Boy Kings of Texas (39 page)

Chapter 32

Cheating

In my defense, I was trying to do the opposite of what Dad had done with his wife. Actually, in all of his life, all of his choices. I was using him as a reverse compass.

I think in my distorted thinking, if I didn't “oppress” her by demanding that she didn't cheat, perhaps she wouldn't. Maybe, if I gave her the choice to make, and allowed it to happen, I wouldn't be the asshole my dad was. That she would choose correctly, that she would stay.

Karis had started having bad dreams, where she would be surrounded by her family and lying in a bed, and they had all gathered there to help her commit suicide, by taking a large black pill. Her mother fed it to her, and Karis would be crying, begging her to stop because she didn't want to die, and they would force her to swallow it, and waited with her as she died, holding her and thanking her.

One afternoon, when Karis was supposed to be visiting her mother and I was staying at home, because Meg and I didn't get along—Meg blamed me when Karis told her she couldn't move in with us in the one-bedroom apartment, and so she decided she'd remain homeless, couch surfing at the hospitality of the women from the Lesbian Resource Center in Seattle—and I was staying in on that off-deadline weekday, just getting mildly stoned and listening to
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
and scribbling in my notebook, Karis suddenly appeared at our door and closed the door behind her with a look of sheer panic and fear in her face and announced, “June, I lied to you. Instead of being with my mother, I was upstairs with Kip and then Janine came home, and I hid in the closet, and she caught me, in the closet.” She says all this without taking off her coat or dropping her purse.

Being high, and being young and in love and unsettled by this abrupt forthcoming, I was knocked off-balance, and all I genuinely felt right then was a sincere sympathy for her state, not really taking in what she was telling me.

I said, “Oh, you poor thing; you must be totally freaked out. Come here,” and I hugged her, asked her if she wanted some tea, clutching her to me. She was shaking, started crying into my shoulder, and I tried to calm her down, wondering if we had anymore chamomile.

It took me about an hour to realize what exactly was happening, to become angry, and I did fuck all, because I didn't want to react like my father would have, didn't want to be seen by others as a dominating, patriarchal machismo Mexican man. So I just took it.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, Dad had come back into town and was drunk.

His first stop was with
La Señora,
the
cúrandera
, his witch doctor. He waited for an hour in the waiting room while the line of superstitious pilgrims in front of him got their medical results mystically diagnosed (no need for X-rays here) or were given useless assurances that their financial health would be guaranteed.

Dad was here for a different reason this time. He wanted to know if his wife was fucking around behind his back.

It made no difference that he was carrying on behind hers—that was none of her business, and he had been feeling guilty enough about it already, didn't need anyone else telling him it was wrong—but if she was doing it, then there was hell to pay. But he needed to know for sure. Gramma had been on the phone with him and told him already that things were not normal over at his house. The other night, Velva had a woman over, and she spent the night there, of all things.

Gramma had taken revenge on the lesbian affair by turning off the water so those two
marimachas
couldn't shower in the morning. (It had been Mom's friend and coworker from JC Penney, who had been afraid to go home because her live-in boyfriend had been beating her, and also another textbook case of projection, on Gramma's part.)

But Dad didn't care about Mom being with another woman. It was another
man
that Dad was concerned about.

Dad had suspected Mom was carrying on behind his back since she had started working at the JC Penney's in Amigoland Mall, near the border across town, because she'd been acting all independent and paying her own bills and seriously crimping his manhood by doing what he was supposed to be doing, and well, things just weren't the same anymore. And he suspected there was a man involved. So here he was, at his “spirit-counselor's” and was asking her if his wife was cheating on him. And so she asked her spirits what they knew. Was Domingo Martinez's wife cheating on him? She looked in the ball, and so on. Rang the glass of water and all that.

Then she said, “Yes; your wife is seeing a man who's short, wears a uniform, and she sees him when she's supposed to be at work, when she's supposed to be somewhere else. They think they love each other, and it's a secret for him, too. She still loves you and the house, and she is conflicted, but she needs more. She wants more than what is at home. They make the love in secret.” Yada yada yada.

Dad got his money's worth. The information was vague enough to be specific, and when I heard all this about a week later from Dan, I found it fantastically perfect that all the information “mystically” divulged could have been describing my situation with Karis, and I wondered if the spirits had tapped into the wrong “Domingo Martinez,” sort of pulled up the wrong website when they Googled the name.

