Boy Kings of Texas (6 page)

Daniel sees the gun, pushes the beer forward, leans back away from the gape of the gun, and puts up his hands, this story goes, and he says: “
Hombre, píensale lo qué estás hacíendo.
” Think about what you're doing, man.
And here is where whole lives change.

The bartender shoots Daniel through his raised hands, into his chest, and he destroys a generation of people.

He fires four times, the first one blows apart Daniel's right hand, rips through the palm, and opens up his lower neck at the collar bone in an aortic splurt, tearing out Daniel's shoulder at the back. The three other shots hit Daniel center mass, ripping his torso apart in the back like a large erupting blossom, and thus my grandfather's warrant is served, at age twenty, at the hands of a nonevent, enterprising Mexican bartender servile to the Texas Rangers, who did not quite think about what he was doing, who else he would kill, and mar.

Because, you see, it didn't end there.

The next we hear of the story, Daniel has been carted to a hospital. His family has been alerted, and people are running off and closing their doors, attempting to avoid trouble. Children are running home to tell of this new massacre in the border town. Daniel's father, my great-grandfather—my father's grandfather, if you can follow this, and the only person who could step in and rear the ten-month-old child as family—rushes to the hospital after being told that his son was shot, but not told he was eviscerated, and so when he gets to the morgue and sees an emptied, exploded carcass, the old man has a heart attack and dies in the same room. Here, the Martinez family becomes unmoored.

That's the story that's been told, but never in detail. It existed around us, growing up, and we knew never to ask the sort of questions other people would, of our origins, because we would get this grim fairy tale told broadly, quickly, to shut us children up, so it hung around our family like a grotesque bedtime mist, or a nightmarish nursery rhyme hummed by our mother to fell us asleep. It permeated everything I knew, answered any question I could have about our past and our future, yet I never fully experienced, never comprehended the horror of it, until that afternoon.

This horror of my grandfather's death. A twenty-year-old kid with no future. His chest opened up like a clumsy autopsy in a Mexican bar. The death of his father, upon witnessing. These images were poured into our cereal bowls and left on our pillows, but the barbarity of it never really nestled itself in my heart, until I asked my father, heard the story as an adult.

I have this dream.

There's this unruly kid, and I'm trying to get away from him because he just seems like trouble, and when I turn my back, he's suddenly shot by some unseen gunman, and then in my hand I am carrying a part of his liver, purple and globuled wet, and instead of being afraid or repulsed, I find myself wondering where I should put it, if I should try to drop it back in his body, or leave it on the ground, but I'm reluctant because the earth is so dusty . . . and then I wake up, thinking I could use a drink, or a valium.

And I have this memory.

My father and I are driving around downtown Browns­ville, and I'm not 100 percent certain as to the accuracy of this recounting, but I could swear to you—and I hope that I'm wrong, that my memory is faulty—that when we drive through Elizabeth Street, I could swear—in my memory, mind you—that he says, “That's the man that shot your grandfather,” and with his chin he points to a fat man, an utterly nondescript Mexican with a mustache who looks like a hundred other Mexicans, wearing a soiled white pentafold, standing in the back alley doorway of a derelict restaurant. Now, I say that I hope I'm making this up because I wonder at the torture it would be to know that the man who shot your father lived, and lived right over there, scratching out a living, and then to say this to your own son, and not want to rip that man's face from his skull with your fingers, put a brick through his brain.

In my memory, Dad looks at that man the way a forty-year-old Hamlet would look at a very fat and Mexican Claudius, ridiculous in his cook's outfit, smoking a cigarette in a doorway and looking like a man who's carrying very grim things. Dad looks at him like a man who knows he should do something, anything, but also knows that he won't.

But again, I cannot guarantee the accuracy of this memory, and probably could not ask Dad if it ever happened. I just don't think I'm that cruel. And yet I have it.

Gramma was widowed with a ten-month-old child before she turned eighteen.

For three years, Gramma was grateful to be picking cotton and tomatoes for a living with her son strapped to her waist when she met Pablo Rubio Junior, my Grampa, about the time she was twenty-one. She was accustomed to hard work, and she could keep up with the men working the field. Pablo Rubio Junior drove the delivery trucks, had just come back from the Korean War where he had been a private in the trucking pool.

