Country of the Bad Wolfes

law degree who once served as an American consul to Switzerland and had a gift for languages and for making and keeping friends, Stephen Powers had been living in Brownsville since right after the Mexican War. He had at various times been mayor of the town, a Cameron County judge, a district judge, a member of the Democratic state central committee, a state representative, and a state senator. To say he was the most powerful man in Cameron County was akin to saying the sky was blue, and if Jim Wells could not have had a more suitable mentor in the four years of their partnership before Powers’s death, Stephen Powers could not have had a more brilliant protege. Moreover, when Wells married Powers’s niece, Pauline Kleiber, he joined an august circle of prominent families into which Powers himself had wed.

Powers’s specialty was real estate law, and Wells fast became as expert as his partner in land grant litigation. Their firm’s clients included Mifflin Kenedy and Richard King, who owned the largest cattle ranches in the state and were part of a coalition Powers had formed of the region’s most important ranchers, fewer than a hundred of whom owned almost all of Cameron County—which in that day stretched a hundred miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande up to Baffin Bay. This alliance of ranchmen was the core of Powers’s political strength. Each ranch employed hundreds of mestizos who would in any election cast their votes as their bosses directed. Like all mestizos in South Texas, regardless of their actual nationality, the ranch workers were all of a category and called Mexicans—“my Mexicans” by the ranchers who employed them—and if some or even most of them who voted were not American citizens, well, who could prove it in a rural world largely devoid of birth certificates? On their arrival in Texas the twins had recognized that the relationship between a rancher and his mestizos was not much different from that of a Mexican hacendado and his peons. A relationship that had developed, after all, from the same cultural traditions.

In return for Powers’s protection and promotion of their interests in the state capital, the ranchers delivered their workers’ votes to whichever candidates he pointed. It was a form of political brokering as old as the republic, and Powers was a master of it. And Jim Wells became a wizard. He was as affable as his partner, but having grown up on a cattle ranch he was one of the ranchers’ own and hence even more adept at dealing with them. He knew their ways, talked like they did, was given to the same gestures. But in his rapport with the peons he had no Anglo equal. Like Powers he was fluent in Spanish and familiar with Mexican culture and respectful of Mexican traditions, and having converted to his wife’s Catholic faith, he shared the peons’ religion. More than any other Anglo of authority, Jim Wells had a genuine concern for the local Mexicans, and they recognized his sincerity and repaid it with steadfast personal loyalty. He knew hundreds of them by name, and in times of want provided for them from his own pocket. He defended them in court for a nominal fee, when he charged them anything at all. He got them out of jail with reduced fines and sentences. He visited with them in their homes and played with their children and was a godfather many times over. Many a Mexican child had been named in his honor—Santiago or Jaime or Diego. The peons venerated Wells as a patron saint and not even their employers had greater sway with them. When Senor Wells—or Don Santiago, as he was widely known—said he would grateful it if they would vote for a particular political candidate, so did they vote. In the thirteen years since Stephen Powers’s death, Jim Wells, who had never held public office except for a brief stint as Brownsville city attorney, had expanded the political machine he inherited from his partner and enhanced its operation. His influence now reached not only to the Texas capitol but to the Washington offices of Texas congressmen he had helped to get elected. El jefe de los jefes, the Mexicans called him.

But to see him standing by the cafe wall and surveying the room, his hat pushed back and his hands in his pockets, you might have taken him for a grocer or a hardware dealer—albeit a popular one, to judge by all the invitations he received to join one or another table. He declined them every one with a smile and small wave. Then his gaze fixed on the twins across the room and he started toward them, still swapping hellos as he went. “Well now, what’s this?” Blake Cortez whispered.

