Boy Kings of Texas (27 page)

Of late, things had been going bad even in the distribution/security business, and things were no longer as good as they had been in the mid-1980s, when Richard's career in the border trades had started.

He wasn't doing well, and he had been reduced to being proud, in the way that white supremacists are proud, because they have nothing else to be proud of, really, except for the good luck of being born white in America—and if they're
really
lucky, being born in Idaho.

Richard, however, had not been born white, and it didn't help that the week before—pressed for time and harried to be elsewhere—I had offered Richard $20 to mow Gramma's lawn for her, a responsibility that had been customarily mine since I was about eight years old. I hadn't meant it to be offensive, and I was utterly naive as to what an insult that had been, but he had laughed it off, sincerely, I had thought.

The resentment had been building for years in moments like these, it would seem, and tonight, it would hit a flashpoint.

The small black truck skids to a stop after roaring and spinning its way into the driveway, and no sooner has it ground to a halt than Richard throws open the driver-side door and springs out of the cab and is stomping his way toward me, as I leave the house.

“
¡JUNIOR
!
” he yells at me, as soon as he catches sight of me, “
¡¿Que le dejíste a JP?
!
” (“What did you say to JP?”)

He's still walking toward me, short but firm and stout, like a coked-up Sherman tank in a leather vest and cowboy hat.

I stop dead in my own tracks, uncertain. I don't usually have reason to interact with any of the natives, and it takes me a moment to figure out that Richard's talking about one of his kids.

JP is the second oldest of Richard's many abandoned and neglected children, traded off like a commodity many years before. JP was at least legitimate, having been born of Richard's first wife, Patty. When they divorced, two of the three kids they had together were abandoned by both parents. Patty had kept the oldest girl, Jenny, but felt the subsequent two were too much for a freshly divorced mother to endure. So when Gramma's infertile sister-in-law Chá-Chá asked to adopt the second-youngest girl, Cindy, Richard and ex-wife bartered: It was to be a bundled package, or nothing. Both kids, or no kids.

JP would have to go, too. To sweeten the pot, so to speak. Hell, to cook in a pot, if you so desire. To feed the girl, Cindy. But they both go, together.

Chá-Chá and her husband Robé considered it. So far, all they had was René, an illiterate mule of a teenager from Robé's first marriage who would wander off for months at a time, and then come back to drive a truck for a while, get paid, then disappear again. Chá-Chá really wanted a daughter. So they took the deal. Fuck it, they decided. There was always work to be done around the yard.

If Richard felt any guilt about this, we'll never know. Remember: Children were bartered like livestock around there, and Richard himself had been handed off as a favor to please Grampa, back when Gramma was into pleasing Grampa, before she killed him.

That being said, my only interaction with JP had been at a barrio party about three or four years before, where I had accidentally wandered into some sort of fiesta on my way home. JP was off in a corner alone: stringy, diseased, pale, and unhealthy. He was also mute. He didn't speak, just sort of grunted enthusiastically and pointed when he was excited about something. This would also make his nose run uncontrollably, so he'd make a sound like, “
Errrrrr
,” SNORT “
Errrrrrrr
,” SNORT “
Errrrrrrr
,” SNORT when he was happy.

He was off to one side eating a plate of food with a tortilla when I tried talking to him, out of pity. He didn't know what to make of me, what to make of my attempt to befriend and joke with him, so after a while he started swinging at me, out of joy, punching at my hips and laughing.

He meant no real harm, I could see, but he took my kindness as weakness, as something to easily dominate, because that was the only language he spoke, and so he tried to beat the pity out of me, but with a smile.

That was the last time I'd ever spoken to JP, who would be about ten years old at this point. I had never interacted with him otherwise. To have Richard, bristling now before me, in fighting posture, accusing me of doing something to his kid, to JP, left me befuddled.

Then I remember the phone call.

“Was . . . was that
him
that called?” I ask, genuinely curious.

