The Ways of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  10

  As the years passed, his embitterment about Billy Capp began to exhaust him. He came to see it as a sort of sickness that would make him old before his time—old and sour and maybe even loony—if he did not somehow surmount it. Wherever Billy was, dead or alive, it simply did not matter anymore. So did he tell himself.

  At the beginning of his fifteenth year of incarceration he was transferred to the Charles Zanco Unit in Terrell County. By then he had been able to stay out of trouble for more than seven years. No fights, no serious frictions of any sort. He was civil to the COs but never friendly, and, as always, he sought no friends among the inmates. He read copiously—histories, tech journals, newsmagazines. The Internet had come into being after he was imprisoned and he informed himself about its rudiments through magazines and Charlie’s letters and listening in on discussions between some of the younger inmates. He kept fit with cell exercises and daily runs around the yard. He wrote to Charlie every two weeks and received a letter every other week in return. Though Zanco was much farther from Brownsville than were any of the other units where he’d done time, Charlie never failed to make his monthly visit.

  Midway through his second year at Zanco he was permitted “contact visits” for the first time ever and could now greet Charlie with a hug in the outdoor visiting area, where they would sit at a table under an umbrella and chat while sipping soda pop. Their conversations no longer monitored, they could speak freely in low voice, and Axel was finally able to tell him who his partners had been. Charlie was outraged to learn that Billy Capp had deserted him, but Axel said he really didn’t care anymore, that he’d exhausted his anger for Billy. It wasn’t worth the toll it had been taking on him. Charlie said he was going to try to track him down anyway, the Duro guy, too, but Billy was his main ambition. Axel shrugged and said, “Whatever makes you happy, little brother.”

  Charlie continued to bring pictures of Jessie, including one taken at her high school graduation, and four years later, one of her receiving her BA in Journalism. There was a picture of her at her desk the first day on the job as a Brownsville newspaper reporter and one of her at the door of her new apartment. By then Charlie was allowed to bring a small camera to leave with the officer in charge at the Zanco visitors’ entrance and with which the officer would take Charlie and Axel’s picture at the end of the visit. Charlie had framed some of the better photos and put them on his living room wall, and on more than one occasion when Jessie came for supper, he had peeked out from the kitchen and seen her staring at them, though she never made mention of them. Still, Axel was pleased to hear it. Pleased that she knew what he looked like.

  So well did he comport himself at Zanco that in his fifth year at the unit he was made a trusty. He proved worthy of the position, and he welcomed his responsibilities as a work crew leader as an additional distraction from his usual preoccupations. The X’s on his calendar seemed to accumulate more quickly. The weeks passed. The months. The years …

  And then last February, during his monthly visit, Charlie said he had a story to tell him, but began by assuring him that Jessie was at home and perfectly fine and unharmed.

  “What? What happened?”

  A few weeks earlier, Charlie told him, Jessie had gone to Mexico City to visit Wolfe relatives and serve as a bridesmaid at a college friend’s nuptials, and the entire wedding party—bride and groom, four ushers, and four bridesmaids—had been abducted by a gang demanding five million dollars for all ten in the bunch from the wealthy parents of the wedding couple.

  Charlie had gone down there with Rudy Wolfe, one of his best operatives, and with the help of their Mexico City relatives they extracted Jessie unharmed. “I wasn’t going to tell you,” Charlie said, “because why make you worry about something that worked out okay? But I knew it wouldn’t be right to keep it from you. Believe me, though, Ax, she’s absolutely fine; I wouldn’t lie to you about that. Hell, man, I came out worse than her. Took a bullet in the side, but luckily no real damage. You oughta be damn proud of her, man, the way she handled herself. She’s a Wolfe all the way to the ground.”

