The sun was at its apex and the bottle held but two inches of water when another cloud of dust rose in the near distance. It began coming toward them, forming into a plume, then veered slightly to westward, to their right. “This way!” Cacho said, heading in that direction, limping fast on his staff. “The road must be over here! Come on!” They were gasping, laughing, Axel saying he hoped to hell whoever it was had some water in the car, Cacho saying cold beer would be better but he just hoped they weren’t cops.
Then the plume swerved directly toward them and they stopped and watched it approach, heightening and broadening as it came their way. Coming from where they knew there was no road. And then they knew what it was. “Carajo!” Cacho said, and tried vainly to spit. The climbing spiral hove up over a low outcrop and swooped onto the open ground before them—a dust devil, a whirlwind generated of the heat. They were both from the Rio Grande flatlands and had seen dust devils before, and that they could have mistaken this one and the others before it for the dust of road traffic was evidence not only of the visual pranks of the desert heat but of their exhaustion and desperate hope…. Axel felt a fool for having inferred that just because there had been no wind where he stood on the rise, there wasn’t any out on the plain to raise the dust he had taken for that of a moving vehicle’s.
The dust devil whirled past them, stinging their eyes, and they watched it go, gyrating like some antic specter. Again, their inclination was to head back to the river, but they knew they’d never make it. They had come too far. The only thing to do was push on in hope of coming across a road, however primitive. They told each other that maybe some of the dust clouds they’d seen had been raised by vehicles. Axel didn’t believe it and didn’t think the kid did, either, but they had to hope so. And so they walked on, Axel plodding ahead, Cacho trailing awkwardly behind on the staff….
Now they’re dying.
All water gone.
Axel’s lips are swollen and sore, his tongue feels thick, his throat burns. His scalp is on fire and his vision has a pink tinge. He’s queasy even though there’s nothing in his stomach to throw up. He recalls having heard another helicopter, the whine of its engine similar to that of the last chopper they’d seen. He has a fuzzy memory of huddling against a low outcrop, glad of the camouflage afforded by their dirty clothes. But he can’t say if it happened an hour ago or in the last ten minutes or even if the memory is real.
He hears Cacho cry out and turns to see the kid sprawled facedown. He staggers back to him and rasps, “C’mon, man, up.” When he stoops to help him, he loses his balance and falls on his ass.
He sits there a moment, catching his breath. Cacho’s face is turned toward him, his eyes shut, his mouth slack, his lips dark and swollen.
“Let’s go, kid!” he says. “Won’t get to a road lazing around like this.”
Cacho’s eyes open and fix on him blankly. Then they blink a few times, and there’s recognition.
“Heyyyy … Ax,” he says, barely audibly. “Go on, man … find us … taxi.”
“Bullshit … We’re both going.” Axel slowly gets on all fours, pauses, then stands up, gets dizzy again, totters sideways, and falls. He’s now farther from the kid, whose eyes are again closed. He wants to call to him but hasn’t the strength and there’s anyway nothing to say. Then everything seems to make a small jump ahead as in a badly spliced film and he senses he has been unconscious for a time. A few seconds? Minutes? He’s staring close-up at the hot ground, one cheek pressed to it. He stirs slightly and stops, exhausted.
This is it, buddy boy, he thinks. Out in the Big Nowhere. Next stop, the Cosmic Nowhere.
What the hell. At least you’re not dying in prison.
Now comes a sound, distant but bearing their way.
The thwucking of a helicopter.
He recognizes the high whine of its engine. The same one. Still hunting them. Or maybe only the same kind of chopper.
Don’t see us. Don’t.
He tries to curl himself into a ball, to embed himself in the ground, to make himself as hard to see as possible. The kid lies as before and seems oblivious to the aircraft.
Pass by, Axel thinks, pass by. Let me die here.
The helicopter passes by. It does not sound very high or far off.
Keep going, keep going, keep going….
The chopper keeps going. Its sound diminishing.
Yes!