It was just like Richard to abandon a child and then feel compelled to protect his besmirched honor.

“Yeah, and you said, ‘Someone who doesn't want to talk to you!' and then hung up on him!” he yells at me, getting uncomfortably close. This, he spoke to me in English, and it was curious to hear my own words yelled back at me, like a weapon being discharged. Richard's face is pale with rage.

I've never seen this before, not from Richard. Richard was always my friend, my brother, in a way. For him to be this mad, for him to be able to reach this level of hostility and potential violence—it just never figured.

“Listen, I didn't know it was JP, man. All I heard was someone being rude on the phone, and I said something in return. I didn't mean any disrespect to your kid, man,” I say all this in the most nuanced, plaintive terms. Neutral, calming. I've done this before. And I mean it, with Richard. He stands there, fuming for a minute, in conflict.

He has green eyes behind clear, frameless glasses, and they're narrowed in a way that is all danger.

I say, “Richard, come on. It's me. You know I'd never do anything to hurt your feelings intentionally.” This seems to be enough, seems to quell the savagery.

He grabs the beer out of my hand and upends it, drinks it dry in one gulp as a means of neutralizing the moment, granting me pardon. But meaning it as a threat:
I can take what I want from you.

He does this in front of Segis and Didi, who have been standing in the doorway watching this happen from the beginning but have said or done nothing. We all seem to relax a bit.

“So we're cool?” I ask.

“Yeah, we're alright,” he says. “Just don't ever be mean to my kids again, Junior.”

“Like I said, if I knew it was JP, it wouldn't have happened; why don't you come in and have some beers with us?”

We go back into the house and resume our evening at the now-cleared dinner table, the atmosphere much relaxed. With Richard at the table with us, we feel an odd sense of gratitude, like we're being graced by barrio royalty. We all feel this, I can tell.

It's Richard, after all, who had taken me to my first bar for a drink, when I was fifteen. I don't really remember how it happened, but I had come home after skipping school all day with Tony and found Richard drinking beer in our driveway. So I sat out with him, sneaking the occasional beer, when around ten o'clock or so he suddenly wanted to look up a certain floozy who had caught his fancy some days before. He decided right there that she needed finding.

To this day—and I mean this sincerely—that has to have been the toughest, most dangerous bar I've ever visited. It made the bar scene in
Star Wars
look like a daycare for vegan children. It was constructed from plywood planks and erected illegally in an uncleared lot near the Port of Brownsville, snug in the still-unrecognized projects, and the beer was served in bottles from an Igloo cooler, on the ground, for a dollar apiece.

Because he had decided to visit on impulse, Richard was simply in shorts: no shirt or shoes, which was obviously no problem.

The place was hopping, with a jukebox in the sagging corner of the one room playing
corridos
loudly. We got a table and sat, with Richard ordering a round of Miller High Lifes with no hassle at me being at the table. He threw a $5 bill on the table, and the waitress didn't blink, just set the bottles down and wandered off with her $3 tip. Richard spent his time questioning the other bar girls about his particular interest, and I took in the scene around me, transfixed by the people there, the lowest of the working class, people with absolutely nothing, and totally enjoying themselves in a horrible penny opera. They fascinated me.

“Junior, quit staring,” Richard hissed at me, bringing me out of my reverie.

I was riveted by this one little fella across the bar, wondering about his backstory, how he had gotten that scar on his arm, what he did for a living, and where he lived. Would he stab me? Where was his knife? Gramma used to tell me stories about Grampa and his cousins drinking in bars such as this, and one night in particular when his best friend Mariano had been stabbed in the belly, split open like a melon, and how he'd clutched both sides of his stomach to bring it together to keep the beer from spilling out, bemoaning how much he'd spent on beer that night, and how they all had laughed about it later. . . .

These
were
those
people, I was understanding.

“Hey, he's gonna get pissed!” Richard had said and smacked my arm, and then I realized I had been staring, so I smiled and waved, and the guy just sorta waved back, in a way that wasn't friendly.

