Country of the Bad Wolfes (46 page)

As Louis Little headed for the bridesmaids' table where Gloria sat and watched him approach, Díaz gestured at the others sitting there and they all got up and moved away—except for Sófi, until Gloria hissed, “Vete,” and she sighed and left too. Then Louis was at the table and asked Gloria's permission to sit beside her and she nodded. He sat down and leaned toward her and spoke in a voice so low she had to lean towards him too, their heads almost touching, and to every eye in the room they looked like longtime intimates. Louis Little spoke without pause for about a minute and was done. Gloria stared at him a moment more and then smiled and said something in response and he grinned and took her hand and turned to look at his father, who smiled in his own maimed fashion and raised his glass in salute.

“Bravo!” Díaz said. He leaped up to the dais and called for everyone's attention and proclaimed the impending marriage of Louis Little and Gloria Blanco.

The room erupted with applause and cheers and copious wisecracking about the ball-and-chain and the poor gringo's excessive punishment for the simple crime of shooting a man, and so on. The smiling couple stood with their arms around each other and Louis Little bent to Gloria's ear and said something and her smile widened. She was beaming.

Díaz called for Father Benedicto and someone shouted that the old padre was passed out in the bar adjoining the ballroom. Díaz joined in the laughter and said to rouse him and bring him up there, to carry him if they had to. While the revived priest was being assisted in making his unsteady way across the room, Díaz announced that the funeral for Lieutenant Julián Salgado Ordoñez would be held in the garrison cemetery tomorrow afternoon. He expected every officer in the room to attend. Lieutenant Salgado was an honorable soldier who fell in a honorable contest and he would be shown every respect.

Sófi stood bewildered. Julián Salgado was lying dead in the garden while in this boisterous ballroom her sister was smiling in the arms of the man who'd killed him. A man she had only just met and would marry in the next few minutes.

Father Benedicto was hoisted up to the dais and an officer held him upright by one arm. White hair disheveled and eyes a red glaze, his collar awry, the old priest protested to Díaz that it would be an offense before God to perform a sacred office in such shameful condition as he was in. Don't worry, Father, Díaz said. God and I are old comrades. I'll square you with Him in my prayers tonight. Just keep it short and simple. You ask if they want to be married, they say yes, and you say all right you're married.

The priest swayed and the officer holding to him said, Easy does it. Another said, The old boy needs a bracer, that's all. He handed a bottle to the priest and said, Here you go, Moses. Father Benedicto took a deep drink, paused for breath, then took another big swallow. He smacked his lips and gave a contented sigh. The color rose in his cheeks. Díaz grinned and said, Father, you'll outlive us all.

Sófi pushed her way through the crowd to get to Gloria's side at the foot of the dais stairs. Gloria smiled to see her and said Hey, girl, I was wondering where you were.

What are you
doing
? Sófi said.

Getting married, sweetie, what's it look like?

It looks like you've lost your mind.

Gloria laughed and gave Sófi's cheek an affectionate pat.

The old priest took another drink before Díaz gently detached the bottle from him. Let's hold off on that for just a minute, Father, he said, and beckoned Louis Little.

“Come on, darlin,” Louis said, “before the old coot passes out again.”

A minute later Gloria was Louis Little's wife. And by legal definition had also become daughter-in-law to her lifelong friend Raquel Aguilera de Little, who was in fact two months younger than Gloria and herself only three hours a bride. The band struck up a lively tune and the brides each kissed Díaz in turn, and the bridegrooms, father and son, shook his hand, and then both couples headed for the door. As Gloria was being hurried along on Louis Little's arm, Sófi trotted up beside her and said, Where are you going? What do I tell Mother and Father? What about your clothes? What about—?

Gloria blew her a kiss. I'll write you, sweetie, I promise! And was gone.

When Sófi got home and told her parents what happened, María Palomina said, Oh my dear Jesus, and sat at the table and put her head in her hands. She had not liked Julián Salgado, true, but to lose his life in a stupid duel over her impetuous daughter! Nothing Gloria Tomasina ever did could surprise her, but María Palomina had to wonder about the girl's mental condition. To marry a man she had not known an hour—and even more unbelievable, whose hands were still dripping with the blood of her betrothed!

How could it be, María Palomina said, addressing the room at large, that I gave birth to such a one?

She looked at Samuel Thomas, who sat sipping brandy at the other end of the table, scowling at some vision in his head.

I guess we know which side of the family she takes after, María Palomina said.
My
people never produced anybody even a little bit like her.

Samuel Thomas ignored the gibe. He did not care about what happened to Julián Salgado, but he was incensed that Gloria had married an American. A goddam gringo, he said. That stupid girl.

He persisted in his bitter mutterings about it until María Palomina, in her irritation with the whole matter, said that if he was so strongly opposed to marriage between Mexicans and Americans, maybe they should have their own holy union annulled. She asked what he was anyway so mad about. He had wanted Gloria gone and she was gone. What did he care who she was gone with?