He releases a long exhalation. His chest hurts.
Dying time. Just lie here and let it come. Won’t be so bad, not as worn out as you are. Just let it—
The chopper sound stops fading.
Then again begins to grow.
It’s turned back.
Son of a bitch!
The aircraft closes fast, growing steadily louder. Then its volume holds and he knows it’s circling them.
He sees a flat, hand-sized rock close by and closes his hand around it. Turn over, he thinks. Turn over and point it at them. They can’t see what it is from up there. They’ll think it’s a gun and they’ll shoot you dead. Do it.
He raises his head, moves his feet in search of purchase, tries to roll over, and falls on his face again. He wants to howl his rage at being unable to keep his promise to die free.
The helicopter descends, its engine whine ear-stopping, its downdraft buffeting. He shuts his burning eyes, the raised dust enveloping him as the craft touches down.
Over the engine whine and beating rotors he hears voices shouting in Spanish, the speech too fast and clipped and mingled with the engine whine for him to comprehend.
He cracks open his eyes. Sees figures in dark blue uniforms. Federales?
Crouching over Cacho, picking him up, bearing him away.
He lies ignored. Leave me, he thinks, leave me.
Then shadows fall over him and hands are at him, turning him onto his back, lifting him by knees and underarms. He squints through the dust as he’s borne to the chopper. The lettering on its side reads “Policía de Coahuila.”
State cops.
He’s carried under the whirling blades and shuts his eyes against the blast of the downdraft. They set him on the chopper floor and someone within drags him further inside. A cop in SWAT gear and dark glasses hunkers just inside the door, an M4 carbine in his hands. Someone puts a wet cloth to Axel’s blistered lips and says, “No mas un poquito! Just a leetle!” The man squeezes out a bit of moisture that sears Axel’s lips but feels wonderful on his tongue, even as he curses his flesh for its limbic desperation to survive. He hears garbled speech shouted against the engine noise. Cacho lies almost within reach, a cop with a medic’s red-cross armband crouched beside him, adjusting an intravenous tube from the kid’s arm to a solution bag hanging on an overhead hook. He preps a hypodermic syringe and gives Cacho an injection, then turns to Axel and starts rigging a similar IV into him.
Axel wants to yank the needle out of his arm, wants only to die. But he knows they won’t let it happen. Both the Mex and the Texas cops want them back alive. The Mexicans will want to put them on display for the news cameras in a grand show of cross-border cooperation and the competence of their police. And Texas wants to remind its convicts that you can’t escape the long arm of its law, and if you try it they might have to kill you and wouldn’t mind doing it but they’d really rather catch your sorry ass and add to your time and start beating you down some more. That’s what’s coming—a lot more years in the cage.
The medic says something to him he doesn’t catch through the noise of the engine, then holds an index finger in front of his face and moves it slowly from side to side. Axel follows it with his eyes. The man smiles. Then gives him an injection, too, pats him on the shoulder, and moves back to Cacho.
Someone shouts Ready! in Spanish and the chopper engine revs higher and Axel’s stomach feels like it’s being left behind as the craft rises and leans and accelerates in an ascending climb.
Now a different face looms over him, that of a man crouching. Eyes dark and b
right.
“You’re pretty goddamn lucky we spotted you,” he says in only slightly accented English. “This was our last flyover. If we hadn’t seen you this time, the coyotes would have been feeding on you tonight.”
If they hadn’t seen us this time! If they hadn’t … he would’ve died free. He wants to howl his bitterness, but he’s beginning to feel dopey and lax. He glances at Cacho, who looks dead.
“He’ll be all right,” the man says. “Both of you.”
“Fug … fuck you, cob … cop.” The injection is doing its work. It’s an effort to form words.
“What?” The man laughs. “Well, fuck you right back, dude. Christ, you got no idea where you are, do you? Who you’re talking to?”
“In cob chob … chopper … and you’re … fuggen cob.”
The man laughs and says something that sounds to Axel like “Pope of Rome.”
