The Ways of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  Now comes the first loud crack of thunder.

  There are two doors to his left, but neither shows light at its bottom. To his right, toward the fore of the house, is a single door, a bright strip of light at its foot. He goes to it, hears no sound within, opens it quickly, and enters the room in a crouch, the .45 straight out in front of him. There’s no one there.

  It’s a large room. Venetian blinds closed on the windows. Tall bookshelves with more gimcrackery and magazines on them than books. A rowing machine in a corner. On a spacious, littered desk is a closed laptop. Set into the wall to the right of the desk is a small fireplace whose mantel holds a trio of similar metallic objects and a few framed photographs. Almost the entire wall behind the desk is covered with framed pictures. He closes the door and goes to the mantel and sees that the three metallic objects are bronze cremation urns with etched plate inscriptions. One reads, “Mercedes Rivera de Calderas, 1928–1993,” another “Ricardo Elias Calderas, 1925–1997,” and the third, “Elena Mercedes McCapp Calderas, 1987–1991.”

  Axel’s pulse jumps…. McCapp Calderas.

  And there, next to the urns, stands a picture of young Billy and Raquel at a church altar. The first time ever he’s seen Billy in a suit. Raquel beautiful in a dress of white lace. The whole story’s right there. He did come back, did go to her, she did still love him, then he went to the father and said look what I can offer and dumped the bonds in his lap. All I want is your daughter and a job. And the father had opened his arms and said welcome to the family, my son. He changed his name to McCapp and married Raquel and they had a daughter, Elena. And she died. So too had Raquel’s parents. And unless they bequeathed the place to Raquel, it’s Billy’s.

  All this time Charlie was hunting him, he was just across the river.

  He regards another mantel photo, this one of Raquel in a hospital bed, smiling and holding a swaddled newborn. The handwritten inscription says “Elena, 2/4/87.” The dead child. Next to that photo are two others of Raquel in different hospital beds and in both pictures holding an infant, one inscription reading “María Susana, 5/18/88,” and the other “Anita Flor, 8/10/90.”

  Three daughters.

  The thunder is coming faster, growing louder.

  He goes behind the desk to look at the images on the wall. There are portraits and studio shots and candid photos of the surviving girls. There are childhood snapshots of them—helping their mother build a sand castle on the beach, assisting her in setting a picnic table, clutching to Billy and the teddy bears he’s won for them at a carnival shooting gallery with the rifle he’s yet holding. There are pictures of them as skinny pubescents attempting vixenish poses in their bathing suits, and in goggles and snorkels and standing in seawater to their waists. Pictures of them on saddle horses, in soccer uniforms.

  Here’s a captioned newspaper picture of María Susana McCapp Calderas at age twelve receiving a plaque for winning a citywide spelling bee, and here one of her at sixteen, on a tennis court and being presented with a singles trophy. There are newspaper photos of Anita Flor McCapp Calderas as well. At age nine as she waves at the street-side crowd from a parade float belonging to “Frontera-Mexica Investments” during a Charro Days festival. At thirteen and grinning at her first-prize medal at a science fair for her three-dimensional model of something to do with genetics. Here the girls are in prom dresses, here in high school graduation gowns and being hugged by Billy and Raquel and everybody beaming.

  In the very center of the wall is a photograph of Billy sitting before a birthday cake blazing with candles, his teenage daughters hugging him, all three of them laughing, the picture inscribed, “Happy 40th, Daddy!” There are pictures of Billy and Raquel in their youth, in middle age, on horseback, on a day sailer, toasting each other in a kitchen, dancing at a party. A gun range snapshot of Billy standing at Raquel’s back and helping her aim a Browning pistol. There are several shots of Billy together with his father-in-law, Ricardo Calderas—both of them grinning wide in dirty ranch clothes, smiling on a golf course, looking serious in suits as they confer at a dockside restaurant table, posing with shovels at a groundbreaking and next to a sign proclaiming, “A Frontera-Mexica Development.” In another picture they are sitting at a café table in the company of a wizened and dapper Mexican whom Axel recognizes as Manuel Sosa-Magón, a Matamoros gangster he had once seen at the Doghouse Cantina in conference with Henry James Wolfe, the photo lending support to the old rumors of Señor Calderas’s illicit sidelines. Indeed, he might very well have appreciated the assistance of a son-in-law with Billy’s outlook and experience. Not to mention his 750-thousand-dollar contribution to the Calderas holdings.

