The Ways of Wolfe

  Rayo says she can handle the rest of it by herself and suggests that Jessie go off a ways and wait. But Jessie says, “No. I can do it. It isn’t him anymore, like you said. I know it isn’t.”

  “Okay, get the pole.”

  While Jessie does that, Rayo cuts away the ties holding the blankets around the bodies and then loosens the blankets so that they simply drape them. Jessie returns with the pole, and Rayo sets one end of it against one of the corpses and they both take hold of the other end. “Push!” Rayo says, and they shove forward in concert and launch the body off the bank with enough force to send it bobbing out into the water. They then do the same with the other. As the bodies drift toward the opposite bank, the loosened blankets slip off them and sink and Jessie can’t restrain a small cry. Rayo turns her away, but she wrests free and says, “I can do it!” And remains in place, watching.

  There’s a sudden agitation of reeds on the opposite bank, and then the alligators come crashing out of the shadows. They tear into the corpses in a wild froth, rending flesh, crunching bone, the men’s blood mingling in dark billows, their sundered remains mixing in the bellies of the beasts. Jessie covers her mouth with both hands, but she’s unable to look away from the carnage. Rayo hugs her close.

  It does not take very long, but Jessie refuses to leave until there’s nothing left to see. After a time, the last of the gators vanishes into the reeds and shadows of the other bank, and the water slowly gentles, and then again becomes placid.

  “It’s done, Jess,” Rayo says. “Come on.”

  They get in the Durango and head for home.

  It’s a silent drive until they’re almost to the beach and Jessie says, “I never went to see him. I never wrote to him. So I don’t understand … why did he come?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie,” Rayo says. “I guess he just couldn’t help it. That’s the way with some men. Some people.”

  They will make a pact not to confide to anyone else what they have done, and the rest of the family, like everyone else, will continue to believe that Axel Prince Wolfe was drowned in the Rio Grande rapids while attempting to evade capture after escaping from confinement.

  61

  Raquel and the girls will wait for three fretful days before they report Billy missing. He has never gone away for more than a day without telling her in advance, never, and has never been gone more than a day without calling her. The police will issue a bulletin and promise to keep an eye out, but after another week, and knowing the utter incompetence of the local cops, Raquel will hire private detectives in Matamoros to try to find him, and then engage the services of even more expensive investigators from Monterrey. Both companies will exploit her hope with false reports of possible leads, billing her steadily, until the daughters lose all patience with them and fire both firms and threaten legal action if they submit even one more invoice. Neither the girls nor their mother ever knew the particulars of Señor Calderas’s or Billy Capp’s private enterprises, but none of them are fools and they have always suspected that many of the men’s dealings were of an illegal nature involving dangerous people. Still, they keep hoping for word from him or about him, but when he has been unheard from for six months, the daughters accept that he is dead and put on mourning dress. So, too, their mother, although for the rest of her life—another four years, before she succumbs to breast cancer—she will harbor a secret hope and wake every morning with the thought, This is the day he will return.

  After two weeks without word from or about him, Quino’s only certainty regarding Axel is that he was not captured by police. Had he been, it would have made the news. Cacho bets that he has returned to his family. Quino accepts the bet and sends his best men to Brownsville. Days later they report that Axel Prince Wolfe is not living with any of his family, nor has anyone claimed to have seen him in either Matamoros or Brownsville. Quino and Cacho agree that he is either dead or, for whatever reason, has gone somewhere else and deliberately chosen not to come back.

  Why did he go, you think? Cacho says at the breakfast table.

  Quino shrugs. Something personal, I would suppose.

  Wish he had let us in on it.

  So do I. But as you know, he was one for keeping secrets.

  Cacho nods. Yeah. Had some funny ways. Ran in the family, he told me.