Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  After three months went by without a word from Evaristo, Jim Wells himself called on Mrs Dória. He told her he was sorry but it was probably best to assume her husband wouldn’t be coming back. He informed her that a bank account had been opened in her name and would receive a monthly deposit sufficient for her to take care of her children until they were of age or she remarried.

  “I have to say, she didn’t seem all that distressed by the idea her husband might be gone for good,” Wells told the twins. “Her only concern was the means to feed her kids, and now that’s took care of. Anyhow, she’s a right goodlookin woman, so I don’t expect her children will be without a daddy too long.”

  It was a chill March evening and Wells and the twins were sitting with drinks and cigars before a low fire in his den. In the parlor, his wife Pauline and their thirteen-year-old daughter Zoe were entertaining the twins’ wives and young sons while the family cook was preparing supper. In the three months of their acquaintance, the twins and Jim Wells and their families had supped together at the Wells’ home several times, and there would be many more such evenings over the years to come. Suppers and small parties in the company of their families and occasionally with other guests as well. And there would be meetings too of just the three of them, at an hour when their families were abed, when the men would converse in muted voices and dim lamplight about topics privileged to themselves alone.

  Only two weeks earlier, Wells had told the twins that his boyhood dream had been to become a man of influence and respect, and if he did say so himself he had achieved that aspiration and was proud of it. They knew he was mildly drunk—his drawl a little more pronounced—and enjoying the bourbon’s liberation of sentiments he rarely voiced. “But I’ll tell you the truth, boys,” he said. “I’d give it all up in a minute if I could just be your age again. And I mean without a nickel in my pocket. All the money on earth aint worth spit compared to bein young and havin a dream to chase after. It’s nice to arrive at it, no denyin that, but the real fun’s in the gettin there. The gettin there. I cannot say how much I envy you. I expect you fellas have some dream of your own and I surely hope you attain it.”

  Blake Cortéz said that, for one thing, they wanted a house by the sea.

  “Well heck, that’s simple enough,” Wells said. “Just build yourself one. Around Point Isabel probly the best place. Then you’ll only have three houses—excuse me, I mean four. That your big aim? Own more and more houses?”

  They had bought the lot next to the Levee Street house and were nearly finished with the house they were raising on it. Enlarged as their two families had become, and with Remedios Marisól expecting her third child in the summer, the house they shared had become much too small and they decided that each family would have its own, side by side.

  The seaside house wasn’t their big dream, they told Wells, but in thinking about a beach house they had come to understand what they really wanted. Instead of acquiring a separate gulfside property, the thing to do was to extend Tierra Wolfe to the gulfside.

  “You mean to buy up all the land in between?”

  “Yessir,” James said. “The coast aint but about eight miles from our eastmost line as the crow flies.”

  “Make it sound like a stone toss,” Wells said. “How far up you thinkin to go?”

  “Nameless Creek. We figure it’d be best to keep the same north boundary.”

  Wells smiled from one of them to the other. “That’s a smart of property, boys.”

  “A hankering for a little more land aint anything needs explaining to a cattleman,” Blake said.

  “Well, you’re right about that, though I know dang well you aint about to raise cows out there. Fact is, a hankerin for more land don’t need explainin to nobody. Some men know what they want it for before they get it and some don’t know till after and some just want it to have it.”

  “That’s right,” Blake said. “And like a fella once said, it’s the getting that’s the fun.”

  Wells grinned. “Well, that aint exactly what the fella said but it’s close enough. Tell me true, boys, you got a reason for wantin all that ground?”

  “Well sir,” James said, “I guess we’d just like to keep the world from crowding us too close.”

  Wells nodded. “Good reason as any.” They could see he knew it wasn’t the only reason or even the main one. But he’d come to know them well enough to understand they never explained anything to anyone until they were ready to, if ever they should be.

