Boy Kings of Texas (5 page)

The look on Mare's face as I left, I don't think even she was prepared for what Mom's reaction would be. Mare went to the kitchen, got a wet towel and came back, and put it to my face as I cried quietly into it. A little later, Mom came out of the room. She sat next to me on the couch, lifted the cold wet towel from my face like she did when I was younger and had the fever, and looked at me, looked at what she had done to my face. The look on her face, it was a cluster of things, like she was forgiving herself and forcing herself to forgive me, and it was the complete opposite of the look she had given me when I was badly fevered. I couldn't look at her again for ten years.

Chapter 6

¡Oklahoma!

There's a custom in this part of the world that never fails to raise eyebrows when I describe it to those who didn't grow up here, and usually fails to impress anyone who has.

Down on the border, it is quite common for a family to swap or trade children in a sort of biological “regifting” program, usually when an unwanted issue has visited unexpectedly, and it is also used as a system of barter. If an indigent family cannot afford to feed yet another mouth, or finds itself in need of something and has a newborn for exchange, then they might exchange it with a childless couple who is willing to swap. And they will do so totally without oversight or consequence. Well, without immediate consequence.

Children here are a commodity slightly more precious than livestock, I think because eventually a life-insurance policy could be placed upon them, and then they further mean a guaranteed revenue stream once past elementary school, when they are capable of manual labor, or exhibit some skill at driving.

This is an admittedly cynical posture to take, sure, but growing up among this displaced strata of people, this is what I felt, or felt eventually, when I was able to describe it. It was not that they were incapable of feeling love—I'm fairly positive most did
love
their children, but I think they were simply incapable of translating it into everyday communication when there was work to do, or the possibility of sex in the offing.

Gramma, as bad luck would have it, experienced this familial redistribution firsthand in the late 1930s during the Depression, and then more than once. Gramma was swapped around until she could be placed with a family that could find her useful, and feed her in return. By the time she was ten years old, she was sent to live with her uncle at a farm adjoined to her father's, equally poor, but burdened with wild children whom Gramma would presumably nanny.

She would do this, it was decided, for half a tortilla a day. For the other half, her brother, Felípe, an Irish twin ten months older than she, would work the ramshackle dust-boned animals.

In later years Gramma would tell us of this time, how, for punishment, she and Felípe would sometimes be tied to a pole buried in the ground and whipped without mercy, their hands bound together while made to walk around and around. Marge teared up when Gramma told us this story, sobbing, holding her hands to her face, saying, “. . .
they were like slaves!”
But I couldn't really feel anything for Gramma at that time, although I'm sure Marge did, because she didn't have the sort of history I had with Gramma. For Marge, the image of Gramma getting whipped like a Mexican Kunta Kinte was poignant, but to me it was
mot juste,
because I couldn't feel pity for her after having experienced a similar childhood at her hand.

Gramma had grown up tough and mean as a result of her circumstances. She had to become tougher than her environment, or she would have starved. Her metric for wealth, as a result, became food, at a very early age, like you see in survivors of POW camps, who horde secret caches of food in an otherwise suburban existence.

Gramma went on to describe how she spent the early part of her adolescence as the unwanted cousin come to live with a mean, wild-boy tribe of haranguers, these five cousins of hers, who would torture and assault her every chance they had, would keep her subjugated, inferior, reduced, and reminded of why she was there. She had to watch her cousins during the day, while everyone who was capable (boys over age twelve, girls over age fifteen) would work the land, the fields, the farm.

She was responsible for their welfare, and it was a tough job because there were so goddamned many of them, and some of them were actually older, like her cousin Elvíra. Elvíra was fourteen, and blossoming. One day, she decided to cross the woods through a short cut that separated her from the rest of the kids, returning home from some errand or chore, and Gramma had decided to follow her. When they arrived at the wooden fence, which served as a boundary between their farm and their neighbor's, Elvíra was suddenly grabbed from behind in ambush by the eldest son of that neighboring family, a lean boy in his twenties, who set about to tumble her in the field, right there. But this was Gramma's family, and she was having none of it. She grabbed a log and brought it down hard on the back of his head while he was trying to pin down her cousin.

