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  But our livelihood still depended on it, or on its fertile soil and sand that Grampa was now selling at $180 a truckload, which he had his brothers hauling. Oklahoma was our personal “promised land.” Our own private Israel.

  Oklahoma Avenue was in the hinterlands east of the township of Brownsville, further rural to an already rural area. It was twenty-eight miles from Boca Chica Beach, or the Gulf Coast, and one mile from the Port of Brownsville to the immediate north, about a mile from the city landfill.

  During the growing season, we’d awaken every morning at six o’clock sharp to the sound of a small yellow crop duster, flying overhead and disregarding the fact that a whole series of families lived in its path. It would make an attempt to cut its pesticide spraying short while over the barrio, then engage it once again while it was immediately over Gramma and Grampa’s house so that it didn’t miss the first few rows of cotton or corn.

  “Growing up, we ate polio for breakfast,” I would tell my friends, when I had them. “We had malaria sandwiches for lunch, with a side of the pox.” Because we were sprayed with DDT, you see. It was kind of the truth; such was my resistance to pestilence in my youth. Now, if someone sneezes on a bus, I’m sure to catch cold. Such is my resistance to pestilence in my maturity. I’m fairly sure I’m infertile, as is my older brother. We’ve never knocked anyone up, though we’ve had plenty of misadventures. My sisters have had difficulty bringing their children to term, struggle in their legitimate attempts. Personally I’m now just waiting for the first signals of cancer. I’ll probably go willingly. Likely go willingly. I don’t want a fuss. But as a kid, I always wanted to shoot that plane down with a .22 rifle I had handy, just on impulse. Now, knowing what I do, I wish I had. It would have been fair dinkum. Border justice.

  But back to Gramma. For the first few years, she beat her son in front of her new husband to make herself seem like she was totally on board with the new program, the whole new family plan over here in America, goddamn it. She treated Dad like veal. I would imagine Weeto tried to stop it, but he would also respect the fact that because it was her son, he figured she knew what she was doing, since he had no kids of his own, so maybe making the boy crawl home on his knees until they were bloody wasn’t too horrible, or maybe when she made him hold a brick over his head while kneeling for two hours wasn’t . . . I dunno. Maybe I say this because he never struck me as the sort of man who would strike children, didn’t know what was right and wrong with them. I do know that for the first year, when they lived in a small one room farmhouse off that Oklahoma Avenue, that—at least from Dad’s reports—Weeto and Gramma had no problem rutting like elk on a bed not ten feet from the box that Dad had to sleep in.

  This I can believe. Grampa was always a bit priapic, but who among us. . . . Ah, well.

  Anyhow, Grampa really wanted a son, but Gramma could no longer conceive, it has been whispered, suggested. Most everything to do with female reproduction is kept secret from men, avoided conversationally, shamefully, then celebrated when conception occurs, perhaps to keep up a sublimated version of the virgin birth.

  In her intimidation and infertility, Gramma turned to her first cousin Lydia, and begged for her son, Ricardo, freshly minted from her prodigious and overflowing womb.

  “Please,” Gramma begged. “I will help you become Americans.”

  “And what else?”

  This is how Gramma gave Grampa a son, Richard, as a newborn, birthed by her cousin, Lydia, and Dad had met his cuckoo bird, the brood parasite that would eventually kick Dad free of the nest, but not so very far.

  His cuckolding would come much later, but that’s another story.

  Chapter 7

  GRAMMA AND THE SNAKES

  Dan and I are helping some long-forgotten Mexican mechanic replace a radiator in one of the older trucks when we hear shouting and loud metallic cracks coming from behind Gramma’s garage, near her pigsty, early one Saturday morning. It sounds like a war cry, thick and high, as if signaling a Viking charge and it pierces the too-bright morning like an ice pick.

  Immediately, all three of us are on high alert, and the mechanic struggles to get out of the innards of the truck, his eyes wide and white. Dan and I look at each other sideways, and for a moment, I see him thinking, Now what?

  Another shout, another series of loud cracks, and we’re all off, running to the source of the clatter, our tools and hats falling off us in our wake.

