The Ways of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  The van’s riding the current nose-down with only the upper rear part of its body above water, the embedded limb trailing from the back window.

  Water billows into Axel’s face and he inhales some and coughs. “Hang on!” he says.

  “No shit, hang on!” Cacho says. “And don’t breathe the water … Ah goddamnit … lost the gun!”

  “Wanna go back … hunt for it?”

  “Eat your mother!”

  Every rightward roll of the van dunks them again. Each bang against a bank drives the limb into their chests or nearly yanks it from their grasp, depending on the direction of their spin. They keep their legs drawn up to avoid hitting them on rocks in the shallower parts of the creek. The van ships water at every jolt and is soon sunken almost to the limb’s juncture with the broken window.

  “It’s gonna go under,” Cacho says. “Gotta get to ground.”

  “Let go the limb we’ll drown.”

  “It goes down we drown! … Gotta try.”

  “No! Current’s too—”

  “Watch it!” Cacho hollers.

  The van rams into a bank-side boulder with an impact Axel feels to the roots of his eyes, and the limb snaps off at the hatchback window with a sound like a whip crack. They twirl away on its truncated five-foot length as the van sinks between the boulder and the bank and holds there.

  Loosed of the van, the limb fragment flies. They careen through the shadows, swaying through curve after curve, snorting water, hacking. Then the meanders lengthen and the limb no longer runs into the banks, which are now rising on both sides. The current’s flow now discernibly downward and faster yet.

  There’s a growing rumble somewhere ahead.

  The creek sweeps into another wide bend and begins a series of short dips as they head into the deeper forward shadows.

  “Oh man,” Cacho says. “You think the river’s—”

  They cry out as they fly past the creek mouth and into the rage of the Rio Grande.

  27

  They’re in a narrow canyon—a steep gorge that amplifies the Rio’s roar as they whoosh downriver, hugging to the limb for their lives. There is no other thunder now, no longer lightning, only the torrential river under the teeming rain. The surrounding world now delineated in shades of black and gray to either side of them, the odor of mud now woven with a strong smell of iron.

  It’s hard for Axel to believe this is the same river that so placidly winds through the flatlands of South Texas and past his hometown to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, some five hundred miles downstream. He fears they’re going to be crushed against a gorge wall or knocked off the limb and drowned, and then perceives that the river is now running mostly straight, its bends here few and of wide arc. The limb is cleaving to the current’s main channel and no longer whirling. He’s read and heard about this untamed portion of the Rio Grande that runs from the upriver Big Bend wild country to somewhere down here—a stretch of narrow canyons and intermittent white-water rapids and pool drops. It’s a big attraction to thrill-seekers in canoes or kayaks or inflatable rafts, but it can be hard going even for an expert river-man when the rapids deepen and surge even faster with runoff from a storm.

  The question is whether they entered the river at a point past the last of the rapids or if there are still some up ahead. Axel figures it’s best to assume there are, and so they’d better get aground before they reach them. But the vertical rock bluffs offer no exit from the river and they’re anyway moving too fast to even try to make it to a bank. There’s nothing they can do but hold to the limb in terrified exhilaration and let the current take them where it will.

  “Fuck!” Cacho says. “Mexico’s right there and we can’t get on it.” Then says, “Look! Up ahead! One o’clock!”

  Axel sees it. A glow. A light. Not much more than a yellow pinpoint in the rain. It seems to be at river level, though it’s hard to say. Slightly to their right and at some distance, but they’re approaching it fast.

  “What is it?” Cacho says.

  “Don’t know! Lantern? Gotta be a lantern! Camp lantern under some kind of cover!” They have to holler to hear each other above the river roar.

  “Camp lantern? Who’d be camping here? How?”

  “I don’t know! Some … sportsman! Hiker! … Some canoe guy didn’t expect a storm! But that light’s on flat ground! River beach of some kind!”

  “Well, if he got off there, so can we!”

  “Coulda got off before the storm hit and river got bad!”

  “It’s on the right, in Mexico, man! That’s where we want!”

