The Bones of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  This time it’s Jessie who shouts, “Look!” She’s pointing at a fish hawk that’s appeared to our left, circling, on the hunt. It’s a beautiful thing, its breast and shoulders bright white against the gray-and-white checkering of its underwings and tail.

  “Osprey!” Frank tells the girls. “Name comes from the Latin ossifraga. Means ‘bone-breaker’!”

  “Bone-breaker!” Rayo says. “That’s so perfect!”

  I wouldn’t say Frank’s a showoff, but he does like to impress women every now and again with his erudition, and I have to admit most of them get a kick out of it. Just a few nights ago, Rayo and I were at a bar with him and a girlfriend of his, a nursing instructor at UTB, who got riled at the bartender for some reason and said to Frank, “Hit him with an English major put-down, baby.” So Frank said to the guy, “You, sir, are the terminus of an alimentary canal.” We all laughed, even the bartender, who admitted he didn’t know what Frank called him but thought it sounded funny.

  Now the osprey spies a fish and wings around to the east before turning back again.

  “He’s coming into the sun so the fish won’t see his shadow,” I tell the girls. Frank’s not the only one on the boat who knows stuff.

  The osprey’s gliding now as it starts angling into a descending trajectory and picking up speed, tucking its wings back as it swoops down. It’s just a few feet above the water when it slings its legs forward with the talons spread and wham, it hits the surface with a terrific splash and flies up with a sea trout in its grip.

  We all cheer and watch the hawk rise and start angling off to wherever its nest is. Then it jerks sideways a split second before we hear the gunshot, and it drops into the water about twenty yards from us, still holding the fish. It’s trying to fly but is just splashing around in a small circle.

  “Son of a bitch!” Frank shouts, slowing the boat and turning it toward the hawk.

  “It was them,” Rayo says, pointing at the small boat we’d noted earlier.

  I pick up the big field glasses and home in on it, a little over a hundred yards off and bobbing at anchor. A bowrider, twenty-two, twenty-three feet, stern drive, its Bimini top furled. Two guys standing in it, long-billed fishing caps, dark glasses, looking this way. One holding a scoped rifle with one hand, muzzle up, the butt resting on his hip.

  We draw up beside the hawk, and Frank tells me to take the wheel and hold us in place, then gets his SIG nine from the bridge locker and goes down and around to the fishing cockpit, where the girls are discussing how to get the hawk out of the water. It’s beating one wing in a spread of blood, and even from the bridge I can see the other wing’s crippled and the chest torn. No way it can be saved. Frank picks up a long gaff and Jessie says, “Not with that, you’ll hurt it worse.” Then she sees the pistol in his other hand and says, “Ah, hell.”

  Frank steps around them and starts to take aim at the hawk, but it abruptly goes still. Before it can sink, he gaffs it out of the water, the fish still in its clutch, and lays it on the deck. He looks up at me and points at the other boat, and I start us toward it, then reach down and take my Beretta nine out of the locker and slip it into my waistband.

  Frank detaches the trout from the osprey and lobs it overboard, then places the hawk at the foot of the cockpit’s starboard gunwale. He goes up close to Jessie and says something to her, glancing over at the bowrider as he talks. She looks out at it, too, then nods and goes up to the bow and stands by the rail. He beckons Rayo to him and furtively hands her the SIG as he speaks to her. She listens, then moves back to the stern, holding the pistol out of sight behind her leg. Frank looks up at me, his back to the bowrider, and shows me with his hands how he wants me to position our boat in respect to theirs. It’s pretty much what I had anticipated, and I show him a fist to let him know I got it.

  The two guys watch us close in on them, and I draw up alongside, our deck several feet higher than theirs. I align our cockpit right next to their open bow, where the one with the rifle, the bigger and older of the two men—midforties, I’d guess—is standing with the rifle barrel now propped against his shoulder, his finger on the trigger guard. It’s an M1 Garand out of the Second World War and a fine weapon to this day. The other guy’s in the cockpit, a kid of eighteen or nineteen, his thumbs hooked into the front of his cargo shorts to either side of the .38 revolver tucked there. Four fishing rods, their lines out, are in rod holders affixed to the stern. Both guys take off their shades for a better look at the girls and keep smiling from one of them to the other at either end of the boat.

