Boy Kings of Texas (28 page)

This doesn't go over at all well with the boys drinking at the table.

Segis makes an attempt to keep me from retiring, as he's not done with the drinking, and I resist, saying that I'm done, and Richard pipes in, says, “They can stay. They're drinking with me.”

I don't take this in the least as usurping; in fact, I feel better that he takes the responsibility of host. The house will be safe. “Great,” I say. “Just please make sure the door is locked when you guys go.”

“Don't worry about the fucking door,” Richard barks, and the whole room sort of goes quiet, even though Ozzy is playing on the stereo.

I hadn't noticed, but he has been steadily fuming since joining us at the table. When I said I had something to do tomorrow, he had decided to take it badly. He had taken it as me posturing. Perhaps he had been right. I really can't be sure.

I say goodnight, empty my final beer, and then retire to my parents' room. This is the only room in the house with an air-conditioning window unit. They have a queen sized bed, a recliner, and a TV. It's like being in a hotel room, and I'm looking forward to sleeping in it that night. The door closed behind me; I undress down to my Y-fronts with the window unit turned to high.

The drone it makes cancels any noise coming from the kitchen. The room is dark, pitch black with the curtains drawn, and I very quickly drop off into a heavy sleep.

What happens next is a long time coming, but completely unexpected.

I'm dead asleep when I hear the door to Mom and Dad's room explode open and slam into the wall behind it, the doorknob burying itself into the wood paneling.

I sit up and twist in bed and can see the door frame illuminated by the hallway light behind it, and just barely make out a figure rushing into the room before I'm punched violently in the back of the head and then once in the clavicle, just under my throat, as I'm grabbed by my hair and yanked forward. I have enough sense to grab the hands that are grabbing at my hair. I'm pulled sprawling out of the bed, and I fall to the floor, in a crumple, at the base of the bed, where suddenly I'm being kicked in the neck and torso by something that feels and smells like a cowboy boot.

This is all in the dark, and I have not had time to consider or think about what might be happening, and I think I might have caught a voice—sounding like Richard's—when I feel the hard sharp thumps of pointed cowboy boots kicking me in the chest, the stomach, the chest. I roll up with my arms up around my head and figure out where the kicks are coming from, and so I roll into the kicks instinctively. The lights suddenly go on, and I jump up and see Richard standing in front of me at the end of the boots, and it doesn't make any sense to me what's happening.

His cowboy hat is off and his face is a mask of venom, his green eyes wide and dilated behind his glasses and his balding head covered in perspiration. He is breathing heavily from the beating he's just given me.

The light going on has shocked him into stopping for a heartbeat, and I'm standing there, my body stinging and red from all the shots I've just taken in my underwear, and I hear Segis shouting, “Richard! Richard! No! Stop it! Stop it! I didn't mean nothing!”

It had been Segis who had run in here, had snapped on the lights behind Richard, and who was now trying to get between Richard and me. The shock of the light now gone, Richard suddenly resumes his assault, this time on both me and Segis.

Segis tries to get in Richard's way, but is leveled quickly with a single hard kick to the balls, and he falls to the side while Richard charges at me. I lean back into a window and curtains and just sort of thrust my hands forward to try to stifle his punches before they come, and it seems to work, seems to keep him from summoning too much power, and I can take what blows he's mustering. Richard doesn't seem to be much of a fighter if you fight back, I'm understanding, even here. He's swinging fat, wide haymakers at my head and arms, and I'm able to keep the full force of the blows from hitting me by flaring my elbows and ducking my head, which is the only way I'm able to survive the second onslaught.

Still, I'm scared out of my mind at this point. A stout little fucker, Richard could generate a lot of gravity behind a punch, if he did it right.

I was a skinny boy, weighing about 140 pounds at this point. and aside from the few scraps a male gets into in high school and the ones Richard himself had arranged against Joe and the kids across the street, I'd never been in a real fight, never been hit like this. Richard, on the other hand, weighs about 250, and makes his living slapping people around. He throws his weight around, so to speak, and he has a lot of weight to throw.

