Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  They knew of the bitterness some of the fishermen felt toward them and had been wondering how long it would be before some crew tried to do something about it. They brought in the shark, a nine-foot mako, and shot it and hauled it onto the deck. Then made ready for the approaching boat. When they were all set they turned back to the mako and finned it. They waited till the other vessel was close enough to see what they were doing before pitching the carcass over the side.

  The other boat was half again as big as theirs. A man at the bow raised a hand and hollered, “Qué tal, amigos!” The twins stood at either end of the little cuddy and grinned widely and returned his wave and kept their hands in sight of the other crew. The Colts were tucked into their waistbands at the small of their backs, and the Winchesters, with bullets chambered and hammers cocked, were leaning against the cabin side where the other crew couldn’t see them.

  The boat dropped its sails and came abeam of the Marina Dos with about fifteen feet between them, the two vessels bobbing on the gentle swells. The pilot worked the rudder to keep the boat in place. Fishnets hung gathered on their upraised beams, dripping silver in the sun.

  “Hola, jóvenes,” called the man at the bow. The twins took him for the captain. He looked down at the sharks tearing up the carcass in the churning red water, then looked at the twins, his smile brilliant against his dark face. “Tiburoneros, eh?”

  That’s right, one twin said. Shark is all we go after. “Y ustedes?”

  Oh hell, the captain said, anything we can catch. Sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes something else. We saw your boat and we thought maybe there are fish here and we catch some too, so we take up the nets and get here quick, but . . . shark? He made a face of disgust and shook his head.

  There were four of them, including the pilot and captain, the other two standing amidship at the near side—and the twins were sure they’d seen still another two duck behind the cabin as the boat closed in. Low-voiced and without looking at his brother or losing his smile, James Sebastian said the two at the near side likely had weapons at the ready below the gunwales. “Sneaky sonofabitches,” Blake Cortéz whispered through his own smile.

  We heard a shot, the captain said. You shoot the shark, eh? I don’t see no gun. What kind of gun you have?

  An old beat-up thing. We keep it in the cabin except for when we need it so it doesn’t get any rustier than it is.

  Very smart, the man said. And then in a voice of different sort said, Tell me, do you take only the fins?

  That was the signal. The captain ducked below the gunwale as the pilot reached behind a high coil of mooring line and the two men at the near side stooped to take up their muskets and the two behind the cabin rose up with their muskets ready and fired the first shots. One ball bit nothing but the sea on the far side of the Marina Dos and the other glanced off the cabin roof in a spray of splinters and passed so close to James Sebastian’s ear he heard its hum as he and Blake snatched up the Winchesters. Then the twins were shooting and shooting as fast as they could work the levers. They shot the two men at the near side before they could raise their muskets and shot the pilot—whose pistol discharged into the deck as he staggered backward and went heels over head into the water—and they shot one of the men on the other side of the cabin in the face and he spun into the gunwale and lost his balance and screamed as he too fell overboard and they shot the other one in the neck and he slumped against the cabin roof and Blake shot him in the crown this time and the man spasmed off the cabin and onto the deck.

  The twins stopped firing but still held the carbines ready. Not ten seconds had elapsed between the first shot and the last. The powdersmoke carried away on the breeze. The only sounds were the swashings of the ravening sharks, the flappings of loose sails, someone moaning. An open hand showed itself above the rail near the bow and the captain called out that he was unarmed, he swore it, he wanted to surrender. All right then, James Sebastian said, stand up. Don’t shoot me, for the love of God! the captain cried. We won’t, James said, now get up. The man raised himself just high enough to peek over the rail and James Sebastian shot him through the eye.

  The boat began to drift from them, and they saw now its name was Marta. Somebody on it yet moaning. Blake set down his rifle and picked up a grapple line and whirled the end of it over his head like a lasso and sent the grapple lofting onto the other deck and quickly took up the slack until the hooks snagged the gunwale. James Sebastian helped him pull the other boat toward theirs, which was held fast on her anchor. When the Marta was within a few feet of them, Blake made the grapple line fast to a cleat. James Sebastian retrieved their axes from the cabin and tossed them into the other boat, and with Colts in hand they jumped over onto it.

