Frank and I were our parents’ only children, seventeen and sixteen years old at the time, but both of us heading into our senior year of high school by dint of our parents’ finagling my enrollment in first grade when I was only five so that Frank and I could be in the same grade all the way through school. They had willed us the house and we wanted to continue living in it, just us two, but some of our relatives were very much opposed. They said it would be unseemly and irresponsible of the family to permit any of its children to live without adult supervision while they were still in school. Frank and I said we weren’t children and could take care of ourselves quite well, thank you very much. So they took the matter to the Three Uncles. Whenever there’s a family conflict that the principals can’t settle on their own, the Uncles are asked to decide it. In this instance they ruled that we had to live under direct adult supervision until we graduated. Either an adult relative moved in with us or we moved in with an adult relative. We didn’t like the choice worth a damn, but in our family the rules are the rules, and one of the most basic is that a decision of the Uncles is final. Most of our relatives were willing to take us in, but the only one willing to move in with us was our spinster aunt, Laurel Lee. She’s a nice person in many ways and a real whiz with digital gadgetry, but she’s got some rigorous views about the proper governance of the legally underage, and the idea of being under her authority was as appealing as a yearlong stretch in reform school. Still, it was a better option than moving in with another household. We intended to inform her of our decision right after the memorial ceremony, but as soon as the service ended, Charlie Fortune came up to us to express his condolences and ask how we were doing.
We didn’t know him very well then. He’d gone off to Texas A&M when Frank and I were in elementary school, but even as little kids, we knew about his athletic achievements in high school. He had set a state broad jump record that stood for five years and he twice made all-state in football as a running back and three times in baseball as a catcher. He went to A&M because he wanted to stay in-state and preferred College Station to the other university towns. He majored in history, took full-time coursework even in the summer sessions, and got his degree in three years. He has many times said he would’ve gone on to law school except he didn’t meet the entrance requirements because he’d been born of married parents. You wouldn’t think that old joke would continue to get as many laughs as it does in a family with a half-dozen lawyers in it, including Harry Mack. As soon as he graduated, Charlie came home and went to work for our daddy, Henry James Wolfe, whom everybody called HJ, and who by that time had been chief of the family shade trade for about ten years, since shortly after I was born. Daddy had promised him a position as soon as he met the rule that requires any family member who wants to work in the shade trade to get a degree first, which is why Charlie had matriculated year-round at A&M, to get it over with as soon as he could. Frank and I would do the same thing at UT Austin. Charlie quickly became Daddy’s number two operative, behind Uncle Harry Morgan Wolfe, but even then Frank and I still didn’t see much of him. Unlike Daddy, who commuted daily from Brownsville to the Landing, Charlie lived out there from the day he entered the shade trade and but infrequently came into town. The only times we saw him were at family gatherings on holidays or birthdays, and our exchanges with him were pretty much limited to “hey” when we arrived and “so long” when we left.
Frank and I were in junior high when he got married. Her name was Hallie Rheinhardt and she was nineteen years old and the marriage lasted exactly eight days. Frank and I never did meet her. Nobody did except some of the folks who lived or worked at the Landing back then, including Daddy. All he ever told us about it was that Charlie met her in Galveston and married her two days later, then brought her home to the Landing, where they mostly kept to themselves for a week before she lit out while Charlie was making a gun run to Laredo. When he got back and found out she’d left, he went looking for her and was gone for almost three weeks before he came back and told everybody the marriage was over and done and he did not ever want to hear a word about her. Daddy said everybody was wise enough to take his warning to heart, and nobody ever mentioned Hallie Rheinhardt within earshot of Charlie again. So far as I know, that’s still true. It’s a whole story of its own, Charlie’s marriage.
