8

Billy Capp was a senior-year transfer student from Fort Worth, but Axel didn’t get to know him until they played baseball on the school team. With Axel at short and Billy at second, they were a formidable double-play combination. Billy’s dad, an oil company pilot, was killed in a crash in the Gulf when Billy was three. His mother went to work as a waitress and they lived all over Texas before settling in Fort Worth when Billy was sixteen. When she died of a stroke at the end of his junior year, he moved to Brownsville to live with his widowed and childless aunt Jolene in her little house and finish high school.

The two boys soon became close friends, and Billy confessed to Axel that he’d had run-ins with the police since the age of thirteen. Breaking and entering, theft, possession of stolen property, such as that. It was a real rush, the night-prowling, even though he was caught twice, but his mother’s tearful courtroom pleas and the character testaments of baseball coaches had both times saved him from juvenile detention. As a condition to living under his aunt’s roof, he had promised her he would stay out of trouble. Axel had never committed a crime more serious than street fighting, but the rush Billy spoke of was the sort of sensation he associated with the shade trade, though he said nothing of it to Billy. One of the strictest of Wolfe rules was that you never even hinted at the shade trade to anyone outside the family.

They often double-dated on weekends, Axel usually with a different girl each time but Billy always with Raquel Calderas, a Mexican beauty he’d met at a dance during the annual Charro Days festival. Her family lived on a large estate across the river, just outside of Matamoros, but she attended an elite Catholic school in Brownsville. In addition to the best education she could get close to home, her father wanted her to acquire American friends and further improve her English, so she was living with Brownsville relatives until graduation. Señor Calderas was a major partner in an investment company with branches all over northern Mexico, but it was whispered he had a hand in a number of illicit interests as well. Such rumors of course attached to a number of the most prosperous families along both sides of the Lower Rio Grande, including the Wolfes. Billy had recently confided to Axel that he was crazy about Raquel and believed she liked him a lot, too, even though she wouldn’t let him do anything more than fondle her through her clothes and hadn’t done anything more for him than give him a hand job through his swim trunks once when they were at Boca Chica Beach in water to their necks. He called her Rocky, and she delighted in the nickname, sometimes putting up her fists and making awkward feints and jabs at him. He took her to the graduation dance at the school gym, doubling with Axel and his date, and later that evening, after they took the girls home, they bought a six-pack and drank it on Aunt Jolene’s porch, talking quietly about how great it was to be done with high school. They were down to the last two beers when Billy told him that during the dance he and Raquel had gone outside to do a little smooching and he’d told her he loved her and she said she loved him too, which was the greatest thing he’d ever heard. He asked her to marry him, but she said she couldn’t. She had promised her father she would not get married or even engaged until after she graduated from college—she had already been accepted by St. Edward’s University in Austin—and she had to honor the promise. They’d neither one said much on the way home, but when he walked her to her door she gave him the best kiss of his life.

“Aw, man,” Axel said. “She’s really beautiful and sweet and I know how special she is, but why would you want to get married? She’s right. She’s too young. So are you and me. We got a lot of beautiful girls to meet yet, bud, and we oughta sample as many as we can, don’t you reckon? Before we settle down? If we ever do?”

Billy chuckled along with him. “You’re right. What the hell was I thinking?”

They finished the beer and Billy went over to the car with him.

“It’s on account of I got no money, I know that’s why,” he said at the driver’s window as Axel started the engine. “I’ll never have enough for her daddy. Never enough to satisfy him.”

Before Axel could think of what to say, Billy slapped the car roof and said, “Take her easy, amigo,” and headed back to the house.

He would not mention her to Axel again.