  One of their Mexican cousins, Jessie’s longtime best friend, Rayo Luna Wolfe, had been a big help in getting her out of that jackpot, and she had come back to Texas with them. She and Jessie were renting the old beach house belonging to Harry Morgan Wolfe, an elder cousin of many younger Wolfes who call him “Uncle” in deference to his age. Axel wasn’t pleased by the idea of the two of them living by themselves in that isolated place way back in the dunes, but Charlie said he didn’t have to worry. In addition to being a stuntwoman in Mexican movies and TV shows, Rayo Luna had been a Jaguaro and was now working for him in the shade trade. “If you saw how that girl can use a gun and kick ass,” Charlie said, “you’d know Jessie’s got all the home security she needs.”

  Still, as Axel’s yearning to see Jessie had grown keener over time, he had begun to fret that something might happen to him before he ever got the chance. Charlie’s report of her abduction gave rise to another anxiety—that something might happen to her before he got the chance.

  11

  The next two jobs are plumbing problems, a common sort in these old cell blocks. The first one is easy enough to deal with, a sink trap plugged by a sludgy buildup of soap and hair. The second is a toilet stopped up with T-shirts jammed into the trapway by an aggrieved convict who had then copiously evacuated his bowels into it before wedging open the flush valve to keep the intake water coming. When the enraged guards sloshed into the cell through the foul overflow, the perpetrator laughed at their disgust and then made matters much the worse for himself by resisting his removal to the isolation block before at last being borne away unconscious.

  By the time they clear the clog and mop up the reeking cell and the flanking corridor and clean off their shoes and rinse the mops in the outdoor spigots, it’s nearing 10:30, the start of the lunch period and midday yard time.

  They return the cart to the storeroom and get to the dining hall fast enough to be near the front of the line when the hall guards open its door. The hall is most crowded at the beginning of a feeding period, and especially so at lunch, the biggest meal of the day, when the guards are much quicker to eject any man lingering at a table or running his mouth instead of eating. Like most inmates who strive to be at the front of the chow line, Axel and his crew don’t dally. Their usual mode is to eat in a hurry and then hustle away in order to have more time out in the yard before having to return to their cells for the next head count. Today Axel and Cacho cajole the servers into giving them a little extra of the mashed potatoes and gravy, and they take additional slices of bread as well. They clean off their trays to the last crumb because there’s no telling when they will eat again, or even if ever again, as Axel anxiously reflects while mopping the last of his gravy with the last of his bread.

  Earlier that morning, when they crossed from the officers’ hall to the cell block with the clogged drains, the sky was a cloudless blue but for a few sallow wisps above the mountains far to the west. “Rain, my ass,” Cacho had said low-voiced. “Weathermen don’t know dick. No big deal. Be a help, rain, but nothing depends on it.”

  But now, out in the yard after lunch, they’re looking at a long, lean bank of bruise-colored clouds extending over the western ranges.

  “Well now, lookee there,” says Cacho.

  “It’s not much and a good ways off,” says Axel, “but could turn into something.”

  “You feel it, bro? Feel God’s big smile on us?”

  12

  After graduation, Billy put off looking for a job so that they could enjoy summer to the fullest before Axel left for the University of Houston. They often went fishing in Axel’s little johnboat in the shallows of the Laguna Madre and always brought in some nice catches. One day Axel accidentally cut his hand cleaning a redfish on a dockside table, and Billy deliberately cut his own hand and placed his elbow on the table with the hand upraised. They grinned and clasped hands in the
manner of arm wrestlers, and Billy cried, “Blood brothers!”