For a while after it happened, though, he kept to the Landing and refrained from attending family events. Daddy figured he was feeling humiliated and probably thought everyone saw him as a fool, though in truth nobody did. Charlie Fortune was not the first man to fall in love with the wrong woman, Daddy said, and he would get over it by and by. In the meantime, Charlie made him an offer on the Doghouse Cantina and Daddy took it. He had inherited the place and never cared for the onus of operating it, but Charlie loved the joint. He enjoyed the badinage of bartending, and its management was no burden to him. Daddy believed that operating the Doghouse and socializing with the patrons did a lot to help Charlie get over the embarrassment of his marriage, and he pretty soon resumed attending family get-togethers.
It was at the family Christmas party at Uncle Peck’s house just a few months before our parents disappeared that Frank and I had our first real conversation with Charlie. It came about when Daddy mentioned to him in our presence that Frank was now the best high school pitcher in the county and I was the best third baseman and so on and so forth. His bragging on us made us uncomfortable in light of Charlie having been one of the best-ever players in South Texas, but the baseball talk got the conversational ball rolling between us. He was only twenty-six then, yet there was an air about him that made us address him as “sir” until he said to quit it and just call him Charlie. We jawed about baseball with him for about an hour before he said he had to leave and had enjoyed the talk and hoped we could do it again sometime. But we didn’t see him again until the memorial service, when he came up and asked how we were doing. By then the Three Uncles had appointed him to take Daddy’s place as chief of the shade trade.
It so happened he hadn’t heard about our residence problem and the Three Uncles’ edict about it, and Frank told him the whole thing.
“Jesus,” Charlie said. “You guys are gonna live with Aunt Laurel?”
All we could say was it beat the alternative.
He looked at us in a way he never had before. Like he’d just been asked a question about us and was trying to come up with a good answer. Then he asked if we’d like to live out at Wolfe Landing in one of the rental trailers, a double-wide in good shape that happened to be available. We wouldn’t have to pay rent, not even if we sold our parents’ house—which we would end up doing—but we’d have regular chores to do in lieu of rent. Our homework would always come first, but then would come the chores. He said it would be a long drive to school in Brownsville, but he’d provide the vehicle, and because we were under eighteen, he’d see to it we were given “hardship” driver licenses so we could drive without a licensed adult in the car.
We couldn’t believe it. A house and a car and the licenses to drive it on our own. We also couldn’t believe the Uncles would allow it, since they’d said we had to live under the same roof with an adult.
Charlie said to leave it to him, he’d talk to the Uncles that night.
We didn’t think they would okay it, but they did. They said his offer to be our guardian and supervise us until we were of legal age met the terms of their ruling, and, notwithstanding the protests of some in the family, the matter was closed.
So Frank and I moved to Wolfe Landing.
Like all Texas Wolfes, we’ve known about the shade trade from the time we were kids, and we’d been taught never to speak of it to anyone outside the family. Until we moved to the Landing, however, we’d been there only once, back when we were still in grammar school. We nagged Daddy into taking us out there one Saturday but he wouldn’t let us go exploring, so there was nothing for us to do but fish off the dock, and we got so bored we never asked to g
o out there again. That suited Daddy just fine and very much pleased Momma, who never liked the Landing or its “denizens,” as she called its residents.
When we went to live there, though, we not only were older but had a whole summer to get acquainted with the place, and we came to love it. We loved its distance from the rest of the world. We loved its shadowy green daylight and the awesome blackness of its dank nights, the raw smells of the passing river and the surrounding resacas. The sudden frantic splashings in the dark. The ghostly calls of owls. The hissing of wind in the palms and the mossy hardwoods. We loved its wildness.
Our daily chore was to maintain the Landing’s dock, to keep it swept and mopped, ensure that the cleats and mooring lines and tire bumpers were in good shape and replace whatever wasn’t, and to help out Len Richardson at his Gringo’s Bait & Tackle store in any way he might need. Richardson had come to the Landing only a few years ago, supposedly from Florida. He knew a thousand good jokes, but he never said much about himself. Probably for good reason, since rumor had it he was on the run from more than one felony warrant. He was hardly the only resident of the Landing with such a rumor about him.
