The academy became my new living hell, just as the Little Weed had been for me out in the San Luis Rey Valley and the Oceanside Public School System before that. They all saw their job was to “break” us, not to befriend and “amanzar” us. They hadn’t been raised like women for the seven years of their life, so they had no idea how to be gentle, patient cowboys, Christians, or cadets.
Many a night I cried myself to sleep, asking God what was going on, but I could no longer hear that little voice deep inside of me nor feel that humming behind my left ear, even when I drew stars and colored them. I felt abandoned by Papito! I felt abandoned by my brother Joseph, Shep, Sam, and my two grandmothers, and even Jesus and Mary.
Then came that short, muscular, blond substitute teacher and he put his poster on the wall of skiing in Colorado, and hope was born! For three glorious days I once more felt the humming and I could hear God’s purring Voice of Love, too. But when the substitute teacher left, I began to hate that he’d ever come into my life and given me even a little glimpse of light in my awful darkness.
I could now see that the nuns had been right when they’d called me the Devil, because now that Moses had given me that F, without even reading my paper, then ridiculed the name that my dad had given me, I was thinking evil thoughts every time I’d see him. I was going to kill him. I was going to do as evil does.
This was when I called up information to get Captain Moses’s phone number and address. Getting it, I dialed his number. He answered. I heard him say, “Hello, hello,” over and over again, and then I hung up. Now I was the one who was smiling.
I decided to call information again and get that playground teacher’s phone number and address, the one who’d tortured us in kindergarten. I got it.
I called her. She answered, saying, “Hello, hello,” too.
I hung up, and I just couldn’t stop smiling. Now I had a plan. Now I had a reason to live. Now I was going to kill these two teachers and that priest and nun who’d abused me. I was going to blow them all into smithereens! And I’d do it all in one night!
But then I remembered that I didn’t have a permit to drive a car yet, so I’d have a hard time getting everyone in one night on foot or on my bike. It probably made a lot more horse sense to only dynamite or kill one person per night.
I had a mission. It felt wonderful!
Late one night after school, I rode my bike over to the Army Navy Academy. I’d learned that most of our school faculty lived within a few blocks of our campus. Having written Moses’s address and phone number on a piece of paper, I was able to find his home. I rode past his house several times. On my last pass, I saw a woman through the kitchen window and I realized that she was our school librarian. I liked her. She was a nice person. I couldn’t figure out why she would be at Moses’s house. I pedaled home.
That week, I asked some questions at school and found out that Captain Moses was married to our librarian, and that they had a little girl. This pissed me off! Now I couldn’t just blow up Moses’s home, because I didn’t want to hurt our librarian and their child. I’d have to shoot Moses. Yes, I’d use my dad’s old 30/30 Winchester and shoot him through their kitchen window. But I got to figuring and decided that a 30/30 was too big and noisy. Hell, I’d just use my .22 pump action Winchester. After all, we killed our thousand pound steers with a .22
My secret life was so exciting! I was now shooting well over five hundred rounds of ammunition per week. I was getting ten or twelve rabbits every time I went hunting. All that training that I received from Shep on how to stalk game was now really paying off.
One night, I decided to bike past the playground teacher’s house. But I didn’t take the piece of paper on which I’d written down her phone number and address. No, after that first night that I’d biked past Moses’s house, I destroyed the piece of paper on which I’d written down his phone number and address. Hell, if a cop had stopped me and asked me what I was doing, and then searched me and found that piece of paper, my goose would’ve been cooked. Because once they’d begin questioning me, I was sure that I would’ve broke down and started crying and told them everything. Over and over my dad had explained to me that a man had to keep his cards close to his chest, have a plan, think ahead, and always bring into consideration all the things that could go wrong. That a chain was only as strong as its weakest link. If I planned to kill all these teachers, and that priest and nun who’d been cruel to me, I had to be the strongest, best thought-out hunter-stalker I could be.
