Boy Kings of Texas (13 page)

When Mom and I reach the checkpoint at 11:45 that morning, it is very much open for business. A line of cars five deep stretches back from the Airstream trailer. Our job now is to go through and then turn back around and report to Dad that his doom is indeed imminent.

Mom is visibly shaken. She turns off the radio with a hard click and considers this, considers her options. She goes over her instructions in her head, the “if/then” variables. Though she never said it or asked, I think she assumed I had figured the whole thing out by this point, though I really had not.

From the car, we can see a skinny middle-age white guy in green border patrol garb sitting on a reclining chair in the open doorway of the Airstream trailer facing the cars as they pass under the tin roof. It must have been 110 degrees inside the trailer, 100 in the shade.

From his position, never bothering to get up, he sits fanning himself with a newspaper and sleepily peers into the cars, asking if everyone is an American citizen, waiting for an accented answer, smiling, and then waving them through, like a sympathetic priest granting absolution to his untidy native and newly Catholic horde.

There is a very specific profile of mule that border patrolmen look for. Mom and me, we don't fit any of these profiles, but we feel visibly guilty just the same. She turns the radio back on, and rolls up her window.

Suddenly, she turns her head sharply to face me and I automatically shift my body away from her, pressing myself against the passenger door because I've been slapped too many times from the driver's seat and I've learned to protect myself. There is venom in her eyes but no blow headed my way.

“Don't you
dare
do anything stupid here,” she spits at me in English. This catches me by surprise. Never before had I seen this amount of hatred from her. Well, just once before, that time in the third grade. Her eyes rip into me with an accusation of possibilities, and then they turn back to the bumper of the car in front of us. Her hand nervously turns the radio off, then back on again, but she rolls the volume back to nothing.

That's when I figure out what we're doing here.

“Hi, where y'all goin'ta today?” asks the skinny little man in the swelter. Mom's window is now only halfway open, and in her nervousness she rolls it all the way up.

“Hi, sorry. I mean, San Antonio,” as she opens the window.

“Y'all American citizens?” he asks, disinterested.

“Yes,” she says, and she leans back so he can get a clear look at me, nodding my head. I don't say anything except a quiet “Yep” when I nod, but he has not heard me.

There is an uncomfortable pause, I think because they're supposed to hear your accent. There is an anxious beat and he still hasn't let us go when I say, “Yes, I am,” a bit too enthusiastically, and that doesn't go over very well either.

Mom laughs nervously. She had been hoping our light skin would exonerate us, without problem.

“Y'all have a nice day,” he says, like he hasn't noticed anything awkward.

We drive through, and I feel her seethe for the next few miles.

That was about noon.

Somewhere behind us, at a roadside rest stop, Dad and my older brother Dan are waiting near Raymondville in Dad's tractor-trailer, which is attached to the trailer with the marijuana. In the argot of the smuggler, these trailers are said to have a
clavo
, which translates to “nail” in English.

The two center I beams that run the length of the trailer make perfect housing once you weld metal plates all along the underside and at the tail end. It creates a long rectangular box sealed at the rear end with the axle of the rig.

Ten fifty-pound square blocks of marijuana can be slid down the length of the rig, which can carry up to five hundred pounds' worth of pot, enclosed at the end with a plate, creating the image of, well, a “nail.” This is what Dad and Dan are carrying.

I wonder dimly if Dan has figured out what he's doing out here, on the road north when he should be in high school, but Dan has always been more streetwise, much savvier than me.

I figure that if I've figured it out, he'd have figured it out long before.

It turned out that Dan was actually doing most of the driving, because Dad was too frightened, too panicked, but this was not unusual. Dan was sixteen at the time, but he had been driving trucks since he was ten. The thirteen-gear diesel trailer was not foreign to him. Every day after school and weekends, he'd have most of Dad's obligations to fulfill because Dad would give up sometime during the day, or during a hangover, and rely on Dan to finish up for him. Dan was expected to be something of an indentured servant as firstborn son.