Finally, I'm able to yell out, “Richard! Richard! What the
hell
are you
doing,
man? You're my fucking uncle! You're not supposed to be
doing
this!!”

I say this as the last wave of blows glances off my head, and I use my arms to entangle his and keep it from being too easy to hit my head again. Already I can feel that a few of them have gotten through and my left eye is starting to swell, starting to throb deeply in a way that I know far too well now. He then changes tactics and grabs me and swings me around and shoves me against the dresser.

“Shut up! Shut up!” he yells, pointing at me, “Stop your talking! You think you're so fucking smart, you and all your fucking family! You think you're so much better than us because you got psychology and school and you read all those books! I don't care, Junior! I don't fucking care! I'll fucking kill you and your fucking father, Junior! You can't just make us feel like we're nothing and then just leave! I don't give a shit! Your sisters are up there in that college just fucking around! They're just
putas!
You're not better than us because we're fucking Mexicans! You think you're fucking white people! You're not white! You're just like the rest of us! And don't you fucking think I won't kill your father, Junior; I'll kill him! I don't care! I'll go to fucking prison! I'll fucking do it! I'll fucking shoot him!”

I'm reeling backward at this hatred, this gestalt of the entire barrio gushing out of Richard's mouth, like a spigot of vitriol, a toxic explosion of gossip, envy, and anger convulsing out of this poor, stupid dumb beast who suddenly became a vehicle for the sentiments that the whole barrio had wanted to tell the Martinezes, that we didn't belong here, on Oklahoma Avenue, in their barrio, by using the only other outsider, who had nothing, and so much to prove.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Richard; listen to what you're saying. What the hell brought this on?” I'm legitimately confused, and I make my way to the mirror in my mom's bedroom, moving past Segis, who's sitting on the floor, holding his testicles, and I see that my eye is red and white and swelling, will soon be deeply bruised, the blood vessels in the white totally burst. Lots of punches got through to that side. My lips are ripped open on the inside and I have to spit out a lot of blood, but not a single hit to the nose, I notice. Richard can't throw a straight punch.

The betrayal of it, the hostility coming from so close within the family, and then bared so openly at me, I just can't get my mind around it.

“What did you say about your Gramma?” Richard demands from me suddenly.

“What?”

“What did you say? Did you call her a bitch or not? Did you call your Gramma a bitch?”

I feel caught here; I'm not sure what I've said, what this means.

Here, Segis calls out from the floor, “No, Richard! He didn't! He said it a long time ago! He didn't mean it like that!”

“You shut up!” Richard spits at Segis, who complies readily. “Did you say it or not?”

“He . . . He . . . ” stammers Segis, “ . . . it wasn't like that.”

“What the fuck are you two
talking
about?” I yell, my mouth filling with blood again. I spit it out, on the carpet. It makes a puddle.

“Junior!
Did you call your Gramma a bitch or not?” he demands, furious again.

“I . . . I don't know! I say a lot of shit!” I yell, trying to tell the truth. “Maybe! Probably! I don't remember! Why do you people listen to me? I say a lot of shit!”

And then he charges at me again.

His first punch this time hits me clear on the mouth, and I feel something click, in the architecture of my skull. The next few punches, I see coming, and I block them mostly with my arms and elbows. I start to get the hang of it, at this point.

Richard's not a trained fighter, just an average brawler, only has two swings and a planted right kick in him, if he can get his leg up.

In fact, the one time Richard went up against a trained fighter—a black belt from a
tae kwon do
school near the airport—Richard didn't do so well. One morning I was lurking near his door, trying to determine if he was home or asleep, and thinking of possibly risking entering and pillaging a fresh skin magazine, when he called out: “
Quien esta alli?
” (“Who's there?”)

I held back, then said, “Oh, it's just June.”

“Help me out of bed, please,” he said, almost inaudibly. I entered and saw that he was still in bed, having trouble putting his feet on the floor.

