Burro Genius

by Victor Villaseñor

  This was also when I met Nick, Clare, Sally, and Dave Rorick, whose father owned Rorick Buick in downtown Oceanside. I became good friends with Nick who was in my same grade and his friend Dennis Tico, who was the best-looking guy in all of our school, or so all the girls said. Myself, I’d started to put on weight ever since my brother’s death, and then gained even more weight when I hadn’t been allowed to play with the other kids at the San Luis Rey Mission school.

  I went to Saint Mary’s Star of the Sea for two years, and even though I never learned to read any better, I was able to at least hide this fact from the other kids. For the first time since I started school, I wasn’t called stupid or slow. I got to play on the playground with the other kids and everything was going pretty well…until one day when a real poor-looking blondish kid was put in our class. He had three younger sisters and they all wore dirty, old-looking clothes and they’d pick their noses without caring if anyone was watching.

  His name was Augustus and he was in the same class as Nick’s and mine. They had us in alphabetical order by our last names, and Augustus was placed right in front of me. Just before lunchtime, when it was time for us to stand up, put our hands together and pray, it was easy to see that Augustus really didn’t want to do it.

  “Put your hands together and pray with us,” said our teacher, Sister Michael Mary, who was also the principal.

  Augustus just shook his head, looking all beaten down.

  “I said,” said Sister Michael Mary, raising her voice, “put your two hands together this moment, and do your prayers with the rest of us!”

  Augustus was hurting, I could tell. So I spoke up for him. “But sister, you just gave us a long talk on free will, so if he doesn’t want to pray, then he doesn’t have to.”

  But my words didn’t help. Sister Michael Mary, who was usually pretty calm and fair-minded, now rushed down the aisle and grabbed Augustus by the shoulders and shook him real hard. I guessed that she thought that it was he who’d spoken up.

  “Don’t talk to me about free will!” she yelled. “We took your family in when we had no more room, and you will now pray like everyone else when it’s prayer time!”

  “But sister,” I said, still trying to help Augustus out, “this goes against everything that you’ve been teaching us all month. You said that free will gives us the freedom of choice, so he has the God-given right to—”

  “You haven’t been here a month!” she screamed at Augustus, grabbing his hands and slapping them together. “Now pray! You hear me, PRAY!”

  She was so angry that she couldn’t see that it wasn’t Augustus who was talking. It was me who was behind him. She turned and went back up to the head of the classroom and continued leading us in prayer. Augustus just dropped his hands once again, and I could see from the back of his shoulders that someone, somewhere had “broke” him real bad like so many stupid, mean cowboys did with horses. But Sister Michael Mary couldn’t see any of this, and when she saw him drop his hands again, she came flying across the classroom. She slapped him in the face until Augustus finally put his hands together to pray.

  The moment we went out of the classroom for lunch, Augustus took off after me, yelling that he was going to kill me for getting him in trouble.

  I took off running, but he caught up with me at the end of the playground. “I’m sorry,” I said, between heaves for air. “I’m really sorry! I was just trying to help you.”

  “Well, don’t try and help people, you fool!” he said, hitting me two or three more times. I didn’t fight back. I could see that he was just upset. “I never told them to take us in,” he said. “Our pa left us, going back to Texas, and my ma didn’t know what else to do to feed us except take us to the priest, like her ma always done.”

  He quit hitting me and started crying. I apologized some more. He finally forgave me, saying that he knew that I’d meant good. We then walked back to the school buildings where everyone was having lunch. I got my lunch box, and when I saw that Augustus had no food, I split my lunch with him, and he told me the strangest thing—that his grama was Mexican and she, too, had always made egg and chorizo burritos for him. I couldn’t believe it, he was blondish, and yet he was part Mexicano.

  The next day, I brought extra burritos for Augustus and his two little sisters, but they were gone. They never came back to school. I guess that they’d gone back to Texas to try and find their dad.

  About a week later, our new, young priest from the Oceanside parish came to our school. His arms were thick and real hairy and he informed us that a great opportunity was available for us students, if we said one rosary every day for world peace for two straight weeks. If we accomplished this, we’d get a special picture of a saint to carry in our pocket, and we would also have a guaranteed passage into Heaven when we died.

  I wanted to ask the priest how this was possible, because it didn’t make any good horse sense to me. Did this mean that after we said these rosaries for two weeks, we could go out and do bad, mean things and still have a guaranteed passage to Heaven? But by now, I’d been beaten enough and seen enough slapping and yelling any time one of us kids asked a good question, that I knew better than to ask this.

  My God, back in third grade, when I’d told What-A-King that I’d figured out that there was no Santa Claus, his parents had told him that it was true, there was no Santa, it was they, our parents, who gave us our Christmas presents. They also told him to keep away from me, because any kid who went around telling other kids such things was a bad person. So then, I guessed a kid was bad if he questioned, and was a no-good rat if he figured things out. My dad had sure been right when he’d told me that in every game there were two sets of rules: one for the public, and another for the insiders to use only for themselves.

