Country of the Bad Wolfes (62 page)

That the twins have chosen to come in by their garden route makes it clear they know how late they are and that they don't want to run into their father before getting to the church. The young maid, Concha, is alight with excitement. She has never met the twins and has seen them only from a distance, but she has heard much
about them from the women in the laundry, most of it scandalous and therefore enticing.

The garden door bangs open and they come stomping in, still laughing over some shared joke, charging the room with masculine energy and infusing the air with the effluvia of the sweat and blood caked on their clothes and seasoned with the smell of campfire smoke. They are hatless and their hair dusty. For the last two weeks they have been taking crocodile hides on the river, the skins now drying at the cove.

“Pues, al fin llegan estos brutos desgraciados!” Josefina says. She whacks at the boys with her cane, berating them for their lateness and their filthy stinking state and the trouble they have caused her with their father.

They laugh and fend her blows, and then Blake Cortéz snatches her to him and pins her skinny arms against her sides and kisses her full on the mouth. He says he's damned glad a crocodile isn't as tough as she is or they wouldn't have collected a single hide. Marina has often marveled at the blush only the twins can raise in the brown wither of Josefina's face.

Let go of me, Blackie, you good-for-nothing, Josefina says, trying to wriggle free. He kisses her again, then hops back from her with his fists raised like a pugilist, exhibiting a fancy footwork and feinting with lefts and rights, saying, “Come on, you old warhorse, I'm ready for you. This one's for the championship.”

She swats at his arms with the cane and calls him a wicked child and says she's told him a thousand times not to talk that gringo talk to her. She drives him rearward toward the patio door, ordering him to get into the bathtub this minute, they are late enough as it is.

“Oye! Pero quién es esa hermosa?” James Sebastian says, taking notice of Concha at the other end of the room.

Never mind that, Marina says. Get in those tubs and clean up, there's no time for foolishness. As she pushes James toward the patio door, he grins and fondles her bottom and whispers in her ear that he has missed her terribly and how about sneaking into the tub with him. Marina slaps his hand away and calls him a donkey and cuts a look at Josefina, whose attention is still fixed on driving Blackie toward the patio with jabs of her cane. It frets Marina that James could be so indiscreet. But she knows how he feels. When the twins entered the kitchen it had been all she could do to keep from running to them and kissing them with all her might. She had done that once, after not having seen them for six months. Had come into the kitchen and seen them standing there, just arrived, and even in Josefina's presence she could not refrain from kissing them each in turn with all her heart until Josefina said, Enough, girl, for God's sake, let the poor boys catch their breath. She had felt her face flush and expected Josefina to be shocked, but the old woman simply busied herself at making the boys something to eat. She and the twins have now been lovers for more than two years and she cannot believe Josefina is still unaware of it.

Her incredulity is well-founded, for Josefina has in fact been aware of her sexual relation with the twins since it began. She had at first been dismayed by the realization that Marina had accepted the boys as lovers, but the more she turned it over in her mind the less it troubled her, until at last she felt obliged to ask the Holy Mother's forgiveness for her lack of moral affront. Where, after all, was the sin? The boys' cheekiness with Marina was but a flimsy veil over their adoration of her, and Marina was still a fairly young woman with a young woman's natural appetites and she loved them too and knew how to guard against conception. Who could have taught them better than she what they should know most about women? And who else has ever given her the respect and protection she deserves? Who else has ever defended her honor as they did last summer when they accompanied her to the hacienda market to carry back a side of beef and that fool of a muleskinner called out that if she would place a sack over her head he'd be willing to play with her body? He was a very large man of rough repute but no match for the two of them. They went at him from opposite flanks like a pair of boar dogs and got him down fast and began beating him in the face with a cobblestone and surely would have killed him if Marina had not managed to make them desist. Even so, they pounded the man's face to a ruination worse than hers, fracturing it so severely he would for the rest of his life have to breathe through his mouth and have trouble making himself understood. They had already acquired a reputation as ferocious fighters but after the public maiming of the muleskinner there were few men who weren't at least a little bit afraid of them—and they were only fifteen at the time. When their father heard about the fight he said nothing of it to them or to Marina but summoned Josefina to get the details, and she had sensed both Don Juan's pride in their gallantry and his dismay at their viciousness. Like their father, Josefina fears for the twins' future. Fears it because of the men they are becoming and cannot be prevented from becoming and the dangers such men seem naturally to attract and those they seem naturally to seek out. And yet she cannot but admire them for their bravery and love them the more for their devotion to Marina. In a girlhood of so long ago it seems more like some tale she once heard told than an actual part of her past, Josefina had learned that the only man of worth to a woman was one who was willing to kill for her, a truth that was proved in her own marriage to a man who was not of that sort. In her prayers to the Holy Mother she has allowed that if there is sin in the love between the twins and Marina, then she herself, Josefina María Cortéz de Quito, must be held to a share of that sin, because she cannot condemn it.

