Boy Kings of Texas (22 page)

So I point. At the bag of tools.

And he points back. At the fence, the one to which Karsten had vaguely alluded, some distance down the dirt road.

And I get what he means. “Get to work, tourist.”

Chris and I take the bag and wander down the road to where the fence has been under deconstruction.

It is barbed wire, three tiers of it, held up every ten or so feet by some wood stake driven into the earth about a foot or so down. One of those “u” shaped nails holds the line to. Remarkable that it has stayed up, in this cracked earth. Most of the stakes are just mesquite branches, given a minimum effort at whacking it into something resembling a vertical stake, then pounded into the earth, before the next one was done, and so on, until the perimeter was created, extending into either horizon and obscured by the shrubby trees.

I look in the bag that the old man had given me. It has two pairs of pliers and a flat-headed screw driver and a hammer, along with a hot plastic bottle of Coca-Cola that is filled with what now is clearly creek water, tinged with particles.

I think we get about four stakes done before we quit, Chris and me. That was our contribution to the great acquisition of Karsten's dad's ranch barony.

Come to think of it now, I think I was the only one who attempted to help. I think Chris was off writing his meandering, nonmetered poetry, and who knew what sort of malfeasance Karsten had gotten himself into, and then out of. Then into again.

My own sense of Gramma's peasant work ethic had driven me to help, but my sissy idleness and a small gash on my thumb had allowed me to give in after only a few minutes, which perfectly captured my psychological profile at the time.

It is getting into the late afternoon, and I decide that I wanted to ride a horse in order to have something to remember the experience with, before we leave. Maybe not the dangerous one Karsten is riding, but another, slower, maybe crippled one, like at a children's hospital.

After cooing and fumbling through a few old Americanized Spanish phrases and a lot of pointing, I'm able to ask the old man about the horse. His look is suspicious, uncertain.

Finally, he relents and enters the horse pen to catch a lazy, marelike creature and begin to harness it with saddle and bridle, which is an amazing amount of work. I hadn't realized what I had been asking of him. But he helps me climb aboard the sedate and pliable mare, who, out of nowhere, turns into a hell-borne, meth-crazed hot rod and sprints toward the low trees to knock me from her back.

I hear the old man and the kid shouting instructions to me from their perch at the stoop of the old man's house, but their shouts are drowned out by my hysterical and unending cries of “Whoah! Whoah! Whoah!” and the horse starts bucking, bucking me up and kicking out her back legs, trying
really
hard to catch me on a branch by darting for the trees, and then I have a clear idea of what she is attempting to do, that she has it in for me, and so I try to think of the best thing to do in this situation and I come to the conclusion that I will lie flat on her back, wrap the bridle and my arms around her dinosaur neck, and choke the animal to death, because I'm like that when someone threatens me.

So I do, or at least I try, and in doing so, I yank the bridle quite hard to the right and she rockets off in a steady, ridable pace back to the house.

It was more frightening than riding with Karsten, being on that horse's back and it charging out of control with the intention of knocking me off. I dream of that short ride still, when things are not going so well.

The mare, under the stern direction of the yank, gallops right up to the old man who catches her by the bridle, and by now, Chris and Karsten have come out to see what all the shouting has been about, and they laugh, hoot and point at me and my near-death experience at the hooves of an old mare.

I climb off the horse shaking, and she turns away and refuses to look at me, wanders off to join the rest of her people and do what horses do when they're not trying to kill the unhooved. The old man, quietly tickled, can tell I've had a considerable fright and is sympathetic. “
Estas asustádo,
” he says, which is a kind of low-frequency shock, and he takes me inside the house and sits me in the only chair available—an old, unsteady wooden thing—and pours me a drink of water from the jug. I drink it with my hands shaking, no longer concerned about the bacteria in the water.

His house, like him, is lean and simple. He has a cot along the wall with a rough cut window above it, with no glass, screen, or bars, just a hole into the outside. Tools and rope are hung on the walls, all of them obviously for use and not decoration. Every part of this house is put to use, intentional, functional. I think he is the richest and happiest person I've met until then. Even then, as an idiotic teenager, I could understand that.

The drive back to Brownsville the next day was every bit as treacherous and aging as the drive to Juarez had been three days before. That morning, Karsten's dad had been no warmer over breakfast—fried egg soup and fried plantains: Remember, these were Cubans, not Mexicans—and so I preoccupied myself with the paper while Karsten tried to bridge the gap between friends and reluctant family, before we took up the gauntlet of the drive back to Texas.

