Boy Kings of Texas (17 page)

“No,” Mr. Jacobs had corrected her. “What I said to you was ‘obscene,' and not ‘profane.'” He had told her to go fuck herself, I think he was saying; not for God to go fuck Himself.

He didn't make many friends in Brownsville, either.

To make the time go by faster, I open Dan's notebook and flip through his academics. It isn't exactly convincing, as a student's notebook. It's more of a prop, with empty line-ruled paper and half-hearted attempts at note-taking, indiscernible scribbles and the lyrics to
Knocking at Your Back Door,
a song by Deep Purple that had much more
double entendre
than I was capable of understanding at the time.

It's a terrible fifty minutes, spent in that Latin classroom, and I don't think I ever managed to thank Mr. Jacobs for forcing me to make the choice that day. (Except by getting horribly drunk at one of his summer parties and frightening a girl I liked named Kathy, but that's another story.)

When the bell rings, I erupt from that classroom and run down anyone I can find for news, news, news of the event.

Certainly it is on everyone's mind, on everyone's lips . . . ?

And it is: The first familiar person I see is an old friend of Dan's, Israel, from way back.

“Oh, man,” he tells me, “Dan got his ass
kicked
, man. You should have been there, man. They fought for like, an hour. Dan's all messed up.”

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.