Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  I said I understand.

  All right then. Good.

  Díaz gazed out the window at the darkness. Edward waited.

  You say he was kissing the girl?

  It looked like it.

  Did he have a hand on her ass?

  That I can’t say. I was pretty far off.

  Díaz turned to him. Spare me the bragging. He probably had a hand on her ass, don’t you think? I would have had a hand on her ass.

  He probably did.

  One shot, right, Mister Deadeye? Quick kill?

  Probably dead on the way to the ground.

  Just can’t keep from bragging, can you?

  Edward returned his smile.

  Kissing a woman. Hand on her ass. There are worse ways to go.

  Plenty of them.

  Goddammit, Lalo. I liked him.

  I know.

  He wasn’t a son of a bitch, not that one.

  I believe you.

  Well thank you so much for your belief and go fuck yourself.

  Edward grinned.

  Christ, the older you get the scarier that smile. I bet mothers point you out to their kids on the street. There, you see him? Right there’s the man who comes to take away bad little boys who disobey their mamas. Kids probably piss their pants and can’t sleep for a week.

  They both laughed.

  Díaz consulted his gold pocketwatch, a gift from Doña Carmen. Let’s go to Lagrimas. What do you say?

  Las Lagrimas de Nuestras Madres was a brothel in a derelict neighborhood a dozen blocks from Chapultepec. Díaz had discovered the place the year before and he and Edward would two or three times a month slip away from the bodyguards and go there for a few hours of fun. They did not go there to fuck the whores but only to drink and dance with them. Like Díaz, the madam and most of her girls were from the state of Oaxaca, and the music and dances of that house were those of his boyhood. Dances that Edward himself had learned back when he first met Colonel Díaz in Oaxaca during the war against the French. They always went to Lagrimas after dark and always walked there rather than rode because it was a district of dangerous reputation and Díaz always hoped to be accosted by robbers. He had often complained to Edward that the worst thing about being president was the lack of action. He missed the action of his army days. They had run into thugs only once. Five of them suddenly blocking the sidewalk and showing their teeth in the light of a streetlamp, pleased by the easy pickings of two graying men with gold-hilt canes and fine clothes that bespoke fat purses. Young toughs so ignorant of the world outside themselves that even in full daylight they would not have recognized the president of their country. They produced knives and demanded money. Díaz laughed and ignored the pistol holstered under his coat and drew his cane sword. Edward too. In less than half a minute three rateros were down and the other two fled bloodied. Díaz examined the fallen ones and determined that two were not mortally wounded but advised the third to make his peace with God as quickly as he could. When they would pass by here again on their way back from Lagrimas long after midnight, only the dead one would still be there, rolled into the gutter and absent his shoes. The fight so invigorated Díaz that he danced that night with even greater gusto than usual and till a later hour. He drank with keener pleasure and sang in louder voice and tipped the girls with a freer hand. And as always in that dingy malodorous cathouse called The Tears of Our Mothers he and Edward danced and danced with every girl in the place. Danced as if they were yet young men who would never die or even ever grow old.

  I say let’s, said Edward.

  NOOSES

  Amonth after John Roger’s death, Javier Tomás Wolfe y Blanco Méndez was born to Bruno and Felicia. At the insistence of Vicki Clara they had brought a doctor from Veracruz to make the delivery. Old Josefina waited in the kitchen, ready to be of assistance, but although the birth was difficult no one thought to summon her. Bruno and Felicia were delighted by Javier Tomás but sick at heart when the doctor told them they could not have more children. It wasn’t that Felicia could no longer conceive—how much better, the doctor said, if that were the case—but that she had an irregularity in her womb. Another pregnancy would place her at grave risk, regardless of her youth. Abstinence was the only sure protection, but the doctor was a cosmopolitan young Creole who shared their lack of enthusiasm for that solution and knew as well as they there would be times it could not hold. With a casual frankness—We are sophisticated adults, are we not?—and with Bruno blushing no less than Felicia even as they smiled, the doctor discussed various ways other than intercourse by which they might pleasure each other. And for the inevitable occasions when coitus was simply not to be denied, he informed them of the latest English condoms, in his opinion the finest in the world. He would send them a supply from Veracruz. He warned, however, that although condoms were quite effective, they were known to fail, and he recommended the additional safeguard of withdrawal. A less satisfying climax, to be sure, he said, but a much safer one. I cannot stress strongly enough the importance of safety in this regard. The passions are pleasurable but must never be permitted to overrule reason.

