The Ways of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  The showers are open and breakfast will be served until 5:30. Then comes a cell head count. Then crews to their jobs at 6.

  The day is here.

  2

  Axel Prince Wolfe was three years old when his mother died giving birth to his brother, Charlie Fortune. His sister, Andrea Marie, was two. Their father, Harry McElroy Wolfe, was only a few years out of law school but already the main criminal defense attorney at Wolfe Associates, the family law firm in Brownsville, Texas.

  In addition to their practice of law since the early twentieth century, the Wolfes have conducted a variety of illicit enterprises under the collective name of the “shade trade,” the main enterprise of which has always been gunrunning, the bulk of it to their Mexican relatives, also named Wolfe and concentrated in Mexico City. For their part, the Mexican Wolfes operate a small and highly secretive cartel of their own, Los Jaguaros, which chiefly sells guns and information of all sorts to other cartels.

  By family rule, any Wolfe who aspires to be part of the shade trade must first earn a college degree, which can be in any major except physical education or anything that ends in “Studies.” The exception of the “Studies” major is of much more recent vintage than the college requirement itself, which has been in force since the 1930s and is without dispensation. The rationale behind the rule is not only that higher education is a valuable asset in itself—no less so to the criminally inclined than to the legally minded—but also that, in the process of earning the degree, one might stumble onto one’s true calling.

  Once you reach the age of sixteen, you can, if you wish, spend your high school summers learning the ins and outs of the shade trade’s main components, but you cannot take an active role in any actual undertaking. You can learn about gunrunning and other forms of smuggling, about document forgery, about finding people who are lost or in hiding or in captivity. There are any number of specializations you can concentrate on, and you also receive training in the arts of self-defense, such arts of course being equally useful for persuasive or retributive purpose.

  From the time he first learned of the shade trade, Axel knew it was the career for him. His father, however, had a greater expectation of him, namely that he go to law school and then join Wolfe Associates. Still, because Harry Mack believed that the more one knew about criminal ways the better equipped one was for the practice of criminal law, he was not opposed to Axel’s learning as much as he could during his high school summers about shade trade operations. To avoid argument, Axel agreed to go to law school after getting his bachelor’s degree, but in truth he intended to renege as soon as he got the BA and was eligible for the shade trade, regardless of his father’s opposition.

  His closest bond was with his brother. Axel taught Charlie how to fight, sail, play baseball, fish, shoot, drive a car. The spring Axel graduated from high school, Charlie turned fourteen, and as a birthday present to him, Axel persuaded a companionable girlfriend named Mickey to introduce him to the delights of sex. The exuberant event took place in Mickey’s bedroom, and when they at last rejoined Axel in the kitchen, Charlie was beaming and Mickey affecting a glazed-eyed stagger that got a laugh from both brothers. They drank celebratory beers deep into the evening and got happily drunk, another first for Charlie, who couldn’t stop staring at Mickey in adoration. At a later hour that night he asked her to marry him as soon as he graduated from high school, in another three years. She giggled in response and Charlie looked so stricken that Axel roared with laughter and fell over backward in his chair. Which made Mickey laugh so hard she snorted beer out of her nose. Which made Charlie laugh so hard he got a case of hiccups that took forever to get under control, and every time it seemed like it was, he’d suddenly hic and they’d all bust out howling again.

  It was obvious to Mickey that Charlie venerated his brother. She noted his emulation of Axel’s walk, his two-finger grip on a longneck, his mode of sitting with the chair tipped on its rear legs. “That kid,” she once remarked to Axel, “would wear a dead rat for a hat if you did. Please don’t ever tell him to kill me, because he’d do it without even asking why.”

