Boy Kings of Texas

by Domingo Martinez

  Take that, Mr. Freud.

  Chapter 34

  KEEP ON TRUCKIN’

  Dad is doing long-distance trucking for a company out of Brownsville now for some time, and he’s in the middle of darkest Mississippi headed for a Ford factory in the south with his new partner, an old man named Jim who’s been doing the route for fifteen years.

  It’s three in the morning when they’re approaching Tennessee and a tire in the driver-side rearmost axle blows and shreds and catches fire from the friction. Dad is driving and watches it all happen in the side-view mirror. He panics, wakes up Jim, and tries to pull off the interstate.

  “Keep on truckin’!” yells Jim from the bunk, pulling on his pleated denim jeans in a hurry. “Keep on truckin’!”

  Dad, unsure of what to do, does instead as he’s told and he downshifts, presses hard on the accelerator, and moves the rig back into “the hammer lane.”

  The tire is alight, glowing orange in the sideview mirror as Jim climbs into the passenger seat and soporifically readjusts his glasses. “Keep on truckin’,” he mumbles, mostly to himself, patting his shirt pockets for his smokes.

  Sure enough, the tire burns out in a matter of minutes, shreds itself over the course of a hundred miles, and billows for a couple hundred more but they make it into Memphis, all the way to Galilee.

  This is what I think about the morning I awake with a pain in my lower back. It’s very likely my kidney, maybe my liver, and I get upset at my deterioration, so I grab a beer at nine that Saturday morning.

  Take that, kidney. Screw you, liver. Gonna keep on truckin’. Gonna make it into Galilee.

  Chapter 35

  TEN YEARS LATER

  Hard times. I’ve been unemployed for ten months now, working a temp job at the Starbucks Resource Center, answering phones, having recently separated from my last relationship of three years. I have to move out of my apartment. I simply can’t afford to live here anymore. It’s not a great apartment by any means. There’s no view, it’s near basement quality and if there is another bad earthquake, I will certainly die in my sleep. But it’s mine, and I’m thirty-two, and I want my own space. Thing is, I can’t come up with the $700 anymore.

  I have to move in with Dan, who had moved back to Seattle after six years of living apart, and now lives across the way with his mute girlfriend, Orlene. She’s not really mute, but you have to be able to talk about the things she likes or else she’ll sit quietly opposite you for hours without any impulse to speak to you. I’ve tried this before and have been impressed by her ability to say nothing, and to say it without a single word.

  We’re going to try this out, because both Dan and I feel a great compulsion to live together, like we did when we were kids. Dan’s helping me get my stuff out of my apartment and into the one we’re going to share.

  We’re trying to get my couch out over the balcony: That’s how we got it in, after I had to move out of Rebecca’s, my last girlfriend.

  The couch, my couch, was one of the contingencies of moving in with Rebecca, previously: When we had moved in together, she had a terribly uncomfortable couch, and I demanded something far superior to the driftwood obstacle she had bought in a display of sympathy for a Pike Place Market “artist.” I’d received my severance pay from the union I unwittingly and unintentionally joined while working at the Seattle Times, and it covered the cost of this lovely, oil-clothed couch, dog proof and deep. And about 250 pounds.

  It’s coming over the balcony, and Dan is holding it while standing on the roof of a UHaul, lowering it down for me, and in my terrible cross trainers, my ankle gives way while I’m supporting the couch, shifting it to a secure point of rest, and my knee pops out of socket: I feel more pain then than all the pain I’ve felt combined for the last ten years. I collapse, but save the couch, shifting its weight onto the face of the rockery nearby.

  My knee pops back in again and I’m nearly delirious with pain and worry, lying in the parking lot. I’ve been out of work for ten months and have no health insurance. I’m scared, scared a lot. The couch is safe and Dan, his Honduran girlfriend Orlene, and their tiny El Salvadoran friend Alex are all standing over me, looking at me. Health professionals, all of them.

