I gave up shouting out potential threats of impact, collisions coming from all sides. It was like a Blitzkrieg dogfight over London skies. Catholic buses full of peasants would veer out of roads that were not there a second ago; an oncoming Volkswagen Bug would suddenly appear in your lane, materializing right out of the choking dust cloud of the Nissan Maxima that was ahead of you not fifty feet away, pumping sickly black exhaust in poisonous concentrations from the unrefined Mexican gas.
I am so sick with fear, I actually crumple into a fetal position in the backseat and simply let my fate go into the hands of whoever is listening. I actually go limp and, if you remember your Watership Down, I go “tharn.” I just curl up into a ball and let destiny take over, like a trapped rabbit.
Three hours later, when we round a hillside and look out into a valley below and see the lights of a city, I realize we might actually live through this.
We get to the Mexican town after dusk and the town is blinking sulfur pink and white below us in erratic geometry, carved into a valley between slow rolling hills, and I have a fleeting sense of disappointment that they have electricity, somehow. Hadn’t thought out my Mexican Huckleberry Finn fantasy all the way through, with this running away.
We descend into the valley and Karsten makes an abrupt right turn, suddenly parks his car against a pink stucco wall with broken beer bottles cemented into the top as a form of security, to prevent people from climbing over it.
“We’re here,” he says, and leaps from the driver’s side door, leaving us alone and bewildered as he disappears through a metal and intimidating gate, leaving us to wait for half an hour in the car without even the keys.
Chris and I are eventually shown inside, and I’m further disappointed to find out that Karsten’s father’s Mexican mansion is an exact duplicate of every other newly built construction in Brownsville: poured, solid concrete for a floor with tile laid indecorously atop, ceiling fans propelling themselves in dangerously unbalanced elliptical rotations, central air ducts added as an afterthought, exposed throughout. I could be at Anthony’s house, a mile from where I live.
The lord of the manor is no more welcoming than the ride in: We are banished to a single, sterile room with a JC Penney bed with scratchy sheets and a thin polyester comforter to comfort us from the stale, dreadfully cold, and mildewy air. It is like sucking air from the bottom of a well, breathing in that house.
Karsten and Chris take the bed, and I figure it will be best for all of us if I stretch out on the oval rug with a pillow and a similar comforter Karsten nicked from another, unmade room. I shiver the cold night away, feeling thankful that we made the drive there in one piece, at the very least.
That three teenage boys would sleep together in the same room didn’t bother anyone, or make anyone draw any sort of conclusions. This was something I always thought strange about Mexicans and machismo: They don’t immediately leap to a conclusion of homosexuality, or get hostile with true, honest homosexuals.
It’s a holdover from preconquest times, before the Catholic Church began its native programming. Mexicans innately consider homosexuals to be a third sex, leave them to exist on their own: Go on, do your thing; have fun.
Where they get weird and violent is when there is a question of a straight man who might be gay; I think it’s the self-deception that gets at them, because they’re caught in the same conflict. Does that make sense, the clarification? If you’re gay and you know it: Clap your hands. Enjoy it. If you’re straight and are acting gay, with the potential to be gay, then the other men will take umbrage.
Meaning that, if you’re gay and pretending to be straight in Texas, you’re far more of a threat, because that’s what macho men are struggling with, while the fantastically out gay men are not a threat, because, well, they’re gay, right? They know who they are. And we’re not gay. We’re men. Sexy hetero men. Who like women. Until, you know, we like … men, in a moment of drunken sincerity. And we make up sub-groups: you’re only gay if you get penetrated. If you do the penetrating, you’re not gay. That’s just pleasure, right?
I saw this happen many times, growing up in Brownsville. Totally out gay men were left entirely unharmed and unto themselves. Very prelapsarian bliss.
But svelte boys that didn’t fit any particular macho prototype were subjected to horrible things, punishment, for not being a model of macho masculinity.
