Country of the Bad Wolfes (96 page)

By eleven o'clock the house is quiet and its windows dark. At midnight a cusp of moon shows at the far end of the gulf. A fat bright crescent just entering its last
quarter, it silvers the water surface as it ascends, brings the beach into pale form, shapes the house in distinct silhouette.

The moon is almost detached from the gulf when Lobo sends Fat Pori to his assigned post. They lose sight of him in the dunes until some minutes later when he appears on the beach about forty yards north of the house. He lies belly down and pushes sand into a mound in front of him for some modicum of concealment. From there he has an unobstructed and moonlit view of both the front of the house and its north side. He settles himself with rifle ready.

Now Lobo and Sarmiento and Dax scurry down to the house, Dax with his rifle slung on his shoulder. Each of them goes to one of the oil barrels and with his machete hacks a gash into it, the blades whunking loud through the metal. Each man then picks up a paint can of oil and pours a track of it from the pool forming around the barrel as he backs up, Lobo and Sarmiento moving toward the rear of the house, Dax toward its front. They strike matches and put them to the oil tracks. As the flames rush along the ground toward the barrels, Lobo and Sarmiento race back to the dune behind the house while Dax sprints out to a spot on the beach from which he can cover the dark south side of the house and, like Pori, the front as well. As he runs, the barrels boom into spheres of fire.

The hackings into the oil barrels wake the twins. All the bedrooms are on the second floor and theirs are the last two at the north end of the rear of the house. Blake Cortéz lies still a moment, listening hard, a hand on the revolver under his pillow. When he gets up and goes to the window, Remedios wakes. What is it? she says. He shushes her and stares hard into the blackness directly behind the house. Reviews a quick mental roster of who is in the house. César and Hector are away on the
Remerina
, night fishing in the Laguna Madre. And then come the booms of the barrels bursting into flame—and in the glare of orange light from under the house, he glimpses two men ducking behind opposite ends of the nearest dune. At the same moment, James Sebastian, at the north window of his room and scanning the area without, spies the low mound of sand on the beach and the man lying prone behind it.

Laced with distilled coal tar as protection against the elements, the pilings burn like oversized matchsticks. The fire sheets the underside of the house in less than a minute. It flares through the plank seams and leaps up from the floor inside, combusting the rugs and drapes, igniting the furniture. It scales the walls, finds the hallways. . . .

The twins are in a hallway murky with smoke, James Sebastian with a Winchester, Blake Cortéz a double-barreled shotgun. Remedios has a wet cloth to her face, red eyes great with terror. Morgan and Jacky Ríos join them, revolvers in hand. “Las muchachas!” Remedios cries. James and Morgan start for the other side of the house where the girls' room is, the hallway ahead already churning in flames and smoke. They are about to run through the fire when a portion of the floor before them collapses in a downpour of burning wood and a swirling uprush of sparks. They hurry back to the others and James Sebastian says, “No way to them! They'll use the window!” His throat feels flayed. As they hasten down the burning stairway Blake says there are two behind the house and James says he spotted one on the beach. At the foot of the stairs part of a wall falls on Morgan, and his father and Jacky pull him out fast and beat at his clothes and hair and he hollers when they strike his broken arm. Blake is already heading with Remedios toward the back of the house and yelling at James to take the others out by the front.

The sound of the machetes does not reach the room Catalina shares with Vicki Angel midway along the south side of the house and so she does not wake until she smells the smoke. She shouts for Vicki to wake up and flies into her clothes in the dark, the knife as always already on her belt. Vicki is confused in the darkness, terrified by the smoke and Catalina's urgency. She can't find her pants. Smoke is rising off the floor, their bare feet near to burning. The door shows a wavering band of light along its bottom edge and Catalina senses that to open the door is to admit hell. The window, she says, and pulls Vicki, still in her shift, over to it. This side of the house is away from the moon and still in darkness but for the glow of the fire from under the house, and they can barely see the ground thirty feet below. Catalina tells Vicki she'll lower her as far as she can before letting her drop, that it's soft sand, that she won't get hurt. As Vicki begins to ease out the window with Cat gripping her wrists, the door behind them erupts into flame and a searing blaze fills the room.

Even at some forty yards from the house, their angles of vision and the forward projection of the porch permit Dax and Pori to see only the upper part of the front door. If the fuckers come out standing up, how convenient, but even if they crawl out on the porch and can't be seen, they'll soon enough have to come off the burning porch and into the light. Now an upper window on the dark side of the house comes aglow with fire and Dax sees a pair of vague silhouettes in it, one of them climbing out and holding to the other. He aims and shoots and hears a cry and the one partway out falls into the darkness below. He works the rifle bolt as the other scrabbles through the window and he shoots as that one too drops out of the frame of light. He works the bolt again and peers hard, but the uneven ground
on that side of the house is all flickering shadows in the firelight and he cannot distinguish the forms of the two who dropped from the window. He hears nothing but the waves breaking on the sand, the crackling of the fire. Then rifleshots resound from the house and he returns his attention to the front porch.

They're now in the kitchen and Remedios is suffocating. She lunges for the back door but Blake restrains her, forces her to the floor. Her hands are burning and she screams. He hunkers beside her and kicks the door open and lunges out onto the porch, pulling her with him—and the two men start shooting from either end of the dune. Keeping below their angle of sight and holding Remedios to him, Blake flings his shotgun over the porch's south rail, then drags Remedios to the rail and scoops her up and stands up and is shot in the back and shoulder as he heaves her over and then falls wheeling after her. He lands hard on the sand, jarred almost breathless. Remedios lies sprawled and still. He grabs the shotgun and is shot in the back yet again as he rolls under the porch and behind the steps. He lies prone, fighting for breath, then rises on his elbows and looks out between the porch steps and sees a muzzle flash at the near end of the dune, the bullet striking a step and deflecting into his side. He fires one barrel at a point just below where the flash was and the buckshot blows through the top of the dune and he glimpses a man pitching backward.