Country of the Bad Wolfes (76 page)

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.

T
he 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.

The rail line to Brownsville was less than twenty-five miles long but spanned a number of short bridges in traversing the marshiest regions. The wagon road alongside the track was intermittently corduroyed with logs. But there were wide expanses of drier ground too, vast pale sand flats, here and there clustered with prickly pear cactus and stands of mesquite. In some places the thorny brush was so dense it seemed to them not man nor beast could penetrate it. Chaparral, the locals called such countryside, sometimes el monte. The twins liked its roughness. Marina thought it was an ugly place, but she agreed the immense sky was dazzling.