Boy Kings of Texas

by Domingo Martinez

I stop to look in my mother’s mirror, and Richard sits on the bed, behind me, winded. My eye is swelling shut, and my bottom lip is torn open. “Jesus,” I say.

  “Shut up!” he yells from the bed. “You called her a bitch last week because she only lent you five dollars!”

  I stop. I look at Segis. “Is that what this is about?”

  “No! No!” screams Segis. “That’s not right! It was a long time ago! I said he wasn’t just an asshole to you and your kids, that he was an asshole to everyone! Not just us! That’s what I said, man!”

  Still, I couldn’t put together what was happening, what had happened after I left.

  “So you were lying?” Richard says to Segis. Richard gets up, looms over Segis. “Hunh?” he challenges Segis. “You were lying? Is that it?” He tries to kick Segis again, who rolls on his side like a puppy and gets kicked in the ass.

  “No!” yells Segis from the floor. “I just said he was an asshole to everyone, man, even his Gramma!”

  “Jesus, Richard; is that what this is about? You’ve known me all your life; you know how I am. I just say shit about everything without meaning it, to make a joke. You used to laugh at it all the time; I did it to make you laugh. You were like a brother to me,” I say.

  “Shut up!” he says and lunges at me again, but this time, I’m out of reach, and his glasses fall off and he almost steps on them. We end up shuffling and in a weird shifting of position, I end up near them, and I pick them up, hand them back to him. He takes them and puts them on without thinking about it.

  “Just shut up, Junior! You don’t use your psychology and books on me! You’re not smarter than me! I know who you are! I saw you grow up, you pendéjo! You and your family! I’ve seen everything about you! You think you’re so much better than all of us because you try to speak good English and go to school! But you’re from here like all of us! You’re poor, your father is Mexican! Like all of us! Your sisters are just sluts who think their shit don’t stink, like your mom! And your dad is just weak! He’s weak, Junior! I could kill him, and your brother Dan, and your whole fucking family if I want! I’ll go to prison, I don’t care! You fucking disrespect your grandmother? What’s wrong with you, Junior? You don’t have no respect for nobody! For none of us! You disrespect all of us! You’re not better than us, Junior! You’re not! You hate us because you’re just like us!”

  Through this last tirade, Richard has broken down, weeping, in dangerous spurts, his hand to his eyes, and continues to cry, on his own, me and Stegis standing or sitting around him, unsure.

  I almost want to hug him, hold him, like my older brother, crying, because up until the point he restructured my jaw, I still loved him. He had nothing more, nothing. All he could do to save his dignity was to threaten to kill my family and take the prison sentence, he thought, the poor pathetic bastard.

  To be totally honest, everything he’s said tonight is true.

  As I stand there, beaten up, and watch him cry, the detached observer in me is taking notes, in my mind, so I can write the story down one day.

  When he is finished crying, Richard picks up his hat, and I say, “Jesus, Richard; you were like one of the family . . . ” and, with what is probably shame, he walks past Segis on the floor, past Didi who is standing by the door, watching all this happen, crying still, and he leaves.

  We hear Richard’s truck light up and tear out of the driveway, and I take that time to find my shirt and pantaloons and get redressed, with Didi’s help. I say to Segis, “Jesus fucking Christ, what the hell did you say to him?”

  He’s immediately defensive. “Nothingk, mang! I didn’t say nothing! Except that we were just sitting there after you left and he said, ‘That guy’s an asshole,’ and I just said, ‘Yeah, he’s an asshole to everyone’!”

  “And that’s all you said?”

  “Well, he was talking about your Gramma, that you said something disrespectful to her, and I just said you called her a bitch once, and then he got mad.”

  “Nice.”

  “I’m sorry, man. Really sorry.”

  “Nice fucking work.”

  I want to see what kind of shape the rest of the house is in, so he and Didi help me limp through the house, and it is mostly in place, nothing broken or shattered. When I look out the window, I see Arnold hiding outside, cowering by the rear left axle of Didi’s car. Not exactly the sort of person you want around you in an emergency.

