Burro Genius

by Victor Villaseñor

  We all knew what we were doing, so we had the huge animal skinned in less than twenty minutes. We moved a big wheelbarrow under him between his front legs—because we’d hoisted him ass up—and my dad gutted him, then went through the intestines, looking for las tripas de leche that felt so warm and slippery to the hand. We also took the heart and liver, being very careful to not disturb the spleen or the piss bag. My mother would love the good job that we’d done, and she’d make blood pudding for us tonight, Mexican-style, in a real tasty gesado with plenty of onions and garlic—I could hardly wait!

  That same afternoon, we dug a huge pit and lined the bottom with rocks, then that night, right after midnight, we started a huge fire with lots of good, solid wood that would take a long time in burning. This night I got to sleep outside with the vaqueros while they played guitars, drank tequila, watched the fire, and told stories of the old days when hombres were hombres a todo dar and they’d been doing this kind of killing and preparation since the beginning of time all over the whole world.

  An hour before day break, my father came to check on the fire, which was now mostly coals, then he and Nicolás and a couple of other men went to the old ranch house with the huge kitchen where the women had been soaking the different meats all night in herbs and spices. My father and the men wheelbarrowed the meat of the steer and the two goats to the pit. Each piece of meat was wrapped in clean white sheets, and then wrapped in wet burlap and tied into bundles with good solid cotton cord. The three pigs we would cook aboveground in a great big copper kettle on an open fire to make chicharrones. We now lowered each of the huge bundles of meat into the burning hot pit with shovels and pitchforks. A couple bundles of corn and squash and sweet potatoes were put into the pit, too. Then iron pipes were placed across the pit and sheets of corrugated metal were laid crosswise over the pipes.

  The men told me that in the old days in Mexico, they’d used green logs instead of iron pipes, and palm or banana leaves instead of metal sheets. Either way it didn’t matter, they’d explained to me. What was important was to build a support so that the pit could then be covered with about five inches of dirt to hold in the heat. Every inch of the metal sheets was now carefully covered with dirt until not one little spirally pinch of smoke escaped.

  Then it was done, and we now had ourselves an earthen oven, a way that people had been cooking, my dad told me, for millions of years all over the Mother Earth. The Father Sun was just rising on the distant horizon above the tree tops in beautiful colors of orange and red and gold when we finished. My father and the men passed around the last of the bottle of tequila and the jar of blood that had been especially prepared with lemon and spices.

  “Now everyone get some shut-eye,” said my dad. “Then we’ll have huevos ranchos in a couple of hours, then get the rest of this feast ready. And remember, our guests will start getting here about noon and I don’t want to see one of you cabrones drunk. This celebration is to last three days and nights, and we got to show these gringos that we, los Mejicanos, can have a celebration a lo chingón without getting drunk and ending up in a damn fight. Okay?”

  The ranch hands all agreed and I went home to our new house with my dad. My whole head was full of all the different smells that I’d been experiencing in the last two days. All the animals slaughtered, all the innards separated, and all the food that was being prepared, tortillas, frijoles, tripas de leche, chicharrones, and that special combination of apple cobbler and capirotada. Smell was so important, and hearing was, too. The singing of the men around the huge fire was still ringing in my ears.

  I went up the stairs of our new house and lay down in the room that I shared with my brother, but I couldn’t sleep, I was so excited. My brother was down the hallway in our new bathroom and I could hear him coughing. For months now, my parents kept taking my brother to our local doctor who lived up the hill from us on California Street and had horses, but Dr. Hoskins kept saying that nothing was wrong with my brother, that he was just going through growing pains, and this was why he was always tired and not feeling well.

  When I awoke I could hear people’s loud, happy voices downstairs and I could see that my brother was lying down on his bed across the room from me and he was wide awake, but he didn’t look so good.

  “What is it, José?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. I could see that he’d been crying.

  “Do you want me to go and get mama?” I asked.

