Country of the Bad Wolfes

CATALINA

Many years later Catalina would tell her children that their great-great-grandfather had been feared by many men who never even met him and by every man who ever did. Except for Don Porfirio, I suppose, she would say. But then, your great-great-grandfather was probably the only man in Mexico not afraid of Don Porfirio.

To say she had always been Edward Little’s favorite would be misleading in its implication that he was simply fonder of her than of his own children and other grandchildren. In fact, she was the only one whose company he looked forward to on his visits to Patria Chica. All the things she would love best in life she would learn to love from him. She alone called him Buelito. While she was yet an infant he had carried her about the casa grande courtyard, naming for her the trees and birds, the types of clouds above. She was four when he began taking her for long saddle rides over the hacienda’s expanse, holding her to his chest and teaching her now of the larger world. The language of the land. The secrets of the wind. On long walks at night he instructed her on the nature of the moon, on the stars and their turnings and the unerring maps they provided to those who knew how to read them. He gave her a pony when she was six. When she began wearing Eduardo Luis’s outgrown pants and boots, Gloria objected on the grounds that it was unfeminine, that she was turning into a cowboy, but Edward spoke to Gloria in private and the matter was closed. He took Catalina to the hacienda store and bought her several pairs of pants and had her fitted for boots, and bought her too some pretty dresses to wear when occasion demanded. Though you are much more, he told her, you are also a lady. By the age of eight she had learned from him how to track anything—horses, game, a man afoot. No one else in the family knew of her witness to her grandmother’s murder of her grandfather, but she told Edward all she had seen and described for him even the expressions on their faces in the moment before the first shot—his of a man in nightmare and hers of an amused sleepwalker—and the way her grandmother’s feet slung up as she went into the well. He taught her to shoot when she was twelve and a year later she killed her first deer, dropping it with a head shot from a hundred yards and then dressing it herself under his supervision. At her quinceañera on New Year’s day of 1910 she was beautiful in white finery, and her first dance of the occasion was with him. His gift to her, bestowed in private, was a bone-handled scalping knife he had taken from an Apache warrior he’d killed sixty-four years before.

Edward Little never explained his predilection for Catalina to anyone—he explained nothing of himself to anyone—and no one of the family, not even her father or grandfather, ever mentioned it. Catalina was Don Eduardo’s darling and that was that. It had occurred to Gloria, who kept the thought to herself, that her father-in-law’s partiality for the girl might be rooted in the loss of his only daughter when she was still a baby. But if that were so, why choose Catalina over Sandra Rosario who had been born first? Gloria had a notion about that too. Sandi was a sensitive child who wept for the injured and the helpless and the all alone, while Catalina . . . well, Gloria had never seen nor heard Catalina cry, not in pain or for any other reason, not even as an infant.

Given Patria Chica’s isolation and proximity to the railroad, its safety was unsure. In early March when rebel action was reported only fifty miles from San Luis Potosí, Díaz had a company of infantry posted on the outskirts of the hacienda. But still Edward wanted to send Catalina someplace safer, and so of course would send Sandra Rosario too. He put the girls on an army train bound for Monterrey, where the next afternoon they would transfer to another military train and arrive in Matamoros around midnight. He assigned Eduardo Luis to go along as his sisters’ protector until he turned them over to John Louis at the Matamoros station. John Louis would take the girls across the river to his Brownsville home and Eduardo Luis would return to Patria Chica. Catalina asked how long they would have to be away. Until things settle down here, Edward said. He gave her a roll of American currency and hugged her hard and kissed her. Then patted tearful Sandra Rosario on the head and was gone.

In Monterrey there was a mechanical problem with the train they were supposed to transfer onto. Wanting to deliver the children on schedule, the officer in charge had a sleeping coach added to a special train about to leave for the Matamoros garrison—a train of only two other cars, one packed with munitions and the other carrying a guard detail of two rifle squads. The train chugged off through a sunset-reddened countryside and then into a desert night made ghostly by an incandescent moon. Catalina lay awake for a time, staring out the window at the night sky and wondering what the border would be like.