This was a rough time for Gramma. She was the very definition of butch, though they didn't have time for fancy things like “definitions” in the tomato fields. She felt tougher than the young men, and far superior to the women who were expected to pick less and carry smaller burdens. She was competitive and mean, and would proudly get into fistfights with the young bucks who'd be surprised at how hard she could hit, hit like a man. And young Mingo, at age four, could do nothing but watch while his mother got into dusty, dirty entanglements with teenage boys who would initially humor her in a slap fight but would then realize she meant business, and that she could punch and kick and scratch like the rest of them, and they'd end up sprawled on the dirt, in a real fight, and she'd hold her own.

Apparently, Pablo Rubio Junior found this enchanting. He was bewitched by this siren of the tomato fields (bet you didn't know there was such a thing, did you?) and he paid her court in a manner worthy of their station. They had more than their share of romps behind the truck, when no one was looking, or sometimes when people were. You take love where you can get it, in the tomato fields.

When Pablo Rubio Junior asked her to marry him, Gramma had immediately consented: An opportunity like this comes only twice in a young widow's lifetime. Plus, he was another sort of royalty in the area: He was an American; he could give her citizenship. Gramma was lucky that way.

And so he did. Grampa brought her over from Matamoros to live in the barrio he and his brothers were carving out of a useable piece of farmland, a flat loamish landscape by the port, near the dump. For Gramma, it was a long way from the threadbare farm on the Matamoros side of the river to a Mexican-American barrio on the Brownsville tide flats, though topographically it might have been less than twenty-five miles removed, and it was a long way for her to go before her twenty-first birthday with a child in tow, both geographically and psychologically.

Grampa's brothers' wives were horrified that he had married a widow with a child, married below his station as head of their clan, and they made Gramma feel accordingly when she moved in, the gold digger and her son by another man. They immediately treated her the way the cousins of old had treated her before she was swept up into the soap opera of Daniel Martinez, and the feelings of inferiority she thought she had left behind began to take shape once again.

When she had been on her own, and working the fields, she had some feeling of control, could fight the fuckers if they got too uppity . . . but here, she was expected to be a fucking lady, be all classy-like and shit, but she had this damned kid from the previous marriage, and that dead bastard Daniel—God rest and bless his soul—had frenchified her and
good
so that she knew damn well she couldn't bear
Weeto
a son (that was his nickname, “Pablo” becoming “Pablíto” becoming “Weeto.” Don't ask). And that's what these barrio bitches respected, Gramma knew: child-bearing and shit. She was in trouble, she felt. In the meantime she had this goddamned kid to deal with.

I suppose at this point, my father should have thanked his stars that he was not traded for a new axle or a set of brake pads. Perhaps he was too old, his genealogy too uncertain. Whatever his shortcomings at age four, Dad was stuck with Gramma, and Grampa stuck with Dad.

I should also note here that Grampa, Pablo Rubio Junior, was never the sort of man that Dad remembers now. That Gramma, with her motivations to impress Grampa and swim in this new “up-scale” neighborhood in America, these things did not at all register on Grampa. Grampa was, and I will take this to my grave, a genuine saint. A drunken saint. He was saintly to me. He was saintly to my brothers and sisters. I wish he would have stuck around to meet my younger brother Derek. Grampa would have wet himself, he would have loved Derek so much. The way he loved me, and I loved him. Grampa—and this brings me to tears—Grampa was a really good person, even if a bit of a drunk. But who among us isn't?

I'm drunk now, as I'm writing this. And I'm tearing up, remembering him. Grampa was love. A big, brown Buddha of grandfatherly love.

Grampa was the only male member of his tribe to have served in the US Army. He drove trucks through the conflict, was “in the shit” in the Korean War, and when he came back home he had his future mapped out like a Manchurian hillside. The first thing he did was buy a stretch of property for his brothers and himself, about five acres of land right smack in the center of a large field that grew sorghum, corn, and cotton on rotating years.

This was the Rubio barrio, though we didn't know it growing up. (I'm sure it would have horrified my sisters and my mother to know that we were living in a barrio, but from the safety of distance and time, the patterns are much more clear, and I can say, without complication, that we lived in
their
barrio, that we lived in a barrio, the Rubio barrio. It fits the definition. That I am, after all, a “barrio boy.”)

The barrio was rectangular and surrounded on three sides by farmland, and it ran immediately parallel to Oklahoma Avenue, an unremarkable dirt road off State Road 511, just four miles from the Rio Grande, which by this point had become a broken, feeble thing hardly worth mentioning, full of pesticides and heavy metals from American manufacturing that moved south after NAFTA, and a ghost of the natural phenomenon of ages past when my other grandfather worked its boundaries.

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.