Me, I was a late bloomer, the runt. I learned to drive automatic at ten, and standard around thirteen, which is considered unacceptable on the Mexican farm, and I could sense my father's disappointment.

I resisted learning because I did not want my brother's responsibilities. I resisted learning because, unconsciously, I understood that this was a point of macho pride with my father, and I wanted to avoid this despicable association with the peasant-minded friends of his, even at that age.

“Chuyíto lla máneja con Chúy,”
he'd say to me as we'd drive around the outskirts of Brownsville, avoiding sheriffs and cops because his truck had no working turn signals or brake lights, let alone insurance, or reliable brakes. He was referring to some cousins of his, saying how young Chuyíto was now driving with his father, older Chúy.

This was meant as a direct challenge to me. (
Chúy
is pronounced “chewy,” and is somehow a nickname for the name Jésus.
Chuyíto,
a diminutive of
Chúy
, was Jésus Jr. Beyond that, I have no explanation.)

They lived in a cluster of mud-soaked hovels behind our barrio, vaguely related to Grampa or Gramma. Don't remember which.

Chuyíto was my age, about fourteen, and his skin was the gray color of the mud puddles that eternally surrounded his ramshackle clapboard house, even in drought, a result of the absent plumbing. Planks of lumber sometimes led from the doorstep to dry ground, you could see from the dirt road. His sisters were loud, prenatally obese girls who had every quality of unlikable spinsters or single baby mamas from age six. My only contact with them was on the school bus, which we had to share because there was no “short bus” for their trip to the remedial school, and their whole family, it seemed, was too proud and thick to learn English, so they went to different schools, until they were old enough to quit.

Chuyíto, the boy my father was comparing me with, rarely wore shirts, like his own father. They simply didn't see a need for them. Elder Chúy sported a huge swollen brown belly that spilled laterally over the front of his trousers, which were usually a brown polyester relic that never seemed to cover the elastic bands of his underwear, and neither one of them ever seemed to wear shoes. Any sort of shoes.

Sometimes, elder Chúy would pull into our driveway very late at night and hock a pistol from Gramma for five dollars so he could get a final six-pack of Budweiser while he had a gang of children hanging on for dear life to the back of his pickup truck, as he drunkenly maneuvered through the dark and dirt roads, dreading the finality of an evening when he had to report home, brood in tow.

Chuyíto was a direct facsimile of his father, except molecularly condensed by about two-thirds. His fourteen-year-old belly protruded with parasites and his nose perpetually ran with an electric green infection. He had quit junior high and was now driving his own dump truck, earning a man's wage, and this was a sign of virility in the barrio, for both him as a preteen and for his father. Soon Chuyíto would have a wife and child and live
in the same hovel or hovel complex with Chúy.

Now, to be compared with this crude germ of a boy, to be asked to compete with him for the sake of my father's pride—this just repulsed me to no end.

Once more I saw that there would never, ever, be an understanding between my father and me. We were alien to one another, and he could not understand why.

“
Cúando yo era tú edad, yo era una vérga con ójos
!
” (“When I was your age, I was an erect cock with eyeballs!”) Dad liked to boast to me when he was feeling good about something he'd done. This apparently was a very good thing. Something virile, cocklike. Dad had lots of colorful quips like that.

When he was dissatisfied with me or Dan, he'd violently exclaim, “
No valés tres tajádas de vérga
!
” which roughly translates into “Your net worth is equal to or less than that of three slices of cock!” Mexican men have an unusual fascination with cocks.

Anyhow, this phrase was apparently a bad thing, and I was supposed to feel shame, though I simply could not, try as I might, because it just made me giggle at the image. And wince, of course: Three slices of cock? Man, that just sounds painful.

No, there would never be an understanding between myself and this stranger who called himself my father, this man whom I disliked more and more every day I knew him. And I outright refused to let him take any pride from what I did.

