Country of the Bad Wolfes

TALES FROM THE COVE

When they made the first of their promised visits, after six long weeks at the cove, they were brown as Indians and it seemed to John Roger they had grown noticeably taller. God, were they growing! They were stronger too. He saw it in the sinews of their hands, in the new tightness of their coats across their shoulders when they dressed for dinner. He had thought much about them during their absence. About how near they were to full manhood and the ways in which they were already more capable than most men of his acquaintance. Their “Thank you, Father” had come to mind many times since. He regretted his mistakes with them. Regretted having kept himself a stranger to them for so long, no matter they had as much kept themselves strangers to him. As the father, he had the greater obligation to wisdom and fairness, and it was neither wise nor fair—quite the contrary—to defend one’s conduct toward one’s children on the basis of tit for tat. He could not recall ever having addressed them as “sons.”

That they had honored their agreement to make the visit was far less surprising to him than the size of his gladness to see them. Victoria Clara, too, was happy to have them home. In her six years at Buenaventura she had watched them grow from precocious and cocky identical children to handsome and cocky identical young men and had become very fond of them. She had lost her mother to a disease of the throat four years before, and a year later her father to a pulmonary infection. Her two brothers, who had inherited everything, were both much older than she and had always been strangers to her. She’d had no true sense of sisterhood until she came to know the twins, and it didn’t bother her at all that she couldn’t differentiate between them. John Roger never saw her so animated as at dinnertimes in their company. Neither, to his unspoken chagrin, did John Samuel.

The greatest surprise of that first visit was their unprecedented loquacity at the dinner table, the conversation shifting at whim between English and Spanish. John Roger grinned and Vicki Clara laughed at their amusing account of journeying to the cove with the six burros that on hearing a jaguar growl in the bush went so crazy with fright and thrashed so wildly it took the twins two hours to calm them and repack the scattered pack goods. And because the stable at the cove was too small for six burros and anyway too dilapidated to afford protection, the twins had tethered the animals on the verandah every evening.

On the verandah! Vicki Clara said. Like a little hotel for donkeys!

You including a couple who walk on their hind legs? a twin said with a wry grin, and Vicki laughed with them even as she protested that she did not mean any such thing.

They told about the work they had done on the house and on the sloop, and confessed that they had devoted themselves to the full repair of the boat before they even began to work on the house. “We just couldn’t wait to start sailing her,” one said. It did not escape John Roger’s notice that they still did not refer to the Lizzie by name.

Once the sloop was seaworthy they had spent the mornings working on the house and the afternoons teaching themselves to handle the boat out on the gulf—which dazzled them with its vastness. It gave them a strange feeling of being awful small and awful free at the same time.

John Roger said he knew what they meant. “I always had that same feeling out there.” Their zest for the open sea had made him recall his own youthful passion for sailing. But it shocked him to realize he had spoken in the past tense. That he had not been aboard a boat since before they were born. He had a moment’s banal curiosity about where the years had gone.

He mentioned the inlet’s tricky passage, and they said it was tricky, all right, but that was what made it so much fun, and they had gotten pretty good at zipping through it, if they did say so themselves. Because they did not want to seem braggarts, they did not tell him they had already become expert at navigating by the stars. Or that they were keeping track of the lunar cycle so they could at any time of day or night predict the turns of the tide within a quarter hour’s accuracy. It was their objective—and they would achieve it—to be able to negotiate the inlet even on a moonless night.

Vicki Clara asked what they planned on doing out there once they finished repairing the house, and they said there would never be a problem keeping busy, as the house and boat would always be in need of some kind of upkeep. When they weren’t busy working they’d go fishing or hunting, or catch up on their reading.

John Roger admired the shrewdness of their answer. It was the truth as far as it went but it was hardly the whole truth. They had some plan in mind, some enterprise. He had sensed it when they came to him those weeks ago and he was even more certain of it now. But whatever they intended to do—were perhaps already doing—it would remain their secret until they chose to reveal it, if ever.

Vicki said it sounded like a very simple life. But I think there is one problem with it, she said.

The twins smiled, knowing some tease was coming. And what is that? one said.

I do not believe you will meet very many girls out there.

The twins laughed with her. “Dang it!” one said. “I knew there was something we forgot to account for.” And the other said all they could do was hope to get lucky and meet a few mermaids.