  They loved to spend time in Wolfe Landing, a riverside village in the midst of a 450-acre palm grove about midway between Brownsville and the Gulf. Founded in the late nineteenth century by the first Wolfes to settle in Texas and duly chartered as a town in 1911, it has rarely had as many as a hundred residents, and the most recent census counted sixty-three. The only street not of dirt is tar-and-gravel Main, which contains a little town hall, Riverside Motors & Garage, Mario’s Grocery, a secondhand-goods store, Get Screwed Hardware, and the Republic Arms gun shop. Where Main Street ends, a wide dirt trail branches northward and winds up into the slightly higher ground containing a cemetery and the mobile homes and wooden cabins of the main residential area. Opposite the Republic Arms is Gator Lane, which runs a short way down to the river, ending at Gringo’s Bait & Tackle and, just across the street from it, the Doghouse Cantina. The Lower Rio Grande abounds with resacas—”resaca” being the local term for an oxbow lake—and there are a number of them in Wolfe Landing. The biggest of them, Resaca Mala, is in the perpetual shadows of the deepest part of the grove and is inhabited by a colony of alligators, generations of which have long served as an extremely effective mode for disposing of Doghouse garbage as well as various other forms of organic remains.

  Billy loved the Landing and was tickled to learn that Axel’s much older cousin, Henry James Wolfe, HJ to everyone, was the mayor, the police chief of a department consisting of only himself, and the owner of the Doghouse. He would never know HJ was also chief of the Wolfe shade trade operations. HJ was always glad to see the boys and always let them stay for as long as they wished in one of the unoccupied rental trailers.

  On every visit, they would use up a box or two of cartridges at the target range behind the Republic Arms. Billy had never before held a loaded gun, and the first time he fired a round and felt the recoil and saw the bullet’s black hole in the white-paper target was a novel thrill. He found he had a natural feel for handguns and was soon scoring tight-group bull’s-eyes at fifty feet. Axel’s favorite pistol, a 1911 Army Colt .45 semiautomatic, became Billy’s, too. At the Doghouse Cantina they would shoot pool and play the jukebox, flirt with whichever barmaid was on duty, and gorge on the best barbecued ribs in the county. HJ would let them have beer on the house, but never more than one an hour, his prescription for avoiding getting drunk.

  On Saturday afternoons they would visit the Arguello sisters, Rosa and Ramona, who lived in a trailer far back in the trees. They were attractive, sweet-natured girls who worked at Mario’s Grocery on weekdays and liked a good time on weekends, and Axel and Billy always arrived at their double-wide with steaks to grill and a cooler of beer. And always, at some point during the night, the boys would give each other a grinning thumbs-up as they passed naked in the dim hallway, swapping bedrooms and giggling girls.

  Late that summer, Aunt Jolene had a fatal heart attack while making breakfast. She bequeathed the little house to Billy, who immediately sold it and then rented a furnished room. He told Axel he hoped to get hired as a charter boat mate and didn’t want the responsibility of a house. The night before Axel departed for Houston, they had a few beers at the Doghouse and said they couldn’t wait to get together when he came home for Thanksgiving. Nearly a month later, having received no answer to the two letters he’d written to Billy, Axel phoned the owner of the residence where he was rooming and was told that Billy had abruptly moved out one night almost three weeks before, without word to anyone and a week’s rent in arrears.

  13

  After the postlunch head count they return to the maintenance shop to retrieve the cart, then get back to their job list. By 2:45 a breeze has sprung up, and the western horizon is a mass of swelling purple clouds. During the next hour the clouds begin to flicker with mute heat lightning as they rise toward the lowering sun and then consume it altogether.

  Axel’s crew is running a little behind schedule when it completes its work at the kennel, having rewired an outlet in the dog boy’s quarters and rehinged a pen gate, the dogs whining and barking the whole while in agitation at the coming storm. Distant forks of pale lightning are trailed a few seconds later by muffled rolling rumbles. The wind builds, popping and snapping the big Stars and Stripes on its pole by the front gate. It carries the electric smell of rain into the prison with an effect as unsettling as the scent of a woman. It sets the convicts’ nerves on edge, provokes abrupt scuffles that as hastily break up before the guards converge.

  Now only the infirmary job is left on their list. At a quarter of four, they pack up their gear and set off to D Building—the farthest-removed from the other admin buildings—pushing the cart over a winding walkway under a leaden sky. The lightning now branching more widely and coming in faster sequence. The thunder gradually growing louder and crackling closer on the heels of every flash.