He flopped over, rolled onto his back, and she grabbed Elvíra and they both ran home, Elvíra clutching what was left of her dress closed over her new breasts. When they got home, they told her father, who grabbed his 30/30 and set off in his truck, but the boy had already run off, and he was never heard from again.

Gramma was regaled, heralded at home as the guardian of her cousins, but it was short of the mark. Gramma was not going to let some wiry fieldhand's unchecked libido get between her and the one-a-day tortilla that was keeping her and her little brother alive, no sir.

Some years later, when Gramma was nearing the fertile age of sixteen, it was with some fairy-tale alarm that the unruly tribe of cousins would get surprise and periodic visits from a wandering and charismatic cowboy smuggler during the hours when the kids were out doing what they usually did each day, which was make someone miserable near the Rio Grande.

They first noticed him because he kept coming around and asking if the kids had seen the American Border Patrol, or maybe the “
reínches
,” which is what the border Mexicans called the Texas Rangers, and then if they had, where, how often, how many, et cetera. But he had no need for their sidekick intelligence. He was circling around because Gramma had somehow caught his eye, a fact that eventually surfaced and quickly bewildered everyone.

The kids would gladly and loudly report anything they'd seen, make up information just to keep him hanging around; he was the area's Billy the Kid. Everyone knew him by sight there: Daniel Martinez,
El Caballero
. The Gentleman Cowboy.

At nineteen years old, Daniel, my grandfather by blood, was already a
caballero
, a sort of localized knighthood acquired by his obstinate refusal to acknowledge the law on either side of the border, and excellence in his field. He wore Stetson hats and exotic animal hide as boots, a very big deal at the time, like spinning rims on an Escalade. Daniel was a
coyote
, bringing people and liquor and cinnamon and animals across the Rio Grande River, called
el río bravo
in Mexico. It was, at this time, a huge, swollen, and undammed thing, a proud and dangerous partner in Daniel's enterprise, utterly unconcerned with human welfare, a warm and brown liquid dragon.

My grandfather was a lean, light-skinned man with wavy black hair, and he towered over the regular men of the area at an easy six feet, clearly of Spanish lineage. He was the area's Robin Hood, the bandit-hero, and he was well received everywhere he went, it seemed. Daniel was a born river person, totally unafraid of the whims of the water that now divided Mexico from white people, and he understood its moods and temperament intimately, and he took advantage of this gift.

The Border Patrol had its issues with Daniel Martinez. For years he had helped hundreds of Mexicans across the river to travel north and work more jobs up in the States, floated over booze by the gallons during Prohibition and carried bundles of cinnamon, parrots, and reptiles—anything that could turn a profit in the United States. The “border town” was a brand-new thing to the area, some mythic division created during the Civil War, and he and his own fathers were simply making the best of it, very much a Rhett Butler of the area, and he was very good at it. Just look at his boots. Then, for reasons lost to history, he set eyes on Virginia Campos, and he fell in love. . . . Or the sort of love he was capable of, as a full-grown boy king of early Texas.

The only stories I have of my grandfather are those of guile, of exquisite slipperiness, and of a near mythological ability to evade the law. He was Brer Rabbit, with a fondness for the river, which I actually have to admit I possess as well. I like the water. I am good under the water, and it doesn't scare me in the least, whatever the form or velocity. Its depths and hydraulic violence do not frighten me. Water kills you when you fight it, saves you when you go with it. My father doesn't have this appreciation of water, I've seen. Things like this skip a generation, I read. And things like this, they were very much qualities that my grandfather had. They've told me stories, which are the only things of his that survive.

In one, Daniel is caught by the Border Patrol while he's ferrying a raft full of people over to America, and this bunch, they're caught red-handed, all have their hands in the air, under guard from the agents, and he leans down as they're pulling him ashore, saying, “Don't shoot; my boots are caught in the wire here,” and all the while he's pulling them off, and then when they come off he slips right into the water before they realize he's fucked off. The agents fire into the water, trying to kill him. but Daniel can hold his breath for two minutes and he's so far downstream in his river, they can't do a thing, and he gets away.

