We tie up next to a trawler rig we know Eddie Gato used for a run to Boca Larga last night. A painter working at its transom by lamplight is putting the finishing touches on the name Gringa and, just below it, “Brownsville.” He’s already restored the true hull numbers. It’s good work in that there’s nothing fresh-looking about it. Frank and I used to do the Boca Larga run, but it became so rote it was starting to get boring, and when Charlie said Eddie wanted it, we said by all means.
The night manager, Dario Benítez, informs us that Captain Harry’s already gone but left word he’d meet us at the Doghouse Cantina. Frank and I get cleaned up and into fresh clothes, but the girls plead tiredness and say they’ll take a pass on the crowd and racket of a Doghouse weekend night, and they head for home in Rayo’s pickup. We hop into Frank’s restored ’68 Mustang GT named “Stevie” and follow a well-graded dirt road through the scrubs to State Highway 4, known locally as the Boca Chica Road. A few miles east, roughly halfway between Brownsville and the sea, we exit onto a sand trail where a low roadside marker reads WOLFE LANDING just above the arrow pointing toward the river and a grove of tall palms mingled with hardwoods hung with Spanish moss. The grove’s an extraordinary geographic incongruity out here, where most of the countryside consists of marsh grass, scrub brush, and mudflats. Once upon a time, however, much of this low stretch of the Rio Grande was lined with palm trees as tall as the masts of the Spanish ships that landed here—Rio de las Palmas, those first Europeans called it. Now the only other local palm grove besides ours is one in Brownsville that’s been a nature preserve for a lot of years. The trail to the Landing is just wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other, and our headlights sweep from one side to the other along the winding route through the high brush before a final eastward curve brings us into the Landing’s glow.
Our ancestors established Wolfe Landing in the early 1890s, and in 1911 they somehow managed to get it chartered as a town, even though to this day it’s no more than a village covering about 60 acres in the middle of the 450-acre grove. Only for a few short periods in the past has the Landing’s population exceeded a hundred residents. The most recent census put the number at seventy-something. It’s a place of perpetual shadows, its air always dank and heavy with the odors of fecund vegetation, its nights loud with frogs and cats and owls. From an airplane, the river all along the border of Cameron County looks like a tangled string, so closely bunched are the serpentine loops and crooks of its meanders, a feature that over time has formed numerous resacas on both sides of the river—what they call “bayous” or “oxbows” in the Deep South and other regions. There are several resacas in the palm grove, and the biggest of them, Resaca Mala, is in the gloomiest and most remote part of the property. It has been home to a small colony of alligators since the first Wolfes settled the place, though nobody knows about them except for a few of us in the shade trade. Charlie’s house is the only one back in there.
All of the Landing’s streets and trails are narrow and packed with crushed shell except for Main Street and Gator Lane, which are paved with tar and gravel. The trail off the highway melds into Main Street, on which stands the community’s only stone building—the single-story town hall, comprising the mayor’s office, the police department, and a two-cell jail. Charlie Fortune is both Wolfe Landing’s mayor—now many times reelected—and the chief of its police force, which at present consists of only himself and has never had more than one deputy. Also on Main are the Republic Arms gun shop and shooting range, Mario’s Grocery, Riverside Motors & Garage, Get Screwed Hardware, and Lolita’s, a little place that sells secondhand clothes. Main ends at a trail that curves northward past a couple of piling homes—one of them Frank’s, the other mine—and up into the grove’s higher ground, where you’ll find the graveyard and main residential area, composed of a scattering of cabins and mobile homes. Many of the Landing’s inhabitants are in the employ of Charlie Fortune in one way or another, while others operate businesses of their own but only with his approval.
Branching off Main, just opposite the Republic Arms, is Gator Lane. It runs straight to the river and ends at the Doghouse Cantina, with Big Joe’s Bait & Tackle store just across the lane. Big Joe is Joseph Stilder, who showed up last year in a banged-up old Buick with expired New York plates, saw the FOR SALE sign in the store window, gave the place a quick look-over, and bought it from Charlie for cash. He’s a burly guy with thick white hair and could be anywhere from fifty to seventy. Highly sociable dude and a talented teller of tales, a much-revered gift in a community where even skillfully wrought bullshit is highly prized. Like almost everybody else who lives here, he’s not big on personal disclosure, but he became a hell of a good bartender somewhere along the line and is always willing to fill in at the Doghouse. He’s also a voracious reader, and in addition to everything you might expect to find in a bait-and-tackle store, the place sells used books—fiction, histories, travel guides, sex manuals, name it. People would be surprised at the number of readers in the Landing, and they much appreciate Big Joe’s sideline.
The Doghouse is owned by Charlie Fortune and is the largest building in the village. Its short-order grill serves breakfast, lunch, and supper, and its spacious bar fronts a dance floor flanked by dining booths along three walls. There’s a side room with pool tables, and the office in the rear is the base of operations from which Charlie runs the shade trade—a fact of course known solely to those of us in the trade. The only Wolfes who live at the Landing are Charlie, Frank, me, and a cousin named Jimmy Quick, who manages the Republic Arms, also owned by Charlie. Jessie and Rayo live at the beach, way back in the dunes, in a stilt house they rent from Captain Harry. The rest of the family lives “in town,” which to everyone in the Landing means Brownsville—or, as Frank likes to refer to it, the Paris of Cameron County. Big Joe once heard him call it that and he said that was why he had decided to settle here. He’d always wanted to live in Paris.
As on every Saturday evening the Doghouse parking lot is jammed. Most of the vehicles belong to Brownsville regulars who come out every weekend for the supper specials of seafood gumbo on Friday night and barbecued ribs on Saturday. During the week Charlie will work the grill at the end of the back bar for about two hours every morning and then for another hour around midday. He’s a superb short-order cook and sandwich maker. The backroom kitchen he mostly leaves to Concha and Juana, a mother-daughter team that can handily accommodate the Friday night crowd by making large kettles of gumbo well ahead of the supper hour. But grilling the Saturday ribs is a nonstop task, and Charlie always assists them with it. There aren’t any waitresses. You pay for your order at the bar and receive a card with a number, which you take to the little kitchen window at the end of the bar and give to Charlie or one of the other cooks, then sit and wait for the number to be called. Signs in each booth say CLEAN YOUR TABLE, and the big garbage barrels along the walls are labeled either NON-POOD or SCRAPS. Charlie employs a balding graybeard known only as the Professor to keep an eye out for patrons who neglect to bus their table or who empty their trays into the wrong barrel. To commit either of those transgressions is to get barred from the Doghouse for a month. Runs a tight joint, Charlie does. Every Sunday afternoon a couple of us will load the weekend SCRAPS barrels into a truck and take them to Resaca Mala and feed them to the gators. Those brutes have long been useful for disposing of all sorts of organic matter.
The place is boisterous, and the ceiling fans are whirling with minor effect against the concentration of body heat. The dining booths are full, and at the bar every stool is taken and the spaces between them packed with standees, keeping the weekend trio of barmaids on their toes. Even though the jukebox is turned way up against the laughter and loud conversation, Charlie’s kitchen bellow of “Eighty-two and eighty-three!” carries through the din and a guy scoots out of a booth and over to the window to collect his ready plastic plates of ribs.
The Doghouse juke is renowned for the variety of its musical selections. It holds everything from Tex Ritter to Sinatra to Elvis to Los Tigres del Norte. About a third of its content, though, is “swing music,”1930s and ’40s big band tunes by Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman