Country of the Bad Wolfes (9 page)

In the last days of September came a cold and chronic rain. He got sick, grew weak and dizzy, went about in a sweating chill. His body felt peculiar, as though its flesh was barely clinging to its bones. One morning he was nearly run over as he crossed a street, staggering back as the mule team clopped by. It was a municipal wagon with a load of corpses loosely covered with a tarp. He clearly saw the face of one at the bottom of the pile—eyes open and teeth bared in a grimace that might have passed for a maniacal grin. The face, Samuel Thomas was certain, winked at him.

On a raw dank night, walking in a small plaza of bright shops and restaurants a few blocks north of the zócalo, he was seized by a sudden sensation of being weightless and then the earth tipped under him and he fell unconscious on the sidewalk. But even in the better parts of town the prostrate forms of insensate drunks were a common sight, and passersby on their way to supper or the theater stepped around him with no more interest than if he had been a hole in the ground. The common sentiment about bodies on the central streets was that they would either revive and move on or be picked up in the morning by the collection wagons.

He came to awareness under a sky of iron gray. A young woman was crouched
beside him, studying him with curiosity. She wore an apron and held a broom and had a white crescent scar at the outer corner of one eye. She asked if he were wounded. He said he didn't think so. His voice sounded to him like a stranger's. He tried to get up but fell back and nearly passed out again. She put the back of her hand to his cheek and then a palm to his forehead, then said she would be right back.

In her absence he was unsure whether she had been real or imagined. But then she returned, accompanied by a grayhaired man with a black eye patch. They helped him to stand and steered him a short way down the sidewalk and into a small café cast in soft yellow light and infused with the aromas of coffee and sausage and cinnamon. There were tables covered with white cloth and a small bar with a few stools. Samuel Thomas was unsure if he in fact apologized for his stink or if he only thought he did. Then nearly took the girl and old man down with him as he fell in a swoon.

He awoke on a cot in a dimly lighted storeroom. The sole window was small and high and the daylight in it was as gray as he'd last seen it. An oil lamp with its wick set low burned on a small table beside the cot. The air pungent with peppery odors. The walls were hung with cookware, the ceiling with strings of dried sausages and chiles, the shelves held condiments, sacks of sugar and salt and maize and wheat flour. There were casks of beer and cases of bottled wine. In a corner of the room, a rat lay with its neck under the sprung bail of the trap, its eyes like little pink balloons and the cheese white in its mouth. Samuel was under a blanket and wearing a night shirt. He only vaguely recalled someone undressing him, washing him with a warm cloth, holding a glass to his lips. A wonderful liquor of a kind he had never tasted before.

He'd been awake but a few minutes when the door opened slightly and the girl looked in and saw his open eyes, and smiled. She went away and a few minutes later came back with a tray of food and set it on the little bedside table. She said he had slept around the clock. He guessed her to be a few years older than himself.

She put a cool palm to his forehead and smiled. Your fever is nearly gone, she said in the clearly enunciated Spanish of those educated in the capital.

She leaned down to take a look into the chamber pot under the bed. She said that she had at first feared he had eaten something spoiled or drunk bad water, but had since decided he was not poisoned, only malnourished. A few days of rest and proper feeding, she told him, and he should be fine.

She helped him to sit up. On the tray was a steaming bowl of the tripe stew called menudo, seasoned with lemon juice and chopped green chile, and a small plate of white rice topped with a fried egg. He felt he could feed himself but did not object when she sat on the edge of the cot and began spooning the menudo to him. She said her name was María Palomina Blanco Lobos. The one-eyed man was her grandfather Bruno Blanco. He owned the café, La Rosa Mariposa, and she had been
helping him to operate it since she was a child. They lived in an apartment upstairs and had no family but each other.

The food was delicious but he could not finish half of it before he was sated. She said it was an excellent sign that he had any appetite at all. He asked if he might have some of whatever it was they had given him to drink before. A French brandy, she told him, then left the room and returned a minute later with a small glass of the reddish liquor. He sipped from it and felt its sweet burn down his throat.

He asked why they were being so kind to him. Did they take in every man they found lying on the sidewalk?

Of course not, she said. It was the mark on his face. She knew what it meant. She and her grandfather had read about the San Patricios in the newspapers. Bruno Blanco too had once been a brave fighter, in the long war for independence begun by the great Father Hidalgo. Even after he saw Hidalgo's severed head on display at Guanajuato, Bruno Blanco had continued to fight against the brute Spaniards until independence was won. That was how he lost his eye, in that war.

But I still do not know your name, she said. “Como se llama?”

“Samuel Tomás,” he said.

Are you Irish?

No, he said.

“Ah pues, eres americano.” She smiled.

Not anymore, he said.

She seemed puzzled by that but let it pass. “Tomás no es su apellido, verdad?”

No, he said, his family name was Wolfe.

“Wooolf,” she said, trying it on her tongue. Then asked why he smiled.

