The Bones of Wolfe. James Carlos Blake

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      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 their 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.”

      “Sex dolls?” Lila says as she sets our beers on the counter. “That’s what I love best about this place, the highbrow conversation.” She goes off to attend to other customers, pert ass and ponytail swinging.

      Talking just loud enough for us to hear, Eddie tells us that Alberto Delmonte and his crew were bushwhacked last night as they were heading back on the Boca Larga trail. “Every man of them dead and the load jacked,” Eddie says. “Charlie told me as soon as I got back. He got it from Rigo himself.”

      “We know who did it?” Frank says.

      “Not yet. Charlie said don’t discuss it out here, but I thought you oughta at least know. He wants to see us all in the office after closing.”