The Bones of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  It’s a steamer of a day. In the nineties and with the humidity way up there as well. Rain’s predicted for this evening and it can’t come soon enough. We’re already sweat-soaked as we head out on foot for the Doghouse. At this hour the streets are deserted, everyone being sensible enough to stay indoors with oscillating floor fans or window air conditioners. The housing types out here are pretty simple—stilt houses, trailers, cabins, that’s about it—none of them structured for central air, which neither Frank nor I would choose even if we could, because we can’t stand to have the windows shut. Same goes for Charlie. Strictly window and ceiling fans for us. From the corner of Gator Lane we can see our adjacent houses at the far end of Main Street. The look on Frank’s face tells me he’s wishing the same thing I am—that we could go straight home, take a badly needed shower and a much-desired nap. But even though Rodrigo has certainly told Charlie all the details about the shipment recovery, we know he’s waiting to hear the story from us as well.

  There are only a handful of patrons in the place at this hour. Three guys at the bar are laughing with Lila. She gives us a little wave as we cross toward Charlie’s office and says, “He’s been expecting you.”

  Nearly an hour later we’re still in the office, Charlie behind his desk, Frank and I seated across from him, all of us drinking beer. The floor’s now almost completely in shadow, the ceiling fans are doing a passable job. Charlie’s so pleased about the way everything turned out, and by our gift of the Suburban, that the beer’s on him, a circumstance of which we’re taking full advantage. Because Frank and I are both in that dopey sort of high spirit you sometimes get when you’re sleep-deprived but still juiced from a job well done, we’re slurping the beer at a pretty good pace. Charlie’s keeping up with us to be polite.

  Charlie told us that Rodrigo’s happy, too. They both approve of Mateo settling the scores the way he did with the Coronas and the Sotos, and they’re in accord with his decision to let the two girls go. Like Rigo, Charlie’s intrigued by Soto’s allegation of having met El Chubasco, but like us he suspects the guy was lying through his ass, trying to stay alive by way of a phony connection to him.

  Charlie calls Lila on the bar phone once again and says, “We require additional hops posthaste.” He’s a touch tight, and Frank and I are enjoying seeing him cut loose a little. She brings in three more bottles and sets them on the desk and collects the dead soldiers, sweeping a reproachful eye over the three of us before stalking off. She’s a funny one, Lila. Very open-minded about most things but she frowns on Charlie getting even slightly tipsy in the Doghouse, never mind how rarely he does. She thinks it looks bad for patrons to see the proprietor the least bit under the influence.

  We’re not halfway into the fresh beers before she’s back, this time with a small carton wrapped in brown paper. “McGee just dropped this off,” she says brusquely, putting it on the desk. “Said you guys left it in some vehicle.” Then she’s gone again.

  “What’s that?” Charlie asks.

  “DVDs,” Frank says. “Porn movies. Soto bought them for Chubasco. Was gonna give them to him as a present to try to score some points because, according to him, Chubasco’s a big fan of skin flicks and thinks productions by these particular companies are the best of their kind. The box was in the Suburban with the shipment. The guys who did the unloading in Nuevo Laredo must’ve thought it was ours.”

  “The best of their kind?” Charlie says. “Rather a categorical assessment, wouldn’t you say? I’m inclined to put it to the test. Might you gents be of similar inclination?”

  Frank and I say we’re of similar inclination.

  Charlie turns on the desk lamp and slits open the carton with a penknife and takes out its contents, six DVDs. He shows us the top one, which displays the title, The Love Tutors, directly above a photo of three dazzling young women in nurse uniforms skimpier than any ever beheld in an actual hospital—a blonde with long straight hair, a pigtailed redhead, and a ponytailed brunette who’s either nicely tanned or blessed with a natural cinnamon complexion. They’re standing side by side, smiling archly, each with one hand on a cocked hip and the other pointing a finger at the viewer as if in admonition to him to be sure to take his medication. Charlie turns the case over and skims the text, then takes out the disc and slides the case to us. The back of it carries a terse summary of the action—“By way of their specialized skills, the love tutors help troubled men regain the capacity for sensual intimacy.” The case text also informs that the actresses, the blonde, redhead, and brunette, are, respectively, Sunny Diamond, Ginger Snapper, and Kitty Quick. There are also three male actors listed—Jack Rocker, Buck Toole, and Mitch DeMann. The director is Dick Stone. The film is but thirty-nine minutes long and, with a copyright date of 2010, can’t be more than eight months old. It was made by Mount of Venus Productions, Inc., whose address is a post office box in Tucson, Arizona. The price and shipping cost of the DVD are displayed in an info box in a corner of the case, together with a notice that credit card or debit card payment is acceptable but not cash or check. And that’s it. No email address, no phone number, no other contact information.