  Bruno wrote to Sófi and María Palomina with the good news of the baby’s arrival but did not tell them of the doctor’s warning, only of his pronouncement that they could not have more children and of their sadness about it, for they had wanted to have many of them. Sófi wrote back that they should consider themselves lucky to have even one child, and a healthy son, at that. There was no need to remind him of her own sad history with husbands and children. Bruno had told Felicia about it, and Sófi’s letter was of great help to them in shunning self-pity.

  Javier Tomás was baptized at three months. His godparents were John Samuel and Victoria Clara. The celebration party in the compound plaza produced the first loud gaiety heard at Buenaventura since John Roger’s death. The fiesta dispelled the gloom of the last five months and the hacienda began to revive.

  The baby was ten months old when Bruno and Felicia took him to Mexico City so his Grandmother María and Aunt Sófi could meet him—and at last meet Felicia Flor too. The two women doted on Javier Tomás and lavished Felicia with affection. It was Bruno’s first return to the capital since moving to Buenaventura, and the weeklong visit was a happy one for them all. His mother and sister several times told him he was luckier than he deserved, and he each time smiled back at them and said he knew it. Just before they left for the train to return to Buenaventura, Bruno said his wife had something to tell them, and Felicia announced she was three months pregnant. They had deliberately saved this news for a goodbye present. María Palomina and Sófi whooped and hugged Felicia yet again and told her over and over to be careful. Sófi shook a finger in Bruno’s face and said, You see? What do doctors know?

  It had happened on the night of her brother Rogelio’s wedding party. The evening of dancing and drinking had so heated their blood that when they got home they did not even get all their clothes off before they were at each other, her skirts gathered at her breasts and his trousers bunched atop the boot yet on one foot. It was the only time they did it without a prophylactic since the doctor’s warning. They afterward lay in close embrace and made effusive apologies to each other for their lack of caution. They agreed that a single instance was not a great risk but also agreed they would not take another such gamble. While alarmed by their rashness they were stirred by their abandon, by their own wild crave for each other. They joked about crossing the high wire without a net. Then two months passed without her menses and they knew.

  The young doctor confirmed the consequence of their lapse. He told them that of their two choices abortion presented the lesser danger. Not to the baby it doesn’t, Felicia said, and began to cry. Bruno and the doctor exchanged glum looks. The doctor then said that he was sometimes not so assured in his opinions as he might seem. That some of his prognoses had proved wrong. That it would not astound him if everything went well. For the next five months and sixteen days Felicia Flor told Bruno dail
y she believed everything would be fine, that she felt strong, that she knew, just knew, she and the baby would both fare well. Bruno each time said yes, yes, of course, he felt sure of it. And for much of every night lay in a sleepless dread.

  On the last night in October, Felicia went into labor and five hours later their second son—whom they had already decided to name Joaquín Félix—was born dead. And twenty minutes afterward Felicia Flor too was dead. When Bruno learned the baby had strangled on the umbilical, he had a momentary vision of the infant hanging from a gallows. Sentenced to death by his father’s brute lust. As was his mother.

  Sofía Reina and María Palomina were stricken by the news. Only three months after completion of a year’s mourning for John Roger they again dressed in black. Six weeks later little Javier Tomás contracted an intestinal illness, then seemed to be improving, then took an abrupt turn and died. And Sófi and María began the mourning period all over again.

  It was not until some months after Javier’s death, when he at last went to visit his mother and sister—who were shocked by his skeletal aspect—that Bruno Tomás told Sófi about the doctor’s caveat. It was late and he’d had much to drink. Amos Bentley had said good night and left for home and María Palomina had retired to bed. In a voice so low Sófi had to lean forward to make out what he was saying, he told of the doctor’s dire prediction and of the stupid chance he had taken for no reason but sexual urgency. I was supposed to protect her, he said, but I couldn’t protect her from my own stupid cock.

