Country of the Bad Wolfes (37 page)

“Condition, sir?”

“You come home every, ah, two weeks, let us say. And you stay three days.”

“But sir,” one said, “why would . . .?”

“If you want to make sure we're getting our proper nourishment,” the other one said with a crooked smile, “well sir, we
can
feed ourselves.”

He looked from one to the other. “That's the bargain, gentlemen. Feel free to turn it down.”

“No sir, no, we're not turning it down,” one said. “It's just that there's a lot of work to do and if we have to leave off from it for three days every couple of weeks, well, it'll take a whole lot longer to ever get done than if we can apply ourselves to it more, ah, consistently.”

“Why don't we say . . . every three months?” the other said.

“Let's say at the end of every month,” John Roger said, “and you stay two nights.”

“Suppose we say—”

“Suppose we say it's settled.”

They read his eyes. “Yessir.”

He swept a pointing finger from one to the other. “Break the bargain and I'll send a crew down there with dynamite to blast that house to splinters and sink that boat a mile offshore. I hope you gents believe me.”

“Yessir,” one said. The other nodded.

He consulted the calendar on the wall. “We're already near the end of this month and you won't be ready to set off for a week or two. No sense in making you come right back at the end of June. You don't have to make the first visit till the end of July.”

“All right, sir,” one said.

“Well then,” he said, “you had best get to it.”

They were at the door when they turned to look at him, who was at the moment bent over a bottom drawer in search of a match to refire his cigar.

“Thank you, Father.”

He was arrested. They had never thanked him, never called him anything other than “sir.”

But when he sat up to look, they were gone.

As they went out the casa grande's front doors, Blake said, “Any sonofabitches ever go down there and try to blow up that house—”

“Or sink that boat.”

“Be the last damn thing they ever try.”

“That's it.”

They grinned at each other. Winchesters, by Jesus!

The first thing John Samuel wanted to know when his father arrived at his office was what “they” had wanted.

John Roger told him of their intention to fix up the cove house and the
Lizzie
.

“I'm glad of it, frankly,” John Roger said. “It'll give them something constructive to do.”

“Will they be living out there from now on?”

John Roger sighed. “Most of the time, yes.”

John Samuel looked out the window and smiled.

That they had known about the cove and its house and boat before they ever went there was a truth they could not have admitted to their father without confessing to an act worse than their lie. A few months earlier, having just read about
the newest models of Colt revolvers, they recalled Josefina's description of the gun their mother had used to shoot the younger Montenegro. Josefina said it was the largest pistol she had ever seen. Shaped like a pig's hind leg, she said, and almost that big, and their mother had held it with both hands to shoot. James Sebastian was sure it was an old Walker, and Blake Cortéz said maybe, or a later Dragoon. They wondered if the gun might still be around.

The next time their father rode off to one of his all-day surveys of the coffee farm, they slipped into his bedroom and made a thorough search of it but did not find the pistol. They then went downstairs and sneaked into his office and Blake rummaged a wall cabinet while James Sebastian searched the desk.

“Not here,” Blake said.

“Hey Black, look at this,” James said. He was perusing a set of photographs he had found in the desk's middle drawer. They were old studio pictures, most of them of their mother, some of their mother and father together, a few of which included John Samuel, who was an infant in some of them.

“How young Father was,” Blake said. “And Momma. She looks like a girl.”

“This musta been made about the same time as the one Josefina's got.”

They were tempted to take one of the pictures of their mother but thought their father might notice it was missing when he next looked through them, and they left the pictures as they found them. The Dragoon was in the top right drawer. James Sebastian took it out and saw that it was fully charged. He held it this way and that, aimed it at the map of Mexico affixed to the opposite wall, sighting on the heart of the country, on the Yucatán, at the rooster foot that was the Baja California territory. Then passed it to his brother, saying, “Feel the heft.”

“Now this here's a damn
gun
,” Blake said. He set it on half cock and with his other hand rotated the cylinder with a soft ticking. They had read much about the early Colts and if they had been obliged to load this weapon they had never set hand to before now they could have done so. Could have charged each chamber of the cylinder and seated a ball in it by means of the lever under the barrel and capped the nipple over each chamber for firing. “They say you can hammer ten-penny nails with this thing all day long and it'll still shoot straight as a sunray.”

