Country of the Bad Wolfes (87 page)

They send telegraphic notice to their father at Chapultepec but he is at his work somewhere else when the wire arrives and three days will pass before he reads it. By then his eldest son is buried. He tells Porfirio, who weeps. That evening they go to Las Lagrimas de Nuestras Madres but do not dance, only drink to the memory of Louis Welch Little and recount tales of him, begat fifty-eight years ago in Louisiana of a sixteen-year-old girl named Sharon.

The Little brothers also inform Bruno Tomás at Buenaventura, and Sofía Reina and María Palomina in Mexico City, none of whom have seen Gloria since the day of her precipitate marriage to Louis Welch Little thirty-six years before, nor ever met her husband. Bruno mourns for the sister with whom he had at last become familiar through their affectionate correspondence. Sófi and María Palomina are grieved to the bone. And yet, at the same time, Gloria having for years confided to Sófi—and thereby to María Palomina—the infidelities of Louis Welch, they cannot help but feel a guilty pleasure in her remedy of those injuries. From the day they met, María Palomina says, that gringo should have known that she was not a woman to mistreat. Well, Sófi says, he at least should have known it by the time they got married. And they laugh louder than they cried.

F
or more than a decade the twins would smuggle only liquor and conduct transactions with no one but the Goya brothers in Matamoros and their regular suppliers and buyers in Corpus Christi. Contrary to their expectations, the river trade never slackened for more than a few weeks at a time, and there was never a period of as long as two months that it did not turn a profit. Together with their income from the intermittent cattle sales in Mexico and the sums in the occasional envelopes left at the door, it gave them more than enough money to buy the properties they wanted as they became available, no mortgages necessary.

They of course began their acquisitions with those parcels that already had clear title. Most of those were in the wilder country, eastward of Tierra Wolfe, and the owners were so glad to be rid of the worthless grounds that the twins were able to buy them at a bargain. Came a summer day in 1905 when they bought a tract that ran northward from the river mouth up to Boca Chica Pass and then along the east coast of South Bay up to Nameless Creek. The property was mostly a mix of marsh and scrubland, but its stretch of beach between the river and the pass was broad and dense with dunes along the higher ground, and the sea wind was a bracing contrast to the stifling humidity of Brownsville. Scattered about the riverside just off the beach were the weather-eaten foundations of former structures, the remains of a one-time boomtown port called Clarksville. According to Ben Watson it had been the wildest place on the border with the possible exception of Bagdad, a Mexican port directly across the river. Both towns had teemed with smugglers, bootleggers, fugitives, runagates, outlaws of every stripe, and so of course attracted gamblers and whores as well—and both had long since been obliterated by economic turns of fortune and a series of hurricanes. Marina and Remedios and the kids were agog
when the twins showed them where the house would stand with its grand view of the gulf and the enormous gulf sky.

On each visit home during the next two months the twins spent time with a Brownsville architect, discussing with him exactly the sort of house they wanted. A two-story on twelve-foot pilings and large enough for both families, with roofed upper and lower porches in front and an unroofed lower porch in back. When the architect's plan at last met with their approval they went to the best builder in Brownsville and hired him to construct the house. Their plan was to live there in the summers while the kids were out of school and then move back into town during the school year and come to the beach house on weekends. While the house was being built, they hired another crew to excavate a horseshoe cove into the bank about fifty yards upstream from the river mouth and there built a dock large enough for several small boats.

They named the place Playa Blanca and moved into the house in the early summer of ‘06. The eldest child, Morgan James, was almost thirteen, and the youngest, Vicki Angel, had just turned ten. The youngsters all took to the sea like dolphins. Just beyond the small whitecaps, the water was a placid undulation, shallow and clear pale green all the way out to the sand bars. Any shark that crossed the bar could be seen while it was still a long way out. Marina had taught the children and Remedios Marisól how to swim in a resaca, but swimming in the gulf was far more fun, though it was a vexation to the boys that Vicki Angel was the fastest of them. When the twins said they weren't sure Vicki should be swimming naked with the boys, their wives laughed and hooted at them and called them evil-minded Yankee hypocrites, and the twins sheepishly retreated and said no more about it.

But then one day when the twins and Remedios were running errands in town, Marina went out on the porch and saw the children about fifty yards down the beach, standing in a group in water to their thighs, and she looked through the powerful telescope mounted on the porch rail and saw that the boys were exposing erections to Vicki, who sat in the water to her shoulders and looked both amused and uncertain. As Marina stalked down the beach toward them, the boys saw her coming and lowered themselves in the water, then came out at her beckon with not an erection in evidence. She told them there would be no more naked swimming when Vicki was with them and that if any of them ever did that again to her or any other girl, she, Marina, would tie their thing in a knot they'd never be able to undo.

