Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  But to see him standing by the café wall and surveying the room, his hat pushed back and his hands in his pockets, you might have taken him for a grocer or a hardware dealer—albeit a popular one, to judge by all the invitations he received to join one or another table. He declined them every one with a smile and small wave. Then his gaze fixed on the twins across the room and he started toward them, still swapping hellos as he went. “Well now, what’s this?” Blake Cortéz whispered.

  Some of the other patrons turned to see who Mr Wells was headed for and saw it was those Wolfe twins nobody could tell apart and who you hardly ever saw in town but on the week’s end. Been building a house in that downriver palm swamp for well-nigh three years on account of they were doing it all themselves, if you could believe that, which was about as crazy as building a house out there in the first place. Said to be from Galveston. Their daddy some kind of bigwig diplomat down in Mexico till him and their momma got took by the yellow jack. Elmer at the bank said they come with scads of money but had near spent the last dollar of it, what with their Mex wives and children and a house in town to support besides building the one in the swamp. Oh, they were finelooking young fellas, no disputing that, and always good to return a howdy and a smile. But you had to admit that none of them—meaning their wives too—were given to passing the time of day. Pleasant and all if you ran into them at the market or the bank but always ready to move along. Odd clan, truth to tell. What would old Jim want to see them about?

  “Howdy boys,” Wells said as he got to their table. He looked from one to the other. “Had to see for myself if you the spittin images I been told. Begosh if you aint. About as hard to believe as we never met in all the time you been here.” He put his hand out. “Name’s Jim Wells.” They each shook his hand in turn and said their names. He asked if he could join them and they both glanced at the wall clock. In a voice that couldn’t be heard at the nearest tables, Jim Wells said, “Evaristo aint coming, boys. I’d be obliged if yall could spare me a minute.”

  The twins looked at each other and then back at him and said of course and pardon their manners and asked him to join them. Wells hung his hat on the ladderback chair and sat himself so that he could easily shift his attention between them. “I mean to say, you fellas are the twinnest twins I ever saw.” A few of the curious were still eyeing them, but when Wells glanced their way they cut their attention elsewhere. “I take it you know who I am?” Wells said, again pitching his voice not to carry beyond their table.

  “Yessir,” Blake Cortéz said, muting his own voice. “Doesn’t everybody in here?”

  Wells’s mustache widened. “I suppose they do.” His eyes were bright with bonhomie and crafty intelligence. “I know about you boys too. Leastways I know what-all you’ve told folk and what they have to say about you. Speak good Spanish, they say, on account of you grew up in Mexico. I can see I was told true about your proper manners.”

  In fluent Spanish with only a trace of accent, he said, But I don’t believe there are many people who know that at least one of you might—I emphasize might—be able to throw a machete through a man some twenty feet off. It’s something I heard tell, but it’s mighty hard to believe. His smile and manner did not alter. To anyone glancing their way he could have been relating an amusing anecdote.

  The twins wondered whether he had talked to Anselmo, or to Evaristo after he’d talked to Anselmo.

  Well sir, Blake said, I don’t fault you for finding it hard to believe. Because if such a thing actually happened, it would probably have been more like ten feet.

  If such a thing actually happened, James Sebastian said.

  “I see,” Wells said. “Well, let me just say that if such a thing actually happened, even at ten feet, I’d be mighty doggone impressed.” As they would soon come to realize, Jim Wells almost never used profanity in either language—and, like themselves, he could shift from folksy vernacular to formal diction whenever it suited him. He again reverted to Spanish. Of course, if anybody wanted to try to prove such a thing actually happened, first thing he’d have to do is produce a body, or at least a witness more reliable than, oh, the employee of a smuggler, say. But I would bet that if such a thing actually did happen, the body would probably already be somewhere beyond all possibility of recovery.

  That would be my bet too, James said. He and Blake smiled back at him. He was as genial as they’d heard. He piqued their curiosity.

  “Look here, boys, I hope you’ll pardon my bluntness, but there’s something I have to know and I want you to tell me true. You on the run from the law? I mean real law, American law.” They would have smiled to learn that his curiosity had already prompted him to make telegraphic inquiries of sheriffs’ offices all over the state, seeking to know if they had warrants on either James S or Blake C Wolfe.

  “No sir, we aint,” James said.

  Wells nodded. “Good, good. Well now, let me just say, I never take long to make up my mind about somebody, and I have a feeling that neither do yall. I’d like us to speak frankly, so what say we quit being coy about that riverside business and let’s agree that whatever gets said between us stays between us. You have my word on it. I got yours?”

  Again the twins swapped a quick look. Then Blake Cortéz said, You do, sir. Despite the man’s casual fostering of trust, they had read his eyes and knew he was not one to ever tell anybody anything incriminating, not in any way that didn’t allow for easy legal refutation should that need later arise. But then of course they would as always keep their own secrets and they sensed that Wells knew it. And sensed too that what mattered to him wasn’t whether a man kept secrets but that he knew which secrets to keep.

