Boy Kings of Texas (14 page)

But the skinny white guy is having lunch and can't be bothered.

In one of the weirder moments of this whole debacle, the Bonneville, the Airstream trailer, and Dad's tractor are all lined up like some cosmic event and we see the skinny border patrol agent with a white napkin tucked in his chin and Dad's bloodless face up in the trailer through the window of the Airstream as the agent waves them through with a fork, like he's conducting an orchestra: “Go on through. Go on through. Go on through.”

Mom continues driving south, stunned by what has just happened, and I am careful not to say a word. We almost reach Raymondville and stop at a Whataburger to get a quick, wordless lunch, then spend some time sitting in a parking lot, waiting. When she feels it is safe to return, she turns the car around and heads back north, back through the same checkpoint.

“Are you sure this is safe?” I ask. She doesn't answer.

When we pull up again to the checkpoint headed back to Hebronville around three o'clock in afternoon, there is a different border patrol agent at the trailer. He is a small, clean-cut militant Mexican with a southern drawl, and he does not like others who remind him of himself.

“Y'all American citizens?” he demands instantly, leaning into the car through the window, smelling for marijuana smoke. You can never be sure who is Mexican these days.

“Oh, yes,” says my mother, who is probably quite relieved the hard part is over and it looks like we are getting away with it.

“How 'bout you, son? You a 'Merican citizen?” He gave me a direct glare through reflective sunglasses.

There is nothing more potentially hostile than the indigenous ego interpreting the laws of his conqueror upon his own people.

“Yes, sir.” I say, careful not to move or fidget or look away, like I've learned.

He reminds me of something Dad used to say, when he was feeling clever. “Never give a Mexican a pencil,” he'd say. “They're better with shovels and machetes.”

The sunglasses give away nothing, sitting on his nose in stark contrast to the deep, coffee color of his face. He looks back at my mother, then at me, like he smells the nervousness of earlier. Something tugs at his intuition. He is very good at his job, even if horribly loathing of self. By watching him, you wonder what itches him more: his red neck or his wet back.

“Where ya'll headed?” the sunglasses finally ask.

This catches Mom off guard. Her subterfuge had ended when Dad had driven through the checkpoint. She left all her answers back in Raymondville.

“We're going to Hebronville,” she says unconvincingly.

Had he asked one more question, had he pressed it, we would have been in some sort of trouble. But he doesn't, and he backs off and motions us through. We drive off, but we aren't exactly relieved. That instance showed us that at any minute, it could have been all over. Crossing the checkpoint was only the superficial point of relief: When you're this far on the side of wrong, everything is a threat, every moment a reason to panic, and we were just not good at it.

Mom drives the Bonneville through Hebronville, and we are about to hit the open highway again—281 turns into the “business district” in all those tiny Texas towns—when we notice Dad's trailer in the parking lot of a cheap motel by the side of the road. Dan is lodged between the rear-most tires, working on the brake lights. I am very nearly surprised that they aren't working.

Mom is as alarmed to find them there as I am. This confirms my suspicions that there had been no planning beyond the consultation at the
cúrandera's
. This whole debacle had been based on nothing more than $100 worth of faith.

Mom pulls up next to the trailer, and I think she expects a victorious reunion. She gets out of the car and almost runs up to Dad with her arms out, who turns to her and suddenly looks like he's about to punch her.

“Pínche vieja pendéja!”
he erupts when he sees her. (“Stupid fucking woman!”)

Mom stops cold.

“Que chingádos estábas pensándo?”
(“What the fuck were you thinking?”)

Her face is a cocktail of misunderstanding. Then we both suddenly realize what he is upset about: the flashing of the headlights.

“If they would have just turned around for a moment, it would all be over and
it would all be your fault
,” he spits at her in Spanish.

His words continue to snap and hiss around her like bullets in a firefight, like he's been trained to do, mercilessly, and she follows him forward to the cab of the truck, kowtowing to her ongoing punishment.

