Country of the Bad Wolfes (86 page)

They were often away from home for weeks at a time. But as the years went by and the incidence of crime in the colonias fell off they were able to return to their families more often and stay for longer periods. Marina and Remedios Marisól were always as relieved to see that they were unhurt as they were glad to have them home, and the children were always happy as pups at their return.

In June of 1896 Remedios Marisól added the first daughter to the two families, Victoria Angélica, and her father and uncle doted on her. She was three and a half years old when the world entered the twentieth century. Jim Wells was by then Judge Wells, having accepted a gubernatorial appointment to serve out the term of a state district judge who'd been obliged to resign. On the last night of 1899 he hosted a New Year's Eve party for a hundred friends and their families. The celebration took place in a large rented hall and on its lantern-lit surrounding grounds arrayed with picnic tables and bandstands and dance floors. Morgan James was a month shy of seven years old and attending the best school in the county—a Catholic school run by nuns—where the other boys would also be enrolled when they were of age. Harry Sebastian and Jackson Ríos were now five, César Augusto four. The boys wore suits and ties and everyone smiled to see them dancing with their mothers.

On each of the twins' respites with their families, the Wolfes always took supper at least once or twice with the Wells. And too, in the course of every visit home, there would be a stag barbecue at one ranch or another with some of Jim Wells's friends, most of them ranchers, but always a few politicians in attendance as well, plus the Brownsville marshal and the chief of police and a Texas Ranger or two. From one year to the next, more of Jim Wells's friends—men of power and experience and not easily impressed—became the twins' friends too.

For his varied efforts on the twins' behalf, Jim Wells of course received something of great value from them in return, something more than their protection of the countryside peons, whose votes were the core of his political influence. Something he did not in fact ever actually
ask
for, not in so many words, but which they never failed to grasp as a request and never failed to fulfill. And for which service they always received an appreciative and generous remuneration. After each circuit of the colonias, they would as always meet with Wells in private and give him their report and usually that was that. Sometimes, however—not often, rarely more than three or four times in the course of a year—he would tell them about someone or other who was causing a problem for the regional party or for the coalition of ranchers or for some other association important to South Texas. Someone who had persistently rejected Jim Wells's every effort to arrive at some reasonable resolution to the problem, some sensible accommodation. “I tell you, boys,” he said, “being reasonable is all the means we've got for getting along with each other in this world. A fella who won't be reasonable, who aint willing to compromise the least little bit,
is about the biggest liability on God's green earth. Fellas like that, well, sometimes they don't leave you much choice about things, sad to say.” In terms that no law court could ever construe as directive, Wells would say that a number of important people were of the same mind as his in wishing this person would cease and desist in the difficulty he was causing. Wells was never specific about the problem presented by the man under discussion, but the details were in any case irrelevant to the twins. They never said anything in response to his account of the troublemaker but only listened and nodded. Some days or weeks later, the man in question might be found expired in his bed with not a mark on him and hence presumed the victim of heart failure or stroke. Or sprawled neckbroken on the floor of his barn after a fall from his loft. Or drowned in a creek or the river after being thrown from his horse, which would be grazing nearby. And every time some such gadfly succumbed to some such natural cause and ceased to present a problem to Jim Wells and his associates, a thick sealed envelope bearing no mark at all would sometime in the night be left at the front door of one or the other twin's Levee Street home. Marina or Remedios was usually the one to find it and would pass it to her husband without remark. If the women intuited what was in the envelope or what it was for, they never said so, not even to each other.

Their constable duties left them scant time to attend to their smuggling business, so they hired Anselmo Xocoto to run it for them. Anselmo in turn hired as his assistants his younger brother Pepe and Licho Frentes, Pepe's best friend. The twins permitted the trio to build cabins at Wolfe Landing for their personal quarters, and in Anselmo's name they opened a bank account to be used strictly for the business. They bought such great quantities of whiskey at cut rates from suppliers in Corpus Christi that Anselmo and the boys were obliged to build a large separate shed for the storage of it. Their main buyers of Mexican liquor were also in Corpus Christi, buyers who in turn sold to clients in Galveston, Houston, New Orleans. The twins permitted Anselmo to arrange transactions with the Goya brothers and let him keep twenty-five percent of the profits and pay Pepe and Licho twelve and a half percent each. The remaining fifty percent was reserved to the twins, a share justified by their financing of the business and their ownership of the land on which it was conducted and, not least of all, by their readiness to defend their employees against any trouble, legal or otherwise. Each time they were home from a backcountry patrol they would go to Wolfe Landing for at least one night to consult with Anselmo about the river trade. Anselmo would review with them all the transactions that had taken place since their last visit and apprise them of pending deals. He would show them the account books and the inventory lists. All in all, he did a fine job, his helpers too, for which the twins would reward them with a bonus every year.