John Roger smiled at the laughter of his daughter-in-law and twin sons. He could not remember the last loud mirth at the table. Not since Lizzie was there. He wanted to contribute to it, to add to the banter by saying . . . what? . . . that the trouble with mermaids was that they were such terrible dancers? But he feared his joke would seem a lame effort and any smiles they might show would be mere politeness. He recognized the silliness of this qualm, but now the moment for the quip had passed, and he refrained from making it for fear of seeming slow witted. Good Lord, he thought, I’m thinking like an old man. Then had the melancholy apprehension that a man of fifty-six was old.

John Samuel did not join in the table conversation nor show the least interest in anything the twins had to say. He had avoided them since their arrival from the cove. They did not see each other until dinnertime, when they were all in the dining room and John Roger said to his eldest son, “Look who’s here.” John Samuel stared at them without word. The twins smiled at him, then looked at each other and made puckered faces of sourness and laughed and took their places at the table. They and John Samuel then ignored each other for the rest of the evening, as they would on all of the twins’ subsequent visits.

The disregard between his older and younger sons had become so familiar to John Roger, and to Vicki Clara too, that it hardly bore the notice of either of them anymore. Still, John Roger had hoped that when the twins grew to adolescence and the difference in age between them and John Samuel mattered less, they might all begin to appreciate the fact of their brotherhood and accord each other some degree of respect. But it hadn’t turned out that way, and it saddened him that their mutual dislike was more pointed than ever. He had several times in recent years thought to ask John Samuel directly why he and the twins could not get along. But he had each time held back, telling himself it was not the right moment to bring up the subject. And then one day he knew it was too late to discuss it at all. Knew that whatever the reason for the rancor between his sons it was past all possibility of being reconciled or even rationally explained.

John Samuel finished eating before everyone else and forwent dessert and coffee, excusing himself to his wife and father, saying he had work to do. After he’d gone, Vicki Clara asked the twins if they would like to go upstairs with her after dinner and see the boys, who as always had taken supper with the maids. You won’t believe how much they’ve grown since you saw them last, she said.

The twins had never indicated more than passing interest in their young nephews, and John Roger assumed they were only being polite to Vicki when they followed her upstairs. But later that evening, when she joined John Roger in the library, Vicki reported that the twins had greeted their nephews, five-year-old Juanito Sotero and soon-to-be-four Roger Samuel, with man-to-man handshakes, and not two minutes later were on all fours and letting the boys ride them like rodeo broncos, neighing and snorting and tossing their heads while the boys clutched tight to their uncles’ shirt collars with one hand and used their free arm to keep their balance, waving it about and as they had seen the bronc-breakers at the horse ranch do, whooping like them. When Roger Samuel lost his grip and tumbled off his uncle and knocked his head hard on the floor, Vicki jumped up from her chair in alarm but Rogerito quickly got up, laughing and rubbing his head, and said, “Don’t come in the corral, Mother, you might get kicked by that mean mustang.” He remounted his uncle’s back and got a firm grip on his collar and dug his heels into his ribs and ya-hooed as the uncle resumed bucking.

John Roger said it was hard for him to imagine the twins playing with children. Vicki laughed and said, I know, Papá Juan, but I saw it with my own eyes.

They would never lack for dinnertable tales about the cove. They would tell of storms that rose out of the sea faster and blacker and with stronger rain than any they had ever known at the compound. Rain that struck the house like stones and sometimes left the beach and even the verandah littered with fish. Would tell of a black jaguar that every day for more than a week had shown up at the edge of the jungle and there sat and studied the house for a time before baring its fangs in a gigantic pink yawn—it did that every time—and then padding back into the bush in no hurry at all. Then one day it did not show up and they had not seen it again, which of course did not mean that it had not seen them many times since. They would tell of a gargantuan sawfish that found its way into the cove and spent an entire day and night circling within it. It was near to seventeen feet long and terrified the other fish, which again and again broke from the water in fleeing silvery schools by day and fiery ones by night until the monster finally swam back out to the open sea.

And always, in a custom established on their first visit, they would bid their father goodnight after dinner and accompany Vicki upstairs to their nephews’ room for a quick session of the bucking-horse game. And after saying goodnight to them and Vicki too, they would go down to the kitchen, where Josefina and Marina would be awaiting them with fresh coffee and pastries in case they weren’t full from dinner. They would all four sit at the table and the women would regale them with the latest hacienda gossip and the twins would in turn tell them mostly the same things they had related at the dinner table.

Then came a visit when they confided their business enterprises to Josefina and Marina and told of their monthly trips to Veracruz. Josefina said she had known they had to be doing something besides lazing on the beach. She loved hearing about Veracruz, where she had lived for so many years, and Marina, who had spent her whole life on Buenaventura, could not imagine some of the city sights the twins described.

