Boy Kings of Texas

by Domingo Martinez

You see, sometime back, I heard a fantastical tale of family lore, many years later when we were much older, sometime in late 2007, and it forced me to reevaluate that day, and those moments of watching Joe, watching Dad, and watching Lupé’s daughters cry out like they did at the side of his casket, as he lay shrunken, green.

  About three days before, I had flown into Texas and had made a complete ass of myself after drinking way too much on the extended flight back home, and had then continued knocking back drinks rather enjoyably at Syl’s fortieth birthday party, when suddenly the traveling, the lack of food, and the inordinate amount of booze I had been drinking sort of locked in and I became an insufferable boob at her party, and had to be helped to bed. It was awful, terribly humiliating, and I was gathering the emotional capital to apologize to Syl and her husband, and eat a crow buffet, with crow juice and crow dessert, while I was staying with Marge.

  Marge had waved the incident away, said I should probably be apologizing to Syl and Ruben, but emphasized more the damage to my health, which I then subsequently waved away. If life doesn’t in fact get any better, I reasoned, I don’t want more of it; I want less.

  Marge is a research scientist, a PhD living in Sugarland, the city within the city of Houston, with her husband, Corwin. I can’t really claim to know what it is she does. It’s research, I know that much, but if she’s ever given me the elevator speech as to what it is she researches, I must have gotten off at a previous floor, because I don’t know what it is. But I get Marge now, as an adult, if that makes any sense. She’s civil and well-adjusted, understands schedules and calendars and planning in advance. I still can’t get Dan to commit to a string of vacation days when I visit. When I fly in to see him, he continues to work and has me wait for him until he gets done with his day. Terribly frustrating. Plus, she didn’t judge me from what she had seen that other night.

  Anyhow, that morning, it was me and Marge and her two kids, and strangely, how life works, Marge is the person in the family to whom I feel closest now. Twenty years ago, after the Mimis episode, she was the one I despised most. Simply could not get along with her. Marge was establishment, I was rebellion. The foibles of youth.

  It was when I was staying at her house when I remembered something that Dad had said, about Lúpe, that Dad suspected that Lúpe was actually Syl’s father. He said he remembered a day, early in his marriage to my mother, when Mom had been upset with him, had wandered off, and Lúpe had told him to sit still, in Gramma’s mother’s kitchen (Dad’s abuelita), while he fetched her. Buelita kept looking out the window and shaking her head, ominously. Finally, Dad said, when they returned, he had noticed bruises on Mom’s slender, white legs.

  I remember that my first reaction to this story, when I heard it, had been indescribable. It was a mixture of things. I remembered feeling a vengeful revulsion and the memory of the old sexual assault wound at the hands of Martín and the horrible, more humiliating events that followed at the hands of Gramma and Dad—followed by an overwhelming feeling of helplessness that no one in our family was ever able to escape the hostile advances from that Ramirez family, and a deep, sincere desire for vengeance, if it was true.

  But then, suddenly, during that weekend at Marge’s house, I was feeling relief that I would not have to apologize to Syl and her family for my terrible behavior at her fortieth birthday party, because it just so happened she wasn’t really related, like a disgusting deux ex machina, which I knew was just horrible of me, and I fought hard not to feel it. But it kept popping up.

  Dad had difficulty adjusting when his family dispersed to the north without him, when the kids left for college and Mom fled with Derek. He would still attempt to exert his sense of patriafamilias by barging in, uninvited, to my sisters’ apartments and then settling himself down to watch cable (he found the nature shows erotic) and then have a snooze until dinner time. He even tried doing this with Mom, at her new apartment, while she was filing for divorce. Eventually everyone started locking their doors and telling him to get lost, beginning with Syl. Syl was never shy about yelling at Dad, and this had hurt his feelings. So much so that he was now wondering if, in fact, she was really his daughter.

  Here’s the problem, though: It would be just like Dad to choose to believe that his young bride had been raped so many years prior rather than have to accept his oldest daughter’s unwillingness to put up with his unannounced visits and regularly boorish personality. It’s the only thing that made sense to him.

