And that was what these dogs had done to Blackie, from what Dad had seen. That was his postmortem assessment. Bit down on each end and split the tiny mutt apart.
Dad wrapped Blackie in a white blanket as we all stood around weeping, unsure of what to do. He lowered the tiny bundle into the hole while we surrounded him, crying all the while, and then he filled the grave with the coal-colored loam upon which Gramma’s land was built, having been carved out of a larger cornfield. He affixed the small cross Gramma had fashioned from dirty, soiled planks over the small grave, and then he clutched his crying wife and children to him as Gramma said some sort of fiery prayer calling for vengeance, in Jesus’s holy name.
Dad must have been about twenty-six then, watching his family cry like that. And it’s only now, really, that I understood why he cried as much as we did, even though he was not exactly what you would describe as an animal lover.
There was another message in this horrible pet murder, something more disquieting that attacked the very position of Dad’s family in this barrio, something I understand now, from this distance. I know now why he wept like that, for that dog, for us.
The Rubios had kept these dogs unfed, unloved, and hostile. Presumably it was to keep burglars away from their prototypical barrio home: a main house, built by farmhands many years before, with subsequent single-room constructions slapped together according to the needs of the coming-of-age males and their knocked-up wetback girlfriends. As such, the houses were consistently in varying stages of construction and deconstruction, because the boys never left home; they just brought their illegitimate children and unhappy wives along for the only ride they knew, the one that headed nowhere.
The dog pack resulted from the same sort of impulsive decisions and behavior: They’d bring a feral puppy home when some overwhelming sense of crypto-macho sentimentality overtook them, and then they would leave the dog disregarded and abandoned, much like the families they were creating.
And now, whether consciously or subconsciously, the dog pack had grown to a level of domination on that street, establishing their position in the pack order of this barrio.
And those dogs had attacked our dog. And it would have to be answered.
The next morning is one of the few memories I have of seeing my father as an adult, as a man, as he climbed somberly into his dump truck. It’s the best truck of the lot, oversize and red, fancy for the barrio business. His CB handle is “Too Tall,” but the other drivers have difficulty with English, so instead they call him tútol.
As he pulls out of the driveway, Mom stands in the door of our house and tells me to walk out to the road, to watch as my father drives off just after the school bus had picked up the rest of the kids earlier that morning. Dad pulls out onto Oklahoma Avenue, the dirt billowing behind him as he makes his way to the state road about a mile west, a route that would take him past the Rubios’ house. I stand in the road and watch as Dad’s dump truck rumbles off while the low morning sun beats down on the tailgate, making the red paint glow orange through the dust cloud.
As if on cue, the wild dogs run at the dump truck when he drives past the Rubios’ house, barking and snapping at the tires. Except this time my father slows his truck with menacing purpose and leans out of the driver’s side window with a .22-caliber revolver. I hear him shoot repeatedly, shoot every single dog as close to the head as he can. And as they all lay there dying, gray and brown lumps in the dusty early morning road, he continues his drive to work, and I don’t ever remember feeling so proud of my father again.
Chapter 2
HIS FAVORITE PLACE
In those rare moments when my father was gripped by paternal obligation, he would attempt to bridge the widening gap that was developing between us with an awkward father/son exchange, more often than not by asking whether I’d had my cock sucked yet or had bedded a cousin. I was fourteen, and that gap was widening daily.
My father wasn’t a complicated man, you can be sure. I think at this time he actually took pride in his coarser urges.Or, more accurately, in his ability to get them satisfied. And he would teach his boys this quality, so help him Jesus.
But one day, he catches me off guard when he asks, “Where’s your favorite place?”
I don’t have to think about it too long on that stifling South Texas afternoon. I knew it could be anywhere other than these talcum-powder farm roads he had us constantly traveling, tending to his deteriorating trucking business. We were Sisyphean wetbacks with a back load of dirt or sand or grain or corn, grimly traveling the same fields, the same roads, the same faces.
Yet his question has an uncharacteristic lure of soul-searching, something that might even be approaching the thoughtful. So I try to answer with some due sense of hope, introspection. But I have to be careful.