  Being the smallest and lightest, I’m also the fastest, and I round the corner of the garage first, leap over an upturned five-gallon can and stop short when I see my grandmother pummeling the concrete slab she uses as a sidewalk from her porch to the gate of the sty.

  In her hands held high over her head is a shovel, and she’s using the flat side of it as a hammer and keeps bringing it down again and again, hollering a loud Indian battle cry and I think for a moment she’s lost her mind, because there doesn’t seem to be anything at the end of her blows, but dirt.

  She’s standing there, in full battle mode, rude trousers cut short just above the knee, her loose shirt flying open at the waist so that each time she lifts her weapon you catch sight of pale flab, and she reminds me briefly of the Incredible Hulk in transformation. Or a runtish, hallucinating barbarian braining an imaginary opponent.

  Dan runs into me and holds me by the shoulder, and he too is caught short, paralyzed in confusion as well, but the mechanic charges by us, runs around the large silver propane tank that sits outside Gramma’s house and immediately understands what’s happening. He grabs an old rusty hoe leaning against the garage and joins in the attack: rattlesnakes.

  Gramma has killed one already, smashed its head flat on the white concrete slab and it is still coiling itself around itself, turning around and around in a death spasm while she continued to smash at the living one again and again.

  Gramma had been surprised by the mate, the female who very nearly bit Gramma as she killed the first one, and the mechanic tries to join in on the fray but as he lifts the hoe to swing it down hard, it is caught by the laundry line—it’s close quarters combat in that yard—but he adjusts and catches the second snake in the mid-section and nearly cuts it in two. It turns and strikes back at the mechanic, who is well beyond reach, just as me and Dan finally come to, look around for some sort of weapon to join in on the fracas—where’s a goddamned machete? That would be cool!—but we can’t find anything except the bucket and an ax handle, so Dan throws the bucket on the snake making more noise than concussion, and though the snake is stunned, unravels itself and then attempts to run, and I pick up the ax handle and Gramma pushes me away, says I’d get too close to it trying to hit it with that, was I stupid? and the snake tries to slip away and Gramma gives it the coup de grâce, flattening its head against a particularly hard bit of earth, and the snake begins the same coiling thing that the other one did, rolling around and around on its back, in a final seizure.

  Gramma doesn’t let up though. She then turns the shovel into a large, edged spear and begins to divide the snake into sections, and the mechanic joins in with the hoe: halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, et cetera. They turn on the original snake, too, and leave a large, bloody smear on the concrete slab.

  When she’s done she leans on the shovel and breathes heavily, looks at the mechanic, who’s also feeling a bit of that victorious bloodlust, and they smile at each other.

  “No sábien con quien estában chingándo,” she says to him. They did not know who they were fucking with.

  “La Señora Rubio, chingádo,” says the mechanic, laughing and shaking his head in amused disbelief. He’s heard the stories, has been warned: “Don’t fuck with Mrs. Rubio.”

  Gramma’s reputation preceded her all over South Texas. Growing up on that farm in the 1930s, in Tamaulipas, Mexico, it was not uncommon for the Mexican government to encourage squatters to set up camp on the land of indigenous farmers, then by some stroke of bureaucratic maliciousness, serve the illiterate owners some documents claimin
g that their land was now forfeit, that it belonged to the squatters. They were called curceríos, the “men of diarrhea.” One had set up camp on Gramma’s father’s property, and was slowly attempting to stake his claim. He had the annoying habit of putting his saddle and saddle blanket on a tree that was of particular value on that farm, since there was little else on it, and one that Gramma’s family had asked him repeatedly to desist from using to dry his saddle, as it was killing the tree. After ignoring them for the third time, Gramma, who was fifteen, had had enough and took her father’s .45 caliber revolver and woke the man up with the pistol in his mouth. She led him to a field near their house with the whole family watching, and she made him kneel in his underwear, beg for his life in the dust. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you right here,” she asks him.

  “Because I’ll leave right now and you’ll never see me again,” was his reply, and this time, he was as good as his word.

