Country of the Bad Wolfes

DISCOVERIES

They made their first trip to the cove when they were fourteen years old, and they went there by running the rapids on a raft of their own making. They had by that time made numerous excursions into the jungle and were sometimes gone longer than a week. Josefina had scolded them for disobeying their father by never telling her which way they were going and for how long, and Blake Cortéz had said Well, if he asks, tell him we went north. She asked if that was the truth and he grinned and shrugged, then dodged the swat of her cane. If you two think I’ll keep lying to your father for you, you’re very wrong, Josefina said. Then tell him the truth, James Sebastian said. You forgot what we told you because you’re too old to remember anything.

“Ay, que desgraciado sinvergüenza!” Josefina said, swinging her cane.

John Roger had never tried to enforce his provisos on the twins’ jungle ventures. But the raft was a different matter. Reynaldo the mayordomo had thought so too. He was not one to relay to John Roger the twins’ every peccadillo that came to his ear, but when his informants told him the twins were building a raft at the landing just above the start of the rapids and that it was nearly finished, he could guess what they intended to do, and he thought it his duty to tell their father. In all the collective lore of the hacienda, nobody had ever survived the rapids.

That evening at the dinner table John Roger told the twins he knew about the raft and forbade them from attempting the white water.

“Yes sir,” one said, and the other nodded and said, “Whatever you say, sir.”

He knew they were lying. They were going to try it no matter his prohibition or what punishments he might threaten. He had thought of putting men at the landing to prevent them from shoving off. Of having the raft destroyed in the night. But if he did either of those things they would just build another raft in secrecy and on some other stretch of the river. He told himself he was a damned fool for even thinking of trying to stop them.

He had been feeling this sense of foolishness about the twins for some time. Since the day when he was just about to restrict them to their room yet again for some infraction or other but suddenly saw no point to it, not even as gesture. The punishment was an illusion, after all. They would stay in the room for no reason except they agreed to. They could escape whenever they wished and they knew he knew it. That’s when it occurred to him that everybody knew it. Nothing of interest ever happened on Buenaventura that did not immediately become part of its circulation of gossip, and the twins’ previous escapes from his efforts to punish them had surely been bruited through the compound and even out to the villages. The gist of such talk—as he learned from Reynaldo after insisting that the man be entirely candid with him—was an amused admiration for the twins’ daring and resourcefulness, and a sincere sympathy for the patrón, a worthy man of great dignity except in contesting with his twin sons. John Roger had felt the embarrassment of it like a well-deserved slap. To be pitied by peons for his indignities with the twins—good Christ! Thus did he recognize the folly, the very ignominy, of trying to force them to his will.

He excused himself to Vicki Clara as he got up from his chair, then left.

John Samuel glared at them from across the table as Victoria Clara gave careful attention to her soup. Their brother’s censorious scowls had become so familiar to the twins that between themselves they had taken to calling him Mister Sourmouth. One evening in the library they had referred to him by that name before remembering Vicki’s presence, then saw her small smile even as she kept her eyes on the book in her lap.

They grinned at John Samuel’s hard look. “What about you, hermano mayor?” one of them said. “Will you spare a tear when we are drowned?”

“I’ll never understand why Father tolerates your insolence,” John Samuel said, rising from his chair. “Were I in his shoes, I would have packed you off to a military school years ago.”

The twins laughed, and one said, “Father’s shoes would fit you like a pair of washtubs.”

John Samuel reddened, then started for the door. Then stopped and looked back at Vicki Clara, who seemed unsure what to do. “Señora?” he said. She dabbed at her lips with her napkin and gave the twins a fleet commiserative smile as she got up and then accompanied her husband from the room.

Two days later they made the run, waiting till sunup before shoving off—the ride would be hazardous enough without attempting it in less than full light. They lashed their knapsacks tightly to the deck and checked and rechecked the tightness of the ropes engirdling the raft and once again rosined the pushpoles to ensure a good grip. They could faintly hear the rush of the white water where it began a half mile downriver. Each time they caught each other’s eye they grinned.

When the sun was risen into the trees they threw off the lines and pushed off. They hadn’t gone fifty yards before the current began a swift acceleration. They slid the pushpoles under the deck lashings and took off their hats and crammed them under the knapsacks and lay down side by side on their stomachs and took firm hold of the cross-deck rope lashed taut over the planks. The raft was going faster yet and swaying from side to side and the river ahead grew louder. Then they saw the white water directly before them and saw too there was a small drop just ahead of it and then the raft seemed to leap off the river before smashing down into a snarling torrent and they were pitching and bucking and the jungle was a green blur to either side of them as the raft rocketed downriver and was jarring off one cluster of jutting rocks after another and rearing skyward and plunging headlong and tilting sidewise and almost overturning and then banging off one steep bank to go spinning across the deranged river and bang off the other as the boys held on with all their might and bellowed in wild glee as they were slung about with arms twisting and legs flapping and at times they were in weightless detachment from the raft entirely but for their grip on the crossrope before again being slammed against the deck so hard that for days after they would be dappled with bruises. They sped along on the wild water, yawing and lofting and plunging and wheeling through a drenching tumult for some six miles, by their later estimate, that passed under them faster than they could believe before the river vanished and they were aloft—having arrived at a small falls they’d had no idea would be there, that nobody on the hacienda knew was there. The raft fell for what seemed to them an eternity of terrified elation—and was in fact a drop of almost twenty feet—before they collided with the water below in a foaming crash that clouted their heads against the deck and nearly banged them unconscious and loose of the deck rope.

They could not have said which fact was the more astonishing, that the raft was still right-side-up or that they were still on it.

The falls marked the end of the rapids. The twins lay dazed and gasping as the raft carried in a slow swirl away from the crashing water. Blake Cortéz said something but James Sebastian couldn’t make it out and yelled, “What?”

“I saaaaid, goddammit . . . it’s goood to be aliiive!”

“You can say that again! Man, I saw stars!”

They had knots under the hair plastered to their foreheads, and their mouths were bloody, but they had lost no teeth and their bones were intact. They hung over the side of the raft and slurped up water and rinsed out the blood, then looked at each other and started laughing again. And kept at it for a while for no reason but it felt so good to laugh.