  “No, I think I’ll just stay up here and rest so papa and mama can have their celebration without worrying about me. You see, Mundo,” he added as he kept staring up at the ceiling, “papa and mama have worked so hard for this day that I don’t want to ruin it for them.”

  I nodded. My brother Joseph, he was always so smart and goodhearted. I wasn’t like him at all. I’d be yelling at the top of my lungs for mama if I didn’t feel well, not giving a damn—I mean, a blessed—thing about their celebration.

  “You really don’t want me to call mama?” I asked again.

  He turned and looked at me for the first time. “Promise me,” he said, “that you’ll say nothing, and if something happens to me, you’ll always honor our parents.” I swallowed. He was scaring me. “Look,” he continued, “I’ve met a lot of rich kids and their parents at the Academy, and I’ll tell you, there are no parents that I’m prouder to have as my father and mother than ours. They rose up with nothing, Mundo, except guts and faith and love. Do you understand?”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t,” I said.

  He licked his lips. He seemed to be licking his lips all the time now. “You will,” he said. “You just pay close attention, and you will.”

  He turned and began staring at the ceiling once again. I looked up at the ceiling, too, but I couldn’t find anything worth looking at, so I got up to go.

  “Remember,” he said, “don’t say anything to anyone. Júrame.”

  “Okay, te juro,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, and he turned over, putting his face into his pillow. And I knew that he was crying again, but I didn’t know what to do, so I just got dressed and went running down the stairs.

  The front patio was full of people. They were all talking at the same time and looking real excited. I could see that most of them had arrived in cars and trucks, but I could also see that a few had come on horseback or buggy. We would have horse races in the afternoon and maybe even leaps of death, pasos de muerte, which meant jumping from a saddled horse to a bareback horse at a full run and riding the bareback horse to a standstill. The last time we’d done this, one of our vaqueros had been taken under a lemon tree by the bareback horse and almost cut to shreds by the thorns of our young lemon trees. But Nicolás, our foreman, who’d probably win the event, would have no trouble, because somehow he could mount a wild bareback horse and smooth-talk the horse with a gentle voice, and the horse would relax and trust him within seconds.

  It was about noon when big George Lopez and Visteros came roaring up on their Harleys, grinning ear to ear like wild teenagers. My dad, who was now all dressed up in his half-charro, half-cowboy best, cussed them out, telling them that they were married men and shouldn’t be risking their lives on those damn “murdercycles”! But George and Visteros had already had a quite a few, so they just laughed, and George told my dad, “How about you riding your horse through downtown Carlsbad drunker than a skunk!”

  “But horses got brains!” yelled my dad back at George. “And my mare knew enough to get me home in one piece!”

  “Well, Harleys got brains, too!” said George, laughing.

  “All right,” said my dad, “have it your way, but just no scaring the livestock this time, cabrones!”

  “You got it, Sal! Now let’s have a serious drink!” said George, grinning that drop-dead handsome grin of his.

  Myself, I was already drinking lemonade and eating golden chicharrones, which were being cooked on an open fire in the great big copper kettle that had been brought in from G
uadalajara, Mexico. The pork was a golden brown color and so delicious with a freshly made corn tortilla, a little lime, and salsa. By now there were already a couple of hundred people and the mariachis were playing. This was when a real good-looking young man from the barrio de Carlos Malo came by me, headed for the beer keg that was high overhead on a rack with blocks of ice. He had the biggest smile I’d ever seen.

  “Hey, aren’t you Salvador’s son?” he asked me in Spanish.

  “Yes, I am,” I said in Spanish, too.

  “Could you get me a couple of those tacos de chicharrón?”

  “Sure, but come get them yourself,” I said. “Everything is free.”

  “Yeah, that’s because your father is the king.”

  “The king? The king of what?”

  “Of all this territory.”

  “What territory?”

  “From Orange County down to San Diego on the coast and inland from San Bernardino all the way to Escondido.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “Our ranch isn’t that big.”

