His ruminations about Billy Capp were at times so infuriating he considered ratting him out. See if Harry Mack could still work a deal with the state, get his sentence cut in trade for Billy’s name. He’d throw in Duro, too, if they cut it even more. But he couldn’t do it. Not because ratting was against the convict way but because it was against his way. Against the Wolfe way, actually, although some in the family—his father a prime case in point—believed that Wolfe loyalty was requisite only to Wolfe blood.
There were anyhow other possibilities about Billy. Maybe he was dead. Maybe he and Duro had been found by hirelings of the people whose bonds they stole. Maybe they had a falling-out and Duro killed him. Maybe they got caught by the cops, or just Billy did, and he was now back in prison, maybe somewhere in Texas, maybe in some other state. Or maybe not. Maybe he was settled down somewhere. Maybe married, had kids. Was maybe living off the accumulated fruits of his labor, had solid investments, spent his days watching ball games on a big-screen TV, grilling steaks and chugging beers with buddies. Maybe…. But if that’s the way it was, then the son of a bitch damn well owed him. No maybe about it.
He was in his sixth year when Charlie told him that their cousin Henry James and his wife Sally had gone sailing out on the Gulf and disappeared. The Coast Guard had searched for days but not a trace of them or the boat was found, and they’d been presumed dead. Shortly thereafter Charlie—a graduate of Texas A&M with a degree in history—had been made Henry James’s replacement as chief of the shade trade. “By the way, I been promoted to superintendent of the export department,” was how he said it on the visitor’s phone on his side of the glass. “Long as I’m there, you know you got a job waiting when you get out. We don’t discriminate against applicants of advanced years.”
Axel grinned back and gave him the finger.
The sameness of his days made it hard to retain a clear chronological perspective. His best record of time’s passing was in the photos of Jessie that Charlie brought him every few months. Every picture had to be approved by the admin office, but once it was cleared and passed on to him, Axel added it to the others of her in a small album, a collection that would eventually grow into a photographic chronicle of her maturation from child to girl to young woman.
He was in his eighth year inside and Jessie had just turned ten when Charlie wrote that he had finally been able to persuade her to come with him on his next visit. Axel was elated and counted the days. But when the guard towers and high fence and razor wire came into view, Jessie burst into tears and refused to leave the car. There was nothing Charlie could do but go in and tell Axel, who said he understood and told him to go back out to her right away and not chide her for it, just comfort her the best he could on the way home.
In the exercise yard after dinner the next day he got into a fight with an inmate for no reason he could name. He was in a frenzy when the COs came shoving through the crowd to break it up. When one of the guards grabbed him from behind to pull him away, Axel spun around and punched him hard in the face several times, breaking the man’s jaw, before he was clubbed into submission by the other COs.
He was convicted of assaulting a corrections officer and sentenced to an additional five years.
7
At a quarter to five he joins the last bunch of inmates headed for breakfast. They file down the tier stairs to the ground floor and then turn onto a broad corridor, staying inside the one-way lane defined by a yellow line about three feet from the wall on their right. In a similar lane on the other side of the corridor the inmate traffic moves in the opposite direction. Only prison staff and inmates in their custody are allowed in the corridor’s wide central zone. After passing through connecting wings, the line of men arrives at the dining hall. It is now a little more than half full, droning low with conversations. Inmates are permitted to talk at meals but not to dawdle over them. Guards patrol the aisles between the long rows of tables, and the entire room is overseen by a guard on an elevated catwalk. Moving down the serving line, Axel sees Cacho seated at the end of a table near the far wall and occupied by only three other cons. He takes his tray over there and sits across from him.
“My man,” Cacho says. His eyes are bright with excited anticipation. He is built much like Axel, lean and of medium height, but under his black, close-cropped hair his face is still a boy’s, smoothly brown and yet to grow a whisker, flawed only by a pair of scars—a purple wither at the top of one ear and a shiny pink smudge at the corner of his chin. He has confessed to Axel that the pearly perfection of his teeth is the result of superior dental reconstruction occasioned a few years ago, like the chin scar, by a bottle hard-swung into his mouth.
He checks out Axel’s breakfast and says, “Smart choice, the oatmeal. The powdered eggs usually taste like old rubber, right? Today they taste like old burnt rubber.”
Axel trades a blank glance with one of the three cons seated at the table, mestizos yakking low in Spanish of Guatemalan intonations. About two thirds of the inmates at Zanco are Latinos, most of them Mexes, the rest primarily Central Americans of one kind or another, and Spanish is the prevalent language in the unit. Even half of the COs are Latin.
Having grown up in a bilingual family in a bilingual town, Axel speaks Spanish with exceptional fluency, but he has kept his knowledge of it a secret from everyone on the inside. Always better if they think you don’t know what’s being said. He has kept the secret even from Cacho. To retain his own competence with the language over the years, he has made a daily practice of speaking it to himself during his afternoon runs in the exercise yard, holding imaginary conversations requiring a complexity of ideas and denotations and a full range of grammatical inflections.