  Before that, when she was thirteen, she and her little brother Robé, who was always her wingman during this time, were out checking the traps put out on their land that their father would use to catch small game, rabbits and such. This particular day, he’d caught a thirty pound male ocelot. No shit. They were mesmerized by the cat, a tigríllo.

  They’d heard of them, but had never seen one. This wasn’t a bobcat: This was an actual fuck-off ocelot, about a third the size of a leopard, and similarly mottled, and it was pissed. Gramma was not about to let this opportunity pass her by. She was armed with a machete, and a ten-year-old brother. She could do this, she thought to herself. She had enough time to cut down a sizeable branch and whack it into something resembling a club, handed the machete to Robé, who was terrified, and she set upon bludgeoning the cat, who was not cooperating. The ocelot fought back and got in a few scratches before Gramma brought the wood down on its head. A week later, when she came by to check the traps after the first ocelot, the traps had caught the mate, the female, and Gramma brought the club down on her as well and took down two ocelots, took two pelts, got fifty pesos for the male and thirty for the female (that one was damaged a bit more, because she put up more of a fight). Gramma fed her family for months. That was my grandmother. That was her reputation in South Texas.

  This morning, after the snakes, I believed everything I’d ever heard about her. Watching her go into a frenzied attack, when she felt threatened at a primitive, life-and-death level with another animal, watching her ego leave her and her reptile brain take over completely as she pummeled those rattlesnakes?

  Yeah, I was a believer.

  Gramma warns me to step back, since I am barefoot. The snakes could have lost their teeth in the grass or on the concrete walkway, she says, and I could still get stuck and poisoned. This frightens me, and I stay on the porch while she gets the hose and washes away the snake blood, and the parts. The mechanic cuts off both rattles and gives them to Gramma to keep as souvenirs. She eventually hangs them in her garage over her car. Rattlesnakes grow a section each year, and this pair was about nine years old, a year younger than me.

  I take the hose from her and continue to water down the area, feeling that it needed a good cleansing and that spraying water would cool off the morning anyway, and it reminds me of the time I was four and being stalked by a particularly dominating rooster, right here, in the same spot, near Gramma’s hen house. The rooster immediately saw me as a sissy and would attack me on sight, so that going from Gramma’s house to our house became something of a game of cat and mouse. My legs were riddled with small, bloody pecks from the fucking thing.

  I had told Gramma about this, but she didn’t believe me until the day the concrete slab was being poured. This was a sign of wealth in the barrio, that you had wealth enough to avoid mud, and I remember most of the day was spent in making a large singular concrete mold out of wood planks that led from the final step of her porch to the gate of the hen house.

  I had been helping gather nails, pouring water for the cement, patting it down—it was one single large pour that would break into pieces over the next ten years—when Gramma unexpectedly opened the chicken coop and suddenly the rooster ran out, flailing its bony wings and on the attack. I turned and screamed in the mostly cowardly, girly way possible, with this demon chicken swooping down behind me like an F-16, and I ran right past Gramma who, without missing a beat, grabbed the rooster by its neck and using the rooster’s own momentum swung it in a high wide arc that snapped its neck at the apex. We had a nice chicken soup for dinner that night, and while I felt quite avenged, I was also thoroughly humiliated.

  Don’t fuck with Mrs. Rubio, indeed.

  Chapter 8

  POO AND PIGLETS

  Gramma was never at her cruelest as when she tried to be at her kindest.

  She was in the habit of buying a young pig at the start of every year, sometime in January, and raising it all year long, fattening it for the Christmas tamales.

  It wasn’t until I was older that I would come to appreciate the foresight involved in such a tradition, and I can say with a fair degree of certainty that this was about as far ahead as our planning for the future went—the Christmas tamales.

  One particular year, she came home with two piglets: a healthy robust one that was guaranteed an afternoon on a dirty plywood slaughtering table in eleven months, and then a tiny, defenseless pink piglet that had not even opened its eyes.

  Gramma’s older brother, Felípe, who’d sold her the larger piglet, had thrown in the smaller one for free, to sweeten the deal, so to speak, because—as the runt of the litter—it had no chance of surviving pigletness.

  She was excited when she got home, called me over to her huge fuckoff dark blue LTD before she had come to a complete stop and ground the transmission noisily into park.

