The road takes them into a large clearing amid the palms and moss-hung trees. The place is but a hamlet, comprising a large two-story house and a few smaller residences, some outbuildings, a stable and corral holding horses and mules. There are several dray wagons. A pier with a moored pair of rowboats. The men ignore the barking dogs that have converged around them, but the irritated horses snap down at them.
Beside a house, Anselmo and Pepe pause at their work of planing a board on sawbucks and watch the horsemen approach. Lupita comes in view at a window, drying her just-washed hair with a towel. The horsemen rein up and Anselmo says, “Buenas tardes, caballeros. A su servicio.” Beside him, Pepe orders the dogs to shut up but they persist in their commotion.
Juan Lobo smiles and says he wishes to speak to James and Blake Wolfe.
I am sorry to say neither one is here, Anselmo says. His rifle is leaning against the side of the house ten feet away and he curses himself for not having retrieved it as soon as these men came in view. Up close the stink of them is terrific and he sees now the flyblown sack dangling from the saddle horn and feels a stir in his stomach. He tells the man the brothers have gone into town and he should look for them there.
Juan Lobo looks at the woman in the window and she moves out of sight. He had known the twins would not be here, that they are at the beach house as he had been told is their weekend custom, but this place, this so-called town, is theirs, a part of them, as were these people, and he would not pass it by.
A dog nips at his mount’s leg and dodges the horse’s kick that jostles Lobo in the saddle. Lobo draws his pistol and shoots the dog in the eye and its head hits the ground ahead of the rest of its body.
The gunshot frights the birds from the trees and the other dogs sprint away into the brush as Anselmo yells, You son of a—and the next bullet passes through his head.
By the time they are back on the Boca Chica road and heading east again, the night is fully risen and its only light is from the flaming hamlet. The glow is visible for miles but the only witnesses in range of it are the four horsemen themselves and a trio of Mexican shepherds a half mile south of the river, and even the shepherds cannot see the smoke against a sky so black with clouds. The gunshots and screamings have carried unheard into the uninhabited countryside. The horsemen feel invigorated, two of them having taken their pleasure with Lupita Xocoto, the other two with Selma Fuentes. The remains of the entire population of Wolfe Landing—all eight residents, including two boys, ages six and three, and an infant girl but seven months old—are charring in the flames.
They ride to the end of the Boca Chica road and onto the beach, the enormous dark undulation of the gulf before them. In the eastern sky the clouds have broken and the lowest of the stars demarcate a vague horizon. The men head south along the smooth beach, the breeze briny, the swash of the breakers muting the jinglings of harness. After a time they see small glowings of light in the distance ahead. The house. When they close to within a hundred yards, they can tell by the lights that it is a two-story on the crest of the sloping beach. They ride up into the dunes and out of sight of the house and then turn south again. Their horses strain for footing in the soft sand and the men dismount and lead them by the reins. They traverse a road of logs packed over with a mixture of gravel and dirt, the trail to the Boca Chica road, the turnoff onto which they could never have found in the dark. When they reckon they are near the house they hobble the horses and crawl over two low dunes and reach the crest of a taller one. And there the house is, fifteen yards from them. Atop the dune they are still below the level of the roofless porch and the windows of the lower floor are much too high for them to see into the house. But the breeze carries to them the sound of laughter. They can make out the garage just south of the house, and a few yards behind it a shed. Lobo and Dax scurry to the shed in a low crouch. By matchlight they find the store of lamp oil for the house—three barrels, one tapped. On a shelf are several empty paint cans, and they fill three of them with oil. Then they roll the three barrels, each in turn, from the shed to the house, setting one against a piling at the rear southwest corner and the other two against the pilings at the east side front corners. They retrieve the open cans of oil and set one beside each of the barrels. Then rejoin Sarmiento and Pori on the dune. And wait for the moon to come up.
Although Juan Lobo has imagined the pleasure of presenting the twins with their brother’s head just before he kills them, the fact of the matter is that such a moment cannot be had without first capturing them, and to try to capture them is to give them more of a chance to make a fight of it. No. Not these two. The least chance possible for them. If they die without knowing who is killing them and why, so what? Even if they knew, they would no longer know it when they’re dead, would they? The dead are without memory and so have no regret. Lobo well understands that the great failing of revenge is that the moment you kill a man you deliver him from pain and regret and can no longer get even with him. But. You can remember the occasion of getting even with him. You can remember it for the rest of your life. So. The thing of importance, Juan Lobo has told himself, the thing to keep in mind, is that these Wolfe twins will die because he, Juan Lobo, wills it. He who will know he was the instrument of their death and will take pleasure from that knowledge for as long as he has left to live.
By eleven o’clock the house is quiet and its windows dark. At midnight a cusp of moon shows at the far end of the gulf. A fat bright crescent just entering its last quarter, it silvers the water surface as it ascends, brings the beach into pale form, shapes the house in distinct silhouette.
The moon is almost detached from the gulf when Lobo sends Fat Pori to his assigned post. They lose sight of him in the dunes until some minutes later when he appears on the beach about forty yards north of the house. He lies belly down and pushes sand into a mound in front of him for some modicum of concealment. From there he has an unobstructed and moonlit view of both the front of the house and its north side. He settles himself with rifle ready.
Now Lobo and Sarmiento and Dax scurry down to the house, Dax with his rifle slung on his shoulder. Each of them goes to one of the oil barrels and with his machete hacks a gash into it, the blades whunking loud through the metal. Each man then picks up a paint can of oil and pours a track of it from the pool forming around the barrel as he backs up, Lobo and Sarmiento moving toward the rear of the house, Dax toward its front. They strike matches and put them to the oil tracks. As the flames rush along the ground toward the barrels, Lobo and Sarmiento race back to the dune behind the house while Dax sprints out to a spot on the beach from which he can cover the dark south side of the house and, like Pori, the front as well. As he runs, the barrels boom into spheres of fire.
The hackings into the oil barrels wake the twins. All the bedrooms are on the second floor and theirs are the last two at the north end of the rear of the house. Blake Cortéz lies still a moment, listening hard, a hand on the revolver under his pillow. When he gets up and goes to the window, Remedios wakes. What is it? she says. He shushes her and stares hard into the blackness directly behind the house. Reviews a quick mental roster of who is in the house. César and Hector are away on the Remerina, night fishing in the Laguna Madre. And then come the booms of the barrels bursting into flame—and in the glare of orange light from under the house, he glimpses two men ducking behind opposite ends of the nearest dune. At the same moment, James Sebastian, at the north window of his room and scanning the area without, spies the low mound of sand on the beach and the man lying prone behind it.