  Charlie’s gone over to the DVD player under the big-screen TV against the wall and inserted the disc. “I think it would be sage of us to have the next couple of rounds at hand before we begin the entertainment,” he says. “That way we won’t need to call for more beer in the midst of the movie and have to turn the thing off to keep Lila from getting an eyeful and denouncing us for libertines.” As he rings her up and orders six more beers—“That is correct, my dear, six,” he says—Frank and I scan the cases of the other five DVDs. Two of them are also made by Mount of Venus but by directors other than Dick Stone, and neither of them uses any of the Tutors actresses. Each of the other three was produced by a different company.

  “Major resupply is en route,” Charlie says, hanging up the phone.

  When Lila comes in with the loaded tray of beers, I casually cover up the DVDs with a handy section of newspaper. Charlie’s right about not needing to give her more reason to be miffed at us. Still, her eyes narrow when she sees we still haven’t finished the last round. She sets out the six bottles, thunking each one down on the desk, and leaves without a word.

  “Is there anything sadder,” Frank says, staring at the door she closed behind her, “than a pretty girl with a truly fine ass and a great big bug way up it?”

  Even though the room is now in deep shadow, we lower the blinds to achieve a more proper movie-watching darkness, then shift our chairs around to face the screen. The remote in hand, Charlie turns off the desk lamp and says, “Well now, compadres, let’s just see if Señor Chubasco’s aptitude for film criticism is worth a goddamn.”

  The opening credits offer no more information than the DVD case—just the logo of Mount of Venus, the title, the names of the actors and the director. But within the first few minutes the movie’s production qualities are indisputable. Not only are the actresses uncommonly pretty—though we’re willing to bet the brunette can’t possibly be the lawful age of eighteen and that the blonde might be a close legal call as well—every technical facet is first class. The directing, editing, camera work, lighting, everything. Even the sound track, a frisky soft jazz number, is pretty good. The plot, such as it is, consists of a series of vignettes, each one dealing with a different patient who, for one reason or another, has been having trouble pleasing his sex partners and, desperate for help, has come to the Spire of Power clinic, wherein the tutors are employed. The vignettes rotate from tutor to tutor, each girl treating a different patient each time, teaching him some technique guaranteed to curl a woman’s toes, and during which instruction the patient receives bounteous pleasures of his own. Each of the male actors plays several different parts, every character made physically distinct from the others by some minor guise—a mustache or beard, a wig, eyeglasses. Not surprisingly, all three dudes are impressively equipped, especially Mitch DeMann, whom we’re soon referring to as
Jumbo. The dialogue is a high cut above most that you hear in this genre and all the players are adept in their delivery of it. What’s more, Sunny Diamond and Ginger Snapper both have southern accents that add to their appeal, while Kitty Quick’s voice has a huskiness that reminds me of Lauren Bacall.

  Halfway through the movie, Charlie says that if the other flicks in Chubasco’s collection are of equal quality to this one, the man’s opinion of them is on the money.

  With about ten minutes left in the movie—in the midst of a scene in which Ginger Snapper and Kitty Quick are double-teaming Jumbo, whose particular problem this time is a profound fear of submitting to oral sex because he’s afraid to let teeth come anywhere near his manly treasure—the office door opens, admitting a bright shaft of light from the outer room and provoking snarls of objection from all of us. Charlie hits the pause button, and we turn to glare at a couple of silhouetted figures in the brightly lit doorframe.

  “Oh . . . my . . . gawwwd!” Jessie Juliet’s voice.