He asked if she knew what the name meant.

No. What?

“Lobo.”

“En verdad? Lo mismo como la familia de mi mamá?”

Well, not quite the same. For one thing, her mother's maiden name was in plural form—Lobos—but his name was not. Also, his surname had an “e” on the end. “En inglés no hay una ‘e' en la palabra para el lobo.”

Even so, she said, the coincidence of their family names was a little curious.

He said he supposed so.

Where had he learned to speak Spanish?

Everywhere between Matamoros and Mexico City.

Well, she said with a smile, she did not mean to be rude, but it sounded like it. His grammar was good, but that accent! It had to be the only one of its kind in Mexico.

He returned her smile. The brandy warmed him. He asked about the scar and she said she'd got it from a fight with a ratero who stole her purse on the street about a year ago. Some weeks after, she and her grandfather were shopping in the rowdy Volador Market behind the zócalo when she spotted the thief in a packed
crowd in front of a kiosk, watching a puppet show. Bruno Blanco asked if she were absolutely sure, and she was. Her grandfather had then eased through the crowd and up alongside the thief and so neatly stabbed him in the heart from behind that he was dead without a cry. As her grandfather withdrew from the crowd, the man sank in the press of people around him without drawing more than a glance of irritation at one more drunk passing out in public.

Your grandfather is an honorable and capable man, but I would have made the bastard look at you before I killed him. So he would know why he was getting it.

She studied his eyes. I believe you.

You have beautiful skin.

She blushed even as she laughed at his sudden compliment. Then held out an arm for his inspection and said, “Leche teñida por un poquito de café.” Her family had been Creole until Grandfather Bruno married a mestiza. It was that grandmother who put the trace of milk-and-coffee in her complexion.

Had she ever been married?

No, but she had been engaged to an army officer when she was sixteen. He was sent to Sonora to fight Yaquis, and a month before he was due to return for their wedding he took an arrow in the leg. The wound became infected and the leg had to be cut off. He wrote her a letter saying he would understand if she decided not to marry him now that he was an incomplete man. She wrote back to tell him not to be foolish, that she didn't care if he was without a leg. But the infection had poisoned his blood and by the time her letter got to the military hospital he had been dead almost a week.

Did you love him very much?

Yes. But now I cannot clearly remember his face.

You have no picture of him?

No. From her apron pocket she produced a black cigarillo and set it between her teeth, then rasped a lucifer into flame and put it to the end of the little cigar. The smoke was blue and sweet. The only women he'd ever seen smoke were some of the girls of the Blue Mermaid and some women of the Mexican outlands. He was taken with her easy confidence. She smiled and asked if he wanted a puff, then held the cigarillo to his lips. It was moist with the touch of her tongue. The act seemed to him somehow more intimate than any he had ever shared with even a naked woman.

She closed her fingers around his clawed hand and said, Listen. And told him that even after she saw the brand on his face she had been in doubt of what to do. She had thought to leave him on the sidewalk to recover on his own or to die, whichever way fate would have it.

It was like a little trial in my head, she said. One side argued that I should help you because you fought for my country and the other side said not to be foolish, life in this terrible time is dangerous enough without bringing a stranger under our
roof, especially a foreigner. A man who has killed so many might choose to kill us too for whatever reason enters his head. And then you opened your eyes. When I saw them it was decided. You have true eyes.

He said he was glad the verdict went his way. He would have hated to become one more corpse for the dead wagon to collect.

You are luckier than you know, she said. I was decided before I saw you smile. I do not mean to insult you, but with that hole in your teeth and the way that scar pulls your face, it is not the kind of smile to make others smile back. If I had seen you smile before deciding about you . . . well, who knows what the verdict might have been.

She laughed. And his grimace of a grin widened.

He accepted Bruno Blanco's offer of employment as the café's barman, a job he could do with one good hand and one bad one. He could live in the storeroom, old Bruno said. He had been there a week when she tiptoed down the stairs in the middle of the night and slipped into his cot. After a month of it, Bruno Blanco said they should stop thinking they were fooling anyone and might as well live together in her room with the larger and more comfortable bed. In the darkness of their trysts she had shed silent tears as her fingers traced the whip scars on his back, and when she saw them in the lamplight she cried harder yet and cursed the whoresons who had given them to him. Cursed all armies of the earth as gangs of barbarians.

They had been together only two months when she proposed marriage because she wanted children. But if you do not want to be a father, she said, we can continue as we are. You are my first importance. And because there was nothing he wished to do with his life other than what he was doing, nowhere he wished to be other than where he was, he could think of no objection to marriage or fatherhood and so said all right.

They never spoke of love. She would in time tell him that she had never had a better friend, but he knew it was not true, knew her grandfather had been a better friend to her than anyone else could ever be. But she did not know he told the same lie, for she was unaware of his brother. He had told her he was an orphaned only child. He lied for no reason but to keep things simple, and he assumed she did too.