by James Blake
Well get it, the man said.
James removed the screen cover and reached across the barrel for the cord. The shotgun muzzle pressed into his spine as he started taking the cord up hand over hand. Christ, it gets heavier every time, he said. Which was true—the sack now held nine fat money belts and a partially filled tenth. Glad to hear it, the man said.
As he got the sack to the surface James Sebastian cursed low and hunched forward against the rim of the barrel. What? the man said. Gashed my hand on the edge of this goddam thing, James said. He held the sack against the inner rim of the barrel with his left hand and with the right slid the shark knife out from between the sack and the cord wrapped around it. It was a principle of his and Blackie’s to keep a weapon wherever they kept money. Fuck your hand, the man said. Get it out here.
Holding the knife close against his chest as he would an injured hand, James grunted and raised the heavy dripping sack out of the barrel with his left hand. As he turned toward the man he felt the shotgun muzzle slide off his back. Take it, quick, James said, it’s slipping.
As the man’s hand closed on the sack, James brought the knife up as quick as a punch and skewered his neck and grabbed his shirtfront to support the instant dead weight of him—the hilt wedged under the jaw and the blade angling out the back of the skull, the brain stem severed so he could not have pulled the trigger even in reflex.
He had feared the shotgun would discharge when it hit the ground but it didn’t. The blood was hot on his knife hand. He yanked out the blade and let the man drop. He rinsed his hands and the knife in the water barrel and slipped the knife into his belt and picked up the shotgun and opened the breech to ensure both chambers were loaded and then snapped the breech shut again. He took up the money sack and went to the kitchen porch and set the sack under the steps. He recocked both hammers and went up to the door and eased into the kitchen as noiseless as shadow. He stood still and listened hard a moment. Then crossed the kitchen to the parlor door.
The two men were standing with their backs to him, facing Blake and Marina, who still sat on their hands. One of the men was saying something to Marina in low voice and the other was giggling. She was staring at the floor, her face stiff and dark with fury and embarrassment. Blake looked past the men and saw James, who nodded and entered the room, raising the shotgun as he advanced toward the two men and said “Oye.”
As the men turned, Blake pushed Marina down and threw himself atop her—and in the next instant and from a distance of five feet James Sebastian shot one man in the side of the head and the other square in the face with blasts that shook the room and slathered large portions of both heads onto the wall behind the sofa.
The air stung with gunsmoke. James’s ears felt plugged. Blake got off Marina and she scrambled to her feet in a rage and glared down at what remained of the one who had been talking to her. “Pinche puerco!” she said, and spat on him and kicked him. Then cursed at the blood on her shoe and wiped it off on the man’s pants.
She saw the twins staring at her. What? she said, her look defiant. You heard what this asshole said to me. She rarely used profanity, and when she did, it had bite. Like Blake, she was flexing her fingers to regain circulation.
Blake raised his palms to her. “I didn’t say anything.”
Then stop looking at me like that. Both of you.
“Yes mam.” The twins exchanged an arched-brow look, then Blake said, “I take it the other’s down too.”
“Yep.” James Sebastian picked up the two revolvers—.38 Smith & Wesson double-action top-breaks—and passed them to Blake. As he retrieved the derringers from the coat of the one who’d taken them, the coat flap fell open to reveal a badge. Policía de Tampico.
“Ah Christ,” Blake said. “Is that real?”
“Looks it. Doesn’t mean it’s really his.”
Now Marina saw it. “Es un policía? Ay, dios mío.”
James flipped open the other man’s coat and exposed his badge too.
“Son of a bitch,” Blake said. “And the one out there?”
“I didn’t look but I’d bet on it. He was the bossman.”
“Well, Brother Jeck, I’d say it’s time we mosey.”
“For damn sure, Brother Black. They probly didn’t hear the shots in the plaza but the neighbors might’ve. Could be they sent for police.”
“For the rest of them, you mean.”
In five minutes they were out of there. They left by the kitchen door and out the rear gate of the dark patio and made their back-alley way to the river. The twins each wore a full money belt and were armed with the derringers and the cops’ revolvers. In one hand Blake carried a valise of clothes and in the other the shotgun and a smaller valise containing only money and a Colt revolver. James Sebastian carried identical valises with identical contents. Marina carried a bag of clothes too—including her lovely dress—and tucked under her other arm was the document case, which in addition to their father’s papers held their mother’s Dragoon and the deed to the Rio Grande property. Another fifteen minutes and they had the sails up on the Marina Dos and were pulling away from the dock.
As they headed downriver they speculated that some sore loser at the casino who was friends with the crooked policemen had tipped them about the Anglo brothers who had been winning too much for too long. Probably made a deal with them for a cut of the recovered money. The police had likely watched them for a time and came to know they never went to the bank and so the money had to be in the house.
Maybe it wasn’t like that. There were various other possibilities. But however it really was didn’t matter. They had been after the money, that was the simple fact of it. So the only thing that really mattered was in Marina’s question that wasn’t a question at all—If they had intended to let us live they would have worn masks, wouldn’t they?
Nor was there any question about which way to go when they cleared the mouth of the Pánuco. They bore north.
