by James Blake
Their constable duties left them scant time to attend to their smuggling business, so they hired Anselmo Xocoto to run it for them. Anselmo in turn hired as his assistants his younger brother Pepe and Licho Frentes, Pepe’s best friend. The twins permitted the trio to build cabins at Wolfe Landing for their personal quarters, and in Anselmo’s name they opened a bank account to be used strictly for the business. They bought such great quantities of whiskey at cut rates from suppliers in Corpus Christi that Anselmo and the boys were obliged to build a large separate shed for the storage of it. Their main buyers of Mexican liquor were also in Corpus Christi, buyers who in turn sold to clients in Galveston, Houston, New Orleans. The twins permitted Anselmo to arrange transactions with the Goya brothers and let him keep twenty-five percent of the profits and pay Pepe and Licho twelve and a half percent each. The remaining fifty percent was reserved to the twins, a share justified by their financing of the business and their ownership of the land on which it was conducted and, not least of all, by their readiness to defend their employees against any trouble, legal or otherwise. Each time they were home from a backcountry patrol they would go to Wolfe Landing for at least one night to consult with Anselmo about the river trade. Anselmo would review with them all the transactions that had taken place since their last visit and apprise them of pending deals. He would show them the account books and the inventory lists. All in all, he did a fine job, his helpers too, for which the twins would reward them with a bonus every year.
CULMINATION
The fifteenth of August, 1903.
She has been lying awake for hours when the first faint dawnlight shows in the window. She knows where he is. Knows that this one is not a one-time thing but that he has been seeing her for many weeks. Bad enough to be pitied for a wife whose husband hops from this one to that one to still another. But when he begins repeat visits to one, well, then it’s no longer a matter of wanting to bed others but of wanting to share another’s bed. That makes it something different. Something worse. Something she can no longer endure.
She cannot think anything she has not already thought many times before. Well, enough of thinking. She supposes she should write a letter to the grandchildren but the thought of explication is more tiring than she can stand. He has exhausted her. Let him explain.
She gets out of bed and strips and washes with thoroughness at the basin, avoiding even a glance at her slack breasts in early wither. Then puts on a black dress and her best shoes and sits before her mirror and brushes her hair to a fine loose hang and leaves it that way. Her flaccid flesh evidence of her fifty-three years but her hair yet the lustrous ebony of a girl’s. She goes to the closet in his room and there finds the holstered revolver he long ago taught her to shoot. A single-action, .36-caliber Navy Colt he used in the days of the American Civil War. She checks the chambers and sees all six are charged. Then goes to his neatly made bed and lies down on her back. Legs straight, feet together, head on pillow, eyes on ceiling. She cocks the Colt and holds it in awkward fashion with the muzzle positioned against her breast and over her heart, her fingers around the back of the butt and one thumb against the trigger guard and the other on the trigger. She feels her pulse thumping up through the gun.
Wait a minute. Wait just a goddam minute. This isn’t right.
She removes the gun from her breast and sits up. Sits motionless, pondering. Then gets up and straightens her dress and gives her hair another quick brush and drapes a shawl over her shoulders and takes up the gun and goes downstairs, holding the pistol under the shawl, her arms crossed as if against the morning chill. She leaves the house and goes across the main courtyard and out the gate into the larger compound that even at this early hour is already bustling.
She has rarely ventured into the workers’ quarter, and she receives respectful but puzzled greetings as she passes. Induces whispers about her all-black attire and unpainted face and loose uncovered hair. She has been told where the woman lives and as she turns onto that street she is thinking that she will have to wait for a time before he comes out. And then almost laughs aloud when she spies the woman’s house and sees her door come open and him step out. What timing. As though it had all been planned somewhere sometime long before now and she doesn’t even have to think what to do but only let herself do it. She stops on this side of the street and watches as he turns to give the bitch a parting kiss. Then the door shuts and he starts in her direction. Smiling. His thoughts yet inside the house.
Now he sees her and halts in the middle of the street. Sees her raising the Colt—is that his Navy?—as others on the street are scattering, having seen the gun too. He raises his palms as if he might push away this entire circumstance or at the least fend the bullet and he has no idea what he is about to say and then is on the ground and breathless, the report of the pistolshot still in his ears. A numbness in his chest. He manages to get to one knee, regaining his breath in gasps, and feels a great inflating pain under his ribs. Dark blotches of blood forming in the dust below him, his hat on the ground. He leans back on a haunch, hand to his hot wound and sees her aiming even as she comes toward him. The next bullet smashes his shoulder and swats him half-about and onto his side.
