Country of the Bad Wolfes

by James Blake

  Jacky Ríos and Morgan crawl out beside James Sebastian on the porch floor as the gunfire continues on the rear side of the house. The planks under them are crackling and smoking, the fire closing on them from every direction but ahead. A shotgun resounds and the shooting behind the house abruptly ceases. There’s two out here, James Sebastian says, wheezing. The one that hit me’s somewhere to the right but the other’s at ten o’clock. Jacky picks up James Sebastian’s Winchester, scorching his hand, and crawls forward to the porch rails and peers between them. He scans the beach slightly to his left. Sees nothing. Wipes at his streaming eyes and looks again. Sees the slight mound and what could be a head peering over it. He aims between the rail slats. Shoots. The head jerks and drops forward. Now Jacky drags James Sebastian down the steps and Morgan James comes tumbling behind them and cries out at the pain of his arm, all of them ready to take a fatal bullet rather than burn to death—as a shotgun and rifle fire together from the back of the house.

  “No te mueres, querido! No te mueres!” Blake is hazily aware of being dragged by fits and starts, of gruntings and profanity and crying. He tastes blood, smells burned flesh. Now recognizes Remedios’s voice. Pleading with him not to die as she drags him, tug by tug, away from the flaming house.

  In the firelight shadows alongside the house, Catalina crawls to Vicki and finds her unconscious but breathing. She searches by feel for a wound and finds it on her left buttock. Entry and exit without hitting bone. Bloody but not bad. Vicki moans at her probe of it and Cat claps a hand over her mouth, shushes her, tells her to be very quiet. She can see the prone form of the shooter on the moonlit beach and knows he’s looking their way but can’t make them out among the gyrating shadows. Lock your teeth, she tells Vicki. Then drags her away from the growing heat of the burning house, their gaspings inaudible over the breaking waves. About ten yards from the edge of the house’s shadow is a grassy sand dune, but the man is still looking this way. Catalina is sure she will be shot as she runs across that moonlit span but she cannot lie there and do nothing. Stay here and don’t move, she tells Vicki. Just then there’s riflefire at the house and the man’s head turns in that direction, and Cat dashes out of the shadows and over the open ground, expecting a bullet at every stride. But she reaches the dune without drawing fire and keeps on running. There’s a rifleshot from the beach and she nearly yells in rage that the man may have shot Vicki. She estimates her position as she runs, and when she’s sure she is south of him she starts scrabbling up the dune. A shotgun fires somewhere. She reaches the crest and sees him to her left, a prone stark figure on the moonbright beach. She comes down the dune in a crouch, thinking, Don’t turn, don’t turn, don’t turn. And then she’s on the beach and twenty feet behind him and starts closing fast, knife in hand, her footfalls muted by the breakers. At the house a rifle fires, and the man on the beach raises his head slightly, the better to see as three men come stumbling down the porch steps and into the light of the moon. The man lowers his face to take aim.

  And Cat plunges onto him and he is dead before he can know his neck is skewered to the rifle stock.

  REMAINS OF NIGHT

  Each twin asks about the other and learns he yet lives. As familiar as they are with mortal wounds, they refuse Jacky Ríos’s plea to drive them to the hospital in town, not wanting to die in such a place or in a car on the way to it. With broken-armed Morgan following, Jacky and Catalina and Remedios carry Blake Cortéz down to the edge of the beach where his brother sits. They ease him down beside James, facing the moonbright sea.

  “Dame un beso, mujer . . . y déjanos,” Blake says. Remedios kisses him and then hurries away with tears coursing.

  James beckons Morgan, who says “Yessir” and crouches before him.

  “It’s on . . . you now,” James says. “See to things. Kiss . . . your momma for me.”

  Morgan cannot speak. He grips his father’s hand and nods. Then goes.

  After a minute, James says, “Who the hell . . . those guys?”

  Blake tries to shrug. “Bastards . . . mad about . . . something.”

  James grins and makes a sound like a small hiccup. “Took it awful . . . personal.”

  A long minute passes.

  “I’d rather . . . firing squad . . . than this,” James says.

  Blake chokes on his chuckle. “Puffing . . . cigar.”

  “Girls fighting . . . over us.”

  “That old . . . Bad Wolfe.”

  “Jolly Roger.”

  They groan their laughter.

