Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  Speaking of pretty, Blake said, we don’t even have to mention this lovely thing. He patted her bottom and she slapped away his hand. Then was laughing as she hugged them to her, one in each arm.

  They liked to go to the beach just north of the river mouth. They rode out on the public mule-carriage and took a picnic basket and a sheet to spread on the sand and stayed all day and came back on the last coach. They would have preferred to frolic naked as they did at the cove but there were always at least a few other people in view, often with children, and so the twins wore pants cut short above the knees and Marina wore a swimming suit of her own creation, made of cotton and hemmed at mid-thigh and its halter top thin-strapped and low in the back. The costume sufficed to meet the proprieties of a sparsely populated Mexican beach but would have gotten her arrested at any American seaside resort. Her dusky skin became so much darker they began calling her Negrita. They taught her to swim, and the sensation of propelling herself through the water became one of the joys of her life. The three of them would swim out to where the waves formed, and when a big one began to build they would start stroking hard atop it and side by side ride the wave’s accelerating forward roll all the way in to shore where it broke in a great crash of foam and sent them tumbling over the sand.

  It became her habit to have a long solo swim on every visit to the beach. On one such swim a trio of dolphins suddenly appeared beside her, and she trod water as they circled her, rolling under and up again, blowing spray. She laughed and stroked them as they passed. Then one came up under her and with its face against her bottom raised her out of the water entirely and dropped her with a splash. The twins were watching from down the beach and heard her happy shriek. Far up the beach in the other direction a small party of people was watching too and they cheered when the dolphin tossed her. Then the dolphins vanished and she swam to shore and the other people waved to her and she waved back and came sprinting toward the twins, grinning wide, no hand at her mouth, shouting, Did you see! Did you see!

  They practiced their fighting techniques on the beach and it pleased her to watch them at it, to witness their dance-like spins and torsions as they threw and dodged open-hand punches fast as snake strikes, never hitting each other in the face with more than a brush of fingertips but exercising no such reserve with blows to the body, and she cringed at each loud smack of palm to belly or ribs. At the end of every session, both of them sported large red blotches on their stomachs and chests.

  Their social world contained the three of them alone and they were content within it. They sometimes spoke of Vicki Clara and hoped she was doing well, and of young Juan Sotero. But they would not chance a letter to her lest John Samuel somehow get hold of it and know by the postmark where they were and pass the information to Mauricio Espinosa. What if they wrote to their cousin Bruno, Marina said. They didn’t really know him, they said, not enough to trust him. Josefina they missed dearly. To her they might have chanced a letter had she known how to read—but they would trust no one to read it to her.

  In their fourth year they began to run low on money but they were unworried. There was always money to be made, always someone willing to pay you to provide them with something they could not get for themselves. In fact the twins were eager to return to work, though they would not go back to the hide business. The swamps teemed with alligators but there was no shortage of hunters or buyers and the market was glutted. As in Veracruz, however, there was a Chinese quarter, and as in Veracruz the Chinese did not dare to fish in the open gulf for fear of attack by Mexican boats. The twins found their way to a man named Chu, the quarter’s chief broker in various enterprises. As they had hoped, he was in the market for shark fins. Like Mr Sing, he had inland buyers who were always in short supply of fins—and of shark livers, to which some of the local Chinese attributed medicinal and aphrodisiacal power. Mr Chu agreed to the twins’ rate for fins and they agreed to his for livers. And they were back in the shark trade. They had thought that, as in Veracruz, they might have trouble when the local crews found out they were selling to a Chinaman. But unlike the Veracruzanos, the twins learned, the Tampiqueños didn’t care who caught fish for the Chinese so long as it wasn’t the Chinks themselves.

  They eventually yielded to Marina’s entreaties and let her go sharking with them—and she loved it from the first and fast proved an able hand. She was awed by the sharks, exhilarated by the process of catching and killing them. She could soon do every job the twins could except reel in a big one by herself, or—for her fear of guns—shoot one dead. But she was very good with the shark knife and became so adept at extracting livers and excising fins that the twins soon left those tasks entirely to her.

  Over time they came to believe that Mauricio Espinosa was either no longer looking for them or was never going to look for them in Tampico. It was of course also possible that his men had come to Tampico and made inquiries and then reported to Mauricio that no one here had seen any twins of the Wolfes’ description.

  Marina believed it would be best for the twins to retain their distinct appearances. “It is better to be in safety,” she said, “than to be in sadness.” Her English was improving, though she would never gain command of its grammar or solid footing with its idioms.

  And if they kept themselves looking different, Blake Cortéz said, it would be better for whoever might prefer the excitement of two different-looking men in bed with her than the boredom of twins.

  She blushed and stuck her tongue out at them.

  Her thirty-fifth birthday was notable in that nobody else in her family had ever lived that long. So far as she knew, only her Uncle Brito had made it to the age of thirty-four, in which year he was killed trying to stop a fight between his two best friends. I have become old, she said. You two are in company with a hag. A few weeks shy of twenty-one, the twins grinned and ran their eyes over her with exaggerated leers. Some hag, one said. She smiled and mouthed kisses at them.