  The cost of all that land would of course be great, and they had been forced into debt in order to buy the second Levee Street lot and the building materials. But their financial circumstance had very much brightened since they had taken up the smuggling trade. They’d gone to Matamoros with Anselmo and had him introduce them to the Goya brothers with whom Evaristo had done most of his business. The Goyas expressed no surprise that Evaristo was gone and did not ask to know the circumstances but were pleased to learn the twins would continue his trade at the Horseshoe. Two weeks later the Wolfes made their first transaction, receiving a wagonload of tequila at the Horseshoe and paying the Goyas for it with money they’d received for the Marina Dos. It had made them heartsick to sell the sloop but there would be other boats. Anselmo suggested a buyer he knew in Harlingen, thirty miles north. The proceeds exceeded what they’d received for the boat and, even minus Anselmo’s share, were sufficient to let them pay off part of their debt and provide their wives with household money for the next several months.

  They were confident they would succeed at the “river trade”—Jim Wells’s preferred term for smuggling—though they knew it was a volatile business and could not be counted on for steady revenue. Their plan was to use most of the money from each smuggling deal to buy some of the land they wanted, even if they had to mortgage the more expensive parcels. They had spoken with Ben Watson at the White Star Company and he had been able to ascertain the titleholders to some of the land to either side of theirs, but legal ownership of other parcels was tangled up in land-grant disputes that had been in the courts for decades, and he was not optimistic about any of those cases being resolved soon.

  When they told him of Watson’s outlook, Jim Wells said, “Well, gents, in all modesty, I remind you that you are in the presence of the foremost legal mind in Texas with regard to land-grant law. If you’d like, I’ll be proud to see what can be done to speed things up a bit and get them properties available.”

  “We were hoping you’d say that,” Blake Cortéz said. They understood that he couldn’t guarantee a quick resolution to every case. “However long it takes is how long it takes,” James Sebastian said.

  Jim Wells’s smile was rueful. “Of course. No press for time when you’re young.”

  Now, two weeks later, Pauline Wells called to them in the den that supper would be on the table in ten minutes. Jim Wells called back they would be there with bells on. Then said to the twins, “Listen, fellas, we all know how chancy the river trade can be. It wouldn’t hurt if you also had a regular income of some sort you could count on for at least family money.”

  He took something from his coat pocket and placed it on the low table between their chairs. A pair of badges emblazoned with “Deputy Constable” along the top curve and “Cameron County” along the bottom.

  “I spoke with the county bigwigs, and in their wisdom they have seen fit to offer you boys the job of special deputy constables. What’s so special is you wouldn’t be reporting to the constables’ office but to me. Your reports would all be word of mouth and if I thought anything you told me warranted the attention of the sheriff’s office, I’d let them know. Nothing else in your reports would go further than me. Now before you get any grinnier about it, I want you to hear me out. I been getting a lot of stories from the country folk about roughneck gangs. Seems all South Texas is crawling with little bands of bad actors. Fellas too dang lazy to work for a living and who think they’re pretty tough because they can push around a lot of poor
folk with no means of defending themselves. The folk say the constables are scared of the gangs, being outnumbered like they are. For sure they aint been getting the job done. I could ask the Rangers to help out, of course. They’ll do me about any favor and they love shooting Mexican bad actors and bringing the bodies into town and laying them out in the market square to be gawped at. However, the Rangers aint kindly disposed to Mexicans of any kind, bad actors or not, and the poor folk got good reason to be as scared of them as of the gangs. I want somebody helping them folk they know is their friend. Somebody who’s gonna protect them and attend to any meanness done them, and I do believe you boys might just be the fellas for it. You’ll be responsible for all of the colonias in the county—all of them. From now on, the other constables will stick to dealing with the town Mexicans. Another thing is rustlers. They’re actually the sheriff’s job but if you run into them they’re yours. Mexican rustlers were pretty bad all along the border till General Díaz took over down there and his Rurales pretty well put the boot to them, but not even the Rurales can stop them all. Anyhow, as for how you do the job and what profit you make off it besides your salary, that’s your business. My only rule is to do right by the poor folk.” He smiled. “So. Interested?”

  They picked up the badges and pinned them under their coats. They all three chuckled. “Ought be fun,” James Sebastian said. “Yeah,” Jim Wells sighed. “It’s one more reason I envy you.” And they went to join their families at the table.