  But as they close in on the light its position shifts, moving slowly to a point a little to their left—and they realize they’ve been deceived by an illusion in the dim light. Fooled by a long straight length of gorge facing a distant but gradual rightward bend, so that not until they’re into the bend do they see that the light, which had appeared to be on the right side of the river, is actually on the left.

  “It’s in Texas!” Cacho says. “What if that light’s whaddaya-call-’em, those park guys?” He catches a faceful of water and coughs.

  “Park rangers? Hell no! Nearest park’s Big Bend, way upriver!”

  “I don’t want back in Texas!”

  “Maybe no choice! Other side’s nothing but straight-up rock! That light’s on the only flat bank we seen! We’re heading for rapids, man! We hit those, we’ve had it!”

  “How you know there’s rapids?”

  “I know!”

  “Guys ride rapids all the time!”

  “In boats, on rafts, not on fucking tree limbs!”

  “Ah man, you … Goddamnit! … So? How we get off?” Axel has no idea. They’ll be abreast of the light any second now, and it’s obvious they’ll come no closer to the riverbank than seven or eight feet. It won’t look far off, but to try to swim to it would be suicidal.

  They watch as the little light comes rushing up on their left.

  “HEYYYYYYY!” Cacho shouts. “HELLLLLLPPP!”

  “Never hear you in this boom! Even if he did, what can he do except wave when we go by?”

  And then they’re past it, speeding on.

  “Now what’re—”

  “Dead ahead!” Axel says.

  A dark shapeless structure has materialized downstream, a few feet above the waterline and extending from the left bank to midway across the river.

  “Rocks!” Cacho says. “It’s rocks!”

  Axel thinks so too. Maybe a shattered segment of fallen gorge wall. The current is deflecting around it at mid-river but it’s going to ram them into it. They’ll break their bones, their skulls.

  They hurtle toward it, bracing for the impact, Cacho letting out a long holler and Axel having a flash-impression of the river taking his mangled, bloated corpse all the way to Wolfe Landing, the turtles and garfish feeding on him until some kid with a cane pole hooks into his clothes. Nobody will recognize what’s left of him.

  They plow into the barrier with a yielding crunch, Axel’s cheek gashed by something that just misses his eye. The limb halts, arrested in place but joggling on the current. For a baffled few seconds they don’t know what’s happened … and then comprehend that they’re partially burrowed into a massive mound of vegetal debris—broken tree limbs and saplings, uprooted scrub brush and cactus and foliage—all of it borne here on the current and caught in a growing cluster on a bank bend, the river pressing them into it and ripping through the porous accumulation like a strainer even as it adds to it.

  “Holy fuck!” Cacho yells. “You alive?” The river is even louder here.

  “Yeah! Let’s get to ground!”

  Fighting the push of the river and the dense netting of brush and branches, they pull themselves out of the cluster, the current tugging at their legs, their pants. The gorge now so murky they can barely tell where its wall joins the darker bank at its foot. But they can see each other, and can see that they’re only about ten feet from the solid blackness of the bank,
the river swirling over its rim, the mound scraping up and down on it.

  The current’s deflected outward flow is too strong for them to pull themselves to shore, and they have to climb atop the mound, pausing to pull up their pants, then start crawling toward the bank, Cacho closer to it and leading the way. Careful of each handhold and foothold as they push through the branches of the bucking mass, cursing each prick of spine and stab of sliver, they edge ahead on all fours. Where it abuts the bank, the mound looms a few feet above it, jouncing on the current. It’s hard to judge the bobbing, vertical distance between them and the indistinct ground. The cluster suddenly jerks more forcefully and they’re nearly thrown off.

  “It’s gonna break away!” Cacho says. “We musta loosened it when we hit!”

  “Jump!” Axel yells.

  Cacho rises to a half-crouch and jumps into the darkness and lands with a cry of pain.

  Axel can’t see him. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, shit! Busted my assbone is all!”

