stinking drunks, lying around outside in the dirt.” Mrs. Big even plants tulips in the spring, and her roses bloom year-round (though when it’s burning up, their petals literally roast in the heat).
The two vaqueros spread Shears’ insult, embellishing it along the way. Tadeo steps into one of Mrs. Big’s rooms and passes the news on to two whores, the Flamenca sisters, with whom he’s about to begin a relationship that’s almost brotherly. Mateo tells both of his girlfriends. First, his publicly recognized one, Clara, the trapper’s daughter (she was waiting for him down by the dock), and then he tells his secret girlfriend, Perla, Cruz’s housekeeper, whom Mateo has sweet-talked into bed. She really does it for Mateo, she has a sweet ass and boy does she know how to use it, even better than Sandy can. But let’s be honest, she’s no looker.
A little later, Mrs. Big tells her fellow card players about the “Shears-Nepomuceno Affair,” while one of the Flamenca sisters muddles the story in the hotel bar. Tadeo remains in the room with her sister, it’s taking him a while to get it up.
Three people are playing cards with Mrs. Big: Jim Smiley, a compulsive gambler (he’s got a cardboard box with a toad next to him, for a while now he’s been trying to train it to jump farther than any other); Hector López (who has a round, childlike face, is an incurable womanizer, and owns the cart in which the trussed-up crabs are making the rounds of Bruneville); and one other guy who never opens his mouth, Leno (he’s desperate, and is only here to try to win some money).
On one side of the table, Tiburcio, the sour, wrinkled old widower, is watching them play; he’s always got some comment as bitter as his breath on the tip of his tongue.
Captain William Boyle, an Englishman, is the first of the dozen seamen who are about to set sail on the Margarita to understand the insult—most of them don’t speak a word of Spanish—and he translates it back into the sheriff’s mother-tongue, though his rendering alters it somewhat: “None of your business, you damned Mexican.”
The sailors celebrate the insult, “At last someone put the greasers in their place.” Rick and Chris embrace and begin to dance, singing “You damn Meexican! You damn Meeexican!” in a joking tone that carries across the water. Before the day is over, people on both banks of the Rio Grande, from Bruneville to Puerto Bagdad will have heard about what the gringo sheriff said, more or less accurately.
From Puerto Bagdad the news sails out into the Gulf, on boats headed north. After passing Point Isabel, the story runs up the coast, working its way past one river delta after another, and it’s carried upstream on the Nueces, the San Antonio, the Guadalupe, the Lavaca, the Colorado, the Brazos, the San Jacinto, and the Trinity.
And from a rotting dock the news travels with the mail boy to New Braunfels. The Germans are the only ones who give the mail carriers more work than the gringos.
In Galveston, no sooner has the phrase made it off the boat than it doubles back southward, finding passage on a steamboat that’s just arrived from Houston and is headed to Puerto Bagdad, Mexico, almost directly across the river from Point Isabel, Bruneville’s seaport. The majority of the passengers are Germans who’ve spent the better part of the trip’s first leg singing songs from the old country, accompanied by a violin, a horn, and a guitar. They even have a piano on board, but no one can play it because it’s wrapped for shipping.
One passenger, Doctor Schulz, is one of the famous Forty, the Germans who came to the New World to build a new world. In 1847 he helped establish the colony of Bettina (named after Bettina von Arnim, the writer, composer, social activist, publisher, patron of the arts, and acolyte of Goethe—“My soul is an impassioned dancer”). In Bettina there were three rules: Friendship, Freedom, and Equality. No man was treated differently from the next; there was no such thing as private property; and they all slept together in a long house that wasn’t remotely European, with a thatched roof and a tree trunk in the center. The butcher prepared wild boar for the communal table.
Each of the Forty wore beards. The youngest was seventeen and the two eldest were twenty-four, free thinkers one and all. No one knows why they lasted only one year. There are lots of stories: some say that they harvested only six ears of corn because no one wanted to do any work (it’s true they spent most afternoons guzzling whiskey from barrels they had brought from Hamburg), while others say it was because of a woman, which makes no sense, because there weren’t any women in the colony.
When the community disbanded, the piano itself proved a source of friction. Schulz asked to take it—it had been a present from his mother—but because “everything belongs to everyone” it was nearly chopped up into pieces. In the end, the piano, which had accompanied the doctor on his long voyage from Germany, is making its way with him to Mexico. This part of his travels has taken a good long while. Schulz plans to set up shop as a doctor in Puerto Bagdad, where the piano will once again be played.
Another German passenger, Engineer Schleiche, began the trip from Houston half-heartedly, and by the time he arrives in Galveston he’s decided that life without his Texan girlfriend would be empty, meaningless. He decides to jump ship and wait for the next steamboat to New York, where the girl has fled, tired of waiting years for a marriage proposal that never came.
Although Schleiche finds Galveston beautiful—and it is—he is disgusted by the loose morals of its locals. He is at his hotel, giving instructions about having meals delivered to his room (he’s decided not to set foot outside until the steamboat is ready to depart “this den of iniquity”), when he hears about Shears’ insult and who the sheriff is; he already knows all about Nepomuceno. Fearing the worst, he instantly shuts himself in his room, so he’s not up to date on everything else that happens, and arrives in New York with only the first words uttered by Shears.
Schleiche was not one of the founding Forty from Bettina; as assistant to Prince Solms, he arrived in an earlier Prussian migration from the Adelsverein, or Society of Noblemen, the aristocrats who founded the Nassau Plantation in ’45 (his godfather was the Prince of Nassau). The nobles acquired land and servants (they bought twenty-five slaves) but the society broke up a few years later, for reasons different from those of the Forty.
Generally speaking, the Germans were appalled that a gringo sheriff would insult such a well-respected Mexican—you could say what you want about Nepumuceno but no Prussian would ever accuse him of stealing a cow. (Admittedly the Germans were clueless about cattle; they were useless when it came to livestock—“If a Kartofel lays a hand on a cow, she keels over.”)
When the third-class carpenter-sheriff came out with his little insult in 1859, it was only 24 years since Texas had declared and won its independence from Mexico, through a series of skirmishes and battles, some of which were fought more fiercely than others, and both sides have continued to accuse each other of atrocities ever since. Say what you will, the truth is the Texans won the war by river and by sea because the Mexicans didn’t have a navy to speak of; during the entire Spanish occupation not one Mexican was trained to lead a flotilla, and they didn’t have any boats anyway.
Texas declared its independence in 1835. Since the Mexicans had invited Americans to live on large tracts of their land, granting them land concessions at very favorable rates, this declaration didn’t sit well with them. That’s why the military confrontations, skirmishes, and battles between Mexicans and Texans didn’t stop.
In ’38, more than a thousand Comanches coordinated attacks south of the Río Bravo on ranches, towns, and settlements. Since the Texan rebellion, not one Mexican had been able to go out and kill Comanches and Apaches in the Indian Territory—it had become impossible to cross the Republic of Texas because the warlike tribes were running roughshod over the countryside, stirred up by the arrival
