’s light taps on the door and knew it was about them and he readied himself for the worst. “Abre,” he said. She opened the door a few inches and he saw part of her face in the light of the lamp. “Dime,” he said. She told him they were back and both of them unharmed. He thanked her and she said “De nada, Don Juan,” and closed the door. He then lay awake for a time, staring out the window at the starry darkness. And thought, They did it, by damn. They did it!

  They were eating at the kitchen table when Marina returned. They asked what their father said and she told them he’d said nothing other than thank you but that she could tell by his voice he was glad they were all right. Josefina went into her room and returned with a small jar containing a salve of her own invention and gave it to Marina with instructions to apply the medicine to the cuts on the boys’ faces after they bathed. She touched each twin on the head as if conferring a benediction and then returned to her room and shut the door.

  When they finished eating, Marina picked up a lamp and ushered them into the patio and told them to fill the two tubs with well water and strip down and get into them and never mind complaining about the water being too cold. When they were babies she had bathed them in the kitchen, and then in the patio tubs when they were older. They had always liked to play with her breasts through her blouse at bath time and she never made objection. When they began to sprout erections in the tub she smiled at their pride in them, like young explorers who had made a grand discovery. They always giggled through the last stage of every bath when it was time to stand up so she could wash their legs and buttocks and little stiffies. Even after they were old enough to bathe themselves they would often ask her to do their backs, and though she would tease them for helpless children she usually complied. And always, as she attended to their backs, they would squirm around in the tub to face her and she’d return their sly grins and give their cocks a quick gentle squeeze. She was fearful that Josefina would discover them at this naughty play and always kept an eye on the kitchen door. She was startled the first time one of them—they were ten then—ejaculated as she was soaping him. He laughed and she joined in their grins, her hand at her mouth to hide the gaps in her teeth, an action that had become unconscious reflex. He boasted in low voice that they had both done it before with their own hands, and she called them nasty creatures and said they would go blind if they kept at it. In that case, the other one said, she should do for him what she had just done for his brother, not only in fairness but also because she would be helping to save his vision. You think you’re very smart, don’t you? she said, but was again covering her mouth. She glanced toward the kitchen door. Then put her hand to him too.

  They were twelve when Josefina said they were too old to still be bathing in the patio and from then on they had to use a bathing room. They would give Marina a look each time they went off for a bath, and sometimes she ignored it and sometimes she would show up in the bathing room shortly afterward on pretext of making sure they had fresh towels and enough hot water. They would entreat her to wash their hair and scrub their backs, saying she could do it so much better than they could, and she would every time feign irritation and say they weren’t children anymore and could bathe themselves quite well. Then position herself between the two tubs and oblige the rascals. While she washed their hair they would play with her breasts as always, and though they were now putting their hands inside her shirt she still did not chide them for it. But when they started trying to explore under her skirt she pushed their hands away and said, No you don’t, little misters. They tried every time and she continued to rebuff them until one day—they were then thirteen—she thought Oh why not? And they touched her in ways that made obvious their familiarity with female anatomy—a familiarity they could have learned only by experience—and her own pleasure in the bathing games acquired new dimension.

  One day as they were at this fondling game in the bathing room, a twin leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth and she flinched away in shock. She’d had willing sex with several men since the childhood rape that ruined her face but she had never had to question why none of them ever kissed her. The maiming had robbed her of all beauty above the neck except her hair, which at the time hung to the small of her back in a lustrous black spill, but she had refused to keep even that sole reminder of her former comeliness and cut it to a ragged crop barely covering her ears and kept it that way. When she recoiled from the kiss, the twins saw the stark self-revulsion in her eyes. They drew her to them and she made a small whimper as one of them kissed one side of her face while his brother kissed the other. Then they took turns placing soft kisses on her scarred lips. She broke into in tears and clutched to them with an arm around each. One of them said they must be very bad kissers to make her cry and she laughed with them even as she wept. Then was kissing them and kissing them. And that day decided to let her hair grow long again.

  On the
ir fourteenth birthday, less than two months before they rode the rapids, she gave them the present of herself. Despite her brutal introduction to sex, she had learned to enjoy it in the years afterward but she had never imagined how fine it could be when appended to love. She had since made love with the twins many times, one snugged to either side of her in the sturdy little bed and caressing her as she alternated her attentions between them before coupling with one and then the other. Whenever they spent the night with her they always woke before dawn—Josefina the only one already risen at that hour and busy with the breakfast fires—and slipped up to their own room before the rest of the house came astir.

  They finished filling the patio tubs and then stripped and eased into the water, protesting the chill of it, and she sneered and called them sissies. They sped through the washing and got out of the tubs and dried themselves and she made them wrap towels around their waists before going back into the kitchen to sit in the brighter light. She was tender in daubing Josefina’s salve to their facial cuts, stopping at times to bat their hands away from her breasts and bottom, cutting looks toward Josefina’s door and hissing at the twins to behave or she would give them even more bruises.

  The salve was dark yellow and the twins made faces at the reek of it. “I bet she makes it from old dead dogs,” one said and they both laughed. Marina asked what was so funny and one said, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  She said they had been told a thousand times it was impolite to speak English in front of her or Josefina and demanded to know what they had just said. The brothers grinned and one said in Spanish, We said wouldn’t you like to know? They laughed as she swatted at them in feigned affront at the joke they were having on her and told them to hush before they woke the house.