Country of the Bad Wolfes (79 page)

When Marina Colmillo came back in the house James Sebastian asked her if she would marry him. But even at such a moment they could not resist deviling her. They had their hands in their pockets so she could not see who had the crooked little finger or node on the wrist. They were dressed differently but had not called each other by name since arriving. She gave them a chiding look and then stepped closer to the one who had asked her and told him to stop squinting. And saw the green flaw in his eye.

Yes, James, she said, I will.

Two hours later, on that bright January afternoon, they stood before a justice of the peace and were wed.

The marriage did not change their plan for a river house, but first they had to provide a home for her. They looked at different lots around town before buying a large one on the west end of Levee Street. While they were building a sturdy clapboard house of three bedrooms and a small room in the rear as a servant's quarters, they continued living in the Adams Street rental. Most days were cool and bright and favorable for hard work but they had not imagined a South Texas winter could some days be so cold. Some mornings the bushes were sheeted with ice. The occasional blue norther burned their faces raw and had them exhaling on their fingers every few minutes.

They finished the house near the end of March, including the privy and fencing and cistern, everything. They insisted Marina should have a live-in maid while they were working at the landing. She felt she could manage well enough by herself but did not want to argue, and so interviewed several applicants before hiring a bilingual seventeen-year-old named Remedios Marisól Delgallo. The girl had grown up in a San Antonio orphanage run by Irish nuns, then went out on her own at fifteen and made her way to Brownsville to see what it was like. She stayed because she liked the spirited border life and had supported herself with intermittent jobs as a housemaid and as occasional assistant to a midwife. The twins had hoped Marina would choose someone older, but she insisted on Remedios, to whom she had taken an immediate liking. She said the girl would not only be of great help with the birth but also in improving her English. When Remedios was introduced to them she was captivated by their identicalness. She did not ask how to tell them apart but she was sharp-eyed and attentive and within two days could address them by name when they were close enough for her to see the telltale little finger and the wrist node.

The house was furnished, the pantry stocked. With a wagonload of tools and kegs of beer, the twins set out for the river property.

To transport materials to the clearing, they first had to make a wagon road through the grove, a process that would take almost as long as all the construction to follow. The shortest distances between the grove perimeter and the clearing traversed the boggiest ground and presented the most obstacles. The best route they could chart ran parallel to the river and was almost a mile long, and still required cutting through scrub and trees. With machetes and axes they hacked and hewed their way through the grove, using the trunks of felled trees to form a corduroy surface which they then graded by shoveling mud and dirt over the logs and packing it down. It was an arduous process and the early stage of it even more difficult for the advent of the rainy season. All in all it took eight months to complete the road, which they finished on a freezing day in December. Then began the long and strenuous months of cutting the pilings and raising them in place in the corner of the clearing where the house was to stand. Once the pilings were in place they would lay the floor across them and then finally begin to build the house itself. After which they would build a dock, then a stable and some sheds. A seasoned construction crew might have finished the entire project, from first to last, in less than a year, less than half the time it would take the two of them. There would be times, as they labored in the clearing, when they would almost decide to hire a crew to finish the job, but they had reckoned their expenses from first to last and the budget would not allow for it. In truth, they were glad they had no choice but to do it all themselves. Because even if they'd had a choice, they would do it themselves. And that, they told each other, would be perverse.

The twins had been baffled when Marina, on marrying James Sebastian, no longer permitted Blake Cortéz to join them in bed. Things are different now, she said. They did not understand. They argued to her that nothing was different except that one of them had married her to give the forthcoming child legitimacy, but for all any of them knew, the child was really Blake's and she was refusing to make love with the true father. No-no-no, Marina said. When they decided that James would be her husband, they had also decided that James would be the father. She was now the father's wife and was pledged in faithfulness to him and could make love to no other man. It's not some other man, James said, it's Blackie! Besides, what if I say it's all right? She said it wasn't up to him to decide that. She admitted that the three of them had always done things by their own rules and lived very free of the world's opinion, but there were some rules in the world that were greater than their own. Why did one of those rules, Blake said, have to be one about no more me? It just did, she said, and kissed him on the cheek. You have always been my darling Blackie, but now you are my darling
brother
Blackie.

