The Rules of Wolfe, page 12
Across the river from the Landing is Puerto Nuestros, a five-square-mile piece of Mexico the Wolfes have owned since the 1920s. It’s a desolate piece of ground that was already shorn of most of its palms before we bought it, but it’s still full of mesquite and high brush, what the local Mexicans call chaparral. The property’s few inhabitants are all in Wolfe employ. On directly opposite sides of the river as they are, Puerto Nuestros and Wolfe Landing form an excellent venue for the oldest of the Wolfe businesses, which is smuggling.
Our forebears started smuggling almost as soon as they arrived on the border back around the turn of the last century. First booze, then guns too. Our family’s been running guns since before the Revolution.
Which is another thing about Charlie Fortune—he’s the chief of the family’s smuggling enterprise and all its ancillary operations, the “shade trade,” as we all call it, and he answers only to the Three Uncles. He’s the one who gives me and Frank our field assignments, and even though he has a dependable cadre of runners for delivering contraband, when it comes to the riskiest deals, Frank and I are his preferred choice. Okay with us. We like doing runs even more than fieldwork.
Nowadays we Wolfes will smuggle almost anything except wetbacks and drugs if the price is right and the logistics are to our liking. We try to keep every transaction as simple as possible and the number of people involved to a minimum. Wetbacks involve too many people, too many tongues, processing stages, fingers in the money pie. Drugs involve all that too, plus the added hazard of having to deal with way too many volatile personalities of extreme inclinations. Lots of loonies in drugs.
We do smuggle people, but only solo individuals, though in special circumstances we will carry as many as three at a time. It’s a select clientele, people who can afford the steep fee to be transported anywhere on the Gulf coast on either side of the border, or even to some farther destination if that’s what they want and can pay for. We can earn more from carrying one such person than from crossing a couple of dozen wets. And if whoever we carry should be in need of identity papers, we can provide them too. Passport, birth certificate, driver’s license, Social Security card, name it. You want it, we’ll get it for you. One of our companies—Delta Instruments & Graphics—produces masterful forgeries. Or, if you’re willing to pay top dollar, we can get you original-issue documents though our bureaucratic insiders, papers as legit as a dollar from the Mint. Together with guns and hi-tech gadgetry, a fully documented identity is one of our most lucrative articles of trade, and not just with fugitives. There are plenty of folk who aren’t on the run but find it practical to have more than one identity, for the simple reason that everybody’s hiding something and some are hiding a lot. Multiple identities are a kind of self-defense. Every one of us in the shade trade has at least one other identity readily available. If I wanted to, I could make Rudolf Maxwell Wolfe vanish from the earth tomorrow and assume a new life somewhere else under another name, with all the requisite documents to support a complete personal history since birth. The feds can’t reinvent you better than we can.
15
Rudy and Frank
After we drop off the Silverado and its title at Riverside Garage—the property bill of sale will go to our Aunt Katy Jane at South Texas Realty, another family business—we wheel down to the Doghouse to give Charlie our report and have a brew or two. I’ve got a date in Port Isabel tonight with a girl I met last week. Frank’s got a girl coming over, Julie, who he’s been seeing for three months now, close to a longevity record for him.
It’s not even four o’clock and the parking lot’s already full. During the workweek the cantina’s patronage is mostly Landing residents who just walk over and you won’t see but two or three vehicles in the lot, but on weekends people come out from Brownsville for the Friday supper special of all-you-can-eat gumbo, and on Saturdays for the barbecue platter of pork or beef ribs served with pintos and rice and flour tortillas. Besides the best barbecue in Cameron County, the place offers booze and beer and an excellent short-order menu beginning with breakfast. There are pool tables, a dance floor, a replica Wurlitzer CD juke with the most eclectic selection of music you’ve ever heard. The only kinds of music Charlie Fortune won’t permit in it are classical and rap. Classical because he considers it too good to use for background noise, rap because he considers it an offense to the ear.