You know what? Samuel Thomas said. You're right. You're absolutely right. To hell with it. Her punishment for marrying an American will be that she's married to an American.

To which María Palomina said, Tell me something I don't know, Mister Yankee. How long has it been? Eighteen years?

He fixed her with a thin look and she returned it in mock fashion. Then put the back of her hand to her forehead in a theatrical gesture of long-suffering and sighed loudly and said, Eighteen years.
Eighteeeen lonnnng yeeears
. And cut a sidelong look at him. He tried to hold to his indignation, but then she grinned at him and they both laughed.

Well, I'll tell you what, Samuel Thomas said, raising his glass. Here's to eighteen more. Because I can take it, woman, you hear me? I can
take
it. I've taken other punishment almost this bad.

They laughed harder still and Sófi joined in. She had never before heard her father jest and rarely heard him laugh and never with such gusto. He laughed and pounded the table with his fist. María Palomina laughed so hard she nearly slipped off her chair, which made them all laugh harder.

They had just got themselves under control when Bruno Tomás came up after closing for the night and said, Hey, everybody, what's new?

And flinched at the explosion of renewed laughter.

G
loria kept her promise to write to Sófi, but her letters were infrequent and most of them brief. In the first seventeen years of her marriage she wrote only eleven letters to her sister, the first of them not until almost a year after her wedding, by which time Bruno Tomás was in the army and Sófi had given up hope of ever hearing from her. Sófi wrote back right away, eight pages, front and back. She would write two more letters to Gloria in the eight months before receiving a second one from her. Such would be the pattern of their correspondence for the rest of Gloria's life—Sófi writing two or three letters for each one she got from her sister, who would sometimes let more than a year go by between writing one letter and writing the next, and at one point three years would pass without her sending Sófi a line. Even when Sofía sent the news of each of her marriages, of the bereaving loss of each husband, of the wonderful births of her children and of the unbearable deaths of them, there was no telling how long it would be before Gloria wrote back. But respond she always sooner or later did, with buoyant good wishes for each marriage, with high joy at the birth of each child, with deep commiseration at the death of every husband, and, in the two most wrenching letters Sófi ever received in her life, with such keening anguish over the deaths of her infant nephews—whom she never even had a chance to see, to hold in her arms—that Sófi was both times reduced to sobs of renewed grief for her children even as she felt a great swell of love for her sister.

Gloria never wrote to her parents and they never wrote to her, but Sófi always relayed regards between the parties, even when, as was always the case, no actual regards had been tendered.

While infrequent and brief, Gloria's letters to Sofía Reina provided a sketchy chronicle of her life with Louis Little. For the first four of those years, she and Louis—as well as Raquel and Edward Little—lived at La Noria, a hacienda Díaz received as a gift from his home state of Oaxaca, whose governor happened to be his brother, Félix. Having fallen out with Juárez after the defeat of the French and then losing to him in the presidential election, Díaz had resigned his commission and repaired to La Noria, taking with him thirty hand-picked men of his most formidable cavalry company. Juárez may be the president of Mexico, Díaz would say, but in Oaxaca
I
am the law. Félix Díaz would grin at this and say it was true. I am the governor, yes, he said, but he is my big brother and our mother always told me I must do as my big brother says. Gloria described Félix to Sófi as shorter and darker than Porfirio, but as handsome, though in a more menacing mode. Félix is as full of shadows, Gloria wrote, as the strange mountains of this place.

Edward and Louis—the younger Little's Spanish having much improved—were part of Díaz's small cadre of personal guards that accompanied him whenever he left La Noria, which was usually to Mexico City and sometimes for as long as several weeks. Unlike Díaz's military guards, who were uniformed and always stayed close to him, the Littles dressed like ranch hands with big sombreros to shadow their faces and with ponchos to hide the pair of revolvers each of them wore on his belt, and they worked at a distance from Díaz, melding into the throngs and moving along the fringes of wherever he might be. Díaz himself sometimes would not know where they were but Edward and Louis always knew where he was and never let him out of sight of both of them at the same time.

In private Díaz had told his military guards that as much as he liked the Littles and found their bilingualism useful to him, he preferred his nearest protectors to be fellow Mexicans. The soldiers had smiled to hear it. But the fact of the matter, as Díaz confided to the Littles, was that he did not trust his army guards, and he wanted Edward and Louis in a position to keep an eye on them as well as on everybody else. It is a sad truth about my countrymen, Díaz told the Littles, that not one in ten would hesitate to kill his best friend for two pesos, though you can be sure he would attend the funeral and shed the loudest and most heartfelt tears. It is the natural perfidy of their Indian blood. I tell you, my friends, the Aztecs were conquered not by Cortéz but by the treachery of the other Indians.

Between themselves, the Littles remarked on Díaz's increasing penchant for speaking of Indians and mixed-bloods as if he himself were not of them. “I expect the day's coming when Pórfi will be talking about his daddy the Spanish grandee,” Edward Little said to Louis, who grinned along with him.