Marina is trying to shove James out the door, but he laughs and braces himself against his brother, who has also become aware of Concha and stands fast in the doorway, grinning at her. Despite herself, blushing Concha is smiling back.

Get
into
those baths, you little pigs! says Josefina, half their size, flailing at them with her walking stick.

The twins yip in mock pain and affect to flinch at the blows as they stumble
rearward into the patio, holding to each other as if to keep from falling. They trade a grinning look—and then swiftly unbuckle their belts and drop their pants and grab their cocks and wag them at the women.

Concha squeals and whirls about with her back to them as Josefina screeches, You'll burn in
hell
, both of you! You
filthy evil
things!

Marina slams the door shut on the boys' wild laughter and slumps against it in a caricature of slack-jawed exhaustion.

Josefina issues a groaning sigh as she eases into a chair. “Jesucristo,” she says, “que par de bárbaros!”

Concha looks from one woman to the other, her hands at her mouth, her brown face darker yet with embarrassment.

And then all three of them break into a cackling laughter louder than the boys outside.

From the shade of the alamo tree, he keeps intent watch on the casa grande's courtyard gate. The steeple bells in their final clangoring summons to the ceremonial mass. He is familiar with the patrón's habits and knows that before he does anything else he will come to the horses to give them their treat. He takes the flask from his coat and uncorks it and has a drink and re-seals it and tucks it away.

His heart jumps when he sees the white-suited patrón come out the casa grande gate. Unaccompanied, as usual. Excellent. He puts his hand inside his coat and fingers the haft of the knife snug in its sheath under the heavy money belt. The derringer in his coat will have no part in this. To be done as it should, the act calls for the blade. Face to face. So the gringo will see who is doing it, and seeing who, will die knowing why.

But now the patrón stops and pats at his coat pockets, then tosses his head in irritation and looks back toward the casa grande. He takes his watch from a vest fob and checks the time, then puts away the watch and heads for the other end of the plaza and the church.

The circumstance is clear enough. The old bastard forgot the sugar. What to do? To ride after him would put him on his guard. With that damned pistol everybody knows about. A revolver with the barrel cut short for easier carry under his coat. There is nothing to do except stay put and wait until after the mass. Then he thinks, Idiot! Why will he come to the stable afterward? He will go straight back to the house is what he will do. While you stand here with your thumb up your ass.

Damn it. To kill him at the stable would have made it all so simple. No one else nearby. Ahorse and out the gate before anyone even thought to give chase. A back trail into the mountains and then a mule track he knows of, unused for years. He would be in Jalapa before sundown and on a train for Mexico City and from there a train to Durango and the protection of his brother. But now what? If you do it at
the church you've got a lot of people around and you're a whole lot farther from the main gate. Wait until tomorrow and do it here at the stable like you planned. Be smart. And there'll be fewer people tomorrow.

No! Today! You're ready
today
. And you don't want fewer people. You want as many as possible to see it. To see what happens to this gringo who spat on your family's honor!

All right, then. Take the horse over there. You can still mount up fast and get out quick. Goddammit, man, where are your balls?

He leads the horse across the plaza to the church and tethers it to a tree a few yards from the wide breadth of church steps. Then positions himself at the periphery of the crowd assembled outside the doors, hat low over his eyes. And now has only to wait for the end of the mass. Engrossed in his thoughts, he is heedless of late arrivals.

The mass is in progress when the black-suited twins ease through the crowd listening at the open doors. The people grouped at the back of the room make way so that the brothers can stand at the forefront with a clear view of the altar. As those in the rearmost pews become aware of their presence, they make gestures of offering their seats to them, but the twins decline the tenders with their own hand signals.

They see their father in the front pew, his shoulders slumped as never before. To one side of him are John Samuel and Vicki and Juanito Sotero, and next to them Bruno Tomás and his wife Felicia Flor, great with their first child, due in a few weeks. The empty space to the other side of their father is where the twins would be sitting if they had arrived in time. Not until Juan Sotero goes to the altar to receive the communion wafer from the bishop does their father turn to look toward the back of the church and see them. His gaze is tired but reproachful at their lateness. The twins acknowledge him with respectful nods and he nods in turn. Then gives his attention back to Juan Sotero as the boy returns to the pew, hands together in a prayerful attitude contrasting with his wide smile. He sits down and Vicki Clara puts an arm around him and whispers in his ear.

Josefina has told them of their father's directive to go to his office after the mass. They cannot guess what he wishes to see them about, but have a hunch it will entail John Samuel in some way and that he will be there too, and so the session cannot possibly be anything but unpleasant. As the mass nears its end, Blake says, “Let's go.”