Burro Genius

by Victor Villaseñor

  Suddenly, all the things that had made no sense to me were very clear. I mean, here was Jesus hanging on the cross with His Holy Mother praying for him, and here was my own mother just a few feet away, praying and crying as they lowered her son’s body into the ground.

  Tears of joy came to my eyes and I turned and looked across the little valley to the west of us. I’d never realized that the big tall mesa, where I figured that Shep had leaped into the Father Sky to intercept my brother’s Soul, was just across this valley from the cemetery. I smiled. This was so beautiful. My brother Joseph would now be here forever alongside Jesus and Mary, and anytime he wished, he could look from his grave site to the west and see where it was that his dog had intercepted his Soul to guide him back to Heaven. It was easy for me to now understand what my brother had been talking about when he’d said that there was a much larger, grander plan going on than we know nothing about. Jesus and Mary, my mother and Joseph—here they were all together, like familia.

  I got so excited that I wanted to tell my mother about this, but she wouldn’t stop crying long enough for me to tell her.

  Then the burial was over and we began walking back to our cars, when our tía Tota once more told everyone why she’d never wanted children, right in front of Linda and Tencha and me.

  “Having children is terrible!” shouted our aunt, loud enough for everyone to hear. “It’s so painful to bring them into the world, and then it’s so much pain to watch them die before you die! Lupe and I both saw this happen to us in the Revolution over and over again with our beloved mother, so I told Lupe, don’t have children,” said our aunt, crying and crying. “But no, she just wouldn’t listen to me, and now look at her suffering so much!”

  “Carlota!” said our father, glancing at us kids. “Could you please just shut your mouth for once in your PINCHE LIFE!”

  “IT’S YOU MEN WHO SHOULD SHUT YOUR PANTS,” yelled our aunt, “always forcing us to have more and more children when all we want is a little love and kindness!”

  “KINDNESS!” bellowed our dad, grabbing our tía Tota by the throat, “you’ve never had a pinche word of kindness for anyone but yourself—you LOUD-MOUTH STUPID, SELFISH WOMAN! Don’t you see how your words cut Lupe’s heart and hurt our children?”

  “Salvador,” said our mother, pulling our dad off our aunt, “you leave Carlota alone! Even she, in her own way, means well! Please, no more fighting between you two today!”

  Getting home, we found out my mother didn’t have enough silver or crystal to serve everyone, so our tía Tota brought her silver and crystal over from her home to help feed everyone who’d come over after the funeral. I’ll never forget that night, when I was helping to clean the kitchen with her and my cousins Isabela and Loti. My tía Tota took me aside.

  “Look,” she said to me, holding a fork from her set next to my mother’s, “my silverware is bigger, better, and fancier, and more expensive than your mother’s. Just because you live in a great home, don’t you think that the rest of us don’t have fine things. Archie could build me a house bigger than this, and on the beach, too, but he won’t do it, because he’s not a show-off like your abusive father. Lupe should never have had kids!” she added angrily.

  I was stunned. I felt like taking her bigger, more expensive fork and driving it into her belly where the flesh was soft. But I didn’t. I just stood there, listening to her showing me why her silverware was larger and better than my mother’s. After all, maybe she was right and none of us Mexican kids should have ever been born.

  Then, on the seventh day after my brother had passed over, Emilio told me that Joseph and Shep had made it home. “This morning, when I got up, I looked up at the sky and I saw that the morning star was bigger and brighter than I’ve ever seen. This means that your brother and his dog have made it back home to Heaven,” said Emilio. “That’s why God, in His infinite wisdom, has smiled to us, making this Star even brighter.”

  Hearing this, I was sure glad that Shep had spent so much time with me, teaching me how to hunt and see life. I named that star Dog Star. But, when I tried to tell my father and mother about what Rosa and Emilio had told me about Shep running around the house and then intercepting Joseph’s soul to guide him back to Heaven so that my parents could feel better, my dad and mother got angry. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I was saying something to help them.

  “Your mother and I got the finest doctors that money could buy for your brother!” yelled my father at me. “And no stupid old Indian beliefs are going to CREATE DOUBT IN OUR WORD!”

  “But papa,” I said, “I’m not trying to create doubt in your word. I’m just trying to tell you that Joseph and Shep have made it back to Heaven.

  “STOP IT!” he yelled.

  “But papa,” I said, continuing to speak, “please just listen to me, even mama, she has told me that her mother always said that we’re walking stars coming to Earth to do our work, then we return to Heaven to help Papito keep the stars bright. So don’t you see, for Shep to guide Chavaboy’s soul back up to Heaven is only natural,” I added.

  But you would’ve thought I’d said something terrible, because my mother ran out of the room, yelling that she didn’t want to hear anymore!

  “See what you’ve done,” said my father. “Open your eyes. Eh, can’t you see, mijito, your brother is dead! HE’S GONE! THOSE ARE JUST BACKWARD INDIAN SUPERSTITIONS to give people FALSE HOPES! You’re mother is right! We live in this country now! We can’t have all those old ways from Mexico anymore!”