So, if you were nominally straight and wispy and had predilections for all things British, like me, then you’d have trouble from the dicks in football. Try listening to Morrissey and The Smiths while playing football in Brownsville, then. But, that’s another story altogether.
The fact that Karsten, Chris, and I sleep in the same room provokes nothing from Karsten’s dad or the help in the house, other than ignoring us to our discomfort.
The next morning, after an uncomfortable breakfast opposite a silent father, Karsten herds us into the bed of a Ford F-150: white, dirty, and raised vulgarly in 4 x 4 fashion. Chris and I sit in shorts and the veneer of a T-shirt on an unfastened spare tire and sing Smiths songs aloud and in joking unison, because neither of us can carry a tune, not even in a tune bucket. Also, I think we are both quite frightened.
We drive farther into what can only be assumed was south, and then eventually west for the better part of the morning, and soon we come to a queue of tractors, buses, and Volkswagens—all the usual characters on the Mexican roads back then.
Teenage gendarmes, not much older than Chris and me, dressed in dark blue military fatigues point Vietnam-surplus M16s at every car, and then at us, and the ancient Mexican driver who speaks for us somehow calms their minds and we are let through with no problem, but Chris and I are shaken. This also didn’t figure into Huckleberry Finn.
In the shifting bed of the F-150, Chris and I pass the time further by singing tunelessly and talking about girls, or rather, the same girl (Mishell) in whom we are both stupidly interested because she’s the only girl who likes music from Manchester in our school, and we are both trying to keep the other disinterested therein.
If things ever got uncomfortable, I don’t remember, or I didn’t realize it, because we just kept screeching outward into the dry Mexican air as it whipped up around us as the countryside sped past, unusually verdant, at least for me.
Eventually we turn down a dusty brown country road headed—I think now for a good reason—west. West just somehow feels “deeper” into the Mexican wild.
During this whole ride, a good two hours, Chris and I are taking turns swigging water from a green one-gallon thermos with the little white pour thing that had been in the bed of the truck when we had jumped in. The water, after drinking it, had somehow made us thirstier, tasted dusty. Still, we drink more. Pass it back and forth the way hobos would pass a bottle of hooch, and then eventually the truck is brought up short to a shallow ford of a largish creek, and the driver, whom we see now for the first time fully standing—a lean, tough and leathery old man in his sixties—throws the truck into park and comes around, looks at us sideways in an odd dismissal, wordlessly grabs the thermos out of Chris’ hands and begins to refill it, right from the creek.
About ten minutes later after fording the creek in the Ford F-150 at high 4x4 speed, Chris is convinced he’s picked up some sort of bacteria from the raw creek water we’ve been unwittingly drinking and is curled up in a fetal roll as the truck lumbers deeper into Mexican lumber.
I’m not so sure I haven’t contracted something either, but I manage to keep from hysterical vomiting as Chris is doing, in a ball at the end of the truck bed.
Eventually, I notice the truck slowing—and it isn’t my fanciful imagination this time—because the low, gnarled mesquite trees begin giving way and we slowly crest a small, shallow hill into what is essentially a long ranch road. A lone, ramshackle building made of cracking white stone with a low, flat roof appears out of nowhere at the end of the lane, and we stop. We’re suddenly surrounded by horses, and the smell of horses.
“This is one of my dad’s ranches,” Karsten says as he gets out of the passenger side and sees me staring off into the north. (It felt like the north. Felt like I was looking at the underside of Texas.) I can imagine Karsten, from this distance, probably talking in his monosyllabic Spanish to the old man for the first few minutes of the drive, and then saying nothing for the rest of the drive, which probably drove Karsten crazy, but was perfectly all right with the old guy. “We’re supposed to help take down the fences,” he says, absently pointing with an oblique nod to a long barbed-wire fence that trailed off into the distance. His attention is acutely fixed upon a .9mm pistol he suddenly pulls from under his seat, making a show of chambering a round, replacing the hammer, and then checking the safety and putting it in the small of his back. He wore no belt, so for the next few minutes, the gun kept tilting forward precariously, like it wanted to slip into the seat of his trousers and disappear down into his ass, and Karsten, unwilling to divorce his own fantasy, refused to remove it from there. Instead, he chases off after the horses, while Chris and I hop off the truck and attempt to ingratiate ourselves with the old man and the remaining horses, both of whom are visibly repulsed by our advances. We’re unsure of what to do, and what’s expected of us, Chris and me.