  Then Rayo Luna’s laugh, and she says, “That hombre up there must be making you boys feel sooo inferior!”

  She’s referring to the freeze frame, in which Jumbo is lying on his back while Ginger Snapper is proving beyond all question that he’s no longer fearful of receiving fellatio, and Kitty Quick is observing the action from very close range, smiling in approval of her colleague’s artistry.

  “Out!” Charlie says. “Both of you! Out!”

  “Not a chance, boss man,” Rayo says. She directs Jessie onto the divan next to the doorway, then shuts the door and sits beside her. “If you guys are uncomfortable about watching such racy stuff in mixed company, that’s your problem. But we wanna see.”

  “What’re you doing here, anyway?” Charlie says.

  “We heard these two mavericks were back from Mexico and we wanted to know what they’ve been up to, buy them a welcome-home beer,” Rayo says. “But first let’s see the rest of this. Looks pretty good.”

  “What the hell?” Frank says. “They wanna watch, let ’em watch. Who cares?”

  “A man can’t watch this kinda thing in front of his niece,” Charlie says.

  He turns on the desk lamp and I see that Jessie’s transfixed by the paused screen image. Then she looks at Charlie and says, “For pity’s sake, I’m twenty-seven years old! Play the damn thing!”

  Charlie cusses under his breath and switches off the desk lamp and plays the damn thing.

  But it’s not possible to ignore the women’s presence, and not a man of us says anything during the remainder of the flick while Jessie and Rayo—mostly Rayo—laugh and cheer and make remarks about the action or dialogue as the impulse moves them, cracking themselves up. Then it’s over. The end. No closing credits.

  Charlie hits the stop button and switches on the lamp, and Rayo flicks the wall switch to turn on the ceiling fluorescents. I make for the door, saying, “Didn’t somebody mention something about buying me and my brother some beers?”

  Rayo comes up beside me and says with exaggerated sultriness, “That would be me, sailor. But given all this visual stimulation, could be you’d rather we go straight to your place and see what that leads to.”

  “I don’t recall the beer offer having anything to do with other options,” Frank says, right behind us.

  “The man’s right,” I say to her. “Beers first.” The truth is the movie’s got me so jazzed up I’m ready to do her bent over Charlie’s desk if she’d let me.

  She makes a moue and says, “Yeah, yeah, beer first. Always the priority with you buckaroos.”

  At the door Jessie asks Charlie if he can spare a minute. He says sure and tells us they’ll catch up, and we go on.

  No telling what Jess wants to see him about. Their relationship goes much deeper than uncle and niece. She was only two years old and Frank and I were in grammar school when her daddy, Axel, Charlie’s older and only brother, went to prison for aggravated robbery and assault. A year later her mother ran out on her and none of us knows what became of her. Axel never saw Jessie again except in photos of her that Charlie would take to him on visits as the years went by, and she was too young to have any real memory of him. He’d been locked up for over twenty years when he and another convict broke out of a West Texas unit two years ago, and despite a hell of a manhunt that covered most of the western half of the state, neither of them was found. The authorities had reason to assume they had drowned in the Rio Grande rapids below the Big Bend. We all thought they were probably right, because Axel and Charlie were closer to each other than to anybody else on earth, and if Axel had survived he would’ve let Charlie know it. But who knows—there could be some other reason he hasn’t come around or made contact, and we keep thinking that one of these days he might. Whatever the case, ever since Axel’s been gone, Charlie’s practically been a father to Jessie.

  JESSIE AND CHARLIE

  “I need a favor but you can’t question me about it,” she says.

  She looks so serious Charlie can’t hold back a smile. “If you want somebody killed, why not just ask Rayo?”

  “I’m serious, Uncle Charlie.”

  Whenever she calls him Uncle Charlie he knows she’s in earnest. “Okay, sorry. What?”

  “You promise no questions?”

  “Yes, if that’s what you want. So what is it? Oops, a question.”

  “You gonna keep it up, or can we get serious?”

  He moves an open hand down past his face, assuming a serious look, and says, “Okay. All serious. No questions. What’s the favor?”

  “There’s a girl in that movie. The black-haired one?”