Twice a week we also had the duty of burning the Landing’s garbage in a pit—all except the large meat scraps and bones from the Doghouse kitchen. Those we took to the Resaca Mala and dumped into the water just before dark. The first time we were told to do it, we asked how come. It was a much longer haul from the Doghouse to the resaca than to the burn pit, and we’d have to transport the garbage bags in a pickup. Charlie said he did a lot of fishing there and liked to fatten up the fish, the turtles too, which made fine soups and stew. So off we went in the truck into a risen gray dusk. We were dumping the second garbage sack when the alligators came tearing out of the shadowy reeds of the opposing bank. We hollered and nearly pissed ourselves and put some fast yardage between us and the water’s edge before we stopped to watch them chomping up the scraps. Then we busted out laughing at both our fright and the thrill of the feeding frenzy. It was a hell of a spectacle. We then dumped the rest of the scraps, working our way along the bank, the snapping, growling armada of gators churning along behind us.
When we told him about the scare we got, Charlie laughed and said he knew there was something he’d forgotten to tell us. He said Resaca Mala has always been full of gators. “Those fellas long been useful,” he said, “for disposing of, ah . . .”
“Mortal testimony?” I said.
“Why yes, Rudy Max,” he said. “That is precisely their inherent and perennially valuable function.” He can talk like that when he wants to.
He was obviously pleased we weren’t shocked by the revelation about the gators, and from then on he took as much delight in telling us smuggling stories as we took in hearing them. By the time we had to go back to school we knew the shade trade was for us, and one evening when we were having supper with him, we told him so.
“Oh hell, gents,” he said. “I’ve known that since the first time you fed the gators.”
Thus began a routine that held throughout our last year of high school and during which time Charlie became more of a big brother to us than an older cousin. We drove the thirty-five-mile round trip to school every weekday and then usually went there again on weekend nights to take our dates to the movies or a dance, and then afterward, if they were the adventurous sort, out to a secluded stretch of riverside for a little moonlight dallying. We were diligent about our schoolwork and made good grades, and we conscientiously tended to our chores.
And best of all, we began to learn the shade trade.
Daddy had taught Frank and me to shoot when we were just boys, and we kept in practice and were both good shots. But under the tutelage of Charlie Fortune and Niño Ramirez, who back then ran the gun shop, we really came to learn about guns, about the workings of every type of small arm that came through the Republic Arms. On road and topography maps, Charlie showed us the overland passages to key delivery points in the geographic triangle formed by Brownsville, Laredo, and Monterey. He taught us astral navigation and how to read nautical charts. He showed us the locations of the hidden cuts into the Mexican stretch of the Laguna Madre and showed us the channels and transfer points inside the lagoon. In the spring, he brought Uncle Harry Morgan Wolfe into our training. Captain Harry, as everyone calls him, manages Wolfe Marine & Salvage, as well as the family’s shrimp boat and charter boat businesses, and some of his smuggling adventures in younger days are legendary. He’s about fifteen years Charlie’s senior, on which basis he could have succeeded our daddy as chief of the shade trade, but he didn’t want the job and preferred the Uncles give it to Charlie. He was satisfied with prepping the boats to make the runs, and from time to time making a delivery himself, just to keep his hand in. He and Charlie familiarized us with the smuggling vessels—the shrimp boats for offshore deliveries, a charter boat with a modified hull for deliveries in the lagoon shallows—and taught us to pilot them by day or night, on open sea and in coastal channels.
Although Charlie strictly adhered to the family rule that doesn’t permit a Wolfe to take part in any shade trade operation until after he’s out of college, I believe that by the end of the ten months Frank and I lived at the Landing before graduating from high school we were already better prepared for the trade than anybody our age had been since our ancestors back in the day. That’s how well Charlie trained us. And he did more than that. He taught us. He taught us the rules of the family, and he taught us a lot of truths as he saw them. The most important of them—Frank and I have always agreed on this—is that the only things you can ever truly own cannot be bought with money.
All of that is why I believe Frank and I know Charlie Fortune as well as he can be known. I don’t think anyone else, not even his own daddy, can make that claim.
