Country of the Bad Wolfes

They would never lack for dinnertable tales about the cove. They would tell of storms that rose out of the sea faster and blacker and with stronger rain than any they had ever known at the compound. Rain that struck the house like stones and sometimes left the beach and even the verandah littered with fish. Would tell of a black jaguar that every day for more than a week had shown up at the edge of the jungle and there sat and studied the house for a time before baring its fangs in a gigantic pink yawn—it did that every time—and then padding back into the bush in no hurry at all. Then one day it did not show up and they had not seen it again, which of course did not mean that it had not seen them many times since. They would tell of a gargantuan sawfish that found its way into the cove and spent an entire day and night circling within it. It was near to seventeen feet long and terrified the other fish, which again and again broke from the water in fleeing silvery schools by day and fiery ones by night until the monster finally swam back out to the open sea.

And always, in a custom established on their first visit, they would bid their father goodnight after dinner and accompany Vicki upstairs to their nephews’ room for a quick session of the bucking-horse game. And after saying goodnight to them and Vicki too, they would go down to the kitchen, where Josefina and Marina would be awaiting them with fresh coffee and pastries in case they weren’t full from dinner. They would all four sit at the table and the women would regale them with the latest hacienda gossip and the twins would in turn tell them mostly the same things they had related at the dinner table.

Then came a visit when they confided their business enterprises to Josefina and Marina and told of their monthly trips to Veracruz. Josefina said she had known they had to be doing something besides lazing on the beach. She loved hearing about Veracruz, where she had lived for so many years, and Marina, who had spent her whole life on Buenaventura, could not imagine some of the city sights the twins described.

But they would not tell their father about their business. They thought it better to keep him uninformed than to risk some objection from him that might jeopardize their residency at the cove. Nor would they tell him of having renamed the sloop, not wanting him to misconstrue the change as disrespectful to their mother. But the Lizzie had been his boat and they felt that it could not truly be theirs unless it had a name bestowed by them. The little sailboat they had plied on the river when they were twelve had been the Marina, and so the sloop became the Marina Dos.

Finally, at the end of every evening of the twins’ every visit, after Josefina said goodnight and retired to her room, the twins would go with Marina to hers, and just as soon as they closed the door they would all three race each other in getting out of their clothes.

When they arrived for their visit at the end of November and learned they had a cousin from Mexico City now living at the hacienda, Bruno Tomas had already been there two weeks. He looked to them about the same age as John Samuel, but unlike their older brother he bore resemblance to their father and hence to themselves. John Samuel wasn’t present. He had already made Bruno’s acquaintance and heard John Roger’s account of the fortuitous discovery of his brother’s family in Mexico City. Elizabeth Anne had told John Samuel in boyhood about his Uncle Sammy who’d been lost at sea and in whose honor he was middle-named, but he had not since given his uncle a thought. He listened to his father’s tale with a polite avidity but was not really interested in a man he’d never met and who’d been dead ten years.

In conversing with Bruno, however, John Samuel was impressed with his cousin’s knowledge of horses. And just as John Roger had predicted, when Bruno said he’d like to work at the horse ranch, John Samuel said it so happened the ranch was in need of a foreman and gave him the job.

In introducing Bruno to the twins, John Roger presented him first, then said, “And these two are Blake and James,” gesturing at them without indicating which was which. Bruno had been gawking at them from the moment they’d arrived at John Roger’s office. Christ, he said, how does anybody tell you guys apart? He turned to John Roger. “How do you do it?”

“It’s not easy,” John Roger said. “Sometimes I have a hard time.” He smiled but the twins saw the embarrassment rising in his eyes. They had always known he didn’t know one of them from the other but this was the nearest he had ever come to being forced to admit it—in their presence, anyhow.

“Sometimes you can’t tell them apart?” Bruno said. “I don’t believe you, tio. Come on, tell me how you do it.”

“Don’t tell him, Father,” James Sebastian said. He smiled and put his hand out to Bruno and said, “Yo soy Blake. Mucho gusto, primo. But listen, if you want to know how to tell us apart you have to figure it out for yourself. That’s a rule of the house. Father’s not allowed to help you.”

Bruno laughed. Oh, that’s a rule, is it?

“That’s it,” Blake Cortez said, offering his hand. “I’m James.”

John Roger suspected they were probably lying about who was who, as they liked to do for fun. But they had deliberately extricated him from an awkward moment—and done so in a way to prevent its recurrence—and he smiled his gratitude at them. Then told them of his brother whom he’d thought dead at seventeen, and yet again related his account of chancing on Sammy’s family by means of a hornpipe tune he and his brother had composed as boys. Told them of their Aunt Maria and cousin Sofi who lived in Mexico City and their cousin Gloria, who lived near San Luis Potosi.

The twins said it was some story, all right, and that they looked forward to meeting their Mexico City kin some day. They said all the things they intuited they were expected to say and again welcomed Bruno to Buenaventura, then excused themselves to go clean up before dinner.

On the way downstairs they agreed in low voices that the addition of Cousin Bruno to the family could in no way affect their life at the cove and hence he was no cause for concern. Then they were in the kitchen and the embraces of Josefina and Marina.

As for Bruno Tomas, he was determined to fit in at Buenaventura, to accept its ways without qualm or question. When John Roger told him on the train trip from the capital that the twins lived by themselves at the hacienda’s seaside and made a two-day visit to the casa grande every month, Bruno had thought it odd but could not think of even how to ask why that was so. But from the first few minutes of his first dinner with the twins he was quite aware of the mutual snubbing between them and John Samuel. He had hoped John Samuel might sometime volunteer to clarify the situation for him but he did not, and Bruno had a feeling it would be best not to broach the subject with him. Nor with the twins, whom he would see but infrequently and who, he’d known from the moment he met them, were not ones to explain themselves. And because Uncle John and Victoria Clara seemed oblivious to the way his sons ignored each other, Bruno would not ask either of them about it either. A strange bunch, these Wolfes. If not exactly secretive toward each other, for damned sure not much inclined to forthrightness. It had not escaped his notice that Uncle John did not tell his sons that the family Gloria married into was close to President Diaz. Or of his discovery that his brother had been a San Patricio. Did he wish to spare them shame in their turncoat uncle? Did he expect him, Bruno, to keep it secret as well? It would be simple enough to do, as neither John Samuel nor the twins seemed very curious about their Blanco brethren. He wondered if their lack of interest was a matter of station, the Wolfes being hacendados, the Blancos cafe keepers. Well, what matter? If this was how it was with them, fine by him. He did not have to understand anything except horses to be content here. He would do as his uncle and cousin Vicki did and speak only of what they spoke of and ignore the antagonism between the brothers. And would refrain from mention of his own family unless directly asked about them, a prospect of little likelihood.

He would, however, write periodic letters to Sofi and his mother and tell about life at Buenaventura among these odd blood kin. In their return letters to him they would rarely ask about John Samuel but always remark on the twins and ask to hear more about them.

They were as skilled at taking crocodile hides as at everything else they undertook. They had determined a procedure that proved effective on their first try, and so held to it every time after. They started out at dawn, poling the raft against a current that was much stronger than it had seemed when it had so gently carried them downstream from the falls. They poled hard around the first meanders and around the last of the mangroves and then came the first beaches and then the first few crocodiles. And still they poled on. And then poled past the first large bunch of them and around the next meander and past the next bunch too. They kept poling until late in the afternoon, when they arrived at a point within a mile of the falls and there they moored to a tree. They supped on jerky and spent the night on the raft. After breakfast the next morning, they began drifting downriver on the current,