  And Sófi thought, I knew it. I knew it.

  She went over and sat beside him on the sofa and held him close and said that what happened was not his fault, nor Felicia’s, nor anyone’s. Things sometimes just happened and were nobody’s fault. She knew he did not believe her but she knew too she was right. How, after all, could he be at fault for a wild curse in his blood? A curse like a ready noose around the neck of every Wolfe.

  NOTICIAS

  DE PATRIA CHICA

  On a cold Sunday afternoon a few weeks after Sófi and her mother had once again put away their mourning clothes, the lower-floor maid announced that a neatly groomed young gentleman who gave his name as Luis Charón Little Wolfe y Blanco was at the front gate and wished to see them. There followed joyous introductions between Luis Charón and his grandmother and aunt, who said he must join them for dinner. Luis grinned and said his timing had worked out as he’d hoped. He was a lean young man just turned twenty-one, poised and well-mannered, jet-haired, with eyes so dark blue they were nearly violet. His mustache was cropped in the military mode made popular by President Díaz.

  Amos Bentley was present, as he always was for Sunday dinner, and was very pleased to meet the young officer. Luis had at this time been in the Rurales for more than a year. He had been promoted to captain on his reassignment from the army to the Rurales’ Eighth Corps at Aguascalientes, where he’d been an adjutant to the corps commander. Now he was in command of his own company in the Fifth Corps—the youngest commander in the Guardia—at the outskirt of the capital. He cut an urbane figure in his pinstriped suit. The Guardia uniform was strictly for duty, and the only time Sófi and María Palomina would ever see him in it was in parades when he and his comrades passed by on their prancing horses.

  At his first bite of Sófi’s chicken enchiladas Luis Charón pronounced the dish every bit as savory as his mother had alleged. The women invited him to be their dinner guest every Sunday but the best he would be able to do was every six weeks or so. Not only did he alternate Sunday command of the detachment with another captain but there would be times when his company would be out on a mission. And too there was a young lady back at Patria Chica whom he went to see whenever he could. This last bit of information intrigued the women. Was marriage a possibility, they wanted to know. If she will have me, he said, and everyone laughed.

  As they would on his every visit thereafter, the women told Luis Charón stories of the family and of his mother’s girlhood, giving many of the episodes about Gloria a comic aspect they had lacked at the time. They would prevail on Amos to relate some of their favorite anecdotes of his days as an assistant at the American consulate in Veracruz and of his experiences with the Trade Wind Company before the firm’s demise in the American Civil War. In turn Luis Charón told of his childhood on Patria Chica and of his parents. He depicted his American father Louis as a hardworking man who enjoyed his life as manager of the hacienda—and much enjoyed being addressed as “patrón” in his own father’s long absences—though he much preferred being in the saddle and working with the ranch hands to dealing with the estate paperwork. To his mother Gloria he attributed an affectionate nature that Sófi and María Palomina could scarcely relate to the querulous girl of their memory. He told them of his uncles, Zachary Jackson and John Louis, now young men of nineteen and seventeen and being groomed by his father, Louis—their older brother—to manage the hacienda on his retirement. It amused the women that Luis Charón’s uncles were younger than himself, one of them by nearly three years. He told too of his Grandfather Edward, though he was sorry to admit he did not know him very well. In boyhood he had seen his grandfather only on the man’s brief visits from Mexico City, and even though he was now posted so near to him, their respective duties were such that it was unlikely they would ever see each other in the capital.

  He would volunteer little about his life in the Guardia Rural and always responded to the women’s questions about it with general details of camp routines and training and amusing anecdotes about some of his comrades. But whenever he and Amos were alone while the women were busy in the kitchen, Luis would tell him in low-voiced enthusiasm of his company’s most recent skirmishes with bandit gangs and of executing captives on the spot. Amos an avid audience.