  3

  Constructed in 1918, the Charles Zanco Unit is one of the oldest prisons in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Located in the Trans-Pecos region, in the upper eastern reach of the Chihuahuan Desert, it occupies eight hundred acres in the southwest corner of Terrell County, one of the largest counties in the state and, with fewer than a thousand residents, one of the most sparsely populated. The vast majority of its inhabitants live in Sanderson, the county seat and only actual town, set on Highway 90 and a dozen miles northwest of the prison. The closest town of moderate size is Fort Stockton, sixty-five miles farther north, in Pecos County. Less than seven miles south of the Zanco Unit is the nearest portion of the Rio Grande, or as it’s known in Mexico, the Río Bravo. The border.

  This is arid, windswept country of limestone hills and rocky plains rampant with scrub brush and cactus and bony mesquites, an outland of spectral mountain ranges carved with canyons and snaking with cottonwood creeks too far-flung to serve for irrigation. The winters are short and chill, the summers long and roasting. The sandstorms can scour the paint off a car. Rainfall is scant but once in a great while there are thunderstorms of uncommon ferocity, generating flash floods that tear through the gullies with freight train force. Other than petroleum and natural gas, the earth here produces little of economic worth. Goat farms. Small cattle ranches. A scattering of pecan groves.

  Although Zanco is classified as a medium-security prison, popular opinion holds that its surrounding desert presents as formidable an obstacle to escape as any at the max-security units in the TDCJ. Even so, the prison was built here only because the land it stands on was bequeathed to the state by a former lieutenant governor who specified the property could be used for no other purpose. The institution has neither a cooling nor a heating system. In winter the place is colder within than outside. In summer it swelters. Among Texas prison guards, an assignment to Zanco has long been regarded a prime test of one’s commitment to a career as a corrections officer.

  The prison’s population is nearly the equal of the county’s, varying between eight and nine hundred inmates. They are serving sentences of from two years to life, for crimes ranging from murder to driving drunk for the third time or more. The grounds are enclosed by a chain-link fence fifteen feet high, topped with double rolls of razor wire, and watched over by armed tower guards. In addition to the cell blocks and administration buildings, the prison contains a small plant for the manufacture of state-issue footwear, a large garage for the maintenance and repair of state motor vehicles, and a kennel for the training of commercial security dogs. The kennel also houses the prison’s tracking hounds, though in the institution’s ninety-year history there has never been need of them.

  There have been only two escape attempts from Zanco, and none in the past forty years. In 1937 a trio of convicts made it out of their cell block and to a darkened section of the fence—it was then only eleven feet high and crowned with barbed wire—and they had scaled it to the top when the spotlights found them and the tower guards opened fire and killed them all. The fence was thereafter made four feet higher and additional barbed wire was added. In the early 1960s the wire was replaced with razor coils.

  The more recent effort was in 1968. Four convicts overpowered a pair of guards, held shivs to their throats, and demanded that the warden provide a car and guns for them at the front gate. The car was brought and the inmates shuffled out of the building in a tight group, holding the guards close to them as shields. They were halfway to the gate when a quartet of sharpshooters on the roof fired simultaneously, the volley of head shots dropping all four convicts, three of them dead and the fourth critically wounded. The warden took his time about summoning the prison doctor from his home in Sanderson, and when he arrived he was directed to treat the rescued guards for their scrapes and bruises before attending to the wounded prisoner. When the doctor
finally turned his attention to the convict, the man was dead.

  Today the front entrance of the Zanco Unit bears a large bold-lettered sign found at other Texas prisons as well:

  NO HOSTAGE SHALL PASS THROUGH THIS GATE.

  4

  He quickly learned to accommodate the desolation of imprisonment. The institutional rules were easy enough to adhere to, and those of the so-called convict code were no burden, either. You minded your own business. You never trusted the guards, never helped them in any way. You did not interfere in another con’s interests. You never ratted. He would incur no debt, request no favor, ask no personal questions. He learned how to converse without seeming to seek friendship and how to rebuff those who seemed to seek it from him. In brief, he held strong to the most comprehensive rule of the convict code, which was to “do your own time.”

  Except for a single visit from Ruby, his only visitor through all his years inside was Charlie, who would every month visit him at whichever unit he was in, no matter how distant, though in the early years there would be periods when Axel was punished with the loss of visiting rights and they could not see each other for months.