She stands over him and says, “Mírame.” He looks up and sees the small smile above the gun. Does he see the bullet emerge from the bore in the infinitesimal instant before it stains the ground under his head with the ruby ruin of his brain? She shoots him in the face three times more, until the hammer falls on an empty shell. Then drops the gun and looks about. Then in swift sure strides makes for a well at the end of the street and without hesitation goes into it headfirst.
At the corner of the nearest building, Catalina Luisiana Little, eight years old and given to roaming the compound in the early gray hours, witness to the whole thing, hears the deep resonant splash.
By the time Zack Jack and John Louis have been summoned from the ranch, Gloria has been hooked out of the well and taken to the casa grande. Don Louis there too. The two bodies washed and covered with sheets to their chins. On adjacent tables in a room aglow with the amber light of scores of arrayed candles. Ancient women of dark fissured faces and dressed all in black are seated against the walls and loud in their ritual lamentations. Zack Jack and John Louis stand there for a time, looking on their elder brother. His face with four black holes. He whom they called Uncle Louis and who had taught them so many things in their boyhood. And who, as Gloria once told her sister, was more of a father to them than Edward Little had ever been. They regard too their sister-in-law who was Aunt Gloria and the only mother they’d known. Like everyone else of the hacienda except for their father, the brothers knew of Louis Welch’s infidelities and that Aunt Gloria was pained by them. The outcome is no shock.
They send telegraphic notice to their father at Chapultepec but he is at his work somewhere else when the wire arrives and three days will pass before he reads it. By then his eldest son is buried. He tells Porfirio, who weeps. That evening they go to Las Lagrimas de Nuestras Madres but do not dance, only drink to the memory of Louis Welch Little and recount tales of him, begat fifty-eight years ago in Louisiana of a sixteen-year-old girl named Sharon.
The Little brothers also inform Bruno Tomás at Buenaventura, and Sofía Reina and María Palomina in Mexico City, none of whom have seen Gloria since the day of her precipitate marriage to Louis Welch Little thirty-six years before, nor ever met her husband. Bruno mourns for the sister with whom he had at last become familiar through their affectionate correspondence. Sófi and María Palomina are grieved to the bone. And yet, at the same time, Gloria having for years confided to Sófi—and thereby to María Palomina—the infidelities of Louis Welch, they cannot help but feel a guilty pleasure in her remedy of those injuries. From the day they met, María Palomina says, that gringo should have known that she was not a woman to mistreat. Well, Sófi says, he at least should have known it by the time they got married. And they laugh louder than they cried.
BRANCHINGS
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For more than a decade the twins would smuggle only liquor and conduct transactions with no one but the Goya brothers in Matamoros and their regular suppliers and buyers in Corpus Christi. Contrary to their expectations, the river trade never slackened for more than a few weeks at a time, and there was never a period of as long as two months that it did not turn a profit. Together with their income from the intermittent cattle sales in Mexico and the sums in the occasional envelopes left at the door, it gave them more than enough money to buy the properties they wanted as they became available, no mortgages necessary.
They of course began their acquisitions with those parcels that already had clear title. Most of those were in the wilder country, eastward of Tierra Wolfe, and the owners were so glad to be rid of the worthless grounds that the twins were able to buy them at a bargain. Came a summer day in 1905 when they bought a tract that ran northward from the river mouth up to Boca Chica Pass and then along the east coast of South Bay up to Nameless Creek. The property was mostly a mix of marsh and scrubland, but its stretch of beach between the river and the pass was broad and dense with dunes along the higher ground, and the sea wind was a bracing contrast to the stifling humidity of Brownsville. Scattered about the riverside just off the beach were the weather-eaten foundations of former structures, the remains of a one-time boomtown port called Clarksville. According to Ben Watson it had been the wildest place on the border with the possible exception of Bagdad, a Mexican port directly across the river. Both towns had teemed with smugglers, bootleggers, fugitives, runagates, outlaws of every stripe, and so of course attracted gamblers and whores as well—and both had long since been obliterated by economic turns of fortune and a series of hurricanes. Marina and Remedios and the kids were agog when the twins showed them where the house would stand with its grand view of the gulf and the enormous gulf sky.
On each visit home during the next two months the twins spent time with a Brownsville architect, discussing with him exactly the sort of house they wanted. A two-story on twelve-foot pilings and large enough for both families, with roofed upper and lower porches in front and an unroofed lower porch in back. When the architect’s plan at last met with their approval they went to the best builder in Brownsville and hired him to construct the house. Their plan was to live there in the summers while the kids were out of school and then move back into town during the school year and come to the beach house on weekends. While the house was being built, they hired another crew to excavate a horseshoe cove into the bank about fifty yards upstream from the river mouth and there built a dock large enough for several small boats.