“Say, friend, tell me something,” James Sebastian said. “Who would you say are the best rivermen in the whole wide world?”

“Well sir,” Blake said, “as it is contrary to my nature to engage in mendacity except when necessary to gain my objective or the plain damn fun of it, I’d say in no uncertain terms that it’s them there inimitable Wolfe brothers.”

“You mean them two that kinda look alike except the Jake one’s better-looking?”

“No sir. I mean them other two that sorta look alike except the Blackie one is by far the handsomer as any mirror will attest.”

“Oh him! The simple one with the poor eyesight who tries so hard to hide his ignorance behind a lot of fancy words. That poor fella.”

“In point of actual fact, sir, the gent to whom you allude has got the visual acuity of a hawk and the intelligence of Aristotle, qualities so obvious to one and all that only the mentally deficient can fail to perceive them.”

They carried on in this way even as they took up the pushpoles and steered the raft along the center of the current’s easy glide. The trees down here were even taller and more densely leaved than above the falls, their shadows deeper. The light held a green haze. The boom of the falls began to fade as soon as they rounded the first meander, and soon the only sounds besides the twins’ voices were bird cries and the high chatter of monkeys. The riverbanks here were of altered character. No longer blunt and lined with reeds like most of the banks above the falls but low-sloped with narrow beaches.

And roosting all along them, like a littering of dark and rough-barked logs, were crocodiles.

They could derive no explanation for them. Upriver of the rapids, a crocodile was a rarity, though alligators common. But no alligator that had ever been brought back to the compound landing had exceeded thirteen feet, while most of the crocodiles here were longer than that. They saw several that exceeded fifteen feet before Blake said, “Christ amighty, Jeck, lookee there!” He directed his brother’s attention to the bank ahead where lay a monster of no less than seventeen feet. “That’s a goddam dragon!” As the raft went gliding by, some of the crocs slid into the water and vanished but most remained still as stone on the narrow beaches. There were more of them around the next bend. The twins agreed they looked like money just waiting to be skinned off and rolled up.

They then began to notice skeletal fragments of sundry sorts littering the banks. A section of horned cow skull. Segments of ribcages large and small. “That’s how come there’s so many here,” Blake said. “Everything that goes into the river up there ends up down here.”

“That’s right,” James Sebastian said. “Think of all the guts and scraps the slaughterhouse sweeps into the river every damn day. And no telling how many cows and burros and pigs and dogs fall in and get washed down to all these waiting jaws.”

“Falls in or gets thrown in, dead or alive,” Blake said. And pointed at a portion of human cranium on the bank. “Whatever goes in alive is sure as hell dead by the time it gets here, and good thing, too.”

“It’s how come these fellas are so big and fat. They don’t hardly have to work to eat their fill.”

“Hacendados of the river,” Blake said.

For most of the next hour of their slow downriver glide they saw no lack of crocodiles. But as the raft went farther downstream, where less and less of the river carrion carried, their number dwindled until there were no more to see. Then the raft went around yet another bend and they saw bright light ahead, where the trees gave way. And arrived at the cove.

They whooped as they cleared the trees and glided onto the sunlit water. “Ensenada de Isabel! We’re there, brother!” Blake shouted. “You smell it? You smell that sea?”

James said he smelled it and heard it too, just beyond the palms across the way. They spied the house on the low bluff where they knew to look for it, and were surprised to see the dock still standing off its beachfront. Farther down the beach, at the south end of the cove where it had been landed by some great storm and who knew when, the Lizzie lay on its side, its broken mast angled awkwardly but not completely sheared.

As they poled toward the dock, they directed each other’s attention to this or that part of the cove, to the clarity of the water and the green wall of jungle and the mouth of the inlet they were now at an angle to see. They eased up to the end of the dock and made the raft fast to the same posts on which the Lizzie’s snapped mooring lines still hung into the water. They leaped onto the dock and ran to the beach and raced around its south end and past the Lizzie and to the far side of the cove and through the stand of palm trees to the rocky shore and hollered in exultation at their first sight of the Gulf of Mexico.

“Look at it, Jake! Just look at it!” Blake yelled, hair tossing in the wind, arms spread wide as if he would embrace the entire sea. They stood there for a time, beholding the sunbright breadth of gulf, then went back through the trees to have a closer look at the rocky inlet.

They saw it was a tricky passage but told each other they could do it, they who had never yet sailed anything larger than a homemade twelve-foot pram on any water other than the nearly windless Río Perdido. Blake said the thing to do if you sailed up from southward was to go past this point a ways and then turn landward and run up just as close to shore as you could before heeling her over to come at the pass dead on.

“That’s how I see it,” James Sebastian said. “I’ll man the tiller and you work the lines.”

“That’s exactly the opposite of how we’ll do it.”

“That so?”

They grappled and fell in the sand in a grunting tangle, and as usual neither was able to pin the other and they called it a draw. Blake then wondered how fast a fella could swim across the cove to the raft about eighty yards away. James grinned back at him and they threw off their clothes and crouched side by side on the bank and agreed to a count of three. In unison they counted “One”—and dove in. They cut through the water side by side with the smoothness of sharks homing on prey and did not slow down until they reached the raft and it was impossible to say which one’s hand was the first to slap against it, the two slaps sounding like one. They argued in gasps about who had won and tried to dunk each other, then finally pulled themselves up on the planks and flopped onto their backs, chests heaving.

After a while they untied one of the two oilskin knapsacks lashed to the deck and took out a canteen and two of Josefina’s cornhusk-wrapped tamales filled with bits of goat meat and red chile. They sat cross-legged and ate the tamales and passed the canteen between them and studied the house on the bluff. After fourteen years of neglect and the poundings of sun and rain and at least four hurricanes, its only visible damage from where they sat were a few missing shingles and a front shutter hanging askew and patches of peeling paint. Beside the house was a small stable with a collapsed roof.

