All the reports, both print and TV, included mention that Axel Prince Wolfe was the son of Harry McElroy Wolfe, the prominent South Texas attorney. Which had come as news to Cacho.
“You said you were an orphan, same as me,” he’d said.
Axel had shrugged. “Don’t you know better than to believe a convict?”
Quino laughed, and Cacho said, “Jesus Christ, you been keeping secrets even from me. Lying to me. You didn’t trust me for a minute.”
“I do now,” Axel said. “Sometimes for even a minute.”
Cacho grinned back at him. “It’s cool, man. You didn’t know me very good yet.” He held his fist out and Axel bumped it with his own.
“Will you inform your father you’re alive?” Quino asks.
“I don’t think it would be a good idea to inform anybody.”
“I very much agree.”
Quino had then shown them two editions of the Brownsville Herald he’d put aside for last. The front page of one edition blared the news of the prison break and manhunt. It carried a two-year-old prison picture of Axel and one of Harry Mack standing on the sidewalk in front of Wolfe Associates. The report included a recap of Axel’s conviction for armed robbery and assault, and Harry Mack was quoted as saying he was “deeply distressed” by the escape and hoped that Axel would realize the “irrationality” of it and surrender himself.
A sidebar story emphasized the “local boy” angle, highlighting Axel’s once-promising future, his excellent academic record and admirable baseball talent. It contained a yearbook picture of him in his baseball uniform, posing with a bat. It also included the information that he had a daughter, herself a reporter for the Herald, but she had refused to be interviewed or to issue a statement. The other Brownsville edition was this morning’s and related that although the investigators assumed that the escapees had drowned in either Lonely Woman Creek or the Rio Grande, the search for their bodies would continue. Reporters had again called on Harry Mack, who said the family was grieved by the news and he asked the media to respect their privacy.
Scanning the Brownsville papers, Cacho had said, “Damn, man, you’re a real hoot! Some shrink could have a pretty good time poking around in your brain trying to figure why a smart college kid would become an armed robber.”
“Ask your brother with the degree in economics but who’s working as a border guard for the Zetas,” Axel said.
“More whistle in the work,” Quino said.
Everybody thinks we’re dead.
He had not until now attempted to summarize how things stand beyond the fact that he’s free—and now even freer than he’d thought, since the bastards are no longer looking for him.
He’s not badly hurt. He has a comfortable place to stay for as long as he wants. A job if he wants it. One that pays well and keeps the adrenaline flowing.
That’s how things stand.
And everybody thinks he’s dead.
Everybody. The cops. Charlie. Harry Mack.
Jessie. His daughter thinks he’s dead.
Was she grieved by the news too?
He had not yet given thought to how he would go about trying to see her, to talk to her if possible. But now there are new factors to consider. Even though everybody thinks he’s dead, there’s a reward on him, and to the vast majority of border residents ten thousand dollars is a fortune. His picture has appeared everywhere. Everybody knows what he looks like. Countless total strangers can recognize him on sight. Any of them could spot him and call the cops before he even knew he’d been made.
And if he was identified and yet somehow avoided capture, the first thing the cops would think was that somebody in the family was harboring him. They’d go banging on the doors of every Wolfe residence and business, search every foot of them, barge into everybody’s life. They’d for damn sure go snooping in Wolfe Landing and maybe inadvertently stumble onto shade trade evidence of some kind. Which could be big trouble for Charlie.
He cannot risk making trouble for Charlie.
A disguise might work, but you never know. A stranger in a small town can draw close scrutiny, too, just for being a stranger, and he still might get found out someway or other. And there’s the question of how Jessie might react if he shows himself to her and tries to talk to her. What if she freaks and calls the cops? Or the other one does? Rayo Luna? Only one road in and out of that beach where they’re living. They might see him coming toward the house and call the cops without even knowing it was him. Either way, he’d be cut off from all escape routes.