But they would not tell their father about their business. They thought it better to keep him uninformed than to risk some objection from him that might jeopardize their residency at the cove. Nor would they tell him of having renamed the sloop, not wanting him to misconstrue the change as disrespectful to their mother. But the Lizzie had been his boat and they felt that it could not truly be theirs unless it had a name bestowed by them. The little sailboat they had plied on the river when they were twelve had been the Marina, and so the sloop became the Marina Dos.

Finally, at the end of every evening of the twins’ every visit, after Josefina said goodnight and retired to her room, the twins would go with Marina to hers, and just as soon as they closed the door they would all three race each other in getting out of their clothes.

When they arrived for their visit at the end of November and learned they had a cousin from Mexico City now living at the hacienda, Bruno Tomás had already been there two weeks. He looked to them about the same age as John Samuel, but unlike their older brother he bore resemblance to their father and hence to themselves. John Samuel wasn’t present. He had already made Bruno’s acquaintance and heard John Roger’s account of the fortuitous discovery of his brother’s family in Mexico City. Elizabeth Anne had told John Samuel in boyhood about his Uncle Sammy who’d been lost at sea and in whose honor he was middle-named, but he had not since given his uncle a thought. He listened to his father’s tale with a polite avidity but was not really interested in a man he’d never met and who’d been dead ten years.

In conversing with Bruno, however, John Samuel was impressed with his cousin’s knowledge of horses. And just as John Roger had predicted, when Bruno said he’d like to work at the horse ranch, John Samuel said it so happened the ranch was in need of a foreman and gave him the job.

In introducing Bruno to the twins, John Roger presented him first, then said, “And these two are Blake and James,” gesturing at them without indicating which was which. Bruno had been gawking at them from the moment they’d arrived at John Roger’s office. Christ, he said, how does anybody tell you guys apart? He turned to John Roger. “How do you do it?”

“It’s not easy,” John Roger said. “Sometimes I have a hard time.” He smiled but the twins saw the embarrassment rising in his eyes. They had always known he didn’t know one of them from the other but this was the nearest he had ever come to being forced to admit it—in their presence, anyhow.

“Sometimes you can’t tell them apart?” Bruno said. “I don’t believe you, tío. Come on, tell me how you do it.”

“Don’t tell him, Father,” James Sebastian said. He smiled and put his hand out to Bruno and said, “Yo soy Blake. Mucho gusto, primo. But listen, if you want to know how to tell us apart you have to figure it out for yourself. That’s a rule of the house. Father’s not allowed to help you.”

Bruno laughed. Oh, that’s a rule, is it?

“That’s it,” Blake Cortéz said, offering his hand. “I’m James.”

John Roger suspected they were probably lying about who was who, as they liked to do for fun. But they had deliberately extricated him from an awkward moment—and done so in a way to prevent its recurrence—and he smiled his gratitude at them. Then told them of his brother whom he’d thought dead at seventeen, and yet again related his account of chancing on Sammy’s family by means of a hornpipe tune he and his brother had composed as boys. Told them of their Aunt María and cousin Sófi who lived in Mexico City and their cousin Gloria, who lived near San Luis Potosí.

The twins said it was some story, all right, and that they looked forward to meeting their Mexico City kin some day. They said all the things they intuited they were expected to say and again welcomed Bruno to Buenaventura, then excused themselves to go clean up before dinner.

On the way downstairs they agreed in low voices that the addition of Cousin Bruno to the family could in no way affect their life at the cove and hence he was no cause for concern. Then they were in the kitchen and the embraces of Josefina and Marina.

As for Bruno Tomás, he was determined to fit in at Buenaventura, to accept its ways without qualm or question. When John Roger told him on the train trip from the capital that the twins lived by themselves at the hacienda’s seaside and made a two-day visit to the casa grande every month, Bruno had thought it odd but could not think of even how to ask why that was so. But from the first few minutes of his first dinner with the twins he was quite aware of the mutual snubbing between them and John Samuel. He had hoped John Samuel might sometime volunteer to clarify the situation for him but he did not, and Bruno had a feeling it would be best not to broach the subject with him. Nor with the twins, whom he would see but infrequently and who, he’d known from the moment he met them, were not ones to explain themselves. And because Uncle John and Victoria Clara seemed oblivious to the way his sons ignored each other, Bruno would not ask either of them about it either. A strange bunch, these Wolfes. If not exactly secretive toward each other, for damned sure not much inclined to forthrightness. It had not escaped his notice that Uncle John did not tell his sons that the family Gloria married into was close to President Díaz. Or of his discovery that his brother had been a San Patricio. Did he wish to spare them shame in their turncoat uncle? Did he expect him, Bruno, to keep it secret as well? It would be simple enough to do, as neither John Samuel nor the twins seemed very curious about their Blanco brethren. He wondered if their lack of interest was a matter of station, the Wolfes being hacendados, the Blancos café keepers. Well, what matter? If this was how it was with them, fine by him. He did not have to understand anything except horses to be content here. He would do as his uncle and cousin Vicki did and speak only of what they spoke of and ignore the antagonism between the brothers. And would refrain from mention of his own family unless directly asked about them, a prospect of little likelihood.

