The Ways of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  Finding no other money in the house, they will turn off the lights and then cross the backyard to a large shed secured with a heavy but uncomplicated padlock which they easily open. They’ll shut the shed door and by the glow of a butane lighter find the switch for the overhead bulb and begin their search among the clutter of toolboxes and disordered shelves, cursing the owner for his untidiness that makes their own work more difficult. When they push aside a large heavy tool cabinet they will uncover a square of four juxtaposed floor bricks, under which is packed a plastic bag holding another twenty-five thousand dollars.

  To exit the shed, they’ll have to push the big cabinet back over the hidey-hole. They will return to the house and sift through a small ring of keys they earlier noted on a little hook next to the kitchen door and find the one they need and remove it from the ring, then turn off the lights and go out and around to the side of the house where Balestro’s old Chevy Lumina is parked. One of them will get in it and wait until the other has walked away and is almost back to the apartment, then start the car and drive off. A short time later he will pay a seventeen-year-old member of a street gang called Los Fuerzos to drive the car to a certain garage in San Antonio. The man will then take a taxi to the state hospital and from there walk to the apartment. His partner will by then have reported to Sino their recovery of half of the Balestro money. Before noon the next day the Lumina will lie strewn in dozens of parts over the floor of the San Antonio garage, and the owner of the place, a member of the same organization to which Sino belongs, will notify him by phone that the only money found in the car amounted to a dollar and forty-two cents in coins recovered from the floorboards and under the seats. Sino will then go to his chief and apprise him of the situation, and the chief will ask if the van driver was the one with a little girl who has a medical problem. After their meeting, Sino will phone his two men in Big Spring and tell them the job is finished and to come home with the fifty thousand.

  On her return from Castroville the first thing Mrs Balestro will notice when her brother pulls up in front of the house is that the family sedan is gone. She will be perplexed, but her husband had often let friends borrow it, and her first thought will be that one of them has done that. But when they find the front door unlocked and the house rummaged, her brother will immediately call the police while Mrs Balestro calms her alarmed daughters. A careful probe of the house will establish that nothing has been stolen, not the television nor any of the kitchen appliances or the hunting rifle whose case was broken open. Though the shed will be found to be lacking its padlock, the widow will not note anything missing from its cluttered contents, either, though she is not really familiar with them and can’t be sure that everything’s there. The police will commiserate with the widow over the violation of her home, especially so soon after the death of her husband, but will have no reason to suppose a tie between the two events. They will guess that the intruders were in search of something specific, most likely a drug stash, but had been misinformed about the address where they would find it. Such errors were not uncommon among their kind. When they’d come across the car keys, it had been a no-brainer to take the old Lumina and get a few hundred dollars from a chop shop for their evening’s work. The police will encourage everyone in the neighborhood to call 911 at any sign of suspicious activity, and will promise a more pervasive street patrol in the evenings.

  Over the next few weeks, the grieving Mrs Balestro will bit by bit resume a daily routine. She will tend to the house, visit with neighbors, help her daughters with their homework, light a weekly candle for her husband’s soul, and pray daily to the Holy Mother to ease the younger girl’s affliction. Balestro’s employer-provided life insurance will suffice to meet the family’s basic financial needs for the present, but she will have to rely on the free clinic for the minor treatments and generic medicines it can provide her daughter, will grudgingly accept the small monetary contributions her brother presses on her to help with expenses, and will despair about the girl’s future care. To try to distract herself, she will resume puttering with her long-neglected potted plants along the rear wall of the house, deriving emotional respite from the perfunctory acts of ridding the pots of their old dirt and desiccated contents and refilling them with fresh soil and rooting them with new cuttings. One late afternoon she will empty an oversized clay pot and find in the encrusted dirt a tightly packed black plastic bag sealed with duct tape which she’ll cut open with a pair of shears to reveal a jumble of packets of one-hundred-dollar bills. For a long minute she will stare at the money, confused and feeling a sickly turn in her stomach. Then carefully look around and see that no one is in sight and scoop up the bag and take it into the house. And there learn that the contents amount to fifty thousand dollars. She will mull the matter through the long night, will several times pick up the phone before once again putting it down, not knowing who to call or what to say. She is not a stupid woman and will know that the money has something to do with the break-in of her house and almost certainly something to do with her husband. She will slowly accept the frightening explanation that he must have received it for abetting the escape and was paid beforehand and hid the money in the potted dirt. Of all the questions that will beset her, the easiest to answer will be whether to notify the police—of course not.

