Country of the Bad Wolfes (34 page)

The falls marked the end of the rapids. The twins lay dazed and gasping as the raft carried in a slow swirl away from the crashing water. Blake Cortéz said something but James Sebastian couldn't make it out and yelled, “
What?
”

“I
saaaaid
, goddammit . . . it's
goood
to be
aliiive
!”

“You can say that again! Man, I saw
stars
!”

They had knots under the hair plastered to their foreheads, and their mouths were bloody, but they had lost no teeth and their bones were intact. They hung over the side of the raft and slurped up water and rinsed out the blood, then looked at each other and started laughing again. And kept at it for a while for no reason but it felt so good to laugh.

“Say, friend, tell me something,” James Sebastian said. “Who would you say are the best rivermen in the whole wide world?”

“Well sir,” Blake said, “as it is contrary to my nature to engage in mendacity except when necessary to gain my objective or the plain damn fun of it, I'd say in no uncertain terms that it's them there inimitable Wolfe brothers.”

“You mean them two that kinda look alike except the Jake one's better-looking?”

“No sir. I mean them other two that sorta look alike except the Blackie one is by far the handsomer as any mirror will attest.”

“Oh
him
! The simple one with the poor eyesight who tries so hard to hide his ignorance behind a lot of fancy words.
That
poor fella.”

“In point of actual fact, sir, the gent to whom you allude has got the visual acuity of a hawk and the intelligence of Aristotle, qualities so obvious to one and all that only the mentally deficient can fail to perceive them.”

They carried on in this way even as they took up the pushpoles and steered the raft along the center of the current's easy glide. The trees down here were even taller and more densely leaved than above the falls, their shadows deeper. The light held a green haze. The boom of the falls began to fade as soon as they rounded the first meander, and soon the only sounds besides the twins' voices were bird cries and the high chatter of monkeys. The riverbanks here were of altered character. No longer blunt and lined with reeds like most of the banks above the falls but low-sloped with narrow beaches.

And roosting all along them, like a littering of dark and rough-barked logs, were crocodiles.

They could derive no explanation for them. Upriver of the rapids, a crocodile was a rarity, though alligators common. But no alligator that had ever been brought back to the compound landing had exceeded thirteen feet, while most of the crocodiles here were longer than that. They saw several that exceeded fifteen feet before Blake said, “Christ amighty, Jeck, lookee there!” He directed his brother's attention to the bank ahead where lay a monster of no less than seventeen feet. “That's a goddam
dragon
!” As the raft went gliding by, some of the crocs slid into the water and vanished but most remained still as stone on the narrow beaches. There were more of them around the next bend. The twins agreed they looked like money just waiting to be skinned off and rolled up.

They then began to notice skeletal fragments of sundry sorts littering the banks. A section of horned cow skull. Segments of ribcages large and small. “
That's
how come there's so many here,” Blake said. “Everything that goes into the river up there ends up down here.”

“That's right,” James Sebastian said. “Think of all the guts and scraps the slaughterhouse sweeps into the river every damn day. And no telling how many cows and burros and pigs and dogs fall in and get washed down to all these waiting jaws.”

“Falls in or gets thrown in, dead or alive,” Blake said. And pointed at a portion of human cranium on the bank. “Whatever goes in alive is sure as hell dead by the time it gets here, and good thing, too.”

“It's how come these fellas are so big and fat. They don't hardly have to work to eat their fill.”

“Hacendados of the river,” Blake said.

For most of the next hour of their slow downriver glide they saw no lack of crocodiles. But as the raft went farther downstream, where less and less of the river carrion carried, their number dwindled until there were no more to see. Then the raft went around yet another bend and they saw bright light ahead, where the trees gave way. And arrived at the cove.

They whooped as they cleared the trees and glided onto the sunlit water. “Ensenada de Isabel! We're there, brother!” Blake shouted. “You
smell
it? You smell that sea?”

James said he smelled it and heard it too, just beyond the palms across the way. They spied the house on the low bluff where they knew to look for it, and were surprised to see the dock still standing off its beachfront. Farther down the beach, at the south end of the cove where it had been landed by some great storm and who knew when, the
Lizzie
lay on its side, its broken mast angled awkwardly but not completely sheared.

As they poled toward the dock, they directed each other's attention to this or that part of the cove, to the clarity of the water and the green wall of jungle and the mouth of the inlet they were now at an angle to see. They eased up to the end of the dock and made the raft fast to the same posts on which the
Lizzie
's snapped mooring lines still hung into the water. They leaped onto the dock and ran to the beach and raced around its south end and past the
Lizzie
and to the far side of the cove and through the stand of palm trees to the rocky shore and hollered in exultation at their first sight of the Gulf of Mexico.

“
Look
at it, Jake! Just
look
at it!” Blake yelled, hair tossing in the wind, arms spread wide as if he would embrace the entire sea. They stood there for a time, beholding the sunbright breadth of gulf, then went back through the trees to have a closer look at the rocky inlet.

They saw it was a tricky passage but told each other they could do it, they who had never yet sailed anything larger than a homemade twelve-foot pram on any water other than the nearly windless Río Perdido. Blake said the thing to do if you sailed up from southward was to go past this point a ways and
then
turn landward and run up just as close to shore as you could before heeling her over to come at the pass dead on.

“That's how I see it,” James Sebastian said. “I'll man the tiller and you work the lines.”

