The Rules of Wolfe (16 page)

But not even Aunt Cat could be of much help to him when he decided to buck the college rule. It happened last summer when he came home from his freshman year at Louisiana State and told his father he didn't want to go back to school—he wanted to work in our smuggling trade. The notion went against a family rule that any Wolfe who wants to work in the family shade trade must first get a baccalaureate degree. The rule was established by the family heads back in the 1930s. They believed a college education could help you make your way through life, regardless of how you chose to make your living. Most Wolfes of the last three generations have earned at least a BA.

But Eddie didn't think the rule should apply to him. He went to each of the Three Uncles in turn to ask for an exemption but they all said no and dismissed as immaterial his argument that a college degree was unnecessary to be a competent smuggler. They reminded him the rule wasn't intended to ensure shade trade skills but to give him an education and the choices it afforded. He talked to me and Frank about it too. He's ten years our junior and has always looked up to us, and he asked what we'd do if we were in his shoes. Frank said we
had
been in his shoes and what we did was go to college because that was the rule for working in the shade trade and there was no way around it.

It wasn't what he wanted to hear, but too bad. Rules that allow for arbitrary exemptions, or whose exemption can be bought, amount to a rigged game. Sad to say, that's largely the case with the rules of the system at large, and all you can do about it is try to work those rules to your advantage by hook or crook. We Wolfes are good at that kind of hooking and crooking—there are some half dozen lawyers in the family, after all—and we can play the rigged game as well as anybody. But we have our own rules too. And they don't grant exemptions.

Eddie can be a real hardhead, however, and just because he can't have his way doesn't mean he'll accept somebody else's. He insisted he wasn't going back to school, and he rented a ratty apartment near the ship channel and went to work for our uncle Harry Morgan. Captain Harry manages the Wolfe Marine Company, which includes a pair of shrimp boats and a charter boat, fine vessels that bring in good catches—and of course serve well for smuggling contraband. Charlie Fortune sets up the runs and Captain Harry sees they get carried out. Naturally, Eddie tried to finagle Harry into letting him work some runs on the sly, but Harry told him nothing doing, not till he got his sheepskin. Eddie was irked but stayed on the job.

There's this to be said for Eddie—he's a damn quick study. Once you're in high school, the family rules allow you to spend your summers learning the ways and means of the shade trade and the commodities it deals with. To begin an apprenticeship, so to speak, though you aren't allowed take part in any actual
operations, not before you get your degree. Eddie had spent his summers learning everything he could about the various modes of smuggling and about the commodities we carried. He'd be out on a shrimper with Harry Morgan and even while he was sitting cross-legged on the deck and heading shrimp he'd be asking Captain Harry all about the art of smuggling by sea. Charlie Fortune would sigh at seeing him come into the Doghouse, knowing another lengthy interrogation about smuggling logis
tics was about to commence. Eddie became such a distraction to the staff at Delta Instruments & Graphics with all his questions about the electronic devices we traffic in that Aunt Laurel, who manages the store, gave him a carton of handbooks to study and barred him from the premises. The only place he never wore out his welcome was the Republic Arms, where Jimmy Quick was always glad of his company and Eddie became expertly familiar with every kind of gun that passed through the store. He always did well enough in school, but if he had devoted as much time to his textbooks as he did to electronics and firearms manuals, he would've been class valedictorian.

Another thing—the kid can handle himself. Frank and I saw that for ourselves two summers ago, just before he left for LSU. We had taken him out for a few bon voyage beers, and when we came out of the bar we saw this guy at the far end of the parking lot pinning a woman against a truck and slapping her left and right. A couple of his buds were looking on with beers in hand and enjoying the show. Big honkers, all three. They saw us coming and one of them threw a bottle that just missed my head and the fight was on. I went at it with the bottle thrower and broke his nose, which hurts like a bitch and blurs your vision with tears you can't help. He hunched over with a hand to his face, waving the other and saying, “I quit, man.” I almost laughed. Guy throws a bottle and thinks he can call it quits with a broken nose. I gave him one to the kidney that dropped him like he'd been shot and would have him pissing blood for a day or two. Frank had put his guy down by then as well, and kicked him in the ribs to make sure he stayed down a while. “How do you like it now, gentlemen?” he said. The woman was long gone.