After they ate they took ropes and machetes and went over to the Lizzie and examined her and found no holes or cracks in the hull. They hacked off the mast at the point where it was broken and dragged it out of the way, then attached one rope to the sloop’s bow and one to the stern and then pulled in tandem, first on one rope and then on the other, now dragging the bow closer to the water and now dragging the stern, and in this bit-by-bit manner they worked the boat into the water. Once the sloop was afloat they climbed up into her and went below and inspected the interior hull and found only two minor leaks. Even as weathered as she was, the boat was free of serious defect other than the broken mast, which would be simple enough to replace. New sails and rigging, new fittings, some sanding, some oakum, a coat of paint, and she’d be ready for the open sea again.

Their confidence in the sloop’s seaworthiness was founded on their study of boating manuals and the experience of having built a boat themselves, a little gaffrigged pram. They named it for Marina, who fashioned its sail from flour sacks. It was a vessel of much mirth to the fishermen in their dugouts not only for its makeshift aspect but because the river breeze was frail at best and often nonexistent. A sailboat, even one this small, was simply out of place on the Río Perdido. Still, on its maiden try, the twins managed to sail it upriver for about a half mile with the weak breeze behind them before they came about and dropped the sail and rode the current back to the landing dock. The short trip took the better part of a day, and as they tied up at the dock they were aware of their father watching them from a high balcony of the house but did not let him know they had seen him. At that distance they could not see his smile nor anyway have known that he was recalling another small sailboat of another time and the young twins who often sailed it from Portsmouth Bay to the Isles of Shoals—and did so once in a squalling heaving sea.

They gained facility at sailing in the river’s weak wind, but they hankered for the open sea they’d not yet laid eyes on and for a larger boat to sail upon it. When they learned of Ensenada de Isabel, their keenest interest wasn’t in the cove itself or in its house but in the sloop their father kept moored at the cove pier. They wondered if the boat was there still, and if it was, if it might be in reparable condition. Very likely it was in ruin or long ago sunk. There was one way to know for sure. They had anyway been wanting to try the rapids everyone spoke of in such ominous voice. And so began to construct a suitable raft.

They were of course thrilled that the sloop was in reparable condition—and now that they’d seen the cove, were no less enthusiastic about the place itself, recognizing its manifold advantages. Its isolation and natural camouflage against detection. Its bounty of natural sustenance. And the house on the little bluff. They hauled the Lizzie out of the water again and up high on the beach, then went to retrieve their clothes and shook the sand from them and put them on. Then went back around the cove and up the bluff to have a closer look at the house.

The pilings looked like they would stand till the end of time. The gallery steps were solid, so too the gallery floor. The front door had swelled from the humidity and they had to shoulder it open. There was a smell of mold and decay and something else, some stink they could not identify, and they opened all the shutters to air the place. Spiderwebs everywhere, but the ceiling showed only a few water stains. An oil lamp lay in shatters on the floor. Some of the wicker furniture was overturned and one of the chairs was in shreds, but most of the furniture and lamps appeared functional. In the kitchen a window was missing its shutter and the floor held the dry mudprints of a young jaguar. In the pantry were a tattered sack of beans and a bag of salt hardened to rock, strings of jerky like sticks of black wood. The stink was coming from behind the bedroom door and when they opened it they startled a colony of roosting bats and they yelled and crouched down with their arms clasped over their heads as the creatures fled the house in a shrilling dark cyclone of beating wings. The reeking layer of guano on the floor made their eyes water.

They found the roof missing only a handful of shingles. The widow’s walk was still securely in place and they marveled at the view from it. They checked the cisterns and saw they would need a thorough cleaning, but the piping system into the house was in good order. A shed behind the house held a variety of tools, most of them coated with rust. “He couldn’t use much of this with just one hand,” Blake said. “Momma had both hands,” said James Sebastian.

They went back around to the front of the house and sat on the verandah steps and stared out at the cove and neither of them said anything for a time. They had reason to believe John Samuel’s only time at the cove had been in his childhood and that their father had not been here since their mother’s death. There was no sign of anyone else having been there in all those years, either, proof of how well the inlet was hidden from gulf view.

At length Blake said, “A fella could live out here real nice.”

“Make himself a little money, too,” James said. “What with all those hides just up the river.”

They were there for three days, exploring the area around the house and clearing out the guano, shoveling several wheelbarrow loads before finishing the job on hands and knees with trowels and buckets, gagging even through the bandanas over their lower faces.

They slept on the verandah. The large hammock on which their parents had passed so many enjoyable nights was still suspended from the rafters, its craftsmanship and treated hemp resistant to the attritions of time and weather, and they took nightly turns sleeping on it and on a smaller hammock they hung beside it. They fed on coconut milk and mangos, on fish they caught on handlines and roasted over open fires, on oysters gathered from the shallows and pried open with their knives and eaten raw or after baking in the fire. And all the while, they talked about the enterprise they thought to operate from this place once they had fixed up the house and boat. They made a list of the materials they would need to make the repairs—the kegs of pitch and oakum and caulking and solvents, the buckets of paint, the shingles, the sails, the fittings, the special tools and so on.

There was of course a problem. One so obvious they had been skirting it and whose only solution was also so obvious that neither of them had to say it. A solution that held no appeal, requiring them as it would to renege on a vow of long standing. On the other hand, they told each other, things changed, and vows sometimes had to change with them. It was a matter of common sense.

“No matter how you cut it, it’s gonna be double humiliating if the answer’s no,” Blake said.

“Yeah,” James said. “I’d rather take an ass whipping. But there’s no other way.”

“Hell with it. He says no, we’ll come anyway.”

“And if some bunch comes after us, we’ll go in the bush. Like to see them find us in there.”

“And we’ll re-mast that boat some kinda way and rig some kinda sail and—”

“—we’ll start taking croc hides and—”

“—load em on the boat and—”

“Damn right.”

They returned to the compound by way of the vestigial wagon track on which no one had passed since their father’s last visit. Where it had not overgrown the track completely, the rampant foliage had narrowed it to an indefinite footpath and they had to hack their way through in some places. The jungle steamed, droned, shrieked as in some primeval madness. They daubed mud on their faces to fend the mosquitoes but the sweat kept washing it off and the bugs fed on them between applications. The brush slashed at their faces. At night they made a pair of small campfires on the trail and hung their hammocks low between them and under a drape of mosquito netting, and at every low growl from the surrounding darkness tightened their grips on their machetes.