  “I’d say call me Jim,” Wells said, “but my momma raised me to respect my elders and I expect yours did likewise.”

  He did all the talking for the next quarter hour. He told them Evaristo wasn’t coming because he hadn’t received their invitation. Rather than go to Evaristo after leaving the twins, Anselmo had gone to Wells. He had once worked for Wells as a stable groom, and though they hadn’t seen much of each other since then, Anselmo believed Don Santiago was the only one who could help him. He told Wells what happened at a smuggling site called the Horseshoe and that he was sure Evaristo would kill him for not bringing him the money for the whiskey. He was willing to be arrested and put in jail where he might be safe. Wells said that wouldn’t be necessary and let Anselmo take refuge in his carriage house. But what to do about Evaristo? Anselmo hadn’t told them Evaristo was a lawman, had he? Well he was. A constable. A constable who had become a problem. “And there’s nobody to blame for that but myself,” Jim Wells said, “since I was the one to recommend him for the job.” A constable was an elected office but a Wells recommendation so surely determined an election it was tantamount to an appointment, and his deputy recommendations were routine hires. The legion of law officers who owed their jobs to Jim Wells included sheriffs, police chiefs, and even Texas Rangers.

  But in South Texas a constable had a special duty. Wells said that, loosely speaking, the Cameron County sheriff took care of trouble on the ranches, the police took care of trouble in the towns, and it fell to a relative handful of constables to take care of trouble among the countryside Mexicans—most of whom lived in squalid little settlements called colonias, places you’d never find on any map on account of they weren’t official settlements. What’s more, few colonia residents could speak English, and most Texas lawmen, like most Texans, didn’t know more than a few words of Spanish, a lack that was of major hindrance in dealing with trouble in the colonias. Which was exactly why almost everybody Jim Wells ever recommended for a constable’s post was Mexican—because next to the necessary sand for the job, the chief requisite was Spanish. It was a hard job but it had its advantages. For one thing, because a constable had to work so far out in the brush so much of the time, so far from towns and courtroom, he had a lot of leeway in how he operated. It was no secret that for most crimes short of murder a constable
was a lot less likely to arrest a bad-acting Mexican than to fine him and send him on his way with a warning, and then pocket the fine. If the man didn’t have enough money for the fine, he might pay with something else of worth. Because a bad actor would usually rather pay a constable than go to jail, it worked out for both of them, and for the county too, since it didn’t have to cram its jail full of Mexican troublemakers and burden its courtroom with their cases. Of course, if a fella did something just too wrong to be let off with a fine, the constable would bring him in. Unless of course the hardcase was too drunk or too ornery or too stupid to know not to make a fight of it and left the constable no choice but to shoot him. That happened now and again and everybody knew it did. But there was hardly ever any to-do about it.

  Evaristo had been a constable for four months now, and Jim Wells said the mistake he’d made in getting the man a badge had nothing to do with his being a smuggler. Along the southern Rio Grande a smuggler was about as commonplace as a carpenter and at least as beneficial to the community, and the only real difference between the smuggling business and most others was the rather more serious consequences of rival competition. No, the problem with Evaristo was that he was a rank bully with the people he was supposed to protect. Since Evaristo’s appointment, Wells had received a load of complaints from various colonias about Evaristo beating up fellas for no good reason and taking gross liberties with women and stealing stock and so on. The folk were begging Wells to make him stop.

  “Why not just take back his badge?” James Sebastian said.

  “I could see to that,” Wells said. “But then he’d like as not be meaner than ever with the folk on account of they complained on him. And it’s not just him. Anselmo mention the two sidekicks? Evaristo calls them his deputies although they got no more legal standing as deputies than I do as brother-in-law to the Pope. One’s named El Loco and the other Bruto, to give you some idea the kinda fellas we’re talking about. Besides being his so-called deputies, they do most the smuggling jobs for him, one or the other usually working with Anselmo. The fella who got the machete throwed through him—if such a thing actually happened—that was Bruto. I’m told he’s Evaristo’s cousin.”

  Blake said, “This is interesting, sir, but, well, what’s it got to do with us?” But they had been studying his eyes and were pretty sure what it might have to do with them.

  “Why, son, I thought it might behoove you to know something about the fella you wanted to meet with this morning to, ah—how did Anselmo put it?—to try and make an arrangement with him about his using your land. And, as Anselmo says, to talk about the money you took off his recently deceased cousin. Have I been misinformed?”

  “No, sir,” said Blake. “We wanted to let him know that if he wants to keep doing business on our land, we think it only fair he give us a certain percentage of his profits.”

  “And to let him know the money from yesterday would be a sort of good-faith binder,” James Sebastian said.

  Wells smiled at one of them and then the other. “You don’t believe for a minute he’d agree?”

  “Well, sir, that’d be up to him,” James said.

