Boy Kings of Texas Page 16

  This news is like telling me that Jesus had been shot, in church: just not possible, in the cosmology of how I understand the universe.

  “Where is he?” I demand. “Where is everyone?”

  “He went to Dennis’s, I think,” Israel says.

  I bolt: Dennis lives near the school, around the track and over the golf course, in an apartment spread that was, I suppose, middle class, for Brownsville. I sprint the whole way, Dan’s notebook developing a sweat-shaped image of my palm by the time I get there. I hit the doorway running and don’t bother with the doorbell or a knock, just sorta yank it open and burst through, and am completely embarrassed to see Dennis’s mother on the phone just stop midconversation and look at me, the boy who has just disrespected her house. She is on the phone with my parents, I think.

  I fumble through an apology, and she nods in the direction of Dennis’s bedroom, continuing with her conversation with her back turned to me.

  Timidly, I make my way there, and this time, I knock on the door and immediately see Dan sitting on the bed, holding an ice pack to his eye, with Victor playing cut man, his best friend. Victor and Dan go way back.

  Victor’s family has a lot of money, are upper middle-class Mexican and own a chain of jewelry stores in Brownsville and Matamoros. Victor has been incredibly loyal to Dan since they were in junior high. Victor is a good friend, will eventually become my good friend.

  Every Christmas since I was able to drive, I was charged with bringing four or five dozen of Gramma’s freshly made tamales over to Victor’s house, and they’d receive me like a state visitor, which would make me uncomfortable with the attention, and entirely bewildered at their good manners. They would call every member of their family to the dining room table and have me join them, and everyone would take a tamale and eat it, claiming they were the best thing they’d eaten that Christmas. I would blush and squirm and say, “Uh, gee, thank you?” It was just tamales, for Christ’s sake; we had a warehouse full of them, back at Gramma’s. I shot the pig myself, this time.

  Noblesse oblige, though the class dynamics had been lost on me.

  I always loved Victor’s family, who were very kind to me and Dan all our teenaged lives. Things began falling apart for them after Dan had left to join the army, and I was in my senior year later on, as Victor’s father had been under investigation for some anomalies in his taxes, accusations of smuggling and other federal stuff, but never did we think any less of the family, of the man. Everyone in Brownsville is dirty, works the angles. Politicians at every level are laughably crooked. Law enforcement is openly in bed with criminals—not only in bed, but in like, gay and lesbian pornos—the federal agencies are corrupt to a toxic level. It’s endemic with the area, the culture. Victor’s father simply managed to draw the attention of federal thugs; he did nothing any other family in Brownsville had not done at one point or another. He just managed to be good enough at whatever he did to get caught. I don’t know how they managed the cheek to focus on Victor’s dad.

  Anyhow, it was during those troubles that Victor had phoned me, out of the blue, because he’d taken a weekend off from college to help his mother move out of their house, which had been seized by the feds, and they were desperate to get out of there because once the Feds locked the doors, they’d lose anything that was still inside, and would I please help them tomorrow?

  Sure, I said. I had something planned, but no problem: I’d be there at nine. I’ll bring someone to help.

  The next day, I showed up with my friend Alex. We were the only people Victor had called who showed up; we worked all day and got his mother completely moved out of her house and into storage. She was so grateful that it was terribly satisfying to be able to repay her kindness after all those years, when she needed it. It was like a circuit closing, and it felt good, though she cried all day, from losing her house, and then from gratitude to me and Alex for helping her and Victor when no one else did.

  Sidenote: It had been Victor’s mother, actually, who had spurred me on to do something with myself in one of those throwaway moments, to promise her that I wouldn’t allow myself to settle in Brownsville. I had found a pathetic job as a waiter at the newly opened Olive Garden in Harlingen, Texas, when I had first moved back to Brownsville from Seattle. (People in South Texas don’t tip, and by that I mean: nothing. They simply do not tip. Once or twice an hour, a couple might be feeling worldly and leave behind a single dollar after finishing their lunch. I could work an entire ten-hour shift and make less than $5 in tips. That job lasted about a month. But the humiliation of knowing that “birthday song” lingers still.)