The last time he asked something similar I got a knuckle to the temple for answering his spirit-lifting questions truthfully. “In ten years from now, who are you gonna be?” That’s a translation from his Spanish. I think he was drunk.
I was ten, sitting in the passenger side of his red dump truck, and we were driving. I thought about his question for a moment, looked around at the dismal, shortsighted South Texas surroundings, at the complete absence of hope. I muttered, “Dead, hopefully,” mostly to myself. I didn’t think he’d heard me, but then he suddenly exploded into one of his tantrums, which resulted in a lump on the side of my forehead. So today, I’m more cautious, but cryptic.
“I think my favorite place is the water bed at night,” I say.
Back then, it really was. Those summer nights down there could get suffocating. My sisters had all gone off to college and I’d moved into their bedroom, where they left a disco-era waterbed, undulating and slowly leaking away. At night, I could lie there and look at the stars through the badly screened windows, and think about escaping. About what life was going to be like when I was able to get away from this place. But Dad has never been one for romanticism. He doesn’t take the bait.
“Mine’s inside a nice, warm pussy,” he tells me with a big smile, like he’s just said the smartest thing he’s ever thought, and I should be equally impressed.
Instead, I am horrified at this declaration. Even today I cringe when this memory forces its way to the surface. It is visceral, twists my stomach into knots. His face is beaming with boyish satisfaction as he slowly, deliberately, in a singsong exclamation, enunciates the words “Nice. Warm. Pussy.”
We are sitting in the cab of his dump truck. I am opposite him. He is haloed by the nuclear sunlight behind him. It is close to 100 degrees outside and no one in my family lives any farther away than twenty miles from where we now sit. I simply cannot run far enough away from this man. His mustachioed upper lip curls when he forms the word warm, and for a moment his mouth becomes vulvular, creating the image of female pudenda, and I think I might try to turn gay to get as far away from my Dad as possible. It’s the only plausible solution.
Oh dear God, please, I pray silently, turn me gay. Please turn me gay.
Chapter 3
GRAMPA
The last time all four of Grampa’s brothers had met like this, they had come home drunk and beaten him bloody. Tonight is different, though; instead, they are in his bedroom, watching him die.
He has come home after a three-day bender with his mistress that very nearly killed him, and he is slipping into diabetic shock, but no one has realized it yet.
His brothers are large men, the color of coffee and cream, and every one of them a type-1 diabetic. Some of their wives sit in silent concern around Gramma’s table, attempting to comfort her as Gramma wails in desperation, drawing attention from the dying man to her own fears of being left alone. I am maybe seven or eight years old, and I remember thinking that the light in the bedroom was unnaturally bright for Grampa and Gramma’s house, which was usually dark and sepulcherlike, crawling with old religion.
“Lo golpíaron,” Gramma had said with something like inevitability in her voice the
night they had beaten him up and he had come home bloody and bruised. The brothers had all been drinking, and at some point, they’d set upon Grampa, as head of their clan. She took Polaroids of his bruises and cuts and took a wet towel to his head while he breathed heavily and tried to sleep, all while I watched. Ten years later she would do the same for me.
They had beaten Grampa because he was their boss as the oldest brother and he controlled the trucking business he’d built with a GI loan. Obviously the brothers had a problem with Grampa’s terms.
That night their bedroom stank of metabolizing alcohol, sickness, isopropyl, and sage. The smell of sage meant that Gramma was casting spells again. She burned the sage with other plants and assorted bits of witchcraft in a cast-iron skillet and ran around to every corner of both their house and ours chanting Our Fathers and Hail Marys in Spanish. Buena suerte, she said, for good luck.
When we got sick, she’d take an egg from the refrigerator and rub it on us, on our arms and legs and in our palms and feet, while praying, always praying. She’d rub some green aromatic alcohol on our temples and on our necks while chanting Catholic prayers in Spanish. It would lull us into a beta-heavy trance, and then she would call us back, back into the land of the living: “¡Vente, Junior, no te quedes!” (“Come back, Junior: Don’t stay behind.”) “Aye voy.” (“I’m here.”) She’d say that three times, and you would return to consciousness, feeling oddly calm. Then she would crack the egg into a glass of water and study the tendrils and yolk, for omens, or signifiers. But Gramma wasn’t wishing anyone good luck the night Grampa came home beaten purple.
