Country of the Bad Wolfes

TAMPICO

The town stood some six miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, on the north bank of the Río Pánuco, in the southeast corner of Tamaulipas state. Smaller than Veracruz City, Tampico was even hotter for being those few miles removed from the coast. When they arrived in that late July the air was like steam. The country about was swampland, all marsh and hammocks and shallow lakes. The swamps sometimes pulsed in the night with strange glowings said to be restless spirits of the dead. Because the city had once been a haven for pirates, some of the locals believed the lights were the ghosts of those damned to remain forever at the site of their buried booty. There were countless stories of men who had gone into the night swamp in search of treasure marked by the eerie lights and had not come out again. The first time the twins found themselves on the edge of the swamp at night rise and caught a glimpse of such a light, one of them wondered aloud if Roger Blake Wolfe had ever been in Tampico, and the other said he would wager that he had. They stood a long while in the closing darkness, now losing sight of the spectral light and now seeing its glow again, fainter each time, as if, as it receded into the deeper shadows, it was daring them to follow.

They claimed to be Thomas and Timothy Clayton, American sons of Irish parents and fishermen by trade. Marina was María Sotí. They did not explain her relation to them and no one asked to know it. They rented a three-story house on Calle Aduana. A tall narrow structure overlooking the Plaza de Libertad and only a short walk from the river port, where they moored the Marina Dos. The neighborhood featured numerous balconies and galleries of lace ironwork such as the twins had seen in Veracruz and in pictures of New Orleans. Part of the house roof was peaked and part was flat and on the flat part there was a ramada and a table and chairs and it was a good place to eat supper and from which to observe the plaza and listen to its nightly music. On the hottest evenings they all three slept up there where the river breeze could reach them and on cloudless nights the stars looked close enough to touch. They liked hearing the trains at the loading docks, the ship whistles and bells in the night.

All her life Marina had lived within twenty miles of the Gulf of Mexico without ever having seen it until she went to the cove with the twins. And as happened to them before her, she loved the sea at first sight. She was sorry they did not spend more than one night there. The twins had dug up the strongbox containing their savings in coin and paper of high denomination and transferred the contents into several money belts they would wear to Tampico, joking that if they fell overboard they would sink like bricks. Marina had more reason than they to fear drowning, as she had not yet learned to swim, but she was never truly afraid of anything when she was with them. They hated having to abandon their books but did take with them an atlas of the world and one of North America. On the way to Tampico they began teaching her the rudiments of seamanship and by the time they entered the mouth of the Pánuco she was an able hand with sheets and tiller.

They could not know how much effort Mauricio Espinosa might put into searching for them, but their seekers would for sure be looking for twins, so James Sebastian had Marina crop his hair very short and he remained clean shaven and took to wearing plain-lensed, wire-rimmed eyeglasses in public. Blake Cortéz let his hair grow to his collar and cultivated a sparse goatee. The physical distinctions made Marina feel for the first time as if she were sharing a bed with two different men.

And? said James.

Woo-woo, she said.

They would not go unarmed in public, but the Colts were too cumbersome to carry in concealment, so they made inquiries and were directed to a small, signless shop next to the docks where they bought a pair of .36-caliber two-shot derringers. Easy to hide on their persons even when coatless.

They had plenty of money and passed their days at play and at familiarizing themselves with the city and its surrounding world. The Plaza de Armas was but a short walk from the Plaza de Libertad, and some nights they went dancing at one square and some nights at the other and some nights at both. They bought nautical charts and books of all sorts, including volumes of poetry and stories, and on some evenings took turns reading to each other. Marina at last grew tired of telling them to speak only Spanish in her presence and asked to be taught English. They said of course—though Blake affected disgruntlement and said, Well hell, no more telling secrets in front of you.

They bought a canoe and three paddles and began to explore the outlying swamps and on occasion took the pistols with them for target shooting. They tried to teach Marina to shoot, but she could not overcome her fear of guns and fired only a single round with a derringer, flinching at the report, and then would shoot no more.