The old man disappears into his home, and then reappears soon after with a boy who looks very much his simile, except reduced to 30 percent. They both stand there, taking us in.
We stare back. Fidget awkwardly. The horses and their horse smell are swirling at a safe distance around us. Very, very un–Mark Twain, I’m thinking, when suddenly Karsten comes shooting past us riding a large, speckled horse that seems terribly upset at having a rider on its back, making the point very clear by running at full tilt down the length of the road and throwing its head violently around. Karsten, while Chris and I had stood there gaping and wondering what to do, had disappeared into a stable and managed to expertly festoon the fastest horse with saddle and bridle and then put the thing into gear. And then, off he went, like he was on a Ferrari, charging the length of the road, whipping the flanks of the poor beast with malicious glee, and the horse could do little but run faster, and then faster than that. Still, Chris and I stand there.
The old man says something to the boy and the boy slowly dissolves back into their shack, and then emerges holding a bag of tools.
Karsten shoots around behind us and I approach the old man, attempting to say something to him in our native tongue, and realize, all of a sudden, that I can no longer speak Spanish.
All these years of pretending, of cultural snobbery, of emphasizing English and feeling that Spanish was the language of the poor and conquered peasants had suddenly crystalized, and my one chance to engage in a wholly authentic moment, to talk to a human being who lived simply, who needed nothing other than what he had around him, woke with the sun and slept with the moon and the horses and the mesquite and the rattlesnakes, that my chance to talk to my father’s people was lost, right there.
So I point. At the bag of tools.
And he points back. At the fence, the one to which Karsten had vaguely alluded, some distance down the dirt road.
And I get what he means. “Get to work, tourist.”
Chris and I take the bag and wander down the road to where the fence has been under deconstruction.
It is barbed wire, three tiers of it, held up every ten or so feet by some wood stake driven into the earth about a foot or so down. One of those “u” shaped nails holds the line to. Remarkable that it has stayed up, in this cracked earth. Most of the stakes are just mesquite branches, given a minimum effort at whacking it into something resembling a vertical stake, then pounded into the earth, before the next one was done, and so on, until the perimeter was created, extending into either horizon and obscured by the shrubby trees.
I look in the bag that the old man had given me. It has two pairs of pliers and a flat-headed screw driver and a hammer, along with a hot plastic bottle of Coca-Cola that is filled with what now is clearly creek water, tinged with particles.
I think we get about four stakes done before we quit, Chris and me. That was our contribution to the great acquisition of Karsten’s dad’s ranch barony.
Come to think of it now, I think I was the only one who attempted to help. I think Chris was off writing his meandering, nonmetered poetry, and who knew what sort of malfeasance Karsten had gotten himself into, and then out of. Then into again.
My own sense of Gramma’s peasant work ethic had driven me to help, but my sissy idleness and a small gash on my thumb had allowed me to give in after only a few minutes, which perfectly captured my psychological profile at the time.
It is getting into the late afternoon, and I decide that I wanted to ride a horse in order to have something to remember the experience with, before we leave. Maybe not the dangerous one Karsten is riding, but another, slower, maybe crippled one, like at a children’s hospital.
After cooing and fumbling through a few old Americanized Spanish phrases and a lot of pointing, I’m able to ask the old man about the horse. His look is suspicious, uncertain.