  Anyhow, I was on a lunch shift when Victor and his mother happened to stop in at the Olive Garden, and they sat, thankfully, in someone else’s section. I was on break when I noticed them, and I was putting away my pocket copy of Cyrano de Bergerac, when Victor’s mother said, “Domingo, niño,” in her perfect melting and lispy Galithian Spanish, “You simply do not belong here, in this area, in this job. You need to be where people will appreciate you more, or you will end up as a waiter all your life, because you’re too smart for anything else here.”

  I was more befuddled at the fact that she had recognized Cyrano de Bergerac and mentioned that she had read it in the original French (it was available in French?) and had drawn her conclusions from the fact that I was reading it on my break to fully understand what she was telling me. I knew I hated South Texas, but what did Cyrano de Bergerac have to do with it? I just identified with the nose thing.

  That was Victor, and his family. It’s not surprising to see him there, nursing Dan, holding the ice pack to his eye. The blood vessels in one eye had burst, from a punch that had caused the contact lens—one of the early large, hard glass models—to scrape his cornea. Dan had continued to fight, even though he had nearly been blinded, and while Dan sits there quietly sniffling, Victor proceeds to tell me how it went.

  They had met in the alley behind the tennis courts, with half the school assembled to see the fight. Most of the crowd was there for the simple pleasure of watching the pugilistics, but others were there to support either Dan or Ted.

  Ted had been loud and mouthy, talking shit loud and ghetto, while Dan had been quiet, reserved, angry. Frightened.

  Ted’s little entourage of freshmen kids had been there, too, Victor says, leaping and howling and picking fights with others in the crowd, pulling up their shirts in a threatening manner.

  Ted half-pretended to talk to someone in the crowd and then tried to sucker punch Dan to start it off, but Dan had expected it and saw it coming, stepped forward into the swing and caught Ted in a grapple. It was on, and their styles couldn’t have been more different.

  Ted tried to keep Dan at bay, pushed off and defended himself at a distance, then charged forward throwing overhead punches. Dan would deflect and swing wide haymakers, grabbing at anything Ted threw his way, and locking them into a pinch, which Dan would win, but then he would let go.

  In the tussle Ted would connect and Dan would too, and then grab or smother Ted, keep him pinned in a submission hold, and then Ted would say, “OK, OK, I’m done,” then would get up, say something to the crowd, and then lunge at Dan again.

  Dan would win every single exchange, would pin Ted down at the end of every scuffle, but in the end he looked like he got the worst of it, which is how teenage fights are scored.

  Ted, being black, looked as if he had not bruised, had not been hit once, except for the swelling around both his eyes.

  Our sister, Mare, had been there, in the crowd, and when Marlon and the rest of Ted’s entourage had threatened to get involved, she came at them with her tennis racket, beating them back into the crowd. Mare wasn’t alone in this; Dan’s friends—both Victor and Dennis—had been behind her, and had calmed her back down, and made certain it had stayed a one-on-one fight.

  And it was a one-on-one fight that Dan had won ten times over, but his sense of fair play and being a good guy allowed Ted to keep rearing
up every time he’d cry uncle, and then Dan would let him up, even help him up, at times, as Victor told it. Then Ted would try something else, something dirty. The burst eye, in fact, came from the time Dan helped Ted get to his feet: Ted was sitting on the ground, beaten again, grabbed Dan’s offered hand, and then used it as leverage as Ted swung to hit Dan, from the ground, after he had said it was over. This finally pissed Dan off, and he hit Ted back so hard, he didn’t come back up, just rolled over on his stomach and said, “Oh, good hit, good hit . . . ”

  And that’s how it ended. That fight lasted nearly forty-five minutes.

