by James Blake
She finished with the salve and they went across the little hall to her room and snuggled into her bed. But when they began to caress her she shrank from their touch. No, she said, not tonight.
Why not? one asked. What’s wrong?
Affecting pique, she said, Wouldn’t you like to know?
Then laughed at their expression and drew them to her.
John Roger was working at the big desk in his office the next morning when they appeared at the open door and asked if they could have a word with him. It was an effort to mask his surprise. They had never come to him unsummoned. He said to come in and pull a pair of chairs up to his desk. He took off his spectacles—he had needed them for reading these past two years and had long since become adept at opening them one-handed. He studied the twins’ swollen and yellow-dappled faces. The only other time they had not looked identical was when their faces had been bruised in a fight defending some smaller boys against bullies. But, as then, the temporary difference in their facial markings in no wise let him know who was James and who Blake, and he felt his familiar guilt for not knowing.
“Guess you heard we rode the rapids,” one said.
“I did,” he said. “And yet here you are, still among the quick. No small feat.”
“Yessir,” the other said.
“Don’t mistake my wonderment for admiration, and certainly not for approval.”
“No sir,” the same one said.
Such ready agreement was another surprise. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t ironical.
He gestured at their faces. “Vestiges of the saga, no doubt.” He sniffed the air with a frown. “I take it that stuff is of the crone’s making?”
“Yessir,” one said.
“We just thought you ought to hear it from us, sir,” the other said. “That we went on the rapids, I mean.”
“I see. Am I to assume, then, you’re here to receive your due punishment for disobedience?”
“Well, if you want to punish us, sir, you can,” one said.
“I’m grateful for your consent.”
“I didn’t mean it like that, sir. Sorry.”
And now apology! A dies mirabilis if ever there were one.
“So that’s not why you’re here.”
“No sir,” said the other. “Not actually.”
The pendulum on the mantle clock sounded the passing seconds. “Are we waiting to see if I can guess?”
“Well sir,” said one, “it’s about that house on the beach.”
“We went all the way down there, you see,” said the other. “To that little, ah, bay, or cove I guess you’d call it.”
There were footfalls in the hallway and they stopped at the office door. John Roger looked past the twins and raised his brow in question. The twins turned to see John Samuel gaping at them in manifest amazement. “I beg your pardon, Father,” he said, “I didn’t . . . I. . . .”
“Are those the shipment figures?”
John Samuel looked down at the papers in his hand. “Yes. Yes, they are.”
“We’ll review them in your office as soon I’m finished here.”
John Samuel seemed unsure what to do. The twins turned back to their father.
“I’ll be there presently,” John Roger said.
“Yes sir, very well,” John Samuel said. His footsteps receded down the hall.
“How did you know about the house?” John Roger asked.
They were ready for that question. “You mean before we saw it?” one said. “We didn’t know about it before we saw it.”
“We didn’t even know about that little harbor,” the other said. “We thought the river would take us straight into the gulf.
“When we got to the cove and saw the house, well, we figured you’d built it.”
A quarter of a century ago, John Roger thought. Or near to it. A decade before they were born. The jungle at its back, the sea in its face. He had not been to the cove since Elizabeth Anne’s death. The idea of being there without her was as lonely as a grave. “So it’s still standing then?”
“Oh, yes sir, it sure is,” one said. “You can tell nobody’s been there in a long while, but it’s in pretty good shape, all things considered.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” John Roger said. “It was built by the best crew on the coast. You couldn’t bring it down but with dynamite. You had to hike back, of course. I’ll wager there’s not much left of the wagon track.”
“No sir, not more than a snake road,” one said. “It’s how come our faces took such a beating.”
John Roger took a cigar from the humidor on the desk and cleanly bit off the smaller end and spat it into the cuspidor beside the desk and put the cigar in his mouth and patted his coat and then his vest in search of a match. One of the twins took a match from his shirt pocket and struck it on the rasp set into the lid of the cigar case and held the flame to his father’s cigar and John Roger fired it to his satisfaction and nodded his thanks. He asked to hear more about the place, what it looked like now.
They told him in detail, and when they got to the part about the bats’ panicked exodus from the bedroom—hunkering in their chairs with their arms covering their heads as they told it—his grin had a greater gusto than they had ever seen.
He was grinning as much at their theatrics and their capacity to laugh at themselves as at the tale itself. Grinning most of all in pleasure at the present moment, a moment he had thought past all possibility—his twin sons telling him things of their own volition, entertaining him. Their eyes showing the same light he’d seen in Elizabeth Anne’s eyes when she first looked on the place and every time she spoke of the cove in the days thereafter. The too brief, too swift days thereafter.
They told him of the dock that still stood solid and of the sloop whose only major impairment was a sheared mast. Ah yes, he thought, the Lizzie. He could imagine their excitement at the discovery of it. They no doubt understood it was named for their mother, but they had never mentioned her in his presence and so it was unlikely they would allude to her even indirectly by saying the name of the boat. Their refusal to ask him about her, about himself, about anything, was as baffling to him as ever, but whatever their reason, he had to admire their tenacity in holding to it. Margarita had been right those years ago when she said he respected their will more than he knew.
