Rayo hollers, “Look!” and points at a bounding bunch of dolphins that’s surfaced on the port side and is keeping pace with the boat. Frank and I and Jessie grew up around here and have been familiar with boats and the sea since we were children, but Rayo had never even been to a seacoast before she made her first visit here eleven years ago when she and Jessie were sixteen. She grew to love the beach even more during her years at the University of Miami, but ski boats and day sailers were the only kinds of watercraft she was familiar with until she came to live with us two years ago and we took her out on deepwater boats. By now she must’ve seen dolphins on dozens of occasions, and she still gets excited as a kid every time. She still marvels at everything about the sea.
“You know what?” she says, looking up at me and Frank. “I been thinking about how great it’d be to live on this boat. Never go ashore for anything but supplies, a little barhopping and dancing.”
“Well, you better give it plenty of thought before you take up a cruising life,” Frank says. “There’s an old saying—it’s better to be on shore wishing you were at sea than it is to be at sea wishing you were on shore. Lot of downsides to boat life,”
“There are a lot of downsides to any life,” Jessie says.
“Such bleak perspective from one so young and fair,” Frank says in the professorial mode he at times assumes for the fun of it and has enjoyed doing since we were in college. The truth is he could’ve been a professor. “I suppose,” he says, “it stems from a frequency of journalistic exposure to a surfeit of human woe.”
Jessie’s a reporter for the local paper. She makes a face at him.
“Actually, some good arguments can be made for boat living,” I say, “and the best of them was made by the Phoenicians. They believed that no day spent on the ocean was deducted from a man’s life.”
“What about for a woman?” Rayo says.
“They didn’t say.”
“Of course not,” she says, tossing her head in disgust.
“Well, I’ll tell you something, Rudy boy,” Jessie says, pointing at me. “Back in the Middle Ages it was widely believed that every time a man had sex it shortened his life by a day. And they didn’t say anything about a woman, either!”
“Yeah!” Rayo says. She and Jessie trade high fives.
“Well now, that’s just rank nonsense,” Frank says. “Because if it were true, I would’ve been dead a long time ago!”
The girls whoop. “Listen to him!” Jessie says. “Frankie Casanova. Sex probably hasn’t taken two weeks off his life!”
“Unless self-abuse counts,” Rayo says. “In that case he could kick the bucket any minute.”
They laugh it up some more.
“Self-abuse?” Franks says in an injured tone.
“Spanking the monkey, waxing the tent pole, shaking hands with the bishop,” Rayo says. “All those cutesy clever phrases guys have for it.”
“Massaging the midget!” Jessie adds. “Strangling Mister Johnson!”
Those really get them howling, and Frank and I can’t help grinning. They can always give as good as they get.
“I must say, brother,” Frank loudly declares, “I am aghast to hear this sort of talk from women of allegedly proper upbringing.”
“Words cannot describe the depth of my own distress,” I say.
“Yeah, yeah,” Rayo says. “Listen, if I were you boys I’d play it safe from now on and never have sex, not even with just yourself, except on a boat.”
She gives me an exaggerated wink, then laughs when I point my forefinger at her and flick my thumb like I’m shooting her. Ever since she’s come to live with us, she and I have had some lovely times together, but she’s made it abundantly clear she’s not my “girlfriend,” a word she enunciates like it’s been soaked in sour milk. What she and I are, she’s also made quite clear, is good-buddy distant cousins who like to get it on with each other. Quote, unquote. She’s like that. Direct as an arrow. At the University of Miami she got her degree in theater arts and lettered in track, tennis, and swimming—and was a regional collegiate swim champ. When she went back to Mexico she got into stunt work in movies and TV. Some of the stunts she’s done are unreal, but the worst she’s ever been hurt in any of the “bits,” as she calls them, was a sprained thumb. One Sunday morning we were strolling by a schoolyard playground and she jumped the fence and hopped up on a set of monkey bars and went through a workout routine worthy of a spot in the Olympics. She was wearing a loose short skirt, and it wasn’t the first time she’d simultaneously shown me her gymnastic skills and her scanty underwear. She once said she was almost ashamed of herself for teasing me like that, because, as she put it, “It’s so girly.” From up in the wheelhouse, her so-called tramp stamp—a little red tattoo inscription just above the thong strap and between her sacral dimples—is scarcely discernible, but I’ve many a time read it up close. FACTA NON VERBA.
We’re on our way home from Louisiana, where we delivered two men and a woman, all three using the name Aguirre, and perhaps they were truly related, we didn’t ask. We had been contacted about them by our Mexico City relations, our usual source of clients in desperate need of a stealthy exit from Mexico and a new identity in the States. They sent us the necessary photos and pertinent physical data, then kept the Aguirres in a safe house down there while we arranged their relocation. Two weeks later when the Aguirres were transferred to the Salty Girl from a boat we rendezvoused with just a few miles off the Tamaulipas coast, we presented each of them with an American birth certificate, a duly issued Social Security card to match it, and a bona fide Texas driver’s license showing the address of a rooming house we own in Harlingen. At a Mississippi River boatyard a few days later and some thirty miles below New Orleans, we turned them over to some associates—kinfolk of ours named Youngblood—who escorted them the rest of the way to their new home. Because they had expressed a desire to live in a beachside community, a spacious apartment had been leased for them in Panama City, Florida.