  Didi gets a wet towel and some ice for my face, and I take it, put it heavily on my head. I’ve been pummeled, beaten horribly. Disfigured. This had been the thing I’d been threatened with my whole life, as the most terrible thing that could happen to you—losing your manhood in a fight—and a very small part of me is proud that I’ve been through it, come out the other side. Though my eye looks terrible, my jaw is out of alignment, and my tooth is cracked. But otherwise, I’ve gotten through without a scratch. Bring it on, world, I feel.

  We hear Richard’s truck peel out of the driveway in a terrific roar and when we feel safe enough to leave the safety of my parents’ penetrated bedroom to lock the doors, we do so. The pain of the beating has started to settle in like a flu, and my arms and chest have started to bruise brilliantly, and I can’t stop spitting blood, but still I can’t stop myself from thinking, “This isn’t so bad. This is what I’ve been frightened of my whole life, and it isn’t so bad. . . .” I’ve been beaten so badly, it’s as if I’ve been in a car wreck.

  But I’m crying at this point, I realize, into the wet towel. Not from the pain, so much, but from the horror of what has just happened at the hands of someone I trusted thoroughly. Didi is holding the towel to my face as I’m weeping into it quietly, and I realize I’m thinking about this, about the pain, about the beating, as an inevitability, that it wasn’t as painful as I thought it was going to be, like the beating had been understood, was a foregone conclusion, and I had passed the test.

  I could leave Texas. I beat Texas.

  I had a personal understanding that if I stayed here long enough, stayed in Brownsville, that I would get the beating of my life like this at some point. Never knew why, exactly, only that it was because I was different.

  And it didn’t hurt, really, except for the shame of being marked like that, and having to mingle in society with a beaten face. That is the real problem, I’m thinking: facing my employers and coworkers, people I’ve begun to respect, with the mark of my origins imprinted loudly upon my face.

  I ask them to leave, Didi and Segis and Arnold. Didi is herself in tears at this point, and Arnold won’t even come indoors for fear of not having the option of bolting like a rabbit for the nearest hole.

  When they leave, I grab the towel, now saturated in tears and blood, and walk across the driveway to the closest comfort I can think of at the time: Gramma.

  This is a mistake.

  I let myself in and walk through the dark house to her bedroom and wake her up, in the dark, warn her in Spanish before I turn on the light that Richard has gone crazy and beaten me up.

  When I snap on the light, she pauses for only a second, and then puts on her bathrobe and makes her way to the refrigerator in the hallway and proceeds to pull out ice trays and peanut butter, jars full of strange things, anything with cold, and places various things against my head and tells me to hold them there. All the while, she mumbles prayers in low, resolved despair that communicate to me clearly that she, too, has long expected this to happen.

  She sits me in her bedroom, in front of the triangular corner altar she built before Grampa’s death, which still has the Polaroid shots of Grampa’s face, bloodied and pulped, from the night his own brothers had set upon him and had beaten him bloody.

  Gramma had done this very thing, in this very spot, for him. Cold compresses to his face, blaming him for it happening under her breath.

  This time, however, with me, Gramma isn’t taking sides. Or rather, she is taking a side, and it’s not mine.

  Her manner feels more like she is a reluc
tant nurse in a POW camp and I am the POW responsible for fire-bombing her village, some weeks back. Maybe raping her unborn sister, to boot.

  She isn’t exactly sympathetic, is what I’m getting at, as I sit there whimpering, and when Richard unexpectedly returns.

  We hear his truck roar back into the driveway, and Gramma immediately gets up and goes to the door to warn him that I am there, in her bedroom.

  At this point, I think I just gave up, accepting that there are no—or never have been—any safe places in the barrio, not at the hands of these people. I am a giraffe in a community of mules.

  If my heart was hard and dark before, it has become the impenetrable matter of a black hole now.

  Richard stomps by her and looks in the bedroom, looks me full in the face in the bright light, at what he’d done, and Gramma holds onto his shoulder in the senile, beguiling way she usually reserved for pleading with men when she felt infantilism would better serve her cause.

  “Déjalo, déjalo,” she says. “Ya llóro. Bien a cómer.” (“Leave him be. He’s already cried. Come and eat.”)

