How do you think? He got bit by a dog.
No, I mean
Christ, Mister, what is this? What—?
Please.
The barman sighed. Well, I didn’t see it myself. I was in the army then. But the way Mother and my sister told me—the way Father told it to them—he was taking a walk and saw this little kid being threatened by a dog. A little kid scared really bad. There was nobody else around except a bunch of boys watching from across the street. Probably hoping to see the kid get all torn up—you know, for the entertainment, how kids are. So Father grabbed up the boy, but the dog bit him, bit Father I mean. Bit him on the leg and ran off. When he told Mother about it she got worried right away the dog might be rabid but Father told her he didn’t think so, it didn’t act like any rabid dog he’d ever seen, only like a mean one. He said he wouldn’t have taken any chances with a mad dog, kid or no kid. Mother asked around the neighborhood if there had been any report of a mad dog, but nobody had heard anything. So anyhow, about three weeks later, Father started getting really sick in a way that everybody knew what it was. If you know about rabies I don’t have to tell you what it was like after that. I saw a guy in the army die of it and I never want to see it again. The way Mother told it, it was the same way for Father. They had to get some of the neighborhood men to wrestle him onto the bed and tie him down and put a stick between his teeth and be damned careful not to let him bite them and so on, the whole awful business. Sofi—my little sister—she said he bucked so hard he nearly turned the bed over. He had horrible hallucinations. Pissed himself, shit himself, the whole neighborhood heard him screaming. They begged Mother to put him out of his agony. Stab him in the heart with an ice pick, they told her, for the love of God. Poison him, something. Sofi said Mother thought about it. It nearly made her crazy to see him like he was, but she just couldn’t do it. Anyway, he finally died. Jesus, I hate thinking about it. I should have told you to go to hell.
John Roger had seen the kind of terror inspired by a mad dog. Had twice seen rabid dogs shot in the streets of Veracruz to the great relief of everyone in the neighborhoods. He had never seen a rabies death but had heard the dreadful stories. He ran his hand over his face and was unaware of knocking off his hat.
Hey mister, you all right? The barman poured a drink and placed it in front of him and said, “Tragalo.”
He took a sip of the tequila, then drank the rest in a gulp.
“So you knew my father, you say. Were you were his friend or. . .?”
John Roger nodded. Then realized the barman had spoken in English. Accented but precise. “Yes,” he said. “I knew him well. A long time ago.”
The barman’s gaze narrowed. “He did not have many friends, I can tell you that. He never went further than three blocks from here and that’s no lie, not once in my whole life. Where do you know him from?”
“I’m his brother.”
They held each other’s eyes. The barman said “De veras?”
“De veras. We had just graduated from school the last time I saw him. In New Hampshire. That’s up—”
“I know where it is.”
“I never—” He paused to clear his throat.
“I never knew what happened to him. I thought he was dead.”
“Since you were just out of high school you thought he was dead?”
“Yes.”
“Hombre! That was
“Nearly forty.”
“Jesucristo! Was he older or younger than you?”
John Roger hesitated, then said, “Older. He never told you he had a brother?”
“He told Mother he was an only child. He said his parents were dead.” He narrowed his eyes. “I don’t get it. Why would he lie about a brother?”
“I don’t know. Why would I?”
The barman nodded. “Yes. Why would you? And Father, well . . . he had secrets, we all knew that.”
“Now you know one of them.”
“There are more of you? Brothers? Sisters?”
“Just me.”
“Jesus. His brother.”
“Yes.”
“How did you find out where he was? I mean, after so long?”
“I heard the tune. I was passing by and I heard the hornpipe. Sammy and I— your father and I—we made it up, that music you were playing. In New Hampshire when we were boys.”
“You mean you . . . the reason you came in here is you were walking by and heard me playing the little pipe?”
John Roger nodded.
“If you had not heard it you would have passed by?”
“Yes.”
“That is . . . that is just. . . .”
“Yes.”
“We were so near to each other and we would never have known it.”
John Roger nodded.
The barman stared. “So then you are my uncle.”
John Roger managed a meager smile. “I suppose I am.”
“Pues, como se llama, tio? Por supuesto su apellido es Wolfe.”
“Si, soy John Wolfe. Y usted?”
“Bruno. Bruno Tomas Blanco y Blanco. Muchisimo gusto, tio.”
They shook hands across the bar with an awkward formality and then stood staring at each other a moment longer before Bruno came around from behind the counter to embrace him. They hugged hard and pounded each other on the back, John Roger tearful, his nephew grinning.
Bruno Tomas became aware of the solitary patron watching them. He told the man to get the hell out and then locked the door behind him and turned the little “Cerrado” sign in the door window. He poured another drink for each of them.
Bruno Tomas was eager to know what John Roger was doing in Mexico and where he was living. And was stunned to learn he had been in Mexico for thirty years. Which meant he and his brother had both been alive in Mexico for about twenty years without knowing of each other’s presence in the country. Bruno was stunned all the more that this was the first time John Roger been outside the state of Veracruz. It was a long story, John Roger said, one for later on, but he allowed that he’d been the Mexico agent for an American import company for a few years before an unexpected turn of fortune gained him the coffee hacienda where he now lived.
“Una hacienda!” Bruno Tomas said. “Jesucristo, tio! Pero que fortuna.”
John Roger was puzzled by his nephew’s surname, and Bruno Tomas told him the story he and his sisters had been told by their mother, the story of the brutal mistreatment by the American army that led his father and his friends to desert, of the cruelty they suffered after they were captured, of the hatred it had made him feel for his own country and the consequences of that hatred, including the change of his name from Wolfe.
John Roger had never before heard of the Saint Patricks, and he once again wept when Bruno told him of the punishments inflicted on his brother and the other captured ones who were not hanged. He now understood why Bruno Tomas could never have recognized him as Samuel Thomas’s twin. The only face his brother’s family had ever known was the one left to him by the war.
They had another drink, sipping and talking, shifting between English and Spanish, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. Bruno Tomas said his fluency in English had come naturally to him. When they were kids, he and his older sister Gloria had found an English grammar in a bookstore and taught themselves the basics from it. Whenever they heard Americans or Britons conversing on the street, they would eavesdrop. They sometimes bought an English-language newspaper from a zocalo kiosk and read to each other from it. Their younger sister Sofi could probably have learned the language as easily but, like their mother, she did not want to. It was a funny thing, but neither he nor his sisters ever heard their father speak English, not even once. Their mother had told them not to ask for his help in learning it, because he had renounced the language together with everything else American.