  Realizing this, I began to feel that purring behind my left ear. Then I heard the “Ghost Riders” song that my brother had listened to over and over again the last few months of his life. I smiled. So this meant that Joseph was now up in Heaven with Papito, helping Him to massage the back of my head.

  I decided to say nothing to the priest or nun of what I was thinking, and sign up for these rosaries, too. Why not? Anything that would give me a better chance of getting into Heaven so I could be with my brother when I died made a lot of good, common horse sense to me.

  But then, to my complete surprise, when I raised my hand like the other kids and said that I’d also like to sign up for these two weeks of saying a rosary a day, Sister Michael Mary looked at me and said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you understand that this is a serious commitment?”

  “Yes,” I said again.

  “Okay,” she said, “but I’ll be checking on you every day to make sure that you did say your rosary.”

  My heart started pounding. “Does this mean that you’ll be checking on the other kids, too?” I asked.

  She exploded! “You will not QUESTION MY AUTHORITY! I will check on whom and what I see appropriate!”

  “Well, what is appropriate? Because you only asked me if I understood that this was a serious whatever-you-said, and you didn’t ask any of the other kids when they raised their hands.”

  And I knew that I was a burro to have said all this. I should’ve just kept quiet. And I was right, because she now came flying across the classroom with her white robe and black habit flapping like wings, scaring the pee out of me. She got right in my face, and I could see in her eyes that she wanted to grab me and strangle me to death, but thank God, she didn’t. Instead, she caught her breath, heaving and puffing, and said, “You’ll be getting your walking papers if you keep this up!”

  “What are those?” I asked, not understanding. “I’ve never seen papers that got legs and can walk?”

  Some kids started giggling.

  “SILENCE!” she screamed, whirling on everyone. The kids froze, and she turned back to me. “Don’t you think that we don’t know about your past,” she sai
d to me. “We were warned about you by the Mission!”

  And saying this, she stared at me, giving me that mean eye that only the best of the old nuns can give. I said nothing more, and that afternoon after school, I asked Nick, who was the smartest kid in the whole school, what he thought.

  “About what?” he asked.

  We were on our bikes, on our way to his house, which was really two houses right next to each other by the Oceanside pier. They were brown and huge and each was two stories.

  “About how Sister Michael Mary didn’t want to answer my question about what’s appropriate, and she went crazy.”

  “You had it coming,” he said.

  “I had it coming?” I said. “But Nick, it wasn’t fair that she was only going to check on me and not the other kids.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe not,” he said. “You’re not one of her most active participants in extra curriculum, so it seemed strange—for me, too—that you’d volunteer. I’m not going to volunteer.”

  I hadn’t really understood everything that he’d said, but still I wanted to tell him that this wasn’t what was going on. In my opinion, I thought that she’d singled me out because I was—but I couldn’t bring myself to use the word “Mexican.” Because my new friends at this school didn’t really see me this way. I said nothing more.

  We parked our bikes in the backyard of the two huge brown houses. The backyard had green lawns, beautiful flowers, red brick walkways, tall trees, a huge fish pond, and white furniture. I visited with him and his sister Clare. Then we went uptown to take Clare to her piano lesson. Nick went back home so he could go to the beach with Dennis Tico. I went to our local stationery store to buy another fountain pen. A few weeks ago, I’d discovered peacock-blue ink. It was love at first sight. This was the exact shade of blue that I’d been looking for all my life, so I could color-in my Stars, then jump in them and be gone.

  For me, blue wasn’t just blue anymore. I was beginning to see that there were at least ten different shades of blue. That’s what I had seen when I’d been on Duke, swimming with the dolphins. I’d seen all the water alive. Nothing was just what it was. Everything had many shades of reality. Blue wasn’t just blue. Water wasn’t just water. No, everything was alive with all these different shades of color and light. And every shade of color or light felt different so deep inside of me. Like I’d found that when I colored-in my star with this exact shade of peacock blue, then added that tiny touch of red and yellow, immediately the purring began behind my left ear. Then the whole world suddenly became alive all around me, just like when I’d seen Jesus and my brother. Color and light, these were the “eyes” of my purring. The eyes of Papito seeing through us humans.

  I parked my bike outside of the stationery store. It was a new bike, just like Nick’s, with slender tires. I hardly rode my big old heavy Schwinn, anymore. I went into the stationery store all excited, with my pen in hand that I’d purchased the week before. I wasn’t able to find what I wanted, so I walked up to the cashier.

  “Ma’dam,” I said really happily, “I’d like to buy another pen like this one and another jar of your peacock-blue ink.”

  Instead of addressing my question, the woman reached over the counter and snatched the pen that I was holding right out of my hand.

  “Give me back that pen!” she snapped. “You can’t just take our merchandise!”

  “But ma’dam,” I said, suddenly getting all confused inside, “I didn’t take it. I bought it last week.”

  “How can I know that?” she said. “You’re a Mexican, and everyone knows that Mexicans are thieves and can’t be trusted! Now out of here!”