So … better not to go there just now. And that’s okay. He’s waited for so many years, he can wait a little longer. The thing to do is let the hoopla die down. Let the escape fade into old news. Let his face get forgotten in the public mind. It will anyway give him more time to figure the best way to see her and not just go at it catch-as-catch-can. And before he does go there, he should let Charlie know. Give him a chance to wipe down the Landing in case anything goes wrong and the cops came poking around. And if there’s anybody who’d be glad to know he’s alive, it’s Charlie.
That’s how things stand, too.
He takes a short nap, then a walk in the courtyard, wearing a cap against the brute sun. He strides briskly along the perimeter walkway, working up a sweat. Back in his room he takes a shower, careful not to soak the cheek and arm bandages but lingering under the cascade of cool water for the wonderful sensation of it, then puts on fresh clothes and joins Quino and Cacho for lunch. He tells them of his workout walk and Quino says, “I told you you’re not hurt that bad. In no time you’re gonna be agile, mobile, and hostile, like the Zetas were taught at Fort Benning.”
“Hell of a thing to be jealous of an old guy because he can walk without crutches,” Cacho says.
Later in the day Quino presents Axel with a cell phone and acquaints him with its operations. He gives him Cacho’s number and Axel calls him. The kid laughs at his excitement about the little phone’s capacities. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, amigo,” he says.
44
They take supper that night in the main dining room and in the company of the resident Malos, a raucous affair, as Axel will find it to be every night. Few of the men know English, and most of the Spanish in the room is of rustic dialect and erratic grammar. He sits at a table with Quino and Cacho and three others, the eldest of them Quino’s segundo, his second-in-command, a one-eared man named Sino. The other two men are Sino’s personal operatives, Vaquero and Alto, neither one much older than Cacho. They both speak English well and much better than Sino. The three of them live in Nuevo Laredo and spend most of their time there and in Piedras Negras, but they pay frequent visits to the ranch to confer with Quino and they often attend the semimonthly parties.
All the Malos have been told that Axel provided the information essential to Cacho’s escape and that he saved the kid’s life in the course of the getaway. He has thereby proven himself and is accepted as one of them without question. When Sino hears his precise diction and faultless grammar, he says, Fucking guy sounds like a professor. And so is he nicknamed by the Malos—El Maestro.
He’d been unsure if beer would still afford him pleasure after such long absence from his life, but his first sip from a cold bottle of Negra Modelo is so gratifying that he chugalugs half the bottle, then burps, eyes watering, and says, “Jeeesus!” The table grins in appreciation of his pleasure. Supper is a savory repast of roast kid and rice topped with grilled tomatoes and peppers.
The conversation throughout the meal is animated and largely concerned with women. Everyone is in high anticipation of the party the day after tomorrow and the girls it will bring, and Axel is an object of awe and much joking about not having had a woman in twenty-four years. Cacho says his own deprivation of nine months has been unbearable and he can’t conceive how Axel has been able to stand it all that time. Quino says he’s known guys who were in prison for so long that when they got out they couldn’t enjoy a woman except in the ass, and so
me couldn’t even work up a good boner anymore except with their own hand. Axel says he still prefers pussy and has never buggered a guy in his life. The assertion is met with skeptical hoots and grinning insinuations that maybe he was always the one to get buggered. Vaquero quips that even if the Maestro never put it to a guy, he bets his hands have calluses like cowhide from all the years of jacking off. Axel picks up a fork and fakes stabs at his palm, feigning frustration at his inability to puncture it, raising another chorus of laughter.
Near the end of the meal, it comes as a shock when he overhears Joaquín asking Sino if it was really necessary to kill one of the bribed guards. He tried to make fools of us, Sino says. Alto and Vaquero nod in affirmation. Redhead prick had it coming, Chief, Vaquero says. Thought he could fuck us out of the money. Mason, Axel thinks. Dumb bastard took a hell of a beating for the money and got killed trying to keep it. The Zanco word on him was right. Bad gambler.
