12

After graduation, Billy put off looking for a job so that they could enjoy summer to the fullest before Axel left for the University of Houston. They often went fishing in Axel’s little johnboat in the shallows of the Laguna Madre and always brought in some nice catches. One day Axel accidentally cut his hand cleaning a redfish on a dockside table, and Billy deliberately cut his own hand and placed his elbow on the table with the hand upraised. They grinned and clasped hands in the manner of arm wrestlers, and Billy cried, “Blood brothers!”

They loved to spend time in Wolfe Landing, a riverside village in the midst of a 450-acre palm grove about midway between Brownsville and the Gulf. Founded in the late nineteenth century by the first Wolfes to settle in Texas and duly chartered as a town in 1911, it has rarely had as many as a hundred residents, and the most recent census counted sixty-three. The only street not of dirt is tar-and-gravel Main, which contains a little town hall, Riverside Motors & Garage, Mario’s Grocery, a secondhand-goods store, Get Screwed Hardware, and the Republic Arms gun shop. Where Main Street ends, a wide dirt trail branches northward and winds up into the slightly higher ground containing a cemetery and the mobile homes and wooden cabins of the main residential area. Opposite the Republic Arms is Gator Lane, which runs a short way down to the river, ending at Gringo’s Bait & Tackle and, just across the street from it, the Doghouse Cantina. The Lower Rio Grande abounds with resacas—”resaca” being the local term for an oxbow lake—and there are a number of them in Wolfe Landing. The biggest of them, Resaca Mala, is in the perpetual shadows of the deepest part of the grove and is inhabited by a colony of alligators, generations of which have long served as an extremely effective mode for disposing of Doghouse garbage as well as various other forms of organic remains.

Billy loved the Landing and was tickled to learn that Axel’s much older cousin, Henry James Wolfe, HJ to everyone, was the mayor, the police chief of a department consisting of only himself, and the owner of the Doghouse. He would never know HJ was also chief of the Wolfe shade trade operations. HJ was always glad to see the boys and always let them stay for as long as they wished in one of the unoccupied rental trailers.

On every visit, they would use up a box or two of cartridges at the target range behind the Republic Arms. Billy had never before held a loaded gun, and the first time he fired a round and felt the recoil and saw the bullet’s black hole in the white-paper target was a novel thrill. He found he had a natural feel for handguns and was soon scoring tight-group bull’s-eyes at fifty feet. Axel’s favorite pistol, a 1911 Army Colt .45 semiautomatic, became Billy’s, too. At the Doghouse Cantina they would shoot pool and play the jukebox, flirt with whichever barmaid was on duty, and gorge on the best barbecued ribs in the county. HJ would let them have beer on the house, but never more than one an hour, his prescription for avoiding getting drunk.

On Saturday afternoons they would visit the Arguello sisters, Rosa and Ramona, who lived in a trailer far back in the trees. They were attractive, sweet-natured girls who worked at Mario’s Grocery on weekdays and liked a good time on weekends, and Axel and Billy always arrived at their double-wide with steaks to grill and a cooler of beer. And always, at some point during the night, the boys would give each other a grinning thumbs-up as they passed naked in the dim hallway, swapping bedrooms and giggling girls.

Late that summer, Aunt Jolene had a fatal heart attack while making breakfast. She bequeathed the little house to Billy, who immediately sold it and then rented a furnished room. He told Axel he hoped to get hired as a charter boat mate and didn’t want the responsibility of a house. The night before Axel departed for Houston, they had a few beers at the Doghouse and said they couldn’t wait to get together when he came home for Thanksgiving. Nearly a month later, having received no answer to the two letters he’d written to Billy, Axel phoned the owner of the residence where he was rooming and was told that Billy had abruptly moved out one night almost three weeks before, without word to anyone and a week’s rent in arrears.