Boy Kings of Texas Read online

  Eventually things settled down and I made friends with some of the boys, but mostly my immediate peers were the upwardly mobile girls who lived near me, out in the sticks. It was still a tough school; don’t get me wrong—but I learned how to swim in it quickly. Kids got stabbed there, with that little nail-cleaning tool in the rear part of the nail clipper or a stubby pencil. But for the most part, we were kids, doing kid things. We developed a very high-stakes and competitive game of marbles before classes. We played basketball and volleyball in a very organized fashion (I did the organizing). We became ingenious at manufacturing flexible but indestructible pens and pencils, as the game of the day was a sort of “pen smashing” competition, where you’d flick your opponent’s pen with your own, over and over again, until one of them splintered. So we engineered things like pens filled with glue, pens filled with buckshot, pens from Mexico, pens filled with dirt, pens wrapped in rubber bands or tape, and even pens that could write. I was never really good at that game.

  The other thing we did was competitive cursing. This I was good at. Cursing in English, I’ve come to find, is fairly unimaginative and usually indicates a loss for a retort, a failure of description or command of language, so instead the curser resorts to the general and unspecific, to the emptiness of phrases like, “Fuck you, you cock-sucking motherfucker.” Et cetera.

  In Spanish, however, the art form, when it is done well, comes from painting the rudest word picture using anything but vulgar words. Say, for instance, someone is being unreasonably proud of him- or herself. In English, one might say this person’s “full of shit,” or, “up himself.” In Spanish, the phrase would be something like, “… no le cabilla un arroz de punta,” (“… you couldn’t fit a grain of rice up his ass point first, puckered as it was.”)

  Conversely, if a person is out of luck, in English he’s “shit out of luck,” or “screwed,” or maybe “up shit creek.” But in Spanish, the popular colloquialism is that the person “ … tíene la madre en rasta,” (“ … has to drag his mother around”), the suggestion being that the person is so poor, he’s got his family in tow, no vehicle. (I learned about the second part to this phrase when I called my father when I was out of work in Seattle, had to admit to being very nearly broken down, very much out of luck and out of work, and said, “Tengo la madre en rasta.” He surprised me by chuckling, and finishing the sentence, “ ... y la tía en la manó.” (…and my aunt in hand.)

  These are timid examples, though. We could get very dirty, very biological, very Aristocrats in our verbal assaults. For me, somehow, because it was in Spanish it didn’t seem wrong, and I got very good at it—especially in Spanish, but also in English. This is what these kids understood at this new school, this is what I was good at among them, and I had developed a reputation as the “put-down” champion, so much so that I could make kids cry or attack in just a few seconds. Normally I’d have an audience, so the attacks were usually thwarted by my friend Arthur, or Agripino and his bunch, led by a kid nicknamed El Chicloso (“gummy asshole”), because he always smelled like poo. (I remember once feeling really, really terrible when this one kid, Teodóro, challenged the position of champion and I annihilated him in one or two rounds during P.E. He was inconsolable when we got back into the classroom, putting his head down and sobbing loudly. The teacher finally attempted consolation, asking, “What happened? What’s wrong? What’s wrong, Teodóro?” He wouldn’t speak, so she finally asked the class what had happened, and my cousin Dora raised her hand and said, “Domingo said his mother’s anus looks like cauliflower,” which was something I’d heard my Gramma say to a police officer a few weeks before. A few years later, I was driving around with Dad and he had some sort of business with a man who turned out to be Teodóro’s father, and as I was sitting in the passenger seat the whole time my father was calling Teodóro’s dad Panocha, which was apparently his accepted nickname, which means “twat.” His dad’s name was “Twat,” and he cried when I said his mother’s anus looked like a cauliflower? I just don’t understand people sometimes.)

  This continued for many months, and I had established myself among these kids in a way that I had not considered myself capable when I first got to Vermillion. I had changed, certainly, but I was able to turn off the vulgarian side of me with an easy, very smart switch, and the minute I stepped off the school bus and entered the house, another switch was flipped and I was clean-mouthed, pissed off and quiet. The minute I got on the bus in the morning, it was showtime: I would be there all week. I still managed my academia to the extent I could—I was the top student, a good athlete, and well-liked by teachers, students, and administrators—but I was also well-respected by the farm kids, who didn’t buy into this American “upward mobility” thing, this “education,” who might have otherwise picked on me, thought me soft. I spoke their language, after all.

  This created a duality in me that left me feeling soiled and conflicted. I remember one lunch I was sitting with Agripino and Arthur, two of my closest friends at the time, and we were trading marbles while eating our lunch when this scraggly curly haired problem white kid named Billy sat directly across from me. Knowing now what we do about learning disabilities, I think it’s likely that Billy was dyslexic and was acting out from his frustration, because there was nothing else really wrong with him except he couldn’t write and couldn’t read. But he had nothing else so he had decided to be tough.

  He sat there and stared at me. The table got quiet. Billy squinted his eyes in the theatrical way that children do when they’re pretending to be tough, like they’ve seen on TV, and he dramatically stabbed his plastic spork into his Salisbury steak, splashing the gravy on the table.