  The day breaks. The sky at the end of the gulf graduates from gray to pink, a thin shreds of orange, a welter of reds. The house reduced to a great black rectangle of smoking embers. The tide now rolling to within a few feet of the twins. Morgan James and Jacky Ríos sit together at the top of the beach slope, watching their fathers. Remedios too, holding Vicki Angel to her, the girl on her side, keeping the weight off her wound. Catalina sits apart. The twins have not moved in almost an hour, but they all know. Not yet.

  The sun flares up from the gulf as the Remerina comes in sight to the north, its sail white as a seabird.

  “So damn … grand,” Blackie breathes. And his head descends to his brother’s shoulder.

  “Yessss. . . .” Jake manages as his head lowers.

  And their family—their blood—comes down to collect them.

  EPILOGUE

  They find the four horses. The gold and silver in the saddlebags. Find the moldering head, a pair of lensless spectacles affixed to it with a strip of wire, and bury it, bespectacled, by the roadside. Later in the morning they find the horror at Wolfe Landing amid the smoking grove. The roasted bones in the embers. And that afternoon find the staggering heartbreak at the Levee house, where the Wolfe sons weep for the first time since infancy.

  They report to the county sheriff and the chief of police the savagery visited on them by a gang of killers. Inform them that the bastards’ bodies are in the brush a half mile inland from Playa Blanca. Feeding the scavengers.

  The next day, after telling Mamá Sófi and Remedios of their intention, the three sons go to the Davis & Sons Mortuary and retrieve their fathers’ bodies and convey them by wagon to the mouth of the river. There, with no witnesses save themselves, holding to the promise their fathers asked of them some time before, the sons bury the twins on a grassy rise with a fine view of the gulf.

  Two days after that, there is a funeral service for ten at once in the Brownsville cemetery. For the five Xocotos, the three Fuentes, the two Wolfes. When Wolfe Landing is raised anew, as it will be—just as the house at Playa Blanca will be—Marina Colmillo and Harry Sebastian Wolfe will be reburied there, the first to be interred in the town’s graveyard. The Brownsville funeral is restricted to the families of the deceased, with the exception of James and Pauline Wells. Following the ceremony, the judge has a few quiet words with the three young Wolfe men. They accept his invitation to supper on Sunday next. There are matters he wishes to discuss with them. Propositions. Constable badges.

  That night they have supper in the Levee Street house of Remedios Marisól, all of them, every surviving borderland Wolfe—Mamá Sofía, Remedios and her sons Jacky Ríos and César Augusto, her daughter Vicki Angel, the orphaned and now brotherless Morgan James. Also present are the Littles, John Louis and Úrsula, Hector Louis, Catalina. Two tables have been pushed together to accommodate the ten of them and the many platters of food. There are tubs of iced beer, a phonograph player issuing ranchero music. They have all had several rounds of beer when Morgan James recounts the time Marina caught them exposing themselves to Vicki Angel on the beach and threatened to tie their things in a permanent knot, an episode that comes as news to Mamá Sófi and Remedios, who belatedly berate the boys for their nastiness—and then a minute later and despite their blushes they are laughing along with everyone else, including Vicki and Catalina.

  So does it go the rest of the night. They eat and drink and dance and tell funny story after funny story a
bout their lost beloveds. In the middle of a dance with Catalina, César Augusto asks her to marry him, and she laughs at that too and says maybe she will, maybe she won’t. He asks what the hell kind of answer that is and she says it’s the kind he gets for now, and he goes out on the porch and sulks. A short time later she goes out to him and gives him the best kiss of his young life and he beams his happiness and asks if that means yes and she says no, it only means maybe she will, maybe she won’t. In that moment he senses the sort of marriage ahead of him if she should finally say yes, which he also senses she has decided to say but in her own good time.

  The neighbors shake their heads at the loud music and raucous laughter from the Wolfe house. They regard as most unseemly such a party only hours after burying two of their own and eight friends besides. They should be mourning, the neighbors tell each other. They should be grieving.

  The Wolfes are mourning, of course, they are grieving. But grief cannot restrain the shared laughter at their reminiscences of Marina, and of Harry Sebastian, and of the twins. The twins, above all. Who founded this borderland family and who are already the stuff of legend. And whose graves will be forced opened by the next hurricane and their bones borne away to the sea.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: e02839ff-bd90-40e4-99f4-891610c39ba1

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  Document creation date: 7.9.2012

  Created using: calibre 0.8.67, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software

  Document authors :

  James Blake

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