The Ways of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  “Well, let’s get the thing in the water and go.”

  They remove the hold-down rocks and Axel detaches the bowline from a small boulder and drops it in the boat. He takes hold of the bow and hoists it to waist level and Cacho picks up the stern end and they begin sidestepping cautiously down the mild incline. The boat’s not much heavier than Axel guessed, but it’s a cumbersome load, and together with the darkness and unsure ground it’s tricky work to lug the thing between them. The tent light is still on. The guy isn’t asleep yet. He wouldn’t waste the battery while he slept.

  Then they’re back on the flat rock beach and making their clumsy way toward the river. They’re more than halfway to the river, stepping sidelong, huffing hard, when Cacho’s foot gives way and he falls with a yelp.

  “Damn, man, come on!” Axel says in low voice. He looks at the tent, sees a black shape rising inside it. The guy’s sitting up. He heard.

  Cacho gets to his feet, hissing, “Fucking ankle!” He picks up his end of the boat and they start moving again, but he’s limping and can’t match Axel’s pace.

  The man is scrabbling out of the tent on hands and knees.

  Axel moves around ahead of Cacho so that the bow is facing the river. “Put it down and get in!” he says.

  “What?”

  “Get in the boat! Do it!” Axel shouts, stealth no longer necessary.

  Cacho sets down the stern and crawls into the boat as Axel wraps the bowline around his hands and starts scuttling backward, pulling the boat toward the river.

  “HEY! … Hey, you bastards! Stop right there! … Stop!” The man is hurrying toward them, a shadowy figure.

  Axel drags the boat with all the strength and speed he can marshal, leaning back on the bowline, digging in with his heels, at times slipping and nearly falling, the bowline chafing his palms. The boat rasps over the gravelly ground, Cacho chanting, “Go! Go! Go!”

  “Stop!” the man yells.

  A gunshot cracks through the river roar.

  “Carajo!” Cacho says. He huddles lower in the boat and hollers, “Move it! Move!”

  Axel pulls harder, faster, laboring for breath. They have the advantage of being able to see the man against the lighted tent behind him better than he can see them against the dark canyon wall on the other side of the river, though it doesn’t help that they’re wearing white. Glancing over his shoulder, Axel sees that they’re almost to the river, then looks back at the man, who has fallen and is getting back up. Axel sees the flash of his gunshot, and the round buzzes just over his head.

  They reach the river’s edge and Axel flings the bowline into the boat and darts around to the stern, hearing the man yelling, shooting again, the round striking to Axel’s left and sparking off the rock beach with a whine. He pushes the boat forward until the bow juts over the low lip of the bank and the swashing current is thumping on its underside, the boat teetering. But before he can get in, the next shot punctures the hull’s hindmost left chamber with a loud burst of air and knocks the boat forward, and it slides off the bank. In sheer reflex Axel dives after it, catching the transom with both hands as he smacks into the churning water and the boat veers away on the current, slinging him outward in a half-submerged and rolling twist that wrenches his left hand loose of the transom. Through the crashings of the river he hears another gunshot.

  Clinging one-handed to the boat, he’s stretched out behind it, rolling from side to side, being dragged with such force he’s unable to pull himself forward or even reach up far enough with his other arm to grab on with both hands. It’s hard to keep his face out of the water. He doesn’t see Cacho and thinks he’s gone overboard. His clutching hand aches and is beginning to lose its grip.

  Then hands clamp around his wrist, and Cacho’s hunched form looms over him, swaying in the tossing boat, shouting, “I got you! Let go! I’ll pull you in! … Let go!”

  He’s afraid to release his hold on the boat, afraid he’ll slip from Cacho’s hands or pull him into the water too. But lacking other choice, he lets go.

  Cacho fights the river for possession of him, both hands locked around Axel’s wrist, his good foot planted against the skewed transom for leverage. He lugs him up against the sagged corner of the boat. Axel’s shoulder feels like its arm is unrooting. He grabs the transom with his left hand and helps to pull himself up over it, submerging it under his weight, water pouring in as he fumbles into the swirling boat. Cacho releases his arm but still holds tightly to his shirt. Axel rises on his elbows and spews a great gush of water.