She did not tell the twins about the incident but later asked Vicki if they had done that before, and the girl said no. Marina suspected she wasn't being truthful but did not question her further, not wanting to force her to lie. She knew that although Vicki would not let them boss her about, she loved them dearly and would never betray them.

In truth, the boys had displayed erections to Vicki a few other times, making a game of it they called Look at This. They almost always dared her to touch them,
and she once did, a quick two-finger feel of César Augusto's, which was the smallest and least daunting. She had affected to be repulsed but was secretly fascinated. Still, there was something in their eyes when they played Look at This that scared her, and she had not touched one again.

The twins bought a twenty-two foot sloop and named it
Gringa
and taught the boys and Vicki Angel how to sail it. They also instructed them in building their own boat, which they did, a fifteen-foot modified catboat with a centerboard. They named it
Remerina
in honor of both mothers. The twins taught them how to read the clouds and the wind and the different colors of the sea. How to fish for shark. And the beach was a good place for teaching them to shoot and for lessons in how to defend themselves with hands and feet. Marina and Remedios would sometimes sit on the shaded porch and watch the self-defense sessions with narrowed nervous eyes. Though the boys were of course bigger and stronger than Vicki Angel, she was the quickest and very nimble and was sometimes able to trip one of them down. One day she tripped Morgan James, who was the oldest and biggest, and when the others laughed he was furious with embarrassment. He pinned Vicki on the ground with a knee on her chest and tried to force a handful of sand in her mouth but she flung sand in his eyes and broke free and outran him down the beach until he gave up the chase.

When Morgan James turned fourteen, the twins started teaching all their sons the river business. The ways and means of it, the finances and accounting methods, the recording codes, all of which the boys were quick to absorb. They began taking the boys in pairs and by turns on some of the smuggling transactions, instructing them to watch everything very carefully and questioning them afterward to see how well they had observed. They introduced them to the Goyas and to the buyers in Corpus Christi.

The twins never spoke to their wives about this training process, and the boys never said anything of it to their mothers. But Marina and Remedios of course knew it was taking place, as it had to, and if they thought the boys too young to be learning such things, they did not say so.

The following summer the Goyas sent word to the twins that there were two men who wanted to talk to them and it might prove profitable if they did. At the Goya estate the twins were introduced to a pair of well-groomed mestizos who said their names were Yadier and Elizondo and their last names did not matter. They
wore good suits in which they did not seem comfortable but they spoke well and were quick to the point. They wanted guns. Rifles. And ammunition of course. As many and as much as possible. The twins smiled. Blake Cortéz said it sounded like somebody was thinking of going to war. Against who, I wonder, James said grinning. The two men neither smiled nor answered the question. The word of late from across the river was that Porfirio Díaz's political enemies were still in mortal fear of him and keeping to the shadows, but there was a growing and bolder discontent in the countryside. Two years ago, Díaz had won reelection for the sixth time and had now been president for twenty-four consecutive years and twenty-eight of the last thirty-two. He was seventy-six years old but not about to step down—or stop using his club on those who rejected his bread.

The Yadier one said they knew the Wolfes had an excellent smuggling point on their property that permitted them to operate in great safety. The question, said the Elizondo one, was whether the Wolfes could get the guns and ammunition. Blake asked what kind of rifles they wanted. They said the new Springfields. Those could be a little hard to get, James Sebastian said. Of course, the Elizondo one said. That is why we will pay well for them. But naturally, we do not want to be cheated on the price. Naturally, James Sebastian said. The twins said they would see what they could arrange. They agreed to meet at the Goya estate again in ten days.

The twins made inquiries that led them to a Fort Brown master sergeant named Leonard Richardson, the NCO in charge of the post armory. Silverhaired and beefy, he was dressed like a rancher when they met at a corner table in a loud and crowded Matamoros cantina. Richardson knew about the twin constables by reputation. He'd heard of their law enforcement methods in the outland and the rumors of their sideline as liquor smugglers. He told them he had been dealing in army weapons for ten years and had suppliers from various army forts and other military installations throughout Texas and all over the gulf coast, every man of them an expert at reworking inventory ledgers to disguise the thefts. He could easily get them Mausers or Krags. The Springfield M1903 was of course a more difficult acquisition but he could do it for the right price.

“Which is?” James Sebastian asked.

Richardson told him—and was quick to admit it was steep, but then he was the most dependable provider they could hope to do business with. “Every delivery I ever said I'd make got made,” he said, “when and where promised.” He let them confer privately for the time it took him to go to the bar to get three more mugs of beer.