Country of the Bad Wolfes (49 page)

His transformation was greater than they knew. To many of Díaz's most powerful political allies, the four-year wait for his return to office had been a frustration they did not wish to go through again. As they saw it, Don Porfirio was Mexico's best hope for raising the country into the company of the world's great nations, and such a man should not be hindered by restrictions intended to keep lesser men from perpetuating themselves in the presidency.

Díaz was effusive in thanking his supporters for their faith in him. And although, with all due modesty, he had to agree that he was the man best-suited to lead his country to a brighter future, he reminded his stalwarts that the hallmark of a great nation was its respect for the law, and he, for one, would always respect it. The constitution is the primal law, he said, the very core of civilized progress, and we must never abuse it, never violate it in letter or spirit. He proclaimed reverence for the patriots who wrote that glorious document and for those who recognized that it must never be amended for any reason other than the noble one of doing what is best for Mexico.

His followers understood. Before the next election, the constitution would be amended—by a congress composed largely of Díaz cronies and acting under the sanction of doing what was best for Mexico—to permit a president to succeed himself once. And Díaz would easily win election to his second consecutive term. And before the end of
that
period, the constitution would again be amended to remove all restrictions on reelection. So would it come to pass that Porfirio Díaz, that vehement opponent of presidential reelection, would be president of Mexico for thirty years, the last twenty-six of them in uninterrupted sequence.

As in the case of all great leaders, there were many dark rumors about Don Porfirio, and early in his second presidency one of the darkest pertained to a secret police force that answered only to him and whose headquarters were said to be in Chapultepec Castle, the official presidential residence.

His supporters didn't care if there was such a force. After all, a secret police was
the most effective means for uncovering plots against the government and defending the president from assassins. Who but a fool or an enemy of Mexico could argue otherwise? Yet rumors persisted that Díaz's secret agency was more than a means of defense against threats to his person and to the republic. There were whispers that the foremost assassins in the country were carrying federal badges. And that the head of the organization was Díaz's mysterious Yankee friend, Edward Little.

Government officials neither affirmed nor denied the existence of a secret police force. After all, they said, how secret would it be if they admitted to it? On the other hand, even if it did not exist, to permit the suspicion that it did would help to deter subversives. The president did of course have a small corps of bodyguards. What head of state did not? It was a sad fact of life that national leaders had ever to be on guard against violent personal attack. As for the American, Mr Edward Little, yes, he was in the employ of the president, but solely as his personal translator of English.

On one of Edward Little's visits to Patria Chica, Louis asked him outright if there really was a federal secret police.

“Secret police?” his father said with a perplexed expression.

And they burst into laughter.

 

 

 

 

 

W
hen they made the first of their promised visits, after six long weeks at the cove, they were brown as Indians and it seemed to John Roger they had grown noticeably taller. God, were they growing! They were stronger too. He saw it in the sinews of their hands, in the new tightness of their coats across their shoulders when they dressed for dinner. He had thought much about them during their absence. About how near they were to full manhood and the ways in which they were already more capable than most men of his acquaintance. Their “Thank you, Father” had come to mind many times since. He regretted his mistakes with them. Regretted having kept himself a stranger to them for so long, no matter they had as much kept themselves strangers to him. As the father, he had the greater obligation to wisdom and fairness, and it was neither wise nor fair—quite the contrary—to defend one's conduct toward one's children on the basis of tit for tat. He could not recall ever having addressed them as “sons.”

That they had honored their agreement to make the visit was far less surprising to him than the size of his gladness to see them. Victoria Clara, too, was happy to have them home. In her six years at Buenaventura she had watched them grow from precocious and cocky identical children to handsome and cocky identical young men and had become very fond of them. She had lost her mother to a disease of the throat four years before, and a year later her father to a pulmonary infection. Her two brothers, who had inherited everything, were both much older than she and had always been strangers to her. She'd had no true sense of sisterhood until she came to know the twins, and it didn't bother her at all that she couldn't differentiate between them. John Roger never saw her so
animated as at dinnertimes in their company. Neither, to his unspoken chagrin, did John Samuel.

The greatest surprise of that first visit was their unprecedented loquacity at the dinner table, the conversation shifting at whim between English and Spanish. John Roger grinned and Vicki Clara laughed at their amusing account of journeying to the cove with the six burros that on hearing a jaguar growl in the bush went so crazy with fright and thrashed so wildly it took the twins two hours to calm them and repack the scattered pack goods. And because the stable at the cove was too small for six burros and anyway too dilapidated to afford protection, the twins had tethered the animals on the verandah every evening.

On the verandah! Vicki Clara said. Like a little hotel for donkeys!

You including a couple who walk on their hind legs? a twin said with a wry grin, and Vicki laughed with them even as she protested that she did not mean any such thing.

They told about the work they had done on the house and on the sloop, and confessed that they had devoted themselves to the full repair of the boat before they even began to work on the house. “We just couldn't wait to start sailing her,” one said. It did not escape John Roger's notice that they still did not refer to the
Lizzie
by name.

Once the sloop was seaworthy they had spent the mornings working on the house and the afternoons teaching themselves to handle the boat out on the gulf—which dazzled them with its vastness. It gave them a strange feeling of being awful small and awful free at the same time.

John Roger said he knew what they meant. “I always had that same feeling out there.” Their zest for the open sea had made him recall his own youthful passion for sailing. But it shocked him to realize he had spoken in the past tense. That he had not been aboard a boat since before they were born. He had a moment's banal curiosity about where the years had gone.

He mentioned the inlet's tricky passage, and they said it was tricky, all right, but that was what made it so much fun, and they had gotten pretty good at zipping through it, if they did say so themselves. Because they did not want to seem braggarts, they did not tell him they had already become expert at navigating by the stars. Or that they were keeping track of the lunar cycle so they could at any time of day or night predict the turns of the tide within a quarter hour's accuracy. It was their objective—and they would achieve it—to be able to negotiate the inlet even on a moonless night.

Vicki Clara asked what they planned on doing out there once they finished repairing the house, and they said there would never be a problem keeping busy, as the house and boat would always be in need of some kind of upkeep. When they weren't busy working they'd go fishing or hunting, or catch up on their reading.

John Roger admired the shrewdness of their answer. It was the truth as far
as it went but it was hardly the whole truth. They had some plan in mind, some enterprise. He had sensed it when they came to him those weeks ago and he was even more certain of it now. But whatever they intended to do—were perhaps already doing—it would remain their secret until they chose to reveal it, if ever.

Vicki said it sounded like a very simple life. But I think there is one problem with it, she said.

The twins smiled, knowing some tease was coming. And what is that? one said.

I do not believe you will meet very many girls out there.

The twins laughed with her. “Dang it!” one said. “I knew there was something we forgot to account for.” And the other said all they could do was hope to get lucky and meet a few mermaids.