I have a moment alone with my older brother, both of us keeping out of the fray. We'd both learned to ignore the invective when it was directed at someone else, but especially when it was directed at us.

“Hey, shithead,” he says to me in typical blithe and brotherly greeting, not looking up from under the trailer in the failing light. Squinting.

“Do you know what's going on?” I ask.

“You mean about the pot?”

“So you know?”

“Dad said Mom was not going to tell you cuz you're a fag.”

“So where is it?”

“I don't fuckin' know,” he says, continuing on the wiring. “Probably under here somewhere,” he says as he bangs at the side of the I beam with a pair of pliers, which make a dull
clunk
. He stops looping the black electrical tape on the brake lights, curious now too, and knocks again under the I beam. It's more a
thud
than a
clunk
this time.

He dislodges himself and walks over to where I stand. We both stare at the trailer. From where we stand, it looks like every other piece of near-broken down equipment we've ever owned. Rusting, miserable, and totally criminal.

There is a cluster of pallets loaded at the fore of the trailer, over the fifth wheel, but it is otherwise barren. Then, as if in answer to our question, it hits us like a punch in the nostrils: the unmistakable smell of moist marijuana. Sweet, sweet heavenly marijuana.

“So where do you think it is?” he asks me.

“Fuck if I know,” I answer truthfully. I was two years away from even smoking my first joint; I didn't know the calculus of smuggling.

Later on, when I do learn the metrics of it all from my Uncle Richard, I learned a few other things Dad had done wrong. The most important of which was that he traveled in the middle of the day, in the heat. When you're carrying pot through the checkpoints, Richard said, you travel really early in the morning or late in the evening, when it can't be smelled and when the agents are changing their twelve-hour shifts. The more dominant smugglers paid drivers to go through repeatedly, like Mom and I had done to observe shift changes, and had the best hours down to a science. But most important: never late at night, and never, ever under the heat of the sun. Had Dad been stopped, even for a minute, the whiff would have certainly given them away.

The other thing, Richard said, was to carry a load of mechanical farming junk on the trailer like you're driving somewhere with an obvious purpose. And have a story about the destination, written paperwork and shit. White man magic. Dad had done none of this.

“Lucky for us,
La Señora
was right!” Dad said, walking back with Mom, excited and seemingly over his histrionics. “She made them blind and we were let through like they were closed!”

I thought,
Oh, for fuck's sake,
and was about to say something when my brother swatted me on the back of the head, to save me from further abuse and to protect me from my mouth.

When we left them, Dan was doing the driving. They pulled out of the parking lot and headed off to Houston and their payoff. Mom and I turned south, back to Brownsville. Mom was her usual quiet self, except this time she played the radio louder. This meant she was thinking. It was getting dark and I was sleepy, so I slept. She would get us home. She knew the way.

For that, I could trust her.

Maybe this day was what cemented her decision to leave him, though it would not happen for some years more. Maybe she had made the decision before and had convinced herself to stay longer, for the sake of the children, like a good Catholic martyr. Then again, maybe Mom just swallowed the abuse that day and put it away to process later. I never knew and have not yet asked; perhaps eventually I will. She never talked to me about these things, and by this time I knew better than to tell her anything because she told my sisters—whom she felt were her real family, freshly hatched and safe—anything we discussed. She kept none of my secrets from them, and all were open to humiliation.

For that, I could not trust her.

She turned a blind eye to the nights he came home late, stinking of some new whore, I knew that. Or figured as much. But now that he was risking the lives and futures of his sons—her sons, ignored and feral—would she do something now? Now that her children were in jeopardy, would she seek the divorce that lurked in every corner of the house?

I'd like to think that, would like to think that she was looking out for us, that it was for our benefit she would eventually pursue that divorce. But I know better than to believe it because when she did get the divorce, it was well after all of us were gone, all of us except for Derek, and she's still paying for that guilt.

And so is he.