They were two full days on that rugged track and arrived at the compound at a late hour of the second night. The guards opened the gates to admit them, and they crossed the plaza and vanished into the shadows and snuck around to the dark alamo grove adjacent to the casa grande’s garden wall. In childhood they had dug various tunnels between the casa grande enclave and the main compound—and even one under the compound wall itself, running from the back of a stable stall out to a growth of brambles. Josefina and Marina had long suspected the existence of the tunnels and were sure that one of them ran under the garden wall, but the inner walls were lined with thorny shrubbery too dense for the women to search closely for the tunnel opening, and no telling where in the outer alamo grove the other end of the tunnel might be. It was a wonder to them the twins could pass through those thorns without a scratch.

They crawled through the tunnel and out into the shrubbery and then lay motionless, listening hard, making sure no one else was in the garden. Then crossed as silent as shadows to the kitchen door.

As soon as they entered the kitchen, where a lantern always burned through the night, Josefina came out of her room, belting her robe, her colorless hair hanging loose and her dark face pinched with sleep. She shook a finger at them and whispered reproofs for their rashness with the rapids. You’re very lucky to be alive, she said. One of them made to hug her but she recoiled with a face of disgust and told them they stank to high heaven and their clothes looked like they were made of dirt. And your faces! You look like you’ve been trying to kiss cats!

“We have, but I’d rather kiss you, you temptress,” James Sebastian said, reaching for her again.

She slapped him away with her skinny hand and said, “Cállate con ese inglés! Ya les dije mil veces!” She had never learned English nor cared to and had long since forbidden them from speaking it in her presence, yet they anyway sometimes did, either to keep her from knowing what they were saying or just to rile her for the fun of it.

Blake Cortéz said it had been easier to kiss the cats than to kiss her. She berated them for their disrespectful tongues and said not even to dream of sitting at her table without at least washing those filthy hands. Then she lit two more lamps and stirred up the oven fire and set about making tortillas and a skillet of eggs scrambled with grated sausage. Marina came from across the hall and made a small sound of dismay at the sight of their ravaged faces. She called them fools and hugged them, one with each arm. Then went upstairs with a lamp to inform their father, as he had instructed her to do if they should show up. He had been notified of their departure, the entire hacienda had known of it—the twins were trying the white water!—and had decided that if they were not back in ten days he would lead a party of men downriver along the old wagon trace to search for their bodies below the rapids.

He woke to Marina’s light taps on the door and knew it was about them and he readied himself for the worst. “Abre,” he said. She opened the door a few inches and he saw part of her face in the light of the lamp. “Dime,” he said. She told him they were back and both of them unharmed. He thanked her and she said “De nada, Don Juan,” and closed the door. He then lay awake for a time, staring out the window at the starry darkness. And thought, They did it, by damn. They did it!

They were eating at the kitchen table when Marina returned. They asked what their father said and she told them he’d said nothing other than thank you but that she could tell by his voice he was glad they were all right. Josefina went into her room and returned with a small jar containing a salve of her own invention and gave it to Marina with instructions to apply the medicine to the cuts on the boys’ faces after they bathed. She touched each twin on the head as if conferring a benediction and then returned to her room and shut the door.

When they finished eating, Marina picked up a lamp and ushered them into the patio and told them to fill the two tubs with well water and strip down and get into them and never mind complaining about the water being too cold. When they were babies she had bathed them in the kitchen, and then in the patio tubs when they were older. They had always liked to play with her breasts through her blouse at bath time and she never made objection. When they began to sprout erections in the tub she smiled at their pride in them, like young explorers who had made a grand discovery. They always giggled through the last stage of every bath when it was time to stand up so she could wash their legs and buttocks and little stiffies. Even after they were old enough to bathe themselves they would often ask her to do their backs, and though she would tease them for helpless children she usually complied. And always, as she attended to their backs, they would squirm around in the tub to face her and she’d return their sly grins and give their cocks a quick gentle squeeze. She was fearful that Josefina would discover them at this naughty play and always kept an eye on the kitchen door. She was startled the first time one of them—they were ten then—ejaculated as she was soaping him. He laughed and she joined in their grins, her hand at her mouth to hide the gaps in her teeth, an action that had become unconscious reflex. He boasted in low voice that they had both done it before with their own hands, and she called them nasty creatures and said they would go blind if they kept at it. In that case, the other one said, she should do for him what she had just done for his brother, not only in fairness but also because she would be helping to save his vision. You think you’re very smart, don’t you? she said, but was again covering her mouth. She glanced toward the kitchen door. Then put her hand to him too.

They were twelve when Josefina said they were too old to still be bathing in the patio and from then on they had to use a bathing room. They would give Marina a look each time they went off for a bath, and sometimes she ignored it and sometimes she would show up in the bathing room shortly afterward on pretext of making sure they had fresh towels and enough hot water. They would entreat her to wash their hair and scrub their backs, saying she could do it so much better than they could, and she would every time feign irritation and say they weren’t children anymore and could bathe themselves quite well. Then position herself between the two tubs and oblige the rascals. While she washed their hair they would play with her breasts as always, and though they were now putting their hands inside her shirt she still did not chide them for it. But when they started trying to explore under her skirt she pushed their hands away and said, No you don’t, little misters. They tried every time and she continued to rebuff them until one day—they were then thirteen—she thought Oh why not? And they touched her in ways that made obvious their familiarity with female anatomy—a familiarity they could have learned only by experience—and her own pleasure in the bathing games acquired new dimension.