PART FIVE
HIS MOTHER SAID
that his father was a very rich man, richer even than Don Máximo. Look here, she said, right here, her fingertip tapping the map. The hacienda is there. That is where we were born, I and then you. Where we were born. Our home. The home we were banished from. Remember it. . . .
that his father had other sons. Your brothers, she said. White brothers born of a white mother. He was married to that one and he loved her and loved them. But he was not married to me and I was not white and he did not love me and so he does not love you. That he does not love you for such a reason is unjust. Unjust! Never forget it. . . .
that she had no right to anything from his father. But you do, she said. You have as much right as the other ones to a place in his house. You have the same right by blood. By blood, do you understand? You have as much of his blood in your veins as the white ones have in theirs. Remember that, Juanito. You have his blood. Remember. . . .
that he had no reason to feel shame about himself. His father was the shameful one. A father who turns away his son, who sends his son away from his true home, who refuses to grant his son what is his right by blood, is a dishonorable father. He has spit on you. He is worthy only of your hate. It pains me to speak of him to you this way, my son, but it is the truth. It is important that you know the truth about him. He is an unjust man and a coward in his heart. Do not forget that. . . .
that the world was full of injustice, and more so for the poor of course. But anyone, rich or poor, who was a victim of injustice and then had a chance to right that injustice should do so. It is a matter of honor that he do so, she said. A poor man can have as much honor as one who is rich. Never forget, my son, never. . . .
His mother said all this and more about his father, reiterating it through his boyhood like a catechesis.
Feeding him of her own bitter creed.
They had always been outlanders on this hacienda, among these Poblanos, these people of Puebla state, whom all the rest of Mexico knew to be the most duplicitous
and treacherous people in the country. By the age of fifteen he had been in many fights because of her. Because of the things other boys said about the shameless Veracruzana widow who pleasured the patrón under his own roof even as Doña Alicia was at mass. About the whore whose son’s obvious gringo blood testified to a bastardy doubly disgraceful. He fought like a berserker and broke the bones of some and bit the nose off one and beat another to stuttering imbecility. Some said his lunatic temper made him a menace and he should be locked away. Even older boys who were too big for him to defeat with his fists did not come out of the fights undamaged, and when word went around that he now carried a knife, even the bigger ones grew careful with their talk in his presence.
It was said that Doña Alicia had feigned ignorance of the Veracruzana’s bewitchment of her husband for as long as she could, until the day the maids heard her voice through the heavy bedchamber door, shouting at Don Máximo that if the whore ever set foot in her house again she would have her killed.
After that, the patrón came to her, to their house in the workers’ quarter. The boy would hear him arrive late in the night and hear his mother admit him. Then hear them in her adjoining room, sounding as if in struggle. Then hear him leave before dawn. On the mornings after those nights he would refuse to meet her eyes. One day she made him look at her and said he should not think of her what he was thinking or be disturbed by what others might think. You are old enough now to understand, she said. I do what I do by my choice. No one forces me to do anything. I am only a laundress, yes, but I am nobody’s plaything against my will. It is I who decided this thing. Not Don Máximo. I. Do you understand?
He saw that she believed what she was saying and that she felt no shame in it. And so he ceased to feel shame for her and said yes he understood. He became so familiar with the sounds of the don’s visits that after a time he did not wake to them anymore.
Then came the night he was roused by her shrieks. He leaped out of bed with the knife in his hand and ran to her door and crashed through it to find not the patrón but the patrón’s son crouched over her, twenty-year-old Vicente, wild-eyed and pantsless and erect, her shift ripped open and breasts exposed, her blurred face bloody. Vicente was strong and bigger than the boy but the boy was strong too and very quick with the knife, and when Vicente fell with a number of wounds the boy continued to attack him, oblivious to his mother’s screams. Then the room was full of shouting men and he was subdued.
That he lived to stand trial in a Puebla courtroom was testament to the fairness of Don Máximo, who even in his grief would not violate his principles of justice. He would not yield to Doña Alicia’s mad cries for the blood of her son’s assassin, nor capitulate to the impassioned exhortations of his son’s many friends that he hang the son of a whore in the hacienda’s main square. Nor to the woman’s pleas to him to let her son escape in the night. You know they will kill him, she said, no matter the truth. Don Máximo had seen for himself her torn nightclothes and the bruises on her face, her broken nose, her lacerated mouth. He believed her account of what happened. That Vicente had entered her house with such stealth she did not waken until he touched her. That he had refused to leave and attempted to have her by force. That she resisted and he began hitting her and she cried out and the boy came running.
Many believed she was lying to save her son’s life. They believed she had invited Vicente to her bed and that the son discovered them together and flew into a fiendish rage. He had slashed Vicente’s face beyond even Doña Alicia’s recognition and severed his private parts. Then beat his mother for being a whore. Then saw that Vicente was not yet dead and resumed his mutilations of him, so insane in his fury he might still be at it had he not been stopped. The whore mother, they said, was the cause of it all and should be hanged alongside the murderer son.