They took coach trips to Mante, to Victoria, and when the railroad arrived from Monterrey they went for extended visits to that large and rowdy city. They kept the Marina Dos in ready trim and sometimes went cruising for weeks at a time, acquainting themselves with the shoreline for more than a hundred miles in either direction, putting in at seaside hamlets not to be found on any map. They entered rocky passes and navigated lagoon waterways where the only sign of people was the pluming smoke of steamships out on the gulf.

They took her to a dentist who was able to fit her with front teeth. When the job was finally done she could hardly believe the woman grinning from the mirror was herself. It was all she could do to keep her hand from her mouth, so ingrained was the action whenever she smiled, and she would be a long time undoing it.

Do I look . . . better? she asked.

Prettier than ever, James Sebastian said. Blake Cortéz said she’d always had pretty hair and pretty eyes and now had a pretty smile too.

It was not just sweet talk. She had in truth acquired a kind of prettiness in spite of the facial scars. Since joining herself to the twins, she had known danger and uncertainty and yet, paradoxically, had at the same time felt more secure than ever before. She loved them very much and felt very much loved by them, and in that strange way that happiness in love can affect a face, her scars seemed somehow less stark, the misalignment of her cheekbones almost beguiling.

Speaking of pretty, Blake said, we don’t even have to mention this lovely thing. He patted her bottom and she slapped away his hand. Then was laughing as she hugged them to her, one in each arm.

They liked to go to the beach just north of the river mouth. They rode out on the public mule-carriage and took a picnic basket and a sheet to spread on the sand and stayed all day and came back on the last coach. They would have preferred to frolic naked as they did at the cove but there were always at least a few other people in view, often with children, and so the twins wore pants cut short above the knees and Marina wore a swimming suit of her own creation, made of cotton and hemmed at mid-thigh and its halter top thin-strapped and low in the back. The costume sufficed to meet the proprieties of a sparsely populated Mexican beach but would have gotten her arrested at any American seaside resort. Her dusky skin became so much darker they began calling her Negrita. They taught her to swim, and the sensation of propelling herself through the water became one of the joys of her life. The three of them would swim out to where the waves formed, and when a big one began to build they would start stroking hard atop it and side by side ride the wave’s accelerating forward roll all the way in to shore where it broke in a great crash of foam and sent them tumbling over the sand.

It became her habit to have a long solo swim on every visit to the beach. On one such swim a trio of dolphins suddenly appeared beside her, and she trod water as they circled her, rolling under and up again, blowing spray. She laughed and stroked them as they passed. Then one came up under her and with its face against her bottom raised her out of the water entirely and dropped her with a splash. The twins were watching from down the beach and heard her happy shriek. Far up the beach in the other direction a small party of people was watching too and they cheered when the dolphin tossed her. Then the dolphins vanished and she swam to shore and the other people waved to her and she waved back and came sprinting toward the twins, grinning wide, no hand at her mouth, shouting, Did you see! Did you see!

They practiced their fighting techniques on the beach and it pleased her to watch them at it, to witness their dance-like spins and torsions as they threw and dodged open-hand punches fast as snake strikes, never hitting each other in the face with more than a brush of fingertips but exercising no such reserve with blows to the body, and she cringed at each loud smack of palm to belly or ribs. At the end of every session, both of them sported large red blotches on their stomachs and chests.

Their social world contained the three of them alone and they were content within it. They sometimes spoke of Vicki Clara and hoped she was doing well, and of young Juan Sotero. But they would not chance a letter to her lest John Samuel somehow get hold of it and know by the postmark where they were and pass the information to Mauricio Espinosa. What if they wrote to their cousin Bruno, Marina said. They didn’t really know him, they said, not enough to trust him. Josefina they missed dearly. To her they might have chanced a letter had she known how to read—but they would trust no one to read it to her.

In their fourth year they began to run low on money but they were unworried. There was always money to be made, always someone willing to pay you to provide them with something they could not get for themselves. In fact the twins were eager to return to work, though they would not go back to the hide business. The swamps teemed with alligators but there was no shortage of hunters or buyers and the market was glutted. As in Veracruz, however, there was a Chinese quarter, and as in Veracruz the Chinese did not dare to fish in the open gulf for fear of attack by Mexican boats. The twins found their way to a man named Chu, the quarter’s chief broker in various enterprises. As they had hoped, he was in the market for shark fins. Like Mr Sing, he had inland buyers who were always in short supply of fins—and of shark livers, to which some of the local Chinese attributed medicinal and aphrodisiacal power. Mr Chu agreed to the twins’ rate for fins and they agreed to his for livers. And they were back in the shark trade. They had thought that, as in Veracruz, they might have trouble when the local crews found out they were selling to a Chinaman. But unlike the Veracruzanos, the twins learned, the Tampiqueños didn’t care who caught fish for the Chinese so long as it wasn’t the Chinks themselves.