He’s fading out as the man leans closer, his dark face featureless but for a white grin, Axel missing some of what he says, but grasping, “Joaquín Capote, Cacho’s brother … cops with us … you fuckers made it!”
It takes a few seconds more for him to understand, and then he does—and he feels a wild laughter deep in his chest … feels it bearing him away….
40
Even though Jessie Wolfe has always been confused and ashamed about her father, he has never seemed quite real to her. In grammar school there were early instances of classmates mocking her for her “jailbird” daddy, though all such mockery abruptly ceased after her cousins Eddie Wolfe and Jimmy Quick kicked the asses of the boys she pointed out to them as her main harassers. Her uncle Charlie had often told her about the wonderful times he and Axel had together as kids. Her daddy had made a bad mistake, Charlie told her, and he was sorry for it and was paying for it. She never said anything in response, and whenever he asked if she had any questions about him, she simply shook her head.
The only person she’d ever asked about her father was her 113-year-old great-great-grandaunt Catalina, about whose life she has written a book that she’s promised not to publish until after the old woman’s death. In the course of their many interview sessions, she once asked Aunt Cat how well she’d known her father. “Well enough to know he was a clever boy with his own secret ways and secret fears,” Catalina said—she who was regarded by everyone else in the family as the most secret-ridden of them. “But then, that is true of all the men of this family, whatever their age.” She volunteered nothing further, and Jessie asked nothing more.
She’s always felt she should hate her mother more than she does her father because he was taken from her by the law but she left of her own free will, just packed up and split for parts unknown and has never to this day been in contact with her.
She’s never forgotten when she was ten and went with Charlie to visit her father in prison up in East Texas, but the look of the place scared her so bad she couldn’t go in. Charlie wanted her to try again after that but she never would. When she was fourteen she got the only letter from her father she would ever get, and it made her cry. She then lied to Uncle Charlie that she’d burned it, hoping it would hurt her father to hear it, and she said to tell him never to write her again. But she hadn’t burned it, and she’s read it dozens of times over the years. And she’d only said she didn’t want him to write to her to see if he’d do it anyway because he loved her so much he just couldn’t help it. Rayo Luna’s the only one she ever confided that to, and it was Rayo who made her see she had been putting him to an unfair test and then resenting him for failing it.
When Jimmy Quick came into the Doghouse on the evening of the escape and gave them the news of it, Rayo hustled her out of there and back to the beach house. They had a few beers at the kitchen table and Rayo let her do all the talking, though she had heard it all from her before. They slept together that night as they sometimes did when one or the other was feeling low for some reason, and Rayo held her close and petted her but that was all. They have in fact “fooled around”—as they refer to it—with each other a few times since moving into the beach house. After the first time, Jessie asked with a nervous smile if it meant they were “sapphic.” Rayo laughed at her word choice and said no way, because the real thing doesn’t care to do it with men and both of them truly preferred to play with cocks. She said not to worry about it, that they fooled around with each other for no reason except they were free enough in their affection to show it any way they pleased, and sometimes it was just fun as hell to be naked together. However, Rayo said, and speaking strictly for herself, she’d never had an inclination to play naked with any other woman. “Me, neither,” Jessie said—and they’d laughed like loons.
The next evening came the news that her father was presumed dead. And it was like something in her died on hearing it, though she could not specify what.
PART III
RECKONINGS
41
Axel awakens in a large, four-poster bed, its sheets smooth and fresh-smelling. The room is dimly lighted by a small table lamp next to an overstuffed chair in which a stout Mexican woman dozes, snoring lightly, a shawl over her shoulders. Her dark face is pinched with age, her plaited hair mostly gray. The ceiling is high and wood-beamed. The foot of the bed faces a wall on which is mounted a television with a screen he would guess to be five feet wide and a yard high. On the far wall to his right is a closed set of tall drapes.