  The residents of the colonias trusted them from the start, having learned that Don Santiago himself had assigned these indistinguishable twins to protect them. The twins of the gringo name and the gringo skin but who spoke borderland Spanish and carried themselves like Mexicans. Los Puños de Don Santiago, the colonia Mexicans called them. The name got around and before long even some of the Anglos were calling them the Fists of Mr Jim.

  They spent much of their time in the saddle, riding a circuit of the colonias. The residents of a colonia could take care of most their own troubles but not against gangs or even the armed hardcase or two who sometimes showed up and lingered among them and ruled the place by brute force. Until the twins showed up. Any hardcase who brandished a gun at them the twins killed on the spot. Those who were smart enough to submit to arrest were divested of whatever money they had and the twins returned to its owners any portion of it that had been stolen and declared the rest of it a fine. They ordered the bad actors to leave Cameron County with the caveat that if they saw them again they would shoot off a kneecap. Of all those they banished in the early years, only four returned and all four suffered the promised punishment and were warned that next time they would be shot in the other knee and both elbows as well. Word of these punishments got around fast and not a man thereafter returned to Cameron County after being banished from it.

  The kneecap punishment was part of a draconian code they devised for certain crimes and would be rigorous in prosecuting through all their years as backcountry lawmen. Any man who deliberately harmed someone weaker than himself—a woman, a child, an old man, a cripple—would be maimed in one foot and told that next time it would be the other. Thieves were ordered to make restitution and in addition their thumb was cut off. A second conviction cost them the rest of the hand. A third—and there would never be a single case of a third—would cost them both eyes. Captured rapists were brought back to the colonia and turned over to the family of the victim so it could extract its own rough justice without condition except for the obligation to bury the remains. Accused murderers were made to stand trial in the particular colonia where the killing had occurred. The twins sat as judges. If the evidence was insufficient to convict but the accused was nevertheless perceived as a threat, the twins exiled him under penalty of being shot if he came back to Cameron County. The guilty were hanged from the nearest suitable gibbet.

  When a colonia reported a raid by a passing gang, the twins went in pursuit. Once they caught sight of the bunch they would keep their distance and hold to the chaparral to keep from being spotted. When the men stopped to make camp the twins moved up closer on foot. If the bunch was a small one of five or six men, the twins took positions with a clear view of the camp and in the last light of day opened fire with the Winchesters and dropped the lot of them before they even knew where the shots were coming from. Larger gangs—few had more than a dozen men—were the more fun for being the more challenging. The twins would trail them too until they stopped for the night. At a wee hour they would sneak up to the camp and throttle the sentry and make swift work of cutting the throats of the sleeping men—each man waking in turn to the apprehension of his death underway but incapable of voicing his horror or crying an alarm. It pleased the twins to prove to themselves time and again that they yet had the skillful stealth they acquired as boys. Each time they put down a gang they would take whatever money and valuables they found on the bodies, whatever weapons were in good condition, whatever horses and saddles they deemed of salable worth. They sometimes trailed a gang into an adjoining county before it stopped for the night. Local lawmen who followed the black flocks of birds to the remnant carnage always had a good idea of whose work they were looking at but took no umbrage at the jurisdictional trespass. Less work for us, they said. On occasion the twins would track a gang even into Mexico and deal with it down there. As they were leaving the scene of one such incursion, they were set upon by a squad of Rurales and had to outrun them back to the border, riding double the last two hundred yards to the river after Blackie’s mount was shot from under him.

  In their earliest years on the circuit they did not meet with any rustlers despite Jim Wells’s warning that they might. But they heard much about them in the colonias. And about their favored routes to the river and their special fords in the wildest riverside regions of Cameron County and its neighbor county of Hidalgo. So the twins expanded their circuit to include these isolate fords—and began to have run-ins with bands of cattle thieves. The best situation was when the rustlers simply abandoned the animals and sped away. The twins then took the herd across the river themselves and sold it and nobody on the Texas side was the wiser. When they met with thieves less willing to give up the cows but who preferred to avoid a fight if they could, the twins would offer to let them take the herd across in exchange for payment of half its worth. Some agreed and the twins made a tidy profit with no effort at all. But some objected to the rate as exorbitant, whereupon the twins would affect to negotiate, and then, at a practiced signal, pulled their revolvers and started shooting, and in moments the issue was settled. They hated to do it that way because it meant having to round up the cattle spooked and scattered by the gunfire. And because it obliged them to return some of the stolen steers to their owners in order to cover themselves in case the gunfight had been witnessed, or the bodies were discovered, as they often were. They would sell half the herd in Mexico and return the rest to the rancher who owned it. They would tell the man they had run into the rustlers at a ford and got in a fight and dropped most of them, but, sorry to say, a few made it to the other side and got away with some of the herd. They would apologize for their failure to recover all the cows, but the ranchers were always grateful to have even some of them back and were profuse in their gratitude. And they spread the word of the twins’ fine work.