  The next morning, after feeding the girls breakfast and waiting with them at the corner for the school bus, she will go back to her kitchen, brew a pot of tea, and decide on a course of action. Then she’ll go back to bed and sleep more soundly for the next few hours than she has since becoming a widow. That evening she will phone her brother to share the happy news of the life insurance payment she’s to receive on a private policy she hadn’t known her husband had purchased. In less than three months she will have sold the house in Big Spring and be residing in San Antonio, only a short drive from her brother in Castroville. And she will be working on the maintenance staff of a large hospital, a job that includes excellent medical benefits for her and her family.

  38

  Axel wakes up under the trees, in the gray shadow of imminent daybreak, the sun still behind the faraway hills that stand black against the reddening lower sky.

  “Free” is his first thought. Pain his first sensation. He lies supine and unmoving, but everything hurts—head, hands, every muscle and joint. To swallow is an ordeal.

  Just before waking he’d had a brief dream. All his life most of his dreams have been unsettling, and early in his prison years he had trained himself to give them no thought, to eliminate them from memory as soon as his eyes opened. He’d grown so adept at it that for a long time now he has seemed not to dream at all. But this short one was of his daughter, and for some reason, perhaps his weariness, he’d lapsed in his habit of direct dismissal and remembers it clearly.

  He was standing in the outer dark and watching her through a window. She looked exactly as she had in the most recent photo Charlie had brought him, with reddish blonde hair to just below her shoulders. She was standing in a brightly lighted room, appearing to be deep in thought, and then suddenly looked up, as if sensing she was being watched. She glanced all about until her gaze came to the window where he stood and … he woke.

  Goddamn dreams. Then he remembers the lion and its fearsome growl and feels a rush of inexplicable pleasure. He makes a promise to himself that he will not be taken again, never again imprisoned. He dies, he dies free.

  He suddenly grows aware that the river isn’t as loud as before.

  With a grunt of pain he sits up and peers at the Rio through the ragged bank-side foliage and sees that it’s still running strong but not as riotously as last night. He guesses they’re at the tail end of the rapids and the storm runoff has subsided. There isn’t a stir of breeze. The trees droop. In the dawn light the nearby rocky rise is bigger than he had thought last night, an escarpment maybe forty feet high, and stretches off into the upriver shadows. A few yards away a ring of blackened rocks marks a campfire site littered with empti
ed food tins and plastic bottles. The sight of the bean cans makes him hungry. Cacho is still lying on his side and facing the other way and seems not to have moved at all in the night. Axel eyes him closely but cannot tell if he’s breathing.

  His chest hollows at the thought that the kid might be dead.

  He doesn’t know Cacho’s people and anyway wouldn’t know how to contact them. Who could he call except Charlie? But call him how? From where? He doesn’t even—

  Cacho stirs, moaning low. Then haltingly sits up. He puts his hands to the small of his back and carefully twists his torso from side to side, wincing. He sees Axel looking at him. “Christ almighty. Feel like I been thrown off a cliff!”

  Axel is surprised by the size of his relief that the kid’s alive. “Hurting a little, eh, junior?” He has an impulse to tell him about the lion, then decides against it without knowing why.

  “Don’t tell me you ain’t hurting,” Cacho says. “You look like roadkill! Look like somebody ran a can punch across your cheek there!”

  “I might have an ache or two. Why you yelling?”