“Imagine what a .44 ball did to that boy's head Momma shot,” James said. “About like a mallet would do a watermelon.”

“ Momma sure musta been something! Just imagine her shooting this thing.”

“And good as she did.”

“Like to shoot it myself, but we can't even ask Reynaldo to ask him. They'd want to know how we know about it.”

They admired the Colt a while longer and then put it back in its drawer. Then thought to look in the others to see if they held anything of interest. The bottom right drawer and the top left one contained only business records. Then James Sebastian tried the bottom left drawer and said, “Say now.” It was locked.

They examined the keyhole and recognized the kind of lock it contained and smiled at its simplicity. They had crafted skeleton keys that could open any sort of lock to be found in the casa grande, locks to doors and desks and trunks and such, but they liked to keep in practice with simpler implements. James opened his pocketknife and inserted the blade tip into the keyhole and made a careful probe and angled the blade just so and gave it a gentle turn and the lock disengaged.

The drawer held a leather-bound ledger and a document case. They took out the case and opened it and the first thing that came to hand was the framed daguerreotype of John Roger and Samuel Thomas on the day of their high school graduation. They stared at it for a time before James Sebastian said, “Do you believe
this
?”

“Cuates! Just like us.”

“Not quite like us. One on the left's a little bigger in the shoulders, you can tell.”

“Yeah. Doesn't tell us which one's Father though.”

“Don't look to be much older than we are. And I thought he looked young in the ones with Momma.”

“So that's Samuel, eh? Whichever one.”

They had once asked Josefina if their father had any brothers or sisters and she had told them what their mother had told her, that John Roger had been orphaned with no sisters and only one brother, Samuel Thomas, an apprentice officer on a merchant vessel who was eighteen years old when his ship went down. Older or younger brother, they asked, and she said she didn't know.

“Why didn't she say they were twins, I wonder?”

“I expect she doesn't know or she would've.”

“If Josefina doesn't know it's because Momma didn't know, either, and why wouldn't he have told
her
?”

James shrugged. “If Momma didn't know, she for sure never saw this picture. Bedamn if Father aint starting to seem like a secret-keeping man.”

They laughed low. And now took from the case a rolled paper and unfurled it and saw that it was two papers—a letter with a bureaucratic heading, and rolled inside of it, an ink portrait.

“Looks like Father,” Blake said of the sketch. “Except Father's name's not Roger Blake Wolfe and he aint dead yet, much less since 1829.”

“Grandpap's my guess.”

“Me too. Damn sure looks like Father, don't he?”

“It's how you'll look at his age.”

“You too.”

The letter was the one from the British Embassy to Mary Parham Wolfe. “Father's mam, must be,” James said. They read it.

“Man was a goddam
pirate
.”

“Begging your pardon, mister, he was a goddam
captain
of pirates. Says so right here, see? Captain.”

“You suppose Momma knew
this
?”

“I'd wager she didn't.”

They studied the letter again. “Says executed but not how,” Blake said. “Hung for certain. It's what they did with pirates. And left them to rot on the rope. Our own granddaddy. Man, aint life just fulla surprise?”

“With a daddy like that, hardly a wonder Father's killed two fellas.” James Sebastian said. Then grinned. “Two we know of, anyway.”

“A grandpappy like that says something about a coupla other fellas I could name.”

“We couldn't help it, Judge. It's in our blood.”

They started to laugh and hushed each other lest they be heard by some passing maid. They extracted two packets of letters. Most of them were to their father from Richard Davison and to their mother from her mother, neither set of much interest to the twins except for the fact of their mother's maiden name—which they had thought was Barlet because of Josefina's pronunciation. Davison's letters were chockablock with details pertaining to the Trade Wind Company. Their Grandmother Bartlett's abounded with trivia about her family life. The brothers skimmed through them and arrived at the letters to their father from Sebastian Bartlett and James Bartlett, and after skimming these, they read them again.

“Who's he think he is, blaming Father for what happened to Momma?” Blake Cortéz said of Sebastian Bartlett's letter.

“A son of a bitch is who he is, grandpap or no. That goes for this James galoot too.”