Some of the other patrons turned to see who Mr Wells was headed for and saw it was those Wolfe twins nobody could tell apart and who you hardly ever saw in town but on the week’s end. Been building a house in that downriver palm swamp for well-nigh three years on account of they were doing it all themselves, if you could believe that, which was about as crazy as building a house out there in the first place. Said to be from Galveston. Their daddy some kind of bigwig diplomat down in Mexico till him and their momma got took by the yellow jack. Elmer at the bank said they come with scads of money but had near spent the last dollar of it, what with their Mex wives and children and a house in town to support besides building the one in the swamp. Oh, they were finelooking young fellas, no disputing that, and always good to return a howdy and a smile. But you had to admit that none of them—meaning their wives too—were given to passing the time of day. Pleasant and all if you ran into them at the market or the bank but always ready to move along. Odd clan, truth to tell. What would old Jim want to see them about?

“Howdy boys,” Wells said as he got to their table. He looked from one to the other. “Had to see for myself if you the spittin images I been told. Begosh if you aint. About as hard to believe as we never met in all the time you been here.” He put his hand out. “Name’s Jim Wells.” They each shook his hand in turn and said their names. He asked if he could join them and they both glanced at the wall clock. In a voice that couldn’t be heard at the nearest tables, Jim Wells said, “Evaristo aint coming, boys. I’d be obliged if yall could spare me a minute.”

The twins looked at each other and then back at him and said of course and pardon their manners and asked him to join them. Wells hung his hat on the ladderback chair and sat himself so that he could easily shift his attention between them. “I mean to say, you fellas are the twinnest twins I ever saw.” A few of the curious were still eyeing them, but when Wells glanced their way they cut their attention elsewhere. “I take it you know who I am?” Wells said, again pitching his voice not to carry beyond their table.

“Yessir,” Blake Cortez said, muting his own voice. “Doesn’t everybody in here?”

Wells’s mustache widened. “I suppose they do.” His eyes were bright with bonhomie and crafty intelligence. “I know about you boys too. Leastways I know what-all you’ve told folk and what they have to say about you. Speak good Spanish, they say, on account of you grew up in Mexico. I can see I was told true about your proper manners.”

In fluent Spanish with only a trace of accent, he said, But I don’t believe there are many people who know that at least one of you might—I emphasize might—be able to throw a machete through a man some twenty feet off. It’s something I heard tell, but it’s mighty hard to believe. His smile and manner did not alter. To anyone glancing their way he could have been relating an amusing anecdote.

The twins wondered whether he had talked to Anselmo, or to Evaristo after he’d talked to Anselmo.

Well sir, Blake said, I don’t fault you for finding it hard to believe. Because if such a thing actually happened, it would probably have been more like ten feet.

If such a thing actually happened, James Sebastian said.

“I see,” Wells said. “Well, let me just say that if such a thing actually happened, even at ten feet, I’d be mighty doggone impressed.” As they would soon come to realize, Jim Wells almost never used profanity in either language—and, like themselves, he could shift from folksy vernacular to formal diction whenever it suited him. He again reverted to Spanish. Of course, if anybody wanted to try to prove such a thing actually happened, first thing he’d have to do is produce a body, or at least a witness more reliable than, oh, the employee of a smuggler, say. But I would bet that if such a thing actually did happen, the body would probably already be somewhere beyond all possibility of recovery.

That would be my bet too, James said. He and Blake smiled back at him. He was as genial as they’d heard. He piqued their curiosity.

“Look here, boys, I hope you’ll pardon my bluntness, but there’s something I have to know and I want you to tell me true. You on the run from the law? I mean real law, American law.” They would have smiled to learn that his curiosity had already prompted him to make telegraphic inquiries of sheriffs’ offices all over the state, seeking to know if they had warrants on either James S or Blake C Wolfe.

“No sir, we aint,” James said.

Wells nodded. “Good, good. Well now, let me just say, I never take long to make up my mind about somebody, and I have a feeling that neither do yall. I’d like us to speak frankly, so what say we quit being coy about that riverside business and let’s agree that whatever gets said between us stays between us. You have my word on it. I got yours?”

Again the twins swapped a quick look. Then Blake Cortez said, You do, sir. Despite the man’s casual fostering of trust, they had read his eyes and knew he was not one to ever tell anybody anything incriminating, not