“You know what?” she says, looking up at me and Frank. “I been thinking about how great it’d be to live on this boat. Never go ashore for anything but supplies, a little barhopping and dancing.”
“Well, you better give it plenty of thought before you take up a cruising life,” Frank says. “There’s an old saying—it’s better to be on shore wishing you were at sea than it is to be at sea wishing you were on shore. Lot of downsides to boat life,”
“There are a lot of downsides to any life,” Jessie says.
“Such bleak perspective from one so young and fair,” Frank says in the professorial mode he at times assumes for the fun of it and has enjoyed doing since we were in college. The truth is he could’ve been a professor. “I suppose,” he says, “it stems from a frequency of journalistic exposure to a surfeit of human woe.”
Jessie’s a reporter for the local paper. She makes a face at him.
“Actually, some good arguments can be made for boat living,” I say, “and the best of them was made by the Phoenicians. They believed that no day spent on the ocean was deducted from a man’s life.”
“What about for a woman?” Rayo says.
“They didn’t say.”
“Of course not,” she says, tossing her head in disgust.
“Well, I’ll tell you something, Rudy boy,” Jessie says, pointing at me. “Back in the Middle Ages it was widely believed that every time a man had sex it shortened his life by a day. And they didn’t say anything about a woman, either!”
“Yeah!” Rayo says. She and Jessie trade high fives.
“Well now, that’s just rank nonsense,” Frank says. “Because if it were true, I would’ve been dead a long time ago!”
The girls whoop. “Listen to him!” Jessie says. “Frankie Casanova. Sex probably hasn’t taken two weeks off his life!”
“Unless self-abuse counts,” Rayo says. “In that case he could kick the bucket any minute.”
They laugh it up some more.
“Self-abuse?” Franks says in an injured tone.
“Spanking the monkey, waxing the tent pole, shaking hands with the bishop,” Rayo says. “All those cutesy clever phrases guys have for it.”
“Massaging the midget!” Jessie adds. “Strangling Mister Johnson!”
Those really get them howling, and Frank and I can’t help grinning. They can always give as good as they get.
“I must say, brother,” Frank loudly declares, “I am aghast to hear this sort of talk from women of allegedly proper upbringing.”
“Words cannot describe the depth of my own distress,” I say.
“Yeah, yeah,” Rayo says. “Listen, if I were you boys I’d play it safe from now on and never have sex, not even with just yourself, except on a boat.”
She gives me an exaggerated wink, then laughs when I point my forefinger at her and flick my thumb like I’m shooting her. Ever since she’s come to live with us, she and I have had some lovely times together, but she’s made it abundantly clear she’s not my “girlfriend,” a word she enunciates like it’s been soaked in sour milk. What she and I are, she’s also made quite clear, is good-buddy distant cousins who like to get it on with each other. Quote, unquote. She’s like that. Direct as an arrow. At the University of Miami she got her degree in theater arts and lettered in track, tennis, and swimming—and was a regional collegiate swim champ. When she went back to Mexico she got into stunt work in movies and TV. Some of the stunts she’s done are unreal, but the worst she’s ever been hurt in any of the “bits,” as she calls them, was a sprained thumb. One Sunday morning we were strolling by a schoolyard playground and she jumped the fence and hopped up on a set of monkey bars and went through a workout routine worthy of a spot in the Olympics. She was wearing a loose short skirt, and it wasn’t the first time she’d simultaneously shown me her gymnastic skills and her scanty underwear. She once said she was almost ashamed of herself for teasing me like that, because, as she put it, “It’s so girly.” From up in the wheelhouse, her so-called tramp stamp—a little red tattoo inscription just above the thong strap and between her sacral dimples—is scarcely discernible, but I’ve many a time read it up close. FACTA NON VERBA.
We’re on our way home from Louisiana, where we delivered two men and a woman, all three using the name Aguirre, and perhaps they were truly related, we didn’t ask. We had been contacted about them by our Mexico City relations, our usual source of clients in desperate need of a stealthy exit from Mexico and a new identity in the States. They sent us the necessary photos and pertinent physical data, then kept the Aguirres in a safe house down there while we arranged their relocation. Two weeks later when the Aguirres were transferred to the Salty Girl from a boat we rendezvoused with just a few miles off the Tamaulipas coast, we presented each of them with an American birth certificate, a duly issued Social Security card to match it, and a bona fide Texas driver’s license showing the address of a rooming house we own in Harlingen. At a Mississippi River boatyard a few days later and some thirty miles below New Orleans, we turned them over to some associates—kinfolk of ours named Youngblood—who escorted them the rest of the way to their new home. Because they had expressed a desire to live in a beachside community, a spacious apartment had been leased for them in Panama City, Florida.
A body run is what we call that sort of smuggle. Rayo Luna has been on a few of them with us before, all of them to Corpus Christi, Galveston, or Houston. She thinks they’re pretty dull and they usually are. But when she heard we were making a run up near New Orleans and would be spending the night there, she asked if she could come along, and when we said okay, she asked if Jessie could come, too. Neither of them had been to New Orleans since Mardi Gras in their senior year of college. But unlike Rayo, Jessie isn’t in our line of work and has never wanted to be, and Frank and I make it a rule not to take anyone on a run who isn’t in the trade. We don’t need anything more than the cargo to safeguard or worry about. Then again, a body run is the least likely sort to encounter trouble, and we knew that even if things should for any reason get a little dicey, Jessie would be no liability. Like the rest of us she learned how to use a gun when she was a kid, and a couple of years ago down in Mexico City she proved beyond question she can handle herself pretty well. So we made an exception and took both of them along, and after the conclusion of business in the boatyard we treated them to a night in the French Quarter before starting for home the next morning.
All in all, it was a satisfying trip.
It’s what we do, we Wolfes: we smuggle. Mostly into and out of Mexico, now and then Cuba or Central America. Been doing it for over a hundred years, ever since we settled in Brownsville, Texas, which is on the Rio Grande, about twenty-five miles upriver from the Gulf. We began by smuggling booze from Mexico into the States, then started running guns down there before the outbreak of the Revolution. During Prohibition we ran more booze than ever until repeal killed that gold-egg goose. Over the generations we’ve expanded into high-tech military gear and today we carry everything from infrared and thermal-imaging optical instruments to portable radar units to a wide range of explosive-device components. The only things we don’t smuggle are drugs and wetbacks. The drug biz is un-arguably a money river, but it attracts too many crazies. Smuggling is chancy enough without having