“That's exactly the opposite of how we'll do it.”

“That so?”

They grappled and fell in the sand in a grunting tangle, and as usual neither was able to pin the other and they called it a draw. Blake then wondered how fast a fella could swim across the cove to the raft about eighty yards away. James grinned back at him and they threw off their clothes and crouched side by side on the bank and agreed to a count of three. In unison they counted “One”—and dove in. They cut through the water side by side with the smoothness of sharks homing on prey and did not slow down until they reached the raft and it was impossible to say which one's hand was the first to slap against it, the two slaps sounding like one. They argued in gasps about who had won and tried to dunk each other, then finally pulled themselves up on the planks and flopped onto their backs, chests heaving.

After a while they untied one of the two oilskin knapsacks lashed to the deck and took out a canteen and two of Josefina's cornhusk-wrapped tamales filled with bits of goat meat and red chile. They sat cross-legged and ate the tamales and passed the canteen between them and studied the house on the bluff. After fourteen years of neglect and the poundings of sun and rain and at least four hurricanes, its only visible damage from where they sat were a few missing shingles and a front shutter hanging askew and patches of peeling paint. Beside the house was a small stable with a collapsed roof.

After they ate they took ropes and machetes and went over to the
Lizzie
and examined her and found no holes or cracks in the hull. They hacked off the mast at the point where it was broken and dragged it out of the way, then attached one rope to the sloop's bow and one to the stern and then pulled in tandem, first on one rope and then on the other, now dragging the bow closer to the water and now dragging the stern, and in this bit-by-bit manner they worked the boat into the water. Once the sloop was afloat they climbed up into her and went below and inspected the interior hull and found only two minor leaks. Even as weathered as she was, the boat was free of serious defect other than the broken mast, which would be simple enough to replace. New sails and rigging, new fittings, some sanding, some oakum, a coat of paint, and she'd be ready for the open sea again.

Their confidence in the sloop's seaworthiness was founded on their study of boating manuals and the experience of having built a boat themselves, a little gaffrigged pram. They named it for Marina, who fashioned its sail from flour sacks. It was a vessel of much mirth to the fishermen in their dugouts not only for its makeshift aspect but because the river breeze was frail at best and often nonexistent. A sailboat, even one this small, was simply out of place on the Río Perdido. Still, on its maiden try, the twins managed to sail it upriver for about a half mile with the weak breeze behind them before they came about and dropped the sail and rode the current back to the landing dock. The short trip took the better part of a day, and as they tied up at the dock they were aware of their father watching them from
a high balcony of the house but did not let him know they had seen him. At that distance they could not see his smile nor anyway have known that he was recalling another small sailboat of another time and the young twins who often sailed it from Portsmouth Bay to the Isles of Shoals—and did so once in a squalling heaving sea.

They gained facility at sailing in the river's weak wind, but they hankered for the open sea they'd not yet laid eyes on and for a larger boat to sail upon it. When they learned of Ensenada de Isabel, their keenest interest wasn't in the cove itself or in its house but in the sloop their father kept moored at the cove pier. They wondered if the boat was there still, and if it was, if it might be in reparable condition. Very likely it was in ruin or long ago sunk. There was one way to know for sure. They had anyway been wanting to try the rapids everyone spoke of in such ominous voice. And so began to construct a suitable raft.

They were of course thrilled that the sloop was in reparable condition—and now that they'd seen the cove, were no less enthusiastic about the place itself, recognizing its manifold advantages. Its isolation and natural camouflage against detection. Its bounty of natural sustenance. And the house on the little bluff. They hauled the
Lizzie
out of the water again and up high on the beach, then went to retrieve their clothes and shook the sand from them and put them on. Then went back around the cove and up the bluff to have a closer look at the house.

The pilings looked like they would stand till the end of time. The gallery steps were solid, so too the gallery floor. The front door had swelled from the humidity and they had to shoulder it open. There was a smell of mold and decay and something else, some stink they could not identify, and they opened all the shutters to air the place. Spiderwebs everywhere, but the ceiling showed only a few water stains. An oil lamp lay in shatters on the floor. Some of the wicker furniture was overturned and one of the chairs was in shreds, but most of the furniture and lamps appeared functional. In the kitchen a window was missing its shutter and the floor held the dry mudprints of a young jaguar. In the pantry were a tattered sack of beans and a bag of salt hardened to rock, strings of jerky like sticks of black wood. The stink was coming from behind the bedroom door and when they opened it they startled a colony of roosting bats and they yelled and crouched down with their arms clasped over their heads as the creatures fled the house in a shrilling dark cyclone of beating wings. The reeking layer of guano on the floor made their eyes water.

They found the roof missing only a handful of shingles. The widow's walk was still securely in place and they marveled at the view from it. They checked the cisterns and saw they would need a thorough cleaning, but the piping system into the house was in good order. A shed behind the house held a variety of tools, most of them coated with rust. “He couldn't use much of this with just one hand,” Blake said. “Momma had both hands,” said James Sebastian.

They went back around to the front of the house and sat on the verandah steps and stared out at the cove and neither of them said anything for a time. They had
reason to believe John Samuel's only time at the cove had been in his childhood and that their father had not been here since their mother's death. There was no sign of anyone else having been there in all those years, either, proof of how well the inlet was hidden from gulf view.