Boy Kings of Texas Read online

Page 5


  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.


  Daniel sees the gun, pushes the beer forward, leans back away from the gape of the gun, and puts up his hands, this story goes, and he says: “Hombre, píensale lo qué estás hacíendo.” Think about what you’re doing, man. And here is where whole lives change.

  The bartender shoots Daniel through his raised hands, into his chest, and he destroys a generation of people.

  He fires four times, the first one blows apart Daniel’s right hand, rips through the palm, and opens up his lower neck at the collar bone in an aortic splurt, tearing out Daniel’s shoulder at the back. The three other shots hit Daniel center mass, ripping his torso apart in the back like a large erupting blossom, and thus my grandfather’s warrant is served, at age twenty, at the hands of a nonevent, enterprising Mexican bartender servile to the Texas Rangers, who did not quite think about what he was doing, who else he would kill, and mar.

  Because, you see, it didn’t end there.

  The next we hear of the story, Daniel has been carted to a hospital. His family has been alerted, and people are running off and closing their doors, attempting to avoid trouble. Children are running home to tell of this new massacre in the border town. Daniel’s father, my great-grandfather—my father’s grandfather, if you can follow this, and the only person who could step in and rear the ten-month-old child as family—rushes to the hospital after being told that his son was shot, but not told he was eviscerated, and so when he gets to the morgue and sees an emptied, exploded carcass, the old man has a heart attack and dies in the same room. Here, the Martinez family becomes unmoored.

  That’s the story that’s been told, but never in detail. It existed around us, growing up, and we knew never to ask the sort of questions other people would, of our origins, because we would get this grim fairy tale told broadly, quickly, to shut us children up, so it hung around our family like a grotesque bedtime mist, or a nightmarish nursery rhyme hummed by our mother to fell us asleep. It permeated everything I knew, answered any question I could have about our past and our future, yet I never fully experienced, never comprehended the horror of it, until that afternoon.

  This horror of my grandfather’s death. A twenty-year-old kid with no future. His chest opened up like a clumsy autopsy in a Mexican bar. The death of his father, upon witnessing. These images were poured into our cereal bowls and left on our pillows, but the barbarity of it never really nestled itself in my heart, until I asked my father, heard the story as an adult.

  I have this dream.

  There’s this unruly kid, and I’m trying to get away from him because he just seems like trouble, and when I turn my back, he’s suddenly shot by some unseen gunman, and then in my hand I am carrying a part of his liver, purple and globuled wet, and instead of being afraid or repulsed, I find myself wondering where I should put it, if I should try to drop it back in his body, or leave it on the ground, but I’m reluctant because the earth is so dusty . . . and then I wake up, thinking I could use a drink, or a valium.

  And I have this memory.

  My father and I are driving around downtown Brownsville, and I’m not 100 percent certain as to the accuracy of this recounting, but I could swear to you—and I hope that I’m wrong, that my memory is faulty—that when we drive through Elizabeth Street, I could swear—in my memory, mind you—that he says, “That’s the man that shot your grandfather,” and with his chin he points to a fat man, an utterly nondescript Mexican with a mustache who looks like a hundred other Mexicans, wearing a soiled white pentafold, standing in the back alley doorway of a derelict restaurant. Now, I say that I hope I’m making this up because I wonder at the torture it would be to know that the man who shot your father lived, and lived right over there, scratching out a living, and then to say this to your own son, and not want to rip that man’s face from his skull with your fingers, put a brick through his brain.

  In my memory, Dad looks at that man the way a forty-year-old Hamlet would look at a very fat and Mexican Claudius, ridiculous in his cook’s outfit, smoking a cigarette in a doorway and looking like a man who’s carrying very grim things. Dad looks at him like a man who knows he should do something, anything, but also knows that he won’t.

  But again, I cannot guarantee the accuracy of this memory, and probably could not ask Dad if it ever happened. I just don’t think I’m that cruel. And yet I have it.

  Gramma was widowed with a ten-month-old child before she turned eighteen.

  For three years, Gramma was grateful to be picking cotton and tomatoes for a living with her son strapped to her waist when she met Pablo Rubio Junior, my Grampa, about the time she was twenty-one. She was accustomed to hard work, and she could keep up with the men working the field. Pablo Rubio Junior drove the delivery trucks, had just come back from the Korean War where he had been a private in the trucking pool.