  He wrote to Ruby more often and at greater length than she wrote to him. During her only visit, early in his first year, she’d looked so desirable on the other side of the Plexiglas he’d nearly wept for want of her. She’d seemed unnerved by the surroundings and to be at some greater distance than the few feet between them. She promised to come again and they several times agreed on the date, but she each time made some excuse. He tried not to think about her so much, but couldn’t help it, nor refrain from masturbating to the conjured images of her naked flesh. He once accepted a punk’s offer to suck him off for a five-dollar credit at the commissary, but his pleasure in being fellated had always derived as much from watching the woman minister to him as from the actual sensation, and there was no such pleasure with a man. That first time was the last time, and he thereafter relied solely and glumly on his hand.

  He had been inside a little more than a year when Charlie brought the news that Ruby had gone away and no one knew where. Ever since Axel’s conviction, Harry Mack had of course continued to support her and Jessie and had often tried to persuade her to relocate to Brownsville, but she’d insisted on staying in Houston. Then one day the nanny, Mrs Adamson, showed up at Harry Mack’s door with a suitcase in one hand and three-year-old Jessie in the other and told him Mrs Wolfe had said she was leaving town and had paid her to bring the child to the family in Brownsville. She had not said where she was going or why or if she would ever come back. Jessie would thereafter reside with Harry Mack and his housekeeper, Mrs Smith, but Axel specifically asked Charlie to watch out for her, and at least twice a week without fail, through all the years until she finished high school and left for UT Austin, he would take her to a movie and then someplace to eat and they would chat for hours.

  By no other means could Ruby have severed Axel’s love for her so utterly as by abandoning Jessica Juliet, deserting her to go … where? Why? With somebody? How could he have misjudged the low-down bitch so badly?

  None of them would ever know that Ruby met a man named Donnie Weathers in New Orleans during Mardi Gras two weeks before she closed her bank account, paid Mrs Adamson to take Jessie to Brownsville, and went with Donnie to Los Angeles, where he had an ocean-view penthouse and kept a cabin cruiser moored at a marina. He also owned a condominium in San Francisco and a house on eighty wooded acres in the northern part of the state. He was a tall, handsome, physically fit man of fifty-one, twelve years a widower, without a living relative, and enjoying the benefits of a colossal inheritance. He liked to have fun and was what he laughingly called “a sex addict.” She had laughed in turn and said that made two of them.

  Until she’d met Donnie, she had been weighing a future in which the most money she would ever possess was Harry Mack’s twice-a-month apportionment to her. Donnie’s entrance into her life had considerably brightened her prospects. He lavished her with gifts, said pretty things to her, and before they’d known each other three weeks he professed his love. His major failing, as she saw it, was in the sort of sex he was “addicted” to—rough bondage games he liked to record on videotape and which usually pained and sometimes bruised her. Yet she readily obliged him, sensing marriage in the cards and already contriving toward the day she would divorce him on grounds of mental and physical cruelty, with the sex tapes as evidence, plus whatever other basis a lawyer might suggest. Once the community-property state of California granted her a lavish settlement, she could at last begin living the life she was meant for.

  What she could not have foreseen was the night she and Donnie went cruising far off the coast and he initiated yet another of his games, this one involving, among other things, a technique he assured her would intensify her climax. She agreed to it with a lascivious grin, saying it sounded fun. They were well into the diversion when she found herself unable to breathe and tried to tell him that she was choking, that he was killing her. And he was. She died without knowing she was not the first of Donnie Weathers’ sex mates to meet her end in the course of an outré libidinous game out at sea. Nor the first he cut open from belly to breastbone to assure that the corpse would not surface, then dumped overboard, perhaps to sink all the way down to the bottom feeders, perhaps to be disposed of by sharks as it sank.