They eventually yielded to Marina’s entreaties and let her go sharking with them—and she loved it from the first and fast proved an able hand. She was awed by the sharks, exhilarated by the process of catching and killing them. She could soon do every job the twins could except reel in a big one by herself, or—for her fear of guns—shoot one dead. But she was very good with the shark knife and became so adept at extracting livers and excising fins that the twins soon left those tasks entirely to her.

Over time they came to believe that Mauricio Espinosa was either no longer looking for them or was never going to look for them in Tampico. It was of course also possible that his men had come to Tampico and made inquiries and then reported to Mauricio that no one here had seen any twins of the Wolfes’ description.

Marina believed it would be best for the twins to retain their distinct appearances. “It is better to be in safety,” she said, “than to be in sadness.” Her English was improving, though she would never gain command of its grammar or solid footing with its idioms.

And if they kept themselves looking different, Blake Cortéz said, it would be better for whoever might prefer the excitement of two different-looking men in bed with her than the boredom of twins.

She blushed and stuck her tongue out at them.

Her thirty-fifth birthday was notable in that nobody else in her family had ever lived that long. So far as she knew, only her Uncle Brito had made it to the age of thirty-four, in which year he was killed trying to stop a fight between his two best friends. I have become old, she said. You two are in company with a hag. A few weeks shy of twenty-one, the twins grinned and ran their eyes over her with exaggerated leers. Some hag, one said. She smiled and mouthed kisses at them.

They insisted that such a significant birthday called for a significant celebration. They bought her a finer dress than she had ever aspired to wear and new suits for themselves. They had always been disinclined toward settings that called for formal clothes, but on this occasion they insisted on taking her to El Palacio, the city’s most elegant establishment. Owned by an American from Memphis, it contained a restaurant and ballroom and casino. The staff was Mexican but every waiter spoke English, and it pleased Marina to give her dinner order in that language. She had been afraid she might make a fool of herself in such a refined place, but the twins had tutored her in etiquette, and midway through the meal she was no longer uneasy. After dinner they went into the ballroom and each twin took a turn on the floor with her. Vicki Clara had taught them to waltz and they taught Marina. Then they went upstairs to the casino and there were informed it was restricted to members only.

The manager was summoned, a man named Murtaugh. He inspected the cut of their clothes and asked in English who they were and they said the Clayton brothers out of New Orleans, where they owned a fishing company called The Gulf Bounty. They were thinking about setting up a small company in Tampico too. Murtaugh shook their hands and smiled at Marina and approved them for club membership. He apologized for the interrogation, but membership was the best way to keep out undesirables. The twins said they understood the need and approved of the policy.

They had enjoyed gambling ever since boyhood games of dice and cards in the hacienda stables and in the cantina of Santa Rosalba. On their first few visits to Veracruz they had played in most of the gambling halls, but they were all strident places of rough patronage and prone to sudden violence, usually incited by allegations of cheating. The twins had made a careful study of methods for cheating and they thought about using their own dexterous chicanery to counter that of the Veracruz halls, but decided not to. If they were caught at it, or even only accused, it would not be worth the consequences—the certain brawl to follow, the possible killing, the intervention of summoned police who were sure to be in league with the establishment. They liked Veracruz and dealing with Mr Sing and did not want to risk having to exile themselves from the city for doing injury or worse to any of its policemen. So they quit the Veracruz halls. And on finding that the public gambling houses in Tampico were no less crooked, they had shunned them too.