  “But…but I don’t understand? Why not, papa? Even Joseph told me that what is really needed in the world isn’t control or money or new inventions, that what’s needed is—”

  “BECAUSE, DAMNIT!” shouted my father with such power that the cords of his bull neck now came up as big around as ropes, “WE GOT TO KNOW OUR PLACE!”

  Hearing this, my heart leaped! Now I, too, was scared. My very own papa was now telling me the same thing that the kids and principal had told me at school about me needing to know “my place.”

  “So, then, what is our place, papa?” I asked, my heart beat, beat, beating with terror!

  “DAMNIT!” he screamed again, his face twisting with confusion. “I DON’T KNOW!”

  And here, my dad, my hero, the strongest, toughest man in all the world, began crying, too, weeping like a child. Tears came to my eyes. And a cloud came overhead, taking away the sunlight. The day turned cold. And I could see that my brother had been very smart to leave. I wished that I’d gone with him.

  That same day, my mother and father decided to fire Rosa and Emilio, because they said they couldn’t have people on the ranch telling my little sister Linda and me about the old ways of Mexico and undermining their authority.

  Linda and I started crying. We didn’t want Rosa and Emilio to leave. We loved them. They’d become like our second parents. Besides, firing them wouldn’t change anything for me. Because my sister and I had both seen what we’d seen, our brother’s dog Shep had really, really gone crazy-loco with his amor for our brother and then disappeared the morning Joseph died, never to be seen again.

  Our tía Tota could talk all she wanted about her silverware and our parents could talk all they wanted about the best doctors money could buy, but I still knew what I knew: animals had Sacred Souls and we, humans, had to pay close attention to them, so we could then get back into Heaven, with them guiding us.

  BOOK three

  CHAPTER seventeen

  I was CRUSHED! BEAT! Nothing worse could ever happen to me! But then, it was only a few days after my brother Joseph’s death, and I was told by our teacher in front of everyone in my class that I wouldn’t be passing to the fourth grade once again.

  I began to cry. I just couldn’t help it. I was tired, and so beaten down that I now even had trouble breathing. Seeing me cry, our teacher told me not to worry, that this time I wasn’t alone, that Jeffrey, another student, was also not going to pass. I looked at her. What was she
, stupid or constipated, as my dad always said of people who didn’t think straight? Did she really think that it was supposed to make me feel better that someone else was flunking along with me?

  I turned around in my seat to look at Jeffrey and saw how he was taking this announcement. It was strange, I’d never noticed this kid before, but now that we’d both been told that we were going to flunk, I could remember some very interesting things about Jeffrey.

  One day, about a month back, when our teacher had been reading to us about the local Indians, some of the kids had said that they had been so backward that they hadn’t even had the brains to put any windows in their huts so that they could look out. Jeffrey, who was always real quiet, spoke up.

  “They were probably more interested in keeping warm,” he said, “instead of looking out. And besides, because of the local weather, they probably only went inside for sleeping and did all their cooking and eating and living outside.”

  Our teacher, I’ll never forget, looked at Jeffrey as if she’d never seen him before. Then she’d said, “Isn’t it interesting that our second slowest learner in the class is the one to think of this. I guess that maybe there’s a place for all of us.”

  Boy, was I ever shocked that our teacher had called Jeffrey “the second slowest learner” in front of everyone. Hell, I’d never even realized that he was slow. I’d automatically turned to look around, wondering who was the slowest learner of all, and then I noticed that a lot of the kids were looking at me.

  Suddenly, it entered my brain that I was the slowest learner in the class. I’d felt like sliding down in my seat and disappearing. I felt like dying—I felt so ashamed. But then, I heard that little voice deep in the back of my head tell me to remember that the teacher also said that there was maybe a place for all of us. I felt a little better, because maybe this meant that there was a “place” even for me, the slowest learner, and maybe even a place for my dad and mother, too, if we could just find out where this place for Mexicans was, then everything would be okay.

  At recess, after the announcement of Jeffrey and me not passing, I went over to try and befriend him so maybe I could make him feel better, because, after all, I’d already flunked once, so I had a lot of flunking experience.

  But when I approached Jeffrey, I saw that he didn’t want to be seen with me. In fact, he quickly glanced around and moved away from me. I didn’t trail after him. I knew what was going on. He was still trying to fit in with the other kids like I’d tried to do my first year in the third grade, plus he was also White, so he didn’t want to be seen with another flunker, who was a Mexican, on top of that.

  My heart broke, I felt so rejected. Quickly, I walked back across the asphalt by myself. I decided to sit as far away from everyone as possible. This way I figured no one else could reject me. Sitting alone, I watched the other kids, and I could see that it had worked for Jeffrey. Now that the other kids had seen how he’d shunned me, they were accepting him. My teacher came over and asked me why I was alone.

  “Why don’t you play with the other kids?” she asked.

  I felt like spitting on her. Why had she branded me a flunker and the slowest learner in front of everyone if she really wanted me to be accepted by the other kids? But I didn’t spit on her as I should’ve. No, I just shrugged my shoulders and acted like I was too stupid to know what was going on. Acting stupid, I was beginning to find, was a good way of avoiding further embarrassment.