  The moaning man was one of two still alive, the two who’d been standing at the rail. Please, the man said, please. He’d been shot in the arm and the thigh. The thigh wound was streaming blood he was trying to stem with his good hand. This wasn’t my idea, he said, believe me. I didn’t want anything to—Blake Cortéz shot him square in the heart.

  The other one had been hit in the stomach. His hands were tight on the wound and his face clenched against the pain. Bastards, he said. Sons of whores. Blake Cortéz smiled and cocked the Colt but James Sebastian said, “Hold on, Black.” Then said to the wounded man, You should not speak of our mother that way.

  Oh yeah? What are you going to do, you bastard, shoot me? The man gasped through his grimace. Well, do it, you son of a whore! Go on! Shoot me, whoreson!

  Shoot you? James Sebastian said. He grinned. Then yanked the man up by his shirtfront and propelled him toward the rail, the man screaming in pain and the horror of what was happening—and then he was in the air and falling in a flail of arms and legs into the riot of jaws.

  They took the axes below decks and applied them to the hull. The in-rushing water was to their waists before they clambered topside and slung the axes into the Marina Dos and freed the grapple and leapt back onto their deck. The Marta sank stern first in five fathoms and settled on the reef to become roost to all manner of marine life.

  They knew the boat had encountered them by chance. There was no way its crew could have known beforehand where the Marina Dos would be working—the twins themselves rarely knew where they would go to fish for shark until they were under sail. Whatever suspicions about the Marta’s disappearance might obtain among the crew’s friends and family, there was no evidence whatever to implicate them, the White Twins. Oh yes, they were aware of the name they were known by. Los Cuates Blancos. They liked it.

  How many now? They did not know nor care. They had decided it was silly to keep count of men killed. Nor did they feel misgiving. In their view, any man who intended harm to them was simply another kind of crocodile, another kind of shark.

  So would they pass two years. One month collecting crocodile hides for Mr Sing, the next collecting fins. They never failed to meet their quota and rarely required more than two weeks to do it. They took care of business during the first half of each month, spent a few days in Veracruz, then returned to Ensenada de Isabel. As they requested, Mr Sing always paid them half in gold specie, half in currency—paper money the Díaz banking system had made as sound as the bullion and silver that backed it. Because they had few expenses, they each month added a large portion of their earnings to the strongbox they kept wrapped in a tarpaulin and buried at the jungle’s edge behind the house. They spent their time at the cove exercising their talents with guns and knives, practicing hand-to-hand fighting techniques. They grew so skilled at silent movement through the forest they could close to within ten feet of a deer before it was aware of them. In the evenings, they talked, played cards, drank beer of their own brewing. They read. And always, during the last days of every month, they made the promised visits to their father. It was a simple and regimented life, and had it lasted to the end of their days it would have been fine with them. But they well understood that the only certainty in life other than their faith in eac
h other was that things could change with profound suddenness. Hence their practiced arts.

  BRUNO AND FELICIA

  In June Sofía Reina received a letter from Gloria telling of Luis Charón’s enlistment in the army on his seventeenth birthday. My God! Gloria wrote. One day they’re eight years old and playing at being soldiers with stick rifles and the next they’re big enough to join a real army! Where do the years go!

  Luis’s true ambition was the Guardia Rural, but he would not do other than as his Grandfather Edward advised, which to serve two years in the army—the first year as a private in an infantry company to acquire understanding of life in the ranks, the second as an officer, to learn leadership—before transferring to the Rurales.