She came awake to a thundering clash of iron as the coach yawed and shuddered and came to a jarring halt. Her head struck the wall and she was unconscious for a moment before becoming aware of her brother shaking her by the shoulder and shouting “Cat! Come on!” Gunfire blasting outside. Men bellowing, howling. Crying out in pain. She found it hard to sit up and then realized the coach was at a sideward tilt. The little amber lights just inside the doors were still on but the air was hazed with dust and smelled of steaming oil. Eduardo Luis wore only pants and boots. She saw the fear in his eyes, the pistol in his hand. Sandra Rosario shrieked from the other end of the coach where men with big hats and wild dark faces had rushed in and one had his arms around Sandi from behind and was dragging her out. As Eduardo Luis started to raise his pistol somebody shot him and he fell to the floor on his back with his eyes rolled up and a red-black hole in his forehead. Catalina tried to get her knife from under the pillow but was grabbed by her gown and yanked rearward. She twisted and tried to wrest free and the gown ripped away and she fell on the floor, naked but for underpants. The man holding the gown stared down at her, grinning under a huge mustache. Then was on her.

She would not know how many took a turn. Five? Six? The coach windows were gray when the last of them was done. He was the only one of them still in the coach and was having trouble rebuckling his pants belt. He paid no attention to her as she sat up. The floor under her sticky with blood and semen, the pain between her legs like a raw wound. She heard the snortings and stampings of horses, the clatter of heavy wagons. She pulled herself up against the bunk and slid her hand under the pillow. Somebody hollered for the laggard to hurry up, what the hell was he doing, courting her? There was laughter. Without looking up from his struggle with the buckle the man yelled back for them to fuck themselves. She turned to face him and said softly, “Oye, bruto.” The man raised his face to look at her and she backhanded the blade through his neck all the way to the bone. Blood jumped and spattered her breasts. The man staggered, hands to his throat as if trying to hold his head in place as much as stanch the blood throbbing through his fingers and cascading onto his shirt. He tried to cry out but could not. Then tripped over Eduardo Luis and fell facedown and let a gurgling groan and in a moment more went still, blood widening on the floor under his face. There was another shout for him to come on, goddammit. She stood next to the door with the knife ready for whoever came in first. To hell with him, somebody said, he can catch up. She heard them leaving, horsemen and wagons.

She found her clothes and got dressed, nearly falling once from a sudden swirl of dizziness. The floor viscid under her feet. She knelt beside Eduardo Luis and cleaned off his face with her gown and then covered him with it. She had to think hard for a moment to remember he was eighteen. His gun was gone. But the dead man’s gun belt was still on the chair where he’d placed it and she went to it and took the Remington revolver from the holster and emptied the cylinder and saw that all the cartridges had been spent. She reloaded the chambers with bullets from the belt loops and then with the point of her knife made another hole in the belt for the buckle tongue so the belt would fit her. Then put it on and slid her knife under it but had the revolver in hand as she went outside into the light of the risen sun.

The locomotive was canted to one side on the ground beyond the disjointed tracks with its great iron wheels buried to the hubs and a thin haze of steam still rising off the engine. Dead men in every attitude. Some of the attackers and all of the soldiers. Ants already at work on the faces. She did not find Sandra Rosario among the dead but found several canteens of water. In every direction the horizon ran to distant ranges except to the northeast which lay flat all the way to the sky. There was a low dust cloud in the southwest she took to be that of the departed raiders. She had to assume they had Sandi with them. She tried various hats before finding one that wasn’t too big. She had no idea how far she was from Matamoros but knew that the tracks would take her there. She slung a pair of canteens across her chest and started walking.

