Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  SINS OF THE FATHERS

  On an early Saturday afternoon they ford the river a few miles west of town and then ride into Brownsville. Four red-eyed horsemen as gray with dust as their mounts, each man of them wearing pistol and knife, each horse hung with rifle and machete, one saddle horn with a stinking gray sack of black-stained bottom attended by a drone of flies. The fighting has made chaos of rail travel, but they managed to bribe their way onto a flatcar of one military transport train after another, moving northward stretch by stretch—to Jalapa, to Tampico, to Ciudad Victoria, where the northward rail line had been destroyed and they bought horses to carry them the last two hundred miles to the border.

  Market day. The town abustle. Their horses bare their teeth at honking puttering automobiles amid the wagon traffic. None of the four men speak English but through casual queries of an assortment of Mexican locals they learn everything they need to know. Learn of the Wolfe properties and residences and that the twins are longtime constables of celebrated feats who in the course of doing their duty have killed many bad men. Of course they would be lawmen, Juan Lobo thinks. Of course they would have a home on the seashore and own a great tract of land and call it Tierra Wolfe. Of course.

  A Ford touring car is parked alongside one of the Levee Street houses, Marina having come to town earlier today, driven by Harry Sebastian, to have an aching tooth attended by a dentist. They plan to return to the beach in the morning. No neighbors are in sight as the men dismount and lead their horses to the car and tether them to it. Dax and Sarmiento go around to the back and Juan Lobo and Pori to the front.

  Harry Sebastian answers the knock at the door. A fat man in dirty clothes, hat in hand, says he is sorry to disturb anyone but he has an important message for Blake and James Wolfe. Harry says neither of them is in town at the moment and there is no telephone where they are, but he will be seeing them tomorrow and will be glad to take the message. Fat Pori brings a revolver up from behind the hat and cocks it as he puts the muzzle to Harry’s forehead and backs him into the parlor. Juan Lobo follows them inside and closes the door. Marina enters from the kitchen, drying her hands with a dishcloth and asking who it was, then freezes, seeing the strangers and the gun to her son’s head.

  Go back in the kitchen, Mother, Harry Sebastian says, thinking of his folded knife in his pocket, his pistol in the other room.

  Juan Lobo tells her to stay where she is. Then takes a look into the bedrooms and returns with Harry’s gun in his belt and goes into the kitchen and says something to someone at the rear door. Then is back and standing before Marina. She meets his eyes and it is all she can do to hide her fear. Listen, she says. I am Marina Wolfe. You better leave right now and go somewhere far away before my husband hears of this. Juan Lobo grins and says, Which one is he? James Sebastián Wolfe, she says. Poor bastard, Juan Lobo says, married to such a hag.

  Don’t talk to her like that, you son of a bitch, Harry Sebastian says. Pori drives a knee into Harry’s crotch and the boy falls down and clutches himself and vomits. Marina starts to scream but Lobo clamps a hand over her mouth and seizes her to him from behind. He nods at Pori who draws his knife and goes down on one knee and thrusts the blade into Harry’s heart.

  Marina is wild-eyed, her horrified cries muffled under Lobo’s stifling hand as she fights to free herself. And then her struggle slackens and she can make no cry at all for her slashed throat. Lobo lets her fall and puts up his knife and he and Pori leave.

  She crawls through her blood to Harry and puts a stoppering hand to his wound as though the force of her love might save the dead boy before her own slowing heart’s last stumble.

  There is a sign, small and low to the ground, the letters carved into it and burned black—Wolfe Landing. An arrow under the name points down a winding road leading through the high grass and mesquite stands into a riverside palm grove and the town within it, its charter not two months old, with a resident population of eight. Only the tops of the tallest trees are still touched by sunlight at this late afternoon hour as the four horsemen turn onto the narrow road. The sky has gone strange, with clouds bunching overhead and to westward but not in the east, out over the sea.

  The road takes them into a large clearing amid the palms and moss-hung trees. The place is but a hamlet, comprising a large two-story house and a few smaller residences, some outbuildings, a stable and corral holding horses and mules. There are several dray wagons. A pier with a moored pair of rowboats. The men ignore the barking dogs that have converged around them, but the irritated horses snap down at them.