Dad didn't take the news well. To him, getting it from the
cúrandera
was the same as getting it from a police report, or an X-ray. He paid his fee and went to a bar and got more drunk, then drove across town to the Amigoland Mall when it was closing and caught Mom
in flagrante delicto,
as Dad sat in a borrowed car across from the employee's exit in the JC Penney parking lot, and watched as a Border Patrol Jeep slowly crawled up and turned its lights off, waited. So had Dad, in his borrowed Cadillac, from across the parking lot.

Mom eventually emerged from the door and walked around the Jeep, saying good-bye to her coworkers as she got in the passenger-side door, like it was something that happened regularly. The coworkers drove off and Dad took his moment, left the driver's side of the car and the door hanging open, and walked across the parking lot to the Border Patrol Jeep. He opened the passenger-side door and surprised both Velva and the border patrolman, later identified by Mom as her “friend,” Felípe, and he pulled her from the back of her collar onto the parking lot.

They had not been enclenched in a passionate kiss, but had been staring longingly into each other's eyes, said Mom. “We were just talking!” she says.

Dad didn't say anything about this because he denied it could have happened, or didn't remember specifics, or doing it.

Mom was on the ground, outside the Jeep, and began yelling at Dad to stop, stop what he was doing. He then grabbed the Border Patrol agent—who was armed with a .9 mm sidearm, a shotgun, and an M4A1 carbine—and Dad started to pull him out through the passenger-side window as the door had swung back, when Mom fell to the ground.

“Sir, don't do that, sir!” he screamed, this “Felípe,” under his tiny little Mexican moustache. “Sir, please! We were just talking! Sir, please let go!”

Dad pulled Felípe across the console and into the passenger side and had to step around Velva Jean to get him out. And when Dad let go to get a better grip on the man's collar, the border patrolman took his own moment to force the door closed and scramble back into the driver's side and drive away, leaving Velva on the ground with her enraged, drunk husband who had just caught her cheating.

Felípe didn't look back, or stop. The Border Patrol Jeep turned onto the main road and drove off, into the night.

Had he, Felípe, looked back, he would have seen Dad backslapping my mother into the ground and kicking her before he walked back to his borrowed car and drove off somewhere else, to drink all this away, and Velva Jean was left in the empty parking lot of the JC Penney, crying to herself, under the sulfur lights and the moths flitting in crazy deranged circles underneath them.

Chapter 33

Cheating II

I hadn't fared so well either.

I got drunk at the bar across the street, what was then the Romper Room, and then I put on my combat boots. Karis drove up in her yellow Toyota pickup with the bed cover and the bad brakes and waited at the curb, where I had been sitting, smoking cigarettes, waiting for her to get home.

I'd finally gotten mad. Said some things over the phone when she was at work at the PCC deli, making something with tofu.

She pulled up to our assigned parking spot and didn't get out, just sat there and smoked a cigarette out her window.

And then I stood up and walked across the street and I kicked in the side of her truck, with my boots, my combat boots.

I kicked the shit out of the side of that truck and a guy from across the street said, “Miss, miss, are you OK? Do you need help?”

And I looked at him, and I stopped myself, because I was being the asshole, and Karis finished smoking her cigarette, and then drove off, with her truck now looking much the worse for wear, and I walked back upstairs to our empty apartment and listened to Kip and Janine thumping around upstairs, as she threw him out.

When she did leave me, when we finally broke up about a month later, after I'd moved into that horrible karate studio and started taking classes every morning and afternoon like Remo Williams, when she would finally go, Karis left me for a woman who looked exactly like her mother, Meg.

I had to sit down, when she told me. I had met this woman, one morning when I dropped Karis off at her job at Puget Consumer Co-op, in Ravenna. I forget the woman's name, think it was something like Chris, but she was carrying vegetable crates from a delivery truck, and I made the comment to Karis that she looked like her mother's brother: same hairy bowlegged walk, same plaid, same tool-belt, and same moustache. Karis had not laughed.

Take that, Mr. Freud.

Chapter 34

Keep on Truckin'

Dad is doing long-distance trucking for a company out of Brownsville now for some time, and he's in the middle of darkest Mississippi headed for a Ford factory in the south with his new partner, an old man named Jim who's been doing the route for fifteen years.