“Goddammit,” Blake said, “I didn't know it was gonna mean
this
.” He turned to James. “Let's make it two out of three.”

What galled Blake most was not the loss of sex with her. There had always had other girls, in Tampico as well as Buenaventura, none of whom meant anything more to them than an occasional treat of carnal variety, and none of whom, they were certain, Marina had ever been aware of. For sure there were girls in Brownsville and Matamoros as easily to be had. But with Marina, sex was the least of it. It had always been fun with her, yes, but the best thing about it was their sharing of a woman they had loved all their life. James felt the same way. It seemed to them a cruel twist that she should become the first thing in their life they could not share. But if they could not be husband to the same woman or father to the same child, they could at least share the experiences of marriage and fatherhood. Experiences that, on the day Remedios Marisól entered their lives, Blake Cortéz began inclining toward before he was even aware of it.

From the beginning of their project in the palm grove, it was the twins' custom to go into Brownsville every Saturday to get supplies and visit with Marina and Remedios. The first few times they did not stay until nightfall. They had lunch with the women and then late in the afternoon headed back to the palm grove so they could resume work on the wagon road at daybreak. From the first visit, however, it became James's and Marina's ritual to retire to their bedroom after lunch—and to give them more privacy Blake and Remedios would take a walk around town, a routine by which they came to know each other well. Besides being pretty, Remedios was an intelligent and astute girl with a wonderful laugh it pleased Blake to provoke. And too, she had a sassiness much like Marina's, peppery but never mean. Probably the main reason, the twins believed, Marina had taken such immediate liking to her.

Blake found himself thinking about her during the week's work on the grove road, and he looked forward to seeing her on Saturdays. She always seemed pleased to see him too. They had known each other a month when he discovered she was even more akin to Marina than he'd thought—in that she had the same bohemian attitude about sex. From then on, when James and Marina went off to one bedroom, Blake and Remedios went off to another, and they stayed with the women overnight, though it cost them half a morning's work at the clearing on Sundays.

Remedios soon intuited that Blake was falling in love with her, which pleased her very much because she was already enamored of him. But she had early in life acquired the valuable defense of keeping her true feelings out of her eyes, and she did that with him until she could be sure how he felt about her. Marina had confided to her the relationship she'd had with the twins and how sad it had made her to turn away Blackie when she and James married. Remedios thought it exciting that the trio had been able to share themselves as they had, but she secretly fretted that Blake might never feel toward her as he did about Marina. She did not have to fret very long. They had known each other almost four months on the evening in July when he told her he loved her. She saw the truth of it in his eyes and told him she loved him too—and they grinned at each other like fools. Well then, he said, seeing as they
loved each other, and knowing that sooner or later she was sure to get pregnant, they might as well get married now as wait until later. Well, she said, it certainly seemed the practical thing to do, all right, and they laughed at themselves for such talk of practicality. But listen, she said. You must ask me. Of course I must, he said. And did. And she said yes. And when they learned of it, James Sebastian and Marina were overjoyed.

The wedding took place on the last Saturday of July. Outside the church after the ceremony, James Sebastian took Blake aside and said that in all fairness he should be permitted to join him in bed with Remedios Marisól until she conceived. After all, they had shared in the making of the child Marina was carrying and it seemed to him only fair they do the same with Remedios's first. Blake said it sounded fair to him, but he wasn't sure what Remedios would say. They looked over at her where she stood outside the church doors, talking with the priest and Marina and Mr and Mrs Flores, the good neighbors she had invited to the nuptials.

Large-bellied in her eighth month, Marina caught sight of the twins and studied their faces. Then excused herself from the group and went to James and hugged him and gave him a kiss. And whispered to him, Don't even dream about it, sonny.