Country of the Bad Wolfes

to quick shoot at something more than once, well…”

“You want repeaters.”

“Winchester’s said to be dependable.”

“Winchester,” John Roger echoed.

“We understand they’re hard to come by in Mexico, but we saw in a magazine that there’s a place in New Orleans that—”

“I know a closer source,” John Roger said. “I’ll send word this afternoon and they’ll be here in a few days. I assume .44-40s would meet with your satisfaction.”

“Yessir,” one said. “Forty-four forties be just fine.” He rubbed at the edge of his eye as if to remove a speck as the other coughed lightly into his fist. John Roger almost smiled at their clumsy efforts to mask their pleasure. Whatever they had expected of this meeting it certainly wasn’t that it would go in their favor—and for damn sure not as far as Winchesters.

“Reynaldo will get you the burros you need. And if you should ever improve that trail enough, you can have a wagon. Naturally, you’d need a labor gang to cut a proper wagon road, and that can be arranged.”

“Well, sir,” one said, “we’ll probably hold off on that for a while, at least till we’ve taken care of everything else all good and proper.”

John Roger understood him to mean they would never widen the trail. He should have known that. Why would they want to make it easier for others to get down there? They wanted to be hard to reach.

“Well, it’s up to you. You’re the ones who’ll be using it. Anything else you want to ask for?”

They dropped their smiles. “We weren’t asking, sir,” one said. “Just stating the necessities.”

“I see,” he said. And thought, I’ll be damned. They come hat in hand and I give them what they want without their having to ask and then they get proud about not asking. “There’s one condition,” he said. Until that moment he had not thought to impose a condition, but they were not, by damn, going to have it all their own way.

“Condition, sir?”

“You come home every, ah, two weeks, let us say. And you stay three days.”

“But sir,” one said, “why would . . .?”

“If you want to make sure we’re getting our proper nourishment,” the other one said with a crooked smile, “well sir, we can feed ourselves.”

He looked from one to the other. “That’s the bargain, gentlemen. Feel free to turn it down.”

“No sir, no, we’re not turning it down,” one said. “It’s just that there’s a lot of work to do and if we have to leave off from it for three days every couple of weeks, well, it’ll take a whole lot longer to ever get done than if we can apply ourselves to it more, ah, consistently.”

“Why don’t we say . . . every three months?” the other said.

“Let’s say at the end of every month,” John Roger said, “and you stay two nights.”

“Suppose we say—”

“Suppose we say it’s settled.”

They read his eyes. “Yessir.”

He swept a pointing finger from one to the other. “Break the bargain and I’ll send a crew down there with dynamite to blast that house to splinters and sink that boat a mile offshore. I hope you gents believe me.”

“Yessir,” one said. The other nodded.

He consulted the calendar on the wall. “We’re already near the end of this month and you won’t be ready to set off for a week or two. No sense in making you come right back at the end of June. You don’t have to make the first visit till the end of July.”

“All right, sir,” one said.

“Well then,” he said, “you had best get to it.”

They were at the door when they turned to look at him, who was at the moment bent over a bottom drawer in search of a match to refire his cigar.

“Thank you, Father.”

He was arrested. They had never thanked him, never called him anything other than “sir.”

But when he sat up to look, they were gone.

As they went out the casa grande’s front doors, Blake said, “Any sonofabitches ever go down there and try to blow up that house—”

“Or sink that boat.”

“Be the last damn thing they ever try.”

“That’s it.”

They grinned at each other. Winchesters, by Jesus!

The first thing John Samuel wanted to know when his father arrived at his office was what “they” had wanted.

John Roger told him of their intention to fix up the cove house and the Lizzie.

“I’m glad of it, frankly,” John Roger said. “It’ll give them something constructive to do.”

“Will they be living out there from now on?”

John Roger sighed. “Most of the time, yes.”

John Samuel looked out the window and smiled.

That they had known about the cove and its house and boat before they ever went there was a truth they could not have admitted to their father without confessing to an act worse than their lie. A few months earlier, having just read about the newest models of Colt revolvers, they recalled Josefina’s description of the gun their mother had used to shoot the younger Montenegro. Josefina said it was the largest pistol she had ever seen. Shaped like a pig’s hind leg, she said, and almost that big, and their mother had held it with both hands to shoot. James Sebastian was sure it was an old Walker, and Blake Cortez said maybe, or a later Dragoon. They wondered if the gun might still be around.

The next time their father rode off to one of his all-day surveys of the coffee farm, they slipped into his bedroom and made a thorough search of it but did not find the pistol. They then went downstairs and sneaked into his office and Blake rummaged a wall cabinet while James Sebastian searched the desk.

“Not here,” Blake said.

“Hey Black, look at this,” James said. He was perusing a set of photographs he had found in the desk’s middle drawer. They were old studio pictures, most of them of their mother, some of their mother and father together, a few of which included John Samuel, who was an infant in some of them.

“How young Father was,” Blake said. “And Momma. She looks like a girl.”

“This musta been made about the same time as the one Josefina’s got.”

They were tempted to take one of the pictures of their mother but thought their father might notice it was missing when he next looked through them, and they left the pictures as they found them. The Dragoon was in the top right drawer. James Sebastian took it out and saw that it was fully charged. He held it this way and that, aimed it at the map of Mexico affixed to the opposite wall, sighting on the heart of the country, on the Yucatan, at the rooster foot that was the Baja California territory. Then passed it to his brother, saying, “Feel the heft.”

“Now this here’s a damn gun,” Blake said. He set it on half cock and with his other hand rotated the cylinder with a soft ticking. They had read much about the early Colts and if they had been obliged to load this weapon they had never set hand to before now they could have done so. Could have charged each chamber of the cylinder and seated a ball in it by means of the lever under the barrel and capped the nipple over each chamber for firing. “They say you can hammer ten-penny nails with this thing all day long and it’ll still shoot straight as a sunray.”

“Imagine what a .44 ball did to that boy’s head Momma shot,” James said. “About like a mallet would do a watermelon.”

“ Momma sure musta been something! Just imagine her shooting this thing.”

“And good as she did.”

“Like to shoot it myself, but we can’t even ask Reynaldo to ask him. They’d want to know how we know