  “Is he going to be OK?” asks Alex in Spanish.

  Orlene leaves without saying a word.

  Dan says, “He’ll be OK. June, are you going to be OK? Can you stand on it?”

  I stand on it. Dan decides I’ll be all right. Everyone gets back to moving.

  I try to walk it into place; it feels odd and loose, the knee, but I think I can get it back into place. I’ve never been delicate, and my body has an odd way of adapting to its borders, like Japanese goldfish growing to the limits of their ponds. It’s as if my knee, knowing I don’t have insurance, will compensate with whatever material it’s got available. I’m walking inside ten minutes, but by no means normally.

  I ask Dan, “Seriously, what do you think will happen? Is this bad? Will I need to see a doctor?”

  “You probably need surgery,” he tells me. “You probably need a CAT scan, or an MRI. You probably tore your ACL and need to have it surgically stitched back together.”

  I’m petrified now, but satisfied the couch is being moved.

  Chapter 36

  DAN’S LAST FIGHT

  This is the letter I wrote to my sister, Marge, and her husband, Corwin, the night Dan was in the hospital having surgery on his broken leg, the result of a fight outside a bar. Dan had asked me to keep it secret, but I called Mom in hysterics, crying, and she called Marge and Corwin, who managed to fly her out the next day, paid for all her emergency expenses. This is where my relationship with them changed, and my relationship with Dan began to die. I left the letter mostly intact, except where it needed updating, which is noted with parenthetical marks. When I wrote it, I was slowly drinking a bottle of tequila, the only booze we had in the empty three-bedroom apartment into which we had just moved, that day.

  Dear Marge,

  This is exactly the sort of thing I ran away from when I left Texas. Dan has just had that sort of hotheaded response all his life, and he couldn’t back away; in this case I didn’t get to him in time to stop his knee-jerk macho reaction when these snickering fishermen called us “faggots” for wearing similar black leather jackets.

  We turned around, I think I said something snickering back, left it at that and I told Dan to leave it; what did it matter? Forget it. Come on.

  Personally, I had forgotten about it and entered the cab of his truck in the parking lot of that bar, less than a mile from (our new) home. Dan couldn’t. He said, “You going to let them get away with that?”

  (And this is where I feel culpable. Responsible. I allowed our shared verhuenza to speak, I remember. I said, “So, what, you want to do something about it?” He didn’t respond. I said, “Fine. Come on.” Shifted like I was about to open the door. You see, Dan was challenging my verhuenza. My sense of pride.

  I wasn’t strong enough to talk him out of this significant challenge in testosterone. In brotherly, familial honor. This is where I failed Dan. This is the choice I will take into my other lives. This is where the relationship with my older brother ended. I should have said something else. Because I wasn’t big enough to say, “Yes. It is beneath us.”)

  He put the twelve pack in the truck and walked around the back and confronted the tallest guy in the group (the one who said the snide things), as I watched in the rearview mirror. I sincerely did not think Dan was going to swing. But then there was a swing, the first one connecting before I even opened my door to get to them.

  My whole life, since I was a kid, Dad accused me of instigating fights so that my big, “bad” older brother could finish them. This has always been very far from the case. You couldn’t understand the depth of responsibility and guilt I felt any time Dan stood up for me. He is my older brother and as such, my biggest idol, from when we were kids. I absolutely do not ever want this man-boy hurt, especially for
something I did, or could control. Dad used to say to me, “You are like a Chihuahua, barking and starting fights so that your bigger brother can save you!”

  This again was another very wide chasm in my relationship with Dad. How he could believe that I would put Dan in such a position? Every time Dan has ever been in an altercation that involved me in any way, I have always—always—tried to keep him from doing so.

  That time in Kingsville? I wanted desperately to keep him from going back to that bar and challenging that bastard Larry. But Dan was determined, and I couldn’t let him go alone. He was fresh from the military, full of that fake power. He was my older brother, and he was basically calling me out as well. (Where was my verhuenza?) I had to go. I hated that I did. Hated that he did.