  Now he sees him. A hunched dark figure on the ground just ahead and a little below the mound. Axel raises himself on all fours and hops forward, landing awkwardly and bonking the back of his head on the hard ground.

  “Whoo, I heard that!” Cacho says, helping him to his feet. “You’re a hard-headed old bastard, I’ll say that for you!”

  Axel fingers the knot on his head. He tests his legs and arms, relieved not to have suffered worse harm.

  The mound is now quaking even more roughly, and they back away from it. It begins to pivot outward with a low ripping sound as it tears away from the bank, then lunges away into the current and vanishes into the darkness like a ragged phantom vessel.

  “Jesucristo!” Cacho says. “Little sooner and we’da still been on it! Who knows how far it woulda taken us…. God damn it!”

  “What?”

  “The phone!” Cacho’s patting his shirt pockets, his pants. “Lost the phone!”

  Axel stares at him. “Oh, no! How we gonna call a cab?”

  “Real fucking funny!” Cacho says. “Was gonna use it to call my guys once we get outta here!” Then looks around and says, “So … how do we get outta here?”

  Shielding his eyes against the rain, Axel stares upstream. “You know … could be this beach runs back to where the light is!”

  “If it’s flat all the way back, where’s the light? We oughta be able to see it, no?”

  Axel shuffles a few yards farther in from the riverbank and stops.

  “Over here!” he says.

  Cacho comes up next to him.

  “Straight ahead and a hair to the right!” Axel says.

  Cacho searches. “I see it!” It’s a tiny speck, but no question it’s the light.

  “Boulder or something up the way was blocking our view from over there!” Axel says.

  “Well, hell, man, let’s get on over to it! If it’s some guy hiked in here, he can show us the way out! Or if he got here by way of the river—”

  “Hold your horses, kid! No telling how far off it is, and just because we can see it doesn’t mean we can get to it! Could be there’s a break in the beach between here and the light, or someplace up ahead that’s solid wall to the water! That’d be as far as we can go!”

  “Or could be it doesn’t hit no dead end! If it does, we’ll just have to come back this way, and so what? Gonna make us late to the party?”

  Axel has to grin. “I was just pointing out a possibility!”

  “Yeah? Well, here’s a possibility for you. We can stand here blah-blah-blahing till we starve to fucking death, or we can get moving! So let’s cut the horseshit and—”

  “Hey, junior,” Axel says, starting upriver, “if you’re waiting on me, you’re way behind!”

  28

  As they move upriver, the stone beach narrows in places, widens in others. It is strewn with fallen boulders and piles of flotsam—scraps of brush and tree, sections of wooden fencing with lengths of wire still attached. They at times lose sight of the light before spying it again. The wind has kicked up and chills them through their sodden clothes. They have no means of estimating their distance from the light, but they seem to be gaining no ground on it, its minute glow not noticeably brightening. Axel wonders if it’s another illusion of some sort.

  They couldn’t have said how long they’ve been moving toward it when they’re startled by a loud repetitive sound whose source or even direction they can’t immediately identify.

  “What’s that now?” Cacho says.

  It’s coming from somewhere above. A thwuck-thwuck-thwuck sound.

  “Chopper!” Axel says.

  They scurry to the thick brush at the base of the gorge and hunker in it, shielding their eyes from the rain as they search the lesser darkness of the band of sky between the canyon’s walls. They can now hear the whine of the helicopter’s engine as well as the thwucking of the rotors. The chopper grows louder as it approaches along the lay of the gorge, and now they see its rain-blurred spotlight.

  “They’ll see us!” Cacho says.

  “No!” Axel says. “Too much rain reflection! Stay small!”

  They hunch deeper into the brush as the aircraft closes in, its light swiveling from one foot of the gorge to the other. The light flashes past them, the noise of the engine and rotors mixing with the river’s resonance in a deafening din, the rain swirling madly.

  The light and the thwucking fade into the darkness.

  “What if they saw the light on the bank?” Cacho says.

  “If they did they’d be hovering over it right now, calling in coordinates. We can hardly see the light. It’s gotta be harder to see from up there, with all the rain glare.”

