Country of the Bad Wolfes (73 page)

They had plenty of money and passed their days at play and at familiarizing themselves with the city and its surrounding world. The Plaza de Armas was but a short walk from the Plaza de Libertad, and some nights they went dancing at one square and some nights at the other and some nights at both. They bought nautical charts and books of all sorts, including volumes of poetry and stories, and on some evenings took turns reading to each other. Marina at last grew tired of telling them
to speak only Spanish in her presence and asked to be taught English. They said of course—though Blake affected disgruntlement and said, Well hell, no more telling secrets in front of you.

They bought a canoe and three paddles and began to explore the outlying swamps and on occasion took the pistols with them for target shooting. They tried to teach Marina to shoot, but she could not overcome her fear of guns and fired only a single round with a derringer, flinching at the report, and then would shoot no more.

They took coach trips to Mante, to Victoria, and when the railroad arrived from Monterrey they went for extended visits to that large and rowdy city. They kept the
Marina Dos
in ready trim and sometimes went cruising for weeks at a time, acquainting themselves with the shoreline for more than a hundred miles in either direction, putting in at seaside hamlets not to be found on any map. They entered rocky passes and navigated lagoon waterways where the only sign of people was the pluming smoke of steamships out on the gulf.

They took her to a dentist who was able to fit her with front teeth. When the job was finally done she could hardly believe the woman grinning from the mirror was herself. It was all she could do to keep her hand from her mouth, so ingrained was the action whenever she smiled, and she would be a long time undoing it.

Do I look . . . better? she asked.

Prettier than ever, James Sebastian said. Blake Cortéz said she'd always had pretty hair and pretty eyes and now had a pretty smile too.

It was not just sweet talk. She had in truth acquired a kind of prettiness in spite of the facial scars. Since joining herself to the twins, she had known danger and uncertainty and yet, paradoxically, had at the same time felt more secure than ever before. She loved them very much and felt very much loved by them, and in that strange way that happiness in love can affect a face, her scars seemed somehow less stark, the misalignment of her cheekbones almost beguiling.

Speaking of pretty, Blake said, we don't even have to mention this lovely thing. He patted her bottom and she slapped away his hand. Then was laughing as she hugged them to her, one in each arm.

They liked to go to the beach just north of the river mouth. They rode out on the public mule-carriage and took a picnic basket and a sheet to spread on the sand and stayed all day and came back on the last coach. They would have preferred to frolic naked as they did at the cove but there were always at least a few other people in view, often with children, and so the twins wore pants cut short above the knees and Marina wore a swimming suit of her own creation, made of cotton
and hemmed at mid-thigh and its halter top thin-strapped and low in the back. The costume sufficed to meet the proprieties of a sparsely populated Mexican beach but would have gotten her arrested at any American seaside resort. Her dusky skin became so much darker they began calling her Negrita. They taught her to swim, and the sensation of propelling herself through the water became one of the joys of her life. The three of them would swim out to where the waves formed, and when a big one began to build they would start stroking hard atop it and side by side ride the wave's accelerating forward roll all the way in to shore where it broke in a great crash of foam and sent them tumbling over the sand.

It became her habit to have a long solo swim on every visit to the beach. On one such swim a trio of dolphins suddenly appeared beside her, and she trod water as they circled her, rolling under and up again, blowing spray. She laughed and stroked them as they passed. Then one came up under her and with its face against her bottom raised her out of the water entirely and dropped her with a splash. The twins were watching from down the beach and heard her happy shriek. Far up the beach in the other direction a small party of people was watching too and they cheered when the dolphin tossed her. Then the dolphins vanished and she swam to shore and the other people waved to her and she waved back and came sprinting toward the twins, grinning wide, no hand at her mouth, shouting, Did you see! Did you
see
!

They practiced their fighting techniques on the beach and it pleased her to watch them at it, to witness their dance-like spins and torsions as they threw and dodged open-hand punches fast as snake strikes, never hitting each other in the face with more than a brush of fingertips but exercising no such reserve with blows to the body, and she cringed at each loud smack of palm to belly or ribs. At the end of every session, both of them sported large red blotches on their stomachs and chests.

Their social world contained the three of them alone and they were content within it. They sometimes spoke of Vicki Clara and hoped she was doing well, and of young Juan Sotero. But they would not chance a letter to her lest John Samuel somehow get hold of it and know by the postmark where they were and pass the information to Mauricio Espinosa. What if they wrote to their cousin Bruno, Marina said. They didn't really know him, they said, not enough to trust him. Josefina they missed dearly. To her they might have chanced a letter had she known how to read—but they would trust no one to read it to her.

In their fourth year they began to run low on money but they were unworried. There was always money to be made, always someone willing to pay you to provide them with something they could not get for themselves. In fact the twins were eager to return to work, though they would not go back to the hide business. The swamps
teemed with alligators but there was no shortage of hunters or buyers and the market was glutted. As in Veracruz, however, there was a Chinese quarter, and as in Veracruz the Chinese did not dare to fish in the open gulf for fear of attack by Mexican boats. The twins found their way to a man named Chu, the quarter's chief broker in various enterprises. As they had hoped, he was in the market for shark fins. Like Mr Sing, he had inland buyers who were always in short supply of fins—and of shark livers, to which some of the local Chinese attributed medicinal and aphrodisiacal power. Mr Chu agreed to the twins' rate for fins and they agreed to his for livers. And they were back in the shark trade. They had thought that, as in Veracruz, they might have trouble when the local crews found out they were selling to a Chinaman. But unlike the Veracruzanos, the twins learned, the Tampiqueños didn't care who caught fish for the Chinese so long as it wasn't the Chinks themselves.

They eventually yielded to Marina's entreaties and let her go sharking with them—and she loved it from the first and fast proved an able hand. She was awed by the sharks, exhilarated by the process of catching and killing them. She could soon do every job the twins could except reel in a big one by herself, or—for her fear of guns—shoot one dead. But she was very good with the shark knife and became so adept at extracting livers and excising fins that the twins soon left those tasks entirely to her.

Over time they came to believe that Mauricio Espinosa was either no longer looking for them or was never going to look for them in Tampico. It was of course also possible that his men had come to Tampico and made inquiries and then reported to Mauricio that no one here had seen any twins of the Wolfes' description.

Marina believed it would be best for the twins to retain their distinct appearances. “It is better to be in safety,” she said, “than to be in sadness.” Her English was improving, though she would never gain command of its grammar or solid footing with its idioms.

And if they kept themselves looking different, Blake Cortéz said, it would be better for whoever might prefer the excitement of two different-looking men in bed with her than the boredom of twins.

She blushed and stuck her tongue out at them.