  “You got what you deserved!” Richard yells. “I mean it about your father, Junior! I’ll fucking kill him, I don’t care!”

  “Déjalo, lla,” Gramma continues to coo, not acknowledging that the adopted cuckoo is threatening the life of her natural-born son. If she realizes what Richard is saying, she doesn’t care.

  “¡Mira, lo que hiso!” I yell at her in Spanish, as she begins to cook for him in the kitchen. (“Look at what he fucking did to me.”)

  In Spanish: “Listen to what he’s fucking saying! He’s saying he’s going to kill your only son, and you don’t do anything!”

  “Stop fighting, you two,” she says in Spanish, pulling Richard through the door, and then lighting up her stove.

  “I did it for you!” Richard says to her in Spanish, as her back is turned and he’s sitting at the plastic covered table, his eyes streaming.

  “Yes, yes,” she responds, finding a pan from her sink. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “He called you a bitch and who knows what else he’s said. His whole family is like that. They think they’re better than us,” Richard pleads to her hunched back, while Gramma continues grunting her encouragement. Gramma, I could tell, in her twisted way, was deeply moved.

  As Gramma continues to make Richard’s breakfast, I walk out the front door, leave the bloodied towel behind on the chair I last saw my Grampa in.

  It would be a long time before I would be able to stand near her again and not want to punch her teeth out after this. Gramma, I could take; we weighed about the same.

  It is close to 3:00 a.m. when I call my sister Marge in Kingsville and leave a message for my parents, saying, “Mom, Dad; this is June (sniff). Richard beat me up, really awful. Please come home. I don’t know what to do.”

  Segis calls me after I make that call, and the phone rings both in our house and at Gramma’s, and I talk to him for over an hour before we realize Richard has been on the remote line, listening all along. I simply can’t escape this nightmare. Can’t wake up from it.

  At the end of the call, I have Richard laughing and saying he’s sorry before he hangs up, and I never talk to him again. Still haven’t. Richard woke up early and disappeared the next day.

  The sacrifice he made that night, killing his connection to the Martinez family, us kids who truly loved him, I think affected him more than it did me, in the end. Richard had been subconsciously chosen to tell us what everyone really felt about us, to put us in our place, since we were becoming too “uppity” for the barrio, while they were falling further into declension and disarray. And after this violent display, Richard was never again a part of our family, a part of our fold, or accepted back into theirs, the people who hated us in that barrio.

  I took the beating, I took the venom, because I’d always been the most vulnerable, the boy with the mouth, Freudian as that image is. But I was leaving anyway.

  Thing was, Richard was staying in the barrio. Richard’s life could have been much better, much more, if he still had the love of my father’s family. I would have loved Richard still. Today.

  But he lost that, that night, by doing that. And we lost a very happy memory.

  Chapter 23

  AFTERWARD

  Mom and Dad pulled into the driveway around noon.

  Segis, feeling responsible, had shown up around ten o’clock and tried to apologize. In all honesty I never really blamed him for anything other than just being his trusting, innocent, simple self. You could no more blame a soccer-playing kid in the third-world for stepping on a landmine and losing his leg, and the legs of a friend. More to the point, Segis meant nothing by it. And later, he meant even less.

  Mom and Dad listened to our story, and Dad grabbed my chin and forced my head this way, and that way, and then up, to see what was disfiguring, what would mark, what was permanent.

  All the blood vessels in one eye had burst; my mouth was so swollen, I couldn’t speak without first spitting.

  While this was terrible to deal with, what hurt most was the look on my mother’s face, as she studied me. She was half ashamed, half accusatory, like she, too, believed I somehow deserved it, probably for drinking at home, with Richard. But I was accustomed to this response, from Mom.