  But things really weren’t so bad. There were still two or three kids who’d speak to me. One was named Phil and he lived by the lagoon south of school overlooking the water. And the other was Billy, who lived up the hill from our place where California Street dead-ended. Both Billy and Phil had older parents, and they came to school clean and well dressed.

  When I brought the note home, explaining to my parents that I’d flunked the third grade again, my mother started crying, not knowing what else to do. But my dad knew what to do. He took me outside and over across the grass to the large old pepper tree.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Nine,” I said. “I just turned nine a couple of weeks before…before Joseph—” I stopped my words. I didn’t want to upset my father.

  “Died,” said my dad. “You turned nine a few weeks before your brother Joseph died. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then go ahead and say the word. We can’t go on with our life if we’re afraid to say that word.”

  “Died,” I said, tears coming to my eyes. Suddenly a breeze came up and the limbs of the big pepper tree began to sing.

  “Good,” he said. “You know, I guess that your mother and I haven’t been paying too much attention to you and your sisters with your brother’s sickness and death, have we?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Damnit, my father did the same thing to us, and here I end up doing the same thing with you kids.” He took a deep breath. “My dad, he didn’t even have the eyes to see me after all of his tall, blue-eyed sons were dead. He started bellowing from the hilltop to hilltop like a madman, saying that God had forsaken him, and he had nothing more to live for, because all his sons were gone!” Tears streamed down my dad’s face. “I was about nine or ten, the same age as you, but he couldn’t see me, because I was dark and Indian-looking and didn’t have blue eyes like him. Your mother and me, we are not going to forget you and your sisters like my father forgot me. I swear it!”

  And saying this, he took me in his arms and held me close, kissing me and hugging me over and over again, until he finally stopped crying. Drying his eyes, my dad pushed me away, held me at arm’s length, and looked at me eye to eye.

  “Do you remember me telling you what my mother did once she saw our father reject us kids who were still alive, and he start drinking himself to death, grieving over all his dead blue-eyed sons? My mother, nothing but a little bag of Indian bones, saw this same reality, that they’d lost eleven more children, but she didn’t fall apart and say that God had forsaken her. No, she said, ‘I got three children left to live for,’ then she added the most powerful Indian saying that we got in all Mexico, ‘mañana es otro milagro de Dios’, tomorrow is another miracle of God’s, and with these words, with this conviction of heart and soul, I saw her rise up with the power of a mighty star and take us off the highlands of Jalisco and down through the valley of Guanajuato where we saw whole towns with dead bodies piled up high. And that little old woman never gave up!

  “We are not going to panic and lose faith,” he added, holding me by my shoulders, “because of your brother Joseph’s death, and stop living. Do you understand? We are una familia and we are going to keep on living with amor in our corazones, because truly, mañana es otro milagro de Dios, and who knows, maybe it was best for your brother to pass over like this at an early age. He was so goodhearted and thoughtful, that maybe the world would’ve…well, broken him. He wasn’t a real cabrón like you and me. Do you understand?”

  I shrugged, but then I nodded, because maybe my dad was right and I was a real cabrón. After all, I blackmailed people, and I’d paid a girl five cents to see her underwear. And I’d also bit my teacher. “Maybe,” I finally said. “I think I do.”

  My father was looking at me and had the biggest grin I’d ever seen. “Do you know what you just did?” I shook my head. “You just closed your eyes and wrinkled up your face so you could think, just like my mother used to do.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes, like I always say, blood knows blood, and your brother was a lot like my older brother José, and you’re a lot like my mother.”

  “You mean that blood can also cross and go from being male one time, to then being female the next?”

  He nodded. “Sure. Why not? Isn’t this what God, Himself, does, going back and forth between day and night, male and female.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know.

  “Hell, I’m glad that you flunked again,” said my
dad.

  I was shocked. “You are?” I said.

  “Hell, yes! My mother always used to say that when the going got tough, this was when we had the real opportunity to do God’s work. ‘Come on, God,’ she’d say in the middle of disaster, ‘give it to me some more! Because I know that together, You and me, God, We can move mountains!’ And why did my mother—bless her soul—talk like this, because, mijito, she didn’t believe in God. No, she LIVED with GOD! Get it? She saw herself as Living with Papito Dios, and He needing her just as much as she needed Him, so that His Will will be done!

  “Shit, if you had done too good in school, you might have ended up wanting to become a teacher. And you look at these teachers, most of the ones that I’ve seen look so scared, that they’d never stand up for themselves. Your principal, could he ever survive in prison? Would he know what to do in Las Vegas with a thousand dollars on the table? Could he land in Mexico with no money, speak no Spanish, and build a life from nothing? He wouldn’t even have the guts, I tell you, to step up to the high rollers’ table, or go to Mexico broke.”

  “Papa, will I have to go to prison?” I asked.

  “What? Why do you ask this?”

  My heart was beat, beat, beating! “Because of what you just said about the principal. You keep saying that, well, to be a man we must know how to survive in prison.”

  When he saw my fear, his eyes softened. “No, mijito,” he said, “you might not end up going to prison. But you are un Mexicano, and so if you don’t kiss the ass of authority, or learn to be real cunning, then you might end up needing to do some time in prison.”