  He returns his attention to the pictures of Billy with his daughters. The girls would now be how old? Twenty and eighteen, thereabouts. Only a few years younger than Jessica Juliet. In college, most likely.

  Three daughters. Their first one dead. At four years old.

  The edges of the Venetian blinds flare with lightning and the windows shudder in the following thunder.

  He’d never had any money till he stole the whole bundle from the Dallas rip, and look what he’s done with it. Made a family whose love for each other is all over this wall. More than you could do. Let it go. What would be the point now? Really? He didn’t estrange you from Jessie. He didn’t run Ruby off. So what do you want from him if not his blood? Your cut? If he doesn’t hand it over except at gunpoint and then you don’t kill him, he could be of a mind to retake it—he’s got his pride too. You want that, wake up every morning wondering if today’s the day he finds you? And if you kill him to make sure he doesn’t hunt you, you’ll be partly killing those girls. And Rocky. His daughters, man, his wife. What’s killing him going to satisfy?

  Let it go.

  As he starts back to the door, there’s the sound of a vehicle pulling up in front of the house. He goes to the corner window and fingers the blinds aside just enough to see a dark SUV in the verandah’s light near the front steps. The first fat raindrops are ticking against the window. The vehicle’s front and back doors open and three women hasten out of the vehicle, their laughter audible. Two of them dash up the verandah stairs and out of Axel’s sight, but the other one abruptly turns and goes back to the vehicle, calling, “Wait!” She opens a rear door, laughing and saying something to the driver. “Mommmm,” one of the women yells from the porch, “come onnnn!”

  Raquel and the girls. Must be Billy driving. Raquel retrieves a large handbag from the front seat, and now the rain comes harder, clattering on the windowpanes. She holds the bag over her head for cover and scoots to the verandah, the girls shrieking with laughter and warnings not to get hit by lightning. Then she’s out of view too. The SUV passes directly below Axel and turns down the driveway to the garage.

  With the women downstairs, he can’t chance trying to get out the same way he came in. But he recalls drainpipes at the corners of the house. He slips the .45 into the holster and opens the window—the sudden influx of wind batting the venetian blinds crazily and slinging rain into the room and scattering papers—then sticks his head out and his cap sails off and he sees a drainpipe not two feet away. He reaches out and tests its stability with his hand and thinks it will hold. He straddles the sill, leans over, and clutches the pipe with both hands, the rain pasting his hair to his crown, then rolls to his right and falls free of the window.

  The downward swing and tug of his weight on the wet pipe nearly breaks his hold on it and he feels it pull partly loose of its moorings, but it holds. He starts shinning down, hand under hand, each hold tenuous, his feet pressed to the sides of the pipe. He’s six feet from the ground when the pipe lurches outward and he loses his grip and falls, striking heels-first and then smacking onto his back in the mud, hearing the breath heave out of him.

  For a moment he’s unable to breathe and the rain is running into his nose and he remembers the sensation of nearly drowning in the rapids. Then his lungs inflate and he rolls over and gets up just as
a jag of lightning finds the metal rod affixed to the rim of the verandah roof and ignites a great crackling blast of white sparks that draws Axel’s gaping stare and makes the verandah lights flicker.

  And then he’s running down the dark lane and back to the rear gate.

