The Rules of Wolfe (14 page)

14

Rudy and Frank

Wolfe Landing is near the tip of the lower Rio Grande region that the locals call a valley, though in fact it's a delta. The town stands roughly midway between Brownsville and the Gulf of Mexico, about a dozen miles from each, and a mile or so south of the Boca Chica Road. It covers sixty mostly raw acres in the middle of a 450-acre palm grove that abuts the meandering river for about half a mile. Once upon a time this reach of the Rio Grande was so thick with palms that the first Spaniards to land here called it Río de las Palmas. Now there's only one other palm grove left to speak of, a bit bigger than ours, upriver at the periphery of Brownsville and long since converted into a nature sanctuary and tourist attraction.

Frank once said it's an understatement to call it an overstatement to call Wolfe Landing a town, but it was duly chartered as one back in 1911, when it had all of eight inhabitants and one dirt street. It's now got a half dozen streets, all of them dirt but for tar-and-gravel Main Street, and, according to the latest census, fifty-one residents. At one time our family owned a tract of almost fifty square miles between Brownsville and the Gulf. The land was bordered on the south by the river and on the north by a creek that ran out to the Gulf along a route roughly paralleling the one the ship channel would follow when it was dredged in the 1920s and 1930s. We've always called that tract Tierra Wolfe, though you won't find the name on any map, past or present. We've sold off portions of it over time but still own more than half of the original expanse. It's primarily scrub and muck land and not worth much except as a buffer around Wolfe Landing. You can't see the Landing from the Boca Chica Road. You wouldn't even know it was there if it wasn't for a little sign on a narrow dirt turnoff that winds down toward the river and into the grove.

It is a shadowy place, the Landing, usually smelling strongly of the river and wet vegetation. Besides the palms, there are lots of hardwoods and a profusion of Spanish moss. You won't find many spots anywhere on the river nearly so lush. You enter the Landing on Main Street, which is flanked by palm thickets to the right and most of the town's main buildings on the left, the first of them being the town hall, containing two offices and a pair of jail cells. Then there's Riverside Garage, Get Screwed Hardware, Mario's Grocery, the Potluck Palace—which is a secondhand store and coin laundry—and the Republic Arms gun shop. You'll see a lot of dogs and cats on the loose, few of them belonging to anyone in particular. Past the Republic Arms and leading to the river is Gator Lane, which ends at a dock next to Henry's Bait & Tackle
and the entrance to the parking lot of the Doghouse Cantina.

The Doghouse is owned and operated by our cousin Charlie Fortune Wolfe, who also owns the Republic Arms but leaves its routine management to his nephew, Jimmy Quick. In addition, Charlie holds two civic positions—he's the police chief of a force made up of himself and a deputy named Honario Milgracias, and he's the mayor, now in his fifth consecutive term. He ran unopposed the last time and won all but two votes, write-ins for Yosemite Sam and Clint Eastwood, cast by a couple of guys he'd ejected from the Doghouse the night before for being pains in the ass.

Beyond Gator Lane, Main Street branches north into a narrow trail that winds through the Landing's residential area, a scattering of three dozen or so cabins and house trailers, before it dead-ends at Resaca Grande. “Resaca” is the local term for an oxbow or bayou, and there are more of them along the lower Rio Grande than can ever be accurately tallied. The only Wolfes who live at the Landing are Frank and I, Charlie Fortune, and Jimmy Quick. The rest of the family all reside in Brownsville except for Uncle Harry Morgan and his wife, whose house is back up in the dunes near the mouth of the river.

Frank and I moved out here shortly after our parents disappeared when we were sixteen and fifteen. They went sailing in their sloop on a day of perfect weather and didn't come back. The Coast Guard searched for three days but found no sign of them or the boat. All our relatives invited us to move in with them, but we chose to come to the Landing and live in a trailer. We didn't mind the long drive to school every day. Charlie Fortune looked out for us until we graduated, and he became more our big brother than older cousin. Frank and I now live next door to each other in similar cypress houses built solid as ships on eight-foot pilings, high enough to be safe from flooding and to catch the sporadic breezes off the river. Charlie's got a piling house too, set in the deeper palms behind the Doghouse and overlooking Resaca Mala, aptly named for its gloomy dimness and because there are alligators in it. One of the present bunch is easily thirteen feet long. Whenever a dog or cat goes missing, there's not much mystery about what became of it.

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.