Country of the Bad Wolfes (40 page)

John Roger arched his brow and Amos looked away. Then looked back at him and then they burst out laughing. “Oh hell, let's eat,” Amos said, and slapped him on the back. They lunched in a restaurant, then returned to the house for a siesta.

Just before he dozed off, John Roger reflected that his friend had found his rightful calling, and like every man's calling, it had its own credo and rationale.

The party for Díaz that evening was in a mansion on a street adjoining the zócalo. John Roger would have preferred to walk there—the better for a close-up view of the city's center at night—but a light rain was falling and so they took a hired cab. The streets gleamed. The lamplights were nimbused with mist.

The cavernous ballroom was ablaze with chandeliers. Women sparkled with jewelry. Candles glimmering on the tables, glittering buckets of iced champagne. Ball gowns and tailcoats and military finery. The dance floor a colorful whirl of couples spinning to the orchestral strains of Strauss. John Roger was introduced by Amos to army officers and government officials and hacendados from all over central Mexico, but he would remember the names of none of them. The host had provided a number of unmarried girls as dance partners for men who had come without escort, and Amos took happy turns on the floor with all of them. John Roger claimed a bad knee and kept to the table. The closeness of the crowd oppressed him. The babble and laughter. The over-loud music. Only the expectation of meeting Díaz kept him from making an excuse to Amos and their host and taking his leave.

He had endured for two hours when the host mounted the dais to announce that he had just received a message bearing the president's sincere regrets that he would not be able to attend the festivities. Don Porfirio and Doña Carmen sent their deepest apologies to everyone present and urged them all to have a good time.

“Hard luck, chum,” Amos said to John Roger, “but there'll be other chances.”

John Roger said he hoped so. Then said he was tired and thought he might be catching cold and so was going to go back to the house and to bed. Amos said he would leave with him but John Roger knew he was enjoying himself and persuaded him to stay.

He intended to hire a hansom, but when he got outside and saw that the rain had stopped he chose to walk. The night was cold, the air sharp, the streetlights warmly bright. An evening so amenable he decided to alter his route and prolong the walk back, and he turned north at the first street corner he came to.

A few blocks farther on, the surroundings became distinctly less well tended and the people on the street louder. He came to a crowded little plaza of an unkempt, working-class neighborhood whose architecture testified to a more genteel past. The curbs were lined with litter but the square was gaily lit and piquant with spicy aromas, lively with chatter and laughter, with music from a pair of cantinas on opposite sides of the plaza. At a sidewalk cart he bought a pork tamal and ate it as he ambled. He paused at the open doors of one of the cantinas, in which someone was strumming a guitar and singing in tremulous nostalgia about his boyhood in Durango. He listened for a minute, then moved on, ready to head back to Amos's.

He was almost to the corner when he heard a different tune and from a different sort of instrument. Heard it but barely through the surrounding babble and other music, but heard it well enough to recognize it at once, and he halted in his tracks. He thought he might be having an aberrant mental episode. Maybe he was not really hearing the tune but only remembering it after so many years and for who-knew-what reason. He stood rooted, listening hard as passersby sidestepped around him. Now the tune was lost in the laughter of a group of men on the corner just ahead and then the laughter abated and he heard the tune more clearly now among the plaza's other sounds. And knew he was hearing it with his ears and not just in his head. The tweedle of a hornpipe. Playing “Good Jolly Roger.”

The tune was coming from his left. From within the chocked-open doors of a small café not five yards away. A sign next to the door showed the name La Rosa Mariposa in ornate but faded lettering. He went to the door and kept to the shadow alongside it and peered into a dimly lighted room with a few small tables and only a single diner and no one at the little bar but a barman in a white apron. The barman was playing the pipe. He looked about thirty years old. Thick through the chest and shoulders, black hair combed back and parted in the center, short mustache. But even at this distance and despite the mustache, John Roger saw the likeness and knew who the man must be and how he had learned that tune.

For a moment, everything seemed unreal—the barman, the tune, the plaza, the people passing by, the fact that he was in Mexico City, the memory of a brother he had grown up with in a Portsmouth tavern. . . .

The sensation passed. And he thought, Maybe he taught it to somebody who taught it to this one.

No. Look at him. He could be my own. He learned it from his father and none other. From Sammy. Whom you have believed dead these many years but is not.

He is not dead.

But why has he never. . .?

Who knows? But if that's not his son I never drew breath.

Well then?

He inhaled deeply. Exhaled slowly. Went inside.

The barman saw him approaching and set the hornpipe under the counter and wiped his hands on his apron. Good evening, sir. What is your pleasure?

Tell me, John Roger began, but heard the tight note in his voice and paused to clear his throat. Tell me, that tune you were playing just now. Where did you learn it?

The barman smiled. The little jig? You liked it, huh?

Did your father teach it to you?

The barman's smile went smaller. Yes, he said. How did you know?

I would like to speak with him.

With my
father
?

Yes, please. I'm . . . I know him. Listen, is he here? It's very important I see him.

But sir, my father . . . well, my father's dead. He's been dead for, ah, about ten years, I guess.

