Burro Genius

by Victor Villaseñor

  But I didn’t even make it out the door. Our teacher caught me. Her name was Mrs. Morlo, and she wasn’t really mean like the other teachers that I’d had. In fact, I’d say that she was the first fair-minded teacher that I’d ever gotten.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “but I think you forgot that I said I need to speak to you.”

  There was nothing I could do, she’d caught me cold. Gus and the other kid were grinning. They’d been smart enough not to try to make a break for it. She asked Gus and the other boy to wait for her outside the classroom door, and they went out with the rest of the kids. Now I was alone with Mrs. Morlo.

  “I don’t think that you’ve read for me all year, have you?” she said.

  I was looking down at the floor, studying the different squares of the tile-like flooring. I’d never realized until now that this was the exact same flooring that they used at Penney’s. Remembering Penney’s, I began to wonder if I needed any new clothes. Or maybe, now that I was older, I should ask my parents to take me to Sears in Escondido. That’s where my father had just bought some great new spurs.

  “Look,” she said, when I didn’t reply, “I saw how quickly you were able to learn your multiplication and division, so I think that you probably just need a little help with your reading. Here, sit down with me,” she said in a kind voice, “and let me see you read this page.”

  I sat down. There was nothing else I could do. I took the book that she gave me, and immediately all these white rivers began running up and down the page between the words. And the words, they would just jump up off the page at me.

  I took in a big breath, held, and I tried to focus my vision to just one word at a time, and then move my eyes from the left side of the word to the right side of the word, as we’d been told to do in first and second grades. But it was really hard for me to hold on to the different letters, with all the ups and downs of short letters, long letters, and those other ones with the tails that hung down below the line. I was so scared to make a mistake, and maybe say something in Spanish, that I finally just began crying.

  “You can’t read, can you?” she asked.

  “No, I can’t,” I said, wiping my tears.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Since we first started reading.”

  “In first grade?”

  “Yes.”

  “And no one noticed this before?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She looked at me for a long time, and I could see that her look wasn’t mean and she wasn’t going to slap me on the head for not paying attention, like my first-and second-grade teachers used to do. I could hardly remember anything else about the second grade, except our teacher, a woman, hitting us Mexican kids so hard and calling us “stupid Mexicans” that my ears still rang. But we hadn’t even all been Mexicanos, and so we’d sometimes laugh when we’d see her hit the two local Indian kids who weren’t Mexicans, because now, finally, some one else was getting it besides us vatos. This was democracy, Ramón told us, everyone getting hit equally.

  “Look,” she finally said in a kind voice, “I think that if you stay with me a few minutes after school every day, we can have you reading between now and the end of the year. Because, you see,” she added, “if we don’t have you reading at a third-grade level by the end of the school year, you’ll have to repeat the third grade again.”

  “Repeat?” I said.

  “Yes. We’ll have to hold you back a year.”

  I nodded. I understood. I was going to be roped, tied, and branded a “stupid, slow learner” for life if I didn’t learn to read well in the next month and a half.

  She wrote out a note and told me to take it to my parents so that they’d be informed and know why I’d be getting home a little late every day. Then she told me to go outside and tell Gus to come in. When I went out, Gus gave me a great big grin like I’d never seen him give before.

  “So we got busted, eh, partner?” he said. “But it ain’t so bad. Hell, I’ve flunked before.”

  “You have?”

  “Hell, yeah! Back in Texas, I flunked-me one grade real good!”

  And saying this, he went in to see the teacher with a swagger like he was king of the world. Suddenly, I wondered what the hell was going on. Ramón had been the smartest and most capable guy in our whole grade in “thinking” and “figuring” out things, and he’d been considered dumb, too. And now Gus, he was also the smartest guy of all of us during recess and he just said that he’d been flunked before. This didn’t make any damn—I mean, blessed—sense to me at all! The smartest kids I knew were all considered stupid.