The fifteenth of August, 1903.

She has been lying awake for hours when the first faint dawnlight shows in the window. She knows where he is. Knows that this one is not a one-time thing but that he has been seeing her for many weeks. Bad enough to be pitied for a wife whose husband hops from this one to that one to still another. But when he begins repeat visits to one, well, then it's no longer a matter of wanting to bed others but of wanting to share another's bed. That makes it something different. Something worse. Something she can no longer endure.

She cannot think anything she has not already thought many times before. Well, enough of thinking. She supposes she should write a letter to the grandchildren but the thought of explication is more tiring than she can stand. He has exhausted her. Let him explain.

She gets out of bed and strips and washes with thoroughness at the basin, avoiding even a glance at her slack breasts in early wither. Then puts on a black dress and her best shoes and sits before her mirror and brushes her hair to a fine loose hang and leaves it that way. Her flaccid flesh evidence of her fifty-three years but her hair yet the lustrous ebony of a girl's. She goes to the closet in his room and there finds the holstered revolver he long ago taught her to shoot. A single-action, .36-caliber Navy Colt he used in the days of the American Civil War. She checks the chambers and sees all six are charged. Then goes to his neatly made bed and lies down on her back. Legs straight, feet together, head on pillow, eyes on ceiling. She cocks the Colt and holds it in awkward fashion with the muzzle positioned against her breast and over her heart, her fingers around the back of the butt and one thumb against the trigger guard and the other on the trigger. She feels her pulse thumping up through the gun.

Wait a minute. Wait just a goddam minute. This isn't right.

She removes the gun from her breast and sits up. Sits motionless, pondering. Then gets up and straightens her dress and gives her hair another quick brush and drapes a shawl over her shoulders and takes up the gun and goes downstairs, holding the pistol under the shawl, her arms crossed as if against the morning chill. She leaves the house and goes across the main courtyard and out the gate into the larger compound that even at this early hour is already bustling.

She has rarely ventured into the workers' quarter, and she receives respectful but puzzled greetings as she passes. Induces whispers about her all-black attire and unpainted face and loose uncovered hair. She has been told where the woman lives and as she turns onto that street she is thinking that she will have to wait for a time before he comes out. And then almost laughs aloud when she spies the woman's house and sees her door come open and him step out. What timing. As though it had all been planned somewhere sometime long before now and she doesn't even have to think what to do but only let herself do it. She stops on this side of the street and watches as he turns to give the bitch a parting kiss. Then the door shuts and he starts in her direction. Smiling. His thoughts yet inside the house.

Now he sees her and halts in the middle of the street. Sees her raising the Colt—is that
his Navy
?—as others on the street are scattering, having seen the gun too. He raises his palms as if he might push away this entire circumstance or at the least fend the bullet and he has no idea what he is about to say and then is on the ground and breathless, the report of the pistolshot still in his ears. A numbness in his chest. He manages to get to one knee, regaining his breath in gasps, and feels a great inflating pain under his ribs. Dark blotches of blood forming in the dust below him, his hat on the ground. He leans back on a haunch, hand to his hot wound and sees her aiming even as she comes toward him. The next bullet smashes his shoulder and swats him half-about and onto his side.

She stands over him and says, “Mírame.” He looks up and sees the small smile above the gun. Does he see the bullet emerge from the bore in the infinitesimal instant before it stains the ground under his head with the ruby ruin of his brain? She shoots him in the face three times more, until the hammer falls on an empty shell. Then drops the gun and looks about. Then in swift sure strides makes for a well at the end of the street and without hesitation goes into it headfirst.

At the corner of the nearest building, Catalina Luisiana Little, eight years old and given to roaming the compound in the early gray hours, witness to the whole thing, hears the deep resonant splash.

By the time Zack Jack and John Louis have been summoned from the ranch, Gloria has been hooked out of the well and taken to the casa grande. Don Louis there too. The two bodies washed and covered with sheets to their chins. On adjacent
tables in a room aglow with the amber light of scores of arrayed candles. Ancient women of dark fissured faces and dressed all in black are seated against the walls and loud in their ritual lamentations. Zack Jack and John Louis stand there for a time, looking on their elder brother. His face with four black holes. He whom they called Uncle Louis and who had taught them so many things in their boyhood. And who, as Gloria once told her sister, was more of a father to them than Edward Little had ever been. They regard too their sister-in-law who was Aunt Gloria and the only mother they'd known. Like everyone else of the hacienda except for their father, the brothers knew of Louis Welch's infidelities and that Aunt Gloria was pained by them. The outcome is no shock.