The Bones of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  “It’s here, señora,” he tells her. “I’ll send it right away.”

  “I want it in my hands within thirty minutes,” she says.

  Twenty-three minutes later, there is tinkling from the little array of chimes mounted on the wall next to the front door. Jessie answers the door and greets Ricardo, one of Charlie’s runners, who doffs his cap and says, Good evening, miss, and hands her the encased disc, wrapped in newspaper and sealed with tape.

  Catalina dismisses the maids and instructs them not to come into the living room during the rest of the evening. She permits Jessie to operate the DVD player, and because her interest is strictly in Kitty Quick, she agrees with Jessie’s suggestion of fast-forwarding past any scene that does not include Kitty. They thereby run through the movie in less than twenty minutes, Jessie feeling keenly uncomfortable the whole while about watching such a thing in the company of her great-great-grandaunt, never mind that Catalina is totally enrapt in each of Kitty’s scenes.

  At the video’s conclusion, Catalina excuses herself and goes into the bathroom. When she returns, her face has been freshly washed and her eyes are mildly red. She remains standing as she tells Jessie that the girl looks exactly as Sandi looked the very last time she saw her. Then she smiles weakly and adds, “Except, of course, Sandi was wearing clothes. She was not yet seventeen, and I don’t believe this one is, either. And her voice . . . it is the same as Sandra’s. The very same. It is very hard to believe.”

  “She doesn’t look anywhere near legal age,” Jessie says. “Neither does the blonde, for that matter. But hey, I knew a girl in college who in her senior year looked like she should be in junior high. With some, you never know.”

  Catalina opens her arms to her and they hug.

  “Thank you, my dear girl. Now go home and rest.”

  “You rest, too, Aunt Cat. It’s been a tough night.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  She sees Jessie to the door and waits there until she’s in the Jeep and leaves, then shuts the door and locks it. Then goes back to the sofa and the photos on the coffee table. She mulls them for some time before at last going to bed.

  She sleeps later than usual the next morning. Then has a light breakfast. Then once more studies the pictures of Sandra and the Kitty girl and resumes her deliberations of the night before.

  It is late afternoon when she phones Harry McElroy.

  RUDY

  After getting to bed late the night before, I was hoping that the next morning I’d be able to catch up on the sleep I’d missed out on during the shipment recovery. But Rayo pretty well sabotaged the effort by doing a lot of wriggling against me, pretending to be half asleep and simply making herself more comfortable and not really trying to get me worked up, which she managed to do deep in the night and then again shortly after daybreak. The girl’s unreal. I finally gave up the try for more sleep, and we went to the Doghouse for a brunch of egg-bacon-cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. Frank was already there and had called up a girlfriend named Marisa to see if she wanted to come out and join us for a lazy day of pitchers, a bite to eat, a bit of eight-ball, a lot of dancing. She did. Turned out she had the next day off, so we stayed up pretty late again, and it was close to noon today when the four of us got together for breakfast at the Doghouse. Frank and I told Charlie about the splendid huevos rancheros we’d had in Nuevo Laredo, so he worked up four plates of his own recipe, then waited with hands on hips for us to make the taste test. Marisa said, “Wow,” and Rayo blew him a kiss. Frank smiled and nodded, and I gave Charlie the “okay” sign. He grinned and shook his joined hands over his head like an old-time boxing champ.

  Now it’s half past four and we’re playing Wild Wolfe draw poker—two-bit ante, dollar-limit bets, deuces and jokers wild—and telling stories about some of the more memorable residents of the Landing who are no longer with us. Big Joe’s tending the bar and looking on from behind the counter.

  Charlie’s cell sounds the opening notes of “Tuxedo Junction.” He takes it from his shirt pocket, glances at the screen, puts it to his ear, and says, “Yessir?” I figure it’s his daddy on the horn, since Charlie rarely says “yessir” to anyone else. Like the rest of us, he refers to his father as Harry Mack, but he never addresses him directly as anything other than “sir.” If he’s ever called him “Dad” or “Father” or any such thing, nobody I know has ever heard it. He looks over at us and says, “Yessir, they are.” He listens, then says, “I’ll tell them . . . Yessir, you, too.”