  I don’t know if you get what I’m telling you.

  I am not a bad person. Neither is Dan. But he’s yet to develop that sense of responsibility and accountability that would keep him from throwing a blow for something as stupid as being called gay. Frankly, that night, I took that as an underhanded compliment, coming from those common fisher folk dressed in old Eddie Bauer flannels, blue jeans, and white tennis shoes. I mean: Really.

  For most of six years I took those classes in karate and boxing so that I could have that skill set, that defense/offense available to me should I ever need them. Those skills are so rusty now that I am deeply surprised they surfaced last night in the defense of my older brother, who lay broken under some weak, stoned fisherguy who was brutalizing him because Dan’s leg shattered when Dan misstepped. (Dan was knocked out, I have come to realize.)

  They engaged at the end of the truck. I heard Dan yell at the guy, “What did you say to me, you motherfucker? What did you say? Did you think I wouldn’t do anything about it?” (Dan liked to do a Robert De Niro impersonation, when he was being tough.)

  The guy was backpedaling. “Now, hey man; I didn’t mean anything by it; we were just kidding. . . .”

  And then Dan clocked the guy square.

  I didn’t want to get in this thing. I didn’t think it just.

  I jumped out of the truck as three other guys were running toward them. Immediately my whole body went leaden, heavy. Slow to respond. My whole body was feeling, “I really don’t want to do this.”

  But quietly I felt the inhibitors in my mind click off, like a military guy opening his attaché case of weapons, taking in the disability of my left leg. I ran in front of one guy and blocked his approach to Dan and the other guy. Dan was ten times as tough, ten times the fighter as the guy who was swinging back at him, I could tell even in my peripheral vision.

  It was like lead, my right leg, as I faced the first guy in front of me and realized he was in for a fight. I kicked him in his left hip and turned his lower torso suddenly. I had to force it, that kick. My left knee hummed disagreeably in yellow. I didn’t want to do this. He threw his arms up at me to block the combination to his face as the kick connected.

  Stop, it says. I can hurt you.

  My knee disagreed with this, and I reconsidered my stance. I had to protect myself, and them, and Dan. It was stupid, but it was the responsibility of the veteran fighter. (It was what I learned, in karate. You take the responsibility to keep yourself and others in control. You hit just hard enough to make your point.)

  I was trying my best to think my way through this. I attempted to prioritize my goals, now that I was reluctantly in this situation. I didn’t want to hurt my knee, primarily. I didn’t want to hurt these guys so that the altercation became actionable. I wanted to keep Dan from hurting anyone and himself. First and foremost, I wanted it over and I wanted to be home so I could yell at him.

  I was still not convinced I wanted to do this. I felt pressed, forced. These guys were just stoned fishermen who said something stupid. They didn’t want to fight. I didn’t really want to hurt them. I’m not a bad person. I really felt Dan was overreacting, but he’s my brother and I couldn’t get to him to stop. I had to protect him. I stood between the first guy running up in white and Dan, behind me, and kicked him in the hip and punched him square in the face, then set up to do it again.

  The guy I hit stopped, stunned. He looked at me and he was like . . . I don’t know what. He didn’t want to fight. He wanted to talk. I wanted to talk, too, but my brother was fighting the guy not six feet from me to my right, and I couldn’t stop and reason. I pushed him away and threw another set of combinations. The guy was saying something to me but I couldn’t listen. I told him things, I talked to him while I was hitting him, things I don’t remember saying. “Go away. Keep away. Just stay away. I can and will hurt you. You just don’t know. You just don’t know.”

  The guy in white was still talking, trying to get me to stop, trying to reason with me, and mostly, at this point, I just wanted him to understand: This is a fight. You’re in a fight. (You wear a different face here.) Fight me: I’ll try my best not to mark you because even here I can tell you don’t want to do this.

  (And I am a just person.)