A body run is what we call that sort of smuggle. Rayo Luna has been on a few of them with us before, all of them to Corpus Christi, Galveston, or Houston. She thinks they’re pretty dull and they usually are. But when she heard we were making a run up near New Orleans and would be spending the night there, she asked if she could come along, and when we said okay, she asked if Jessie could come, too. Neither of them had been to New Orleans since Mardi Gras in their senior year of college. But unlike Rayo, Jessie isn’t in our line of work and has never wanted to be, and Frank and I make it a rule not to take anyone on a run who isn’t in the trade. We don’t need anything more than the cargo to safeguard or worry about. Then again, a body run is the least likely sort to encounter trouble, and we knew that even if things should for any reason get a little dicey, Jessie would be no liability. Like the rest of us she learned how to use a gun when she was a kid, and a couple of years ago down in Mexico City she proved beyond question she can handle herself pretty well. So we made an exception and took both of them along, and after the conclusion of business in the boatyard we treated them to a night in the French Quarter before starting for home the next morning.
All in all, it was a satisfying trip.
It’s what we do, we Wolfes: we smuggle. Mostly into and out of Mexico, now and then Cuba or Central America. Been doing it for over a hundred years, ever since we settled in Brownsville, Texas, which is on the Rio Grande, about twenty-five miles upriver from the Gulf. We began by smuggling booze from Mexico into the States, then started running guns down there before the outbreak of the Revolution. During Prohibition we ran more booze than ever until repeal killed that gold-egg goose. Over the generations we’ve expanded into high-tech military gear and today we carry everything from infrared and thermal-imaging optical instruments to portable radar units to a wide range of explosive-device components. The only things we don’t smuggle are drugs and wetbacks. The drug biz is un-arguably a money river, but it attracts too many crazies. Smuggling is chancy
enough without having to transact with such impulsive personalities. Besides, except for alcohol, we take a dim view of drugs. Ruinous stuff. As for dealing in wetbacks, the process entails too many stages and too many agents and too many people overall for too little reward. We like to keep every operation as uncomplicated as we can and restrict its number of participants to the fewest necessary. We do smuggle people every so often but usually carry only one or two individuals and never more than three, and what they all have in common is that they’re running from mortal danger and can afford to buy a sure escape from it. Ours is a costly service but worth every dime, considering the official documents we include in the package. The federal government can’t hide you better than we can. The fact is ID documents in general are selling better than ever, and not just to those on the run. Lots of people have something to hide that can best be hidden by way of various certifiable identities, and that’s become truer than ever in our worldwide digital age. We can supply as many identities as anybody might want, each one supported by authentic documents registered in the files of the relevant agency. A certificate of birth or baptism or naturalization, a Social Security account, a military service record—whatever paper or set of papers a client requests, we can produce it. Some of our clients have asked how we do it. Our stock answer is that we have our ways. The simple truth is that the world turns on greed, and greed slavers at an ample bribe. Our insiders at official agencies, bureaus, and record departments have long prospered by way of our incentives.
Among the family, our extralegal pursuits are known collectively as the shade trade, and its main constituent has always been gun smuggling, guns being an article of commerce that, unlike drugs, we very much favor. Nothing else in the world so ably and indisputably accords physical equality between human beings as a gun. A 250-pound man has no advantage over a 90-pound woman if both of them are armed. As we see it, self-defense is the most elemental of all natural rights and includes the right to possess the same means to defend yourself as might be used to assault you. Absent that right, you have to rely on agents of the state for protection, but you can’t count on such an agent being at hand when you find yourself at the mercy of an armed antagonist. We choose not to depend on someone else to safeguard us or to rely on anyone’s mercy. We’re aware that many people of intelligence and good intention would disapprove of our outlook and deem it sophistic, cynical, self-serving, pick your righteous reproof. That’s okay. Sticks and stones. Other people have their ways of looking at things, we have ours.
The family also owns a variety of legitimate and profitable enterprises—a law firm, a real estate company, a tech instruments and graphics store, a marine salvage and repair boatyard, a gun shop, plus a few others. The majority of those businesses are in Brownsville, all of them gainful and, not altogether coincidentally, most of them of advantage to the shade trade. As a matter of record, Frank and I are employed as “field agents” by Wolfe Associates, one of the most respected law firms in South Texas. So are Rayo Luna and two other of our cousins. The firm’s three partners are our uncles Harry McElroy Wolfe—Harry Mack to those who know him—and his close cousins Peck and Forrest. The position of field agent requires that we be state-licensed investigators, a hugely valuable sanction. The most routine duties in our formal job description—serving papers, conducting background checks, searching police records, and so on—are carried out by lower-level hires. What we mainly do is track down essential witnesses who deliberately or against their will have gone missing. We’re as good at finding people as we are at helping them to get lost. I love everything about the work—tracking them down, keeping them under wraps for as long as the firm requires, and all the while staying alert for whoever might be trying to get them back from us or simply wanting to prevent them from appearing in court or making a deposition. Rayo’s been on several such assignments with me and Frank. She’s got all the right instincts for the trade.