Her house was easy to find. It was just off Wisconsin, two streets east of the railroad tracks. On my last pass by her house that night, I spotted her. She was coming up from the beach with her dog. Her dog immediately reacted to me. I guess that he could smell the hate I had for her, because he started not just barking, but going crazy. She never recognized me, and this was good. I decided that I wouldn’t come back by her place until I was ready to do her in. And about her dog, what the hell, I’d just send him to damnation, too, when I blew up her house.
The school year was almost over. Soon it would be summertime. I decided not to do all of my killings this year. What the hell, if I got caught, it could ruin my summer. And this summer I’d be getting that .22 Smith & Wesson revolver with the six-inch barrel on a .38 frame that my dad had promised me, so I didn’t want to miss my chance of getting this handgun and getting even better with weapons.
Also, I was now preoccupied with a few other things, like this one great big older guy who rode on the bus with us every day. His name was Workson. He lived in North Oceanside. He was a day student like me, a sophomore in high school, a basketball player, well over six feet, and he wore a ring with a wolf’s head with tiny red eyes. Every day when we’d pick him up in the bus that took all of us day students to school, he’d start off his day by turning his ring around on his finger, and walk down the aisle, hitting all of us younger kids on the head, telling us that he couldn’t wait until we’d gotten out of grammar school and were in high school, so that he could really give us our proper initiation, just as it had been done to him.
One day he’d hit me so hard that I’d started crying. He’d called me a little sissy girl and hit me six or seven more times, telling me that wolves came in packs, just like a platoon, and that I had to stop being a crybaby and grow up if I wanted to make it in high school at the Army Navy Academy.
He didn’t know it, but that day, he made it to my kill list. After that, his daily blows to my head, which he called knockers, didn’t hurt as much, even though many times my scalp would be bleeding by the time we’d get to school. The little ears on the wolf’s head were pointed and would cut into my head like sharp little spikes. Our bus driver saw this every day, but he only laughed along with all the other older cadets, saying, “Boys will be boys,” just as Hans had done that night I’d had my encounter with the huge, monstrous frog.
When that first year at the Academy was over, my dad took me down to Johnson’s Sporting Goods store in downtown Oceanside and Mr. Johnson immediately brought out the .22 Smith & Wesson that my dad had promised to buy me. My God, the feel, the balance of this handgun was magic! This was no Saturday Night Special. This was a finely made weapon of utmost precision. Instantly, I became a great shot. Then I got a holster and ammo belt just like in the good old Wild West and I’d practice quick drawing and shooting.
By the end of that long hot summer, I was lightning fast and accurate, too. I decided that I wanted to kill Moses…face-to-face, like in the Old West at high noon on main street Carlsbad. I wasn’t just going to blow his house to smithereens. No, I wanted him to see my eyes as I came walking down main street, and I’d explain to him why he was going to die.
“You’re a bad teacher,” I’d say, farting. “A cruel teacher, who likes teaching meanness to kids. This is why you are going to die.”
I’d fast draw and gut-shoot him first, then I’d shoot each leg, and keep him alive so he could suffer and really understand why he was dying—I drew and shot we
ll over five thousand rounds that long summer, pretending that I was killing Moses with every wonderful, well-placed round!
No longer did I hear the humming or purring behind my ears. But who cared? Now I heard the ringing of gunfire in my ears! And this felt ALMIGHTY GOOD!
It was my second year at the Academy, and a bunch of my fellow eighth-graders were weight-lifting behind a cottage on the grass. Only a few could standing press—without jerking—a hundred pounds over their head. Wallrick, Altomar, and a few others did one hundred and twenty over their head. These guys were really strong. They told me to give it a try. I couldn’t even budge the hundred. They all laughed, and said that I had better work out real hard this year, because things were really going to get tough for all of us once we got into high school with the big guys. These words hit me like a ton of bricks. They were right. I could see it so clearly. It wasn’t enough that I was good with guns. I had to get physically strong like I’d been in third grade, before I hadn’t been allowed to play at recess with the other kids. I began to put more effort into the push-ups and other exercises they had us do.
