The Bones of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  He passes out life vests from the equipment compartment and we strap them on. The money bag’s a hindrance, so I take it off and give it to Raul to put in the compartment. He hands us rolls of nylon-web safety lines with D rings, clip-on connectors, and quick-release buckles. Twelve feet long! he says. Might want to hook yourselves up to each other so that if somebody goes overboard you can pull him back in! Unless he pulls you out, too! Ha!

  Frank clips one end of his line to his vest and the other to Kitty’s, and I do likewise with Rayo. Raul then provides nylon rain jackets, saying they might at least warm us a little. Try to enjoy the trip for the next two hours! he says. Like a long carnival ride that’s windy and wet! And don’t worry if someone comes after us! There’s not another boat in that marina can catch this one!

  EL CHUBASCO

  Cuervo wheels them into the marina lot, their headlights sweeping past the pedestrian entrance and fixing on the black Expedition parked next to it. Ram it! Chubasco yells. Smash the fender into the wheel! Disable the fucker!

  Cuervo does it with a loud crash. Chubasco tells him to stay with the truck in case the bastards try sneaking back out. The other men get out with him, leaning into the wind, weapons ready. As they get to the entrance they hear engines start up somewhere within. They rush out onto the main dock as a boat rumbles on the other side of the marina. Puño shouts that it’s heading for the exit—and the boat roars and the Sinas fire flaring bursts into the gloom in that direction.

  Enough! Chubasco says. They made the turn out and we’re shooting blind, wasting ammo! Did you hear those engines? They’re no match for our boat’s! We’ll catch them!

  Roughly twenty minutes later La Ninfa arrives and the two crewmen—the pilot Tuco and the mate Javier—toss bow and stern lines to Sinas who lash the big boat to mooring posts just outside the marina entrance. The crewmen swiftly top off the fuel tanks with jerry cans of gasoline as the boat bobbles on the incoming waves, thumping against the pilings, its engines growling like enormous carnivores. They fling the empty gas cans up onto the dock, and then Chubasco, Puño, Moisés, and Nico carefully lower themselves aboard. Left behind to take the truck back to the Finca, Cuervo frees the mooring lines and tosses them into the boat.

  La Ninfa makes a quick turn to port and begins running parallel to the waves, weaving through them as the Espanta did. Chubasco is seated between the two crewmen and watching the Sangrero boat’s blip on the radar screen. It’s twenty-five miles ahead of them and moving at an erratic fifty miles an hour—which, all things considered, Chubasco reflects, is an impressive speed. They’ve evidently got an excellent pilot. But of course Tuco’s an excellent pilot, too, and has the more powerful boat. Under his expert hand La Ninfa crisscrosses the grueling waves at a steady sixty.

  We’re gonna catch those bastards! Chubasco says.

  RUDY

  We rise and fall, tilt this way and that, veer into and out of wave after high-cresting wave. Time and again there’s a moment of near certainty that we’re about to overturn as another hard wave bursts against our starboard side. But each time we stay upright and only get wetter, and I thank the gods for the self-bailing system as water sloshes around our shins. The boat at times goes airborne and then smacks down into the trough with such force that one or another of us is nearly bounced from the cockpit, and we clutch to each other more tightly. It’s amazing that Disco can hold our present speed in such a sea. Raul is monitoring the radar screen, which shows nothing within its fifteen-mile range of us in any direction.

  It’s like we’re the only people in the whole world! Kitty says, looking about at the encompassing blackness of heaving sea and raging wind, Rayo hugging her close.

  How deep is it out here? Rayo asks.

  That depends! Raul says. The Gulf isn’t so very wide but it has many deep basins! We’re going to cross over one that goes down a mile and a half!

  Is that the truth?

  That’s what all the charts say! And you wouldn’t believe the size of some of the things that live down there! There are fishermen who swear they’ve seen whales in this sea bigger than submarines! I’ve seen sharks the length of this boat and half its width!

  Damn good thing it’s so deep! Rayo says. Or it could get pretty crowded down there!

