Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  The Yadier one said they knew the Wolfes had an excellent smuggling point on their property that permitted them to operate in great safety. The question, said the Elizondo one, was whether the Wolfes could get the guns and ammunition. Blake asked what kind of rifles they wanted. They said the new Springfields. Those could be a little hard to get, James Sebastian said. Of course, the Elizondo one said. That is why we will pay well for them. But naturally, we do not want to be cheated on the price. Naturally, James Sebastian said. The twins said they would see what they could arrange. They agreed to meet at the Goya estate again in ten days.

  The twins made inquiries that led them to a Fort Brown master sergeant named Leonard Richardson, the NCO in charge of the post armory. Silverhaired and beefy, he was dressed like a rancher when they met at a corner table in a loud and crowded Matamoros cantina. Richardson knew about the twin constables by reputation. He’d heard of their law enforcement methods in the outland and the rumors of their sideline as liquor smugglers. He told them he had been dealing in army weapons for ten years and had suppliers from various army forts and other military installations throughout Texas and all over the gulf coast, every man of them an expert at reworking inventory ledgers to disguise the thefts. He could easily get them Mausers or Krags. The Springfield M1903 was of course a more difficult acquisition but he could do it for the right price.

  “Which is?” James Sebastian asked.

  Richardson told him—and was quick to admit it was steep, but then he was the most dependable provider they could hope to do business with. “Every delivery I ever said I’d make got made,” he said, “when and where promised.” He let them confer privately for the time it took him to go to the bar to get three more mugs of beer.

  When he returned to the table they told him they had a different price in mind. Richardson sighed and started to say the price wasn’t negotiable, but then heard one of them offer to pay ten percent more than what he’d asked—on condition that from then on he would sell Springfields to nobody but them. Richardson grinned and said they had a deal.

  “You understand that if we should find out you’re selling Springfields to somebody else, we’ll look on it as a breach of contract,” James Sebastian said.

  “Such a breach would be unjust,” Blake said, “and we have a strong belief in justice.”

  Richardson looked from one to the other. He had dealt with many dangerous men and was no fool. “I understand you very well, gentlemen,” he said. “I have the same view of justice.”

  There were handshakes all around, a surreptitious exchange of money.

  Six days later a pair of heavily laden wagons were turned over to them at two o’clock in the morning at the northern city limit. By daybreak the contents of the wagons were cached in the shed at Wolfe Landing.

  The next time they met with Yadier and Elizondo the twins brought one of the Springfields for them to examine. The Mexicans were pleased, and they understood that as a matter of precaution the twins’ supplier—Mr Jones, the twins called him—would never deliver more than one wagonload at a time but could deliver as often as every two weeks.

  The twins would continue their traffic in booze but their main trade henceforth was guns, a far more lucrative commodity. Most of their arms transactions would be with Yadier and Elizondo, but there would be some with other parties too, few of whom had any political principle in common with each other besides antagonism to Porfirio Díaz.

  In the fall of ‘08, John Louis Little and his family arrived on the border. A yellow fever epidemic had struck Matamoros earlier in the year—Brownsville had been quarantined—and one of its victims was Úrsula’s father. Úrsula and John Louis attended Don Hector’s funeral and were afterward informed that he had bequeathed the cattle hacienda, Las Lomas, to his son Gaspar, and that Doña Martina would continue to live there. To Úrsula and John Louis, Don Hector had willed his sprawling horse ranch to the west of Matamoros. It was a fine place, its rich pasturelands nourished by a wide web of creeks, its large house well shaded by cottonwoods.

  It was not easy for John Louis to take leave of Patria Chica. He had lived there all his life and for the past eight years had been his brother’s segundo. But he was very happy to have his own ranch. Zack Jack said he hated to see him go but he understood why he must. Zack had an able man in mind to serve as segundo in John’s place until young Eduardo Luis—Luis Charón’s son—was seasoned enough to assume the job. Eduardo was only thirteen but already eager to start learning the estate’s operations. Edward Little, too, told John Louis he would miss him, never mind the infrequence of their time together through the years. They promised to visit each other as often as they could, and Edward wished him luck with the Tamaulipas ranch.

  For both Úrsula and John Louis it was a return to the region of their birth, though he was less than a year old the last time he’d been there. They named the ranch Cielo Largo. It was managed so well by the foreman and his segundo that there would never be much for John Louis to do except attend to its finances.

  He knew he had kin in Brownsville—his Aunt Gloria’s twin cousins, Blake and James Wolfe. Although she had never met them she had learned much about them from her brother, Bruno, who had been living at the Wolfe hacienda in Veracruz for twenty years. She had in turn told John Louis and Zack all about the twins, including the story of their killing the man who killed their father and escaping the assassin’s vengeful brother, an army general.

  One Saturday, just a few weeks after their arrival at Cielo Largo, John Louis and Úrsula went into Matamoros and ferried across the river and asked after the Wolfe brothers at the city clerk’s office. They were directed to the two Levee Street addresses. As it happened, the Wolfe families were at Playa Blanca that weekend—except for the twins, who had remained in town for a meeting with Jim Wells. In shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows and with a cigar in hand, James Sebastian answered the knock at the door and saw a neatly dressed couple standing there, the man rugged-looking, brownskinned but green-eyed, the woman a striking mestiza. John Louis introduced himself and Úrsula in English and said he was looking for James and Blake Wolfe, who were first cousins to his sister-in-law Gloria Wolfe y Blanco de Little.