  That night, I took the note to my parents and my mother read it and asked me what was going on.

  “I don’t know,” I said, lying. “Tell me, what does the note say, mama.”

  “Your teacher says that you need help with your reading and that she’s willing to stay after school and help you a little each day. She also says that you do very well with your arithmetic, so she thinks that you’ll catch up by the end of the year. Do you have trouble reading, mijito?” asked my mother.

  My eyes filled with tears. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want my own mother to find out that I was stupid. She took me in her arms, and that night she sang to me an extra-long time about God’s turtledove de amor that says, “Coo-coo-roocoo-coooo!” I loved my mama so much! Nothing bad could ever happen to me when she held me in her large warm arms.

  All that week, Gus and I and this other kid stayed after school and our teacher tried to help us with our reading. Gus was actually pretty good at his reading, and so, by the end of two weeks, he didn’t have to stay after school anymore. By the third week, I could see that our teacher was getting short-tempered with the other kid and me. After about thirty minutes of helping us, she’d begin to look at the clock on the wall and get irritated with us.

  Then in the fourth week, I don’t know what happened, but the other kid quit coming to school altogether, and I was now alone with Mrs. Morlo, and this was when she told me that my parents would have to come to school so she could speak with them in person. It was only two weeks until the end of school.

  That day, I went home on my Schwinn bike, crying the whole way. I knew what was coming, and I’d tried to pay attention so hard and learn how to read, but I couldn’t do it. All those letters just kept jumping around, making designs that made no sense to me.

  At home, I gave my parents the note my teacher had given me to give to them, then we went to the school in my parents’ new car. It was a great big, long, navy-blue Cadillac, the first Cadillac in all of Oceanside and Carlsbad after the war. Also, our new home was finished, and now my father and mother were going to downtown San Diego and ordering custom-made furniture from a great big, fancy furniture store that had the biggest elevator I’d ever seen.

  I could see that my teacher almost shit in her pants—I mean, dress, when she saw my father and mother drive up in their big car and get out, all dressed up. I don’t know what she’d been expecting, but here was my father dressed in tailor-made silver-gray Western slacks, a beautiful handmade belt and buckle from Mexico, and his big cowboy hat with the fancy horsehair band. And my mother, she was dressed in her Sunday best, looking like a movie star. Myself, I was still in my school clothes that were the same ones that I used for working around the ranch.

  Nervously, Mrs. Morlo fixed her hair, then kept asking my parents to please sit down until she realized that our third-grade furniture was too small for adults. Still my father maneuvered his large, thick body into one of the little desk chairs. It was really funny, seeing mi papa in one of our desk chairs. My mother didn’t even try. Calming down, my teacher finally told my parents the same thing that she’d told me, that I was smart at arithmetic, so…she’d thought that I could catch up on my reading, but…I hadn’t been able to do it. Then she dropped the bomb.

  “I’ll be recommending that he repeat the third grade,” she said.

  I watched my
parents look at each other. My mother was the first to speak.

  “Does this mean that he’ll be held back a year?” asked my mother.

  “Yes,” said my teacher. I could see that she felt pretty terrible, herself.

  “I see,” said my mother, and she now also tried to put her body into one of our small desk chairs as my father had. I could see that she was thinking and trying to understand the situation. “Are there any other children who are being held back?” asked my mother.

  Hearing this, my father winked at me. I guess that he thought that this was a good question and he was proud of my mother for having asked it.

  “No,” said my teacher. “The other boy, whom I was also going to recommend to be held back, he and his family have moved from the area.”

  I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help myself, and I began to cry. Then I was going to be the only “stupid, slow learner” to be held back in all of my class. I’d so much hoped to spare my parents the terrible shame of finding out that their son was stupid. My brother Joseph and sister Tencha had never flunked. I wished I could die, I felt so bad.

  Seeing the tears running down my face, my father put his huge thick hand on my shoulder, stroking me gently. “Tell me,” he said to my teacher, “just how much you want?”