  They insisted that such a significant birthday called for a significant celebration. They bought her a finer dress than she had ever aspired to wear and new suits for themselves. They had always been disinclined toward settings that called for formal clothes, but on this occasion they insisted on taking her to El Palacio, the city’s most elegant establishment. Owned by an American from Memphis, it contained a restaurant and ballroom and casino. The staff was Mexican but every waiter spoke English, and it pleased Marina to give her dinner order in that language. She had been afraid she might make a fool of herself in such a refined place, but the twins had tutored her in etiquette, and midway through the meal she was no longer uneasy. After dinner they went into the ballroom and each twin took a turn on the floor with her. Vicki Clara had taught them to waltz and they taught Marina. Then they went upstairs to the casino and there were informed it was restricted to members only.

  The manager was summoned, a man named Murtaugh. He inspected the cut of their clothes and asked in English who they were and they said the Clayton brothers out of New Orleans, where they owned a fishing company called The Gulf Bounty. They were thinking about setting up a small company in Tampico too. Murtaugh shook their hands and smiled at Marina and approved them for club membership. He apologized for the interrogation, but membership was the best way to keep out undesirables. The twins said they understood the need and approved of the policy.

  They had enjoyed gambling ever since boyhood games of dice and cards in the hacienda stables and in the cantina of Santa Rosalba. On their first few visits to Veracruz they had played in most of the gambling halls, but they were all strident places of rough patronage and prone to sudden violence, usually incited by allegations of cheating. The twins had made a careful study of methods for cheating and they thought about using their own dexterous chicanery to counter that of the Veracruz halls, but decided not to. If they were caught at it, or even only accused, it would not be worth the consequences—the certain brawl to follow, the possible killing, the intervention of summoned police who were su
re to be in league with the establishment. They liked Veracruz and dealing with Mr Sing and did not want to risk having to exile themselves from the city for doing injury or worse to any of its policemen. So they quit the Veracruz halls. And on finding that the public gambling houses in Tampico were no less crooked, they had shunned them too.

  But the handsomely appointed casino at El Palacio was a far remove from the public halls. There were roulette wheels, tables for dicing, tables for cards. With Marina between them, the twins strolled about the floor, pausing at one table and then another to scrutinize the play, and they detected no sign of underhandedness. The casino seemed satisfied with the profits ordained to it by the iron law of percentages. They were also pleased to see that at most of the card tables the game was jackpot draw poker, their favorite. There was no betting limit and both Mexican and American money was acceptable. Moreover, property could be wagered in lieu of cash, contingent on the consent of the players still in the hand. Such bets were not uncommon among these men with large holdings in real estate, and most of the regular players always brought a deed or two to the tables. The casino kept a contract lawyer on hand to certify bills of sale and transfers of title. After being assured Marina would be properly safeguarded by Palacio personnel at a side gallery reserved for the women of the players, Blake Cortéz accepted the floor manager’s offer of an open chair at one poker table and James Sebastian was seated at another. They were cordially received by the other players—a mix of Americans, Britishers, and Mexicans.

  Both twins fared very well that first night. In addition to cash, Blake won the deed to a small orange grove a few miles upriver and would two days later sell it for twice as much as the bet it had covered. Their fellow players grumbled good-naturedly about a chance to regain some of their losses, and each twin smiled and promised to return.

  For almost two years they went after shark in the first half of every month and played poker at the casino in the latter half. Sometimes Marina would put on her fine dress and go to El Palacio with them. They would have dinner together and then a few dances before going up to the casino where she would sit in the ladies’ gallery while they played at the tables. Most of the time, however, she chose to stay at home and they didn’t fault her, knowing how bored she must get in the gallery. On the nights she stayed home they would on their return find her dozing on the parlor sofa in wait of them, fresh coffee on the stove, pastries in the warmer.

  Sometimes one twin would lose more money than his brother won and sometimes they both lost, but far more often they both ended the night as winners, usually by sizable amounts. They won more property too—agricultural acreage, a bean farm, a dairy, a tannery, a brickworks. They had no interest in operating any of the businesses or developing any of the land, but most of the properties were close to town and easy to sell at a good price within days of winning them. At first, they had accepted in wager even property in other regions of the country and at one time or another held title to land and other assets as far north as Sonora and as far south as Oaxaca. Such distant holdings, however, were harder to sell, some only at giveaway prices, and they soon stopped accepting bets of any real asset sited more than twenty miles from town.

  Of all the properties they won title to, they held on to only one—an expansive tract of Texas acreage snugged midway between Brownsville and the Gulf of Mexico. Blake Cortéz had won it from an American named Walthers who had never seen the property and himself had won it in a San Antonio dice game from a Texan named Mizzell. The deed carried the imprint of the Cameron County land company that originally prepared it, and the legal transfer of ownership to Walthers in San Antonio had been recorded on the back. Just underneath that record, the Palacio’s lawyer certified Walthers’s grant of ownership to Thomas Clayton. Another man at the table said he had once been to Brownsville and that it was mostly cattle country around there except for between town and the gulf, which was nothing but marsh and scrubland. On hearing that, Walthers smiled like a man who had won the bet even though he’d lost the hand.