  Beside a house, Anselmo and Pepe pause at their work of planing a board on sawbucks and watch the horsemen approach. Lupita comes in view at a window, drying her just-washed hair with a towel. The horsemen rein up and Anselmo says, “Buenas tardes, caballeros. A su servicio.” Beside him, Pepe orders the dogs to shut up but they persist in their commotion.

  Juan Lobo smiles and says he wishes to speak to James and Blake Wolfe.

  I am sorry to say neither one is here, Anselmo says. His rifle is leaning against the side of the house ten feet away and he curses himself for not having retrieved it as soon as these men came in view. Up close the stink of them is terrific and he sees now the flyblown sack dangling from the saddle horn and feels a stir in his stomach. He tells the man the brothers have gone into town and he should look for them there.

  Juan Lobo looks at the woman in the window and she moves out of sight. He had known the twins would not be here, that they are at the beach house as he had been told is their weekend custom, but this place, this so-called town, is theirs, a part of them, as were these people, and he would not pass it by.

  A dog nips at his mount’s leg and dodges the horse’s kick that jostles Lobo in the saddle. Lobo draws his pistol and shoots the dog in the eye and its head hits the ground ahead of the rest of its body.

  The gunshot frights the birds from the trees and the other dogs sprint away into the brush as Anselmo yells, You son of a—and the next bullet passes through his head.

  By the time they are back on the Boca Chica road and heading east again, the night is fully risen and its only light is from the flaming hamlet. The glow is visible for miles but the only witnesses in range of it are the four horsemen themselves and a trio of Mexican shepherds a half mile south of the river, and even the shepherds cannot see the smoke against a sky so black with clouds. The gunshots and screamings have carried unheard into the uninhabited countryside. The horsemen feel invigorated, two of them having taken their pleasure with Lupita Xocoto, the other two with Selma Fuentes. The remains of the entire population of Wolfe Landing—all eight residents, including two boys, ages six and three, and an infant girl but seven months old—are charring in the flames.

  They ride to the end of the Boca Chica road and onto the beach, the enormous dark undulation of the gulf before them. In the eastern sky the clouds have broken and the lowest of the stars demarcate a vague horizon. The men head south along the smooth beach, the breeze briny, the swash of the breakers muting the jinglings of harness. After a time they see small glowings of light in the distance ahead. The house. When they close to within a hundred yards, they can tell by the lights that it is a two-story on the crest of the sloping beach. They ride up into the dunes and out of sight of the house and then turn south again. Their horses strain for footing in the soft sand and the men dismount and lead them by the reins. They traverse a road of logs packed over with a mixture of gravel and dirt, the trail to the Boca Chica road, the turnoff onto which they could never have found in the dark. When they reckon they are near the house they hobble the horses and crawl over two low dunes and reach the crest of a taller one. And there the house is, fifteen yards from them. Atop the dune they are still below the level of the roofless porch and the windows of the lower floor are much too high for them to see into the house. But the breeze carries to them the sound of laughter. They can make out the garage just south of the house, and a few yards behind it a shed. Lobo and Dax s
curry to the shed in a low crouch. By matchlight they find the store of lamp oil for the house—three barrels, one tapped. On a shelf are several empty paint cans, and they fill three of them with oil. Then they roll the three barrels, each in turn, from the shed to the house, setting one against a piling at the rear southwest corner and the other two against the pilings at the east side front corners. They retrieve the open cans of oil and set one beside each of the barrels. Then rejoin Sarmiento and Pori on the dune. And wait for the moon to come up.

