Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  The captain made no reply nor even looked at the man but kept his attention on the watch while some of the strikers shouted their grievances and exhorted the Rurales to take the side of justice, for the love of God. As the minutes ticked away, at least a third of the men broke off from the crowd and hurried back to the mine, ignoring the curses and accusations of cowardice from those who stood fast and who told each other that no two dozen goddam Rurales were a match for 200 miners, even if the only weapons they had were picks and shovels and rocks. Then the five minutes were gone and the captain put away the watch. He raised his arm and the leverings of the carbines sounded like the cranking of some implacable machine. Some of the strikers shouted Get the fuckers! and started running at the lawmen with their picks and shovels raised and they were the first to die when the captain dropped his arm.

  At the opening fusillade the rest of the strikers turned and ran in the other direction. But the carbines continued to fire and fire and powdersmoke billowed and drifted as running men cried out and flung up their arms and reeled and tumbled like drunken acrobats. The Rurales kept shooting until their magazines were emptied and then they re-sheathed the carbines and drew their sabers and put spurs to their horses and charged after the strikers still on the run, slashing at them to right and left and riding over the fallen, then reining their mounts around to make another pass at those still on their feet. In ten minutes it was done. Almost half of the strikers had made it back to the mine. Witnesses would tell of ground turned to red mud, of air laced with the smells of gunpowder and shit and blood. Of the wails of the wounded and the pistolshot to the head of every man of them who could not get up unassisted and walk back to work. Of having to beat away the buzzards and crows to gather the bodies for burial, more than a hundred of them. The following morning, Don Victor put out the word that he was hiring for the mines and by sundown he had replaced every man he’d lost and turned away even more.

  Amos allowed to John Roger that the incident was awful, yes, but he had to agree with Don Victor that the miners’ blood was on the miners’ own hands. “It’s a question of the national good,” Amos said. “I don’t have to remind you, John, how much a country depends on the orderly operations of its economy. A disruption of any those operations is harmful to everyone, to the entire body politic. It simply can’t be tolerated. And if the malcontents won’t yield to reason, well. . . .” He turned up his palms.

  John Roger rolled his cigar between his fingers and studied its burning end. Of course workers could not be permitted to dictate to their employer the terms of their employment. But he was not sure the slaughter of a hundred unarmed men could be justified as a necessary measure to protect the national economy. It seemed to him the only economy that had been protected was that of Don Victor and others like him. But then, such men were the largest part of the nation’s economy. There was also the question of whether a man warranted treatment as a brute simply because he was as ignorant as one, or, more to the point, simply because he could not stop someone from treating him that way. John Roger had heard much about the grueling work of mining and had seen a number of men who had been crippled by it, and he believed that Amos, having lived for years near the mines of Las Nevadas, must have seen even more. Reduced to mendicants, most of them. Becrutched or blind or otherwise maimed. Legless on a little square of wood mounted on metal rollers. All of them, crippled or not, marked with the brand of the mines, a thick pale welt across the forehead made by the tumplines of the endless baskets of ore hauled on their backs up ladder after ladder from the deep torchlit pits.

  Still, the issue was hardly worth an argument with an old friend. “I suppose you’re right,” John Roger said. And held out his glass to Amos’s offer of another dollop of the fine French brandy.

  “Listen,” Amos said, “a few days after that trouble at the mine, I was dining with some associates and I told them about it. One of them said thank God for the Rurales. And somebody else said no, thank Don Porfirio for the Rurales.”

  “Yes,” John Roger said. “A nice point.”

  After breakfast the next morning, Amos gave him a walking tour of the city’s hub. They ambled along the wide sidewalk of Plateros Street, past fashionable shops and restaurants and theaters, the city’s most exclusive clubs, the headquarters buildings of the country’s most lucrative industries, including that of the Nevada Mining Company, and after a time arrived at the immense zócalo, where stood the Presidential Palace and the colossal Metropolitan Cathedral and all the main offices of the federal and municipal governments. John Roger was awed by the bluster and tempo of the city’s core, the ceaseless clatterings of wagons and carriages, the ringing and rumblings of the railed mule trolleys, the press and babble of the sidewalk throngs in their mix of business suits and peón cottons and Indian ponchos. By the nattily uniformed policemen at every street corner. Not even the Boston of his memory had been so vital nor so loud nor so well-policed. Nor had its streets been cleaner than these.

  “They weren’t nearly so clean or safe before Don Porfirio became president, let me tell you,” Amos said. “Law and order, John. To have clean streets and the safety to enjoy them you must first have law and order.” He admitted that it was only the core of the city that was so well kept and secure. Many of the outer neighborhoods were still pestiferous and dangerous places.