One day as they were at this fondling game in the bathing room, a twin leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth and she flinched away in shock. She’d had willing sex with several men since the childhood rape that ruined her face but she had never had to question why none of them ever kissed her. The maiming had robbed her of all beauty above the neck except her hair, which at the time hung to the small of her back in a lustrous black spill, but she had refused to keep even that sole reminder of her former comeliness and cut it to a ragged crop barely covering her ears and kept it that way. When she recoiled from the kiss, the twins saw the stark self-revulsion in her eyes. They drew her to them and she made a small whimper as one of them kissed one side of her face while his brother kissed the other. Then they took turns placing soft kisses on her scarred lips. She broke into in tears and clutched to them with an arm around each. One of them said they must be very bad kissers to make her cry and she laughed with them even as she wept. Then was kissing them and kissing them. And that day decided to let her hair grow long again.

On their fourteenth birthday, less than two months before they rode the rapids, she gave them the present of herself. Despite her brutal introduction to sex, she had learned to enjoy it in the years afterward but she had never imagined how fine it could be when appended to love. She had since made love with the twins many times, one snugged to either side of her in the sturdy little bed and caressing her as she alternated her attentions between them before coupling with one and then the other. Whenever they spent the night with her they always woke before dawn—Josefina the only one already risen at that hour and busy with the breakfast fires—and slipped up to their own room before the rest of the house came astir.

They finished filling the patio tubs and then stripped and eased into the water, protesting the chill of it, and she sneered and called them sissies. They sped through the washing and got out of the tubs and dried themselves and she made them wrap towels around their waists before going back into the kitchen to sit in the brighter light. She was tender in daubing Josefina’s salve to their facial cuts, stopping at times to bat their hands away from her breasts and bottom, cutting looks toward Josefina’s door and hissing at the twins to behave or she would give them even more bruises.

The salve was dark yellow and the twins made faces at the reek of it. “I bet she makes it from old dead dogs,” one said and they both laughed. Marina asked what was so funny and one said, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

She said they had been told a thousand times it was impolite to speak English in front of her or Josefina and demanded to know what they had just said. The brothers grinned and one said in Spanish, We said wouldn’t you like to know? They laughed as she swatted at them in feigned affront at the joke they were having on her and told them to hush before they woke the house.

She finished with the salve and they went across the little hall to her room and snuggled into her bed. But when they began to caress her she shrank from their touch. No, she said, not tonight.

Why not? one asked. What’s wrong?

Affecting pique, she said, Wouldn’t you like to know?

Then laughed at their expression and drew them to her.

John Roger was working at the big desk in his office the next morning when they appeared at the open door and asked if they could have a word with him. It was an effort to mask his surprise. They had never come to him unsummoned. He said to come in and pull a pair of chairs up to his desk. He took off his spectacles—he had needed them for reading these past two years and had long since become adept at opening them one-handed. He studied the twins’ swollen and yellow-dappled faces. The only other time they had not looked identical was when their faces had been bruised in a fight defending some smaller boys against bullies. But, as then, the temporary difference in their facial markings in no wise let him know who was James and who Blake, and he felt his familiar guilt for not knowing.

“Guess you heard we rode the rapids,” one said.

“I did,” he said. “And yet here you are, still among the quick. No small feat.”

“Yessir,” the other said.

“Don’t mistake my wonderment for admiration, and certainly not for approval.”

“No sir,” the same one said.

Such ready agreement was another surprise. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t ironical.

He gestured at their faces. “Vestiges of the saga, no doubt.” He sniffed the air with a frown. “I take it that stuff is of the crone’s making?”

“Yessir,” one said.

“We just thought you ought to hear it from us, sir,” the other said. “That we went on the rapids, I mean.”

“I see. Am I to assume, then, you’re here to receive your due punishment for disobedience?”

“Well, if you want to punish us, sir, you can,” one said.

“I’m grateful for your consent.”

“I didn’t mean it like that, sir. Sorry.”

And now apology! A dies mirabilis if ever there were one.

“So that’s not why you’re here.”

“No sir,” said the other. “Not actually.”

The pendulum on the mantle clock sounded the passing seconds. “Are we waiting to see if I can guess?”

“Well sir,” said one, “it’s about that house on the beach.”

“We went all the way down there, you see,” said the other. “To that little, ah, bay, or cove I guess you’d call it.”

There were footfalls in the hallway and they stopped at the office door. John Roger looked past the twins and raised his brow in question. The twins turned to see John Samuel gaping at them in manifest amazement. “I beg your pardon, Father,” he said, “I didn’t . . . I. . . .”

“Are those the shipment figures?”

John Samuel looked down at the papers in his hand. “Yes. Yes, they are.”

“We’ll review them in your office as soon I’m finished here.”

John Samuel seemed unsure what to do. The twins turned back to their father.

“I’ll be there presently,” John Roger said.

“Yes sir, very well,” John Samuel said. His footsteps receded down the hall.

“How did you know about the house?” John Roger asked.

They were ready for that question. “You mean before we saw it?” one said. “We didn’t know about it before we saw it.”

“We didn’t even know about that little harbor,” the other said. “We thought the river would take us straight into the gulf.

“When we got to the cove and saw the house, well, we figured you’d built it.”

A quarter of a century ago, John Roger thought. Or near to it. A decade before they were born. The jungle at its back, the sea in its face. He had not been to the cove since Elizabeth Anne’s death. The idea of being there without her was as lonely as a grave. “So it’s still standing then?”

“Oh, yes sir, it sure is,” one said. “You can tell nobody’s been there in a long while, but it’s in pretty good shape, all things considered.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” John Roger said. “It was built by the best crew on the coast. You couldn’t bring it down but with dynamite. You had to hike back, of course. I’ll wager there’s not much left of the wagon track.”

“No sir, not more than a snake road,” one said. “It’s how come our faces took such a beating.”

John Roger took a cigar from the humidor on the desk and cleanly bit off the smaller end and spat it into the cuspidor beside the desk and put the cigar in his mouth and patted his coat and then his vest in search of a match. One of the twins took a match from his shirt pocket and struck it on the rasp set into the lid of the cigar case and held the flame to his father’s cigar and John Roger fired it to his satisfaction and nodded his thanks. He asked to hear more about the place, what it looked like now.

They told him in detail, and when they got to the part about the bats’ panicked exodus from the bedroom—hunkering in their chairs with their arms covering their heads as they told it—his grin had a greater gusto than they had ever seen.