Near midday a billow of dust rose in the northwest and began to enlarge. She had the Remington in her hand when they came riding up, a band of men of the same breed and aspects as those of the night before. Teeth bright against faces black in the shadow of their sombreros. Every man of them draped with bandoleers and guns and knives, their horses hung with rifles and machetes. They reined up around her, grinning and joking about the pretty soldadera so ready to shoot them all. The leader said he was Tomás Urbina and asked what happened. She told him about the train attack. He asked if she had been violated and when she didn’t answer he cursed her attackers with such artful vileness she nearly smiled. He told two men to take her to Matamoros. She hesitated but a second before clasping the hand reaching down to her and being swung up behind the rider.

It was late in the afternoon when they deposited her at the Matamoros depot. The stationmaster immediately sent a wire to John Louis at Cielo Largo to let him know. John Louis had been informed the evening before of the change in trains and the reason for it, but when the train had still not arrived by morning he was frantic. He had exchanged a half-dozen wires with the Monterrey garrison before finally going back to Cielo Largo and maintaining telegraphic communications from there. When he got to the station it was the first time he and Catalina had seen each other in the five years since he’d left Patria Chica, and he nearly stopped her breath with the force of his embrace. When she told him Eduardo Luis had been killed and Sandi Rosario taken, he said, Oh dear God, and hugged her again to hide his face. She did not tell him of her assault nor of the man she killed, would for years not tell anyone, though she’d have told Buelito if she’d had the chance and pleaded with him to take her along when he set out to hunt them down. John Louis composed himself and then sent a wire to Edward Little.

The entirety of Edward’s responding telegram said, Send Eduardo to Patria Chica. Attend well to the Cat.

Edward Little assigned his best agents, each with his own crew, to search the border in hunt of the train attackers, especially in the towns where most of the trade in guns and munitions took place. Over the following weeks every man of the gang but three was captured and interrogated to the bloody bones before he was granted the mercy of death. Most were in agreement that the girl was taken from the train by Berto González and Chato Ruíz, two of the three who remained unfound. After receiving their shares from the sale of the munitions in Reynosa, González and Ruíz had left the gang, taking the girl with them. Maybe to sell her, maybe for their own fun, nobody knew. Or knew where they’d gone. Some thought Monterrey, some Nuevo Laredo, some Chihuahua City, but nobody knew. Edward’s men would follow every tenuous lead but find no trace of either man nor of Sandra Rosario.

Úrsula had known Catalina since the girl was a baby and she was very happy to have her living with them. Hector Louis had been eight the last time he’d seen her and was now a little shy around his sixteen-year-old cousin who seemed somehow to have grown more than just two years older than he. Though the house was large by Brownsville standards, she had never lived in a place so small, but she didn’t mind. Her room looked out on a backyard full of trees and abutting a small resaca and she marveled at the variety of birds that watered there. She was in a secret apprehension for the first few weeks and formed a contingent plan to sneak off to town and find a curandera—and then was profoundly relieved when her menses came, and she felt as much delivered by chance as injured by it.

The Littles held a fiesta at Cielo Largo to introduce her to the Wolfes, her kin by way of her Grandmother Gloria. They came in a pair of new Model T Ford touring cars, the twins relinquishing most of the driving to the boys, and Jacky Ríos and César Augusto protested to no avail when Blake Cortéz also allotted Vicki Angel a turn behind the wheel. That evening at the banquet table there was much loud discussion about family lineage and Catalina’s relation to the Wolfes. Beyond the solid facts that Samuel Thomas Wolfe was her great-grandfather and John Roger Wolfe her great-granduncle there was much debate about great-uncles and great-aunts and degrees of cousinship until everybody was laughing at the genealogical tangle. It was finally resolved that although they were technically her granduncles and grandaunts, John Louis and the twins would simply be her uncles, Úrsula and Marina and Remedios her aunts, and all their children her cousins. It was only natural that they would abbreviate her name to Cat and that the nickname would carry over into Spanish as La Gata.