  Cacho stares at him. Then looks out at the river and smiles. “About time it shut up some.” He catches sight of the campfire ring, the empty cans and bottles. “Wetback hotel, looks like.”

  It does, Axel says in Spanish. We’re obviously not the first travelers ever to spend the night here.

  Cacho gapes at him. “What?” Then in Spanish, says, Are you … you speak Spanish?

  I’m fairly confident that’s the language in which I’m addressing you, yes.

  You tricky fuck! Where’d you learn it? When? And so … proper?

  Axel shrugs. I acquired it from some Mexican pals when I was a child.

  You lying prick. No Mex kid taught to you to speak like that. Acquired. But why didn’t … ah! You didn’t want anybody to know so that you could know without them knowing you knew. But why not tell me? You didn’t trust me?

  You kidding? You were a convict. Now you’re not.

  He can see that Cacho’s injured look is more simulated than genuine. Then the kid grins too. Jesus Christ, you kept it a secret from everybody all those years?

  Till now.

  You really got some funny ways, man.

  So you’ve told me.

  So what’re we gonna talk, English or Spanish?

  Whatever suits you. How about a mix? “We start a sentence in English like this” and switch to Spanish in the middle of it, like this, “and maybe finish it in English again like this.”

  Cacho laughs. “My brother and I do that all the time. But look, man, it’s gonna take me a while to get used to talking Spanish to you. What do you say we stick with English for now?”

  “Okay by me.”

  Both of them are lacerated of face and limbs, their palms scored raw by the grab ropes, their prison whites torn and filthy. Axel gingerly fingers the cheek gash, which runs from under his eye to his ear and is still bleeding a bit. His left forearm throbs with the puncture wound. They get to their feet, and he notes Cacho’s limp and remembers his injured ankle. The kid sees how he’s looking at him and says, “Don’t sweat it, old man. I’ll get me a walking pole and do just fine. Probly outrun you.” He inspects a few of the lower and smaller tree limbs, finds a suitable one, and says, “Gimme a hand.” Pulling together, they break it off, and Cacho starts stripping it of smaller branches and twigs.

  The upper rim of the sun breaks over the hills, and they see that in the upstream distance the low rise bends northward with the river and out of view. About forty yards downstream, however, the rise either ends or curves out of sight to the south—it’s hard to know which from where they’re standing—and past that point, the riverbanks lie flat and bare but for wide swaths of low scrub brush.

  “We gotta get moving, viejo,” Cacho says, testing his six-foot staff, his limp lessened by it. “If we stay by the river, we got plenty of water. Hit a road eventually.”

  “Let me have a look first what’s on the other side of this rise,” Axel says, heading for it. “Could be a road’s not far off.”

  “Yeah, maybe a Greyhound station. Train depot.”

  Axel clambers up the slope, gasping and hurting, his raw palms burning. The crest he achieves is flat and wide and overlooks an immense plain of ground shadow receding toward the eastern hills in a dark tide as the sun rises from behind them. Downriver, the rise curves to the south and runs straight out into the plain for maybe a mile before coming to an end. Peppered with scrub brush and studded with outcrops, the plain spreads southward all the way to a horizon of long purple mesas and blunt brown buttes. Given the slight elevation of his vantage, Axel estimates the horizon to be less than five miles distant. And now a plume of dust takes shape shy of the horizon and begins moving west. A vehicle on a dirt road? What else? There isn’t enough wind to raise that dust on its own. The road cannot be even four miles away.

  He goes back down and describes to Cacho what he’s seen and says they should follow the rise all the way around to its end point and keep going to the road, that it’s a better choice than following the river. If they stick by the river, there’s no telling how far they might have to go before coming to a road, and once they pass the bend in the rise there’s no place to hide along the bank, not in that open scrub that’s no higher than their knees. They’d be easy to spot by some posse patrolling on the other side, and if a chopper caught them in the open they’d be sitting ducks for a shooter. But if they hold to the rise and a helicopter comes, they can hide in hollows in the wall or behind rocks before it sees them. They can carry water in some of these plastic bottles. If they cover just one mile an hour they can make the road well before noon, then flag down the first vehicle to come along. He asks if Cacho thinks he can walk a mile an hour on that ankle. The kid says hell, yeah. He thinks it’s pretty chancy to head farther into the desert without knowing if there’s a road out there, but he concedes Axel’s points about the riskiness of holding to the river.

