It was late in the afternoon when they deposited her at the Matamoros depot. The stationmaster immediately sent a wire to John Louis at Cielo Largo to let him know. John Louis had been informed the evening before of the change in trains and the reason for it, but when the train had still not arrived by morning he was frantic. He had exchanged a half-dozen wires with the Monterrey garrison before finally going back to Cielo Largo and maintaining telegraphic communications from there. When he got to the station it was the first time he and Catalina had seen each other in the five years since he’d left Patria Chica, and he nearly stopped her breath with the force of his embrace. When she told him Eduardo Luis had been killed and Sandi Rosario taken, he said, Oh dear God, and hugged her again to hide his face. She did not tell him of her assault nor of the man she killed, would for years not tell anyone, though she’d have told Buelito if she’d had the chance and pleaded with him to take her along when he set out to hunt them down. John Louis composed himself and then sent a wire to Edward Little.
The entirety of Edward’s responding telegram said, Send Eduardo to Patria Chica. Attend well to the Cat.
Edward Little assigned his best agents, each with his own crew, to search the border in hunt of the train attackers, especially in the towns where most of the trade in guns and munitions took place. Over the following weeks every man of the gang but three was captured and interrogated to the bloody bones before he was granted the mercy of death. Most were in agreement that the girl was taken from the train by Berto González and Chato Ruíz, two of the three who remained unfound. After receiving their shares from the sale of the munitions in Reynosa, González and Ruíz had left the gang, taking the girl with them. Maybe to sell her, maybe for their own fun, nobody knew. Or knew where they’d gone. Some thought Monterrey, some Nuevo Laredo, some Chihuahua City, but nobody knew. Edward’s men would follow every tenuous lead but find no trace of either man nor of Sandra Rosario.
Úrsula had known Catalina since the girl was a baby and she was very happy to have her living with them. Hector Louis had been eight the last time he’d seen her and was now a little shy around his sixteen-year-old cousin who seemed somehow to have grown more than just two years older than he. Though the house was large by Brownsville standards, she had never lived in a place so small, but she didn’t mind. Her room looked out on a backyard full of trees and abutting a small resaca and she marveled at the variety of birds that watered there. She was in a secret apprehension for the first few weeks and formed a contingent plan to sneak off to town and find a curandera—and then was profoundly relieved when her menses came, and she felt as much delivered by chance as injured by it.
The Littles held a fiesta at Cielo Largo to introduce her to the Wolfes, her kin by way of her Grandmother Gloria. They came in a pair of new Model T Ford touring cars, the twins relinquishing most of the driving to the boys, and Jacky Ríos and César Augusto protested to no avail when Blake Cortéz also allotted Vicki Angel a turn behind the wheel. That evening at the banquet table there was much loud discussion about family lineage and Catalina’s relation to the Wolfes. Beyond the solid facts that Samuel Thomas Wolfe was her great-grandfather and John Roger Wolfe her great-granduncle there was much debate about great-uncles and great-aunts and degrees of cousinship until everybody was laughing at the genealogical tangle. It was finally resolved that although they were technically her granduncles and grandaunts, John Louis and the twins would simply be her uncles, Úrsula and Marina and Remedios her aunts, and all their children her cousins. It was only natural that they would abbreviate her name to Cat and that the nickname would carry over into Spanish as La Gata.
She was one more Little who had never seen the ocean until her first time at Playa Blanca. They could now drive there in the Fords, the twins having reinforced the wagon trail from the Boca Chica road to the house and there built a garage to protect the cars from windblown sand. Catalina had learned to swim in the river at Patria Chica but shared her cousins’ preference for swimming in the gulf rather than in a river or resaca. All the boys were in a stir over their long-legged, blue-eyed cousin and vied with each other to teach her how to sail. Jacky Ríos and César Augusto nearly got into a fistfight about it, which seemed to amuse her. She chose Vicki Angel to be her instructor and by the end of that weekend she was sailing like an old hand. A year and a half Catalina’s junior, Vicki Angel adored her cousin and was elated to have another girl in the family, an ally at last in a tribe overrun with rough boys. She took to wearing pants and boots too, whenever Catalina did, and none of the adults objected, so long as the girls never failed to dress properly for mealtimes and social outings. They enrolled Catalina in the same Catholic school for girls that Vicki attended and the two of them walked there together every day in their blue-and-white uniforms. The women were pleased by the novelty of two girls among them, girls at the threshold of womanhood but who still in the way of girls could communicate with each other through mysterious smiling glances that sometimes led to outbursts of laughter for reasons they shared with no one else. The twins too were taken with Catalina. They admired her refusal to give up her Remington revolver to John Louis. He had offered to keep it for her in his gun case, he told the twins, but she preferred to keep it in her room and he could think of no argument by which to deny her. That she knew how to use the gun was evident the first time she took a turn at a family target shooting session and outshot all her cousins except Harry Sebastian, the deadeye of the bunch. And the day she slipped the bonehandled knife from its hip sheath and threw it whirling to pinion a four-foot rattlesnake still writhing after Jacky Ríos had shot it was one more proof she’d been well-trained in self-defense and the arts of weaponry. She learned everything from Don Eduardo, Úrsula told the twins. Catalina herself never spoke of her great-grandfather to anyone other than Vicki Angel, who would not have betrayed her confidences even under torture.
And if in those first months with the border families Catalina sometimes withdrew into silence or went for long solitary walks at the ranch or on the beach or kept to her room for an afternoon of staring out the window, it was understandable to Marina and Remedios. Just think of what that poor girl had been through! She had seen her brother killed and her sister taken away and God alone knew how frightened she must have been for her own life. Naturally she would sometimes remember that terrible experience and be sad. Give her time. She was young and would learn to live with the pains of the past as we all must. Úrsula agreed, but said that even as a child Catalina had always had a reclusive side to her, some secret part of herself she never shared with anyone. Except probably Don Eduardo. And now Vicki Angel, to whom she seemed even closer than she had been to her own sister. It is a very right name for her, Úrsula said, the Cat.
Hector Louis told his cousins much the same thing. Catalina had always been a little odd, he said. She never asked if she could play with you, you always had to ask her, and sometimes she would and sometimes she wouldn’t. It was like she didn’t really care if anybody asked her to play or not. I always liked her anyway, Hector said, even though she was odd.
“Well she’s not any odder than any of you all, that’s damn for sure!” Vicki Angel said, and stomped off as the boys all laughed at her clumsy profanity.
Harry Sebastian said the really strange thing about the Cat was how well she could shoot and throw that knife. Jacky Ríos said he’d sure like to get his hands on that knife of hers. “There are lots of things of hers I’d like to get my hands on,” Morgan James said with a lascivious smile. All the boys had by this time disposed of their virginity, fourteen-year-old Hector Louis just a couple of months before, when Morgan James, the eldest at seventeen and the most experienced, took him to one of his compliant Mexican girlfriends in Brownsville.