She took those Polaroids and hung them in her homemade altar as if she needed further encouragement for her hatred of his brothers and their families, needed proof in praying for reprisal. Her altar was a triangular, four-shelf unit that went floor to ceiling, a disorganized cluster of South American and Catholic saints, blood images, and hateful mementos like these photos aligned with postcards of Jesus, statues of the Virgin Mary, and rancid egg yolks suspended in water for interpretation.
The night he’s dying, though, there’s no time for witchcraft, but there are lots of cries to Jesus and far too many people in Gramma’s kitchen. They’re all around the kitchen table, which is covered in a clear plastic that protected a flowery tablecloth underneath, some cigarette burns in the plastic. A porcelain coffee cup sat at the table, the lip stained with that morning’s instant coffee. Grampa did that, left a trail of coffee from the lip.
The last time I had seen this many people at their house was a few months earlier, when Grampa was first caught cheating with la viéja, or “the crone,” as near as could be translated to English. That’s how his mistress came to be known in the neighborhood; we all knew who was meant when someone said, la viéja. The old bitch.
“Witchcraft!” Gramma had cried that afternoon. “La viéja uses witchcraft to control him!” Gramma had been crying and all those same people were there, and I had wandered in because of all the commotion in the driveway and Gramma was a mess, her hair wet from histrionics, looking like she was wearing a black wig that had fallen forward. She was wailing a long, high sound that was far more animal than human, a sound like a race car grinding its way up through its gear cycle—huuuuuuuuu huuuuuu huuuu—and she came at me suddenly, like the witch in the dream I kept having, all black hair and tears, and cried, “Poongui!”
That was what Grampa called me. Never found out why. Might have been a word he picked up in Korea. Spelled as closely as it can get, phonetically. She came at me and kissed my cheeks and clutched me to her, her face hot and uncomfortably damp, sticky with drying saliva and tears, and then a new wave of sobs hit her and I became scared. I didn’t know what was happening. I scanned the room for someone familiar, hoping for my mother. I saw her there, out of place with a look of mild disgust on her face. I felt I did something wrong by coming here. Most of the people in the room were strangers to me because we kept away from Grampa’s family, knew them only by reputation. That night they had the beatified look of churchgoers. There was more drama in the barrio, with Grampa coming home from a fling, a bender, and nearly dead. All was as it should be. It had a pacifying effect on them, to see someone else going through what they were all going through, though not publicly, not like Gramma.
The next few weeks after the night he was caught are weird. Gramma is going to the cúrandera daily, the family witch doctor, and I have to accompany her when I can because that’s my role as the youngest boy.
The cúrandera is known as La Señora. See, there’s the difference. The “good witch” and the “wicked witch” in The Wizard of Oz sort of thing. La Señora, or “The Lady,” is the good witch. La viéja, or “The Old Crone,” is the bad witch. It’s a classic tale of good versus evil, except with garlic. Gramma goes to La Señora for consultation, for help, for direction. But Gramma has darker thoughts than La Señora can get behind.
She’s casting midnight spells with nail clippings and earwax, cheap powdery perfumes and dead toads in jars, carrying her 9 millimeter pistol in her car. She prays for strength. She prays for death. Not for herself or him. Maybe him. She prays to Pancho Villa, she prays to bad saints. One afternoon she and I are out driving along the port of Brownsville by that bar where la viéja supposedly met Grampa, near Portway Acres where she is rumored to live when Gramma sees that other woman driving by and Gramma guns the engine in her huge blue LTD and gives chase, screaming and blaring her horn, trying to run la viéja off the road.
The woman turns onto a dirt road and rockets off, leaving an atomically billowing cloud of dust behind her while Gramma drives her LTD into a ditch and punches the ceiling repeatedly and depresses the horn until you think she’d kill the battery, so long did it howl.
