by James Blake
The disregard between his older and younger sons had become so familiar to John Roger, and to Vicki Clara too, that it hardly bore the notice of either of them anymore. Still, John Roger had hoped that when the twins grew to adolescence and the difference in age between them and John Samuel mattered less, they might all begin to appreciate the fact of their brotherhood and accord each other some degree of respect. But it hadn’t turned out that way, and it saddened him that their mutual dislike was more pointed than ever. He had several times in recent years thought to ask John Samuel directly why he and the twins could not get along. But he had each time held back, telling himself it was not the right moment to bring up the subject. And then one day he knew it was too late to discuss it at all. Knew that whatever the reason for the rancor between his sons it was past all possibility of being reconciled or even rationally explained.
John Samuel finished eating before everyone else and forwent dessert and coffee, excusing himself to his wife and father, saying he had work to do. After he’d gone, Vicki Clara asked the twins if they would like to go upstairs with her after dinner and see the boys, who as always had taken supper with the maids. You won’t believe how much they’ve grown since you saw them last, she said.
The twins had never indicated more than passing interest in their young nephews, and John Roger assumed they were only being polite to Vicki when they followed her upstairs. But later that evening, when she joined John Roger in the library, Vicki reported that the twins had greeted their nephews, five-year-old Juanito Sotero and soon-to-be-four Roger Samuel, with man-to-man handshakes, and not two minutes later were on all fours and letting the boys ride them like rodeo broncos, neighing and snorting and tossing their heads while the boys clutched tight to their uncles’ shirt collars with one hand and used their free arm to keep their balance, waving it about and as they had seen the bronc-breakers at the horse ranch do, whooping like them. When Roger Samuel lost his grip and tumbled off his uncle and knocked his head hard on the floor, Vicki jumped up from her chair in alarm but Rogerito quickly got up, laughing and rubbing his head, and said, “Don’t come in the corral, Mother, you might get kicked by that mean mustang.” He remounted his uncle’s back and got a firm grip on his collar and dug his heels into his ribs and ya-hooed as the uncle resumed bucking.
John Roger said it was hard for him to imagine the twins playing with children. Vicki laughed and said, I know, Papá Juan, but I saw it with my own eyes.
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 Tomás 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, tío. 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 Cortéz 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 María and cousin Sófi who lived in Mexico City and their cousin Gloria, who lived near San Luis Potosí.
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 Tomás, 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 Díaz. 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 café 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 Sófi 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, scanning both banks as they went. The first crocodile they saw that was at least twelve feet long and not too close to any others was the one they started with.
They tied up to the nearest bankside tree that afforded a clear shot from the raft. Sometimes they were able to tie up so close to their target they could have hit it with a flung brick and it was no problem for one or the other of them to shoot it squarely in the vital spot directly back of the eye and destroy the creature’s meager brain. But sometimes the nearest tree that offered a shot at the croc was at some distance and then it was a test of marksmanship to hit that vital spot no bigger than a silver dollar. It was a harder shot still whenever the crocodile lay facing the raft so that they could not see the spot back of the eye and instead had to shoot the creature through the eye itself. For these more challenging shots, one of the twins would stuff his ears with little wads of cloth and lean forward with his hands on his knees so his brother could use his shoulder to steady the rifle.
It was imperative to kill the croc instantly. If it were only wounded, it could go into the river in a bloody thrashing that would clear both banks of other crocodiles to come feed on it. The ensuing tumult—in which some of them even tore into each other—ended all chance of taking a hide from that part of the river the rest of that day, and they would have to drift farther down. But if the croc were killed cleanly with a single shot, the others on the banks might stir at the rifle report and a few might slide into the river and vanish, but most would stay as they were, still as paintings. The twins then went ashore with their sack of gear to skin the kill, first severing the croc’s spine with a hatchet chop just behind the head to ensure it was dead. They had read of croc hunters who thought their prey was dead and had begun to skin it when the creature suddenly revived in a murderous rage.