  “Kitty Quick by professional appellation.”

  Jessie rolls her eyes. “Why the hell not? Anyway, I’d like two still frames of her from the movie. You can do that, right?”

  “Still frames? What for?”

  “No questions. Look, it’s just . . . it has to do with something personal to somebody I know and that’s all I can tell you. If you will just please make the stills for me, I’ll be ever so grateful.”

  “A girl in this flick is linked in some personal way to somebody you know?”

  “You said. . . .”

  He expels a hard breath and flings his hands up. “Yeah, yeah, all right. You have specific frames in mind? That’s a technical question. I have to ask that.”

  “That’s okay. One of them can be any directly frontal close-up of her face. Serious, no smile. The other one is specific. It’s in the last part of the movie. The swimming pool scene. Near the end of it.”

  She stands beside him as he sits at the desk and takes up the remote and turns on the TV and the DVD player. “Bad enough I let you watch as much of this as you did.”

  “You can’t imagine my shock. I pray I haven’t been traumatized.”

  “Keep it up, smart mouth.”

  The disc does not offer such amenities as scene selections or a skip-to-next-scene function, but it does allow fast-forward and reverse and permits display of elapsed time at the bottom of the screen. Charlie starts the movie from the beginning and fast-forwards it, saying, “Tell me where to stop.”

  “There!” Jessie says. “That one you just passed. It’s a perfect close-up!” He pauses the video, then reverses it in short jumps until it’s at the shot she wanted and she says, “Right there.” He hits the pause again and makes a note of the elapsed time.

  He then fast-forwards toward the swimming pool sequence at the tail end of the movie and says he can’t believe he’s doing this—even as he laughs along with Jessie at the passing sequence of comically rapid sexual romps. When they reach the pool scene he resets the video’s speed back to normal.

  “Yeah,” Jessie says. “Somewhere in this section. A little further along. Almost at the end of the movie.”

  Sunny Diamond and Kitty Quick are skinny-dipping with two guys, and Charlie now advances the film in short jumps until Jessie says, “That’s it!” and he again pauses the video. The two guys have exited t
he scene, and Sunny and Kitty, their hair plastered to their scalps, are in the pool and clinging to its near side in a medium close-up, smiling at the camera, nothing of them showing but their heads, shoulders, and hands.

  Charlie again jots down the elapsed time.

  “Cut the blonde out of it,” Jessie says. “Crop it around the Kitty one, okay?”

  “Sure. What size you want? Tech question.”

  She mulls a moment. “Six-by-eight?”

  “Does the resolution have to be first-rate?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, the better the resolution the more helpful. And, oh . . . make them in black-and-white, okay?”

  He puffs out a soft breath. “Black-and-white?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Okay, here’s the thing. Color or black-and-white, I’m not sure I can cut pictures of that size with the best resolution possible. But what I can do is get somebody better than me to do it.”

  He picks up his phone, thumbs through the roster of contacts, and taps his finger on one. He listens, then says, “Good evening, Aunt Laurel, Charlie here . . . Real good, ma’am, and you? . . . Good, that’s good, glad to hear it. Say, if I’m interrupting your supper, I can call back . . . Really? You sure now? . . . Okay then, but I’ll make it short. I just called to ask if I could borrow Louie-Louie from you sometime tomorrow. Won’t take long. Need a first-class pair of black-and-white prints extracted from a color video . . . Oh, yes, ma’am, that’d be great, just perfect, thank you . . . No, really, Aunt Laurel, nothing else. You’re an angel . . . Yes, ma’am, you, too. Bye now.”

  Louie-Louie is the ace “visuals technician” for Delta Instruments & Graphics, a Brownsville company owned and operated by Laurel Eve Wolfe. The company sells and services a broad assortment of electronic and digital equipment but specializes in print and photographic instruments. In addition, it has many wildcat suppliers of state-of-the-art military technology, such as IED triggering mechanisms, night-vision optical tools, surreptitious listening devices, and other surveillance gear of sundry types, much of which it acquires at Charlie’s request and which he then smuggles to his buyers. Delta Instruments & Graphics is also capable of producing masterful forgeries or counterfeits of anything printed on paper.