Cacho picks up a sausage link and bites off half of it. He scowls as he chews and drops the rest of the sausage back in the tray. He takes a slow look at the Guatemalans, then leans toward Axel and points down at his tray and whispers, “No more hog slop, old-timer. Not after today.”
Axel spoons up some oatmeal. Tell him, he thinks.
Cacho looks about with studied indifference, checking for passing guards.
“Hear the weather?”
Axel shakes his head. The oatmeal is glutinous on his tongue.
Laughing and gibing, the Guatemalans get up and leave.
“Gonna rain,” Cacho says. “Heard a coupla COs saying. Probly real hard, they said, on account of some big-ass storm from the California Gulf or something. Rain be nothing but a great big help. Harder for them to see us, no? On the ground, from a chopper. Rain’s a sign that God loves us and is smiling on us.”
Tell him.
Cacho looks at his congealing food with distaste. “First thing I’m gonna have for breakfast back in the world? Chorizo con huevos.” He spreads his thumb and forefinger. “With a stack of tortillas this high. Christ, I’ve missed that! Been nine months, man!”
Tell him!
Cacho taps his fingertips lightly along the table edge as if playing a piano and very softly and with the barest lip movement sings “La Valentina,” a popular song dating to the Mexican Revolution. Axel is familiar with the song and its outlook of ready fatalism. It’s a small wonder to him that although the kid is well aware he can die anytime he cannot conceive that he might someday be old. Can any kid? He couldn’t when he was young.
Not that he’s old now. You can’t call forty-five young, but damn if it’s old, no matter the kid’s always calling him “viejo” or “old-timer.” Even in another eleven years he won’t really be that old…. Oh man, cut the shit! he thinks. The problem with playing it safe for the next eleven years is that no matter how safe he plays it there’s no telling what might happen. He could get shanked in the heart, get his throat cut. Could trip on the stairs and break his neck. Could get cancer and die. He could fuck up royal and get more time added anyway. It happened once, could happen again.
And what if in those eleven years something happens to her again? What if next time she’s not so lucky as she was in Me
xico City last winter? What if Charlie can’t help her next time? There’s no knowing about next time, or even about goddamn tomorrow. All we ever have is right now—that’s the plain and simple duh of it.
He’s been bullshitting himself that more time is the worst that can happen. The worst that can happen is to just roll over and accept at least another eleven years of the same dead now he’s been stuck in since the day they turned the key on him. Another eleven years of waiting for the chance to see her and during which time who-knows-what might happen to prevent it for good. Yeah, he can get killed trying this thing, and yeah, if he gets caught he’ll be in for longer than another eleven. But if he says no to this and it ends up he doesn’t get to see her anyway, he’ll feel like a cowardly fool all the way to his last breath. If the thing goes to hell, it goes to hell, and if he gets killed, fuck it, no more troubles. And if he gets caught and catches more time, well, he’ll just have to chew on that bitter bone when it happens…. If it happens. Because goddamnit, if can go the other way, too, and that’s—
“Earth to Ax … Earth to Ax, over,” Cacho says, holding a fist to his mouth like a microphone. He grins and turns the hand palm-up and says, “Where’d you go, old bro?”
“Was remembering this café in San Benito. Made the best eggs with chorizo I ever had.”
Cacho smiles and pretends to strum a guitar and repeats a line of the “Valentina” song. “Si me han de matar mañana, que me maten de una vez.”
Axel smiles at the line’s audacious self-drama, translating it in his head—”If they’re going to kill me tomorrow, let them kill me here and now.”
“You two! Out! Move!”
They’d failed to notice the floor guard coming down the aisle. “Fist-face,” the cons call him, for his chronic aspect of anger.
“Move your asses!”
They hasten to comply. Fist-face is one of those COs who’ll write you up quick for so much as a smirk. Get you stripped of work privilege, restricted to your cell.
They take their trays across the room and slide them into the pass-through window to the kitchen. As they exit the hall, the PA crackles and announces the end of the breakfast period and orders all inmates back to the cells for head count.
8
Billy Capp was a senior-year transfer student from Fort Worth, but Axel didn’t get to know him until they played baseball on the school team. With Axel at short and Billy at second, they were a formidable double-play combination. Billy’s dad, an oil company pilot, was killed in a crash in the Gulf when Billy was three. His mother went to work as a waitress and they lived all over Texas before settling in Fort Worth when Billy was sixteen. When she died of a stroke at the end of his junior year, he moved to Brownsville to live with his widowed and childless aunt Jolene in her little house and finish high school.
The two boys soon became close friends, and Billy confessed to Axel that he’d had run-ins with the police since the age of thirteen. Breaking and entering, theft, possession of stolen property, such as that. It was a real rush, the night-prowling, even though he was caught twice, but his mother’s tearful courtroom pleas and the character testaments of baseball coaches had both times saved him from juvenile detention. As a condition to living under his aunt’s roof, he had promised her he would stay out of trouble. Axel had never committed a crime more serious than street fighting, but the rush Billy spoke of was the sort of sensation he associated with the shade trade, though he said nothing of it to Billy. One of the strictest of Wolfe rules was that you never even hinted at the shade trade to anyone outside the family.