  “You hit?” Cacho says. “You shot?”

  He doesn’t know, doesn’t think so. He feels a variety of pains, but none of bullet severity. He knows what a gunshot wound feels like. “I’m okay! You?”

  “Not a scratch! God loves us! We’re clear, bro, we’re on the move!”

  The boat is awash and listing hard to its left rear side, but the other three chambers keep it afloat well enough.

  Cacho shakes him by the shirt and yells near his ear, “Look up! Up there!”

  The band of sky between the looming canyon walls has broken into ragged, scudding clouds brightly lit by a moon still out of their view, patches of its light playing in the higher shadows on one wall of the canyon.

  30

  They hold to the safety lines affixed along the top of each side of the boat—the grab ropes—and discuss their options in shouts as they rise and fall, bobbing and wheeling on the swift current’s undulations. They can’t guess where they are or how fast they’re moving or how much time has passed, but they reckon it’s still a few hours till daybreak. They have to get off the river before then or risk being spotted by a riverside search party or a helicopter. The canyon walls are getting lower, the visible sky is widening, though they still can’t see the moon. They’re hoping that when the banks flatten again the boat will get swept into another accumulation of debris, but on the Mexican side this time, and they’ll be able to achieve the beach as before.

  Even if they don’t run into any brush, Axel says, as soon as the river’s calmer they can paddle to the bank. Once they’re on Mexican ground they’ll find a road and hitch a ride or walk if they must to the nearest pueblo and from there somehow get in touch with Cacho’s people.

  What about the rapids he mentioned, Cacho wants to know. What if they hit those first? Axel says he isn’t absolutely sure there are any bad rapids ahead. Could be they entered the river below the last of them. He tells the kid not to worry, they’re not riding a tree limb anymore.

  “Even with an air chamber blown, look how good we’re doing! This thing’s like a big life vest! What the hell, we hit white water we’ll just ride it out till the current eases again and then we paddle over to the first flat bank!”

  “Yeah, right, nothing to it!”

  Which is when they discover they’ve lost one of their paddles. But Axel is confident he can get them ashore with the remaining one.

  The canyon walls soon shrink into short, fragmented bluffs, exposing a gibbous moon, the river agleam with its light. And then the meanders begin to contract, their bends following more closely on one another and tightening the current into greater rigor and the boat moves faster and faster. The river loudens as they round a sharp bend and the boat sways on the current’s flow over a wide rock and they plunge off a sudden short drop, both of them yelling in fright, holding tight to the grab ropes, and the boat hits with a jarring splash and leaps forward on a raging white-water rapid.

  They rocket downriver, pitching, yawing, whirling, gripping the ropes, flopping about on the flooded deck, gulping the sodden air, their shouts lost in the white water’s boom. The current lashes them through the wider rock passages, the boat caroming off the larger boulders and wobbling over the smaller ones, now almost capsizing, now momentarily aloft before smacking down again. They run up against a high rock that tilts them precipitously and Axel falls hard against Cacho and the kid tumbles overboard with a yelp. Then the boat is upright again and all A
xel sees of him is a fist still tight on the grab rope and faintly hears his gasping cries. Cacho’s head bobs up over the hull for a second as he tries to pull himself aboard, then drops from sight again.

  Axel lunges to the right-side grab rope and holds to it with one hand and reaches down with the other and snatches a fistful of the kid’s shirt at the shoulder and leans back, pulling hard, the boat reeling every which way and parting his ass from the deck with every buck, each time nearly tossing him out. Cacho’s head again comes up, hair plastered, eyes wild. He works his arms into the boat, Axel still pulling on his shirt, and he’s got one leg over the hull when the boat plunges over another drop, a long fall that feels like they’ve gone off the edge of the earth. The boat hits the water nose-first with its rear still arcing forward in the manner of someone launching into a handstand, and the kid is flung away.

