The Bones of Wolfe. James Carlos Blake

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      Hell, he’s just a dumb shit who thinks whatever they paid him was worth it. The big question is who they are, but the pressing question is where he is. I figure hiding out with a relative, a pal, a woman, somebody. Thinking to hole up till things blow over. It’s what all the stupid ones do. Don’t understand some things never blow over.

      So what are we doing? Rodrigo says.

      I’ve alerted our intelligence people. Gave them the full jacket on him. They’ve put spiders out everywhere. We’ll find him.

      Has to be fast, brother.

      I know, Mateo says.

      Rodrigo calls Charlie Fortune to relay what he’s learned.

RUDY

      It’s a pleasant Saturday afternoon on the Gulf. We’re bearing south along the Texas coast, about a mile and a half off Padre Island. The sky is bright and nearly cloudless. On the distant eastern horizon a freighter is trailing a thin plume of dark smoke. There’s no other vessel in view except a small boat a quarter mile ahead of us and off to starboard.

      My brother, Frank, and I are on the bridge of the Salty Girl, a thirty-five-foot customized sportfisher belonging to one of our uncles, Harry Morgan Wolfe, who normally uses it for fishing charters, but it sometimes serves other purposes as well. Frank’s at the wheel and I’m astraddle the swivel stool beside him.

      Out on the foredeck, Rayo Luna and Jessie Juliet are lying side by side on their tummies, sunning their exquisite butts in string bikinis and talking about God knows what. Thick as thieves, those two—Rayo of the caramel skin and short black shag, Jessie a tanned strawberry blonde, her long hair loosely knotted in a bunch at the back of her head. They know we’re enjoying the view and that our pleasure isn’t hindered a bit by the fact they’re our cousins. Like Frank and me, Jessie is part of our family’s Texas side and is only a couple of branches removed from us. Rayo’s from the Mexico City half of the family, which originated from the same paternal root and is also surnamed Wolfe, but it places her further out from us on the genealogical tree. For the fun of it we sometimes refer to the two sides of the family in unison as the House of Wolfe. Over the generations, the Mexican Wolfes acquired a touch of mestizo strain through marriage, and most of them have the same light brown complexion and black hair as Rayo. In contrast, we on the Texas side of the house largely reflect the original family’s Anglo-Irish origin, almost all of us fair-haired and light-skinned. Frank and I are the only American Wolfes with a wee drop of mestizo blood, gained by way of a grandaunt whose father was Rodolfo Fierro, Pancho Villa’s right-hand man, and for whom I am first-named and Frank middle-named. For whatever reason, though, Frank tans more readily and darkly than I do, and given his black hair and bandido mustache, when nut-brown in high summer he bears a strong likeness to the Fierro we’ve seen in historical photos. The rest of the Texas clan could be taken for typical natives anywhere in Western Europe.

      Rayo hollers, “Look!” and points at a bounding bunch of dolphins that’s surfaced on the port side and is keeping pace with the boat. Frank and I and Jessie grew up around here and have been familiar with boats and the sea since we were children, but Rayo had never even been to a seacoast before she made her first visit here eleven years ago when she and Jessie were sixteen. She grew to love the beach even more during her years at the University of Miami, but ski boats and day sailers were the only kinds of watercraft she was familiar with until she came to live with us two years ago and we took her out on deepwater boats. By now she must’ve seen dolphins on dozens of occasions, and she still gets excited as a kid every time. She still marvels at everything about the sea.

      “You know what?” she says, looking up at me and Frank. “I been thinking about how great it’d be to live on this boat. Never go ashore for anything but supplies, a little barhopping and dancing.”

      “Well, you better give it plenty of thought before you take up a cruising life,” Frank says. “There’s an old saying—it’s better to be on shore wishing you were at sea than it is to be at sea wishing you were on shore. Lot of downsides to boat life,”

      “There are a lot of downsides to any life,” Jessie says.

      “Such bleak perspective from one so young and fair,” Frank says in the professorial mode he at times assumes for the fun of it and has enjoyed doing since we were in college. The truth is he could’ve been a professor. “I suppose,” he says, “it stems from a frequency of journalistic exposure to a surfeit of human woe.”

      Jessie’s a reporter for the local paper. She makes a face at him.

      “Actually, some good arguments can be made for boat living,” I say, “and the best of them was made by the Phoenicians. They believed that no day spent on the ocean was deducted from a man’s life.”

      “What about for a woman?” Rayo says.

      “They didn’t say.”

      “Of course not,” she says, tossing her head in disgust.

      “Well, I’ll tell you something, Rudy boy,” Jessie says, pointing at me. “Back in the Middle Ages it was widely believed that every time a man had sex it shortened his life by a day. And they didn’t say anything about a woman, either!”

      “Yeah!” Rayo says. She and Jessie trade high fives.

      “Well now, that’s just rank nonsense,” Frank says. “Because if it were true, I would’ve been dead a long time ago!”

      The girls whoop. “Listen to him!” Jessie says. “Frankie Casanova. Sex probably hasn’t taken two weeks off his life!”

      “Unless self-abuse counts,” Rayo says. “In that case he could kick the bucket any minute.”

      They laugh it up some more.

      “Self-abuse?” Franks says in an injured tone.

      “Spanking the monkey, waxing the tent pole, shaking hands with the bishop,” Rayo says. “All those cutesy clever phrases guys have for it.”

      “Massaging the midget!” Jessie adds. “Strangling Mister Johnson!”

      Those really get them howling, and Frank and I can’t help grinning. They can always give as good as they get.

      “I must say, brother,” Frank loudly declares, “I am aghast to hear this sort of talk from women of allegedly proper upbringing.”

      “Words cannot describe the depth of my own distress,” I say.

      “Yeah, yeah,” Rayo says. “Listen, if I were you boys I’d play it safe from now on and never have sex, not even with just yourself, except on a boat.”

      She gives me an exaggerated wink, then laughs when I point my forefinger at her and flick my thumb like I’m shooting her. Ever since she’s come to live with us, she and I have had some lovely times together, but she’s made it abundantly clear she’s not my “girlfriend,” a word she enunciates like it’s been soaked in sour milk. What she and I are, she’s also made quite clear, is good-buddy distant cousins who like to get it on with each other. Quote, unquote. She’s like that. Direct as an arrow. At the University of Miami she got her degree in theater arts and lettered in track, tennis, and swimming—and СКАЧАТЬ