  “You hope!”

  “You better too!”

  “What you better hope is your old ass can keep up with me!”

  The kid moves off and Axel hustles at his heels.

  29

  The beach widens as they advance, wending past debris and boulders, but staying hard by the river. The driving rain gradually relents to a drizzle, ceasing its clatter, and now the only noise is the river’s rumbling. After a while they come to the widest part of the beach yet, marked by scattered rockfall and bench elevations between the river and the bluff—and there the light is. Shining within a small, blue nylon pop-up tent about forty or forty-five yards from the riverbank and a few yards from the foot of the bluff, facing downriver with the wind. Axel figures the light for a battery lantern, since only a fool would use gas or kerosene in a tent, especially such a small one, and whoever positioned the tent so sensibly is no camping fool.

  They move in closer, easing up to a low outcrop about fifteen yards from the tent and affording a good view of it. Now something in the tent blocks the light—a distorted silhouette of somebody shifting around. Then the dark shape settles, seems to lie down, and most of the tent side is bright again.

  “One guy, looks like,” Cacho says, just loud enough for Axel to hear him. “Don’t see no boat. You?” He hugs himself against the chilling wind.

  “Could be stashed the other side of the tent.”

  “What for? Hide it from all the thieves on the loose around here? If there’s no boat, he had to’ve hiked in on some trail, and that’s our way out.”

  “Right. Except we don’t know where the trail is, and we sure as hell can’t just walk up and ask him. Guy could be armed, and everybody in Texas knows who wears these state-issue whites. Might shoot us on the spot, turn our dead asses in for a reward. The thing to do is lay low, wait till he packs up and heads out, then follow him at a distance.”

  “And what if he sticks around a while?” Cacho says. “No telling how long he might. Another day? A week? We can’t hide here, hoping he won’t spot us. No, man, we gotta jump his ass. We move up close as we can, hide good but so we can keep an eye on the door. Soon as he comes out, take a piss, whatever, we come down on him. Make him show us the way out.”

  “Could be a hard case. Say fuck us.”
>
  “He won’t say it more than once.”

  The kid’s right, and Axel knows it. “Okay,” he says. Then points to their right at an outcrop forming a rock wall at the top of a gradual slope and running all the way to the bluff. “Up there’s good cover, and we can position ourselves behind it for a straight look at the tent door. When he comes out in the morning, first chance we get we’ll take him down.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  With Cacho following closely, Axel leads the way up the slope, cutting looks at the tent as they advance in a semicircle to get behind the outcrop wall. But now the wall blocks the tent glow, casting the ground on this side of it in near-total blackness, and they have to move more carefully still. Feeling his way along the wall and over the uneven footing, Axel sidesteps into something knee-high and almost falls over it.

  “What?” Cacho whispers. They can barely make each other out.

  Axel eases himself down beside the ill-defined structure obstructing their way.

  “What is it?” Cacho says.

  “Oh baaby,” Axel croons.

  Cacho crouches and puts a hand to the thing, amazed to feel some sort of hard, canvaslike material. “What the hell …?”

  “Got us a boat, junior.”

  Axel crawls around in it, gauging its measure by feel, running his hands over it, its fittings and equipment. He grew up with boats of all kinds and recognizes this as one of the most basic. “Inflatable dinghy,” he says. “Horseshoe design, about eight by four, maybe a little bigger. Polyester fabric with PVC coating, I’d say. Thing probably doesn’t weigh fifty pounds. Separate air chambers, two each side, feels like. Braced deck, grab ropes all the way around. Transom for an outboard but there’s no motor, or else he’s got it in the tent. Pair of paddles. Aluminum.”

  “All I understand you saying is it’s small and got paddles. And big enough for two, right?”

  “Yeah. Some people think these things are no more than a fancy inner tube, but this one’s pretty well made. Dude was smart to put it way up here in case the river overran the bank so much he wouldn’t be able to get to it. Tied it down, weighed it with rocks. No seat, unless it’s in the tent.