This is why I was ever the shotgun rider at this time, ever the passenger accompanying the women on errands, which was supposed to feminize me, humiliate me, and that is why Dan was “privileged” to drive him around—and not me—and why Dan was stupidly risking the rest of his life and good name for Dad today.

Mom and I drive on to Hebronville. I'm dehydrated. I want to stop at a store.

“We can't,” she says to me. “We have to turn back; I think we're behind.”

She is obviously on a schedule of a sort, one she doesn't impart to me—you can't undertake something of this magnitude without a plan, right? You have to have contingency plans, things mapped out, timed out, choreographed. . . .

Still, I'm hungry and really thirsty. So I persist. Certainly we have time to get to a convenience store. They can't have scheduled this thing to hinge on a few minutes. Certainly they've devised this thing more cleverly than that.

“Please,” I plead. “Just stop at the 7-Eleven.”

Begrudgingly, she pilots the noisy car around the small town and finds a small convenience store. I get out with a couple of dollars and come up short when I try paying for some donuts and a chocolate milk. I return to the car for more money.

“Just get in!” she yells, and I do, leaving the food at the counter.

Mom whips the car around and I'm in trouble. Used to it by now.

She drives forcefully and loudly through side streets and gets back on Highway 281 heading south. It's about twenty minutes back to the checkpoint, but it will be on the opposite highway, the one headed south so hopefully we won't arouse suspicion, slipping through there twice in one day in our noisy car.

She turns off the radio with a snap. Really annoyed with me. The windows are up, but somehow it isn't so hot anymore. I look out my window and try to think of other things.

We travel like that for a few minutes and when the checkpoint is in sight, we hold our breath so the guy won't see us and right then we see Dad and Dan and the trailer heading right for the checkpoint.

Dad had become nervous, or maybe brave, though very likely he was blinded by his $100 faith in his
cúrandera
and had charged forth without waiting for Mom's report.

“Oh, God,” my mother says, and I felt all the blood drain from my face from just the tone in her voice. I had never heard her voice so charged with fear.

“Oh, God,” she says again. With her left hand, she grabs the knob that controls the headlights and flashes at Dad, who is only a few hundred feet from the checkpoint. She flashes four times, in clear view of anyone who is paying attention. I wonder if that is their signal that the checkpoint is open, but question the wisdom of doing it while he is next in line, in full view of the guy at the checkpoint, were he to look over his shoulder through the window at the noisy southbound car he has just seen drive through his checkpoint.

She slows down, slows terrifically down, the noisy car going less than twenty miles per hour on the highway, and for a moment, I can see Dad is driving. I can see that the blood has drained from his face, too, making his eyebrows stand out a rich black on his pallid, deathly white forehead, his face a grotesque mask of someone pretending desperately to act like everything is A-OK, but doing it horrifically badly.

I see Dan in the passenger seat, holding onto the handrail above the door as a means to steady himself through this craziness, through this stupid, unnecessary risk, and he looks calm, collected, uncaring. Like he isn't there. Does he even know what they are carrying? Am I reading into the look on his face?

There are no cars ahead of them now. The trailer is next in line. It slows to a crawl, and I can see Dad desperately trying to ignore the crazy flashing noisy Bonneville rattling through the southbound lane, keeping his eyes fixed to the road, pretending like he isn't smuggling anything in the empty trailer behind him. This empty, useless trailer with the I beams all sealed up, with the two Mexican men driving it, with no obvious destination, no paperwork, no affiliation with any hauling or trucking company. No, sir. Not trafficking in drugs. Just driving through. To Houston, probably. Circuitously. Looking for work. Oh, yes; we're American citizens—that's not why we're nervous. We can prove
that;
that's nothing. We're nervous because it's the pot we're hiding. And because we're only getting $2K for risking ten years. Isn't that funny? Isn't that just fucking hysterical?