After supper they all repair to the lounge at the other end of the house, where there is a room-length bar, tables along the other walls, a jukebox, a bandstand, and a dance floor that gets much use on the two nights a month the girls from Monterrey come to visit. An adjacent room contains three pool tables.
The evening is full of good cheer and drinking, Axel taking care to sip his beer and pace himself so that he won’t get drunk but simply achieve a mellow buzz. The general congeniality is only briefly interrupted by a fight between a man who begins talking about the terrible things he’s going to do to the Nuevo Laredo son of a whore who stole his woman last month and a man who calls him a fool because nobody can steal another guy’s woman unless she wants to be stolen. The antagonists are quickly separated, both of them bloody-nosed, and five minutes later each has an arm around the other’s shoulders and they are in loud agreement about the universal perfidy of women. Let a woman know you love her, they agree, and it’s like giving her a license to lie. She’ll know she can get away with just about anything. There ensues a general discussion on the eternal question of what women want. There is much postulation and bafflement and disagreement.
On the other hand, what men want is easily answered. They want to be respected by other men—to be feared is even better—and to have sex with pretty women, a desire that persists to the end of a man’s life. They all know it’s a lie that old men lose interest in sex. They all know it because they have been told so by old men. The main reason they don’t have sex anymore, the old men have said, isn’t a loss of interest but that their sexual interest remains in young and pretty women, but young and pretty women, by and large, do not want to have sex with old men, and so the only sex available to old men is, very by and large, with their wives, who are, extremely by and large, old women, and not even an old man wants to have sex with an old woman.
45
He rises early the next day, already feeling stronger, his aches much abated. He removes the cheek bandage and the one on his forearm. The arm wound is scabbing nicely and he’s pleased to see that his palms are so much better they don’t really require another gauze wrap. He takes a walk around the compound and admires the tidiness of it. Then spies a circular watchtower atop the roof of the main house—it had not been discernible from the courtyard below his room—and for a moment is suffused with a sense of being back in prison. The guard holds a rifle in the crook of his arm, but his face is indistinct in the shaded booth and under his hat brim, and Axel cannot tell if the man is looking at him. Then the guard raises a hand in greeting and Axel returns the gesture.
During breakfast with Quino and Cacho, he remarks that the kid’s bruises are fading even faster than his.
“Always been a fast healer,” Cacho says.
“Always been young is what you always been,” Quino says. “There’s no curative more effective than youth.”
“Means your bruises oughta start fading in about a year,” the kid says to Axel.
Their plates are cleared away and they are finishing the last of their coffee when Quino tells Axel that he and Cacho are going to do some target shooting tomorrow. “If your hands feel up to it,” he says, “you’re welcome to join us. Kid says his hands don’t hurt too much to shoot, and since it’s been a while since you handled a gun, I thought you might want to check yourself out.”
“Hands are fine,” Axel says. “I’d like to go along.”
He spends most of that day with the rancho’s tech expert, who tutors him in the operations of a personal computer. Through reading, he had kept abreast of computer innovations during his years inside, but it is revelatory to actually use one and discover for himself the seemingly limitless scope of digital processes and possibilities, the ease and speed with which information can be accessed, messages sent and received, all of it.
When he gets back to his room he finds that a small refrigerator has been installed next to the television. It is filled with beer, cold cuts, sundry snacks. There is a large bowl of fresh fruit atop the dresser.
After another loud supper in the big dining room, they again go to the lounge to drink and bullshit, play cards, shoot pool. At the bar Axel and Quino converse about their college studies, Axel recalling that they mainly bored him, Quino reflecting on them mostly with affection, especially his philosophy classes. “The most fun I had in class,” Quino says, “was giving an oral report about Death, capital D, as the only true god because she’s the only one who every hour of ever day gives us copious, visible, irrefutable proof of her omnipotence. She gives it mostly by way of her most powerful emissaries—disease, famine, natural catastrophe, and especially by way of the human race itself. We are her most industrious archangels, and we do her work everywhere and in so many ways. The class didn’t know what to think. Some thought I was crazy, some wanted to beat the shit out of me, some thought I was a hell of a lot more fun than reading Bertrand Russell.”