  5

  Shaved and showered, dressed in a fresh set of inmate whites, Axel lingers in his open cell. For the past weeks he and Cacho have made it a point to wait until the last half hour of the breakfast period before meeting in the dining hall. By then most of the cons have eaten and left the hall and it’s easier to have a degree of conversational privacy. Already gone to breakfast is his cellmate, a beefy, silver-haired man named Duke Jameson doing seventeen years for robbery plus an eight-year jolt on top of that for bigamy. Jameson thought the bigamy sentence both unwarranted and severely excessive, and has said so to Axel on more than one occasion. “As if I hadn’t already punished my own ass enough by bein married to two never-shut-the-fuck-up women at the same time and both of em spendin my money fastern I could steal it!”

  He’s been thinking hard since the block lights came on, especially about something Cacho said during supper last night, after they’d reviewed the plan yet again. “Hey, man, what’s to sweat? The worse that can happen is they kill us.” He had chuckled along with the kid, but the thought had stayed with him.

  Because, as he saw it, getting killed wasn’t the worst that could happen. Getting caught and having years added to his sentence—that was the worst. He had of course considered that risk from the start and had even emphasized it to the kid at the very beginning, wanting Cacho to understand clearly what they stood to lose if the plan went to hell and they were caught and not killed. He had pointed out that if Cacho kept his nose clean he’d be eligible for parole in less than five years. He’d still be a young man with his whole life ahead of him. But the kid had said, “Five years?” like it was eternity. He wanted out now and would run any risk to get free, even the risk of lengthening his sentence. But not until the first of his multiple wakings last night had Axel suddenly realized that it’s a risk he himself cannot afford. What had ever made him think he could? Better to play it safe and serve out the eleven years he’s got left.

  Just tell the kid first thing, he thinks, as soon as you see him … count you out. You can’t do it, you can’t risk more time. He’s young and has a life waiting for him out there and can afford the risk and has good reason to take it. You’re not so young and you’ve got nobody waiting but your little brother, but better to go out to nobody but Charlie in eleven years for sure than in however the hell many more years it’ll be if you get caught. And it’s not like you’re queering the thing for him, because the plan doesn’t require more than one guy. He doesn’t need you. You’ll wish him all the luck in the world and tell him if he makes it you’ll be happy for him and kicking yourself in the ass for not sticking. But if y
ou stick and get caught you’ll be kicking yourself a lot longer. So … count you out.

  The kid will call him a pussy, a scared old man. That’s okay, let him. There’s really no way to tell him the truth about why he can’t chance the added time. He’s never told him about Jessie, never spoken about her to anybody inside the walls. She’s never been to see him or ever written to him and that’s her choice and there’s nothing to be done about it. He wrote to her once, when she was fourteen. A letter of three pages in which he told her he was sorry he’d been a bad father and knew he didn’t deserve her love but he wanted her to know he loved her very much and always would.

  On his next visit, Charlie sadly informed him that she said she had burned the letter and did not want him to write to her again, and if he did she would burn the letter without even opening it. Still, not a day passes that he doesn’t think of her. He has seen her grow up in the photographs Charlie has brought him over the years—pictures he now regrets having cut up and flushed away a few days ago rather than leave them behind for his cellmate and the COs to gawk at—but he aches to truly see her. See her in person. Even if she won’t speak to him. Even if all he can do is look at her from a distance. He wants to see the woman she’s become. There isn’t much he wants anymore, and nothing he wants more than that. And eleven more years is long enough to wait for it without taking a chance of catching even more time. Never mind the chance of getting killed.

  So count him out.

  6

  He would not join a gang. Gangs ruled the prisons, all of them bound tightly to themselves by race—white gangs, black gangs, Latino gangs—and the convict who did not belong to one was a loner without allies. But he would not obligate himself to anyone, not even to a gang that would have sided with him against all others. At every unit he was on his own. The first seven years were the roughest. Each time he was transferred to another unit, he was put to the test as soon as he arrived, forced to choose between backing down or fighting, and of course he always fought. He knew how, and though he was bloodied in every contest, he more often inflicted greater damage than he received. But, together with his antagonist, he was every time punished by the loss of privileges and visiting rights for weeks or months.