  55

  Billy Capp is heading for the side door of the house—flinging aside an umbrella blown inside out the second he stepped out of the garage, his fine suit soaked before he’s gone ten paces, his head hunched against the wind and rain—when the bolt hits the lightning rod. He flinches and looks up to see the spray of sparks and the drainpipe angling awkwardly from the corner of the house and shaking in the wind. Directly below it a man is getting to his feet and gawking upward, his face starkly illuminated by the verandah lights.

  And even at this distance, even after all this time, he recognizes him. Even if he hadn’t seen the recent prison pictures of him in the papers and on television, he would have recognized him. He grabs under his coat for the .45, but, without having looked in his direction, Axel Wolfe is already sprinting out of sight into the rainy gloom.

  Billy runs after him, pistol in hand, squinting against the wind-slung rain, now unable to see more than a few feet ahead but feeling he has an advantage in that Axel didn’t see him. He runs and runs down the lane—sporadically pausing for a moment to listen for him, try to figure which way he’s gone—and then it strikes him that he has to be heading for the back gate and will climb out the same way he climbed in, then hop in a waiting vehicle and be gone before he can even catch sight of him. He whirls around and runs all the way back to the garage, heaving for breath, and gets in the SUV, a 4Runner. He guns it in reverse down the driveway and onto the lane, turns on the lights and windshield wipers, and heads for the front gate, calling the guard on his cell, telling him to open the gate right now.

  Anita Flor sees the 4Runner speed rearward past a window and says, “What in the world? Where’s Daddy going?”

  He supposes Axel was climbing up the pipe when it gave way. Wanted to avoid having to deal with anybody he might run into on the lower floor. Who the fuck knows and what difference does it make? Goddamnit, he knew he’d be coming. He’d read about his capture, about his trial and conviction for some robbery they didn’t do, and he’d known that if Axel didn’t die in prison he would one day be released and find out where he was and come for him. And then all these years later came the news of his escape, and the first thing he thought was, He’s coming. He drowned, they’d said, him and the other convict. But they didn’t find either body, did they? Since last month he’s been on guard, always alert, going armed all the time, even on the estate, putting up a good front for Rocky and the girls but feeling as jumpy as he had for weeks after the Dallas thing. He’d been sure Axel would rat them for cutting out on him, leaving him for dead, which is the only way he woulda seen it. But it was leave him or go down with him.

  Axel for damn sure woulda done the same thing in their shoes. He’d never worried about Duro looking for him. The guy didn’t know anything about him except he’d been a pal of Axel’s. Never a word about Duro in the news. Had thought maybe the cops nailed him at the rest stop. Hadn’t had any choice about the rest stop, either. All bloody like Duro was, if they’d been pulled over for any reason—roadblock, faulty taillight, whatever—they’da been had.

  God damn it, Billy thinks, if all he wanted was his cut, all right, no problem, he had it coming, I’d give it to him quick. But if the cut was what he wanted, all he had to do is get the word to me, let me know, even be hardnose about it if it made him feel better … my cut or else.

  “Oh hell, Ax, no need for ‘or else,’ here’s your money.”

  Could’ve been that easy. But no.

  Because the money’s not what he wants.

  What he wants is to kill me.

  Came for me in my home! My family right here!

  He curses the poor visibility and the narrow winding lane that forces him to hold down his speed, though he nevertheless goes too fast and slews off the pavement twice, once almost miring but for the four-wheel drive, the second time scraping the right side of the 4Runner against a tree. The gate attendant is standing by the open gate when Billy’s headlights swing around the curving lane and fix on him. The man hops into the guard shack just before Billy tears by.

  He cuts off his lights, the flanking ground-lights sufficiently outlining the road. His intention is to get to the trailhead before Axel does, then pull over, jump out, and start shooting as soon as Axel comes wheeling off the trail. Just shoot and shoot till the magazine’s empty and he’s crashed into the trees, then slap in another mag and shoot it all up too, just to make sure. Then call his service people to come and take away the wreckage and the body and dispose of them utterly. End of problem.

  Too late. As he comes out of a curve, he sees Axel’s headlight beams swing out of the side trail and onto the road up ahead, sees the bulky silhouette of his vehicle against them, and then his brake lights flash and he goes into a curve and out of sight.