“She?” says Axel.
“Of course, she. And an unsurpassable knockout. Why do you think so many men hurry to her, run to her with open arms?”
46
After breakfast the next morning they go shooting. They usually shoot at a makeshift range a hundred yards or so outside the compound, Quino says, but he recently bought a brand-new Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck and feels like putting it to the test, so they’ll go out on the plain to shoot.
The Ram truck is a huge quad-cab model and Axel gets in the backseat. Quino cranks up and revs the big Hemi engine, its roar monstrous. As they approach the front gate, a guard with a carbine slung on his shoulder opens it and raises a hand as they pass by. Quino then stomps on the gas and the Ram accelerates like it’s been let off a chain.
In less than a minute they’re moving at a hundred miles an hour, the brush flashing by to either side in a gray-brown blur, a great tan billow of dust rising behind them. It’s a graded dirt road of mostly straightaways and long wide curves, though some of the curves are tight enough that the truck skids off them and onto the rougher ground and rocks so wildly that Axel is sure they will overturn and be battered to pulp as they go rolling and bashing over the ground like some great wild beast shot down in full stride. Feeling a kind of freedom he cannot name, he lets out a shrill cry of maniacal glee.
“Grítalo, Maestro!” Quino yells. “Howl it, Wolfe man!”
They’re on a straightaway and the speedometer reads 105 when Quino eases off the gas and says, That rock stand up ahead will do.
They’ve brought a trash bag full of empty beer cans, and Axel and Quino set several dozen of them along the top of a waist-high outcrop while Cacho hobbles on his cane around to the back of the truck and retrieves a large gym bag. Quino unzips it and takes out a Beretta M9 pistol and shoves it into his waistband. He passes another one to Cacho and then hands one to Axel, saying, “The preferred sidearm of your country’s military forces.”
“You get them direct from American suppliers?”
“No. A Mexico City outfit. Los Jaguaros. Very hush-hush bunch, and they charge top dollar but are always very dependable.”
Axel hides his smile at the thought of what a small world it truly is.
Quino gives him a full magazine and Axel snaps it into the gun butt and chambers a round. It’s the first firearm he’s held since the day of the bonds robbery, and nothing else since the escape, not even the wild drive out here, has made him feel as liberated as he does at this moment. From a distance of ten yards, he shoots a can off the outcrop and exults at the feel of the recoil against his sore palm.
“Get a load of this guy!” Quino says. “First time in twenty years and he’s a goddamn deadeye. No flies on him.”
And a one-hand shooter! Cacho says. Goddamn cowboy!
“Like swimming,” Axel says, backing up another five yards. “Riding a bike.” He shoots another can off the rock. “You don’t forget.”
They back up another five yards and each of them uses up two magazine loads with the Berettas. Axel declares it a very nice pistol. Quino takes it from him and hands him a Glock 17, which Axel recognizes as the make of gun with which Cacho shot the CO at the creek. He shoots up two magazines with it and says he likes it more than the Beretta because of its lighter weight and smaller grip. The brothers agree. “Which reminds me,” Quino says. He goes to the truck and comes back with a Colt .45 1911A and hands it to Axel. “The kid tells me these old bastards are your favorite. Still true after the Glock?”
Axel smiles at his own daffy notion that the gun feels like he’s gripping the hand of an old friend. He draws the slide back enough to see there’s a bullet in the chamber. Though the .45 holds fewer than half the number of rounds that either the Beretta or the Glock do, it’s heavier than either of them. He turns toward the remaining cans on the outcrop, raises the cocked pistol, and fires eight times in quick succession, smacking away a can with each shot, emptying the magazine, the slide locking open after expelling the last shell.
The Ways of Wolfe Page 17