This sort of stuff is happening a lot more often now. We never catch a good look at that other driver, just the car, and we never know what she really looked like; we just see just images of a squat woman in a battered maroon car who turns tail whenever she sees Gramma’s blue LTD. It might not even really be the right person, just someone scared of the prowling lunatic in the LTD. My older brother Dan has many similar stories.
Gramma’s house becomes a coven. The altar in the corner starts to bloom like a death flower, all rosaries and death spells with the Polaroids of Grampa all beaten up and drunk taped up all around. Basil, rosemary, lilac, rue, and peppermint are tied in bundles and placed under pillows; sage smoke saturates everything in both houses. Raw eggs hang suspended in half-empty glasses of water for interpretation, their milky tendrils growing rancid in the South Texas heat and giving the dark house a rank odor of putrescence, like something’s already dead here, already decaying wetly, we just don’t know what it is.
No one talks about Grampa’s disappearances. He goes off for two, maybe three days at a time. Dad is quiet, Mom is nowhere. Am I going to school at this time? I had to be. Busy with my own second grade dramas, likely, as were the other four grandkids.
When he does come home, Grampa is drunk and penniless, and once he returns without his shoes. I remember seeing him sitting on the concrete well that night, just outside their porch, with Gramma throwing his things out the front door while he nodded off, snoring quietly as he waited for her to finish.
He notices me looking at him and smiles.
“Poongui,” he says in Spanish. “Bien paca.” (Come here.) I do, and he hugs me quietly while Gramma howls from within the house. He smells of beer and cigarettes.
This was about a week before Grampa died. The night his brothers were all called over, he’d been gone two or three days. I hadn’t noticed. We lived across the driveway, but Gramma and Grampa came and went on their own. Grampa had given my dad half the property as a wedding present so he and his new wife could build a new house. Our front doors faced each other, but they said very little anymore; they looked away from each other’s lives in what passed for politeness.
There are lots of cars in the driveway parked over by Gramma and Grampa’s hou
se that night, and that’s what catches my attention. Something going on over there. I walk over to see what’s happening even though it’s late, like eight o’clock. Richard’s first of many wives is there, and she holds me back, tells me not to look. Richard is Dad’s younger stepbrother, the one who beats me up years later. His wife is seventeen and knocked up. Her name is Patty. She smells soft, very pretty for the area. Fair. All the men like her, pretend not to flirt. The family is talking about taking Grampa to the hospital across the border because it would be cheaper. He’s sick, really sick. Where is Dad? I don’t see him. He’s not there. Gramma is mad, throwing things around and crying that loud, wailing cry again. Grampa’s whole family is there—his brothers and their wives, maybe one of their kids. I see Grampa through the doorway of his bedroom for a moment, when they finally decide to drive him. They should have called an ambulance hours ago, they shouldn’t move him, but they do. I see him make a painful effort to get up off the bed, swing his legs over the side, and he can hardly do it. His face is aortic, totally purple, like he’s been beaten up again; his neck is a deep crimson, and the rest of his body is deathly pale, freckles on his sagging, overweight torso. He sees me and tries to smile. “Pookie,” he tries to whisper. It hurts him. This makes me cry, even today.
They get him to a clinic in Matamoros, and they immediately send him to that bleak, dirty green hospital. He dies within an hour, of diabetic shock, on a tile table. Someone is holding his hand and his last words are, “¡Sueltáme, Poongui!”—telling me to let go of his hand, imagining I’m there, even though I’m across the border watching television now. He needed to go. It was time for him to say goodbye, and he said it to me. It was March 26, 1980.They tell me this, when they come back, one man short, that his last words were of me, like I should be proud. And I am proud, strangely, even today, but I don’t know why. Maybe because he was the last person I loved without complication, before I learned that love was a negotiation. He was someone I never failed, never hurt, and I still can’t let him go, let go of his hand when I dream of him. And I can’t remember much of him when I’m awake, only feelings. I wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him.
Boy Kings of Texas Page 2