  Came the dog days. August marked nine months since John Roger’s only trip to Mexico City and Bruno Tomás’s move to Buenaventura. They had both maintained a correspondence with María Palomina and Sofía Reina, and in his most recent letter John Roger had again apologized to them for not having made a return visit. That the Blanco women had failed to keep their own promise to visit Buenaventura was understandable in view of the handicap that had befallen María Palomina. She had been demonstrating a lively dance step to Sófi and Amos one evening when a loose tile gave way under her foot and she fractured the ankle. At first she insisted it wasn’t broken, just badly sprained, and there was no need for a doctor. She bound it herself and hobbled about for more than a week until the foot was so darkly swollen that the pain of it pounded with every heartbeat. By which time surgery was necessary. The doctor told her that had she waited another day she would certainly have lost the foot. As it was, even after a lengthy recuperation, she could not walk, or even stand, on the foot for very long before the pain became unbearable, and she cursed the incompetency of the medical profession. She wanted to make a trip to Buenaventura anyway, but Sófi would not agree to it, not until her mother could walk with her cane at least one block without limp or grimace. Unable to pass that test after many efforts, María Palomina had to accept that the foot would never get better and she would not be making a long trip anywhere.

  John Roger had been unable to return to the capital because of Buenaventura’s demands on his time. The coffee farm had produced yet another record yield, requiring still more bookkeeping and more correspondence, and more meetings than ever with buyers. And as with María Palomina, a broken bone figured in his circumstance, though it was not his bone but that of his venerable mayordomo. Now sixty years old, Reynaldo had some months before fractured a leg in a fall from a horse, and the next seven weeks had been the busiest of John Roger’s life on the hacienda as he attended to the mayordomo’s duties as well as his own. He might have been overwhelmed but for John Samuel’s help—and that of Bruno Tomás. Since appointing Bruno foreman of the horse ranch, John Samuel had devoted most of his time to assisting John Roger with Buenaventura business.

  Nevertheless, John Roger wrote, ten months without making a visit to his Mexico City kin was unforgivable, and he promised María Palomina that he and Bruno would go for a visit in October for sure. In closing, he said Bruno had something interesting to tell her and Sófi in his own accompanying letter. And he thus left it to Bruno to break the news of his imminent marriage, which was so soon to take place it would be an accomplished fact before the Blanco women’s letters of response arrived at the hacienda.

  The girl was Felicia Flor Méndez, seventeen-year-old sister to Rogelio Méndez, who was eleven years her senior and a longtime wrangler at the hacienda. Like Rogelio, Felicia was born and raised on Buenaventura, and he had been her only immediate family since she was thirteen. She had worked in the seamstress shop until the previous October, when their uncle in Córdoba died and she went there to live with her invalid widowed aunt, who had no one else to care for her. Felicia loved Buenaventura and did not like having to be away from it, much less indefinitely, but neither was she one to shirk an obligation to family. She had been at Córdoba a month when Bruno Tomás arrived at Buenaventura—and three weeks later he had a memorable fistfight with her brother.

  Bruno had known that some of the wranglers would resent him for an interloper who’d got the foreman’s job by dint of being nephew to the patrón, and they did. But once they saw how well he knew horses and that he was willing to work as hard and get as sweaty and filthy as any man of them—unlike Don Juanito, whom they respected, yes, but who but rarely got his clothes dirty—they began to grant him a due respect. But Rogelio Méndez remained unimpressed and persisted in his recalcitrance. He had been a wrangler at the hacienda since age fourteen and was the best breaker of mustangs on the place, excluding perhaps the twins, who in the estimation of many had no equal in the handling of horses. Rogelio had been Don Juanito’s segundo since the inception of Rancho Isabela, and he had been confident that he would be named foreman if Don Juanito should ever give up the job. But then this cousin from Mexico City comes along, this fucking Bruno—who wasn’t even a Creole like his Wolfe kin, for Christ’s sake!—and just like that, he’s the foreman.

  Bruno heard the gossip about Rogelio’s resentment and understood how he felt. But after three weeks of giving deaf ear to the man’s snide mutterings and enduring his insolent attitude in hope that he would soon enough adjust to the situation, he knew he had to do something about it or lose the other wranglers’ respect.

