A crewman passes out beers to all of us. Mateo sits against the cabin wall with us, watching Rayo and Kitty, huddled under a blanket to their chins, sipping their beers and gabbing about who knows what. He excuses himself and goes to them, says something that makes them laugh, then goes over to talk with Disco and Raul.
Frank tells me in a low voice that he introduced Kitty to Mateo by her first name only and was relieved when Mateo didn’t address her as Miss McCabe and initiate confusion. Then says he supposes the bag of money went down with the boat.
“All the way down would be a sound supposition,” I say. “I shoulda kept it on me.”
“Or I shoulda kept it on me. Mateo’s shipment, his money. I told him we lost it and he shrugged it off. Said the loss of cash now and again is a hazard of the trade and for us to forget it. Some guy.”
“Got that right,” I say. “And I don’t think we should worry about it, either. I think we just send him the money as soon as we get home.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
The sun’s high over the mountains when the chopper lands at the Sonoran ranch airfield. There’s a twin-engine business jet out on the runway. Mateo asks if we’d like to wash up and change clothes, have something to eat, and rest a bit before taking off for Matamoros, and we all say yes.
The afternoon is sunny when we go out to the plane, the girls laughing at the ill-fitting jeans and baggy men’s shirts they’re wearing, the floppy sneakers on their feet. Mateo tells me and Frank we’ll land at a ranch airstrip just outside Matamoros, then be driven over into Brownsville. From there we can make our own arrangements to take the girl to her father in Houston.
At the steps up to the plane, he hugs each of us good-bye, giving the first hug to Kitty, then watching her go up the steps. “I knew she was a beauty,” he says. We exchange abrazos with him and go aboard.
Within minutes of takeoff I fall asleep, Frank in the seat beside me, Rayo and Kitty across the aisle. When I wake, my watch tells me we’re more than midway through the flight. Frank and Rayo aren’t in their seats, and Kitty’s curled up asleep in the seats she and Rayo occupied. I look aft and see them in the rearmost row, conversing across the aisle. I go back there to join them. They’ve been discussing how we should tell Kitty we’re not taking her to Dallas to sign a Starlight contract. We work up a story.
We’re forty minutes from Matamoros when Kitty awakens and sits up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, blinking at the three of us now sitting in the aisle seats nearest her. “We almost there?” she says.
“Almost,” Rayo says.
“I never in the world thought I’d go to Dallas,” she says. “I hear it’s really big.”
“Actually, sugar, we’re not going to Dallas after all,” Rayo says. “We just spoke to the Starlight people on the cockpit radio and found out the financial deal for Throne of Eros fell apart. Starlight tried its best to save the project, but nothing doing. That deal’s dead as stone. We’re going to Brownsville.”
Kitty’s mouth tightens. “God damn it! I knew it was too good to be true. That money was . . . ah, damn.”
“Well now, easy there, girl, because here’s the good news,” Rayo says. “Even though Starlight had to pull the plug on the movie, it’s honoring its promise to you about the money. You’ll get the twenty grand.”
“I will? You kiddin’ me?”
“Nope,” Frank says. “Starlight’s good about honoring its pledges.”
“I can’t believe it,” Kitty says.
“That doesn’t make it any less true,” Rayo says.
The money is of course coming from the three of us, but why tell the kid and have to explain more than we’d care to? Frank and I will each pony up $6,666.66. Rayo’s share is two cents more because it was her idea we go ahead and pay her. “You should’ve seen her face when I told her she was getting twenty for the movie,” she’d told us. “She saw it as her ticket out. Ticket to what, I don’t know, but what’s it matter? That’s why she came with us. No matter what Aunt Cat decides about her, I think we ought to give the kid the money.”
Frank and I said okay.
“You say we’re going where . . . Brownsville?” Kitty says. “How come we’re going there? Is it farther than Dallas?”
“No, it’s a lot closer and we’ll be there shortly,” Rayo says. “It’s where we live. We figure you can rest there awhile, think things over till you decide what you’d like to do, now you’ll have some money to work with. Plus, we’d like you to meet our cousin Jessie and our Aunt Catalina. We’ll be seeing them tonight.”