  But it was absolutely ridiculous. Syl had always been the strongest of the kids, the most able with confrontation. She had forged borders in a family that had none, created boundaries behind her when Dad—especially Dad—was at his most repulsive, or belligerent. And that is why he would rather believe she wasn’t his than learn to cope with her boundaries.

  “You have to promise never to repeat this story to your mother,” Dad had asked of me and Dan.

  “Of course not,” I said, already calculating when I could get a moment alone with Mom to ask her the truth of the statement.

  “So why do you think it happened?”

  “Well, because we couldn’t have kids when we first started out,” he said.

  This was an issue with my sisters, conception. Marge and Mare had had a difficult time of it. Marge’s husband wanted to name their daughter, the second child, Porsche, because she cost as much to conceive. Mare struggled through her pregnancy as well. But Syl was like India: Too many people to keep track of, so that her kids would eventually develop a class system.

  Listening to this story, I had a martini of a reaction: revulsion, revenge, and pity for Mom, being thrown into the den of wolves like that, a poor half-white city girl thrust into a hive of stinging locusts . . . and then uncertainty: This was, after all, Dad’s story.

  “So then what?” I asked.

  “Well, then she was pregnant with Syl,” he said.

  The revulsion came back, with the image of this field tramp, his groin green with the virulent fertility of machismo, his ugly, ferocious seed on a seek-and-destroy mission. It was a putrid, disgusting fecundity, turning my stomach, imagining what my mother could have suffered from that fieldhand, who obviously intimidated my father.

  This had been my mother’s position in the barrio of my grandmother: If Gramma and Dad were reviled as outsiders, Dad’s new, unMexican wife was absolutely detested, a source of fear, distrust, and highly sexualized fantasy. She was America come knocking, next door. So the rape would have been acceptable.

  Dan and I talked about this later, over beers.

  “Dad said he always had a suspicion about Syl,” Dan had said.

  “And everyone else ... ?” I said. “I mean, six kids; that’s not exactly barren.”

  “That’s what he said,” he responded.

  I don’t remember the further explanation about the prolific stream of children that followed. I usually make fun of Mom by telling her that she needed an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all her kids, and that she kept forgetting to scroll all the way to the last column, where my information was kept, and that’s why she forgot about me so often.

  “Aye, June!” Mom would say. “You’re so crazy.”

  Indeed.

  A couple of days later, after my awful behavior at Syl’s party, Mom and I were in a car traveling to Austin to visit Derek, who was pretending to be in college there, and I had some personal business besides. If it’s one thing the roads in Texas are good for, it’s for putting distance between bad memories.

  We had two hours or so to talk, and, of course, I asked her about Lúpe, even though Dad had asked me to keep silent. I’m sure Dad knew I couldn’t possibly keep this to myself.

  Mom’s face deflated in a kind of sadness, tensed in another response I couldn’t read.

  “That never, never happened,” she said quietly, after I finished relaying the story I got.

  “Your father, he’s just . . . I . . . ” and then she couldn’t say anything. Her face hardened.
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br />   And I believed her, believed the body language more than the language she couldn’t evoke.

  The car was quiet as we drove the complicated east to west route. These trips are unusual in Texas; normally you’re either driving up or down, north or south, I mean. Hardly ever does one have reason to drive left and right on the map. Texas, in my mind, is long, not wide. Texas is deep, not . . . broad.

  I was reminded of the drives of our youth, all the time I was forced to ride with Mom for company, when I was incapable of escape. Things were different now. I usually had a drink or two before I got in the same car with anyone in this state, which made the unfathomable distances tolerable.

  “So he made it up?”

  Mom slowly shook her head from side to side, looked like she was about to tear up, but she didn’t.

  “That poor man,” she said. I’m sure she meant Dad.

  Nothing else was said for a while. The thrum of the highway played under the carriage of the car, the usual background sound to Mom’s and my relationship. Our relationship was a travelogue. Once, in a magazine contest where you had to write your life story in six words or less, I came up with, “Mom said, Leave before you’re left.” I never heard back from them. The wankers. A little too much truth, probably.

