Country of the Bad Wolfes (33 page)

He sighed. I don't know. If Lizzie had lived, then maybe all of them . . . ah hell.

She asked if he still locked them up for punishment.

Yes, sometimes. But he had reached an accord with them about it. If he put them in the same room they would stay there for as long as he decreed. He didn't even have to lock the door, not that a lock would have much effect. They had also come to an agreement about camping in the jungle. They could go for five days at a time but had to tell him or Josefina the direction they were going and about how far. It was an agreement made of air, since he couldn't enforce his conditions or even stop them from going short of chaining them to the cellar walls and posting guards at every portal—and even then he wouldn't be surprised if they escaped. And yet they had held to their end of the bargain. So far, anyway.

She wanted to hear more, but the hour was late and they were both tired, so they would have to wait until his next visit.

When he returned to El Castillo two weeks later the house mistress greeted him with a somber face and the news that Margarita was dead. Six days earlier, the afternoon post had included a letter for her, the only one she received in the four and a half months she'd been there. The house mistress recalled that the envelope bore no indication of the sender or the point of origin. She sent the letter upstairs to her, and some hours later, when Margarita still had not come down to begin her evening's duty, the house mistress went up to her room and found her on the bed, blue-faced and rigoring. On the bedside table was a nearly empty cup of tea and next to it the little vial of poison. A saucer held the letter's charred residue. She left no note. She was buried in the city cemetery.

The house mistress averted her eyes for a moment while John Roger regained his composure. He cleared his throat and asked if she knew why Margarita had done it. The woman shrugged. She said Margarita was not the first girl to work at El Castillo whose specific reason for being there or even her real name was known to
no one in the house. She had shown up one day and said she sought employment. She gave her name as Margarita Damascos and admitted its falseness. It was obvious she was well-bred but she would reveal nothing of where she came from or even how she had learned of El Castillo de las Princesas. Then again, the house mistress said, it was not a profession that required the biographical facts of its practitioners.

John Roger wanted to know how it could possibly be that no one she had lived and worked with knew who she was. The house mistress said such a circumstance was far more common in this world more than he might think. She suggested the possibility that the person who wrote the letter was someone Margarita had never wanted to see again, almost certainly a man—a father, a husband, a lover. Someone who had somehow found out where she was and what name she was using and had written to tell her something she could not bear.

Like what? John Roger said.

Who knows? Maybe that he was coming for her.

If that were so, John Roger said, a lot of questions could be answered when that person showed up.

Possibly, the woman said. If that were so.

He went to her grave. The house mistress herself had paid to keep her remains out of the lowest ground in the cemetery—the mucky preserve of the criminal and the kinless and those without name—and had her buried in higher ground and under a simple stone tablet engraved with “Margarita Damascos” and “1880” below the name. He could not stop himself from imagining the unspeakable loneliness of the casket. The immutable darkness and silence of it. Her dead self within, so lovely and comforting and pleasurable in the warm living flesh and now but dark cold rot. He'd had similar thoughts and sensations at Elizabeth Anne's funeral, and now as then he was appalled by his rank perversity and did not believe that anyone of sound mind could have such macabre graveside imaginings.

He began calling at El Castillo once a week to see if anyone had come looking for Margarita Damascos. And was each time told that no one had. During the first weeks of this routine, he sometimes bought the services of a girl, but none of them was a listener such as Margarita had been and he soon gave up trying to talk to them as he had talked to her. Before long even his enjoyment of their flesh waned and he ceased patronizing them altogether, much to the annoyance of the house mistress. He persisted in his weekly inquiry for six months before concluding that no one was ever going to come in search of her—and whatever unendurable disclosure the letter had brought and she had put to the match would remain her eternal secret.

He would not return to El Castillo, and knew he would not again lay with a woman. And if his sexual memories of Elizabeth Anne would sometimes become too much to ignore and compel him to a weeping self-abuse . . . well, so be it.

T
hey made their first trip to the cove when they were fourteen years old, and they went there by running the rapids on a raft of their own making. They had by that time made numerous excursions into the jungle and were sometimes gone longer than a week. Josefina had scolded them for disobeying their father by never telling her which way they were going and for how long, and Blake Cortéz had said Well, if he asks, tell him we went north. She asked if that was the truth and he grinned and shrugged, then dodged the swat of her cane. If you two think I'll keep lying to your father for you, you're very wrong, Josefina said. Then tell him the truth, James Sebastian said. You forgot what we told you because you're too old to remember anything.

“Ay, que desgraciado sinvergüenza!” Josefina said, swinging her cane.