  “Y’all come over here to tell me what a helluva shot that was?” the big man says.

  “It was something, all right,” Frank says. “Damn bold, too, seeing as it’s against both state and federal law to shoot a hawk.”

  The big man shrugs. “I don’t reckon you for no game warden.”

  “Oh, hell no. Thought you might want your prize, though.” Frank picks up the osprey and lobs it down near the big man’s feet.

  “Hey, fellas!” Jessie shouts. The two men both look over at her, and she yanks her top up to show her tits.

  In the moment they’re gawking, Frank vaults over the gunwale and drops into their boat, grabs the M1 with both hands, and wrenches it away as he shoulders the big man backward—and Rayo whips up the SIG and fires a round through the bowrider windshield and yells, “Hands high, boy!” and the kid’s hands fly up. Frank drives the rifle’s steel butt plate into the big man’s mouth with a crack of teeth I hear in the wheelhouse, knocking him on his ass, blood gushing over his chin. He tosses the rifle into the water and kicks the guy onto his back and straddles his chest, pinning his arms with his knees, then picks up the hawk by one of its feet and rakes the talons down one side of the guy’s face and then the other side, the guy just screaming and screaming. Frank gets off him, hauls him to his feet, and pushes him over the side, then turns to the kid, who can’t raise his hands any higher. “Hey, man, hey, I didn’t do nothin! I didn’t do nothin’!” the kid screeches. Frank takes the revolver from the kid’s pants and backhands him with the barrel, cracking his cheek and dropping him to his knees, then flings the gun away and yanks the kid up and shoves him overboard, too. The two guys tread water clumsily, gasping and moaning, blood running off their faces.

  “I don’t know where you shitheels are from and don’t care!” Frank shouts. “But I ever see either of you around here again, I’ll cut your face off!”

  He picks up the hawk and hands it up to Jessie, who’s got her top back in place, then pulls himself aboard and signals me to move out. Rayo’s draped a beach towel over the transom to hide the boat’s name from the two guys—playing it safe despite the unlikelihood they would ever try tracking us down.

  About a half mile farther on, Frank has me stop again. By then the two shitheels have managed to get back into the bowrider and are just a speck heading off in the other direction. Frank hooks the transom ladder to the stern and lowers himself into the water until it’s up to his chest, then Rayo hands him the hawk. He holds it below the surface for about half a minute before letting go of it, and we watch it slowly sink. Then he climbs back up on deck and gives me a hand sign and I head us for home.

  I’m not saying Frank’s a softy or anything, but in truth he’s always been prone to get a little upset when he witnesses mistreatment of an animal.

  It’s after dark when we come off the Gulf and into the seventeen-mile ship channel leading to the Port of Brownsville. Near the channel’s halfway point we turn off into a short canal that ends at the entry to Wolfe Marine & Salvage, a south-bank boatyard owned and operated by Harry Morgan Wolfe, known to everyone in the family as Captain Harry. The yard contains two long docks, one for local boats undergoing maintenance or repair, the other reserved for fishing and family vessels.

  We tie up next to a trawler rig we know Eddie Gato used for a run to Boca Larga last night. A painter working at its transom by lamplight is putting the finishing touches on the name Gringa and
, just below it, “Brownsville.” He’s already restored the true hull numbers. It’s good work in that there’s nothing fresh-looking about it. Frank and I used to do the Boca Larga run, but it became so rote it was starting to get boring, and when Charlie said Eddie wanted it, we said by all means.