  An hour and a half out of Loreto, we’re seventy-five miles into the Gulf, well more than halfway to our landing point. The wind’s at eighty even, and the waves are raising us higher and tilting us more steeply.

  Somebody coming up from behind! Raul says.

  We all lean in to look at the screen. There’s a blip near the bottom of it, a bit less than fifteen miles away and perceptibly gaining.

  Who the hell’s that? Disco asks. The dudes Mateo told us you might piss off?

  Who else? Frank says. I doubt it’s the Coast Guard coming to help!

  That’s some boat! Raul says. Moving that fast through these waves! I thought we were zooming! We have to speed up!

  Any faster on this sea, Disco says, we’ll be badly risking a rollover! Whatever kind of boat that is, it’s bigger than this one and better built for running in a storm!

  They’ll catch up before we make land! Rayo says.

  They get close enough we’ll get out the M16s and start shooting! says Disco.

  They’ll start shooting, too! Frank says. Not that anybody in either boat would hit anything except by wild chance, bouncing around like this!

  Forty-five minutes later we’re holding as tightly to the boat as to each other. The wind’s notched down to seventy-eight, but the waves don’t seem any smaller. Disco’s cursing as he grapples with the wheel. We’re less than seven miles from our landing point, and the pursuit boat has closed to within two miles of us.

  Oh, dear mother of God! Raul says, staring at the radar screen.

  What? says Disco.

  Raul looks off to the darkness on our right and says, A wave’s coming! Then looks back at the screen.

  Been nothing but waves coming! says Frank. Waves and that bastard chaser behind us! What’s the big deal?

  I mean a big bitch of a wave! Coming fast! And long! Coupla miles at least!

  Frank and I regard the screen. It’s a big one, all right. A rogue wave rising out of a collision of currents God knows how deep. It’s advancing very swiftly and growing taller as it closes on our starboard side. And now the boat starts rising precipitously. Raul orders us all closer to the port side and yells that if we start to capsize we shouldn’t jump away from the boat but just drop out of it as it starts to roll over, so it’ll be more likely to fall ahead of us rather than on top of us. Frank pulls Kitty up against him, and Rayo draws closer to me and we get a grip on each other’s life vest.

  We’re rising higher and higher, slowly tipping to port, then suddenly go up on beam-ends—the deck perpendicular to the sky for a trembling moment—and we all tumble out as the boat is carried forward on the crest of the wave that crashes over us.

  And then I’m in wild underwater blackness, whirling in all directions, not knowing up from down. My eyes and nose and throat are burning and I’ve never before felt such panic. I’m certain I’m about to drown. And then suddenly I’m moving sideways and my held breath gives out just as my head breaches the surface and I suck a gasping mouthful of seawater and have a hacking fit so harsh it feels like my Adam’s apple might rip loose and my eyes pop from their sockets. My vest keeps me afloat. And now I realize I’m being tugged by the safety line clipped to it.

  “I got you, baby! I got you!”

  Rayo. The champion swimmer, pulling me to her. She gets her arms around me and holds me close and my coughing eases.

  Dark hours pass and the storm begins to abate. The wind slackens to sporadic gusts of reduced force. The rain quits. The waves lessen. Bobbing like corks, we take turns hollering for the others as loud as we can. The more we call without response, the greater our fear we may be the only ones left. I’m hoarse by the time we hear faint cries of “Over here! Over here!”
/>
  Frank! It’s hard to get a fix on the direction of his voice as we twirl this way and that, rising and falling on the swells, calling to him, though our cries are so weakened it’s doubtful he can hear us.

  Then we don’t hear him anymore.

  Small gray breaks are showing in the black cloud cover and there’s no telling how much time has passed when we make out the sound of an approaching helicopter. We laugh and Rayo hugs my neck. Then she quits laughing and says, “Wait! Whose is it, you think?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Could be the guys chasing us!”