A new teacher came to school. He was tall and had a loose hip gait like a Tennessee Walker horse when he walked. He kind of reminded me of the substitute teacher that I’d had the year before. This teacher’s name was Brookheart. It was a beautiful name, I thought; a heart alongside of a brook. At the end of the year, he gave me a B by accident. I went to him and told him that I needed to talk to him privately. He said to meet him after school. I did.
“Sir,” I said. He was a captain like Moses. “You made a mistake on my grade.”
“You think so?”
“Yes,” I said, “I checked all my past homework real carefully and I was supposed to get a D not a B.”
“You mean, you’re complaining because I gave you a B instead of a D.”
I closed my eyes in concentration. “No, sir…I’m…I’m not complaining. What I’m trying to do is get this straight so you won’t get in trouble.”
He stared at me. “You’re concerned about my welfare?”
I didn’t know what the word “welfare” meant, so I shrugged. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “All I know is that I like you, respect you, and so—” I almost started crying, but didn’t. And for the first time in years, I felt that humming start behind my left ear, then I felt it shoot across the back of my head to my right ear. Instantly, I just knew that Papito Dios was here with me once again, massaging me.
“Look,” he said, “I’m not going to get in trouble. No one checks my grading, especially when they’re Bs or As.”
“Why not?” I said, before I realized that I’d even spoken.
Quickly, I cringed and ducked my head in case he took a swing at me. If there was one thing that I’d learned real well in school so far was not to question without being ready to get slapped or yelled at.
But he didn’t take a swing at me. Instead, he sat back on the front of his desk, just as Mr. Swift had done for those three days, and he looked at me with a kindness that I rarely saw in teachers, but I did see more in dogs, cats, horses, goats, and sometimes even in cows and pigs, too. “Because As and Bs are what the administration and the parents want,” he said.
“But don’t they want to know if it’s true?”
He laughed. “No, not really.” Then out of the blue, he said, “Look, I know that Moses has something going with you, but I want you to realize that it really has nothing to do with you. You see, he never got above a corporal in the Regular Army—just like Hitler—and so they both have that same kind of small man’s mentality.”
I stared at him in utter shock. I didn’t know that anyone knew about Moses torturing me, every chance he got.
“You don’t really understand what I’m saying do you?”
“No, not quite, sir.”
“Well, that’s okay. Just remember that you probably don’t even belong in this school. This school is populated mostly with spoiled rich kids who weren’t handled very well at home. You have a real home, from what I’ve heard. The B remains, and don’t take Moses too seriously. The man is pitiful.”
I didn’t know what this word “pitiful” meant, either, but it felt so good that I was going to be able to keep the B and he wasn’t going to get in trouble. And yet, I hadn’t earned the grade.
“Yes, what else is it?”
“Sir, I didn’t earn that B.”
“Oh, yes, you did!” he quickly said. “You earned it by having the honor of coming in and telling the truth, and that’s rare! All right, enough! If you stay any longer, I’ll make it an A.”
I left as quickly as I could, feeling ten feet tall. Later, just before school was let out for the summer, I found that Captain Brookheart had actually been a major, or maybe even a colonel, in the real Army, but they’d asked him to go down in rank so it wouldn’t embarrass all the rest of the school staff, especially the Colonel, who ran the whole school, but had never even been in the U.S. Army at all.
I came to realize that most of our faculty had fake rank, fake titles. My whole world went into a spin. I wondered if this was also true of the nuns and priests and teachers in public school. Were they really trained, qualified teachers who knew what they were doing? Maybe they weren’t, and this was why they’d been so mean and ignorant about the whole educational system. The truth was that they really didn’t even want to educate us. They wanted to train us. That was why they felt that they needed to “break” us down first, get rid of our spirit, our guts, our soul, so that they could then remake us in their own image of being mean, scared, and all mixed up. Boy, was I ever glad that I’d been too stupid to learn how to read. This was probably why I hadn’t been able to get “trained” into all of their caca.