  Although Juan Lobo has imagined the pleasure of presenting the twins with their brother’s head just before he kills them, the fact of the matter is that such a moment cannot be had without first capturing them, and to try to capture them is to give them more of a chance to make a fight of it. No. Not these two. The least chance possible for them. If they die without knowing who is killing them and why, so what? Even if they knew, they would no longer know it when they’re dead, would they? The dead are without memory and so have no regret. Lobo well understands that the great failing of revenge is that the moment you kill a man you deliver him from pain and regret and can no longer get even with him. But. You can remember the occasion of getting even with him. You can remember it for the rest of your life. So. The thing of importance, Juan Lobo has told himself, the thing to keep in mind, is that these Wolfe twins will die because he, Juan Lobo, wills it. He who will know he was the instrument of their death and will take pleasure from that knowledge for as long as he has left to live.

  By eleven o’clock the house is quiet and its windows dark. At midnight a cusp of moon shows at the far end of the gulf. A fat bright crescent just entering its last quarter, it silvers the water surface as it ascends, brings the beach into pale form, shapes the house in distinct silhouette.

  The moon is almost detached from the gulf when Lobo sends Fat Pori to his assigned post. They lose sight of him in the dunes until some minutes later when he appears on the beach about forty yards north of the house. He lies belly down and pushes sand into a mound in front of him for some modicum of concealment. From there he has an unobstructed and moonlit view of both the front of the house and its north side. He settles himself with rifle ready.

  Now Lobo and Sarmiento and Dax scurry down to the house, Dax with his rifle slung on his shoulder. Each of them goes to one of the oil barrels and with his machete hacks a gash into it, the blades whunking loud through the metal. Each man then picks up a paint can of oil and pours a track of it from the pool forming around the barrel as he backs up, Lobo and Sarmiento moving toward the rear of the house, Dax toward its front. They strike matches and put them to the oil tracks. As the flames rush along the ground toward the barrels, Lobo and Sarmiento race back to the dune behind the house while Dax sprints out to a spot on the beach from which he can cover the dark south side of the house and, like Pori, the front as well. As he runs, the barrels boom into spheres of fire.

  The hackings into the oil barrels wake the twins. All the bedrooms are on the second floor and theirs are the last two at the north end of the rear of the house. Blake Cortéz lies still a moment, listening hard, a hand on the revolver under his pillow. When he gets up and goes to the window, Remedios wakes. What is it? she says. He shushes her and stares hard into the blackness directly behind the house. Reviews a quick mental roster of who is in the house. César and Hector are away on the Remerina, night fishing in the Laguna Madre. And then come the booms of the barrels bursting into flame—and in the glare of orange light from under the house, he glimpses two men ducking behind opposite ends of the nearest dune. At the same moment, James Sebastian, at the north window of his room and scanning the area without, spies the low mound of sand on the beach and the man lying prone behind it.

  Laced with distilled coal tar as protection against the elements, the pilings burn like oversized matchsticks. The fire sheets the underside of the house in less than a minute. It flares through the plank seams and leaps up from the floor inside, combusting the rugs and drapes, igniting the furniture. It scales the walls, finds the hallways. . . .

  The twins are in a hallway murky with smoke, James Sebastian with a Winchester, Blake Cortéz a double-barreled shotgun. Remedios has a wet cloth to her face, red eyes great with terror. Morgan and Jacky Ríos join them, revolvers in hand. “Las muchachas!” Remedios cries. James and Morgan start for the other side of the house where the girls’ room is, the hallway ahead already churning in flames and smoke. They are about to run through the fire when a portion of the floor before them collapses in a downpour of burning wood and a swirling uprush of sparks. They hurry back to the others and James Sebastian says, “No way to them! They’ll use the window!” His throat feels flayed. As they hasten down the burning stairway Blake says there are two behind the house and James says he spotted one on the beach. At the foot of the stairs part of a wall falls on Morgan, and his father and Jacky pull him out fast and beat at his clothes and hair and he hollers when they strike his broken arm. Blake is already heading with Remedios toward the back of the house and yelling at James to take the others out by the front.