  “How much what?” asked my teacher.

  “Money,” said my dad, reaching for his pocket. “We can settle this thing right now.”

  “Salvador!” said my mother. “Please, none of that!”

  “¿Y porque no?” he said, getting out of the little desk and bringing out the huge roll of money that he always kept in the right front pocket of his slacks or Levi’s. Only fools carried their money in wallets in their back pockets, our father always told us. “Money talks, hocus-pocus bullshit just stinks!”

  “Excuse me,” said my teacher, “but this isn’t about money. This is about your son’s future. If he doesn’t get his foundation of reading down, he’ll have trouble all of his life.”

  “Good,” said my father. “All life is trouble, so why the hell worry, eh?”

  “Excuse me, but you don’t seem to understand.”

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND!” roared my father, putting his money back in his pocket. “Hell, I’ve forgotten more than you or most people will EVER UNDERSTAND!”

  “Salvador,” said my mother as quietly as she could, “why don’t you and Mundo go outside and let me talk to this woman alone.”

  “Damn good idea!” said my father. “Let’s go outside, mijo, and get us some fresh air. It stinks de puro pedo here!

  “Listen to me good,” said my father the moment we were out the door. He was hot, I could tell. “Everybody has their own game, understand? Lawyers got theirs. Doctors got theirs. Business people got theirs. Every bum on the street has his, too. Got it? And every game has two sets of rules, the one set that they tell people that they play by, but—listen closely—behind their closed doors, these same people always got another set of rules that they really play their game with. The Church, she does this beautifully, having people pray to Cristo, oh, so sweetly. Then they get all those young nuns and priests to work for free for them all their lives, and yet from behind those closed doors, that goodhearted, all-loving Church steals the best lands of Mexico, and the whole world, if she could!

  “Education, mijo, is another racket. Another con game! Don’t let nobody fool you! School wants to get people thinking all the same way like trained mice. Don’t you ever fall for nobody’s racket, mijito. Think, here in your head, feel, here in your heart, and trust your tanates, here between your legs a lo chingón! This is life in all her power and glory! Got it?” he said, gently putting his huge thick hand on my shoulder.

  “I got it, papa,” I said, wiping the tears out of my eyes. And I really did get it. I loved my father con todo mi corazón. He made so much sense, just like Ramón, and even Gus. All these guys made sense and they took no shit from nobody!

  “Good, because knowing how to think and how to work is how you get ahead in life; not just education. Talone, that Italiano over from Temecula, who buys our cattle from us, he says that he had to lose his leg before he finally learned how to think. Before that, he was always strong like a bull, trying to move the world with his muscles. But then, he lost his right leg in a tractor accident, couldn’t be hired anymore, and he began to think. He bought a calf here, a goat there, butchered them and sold the meat. Soon he was buying two, three head of cattle at a time and supplying the best restaurants in San Diego with steaks, and selling the rest of the meat out of his butcher shop at a good, fair price. He’s a multimillionaire now. He has no school education, but he has life education that taught him to open his eyes, see, and think. You’re doing good, mijito. You’re a worker, and I’ve seen you think and figure things out. This woman teacher says that you’ll have trouble in life. Well, I say good! Let trouble come, and you just kick trouble’s ass a lo chingón, eh?”

  Suddenly my whole heart felt full of power. My dad had turned the whole thing around. I didn’t feel terrible or stupid anymore. I was able to stop crying. Some kids now came by on their bikes and they saw my father with his big Western hat, fancy shirt and belt, and cowboy boots.

  “Do you really have a horse, mister?” asked one kid, dropping his right foot off the peddle of his bike to the ground.

  “Hell, yes,” said my dad. “A whole string of them!”

  “A string of horses?”

  “Yeah, you know, like when you string them up to a wagon.”

  “You mean you got a stagecoach like in the Wild West?”

