My father is of course immensely proud of Dan at this point. When it’s safe to come out, he does so, and for some time they stand around exchanging war stories with Leonard, who is also proud of himself for grabbing the shovel and slapping it on the ground. The last hopper load gets dumped into the trailer and Dad lets Dan drive it all the way to the elevator, as per usual.
At the grain elevator, Dad is ecstatic, telling the story over and over again about his brave, strong, fighting son.
I am there for the last retelling, and he turns on me and says in Spanish, “And what happened to you, Rambo, with your knives?”
I blush a deep crimson, my fingers gripping the handle of the homemade knife in my pocket, feeling a mixture of shame and anger, the basic bartending blend of verhuenza, a besmirching of honor.
This is in front of all his cousins and friends, who, by the looks upon their faces, are thinking thoughts similar to mine, that Dad should not be making fun of anyone who was not recently saved from an ass-kicking by their thirteen-year-old son.
But Mingo, on a roll, pressing his own unintended humiliation, says, “He was probably hiding behind one of the tires, with his knife, like this!” He makes a frightened pouty face, and crouches back, oddly similar to the very posture he had taken during the brief scuffle, after he’d been punched, but I don’t point this out because I didn’t actually notice it then in my shame, but only now, these years later, in the recounting. The bastard.
When he gets home that night, Dad is still very excited, on that post-fistfight high that can be very intoxicating. He pulls the trailer into its spot and turns it off—a sound I still, to this day, love to hear, the winding down of an engine—and he immediately showers and changes into his pressed blue jeans and a fresh shirt, while Mom shakes her head in disbelief and obvious disgust as he splashes on cologne and leaves, the rest of us too tired to care or wonder where he’s off to.
Dan is also very pleased with himself, secretly, I can tell that night. He’s always been something of the tough guy at school and is pleasantly surprised he could carry it off outside school, in the land of men. He can’t help it. He wants his father’s admiration. What boy child doesn’t? He is the caretaker now, the family keeper. He is now a man, according to his father.
Chapter 12
THE OKLAHOMA JONESES
Our neighbor, Lúpe, died of liver cancer around the time I was twelve. Maybe it was later. Everything that happened back then felt like it happened when I was twelve, after I was ten.
For two full years, his deathbed maintenance had been attended by both Gramma and her sister, his wife, Lupíta, both at home and in the same hospital in Matamoros in which Grampa had died.
During this time, the whole of Gramma’s and Lupíta’s routine revolved around his drain circling: trips to Matamoros, trips to medical supply stores, trips to the family witch doctor, trips to unfamiliar witch doctors, and sometimes, even reluctant trips to medical doctors in Brownsville.
Lúpe and Lupíta were raising five children, coincidentally arranged in exact chronological gender order as our family, before Derek was born. They had three older girls and then two boys, an odd predetermined symmetry that guaranteed a high level of competition among us. They were our Juanses, our Mexican Joneses.
Their oldest, Lupíta Chiquita, had been dropped on her head as a baby and was developmentally disabled, which was a merciful turn for our oldest sibling, Syl, because it meant she had no one to compete against, like a cross-town rival who shows up late and retarded for a scrimmage.
My particular doppelganger was José, or Joe. He was four years my junior and had a lazy eye and even lazier habits, which also precluded me from any real sort of competitive comparison. He was small, round, and dull witted, and was never really all that much into role-playing Indiana Jones, probably because I was always Indiana Jones and he was always . . . well, someone else. Someone slower. Someone fatter. Someone who walked around dressed only in his father’s briefs. It just worked out that way. Always.
The Mimis hadn’t fared so well with their same-age competitors, though; their competition was healthy and attractive by the standards of the barrio, and as a result, the competition at times became ferocious, feral. Fashionable.