Then we see Eddie's straddling his guy on the ground and holding him by the collar with one hand and punching him in the face with the other, drilling him hard again and again, even though the guy was making no effort to protect himself. We ran over and pulled him off and he almost took a swing at us. Then I saw that his cheek was bloody from a blade slash about an inch under the eye. No wonder he was fuming. The face of the guy he'd been pounding was a wreck and his arm was bent funny at the elbow. And I suddenly realized he was choking on his own blood. Eddie saw it at the same time and said, “Fucken guy,” and bent down and yanked him over onto his side, loosing a gusher of blood from his mouth, plus a tooth or two. The guy's breathing was still gurgly but he wasn't drowning anymore. Frank spotted the knife on the ground and broke the blade off under his foot and lobbed the handle into a Dumpster.

As we drove Eddie to the home of one of our doctors—who would stitch him up in the kitchen and tell him he'd have a small but permanent scar—Frank told him that even though it's a basic rule that somebody who pulls a knife in a fistfight warrants no mercy, you don't want to kill the guy if you don't have to. This one had been down and out, but Eddie had kept punching him in such a frenzy he might've killed him before he knew it. “You gotta fight cool,” Frank said. “Remember that.”

“Got it,” Eddie said. Despite the cut, he was feeling pretty good about himself, you could see it. And why not? There's hardly anybody in the family who doesn't know how to fight, and I mean the women too—we all start getting lessons when we're still in grammar school—but Eddie's a natural and learned faster and better than most. I mean, to take down a knifer bare-handed. Not bad.

Anyway, we thought he would sooner rather than later accept that he had to hold to the college rule, since the longer he put it off the longer it'd be before he could work with us. But then came the big to-do about him and his cousin Jackie Marie.

The news of it didn't exactly shock me and Frank. Jackie's always been a devilish sort, and from the time he was thirteen Eddie's often told us how she liked to pricktease him. She grew up best friends with his sisters Cassie and Carrie—they're all three or four years older than him—and spent many a night at their house, and whenever his parents were away she'd traipse around in her underwear or in just a towel after showering, giving him an eyeful and laughing at his gaga stares and efforts to hide his hard-ons. His sisters thought it was hilarious and sometimes joined in the teasing, doing stuff like leaving the bedroom door open so he could peek in and then all three of them mooning him or flashing him a tit before slamming the door shut and laughing their asses off.

Frank and I liked hearing his stories about it, and I admit I was envious. Jackie and both of his sisters have been knockouts since junior high, especially Jackie, one of those rare redheads with skin the color of caramel. Around the time Eddie went off to LSU, she got her degree in computer programming and went to work as the chief records keeper for Wolfe Marine and bought herself a house in a nice neighborhood. Then Eddie came home last summer and started working for Captain Harry, and in January the shit hit the family fan.

It happened while Frank and I were making the gun run down by Tampico that we'd refused to let Eddie come along on. The way we heard it, Jackie confided to Eddie's sisters that she was pregnant by him and had made an appointment to have an abortion the following week at a Corpus Christi clinic under a false ID. Eddie had agreed to take her. But his sisters were appalled. It was one thing to sexually tease a brother or a cousin but it was way beyond the pale to actually have sex with him. Jackie didn't see what the big deal was. She said sex was just sex, and if an accident happens you deal with it however you have to.

She trusted them to keep the secret, but the next day the sisters spilled the beans to their parents, Roman and Katy. That evening, when Eddie and Jackie got back to her house after a movie, they found four very upset people waiting for them—Roman and Katy and Jackie's mom Brenda, plus Aunt Laurel who is Brenda's sister. The only one not there you might have expected to be was Jackie's father, Mike Armstrong, who owns Armstrong Industries Corporation. He's been divorced from Brenda since Jackie was six but has always doted on his daughter and is so fiercely protective of her that they all agreed it would be best if he were kept in the dark about the situation until cooler heads determined what should be done about it. As it happened, however, Mike ran into Eddie's sister Carrie at a downtown café that same evening, and when he stopped to chat she broke down and told him everything. Like a shot he was off to Jackie's—where parental recriminations about who was to blame for what were flying back and forth so loudly that nobody heard him drive up.