  Two hours later, sitting at the kitchen table over their second pot of coffee, they were as easy with each other as if they’d been acquainted for years. The twins liked the Littles but were habitually chary about revealing very much of themselves. They were so artful about it that not until later would the Littles realize they had not really learned much about them beyond what Gloria had already told John Louis. Only that they were county constables and real estate investors and had homes in Brownsville and at the seaside, where their families were passing the weekend.

  The twins, on the other hand, had learned a great deal not only about the Littles and their kin but even about their own. Such as their Uncle Samuel having been a San Patricio, one more detail their father had withheld from them. And about the death of their cousin Gloria and the circumstance of it, which evoked a smile from Blake Cortéz both sympathetic and admiring. “Wish I’d known her,” he said.

  James Sebastian wanted to know if it was true the Little family was friends with Porfirio Díaz, as they’d been informed. John Louis said it was.

  “You know him yourself?” Blake said.

  “Only all my life,” John Louis said. His father had known Díaz for some forty years and still worked for him.

  “Doing what?” Blake asked.

  John Louis shrugged and said that was something known only to his father and Porfirio Díaz.

  “Sounds mighty damn mysterious,” James Sebastian said with a grin. And quickly added, “Pardon my language, Miss Úrsula.”

  She smiled and said, “Please, no more Miss Úrsula. I am Úrsula or Sulita, as you prefer. And you are damn well pardoned.” Evoking laughter from them all.

  They were quick to grow close, these border branches of the families Little and Wolfe. Marina and Remedios welcomed Úrsula with sist
erly camaraderie, and their children regarded Hector Louis as one more brother in the bunch. Persuaded that the school the Wolfe boys attended was the best in the region, John Louis and Úrsula decided that Hector should also go there, and to make it easier they bought a house in Brownsville, a brick two-story on a large corner lot on Palm Boulevard and only a three-block walk to the Wolfe homes. The first time the Wolfes visited the Littles in their new residence, Hector Louis and César Augusto got into a fight in the backyard, the cause of which was never made clear. The adults came out of the house to see what was happening and found the other boys yelling fight strategies now to one combatant and now to the other, Vicki Angel looking on with them and with as much avidity. César was nearly two years older than Hector Louis and much better versed in fighting, but Hector was slightly larger and had no lack of courage or verve. Úrsula wanted to stop them but Marina put a hand on her arm and restrained her with a shake of the head. The men let them punch and grapple in the dirt for a minute longer before James Sebastian pulled them apart by the collars, declaring César the winner but telling battered Hector he had no cause for shame. The two boys thereafter became best friends, and César taught him how to fight but then was sorry he did, realizing too late that if they should ever fight again, bigger Hector would surely get the best of him.

  The families made frequent visits between their Brownsville homes and between Playa Blanca and Cielo Largo, and the Wolfes greatly enjoyed the barbecues and rodeos at the Littles’ ranch. The twins admired the excellent breed of John Louis’s herds and introduced him to several serious buyers of horseflesh. As for the Littles, their first visit to Playa Blanca was their first view of the sea. They learned to swim there, all three of them, and to sail.

  Eventually the twins took John Louis to Wolfe Landing, their arrival heralded by the yappings of Anselmo’s dogs, and introduced him to Anselmo and Pepe and Licho. Anselmo had now been married for three years and he and his wife Lupita had a two-year-old son named Costo, and Licho Fuentes was engaged to a girl named Selma. The twins showed him through the large house they had not used much over the years but that was well-kept by a crew of maids Pepe Xocoto transported from town once a week.

  The twins and John Louis were seated on the verandah and finishing their third drink when they told him they thought he should know they sometimes did a little smuggling.

  “Oh hell,” John Louis said, “Suli and I have known that since our first meal in a Brownsville café. People talk, you know.”

  The railroad had come to Brownsville in 1904, and with it a greater influx of Anglos, most of them in search of good cropland. More and more of the countryside continued to be cleared for agriculture, and small mestizo farms continued to give way to larger Anglo operations. More so than in any other part of the state, the mix of Mexicans and Anglos in the delta had long been harmonious, but few of the newcomers had any interest in local customs or in learning Spanish, and most of them disdained all things Mexican. Racial resentments had begun to simmer, then to boil.

  In addition to these alterations to the natural landscape and the social fabric, there had come the inevitable transformations of technology. The telephone. Electric lighting. A sewer system. A waterworks. A trolley line. The changes came and came.

  And the world spun ever faster.

  Over time, the twins had gradually reduced their colonia circuit rides to twice a year, which sufficed to maintain order in them, though sometimes a colonia would send a plea for help to Jim Wells who’d get the word to them and they would at once ride out to attend to the matter. Now they didn’t want to do it anymore. They liked being with their families at the beach and they liked taking part in the gun transactions at the Horseshoe, as they had begun doing.