  “Yeah,” said my dad, “a feed wagon.”

  “Could we come over and ride your horses?” asked the other kid.

  “Yeah, sure,” said my dad, glancing at me, “if it’s all right with my son.”

  I was so glad that my dad had thought of including me, because these two guys weren’t really my friends, so I didn’t want them coming to our ranch. But before I could say anything, my mother came out of the classroom. She looked pensive, and all the way back to our rancho grande, we drove in silence. At home my mother explained to me that I was going to have to repeat the third grade. And how my classmates found out about this, I’ll never know, but for the last two weeks of school, they made fun of me, calling me “a retard, a flunker,” and once more school became a living nightmare.

  But this time, I didn’t start wetting my bed again. No, my father’s words had given me strength and confidence. And the two guys who’d asked if they could come horseback riding, I never invited them to our rancho grande, but I did invite Gus. And Gus, I found out, really had flunked a grade in Texas, and so this was why he was bigger and stronger than the rest of us kids. He was a whole year older than the rest of us.

  It turned out that Gus also knew a lot about horses. He was able to saddle his own horse and he was a pretty damn—I mean, blessed—good rider, too. We ended up playing cowboys and Indians on horseback, running through different orchards. I was the Indian. He was the cowboy. And one day I tried jumping off my horse to a tree branch at a full gallop, so I could swing up into the tree as I’d seen done in a cowboy movie in which the hero had swung up in the tree and then jumped out of the tree on the bad guy who was coming behind him. But I never made it. Hitting the branch, I got knocked backwards off my horse so hard that when I hit the ground, I saw stars.

  The next thing I knew, Gus was on the ground beside me, slapping me in the face and asking me if I was dead. And when I finally came to, he started laughing and laughing, saying that he’d never seen someone do such a crazy-ass stunt in all his life!

  “But I saw the hero do it in a movie,” I said.

  “Yeah, but movies are fake, didn’t you know that? In the movies, I’m sure they don’t really run their horses under those trees at a full gallop. They probably just trot their horses under, then the movie maker speeds up the film, you fool!”

  That was the day I realized that movies weren’t really true. And yeah, s
ure, I’d always known that movies were pretend, but I’d, also, kind of thought that they were real in how they were made and that the movie stars were kind of, well, really like those people that they pretended to be. I’d almost had my head knocked off when I’d tried to do what I’d seen them do in the movies. I was never going to trust these damn—I mean, blessed—movies again!

  One day, Gus and I were walking home—he had no bike, so I’d stopped riding mine so he wouldn’t feel bad—and it started sprinkling and all these snails came out on the road. I don’t know why, but Gus and I began leaping on them with our boots and smashing them into the ground. Dozens of them! Hundreds of them! Squish! Squish! Squish! Popping their little shells!

  Just this side of California Street, we spotted a great big lizard and we caught him. It had stopped sprinkling, so we found some newspaper, set fire to the paper in the middle of the dirt road, and tossed the lizard into the flames.

  We watched the lizard trying his best to get out of the burning fire, but every time he’d almost make it out, we’d kick him back into the flames with our boots. Once, I’ll never forget, the lizard opened his mouth and I’d never heard a lizard scream before. It was awful. It almost sounded like a little human baby crying. That night it rained and stormed and I was afraid to go to sleep, because every time I’d close my eyes, a great big lizard would come out of the storm to my window and open his mouth, screaming out in agony!

  I got up and ran out of my bedroom, yelling for my mother. Finding her, I told her that there was a huge lizard at my window. “Bigger than a horse!” I shouted.

  “Mijito,” said my mother, “there are no such lizards. You’re just having a bad dream.”

  My parents were having dinner with our good German friends, the Huelsters, and I was supposed to be asleep by now.

  “No, mama, I’m not dreaming,” I said. “My eyes were wide open and I could see the lizard! Come, I’ll show him to you. When he opens his mouth, it’s as big as lifting the hood of our new car.”