  Billy passes through the curve and spies him again and slows down. No way Axel can spot him this far back in the dark and the rain and running without lights. He anyhow doesn’t have any reason to think anybody’s chasing him, just wants to get the hell out of here. He notes the horizontal row of small red lights along the rear of Axel’s vehicle. Tailgate strip lights. A pickup. Those lights’ll make it easy as pie to keep a fix on him, even in rainy traffic.

  Axel’s brake lights brighten before each curve and again when he reaches the main highway, where he turns west. Billy halts at the junction and sees a lone set of headlights coming fast from the east. He waits until the car goes by and then pulls out behind it, using it as a visual buffer against Axel, and turns on his lights. Traffic is sparse. When they come to a long curve farther down the highway, he can see past the car ahead and spies Axel’s strip lights. He’s holding to the speed limit. Because he thinks he’s all clear now. Probably already planning his next try at him.

  Only there ain’t gonna be no next try, old buddy. Not gonna happen.

  He moves his hand to the comforting feel of the .45 beside him on the seat. Play the thing by ear. If he stops at a traffic light and there’s no one around, just pull up alongside and toot the horn and when he looks over … boom! If he turns in somewhere—gas station, plaza, bar parking lot—ease in there too and when he gets out stop next to him and give the little toot and … boom! Do it however it presents itself, but get his attention first. So he can see who it’s coming from.

  56

  Nobody saw him, Axel’s sure of it. No one made an outcry. No vehicle came after him on the estate road.

  It’s over, and he’s glad of it. Glad he didn’t encounter anybody in the house. So very glad he didn’t have to frighten Billy’s girls, his wife.

  It is truly over. He bears him no malice anymore. No … enmity. He thinks of Quino and smiles.

  The ferocity of local thunderstorms is often short-lived, and when he reaches the eastern outskirts of Matamoros the thunder and lightning have dwindled to a few last muted rumbles and glimmers, though the wind yet sporadically gusts and the rain is still steadily falling.

  He hasn’t been able to get Billy’s dead daughter out of his mind. He has two others, yes, and the pictures on the wall tell of his love for them and theirs for him. But thoughts of the dead one bring up an old question … what if something were to happen to Jessica Juliet? Something can happen to anybody anytime. If she got killed in a car crash tomorrow, what could he tell himself except he’d been a goddamned fool to wait for a better time to try to see her.

  The river’s right there. And the Gulf just a little ways back. That’s where she lives. She’s not thirty miles from you right this second. At this hour she’s probably home. With this rain, be easy to slip up to the house unseen, unheard, sneak a look at her somehow, slip away again. One look, that’s all, and you’ll have it the rest of your life. This could be your best chance ever.
And if she’s not there, she’s not there, and what the hell, you tried, and you can still try again another time. Nothing to lose.

  He turns north into the heavy traffic on Avenida Cinco de Mayo and it takes him to the river and he crosses the Veterans Bridge into Brownsville—the first time he’s been back in his hometown since Charlie’s high school graduation day.

  What the hell’s this? Billy wonders when Axel makes the turn onto Cinco de Mayo. Then follows him at a distance and over the bridge, staying several cars behind him. Then they’re on the interstate for a mile or two before Axel exits onto the Boca Chica road. Billy stays more than a quarter-mile behind him, thinking he might be going to Port Isabel or Padre Island. But Axel passes the junction to those places just before an old Volkswagen microbus turns off of it, and Billy slows to let it meld in ahead of him. The road now leads nowhere but the beach. It’s the only way there, the only way back.

  Why would he be going to Boca Chica? No matter. Press on and see how it plays. Might never get a better chance at him.

  The microbus’s interior lights are on and he sees four people in it, kids, one couple in the front seat, another in the back. All of them gesticulating, seeming to be talking at once. Going to the beach on a rainy night. Have a few beers, share a joint, get it on.

  He envies them their youth.