  They were often away from home for weeks at a time. But as the years went by and the incidence of crime in the colonias fell off they were able to return to their families more often and stay for longer periods. Marina and Remedios Marisól were always as relieved to see that they were unhurt as they were glad to have them home, and the children were always happy as pups at their return.

  In June of 1896 Remedios Marisól added the first daughter to the two families, Victoria Angélica, and her father and uncle doted on her. She was three and a half years old when the world entered the twentieth century. Jim Wells was by then Judge Wells, having accepted a gubernatorial appointment to serve out the term of a state district judge w
ho’d been obliged to resign. On the last night of 1899 he hosted a New Year’s Eve party for a hundred friends and their families. The celebration took place in a large rented hall and on its lantern-lit surrounding grounds arrayed with picnic tables and bandstands and dance floors. Morgan James was a month shy of seven years old and attending the best school in the county—a Catholic school run by nuns—where the other boys would also be enrolled when they were of age. Harry Sebastian and Jackson Ríos were now five, César Augusto four. The boys wore suits and ties and everyone smiled to see them dancing with their mothers.

  On each of the twins’ respites with their families, the Wolfes always took supper at least once or twice with the Wells. And too, in the course of every visit home, there would be a stag barbecue at one ranch or another with some of Jim Wells’s friends, most of them ranchers, but always a few politicians in attendance as well, plus the Brownsville marshal and the chief of police and a Texas Ranger or two. From one year to the next, more of Jim Wells’s friends—men of power and experience and not easily impressed—became the twins’ friends too.

  For his varied efforts on the twins’ behalf, Jim Wells of course received something of great value from them in return, something more than their protection of the countryside peons, whose votes were the core of his political influence. Something he did not in fact ever actually ask for, not in so many words, but which they never failed to grasp as a request and never failed to fulfill. And for which service they always received an appreciative and generous remuneration. After each circuit of the colonias, they would as always meet with Wells in private and give him their report and usually that was that. Sometimes, however—not often, rarely more than three or four times in the course of a year—he would tell them about someone or other who was causing a problem for the regional party or for the coalition of ranchers or for some other association important to South Texas. Someone who had persistently rejected Jim Wells’s every effort to arrive at some reasonable resolution to the problem, some sensible accommodation. “I tell you, boys,” he said, “being reasonable is all the means we’ve got for getting along with each other in this world. A fella who won’t be reasonable, who aint willing to compromise the least little bit, is about the biggest liability on God’s green earth. Fellas like that, well, sometimes they don’t leave you much choice about things, sad to say.” In terms that no law court could ever construe as directive, Wells would say that a number of important people were of the same mind as his in wishing this person would cease and desist in the difficulty he was causing. Wells was never specific about the problem presented by the man under discussion, but the details were in any case irrelevant to the twins. They never said anything in response to his account of the troublemaker but only listened and nodded. Some days or weeks later, the man in question might be found expired in his bed with not a mark on him and hence presumed the victim of heart failure or stroke. Or sprawled neckbroken on the floor of his barn after a fall from his loft. Or drowned in a creek or the river after being thrown from his horse, which would be grazing nearby. And every time some such gadfly succumbed to some such natural cause and ceased to present a problem to Jim Wells and his associates, a thick sealed envelope bearing no mark at all would sometime in the night be left at the front door of one or the other twin’s Levee Street home. Marina or Remedios was usually the one to find it and would pass it to her husband without remark. If the women intuited what was in the envelope or what it was for, they never said so, not even to each other.