He was grinning as much at their theatrics and their capacity to laugh at themselves as at the tale itself. Grinning most of all in pleasure at the present moment, a moment he had thought past all possibility—his twin sons telling him things of their own volition, entertaining him. Their eyes showing the same light he’d seen in Elizabeth Anne’s eyes when she first looked on the place and every time she spoke of the cove in the days thereafter. The too brief, too swift days thereafter.

They told him of the dock that still stood solid and of the sloop whose only major impairment was a sheared mast. Ah yes, he thought, the Lizzie. He could imagine their excitement at the discovery of it. They no doubt understood it was named for their mother, but they had never mentioned her in his presence and so it was unlikely they would allude to her even indirectly by saying the name of the boat. Their refusal to ask him about her, about himself, about anything, was as baffling to him as ever, but whatever their reason, he had to admire their tenacity in holding to it. Margarita had been right those years ago when she said he respected their will more than he knew.

He wasn’t unaware of the sentimentality he was indulging, nor of his old guilt about them. Still, the moment they’d appeared at his door he’d known it was for no reason except they wanted something they could not have except through him. Wanted it dearly. And he now knew it was the cove. The cove with its sturdy house. And of course the boat—the boat for damned sure and maybe even more than the house. They would want to live there, naturally. In that wild isolation between the jungle and the sea. They had come to him in hope that he would grant their wish, even though they had little cause to believe he would. In addition to the gall they surely had to swallow to come to him, they were risking the ignominy of being refused. Such risk called for a different kind of courage from the physical sort they possessed without limit. He was impressed.

But he also knew they were not being fully forthright. As always with them, there were things they were not telling. Certain facts withheld. Secrets at work. He could sense it. He thought it likely they already had some use in mind for the place but he doubted they would tell him what it was. Then told himself, So what? He had come to fear that some day they would disappear into the jungle never to return and he would not know whether they had been killed or had kept on going to somewhere other without even a fare-thee-well. If he should give them what they wanted he would at least know where they were. Some of the time, anyway. Because once they repaired that boat their whereabouts would never be more specific than out on the gulf or someplace on its sizable coast, perhaps nearby, perhaps not. He knew that too.

They had been watching his eyes and had seen that they were going to get what they’d come for, and they restrained the urge to grin at each other.

He spared them even the need to ask. “Listen. That old house is just collecting mold. I don’t know if you’re interested, but if you want to fix it up so it’s habitable, that’s fine by me. If you’re willing to do the labor, I’ll underwrite the project.”

The twins swapped a glance that to him seemed expressionless.

“Fix it up?” one said. “Well now, there’s a thought.”

“Yeah, it is,” the other said. “Might be fun.”

Their dissimulation struck him as more daring than artful, but he appreciated their quickness to employ it, given the opportunity. “It’s a fine place for fishing,” he said, “as I recall.”

“Say now, we could maybe put a new mast on that little boat,” one said to the other. “Do some fishing out on the gulf, sail around a little. I’m game. You?”

“Why not?” the other said. Then said to their father, “We’ll be needing a bunch of materials, though. Supplies. Tools. There’s tools there, but mostly in bad shape, as you can imagine.”

“Get what you need from the compound store. Anything it doesn’t have, tell Reynaldo and he’ll order it from Veracruz.”

“Firearms,” one said.

John Roger stared at him.

“For meat.”

“And protection,” the other said. “As you know, sir, there’s poisonous snakes and some awful big cats around there, to judge from some of the yowlings we heard.”

“Yes there are,” John Roger said. “Get what you need from the armory.”

“Yessir, except, well, there’s only those old muzzleloaders and caplock pistols. If we were in a tight and had to quick shoot at something more than once, well…”

“You want repeaters.”

“Winchester’s said to be dependable.”

“Winchester,” John Roger echoed.

“We understand they’re hard to come by in Mexico, but we saw in a magazine that there’s a place in New Orleans that—”

“I know a closer source,” John Roger said. “I’ll send word this afternoon and they’ll be here in a few days. I assume .44-40s would meet with your satisfaction.”

“Yessir,” one said. “Forty-four forties be just fine.” He rubbed at the edge of his eye as if to remove a speck as the other coughed lightly into his fist. John Roger almost smiled at their clumsy efforts to mask their pleasure. Whatever they had expected of this meeting it certainly wasn’t that it would go in their favor—and for damn sure not as far as Winchesters.

“Reynaldo will get you the burros you need. And if you should ever improve that trail enough, you can have a wagon. Naturally, you’d need a labor gang to cut a proper wagon road, and that can be arranged.”

“Well, sir,” one said, “we’ll probably hold off on that for a while, at least till we’ve taken care of everything else all good and proper.”

John Roger understood him to mean they would never widen the trail. He should have known that. Why would they want to make it easier for others to get down there? They wanted to be hard to reach.

“Well, it’s up to you. You’re the ones who’ll be using it. Anything else you want to ask for?”

They dropped their smiles. “We weren’t asking, sir,” one said. “Just stating the necessities.”

“I see,” he said. And thought, I’ll be damned. They come hat in hand and I give them what they want without their having to ask and then they get proud about not asking. “There’s one condition,” he said. Until that moment he had not thought to impose a condition, but they were not, by damn, going to have it all their own way.

“Condition, sir?”

“You come home every, ah, two weeks, let us say. And you stay three days.”

“But sir,” one said, “why would . . .?”

“If you want to make sure we’re getting our proper nourishment,” the other one said with a crooked smile, “well sir, we can feed ourselves.”

He looked from one to the other. “That’s the bargain, gentlemen. Feel free to turn it down.”

“No sir, no, we’re not turning it down,” one said. “It’s just that there’s a lot of work to do and if we have to leave off from it for three days every couple of weeks, well, it’ll take a whole lot longer to ever get done than if we can apply ourselves to it more, ah, consistently.”

“Why don’t we say . . . every three months?” the other said.

“Let’s say at the end of every month,” John Roger said, “and you stay two nights.”

“Suppose we say—”

“Suppose we say it’s settled.”

They read his eyes. “Yessir.”