  They sort through the empty bottles. Many of them are cracked and useless, but three quart-sized bottles are intact and six pint-sized ones. More than enough, they figure, to take them five miles and last them till a vehicle comes along.

  They’re filling bottles at the bank when Cacho says, “I just wish we had hats.”

  “Wish? You wish? Well, I wish I was in an air-conditioned bar in Galveston, drinking beer and eating shrimp … with Scarlett Johansson … and she’s whispering to me she’s not wearing underwear.”

  “Well, hell, you wanna have a fucking wishing contest, I wish—”

  “Damn it!” says Axel, looking upriver at the sound of an oncoming helicopter.

  They scuttle to the cover of the trees as the craft’s small form hovers into view over the escarpment’s upriver bend.

  “Think they seen us?” Cacho says.

  “No. Lot easier to see them than them us.”

  The aircraft comes fast, its rotors beating above the roaring engine. It’s following the river and it passes directly overhead, its downdraft flailing the tree limbs and flinging leaves.

  They stay under the trees until they can’t hear it anymore, then return to the bank and finish filling bottles and then drink from the river till their bellies are full, hoping they don’t get sick and thinking it unlikely from water that’s running so fast. They each put three of the smaller bottles inside their tucked-in shirts. Axel will hand-carry two of the bigger bottles, and Cacho, needing one hand for the staff, will carry the other liter bottle.

  Then they set out, holding close to the escarpment, the sun now clear of the hills, the day’s heat building fast.

  39

  Now they’re dying.

  The sun is past its meridian and they are several miles into Mexico. The rise is far behind them, a small dark projection in the shimmering heat. They are out of water. They walk like old drunks, and one of them lame. Axel has known many days of one hundred degrees or more at Zanco, and this one is a match for any of t
hem. But at Zanco there had been water, shade, hats, food….

  From the outset, Cacho’s ankle had rapidly worsened, slowing them more and more. And although they had been sparing with their water, taking sips only every now and again, the heat grew monstrous and had them sipping more and more frequently as they went, and they’d finished two of the quart bottles before they reached the southern end of the rock rise. By then they had twice had to hide from helicopters, both times hunkering in shadowy scoops in the rock wall until the choppers passed by to the north of them, holding to the river.

  They had just arrived at the end of the rise, telling each other they had to go easier on the water, when yet another helicopter came in sight, this one out of the south, out of deeper Mexico and probably a unit of the Mexican Federal Police, maybe state cops. Its engine sound was distinctly different from the others, of a higher whine, but in the blinding sunlight the chopper was no more than a loud black entity whose markings they couldn’t distinguish. It came faster than the others had and at lower altitude, and in their haste to hide under a low shelf at the foot of the rise they flung themselves prone beneath it, cracking some of the bottles in their shirts and feeling the water draining into the sand under them.

  The helicopter made a low pass parallel to the escarpment face and then turned around and bore away to the west. They came out from under the shelf and found only two of their shirt bottles still intact, the others emptied. They considered returning to the river but then agreed that if they were careful with the remaining water—a full quart and two pints—they could still make it to the road up ahead with some to spare. Several more brief sightings of raised dust had suggested that the road was regularly traveled and they would not have to wait long to meet with a vehicle.

  So they had kept going forward under the heightening sun, trudging deeper into a pale wasteland of visibly wavering heat, Cacho hobbling on his staff. They intermittently sipped from the smaller bottles but at times could not help taking a gulp, and in another hour both of those bottles lay behind them. They cautioned each other to take only a single small sip at each turn with the remaining quart, and vowed to enforce the resolution that one of them would hold the bottle to the other’s mouth.