  Axel feels himself parting from the deck and for a second sees his feet against the moonlit sky, the airborne boat ahead of him, and then he’s in the water too and shielding his head with his arms, bouncing off rocks and only dully conscious of the impacts. The overturned boat precedes him through a series of passages and then vanishes and he follows it over another steep drop, and then he’s underwater, tumbling in the current, not knowing up from down, wild with panic and sure that he’s about to drown … and then he’s at the surface again, gasping and spinning, glimpsing the bright moon, flailing to no effect against the river’s force, the muddy water mashing into his mouth as the rapid carries him as easily as a leaf. It whips him in an outward arc and he flashes past a stretch of open bank and then tears through a stand of reeds that lash his face and dim the moonlight. His collar snags around his neck and arrests him, cutting off his breath and holding him faceup and outstretched on the river’s pull, legs flapping.

  Thrashing like a hooked fish and clawing at his collar, he’s strangling even as he’s looking at silver fragments of sky above him through a mesh of leafy tree branches.

  “Stop fighting me! Reach up! Reach up and grab my wrist!”

  Cacho!

  Heart banging, his eyes feeling about to pop from their sockets, Axel puts a hand behind his head, finds the kid’s hand locked on his collar, and grasps his wrist. The collar eases on his neck and he sucks deep breaths broken by hard coughing.

  “Hang onto me till you can reach up to the tree!” Cacho yells.

  As the kid slowly draws him rearward against the river’s drag, Axel is able to crane his head enough to see him holding by one hand to a low branch of an overhanging tree, struggling to keep his feet against the rushing current at his waist, the black bank but a few feet past him. Snarling like a weight lifter at every tug, groaning in pain whenever he puts too much pressure on his bad foot, Cacho pulls him within arm’s length of a low branch and Axel seizes it. “Got it!” he cries in cracked voice. He lets go of Cacho’s wrist and grabs onto the branch with that hand too. A dipping swirl in the current yanks his feet down and bumps them on a hard bottom and then slaps them out again. The water here is only about thigh-high, but the current is far too strong to permit footing.

  They have to work their way to shore by arm strength from handhold to handhold along the branch. Then Cacho’s up on the bank and reaching back for him and they lock hands and he drags Axel out of the river and into a dark stand of trees. Coughing and gasping, they crawl out onto the open bank, fall on their bellies, and roll onto their backs, chests heaving, relishing the feel of solid earth under them. The moon blazes on them from a sky now almost cloudless, the flat bank whitewashed in its light.

  “Hey?” Cacho says.

  “Huh?”

  “We’re on the right … right?”

  Axel can hardly hear him through the rapid’s rumble and is so dazed with exhaustion he doesn’t grasp what the kid’s asking. He coughs and turns to look at him. “Are we … on the right?”

  “What? … That’s what … I’m asking you! … We got off on the right, didn’t we? Not, maybe, you know … the wrong side?”

  “The wrong …? Oh, man, you …” It’s a labor to talk.

  “What?”

  “Listen! … We got off on the … right-hand side … correct side … Mexican side…. We’re in Mexico.”

  “Oh, man, that’s good! … Because, you know … if we were in Texas again … I think I’d rather be caught … than go back … in that fucking river.”

  The kid says something more in a tired slur and Axel doesn’t catch it but doesn’t care. It feels so grand to lie still, eyes closed, do nothing but breathe.

  Through the sound of the river comes the high yipping of a nearby coyote, and then the cries of a pack of them in high chorus. He thrills to the sound, which he hasn’t heard in over ten years. There are lots of coyotes in Terrell County, of course, but people shoot them for fun, so they tend to silence except at night, when you’re in the cell block and can’t hear them. This is the first one he’s heard since his transfer ride to the Zanco Unit in a TDCJ bus with the window glass raised outside the steel mesh, a late-night drive during which they heard the madhouse yowlings of coyotes off and on for most of the trip. A gray-whiskered con sitting next to him had said it was the freest sound in the world. “Except for a wolf,” the con added. “Wolf howl is kick-your-ass free.”

  He wonders how long they’ve been lying here. “Hey?” he says. “We gotta get moving at first light…. find a road … pueblo.”

  Cacho’s asleep.

  Then he’s asleep, too.

