Country of the Bad Wolfes (53 page)

“You see the lie in this fella's eyes, Brother Black?” James said.

“In great big old capital letters, Brother Jake.”

“Como?” Genaro said.

My brother says you are a bad liar, James said. And cocked the carbine's hammer.

Genaro Carrasco raised a cautioning hand. Be careful with that nice rifle, boy. I know you don't want—

The crack of the Winchester spooked an eruption of birds from the trees as the impact of the bullet to his heart knocked Genaro back into the water with a
flat splash. He floated supine, spread-eagled and bobbing, eyes wide to the sun. The twins watched the current wheel him around the point and out into the gulf and take him under.

“Well hell,” Blake said. He went over to the paralyzed one and shot him. Then shot the one with the broken skull. “The tillerman?” he asked his brother.

“Never come up,” James Sebastian said. “Way he hit that cabin, probly busted his neck like a stick.”

“Or got knocked cold and drowned. Either way.”

They put the rifles aside and picked up one of the dead Mayans by the hands and feet and slung the body into the outgoing current and it was gone by the time they did the same with the other.

Those were their first three—the tillerman not counting. It came to them as easily as all else they ever determined to do.

“They won't be expecting them back for a while,” James Sebastian said. “Few days at soonest. Gives us the advantage.”

“Let's get to it,” Blake said.

That night, Crispín Carrasco had just finished tending to the animals in the stable and blown out the lantern wick and started out the door to go back to the house when he was grabbed from behind. An arm closed hard around the lower part of his face and over his mouth even as it tugged his head back and the edge of a knife blade sliced deeply into the left side of his throat and in a single smooth action carved through it all the way over to his right ear. He could then not have called out even if his mouth were uncovered. His eyes swelled at the pain and he felt the heat of his blood sopping his chest and his whimper was a wet gurgle as he tried with both hands to detach the iron arm and felt the killer's breath warm and easy at his ear. They held in that posture like perverse lovers for a moment and then Crispín felt an abrupt sleepiness and his hands fell away from the arm. Then the man behind him was not there and Crispín saw the stars tumbling toward his feet as he thought, This is not so bad. And was past all thought and feeling when he struck the earth.

They dragged the body into an empty stall and covered it with straw and kicked dirt over the blood trail. Then went to the bunkhouse and slipped into its darkness. James Sebastian struck a match and a couple of the workers stirred but didn't wake up and he saw where the lantern hung on a post and went to it and lighted the wick. Blake Cortéz tapped the muzzle of his carbine on the wall until all six workers had come awake and were sitting up in their bunks. One of them had started to say, What the hell is—? But went mute at the sound of a rifle being cocked.

Don't speak except to answer my questions, Blake told them.

The workers informed them there were four Carrasco brothers but one had gone away in the red boat with the Mayans. There were no women in the house, no children.

James Sebastian told them they could have all the animals in the stable but to get them immediately and then get out of Veracruz and never come back.

The workers moved fast, and the ones that got the best animals were those who did not even take the time to dress but hurried to the stable with their clothes under their arms.

Moisés and Chuy Carrasco were at the table playing cards when the front door opened and one of the twins who called themselves Rivera and whom they had never expected to see again came in and stepped off to the side so he would not be an easy target in the doorway. He held an old musket with a cavernous .60-caliber muzzle on a barrel sawed down to about ten inches. Moisés Carrasco had seen other makeshift shotguns and he wondered what dread load this one carried. He could only assume the Mayans were dead. So too Genaro and Crispín. So too his workers, unless they had fled. A pair of Spencer carbines were propped against the wall behind him next to the kitchen door but they may as well have been on the moon.

Listen to me, son, Moisés said, let's talk about this. He heard the other one entering the room through the kitchen door. Chuy turned to look, then started to stand, saying, Hey, wait a—

The rifleshot was ear stopping. Blood jumped from Chuy's head and he fell against the table and then slumped back into the chair and slid off it to the floor. Moisés looked down at him. The one who'd shot him went over to stand beside his brother.

Kids
, for Christ's sake! Moisés thought. In the instant before the shotgun's charge of coral nuggets removed the top half of his head.

Those were their fourth and fifth and sixth.

When they docked at the malecón, it was jammed with people staring at the fire's bright flickering through the trees across the bay. Everyone knew it was the tannery but the twins detected little distress among the spectators. And actually heard somebody say something about reaping what one sowed.