  I was shaking so hard by the time I went out the door that I couldn’t even get on my bike. She’d looked at me with that exact same kind of look that Sister Michael Mary had looked at me. And my friend Nick hadn’t seen it. But how could he? He’d spoken English on his first day of school and he’d learned how to read immediately. Hell, last week when we’d been tested for reading, he’d tested six grade levels ahead of everyone, reading at an advanced high school level. And me, I’d made sure that I was home sick on the day we were tested for reading, because I knew that I was still below a third-grade reading level.

  I took a deep breath. So this was it? As long as people saw me as a Mexican, I could never be trusted by anyone, not even by a nun who was supposed to be so wise and close to God. No wonder all those quicker-learning Mexicans had said they were Spanish or French—anything but Mexicano.

  Realizing this, I got to feeling so bad and hopeless that I wanted to tear the brown skin off my body. I was shaking so bad by the time I got up to the street where Nick’s sister, Clare, was having her piano lesson, that I didn’t want to see her.

  I was supposed to accompany her home, but I felt so heartbroken and angry that I couldn’t see anyone. When I saw Clare come out of the house where she’d taken her lesson, I felt so ashamed that she might see me crying that I took off on my bike without saying a word to her.

  CHAPTER twenty

  I was in the seventh grade when I started going to the Army and Navy Academy. My little sister Teresita was talking pretty well by now. It was early evening and school wouldn’t really start until the next day, but this evening we, the new day students, had to go for a two-hour orientation. All the way home, my little sister Teresita kept laughing and moving her arms up and down, pretending like she was marching, then she’d bark orders at me just as she’d seen my fellow cadet leaders bark at me. I didn’t think it was funny in the least, but Teresita and Linda and my parents thought that it was hilarious.

  The following day, on my first official day of school at the Army Navy Academy, my problemas immediately got started with Moses. He was a captain, as were all of our teachers in the lower school, meaning the seventh and eighth grades. It was late afternoon and we were done with our classroom studies and our marching. Now we changed clothes, got out of our uniforms, and went to do sports. I wasn’t very tall, but I was one of the bigger kids, especially since I’d put on all that weight since Joseph’s death. I’d never played baseball or football, so I had no idea what was going on when they threw the football at me. I ducked, so it wouldn’t hit me.

  Moses got mad and told me that my brother Joseph had been one hell of a football player, so for me to wake up, catch the ball, and run with it through the line of scrimmage. I had no idea what this word “scrimmage” meant and I didn’t see any line to run through, either. But I could see that Moses was getting madder and madder and he finally called the three biggest guys aside, Wallrick, Altomar, a Mexican guy, and this other huge cadet named Williams. These three guys had little smiles on their faces, and they hit me really hard the next time I was given the ball. I wanted to cry. My brother had gotten sick and died because of a football injury. I didn’t want to get sick and die. This was when a great big heavyset cadet named Hillam came to me, helped me up, and spoke to me in a kind voice.

  “Do you know why they want you to run with the ball?”

  “No,” I said.

  He laughed. “It’s because that’s how we score.”

  “Score what?”

  “Points.”

  “Points for what?”

  “To win.”

  “Oh, like my cousin Chemo used to do for the football team in Oceanside. But he didn’t run at any line. He’d run around people, across the field to those tall posts.”

  “Yes, but in practice, we don’t run all the way to those posts. To save time, we run at the line of scrimmage, which in football jargon means the line of the opposing team.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, then, why doesn’t Moses just say that?”

  “Because he likes to show off how much football jargon he knows,” said Hillam, laughing.

  This guy Hillam, I immediately liked. He made good, plain horse sense. It was then time for us to go in, and all the way back to our barracks, the other cadets kept pushing and shoving each other, then they’d hit me when I wouldn’t push and
shove back.

  We had to strip to shower. I’d never stripped in public. The guys were laughing and snapping at each other with their towels, and when we got in the showers, Altomar, a guy way bigger than me, looked at my penis and said, “You call that a dick! Hell, you don’t even got any hair!” He started laughing. Then under his breath he said to me, “Your dad might have the biggest house in all the area and think he’s a big shot with his big cigars and Cadillac, but here you’re nothing but dead meat, punk!”

  And saying this, he hit me in the stomach so hard that I went down, gasping for air. Altomar laughed and said, “What happened? Did you slip?” And he grabbed me and jerked me to my feet, and continued showering as if nothing had happened.

  That was when Wallrick, our class leader, came in, and he and Altomar started talking like they were best friends. And it turned out that they were. Both already had hair all around their private parts, and they were from Vista, and Vista now had its own high school, so they were rivals of Oceanside.

  I was stunned. I had no idea how Altomar even knew about our home. My parents’ Cadillac, of course, everyone had seen when they brought me to school yesterday evening for orientation. I never showered that day. No, instead, I got dressed and went outside to wait for the bus to take us day students home. For the next five years at the Army Navy Academy, I never once showered at school. I’d always wait until I got home. This was, also, when I…began to have trouble peeing in public toilets, and then finally even at home in private.

  By the end of the first week at the Academy, I understood very clearly that Moses was best friends with Wallrick, Altomar, and a couple of the other bullies. In fact, I began to see that it was he who was instilling in these guys the idea that they had to be real men, and real men were tough, gave no quarter—which I thought was really funny. Did this mean that they gave half-dollars?