Axel Prince Wolfe was three years old when his mother died giving birth to his brother, Charlie Fortune. His sister, Andrea Marie, was two. Their father, Harry McElroy Wolfe, was only a few years out of law school but already the main criminal defense attorney at Wolfe Associates, the family law firm in Brownsville, Texas.
In addition to their practice of law since the early twentieth century, the Wolfes have conducted a variety of illicit enterprises under the collective name of the “shade trade,” the main enterprise of which has always been gunrunning, the bulk of it to their Mexican relatives, also named Wolfe and concentrated in Mexico City. For their part, the Mexican Wolfes operate a small and highly secretive cartel of their own, Los Jaguaros, which chiefly sells guns and information of all sorts to other cartels.
By family rule, any Wolfe who aspires to be part of the shade trade must first earn a college degree, which can be in any major except physical education or anything that ends in “Studies.” The exception of the “Studies” major is of much more recent vintage than the college requirement itself, which has been in force since the 1930s and is without dispensation. The rationale behind the rule is not only that higher education is a valuable asset in itself—no less so to the criminally inclined than to the legally minded—but also that, in the process of earning the degree, one might stumble onto one’s true calling.
Once you reach the age of sixteen, you can, if you wish, spend your high school summers learning the ins and outs of the shade trade’s main components, but you cannot take an active role in any actual undertaking. You can learn about gunrunning and other forms of smuggling, about document forgery, about finding people who are lost or in hiding or in captivity. There are any number of specializations you can concentrate on, and you also receive training in the arts of self-defense, such arts of course being equally useful for persuasive or retributive purpose.
From the time he first learned of the shade trade, Axel knew it was the career for him. His father, however, had a greater expectation of him, namely that he go to law school and then join Wolfe Associates. Still, because Harry Mack believed that the more one knew about criminal ways the better equipped one was for the practice of criminal law, he was not opposed to Axel’s learning as much as he could during his high school summers about shade trade operations. To avoid argument, Axel agreed to go to law school after getting his bachelor’s degree, but in truth he intended to renege as soon as he got the BA and was eligible for the shade trade, regardless of his father’s opposition.
His closest bond was with his brother. Axel taught Charlie how to fight, sail, play baseball, fish, shoot, drive a car. The spring Axel graduated from high school, Charlie turned fourteen, and as a birthday present to him, Axel persuaded a companionable girlfriend named Mickey to introduce him to the delights of sex. The exuberant event took place in Mickey’s bedroom, and when they at last rejoined Axel in the kitchen, Charlie was beaming and Mickey affecting a glazed-eyed stagger that got a laugh from both brothers. They drank celebratory beers deep into the evening and got happily drunk, another first for Charlie, who couldn’t stop staring at Mickey in adoration. At a later hour that night he asked her to marry him as soon as he graduated from high school, in another three years. She giggled in response and Charlie looked so stricken that Axel roared with laughter and fell over backward in his chair. Which made Mickey laugh so hard she snorted beer out of her nose. Which made Charlie laugh so hard he got a case of hiccups that took forever to get under control, and every time it seemed like it was, he’d suddenly hic and they’d all bust out howling again.
It was obvious to Mickey that Charlie venerated his brother. She noted his emulation of Axel’s walk, his two-finger grip on a longneck, his mode of sitting with the chair tipped on its rear legs. “That kid,” she once remarked to Axel, “would wear a dead rat for a hat if you did. Please don’t ever tell him to kill me, because he’d do it without even asking why.”