The Bones of Wolfe

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James Carlos Blake. The Bones of Wolfe

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By James Carlos Blake

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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 and their ilk, even though Charlie and Frank and I and the Professor are just about the only ones who ever play it. Actually, the dances of that era are a lot of fun. Our mother—who had learned them from her mother—taught Frank and me how to do the Lindy Hop, fox-trot, jitterbug, and other such dances when we were still in grammar school, and it’s a rare girl who doesn’t get a kick out of learning them from us. Sometimes a patron will complain about all the big band stuff, but Charlie says anybody who doesn’t want to hear it can go somewhere else. A guy once told him he should put some hip-hop in the juke, and Charlie said he’d sooner hire an idiot child to sit in the corner and bang pots and pans together.

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