Country of the Bad Wolfes (84 page)

Evaristo had been a constable for four months now, and Jim Wells said the mistake he'd made in getting the man a badge had nothing to do with his being a smuggler. Along the southern Rio Grande a smuggler was about as commonplace as a carpenter and at least as beneficial to the community, and the only real difference between the smuggling business and most others was the rather more serious consequences of rival competition. No, the problem with Evaristo was that he was a rank bully with the people he was supposed to protect. Since Evaristo's appointment, Wells had received a load of complaints from various colonias about Evaristo beating up fellas for no good reason and taking gross liberties with women and stealing stock and so on. The folk were begging Wells to make him stop.

“Why not just take back his badge?” James Sebastian said.

“I could see to that,” Wells said. “But then he'd like as not be meaner than ever with the folk on account of they complained on him. And it's not just him. Anselmo mention the two sidekicks? Evaristo calls them his deputies although they got no more legal standing as deputies than I do as brother-in-law to the Pope. One's named El Loco and the other Bruto, to give you some idea the kinda fellas we're talking about. Besides being his so-called deputies, they do most the smuggling jobs for him, one or the other usually working with Anselmo. The fella who got the machete throwed through him—
if
such a thing actually happened—that was Bruto. I'm told he's Evaristo's cousin.”

Blake said, “This is interesting, sir, but, well, what's it got to do with us?” But they had been studying his eyes and were pretty sure what it might have to do with them.

“Why, son, I thought it might behoove you to know something about the fella you wanted to meet with this morning to, ah—how did Anselmo put it?—to try and make an arrangement with him about his using your land. And, as Anselmo says, to talk about the money you took off his recently deceased cousin. Have I been misinformed?”

“No, sir,” said Blake. “We wanted to let him know that if he wants to keep doing business on our land, we think it only fair he give us a certain percentage of his profits.”

“And to let him know the money from yesterday would be a sort of good-faith binder,” James Sebastian said.

Wells smiled at one of them and then the other. “You don't believe for a minute he'd agree?”

“Well, sir, that'd be up to him,” James said.

“I see. What will you do when he tells you to give him his money and go jump in the lake?”

“Tell him it's not his money anymore and we'd ruther stay dry,” Blake said.

“I see.” Wells beamed. “I have to say, you boys aint lacking in self-confidence.”

In that moment, the Wolfe brothers and Jim Wells recognized in each other something they would none of them have known what to call except perhaps an affinity of outlook. An understanding that prompted James Sebastian to say, “If you don't mind my saying so, Mr Wells, it seems like the best solution to your problem with this Evaristo would be if he decided to light out to a new life somewhere else.”

“Oh you're right, son, that'd be a blessing for sure.”

“Well, it's the sorta thing happens all the time,” James said. “A man just up and goes one day. Without so much as an hasta la vista to anybody.”

“I've heard that some men do that, yes,” Wells said.

“And of course if Evaristo lit out, he'd be taking leave of his river business,” Blake said. “Be an opportunity for somebody who was looking to get into the trade.”

Wells smiled at them. “I have to tell you, boys, I admire your, ah, eye for opportunity.”

“When do you reckon Evaristo might head out in the brush again?” James said.

“Can't say. But if I was him and neither of my smugglers come back last night, first thing I'd do today is go to their house to see if they're there. If they weren't, and neither was the wagon—which it isn't, since it's at my house where Anselmo brung it—then I'd likely go out to that Horseshoe place to see what I might find there.” Wells consulted his pocketwatch. “It's my guess he's probly already been to their houses and is on the way to the Horseshoe this minute.”

They met them coming back on the Boca Chica road, less than a mile from the turn-off that led to the Horseshoe. They saw each other from a long way off on that open road and both parties reined their mounts from a lope to a trot as they advanced on each other. The short shotgun was slung muzzle down on James Sebastian's saddle horn and he had removed his coat and hung it from the saddle horn too so that it covered the gun. He patted his horse's neck and then slipped his hand under the coat and cocked both hammers. Blake's revolver was in his waistband and covered by the flap of his open coat. When the two parties closed to twenty yards, the twins slowed their horses to a walk and the other riders did the same and they reined up with less than ten yards between them. Evaristo was easy to recognize by Anselmo's description of his leanness and the droop of his mustache. The other wore his hat pushed back on his head and his grin seemed more permanent state than response and his eyes spoke of some restless eagerness. El Loco. Both men with revolvers on their hips. His eyes bespoke his recognition of them, los gringos cuates. And he had surely heard too of the house they had built somewhere out here.

“Buenos días, señor,” Blake said. “Que bonito tiempo, verdad?”

Evaristo grinned to hear his Spanish. Yes, he said. The pity about fine weather, however, is that it never lasts long enough.

“Lo mismo como la vida,” James said, reaching to pat his mount's neck and then sliding his hand under the coat.

Evaristo saw the move and reached for his own gun but before his hand could close on it the hung coat flung up in the shotgun's blast and the charge hit him high in the chest and batted him from the saddle. His horse was hit too and shrieked as it bolted. El Loco was raising his revolver when Blake Cortéz shot him above the eye and his hat jumped as he slung rearward, stirrups flinging, and landed facedown in an attitude of listening to some secret of the earth. Now Evaristo was raising himself on an elbow, red holes in one cheek and chest blood-sopped, again reaching for his gun. James reined his mount steady with one hand and with the other pointed the shotgun like an outsized pistol and with the second barrel of buckshot removed much of the man's head. At almost the same instant, Blake shot El Loco again, to be certain.

They calmed their horses and studied the road in both directions and saw that it lay empty to the horizons. They collected the men's guns and took the money from their pockets and then rounded up their horses and were glad to see that the wounds on Evaristo's mount were not so serious they would have to kill it. They draped the bodies over the horses and put the animals on a lead rope and rode back to westward for a distance before turning off toward the river and then onto the trail that took them through the palms to Wolfe Landing. There they put both bodies on El Loco's horse and took with them another rope and led the horse to the resaca.

W
hen the news got around that Evaristo Dória was missing, everyone who knew him was sure he was dead. Most likely in consequence of some dispute with a smuggling rival. You watch, people said, sooner or later he'll be found in the river reeds, or what's left of him by the fish and the turtles, unless he floated all the way out to the gulf.

For weeks after Evaristo's disappearance a gringo in a suit would show up at his house every Saturday to give Mrs Dória an envelope containing Evaristo's weekly salary. The man said his name was Smith and he worked for Mr Jim Wells, who had said to tell her he hoped her husband soon returned home and to please let him know if she needed anything. The whole neighborhood witnessed Mr Smith's Saturday visits, and Mrs Dória made it known who he was. They all knew that the county did not pay anybody for not working, and so the money had to be coming from Mr Wells's pocket, and they all said thankful prayers to God for putting them in the care of Don Santiago.

After three months went by without a word from Evaristo, Jim Wells himself called on Mrs Dória. He told her he was sorry but it was probably best to assume her husband wouldn't be coming back. He informed her that a bank account had been opened in her name and would receive a monthly deposit sufficient for her to take care of her children until they were of age or she remarried.

“I have to say, she didn't seem all that distressed by the idea her husband might be gone for good,” Wells told the twins. “Her only concern was the means to feed her kids, and now that's took care of. Anyhow, she's a right goodlookin woman, so I don't expect her children will be without a daddy too long.”

It was a chill March evening and Wells and the twins were sitting with drinks and cigars before a low fire in his den. In the parlor, his wife Pauline and their thirteen-year-old daughter Zoe were entertaining the twins' wives and young sons while the family cook was preparing supper. In the three months of their acquaintance, the twins and Jim Wells and their families had supped together at the Wells' home several times, and there would be many more such evenings over the years to come. Suppers and small parties in the company of their families and occasionally with other guests as well. And there would be meetings too of just the three of them, at an hour when their families were abed, when the men would converse in muted voices and dim lamplight about topics privileged to themselves alone.

Only two weeks earlier, Wells had told the twins that his boyhood dream had been to become a man of influence and respect, and if he did say so himself he had achieved that aspiration and was proud of it. They knew he was mildly drunk—his drawl a little more pronounced—and enjoying the bourbon's liberation of sentiments he rarely voiced. “But I'll tell you the truth, boys,” he said. “I'd give it all up in a minute if I could just be your age again. And I mean without a nickel in my pocket. All the money on earth aint worth spit compared to bein young and havin a dream to chase after. It's nice to arrive at it, no denyin that, but the real fun's in the gettin there. The
gettin there
. I cannot say how much I envy you. I expect you fellas have some dream of your own and I surely hope you attain it.”

Blake Cortéz said that, for one thing, they wanted a house by the sea.

“Well heck, that's simple enough,” Wells said. “Just build yourself one. Around Point Isabel probly the best place. Then you'll only have three houses—excuse me, I mean four.
That
your big aim? Own more and more houses?”

They had bought the lot next to the Levee Street house and were nearly finished with the house they were raising on it. Enlarged as their two families had become, and with Remedios Marisól expecting her third child in the summer, the house they shared had become much too small and they decided that each family would have its own, side by side.

The seaside house wasn't their big dream, they told Wells, but in thinking about a beach house they had come to understand what they really wanted. Instead of acquiring a separate gulfside property, the thing to do was to extend Tierra Wolfe to the gulfside.

“You mean to buy up all the land in between?”

“Yessir,” James said. “The coast aint but about eight miles from our eastmost line as the crow flies.”

“Make it sound like a stone toss,” Wells said. “How far up you thinkin to go?”