  14

  Near the end of his first semester at Houston, he met Ruby Saint-Cyr at a street party. A drama major, more fun in bed than any girl he’d known, plus she had an aura of mystery, of a secret self, that made her all the more alluring. She was much on his mind during the Christmas break, and it occurred to him he might be in love.

  Among the things he didn’t know about Ruby was that, on learning he was from a family of lawyers, she researched the Wolfes in the library’s Cameron County reference files, scrolling through microfilm and microfiche, reading newspaper accounts of Wolfe Associates’ courtroom successes, of the sensational 1930s killing of César Wolfe by his wife, Catalina, of the acquittal of James Ryan Wolfe on charges of contraband smuggling some thirty years ago. She also learned of Wolfe ownership of other businesses, and of their substantial real estate holdings. In short, she learned they were rich.

  She was aware of Axel’s undeclared love for her and expertly nurtured it. One night after a party, as they lay in each other’s arms, she murmured that she loved him, an avowal that kept him awake long after she’d fallen asleep. A month later they were living together. At the end of the spring term she told him she was two months pregnant. No, there had been nobody but him, and yes, she had been on the pill but even her doctor said it was not foolproof. She said the biggest surprise to her was that she wanted to have the baby. She assured him she would make no demands for support of any kind and would raise the child herself.

  They talked and talked and then he lay awake into the night, considering the circumstances, and in the morning he asked her to marry him. She wept as she hugged him. He telephoned his father and forthrightly explained the situation. Harry Mack intuited chicanery on the part of the young woman but did not say so. Whether the pregnancy was a consequence of carelessness or contrivance, he saw it as a fortunate turn. He had always suspected subterfuge in Axel’s early agreement to go to law school and had anticipated his intention to default on it as soon as he got his BA. But a family was the foremost of all responsibilities and would be far more reliably provided for by a partner in Wolfe Associates than by a shade trade operative, and Axel would surely see that. And if the woman was gold-digging, well, there were simple legal measures to thwart that.

  They were married in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Brownsville. The reception was at Harry Mack’s home, where Ruby was introduced to so many Wolfe relatives she couldn’t keep them straight. After a brief honeymoon in Galveston they returned to Houston. Jessie Juliet was born the following January, midway through Axel’s sophomore year, and she was attended by nannies night and day.

  Axel maintained excellent grades to better preserve the fiction that he was prepping for law school. In truth, college was an aching bore and he could hardly wait for the day he would get his degree and enter the shade trade. He dearly loved his wife and child but did not deem them a sufficient reason to choose a lawyer’s life over the one he truly wanted. There was no sufficient reason. As for what Ruby would say when the day came that he informed her of the shade trade and his choice of it and all its risks, well, what could she say? S
he’d say if that’s what you want, baby, that’s what we’ll do. She was smart and she was his partner. Until then, he simply had to bite the bullet, be a good student, and bide his time. But the wait was chafing.

  One summer evening at the end of his junior year and a few weeks after he and Ruby and baby Jessie had been to Brownsville for Charlie’s high school graduation, Axel walked home from the campus and was almost to the courtyard gate of his apartment complex when a car parked across the street tooted its horn and he looked over to see Billy Capp grinning at him from behind the wheel. Then they were in the street, hugging and pounding each other on the back, Axel calling him a lowlife bastard for not having been in touch in all this time and Billy saying yeah, yeah, he was a no-good friend and he knew it. He’d phoned Charlie, who told him Axel was married and a daddy and gave him his phone number and address in Houston.

  Axel wanted him to come in and meet Ruby but Billy said he had things to tell him that it would be better his wife didn’t hear. So they went to a nearby sports bar and Axel phoned Ruby to say he’d been roped into a few beers with some pals and would be a little late. She said to enjoy himself, he deserved a break.

  They sat in a rear booth and toasted their reunion. “It’s been, what, damn near three years,” Axel said. “Where the hell you been?”

  “Mostly in prison,” Billy said. And told him about it.