  The night manager, Dario Benítez, informs us that Captain Harry’s already gone but left word he’d meet us at the Doghouse Cantina. Frank and I get cleaned up and into fresh clothes, but the girls plead tiredness and say they’ll take a pass on the crowd and racket of a Doghouse weekend night, and they head for home in Rayo’s pickup. We hop into Frank’s restored ’68 Mustang GT named “Stevie” and follow a well-graded dirt road through the scrubs to State Highway 4, known locally as the Boca Chica Road. A few miles east, roughly halfway between Brownsville and the sea, we exit onto a sand trail where a low roadside marker reads WOLFE LANDING just above the arrow pointing toward the river and a grove of tall palms mingled with hardwoods hung with Spanish moss. The grove’s an extraordinary geographic incongruity out here, where most of the countryside consists of marsh grass, scrub brush, and mudflats. Once upon a time, however, much of this low stretch of the Rio Grande was lined with palm trees as tall as the masts of the Spanish ships that landed here—Rio de las Palmas, those first Europeans called it. Now the only other local palm grove besides ours is one in Brownsville that’s been a nature preserve for a lot of years. The trail to the Landing is just wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other, and our headlights sweep from one side to the other along the winding route through the high brush before a final eastward curve brings us into the Landing’s glow.

  Our ancestors established Wolfe Landing in the early 1890s, and in 1911 they somehow managed to get it chartered as a town, even though to this day it’s no more than a village covering about 60 acres in the middle of the 450-acre grove. Only for a few short periods in the past has the Landing’s population exceeded a hundred residents. The most recent census put the number at seventy-something. It’s a place of perpetual shadows, its air always dank and heavy with the odors of fecund vegetation, its nights loud with frogs and cats and owls. From an airplane, the river all along the border of Cameron County looks like a tangled string, so closely bunched are the serpentine loops and crooks of its meanders, a feature that over time has formed numerous resacas on both sides of the river—what they call “bayous” or “oxbows” in the Deep South and other regions. There are several resacas in the palm grove, and the biggest of them, Resaca Mala, is in the gloomiest and most remote part of the property. It has been home to a small colony of alligators since the first Wolfes settled the place, though nobody knows about them except for a few of us in the shade trade. Charlie’s house is the only one back in there.

  All of the Landing’s streets and trails are narrow and packed with crushed shell except for Main Street and Gator Lane, which are paved with tar and gravel. The trail off the highway melds into Main Street, on which stands the community’s only stone building—the single-story town hall, comprising the mayor’s office, the police department, and a two-cell jail. Charlie Fortune is both Wolfe Landing’s mayor—now many times reelected—and the chief of its police force, which at present consists of only himself and has never had more than one deputy. Also on Main are the Republic Arms gun shop and shooting range, Mario’s Grocery, Riverside Motors & Garage, Get Screwed Hardware, and Lolita’s, a little place that sells secondhand clothes. Main ends at a trail that curves northward past a couple of piling homes—one of them Frank’s, the other mine—and up into the grove’s higher ground, where you’ll find the graveyard and main residential area, composed of a scattering of cabins and mobile homes. Many of the Landing’s inhabitants are in the employ of Charlie Fortune in one way or another, while others operate businesses of their own but only with his approval.

  Branching off Main, just opposite the Republic Arms, is Gator Lane. It runs straight to the river and ends at the Doghouse Cantina, with Big Joe’s Bait & Tackle store just across the lane. Big Joe is Joseph Stilder, who showed up last year in a banged-up old Buick with expired New York plates, saw the FOR SALE sign in the store window, gave the place a quick look-over, and bought it from Charlie for cash. He’s a burly guy with thick white hair and could be anywhere from fifty to seventy. Highly sociable dude and a talented teller of tales, a much-revered gift in a community where even skillfully wrought bullshit is highly prized. Like almost everybody else who lives here, he’s not big on personal disclosure, but he became a hell of a good bartender somewhere along the line and is always willing to fill in at the Doghouse. He’s also a voracious reader, and in addition to everything you might expect to find in a bait-and-tackle store, the place sells used books—fiction, histories, travel guides, sex manuals, name it. People would be surprised at the number of readers in the Landing, and they much appreciate Big Joe’s sideline.