John Roger had never tried to enforce his provisos on the twins' jungle ventures. But the raft was a different matter. Reynaldo the mayordomo had thought so too. He was not one to relay to John Roger the twins' every peccadillo that came to his ear, but when his informants told him the twins were building a raft at the landing just above the start of the rapids and that it was nearly finished, he could guess what they intended to do, and he thought it his duty to tell their father. In all the collective lore of the hacienda, nobody had ever survived the rapids.

That evening at the dinner table John Roger told the twins he knew about the raft and forbade them from attempting the white water.

“Yes sir,” one said, and the other nodded and said, “Whatever you say, sir.”

He knew they were lying. They were going to try it no matter his prohibition or what punishments he might threaten. He had thought of putting men at the landing to prevent them from shoving off. Of having the raft destroyed in the night.
But if he did either of those things they would just build another raft in secrecy and on some other stretch of the river. He told himself he was a damned fool for even thinking of trying to stop them.

He had been feeling this sense of foolishness about the twins for some time. Since the day when he was just about to restrict them to their room yet again for some infraction or other but suddenly saw no point to it, not even as gesture. The punishment was an illusion, after all. They would stay in the room for no reason except they agreed to. They could escape whenever they wished and they knew he knew it. That's when it occurred to him that everybody knew it. Nothing of interest ever happened on Buenaventura that did not immediately become part of its circulation of gossip, and the twins' previous escapes from his efforts to punish them had surely been bruited through the compound and even out to the villages. The gist of such talk—as he learned from Reynaldo after insisting that the man be entirely candid with him—was an amused admiration for the twins' daring and resourcefulness, and a sincere sympathy for the patrón, a worthy man of great dignity except in contesting with his twin sons. John Roger had felt the embarrassment of it like a well-deserved slap. To be pitied by peons for his indignities with the twins—good Christ! Thus did he recognize the folly, the very ignominy, of trying to force them to his will.

He excused himself to Vicki Clara as he got up from his chair, then left.

John Samuel glared at them from across the table as Victoria Clara gave careful attention to her soup. Their brother's censorious scowls had become so familiar to the twins that between themselves they had taken to calling him Mister Sourmouth. One evening in the library they had referred to him by that name before remembering Vicki's presence, then saw her small smile even as she kept her eyes on the book in her lap.

They grinned at John Samuel's hard look. “What about you, hermano mayor?” one of them said. “Will you spare a tear when we are drowned?”

“I'll never understand why Father tolerates your insolence,” John Samuel said, rising from his chair. “Were I in his shoes, I would have packed you off to a military school years ago.”

The twins laughed, and one said, “Father's shoes would fit you like a pair of washtubs.”

John Samuel reddened, then started for the door. Then stopped and looked back at Vicki Clara, who seemed unsure what to do. “Señora?” he said. She dabbed at her lips with her napkin and gave the twins a fleet commiserative smile as she got up and then accompanied her husband from the room.

Two days later they made the run, waiting till sunup before shoving off—the ride would be hazardous enough without attempting it in less than full light. They
lashed their knapsacks tightly to the deck and checked and rechecked the tightness of the ropes engirdling the raft and once again rosined the pushpoles to ensure a good grip. They could faintly hear the rush of the white water where it began a half mile downriver. Each time they caught each other's eye they grinned.

When the sun was risen into the trees they threw off the lines and pushed off. They hadn't gone fifty yards before the current began a swift acceleration. They slid the pushpoles under the deck lashings and took off their hats and crammed them under the knapsacks and lay down side by side on their stomachs and took firm hold of the cross-deck rope lashed taut over the planks. The raft was going faster yet and swaying from side to side and the river ahead grew louder. Then they saw the white water directly before them and saw too there was a small drop just ahead of it and then the raft seemed to leap off the river before smashing down into a snarling torrent and they were pitching and bucking and the jungle was a green blur to either side of them as the raft rocketed downriver and was jarring off one cluster of jutting rocks after another and rearing skyward and plunging headlong and tilting sidewise and almost overturning and then banging off one steep bank to go spinning across the deranged river and bang off the other as the boys held on with all their might and bellowed in wild glee as they were slung about with arms twisting and legs flapping and at times they were in weightless detachment from the raft entirely but for their grip on the crossrope before again being slammed against the deck so hard that for days after they would be dappled with bruises. They sped along on the wild water, yawing and lofting and plunging and wheeling through a drenching tumult for some six miles, by their later estimate, that passed under them faster than they could believe before the river vanished and they were aloft—having arrived at a small falls they'd had no idea would be there, that nobody on the hacienda knew was there. The raft fell for what seemed to them an eternity of terrified elation—and was in fact a drop of almost twenty feet—before they collided with the water below in a foaming crash that clouted their heads against the deck and nearly banged them unconscious and loose of the deck rope.

They could not have said which fact was the more astonishing, that the raft was still right-side-up or that they were still on it.