But the handsomely appointed casino at El Palacio was a far remove from the public halls. There were roulette wheels, tables for dicing, tables for cards. With Marina between them, the twins strolled about the floor, pausing at one table and then another to scrutinize the play, and they detected no sign of underhandedness. The casino seemed satisfied with the profits ordained to it by the iron law of percentages. They were also pleased to see that at most of the card tables the game was jackpot draw poker, their favorite. There was no betting limit and both Mexican and American money was acceptable. Moreover, property could be wagered in lieu of cash, contingent on the consent of the players still in the hand. Such bets were not uncommon among these men with large holdings in real estate, and most of the regular players always brought a deed or two to the tables. The casino kept a contract lawyer on hand to certify bills of sale and transfers of title. After being assured Marina would be properly safeguarded by Palacio personnel at a side gallery reserved for the women of the players, Blake Cortéz accepted the floor manager’s offer of an open chair at one poker table and James Sebastian was seated at another. They were cordially received by the other players—a mix of Americans, Britishers, and Mexicans.

Both twins fared very well that first night. In addition to cash, Blake won the deed to a small orange grove a few miles upriver and would two days later sell it for twice as much as the bet it had covered. Their fellow players grumbled good-naturedly about a chance to regain some of their losses, and each twin smiled and promised to return.

For almost two years they went after shark in the first half of every month and played poker at the casino in the latter half. Sometimes Marina would put on her fine dress and go to El Palacio with them. They would have dinner together and then a few dances before going up to the casino where she would sit in the ladies’ gallery while they played at the tables. Most of the time, however, she chose to stay at home and they didn’t fault her, knowing how bored she must get in the gallery. On the nights she stayed home they would on their return find her dozing on the parlor sofa in wait of them, fresh coffee on the stove, pastries in the warmer.

Sometimes one twin would lose more money than his brother won and sometimes they both lost, but far more often they both ended the night as winners, usually by sizable amounts. They won more property too—agricultural acreage, a bean farm, a dairy, a tannery, a brickworks. They had no interest in operating any of the businesses or developing any of the land, but most of the properties were close to town and easy to sell at a good price within days of winning them. At first, they had accepted in wager even property in other regions of the country and at one time or another held title to land and other assets as far north as Sonora and as far south as Oaxaca. Such distant holdings, however, were harder to sell, some only at giveaway prices, and they soon stopped accepting bets of any real asset sited more than twenty miles from town.

Of all the properties they won title to, they held on to only one—an expansive tract of Texas acreage snugged midway between Brownsville and the Gulf of Mexico. Blake Cortéz had won it from an American named Walthers who had never seen the property and himself had won it in a San Antonio dice game from a Texan named Mizzell. The deed carried the imprint of the Cameron County land company that originally prepared it, and the legal transfer of ownership to Walthers in San Antonio had been recorded on the back. Just underneath that record, the Palacio’s lawyer certified Walthers’s grant of ownership to Thomas Clayton. Another man at the table said he had once been to Brownsville and that it was mostly cattle country around there except for between town and the gulf, which was nothing but marsh and scrubland. On hearing that, Walthers smiled like a man who had won the bet even though he’d lost the hand.

The twins had nautical charts of the gulf coast all the way from Coatzacoalcos up to Corpus Christi, and the chart for the region flanking the Río Bravo showed but a single settlement east of Brownsville, a hamlet called Point Isabel, nestled in a lagoon a few miles above the mouth of the river. Point Isabel! They took the name for an auspicious omen. Even if the property was in fact swampland and scrub, so what? It was on a river and practically on the gulf and by damn in the United States. It gave them a certain satisfaction to own land in the country of their parents, even if the place was as far south from their parents’ patria chica of New England as you could get and still be in the USA. They went to a lawyer in the Plaza de Libertad, introduced themselves as cousins, and had the title transferred from Thomas Clayton to James S Wolfe.

On average they earned well more from the poker tables than from shark fins, but they liked working on the gulf too much to give it up. They lived off the sharking income and kept the casino winnings in money belts they sealed in oilskin and put in a sack and hid in one of the rain barrels behind the house. And if some of the other players had over the past year begun to grumble about the Clayton brothers’ consistency at winning, well, the twins thought that was to be expected. There would always be some men who could not understand that you should not gamble if you could not bear to lose.

