Wolves At Our Door

by J P S Brown

  Martinillo’s clothes sopped up the blood of his wound, and his own fastidiousness more than anything else made him decide to leave his hiding place and try to make it back to Canela. He wished he had brought more food. He drank from a pool of rainwater in the bottom of the chimney. Before he left he washed most of the blood out of his clothes with the remainder of it.

  He took an hour to climb out of the chimney, a climb that would have only taken him a few minutes when he was healthy. He did not worry about the pain, because he had searched the wound carefully with his fingers and decided it was not serious unless it got infected. The bullet had missed an artery where it went in and had torn a ragged hole where it came out, but it probably had not been a hollow point. He was sure Abdullah had been the one who discovered him in his lair and shot him. Bad luck, to look up and lock eyes with a hawk. Bad luck that the only one with hawk eyes in Culebra Canyon, against hundred to one odds, looked up and saw him. The hawk was a good shot. One more step and Martinillo would have made it over the ridge and out of sight. The man had taken the shot as Martinillo’s head disappeared under the ridge. Martinillo bet that his head and shoulders were all that Abdullah could see when he took the shot. Six inches to the left and the bullet would have hit him in the neck. Martinillo decided he would settle for the shot the man had taken. He was alive. For quite a while he would be worthless, so he had to distance himself from La Culebra while he could.

  He used another hour to climb out of the fissure. He wondered how he ever made it through before. For a while his head and shoulders hung out in the open and the rest of himself remained stuck in the fissure. His weakness and pain kept him half in and half out. When he finally squeezed out, he lay on the ledge awhile and looked at the next climb to the top of the cliff. That climb took him another hour. He started home at a rate of about ten steps a minute.

  He stayed off the trail to Canela, but kept it in sight. He walked on rock and pine needles wherever he could. He went slow and kept himself hidden.

  Later in the evening, as he moved through a forest of big trees where he most lacked concealment, he heard a voice, then hoofbeats and the rattle of equipment. He lay flat on the ground against the base of a large pine, in the open for most of the world to see.

  Horses came on and he began to feel good about it. That many horses might mean that Captain Emilio Kosterlinsky and his troop of twenty-five cavalrymen were on their patrol through the region. If this was the captain, Martinillo would be given food and water. His wounds would be examined and treated. He would be given a horse to ride and the protection of Mexican cavalry.

  Captain Kosterlinsky rode behind the soldier who carried the troop’s banner on a lance. Martinillo was about to stand up and wave when the captain saw something up the trail on Martinillo’s right, raised his arm, and ordered the troop to halt.

  Martinillo could not turn his head because of his wound. He wished he could fashion a splint to keep his head in place, because if he moved his chin a fraction to the right or left, up or down, the pain almost felled him.

  He watched Kosterlinsky’s face and decided he better wait to show himself until he saw what had made him stop.

  "Hello, illustrious sentry," Kosterlinsky called, then smiled. Kosterlinsky always used elegant language.

  "Hola, my captain," someone said from the trail behind Martinillo's right shoulder. Martinillo let his forehead rest on the ground and listened. Hoofbeats sounded on the trail behind him. He lay stretched out in plain sight of that rider.

  "Have you found your spy?" Kosterlinsky asked.

  "Nooo, when will we find him in this wilderness?" The rider spoke from Martinillo’s right front now.

  Martinillo raised his head. A tattooed pelon in camouflage utilities with an M-16 rifle slung across his back stopped his horse in front of the troop. He rode a corriente mare, not a Lupino Arab, but that did not surprise Martinillo. Lupino was so particular about his Arabian pets, he would probably weep if he ever saw one of these thugs astride one. Martinillo bet that old Nesib did not have much to do with these hoodlums at La Culebra.

  "How is the commando training coming?" Kosterlinsky asked.

  “Difficult," the sentry said.

  “Where is the other sentry that rides with you?"

  "We separated at the last fork in the trail, but we’ll meet up ahead."