That's my grandfather for you.

In another story, he's riding near the river when his horse steps on a hive of yellow jackets and he and his horse are suddenly swarmed. The horse goes completely insane from the ensuing stings and he charges uncontrollably through the bracken and eventually spills over a cliff and into the river twenty feet below.

Daniel doesn't panic, though he is sinking like a rock because his boots are filling with water. And while he's underwater he removes them as he's swept away in the current—boots tend to suck you down to your death—and he manages to swim to the river bank, though he never sees his best horse again. He lost a lot of boots in that river, too, apparently.

Daniel was exalted around these parts because of escapes like this. He was peasant royalty in the making, and his people loved him. And when he suddenly proposed to Gramma, whom he saw one day playing nanny to a truly horrible assortment of children, she was swept away from this existence in what was considered on the dusty borders of the Rio Grande River in the 1940s to be a Cinderella wedding. It completed his fairy-tale image.

Gramma, of course, accepted this proposal to marry Daniel Martinez and delighted at the envy of her family and cousins, and she was carrying his child within weeks. This child would be my father, and the only child they would have together. When she carried him to term, they decided to name him Domingo. Domingo Campos Martinez, at the vehement insistence of one of Gramma's female cousins, who said the name was dignified and macho because she had a crush on another local cowboy also named Domingo, a relationship that did not last long and existed primarily in her head, and in the woods behind the horse barn.

“
Estába albórrotada,
” Gramma remembers about her cousin, when I asked her why she named her son “Sunday,” and why I was now burdened with it.
The girl was in heat.

This is how I got my name.

Before the birth of my father, Gramma and Daniel got married hurriedly in a small church in Matamoros. She was sixteen years old in her wedding photograph and I have it, the only image I have of my real grandfather, and they both look frightened and corpse-like already, similar to those photographs taken of dead outlaws in the Old West, and with good reason, because Daniel . . . well, Daniel . . . my grandfather by blood … he never quite made it to grandfatherhood.

My own father, or Dad, as I know and recount him here, he was about ten months old where we pick up the story. In one year's time, Gramma had already been rendered infertile by a number of Venusian troubles, so we can surmise that an uxorious saint, my dear departed grandfather was very much not. He was twenty, had a young family at home, which was a farm on the Mexican side of the border, but he had got some ideas of property on the American side of his river, and that was all coming together. But I'm sure that death was whispering from every corner of their newlywed house. You would have had to have been deaf not to hear it, just looking at him. He was aware that the American authorities were on his trail, so he was keeping a low profile, not actively engaging or putting himself in a position to be caught. This infuriated the white law on the American side of the border. The
reínches
, they were these corn-fed white boys from Kansas, maybe Jesufied Okies, from other starving illiterate farm states to the north who simply could not come to meet the area on its terms, so they decide to flood it with warrants, arrests, and bounties, some legal, some not so much. Law kinda changes down here. Things get blurry when you can't do what you want, what you
know
is right. Border Justice.

Eventually these thick-necked yokels, the Texas Rangers—because they could not catch him—they put a large underground bounty on my grandfather, one they'd knew would pay out but that they would never have to pay.

So one final dusty afternoon my grandfather Daniel walks into the last Mexican bar he would ever walk into, sits down, and asks for the last
cerveza
he would ever ask for from the last fat bartender that would ever serve him—this was April 17, 1952, around three in the afternoon (every important story in Mexico happens at three in the afternoon, I think because that's when Jesus died). The fat bartender reaches into a cooler and grabs a Corona, then pulls a .45 caliber pistol he was keeping under the bar for just this moment—and serves Daniel both the beer and his sentence.

My father is on my couch—this is fifty-something years later, and we're in Seattle, I've been out of work for nearly a year, Dan has had his left knee destroyed in a fight, and Dad is visiting and it is a strange thing for every one of us—just moments before one of his usual narcoleptic fits, and he is telling me this story, about his own father. This is the first time I ever hear the detail, the moments, like I'm watching it for the first time on Dan's high-definition TV, and I am . . . what? Thirty-one? Thirty-two? Thirty-two.