  In the final analysis Dan did not have a hardened heart, after all that we’d been through with Dad; he would not do anything to someone else he felt was too damaging or too unfair. Like I said, Dan was a good kid. Ted, on the other hand, was trying every trick he knew to hurt Dan, right down to imitating karate movies, doing reverse mule kicks that never connected, or grabbing Dan’s head and trying to slam it against the tennis court wall. Dan wouldn’t fall for it, used the training he’d learned from football to keep Ted from marshalling the grapple, determining his balance. Dan was just better at it, but he wasn’t a finisher; he didn’t have it in him to hurt Ted. In the end, what ended the fight was exhaustion, and the lunch bell.

  But Dan had survived. Not only survived, but outmatched the Titan of Hanna High, if you really knew how to score.

  Though sitting in Dennis’s bedroom, you wouldn’t have known it, funereal as it was. Fights do that to you, make your soul feel dirty afterward. Make you feel ashamed of yourself, if your moral compass is intact.

  This fight had been city versus farm, and the city had repeatedly conned its way out of a sound beating at the hands of the farm.

  Dennis’s mother had called Dad, had explained what happened, and Dad said he would be right over. Since both Dan and I have been the victims of Dad’s explosive and illogical temper, we both expect and dread the further punishment headed our way, when he gets there. I think he’ll have a fit over Dan losing the contact lenses, for not winning decisively, for the potential trouble from the school, the cops, anything that would occur to Dad, but it doesn’t happen.

  Dad is uncharacteristically understanding, comforting even, and he and Richard had dropped all they were doing that afternoon and drove to Dennis’s to pick Dan up and take him to the emergency room.

  They x-ray his nose (no fracture) and his wrist (hairline fracture) and his thumb (clearly fractured). Then they take Dan to dinner and buy him a beer.

  Dan had fought, and survived, like a man. He was in the club. The club that Dad and Richard had never been able to enter. Maybe make deliveries there, through the tradesman’s entrance, but certainly never enter through the front door.

  An uneasy peace settled in the school after the fight.

  Dan showed up to school the next day, with his red notebook stage prop intact. Ted didn’t.

  Ted was last seen down the alleyway, after the fight, smoking a joint with Marlon and putting a handkerchief to his nose. He dropped out of school and wasn’t heard from again until we read a story in the Brownsville Herald about three months later, when he accidentally shot himself in the thigh, trying to remove a .357 revolver from his waistband as he sat in a car, late at night, across the street from the house of a girl he once briefly dated. That girl lived on a road that led straight to our house, out on Oklahoma Avenue, about five miles away. I didn’t see the threat, until Dan pointed it out.

  “He could have been coming here,” he had said with a sort of sadness, looking at Mom and Derek arguing in the kitchen. His voice betrayed a complicated regret, like his feelings were hurt, with the implication.

  Big hearted to the end, Dan even attended Ted’s funeral, which I could not understand then, either. Ted’s mother, who knew who Dan was, spotted him in the crowd and clutched Dan to her, as she broke down crying. Dan held her, and wept openly as well.

  Chapter 18

  DELTA CITY REPEAT

  By age sixteen, my foremost ambition in attending high school was to get clear away from it before nine o’clock in the morning. Not consciously, of course, not for the first few hundred times.

  School, I had noticed, was considered “my time,” which meant I couldn’t be pressed into labor by my father or grandmother for fear of government involvement. So I learned to take advantage of this.

  Either by school bus or by my mother’s Taurus, I’d make it to school before seven thirty and wait out options for escape. By my sophomore year, Tony had become my principal friend, or veteran pimp. He was by this point a grizzled imitation of the artful dodger, but with seemingly good parents and an even better little brother who was about to lap Tony at high school graduation.

  Together Tony and I would find ways to while away the hours by doing anything other than attending class before we had to report home again.

  We were big fans of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and I think we even tried believing we were continuing a long-celebrated American tradition by ditching class and getting stoned, a fantasy combination of Mark Twain by way of Hunter S. Thompson, but in full disclosure, we were just lazy and looking for a good time, not fully understanding how we were handicapping our future.

  The skipping itself was not a problem, I would eventually come to learn; the problem was being allowed back into school, when we wanted to go back. Tony halfway convinced me that he had long ago mastered this obstacle, with a bit of bronze-age technology. Admittedly, I never did question why he was still held back all this time if his chicanery was so foolproof.