They named the place Playa Blanca and moved into the house in the early summer of ‘06. The eldest child, Morgan James, was almost thirteen, and the youngest, Vicki Angel, had just turned ten. The youngsters all took to the sea like dolphins. Just beyond the small whitecaps, the water was a placid undulation, shallow and clear pale green all the way out to the sand bars. Any shark that crossed the bar could be seen while it was still a long way out. Marina had taught the children and Remedios Marisól how to swim in a resaca, but swimming in the gulf was far more fun, though it was a vexation to the boys that Vicki Angel was the fastest of them. When the twins said they weren’t sure Vicki should be swimming naked with the boys, their wives laughed and hooted at them and called them evil-minded Yankee hypocrites, and the twins sheepishly retreated and said no more about it.
But then one day when the twins and Remedios were running errands in town, Marina went out on the porch and saw the children about fifty yards down the beach, standing in a group in water to their thighs, and she looked through the powerful telescope mounted on the porch rail and saw that the boys were exposing erections to Vicki, who sat in the water to her shoulders and looked both amused and uncertain. As Marina stalked down the beach toward them, the boys saw her coming and lowered themselves in the water, then came out at her beckon with not an erection in evidence. She told them there would be no more naked swimming when Vicki was with them and that if any of them ever did that again to her or any other girl, she, Marina, would tie their thing in a knot they’d never be able to undo.
She did not tell the twins about the incident but later asked Vicki if they had done that before, and the girl said no. Marina suspected she wasn’t being truthful but did not question her further, not wanting to force her to lie. She knew that although Vicki would not let them boss her about, she loved them dearly and would never betray them.
In truth, the boys had displayed erections to Vicki a few other times, making a game of it they called Look at This. They almost always dared her to touch them, and she once did, a quick two-finger feel of César Augusto’s, which was the smallest and least daunting. She had affected to be repulsed but was secretly fascinated. Still, there was something in their eyes when they played Look at This that scared her, and she had not touched one again.
The twins bought a twenty-two foot sloop and named it Gringa and taught the boys and Vicki Angel how to sail it. They also instructed them in building their own boat, which they did, a fifteen-foot modified catboat with a centerboard. They named it Remerina in honor of both mothers. The twins taught them how to read the clouds and the wind and the different colors of the sea. How to fish for shark. And the beach was a good place for teaching them to shoot and for lessons in how to defend themselves with hands and feet. Marina and Remedios would sometimes sit on the shaded porch and watch the self-defense sessions with narrowed nervous eyes. Though the boys were of course bigger and stronger than Vicki Angel, she was the quickest and very nimble and was sometimes able to trip one of them down. One day she tripped Morgan James, who was the oldest and biggest, and when the others laughed he was furious with embarrassment. He pinned Vicki on the ground with a knee on her chest and tried to force a handful of sand in her mouth but she flung sand in his eyes and broke free and outran him down the beach until he gave up the chase.
When Morgan James turned fourteen, the twins started teaching all their sons the river business. The ways and means of it, the finances and accounting methods, the recording codes, all of which the boys were quick to absorb. They began taking the boys in pairs and by turns on some of the smuggling transactions, instructing them to watch everything very carefully and questioning them afterward to see how well they had observed. They introduced them to the Goyas and to the buyers in Corpus Christi.
The twins never spoke to their wives about this training process, and the boys never said anything of it to their mothers. But Marina and Remedios of course knew it was taking place, as it had to, and if they thought the boys too young to be learning such things, they did not say so.
The following summer the Goyas sent word to the twins that there were two men who wanted to talk to them and it might prove profitable if they did. At the Goya estate the twins were introduced to a pair of well-groomed mestizos who said their names were Yadier and Elizondo and their last names did not matter. They wore good suits in which they did not seem comfortable but they spoke well and were quick to the point. They wanted guns. Rifles. And ammunition of course. As many and as much as possible. The twins smiled. Blake Cortéz said it sounded like somebody was thinking of going to war. Against who, I wonder, James said grinning. The two men neither smiled nor answered the question. The word of late from across the river was that Porfirio Díaz’s political enemies were still in mortal fear of him and keeping to the shadows, but there was a growing and bolder discontent in the countryside. Two years ago, Díaz had won reelection for the sixth time and had now been president for twenty-four consecutive years and twenty-eight of the last thirty-two. He was seventy-six years old but not about to step down—or stop using his club on those who rejected his bread.