change with profound suddenness. Hence their practiced arts.
BRUNO AND FELICIA
In June Sofia Reina received a letter from Gloria telling of Luis Charon’s enlistment in the army on his seventeenth birthday. My God! Gloria wrote. One day they’re eight years old and playing at being soldiers with stick rifles and the next they’re big enough to join a real army! Where do the years
Luis’s true ambition was the Guardia Rural, but he would not do other than as his Grandfather Edward advised, which to serve two years in the army—the first year as a private in an infantry company to acquire understanding of life in the ranks, the second as an officer, to learn leadership—before transferring to the Rurales.
Came the dog days. August marked nine months since John Roger’s only trip to Mexico City and Bruno Tomas’s move to Buenaventura. They had both maintained a correspondence with Maria Palomina and Sofia Reina, and in his most recent letter John Roger had again apologized to them for not having made a return visit. That the Blanco women had failed to keep their own promise to visit Buenaventura was understandable in view of the handicap that had befallen Maria Palomina. She had been demonstrating a lively dance step to Sofi and Amos one evening when a loose tile gave way under her foot and she fractured the ankle. At first she insisted it wasn’t broken, just badly sprained, and there was no need for a doctor. She bound it herself and hobbled about for more than a week until the foot was so darkly swollen that the pain of it pounded with every heartbeat. By which time surgery was necessary. The doctor told her that had she waited another day she would certainly have lost the foot. As it was, even after a lengthy recuperation, she could not walk, or even stand, on the foot for very long before the pain became unbearable, and she cursed the incompetency of the medical profession. She wanted to make a trip to Buenaventura anyway, but Sofi would not agree to it, not until her mother could walk with her cane at least one block without limp or grimace. Unable to pass that test after many efforts, Maria Palomina had to accept that the foot would never get better and she would not be making a long trip anywhere.
John Roger had been unable to return to the capital because of Buenaventura’s demands on his time. The coffee farm had produced yet another record yield, requiring still more bookkeeping and more correspondence, and more meetings than ever with buyers. And as with Maria Palomina, a broken bone figured in his circumstance, though it was not his bone but that of his venerable mayordomo. Now sixty years old, Reynaldo had some months before fractured a leg in a fall from a horse, and the next seven weeks had been the busiest of John Roger’s life on the hacienda as he attended to the mayordomo’s duties as well as his own. He might have been overwhelmed but for John Samuel’s help—and that of Bruno Tomas. Since appointing Bruno foreman of the horse ranch, John Samuel had devoted most of his time to assisting John Roger with Buenaventura business.
Nevertheless, John Roger wrote, ten months without making a visit to his Mexico City kin was unforgivable, and he promised Maria Palomina that he and Bruno would go for a visit in October for sure. In closing, he said Bruno had something interesting to tell her and Sofi in his own accompanying letter. And he thus left it to Bruno to break the news of his imminent marriage, which was so soon to take place it would be an accomplished fact before the Blanco women’s letters of response arrived at the hacienda.
The girl was Felicia Flor Mendez, seventeen-year-old sister to Rogelio Mendez, who was eleven years her senior and a longtime wrangler at the hacienda. Like Rogelio, Felicia was born and raised on Buenaventura, and he had been her only immediate family since she was thirteen. She had worked in the seamstress shop until the previous October, when their uncle in Cordoba died and she went there to live with her invalid widowed aunt, who had no one else to care for her. Felicia loved Buenaventura and did not like having to be away from it, much less indefinitely, but neither was she one to shirk an obligation to family. She had been at Cordoba a month when Bruno Tomas arrived at Buenaventura—and three weeks later he had a memorable fistfight with her brother.
Bruno had known that some of the wranglers would resent him for an interloper who’d got the foreman’s job by dint of being nephew to the patron, and they did. But once they saw how well he knew horses and that he was willing to work as hard and get as sweaty and filthy as any man of them—unlike Don Juanito, whom they respected, yes, but who but rarely got his clothes dirty—they began to grant him a due respect. But Rogelio Mendez remained unimpressed and persisted in his recalcitrance. He had been a wrangler at the hacienda since age fourteen and was the best breaker of mustangs on the place, excluding perhaps the twins, who in the estimation of many had no equal in the handling of horses. Rogelio had been Don Juanito’s segundo since the inception of Rancho Isabela, and he had been confident that he would be named foreman if Don Juanito should ever give up the job. But then this cousin from Mexico City comes along, this fucking Bruno—who wasn’t even a Creole like his Wolfe kin, for Christ’s sake!—and just like that,
Bruno heard the gossip about Rogelio’s resentment and understood how he felt. But after three weeks of giving deaf ear to the man’s snide mutterings and enduring his insolent attitude in hope that he would soon enough adjust to the situation, he knew he had to do something about it or lose the other wranglers’ respect.
It happened the next day. One minute they were walking past each other just outside the main corral, and the next they were down in the dirt and punching and then up on their feet and punching harder. They fought for half an hour and not a man looking on had seen a better fistfight or one more evenly matched. Finally, wheezing like asthmatics, clothes ripped, lacerated faces smeared with blood and snot and dirt, eyes and lips and ears bloated red and purple, fists swollen, they stood teetering in front of each other. Rogelio somehow mustered the strength to swing one more time and Bruno somehow managed to sidestep without falling and the punch missed and Rogelio’s momentum carried him in a sideways stutter step for a few feet before he collapsed. He managed to sit up but could not stand.
Bruno dropped his hands to his sides. Chest heaving, knees trembling. Rogelio looked up at him and gasped, Fuck. Bruno nodded and huffed, Yeah. He hawked bloody snot and spat off to the side, then asked Rogelio if the fight was over or if he just wanted time to catch his breath.
Rogelio’s forearms rested on his upraised knees. He stared at the ground and made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “No mas. Ya me ganaste.”
Thank Christ, Bruno thought. He did not think he could have raised his hands again. Knew he could not have reformed them into fists. I hope, he said, still panting, you will continue to be the segundo.
Rogelio grunted with the effort of looking up again. All right, he said. But I still think I should be the foreman.
I know. But you’re not. I am. Oh man, I hope we don’t have to do this again.
Nah, hell. You hit too fucking hard.
Their grotesque smiles were the best their mauled mouths could muster. Bruno put a hand down to help Rogelio to his feet. They groaned at the effort and Rogelio did not make it halfway up before they both went sprawling—and they joined in the wranglers’ laughter, their bruised ribs aching.
By day’s end the news of the fight had carried to every corner of the hacienda. It had already circulated throughout the casa grande when Bruno arrived at the dining room that evening, his neat suit and tie in ludicrous contrast to his bruised and tinctured misshapen face. Vicki Clara cooed over him with solicitude, but John Samuel was angered by the whole thing. He had worked with Rogelio and thought him a fine segundo, but for the man to start a fight with the new foremen—the patron’s nephew, no less!—was a transgression that had to be punished.
Bruno said the fight had been his own doing as much as Rogelio’s, and that Rogelio
John Roger smiled and Vicki Clara shook her head in exasperation with the ways of men. John Samuel sighed and half-raised his hands and said, Very well, you’re the foreman who has to work with him.
The Cordoban aunt proved to be an interesting companion and was valiant and good-humored to her last breath, which she exhaled on an early morning in July. Though saddened by the old woman’s passing, Felicia Flor Mendez was happy to return to Buenaventura. She had been home a week when her brother invited Bruno to supper