“Cool.”
Rayo grins back at her. “So happens we think you’re pretty cool. We’d like to know more about you.”
“Really? What do you wanna know?”
“Oh, where you’re from, about your family, how you came to meet Lance Furman. If you don’t mind telling.”
“I don’t mind. Not really a whole lot to tell, though.”
Her name, she tells us, is Alejandra Katrina Harris. Everybody at school called her Allie. She was an only child, born and raised in Salinas, California, the only place she ever lived until she was sixteen. Her mother was Tina Mendoza—she was born in California, too, and grew up all over the San Joaquin Valley—and her daddy was Jimmy Jack Harris, a car mechanic from Louisiana. Allie was six when he deserted them. Her mother burned all his pictures and hardly ever spoke about him again and never nicely. After he left, her mother always had to work at two jobs to support them in their little rented house at the edge of town. She mostly cashiered at grocery stores and fast-food places, and it helped that she could speak Spanish. She had learned it from her mom, and she taught Allie to speak it, too. It came in handy for making friends with the Mexican kids in the neighborhood and at school. Allie sometimes asked about her mother’s family, but Tina didn’t like to talk about it and never did. What she liked was to have a good time with men. One night she and some fella were coming back from a good time in Watsonville and he ran off the road at pretty high speed and hit a tree and they were both killed. Allie was sixteen and there was only seventy-odd dollars in her mother’s bank account, so for the rest of that school year she lived at the homes of different friends. Some of the other kids started calling her Gypsy because of it and she came to like the name and sometimes used it. She’d lost her virginity the year before and now started fooling around so much she pretty soon got herself a reputation but didn’t care. Her best friend was Connie Amado, who did a lot of fooling around, too. One day she told Connie about this Los Angeles movie agent she’d read about online. His specialty was in getting pretty girls good-paying acting jobs in sex movies, and from there some of them went on to being in real movies like you can see in mall theaters and on HBO. She thought they ought to go to LA and see if that agent could get them started, too, and Connie said okay. But the day before they were going to leave, Connie backed out, saying she just couldn’t do it. So Allie went to Los Angeles by herself and found the agent and told him she was Katie Moore from Fresno and wanted to be in the movies. He explained about having to start out in porn, and she said that was all right with her. He sent her to a doctor to get a full exam, then had a photographer take a bunch of pictures of her, some dressed, some bare-assed, and next thing she knew, she was in Arizona, making The Love Tutors with Lance Furman, and was calling herself Kitty Quick.
“I guess you pretty much know the rest,” she says.
“Speaking of Kitty,” Rayo says. “What name you want to go by with us? Kitty? Alejandra? Allie? Gypsy? Something else?”
“You know, I really do like Kitty. It’s why I chose it when I could be somebody new. You think it’s maybe too slutty on account of I used it in sex movies?”
Rayo chuckles. “No, baby, I don’t. You want to be Kitty, Kitty it is.”
“I like it myself,” I say. Frank nods. Kitty beams.
We land at the Matamoros ranch airstrip in the rising darkness of early evening. There’s a car waiting for us, and we have the driver take us across the river and out to the Landing, where the girls get in Rayo’s truck and head off to the beach house to clean up and change clothes and round up Jessie. We all know Catalina would never forgive us if we wait until tomorrow to tell her we’ve got Kitty. She’s going to want to see her tonight.
When I come out of the shower, Frank tells me he’s given Catalina the news and asked when she’d like to see the girl, and she said right now would be satisfactory. “Not a hooray or a thank-you or is everyone all right,” Frank says. “Just, ‘Right now would be satisfactory, Francis.’”
Frank told her the girls were getting ready and we’d be there in about an hour, then called Rayo. He could hear Jessie and Kitty talking and laughing in the background like they were college roommates.
Catalina’s porch is cast in the amber glow of the overhead light. A note taped to the front door informs us the maids have been given the night off to visit relatives in Matamoros and won’t return until tomorrow. It invites us to enter, make ourselves at home, feel free to dance, and help ourselves to the beer.