No, I wasn’t very smart, this I knew, but I was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, I was some kind of crazy-loco genius, burro genius. I mean, to have been able to hold on to my Spirit for this long had to mean something.
CHAPTER twenty-one
That summer, I drove out with my dad to look at a great big ranch in the San Luis Rey Valley. Part of the ranch ran alongside the little airport that was located just south of the main riverbed. It was a beautiful place, full of hills and valleys and wild deer and quail and skunk and bobcat and even mountain lion. Its northern border butted up against Camp Pendleton for about a mile. My father asked me what I thought about it. I told him that I loved it. He said he loved it, too. In fact, it reminded him a little of his home back in Los Altos de Jalisco. So he purchased the huge spread, and I learned how to drive a Caterpillar tractor, plant hundreds of acres of hay, and then bail it. I worked from sunup to sundown with our workers from Mexico. I worked so hard that all night long, I dreamed of bailing hay, loading trucks, then unloading them into our barns. I didn’t have a driver’s license, but still I was driving trucks and tractors. This was the summer that I met John Folting, Terry Watson, and Ted Bourland, Little Richard, Bill Coe, and Eddie O’Neil. I didn’t see as much of Nick Rorick anymore. All these other guys lived in South Oceanside. They became my first real group of friends, next to Nick Rorick and Jimmy Tucker and Jimmy’s cousin, Michael.
On my first day back on the school bus to the Academy, I quickly got out of my seat the moment Workson, the guy who’d been hitting me on the head for two years with his wolf ring, got on the bus.
“I’m ready!” I said to him.
“Ready for what?” he said, looking surprised.
He was still a whole head taller than me, but I didn’t give a shit. This was it. “You’ve been telling me for two years how you’re going to really get me once I get into high school, so here I am. I’m in high school now. So come on! I’m ready! TRY AND GET ME!”
My heart was pounding a million miles an hour, but I knew what I was going to do. I had a plan. I was short, he was tall, so I was going to belt him in the balls, again and again till he bent over, then I’d grab him by the hair, jerk him down to me, and bite him on his long nose, teari
ng it off his face like I’d seen an old-timer bite the balls off of our goats and sheep.
But what Workson did next took me by complete surprise. He started laughing. This I hadn’t been prepared for.
“Get away from me,” he said, backing away. “You’re crazy!”
My heart was beat, beat, BEATING!
I SCREAMED! I BELLOWED! I started kicking at the seats in our bus. Our bus driver pulled over. But this time our driver wasn’t laughing and saying that boys will be boys. He wanted to know what was going on. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t explain. Finally, Workson said that nothing was going on, that I was just a mixed up little freshman who didn’t know how to take a joke.
My rage exploded! “IT WAS NO JOKE for my head to get BLOODY every morning for two years!” I screamed.
The driver told me to calm down and get hold of myself or he’d report me.
“REPORT ME!” I yelled. “This is all ass backwards! Where was your concern all these years when he’d hit us little kids! I’LL REPORT YOUR ASS, TOO!” I screamed.
“Okay, there will be no reporting,” said our driver. He was scared. I could see it in his eyes. It had worked. My surprise attack had paid off. “Please, just take a seat. You’ve made your point.”
I took a seat, sitting down, and tears of rage—not fear—began streaming down my face. I had my .22 Smith & Wesson revolver with me in my book bag. I would’ve belted him, bit him, shot him, and killed him! But he’d laughed and backed away, chickening-out on me, and so he’d slipped out of my death trap!
But at least I was now ready for Moses. Today, today, TODAY, I was going to KILL HIM! This was why I’d brought my revolver: to kill Moses in public. Face-to-face.
Then a strange thing happened. That day after classes, a bunch of cadets started lifting weights out on the grass behind a cottage once again. And these were the big high school cadets. Really big guys. Still, most of these guys couldn’t press a full one hundred pounds over their heads without dipping their knees a little bit, then throwing the weight upward. But a lot of guys could. They asked me to try. I said no, because I knew I couldn’t even budge a hundred pounds.
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