  “You’ll tell who what?” I ask him when he puts up the phone.

  “I’ll tell you boys that the uncounted wonder of the world, the antediluvian silver Cat herself, wants you to go see her. She said right now would be fine, so perhaps you best not dawdle.”

  “What is it this time?” Frank says. “Toilet stopped up? Oven on the blink? Water heater?”

  “Harry Mack didn’t say, but I can hardly wait for you to get back and tell me.”

  Because Catalina never permits strangers to enter her home, any household problems that crop up—plumbing, electrical, whatever—can be attended to only by somebody in the family. Most often that’s me and Frank. The last time we were in her place was a few months ago, when we picked up a new refrigerator she’d ordered and then installed it for her. Jessie and Eddie and Rayo visit her at home a lot more often than we do, but she’s never asked any of them to do a repair more challenging than a leaky faucet Rayo once fixed. And though Charlie’s as much a handyman as Frank and I, she’d never ask him for help. The whole family’s aware of their reciprocally irritant relationship. He has a tendency to get sardonic with her, which she deems impertinent, and he doesn’t care for her “royal-ass manner,” as he calls it.

  She lives on Levee Street in a small, well-kept two-bedroom house. Built in the early twentieth century, it has withstood every hurricane since then with no more damage than a cracked window or two and a few blown roof tiles. The place is as hardy as she is.

  We park next to the fence gate and let ourselves in and wave at Señora Villareal next door, who smiles and waves back from her porch rocker. Aunt Catalina detests door knocking of any kind as well as the sound of most doorbells, and to announce ourselves we jiggle a little door-side chain that sounds a small set of chimes inside. Anna, the younger of the two live-in maids, admits us into the living room, where Catalina is seated on the sofa, a long coffee table before her. On the other side of the table and facing her are two armchairs. She smiles at the sight of us.

  “Francis. Rudolf.” She leans forward, and we each in turn bend down to kiss her on the cheek. She extends a hand toward the chairs. “Please, nephews, be seated. Would you care for something to eat? Anna makes wonderful sandwiches.”

  We assure her we’re not hungry

  Just the beer, Anna, she says. The girl says, Yes, madam, and vanishes into the kitchen.

  “I’m grateful to you for coming,” Catalina says. “I know how busy you are.”

  When we come on a repair job, she usually speaks Spanish. That she’s addressing us in English is a clear indication she doesn’t want the maids to comprehend anything they might overhear. She has never hired a maid who knows English, and she has ways of determining during an interview how much of the language, if any, a prospective employee understands. The armchairs are positioned close to each other so that she can study both of us with only slight shifts of her eyes. Knows a lot of tricks, the old Cat. I’m watching her as closely as I can without being obvious, but there’s nothing about her that suggests disquiet.

  Anna returns with a tray holding three bottles of Dos Equis and sets it on the low table. Aunt Catalina tells her that will be all and the girl goes.

  “I have taken up your preference for drinking from the bottle rather than a glass,” she says. “Let it be a lesson to you. You’re never too old to acquire unrefined habits.” She smiles as she says it, and we smile at her jest. The thing is, she doesn’t really drink, but she’s a decorous hostess and always goes th
rough the motions of joining her guests in a libation, though never actually taking but a few wee sips of beer or wine.

  She raises her beer to us and we clink our bottles against hers, then pull deep swallows as she takes a tiny taste.

  “Now,” she says, setting her beer aside. “You’re wondering why I have asked to see you.” She opens the wide, shallow drawer beneath the tabletop and withdraws a manila envelope. “As you know, I once had a brother and a sister, Eduardo and Sandra, but they were lost to me a very long time ago.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Frank says.