  “Nevertheless, you have to credit Don Porfirio for all the improvements to the city,” Amos said. “The police, for example. He brought professionals from Europe to train them, did you know that? He dressed them in those French uniforms not only to give them a more professional look but also a sense of pride. You can bet that he’ll now make the force even more efficient. The Rurales too, if you can imagine them any better at their work than they already are. It’s a new age for Mexico, John. This country’s always been a jackpot of resources, but these people, God love them, have never had what it takes to make use of their own riches. What this country needs is foreign capital and know-how and a good rail system, and it’s getting them. In the next few years there won’t be a corner of the country the rails haven’t reached. But first you have to have order. That’s what Don Porfirio’s brought to this country, John, order. That’s why outside investment’s starting to pour in. And it’s just the beginning, my friend. With Don Porfirio running things again, it’s just the beginning.”

  John Roger grinned. “You speak as though the man can walk on water.”

  “You mock, sir, but much of what he’s doing is almost miraculous. No other Mexican president ever managed to unify so many political camps.”

  “Ya lo sé,” John Roger said. “Pan o palo.”

  “Exactamente, mi amigo. Share my bread or feel my club. A simple offer and a very effective one. And, if you ask me, a damned generous one to make to his enemies. The wise ones always choose the bread.”

  “I can understand why. His enemies have a tendency to vanish. Now and then one gets found out in the scrub with a bullet in the head or his throat cut.”

  “Oh come now, John,” Amos said. “You can’t be serious in that implication.”

  John Roger arched his brow and Amos looked away. Then looked back at him and then they burst out laughing. “Oh hell, let’s eat,” Amos said, and slapped him on the back. They lunched in a restaurant, then returned to the house for a siesta.

  Just before he dozed off, John Roger reflected that his friend had found his rightful calling, and like every man’s calling, it had its own credo and rationale.

  The party for Díaz that evening was in a mansion on a street adjoining the zócalo. John Roger would have preferred to walk there—the better for a close-up view of the city’s center at night—but a light rain was falling and so they took a hired cab. The streets gleamed. The lamplights were nimbused with mist.

  The cavernous ballroom was ablaze with chandeliers. Women sparkled with jewelry. Candles glimmering on the tables, glittering buckets of iced champagne. Ball gowns and tailcoats and military finery. The dance floor a c
olorful whirl of couples spinning to the orchestral strains of Strauss. John Roger was introduced by Amos to army officers and government officials and hacendados from all over central Mexico, but he would remember the names of none of them. The host had provided a number of unmarried girls as dance partners for men who had come without escort, and Amos took happy turns on the floor with all of them. John Roger claimed a bad knee and kept to the table. The closeness of the crowd oppressed him. The babble and laughter. The over-loud music. Only the expectation of meeting Díaz kept him from making an excuse to Amos and their host and taking his leave.

  He had endured for two hours when the host mounted the dais to announce that he had just received a message bearing the president’s sincere regrets that he would not be able to attend the festivities. Don Porfirio and Doña Carmen sent their deepest apologies to everyone present and urged them all to have a good time.

  “Hard luck, chum,” Amos said to John Roger, “but there’ll be other chances.”

  John Roger said he hoped so. Then said he was tired and thought he might be catching cold and so was going to go back to the house and to bed. Amos said he would leave with him but John Roger knew he was enjoying himself and persuaded him to stay.

  He intended to hire a hansom, but when he got outside and saw that the rain had stopped he chose to walk. The night was cold, the air sharp, the streetlights warmly bright. An evening so amenable he decided to alter his route and prolong the walk back, and he turned north at the first street corner he came to.

  A few blocks farther on, the surroundings became distinctly less well tended and the people on the street louder. He came to a crowded little plaza of an unkempt, working-class neighborhood whose architecture testified to a more genteel past. The curbs were lined with litter but the square was gaily lit and piquant with spicy aromas, lively with chatter and laughter, with music from a pair of cantinas on opposite sides of the plaza. At a sidewalk cart he bought a pork tamal and ate it as he ambled. He paused at the open doors of one of the cantinas, in which someone was strumming a guitar and singing in tremulous nostalgia about his boyhood in Durango. He listened for a minute, then moved on, ready to head back to Amos’s.

  He was almost to the corner when he heard a different tune and from a different sort of instrument. Heard it but barely through the surrounding babble and other music, but heard it well enough to recognize it at once, and he halted in his tracks. He thought he might be having an aberrant mental episode. Maybe he was not really hearing the tune but only remembering it after so many years and for who-knew-what reason. He stood rooted, listening hard as passersby sidestepped around him. Now the tune was lost in the laughter of a group of men on the corner just ahead and then the laughter abated and he heard the tune more clearly now among the plaza’s other sounds. And knew he was hearing it with his ears and not just in his head. The tweedle of a hornpipe. Playing “Good Jolly Roger.”

  The tune was coming from his left. From within the chocked-open doors of a small café not five yards away. A sign next to the door showed the name La Rosa Mariposa in ornate but faded lettering. He went to the door and kept to the shadow alongside it and peered into a dimly lighted room with a few small tables and only a single diner and no one at the little bar but a barman in a white apron. The barman was playing the pipe. He looked about thirty years old. Thick through the chest and shoulders, black hair combed back and parted in the center, short mustache. But even at this distance and despite the mustache, John Roger saw the likeness and knew who the man must be and how he had learned that tune.