He would, however, write periodic letters to Sófi and his mother and tell about life at Buenaventura among these odd blood kin. In their return letters to him they would rarely ask about John Samuel but always remark on the twins and ask to hear more about them.

They were as skilled at taking crocodile hides as at everything else they undertook. They had determined a procedure that proved effective on their first try, and so held to it every time after. They started out at dawn, poling the raft against a current that was much stronger than it had seemed when it had so gently carried them downstream from the falls. They poled hard around the first meanders and around the last of the mangroves and then came the first beaches and then the first few crocodiles. And still they poled on. And then poled past the first large bunch of them and around the next meander and past the next bunch too. They kept poling until late in the afternoon, when they arrived at a point within a mile of the falls and there they moored to a tree. They supped on jerky and spent the night on the raft. After breakfast the next morning, they began drifting downriver on the current, scanning both banks as they went. The first crocodile they saw that was at least twelve feet long and not too close to any others was the one they started with.

They tied up to the nearest bankside tree that afforded a clear shot from the raft. Sometimes they were able to tie up so close to their target they could have hit it with a flung brick and it was no problem for one or the other of them to shoot it squarely in the vital spot directly back of the eye and destroy the creature’s meager brain. But sometimes the nearest tree that offered a shot at the croc was at some distance and then it was a test of marksmanship to hit that vital spot no bigger than a silver dollar. It was a harder shot still whenever the crocodile lay facing the raft so that they could not see the spot back of the eye and instead had to shoot the creature through the eye itself. For these more challenging shots, one of the twins would stuff his ears with little wads of cloth and lean forward with his hands on his knees so his brother could use his shoulder to steady the rifle.

It was imperative to kill the croc instantly. If it were only wounded, it could go into the river in a bloody thrashing that would clear both banks of other crocodiles to come feed on it. The ensuing tumult—in which some of them even tore into each other—ended all chance of taking a hide from that part of the river the rest of that day, and they would have to drift farther down. But if the croc were killed cleanly with a single shot, the others on the banks might stir at the rifle report and a few might slide into the river and vanish, but most would stay as they were, still as paintings. The twins then went ashore with their sack of gear to skin the kill, first severing the croc’s spine with a hatchet chop just behind the head to ensure it was dead. They had read of croc hunters who thought their prey was dead and had begun to skin it when the creature suddenly revived in a murderous rage.

From the larger crocs they took only the belly hide—the flat, as it was called in the trade—which was not only easier to remove than the hornback, or top hide, but also fetched a better price, being softer and easier to fashion into boots and holsters and belts and hatbands, however the skin might end up. Only a small croc had hornback supple enough to be worth as much as a flat and hence warrant the taking. They would alternate between killing three large crocodiles for the belly hides and then a small one for the whole skin. In either instance, after they removed the hide they fleshed it on the spot, scraping as much meat and fat off it as they could, then rolled it and put it in one of the tubs of brine they had affixed to the raft deck. The skinned crocs were left on the bank for its fellows to gorge on. Then they drifted around the next bend to where the crocs were still placid and there they tied up again and repeated the process.

They would be on the river for five or six days before reaching the last of the downstream beaches where they would take the last hides of the trip. Then came the stretch of mangroves and then they were back in the cove, tired, crusted with gore, singing, though they yet had to give the hides another scraping and salt them and hang them up to dry. Only then would they rest.

Sometimes it rained for most of a hunting trip and they did their killing and skinning in a dripping, green-gray gloom. If it was raining when they got back to the cove, there could be days of waiting for it to pass. But once the clouds broke, the sun made short work of drying the skins. The twins then stacked them in bundles and lashed them with cord and loaded them in the hold of the Marina Dos. And set sail for Veracruz.