But Don Máximo had known that Vicente wanted the woman. Like everyone else, Vicente had heard the talk of the father’s relations with her, and as father and son had always been frank with each other Vicente had told him he thought the woman was very beautiful and he envied him. And instead of telling Vicente never again to speak of her that way and never to go near her, Don Máximo had only smiled. I was a fool, he said in the courtroom, an old man gloating over his son’s jealousy of him for his mistress. Now my son is dead for my stupidity.
Because Don Máximo had the courage to make such public testament—to admit his relations with the woman and reveal his son’s lust for her and profess his certainty that Vicente had tried to violate her—the boy was spared a death sentence. And Doña Alicia would never speak to her husband again.
However, said the judge. Although the defendant was justified in protecting his mother, he was not justified in killing Don Vicente once the don was too severely wounded to be a threat or even to defend himself. For the defendant to have given Don Vicente forty-one distinct wounds—forty-one!—was to go far beyond a defense of his mother to an act of arrant savagery. Considering also the extensive testimony regarding the defendant’s violent nature since childhood, it was the judge’s opinion that the boy presented a great danger to the public and should be removed from it. He sentenced fifteen-year-old Juan Lobo Ávila to the Puebla penitentiary for fifty years.
He had been in prison only two months when he was informed of her death. Someone who either sneaked into her house or was there by invitation had throttled her. He could imagine the hands at her throat. Whose hands? There were so many who hated her and wanted her dead. And him too. The only thing he knew for sure was that the agent of their misfortunes was the man who had made use of her but had not loved her because she was not white and therefore had not loved the son she bore him. The man who banished them, mother and child, from their patria chica and to a place where they would be detested strangers. Where she would be strangled and he locked away.
He might have hanged himself rather than grow old and rot to death in that prison—and to deprive them of the pleasure of keeping him caged—but his hatred would not permit it. His hatred was the very sustenance of his continued existence. It burned in his heart like a fire in a cave that was each day murkier with smoke, its rock walls each day blacker. Day after day and year after year in that cage of iron and stone he reveled in the waking dream of his hands at the man’s throat. His father’s throat. And then, each in his turn, at the throats of the man’s other sons. The loved sons. His white brothers. Two of them twins who from the day they took their first steps had walked like they owned the earth. So his mother said.
A COUNTRY ALL ITS OWN
The sloop’s low draft would have permitted easy crossing of the sandbars at the mouth of the Rio Grande, but they sensed it was no river for a sailboat. Unlike the Pánuco, whose route from Tampico to the gulf was a single smooth curve, the Rio Grande, as shown on their map, was as loopy as a cast-off string. It meandered in every direction of the compass and doubled back on itself in so many places that they estimated the distance to Brownsville by boat might be three or four times farther than by foot. The windward side of the boat would be in constant shift in such meanders—provided there was enough upriver breeze to even produce a windward side. They would have given odds they could walk to town and back to the coast faster than the Marina Dos could get them to Brownsville, if it could get them there at all.
So they sailed past the river mouth and Blake Cortéz intoned, “Lady and gent, be apprised that we are now in the territorial water of the United States of America.”
“Gringolandia,” Marina said, “ya llegamos.”
The twins had heard the USA called Gringolandia by one of the Mexican card players at the Palacio. They thought it a clever coinage and told it to Marina, who liked it a lot.
A few miles north of the river they went through an inlet called Boca Chica, then across a small bay, then through another short pass to enter the south end of the Laguna Madre. The lagoon extended more than a hundred miles up to Corpus Christi. Their charts showed that it was no more than four feet deep in most places and
had an average width of about five miles. The Point Isabel lighthouse gleamed white two miles to northeast. As they made for it they saw a stingray gliding along the bottom and estimated its wingspan at near to six feet. Further on, a school of mullet burst from the water in a great silvery rush and Marina yelled, “Mira!” and pointed at the dark shape of the hammerhead closing behind the fish.
Point Isabel was a compact village with a busy quay and with a small train depot on a narrow-gauge track. They leased a moorage for the sloop and were told that the daily train to Brownsville had already made its run. They registered at the little hotel and went up to their room and cleaned up and the twins unpacked their suits and hung them up to air. They took the money valises with them when they went to eat at a café. They afterward took a turn around the village and watched a merchant ship come in off the gulf through the Brazos de Santiago pass. It was already furling its sails, the Point Isabel harbor lacking the depth for vessels of such size. It anchored in the bay and lighters went out to it to transfer the cargo to the wharf.
The next day was graced with perfect December weather for the region, cloudless and almost cool. The Brownsville train arrived shortly before noon, bringing the mail and a handful of passengers and a load of Mexican imports for shipping to Galveston and New Orleans. The train then took on the Brownsville mail and all cargo bound for the Mexican ferry. It was early afternoon when its whistle blew and the last of the passengers for Brownsville got aboard and the train chugged away from the depot. The twins wore suits and each carried a money valise and under their coats an S&W five-shooter, less powerful than the Frontier Colt but also less obtrusive. Marina’s bag held a change of clothes for each of them. The rest of their belongings were padlocked in the boat cabin’s razor-tricked lockers. The harbormaster assured them the quay was under guard around the clock and they need not worry about their boat being thieved.