Their time in Tampico was not without violent event. There were various brief punch-ups in the street, mainly with men who groped Marina in passing or hissed some vileness to her, but also with men who were simply looking for a fight and had the bad judgment to pick it with the Wolfes. The damage the twins inflicted in these affrays was rarely worse than broken teeth or bones but there were some rougher occasions too. As on the evening they were walking with Marina along the levee and spied a pair of men beside a boathouse trying to force themselves on a drunk but unwilling woman. The fight ended with both men in the river, one with his back likely broken and who therefore likely drowned—the twins made no effort to find out. Marina was also with them the afternoon they came upon a drayman whipping his emaciated mule with a length of bamboo because the animal could not pull the overloaded wagon any further. James Sebastian snatched the man’s stick from him and began beating him with it, and when the man pulled a knife James brought the fool’s arm down hard over his knee and disjointed it at the elbow. He would have cut off the man’s nose for good measure but for Marina’s plea not to. They flung money at the man and unharnessed the mule and took it to the edge of town where there was plenty of wild grass for it to feed on and there set loose the animal and wished it luck.

Still, they were in Tampico for almost six and a half years without serious trouble until one night just after Christmas. Marina had gone with them to the casino and the twins had again done well at the tables and they had come home just before midnight—the plaza fronting their street still loud with music and aswirl with dancers—and found three men waiting for them in the parlor. Two held five-shooters and one a shotgun with a shortened double-barrel with bores you could have fit your thumb into and both hammers cocked. At the sight of the men Marina made a small sound, then went mute, and the one with the shotgun said, Shut the fucking door.

The men looked angry and were sweat-soaked and the room was sour with the smell of them. One of them made a quick search of the twins and relieved them of the derringers. The one with the shotgun ordered them all three to sit on the floor with their hands under their ass.

The parlor had been laid to waste. Picks and axes and pry bars were scattered about. Every stuffed chair lay overturned and slashed open and its stuffing strewn. Various holes had been axed in the walls, in the floor. The twins knew the upper rooms would be in similar wreckage.

Where is it? the one with the shotgun said, looking at Blake Cortéz.

Where’s what? Blake said.

Say that again and I’ll kill you.

In a rain barrel, James Sebastian said.

What?

It’s in one of the rain barrels in back of the house. In a bag. Wrapped in oilskin.

The robbers looked at each other—and in that moment so did the twins.

The one with the shotgun said, Show me, and told the other two to stay with the girl and the brother.

James Sebastian led him through the kitchen to the back door and saw that they had axed an opening through its thick wood and then reached in and shoved the door’s heavy bolt up and out of its slot. Not much finesse but fast and effective. They could not have breached the iron grillwork embedded in the windows except with a long day’s work of sawing and prying, and the front door was in plain view of the plaza. With the man right behind him, James went out the door and onto a small porch and down a short set of steps.

Stop, the man said.

The patio was in deep darkness under the cover of the trees. They could hear the music from the plaza on the other side of the house. The man pressed the muzzle of the shotgun against James Sebastian’s back and said that if he even thought about jumping off into the blackness he would blow him apart. Not me, mister, James said. I can get more money but I only have one life. Smart boy, the man said, and prodded him with the gun. Now show me.

They eased through the gloom to the corner of the house where four big rain barrels, barely discernible, were aligned along the wall beneath the gutter drains. The barrels stood chest high and had wirescreen covers. James Sebastian went to the barrel at the far end. In here, he said. The bag’s tied to a cord hanging over the other side.

Well get it, the man said.

James removed the screen cover and reached across the barrel for the cord. The shotgun muzzle pressed into his spine as he started taking the cord up hand over hand. Christ, it gets heavier every time, he said. Which was true—the sack now held nine fat money belts and a partially filled tenth. Glad to hear it, the man said.

As he got the sack to the surface James Sebastian cursed low and hunched forward against the rim of the barrel. What? the man said. Gashed my hand on the edge of this goddam thing, James said. He held the sack against the inner rim of the barrel with his left hand and with the right slid the shark knife out from between the sack and the cord wrapped around it. It was a principle of his and Blackie’s to keep a weapon wherever they kept money. Fuck your hand, the man said. Get it out here.

Holding the knife close against his chest as he would an injured hand, James grunted and raised the heavy dripping sack out of the barrel with his left hand. As he turned toward the man he felt the shotgun muzzle slide off his back. Take it, quick, James said, it’s slipping.