  From here I don’t remember anything, because when you’re in a fight, you don’t think your way through it, you don’t make conscious decisions, you react and act. I think, to his credit, the guy in the white swung at me and almost connected, to the back of my left ear, but nothing’s there this morning. Not even a lump.

  Then, I remember the guy in the blue ran toward Dan with another guy and the big guy Dan was engaged with (I think they were trying to stop that fight), and I ran in front of them, too.

  I think that’s where I broke my pinky, when I hit him with a sound combination of hooks and straights to the head and body and I kicked the guy in the blue square in the stomach, and this is where I heard Dan’s glasses skid on the pavement.

  This might be where Dan broke his leg. A bad step. (This is where he was knocked out.) The weight of his body crushed the tibial plateau—shattered it—and he fell. Stupidly, and one of those weird things, I focused on finding his glasses to minimize the financial impact of this, to be able to get up and out of here as quickly as possible and so I scurried after the frames when I heard them go and ran after them, when I got the chance.

  I didn’t notice that Dan had fallen. I didn’t see that the tall guy was now straddled over him and going left/right, left/right on Dan’s face—Dan’s arms were held out defensively and he was screaming, “Cut it out, cut it out.” (I might be making that part up. I don’t have a memory of this. I just remember the guy straddling Dan, vague images.)

  I picked up the lens and the glasses and saw the guy on Dan (from a few yards away). I was stunned: It was just wrong. Dan was not supposed to be the guy on the ground. It didn’t make sense. I screamed and charged, ran at the guy and behind him and grabbed him by the collar and slammed him backward into the ground, where he fell hard, hit his head, and rolled, and then I hit him, I don’t know how many times, in the soft tissue of his face. I remember, here, at this moment, thinking about how surprised I was at how much human facial tissue gives, how soft it is, how unlike the punching bags and padded structures on which I’d spent so much time and so much knuckle. (So much so, that when you hit it, it is almost welcome, and you want to do it again because it doesn’t feel real.) I’d lived here ten years on my own and never been in a fight. But this was different. We were in a fight.

  The guy stood up, and he was much bigger than me. We stood there for a millisecond and looked at each other. (He was tall, about six feet, three inches, and lengthy, thin.) He outweighed me by about fifteen pounds, and we looked at each other, both of us giving away our poker faces at the idea of having to fight each other. I looked at him and I was scared, and though in my “tough guy” moments I would welcome the idea of fighting someone larger and with a better reach at any other time—I just didn’t want to do this with a bad knee.

  But it needed to be done. A look came over my face. I yelled “Fuck!” at what I had to do, made a face, and charged at him, bad knee and all. (It was the best thing to do, with an opponent
with a better reach. Get inside and hurt him structurally, limit his reach. Tackle him. I remember thinking I was going to wrap him up, use his height against him, pull his legs out from under him and exaggerate his own falling velocity to slap his body on the ground, headfirst if I could, my weight on top of his. The reserve inhibitors in my head were unlocked. I intended to kill him. I don’t know if that’s actionable, admitting it here. Because I finally got scared. This guy bested Dan, who has always bested me. That was the look he saw, the banzai charge of death. This isn’t bravado writing this, four or five years later: I intended to kill him, when I charged him. I think he saw that, in my face, and he ran. Thank fucking God that he did.)

  The other guys I had just fought started running toward their Chevrolet Blazer and then, suddenly, remarkably, so did he. They were gone. They all just turned and ran. It was all over in twenty-five seconds, it felt.

  If this had been Texas, if they had been fighters, we’d have been in real trouble.

  Dan was calling to me, at my feet. His face was covered in blood. This didn’t make sense to me. He was in total control of this thing. Personally, I did what I had to do in complete reluctance. My brother couldn’t get up. He was in shock. He was white, under the blood. His eyes were huge, pupils dilated completely.

  “Get up,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here, before the fucking cops show up.”

  “I can’t,” he screamed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My leg’s broken.”

  “No, you’ve just sprained something or another.”