  What was really terrible was the offers of pity I received from Gina, the girl I had fallen in love with, whom I had dated for like, three weeks, and really liked, but didn’t realize I felt totally outclassed—at the time, I had just felt weird, strangely nervous, but couldn’t figure out why—until eventually I realized it was because I couldn’t meet standards, as a boyfriend. I had nothing to offer her. Which didn’t stop me from falling further in love with her, as adolescent boys do. That’s why the Cure had meant so much to me, at the time, because of Gina, with all its sweet bitterness, the soundtrack for the lovelorn. And when I finally got her on the phone to tell her what had happened, she paused, asked me to hold, and then came back and said her dad, the very reverend Judge Hinojosa, had offered me a place to stay, if I needed it, and I thanked her, and knew enough to feel totally humiliated, to be completely ashamed of where I came from. And always very grateful to him for the offer.

  Dad had listened to me and Segis with obvious disgust, frustration. He was going out of his mind with rage by two o’clock. He was vengeful and horribly ashamed in that machismo way at the possibility of impotency, that he could not protect his family, yet again, even after Richard had threatened his life.

  The sheriff’s department was called, and another morbidly obese deputy had driven by around one in the afternoon, saying there was nothing he could do now, should have called when it was happening. Dad went inside the house and came back with a photo of Richard and the deputy’s boss, the High Sheriff Alex Perez, arm in arm, with two other drug dealers, drinking beer.

  “Oh,” said the deputy. “That guy. Riche,” recognizing Richard.

  After he left, Dad turned on both Segis and me. “Why didn’t you both gang up on him, at once? You two together? Kicked his ass!”

  Segis answered, “Well, because of respect,” he said, confused. “He’s Domingo’s uncle . . . ”

  Dad hissed at this, cursed. Spit and nearly punched Segis himself.

  I had a better answer: fear. Richard would have killed us then, if we had fought back. This was a man without an Id in those ten minutes. He was unchecked, insane. Anything we would have brought against him, he would have turned on us, double. We were kids, dealing with a werewolf on cocaine. This isn’t hyperbole: He would have killed one of us, or both. Dad’s macho pride wasn’t there to see it.

  Dad called Dan, who was living in Seattle at the time with his friend Dennis, and made Dan feel like this was his fault. Dan felt horrible, and I got on the phone, told him it wasn’t his fault: There was nothing anyone could do. Richard just spiraled out of control. Dan was relieved to hear me speak, I could tell.

  Eventually, Dad got so wound up, he
worked up his courage and drove off in the Taurus, infuriated, but quiet. Mom tried to stop him, knowing how something like this could turn out. She loved him still, at this point. She did not buy into this barrio drama machismo bullshit, with knives and guns. Mom was America.

  But Dad didn’t listen to her and he went looking for Richard, like he’d been expected to do all along, like it had been scripted.

  Every ounce of courage was summoned and Dad drove off knowing he was now getting into a fight that had been building since Richard was brought home as a one-year-old in exchange for a pair of brake pads, a muffler, and a four-barrel carburetor.

  Richard had shoved Dad into a remote corner of the nest, and Dad now had to prove himself against the neighborhood bully, his own stepbrother.

  We all held our breath, and the guilt I felt was crushing, bringing this unconscious resentment in the barrio to a head once again.

  Richard, in the meantime, had quickly converted to a fundamentalist hyper-Pentecostal church group that happened to be leaving for Michigan that morning, to work in a diner washing dishes and helping build more evangelical churches for the poor along the way.

  Beating me, and having to own up to it, had been a mystical experience. He’d found Pentecostal Jesus, who spoke in tongues and snake venom. So he boarded the van and had been gone by three o’clock that next day.

  And his cowardice, his hollow shallow crust of a fighter had crumbled that day, when Dad chased him from house to house, from hideout to hideout, and his biological family had lied to my Dad to keep Richard safe, hidden, and then put him on an Econoline headed north. And when Dad came home again, unbloodied, untainted, and safe, he was bigger to me and Mom, because nothing had happened. That was civilized.

  After that, Dad never quite re-integrated with the barrio. He had already been feeling a sort of drift—nothing he’d ever mentioned, or quite been able to place, but after this, all his friendships went cold and he never really tried to pursue them. Richard, when he returned over a year later, caught Dad in a Christian logic riddle, and apologized to him in such a way that Dad, now also a good Christian, was forced to forgive him and had no choice in the matter, like they were competing players in Dungeons and Dragons. But Dad never forgot what Richard had done.