The next afternoon, when the Carrascos' blackened bones were excavated from the smoking ashes and it was seen that there were only three sets of skeletal remains and one of them was absent half its head, it was largely assumed that the missing skeleton was still in service of the missing brother, whichever one it might be, and further assumed that the missing brother had become estranged from the other three in the most serious of ways. But in a certain waterfront bar, a few seamen and a bartender would among themselves recall the young crocodile hunters they called the White Twins who two days earlier had stopped in for mugs of beer and
had been so interested in hearing everything anyone had to say about the Carrascos. And a certain zambo turtler would say that, all in all, it was probably a good thing for his mulatto friend that those boys had taken his joke about mother's milk with such good humor.

O
n the trip back to the cove they drank beer from large green bottles and when the bottles were empty lobbed them over the side and pulled up the netful of beer they kept cool by trailing it in the water on a stern line. James Sebastian extracted two more bottles and lowered the rest back into the water. He unsnapped the metal clamps on the corks and worked the corks out with a pop and handed one of the foaming bottles to his brother. It was another fine day on the gulf and though they had not had much sleep the previous night they felt in fresh good humor and passed the time singing ranchero songs learned from Josefina in their childhood.

The night before, while the malecón crowd was still gaping at the distant blaze across the harbor, the twins had gone into the Chinese quarter and wandered the narrow winding streets of that alien world whose border was but a block from the beach road. The streets were crowded and smoky, pungent with strange smells, and the twins felt the lack of enough eyes to see all there was to look at. They began asking after Mr Sing, asking various pedestrians and cart vendors, and were each time ignored or dismissed with no more than a glance.

They chanced on the place by smell, a stink like the one at the Carrasco tannery, detecting it even in the tangle of the quarter's outlandish odors. It came from a brick warehouse with boarded windows. They entered into a haze of smoke and steam in the amber light of oil lamps. There were rows of wooden frames with hides stretched on them. Most of the skins looked to be of jaguar and deer and snake, though here and there they spied one of an alligator or a crocodile, none of them very large. The place was shrill with Chinese babble, the churning of wash vats, the rattlings of carts trundling over a cement floor.

A man no taller than their collarbone was suddenly before them, shouting at
them, pointing them back toward the door. In English and in then in Spanish they told him they wanted to talk to Mr Sing, but the little man persisted in his angry demands that they get out. Abruptly the man's eyes cut past them and he went silent and took a step back and made a small bow. The twins turned to see a man almost as tall as themselves, wearing a cream linen suit and dark-tinted spectacles. In English he said, “Good evening, young gentlemen. May I be of assistance?”

One twin said they wanted to speak to Mr Sing, and the man said, “He stands before you.” His expression was such that he might be smiling but it was hard to tell.

“Well sir, we came to talk to you about hides,” the same one said. “Crocodile hides. As many as you want.”

“I see,” said Mr Sing.

“Big ones,” the other twin said. “Bigger than any in here. Superior in every respect.”

“I see. I admire your directness, young gentlemen. You are American?”

“Mexican.”

“Ah. Most interesting.” He waited a moment to allow them to expand on the disclosure, but they didn't, and he said, “You will follow me, please.”

They went to the rear of the tannery and into a room bare of furniture but for a few chairs and a desk, where they sat across from him. There was nothing on the desktop but a thick ledger and an abacus. Mr Sing said it was very unusual for someone not Chinese to come to him with hides, but he was not surprised they had, as he was aware of the terrible fire at the Carrasco tannery that was still burning at that moment, an event that had quite suddenly made his tannery the only one in town, at least for the time being. He asked if they had ever done business with the Carrascos, and the twins admitted they had sold hides to them earlier that day for the first and last time.

Ah, Mr Sing said. He said he himself was acquainted with the Carrascos only by reputation. “But if some of the things I have heard are true,” he said, “well, what has befallen them this evening seems to me less shocking, let us say, than . . . inevitable. What no one seems to know as yet is whether there are survivors.”

“There aren't,” one twin said. Mr Sing looked from one twin to the other, face impassive, eyes inscrutable behind the tinted lenses. He had not commented on their twinhood and never would. “I see,” he said. And seemed to smile. “Well then. Shall we attend to business? Dime, jóvenes—hablaremos en inlgés o español?”

“English is better for business,” a twin said.

Mr Sing told them he had a ready buyer of crocodile hides in Puebla, a Chinese maker of footwear and other clothing who shipped his products from Salina Cruz, but he had been unable to provide the man with as much hide as he wanted because Mexican hide hunters were violently intolerant of Chinese competition. Mr Sing's hide collectors could venture only where the Mexicans did not, where the hides to be had were few and generally smaller. “As you young gentlemen surely know,” he said, “the common Mexican opinion of Chinese is not a kindly one. I intend no disrespect to yourselves.”