  The sound of the machetes does not reach the room Catalina shares with Vicki Angel midway along the south side of the house and so she does not wake until she smells the smoke. She shouts for Vicki to wake up and flies into her clothes in the dark, the knife as always already on her belt. Vicki is confused in the darkness, terrified by the smoke and Catalina’s urgency. She can’t find her pants. Smoke is rising off the floor, their bare feet near to burning. The door shows a wavering band of light along its bottom edge and Catalina senses that to open the door is to admit hell. The window, she says, and pulls Vicki, still in her shift, over to it. This side of the house is away from the moon and still in darkness but for the glow of the fire from under the house, and they can barely see the ground thirty feet below. Catalina tells Vicki she’ll lower her as far as she can before letting her drop, that it’s soft sand, that she won’t get hurt. As Vicki begins to ease out the window with Cat gripping her wrists, the door behind them erupts into flame and a searing blaze fills the room.

  Even at some forty yards from the house, their angles of vision and the forward projection of the porch permit Dax and Pori to see only the upper part of the front door. If the fuckers come out standing up, how convenient, but even if they crawl out on the porch and can’t be seen, they’ll soon enough have to come off the burning porch and into the light. Now an upper window on the dark side of the house comes aglow with fire and Dax sees a pair of vague silhouettes in it, one of them climbing out and holding to the other. He aims and shoots and hears a cry and the one partway out falls into the darkness below. He works the rifle bolt as the other scrabbles through the window and he shoots as that one too drops out of the frame of light. He works the bolt again and peers hard, but the uneven ground on that side of the house is all flickering shadows in the firelight and he cannot distinguish the forms of the two who dropped from the window. He hears nothing but the waves breaking on the sand, the crackling of the fire. Then rifleshots resound from the house and he returns his attention to the front porch.

  They’re now in the kitchen and Remedios is suffocating. She lunges for the back door but Blake restrains her, forces her to the floor. Her hands are burning and she screams. He hunkers beside her and kicks the door open and lunges out onto the porch, pulling her with him—and the two men start shooting from either end of the dune. Keeping below their angle of sight and holding Remedios to him, Blake flings his shotgun over the porch’s south rail, then drags Remedios to the rail and scoops her up and stands up and is shot in the back and shoulder as he heaves her over and then falls wheeling after her. He lands hard on the sand, jarred almost breathless. Remedios lies sprawled and still. He grabs the shotgun and is shot in the back yet again as he rolls under the porch and behind the steps. He lies prone, fighting for breath, then rises on his elbows and looks out between the porch steps and sees a muzzle flash at the near end of the dune, the bullet striking a step and defl
ecting into his side. He fires one barrel at a point just below where the flash was and the buckshot blows through the top of the dune and he glimpses a man pitching backward.

  A figure appears at the front door, visible only from the chest up, silhouetted by the firelight within. He stands just inside the door and to the left, as though aware of Pori and staying out of his view but unaware of Dax—who smiles as he shoots him. The man falls forward onto the porch and out of sight. Pori too sees the man fall and has the same thought as Dax—that whoever else comes onto the porch will do it in a crouch. But the fire is gobbling up the porch and the fuckers will have to come off it or be cooked.

  Embers fall into Blake’s hair and burn into his scalp and he brushes them away. His clothes are smoking, his hands and face blistering. Through the flaming porch steps he watches the dune. The second man behind it has not fired again and Blake guesses he is positioning for a better shot. Maybe he’s waiting till I have to move out from under here, he thinks. That’s what I’d do. Then sees him on the dune crest, directly in front of the steps, looking at him, rising on his knees and raising a rifle. They both shoot.

  Juan Lobo is enraged. He knows he hit the son of a bitch twice—and he’s still alive. Maybe Sarmiento hit him too before the fucker cut loose with that shotgun and probably nailed him. Goddammit! Shot up and roasting and he still nails the One-Eye! Lobo flings off his hat and slogs through the soft sand along the foot of the dune, moving to a better angle of fire. Right about here, he thinks, and crawls up the slope and peeks over the crest. The underside of the house is roiling with red-yellow fire and the glare of it makes him squint. He scans the flaming stairway. Sees him. Face framed between two of the lower steps and looking right at him like a devil peering out of hell. He rises to his knees as he brings up the rifle and he pulls the trigger at the same instant that the buckshot charge hits him. He feels himself floating rearward. Then is staring up at the whirling starry sky. Whirling and whirling and fading and gone.