When I was in high school and college, I read books about concentration camps—J.G. Ballard, Viktor E. Frankl, some bad Vietnam memoirs—and I didn't quite understand why I identified so readily with them, the grind of that low, tough gear that gets you through an impossible experience, seemingly without end. How you just keep on. And on. Hope disappears. And you still go on. Then suddenly it's over. And hope doesn't surprise you again, once it's gone. It has a different name. Different face. And you're not happy to see it, or surprised. It's like a long-forgotten agreement. Sort of a, “Oh, there you are. I've been expecting you, I think.”

That's what we experienced. Mom, Dan, and I lived in an emotional concentration camp, held captive by a petty tyrant and his mother. There was no hope of escape, which is also why we were so foreign to each other, for years and years after.

When you live in a concentration camp, it's every man for himself, I felt back then.

Not that Frankl would agree. But maybe he would have agreed with my mother, who was hoping—always hoping—for Dad's better self to emerge, to make better choices for his family, and not put them in harm's way.

It never would, so Dan and I had to shift our faith to Mom, and hope that her better self would emerge, to save us.

It did, eventually, but that would take time, and I was long gone by then.

Chapter 15

Football

My God, did I hate football.

For years the punishment, the ritual drilling in dirt, the concussions, the running and jumping and ill-fitting equipment—I didn't get the draw. I had no idea what the hell I was doing there. I did it because Dan made me do it. Not Dad, but Dan. Dan made me play football.

Perhaps I should thank him here. I won't. I'm not sure that I should. How I hate it even now.

Dan still charts his entire year by it, like a farmer scheduling his harvest. I won't talk to him for most of the NFL season, because he's just an emotional wreck, and when I need to discuss something important, I wait until the Super Bowl is over.

For months, it seemed, our football team would practice in order to schedule a game against an equally inadequate and unprepared South Texas high school team full of kids who were terribly similar to ourselves, only to expose our inadequacies and incompetence at their feet, and then one side would soundly beat the other by scoring hundreds of points, this way or that, while cheerleaders blandly encouraged the team and their families, with meaningless chants, boring and terribly unsexy cheers.

That was football, for me. I would study the other kids playing it, wondering what the hell would possess them to give up so much of their time for this. I knew why I had to; what the fuck was
their
problem?

But I still managed to make friends there, like you do in prison movies. Like you have to. And enemies. I made lots of those.

Primarily, I made an enemy of my coach. I was in the ninth grade when our varsity team (my brother included) lost 21-0 to the worst football program in the state, a school in an even poorer district than our own: Gladys Porter High School, and a friend of mine gave me a paper bag complete with eye holes and a frown to wear over my head, which I thought was hysterical, and the coach saw me.

He was a runty little guy, Coach Chavez, who always asked if my mother was coming to our games. He gave me the creeps, because he'd seen her at my brother's games and leched over her. Mom was pretty cute in the 1980s. Chavez was about five feet, five inches tall and had a habit of picking his nose and smearing the enormous yield across the bottom of his cleats while he was talking to sweaty, inattentive boys. He was a disgusting little man in brown polyester shorts, and portentous in my inability to get along with short men as an adult.

He was my first-period coach, and he drew me out immediately after he saw me in the paper-bag hat-thing, and told me to dress in full gear and run around the track until he said stop. Something inside me clicked, and I thought,
How dare you? How fucking dare you try and punish me? My father is twice the coward you are!
I figured I could take
double
anything this little fucker could dish out.

It just stood to logic.

So I ran in full gear, in the furious August sun, and after half an hour he tried to flag me down and tell me to stop. I said, “No.” I kept going, my helmet amplifying my breathing around my sticky, slimy mouthpiece. Forty-five minutes and the whole team stopped to watch, disquieted at my passive hostility. I wouldn't give him the benefit. Made him uncomfortable in the face of his superiors, who were now suddenly watching, suddenly worried about liability. I kept running. The whole program stopped to watch me jog at the end of the class, knew that something was not right. I had jogged thirty-six laps in less than an hour, eight and a half miles, and I would have kept going, because I wanted to drop from heat exhaustion, but the bell rang and I was already in Dutch for my second period algebra II class, for being late.