The place is loud with voices raised over Willie Nelson’s belting out of “On the Road Again.” The ceiling fans are doing a fair job of beating back the heat for now but won’t do much against the swelter of the packed house later tonight. Lila the barmaid is chatting with a couple of guys down the bar and we catch her eye and call for Shiner Bocks.
The aroma of grilling meat is wafting in from the fire pits out back where Charlie and his helper Moisés are at work. Lila brings the beer and we ask for a couple of plates of the supper special, but she says, “Too early, guys, you know that.” The supper special hours are four-thirty to six-thirty and Charlie’s a stickler about them. I tell her that the restriction doesn’t apply to us because we’re kin, but she only smiles and rolls her eyes. Franks asks her to tell Charlie we’re here and she goes out the kitchen door for a minute and comes back and gives us a thumbs-up, then returns to the fellas down the bar with a little extra sway to her butt because she knows we’re admiring it.
A minute later Charlie sticks his head out the kitchen door and sees us and beckons. He’s wearing a sauce-smeared bib apron that says “Kiss the Cook” and he has a grill fork in one hand and a Negra Modelo in the other. We go around the bar and follow him into the kitchen, where Concha the cook and her young daughter Julia are tending the kettles of beans and rice and preparing big bowls of maize dough for the evening’s supply of tortillas.
Charlie’s the only Wolfe ever known to have achieved six feet in height. He’s ten years older than Frank and stronger than both of us. He still works with free weights and does a few rounds a day on the heavy bag. His arms put me in mind of pythons. His buzz cut and the white scar through one eyebrow don’t detract a bit from his formidable aspect.
“Well?” he says.
I tell him about the encounter with Goetzman and of the recompense that will more than cover our loss.
He nods, then looks at Frank. “Penalty?”
“A knee,” Frank says.
“One?” Charlie says with a scowl. I’m about to explain why we thought one was enough, but then he grins and says, “Good job, gents.”
It’s sometimes hard to know when Charlie Fortune’s putting you on.
We hear Moisés holler, “You mangy son of a bitch!”
Charlie’s orange tomcat, the one-eyed Captain Kiddo, appears at the clear-plastic flap entrance at the bottom of the half-screened door, but the chunk of raw pork rib in his jaws is too big to fit through the entry. A rock ricochets off the door and Captain Kiddo flees with his prize.
Charlie goes to the door and yells at Moisés, “The pirate strikes again!”
“I’m gonna skin that bastard and put him on a spit!” Moisés bellows.
“You’ll have to catch him first.”
Frank remarks on how good the meat smells and says maybe he’ll have a plate.
“Sure,” Charlie says, and looks at his watch. “Only gotta wait another sixteen minutes.”
“Christ sake,” Frank mutters.
As we head for the door out to the bar, Charlie says, “Hey. What’d the vieja want?”
I ask what he means and he says he had Moisés stick a note on each of our front doors telling us to phone Aunt Cat. I tell him we haven’t been home yet to see the notes, and he says she called the Doghouse in search of us about two hours ago. She wanted us to get back to her right away but wouldn’t tell him what it was about, so naturally he didn’t let her have the number of our prepaid. “But I don’t want her nagging my ass, so call her, then let me know what she wanted.”
Aunt Cat is my and Frank’s great-grandaunt, the Wolfe grande dame. It isn’t unheard of for her to telephone somebody in the family, but it happens maybe once in a blue moon. She mostly keeps to herself and gets by with the help of a pair of maids who’d sooner cut out their own tongues than betray her confidence. Besides them, the only one she confides in, so far as we know, is our cousin Jessie Juliet, who works as a reporter for the Herald but has literary ambitions and wants to write a book about her. The idea that Aunt Cat would agree to be interviewed about her life was laughable until Jess asked her if she would, and she said yes—on condition that none of the material be divulged until after her death. Jessie agreed, and I admire how well she’s honored the old woman’s trust. When she told us about their deal, Frank laughed and said, “Hell, kid, you been snookered. That old cat ain’t ever gonna die.”