Even the final issue of the Martinez clan, Derek Allen (named, obviously, by the Mimis), would eventually encounter his own dark shadow across the way. Derek snuck up on us, as an “Oops!” baby Mom delivered in her early thirties, when I was around thirteen or fourteen years old, and he became the object of everyone’s affection, as a family. Not to be outdone, the Ramirezes next door had one of their waitress-daughters get knocked up by a trucker, and within a year she had a son named “Juan.” Or Jay. Or something. Anyhow, he couldn’t pronounce Derek’s name. In fact neither could Gramma.
I mentioned this recently to my friend, Sarah, when I was reading her a letter that Gramma had written me years ago, and I pointed out how Gramma could neither spell nor pronounce Derek.
“Well, that was the point, wasn’t it?” she said.
Anyhow, Lúpe, the father, was a bastard. He was a mean, tyrannical farmhand who had married into Gramma’s family by knocking up her younger sister, Lupíta (again: the names were coincidental), and they set up shop next door to us and eyed everything that went on at our house with carcinogenic envy. Perhaps they felt the same way about us.
Martín, the oldest boy—Dan’s competitor—was a pederast, something he very likely learned at the knee of his father, if the soft sciences are correct. When I was younger, about seven years old, he used a purloined skin magazine to lure me and his three-year-old little brother into their laundry shack, a rickety, mold-ridden and musty one-room storage shed that had been amateurishly plumbed to house their most prized of possessions, a 1970s Maytag. As a result, the concrete slab floor was in a perpetual state of slipperiness.
Once inside the shack, Martín pulled out the magazine and zipped down his cheap trousers, produced his brown, rough-hardened penis, uncircumcised and calloused. He flipped through the mildewed copy of Oui to a page that would satisfy his emergency and secret farmer’s kid kink, and then grabbed my seven-year-old hand and urgently shoved his cock into it, telling me to rub it, back and forth, while his narrow brown hips bucked forward and he whispered a steady “Shhhhhhhh” as he flipped to a better photograph.
Joe just kind of sat there, watched through his one good eye. “Motherfucker,” he said.
That was his first word, and he was good at it.
I remember the day he first learned it, his dad proudly stepping back from the alley between our houses and encouraging him, thrust the little round boy forward and said, in Spanish, “OK: Go.”
Joe, three years old and duly prompted, narrowed his eyes and said, “Motha-FUCK. MOTHA-FUCK.”
Lúpe beamed. He had a three-year-old man.
And that’s what Joe said now, but a bit more clearly: Motherfucker.
No more than a minute had passed as Martín found another photograph of a naked, provocative woman to incite the fire in his peasant’s desire —and making do with what he had, or, more to the point, what I had, in hand —when we heard my father calling out from the back door of our house.
His dick in my hand—hard, young, malevolent, startled—he clutched me by the shoulders. He put his hand over my mouth and said again, urgently, “Shhhhhhhhhhh ...”
I had no desire to call out to my father. As far as I knew, we were doing nothing wrong besides being in possession of the magazine, which would bring down the wrath of severe, hypocritical Catholic piety upon all of us, and this was far from the first time I’d been in possession of such goods, so I was not exactly sure why Martín was behaving this way.
I was about to tell him that I could just walk out and own up to telling Dad that Joe and I were playing in the laundry shack, and it would be over, but Martín was insistent, bordering on violent.
Even at this age, I had learned how to talk people down from escalation, learned when no
t to press. It would come in handy later, too.
So I didn’t press. I let him feel he was in control by keeping still, keeping quiet, and watched as, through the crack of the loosely hinged plank door, we saw Dad retreat inside the back door to our house. I saw my chance and yanked myself free when Martín stopped to zip up his trousers. I wandered out into the yard and—realizing I wasn’t being pursued, walked back across the grassy unused separation between our house and the Ramirezes’ house, painted an awful electric green color with shit brown trimming.
I walked into our house through the same door Dad had just backed into, through our own laundry room—also personally plumbed—and pretended nothing was wrong.
My father immediately seized upon me in a most surprising way. It was as if he knew exactly what had happened, and what Martín had done to me, had had me do, just a minute ago.