It's three in the morning when they're approaching Tennessee and a tire in the driver-side rearmost axle blows and shreds and catches fire from the friction. Dad is driving and watches it all happen in the side-view mirror. He panics, wakes up Jim, and tries to pull off the interstate.

“Keep on truckin'!” yells Jim from the bunk, pulling on his pleated denim jeans in a hurry. “Keep on truckin'!”

Dad, unsure of what to do, does instead as he's told and he downshifts, presses hard on the accelerator, and moves the rig back into “the hammer lane.”

The tire is alight, glowing orange in the sideview mirror as Jim climbs into the passenger seat and soporifically readjusts his glasses. “Keep on truckin',” he mumbles, mostly to himself, patting his shirt pockets for his smokes.

Sure enough, the tire burns out in a matter of minutes, shreds itself over the course of a hundred miles, and billows for a couple hundred more but they make it into Memphis, all the way to Galilee.

This is what I think about the morning I awake with a pain in my lower back. It's very likely my kidney, maybe my liver, and I get upset at my deterioration, so I grab a beer at nine that Saturday morning.

Take that, kidney. Screw you, liver. Gonna keep on truckin'. Gonna make it into Galilee.

Chapter 35

Ten Years Later

Hard times. I've been unemployed for ten months now, working a temp job at the Starbucks Resource Center, answering phones, having recently separated from my last relationship of three years. I have to move out of my apartment. I simply can't afford to live here anymore. It's not a great apartment by any means. There's no view, it's near basement quality and if there is another bad earthquake, I will certainly die in my sleep. But it's mine, and I'm thirty-two, and I want my own space. Thing is, I can't come up with the $700 anymore.

I have to move in with Dan, who had moved back to Seattle after six years of living apart, and now lives across the way with his mute girlfriend, Orlene. She's not really mute, but you have to be able to talk about the things she likes or else she'll sit quietly opposite you for hours without any impulse to speak to you. I've tried this before and have been impressed by her ability to say nothing, and to say it without a single word.

We're going to try this out, because both Dan and I feel a great compulsion to live together, like we did when we were kids. Dan's helping me get my stuff out of my apartment and into the one we're going to share.

We're trying to get my couch out over the balcony: That's how we got it in, after I had to move out of Rebecca's, my last girlfriend.

The couch, my couch, was one of the contingencies of moving in with Rebecca, previously: When we had moved in together, she had a terribly uncomfortable couch, and I demanded something far superior to the driftwood obstacle she had bought in a display of sympathy for a Pike Place Market “artist.” I'd received my severance pay from the union I unwittingly and unintentionally joined while working at the
Seattle Times,
and it covered the cost of this lovely, oil-clothed couch, dog proof and deep. And about 250 pounds.

It's coming over the balcony, and Dan is holding it while standing on the roof of a UHaul, lowering it down for me, and in my terrible cross trainers, my ankle gives way while I'm supporting the couch, shifting it to a secure point of rest, and my knee pops out of socket: I feel more pain then than all the pain I've felt combined for the last ten years. I collapse, but save the couch, shifting its weight onto the face of the rockery nearby.

My knee pops back in again and I'm nearly delirious with pain and worry, lying in the parking lot. I've been out of work for ten months and have no health insurance. I'm scared, scared a lot. The couch is safe and Dan, his Honduran girlfriend Orlene, and their tiny El Salvadoran friend Alex are all standing over me, looking at me. Health professionals, all of them.

“Is he going to be OK?” asks Alex in Spanish.

Orlene leaves without saying a word.

Dan says, “He'll be OK. June, are you going to be OK? Can you stand on it?”

I stand on it. Dan decides I'll be all right. Everyone gets back to moving.

I try to walk it into place; it feels odd and loose, the knee, but I think I can get it back into place. I've never been delicate, and my body has an odd way of adapting to its borders, like Japanese goldfish growing to the limits of their ponds. It's as if my knee, knowing I don't have insurance, will compensate with whatever material it's got available. I'm walking inside ten minutes, but by no means normally.

I ask Dan, “Seriously, what do you think will happen? Is this bad? Will I need to see a doctor?”

“You probably need surgery,” he tells me. “You probably need a CAT scan, or an MRI. You probably tore your ACL and need to have it surgically stitched back together.”

I'm petrified now, but satisfied the couch is being moved.