Finally, he relents and enters the horse pen to catch a lazy, marelike creature and begin to harness it with saddle and bridle, which is an amazing amount of work. I hadn’t realized what I had been asking of him. But he helps me climb aboard the sedate and pliable mare, who, out of nowhere, turns into a hell-borne, meth-crazed hot rod and sprints toward the low trees to knock me from her back.
I hear the old man and the kid shouting instructions to me from their perch at the stoop of the old man’s house, but their shouts are drowned out by my hysterical and unending cries of “Whoah! Whoah! Whoah!” and the horse starts bucking, bucking me up and kicking out her back legs, trying really hard to catch me on a branch by darting for the trees, and then I have a clear idea of what she is attempting to do, that she has it in for me, and so I try to think of the best thing to do in this situation and I come to the conclusion that I will lie flat on her back, wrap the bridle and my arms around her dinosaur neck, and choke the animal to death, because I’m like that when someone threatens me.
So I do, or at least I try, and in doing so, I yank the bridle quite hard to the right and she rockets off in a steady, ridable pace back to the house.
It was more frightening than riding with Karsten, being on that horse’s back and it charging out of control with the intention of knocking me off. I dream of that short ride still, when things are not going so well.
The mare, under the stern direction of the yank, gallops right up to the old man who catches her by the bridle, and by now, Chris and Karsten have come out to see what all the shouting has been about, and they laugh, hoot and point at me and my near-death experience at the hooves of an old mare.
I climb off the horse shaking, and she turns away and refuses to look at me, wanders off to join the rest of her people and do what horses do when they’re not trying to kill the unhooved. The old man, quietly tickled, can tell I’ve had a considerable fright and is sympathetic. “Estas asustádo,” he says, which is a kind of low-frequency shock, and he takes me inside the house and sits me in the only chair available—an old, unsteady wooden thing—and pours me a drink of water from the jug. I drink it with my hands shaking, no longer concerned about the bacteria in the water.
His house, like him, is lean and simple. He has a cot along the wall with a rough cut window above it, with no glass, screen, or bars, just a hole into the outside. Tools and rope are hung on the walls, all of them obviously for use and not decoration. Every part of this house is put to use, intentional, functional. I think he is the richest and happiest person I’ve met until then. Even then, as an idiotic teenager, I could understand that.
The drive back to Brownsville the next day was e
very bit as treacherous and aging as the drive to Juarez had been three days before. That morning, Karsten’s dad had been no warmer over breakfast—fried egg soup and fried plantains: Remember, these were Cubans, not Mexicans—and so I preoccupied myself with the paper while Karsten tried to bridge the gap between friends and reluctant family, before we took up the gauntlet of the drive back to Texas.
Chris rode in the passenger seat up front and shouted out potential threats while Karsten gleefully gunned his engine on the dusty highways back north. I was exhausted by this point, incapable of sustaining that level of alarm, so I laid back down on the back seat and slept, the cries and shouts of the two idiots driving in the front of the retired police car seemingly far enough away so that they didn’t pertain to me, could not possibly harm me, and so I slept. I slept.
When I got home, two days later, the house was dark, and I ate a half a bag of Doritos for dinner, as I had gone unmissed, except by maybe Lupíta Chiquita, to whom I still owe those five bucks.
Karsten disappeared a few months after that, when his father “made a donation” to St. Mary’s Catholic School and they allowed Karsten to graduate finally, though he had not been to school for close to two years. He called me about a year later from a naval academy somewhere on the east coast, asking me for the telephone number of some girl he had dated twice, said he’d call me right back, but never did.
That crazy Karsten.
Chapter 20
NEIGHBORHOOD HEROES
Joe’s house had been unguarded by any male of consequence for some years after Lúpe had died, and Martín had scuttled off to the north to find work fit for a seventeen-year-old who was now earning the family bread. For some time now, the lime green house with the shit-brown trim was protected only by Joe, who was twelve now, cross-eyed and fat. It was otherwise full of women, full of a powdery allure, awaiting penetration of any sort, to hear my Dad tell it.
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