  It happened the next day. One minute they were walking past each other just outside the main corral, and the next they were down in the dirt and punching and then up on their feet and punching harder. They fought for half an hour and not a man looking on had seen a better fistfight or one more evenly matched. Finally, wheezing like asthmatics, clothes ripped, lacerated faces smeared with blood and snot and dirt, eyes and lips and ears bloated red and purple, fists swollen, they stood teetering in front of each other. Rogelio somehow mustered the strength to swing one more time and Bruno somehow managed to sidestep without falling and the punch missed and Rogelio’s momentum carried him in a sideways stutter step for a few feet before he collapsed. He managed to sit up but could not stand.

  Bruno dropped his hands to his sides. Chest heaving, knees trembling. Rogelio looked up at him and gasped, Fuck. Bruno nodded and huffed, Yeah. He hawked bloody snot and spat off to the side, then asked Rogelio if the fight was over or if he just wanted time to catch his breath.

  Rogelio’s forearms rested on his upraised knees. He stared at the ground and made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “No más. Ya me ganaste.”

  Thank Christ, Bruno thought. He did not think he could have raised his hands again. Knew he could not have reformed them into fists. I hope, he said, still panting, you will continue to be the segundo.

  Rogelio grunted with the effort of looking up again. All right, he said. But I still think I should be the foreman.

  I know. But you’re not. I am. Oh man, I hope we don’t have to do this again.

  Nah, hell. You hit too fucking hard.

  I hit too fucking hard?

  Their grotesque smiles were the best their mauled mouths could muster. Bruno put a hand down to help Rogelio to his feet. They groaned at the effort and Rogelio did not make it halfway up before they both went sprawling—and they joined in the wranglers’ laughter, their bruised ribs aching.

  By day’s end the news of the fight had carried to every corner of the hacienda. It had already circulated throughout the casa grande when Bruno arrived at the dining room that evening, his neat suit and tie in ludicrous contrast to his bruised and tinctured misshapen face. Vicki Clara cooed over him with solicitude, but John Samuel was angered by the whole thing. He had worked with Rogelio and thought him a fine segundo, but for the man to start a fight with the new foremen—the patrón’s nephew, no less!—was a transgression that had to be punished.

  Bruno said the fight had been his own doing as much as Rogelio’s, and that Rogelio had been punished. If you think I look bad, he said, you should see him.

  John Roger smiled and Vicki Clara shook her head
in exasperation with the ways of men. John Samuel sighed and half-raised his hands and said, Very well, you’re the foreman who has to work with him.

  The Córdoban aunt proved to be an interesting companion and was valiant and good-humored to her last breath, which she exhaled on an early morning in July. Though saddened by the old woman’s passing, Felicia Flor Méndez was happy to return to Buenaventura. She had been home a week when her brother invited Bruno to supper and introduced him to her as his foreman, Bruno Tomás Wolfe y Blanco—a name change Bruno and his sister Sófi had decided on as more accurate to their parentage.

  Like many a brother with a little sister both pretty and unafraid of men, Rogelio had been fretful for Felicia Flor’s virtue from the day her breasts began to bloom. The whole time she had been away at their aunt’s he lived in apprehension that she would succumb to some charming son of a bitch. He wanted nothing for her so much as the safety of marriage and motherhood. Various young wranglers had courted her from the time she turned fifteen but none had struck her fancy. She was too damned choosy was her problem. What do you want, Rogelio asked her, some guy in shining armor like in a goddammed fairy tale? Of course not, she said. A suit of armor would rust very fast in this climate. That was another thing, her sassy tongue. His hope that she and Bruno might like each other and that something might come of it was rooted more in desperation than in reason. It was crazy to think she would give serious thought to a man thirty-four years old or that a man of thirty-four would put up with her impudence. Rogelio could not have imagined the mutual smiting that took place within minutes of their meeting.