When we’re not on a job for the Associates, we work for our cousin Charlie Fortune, the chief of shade trade operations. He’s big-muscled but limber as a fly rod, and with his close-cut dirty-blond hair, a scar through one eyebrow, and the beard he keeps at a five o’clock growth, his countenance is as daunting as his physique. His only boss is his daddy, Harry Mack. Frank and I have been Charlie’s main smugglers since graduating from college, though for the past year or so he’s been letting one of our field agent cousins, Eddie Gato, do gun runs, too. Rayo has gone with me and Frank on a few such runs and enjoyed it, but not as much as tracking down people. She doesn’t find it as satisfying. “Not as much juice,” she says.
Most of our arms shipments go to our Mexican kin, who in turn sell them to their clients. Like us, the Mexican Wolfes are a large family of social standing who own and operate an assortment of lawful and profitable businesses in addition to engaging in various unlawful pursuits. And like us, they have always trafficked in such activities primarily for the satisfaction of asserting their independence from the horde of bastards who own the government and devise laws that first and foremost serve their own interests. It’s a matter of self-respect, of a pride that’s bred in our bones. Our Mexican cousins don’t like being played for saps any more than we do. Unlike us, however, they conduct their illicit dealings by means of a small outfit of their own creation called Los Jaguaros. To this day, not the Mexican government, the police, or the press is conclusively certain the Jaguaros even exist, notwithstanding the pervasive rumors that they’re the principal suppliers of arms to some of the country’s largest criminal societies. It has long been alleged by much of the news media and by political enemies of the current administration that the Jaguaros are a fabrication of the federal government, intended to cover up many of its own misdeeds. Over the years a number of captured cartel operatives have said that much of their armament come from the Jaguaros, but none of them knew where that organization is headquartered or could name any of its members. Some government critics insist that such prisoner allegations of the Jaguaros’ existence are outright lies intended to conceal the true sources of cartel arms. Despite all such conjectures and suppositions, the Jaguaros’ tie to the Mexico City Wolfes remains an impenetrable secret. Even the cartels chiefs who do business with the Jaguaros don’t know of the connection to the family. Not even most Jaguaros know of it—except, of course, for their Wolfe crew chiefs, all of whom use false surnames.
Also, unlike ours, the Jaguaros’ primary stock-in-trade isn’t guns but information, and the cartels are their foremost market for that commodity, too. They sell military intelligence, police records, names of informants. They sell blueprints of banks, jewelry stores, art museums, prisons—of any venue someone might want to break into or out of. Much of that information comes from insiders at government bureaucracies, police and military agencies, corporate offices, construction companies, et cetera. But almost as much of it originates from the Jaguaros’ squads of ace hackers. Their access to so many sources of information also serves the Jaguaros very well in finding people who may or may not want to be found. Their boundless web of informants—whom they call “spiders”—reaches to every region of the country and every level of society, from shoeshine boys house maids, whores, and gardeners to hotel staff, media reporters, cops, and politicians. Not even the federal police have such a comprehensive network of eyes and ears as the Jaguaros do, or as secure a system for transmitting, sifting, cataloging, and storing the data they amass. And even while the cartels are their primary buyers of information, the Jaguaros have compiled vast files of data on each of them as well. That knowledge, however, is not for sale. It’s maintained by the Jaguaros solely for their own purposes. They of course also have a security unit, and it says something about Rayo Luna that she was a member of it before she came to live with us and joined the shade trade.
It’s a rock-hard rule in the Texas family that no member of it can work in its unlawful trades without first earning a college degree, which can be in any major except phys ed or one that ends in the
word studies. Charlie got his BA in history at A&M. Frank and I both got ours in English at UT Austin. He’s a Hemingway man, Frank, and his senior thesis contended that Stephen Crane’s influence on Hem’s short works was even more significant than had been previously recognized. His mentor thought that with a few minor tweaks the paper could get published in an academic journal, but Frank shrugged it off. My thesis was on Alexander Pope, who could express more insight in a heroic couplet than most poets can muster in an entire poem. The department offered Frank a graduate fellowship, but he turned it down. And even though he’d told the baseball scouts he wasn’t interested in a pro career—he had a rifle-shot fastball, plus a changeup that made a hitter swing like a drunk, and he came within four strikeouts of breaking the conference strikeout record in his senior year—the Orioles picked him in the third round anyway, hoping to change his mind with a big-bucks offer, but he nixed that, too. I was a good-field, good-hit third baseman and got a few offers myself, but the scouts didn’t swarm me like they did him. We’ve now been in the shade trade about fourteen years, and I can’t speak for Frank, but I think it’s safe to say that, like me, he hasn’t any regrets about his college major or career.
The Bones of Wolfe Page 3