He swept a pointing finger from one to the other. “Break the bargain and I’ll send a crew down there with dynamite to blast that house to splinters and sink that boat a mile offshore. I hope you gents believe me.”

“Yessir,” one said. The other nodded.

He consulted the calendar on the wall. “We’re already near the end of this month and you won’t be ready to set off for a week or two. No sense in making you come right back at the end of June. You don’t have to make the first visit till the end of July.”

“All right, sir,” one said.

“Well then,” he said, “you had best get to it.”

They were at the door when they turned to look at him, who was at the moment bent over a bottom drawer in search of a match to refire his cigar.

“Thank you, Father.”

He was arrested. They had never thanked him, never called him anything other than “sir.”

But when he sat up to look, they were gone.

As they went out the casa grande’s front doors, Blake said, “Any sonofabitches ever go down there and try to blow up that house—”

“Or sink that boat.”

“Be the last damn thing they ever try.”

“That’s it.”

They grinned at each other. Winchesters, by Jesus!

The first thing John Samuel wanted to know when his father arrived at his office was what “they” had wanted.

John Roger told him of their intention to fix up the cove house and the Lizzie.

“I’m glad of it, frankly,” John Roger said. “It’ll give them something constructive to do.”

“Will they be living out there from now on?”

John Roger sighed. “Most of the time, yes.”

John Samuel looked out the window and smiled.

That they had known about the cove and its house and boat before they ever went there was a truth they could not have admitted to their father without confessing to an act worse than their lie. A few months earlier, having just read about the newest models of Colt revolvers, they recalled Josefina’s description of the gun their mother had used to shoot the younger Montenegro. Josefina said it was the largest pistol she had ever seen. Shaped like a pig’s hind leg, she said, and almost that big, and their mother had held it with both hands to shoot. James Sebastian was sure it was an old Walker, and Blake Cortéz said maybe, or a later Dragoon. They wondered if the gun might still be around.

The next time their father rode off to one of his all-day surveys of the coffee farm, they slipped into his bedroom and made a thorough search of it but did not find the pistol. They then went downstairs and sneaked into his office and Blake rummaged a wall cabinet while James Sebastian searched the desk.

“Not here,” Blake said.

“Hey Black, look at this,” James said. He was perusing a set of photographs he had found in the desk’s middle drawer. They were old studio pictures, most of them of their mother, some of their mother and father together, a few of which included John Samuel, who was an infant in some of them.

“How young Father was,” Blake said. “And Momma. She looks like a girl.”

“This musta been made about the same time as the one Josefina’s got.”

They were tempted to take one of the pictures of their mother but thought their father might notice it was missing when he next looked through them, and they left the pictures as they found them. The Dragoon was in the top right drawer. James Sebastian took it out and saw that it was fully charged. He held it this way and that, aimed it at the map of Mexico affixed to the opposite wall, sighting on the heart of the country, on the Yucatán, at the rooster foot that was the Baja California territory. Then passed it to his brother, saying, “Feel the heft.”

“Now this here’s a damn gun,” Blake said. He set it on half cock and with his other hand rotated the cylinder with a soft ticking. They had read much about the early Colts and if they had been obliged to load this weapon they had never set hand to before now they could have done so. Could have charged each chamber of the cylinder and seated a ball in it by means of the lever under the barrel and capped the nipple over each chamber for firing. “They say you can hammer ten-penny nails with this thing all day long and it’ll still shoot straight as a sunray.”

“Imagine what a .44 ball did to that boy’s head Momma shot,” James said. “About like a mallet would do a watermelon.”

“ Momma sure musta been something! Just imagine her shooting this thing.”

“And good as she did.”

“Like to shoot it myself, but we can’t even ask Reynaldo to ask him. They’d want to know how we know about it.”

They admired the Colt a while longer and then put it back in its drawer. Then thought to look in the others to see if they held anything of interest. The bottom right drawer and the top left one contained only business records. Then James Sebastian tried the bottom left drawer and said, “Say now.” It was locked.

They examined the keyhole and recognized the kind of lock it contained and smiled at its simplicity. They had crafted skeleton keys that could open any sort of lock to be found in the casa grande, locks to doors and desks and trunks and such, but they liked to keep in practice with simpler implements. James opened his pocketknife and inserted the blade tip into the keyhole and made a careful probe and angled the blade just so and gave it a gentle turn and the lock disengaged.

The drawer held a leather-bound ledger and a document case. They took out the case and opened it and the first thing that came to hand was the framed daguerreotype of John Roger and Samuel Thomas on the day of their high school graduation. They stared at it for a time before James Sebastian said, “Do you believe this?”

“Cuates! Just like us.”

“Not quite like us. One on the left’s a little bigger in the shoulders, you can tell.”

“Yeah. Doesn’t tell us which one’s Father though.”

“Don’t look to be much older than we are. And I thought he looked young in the ones with Momma.”

“So that’s Samuel, eh? Whichever one.”

They had once asked Josefina if their father had any brothers or sisters and she had told them what their mother had told her, that John Roger had been orphaned with no sisters and only one brother, Samuel Thomas, an apprentice officer on a merchant vessel who was eighteen years old when his ship went down. Older or younger brother, they asked, and she said she didn’t know.

“Why didn’t she say they were twins, I wonder?”

“I expect she doesn’t know or she would’ve.”

“If Josefina doesn’t know it’s because Momma didn’t know, either, and why wouldn’t he have told her?”

James shrugged. “If Momma didn’t know, she for sure never saw this picture. Bedamn if Father aint starting to seem like a secret-keeping man.”

They laughed low. And now took from the case a rolled paper and unfurled it and saw that it was two papers—a letter with a bureaucratic heading, and rolled inside of it, an ink portrait.

“Looks like Father,” Blake said of the sketch. “Except Father’s name’s not Roger Blake Wolfe and he aint dead yet, much less since 1829.”

“Grandpap’s my guess.”

“Me too. Damn sure looks like Father, don’t he?”

“It’s how you’ll look at his age.”

“You too.”

The letter was the one from the British Embassy to Mary Parham Wolfe. “Father’s mam, must be,” James said. They read it.