  He quickly fixed himself a couple of tacos de chicharrón with plenty of lime, salsa, and cilantro. “This ranch is nothing,” he said, biting into his taco. “It’s just a cover. Don’t you know who your father really is? He’s el capón!” he said with pride.

  “Oh, you mean Al Capone, that guy in the movies.”

  “No, not Al Capone,” he said laughing as he continued eating. “He’s the real thing. He’s el capón, the man who castrates, and he was so feared back in his day that people said that men’s blood ran backwards to their heart, if they even thought of double-crossing him.”

  “My dad?”

  “Hell, I was your age when it was said that he’d castrated un hombre, cooked his balls in salsa verde, and forced the man to eat his own tanates.”

  “Oh, my God!” I said in disgust. “My dad did that?” It sounded awful.

  “Hell,” said the young man with admiration, “I personally saw him kill a man with his bare hands in the alley behind his poolhall when I was a kid!”

  “You did.” I said, and suddenly, I don’t know how to explain it, but I could very clearly see that what this young man was saying to me could actually be true. How many times had I seen my father castrate livestock and then cook up their balls out in an open fire? A dozen times? No, more like a hundred!

  My head exploded, my heart was pounding, and an icy chill went up and down my spine, as I looked at this young man who was devouring his tacos de chicharrón with such gusto. He was really good-looking, about eighteen years old, the same age as my sister Tencha, more or less, and it didn’t seem to me like he meant to be speaking badly about my father. No, he was grinning, ear to ear, looking around at the huge place like he was in total admiration of mi papa, el capón, the castrater.

  But oh, my God, to castrate a man and then cook up his tanates and force him to eat his own balls, that was pretty damn—yes, I mean pretty DAMN AWFUL! Then what was all this crap about my dad telling me to respect life, that to kill even a snail was being disrespectful of God?

  I breathed, wondering if my brother Joseph knew this about our father. My heart continued to pound, and suddenly a dark cloud came overhead taking away the bright sunlight. I turned and saw mi papa over there talking to all these people, and he suddenly looked very different to me.

  Flashes of the barrio came bursting to my mind’s eye, and I now remembered like in a dream, my mother picking me up in her arms, waking up my brother and sister, and all of us running out the back door to hide behind the clothesline, as this huge awful monster came stumbling, bellowing to our home!

  I could now remember all this so clearly. There were huge white sheets flapping on the clothesline like great white birds trying to take flight. My mother was crying and she held me close to her breasts. I could feel her terror. She was praying as fast as she could, begging God to please not let us be found. The tears were streaming down my mama’s face and getting me all wet. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Could this huge monster have been my very own dad? He kept bellowing something about, “Mi FAMILIA! MI FAMILIA! Where are you! I love you, con todo mi corazón!”

  My brother Joseph wanted to go to the monster, but our mother held him fast. Then the bellow suddenly stopped, just like that. And my brother was the first one to go see the monster. And yes, the monster was our very own father, and he’d stopped bellowing because he’d passed out on the back porch into the awful-smelling puddle of his own puke.

  Our mother told José to leave our dad alone, that sleeping in his own puke served him right. But José disobeyed our mama, went inside and got a blanket, and moved our dad’s face out of the puke, being really careful not to wake him, and covered him up.

  My mother wasn’t crying anymore. No, now—with me still in her arms—she was looking up at the stars and thanking Papito Dios with all her heart. This, I now remember, was the first time in my life that I really looked up at the stars and saw how infinitely beautiful they were. I saw my mother had stopped crying and was talking to the stars. No wonder those big, ghostly white sheets kept trying to take flight—so they could be with the stars. The noise of the flapping sheets I’ll never forget, for at that moment, I, too, began to flap my little arms, wanting to fly. The Stars were our True Home, I just knew it, here inside my heart and soul.

  Then I snapped out of it.