  The Doghouse is owned by Charlie Fortune and is the largest building in the village. Its short-order grill serves breakfast, lunch, and supper, and its spacious bar fronts a dance floor flanked by dining booths along three walls. There’s a side room with pool tables, and the office in the rear is the base of operations from which Charlie runs the shade trade—a fact of course known solely to those of us in the trade. The only Wolfes who live at the Landing are Charlie, Frank, me, and a cousin named Jimmy Quick, who manages the Republic Arms, also owned by Charlie. Jessie and Rayo live at the beach, way back in the dunes, in a stilt house they rent from Captain Harry. The rest of the family lives “in town,” which to everyone in the Landing means Brownsville—or, as Frank likes to refer to it, the Paris of Cameron County. Big Joe once heard him call it that and he said that was why he had decided to settle here. He’d always wanted to live in Paris.

  As on every Saturday evening the Doghouse parking lot is jammed. Most of the vehicles belong to Brownsville regulars who come out every weekend for the supper specials of seafood gumbo on Friday night and barbecued ribs on Saturday. During the week Charlie will work the grill at the end of the back bar for about two hours every morning and then for another hour around midday. He’s a superb short-order cook and sandwich maker. The backroom kitchen he mostly leaves to Concha and Juana, a mother-daughter team that can handily accommodate the Friday night crowd by making large kettles of gumbo well ahead of the supper hour. But grilling the Saturday ribs is a nonstop task, and Charlie always assists them with it. There aren’t any waitresses. You pay for your order at the bar and receive a card with a number, which you take to the little kitchen window at the end of the bar and give to Charlie or one of the other cooks, then sit and wait for the number to be called. Signs in each booth say CLEAN YOUR TABLE, and the big garbage barrels along the walls are labeled either NON-POOD or SCRAPS. Charlie employs a balding graybeard known only as the Professor to keep an eye out for patrons who neglect to bus their table or who empty their trays into the wrong barrel. To commit either of those transgressions is to get barred from the Doghouse for a month. Runs a tight joint, Charlie does. Every Sunday afternoon a couple of us will load the weekend SCRAPS barrels into a truck and take them to Resaca Mala and feed them to the gators. Those brutes have long been useful for disposing of all sorts of organic matter.

  The place is boisterous, and the ceiling fans are whirling with minor effect against the concentration of body heat. The dining booths are full, and at the bar every stool is taken and the spaces between them packed with standees, keeping the weekend trio of barmaids on their toes. Even though the jukebox is turned way up against the laughter and loud conversation, Charlie’s kitchen bellow of “Eighty-two and eighty-three!” carries through the din and a guy scoots out of a booth and over to the window to collect his ready plastic plates of ribs.

  The Doghouse juke is renowned for the variety of its musical selections. It holds everything from Tex Ritter to Sinatra to Elvis to Los Tigres del Norte. About a third of its content, though, is “swing music,”1930s and ’40s big band tunes by Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman and the
ir ilk, even though Charlie and Frank and I and the Professor are just about the only ones who ever play it. Actually, the dances of that era are a lot of fun. Our mother—who had learned them from her mother—taught Frank and me how to do the Lindy Hop, fox-trot, jitterbug, and other such dances when we were still in grammar school, and it’s a rare girl who doesn’t get a kick out of learning them from us. Sometimes a patron will complain about all the big band stuff, but Charlie says anybody who doesn’t want to hear it can go somewhere else. A guy once told him he should put some hip-hop in the juke, and Charlie said he’d sooner hire an idiot child to sit in the corner and bang pots and pans together.

  Captain Harry and Eddie Gato are standing at the far end of the bar, leaning close in conversation. We go over and press up beside them, the nearest standees making room when they see who we are, and I signal Lila for a couple of Shiner Bocks. She’s Charlie’s only full-time bartender and is in charge of the two part-timers who assist her on weekends. On her days off or a busy weeknight, Charlie or Big Joe will help her out. As she heads for the beer cooler, her brown ponytail swings above a delectable butt snugged into faded jeans that cling to it like pale blue skin. It’s shaped like a perfect upside-down Valentine’s heart, and when she bends over into the cooler, the heart turns right-side up. She and Eddie have had an on-again, off-again thing for the past few years.

  Frank claps Captain Harry on the shoulder and says, “What’s the good word, Unc?”

  “Evening, fellas,” Harry says. But his smile’s a puny thing and Eddie’s looking grim.

  “What the hell, guys?” Frank says. “You look like somebody let the air out of your sex dolls.”