  They tried to give their badges back to Jim Wells but he refused to accept them. He said they would no longer be required to ride the circuit, he would have other constables assigned to it. But he wanted them to remain special constables with no specific duty other than to be his “confidantes,” as he called it, to be available whenever he should need to talk about somebody who was causing him a problem and refusing to be reasonable in settling it.

  They said being his confidantes was the least they could do for him.

  “Good,” Wells said. “So keep the badges. They’re a mighty handy thing for confidantes to have.”

  The profits from arms smuggling dwarfed what they earned from liquor. They had been smuggling guns for more than a year when they bought the last of the parcels extricated by Jim Wells from the welter of land-grant litigation and achieved their goal of owning all the land—minus the state right-of-way to the gulf—east of the city and between the river and Nameless Creek. An area of some fifty square miles, depending on the Rio Grande’s unpredictable and ever-shifting meanders. Shortly after that final deed came into their hands, they told Jim Wells they wanted one more thing.

  “A town?” Jim Wells said. He grinned from one of them to the other. They were puffing cigars and sipping whiskey in his den and waiting to be called to Christmas Eve dinner with their families, after which Wells and his wife and children would attend the midnight mass at the Immaculate Conception Church, as they did every Christmas.

  “Yessir,” Blake Cortéz said. “You always wanted to know what our big plan was. Well, that’s it.”

  The three had been talking of the state’s intention to form several new counties in South Texas in the next few years, and Blake asked if it was true that one of the new counties was going to be named Jim Wells. “I’ve heard that rumor,” Wells said, as though he had no inkling at all. “If it happens, it’ll be an honor.” They all laughed and had another drink. Then the twins told him of wanting to make Wolfe Landing a town.

  “Let me get this straight,” Wells said. “You want Wolfe Landing to be a bona fide town. A state-chartered town. Out there in the middle of that godforsaken land nobody owns but you?”

  “Yessir,” James Sebastian said.

  “And of course the state would get the right-of-way for a road to it from off the Boca Chica Road,” Blake said. “Can’t have a town without a public road to it, naturally.”

  Wells looked at them as if not quite sure they weren’t joking.

  “You know we’ve always wanted to keep the world from crowding in too close,” James said. “What better way than live in a town in the middle of your own land?”

  “Which would pretty much make it your town,” Wells said.

  “Well, I suppose you could say it’s our town in the sense that we’re its founders, yessir,” Blake said.

  “Every town had to be founded by somebody,” James said.

  “Your town with your laws.”

  “Well naturally there’s got to be laws, same as in any town,” Blake said. “Municipal ordinances and the like. For the protection of the community. For the sake of economic progress. Heck, Judge, nobody knows that better’n you.”

  “You already got the petition papers all writ up, aint you?”

  Blake tapped his coat pocket. “Every i dotted and t crossed, yessir.”

  Wells laughed. “You boys. You make it sound so goldang easy.”

  “It will be, sir,” James Sebastian said. “If you push for it, it’ll be easy as pie.”

  “Especially when the state’s about to charter all these counties,” Blake said, “and one of them to be named in your honor’s honor.” He grinned.

  “I mean, how much trouble would it be to throw in a charter for one little-bitty town?” James said. “At the request of the esteemed James B Wells?”

  “If anybody can do it, Judge, you can,” said Blake.

  “You two think way too much of me.”

  “Now don’t getting all modest on us, your honor,” James Sebastian said. “We known each other too long.”

  Wells smiled and stared into his nearly empty glass.

  “What say, Judge?” Blake said.

  “You’re aware that there will be, ah, some requisite political contributions?
To certain personnel on certain state committees.”

  “Of course,” James Sebastian said. “Just let us know how much and when.”

  Wells emptied his glass and smacked his lips. “Well heck,” he said. “I suppose I could talk to some people, see what happens.”

  Pauline had to come to the door and rap hard on it more than once to get their attention and tell them to hush all that whooping and braying laughter before the neighbors thought they were drunk as coots on the Good Lord’s birthday.

  It took almost a year but Wells did it. He received the official decision shortly after Thanksgiving but he kept it to himself till Christmas Eve because it seemed fitting to him that they should be notified exactly a year to the day after making the proposal. And in the same setting and circumstance—his den, waiting to be called to dinner. As their families socialized in the parlor and kitchen, Wells poured drinks for the twins, but when they raised their glasses to him he said, “Just a second, boys. I got something here yall might want to drink to.” He took a bound copy of the charter out of the top drawer and placed it on the desktop. “Merry Christmas, muchachos.”

  They saw the bureaucratic insignia and the embossed image of the lone star and knew what the packet was. They looked at each other and then grinned at Wells.

  “This aint the end of it, is it?” Wells said. “You think I don’t know what all you got in mind for down the road?”

  “Why, Judge, whatever do you mean?” Blake Cortéz said in mock bafflement.

  “What you aiming to call it? Something modest, no doubt. Wolfe County, maybe.”

  “Whoa there, your honor, now don’t go getting too far ahead of us,” James Sebastian said.

  “Ahead of you two?”

  They all laughed. The twins raised their glasses and James Sebastian said, “Muchísimas gracias, your honor.”