  “¡Bien paca! ¡Bien míra!” she called to me like an excited teenager, bubbling with girlishness. (“Come here! Come look!”)

  I waddled over, a toddler freshly relieved of swaddles. Or maybe I was ten. I dunno. Memory overlaps over itself sometimes.

  She grabbed the squirming, struggling Christmas dinner under one arm, tucking him wriggling against her hip, and with her other hand, she gingerly pulled back a dirty cloth to reveal a sleeping, pink piglet. “Mira,” she cooed. “¡Tán precioso!” she continued in a moment of uncharacteristic tenderness. (“So precious!”)

  Gramma had decided that the runt would make a perfect pet for me, even though the chances of it dying in a day’s time were nearly certain. Actually, they were guaranteed.

  Still, she saw an opportunity to teach me a few Catholic lessons, without her realizing it superconsciously. The first was to expect crushing disappointment in life, the second was the absolute reliability of loss, and finally, the utter futility of faith.

  That might be a bit unfair, actually.

  I don’t really believe, now, that Gramma had intended for events to unfold in the manner that they did, but these incomprehensibly large and looming lessons were precisely what this piglet brought to my toddler’s door. Or ten year-old’s door.

  Gramma believed much more in the healing power of her faith and prayer and in odd adaptive measures mixed with traditional remedies, rather than in anything that might have been mistaken as “scientific” or “modern,” or, more sinister than that, “white.” (Gramma distrusted anything “white,” in fact. For a very long period after Dad and Mom were first married, Gramma referred to Mom as la vivora blanca, or “the white viper.”) In regard to trauma care, though, Gramma steadfastly ignored even basic medical assumptions; it was not unusual for her to treat our minor burns and scrapes with toothpaste (it was the “cooling” power of toothpaste that helped you heal). And once, when the skin had burned off my right hand in a natural-gas explosion while trying to light her water heater, she said a quick prayer to Jesus and then halved a tomato and placed it splat on the back of my hand, which was now missing the top two layers of skin. I nearly punched her from the agony. (As she got older, someone once told her that WD-40 w
as good for arthritic pain, in her joints. She told me this one Sunday afternoon, on my rare calls home when I could muster enough Spanish to communicate with her. I responded incredulously: “What are you, a robot?”

  But back to the piglet.

  Gramma gave me a crate and an old blanket for my new pet, even made room for it in a corner of an old room we called la oficína (“the office”), which was mostly used to warehouse bits and parts of the trucks, and a checkbook.

  She folded the blanket so that the piglet was kept overheated in the sweltering room and we carved a corner out of the mess and settled the piglet down. She gave me a baby bottle full of milk from the refrigerator and showed me how to warm it up, hold it to the tiny snout, and wait for the animal’s instincts to kick in. They never did.

  His eyes never opened, and really the only way I knew it was still alive was because it was consistently secreting a small trickle of urine and a thin, smelly excremental leakage.

  This, of course, deterred Gramma nothing. She had faith it would live. She found a small portrait of “Burning Heart” Jesus, the one where he looks you straight in the eye while holding his own heart in his hands, engulfed in flame—you remember the one—and she put it over the piglet’s head, then told me to pray with all my might, to squeeze my eyes shut and put all my faith into Jesus’s healing power, and that if I prayed hard enough, the piglet would get better. Just you wait and see. Pray your little fucking heart out, she said to me in Spanish, and it will live.

  Of course, I had no idea what the hell she was talking about, as a toddler (or a ten-year-old) when she went on and on about her fé, (“faith”), but I knew to repeat whatever she said, when she was praying, so I did, and after she left, I kept praying to Jesus in a long, uninterrupted conversation about how well I’d treat the piggy if it got better, how I’d feed it and hold it and take it home with me so it could sleep in the bed with me and Mom and Dad (either as a toddler, or ten-year-old) and I fell asleep after a while, with that list of what I’d compromise in exchange for the piglet to live growing and growing in that stifling oversize closet Grampa had used for an office. It was really just a catchall windowless room of greasy truck parts, oil cans, half-working tools, unbreathable air, and now, a dying piglet.