“Man was a goddam pirate.”

“Begging your pardon, mister, he was a goddam captain of pirates. Says so right here, see? Captain.”

“You suppose Momma knew this?”

“I’d wager she didn’t.”

They studied the letter again. “Says executed but not how,” Blake said. “Hung for certain. It’s what they did with pirates. And left them to rot on the rope. Our own granddaddy. Man, aint life just fulla surprise?”

“With a daddy like that, hardly a wonder Father’s killed two fellas.” James Sebastian said. Then grinned. “Two we know of, anyway.”

“A grandpappy like that says something about a coupla other fellas I could name.”

“We couldn’t help it, Judge. It’s in our blood.”

They started to laugh and hushed each other lest they be heard by some passing maid. They extracted two packets of letters. Most of them were to their father from Richard Davison and to their mother from her mother, neither set of much interest to the twins except for the fact of their mother’s maiden name—which they had thought was Barlet because of Josefina’s pronunciation. Davison’s letters were chockablock with details pertaining to the Trade Wind Company. Their Grandmother Bartlett’s abounded with trivia about her family life. The brothers skimmed through them and arrived at the letters to their father from Sebastian Bartlett and James Bartlett, and after skimming these, they read them again.

“Who’s he think he is, blaming Father for what happened to Momma?” Blake Cortéz said of Sebastian Bartlett’s letter.

“A son of a bitch is who he is, grandpap or no. That goes for this James galoot too.”

“Uncle James to you.”

“I aint calling anybody uncle writes a letter like this to Father.”

“Reckon he ever did come for Momma’s bones?”

“Hell no. I think he was just blowing hard.”

“Me too. If he’d come here to dig her up, Father would’ve stopped him cold.”

“Hell yes, he would’ve. Would’ve done him like he did that soldier.”

“Or like he did what’s-his-name, the one Josefina said—”

“Montenegro.”

“Yeah, that son of a bitch.”

They opened the leatherbound book and saw what it was and Blake pulled up a chair so he could read along with James Sebastian. Its earliest parts had been inscribed at Dartmouth College and dealt mostly with fellow students and various academic notions. These entries meant little to them and they turned the pages swiftly, slowing only at their father’s intermittent mentions of his mother and her father, Thomas Parham. They were interested most of all in his references to his brother, whose name they learned was Sammy and whom their father wished himself more like. “Our Physiognomies the same but Sammy’s Spirit so much the more daring,” their father wrote. They read of his desire to become a gentleman and of his fear that his classmates might learn the truth of his father’s brigandage and about his brother’s mysterious disappearance from Portsmouth.

“So he doesn’t know what became of old Sammy,” Blake said. “Or didn’t when he wrote this, anyhow.”

“Told Momma he was lost at sea.”

“Maybe that’s what he found out later, after he wrote this.”

“Or maybe it was just another lie.”

“Why lie about his brother? Think maybe he was a murderer too?”

“Who knows? But seeing how scared he was of his school chums finding out about his pa the pirate, I’ll wager he never told Momma about Sammy either.”

“That counts as a lie too. Lie of omission.”

“Wooo, you’re a hard judge, mister,” James said.

“Hey, son, the law’s the law, I always say. Law of the books, law of the truth.”

There was an entry about his upcoming graduation and his disappointment at failing to qualify for valedictorian, and then the journal jumped forward by several months to a nearly illegible passage about his marriage engagement to “Lizzie”—his erratic penmanship occasioned perhaps by euphoria. Then a still greater leap in time to his first notation in Mexico, conveying his happiness over Lizzie’s miraculous pregnancy. The next segment was five pages long and absorbed them above all others, detailing as it did what their father had learned about Roger Blake Wolfe from the Veracruz archives and the London genealogist.

“Well now,” Blake said, “how about this?”

“Now we know. Firing squad.”

“Girls fighting over him even when he’s about to get shot.”

“Buying drinks for his pals. Puffing a cigar. The man had aplomb, no question about it.”

“Aplomb aplenty. How come shot, though? They always hanged pirates.”

“Most likely offered the judge a little something to make it the muskets.”

“You reckon? Hell of a note, having to pay to be shot.”

“Beats hanging even for free.”

“That’s a point. They sure must’ve had it in for him to cut off his head after and stick it on a goddamn pike. Made his daddy and momma mighty mad about something too, to disown him like they did.”

“Well, seeing as Grandpappy Roger was a pirate and his daddy was a navy man, I’d say they probably had different ways of looking at things.”

“Roger’s sure a right name for him, aint it? Man was a Jolly Roger in every way.”

James Sebastian grinned. “A Jolly Roger and a Big Bad Wolfe.”

“For damn sure! The Big Bad Wolfe of the family.”

“The first one of it, anyhow.” They muffled their laughter with their hands.

There was an entry about his great happiness over the birth of John Samuel, but the entries of the next five years consumed less than two pages, so terse and widely spaced in time were they. There were various mentions of Charley Patterson, whose mode of speech they liked so much, and references to “the company,” and to people the twins had never heard of. Then came a lengthy segment about the house their father was building on the beach, and they learned of the cove he named Ensenada de Isabel and of their parents’ great love of the place. There were a few pages of technical details pertaining to the construction of the house, then a passage about the fishing sloop he’d bought and named Lizzie and sailed from Veracruz to the cove with the skilled crewing of their mother. Interspersed through this section were brief references to John Samuel, including one about the only time he had been to the cove, when he was still a small boy, and his propensity to seasickness that had disappointed their father. The twins were tickled to learn their parents were such expert hands with a sailboat—and not in the least surprised their brother was no sailor at all.

The final inscription was dated a few days before their birth. It registered John Roger’s great relief in Lizzie’s easy term and their eager anticipation of another child.

The rest of the journal was blank.

“Not a word about Momma dying,” Blake said. “Or about us. Or the other two.”

“Well, he sure as hell wasn’t gonna write down anything about them.”

“I can understand that. But why not us?”

“Maybe we’re . . . what’s that word for something that’s real hard to . . . ineffable.”

Blake Cortéz grinned. “Yeah, I bet that’s exactly why.”