Chris rode in the passenger seat up front and shouted out potential threats while Karsten gleefully gunned his engine on the dusty highways back north. I was exhausted by this point, incapable of sustaining that level of alarm, so I laid back down on the back seat and slept, the cries and shouts of the two idiots driving in the front of the retired police car seemingly far enough away so that they didn't pertain to me, could not possibly harm me, and so I slept. I slept.

When I got home, two days later, the house was dark, and I ate a half a bag of Doritos for dinner, as I had gone unmissed, except by maybe Lupíta Chiquita, to whom I still owe those five bucks.

Karsten disappeared a few months after that, when his father “made a donation” to St. Mary's Catholic School and they allowed Karsten to graduate finally, though he had not been to school for close to two years. He called me about a year later from a naval academy somewhere on the east coast, asking me for the telephone number of some girl he had dated twice, said he'd call me right back, but never did.

That crazy Karsten.

Chapter 20

Neighborhood Heroes

Joe's house had been unguarded by any male of consequence for some years after Lúpe had died, and Martín had scuttled off to the north to find work fit for a seventeen-year-old who was now earning the family bread. For some time now, the lime green house with the shit-brown trim was protected only by Joe, who was twelve now, cross-eyed and fat. It was otherwise full of women, full of a powdery allure, awaiting penetration of any sort, to hear my Dad tell it.

Across from their house on Oklahoma Avenue, there was a forgotten brick shanty that had at one point of usefulness been a kind of storehouse used to keep feed or bales of cotton, some sort of farming thing. It had fallen into disrepair and was quite uninhabitable, but that didn't stop a series of families from taking residency in it.

For most of the time I can remember living on Oklahoma Avenue, a small dirty family of white transients had taken squatters' rights on the spot, which was eventually reduced to a triangular mud hole, next to a stinking stilled drainage ditch that I believe was used as a septic system and garbage disposal. There were no other amenities to be seen, besides a perpetually smoldering fire pit by a gutted car shell.

They had a boy about three years older than me, named Stephen. Stephen was a skinny, dirty boy who had been the focus of periodic intimidation from Dan some mornings on the bus to school, I think to impress me. I never said much to Stephen, except once when he'd been recruited by the Army, and, excited to talk to anyone about it, he tried to read the recruiting literature to me while we waited for the bus on his last morning attending class. He'd had trouble sounding out the most basic of words in the propagandist promises of the brochure, and I felt awful for him.

I never saw him again. Then the rest of his family moved, overnight. They were just gone one morning, after five or six years of living there.

Eventually a large Mexican family moved into the spot. They never quite mingled in Grampa's barrio. I don't know if they ever really tried and were rebuffed, or if they were simply met with a cold reception and took their cue from that, but there were no formal introductions, no shared breakfasts or gossip, or work. They remained unto themselves. They were male, mostly: teenage boys and a few men, maybe a matriarch, if I remember correctly.

And it was one of these teenage boys who found himself a bit too tempted by the fruits of Joe's mother's house, the large looming green house with the brown trimming, with the three girls and the mother just living there, with the boy. Sure, the big one was retarded,
but,
as the comedian Dave Atell once horribly said,
“ . . . those titties weren't retarded. . . .” (And shame on me for repeating a terrible joke.)

One night, the eldest Lupíta, the mother who was at this point long widowed, woke up and decided to get a drink of water. She walked right by a shape in the dark, said she didn't realize it was a boy at first, but then the shape moved, broke, and ran—ran right for the door and ditched her purse in the living room, spilling its contents as he kicked out the screen door.

He had been interrupted in his burglary, and Lupíta had watched him run right straight to the squat across the street.

The next day, the barrio was abuzz. Gramma came in and told Mom and me over breakfast, and later I got the story from Lupíta herself, as she told and retold the story of her nocturnal visitor and his unsuccessful theft to anyone who'd listen.

She performed the story like Blanche Dubois, fanning herself at the memory and playing up the sympathies of her audience, but—like most everything else in the barrio—I got a sense of something vaguely sexual in her retelling, like she was really saying, “Why, I'm just not sure what he all wanted with little old me; I'm just a lonely old widow with an empty bed. . . .”