They often double-dated on weekends, Axel usually with a different girl each time but Billy always with Raquel Calderas, a Mexican beauty he’d met at a dance during the annual Charro Days festival. Her family lived on a large estate across the river, just outside of Matamoros, but she attended an elite Catholic school in Brownsville. In addition to the best education she could get close to home, her father wanted her to acquire American friends and further improve her English, so she was living with Brownsville relatives until graduation. Señor Calderas was a major partner in an investment company with branches all over northern Mexico, but it was whispered he had a hand in a number of illicit interests as well. Such rumors of course attached to a number of the most prosperous families along both sides of the Lower Rio Grande, including the Wolfes. Billy had recently confided to Axel that he was crazy about Raquel and believed she liked him a lot, too, even though she wouldn’t let him do anything more than fondle her through her clothes and hadn’t done anything more for him than give him a hand job through his swim trunks once when they were at Boca Chica Beach in water to their necks. He called her Rocky, and she delighted in the nickname, sometimes putting up her fists and making awkward feints and jabs at him. He took her to the graduation dance at the school gym, doubling with Axel and his date, and later that evening, after they took the girls home, they bought a six-pack and drank it on Aunt Jolene’s porch, talking quietly about how great it was to be done with high school. They were down to the last two beers when Billy told him that during the dance he and Raquel had gone outside to do a little smooching and he’d told her he loved her and she said she loved him too, which was the greatest thing he’d ever heard. He asked her to marry him, but she said she couldn’t. She had promised her father she would not get married or even engaged until after she graduated from college—she had already been accepted by St. Edward’s University in Austin—and she had to honor the promise. They’d neither one said much on the way home, but when he walked her to her door she gave him the best kiss of his life.
“Aw, man,” Axel said. “She’s really beautiful and sweet and I know how special she is, but why would you want to get married? She’s right. She’s too young. So are you and me. We got a lot of beautiful girls to meet yet, bud, and we oughta sample as many as we can, don’t you reckon? Before we settle down? If we ever do?”
Billy chuckled along with him. “You’re right. What the hell was I thinking?”
They finished the beer and Billy went over to the car with him.
“It’s on account of I got no money, I know that’s why,” he said at the driver’s window as Axel started the engine. “I’ll never have enough for her daddy. Never enough to satisfy him.”
Before Axel could think of what to say, Billy slapped the car roof and said, “Take her easy, amigo,” and headed back to the house.
He would not mention her to Axel again.
9
Half an hour after the post breakfast head count, Axel arrives at the maintenance annex, where the work crews are mustering in the hallway. He joins the other three trusties waiting at the office door. The head maintenance officer, Mason, a lanky man with a fiery red pompadour, looks up from the papers on his desk and beckons the trusties into the room. He hands each one a printout of his crew’s job list for the day. Axel looks at the last venue on his list and sees that it’s the infirmary. As planned. He and Mason exchange a blank look.
Mason is one of the inside men. He’s a longtime CO of good standing who has worked at a number of Texas units and has now been at Zanco for eight years. The word on him is that he has a gambling habit and has been married and divorced three times, the most recent split within the past year. It’s said that he has on occasion sold a con an inside favor, always in a manner too sly to risk implicating himself. Axel hasn’t known a convict who claimed to have personally done business with him, but he’s long had a hunch Mason could be bought, and he had told Cacho so.
The trusties go into the storeroom, where under the eye of the supply officer they each load a utility cart with the equipment and supplies his crew will need for their morning labors. The mandatory forms are filled out and signed and the crews disperse to their assignments. Besides himself and Cacho, there are three other men in Axel’s crew—an Okie kid doing four years for auto theft, a Mexican from Hermosillo doing fifteen for manslaughter, and a sixty-year-old Negro, as he insists on being called—he will bristle
if called “black” and come at you swinging if referred to as “African-American”—who’s been under a life sentence for murder since the age of eighteen.
Their first job is at the corrections officers’ dining hall. They inspect a coffee urn reported to be malfunctioning, determine that it is, and a crewman loads it on the cart and takes it away to the maintenance shop. They sweep and mop the dining room floor, then run the buffer over it. They wash the windows, clean the hall bathroom, change the gasket on a leaky sink tap. They refill the paper towel dispensers and restock the bathroom shelves with towels, soap, toilet paper. They lug out the garbage cans and empty them in one of the Dumpsters that stand in long rows in full view of the tower guards.
All the while they’re at work, Axel can’t help thinking that this could be his last day alive. An alternate possibility, that he could be both alive and at large by tonight, seems more unreal to him by the hour. After so many years of caged regimentation in which nothing really changes except for your aging flesh, he finds it hard to visualize himself in the outside world and engaged with its countless and constant choices, its incessant changes. At the same time—and for the first time in more than two decades—he does not know where, if he’s still alive, he will be tomorrow, what he will be wearing, what he might choose to eat, what he might see, whom he might talk to who’s never been inside a prison. Such uncertainty about his immediate future charges him with a vibrant excitement he hasn’t known for so long it seems an alien sensation.
The Ways of Wolfe Page 4