Back at the bar we get another round of Shiners from Lila. We have no idea what Aunt Cat might want with us, but we know we’d better find out. Frank tosses a quarter and I call tails and that’s what comes up. He says, “Damn it,” and goes out to the 4Runner, where we left the cell.
A few minutes later he’s back and says, “She wants us over there.”
“When?
“Now.”
“You ask why?”
“Musta slipped my mind. Why don’t you call her back and ask?”
16
Rudy and Frank
She has lived in this small house on Levee Street since the Three Uncles were toddlers. Built by the first Wolfes to settle in the delta, it’s made of stone and roofed in Spanish tile and has withstood every hurricane of the last hundred years with no more damage than a broken window or a lost tile or two. The small front lawn is neatly trimmed and bordered by flower beds and a chain-link fence. Frank parks the 4Runner in front and we pass through the gate and go up the walk.
We’re admitted by the younger maid, Rosario, who says for us to please be seated, la doña will be with us in a moment. We no sooner settle ourselves on the sofa than she enters the room and we stand up again.
She’s in a loose dress of a light blue that matches her eyes, her carriage erect, her silver hair cropped above dangling silver earrings, her only capitulation to vanity. Nobody we know has ever seen her with even a trace of makeup. She’s a bit taller than most Wolfe women, a genetic advantage of her paternal lineage, a rugged Scotch-Irish family long since settled in Mexico. They’re inclined to lankiness and are incongruously named Little. Her grandmother on her father’s side was a Wolfe, and Aunt Cat’s sole marriage was to one of her Wolfe cousins.
“Buenas tardes, Mamacita,” I say, using the family’s maternal address for her. It is also permissible to call her “señora” or Aunt Catalina in either language, but to directly address her as “Aunt Cat” or “tía Gata” would be excessively informal. Among ourselves, we generally refer to her as La Gata, and sometimes—if we’re peeved at her for some reason and not under the same roof with her—as the “old woman” or “la vieja.” Frank has pointed out, however, that it isn’t really accurate to call her “la vieja,” that to be precise we should speak of “la antigua” or “la prehistórica.”
“Good afternoon, Rudolf, Francis,” she says. “Please sit.” Her voice a mild rasp but still strong. That she chooses to speak in English means she doesn’t want the maids to be privy to our conversation. She eases herself into a chair on the other side of the low coffee table.
She looks to be in her seventies and in excellent health for her years, but the irrefutable fact is that the birthday we celebrated last New Year’s Day at Uncle Harry Mack’s house was her one hundred ninth. Harry McElroy may be the patriarch, but Aunt Catalina was already in her forties when he was born. Her only two children, both sons, are long dead, but her three grandchildren are alive and robust, and all four of her great-grandchildren are now adults.
“Phenomenal” is an insufficient descriptive of her. She wears glasses only to read or thread a needle. She uses a cane on her daily neighborhood stroll less as an aid to walking than to swat away overly frisky dogs. Her hearing’s still good enough to keep us from even whispering about her when we’re under the same roof. She cooks, works in her garden, submits to Jessie’s interviews for hours at a time. Her known history is no less impressive. Her godfather was Porfirio Díaz, dictator of Mexico for thirtysomething years. Her American great-grandfather was said to be the chief of Díaz’s secret police. She was sixteen in the early days of the Revolution when a train carrying her and her two siblings to the Texas border to live with the Wolfes was attacked by bandits who murdered her brother and abducted her sister. In some versions of the story the bandits raped Catalina, though nobody knows if that’s true because nobody’s ever mustered the nerve to ask her such a personal question. Maybe Jessie knows, but of course she won’t say. A few months after crossing the border, she survived another bandit attack, this one at the Wolfe seaside home. The family’s twin patriarchs died in that fight, but all the raiders were killed, and, as the story has it, Catalina herself killed one of them. With a knife. The most widely known fact about her—it made headlines in the 1930s—is that she shot her husband to death in front of more than a hundred witnesses at a party. Then spent thirteen years in prison for it. Of course Jessie Juliet wants to write about her. Every year since she turned a hundred the Herald has solicited an interview, and every year she has turned it down. Doctors from medical schools have asked if they might examine her, and university historians and anthropologists have requested meetings with her. All of them turned down too. Since the New Year’s party, we’d seen her only once, back in April, at the funeral of an infant cousin of ours, who died at the age of three months. I suspect Frank and I weren’t the only ones at the graveside who reflected on life’s vastly unequal apportionments.