“What happened to you?”

“Oh, I went up against Benavidez last night, at a club.”

“The guy from the tae kwon do school?” I asked, intrigued.

“Yeah, he kicked my ass. I said something about his girlfriend in the parking lot, and he kicked the shit out of me. I'd never been hit like that before. I ended up under my truck. I stayed under there until he went inside.”

“Hunh,” I thought. This was news indeed; it was like Jackie Chan fighting Godzilla, with Jackie winning. But this also created a perfect snapshot of the barrio boy kings: pretending to be tough guys, but having no discipline or training. They were just cock-strong field hands talking shit.

But this night, I've still never been in a real fight, not in the life or death way it seems, and Richard outweighs me by one hundred pounds and a ton of anger. My best way out of it is to talk my way out, I decide.

“Richard, you've got to stop this,” I say, and something is wrong with my mouth. My jaw doesn't align, I realize. And something is wrong with my teeth. I run my tongue over my front teeth and can feel one of the incisors split in two, cracked down the middle. Richard is wearing a ring, just for this purpose.

I spit out a bit of tooth, and it hits the dresser with a click. Fuck. “Jesus, look at what you did, you fucking bastard,” I say.

I stop to look in my mother's mirror, and Richard sits on the bed, behind me, winded. My eye is swelling shut, and my bottom lip is torn open. “Jesus,” I say.

“Shut up!” he yells from the bed. “You called her a bitch last week because she only lent you five dollars!”

I stop. I look at Segis. “Is
that
what this is about?”

“No! No!” screams Segis. “That's not right! It was a long time ago! I said he wasn't just an asshole to you and your kids, that he was an asshole to everyone! Not just us! That's what I said, man!”

Still, I couldn't put together what was happening, what had happened after I left.

“So you were lying?” Richard says to Segis. Richard gets up, looms over Segis. “Hunh?” he challenges Segis. “You were lying? Is that it?” He tries to kick Segis again, who rolls on his side like a puppy and gets kicked in the ass.

“No!” yells Segis from the floor. “I just said he was an asshole to everyone, man, even his Gramma!”

“Jesus, Richard; is that what this is about? You've known me all your life; you know how I am. I just say shit about everything without meaning it, to make a joke. You used to laugh at it all the time; I did it to make you laugh. You were like a brother to me,” I say.

“Shut up!” he says and lunges at me again, but this time, I'm out of reach, and his glasses fall off and he almost steps on them. We end up shuffling and in a weird shifting of position, I end up near them, and I pick them up, hand them back to him. He takes them and puts them on without thinking about it.

“Just shut up, Junior! You don't use your psychology and books on me! You're not smarter than me! I know who you are! I saw you grow up, you
pendéjo!
You and your family! I've seen everything about you! You think you're so much better than all of us because you try to speak good English and go to school! But you're from
here
like all of us! You're
poor,
your father is
Mexican!
Like all of us! Your sisters are just sluts who think their shit don't stink, like your mom! And your dad is just
weak!
He's
weak,
Junior! I could kill him, and your brother Dan, and your whole fucking family if I want! I'll go to prison, I don't care! You fucking disrespect your
grandmother?
What's wrong with you, Junior? You don't have no respect for
nobody!
For none of us! You disrespect all of us! You're not
better
than us, Junior! You're
not!
You hate us because you're just like us!”

Through this last tirade, Richard has broken down, weeping, in dangerous spurts, his hand to his eyes, and continues to cry, on his own, me and Stegis standing or sitting around him, unsure.

I almost want to hug him, hold him, like my older brother, crying, because up until the point he restructured my jaw, I still loved him. He had nothing more, nothing. All he could do to save his dignity was to threaten to kill my family and take the prison sentence, he thought, the poor pathetic bastard.

To be totally honest, everything he's said tonight is true.

As I stand there, beaten up, and watch him cry, the detached observer in me is taking notes, in my mind, so I can write the story down one day.