  The twins had nautical charts of the gulf coast all the way from Coatzacoalcos up to Corpus Christi, and the chart for the region flanking the Río Bravo showed but a single settlement east of Brownsville, a hamlet called Point Isabel, nestled in a lagoon a few miles above the mouth of the river. Point Isabel! They took the name for an auspicious omen. Even if the property was in fact swampland and scrub, so what? It was on a river and practically on the gulf and by damn in the United States. It gave them a certain satisfaction to own land in the country of their parents, even if the place was as far south from their parents’ patria chica of New England as you could get and still be in the USA. They went to a lawyer in the Plaza de Libertad, introduced themselves as cousins, and had the title transferred from Thomas Clayton to James S Wolfe.

  On average they earned well more from the poker tables than from shark fins, but they liked working on the gulf too much to give it up. They lived off the sharking income and kept the casino winnings in money belts they sealed in oilskin and put in a sack and hid in one of the rain barrels behind the house. And if some of the other players had over the past year begun to grumble about the Clayton brothers’ consistency at winning, well, the twins thought that was to be expected. There would always be some men who could not understand that you should not gamble if you could not bear to lose.

  Their time in Tampico was not without violent event. There were various brief punch-ups in the street, mainly with men who groped Marina in passing or hissed some vileness to her, but also with men who were simply looking for a fight and had the bad judgment to pick it with the Wolfes. The damage the twins inflicted in these affrays was rarely worse than broken teeth or bones but there were some rougher occasions too. As on the evening they were walking with Marina along the levee and spied a pair of men beside a boathouse trying to force themselves on a drunk but unwilling woman. The fight ended with both men in the river, one with his back likely broken and who therefore likely drowned—the twins made no effort to find out. Marina was also with them the afternoon they came upon a drayman whipping his emaciated mule with a length of bamboo because the animal could not pull the overloaded wagon any further. James Sebastian snatched the man’s stick from him and began beating him with it, and when the man pulled a knife James brought the fool’s arm down hard over his knee and disjointed it at the elbow. He would have cut off the man’s nose for good measure but for Marina’s plea not to. They flung money at the man and unharnessed the mule and took it to the edge of town where there was plenty of wild grass for it to feed on and there set loose the animal and wished it luck.

  Still, they were in Tampico for almost six and a half years without serious trouble until one night just after Christmas. Marina had gone with them to the casino and the twins had again done well at the tables and they had come home just before midnight—the plaza fronting their street still loud with music and aswirl with dancers—and found three men waiting for them in the parlor. Two held five-shooters and one a shotgun with a shortened double-barrel with bores you could have fit your thumb into and both hammers cocked. At the sight of the men Marina made a small sound, then went mute, and the one with the shotgun said, Shut the fucking door.

  The men looked angry and were sweat-soaked and the room was sour with the smell of them. One of them made a quick search of the twins and relieved them of the derringers. The one with the shotgun ordered them all three to sit on the floor with their hands under their ass.

  The parlor had been laid to waste. Picks and axes and pry bars were scattered about. Every stuffed chair lay overturned and slashed open and its stuffing strewn. Various holes had been axed in the walls, in the floor. The twins knew the upper rooms would be in similar wreckage.

  Where is it? the one with the shotgun said, looking at Blake Cortéz.

  Where’s what? Blake said.

  Say that again and I’ll kill you.

  In a rain barrel, James Sebastian said.

  What?

/>   It’s in one of the rain barrels in back of the house. In a bag. Wrapped in oilskin.

  The robbers looked at each other—and in that moment so did the twins.

  The one with the shotgun said, Show me, and told the other two to stay with the girl and the brother.

  James Sebastian led him through the kitchen to the back door and saw that they had axed an opening through its thick wood and then reached in and shoved the door’s heavy bolt up and out of its slot. Not much finesse but fast and effective. They could not have breached the iron grillwork embedded in the windows except with a long day’s work of sawing and prying, and the front door was in plain view of the plaza. With the man right behind him, James went out the door and onto a small porch and down a short set of steps.

  Stop, the man said.

  The patio was in deep darkness under the cover of the trees. They could hear the music from the plaza on the other side of the house. The man pressed the muzzle of the shotgun against James Sebastian’s back and said that if he even thought about jumping off into the blackness he would blow him apart. Not me, mister, James said. I can get more money but I only have one life. Smart boy, the man said, and prodded him with the gun. Now show me.

  They eased through the gloom to the corner of the house where four big rain barrels, barely discernible, were aligned along the wall beneath the gutter drains. The barrels stood chest high and had wirescreen covers. James Sebastian went to the barrel at the far end. In here, he said. The bag’s tied to a cord hanging over the other side.