The girl Richard had been looking for had already fucked off back to Mexico, and so we ended the night by going swimming in a pool at an apartment “complex” where Richard knew someone, at two in the morning. It had been a really great night.

Another time, he came home drunk the night before Mother's Day with a Grammy-nominated accordionist, and they set up a party in the driveway. They had made quite a ruckus arriving, had awoken me and I'd wandered out like a cranky neighbor. Richard was the first one to notice me.

“Hey, June. Don't tell your mom. That's a famous guy, on the accordion. I don't know his name. You want a beer? Don't be an asshole.”

It was Esteban Jordan, or Steve Jordan, who had been in a movie by David Byrne,
True Stories
. I recognized him right away because of the one-eye thing. Holy shit: This guy had been in a movie with John Goodman and David fricken Byrne!
No one would believe me,
I thought.

This was my first brush with someone famous, besides Freddy Fender, who had knocked up my Aunt Diana in 1969, who had apparently brushed up against Freddy more than once.

I said, “Hey, you're that guy in that movie with David Byrne! In that scene, at the Mexican bar, with the red lighting, with John Goodman!” Steve didn't acknowledge me. He looked away.

His flunkie answered, though: “He was in
three
movies,
mang!
But two of them didn't get released yet. He's a pro,
mang
!
”

Steve was elusive, aloof, wouldn't really engage except to play the accordion that night.

I slipped back into my house and found my microcassette recorder, which I had because I was still working for the
Brownsville Herald
as a stringer at this time, and then I slipped back out to the party to record the rest of the evening. I needed proof that he'd been there; proof for whom, I'm not exactly sure.

Apparently Mr. Jordan was releasing a new album, and all these songs he was playing were “bootleg,
mang
!
” When he found out I worked for the
Herald,
he was reluctant to continue, worried that I might write a bad review, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that, besides the fact that I didn't write record reviews, all Spanish songs sounded exactly alike to me, and no one would really care about his new album. But please: Play on.

And, as predicted, no one really cared about the chance meeting with Steve Jordan in my driveway, in the middle of the night, on Mother's Day, except for Basilio, my mentor at the
Herald
. “No shit?” he asked.

“Yeah, no shit. He even played a couple songs for my Gramma, at her window, for Mother's Day,” I said.

“
No shit?”
He asked again, impressed.

“No shit. I think he was there for the coke.”

“Hunh,” he said. “Can I listen to it?”

‘Sure,” I said, and handed him the “bootleg,
mang
!
” microcassette tape and then heard Basilio chuckling for the next two hours.

“You're a hoot, Domingo,” he said, afterward.

Basilio had taken a liking to me the year before, when we originally started working together and I had shown myself to be very much a part of the Hunter Thompson school of journalism, when I came in half drunk from a night out on South Padre Island during spring break, while all the other high schoolers reeled in horror at my terrible state, dressed in a camouflage jacket and matted hair, then managed to write a six-hundred-word feature that made the front page, while their high school stuff
had ended up as paragraphs in the H section, if used at all. Basilio had bought me a Dr Pepper, and copyedited my story himself, had been very much impressed. We became fast friends.

But this? Steve Jordan in my driveway, coked up and playing Mother's Day songs while I niggled and prodded him and his entourage? I was creating a legacy here. All thanks to Richard.

That had been our friendship, up until this night. I always felt safe with him, protected. Had no reason ever to fear that the mask he wore with other people could be turned to face me.

When I invite him inside that night, the danger is over. It will then be a good and happy night, drinking with Segis, like equals. I feel it.

We sit around the kitchen table, trading stories and laughing as usual, and the mood has changed since the unpleasantness of earlier.

But then the hour has grown later, and I have grown weary of the bad music, weary of the company, and I'm looking for bed, suddenly.

I say, “Hey, guys, I hate to do this, but I'm really kind of tired and I have stuff to do tomorrow; can we call it a night?”