However, I'm sure the terror she felt at the moment of realization was severe: The few times I've discovered I've been robbed, the shock of it stupefies me for a minute; I can only imagine what it was like for her to catch the thief under her roof, and the fright she must have had.

For a full day, nothing happened. The incident seemed to pass and life went on as usual on Oklahoma Avenue, and I'm sure the kid across the street in the squat was finally breathing a sigh of relief when out of nowhere the night ignited like the Alamo over at the brick shanty.

Richard and the Rubio brothers, Grampa's nephews, all of them in their twenties and in varying involvement of cocaine smuggling at this point, the “trucking business” having adapted to the 1980s recession, and all of them with large shiny 4x4 pickups with chrome roll-bars and KC lights—they descended roaring into the property, coked up and locked down for war.

Four or five trucks broke through whatever flimsy fencing surrounded the place, and six to ten men with guns shouting in Spanish erupted from the cabins of the trucks, kicking down doors and setting fire to anything that would catch.

The young thief had unknowingly stirred up a cocaine-fueled hornet's nest. The group of squatters were beaten, rounded up, and terrorized, and though many guns bristled, none of them were fired, I remember, and I was impressed at their discipline, because they didn't want the sheriff called. Or maybe they just forgot their bullets, because mean-fighting, coked-up Mexicans aren't exactly known for their foresight.

Whatever the truth, no one was shot, no one injured critically, and no sheriffs were called. The transient family was run off in the one vehicle they owned, piled in and bloodied.

The day after, while the heroes were still off celebrating their victory in some port-side bar that was tolerant of their cocaine use, the morning sun rose on the smoldering ruins of what just the evening before had been a perfectly good brick shanty.

Joe and I heard the battle reports from his mother, Lupíta, who told us about this new development while Joe finished his breakfast, like we should learn a lesson from it, that if we make a life of stealing, a horde of coked-up Mexicans will kick down our doors and run us out of town, and that this was right and good, and how justice is meted out here. More border justice.

We listened to her solemnly, but were suddenly itching to get to the scene of the fight and see for ourselves what had happened.

When she finally finished, and Joe shoved what was left of his breakfast into his mouth, we bolted (well, I
bolted
: Joe waddled enthusiastically) through the same door the kid had kicked apart in his hurry to get back to his hovel, the same place we were now in a hurry to reach, before the fires died out, where it had all just happened, not a few hours before. The place was still smoking, the ashes of burned belongings still warm.

We picked through the rooms, and Joe looked for things to steal while I just felt a sense of shame at the abuse these people had just suffered—all of them, as a clan—because of what one of them had done, and at the smoldering piles of secondhand clothes, mismatched and moldy, and their mattresses made from cardboard boxes and unwearable denim, all of it half burnt. This was the undeniable ugliness of border justice, at our adolescent feet, and I was confused by feeling aligned to our men, and ashamed of what they'd done.

The rooms were uninsulated, open to the weather, and even through the disruption of the attack of the night before, it was evident to my eyes that this place was not habitable for people, that humans should not live like this, and even then, they had fought to defend it, and that then, even this—
this
—was taken from them.

I thought back to Stephen, who had attended the same school as me, walked the same hallways feeling the same teenage crushes on the same girls, likely, the same desires, and I remembered the first night I saw that kid in the barrio, his family's first night on Oklahoma Avenue. How he leaned his whole skinny body on a loose board on the wire fence and howled in imitation of a dog who barked relentlessly back at him—how wild and dirty this boy looked—and realizing that this is what he had to come home to, every night of high school.

And besides feeling so terribly sorry for him, for the people who had just been burned out of this hovel for breaking the peace of the Rubio Barrio, I felt odd, picking through there, an uneasy gratitude for everything that Dad and Mom and Gramma had endured to keep us together, however uncertain, in that house on Oklahoma Avenue.

I found a burned up tin of ravioli, split at the top with a knife and two plastic forks still sticking out of it—an interrupted dinner—and I felt like I had to give a little prayer of thanks to Dad, Mom, Gramma, for being stronger than this whole fucking system of peasantry, and exclusion.

Rummaging through the dirt, Joe found and began eating a Li'l Debbie snack cake with the plastic only slightly melted, fairly recoverable. He pulled at the plastic and didn't seem to mind as he chewed his way through the ash.