The House of Wolfe Read Free Page A

I cut a few slits in it with a jackknife. Then Eddie takes the bag and the two cut-offs over to the dock and flings it all into the river.
    Charlie gets in the cab with me, and Frank and Eddie climb into the bed, and I drive slowly down a narrow track that snakes into the deeper regions of the grove. This is the darkest part of the Landing even on the brightest day, and tonight it’s so gloomy we can’t see anything but what the headlights show. The wipers swipe hard at the tree drippings. We can see vague orange lights in the windows of Charlie’s piling house as we go by but can’t make out its shape.
    We arrive at a small clearing next to a resaca, which in this part of Texas is what they call an oxbow. There are resacas all over the lower Rio Grande, and the palm grove around the Landing has no fewer than a dozen of all sizes. This one’s called Resaca Mala and is the biggest and most remote in the grove. It’s shaped like a boomerang and we’re near its lower tip and there’s no simpler way to get to any part of it than the one we’ve just come on. The air’s heavier here, the smells riper. The banks are thick with cattail reeds and brush except for a few clearings like this one. I turn off the engine but leave the headlights blazing out over the black water and glaring against a wall of cattails on the opposite bank.
    Charlie and I get out and go around to the back of the truck, and Eddie lets the gate down and we get the bodies out. The only sounds are of us and the massive ringings of frogs.
    I grip the bigger guy by the wrists and Charlie gets him by the ankles and we carry him over to the bank and set him down. I take the hood off him, knot it around a fist-sized rock and toss it in the water, and rinse the blood off my hands. Then we pick him up again and Charlie says, “On three.” We get a good momentum on him with the first two swings and on the third one loft him through the air and he splashes down more than ten feet out, then bobs up spread-eagled in the ripples and floats off a little farther. The frogs have gone mute.
    Frank and Eddie sling the other guy into the water. Even though he’s smaller he doesn’t sail quite as far as the one we tossed, but Frank’s had a creaky shoulder for a few years now.
    The water settles around the floating bodies, and Charlie says, “Cut the lights.”
    I go to the truck and switch off the headlights and the world goes black as blindness.
    We stand motionless and I hear nothing but my own breath. Then the reeds start rustling in different parts of the banks. There are small splashings. Then louder ones. Then the water erupts into a loud and frantic agitation of swashings mixed with hoarse guttural grunts.
    â€œLights,” Charlie says.
    I switch them on and starkly expose the mad churnings of a mob of alligators tearing the bodies apart. Some of them are ten-footers, and Charlie’s seen some around here bigger than that. This resaca has had ­gators in it since our family settled here in the nineteenth century. They’ve always served us well.
    â€œDamn,” Eddie says.
    â€œYeah,” Charlie says. “Let’s go.”
    The water’s still in a thrashing fury as we get in the truck and head back to the Doghouse.
    In the morning there won’t be so much as a bone or a bootlace to be found.
    Now it’s after one o’clock and the four of us are still in the Doghouse. An Irish string band is plunking on the juke. The floor’s cleaned up, and we’ve put the robbers’ vehicle around back—a Ram pickup truck about ten years old. Tomorrow Jesus McGee will come over and check it out. He owns Riverside Motors and Garage over on Main, and he’ll decide whether it’s worth giving the pickup a new VIN, tag, and title and selling it on this side of the river, or if it’d be better to peddle it “as is” to some Mex dealer in Matamoros.
    Charlie had