He wasn’t unaware of the sentimentality he was indulging, nor of his old guilt about them. Still, the moment they’d appeared at his door he’d known it was for no reason except they wanted something they could not have except through him. Wanted it dearly. And he now knew it was the cove. The cove with its sturdy house. And of course the boat—the boat for damned sure and maybe even more than the house. They would want to live there, naturally. In that wild isolation between the jungle and the sea. They had come to him in hope that he would grant their wish, even though they had little cause to believe he would. In addition to the gall they surely had to swallow to come to him, they were risking the ignominy of being refused. Such risk called for a different kind of courage from the physical sort they possessed without limit. He was impressed.
But he also knew they were not being fully forthright. As always with them, there were things they were not telling. Certain facts withheld. Secrets at work. He could sense it. He thought it likely they already had some use in mind for the place but he doubted they would tell him what it was. Then told himself, So what? He had come to fear that some day they would disappear into the jungle never to return and he would not know whether they had been killed or had kept on going to somewhere other without even a fare-thee-well. If he should give them what they wanted he would at least know where they were. Some of the time, anyway. Because once they repaired that boat their whereabouts would never be more specific than out on the gulf or someplace on its sizable coast, perhaps nearby, perhaps not. He knew that too.
They had been watching his eyes and had seen that they were going to get what they’d come for, and they restrained the urge t
o grin at each other.
He spared them even the need to ask. “Listen. That old house is just collecting mold. I don’t know if you’re interested, but if you want to fix it up so it’s habitable, that’s fine by me. If you’re willing to do the labor, I’ll underwrite the project.”
The twins swapped a glance that to him seemed expressionless.
“Fix it up?” one said. “Well now, there’s a thought.”
“Yeah, it is,” the other said. “Might be fun.”
Their dissimulation struck him as more daring than artful, but he appreciated their quickness to employ it, given the opportunity. “It’s a fine place for fishing,” he said, “as I recall.”
“Say now, we could maybe put a new mast on that little boat,” one said to the other. “Do some fishing out on the gulf, sail around a little. I’m game. You?”
“Why not?” the other said. Then said to their father, “We’ll be needing a bunch of materials, though. Supplies. Tools. There’s tools there, but mostly in bad shape, as you can imagine.”
“Get what you need from the compound store. Anything it doesn’t have, tell Reynaldo and he’ll order it from Veracruz.”
“Firearms,” one said.
John Roger stared at him.
“For meat.”
“And protection,” the other said. “As you know, sir, there’s poisonous snakes and some awful big cats around there, to judge from some of the yowlings we heard.”
“Yes there are,” John Roger said. “Get what you need from the armory.”
“Yessir, except, well, there’s only those old muzzleloaders and caplock pistols. If we were in a tight and had to quick shoot at something more than once, well…”
“You want repeaters.”
“Winchester’s said to be dependable.”
“Winchester,” John Roger echoed.
“We understand they’re hard to come by in Mexico, but we saw in a magazine that there’s a place in New Orleans that—”
“I know a closer source,” John Roger said. “I’ll send word this afternoon and they’ll be here in a few days. I assume .44-40s would meet with your satisfaction.”
“Yessir,” one said. “Forty-four forties be just fine.” He rubbed at the edge of his eye as if to remove a speck as the other coughed lightly into his fist. John Roger almost smiled at their clumsy efforts to mask their pleasure. Whatever they had expected of this meeting it certainly wasn’t that it would go in their favor—and for damn sure not as far as Winchesters.
“Reynaldo will get you the burros you need. And if you should ever improve that trail enough, you can have a wagon. Naturally, you’d need a labor gang to cut a proper wagon road, and that can be arranged.”
“Well, sir,” one said, “we’ll probably hold off on that for a while, at least till we’ve taken care of everything else all good and proper.”
John Roger understood him to mean they would never widen the trail. He should have known that. Why would they want to make it easier for others to get down there? They wanted to be hard to reach.
“Well, it’s up to you. You’re the ones who’ll be using it. Anything else you want to ask for?”
They dropped their smiles. “We weren’t asking, sir,” one said. “Just stating the necessities.”
“I see,” he said. And thought, I’ll be damned. They come hat in hand and I give them what they want without their having to ask and then they get proud about not asking. “There’s one condition,” he said. Until that moment he had not thought to impose a condition, but they were not, by damn, going to have it all their own way.
“Condition, sir?”
“You come home every, ah, two weeks, let us say. And you stay three days.”
“But sir,” one said, “why would . . .?”
“If you want to make sure we’re getting our proper nourishment,” the other one said with a crooked smile, “well sir, we can feed ourselves.”