  Now a searchlight is playing over the water, and at times we see the dark form of the aircraft as it passes below some gray portion of sky. It’s flying a meandering pattern, the light sweeping in all directions.

  The helicopter suddenly veers out of its pattern and circles around and descends to about fifty feet above the water and holds that altitude in a wavering hover. It’s maybe fifty lateral yards from us, its light fixed on something or somebody that’s blocked from our view by the swells. A moment later we make out the vague form of someone on a rescue line being lowered from the chopper through the searchlight beam and swaying in the wind until he’s out of sight behind the waves. A minute passes and we see two forms clutching each other being raised to the aircraft. The procedure then repeats and another person is hauled up to the chopper. Then a third.

  “If they’re not our guys they wouldn’t be picking us up, would they?” Rayo says.

  “Unless they want to interrogate us! Give us a ration of pain!”

  The chopper moves off to our right and for a moment I think it might be leaving. But then it pauses and hovers again. And once again the guy goes down on the safety line and retrieves somebody. Whoever’s chopper it is, if it’s picked up only our people it’s picked up everybody but Rayo and me.

  The helicopter starts coming our way, now flying in tight circles and working the searchlight with wide sweeps. Whoever they are, we have to chance them. Out here on our own we’re dead for sure. We wave our arms and yell as if it were even remotely possible to be heard above the engine and the wailing of the wind. The light is flashing everywhere except on us as the chopper passes overhead.

  “God damn it!” I say.

  “Stupid blind asshole dipshit motherfuckers!” Rayo bellows—and the beam swings back and flicks past us and then whips back again and holds on us.

  We bust out laughing. “Oh, man,” she says, “is that what it takes? Give the bastards a good cussing?”

  The chopper comes around to hover directly above us, pinning us in the glaring shaft of light, its downdraft agitating the water all the more. And now here comes the guy on the rescue line. As I help hook Rayo to him and work the rescue harness under her arms, I ask him who they are and he says, The best friends you got in the world right now! He waves up at the chopper and the line hoists them away.

  The chopper keeps its light on me and moves along with my drift. Then down comes the guy on the line again. He hooks me to him and I put on the harness. He waves up at somebody, and the line reels us up.

  At the cabin door another crewman pulls us in and yells, That’s it! The chopper swings around and off we go.

  The cabin has no seats. Frank’s sitting with his back against the wall, Kitty and Rayo are on one side of him, Raul and Disco on the other. Everybody’s grinning at everybody else, including Mateo, who’s hunkered near the cockpit.

  “As I’ve informed the others,” he says to me, “I would never have put you guys on a boat that wasn’t equipped with a location sender.”

  EL CHUBASCO

  When the radar spots the rogue wave coming at their starboard side, Chubasco asks Tuco if La Ninfa can go up and over it. Tuco’s sure she can. Chubasco laughs and punches him on the arm. Do it! he says.

  Tuco steers the boat toward the coming wave and revs the engines. Just before they meet it head-on, he veers to port and speeds up even more, and they climb the wave at an angle. As La Ninfa steadily ascends the wave, every man of them cheers. But then just shy of the crest, the boat slows and falters, and the bow begins rising like a rearing horse. Realizing they’re going to overturn, Puño grabs Chubasco from behind and lunges with him out of the cockpit just before La Ninfa topples backward and falls free of the wave. The boat hits the water topside down, crushing both crewmen and the two gunmen. The prow narrowly misses Chubasco, but it clouts Puño’s shoulder and shatters both it and his collarbone.

  Puño howls and struggles with one arm to stay afloat. He calls to Chubasco for help. Chubasco starts toward him, then spies one of the cockpit’s white flotation pads and strokes over to it and hugs it to his chest, gasping with relief.

  Help me, chief! Puño yells, trying to keep his head above water. He goes under for a long moment before he resurfaces, coughing and gagging. Chieeeef! he cries. Then goes under again. And comes up no more.

  The storm passes.

  The waves diminish to easy rolls.

  The wind gentles to fitful gusts, and the remnant clouds come apart in gray tatters.

