might push away this entire circumstance or at the least fend the bullet and he has no idea what he is about to say and then is on the ground and breathless, the report of the pistolshot still in his ears. A numbness in his chest. He manages to get to one knee, regaining his breath in gasps, and feels a great inflating pain under his ribs. Dark blotches of blood forming in the dust below him, his hat on the ground. He leans back on a haunch, hand to his hot wound and sees her aiming even as she comes toward him. The next bullet smashes his shoulder and swats him half-about and onto his side.
She stands over him and says, “Mirame.” He looks up and sees the small smile above the gun. Does he see the bullet emerge from the bore in the infinitesimal instant before it stains the ground under his head with the ruby ruin of his brain? She shoots him in the face three times more, until the hammer falls on an empty shell. Then drops the gun and looks about. Then in swift sure strides makes for a well at the end of the street and without hesitation goes into it headfirst.
At the corner of the nearest building, Catalina Luisiana Little, eight years old and given to roaming the compound in the early gray hours, witness to the whole thing, hears the deep resonant splash.
By the time Zack Jack and John Louis have been summoned from the ranch, Gloria has been hooked out of the well and taken to the casa grande. Don Louis there too. The two bodies washed and covered with sheets to their chins. On adjacent tables in a room aglow with the amber light of scores of arrayed candles. Ancient women of dark fissured faces and dressed all in black are seated against the walls and loud in their ritual lamentations. Zack Jack and John Louis stand there for a time, looking on their elder brother. His face with four black holes. He whom they called Uncle Louis and who had taught them so many things in their boyhood. And who, as Gloria once told her sister, was more of a father to them than Edward Little had ever been. They regard too their sister-in-law who was Aunt Gloria and the only mother they’d known. Like everyone else of the hacienda except for their father, the brothers knew of Louis Welch’s infidelities and that Aunt Gloria was pained by them. The outcome is no shock.
They send telegraphic notice to their father at Chapultepec but he is at his work somewhere else when the wire arrives and three days will pass before he reads it. By then his eldest son is buried. He tells Porfirio, who weeps. That evening they go to Las Lagrimas de Nuestras Madres but do not dance, only drink to the memory of Louis Welch Little and recount tales of him, begat fifty-eight years ago in Louisiana of a sixteen-year-old girl named Sharon.
The Little brothers also inform Bruno Tomas at Buenaventura, and Sofia Reina and Maria Palomina in Mexico City, none of whom have seen Gloria since the day of her precipitate marriage to Louis Welch Little thirty-six years before, nor ever met her husband. Bruno mourns for the sister with whom he had at last become familiar through their affectionate correspondence. Sofi and Maria Palomina are grieved to the bone. And yet, at the same time, Gloria having for years confided to Sofi—and thereby to Maria Palomina—the infidelities of Louis Welch, they cannot help but feel a guilty pleasure in her remedy of those injuries. From the day they met, Maria Palomina says, that gringo should have known that she was not a woman to mistreat. Well, Sofi says, he at least should have known it by the time they got married. And they laugh louder than they cried.
BRANCHINGS
For more than a decade the twins would smuggle only liquor and conduct transactions with no one but the Goya brothers in Matamoros and their regular suppliers and buyers in Corpus Christi. Contrary to their expectations, the river trade never slackened for more than a few weeks at a time, and there was never a period of as long as two months that it did not turn a profit. Together with their income from the intermittent cattle sales in Mexico and the sums in the occasional envelopes left at the door, it gave them more than enough money to buy the properties they wanted as they became available, no mortgages necessary.
They of course began their acquisitions with those parcels that already had clear title. Most of those were in the wilder country, eastward of Tierra Wolfe, and the owners were so glad to be rid of the worthless grounds that the twins were able to buy them at a bargain. Came a summer day in 1905 when they bought a tract that ran northward from the river mouth up to Boca Chica Pass and then along the east coast of South Bay up to Nameless Creek. The property was mostly a mix of marsh and scrubland, but its stretch of beach between the river and the pass was broad and dense with dunes along the higher ground, and the sea wind was a bracing contrast to the stifling humidity of Brownsville. Scattered about the riverside just off the beach were the weather-eaten foundations of former structures, the remains of a one-time boomtown port called Clarksville. According to Ben Watson it had been the wildest place on the border with the possible exception of Bagdad, a Mexican port directly across the river. Both towns had teemed with smugglers, bootleggers, fugitives, runagates, outlaws of every stripe, and so of course attracted gamblers and whores as well—and both had long since been obliterated by economic turns of fortune and a series of hurricanes. Marina and Remedios and the kids were agog when the twins showed them where the house would stand with its grand view of the gulf and the enormous gulf sky.
On each visit home during the next two months the twins spent time with a Brownsville architect, discussing with him exactly the sort of house they wanted. A two-story on twelve-foot pilings and large enough for both families, with roofed upper and lower porches in front and an unroofed lower porch in back. When the architect’s plan at last met with their approval they went to the best builder in Brownsville and hired him to construct the house. Their plan was to live there in the summers while the kids were out of school and then move back into town during the school year and come to the beach house on weekends. While the house was being built, they hired another crew to excavate a horseshoe cove into the bank about fifty yards upstream from the river mouth and there built a dock large enough for several small boats.
They named the place Playa Blanca and moved into the house in the early summer of ‘06. The eldest child, Morgan James, was almost thirteen, and the youngest, Vicki Angel, had just turned ten. The youngsters all took to the sea like dolphins. Just beyond the small whitecaps, the water was a placid undulation, shallow and clear pale green all the way out to the sand bars. Any shark that crossed the bar could be seen while it was still a long way out. Marina had taught the children and Remedios Marisol how to swim in a resaca, but swimming in the gulf was far more fun, though it was a vexation to the boys that Vicki Angel was the fastest of them. When the twins said they weren’t sure Vicki should be swimming naked with the boys, their wives laughed and hooted at them and called them evil-minded Yankee hypocrites, and the twins sheepishly retreated and said no more about it.
But then one day when the twins and Remedios were running errands in town, Marina went out on the porch and saw the children about fifty yards down the beach, standing in a group in water to their thighs, and she looked through the powerful telescope mounted on the porch rail and saw that the boys were exposing erections to Vicki, who sat in the water to her shoulders and looked both amused and uncertain. As Marina stalked down the beach toward them, the boys saw her coming and lowered themselves in the water, then came out at her beckon with not an erection in evidence. She told them there would be no more naked swimming when Vicki was with them and that if any of them ever did that again to her or any other girl, she, Marina, would tie their thing in a knot they’d never be able to undo.
She did not tell the twins about the incident but later asked Vicki if they had done that before, and the girl said no. Marina suspected she wasn’t being truthful but did not question her further, not wanting to force her to lie. She knew that although Vicki would not let them boss her about, she loved them dearly and would never betray them.
In truth, the boys had displayed erections to Vicki a few other times, making a game of it they called Look at This. They almost always dared her to touch them, and she once did, a quick two-finger feel of Cesar Augusto’s, which was the smallest and least daunting. She had affected to be repulsed but was secretly fascinated. Still, there was something in their eyes when they played Look at This that scared her, and she had not touched one again.
The twins bought a twenty-two foot sloop and named it