That oughta show him, I thought, as I showered and nearly collapsed. He never spoke to me again, and I got a bear claw and a juice out of it from the trainer, who almost called an ambulance.

But I also had friends in the program, one or two. Friends who just disappeared, it seemed like.

Like Albert, who had a lighthearted exuberance about him, especially in his inability to play ball. That's why we were both B-team quarterbacks: We both stank at it, we were both less consequential than the plastic gear we were wearing, and we could both speak English, so there was no other position for us.

The primary difference between us was that I didn't want to be there. Albert did, though I think it was more for the glamour of being a B-team quarterback: It worked well on his ladies. Anyhow, he was always hurt, so he never really got to play. He broke his collarbone the first week of practice and then there was something with a thigh muscle, making me play out all the B-team games by myself, and we'd get annihilated.

I remember the first time we traveled elsewhere to get the shit kicked out of us by an opposing team. Albert was there at the Athletics Building when we returned late that night, around eight o'clock or so, and he stood outside the door of the Bluebird bus and I was the first one to answer him, when he asked, “So what happened, Chicken-man?” (There's a story behind that nickname.)

I said, “We lost, man. Fifty-six to zero.”

A complicated look came over his face. He said, “What happened?”

I said, “They were fucking bigger than us, better. I couldn't get a hand off to anyone. I got my ass kicked every single play. No one was blocking, from the line. I'd get the snap and before I could turn around, I was tackled. They were just better than us.”

It was the truth: As a scheduling error, we ended up playing their varsity team, in front of their whole school, who suddenly thought these guys had a shot at state. However, it was quickly answered a few weeks later when their varsity team played our real varsity team and they realized they had played the practice dummies a couple weeks before. They lost, 86-0.

Anyhow, I never forgot the way he looked at me right then, and asked him about it later, when I was driving him to his girlfriend's house one afternoon in my sister's Volkswagen Rabbit.

“You thought it was my fault, didn't you? That we had lost like that?” I asked him.

He grinned sheepishly, in a very likeable and friendly way.

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought you fucked up, Chicken-man. After all we practiced, I thought you lost your balls in the game.” It was certainly not the case. I just kept getting my balls stomped.

All right, about “Chicken-man”: I got that nickname in the football program at Hanna because of a
quinceañera
I was forced to participate in. (These are the coming-out parties for fifteen-year-old girls. They're so popular, they drive the local economy.)

How this begins is, one night, my father comes home drunk and we'd just somehow bought an electric clipper, and Dad decides I need a hair cut (I was looking like Lyle Lovett would, a couple years later). He manhandles me into the bathroom, puts my head in the sink, and just starts clipping away at the sides of my head, sort of jokingly.

Now, I'm in my odd adolescent stage here and my head is out of whack, proportionally. I've been getting bad haircuts that enhance my large Aztecan nose, or, at this point, overgrown ears. Dad somehow clips at the sides of my head and makes my hair complement the shape of my head, totally. Suddenly, I cannot tear myself away from mirrors. I look like an Ashkenazi Elvis: I'm in love.

A few months later, my hair is shaggy again, and so I ask my dad to do the same thing. He says, in Spanish, “Are you retarded? I was drunk that night and didn't know what I was doing. You could have ended up bald. Here's five dollars; go get a haircut.”

The only thing I could figure out that he had done that no one else had done before was cut my hair to Marine Corps regulation, almost. So when I get to the trailer of the woman who would cut hair for five bucks over by the sandpit, I ask her to go short.

“Just short,” I say.

“Short?” she asks, kicking her toddler daughter away from the chair I'm in.

“Short,” I say.

“Shorter?” She asks, after she has cut it really short.

I look in the mirror. It doesn't look right.