  The flotation pad under his torso bears him easily. Its side straps are a comfortable fit over his shoulders and they afford his arms ample freedom to stroke through the water toward the pale beach he estimates to be less than two miles away.

  Despite his exhaustion he maintains a steady rhythm of stroking and kicking, fueling his strength with his hatred, with thoughts of the retribution he will take on the Sangrero sons of whores—all of them, not just the two deliverymen they sent with the guns, but, yes, those two in particular, who killed two of his men and stole one of his women. He grins as he envisions the reckoning to come, the bastards chained to a wall or bound in chairs in one of the special rooms designed specifically for the purpose of introducing certain enemies to varieties of pain greater than any they’ve ever imagined. They’ll beg for mercy. They’ll plead for death.

  He’ll laugh at them.

  Just above the mountains, the lower sky has slowly transformed into a long bright band of interwoven reds and pinks. He pauses to admire the lovely sunrise and smiles at its assurance of yet another day. He rests for a moment, then strokes even harder toward shore.

  He’s within a half mile of the beach when he hears a peculiar sound behind him. He pauses and turns, holding tight to the pad, and stares in icy terror at the huge black dorsal fin hissing through the water toward him.

  His scream is shrill and short.

  RUDY

  A crewman passes out beers to all of us. Mateo sits against the cabin wall with us, watching Rayo and Kitty, huddled under a blanket to their chins, sipping their beers and gabbing about who knows what. He excuses himself and goes to them, says something that makes them laugh, then goes over to talk with Disco and Raul.

  Frank tells me in a low voice that he introduced Kitty to Mateo by her first name only and was relieved when Mateo didn’t address her as Miss McCabe and initiate confusion. Then says he supposes the bag of money went down with the boat.

  “All the way down would be a sound supposition,” I say. “I shoulda kept it on me.”

  “Or I shoulda kept it on me. Mateo’s shipment, his money. I told him we lost it and he shrugged it off. Said the loss of cash now and again is a hazard of the trade and for us to forget it. Some guy.”

  “Got that right,” I say. “And I don’t think we should worry about it, either. I think we just send him the money as soon as we get home.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  The sun’s high over the mountains when the chopper lands at the Sonoran ranch airfield. There’s a twin-engine business jet out on the runway. Mateo asks if we’d like to wash up and change clothes, have something to eat, and rest a bit before taking off for Matamoros, and we all say yes.

  The afternoon is sunny when we go out to the plane, the girls laughing at the ill-fitting jeans and baggy men’s shirts they’re wearing, the floppy sneakers on their feet. Mateo tells me and Frank we’ll land at a ranc
h airstrip just outside Matamoros, then be driven over into Brownsville. From there we can make our own arrangements to take the girl to her father in Houston.

  At the steps up to the plane, he hugs each of us good-bye, giving the first hug to Kitty, then watching her go up the steps. “I knew she was a beauty,” he says. We exchange abrazos with him and go aboard.

  Within minutes of takeoff I fall asleep, Frank in the seat beside me, Rayo and Kitty across the aisle. When I wake, my watch tells me we’re more than midway through the flight. Frank and Rayo aren’t in their seats, and Kitty’s curled up asleep in the seats she and Rayo occupied. I look aft and see them in the rearmost row, conversing across the aisle. I go back there to join them. They’ve been discussing how we should tell Kitty we’re not taking her to Dallas to sign a Starlight contract. We work up a story.

  We’re forty minutes from Matamoros when Kitty awakens and sits up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, blinking at the three of us now sitting in the aisle seats nearest her. “We almost there?” she says.

  “Almost,” Rayo says.

  “I never in the world thought I’d go to Dallas,” she says. “I hear it’s really big.”

  “Actually, sugar, we’re not going to Dallas after all,” Rayo says. “We just spoke to the Starlight people on the cockpit radio and found out the financial deal for Throne of Eros fell apart. Starlight tried its best to save the project, but nothing doing. That deal’s dead as stone. We’re going to Brownsville.”