His IV has been removed and he’s been cleaned up and dressed in short-sleeved pajamas. There’s a white terry cloth robe hung on a bedpost. Wherever he is, it’s obviously not jail, and he has no doubt that the man who said he’s Cacho’s brother was telling the truth. But the Coahuila state cops and their helicopter were the real thing, no question about that, either, and while it wouldn’t be the first time he’s heard of Mexican cops helping out crooks in a big way, he knows they don’t do it for small-timers. Whoever Cacho’s brother is with, they’re big.
He’s sore all over. His forearm is bandaged, and his hands, except for the fingers. His face hurts. He lightly touches the thin dressing on his cheek. Every movement of his shoulder pangs it, his neck aches at every turn of his head. But his throat is much better and his lips feel only lightly scabbed. Not too bad, he thinks. All things considered.
He has a vague recollection of coming partially awake as he was taken off the helicopter by two men bearing the stretcher through an amber haze of rotor-raised dust, another man tending to the IV in his arm. He wanted to look for Cacho but lacked the strength to move his head. He was carried to a black SUV, its windows dark and its backseats folded down to form a floor for the stretcher. When the IV guy saw that his eyes were open he made an adjustment to the drip and it was lights out again. If he has wakened even once between then and now, he has no memory of it.
He hears a rooster crow. Distant wavering bleats of goats. He sits up with a grunt and eases off the bed, works his feet into a ready pair of slippers and goes to the drapes. He pushes one aside to reveal the open shutter doors of a small balcony on an upper floor. It overlooks a large courtyard enclosed by a high stone wall. There are wooden tables and benches under rainbow-striped umbrellas and scraggly mesquite trees. A pair of ravens alight on the rim of a stone birdbath, take a few sips, fly away. Beyond the wall lies a vast, brushy plain extending to a horizon of peppercorn hills, the sun not far above them. Quasi-desert country, rugged but no so starkly as that surrounding the Zanco Unit.
The woman wakes and emits a cry of dismay at the sight of him out of bed. She lumbers from the chair, scolding him for his negligence, and he chuckles as she puts his arm over her shoulders and her arm around his waist as though he might collapse if she did not support him. She guides him to the bed and tries to assist him in getting back into it, chiding him the whole while. She arranges his pillows at his back so he can sit comfortably, then shakes her finger at him in an unmistakable command to stay put and leaves the room. As soon as she’s gone, he gets out of bed and puts on the robe and sits in her chair.
>
Minutes later, Joaquín Capote comes through the door, smiling wide.
“Buenos días, Axel! You don’t mind if I call you Axel? My brother tells me you speak excellent Spanish, but if it’s all right with you I’d rather we converse in English. I don’t get much opportunity to practice mine out here.”
Axel stands up and they shake hands. Joaquín is taller than both he and Cacho, with thick black hair and a large droopy mustache. He’s dressed in jeans, black T-shirt, running shoes. Cacho had said his brother was eighteen years his elder. He looks it.
Axel smiles at the man’s good cheer. “English is fine with me, sir. Where are we?”
“In a hell of a lot better place than where I found you. And call me Quino. How you feeling?”
“Little achy is all. What about the kid?”
“Lucky. Ankle’s only badly sprained, no fracture or ligament tear. He’ll wear one of those removable cast shoes for ten days, be on crutches, then use a cane for another couple of weeks. Otherwise he’s pretty much the same as you. A few cuts, bruises, sunburn. Mainly, you guys were dying of thirst and exhausted to the bone. Amazing what a little hydration, some antibiotics and nutrients can do. Except for his ankle, you’ll both be fine in a few days. The doc said to take the bandage off your face today, let the air work on it. Use a bandage again tonight when you go to bed, then take it off for good tomorrow. Same for your arm. And let the lip scabs come off naturally, don’t pull them off.”
Axel goes to the dresser mirror and is surprised by the deep redness of his face. He carefully removes the bandage. The cheek cut is discolored but not as swollen as he’d expected. It’s been closed with small adhesive butterfly stitches.
The Ways of Wolfe Page 15