“Go shorter,” I say.

“Shorter?” she asks, after a couple minutes.

“Shorter,” I say, and barely wince when she switches to scissors and clips off a part of my ear.

“Oh, my God! I'm so sorry! I've never done that before!” she says as the blood runs down the back of my neck, crimson against the white cotton bedsheet she is using as a barber's bib.

Over tears, she tells me she cannot accept payment for maiming my ear, which, I understand in some cultures means that I can't marry again, but I'm perfectly all right with it because it gets me a free haircut. Though, again, something is not quite right with it.

“
¿Que chingádos te paso con tu pinche pelo?
” (“What the fuck happened to your fucking hair?”)
Dad asks, as soon as I get home.

“She cut it,” I reply.

“
Te miras pelon,
” he says. (“You look like a convict,” or rather, “You look bald, like a convict.”)

The
quinceañera
event was awful, as to be expected. I still have some photos, and I look like a survivor from a Russian labor camp. That wasn't the worst part, though.

That next Monday, at first-period football, I'm out on the field doing stretches and one of the smaller, tubbier mustachioed coaches with a sense of humor walks by me and says, “Martinez! Did they catch you stealing chickens? What the fuck happened to your hair? We used to shave people's heads like that, when they were caught stealing chickens.”

And it stuck. What's interesting is that it never quite got up to Dan's sphere, and he never heard my nickname in football practice. In my own group I was known to be able to take a good hit. I'd grown up with Dan and Richard, after all, and these guys here were pikers, had plastic, and rules, and were not going to kill you, which were the rules I grew up with. So when they'd come at me, I'd stand my ground. Take my hits. But then suddenly my nickname was “Chicken-man,” and “Chicken,” in the same way that a huge guy is called “Tiny.” I'd like to think.

However, the first time I was called “Chicken-man” in front of Dan, he gave me a look, and I couldn't explain it, so I just kind of sat there, saddled with it, in his eyes, and it hurt. I don't think I ever explained that to him.

Anyhow, Albert and I had become fairly good friends. He liked my British Knights so much that one day he asked to borrow them. I said, Um, sure, and he gave me his leather boots, very ala Lando Calrissian, I thought. They were popular at the time, that style of boots (sort of Ugg Boots, for boys, a kind of farmer chav), but as the school day was ending, I realized I couldn't go home with them, so I searched him out, found out his last period class, and tracked him there, found he wasn't actually in there, and then got his home address from a mutual friend and had to skip the last period of school to find him at home, where he was outside on a patio, doing homework. He looked very happy, and not at all surprised to see me. He made shrimp from the freezer, and we hung out and talked about what was going on with him.

Albert had an eye for the cutesy Mexican girls of the area, and they certainly had one for him. In Brownsville, the drug dealers have a severe “madonna versus whore” issue, which is really quite dangerous. Mexican girls with angelic faces are revered as dainty princesses and auctioned off to the most virile and competent dealer, known by the flashiest truck and the bloodiest sinus, even at, say, fifteen years of age.

As a young man, if you had any sense of self-preservation, you would stay far away from these girls, because they were considered untouchable and reserved for the next available son of a drug dealer who would fall in desperate love upon laying eyes on her, and then beat them in public for talking to another boy, later. These were not people accustomed to rational resolution of grievances.

Because, even if you listened to the cries for help from atop the pedestals where these girls were kept, and even if your motives were pure—and, let's be honest, they never were—the lionized male children of drug dealers were totally incapable of understanding how to treat their women with the respect of an equal, that they might have something of interest to share, (and in full disclosure, they very likely didn't, beyond what they saw in fashion magazines and on Univision) so these pretty girls were left lonely, isolated in their dangerous native beauty. No, they were the image of the holy mother, and the drug-dealing boys couldn't wait to fuck them, and any man talking to their objects of affection was someone who challenged their virility, someone to be shot. Which is what is widely speculated to have happened to my friend, Albert.