  Because Patria Chica was a train ride of only a few hours from his post at the northern outskirt of Mexico City, Luis Charón was able to make frequent, if brief, visits home. The main reason for these trips was Rosario Monte DeLeón, daughter of the Creole foreman of the hacienda cattle ranch. Luis had known her since childhood, a soft-spoken girl who after accepting his proposal confessed she had been in love with him since she was six years old.

  They were married in the summer of 1891 and their three children were born on Patria Chica. Eduardo Luis in winter of 1893, Sandra Rosario a year later, and on New Year’s Day of 1895, Catalina Luisiana, blackhaired like the others but the only one with the blue eyes of their father and grandfather. Rosario bore all three with ease, but after delivering Catalina she did not stop bleeding and died the next day. Luis Charón made no public show of grief save for a black armband. The upbringing of the children fell to their Grandmother Gloria and a trio of maids.

  Catalina’s middle name was meant to be Louisiana. Luis Charón had heard his father speak of the natural beauty of that place and both he and Rosario thought the name a pretty one and decided they would so name the next child if it was a girl. The church recorder, however, having never heard of Louisiana, assumed the name was a variant of “Luisa” and entered it as “Luisiana.” The misspelling appealed to Luis Charón and he left it that way.

  The year after Rosario’s death, twenty-four-year-old John Louis Little was introduced to seventeen-year-old Úrsula Filomena Bos at a quinceañera fiesta hosted by a mutual friend at an estate in San Luis Potosí. From the moment of their meeting they had eyes for none but each other. She had been educated at an academy in Monterrey and spoke English very well. Her parents were present and when she introduced him to them they saw at once that their only daughter was smitten as she not been before. They had one surviving son, Gaspar, but Úrsula had been their only girl and besides was the baby of the family—the jocoyote—and hence their favorite. They called her Sulita. Her father, Don Hector, owned a large hacienda, containing a cattle ranch, just south of Matamoros, and in addition owned a horse ranch a few miles west of town. He was a man without social pretense and had fretted to his wife that the men who aspired to woo young Úrsula
were either too old for her or were spoiled brats who had not done a day of manual labor in their lives, a failing in Don Hector’s view that more than offset their wealth and station. But he liked John Louis at once. So what if he was a gringo with red hair and green eyes? He had his mestizo mother’s brown skin, and in most of Mexico that made him more Mexican than any Creole, even one of long lineage such as Don Hector himself. Besides, the young man had grown up in Mexico and spoke Spanish and had fine manners and was well educated and knew much about ranching and, thank God, had calluses on his hands. Úrsula’s mother, Doña Martina, herself mestiza, also approved of him. The owner of the hacienda invited Úrsula to remain as his family’s guest for as long as she wished, giving John Louis the opportunity to court her, and Don Hector granted his permission for her to do so, knowing she would be properly chaperoned.

  Only four months later, John Louis and Úrsula Filomena were married at Patria Chica. Don Hector had no qualms about the speed of the courtship but wanted the couple to hold to tradition and be wed in the home of the bride, which would have been fine with John Louis, but Úrsula, who could be sweetly headstrong, insisted that she preferred to be married in her new home of Patria Chica. Her parents’ mild annoyance at this breach was forgotten the moment they found that President Díaz was among the wedding guests. They were awed when introduced to him. Úrsula had wanted to surprise them with the revelation that the president was a longtime friend of the Wolfe family. Don Porfirio did not stay long, however, not wanting to further detract attention from the newlyweds.

  Edward Little was gracious toward Don Hector and Doña Martina but tended to reticence, and they found it difficult not to stare at his disfigured face. They met Luis Charón—an officer in the Guardia Rural!—and expressed condolences when informed he was a widower, then offered congratulations on learning he had three young children, ages one through three. They also made the acquaintance of Louis Welch Little, Don Eduardo’s eldest son, and his wife Gloria. If Doña Martina had not discreetly directed his attention to it later in the evening, Don Hector would not have noticed that Gloria and Louis Welch rarely looked at each other and almost never at the same time, and that the few looks they did exchange were without evident affection. She tries not to show it, Doña Martina said, but she is very angry with him. Don Hector said Don Louis himself did not seem troubled. That is because he does not pay very good attention, Doña Martina said.