  Anyhow, I was much relieved to hear it from her, that she had never been sexually brutalized in that manner. Not like Dan and me.

  But, on the very heels of that, I have to admit I was also a little disappointed because it meant that I had to, at some point or another, apologize to my oldest sister and her husband for ruining her fortieth birthday party.

  I am, after all, my father’s son, selfish and cowardly.

  Chapter 14

  FAITH

  By 1986 Dad had become a truck driver with nothing left to haul but marijuana.

  Through his early thirties, he could do little with the trucking business he had inherited from Grampa except watch as it crumbled around him and his step-uncles usurped what few dirt-hauling contracts came the way of our barrio.

  As a result Dad could no longer sleep at night and would pace the length of the new addition to our house incessantly. Every three or four hours, Dan and I would hear his muffled footfalls on the carpet, which increasingly lost its ability to absorb the concussion of his steps year after year, so that by the time we were in our teens, we could feel him plant his feet in his bedroom, even though that part of the house was built on concrete.

  Then he would stomp his way to our room and throw open the door in total disrespect of our privacy, at any hour of the night, but especially at daybreak.

  I think he did this at first to catch either one of us masturbating, in an attempt to humiliate us. But then it just became his habit, thrusting open the door to wake us up, get us on some small task before we dressed for school on school days, or get set to work proper on weekends.

  He would stand there in his Y-fronts, looking like a lean, tall, diapered child with his curly black locks backlit and haloed from the overhead light in the kitchen. He’d scratch at his belly quietly and turn something over in his mind and in his mouth, and then he’d say in a small, heavy baritone, “Levántensen.” You two get up.

  That’s how our days invariably started back then.

  How they ended, for him, was just as unvaried. After some perfunctory attempt at keeping shop, Dad would normally repair to one of the makeshift bars that dotted the poorer subdivisions just outside the Port of Brownsville and drink many of the dollar-fifty Budweisers, increasingly dreading the wobbly two-mile drive home in the dark as the night wore on, because the lights in his trucks were unreliable.

  Dad felt at home among the dispossessed at this time, I think maybe even superior, and for five years he listened as his meager inheritance spilled out of the unplumbed urinals in the piss rooms of those bars, splashing a clear yellow onto the baked earth just on the other side of the plywood walls.

  It was in those bars, on soiled and untreated planks of plywood flooring, that I spent much of my time away from school as a child, watching and listening from the safety of the floor, facing the people in the tavern as my father put in marathon hours on barstools. The men at the bar talked of nothing to one another, spoke in a vague and cryptic lingua hispanica, a pidgin code that insinuated more than clarified.

  As a child listening in, I figured there was much being left to allusion or circumspection, and that as an adult, I would eventually be allowed in on the big secret, but I have come to realize this has never been the case: Men in bars have nothing to say.

  When I’d grow sleepy, I’d curl up in the cab of his dump truck, parked just outside, and wait for him to finish drinking and drive us home.

  Dad drank lengthily and with intention, so I would tire and retreat, giving him the freedom to overtly ply the unremarkable bar whores without fatherhood weighing in on his conscience.

  Later, when I was in my teens, he’d come to confide in ugly detail these secretive instances. “See that bar over there?” he’d say, in abhorrent and gleeful English as we drove by some ramshackle building. “I fuck a lot of women in that bar. . . .”

  I would wince when I remembered the long hours I spent there with him, sleeping in the cab of his truck.

  At home Mom kept sentinel over the bookkeeping. She watched the flow of money slow to a trickle and then stop outright when I was in junior high. She tried to keep her desperation to herself, but there was no way for her to hide her worry.

  For anyone listening, there were rumblings all around of our deeper declension into poverty. My sisters, brother, and I knew things had turned outright dire when our mother stopped shopping at El Centro Supermarket and had to shop at Lopez Superstores, which catered to the people on welfare in Brownsville.