  Thank you, Emilio, Martinillo thought. You just told me which trail to take to Canela. I guess I better not ask for your help. I won’t get a can of pork and beans from your knapsack, and I won’t get a shot of antibiotic or a dressing for my wound. However, you've shown me that my government knows about this training operation of Lupino's. You are plenty free about patrolling the high Sierra of La Golondrina now. I bet Lupino doesn’t even pay you extra to do it. La Culebra is part of a government patrol. You and your troop protect an enemy of Mexico.

  "Your spy disappeared, did he?" Kosterlinsky asked.

  "He disappeared, or he never appeared at all," the sentry said.

  "We’ll bivouac at La Brava Spring tonight. Bring your partner and have supper with us."

  "We’ll do that, man, thank you."

  "Fine. We’ll see you at the spring."

  The troop filed past Martinillo’s right and continued on. After a while the sounds of loose chains on the pack mules died, and he sat up with his back against the trunk of the tree.

  Lucrecia was sitting under the shade of the ramada in her yard and kneading clay for a new pot when Che Che Salazar rode in that afternoon. He sat his mule until Lucrecia asked him to dismount. He told Lucrecia that he had come to get Dolly Ann so she could fly with her grandfather to Rio Alamos the next day for the horse race. She and Luci were also invited to go.

  Lucrecia rinsed her hands, wiped them on her apron, and shook hands with Che Che. He took off his hat for her, hobbled his mule’s front feet, and sat in the shade of her porch. She went in to put coffee on the stove to warm. She came back out with a swallow of mezcal in a coffee cup for him and a measure of corn for his mule.

  "My nino Jim would like you to fly to Rio Alamos with him early tomorrow," Che Che said. "You should spend the night at El Trigo."

  "Here come the girls." Lucrecia said. "You can tell them."

  Dolly Ann and Luci came to the porch with two young cottontail rabbits that had been caught in Lucrecia’s snares. Each girl carried one and they petted and crooned to them while they showed them to Che Che.

  "Give them to me and visit with Che Che," Lucrecia said.

  With great care the girls handed the rabbits to her, then shook hands with the man.

  Lucrecia went into the kitchen and put the rabbits into a small wooden box. She carried coffee to Che Che, then went out the back door with the rabbits, rapped them behind the ears one at a time with a horseshoe hammer, cut off their heads, skinned them, gutted them, dismembered them, salt and peppered them, rolled them in cornmeal, and put them in a skillet on her stove to fry.

  Lucrecia had decided to send Luci with Dolly Ann to Rancho Quemado with Che Che. She would pack the tan suitcase for her and let her go as far as she could go with Dolly Ann and Jim Kane, if her compadre Jim would take her. She took the valise down from its shelf and filled it with Luci’s clothes.

  Luci and Dolly Ann rode away with Che Che that afternoon. Lucrecia stayed at Las Animas in case Martinillo came home. The look on Luci’s face haunted her all night. Luci had wanted to go to the "United," but did not want to be rushed off at a moment’s notice and turned loose in the outside world without her abuelita, grandmother. Dolly Ann’s look had been as woebegone as Luci’s when they rode away.

  Faced with the reality of achieving Luci’s dream, they had not been sure they should take the first step. They did not say anything about their worry to Lucrecia, because it was nothing to fly with Jim Kane to Rio Alamos for a horse race. Luci could stop there and wait for her grandparents to come and get her, or to send for her. Lucrecia knew that while Martinillo was away and unable to object, this might
be the only chance Luci would have to go to the United States with Dolly Ann. The good-byes they had said would probably be for a long time.

  That night Dolly Ann and Luci waited in the kitchen of the El Trigo hacienda for Kane and Vogel. Everyone at El Trigo went to bed early. Sundown usually killed everything dead at El Trigo, but Che Che stayed up with the girls to wait for Kane. The girls discussed the situation with him, so he gave them his opinion that Luci should not leave home. He did not want to see a product of the Sierra corrupted. The values she learned in the Sierra would be good anywhere she went. The values she would learn from the girls in the United would not last. After about a half hour of that discussion, because he had stayed up an hour and a half past his bedtime, Che Che went to sleep in his chair with his face to the girls.

  At ten o’clock the girls thought they heard someone mumble a word outside, then heard nothing, then they heard a rustle, then the soft scuff of a boot, and the door opened and Kane and Vogel walked in. Che Che woke up and took his employers into the kitchen to show them their supper on the stove, saw the girls serve their plates, then excused himself and went to bed with his family in the recently finished commissary.