Dead? John Roger repeated the word as if he had never before heard it. In the midst of his stunning understanding that his brother had not died all those years ago, it had not crossed his mind that he might have died since.

You say you knew my father?

Yes. Yes, I . . . ten years?

Yeah, just about.

What did . . . how did he die?

Oh God, don't ask. It wasn't good. Listen, how do—?

How did he die? Tell me.

Jesus, man, if you
must
know, it was rabies.

John Roger stared at him. Then down at his hands on the bar top.

Yeah, see? Like I said, it wasn't good.

How did it happen?

How do you think? He got bit by a dog.

No, I mean
how
. What was the circumstance?

Christ, Mister, what is this? What—?

Please.

The barman sighed. Well, I didn't see it myself. I was in the army then. But the way Mother and my sister told me—the way Father told it to them—he was taking a walk and saw this little kid being threatened by a dog. A little kid scared really bad. There was nobody else around except a bunch of boys watching from across the street. Probably hoping to see the kid get all torn up—you know, for the entertainment, how kids are. So Father grabbed up the boy, but the dog bit him, bit Father I mean. Bit him on the leg and ran off. When he told Mother about it she got worried right away the dog might be rabid but Father told her he didn't think so, it didn't act like any rabid dog he'd ever seen, only like a mean one. He said he wouldn't have taken any chances with a mad dog, kid or no kid. Mother asked around the neighborhood if there had been any report of a mad dog, but nobody had heard anything. So anyhow, about three weeks later, Father started getting really sick in a way that everybody knew what it was. If you know about rabies I don't have to tell you what it was like after that. I saw a guy in the army die of it and I never want to see it again. The way Mother told it, it was the same way for Father. They had to get some of the neighborhood men to wrestle him onto the bed and tie him down and put a stick between his teeth and be damned careful not to let him bite them and so on, the whole awful business. Sófi—my little sister—she said he bucked so hard he nearly turned the bed over. He had horrible hallucinations. Pissed himself, shit himself, the whole neighborhood heard him screaming. They begged Mother to put him out of his agony. Stab him in the heart with an ice pick, they told her, for the love of God. Poison him, something. Sófi said Mother thought
about it. It nearly made her crazy to see him like he was, but she just couldn't do it. Anyway, he finally died. Jesus, I hate thinking about it. I should have told you to go to hell.

John Roger had seen the kind of terror inspired by a mad dog. Had twice seen rabid dogs shot in the streets of Veracruz to the great relief of everyone in the neighborhoods. He had never seen a rabies death but had heard the dreadful stories. He ran his hand over his face and was unaware of knocking off his hat.

Hey mister, you all right? The barman poured a drink and placed it in front of him and said, “Trágalo.”

He took a sip of the tequila, then drank the rest in a gulp.

“So you knew my father, you say. Were you were his friend or. . .?”

John Roger nodded. Then realized the barman had spoken in English. Accented but precise. “Yes,” he said. “I knew him well. A long time ago.”

The barman's gaze narrowed. “He did not have many friends, I can tell you that. He never went further than three blocks from here and that's no lie, not once in my whole life. Where do you know him from?”

“I'm his brother.”

They held each other's eyes. The barman said “De veras?”

“De veras. We had just graduated from school the last time I saw him. In New Hampshire. That's up—”

“I know where it is.”

“I never—” He paused to clear his throat.

“I never knew what happened to him. I thought he was dead.”

“Since you were just out of high school you thought he was dead?”

“Yes.”

“Hombre! That was
how
many years ago?”

“Nearly forty.”

“Jesucristo! Was he older or younger than you?”

John Roger hesitated, then said, “Older. He never told you he had a brother?”

“He told Mother he was an only child. He said his parents were dead.” He narrowed his eyes. “I don't get it. Why would he lie about a brother?”

“I don't know. Why would I?”

The barman nodded. “Yes. Why would you? And Father, well . . . he had secrets, we all knew that.”

“Now you know one of them.”

“There are more of you? Brothers? Sisters?”

“Just me.”

“Jesus. His brother.”

“Yes.”

“How did you find out where he was? I mean, after so long?”

“I heard the tune. I was passing by and I heard the hornpipe. Sammy and I—
your father and I—we made it up, that music you were playing. In New Hampshire when we were boys.”

“You mean you . . . the reason you came in here is you were walking by and heard me playing the little pipe?”

John Roger nodded.

“If you had not heard it you would have passed by?”

“Yes.”

“That is . . . that is just. . . .”

“Yes.”

“We were so near to each other and we would never have known it.”

John Roger nodded.

The barman stared. “So then you are my uncle.”

John Roger managed a meager smile. “I suppose I am.”

“Pues, como se llama, tío? Por supuesto su apellido es Wolfe.”

“Sí, soy John Wolfe. Y usted?”

“Bruno. Bruno Tomás Blanco y Blanco. Muchísimo gusto, tío.”

They shook hands across the bar with an awkward formality and then stood staring at each other a moment longer before Bruno came around from behind the counter to embrace him. They hugged hard and pounded each other on the back, John Roger tearful, his nephew grinning.