From the larger crocs they took only the belly hide—the flat, as it was called in the trade—which was not only easier to remove than the hornback, or top hide, but also fetched a better price, being softer and easier to fashion into boots and holsters and belts and hatbands, however the skin might end up. Only a small croc had hornback supple enough to be worth as much as a flat and hence warrant the taking. They would alternate between killing three large crocodiles for the belly hides and then a small one for the whole skin. In either instance, after they removed the hide they fleshed it on the spot, scraping as much meat and fat off it as they could, then rolled it and put it in one of the tubs of brine they had affixed to the raft deck. The skinned crocs were left on the bank for its fellows to gorge on. Then they drifted around the next bend to where the crocs were still placid and there they tied up again and repeated the process.
They would be on the river for five or six days before reaching the last of the downstream beaches where they would take the last hides of the trip. Then came the stretch of mangroves and then they were back in the cove, tired, crusted with gore, singing, though they yet had to give the hides another scraping and salt them and hang them up to dry. Only then would they rest.
Sometimes it rained for most of a hunting trip and they did their killing and skinning in a dripping, green-gray gloom. If it was raining when they got back to the cove, there could be days of waiting for it to pass. But once the clouds broke, the sun made short work of drying the skins. The twins then stacked them in bundles and lashed them with cord and loaded them in the hold of the Marina Dos. And set sail for Veracruz.
LOS CUATES BLANCOS
At the time they took their first hides to Veracruz the town had but a single tannery. It stood on the far side of the harbor, on a slight rise back in the woods and out of view of the city, in a clearing next to a creek that carried the tannery detritus to the bay. It was owned and operated by the Carrasco brothers, of whom there were four, the oldest and head of the family being Moisés, a large man of around forty-five. They were a clannish lot with no friends or family except each other, and with a few employees who lived in a bunkhouse behind the tannery. They rarely went into town except for supplies and an occasional night of roistering. Now and again one of their bar fights ended with somebody dead on the floor but their standard claim of self-defense had never been refuted by any witness. They had long been a womanless bunch. Only two of the brothers, Genaro and Chuy, had ever married, but in her fourth month of pregnancy Genaro’s wife had hanged herself, and barely six months later and five days after their wedding, Chuy’s wife had run away.
When the Carrascos arrived in Veracruz, there had been two tanneries in town, one larger than the other. The Carrascos persuaded the owner of the larger one to sell it to them, and the seller and his family then packed up their possessions and left town without a parting word to anyone.
A week later the smaller tannery somehow caught on fire late one night and its owner and his wife and his only son all perished in the flames. In the thirty years since, the Carrascos had held a monopoly of the Veracruz hide trade. For the past two years, there had been a rumor of a tannery in the Chinese quarter, but even if true it meant nothing to the Carrascos, as the Chinese were a world unto themselves and no one would anyway do business with a Chinaman except another Chinaman.
The only challenge to the Carrasco monopoly had occurred seven years prior to the twins’ arrival with their first load of skins. Franco Carrasco, the brothers’ father, was still alive then, though already shitting blood from the cancer that was eating his guts and would kill him the following year. The competition was a family of tanners named Montemayor, newly landed from Cuba. They bought a property further inland than the Carrascos’s but on the same creek. The construction of their tannery was near completion when the Montemayor patriarch called on Franco Carrasco to introduce himself and say that he was sure the local hide trade could support two tanneries. Besides, Mr Montemayor said, everyone knew that a little competition always inspired a business to its best effort, didn’t he agree? Old Franco said he certainly did. And the two men shook hands and wished each other well. Because Old Franco smiled throughout their conversation, Mr Montemayor took him for an amiable man, not knowing a Cuban accent was ever a dependable amusement to a Mexican.
Late one night, just two days before it was scheduled to begin operation, the Montemayor tannery went up in flames—and with it the family residence and the workers’ quarters and the stable. The blaze was soon visible from the malecón, and everyone knew it was one of the tanneries, but as far removed as it was, there was no help for it. At sunrise all that was left of the place were smoking ruins and the charred bones of the entire family—five men and two women, three young girls and an infant boy—and of three employees and two mules. The family’s horses were gone.