  "And your grandfather?," Vogel asked Luci. "Has he returned to Las Animas? We’ve not seen him."

  "I hoped you’d have news of him," Luci said.

  "He’s on another big hunt. I hope he brings home a valuable pelt of some kind, a king of a buck deer, the fang of a wolf, or the claws of a jaguar."

  That was all the conversation Vogel could entertain. He ate and went to bed. Kane still felt high from the ride in bare moonlight through pine forest. He and Vogel had watched faraway lightning in the north, but had not smelled rain or heard thunder. Although it happened far away, the sight had refreshed them.

  Now, he wanted to sit in the light of the kerosene lamp and watch the flame and look at the faces of the girls. He thanked them for waiting up.

  "Pappy, I have a problem," Dolly Ann said in Spanish.

  "Oh, hell."

  "It concerns Luci."

  "What’s wrong? What’s happened to Luci?"

  "She’s growing up, Pappy."

  "Oh, no. She’s not going to have a baby, is she?"

  Luci and Dolly Ann laughed merrily at that.

  “No, nothing like that. She wants to have a life, Pappy. She’s almost grown and wants to leave Las Animas."

  "Life at Las Animas is good, granddaughter. She belongs to the most exciting family I know. Who do you know in Arizona that runs jaguars and wolf packs out of their front yards? The Martinillos do that every day, practically as a drill."

  "That’s it, Pappy. She has wolves, drunk drug growers with Uzis, rapists, killers, and plain old hardship every day for drill too. Lucrecia wants her to go home with us and start her own life. Luci wants to go to school."

  "She does?"

  "Yes, Pappy."

  "We have to think about this. Maybe the easiest way to cross her would be to enroll her in a school so she can get a student visa."

  "Her grandmother wants her to go before her grandfather gets back. She wants her out of the Sierra before the same thing happens to her that has happened to other girls her age. Nobody courts up here anymore. Some Sinaloa jackass will see her, want her, steal her away, get her with child, and ruin her life. It happens to every girl who stays here."

  "I won’t smuggle her across. I smuggle a lot of contraband down here, but I’ve never taken anything illegal to the States. The guys on the line in customs and immigration trust me."

  "I only want to help Lucrecia and Luci."

  "I’ll have to think about it. Maybe I can get her a seventy-two-hour permit from my friends in immigration at the airport. We might get her a provisional permit, then you can get her a student visa."

  ”Good, Pappy. I knew you’d think of something."

  "We’ll see. Call the immigration service in Nogales from Rio Alamos tomorrow and tell them we want to bring Luci, a minor, across the border, so they can tell us what papers she needs. Tell them we’ll go through the airport customs and immigration about noon. We’ll radio from thirty minutes out."

  "Hear that, Luci?" Dolly Ann said.

  "Yes, thank you," Luci said.

  "Don’t be giving me any wet kisses for that," Kane said. "Don’t get mushy. Just a little dry one will be all right."

  "You’ll get nothing from me," Dolly Ann said. "It’s only right that you do this for Luci. You don’t need to be rewarded for doing right, do you?"

  "Just a little."

  "A little what?"

  "Neck sugar."

  "Oh, I can do that." Dolly Ann laughed and hugged and kissed his dusty neck.

  "Bath time, Pappy," she said. "Che Che heated a whole tank of water."

  Kane could see that the whipping he had given Rafa did not bother Dolly Ann anymore. She would probably turn out to be the same as all the Kane women. They took the men the way they were, because they could see themselves in them and knew they would have to get over the atrocities they committed.

  Kane loaded Vogel, Dolly Ann, and Luci in Little Buck a half hour before sunup the next morning and took off. He ran Little Buck off the end of the runway stuck its nose down into the canyon to gain airspeed, followed Arroyo Hondo south, then Arroyo de los Mezcales west, and down the Mayo River to Rio Alamos.

  The horse race would be run the next day. Vogel’s daughter Mari picked them up at the airport and took them to Vogel’s home, then took the girls shopping so they could gussy up.