  “I see. What will you do when he tells you to give him his money and go jump in the lake?”

  “Tell him it’s not his money anymore and we’d ruther stay dry,” Blake said.

  “I see.” Wells beamed. “I have to say, you boys aint lacking in self-confidence.”

  In that moment, the Wolfe brothers and Jim Wells recognized in each other something they would none of them have known what to call except perhaps an affinity of outlook. An understanding that prompted James Sebastian to say, “If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr Wells, it seems like the best solution to your problem with this Evaristo would be if he decided to light out to a new life somewhere else.”

  “Oh you’re right, son, that’d be a blessing for sure.”

  “Well, it’s the sorta thing happens all the time,” James said. “A man just up and goes one day. Without so much as an hasta la vista to anybody.”

  “I’ve heard that some men do that, yes,” Wells said.

  “And of course if Evaristo lit out, he’d be taking leave of his river business,” Blake said. “Be an opportunity for somebody who was looking to get into the trade.”

  Wells smiled at them. “I have to tell you, boys, I admire your, ah, eye for opportunity.”

  “When do you reckon Evaristo might head out in the brush again?” James said.

  “Can’t say. But if I was him and neither of my smugglers come back last night, first thing I’d do today is go to their house to see if they’re there. If they weren’t, and neither was the wagon—which it isn’t, since it’s at my house where Anselmo brung it—then I’d likely go out to that Horseshoe place to see what I might find there.” Wells consulted his pocketwatch. “It’s my guess he’s probly already been to their houses and is on the way to the Horseshoe this minute.”

  They met them coming back on the Boca Chica road, less than a mile from the turn-off that led to the Horseshoe. They saw each other from a long way off on that open road and both parties reined their mounts from a lope to a trot as they advanced on each other. The short shotgun was slung muzzle down on James Sebastian’s saddle horn and he had removed his coat and hung it from the saddle horn too so that it covered the gun. He patted his horse’s neck and then slipped his hand under the coat and cocked both hammers. Blake’s revolver was in his waistband and covered by the flap of his open coat. When the two parties closed to twenty yards, the twins slowed their horses to a walk and the other riders did the same and they reined up with less than ten yards between them. Evaristo was easy to recognize by Anselmo’s description of his leanness and the droop of his mustache. The other wore his hat pushed back on his head and his grin seemed more permanent state than response and his eyes spoke of some restless eagerness. El Loco. Both men with revolvers on their hips. His eyes bespoke his recognition of them, los gringos cuates. And he had surely heard too of the house they had built somewhere out here.

  “Buenos días, señor,” Blake said. “Que bonito tiempo, verdad?”

  Evaristo grinned to hear his Spanish. Yes, he said. The pity about fine weather, however, is that it never lasts long enough.

  “Lo mismo como la vida,” James said, reaching to pat his mount’s neck and then sliding his hand under the coat.

  Evaristo saw the move and reached for his own gun but before his hand could close on it the hung coat flung up in the shotgun’s blast and the charge hit him high in the chest and batted him from the saddle. His horse was hit too and shrieked as it bolted. El Loco was raising his revolver when Blake Cortéz shot him above the eye and his hat jumped as he slung rearward, stirrups flinging, and landed facedown in an attitude of listening to some secret of the earth. Now Evaristo was raising himself on an elbow, red holes in one cheek and chest blood-sopped, again reaching for his gun. James reined his mount steady with one hand and with the other pointed the shotgun like an outsized pistol and with the second barrel of buckshot removed much of the man’s head. At almost the same instant, Blake shot El Loco again, to be certain.

  They calmed their horses and studied the road in both directions and saw that it lay empty to the horizons. They collected the men’s guns and took the money from their pockets and then rounded up their horses and were glad to see that the wounds on Evaristo’s mount were not so serious they would have to kill it. They draped the bodies over the horses and put the animals on a lead rope and rode back to westward for a distance before turning off toward the river and then onto the trail that took them through the palms to Wolfe Landing. There they put both bodies on El Loco’s horse and took with them another rope and led the horse to the resaca.

  IN THE GETTING

  When the news got around that Evaristo Dória was missing, everyone who knew him was sure he was dead. Most likely in consequence of some dispute with a smuggling rival. You watch, people said, sooner or later he’ll be found in the river re
eds, or what’s left of him by the fish and the turtles, unless he floated all the way out to the gulf.

  For weeks after Evaristo’s disappearance a gringo in a suit would show up at his house every Saturday to give Mrs Dória an envelope containing Evaristo’s weekly salary. The man said his name was Smith and he worked for Mr Jim Wells, who had said to tell her he hoped her husband soon returned home and to please let him know if she needed anything. The whole neighborhood witnessed Mr Smith’s Saturday visits, and Mrs Dória made it known who he was. They all knew that the county did not pay anybody for not working, and so the money had to be coming from Mr Wells’s pocket, and they all said thankful prayers to God for putting them in the care of Don Santiago.