The furniture has been pushed to the walls to provide a small dance floor. On a table in a corner of the living room is a big plastic tub of beer and soda pop on ice, and next to it is Catalina’s old phonograph—at the moment playing Artie Shaw’s rendition of “Stardust” at low volume. Like Frank and me and Charlie, she loves the music of the jazz age and big band era, which she’d come to relish at the height of its popularity in the twenties, thirties, and forties.
“Stardust” ends and “Temptation” starts playing. Frank beckons Jessie for a dance, and I dance with both Rayo and Kitty at the same time, an arm around each of them, all three of us laughing in our efforts not to step on each other’s feet. Not until the number ends and we hear her applauding do we become aware of Catalina watching us all from the hallway entry, wearing a white half-sleeved dress that very much becomes her.
“I see we have a special guest,” she says, smiling at Kitty, whose own smile at that moment is the shyest of hers I’ve seen.
Frank steers her to Catalina and introduces them to each other as “our dear friend Kitty Harris” and “our dear Aunt Catalina.” Aunt Cat says she’s delighted to make her acquaintance. They hug closely and I see Catalina whispering in her ear. Kitty looks up at her and nods. Catalina tells us they’re going to have a private conversation in another room and will return shortly. In the meantime, we’re to help ourselves to the beer, keep the music playing, and dance, dance, dance.
As soon as she and Kitty disappear down the hall, Frank turns to me and Rayo and Jessie and asks what we think. We all shrug.
“Yeah,” Frank says. “Me, too.”
We’ve gone through maybe a dozen numbers, Frank and I trading off on Rayo and Jessie as partners on every other one, all of us now and then pausing to have a pull or two off a bottle of beer, and we’ve just put on a Glenn Miller record when Cat and Kitty return. Catalina gestures at the player, and I go over and take the tone arm off the record and turn off the phonograph.
“My dear people,” she says, “this young lady and I have had a very interesting conversation whose purpose is no secret to any of you. I had told you that if I could see her in person, hear her voice directly, and ask a few questions of her, I would know—know in my bones, the surest means of knowing of which I am capable—if she is or is not a descendant of my sister, Sandra. And I now know beyond all doubt that she is not.”
We all cut looks at each other.
“However,” she says, “having heard her life story to date and her account of a harrowing adventure she shared with you in Mexico, I believe that, although not of my birth family’s blood, she is certainly of our Wolfe family’s character. Its essence. Its bone, if you will. I have asked if she would like to become a member of our family and she has said yes. Now I ask that you welcome her into it, this young woman who wishes to assume the name Kitty Alejandra Wolfe. And so shall it become officially.”
Catalina’s smile is small and pleased, Kitty’s smile wide in spite of the tears she wipes from her cheeks. The rest of us grin like lunatics.
And just like that it’s done. We hug and kiss Kitty, laughing with her, she and Jessie and Rayo crying and laughing at the same time.
Frank starts the Glenn Miller record and “Moonlight Serenade” fills the room. Catalina says Miller has always been her favorite dance musician, and Frank says that’s why he put him on the player. He gives her a gentlemanly bow and asks if he may have the pleasure. She responds with a half curtsy and says it would no less be her pleasure. Then Frank and the oldest person in the world are dancing. And though in deference to her years he keeps their footwork to a minimum and they mostly sway in place, she is no less graceful for that or, as evidenced in her radiant smile, any less exhilarated. As Rayo and I foxtrot around the floor, Jessie bows to Kitty and asks her for a dance, and Kitty laughs and says of course, and then they’re at it, too. When that number draws to a close, the marvelous opening notes of “In the Mood” come welling from the speaker, and Frank and Jessie and Rayo and I really start swinging. Kitty watches us avidly and asks Catalina what kind of dance we’re doing. Rayo steps away from me and gestures for the kid to assume her place. I teach her the basic swing steps, and by the end of the number she’s an ace. Then “String of Pearls” is playing, and I’m taking a careful turn with Catalina, and Frank’s dancing with Jessie, and Rayo and Kitty are spinning each other around with some fancy improvisational moves of their own.
And so does it go, the laughter and the chatter and the beer and the music and the dancing, dancing, dancing, deep into the night.