  It was on. But I had this one won before it started. Instead of a verbal assault, I diversified by kicking him square on the knee under the table and then tucking back my legs and opening them astride the chair, pulling them back without moving my upper torso so Billy didn’t see what I’d done, and he tried to kick me back, and hard, but instead his kick went high and he kicked the underside of the table, scraped his shin hard on an under-support. Dyslexic he may have been, but gullible he certainly was.

  The blow was clearly quite painful, and he began yelling loudly. The new female principal came up and grabbed him by the arm, said, “Now what are you yelling about, Billy?”

  Billy pointed at me and said, “He kicked me under the table!” That was partially true. Mostly true.

  The female principal, whose name is lost to history, pointed to me and said, “This is the nicest and smartest boy at this school. This boy would not have kicked you.” She pulled him out of his chair and he began screaming. As he was being led away, he managed to pull back his jeans and reveal a huge scarlet scrape, bleeding from where the skin on his shin had been peeled back from kicking the underside of the table.

  I felt the weight of the world there, the cross-over consequence of my dual personality, and I wanted to chase the kid down, apologize, and tell the principal the truth, but instead, Arthur said, “Damn, Dom; you got rid of him quick.” But I didn’t have much time to feel sorry for Billy, as my own rue was already in the cosmic mail.

  Dan and Mare were also at Vermillion for their sixth-grade year, but it was as if they were already in junior high, at another school. We never overlapped, never saw one another. My reputation as a gutter-mouthed vulgarian would inevitably show up on their radar, I understood. It was too small a school, and kids, they liked to talk. For the record, I wasn’t comfortable being a hoodlum-in-training. I preferred to be the Nancy-boy academic, but the suction of appealing to the neglected element, of having their respect and keeping them quieted, keeping them from looking at me like a target, like someone they’d like to have a go at, that sense of . . . well, survival . . . that was more powerful, and I felt I could walk that line like Johnny Cash. This was a question of survival: I was a soft kid, thin for my age, and fairer and smarter than the rest of them. They felt I was not one of them, not one of the Mexican kids, nor
was I one of the others, the white kids, and so I adapted. This was adaptation for the border town.

  But I didn’t think anyone was capable of understanding, so instead I parceled it out, compartmentalized, and I dreaded the day my family would find me out.

  It was Mare who got the word first. One of the girls in my grade found out Mare was my sister, and I must have pissed off that girl at some point because she told Mare everything, in great delicious detail.

  I remember that afternoon. I am sent on an errand with this kid named Juan. Juan is scary. He must have been fourteen or so, but was passing off as a ten-year-old. He wore thin cotton shirts that were hardly ever buttoned, a black comb in his back pocket, didn’t speak a word of English. You could very easily see Juan having lived in some ramshackle hut out in the Mexican frontiers, a horseman, cattleman, something, and already having been fully realized. There was something elegant about him, something sinister and beautiful, like he was already a man very clearly defined. He scared me and most of the teachers, too. So this afternoon, we’re asked to get the projector from the library, and as we’re walking down the exposed hallway, we’re alone and we’re having an easy exchange—this guy that speaks to no one—and he says through a smile, “Esté vato,” which really can’t be translated, more of a Get a load of this guy, man sort of mock shoulder punch, very blokish, and well, I felt that I had done my work. Like I’d arrived, like I was safe.

  When I get home, Mom yells to me from her bedroom. The door is shut, because it’s the only air-conditioned room in the house. I put my books down and am changing into my afternoon clothes. I’m not expecting anything when I walk into her bedroom and almost recognize the look on my sister’s face, one of delight at reporting gossip, tattletaling, and I certainly do not recognize the look on my mother’s face before her blow catches me on the jaw. It was the look of divorce. It was the look of hatred only a mother could give her child.

  She hits me again, when I recover. She slaps me on the ear, leaving it ringing. She slaps me again, high on the cheek. She backhands me on the lower jaw, nearly chipping my tooth. She slaps me on the eye. She slaps me so many times I lose count, lose a sort of consciousness as I slip back into that cold around my heart, confused, now that I got the beating at home—in this room, it wouldn’t be the last time—that I thought I had avoided at school. And the tug from my heart, this time it did snap, snapped like a winter that has never really gone away. This is finally where I went cold.

  My father gave my brother and me spankings about three, maybe four times a week. They were painful at first, but eventually you got used to the routines, the motions, you cried loudly so he’d stop and sometimes they’d bruise but mostly they just made your legs rosy—he’d use a belt, sometimes a stripped branch from a tree, if it was available.

  A few of those stories really got into my brain, got into my psychology. As I grew older, it became a power play: How long could you take it before you cried? He’d hit you repeatedly, then you’d cry, then you’d get one or two more: That was where the lesson was. That was how I learned justice. And I eventually understood it to be a regular Catholic exercise: You did bad, you got your licks, you did your mea culpa for a while, then things settled down. This pattern was repeated until you understood the thing about Jesus: You do it, He pays for it. That’s why you should feel guilty. He took your licks for you. Awfully good of him.

  But Mom’s beating, that I don’t think I ever recovered from. I felt that if she only could hear about it, if she knew what that school was like, I was certain she would have understood—Mom was the only bastion of reason and safety and to an extent, love, in that household. Mom was supposed to be the opposite of Dad, but then: this. It was betrayal from a place I had never expected.

  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 E
lvíra. 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.