I wailed horribly, like a stricken thing, collapsed at his feet and struggled against his pulling arms, and he lifted me like I was a shifting sack of flour and he struck at me, demanding me to tell him where I’d been, already disgusted at my victimhood.
He pulled me by the arm across the gravel drive to Gramma’s house, banged open the door and demanded of her to determine right there, on her bedroom floor, whether I’d been buggered within the last hour. Gramma, who had been kneeling at her corner altar praying, calmly looked over from her Bible and pulled down my underwear while Dad held me prone, and she studied my asshole for a second and then quite reasonably declared that, no; no, your son has not been corn-holed. Dad, satisfied with this proclamation, left quickly, stormed out while I lay there cowering, sniffling, uncertain of what had just played out.
Mom finally caught wind of what had been happening and rushed over to Gramma’s house, saw me laid out on her floor with my shorts and underwear askew, and said nothing. She picked me up from the crumple I had turned myself into at the foot of the bed that Grampa would nearly die in within the next year, and I sobbed into her neck.
I don’t remember what Mom was like then, but I think she tried to comfort me. I don’t know what she felt. It must have been horrible, though, being a stranger in this family, with them treating her child like this. But Gramma chuckled lightly. “His underwear was dirty,” she said in Spanish, and reached up to kiss my hot, teary cheeks.
I didn’t resist. I wasn’t there anymore. Anyway, I’m not sure whether she meant that as a shot to the limitations of my personal hygiene or Mom’s ability to keep a house.
Years later, while talking with Dan, I finally got around to admitting that this had happened. I started to tell him the story and he stopped me. “He tried the same thing with me,” Dan said, and then there was a dark, low silence between us. That part frightened me.
Years after even that, when this finally came up in therapy and I told both elements to Sally, my therapist, she asked, “Do you think that’s why your father knew what happened so quickly?”
“Hunh,” was my response.
That’s why she’s the therapist.
Back to Dad: Sometime later, I remember being back in that alley.
Martín is shirtless, walking by their house, visibly pretending nothing is wrong, a pink towel hanging on his shoulder, leading Joe by the hand to their backyard.
Dad yelling at them.
Them stopping. Martín turning around, frightened.
Lúpe coming to see what was wrong.
Dad yelling some more at both Martín and Lúpe.
Lúpe and Martín responding, looking back defiantly.
Lúpe scoffing.
Prove my son fucked your son.
Another exchange.
Me now sitting at Dad’s feet, and him gesturing down at me, at his youngest boy, his despoiled, feminized boy.
Them dismissing my father, and turning to go.
Their door slamming shut behind them.
Dad standing there for a second longer, then turning to go back inside, leaving me to cry on the back porch step.
I sit there sniffling, waiting for someone to come get me, waiting until it’s safe to go back inside, but no one comes out, except the mosquitoes.
Chapter 13
IN WHICH MOM IS INTRODUCED
TO THE BARRIO
After Lúpe died, his family was left rudderless, frightened. Martín took the helm and abruptly assumed his father’s duty as patriarch and chief pederast-in-charge. He dropped out of high school and began working a night shift at the new windshield-wiper factory near the airport, giving his mother his entire paycheck at the end of every second week like a dutiful peasant. If this arrangement was to his disliking, he told no one; he seemed happier for the unburdening of education and the chance to get his hands where they belonged: manufacturing goods. Kept them from roaming elsewhere.
We were long expecting Lúpe to expire, but still, when it happened, it came as a surprise. We, as kids, had the good sense to go by our own clock, preoccupy ourselves with the chores and desires of our adolescence, and on that Monday, when Lúpe finally lapsed, Dad had taken Dan and me out of school and had us working the sand pit, with Dan on the backhoe loading sand into the beds of the rare few trucks that showed.
Lúpe’s death had become a sort of a holiday in the barrio, and no one was really working that day, but Dan and I were oblivious. We did what we were told unquestioningly and waited patiently for the next truck to show, though on that day, it would be hours between loads, when it was usually just a few minutes.