Except maybe Jessie Juliet.
Besides being her uncle, Charlie is Jessie’s guardian. Not in a legal way—there’s no court document involved—but in the more binding sense that he had promised her daddy, his brother, Axel, that he would always watch out for her. When Axel was sent to prison for thirty years for the armed robbery of a Dallas jewelry store, he was just twenty-two years old and Jessie was two. It was a stiff sentence for a first-time conviction, but there had been shooting as the robbers made their getaway, and some people were wounded, including Axel, who took a bullet in the leg and was captured. He hadn’t fired a shot, but he refused to rat on his accomplices, both of whom got away with a load of jewels, so the court came down hard on him. Not even the Uncles’ most talented criminal law associates could get him a lesser sentence. He’d been inside the walls a year when his wife took off for parts unknown, deserting baby Jessie. Axel’s and Charlie’s sister, Andie, their only other sibling, had two young children of her own and wanted to take Jessie into her family, but Axel wouldn’t have it. He’d never approved of Andie’s poor choice of husband, and he asked Charlie’s promise to always take care of Jessie and not ever let Andie get custody of her. Charlie made the promise, but he was in his senior year at A&M at the time and couldn’t do much about tending to Jessie himself. So he went to their daddy for help, and even though Harry Mack looked on Axel as a severe disappointment, he agreed to take Jessie into his home under the care of Mrs. Smith, who had been his household employee for more than twenty years. She had only recently been widowed when he hired her to attend to his three young children after his wife died giving birth to Charlie, and even after Charlie left for college she stayed on as Harry Mack’s cook and housekeeper. Everyone liked her, but she wasn’t one for revealing much about herself, and though her first name was said to be Rachel, nobody, not even Harry Mack, so far as I know, ever referred to her or addressed her as other than Mrs. Smith. She was a handsome woman and a model of probity through all the years she worked for him, but there were whispers that she had long been more to him than his housekeeper and children’s nanny. Maybe she was, and if so, good for them. Frank and I h
ad known Mrs. Smith since we were little kids and thought she was wonderful, and not just because she made the best pecan pies in Cameron County.
When Charlie graduated from A&M and came to work in the shade trade, he and Harry Mack both felt it would be best if Jessie remained under Mrs. Smith’s care. But he kept his promise to Axel to watch out for her. During the thirteen years she lived under his daddy’s roof, Charlie made it a point to go into town twice a week and take her out for a movie and a pizza, ask her about school and so forth, just generally chat. So far as I know, neither of them ever shared with anyone else the things they talked about, including her feelings about her daddy. Charlie did tell me and Frank that she only once asked to go visit him, back when she was about ten, but as they were about to enter the prison she suddenly busted out crying and ran back to the car. Charlie couldn’t persuade her to go inside. He went ahead and saw Axel, who said he understood. She never again asked to go see her father, and has repeatedly turned down Charlie’s invitation each time he goes. To this day she’s never been to visit him.
She was in her senior year of high school when Mrs. Smith died of a heart attack. Harry Mack was doing a lot of casework all around the state in those years and was often gone for days at a time and sometimes a week or more, and neither he nor Charlie wanted Jessie to be home alone. All our relatives offered to take her in, and Harry Mack wanted to hire another housekeeper, but Charlie said she was his responsibility, and although he’d been okay with Mrs. Smith watching over her, nobody else would do. So he rented a house in Brownsville for the two of them to live in until she graduated. As soon as Jessie would leave for school in the mornings, Charlie would go to the Landing, and he’d return home in time for them to have supper together. At that time, Frank and I had been in the shade trade about three years, and on most weekends we’d join the two of them for a patio barbecue and a rented movie. We saw a lot of Jess and Charlie over the course of those months until she finished high school, and if I hadn’t seen it for myself I wouldn’t have believed Charlie could look on anybody with such tender affection as he did her. It was the same for Jessie. You could see it in her eyes even as she’d mock-sass him or make him the butt of some joke he’d end up laughing at along with me and Frank.
The House of Wolfe Page 13