  The whole family knows the story, but as commonly happens with a story that is told and retold through generations, it has been modified into slightly differing versions. What is known for certain is that in the spring of 1911, during the first year of the uprising against the regime of Porfirio Díaz, when Catalina was sixteen years old and rebel troops were closing in on the Little family’s ranch, Patria Chica, her great-grandfather Edward Little put her and her sister and their older brother on a train to the border and the safety of their Wolfe relations in Texas. But the train was derailed en route by bandits, Eduardo was killed and Sandra kidnapped. According to one account, Catalina was raped, but nobody of the living family has ever claimed to have heard her say so and no one has ever had the nerve to ask her if it’s true. Nor has anyone ever asked her if, as some versions attest, she killed one of the bandits. Whatever the full details, Catalina was the only survivor of the attack, and when the bandits left she set out to follow the train tracks the rest of the way to the border, which was still almost two hundred miles away over rugged open country. She would never have made it if a detachment of Pancho Villa’s men hadn’t come upon her and taken her the remaining distance to Matamoros, just across the river from Brownsville. The Villistas’ rescue of her was an ironic turn, given that such men were the danger from which Edward Little had wanted to distance the children. On arriving among her Wolfe kin, Catalina told them about the train attack, but who knows how much she withheld? If she’s ever told the full truth about the incident to anyone, it would be Jessie, who has faithfully held to her promise not to disclose any details of her book as long as the Cat’s still alive. In any event, when word of what happened got back to Edward Little, he dispatched search parties and private investigators all over northern Mexico and all along the border in quest of Sandra or information about her. But none of them would ever uncover anything of promise, and the family at length had to accept the hard fact that, dead or alive, she was lost to them forever. A few weeks after the train incident, the revolutionary forces triumphed and Porfirio Díaz went into exile in Paris. And not two weeks after that, Edward Little was killed in the Mexico City earthquake that preceded by only a few hours the rebels’ victorious entrance into the capital.

  What any of that might have to do with us being here I can’t begin to guess.

  She takes a black-and-white photograph out of the envelope, places it on the table, and rotates it so we can see it right-side up. It’s of two girls in a stock tank. Aunt Catalina puts a finger to one of them and says, “That is Sandi at age sixteen. The other is me.”

  It’s a stunner of a moment to see Catalina as she looked a hundred years ago. Then my gaze shifts back to Sandra. There’s something vaguely familiar about her. Frank’s staring at the picture like he might be sensing the same thing.

  Catalina takes a larger black-and-white photo from the envelope and lays it beside the first.

  “That is Sandra almost a year earlier.”

  It’s a studio close-up, and it doesn’t take five seconds for me to realize she’s the spitting image of one of the girls in the sex video we watched in the Doghouse the other night. Frank and I cut a look at each other.

  “Ah,” the Cat says. “She reminds you of someone, yes?”

  Oh, man. You can’t tell your great-great-grandaunt her sister looks like somebody you just saw in a porn movie.

  “Well, señora,” Frank says, “I have to confess that, for a second there, I thought she looked a lot like a girl I once knew, but . . . naw.”

  “I know the one you mean, though, Frankie,” I say. “You dated her in high school. Aleana or Elena, something like that.”

  “Oh, stop it, both of you,” she says. “If that’s the best you can lie, it’s a miracle you have survived for as long as you have.”

  She takes another photo from the envelope and sets it down beside the studio shot. The pictures are the same size and this one, too, is a black-and-white close-up, but even so, there’s no doubt whatever it’s the black-haired girl in The Love Tutors.

  “Where did that come from?” Frank says.

  She ignores the question and says, “Her dubious name, as you may recall, is Kitty Quick. Look at her and Sandra. Just look at them. Have you ever seen two people who looked more alike?”

  I shake my head. Franks mumbles, “No, ma’am, can’t say I have.”

  “And her voice. It is identical to Sandra’s.”

  “Her voice?” I say. “But, señora, how can you possibly know that?” And hastily add, “With all due respect.”

  She reaches into the drawer again and this time takes out a DVD of The Love Tutors and sets it beside the pictures. “Please return that to Charles at your convenience.”

  “Charlie gave you that?” Frank says.

  “He did. At my request.”

