Country of the Bad Wolfes

coat.

Evaristo saw the move and reached for his own gun but before his hand could close on it the hung coat flung up in the shotgun’s blast and the charge hit him high in the chest and batted him from the saddle. His horse was hit too and shrieked as it bolted. El Loco was raising his revolver when Blake Cortez shot him above the eye and his hat jumped as he slung rearward, stirrups flinging, and landed facedown in an attitude of listening to some secret of the earth. Now Evaristo was raising himself on an elbow, red holes in one cheek and chest blood-sopped, again reaching for his gun. James reined his mount steady with one hand and with the other pointed the shotgun like an outsized pistol and with the second barrel of buckshot removed much of the man’s head. At almost the same instant, Blake shot El Loco again, to be certain.

They calmed their horses and studied the road in both directions and saw that it lay empty to the horizons. They collected the men’s guns and took the money from their pockets and then rounded up their horses and were glad to see that the wounds on Evaristo’s mount were not so serious they would have to kill it. They draped the bodies over the horses and put the animals on a lead rope and rode back to westward for a distance before turning off toward the river and then onto the trail that took them through the palms to Wolfe Landing. There they put both bodies on El Loco’s horse and took with them another rope and led the horse to the resaca.

IN THE GETTING

When the news got around that Evaristo Doria was missing, everyone who knew him was sure he was dead. Most likely in consequence of some dispute with a smuggling rival. You watch, people said, sooner or later he’ll be found in the river reeds, or what’s left of him by the fish and the turtles, unless he floated all the way out to the gulf.

For weeks after Evaristo’s disappearance a gringo in a suit would show up at his house every Saturday to give Mrs Doria an envelope containing Evaristo’s weekly salary. The man said his name was Smith and he worked for Mr Jim Wells, who had said to tell her he hoped her husband soon returned home and to please let him know if she needed anything. The whole neighborhood witnessed Mr Smith’s Saturday visits, and Mrs Doria made it known who he was. They all knew that the county did not pay anybody for not working, and so the money had to be coming from Mr Wells’s pocket, and they all said thankful prayers to God for putting them in the care of Don Santiago.

After three months went by without a word from Evaristo, Jim Wells himself called on Mrs Doria. He told her he was sorry but it was probably best to assume her husband wouldn’t be coming back. He informed her that a bank account had been opened in her name and would receive a monthly deposit sufficient for her to take care of her children until they were of age or she remarried.

“I have to say, she didn’t seem all that distressed by the idea her husband might be gone for good,” Wells told the twins. “Her only concern was the means to feed her kids, and now that’s took care of. Anyhow, she’s a right goodlookin woman, so I don’t expect her children will be without a daddy too long.”

It was a chill March evening and Wells and the twins were sitting with drinks and cigars before a low fire in his den. In the parlor, his wife Pauline and their thirteen-year-old daughter Zoe were entertaining the twins’ wives and young sons while the family cook was preparing supper. In the three months of their acquaintance, the twins and Jim Wells and their families had supped together at the Wells’ home several times, and there would be many more such evenings over the years to come. Suppers and small parties in the company of their families and occasionally with other guests as well. And there would be meetings too of just the three of them, at an hour when their families were abed, when the men would converse in muted voices and dim lamplight about topics privileged to themselves alone.

Only two weeks earlier, Wells had told the twins that his boyhood dream had been to become a man of influence and respect, and if he did say so himself he had achieved that aspiration and was proud of it. They knew he was mildly drunk—his drawl a little more pronounced—and enjoying the bourbon’s liberation of sentiments he rarely voiced. “But I’ll tell you the truth, boys,” he said. “I’d give it all up in a minute if I could just be your age again. And I mean without a nickel in my pocket. All the money on earth aint worth spit compared to bein young and havin a dream to chase after. It’s nice to arrive at it, no denyin that, but the real fun’s in the gettin there. The gettin there. I cannot say how much I envy you. I expect you fellas have some dream of your own and I surely hope you attain it.”

Blake Cortez said that, for one thing, they wanted a house by the sea.

“Well heck, that’s simple enough,” Wells said. “Just build yourself one. Around Point Isabel probly the best place. Then you’ll only have three houses—excuse me, I mean four. That your big aim? Own more and more houses?”

They had bought the lot next to the Levee Street house and were nearly finished with the house they were raising on it. Enlarged as their two families had become, and with Remedios Marisol expecting her third child in the summer, the house they shared had become much too small and they decided that each family would have its own, side by side.

The seaside house wasn’t their big dream, they told Wells, but in thinking about a beach house they had come to understand what they really wanted. Instead of acquiring a separate gulfside property, the thing to do was to extend Tierra Wolfe to the gulfside.

“You mean to buy up all the land in between?”

“Yessir,” James said. “The coast aint but about eight miles from our eastmost line as the crow flies.”

“Make it sound like a stone toss,” Wells said. “How far up you thinkin to go?”

“Nameless Creek. We figure it’d be best to keep the same north boundary.”

Wells smiled from one of them to the other. “That’s a smart of property, boys.”

“A hankering for a little more land aint anything needs explaining to a cattleman,” Blake said.

“Well, you’re right about that, though I know dang well you aint about to raise cows out there. Fact is, a hankerin for more land don’t need explainin to nobody. Some men know what they want it for before they get it and some don’t know till after and some just want it to have it.”

“That’s right,” Blake said. “And like a fella once said, it’s the getting that’s the fun.”

Wells grinned. “Well, that aint exactly what the fella said but it’s close enough. Tell me true, boys, you got a reason for wantin all that ground?”

“Well sir,” James said, “I guess we’d just like to keep the world from crowding us too close.”

Wells nodded. “Good reason as any.” They could see he knew it wasn’t the only reason or even the main one. But he’d come to know them well enough to understand they never explained anything to anyone until they were ready to, if ever they should be.

The cost of all that land would of course be great, and they had been forced into debt in order to buy the second Levee Street lot and the building materials. But their financial circumstance had very much brightened since they had taken up the smuggling trade. They’d gone to Matamoros with Anselmo and had him introduce them to the Goya brothers with whom Evaristo had done most of his business. The Goyas expressed no surprise that Evaristo was gone and did not ask to know the circumstances but were pleased to learn the twins would continue his trade at the Horseshoe. Two weeks later the Wolfes made their first transaction, receiving a wagonload of tequila at the Horseshoe and paying the Goyas for it with money they’d received for the Marina Dos. It had made them heartsick to sell the sloop but there would be other boats. Anselmo suggested a buyer he knew in Harlingen, thirty miles north. The proceeds exceeded what they’d received for the boat and, even minus Anselmo’s share, were sufficient to let them pay off part of their debt and provide their wives with household money for the next several months.

They were confident they would succeed at the “river trade”—Jim Wells’s preferred term for smuggling— though they knew it was a volatile business and could not be counted on for steady revenue. Their plan was to use most of the money from each smuggling deal to buy some of the land they wanted, even if they had to mortgage the more expensive parcels. They had spoken with Ben Watson at the White Star Company and he had been able to ascertain the titleholders to some of the land to either side of theirs, but legal ownership of other parcels was