  That afternoon Kane and Vogel withdrew $90,000 in cash from their bank accounts in Sonora and Arizona to put down in side bets on the race. They put down $10,000 in each of five bars so that bettors could match all or parts of it. The bartenders had done this beforetook bets and held the stakes until after the race.

  The partners kept $40,000 to bet against special adversaries who hungered to beat them out of money any way they could. They would only be able to get even money on the $50,000 they left in the bars. However, some of their adversaries would bet any amount of money they wanted and give them odds on who could pee the farthest, if that happened to be the only contest the partners proposed. By race time tomorrow, they expected some of those adversaries would practically run the partners down to give them odds against their horse.

  The partners drove across the Mayo River to the Escondida ranch that Kane used to own near the Mayo Indian community of Chihuahuita. The Escondida had been Kane’s first ranch in that region. Vicenta Solano, the present owner, had been Kane’s mistress before he met and married Adelita Pesquiera. After Vicenta gave him a dose of strychnine to celebrate the news of his betrothal to Adelita, she had calmed herself and begun to like him again. Killing him would have made her happy at the time, but she was also happy later when the strychnine only swelled him up and split him open. She tried to kill him other times, then had been happy that he lived through it, so she thought it was probably best that she let him live. When they finally parted, Kane gave her the Escondida.

  The fifty hectares of the Escondida lay on the north bank of the Mayo River and in the center of a Mayo Indian ejido, five thousand hectares of brush pasture that was shared by the Mayo community. Kane had acquired a long-term lease on the pasture for fencing it with five strands of barbed wire.

  Kane and Vogel found the dirt road to Escondida crowded with Mayo Indians who celebrated Gato as their champion. The whole community of Chihuahuita had guarded Gato’s training since he arrived. Ursulo Valenzuela, a chief of the tribe, met Vogel’s truck at the entrance to the ranch. Since all trucks looked the same to him, he walked up to show his authority and inquire as to the business of its occupants. When he recognized Kane and Vogel, he grinned, climbed into the pickup with them, and guided them to Gato’s stall, as though he had taken total charge of the training.

  Ursulo had taken a crew of fifty men and cleared a brecha, a right of way, through the brush to serve as Gato’s training track. Its sandy loam protected the horse from
strain and conditioned his legs, heart, and lungs.

  Mayo Indians crowded around the stable to watch Gato rest. They had brought him a billy goat so he would have a friend other than the mules Paseador and Negrito and to ward off sickness. The billy goat, Gato, and the mules gazed at the partners from their stalls with expressions that said, "Ah, more public. We have so much admiring public."

  Marco Antonio braided a rawhide halter as he and Cody Joe lounged on their cots in another stall. Cody Joe whittled a stick with a new pocketknife. Both their hats were cocked jauntily on their heads.

  After six weeks of careful, gentle training, Gato looked as though he could outrun the wind. Daily workouts, baths, rubdowns, and good grass hay and grain had made him bloom. Every lustrous hair on him seemed to vibrate. His eyes were clear as mezcal and showed an antagonistic gleam that came straight out of his stallion’s heart. He was ready to run a race, or fight a battle, and his look said that he hoped it would start soon.

  "I’ve never seen a horse in such good shape," Kane said to Marco Antonio and Cody Joe. "What's you boys’ secret?"

  "We’ve had everything right," Cody Joe said. "Dona Vicenta came and got us and made us move here from the racetrack the day after we arrived. Since then, we’ve just stayed with the horse. She gave us her roof, her kitchen, her truck, has watched over us, and fed us way too much."

  Ulp, Kane swallowed, and thought, More for me to feel guilty about.

  Vogel saw Kane’s big swallow of consternation. "Vicenta’s my compadre Jim’s best friend." He laughed.

  "She’s been a mother to us," Cody Joe said. "The Mayos have been our family. We’re happy here. Even Lupino is happy."

  "Lupino?" Kane asked.

  "The goat." Cody Joe laughed. "We think he might be related to the Lupinos, with those chin whiskers."

  A tall, handsome young man came to the stables and stood in the shade while the partners and the boys discussed Gato’s training. Kane thought he might be a youngster from Chihuahuita who had grown up while he was gone. Vogel introduced him to Kane as Miguel, "Vicenta’s man."