  Shopping at El Centro had been a badge of honor for Mom, a status for the family. She taught me this at a young age, and I thought everyone knew it, too. Once, at a barrio party at some neighbor’s house, someone mentioned a sale on milk at Lopez.

  “We don’t shop at Lopez,” erupted from my five-year-old mouth, in Spanish. “That’s where poor people shop,” I said with authority. This was immediately met with nervous laughter, and later with a sound beating on the way home.

  To see my mother come home with LOPEZ SUPERMARKET on her grocery bags when I was in the seventh grade was a watershed in my life. It was then that I realized we were in real trouble.

  One morning Mom surprised me by showing up at my seventh-grade homeroom algebra class and removing me, getting us on the road out of Brownsville, heading north. There was no explanation.

  “Are we going to Kingsville?” I asked. Sylvia was in school there, at what was then Texas A&I University, and I could think of no other reason for us to drive that way. Syl, as the oldest, was the first of the girls to attend the local farming university, in Kingsville, Texas, about an hour outside of Corpus Christi. She’d qualified for a number of federal grants and loans in her bid for freedom, all of this done in something nearing secrecy from Dan and me: One day, Syl was just gone, and I had no idea where she was off to. I had no idea what “college” was.

  “Sientáte y lla cállete,” she snapped at me in irritation. Sit down and shut up.

  While she was growing up, Mom spoke English, though she knew Spanish. Everyone in Brownsville knows Spanish. But after years of living with my father and Gramma, she’d forgotten most of her English and spoke only Spanish now. She’d gone native.

  I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me what we were doing that morning, that Mom and I were driving shotgun for Dad, who was on the road somewhere behind us in one of his flat-nosed tractor trailers, carrying a large load of marijuana and headed north. I had heard the stories, knew some of the tactics of smuggling by this point, but I didn’t make the connection. Mom and I were driving ahead of him to ensure the customs station was closed, and if it happened to be open, we were charged with turning back and warning him.

  We headed north on Highway 281, one of two highways ou
t of the Rio Grande Valley. This is an unkempt, sun-roasted, and broken-up tarmac with its northernmost terminus just outside of San Antonio. It cuts right up the center of the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost spit of the geopolitical border of Texas with Mexico. The only other escape out of the area, Highway 77, is equally dismal in vistas, but parallels the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. That route slices through the largest nonfunctioning ranch in Texas, the King Ranch, one of the oldest ranches in Texas and with the bloodiest history. It’s been out of full operation for years, producing only a dismal percentage of what it did in its heyday, but its continued existence has little to do with cattle ranching.

  The King Ranch provides the real border between Mexico and Texas: 200 miles of uncrossable, wretched, and sun-drenched land.

  Before the Patriot Act, back in the 1980s, there were two U.S. Customs checkpoints blocking the migration of drugs, fruit, people, reptiles, and parrots on the roads between the United States and Mexico—both about one hundred miles north of the Mexican border at highway choke points.

  The station on Highway 77, in Sarita, is the busier and better financed. It boasts the newest in anti-immigrant technology, full staffing, and a huge billboard with a creepy propagandist image of “The Good Border Patrol Agent” and his militant German shepherd asking you to drive safe and be sure to turn in them wetbacks if you see them.

  The checkpoint in Hebronville, back then, was an Airstream trailer with an attached carport to protect the agents from the sun, and it would often be closed for breakfast or lunch, so we were headed toward that one.

  Mom is driving on 281, headed north that hot summer morning. I’m accustomed to this. Outside in all directions, the farmland throbs in a liquid, mundane mirage, like every other morning. Brown asthmatic plants and stunted trees sizzle during the hot hours of the day, which is most of every day. Drivers become hypnotized by the redundancy of the farms, the hum of the tires, the visible and predatory heat. Under the spell of the third-world sun, imagination and reality eventually begin to slide back and forth seamlessly, soporifically, so that you’re hypnotized into an uncaring, unquestioning stupor in order to let the time move on without punishing your mind further.