  This was a rough time for Gramma. She was the very definition of butch, though they didn’t have time for fancy things like “definitions” in the tomato fields. She felt tougher than the young men, and far superior to the women who were expected to pick less and carry smaller burdens. She was competitive and mean, and would proudly get into fistfights with the young bucks who’d be surprised at how hard she could hit, hit like a man. And young Mingo, at age four, could do nothing but watch while his mother got into dusty, dirty entanglements with teenage boys who would initially humor her in a slap fight but would then realize she meant business, and that she could punch and kick and scratch like the rest of them, and they’d end up sprawled on the dirt, in a real fight, and she’d hold her own.

  Apparently, Pablo Rubio Junior found this enchanting. He was bewitched by this siren of the tomato fields (bet you didn’t know there was such a thing, did you?) and he paid her court in a manner worthy of their station. They had more than their share of romps behind the truck, when no one was looking, or sometimes when people were. You take love where you can get it, in the tomato fields.

  When Pablo Rubio Junior asked her to marry him, Gramma had immediately consented: An opportunity like this comes only twice in a young widow’s lifetime. Plus, he was another sort of royalty in the area: He was an American; he could give her citizenship. Gramma was lucky that way.

  And so he did. Grampa brought her over from Matamoros to live in the barrio he and his brothers were carving out of a useable piece of farmland, a flat loamish landscape by the port, near the dump. For Gramma, it was a long way from the threadbare farm on the Matamoros side of the river to a Mexican-American barrio on the Brownsville tide flats, though topographically it might have been less than twenty-five miles removed, and it was a long way for her to go before her twenty-first birthday with a child in tow, both geographically and psychologically.

  Grampa’s brothers’ wives were horrified that he had married a widow with a child, married below his station as head of their clan, and they made Gramma feel accordingly when she moved in, the gold digger and her son by another man. They immediately treated her the way the cousins of old had treated her before she was swept up into the soap opera of Daniel Martinez, and the feelings of inferiority she thought she had left behind began to take shape once again.

  When she had been on her own, and working the fields, she had some feeling of control, could fight the fuckers if they got too uppity . . . but here, she was expected to be a fucking lady, be all classy-like and shit, but she had this damned kid from the previous marriage, and that dead bastard Daniel—God rest and bless his soul—had frenchified her and good so that she knew damn well she couldn’t bear Weeto a son (that was his nickname, “Pablo” becoming “Pablíto” becoming “Weeto.” Don’t ask). And that’s what these barrio bitches respected, Gramma knew: child-bearing and shit. She was in trouble, she felt. In the meantime she had this goddamned kid to deal with.

  I suppose at this point, my father should have thanked his stars that he was not traded for a new axle or a set of brake pads. Perhaps he was too old, his genealogy too uncertain. Whatever his shortcomings at age four, Dad was stuck with Gramma, and
Grampa stuck with Dad.

  I should also note here that Grampa, Pablo Rubio Junior, was never the sort of man that Dad remembers now. That Gramma, with her motivations to impress Grampa and swim in this new “up-scale” neighborhood in America, these things did not at all register on Grampa. Grampa was, and I will take this to my grave, a genuine saint. A drunken saint. He was saintly to me. He was saintly to my brothers and sisters. I wish he would have stuck around to meet my younger brother Derek. Grampa would have wet himself, he would have loved Derek so much. The way he loved me, and I loved him. Grampa—and this brings me to tears—Grampa was a really good person, even if a bit of a drunk. But who among us isn’t?

  I’m drunk now, as I’m writing this. And I’m tearing up, remembering him. Grampa was love. A big, brown Buddha of grandfatherly love.

  Grampa was the only male member of his tribe to have served in the US Army. He drove trucks through the conflict, was “in the shit” in the Korean War, and when he came back home he had his future mapped out like a Manchurian hillside. The first thing he did was buy a stretch of property for his brothers and himself, about five acres of land right smack in the center of a large field that grew sorghum, corn, and cotton on rotating years.

  This was the Rubio barrio, though we didn’t know it growing up. (I’m sure it would have horrified my sisters and my mother to know that we were living in a barrio, but from the safety of distance and time, the patterns are much more clear, and I can say, without complication, that we lived in their barrio, that we lived in a barrio, the Rubio barrio. It fits the definition. That I am, after all, a “barrio boy.”)

  The barrio was rectangular and surrounded on three sides by farmland, and it ran immediately parallel to Oklahoma Avenue, an unremarkable dirt road off State Road 511, just four miles from the Rio Grande, which by this point had become a broken, feeble thing hardly worth mentioning, full of pesticides and heavy metals from American manufacturing that moved south after NAFTA, and a ghost of the natural phenomenon of ages past when my other grandfather worked its boundaries.