“You look well, señora,” I say.
“As do you both,” she says. “Though perhaps a bit thirsty.”
She inclines her head toward the kitchen and without raising her voice says, “Rosario. Cerveza, por favor.”
The girl brings in a tray holding three cold glasses of beer and places it on the little table and retreats. We wait for Aunt Cat to pick up her glass before we reach for ours and raise them to her. “Salud,” I say.
Frank echoes the toast and he and I take a deep draft as she touches her glass to her lips, then sets it down. It’s a superb pale ale, and I wonder of what label.
“I do not wish to be ungracious,” she says, “but the situation is urgent and I must proceed directly to it.”
“Yes, mam,” I say. Wondering what the hell.
She tells us that Eddie Gato—“your cousin Edward,” she says, referring to him as always by his formal name—is in serious trouble in Mexico. She’s been informed that he angered some dangerous people in Sonora and they are in pursuit of him. If they catch him they intend to kill him. His only hope of escaping the country is to get to the border by motor vehicle and then cross it on foot, and the only part of the border he might hope to achieve is a segment along the edge of Arizona between Nogales and a place called Sonoyta. She’s been told that although it is possible he could get to the border as soon as tonight, it is very doubtful that he will, considering the extreme caution he must exercise and the remote and roundabout roads he must use to avoid detection.
“More probable,” she says, “is that he will not arrive at the border before sometime tomorrow. Should he get there at all.”
She picks up her glass and raises it to her mouth and this time lets the ale touch her lips as we take another big slug of ours. She’s giving us a minute to take in what she’s told us.
I can see Frank’s as knocked back as I am. We haven’t seen Eddie in six months—nobody in the family has, so far as we know, not since the brouhaha about him and Jackie Marie—and I have to wonder what the hell he’s done to get in such a serious jam. It’s not entirely surprising, though, that this is about him. He’s the only one in the family Aunt Cat’s fonder of than she is of Jessie Juliet. Most of us believe there’s nobody she’s genuinely fond of except him and Jessie. As for why she’s telling me and Frank all this, only one possibility comes to mind, and I don’t like it.
Frank asks what Eddie was doing way over in Sonora. “We’d heard . . . I mean, there’s always been talk he may have gone to . . . down to Mexico, but . . .” He lets it fall away. He’d almost said what many in the family have thought ever since Eddie took off—that he’s been staying with Aunt Cat’s people at Patria Chica, their place in San Luis Potosí. Nobody knows for certain if it’s true, except for Aunt Cat herself, of course, and she’s never said. The only one who’s ever asked her if Eddie was really there was Aunt Laurel, one of her granddaughters, who said La Gata’s “icy” response was “What makes you think that?” It put an end to the conversation, and despite several apologies for having asked such a presumptuous question, Aunt Laurel still got the silent treatment from her for almost two months.
“Why he was in Sonora is now irrelevant,” Aunt Cat says. “The only pertinent point is that he is in danger there and is trying to get across the border to save himself.”
“Yes, mam,” Frank says. “But . . . do you have any idea why these people want to kill him?”
“I am told he killed someone of importance to them. I am told he did so in his own defense.”
Oh swell, I think. And wonder how she can know all this except through her Patria Chica kin, however the hell they knew it.
“Do you know who they are,” I ask, “these dangerous people?”
“A criminal organization of Sinaloa. So I am told.”