  To his credit, Tony actually initiated me into the trade that I’d eventually pursue, graphic design. But in this early stage, it was plain and simple forgery: There was no “design” in what we were doing. It was Tony who placed the first X-Acto knife I ever held in my hands, and immediately, I felt an overwhelming sense of possibility, holding that little penknife.

  He showed me how to use the X-Acto to surgically remove and rearrange grades and absences on a report card before it got to our parents. We’d intercept the report card and make our alterations, photocopy the doctored product and slip the manufactured version into the school district’s envelope to cover our trespasses, and then lay it nonchalantly on the dining room table before our parents got home from work.

  Tony took careful pains to explain this whole process to me, his flunky—a term that came uncomfortably close to becoming literal—over the photocopier in the library, feeding dimes into the machine like he was playing slots, in search of a copy that didn’t blur or show the incisions in the original.

  We were stoned and forcibly schoolbound because he couldn’t get his mother’s car that spring day.

  “Look, man,” he said through his trendy and tinted John Lennon glasses, a wanker style, even then, “You just gotta remove the 2 from in front of the 23 absences, then lighten the reproduction, and you got three absences in first period instead of twenty-three. Now take the 8 from the 48, move the 4 over and put the 8 in front of it, and now you have a B in Spanish instead of an F.”

  “Ho,” I said, in total understanding, a big smile growing on my face, conveying how thoroughly I understood. Give a man a ride, he skips for a day. Teach him how to forge. . . .

  Oh, it was ridiculously shortsighted, sure, but at that age, I never thought further than the immediate threat. Simply convincing my mother everything was quiet at school was enough for me; dealing with school records and the larger consequences of robbing myself of even that low-shelf an education—all that I would face at a later date. And certainly have.

  That first year, Tony would usually borrow his mother’s car, a blue Oldsmobile Delta 88, which was my own mother’s dream car but totally unaffordable to us, and he would use it for our expeditions.

  It was with complicated disquiet that I rode in this car on almost a daily basis to South Padre Island and back, a resort town at the end of a twenty-eight-mile highway that somehow felt much more cosmopolitan than Browns
ville ever could, possibly because people from all over the United States vacationed there.

  We’d drive there three or four times a day, listening to Led Zeppelin, as was Tony’s unwavering musical proclivity, and I’d nod my head in unison and in rhythm with whomever else was stoned or drunk in the car.

  There was a revolving cast of extras, but me, Tony, and Chris were the standards. I didn’t trust Chris at the time because he reminded me too much of myself, and I felt threatened by him, somehow. But I didn’t know that then.

  Most of the other transient guys were idiots, even before they were stoned, so there was very little discovery or anything of interest ever said when others were in the car. Collectively, we just wanted to feel better than sobriety, not understanding that we were feeding what would become addictive personalities.

  Among Chris, Tony, and me, though, we were capable of telling good stories, appreciating smart things, and Chris had really good taste in music, when he was allowed to take over the radio.

  Once, Tony blew us all away by narrating a story he made up against the wordless musical theater piece, “On the Run,” on the Dark Side of the Moon album by Pink Floyd, while we were high and parked at the country club. He just stopped the car, turned up the volume, and narrated this fantasy piece he’d written while the “song” played on the radio. We were all enraptured by this. I’ve always loved radio plays, and this was among some of the best I’ve heard.

  He’d never top that, all his life. That was his crowning artistic achievement, the poor bastard.

  My junior year—and his third senior year—Tony’s parents bought him a Dodge Laser. It was the year he would most assuredly graduate, they felt, and it was a chance for him to develop responsibility. The car was a dopey silver four-seater, about which we would eventually become quite fond.

  By that year, I’d be dropped off in front of the school as early in the morning as possible because I was embarrassed to be seen in the aging Taurus. Among the poor and working class in Texas, an automobile is as telling as a tax return, and I had been taught by the Mimis long before to pretend that one was rich and white. And a 1986 Taurus in 1990, well, that wasn’t quite well-to-do in Brownsville. It wasn’t quite Dallas enough.