As the man’s hand closed on the sack, James brought the knife up as quick as a punch and skewered his neck and grabbed his shirtfront to support the instant dead weight of him—the hilt wedged under the jaw and the blade angling out the back of the skull, the brain stem severed so he could not have pulled the trigger even in reflex.

He had feared the shotgun would discharge when it hit the ground but it didn’t. The blood was hot on his knife hand. He yanked out the blade and let the man drop. He rinsed his hands and the knife in the water barrel and slipped the knife into his belt and picked up the shotgun and opened the breech to ensure both chambers were loaded and then snapped the breech shut again. He took up the money sack and went to the kitchen porch and set the sack under the steps. He recocked both hammers and went up to the door and eased into the kitchen as noiseless as shadow. He stood still and listened hard a moment. Then crossed the kitchen to the parlor door.

The two men were standing with their backs to him, facing Blake and Marina, who still sat on their hands. One of the men was saying something to Marina in low voice and the other was giggling. She was staring at the floor, her face stiff and dark with fury and embarrassment. Blake looked past the men and saw James, who nodded and entered the room, raising the shotgun as he advanced toward the two men and said “Oye.”

As the men turned, Blake pushed Marina down and threw himself atop her—and in the next instant and from a distance of five feet James Sebastian shot one man in the side of the head and the other square in the face with blasts that shook the room and slathered large portions of both heads onto the wall behind the sofa.

The air stung with gunsmoke. James’s ears felt plugged. Blake got off Marina and she scrambled to her feet in a rage and glared down at what remained of the one who had been talking to her. “Pinche puerco!” she said, and spat on him and kicked him. Then cursed at the blood on her shoe and wiped it off on the man’s pants.

She saw the twins staring at her. What? she said, her look defiant. You heard what this asshole said to me. She rarely used profanity, and when she did, it had bite. Like Blake, she was flexing her fingers to regain circulation.

Blake raised his palms to her. “I didn’t say anything.”

Then stop looking at me like that. Both of you.

“Yes mam.” The twins exchanged an arched-brow look, then Blake said, “I take it the other’s down too.”

“Yep.” James Sebastian picked up the two revolvers—.38 Smith & Wesson double-action top-breaks—and passed them to Blake. As he retrieved the derringers from the coat of the one who’d taken them, the coat flap fell open to reveal a badge. Policía de Tampico.

“Ah Christ,” Blake said. “Is that real?”

“Looks it. Doesn’t mean it’s really his.”

Now Marina saw it. “Es un policía? Ay, dios mío.”

James flipped open the other man’s coat and exposed his badge too.

“Son of a bitch,” Blake said. “And the one out there?”

“I didn’t look but I’d bet on it. He was the bossman.”

“Well, Brother Jeck, I’d say it’s time we mosey.”

“For damn sure, Brother Black. They probly didn’t hear the shots in the plaza but the neighbors might’ve. Could be they sent for police.”

“For the rest of them, you mean.”

In five minutes they were out of there. They left by the kitchen door and out the rear gate of the dark patio and made their back-alley way to the river. The twins each wore a full money belt and were armed with the derringers and the cops’ revolvers. In one hand Blake carried a valise of clothes and in the other the shotgun and a smaller valise containing only money and a Colt revolver. James Sebastian carried identical valises with identical contents. Marina carried a bag of clothes too—including her lovely dress—and tucked under her other arm was the document case, which in addition to their father’s papers held their mother’s Dragoon and the deed to the Rio Grande property. Another fifteen minutes and they had the sails up on the Marina Dos and were pulling away from the dock.

As they headed downriver they speculated that some sore loser at the casino who was friends with the crooked policemen had tipped them about the Anglo brothers who had been winning too much for too long. Probably made a deal with them for a cut of the recovered money. The police had likely watched them for a time and came to know they never went to the bank and so the money had to be in the house.

Maybe it wasn’t like that. There were various other possibilities. But however it really was didn’t matter. They had been after the money, that was the simple fact of it. So the only thing that really mattered was in Marina’s question that wasn’t a question at all—If they had intended to let us live they would have worn masks, wouldn’t they?

Nor was there any question about which way to go when they cleared the mouth of the Pánuco. They bore north.