And so we sat in the swelter, keeping ourselves preoccupied with what we could, when eventually no one else showed, after lunch. My job was to be in the bed of the dump truck while Dan maneuvered the boom and bucket of the backhoe. He loaded the truck with scoop after scoop of river sand, and I was to avoid getting killed if I could, or buried under the sand, while removing all errant roots and matter that was decidedly not sand, or unsandlike. Dan and I had a game where he would bring the boom over, and I’d stand still, and he’d try to bury my shoes, and then not hit me with the bucket as it unfurled, inches from my head and chest. I had complete trust in him, and he never once did touch me, though the hydraulic machine could have crushed me in a matter of seconds. Dan, even at age twelve, was that good at the backhoe.
We were baking in the cab of a loaded truck—our one driver doing tandem runs—listening to the local classic rock station, when Dan inexplicably slipped out of the driver’s side, not saying a word. About fifteen minutes later, I became curious and lifted my head from the sweaty crook in my arm and looked over to where Dan should be, and in the side-view mirror, I saw his head bobbing in the collected brown yuck pool that had appeared there some days before, after a particularly hard rain and flooding of the Rio Grande, which was now resting peacefully back within its banks. I saw his head come out of the water like a tiny round Loch Ness Monster, spitting out water and thought, Oh, bliss.
I was down to my Y-fronts and in the water in half a minute, chasing after Dan and splashing. It was only a few feet deep, and terribly disgusting, probably frothing with heavy metals and bases from the manufacturing plants, but we didn’t care: It was a pardon from the sun.
Dan had emerged from the pool and was on the shore, about to jump on me from a muddy outcrop, when we heard a car turn the corner into the sand pit. Both Dan and I instinctively charged out of the water and grabbed our clothes, determined to pretend we were working so as not to incur the wrath of Dad. Then we both just sort of stopped, understood we were caught red-handed, put on gritty, dampened jeans over our murky wet legs, and waited for our feet to dry in order to wear our shoes again. The car slowly pulled up parallel to the truck, and we came around the other side. We noticed that it was not just Dad, but Mom, too, and Joe, my eight-year-old neighbor proxy, in the backseat, which was terribly unusual.
I think I can speak for Dan when I say that while we were standing there, waiting to get reamed by Dad, we were surprised that rather than violent and full of rage, Dad was instead distracted, quiet, not even out of th
e car yet. This was quite unusual as well. I called through the back window to Joe, who looked like he wanted nothing more in the world but to jump out of the car and join us in the water. I said, “Hey, Joe; how’s your dad doing?”
“He’s dead,” said Joe, his wandering eye wandering further, looking uncomfortably at my Mom, like he was about to ask permission from her to join me and Dan.
Dad had come by to park the backhoe and close down shop for the day, take us back home to clean up for the wake, which would be held later that Monday night, and we did it slowly, automatically, and . . . well, funereally, because no one wanted to be in the car with Joe.
Lúpe’s impending death had created a stranglehold on the barrio, had kept everyone in a sort of holding pattern for the better part of a year, because Gramma had become the midwife of his expiration—nothing excited her more at this point than a visit from the Angel of Death—and Dad, beholden to Gramma all his life, had gotten locked into her rhythms, and subsequently, so had the trucking business. Attending to the dying man had filled her days, fulfilled her completely, perhaps allowed her to pay penance for Grampa’s death, and now that her sister’s husband was dead, it wasn’t only her that felt like her direction had been lost, it was Lupíta as well, and also Dad now, who lost his way for a few days.
That had been my initial conclusion, back then, as a kid. I thought Dad had lost his steering because Gramma would now have nothing to preoccupy her days, and would then reinsert herself in the day-to-day management of the trucking business. Not that she had ever disengaged entirely; she just kind of did it from the reeking, cancerous bedside two doors down. But things were changing again.
Looking back now, though, I think there had been much more to this dispatching of a scourge from the planet of the acceptable than we were capable of understanding as kids.
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