  He’s awakened by the swelling sound of a helicopter. He scrambles over to the trees, Cacho crawling up beside him. They crouch in the cottonwood shadows as the chopper approaches, its racket swelling. It passes close to the trees, a spotlight flashing against the tree cover but not penetrating it. And then it’s gone.

  “Madre mia,” Cacho says. “I about had a heart attack. No more under the stars for me.” He crawls about in the shadows, testing the earth with his hand, finds a satisfactory site, and lies down.

  Axel stays put, too. It takes a while for his pulse to settle. After a time he says, “Hey?” just to see if Cacho’s still awake, and gets no answer. He wonders how the kid could drift off again so easily. And a minute later is once again asleep.

  31

  He wakes in the deeper night, curled up on his side, arms folded to his chest, hands in fists, cheek to the hard ground, his ear numb against it. His neck hurts. It’s a torment to unclench his fists and work the fingers.

  Then he senses it wasn’t pain that woke him.

  He stops flexing his hands and lies motionless. Listens hard. Bits of moonlight filter through the trees. Close by, Cacho lies with his back to him. And then from somewhere behind him he hears it, the sound that roused him.

  A low, reverberant growl.

  His scalp tightens and his bladder feels a sudden urgency.

  He knows with an instinct as old as that of the first men to walk the earth that he’s in the presence of something against which he stands not a chance. Only in movies has he heard a lion growl, and now knows it bears no comparison to the real thing. The growl comes again, and he feels its resonance in his bones. His hand closes around a large rock and draws it close. You do what you can.

  He waits, motionless, chest aching for the deeper breath he dares not risk lest his fear be heard in it, even though he’s sure the thing can sense his fear anyway, can probably smell it. He waits. And waits. Then hears the growl again, but only barely. At greater distance. Moving away. He waits a long time before he very slowly turns over onto his other side, suppressing a groan, and looks in the direction from which the growl came.

  In the near distance is a low rise running roughly parallel to the river, its sloped, moonlit face scooped and deeply shadowed. He hadn’t noticed it when they crawled out of the river, but then he hadn’t been focused on much of anything at the time except the fact of still being alive. He rolls over again and looks at Cacho, who hasn’t stirred. He stares at the glow of the moon behind the lower leaves
, certain he will sleep no more tonight, not with that growl still sounding in his mind. And then is once again asleep.

  His next waking will be to a reddening dawn.

  32

  Within minutes of the duty officer’s receipt of CO Berra’s frantic phone call from the infirmary storeroom where he has found Mason battered, bound, and gagged, the Zanco Unit is in lockdown, sirens wailing. A pursuit party of two-man teams draws weapons from the armory, vehicles from the motor pool, sets out in chase of the van. A state alert is issued, and Texas Rangers unite with a half-dozen sheriff’s departments in a region-wide manhunt. Roadblocks are set up at Alpine and at the western boundary of Val Verde County, sealing off a 125-mile stretch of Highway 90. Others are placed at the juncture of every road connecting to the south side of I-10 out of Jeff Davis, Reeves, Pecos, and Crockett Counties. Helicopters are deployed from Fort Stockton and Del Rio.

  One of the Zanco pursuit vehicles, a Ford 250 pickup truck, loses radio contact with the others and is not heard from again, its whereabouts unknown until a rancher assisting in the search for the convicts finds it that evening in Lonely Woman Creek where the storm has washed out the old bridge. He calls the sheriff’s office, which sends out deputies and a tow truck. Only the fore part of the pickup’s roof is above water, and the tow crew ascertains that the truck has been held in place against the current by its rear axle, caught on a creek bottom undercut.

  When the truck is finally hauled out, the drowned driver is still in his seat, but missing is his partner, CO Tillis Moore. The passenger-side window is down, and the deputies infer that Moore got out before the cab was swamped, then was taken away on the current. Scattered through the truck is a litter of .38 cartridges and spent shells, indicative that they’d had the van in sight and that Moore fired his revolver at it repeatedly from the open window and reloaded more than once. But the gun is not in the truck and so was either lost in the creek or was still in Moore’s possession when he exited the vehicle.