They say he barged into the house looking insane and went straight for Eddie and grabbed him by the throat. Mike started out as a bricklayer and has the biggest hands I've ever seen, and just the thought of them around
my
neck makes me breathless. By all reports, the next few minutes were absolute bedlam. Mike had Eddie on the floor and was bent on throttling him, everybody yelling and trying to break them up. Feet and elbows were flying every which way and Aunt Brenda's nose got bloodied and Katy's lip was split and Jackie got a doozy of a shiner and Roman caught a wild kick in the balls and threw up on everybody. They say Eddie's face was
black
by the time he managed to gouge a thumb into Mike's eye and bash him in the face with his forehead, breaking Mike's nose and getting free of him. Then Eddie was kicking him and Mike was screaming he was blind and trying to protect his head with his hands and when Laurel tried to get between them Eddie shoved her crashing over a chair and kept on kicking. At which point Brenda pulled a. 32 five-shooter from her purse and fired a round into the ceiling and everybody froze. She pointed the piece at Eddie and said if he kicked Mike one more time she'd shoot him. They say Eddie's face was still purple and his eyes were blood red and it took him a few tries before he was able to say, “All you . . . go fuck yourself.” Then kicked Mike once more and hustled out to his car and left. Brenda was so stunned by that last kick she didn't even think to shoot.

Anyhow, none of us has seen Eddie since. He went directly to Aunt Cat's house—that we know, because Roman called her the next morning to ask if she'd seen him and she admitted he had been there and told her what happened and had decided to go away for a while until things settled down. Roman asked where he'd gone and she said she couldn't say, which isn't saying she didn't know, but added that Edward was a grown man and could take care of himself and would return when he chose to. It would have been fruitless for Roman to press her any further. She would've just clammed up altogether. The most popular supposition was that she'd sent Eddie to stay with her people in Mexico, the Littles, whom no one but her knows how to contact and who wouldn't tell us anything anyway without her permission.

Most of the family thought it was a good thing if Eddie was in Mexico. There was concern that the next time Mike Armstrong saw him he might do worse than try to strangle him. Mike had nearly lost the gouged eye, and the doctors told him some of the damage to his vision might be permanent. Hard feelings lingered as well between Eddie's parents and Jackie's mom—on Roman and Katy's part because of Brenda pointing a gun at their son, on Brenda's part because Eddie had nearly blinded Mike and seemed willing to kick him to death. And although Jackie was pissed off at all of them for butting into her personal life and damaging her furniture and ceiling, she and her mother arrived at an understanding and the following week went to Corpus together and Jackie had the abortion.

Then in April our baby cousin died and the whole family went to the funeral, and a funeral has a way of putting things in perspective. After the ceremony, I saw Roman and Katy and Brenda and Laurel in a four-way hug. Then Mike Armstrong joined them and there were more hugs all around. Amazingly, Mike's vision was almost back to normal, and although he didn't apologize for trying to strangle Eddie, he did tell Roman he was glad no one had been seriously hurt and as far as he was concerned the matter was a bygone. Then they all went to dinner together.

It wasn't the first time a family tiff got a little out of hand and took a while to be set right.

Since then, everybody has continued to assume that Eddie's with Aunt Cat's people, though as I said, she's never corroborated that assumption to anyone.

Not until this afternoon, anyway, when she all but admitted it to me and Frank.

Now that Eddie isn't there anymore.

18

Catalina

She had made them promise to call every Monday to let her know how Edward was doing, and had told them not to allow him to take part in any criminal activity. Very well, they said. They did not ask why not, and she did not offer to explain that she did not want him to find in Mexico the occupation he was denied at home. He might then never return. Still, because the Wolfe family was well known in Mexico City, she agreed with the Littles' suggestion that Edward use a different name to avoid rousing speculation about the presence of a Wolfe at Patria Chica. He had chosen to be known as Eduardo Porter.