Boy Kings of Texas (12 page)

“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.

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 out 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.

Mom and I drive through this scenery like we have a hundred times before. We say nothing to one another. By now, we have each decided that the other is unworthy of conversation. We stare out the windows and think very different things.

The old Bonneville struggles along at top speed, sputtering through its third engine in its ten years with us. Air-conditioning is a luxury long lost, so my window remains half open, drying out our sinuses and sucking the moisture from our skin.

Inside the Bonneville, I am stupefied to near unconsciousness by the drive. The torpor lulls me into a hypnagogic state, a dreamlike trance of fantasy and escape, so I really don't mind these drives anymore.

Mom, on the other hand, is electric. She sits upright, hands clenching the beige Pontiac steering wheel. An hour into the drive and she has not yet told me where we're driving.

She plays the radio unbearably low, keeping the music just under audial reach, making each country song sound like a memory.

Mom is thinking about the hundred dollars she and Dad had spent before six o'clock that morning—one hundred dollars that would help them make two thousand dollars, if things went right.

Their first stop on this morning felony excursion was to Dad's
cúrandera
, whom we knew as
La Señora,
Dad's personal witch doctor, for an emergency session. They were let right through at five in the morning, and they had only one burning question:
Will the checkpoint on Highway 281 be open?

After years of sitting through them with Gramma, I didn't have to be there to know exactly how the session in the
cúrandera's
office went.

La Señora
is older, matronly, dresses in a thin frock with her hair pulled back in a bun. She has them sit across from her desk, in a black leather love seat with chrome handles. A panorama of photos hangs around her office, some wallet-sized, others larger and in portrait. A pencil sketch of a Camaro by one of her grandsons hangs next to a window. It's really not very good.

She listens closely to their question, nodding sleepily at their preoccupation. Sympathizing. Understanding. They've reached a decision and they can't turn back, they tell her; they need to do it; no other choice anymore.

She stands up abruptly and walks behind her desk, which is cluttered with sheets of notebook paper crawling with ink: illegible notes, names of people, sets of cryptic numbers, home addresses of saints. She closes her eyes and scribbles something on her yellow legal pad, nonsense to anyone else reading it.

Then she walks over to a chest of drawers. On top of it is a cluster of saintly action figures, candles, incense, and photos of her own grandchildren, each bearing a remarkable similarity to all the other photos. In the center of her Sears-Roebuck chiffonier sit two cheap leaded crystal bottles, both filled with clear liquid. She gently finds a matching shot glass and lifts it to the light, making it sparkle.

She places the glass on the surface before her and into it pours out one bottle's contents, then the other. When the two clear liquids mix, they turn a deep crimson and thicken like plasma. She nods her head, as if her suspicions have been confirmed.

She turns back to her desk, plops her large figure back into her chair, and then turns to face them on the love seat.

Before her, on the desk, sits a glass orb filled with water resting on a black plastic ring. No shit. She sits up straight, closes her eyes, and regulates her breathing into a loud rhythmic, slipping, flowing stream of in-out, in-out breathing that unconsciously forces Mom and Dad to do the same thing. After a few seconds, when they've moved into their own theta waves, she opens her eyes suddenly and strikes the glass orb sharply with a metal wand, making it ring loudly in the clear morning air.

Then she lifts the orb between her two pudgy hands and stares deeply into the inverted image of the room around it. She holds it up to her face and peers intently—and they, sitting opposite, can't help it either: They also peer deeply into that inverted image of the room, too, though they try not to.

Sitting opposite this chicanery and watching everything she does, attempting to apply meaning to it, and watching what your money has bought you, you're drawn into the ritual and you can't help but try to figure it out, I always felt, even as a kid, when I was in there with Gramma.

What
does
she see in the orb? Did it move? Did something just move? Look deeper; it's upside down. That's me there, that's her, that's JFK behind me, there's the Camaro in pencil . . . was that a flash of color? Does that mean something to her? Does it mean something to me? Does that mean anything at all? What the fuck does it all
mean?

Does it mean anything at all?

“No,” she says with certainty. “The checkpoint will not be open this morning. Go in peace. God be with you. You can pay Maria, who is just now getting up and feeding the chickens.”