  For a moment, everything seemed unreal—the barman, the tune, the plaza, the people passing by, the fact that he was in Mexico City, the memory of a brother he had grown up with in a Portsmouth tavern. . . .

  The sensation passed. And he thought, Maybe he taught it to somebody who taught it to this one.

  No. Look at him. He could be my own. He learned it from his father and none other. From Sammy. Whom you have believed dead these many years but is not.

  He is not dead.

  But why has he never. . .?

  Who knows? But if that’s not his son I never drew breath.

  Well then?

  He inhaled deeply. Exhaled slowly. Went inside.

  The barman saw him approaching and set the hornpipe under the counter and wiped his hands on his apron. Good evening, sir. What is your pleasure?

  Tell me, John Roger began, but heard the tight note in his voice and paused to clear his throat. Tell me, that tune you were playing just now. Where did you learn it?

  The barman smiled. The little jig? You liked it, huh?

  Did your father teach it to you?

  The barman’s smile went smaller. Yes, he said. How did you know?

  I would like to speak with him.

  With my father?

  Yes, please. I’m . . . I know him. Listen, is he here? It’s very important I see him.

  But sir, my father . . . well, my father’s dead. He’s been dead for, ah, about ten years, I guess.

  Dead? John Roger repeated the word as if he had never before heard it. In the midst of his stunning understanding that his brother had not died all those years ago, it had not crossed his mind that he might have died since.

  You say you knew my father?

  Yes. Yes, I . . . ten years?

  Yeah, just about.

  What did . . . how did he die?

  Oh God, don’t ask. It wasn’t good. Listen, how do—?

  How did he die? Tell me.

  Jesus, man, if you must know, it was rabies.

  John Roger stared at him. Then down at his hands on the bar top.

  Yeah, see? Like I said, it wasn’t good.

  How did it happen?

  How do you think? He got bit by a dog.

  No, I mean how. What was the circumstance?

  Christ, Mister, what is this? What—?

  Please.

  The barman sighed. Well, I didn’t see it myself. I was in the army then. But the way Mother and my sister told me—the way Father told it to them—he was taking a walk and saw this little kid being threatened by a dog. A little kid scared really bad. There was nobody else around except a bunch of boys watching from across the street. Probably hoping to see the kid get all torn up—you know, for the entertainment, how kids are. So Father grabbed up the boy, but the dog bit him, bit Father I mean. Bit him on the leg and ran off. When he told Mother about it she got worried right away the dog might be rabid but Father told her he didn’t think so, it didn’t act like any rabid dog he’d ever seen, only like a mean one. He said he wouldn’t have taken any chances with a mad dog, kid or no kid. Mother asked around the neighborhood if there had been any report of a mad dog, but nobody had heard anything. So anyhow, about three weeks later, Father started getting really sick in a way that everybody knew what it was. If you know about rabies I don’t have to tell you what it was like after that. I saw a guy in the army die of it and I never want to see it again. The way Mother told it, it was the same way for Father. They had to get some of the neighborhood men to wrestle him onto the bed and tie him down and put a stick between his teeth and be damned careful not to let him bite them and so on, the whole awful business. Sófi—my little sister—she said he bucked so hard he nearly turned the bed over. He had horrible hallucinations. Pissed himself, shit himself, the whole neighborhood heard him screaming. They begged Mother to put him out of his agony. Stab him in the heart with an ice pick, they told her, for the love of God. Poison him, something. Sófi said Mother thought about it. It nearly made her crazy to see him like he was, but she just couldn’t do it. Anyway, he finally died. Jesus, I hate thinking about it. I should have told you to go to hell.

  John Roger had seen the kind of terror inspired by a mad dog. Had twice seen rabid dogs shot in the streets of Veracruz to the great relief of everyone in the neighborhoods. He had never seen a rabies death but had heard the dreadful stories. He ran his hand over his face and was unaware of knocking off his hat.


  Hey mister, you all right? The barman poured a drink and placed it in front of him and said, “Trágalo.”

  He took a sip of the tequila, then drank the rest in a gulp.

  “So you knew my father, you say. Were you were his friend or. . .?”

  John Roger nodded. Then realized the barman had spoken in English. Accented but precise. “Yes,” he said. “I knew him well. A long time ago.”

  The barman’s gaze narrowed. “He did not have many friends, I can tell you that. He never went further than three blocks from here and that’s no lie, not once in my whole life. Where do you know him from?”

  “I’m his brother.”

  They held each other’s eyes. The barman said “De veras?”

  “De veras. We had just graduated from school the last time I saw him. In New Hampshire. That’s up—”

  “I know where it is.”

  “I never—” He paused to clear his throat.

  “I never knew what happened to him. I thought he was dead.”

  “Since you were just out of high school you thought he was dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hombre! That was how many years ago?”

  “Nearly forty.”

  “Jesucristo! Was he older or younger than you?”

  John Roger hesitated, then said, “Older. He never told you he had a brother?”

  “He told Mother he was an only child. He said his parents were dead.” He narrowed his eyes. “I don’t get it. Why would he lie about a brother?”

  “I don’t know. Why would I?”