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 Gonzalez and Chato Ruiz, two of the three who remained unfound. After receiving their shares from the sale of the munitions in Reynosa, Gonzalez and Ruiz 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.
Ursula 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 Rios and Cesar Augusto protested to no avail when Blake Cortez 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, Ursula 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 Rios and Cesar 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 Rios 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, Ursula 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. Ursula 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, Ursula 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
Harry Sebastian said the really strange thing about the Cat was how well she could shoot and throw that knife. Jacky Rios said he’d sure like to get his hands on that knife of hers. “There are lots of things of hers
Jacky Rios 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.”
Cesar 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,” Cesar said.
“Why not?” Jacky Rios said, winking at the others. “You sweet on her? You gonna
And Cesar said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact I am.” And grinned at their laughter.
THE MATRIARCH
In the final days of 1910, some years after finally accepting that she was past all possibility of conception and at last acquiescing to sexual intercourse with Amos Bentley—berating herself for her long abstention even as she thrilled to the act as much as she had the first time in her life, at sixteen with her young soldier husband Melchor— Sofia Reina, age fifty-seven, at last also accepted as fact seventy-two-year-old Amos’s insistence that she was in