  I’d been like in a trance, and I saw that the housewarming celebration was going on all around me. This was when I saw that John Ford, whom my dad and I had met out by the front gates, was driving up in his baby-blue convertible. He had a woman with him who had wild red hair. I’d never seen hair like that on any human, horse, or dog. It stood up real tall, looking like flames of fire leaping off her head.

  I quickly ran ahead to warn my dad, but I couldn’t find him. There were hundreds and hundreds of people everywhere. I must’ve been off in my dreams for quite a while. I spotted Hans and Helen. They were talking with our town’s mayor and several other city people. Jerry Bill, a close family friend, and Fred Noon, my parents’ attorney, who were both from downtown San Diego, were walking up the driveway with a bunch of important-looking people. All these people had on real smooth, well-pressed clothes, clean shoes, and had a certain air about them. All of our neighbors and friends and familia had already arrived. My godparents, Vicente and Manuelita Arriza, had also arrived. Leo Meese and the Thills hadn’t arrived yet. Jackie and Bert Lawrence, the most handsome young couple in all the world, were walking up. But only a few of our choice amigos from the barrio de Carlos Malo had been invited. My parents had made it known to everyone in the barrio that it was very important that there be no arguments between the gringos and Mexicanos on this day of their celebration.

  My uncle Archie Freeman had been put in charge of security. He had several armed men riding the grounds on horseback, keeping watch over matters. Men on horseback, just like the knights of old, Archie had explained to my dad, could keep a large crowd in order pretty easily.

  Finally, I spotted my father, but it was too late. John Ford and his red-haired woman were talking to Hans and Helen and to our Oceanside mayor. And now Hans turned around to introduce John to my father and mother, who’d just walked up. But when John Ford suddenly recognized my dad as the poor worker at the front gates, his whole mouth dropped open.

  “WHAT!” shouted John, loud enough for everyone to hear. “YOU’RE THE OWNER!?! Why, you SON OF A BITCH!” he screamed, laughing. “I want MY FIVE DOLLARS BACK!”

  “HELL, NO!” yelled my father, laughing, too. “You took it hook, line, and sinker, and that was the price for the story!”

  “YOU CON ARTIST BASTARD!” said John Ford, still laughing. No one knew what John and my father were talking about. “Now, he’s all dressed up like the don, himself,” said John to everyone who was standing close by, “but three days ago, when he was working by the front gates with his son on a tractor, he was in the dirtiest old work clothes I’ve ever seen, a
nd the bastard gets in my nice clean car, acting like he doesn’t know any better and brushed all this dirt and cow manure over my nice, new—”

  John didn’t get to finish his words. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a lariat came down around John, roping him about the shoulders, yanking him up close.

  “No, Nicolás!” yelled my father. “It’s all right!”

  “What the hell!” said John.

  “Relax,” said my dad, “it’s okay, John. Everything’s fine.”

  But Nicolás was hot, had the lariat dallied around the saddle horn, and was ready to give the horse his spurs and yank the gringo off his feet, and drag him through the orchard. My father loosened the rope around John’s shoulders and slipped it off.

  “Good throw,” my father said to Nicolás. “Good job. But we got to be careful, and not over do it.” Then turning to the crowd, he said, “Everything is okay. We just got a few horsemen working our celebration. Anyone who gets out of hand will be roped and dragged off, and then Archie will deal with you. This is a happy, peaceful occasion that Lupe and I have here. No guns will be fired up in the air! No fistfights or knife fights! This is a housewarming party!”

  The woman with flaming red hair looked so excited that she could have popped. “Honey, I liked seeing you roped!” she said, snuggling up and down against John like a snake in mating season. “I want to learn how to do that!” Then turning to my dad, she said, “Then you must be the Al Capone of the West that my honey told me so much about?”

  “No, not me,” said my dad to the tall, beautiful, large-busted woman who just couldn’t seem to stop her body from going up and down. “You got me mixed up with someone else. I’m just a plain little, law-abiding citizen like you and everyone else here.”