  “Señora,” I say, “why . . . how do you even know about this thing? This movie?”

  “How do you suppose?”

  “How else?” Frank says. “Jessie or Rayo or both of them, right? They thought it’d be real funny to tell you about busting in on us at the Doghouse when we were watching a . . . an adult movie. But why would they would want you to see it?”

  “I know why,” I say. “I’ll lay odds Jessie has seen pictures of your sister. When she was writing her book about you. Right? I’ll bet anything you showed her pictures of Sandra Little.”

  “Very good, Rudolf,” she says. “Yes, she has seen pictures of Sandra.”

  “Of course!” Frank says. “Then Jessie sees the movie and the girl’s resemblance to Sandra and she wants you to see it, too. And then you want to see . . . no, then you want to hear the girl, and so you get Charlie to hand over the movie.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the Cat says, raising her hands shoulder-high as if in surrender. “It is such a joy to observe clever minds at work. You have surmised it all correctly.”

  “What about the prints?” I ask Frank. “Where’d they come from? How’d Jessie—” I fake a dummy slap at my forehead. “Well, who’s got the video? Charlie. Had to be he made them for her. So now the question is did Jessie tell him why she wanted them? Because if she did—”

  “She did not,” the Cat says. “She has always had a way with Charles, as you know. Without revealing her purpose she was able to persuade him to make the pictures for her. But enough! You are . . . what is the word? . . . masterminds. You understand everything. The only point of importance now is that this girl and my sister are mirror reflections of each other. You can both see that. You have admitted it. And if you had ever heard Sandi speak, you would not be able to distinguish between their voices, believe me. There are millions of twins in the world who are less alike than these two.”

  She raises her beer to her lips, and Frank and I jump at the chance to take a pull off our bottles, swapping a look as we do. She catches the exchange and says, “My dear nephews, I know that their similarity of appearance and voice is likely no more than an incredible coincidence. But will you grant me that it is also possible, possible and nothing more, that this girl is a descendant of my sister?”

  I now know where this is heading and I can tell Frank does, too.

  “Well, ma’am, as you know, possible covers an awful lot of ground,” Frank says. “There are countless things that might be possible but are not at all probable.”

  “Are you saying you do not believe there is any possibility, none at all, that the girl
is related to Sandra?”

  “Well, ma’am, I can’t say there’s no possibility at all. But I don’t think it’s probable.”

  “I see. You don’t believe it’s probable but you think it might be possible?”

  “Ma’am, there’s no way of knowing—”

  “Forgive me for interrupting, Francis, but a simple yes or no will suffice. Do you think it might . . . might be possible they are related?”

  Frank lets out a long breath and half raises his hands in surrender. “Yes, ma’am, it might be.”

  “And you, Rudolf?”

  “I have to agree with Frank, señora.”

  “What exactly is it you agree with?”

  She holds her stare on me, waiting for me to say it.

  “I think it might be possible.”

  She smiles at each of us. “Excellent. So then, because all three of us believe it might be possible that this girl is descended from my sister, I want to see her with my own eyes. If that can be made to happen, if I can simply see her before me and hear her voice, I’ll know if she is or is not descended of Sandi. I’ll know it in my bones. And this is something I must know.”

  There it is.

  She affects a sip from her bottle, allowing us the opportunity to finish off ours.

  “Would you care for another?” she says.

  “No, thank you, señora,” I say. “I’m good.”

  “Me, too, ma’am,” Frank says.

  “Very well then,” she says. “I want you to bring this girl to me. Nothing very difficult, you see? I have already asked Harry McElroy if I could borrow the two of you to locate someone for me and he said yes. He of course asked whom I wanted found and said that Charles would also want to know because he is your operations chief. I said I would not reveal that information to anyone except the two of you, and he did not ask me again, nor will he. He also granted my request that you be permitted to borrow one of his airplanes and a pilot to take you wherever you may need to go. He asks only that you call the airfield this evening and tell them your destination and what time you wish to leave so that they can make a . . . what-do-you-call-it.”