She was one more Little who had never seen the ocean until her first time at Playa Blanca. They could now drive there in the Fords, the twins having reinforced the wagon trail from the Boca Chica road to the house and there built a garage to protect the cars from windblown sand. Catalina had learned to swim in the river at Patria Chica but shared her cousins’ preference for swimming in the gulf rather than in a river or resaca. All the boys were in a stir over their long-legged, blue-eyed cousin and vied with each other to teach her how to sail. Jacky Ríos and César Augusto nearly got into a fistfight about it, which seemed to amuse her. She chose Vicki Angel to be her instructor and by the end of that weekend she was sailing like an old hand. A year and a half Catalina’s junior, Vicki Angel adored her cousin and was elated to have another girl in the family, an ally at last in a tribe overrun with rough boys. She took to wearing pants and boots too, whenever Catalina did, and none of the adults objected, so long as the girls never failed to dress properly for mealtimes and social outings. They enrolled Catalina in the same Catholic school for girls that Vicki attended and the two of them walked there together every day in their blue-and-white uniforms. The women were pleased by the novelty of two girls among them, girls at the threshold of womanhood but who still in the way of girls could communicate with each other through mysterious smiling glances that sometimes led to outbursts of laughter for reasons they shared with no one else. The twins too were taken with Catalina. They admired her refusal to give up her Remington revolver to John Louis. He had offered to keep it for her in his gun case, he told the twins, but she preferred to keep it in her room and he could think of no argument by which to deny her. That she knew how to use the gun was evident the first time she took a turn at a family target shooting session and outshot all her cousins except Harry Sebastian, the deadeye of the bunch. And the day she slipped the bonehandled knife from its hip sheath and threw it whirling to pinion a four-foot rattlesnake still writhing after Jacky Ríos had shot it was one more proof she’d been well-trained in self-defense and the arts of weaponry. She learned everything from Don Eduardo, Úrsula told the twins. Catalina herself never spoke of her great-grandfather to anyone other than Vicki Angel, who would not have betrayed her confidences even under torture.

And if in those first months with the border families Catalina sometimes withdrew into silence or went for long solitary walks at the ranch or on the beach or kept to her room for an afternoon of staring out the window, it was understandable to Marina and Remedios. Just think of what that poor girl had been through! She had seen her brother killed and her sister taken away and God alone knew how frightened she must have been for her own life. Naturally she would sometimes remember that terrible experience and be sad. Give her time. She was young and would learn to live with the pains of the past as we all must. Úrsula agreed, but said that even as a child Catalina had always had a reclusive side to her, some secret part of herself she never shared with anyone. Except probably Don Eduardo. And now Vicki Angel, to whom she seemed even closer than she had been to her own sister. It is a very right name for her, Úrsula said, the Cat.

Hector Louis told his cousins much the same thing. Catalina had always been a little odd, he said. She never asked if she could play with you, you always had to ask her, and sometimes she would and sometimes she wouldn’t. It was like she didn’t really care if anybody asked her to play or not. I always liked her anyway, Hector said, even though she was odd.

“Well she’s not any odder than any of you all, that’s damn for sure!” Vicki Angel said, and stomped off as the boys all laughed at her clumsy profanity.

Harry Sebastian said the really strange thing about the Cat was how well she could shoot and throw that knife. Jacky Ríos said he’d sure like to get his hands on that knife of hers. “There are lots of things of hers I’d like to get my hands on,” Morgan James said with a lascivious smile. All the boys had by this time disposed of their virginity, fourteen-year-old Hector Louis just a couple of months before, when Morgan James, the eldest at seventeen and the most experienced, took him to one of his compliant Mexican girlfriends in Brownsville.

Jacky Ríos told Morgan he better not try anything with the Cat, not only on account of she might gut him with that knife but you weren’t supposed to do such things with your cousin, he’d heard you could go to jail for it.

“Ah hell,” Harry Sebastian said, “she’s so far out on a limb of the family tree she hardly counts as a cousin.”

César Augusto said for them to quit talking about her that way.

“What’s biting your ass?” Morgan said.

“Just don’t talk about her that way, that’s all,” César said.

“Why not?” Jacky Ríos said, winking at the others. “You sweet on her? You gonna marry her?”

And César said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact I am.” And grinned at their laughter.