He looked from one to the other. “That’s the bargain, gentlemen. Feel free to turn it down.”
“No sir, no, we’re not turning it down,” one said. “It’s just that there’s a lot of work to do and if we have to leave off from it for three days every couple of weeks, well, it’ll take a whole lot longer to ever get done than if we can apply ourselves to it more, ah, consistently.”
“Why don’t we say . . . every three months?” the other said.
“Let’s say at the end of every month,” John Roger said, “and you stay two nights.”
“Suppose we say—”
“Suppose we say it’s settled.”
They read his eyes. “Yessir.”
He swept a pointing finger from one to the other. “Break the bargain and I’ll send a crew down there with dynamite to blast that house to splinters and sink that boat a mile offshore. I hope you gents believe me.”
“Yessir,” one said. The other nodded.
He consulted the calendar on the wall. “We’re already near the end of this month and you won’t be ready to set off for a week or two. No sense in making you come right back at the end of June. You don’t have to make the first visit till the end of July.”
“All right, sir,” one said.
“Well then,” he said, “you had best get to it.”
They were at the door when they turned to look at him, who was at the moment bent over a bottom drawer in search of a match to refire his cigar.
“Thank you, Father.”
He was arrested. They had never thanked him, never called him anything other than “sir.”
But when he sat up to look, they were gone.
As they went out the casa grande’s front doors, Blake said, “Any sonofabitches ever go down there and try to blow up that house—”
“Or sink that boat.”
“Be the last damn thing they ever try.”
“That’s it.”
They grinned at each other. Winchesters, by Jesus!
The first thing John Samuel wanted to know when his father arrived at his office was what “they” had wanted.
John Roger told him of their intention to fix up the cove house and the Lizzie.
“I’m glad of it, frankly,” John Roger said. “It’ll give them something constructive to do.”
“Will they be living out there from now on?”
John Roger sighed. “Most of the time, yes.”
John Samuel looked out the window and smiled.
That they had known about the cove and its house and boat before they ever went there was a truth they could not have admitted to their father without confessing to an act worse than their lie. A few months earlier, having just read about the newest models of Colt revolvers, they recalled Josefina’s description of the gun their mother had used to shoot the younger Montenegro. Josefina said it was the largest pistol she had ever seen. Shaped like a pig’s hind leg, she said, and almost that big, and their mother had held it with both hands to shoot. James Sebastian was sure it was an old Walker, and Blake Cortéz said maybe, or a later Dragoon. They wondered if the gun might still be around.
The next time their father rode off to one of his all-day surveys of the coffee farm, they slipped into his bedroom and made a thorough search of it but did not find the pistol. They then went downstairs and sneaked into his office and Blake rummaged a wall cabinet while James Sebastian searched the desk.
“Not here,” Blake said.
“Hey Black, look at this,” James said. He was perusing a set of photographs he had found in the desk’s middle drawer. They were old studio pictures, most of them of their mother, some of their mother and father together, a few of which included John Samuel, who was an infant in some of them.
“How young Father was,” Blake said. “And Momma. She looks like a girl.”
“This musta been made about the same time as the one Josefina’s got.”
They were tempted to take one of the pictures of their mother but thought their father might notice it was missing when he next looked through the
m, and they left the pictures as they found them. The Dragoon was in the top right drawer. James Sebastian took it out and saw that it was fully charged. He held it this way and that, aimed it at the map of Mexico affixed to the opposite wall, sighting on the heart of the country, on the Yucatán, at the rooster foot that was the Baja California territory. Then passed it to his brother, saying, “Feel the heft.”
“Now this here’s a damn gun,” Blake said. He set it on half cock and with his other hand rotated the cylinder with a soft ticking. They had read much about the early Colts and if they had been obliged to load this weapon they had never set hand to before now they could have done so. Could have charged each chamber of the cylinder and seated a ball in it by means of the lever under the barrel and capped the nipple over each chamber for firing. “They say you can hammer ten-penny nails with this thing all day long and it’ll still shoot straight as a sunray.”
“Imagine what a .44 ball did to that boy’s head Momma shot,” James said. “About like a mallet would do a watermelon.”
“ Momma sure musta been something! Just imagine her shooting this thing.”
“And good as she did.”
“Like to shoot it myself, but we can’t even ask Reynaldo to ask him. They’d want to know how we know about it.”
They admired the Colt a while longer and then put it back in its drawer. Then thought to look in the others to see if they held anything of interest. The bottom right drawer and the top left one contained only business records. Then James Sebastian tried the bottom left drawer and said, “Say now.” It was locked.
They examined the keyhole and recognized the kind of lock it contained and smiled at its simplicity. They had crafted skeleton keys that could open any sort of lock to be found in the casa grande, locks to doors and desks and trunks and such, but they liked to keep in practice with simpler implements. James opened his pocketknife and inserted the blade tip into the keyhole and made a careful probe and angled the blade just so and gave it a gentle turn and the lock disengaged.
