Boy Kings of Texas (10 page)

Mom, I remember, was horrified at the implications, at the shame of having to send her virginal and royal daughters out to the fields. Plus, Dad's extended family out in California were very different from us, wild and frightening and . . . well, Californian. (Texas Mexicans and California Mexicans are very different from each other, like the Scottish and the Irish—fundamentally the same genetic code, but completely different in accent and habits.)

The Mimis, though, were undaunted. They did not understand the implications.

“Mimi, we're going to California!”

“Oh my God, Mimi! We're going to be ‘Valley Girls!'”

“Mimi, gag me with a spoon, Mimi!”

“Mimi, your roots are showing.”

We packed up Mom, the Mimis, Rex, and Syl in the beige 1980 Pontiac Bonneville, already an antique on its second engine and failing transmission, and they drove out of Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley, eventually took I-10 to Indio, California, and into the Coachella Valley where they would pick grapes for three months like Steinbeck's Okies, way back when. Dan and I were left seething with envy.

Although, the year after the Mimis went to California, I would take this ride as well and also ended up picking grapes for the summer, and I would realize that all my envy was utterly unfounded. That we had been “migrant workers” for that period didn't occur to me, or to anyone else. That label would never stick. Could never stick. We couldn't descend to that level. We just had to do it to help out Dad; that was all. Desperate circumstances calling for desperate measures and all that. This is actually one of the few positive lessons I learned from my father: Sometimes you need to do humiliating things for work, to get through bad times. And it actually taught me quite a bit, that summer I spent there.

When it was my turn to go to California and pick grapes, I was stuck with Dad a lot of the time, which I heavily resented, but in retrospect, I realize now that he taught me more during that summer than he had taught me in the thirteen or so years previous. In the deep early morning, when the vineyards were still damp with the morning dew, and the hordes of pickers were lining up and splitting into work groups and preparing for a difficult day, Dad held me back, had me blend in with him toward the back of whatever mob we were assigned.

“
Cálmate, cálmate
,” he'd say to me, when the whistle blew at five o'clock in the morning and everyone was off to work, one person on one side of the vine row, and his partner on the other. Every bunch was sure to get picked this way. Dad, instead, was asking me to stay back, slow down. Keep still.

I kept still. He went to his side of the row, and I started to clip the grapes. Slowly. Making sure not to lose a digit. I clipped the bunch, held it up in the morning light, looking for rotten grapes, and then artistically clipped those free. I was making a still-life. This kept me preoccupied and I didn't hear from Dad for a while, and my attention was suddenly seized by the family clipping away next to us. They were insane: clipping left and right, high and low, competitively throwing bunches into boxes and having their children cart the boxes to the front, where they'd be picked up, assessed, registered, and transported to the flatbed truck, where strong toughs were in charge of loading the back. They were filling up six, seven, eight boxes to my one. But mine was prettier.

Eventually, I looked through the vines on my row and saw that Dad had found himself a nice shady spot and had cozied himself up against a post, was taking a snooze, looking very much the picture of the Mexican-taking-a-siesta thing, but without the sombrero. Just a baseball cap and a mustache. So I slowed down, too.

Asking him about it later, he said, “What the hell was the point? Those other people are going to win that bonus for the most boxes because they had nothing else except for this, and we get paid the same anyway.”

Don't get me wrong: We would eventually get to work and make a notable showing of progress by the end of the day, but not until we were good and ready, when the sun had warmed up a little and we had had breakfast.

Anyhow, the Mimis' little excursion as migrant workers was quite different. When they were at their peak, the Mimis had been capable of creating a real sort of magic around them, enchanting both people and places, in such a way that you could be looking at the same dreary landscape as them, the same terrible and hopeless event, and while you might be miserable and bitter, they would be beaming, enthralled, and enthusiastically hopeful. And then, if you got near them, or were blessed enough to maybe talk to them, you would walk away feeling the same way they felt, too.

They were a gift to everyone who was lucky enough to get caught in their Anais Anais, the Mimis. They made all of us Americans.

But it was too much for even them, the reality of this trip. Sadly, I think it was childhood's end for the Mimis; the vineyards had somehow inverted their secret garden, and the low door in the wall had closed shut behind them.

The year previous, when they had made the first trip to California, the Mimis had indeed become Valley Girls: the hippest, cutest, best-dressed migrant workers of that year, and very likely for many years to come. I would imagine those migrant workers had had every quiet, onanistic nighttime wish come true, working alongside girls with movie-star looks, picking grapes at the vineyards.

The older Mimi (Marge) continued to dress like Jennifer Beals in
Flashdance
out in the fields, where the sun would sizzle any inch of exposed skin. She wore a spaghetti-strapped, red and white–striped Esprit top, white cotton shorts, and a matching headband with her red and white leather Nike tennis shoes, and took pictures of the vineyards and the workers with her Canon AE-1. Her headband kept a white division of skin on her forehead from tanning along with the rest of her face, and as a result, she was forced to wear headbands for a few months afterward, way after headbands were out of fashion.

Eventually, though, even she started dressing like the rest of the migrant workers, or else she would have died of heat stroke. There were no photos taken of that.

The younger Mimi (Mare) did not fare any better. Her vanity glasses with the fake lenses were scratched well beyond recovery, even blighting out her name etched in the gold cursive. Her roots grew out eventually, except this time, her hair turned a lighter brown as a result of the heat and the pesticides of the grape fields of Southern California.

The hard work went on all summer, and eventually it became bitter enough to breach even the walls of the Mimis' perfectly constructed fantasy, which had once withstood the ugly reality that had been screaming at the door of the Mimis' magic garden: their father's failures in keeping his family together. The wolf was now breaking through, with each snip of the clippers, and each box of grapes they had to fill, Mom and the Mimis. Oh, and Syl.

And so sadly, eventually even they were humiliated, and the delusion of wealth that had kept the family's idea of itself buoyant was deflated and left buried in a Californian vineyard, because when they returned to Brownsville—the Bonneville limping in on its second transmission—no one ever mentioned the Mimis again. They had been left behind in the grape fields, and it was Marge and Mare who returned in their place.

As it happened even Rex was finally able to break out of the fantasy of the Mimis. He found his own low door in the garden, before it disappeared.

He wasn't among the returning party, though we were left with enough fleas in the carpet and the vague smell of urine to remember him for many, many years after.

He died unexpectedly one night, when they were still in California. Mare found him first, awoken by her allergies, and stumbled across Rex's still body on the floor on her way to the bathroom.

“Hey, Marge, wake up,” she growled back to her sleeping sister. “Your dog's dead. It's four fifteen; time to go.”

In his dying spasms, Rex's deformed leg had rigored stiffly into a 90-degree angle away from his body in a final salute and “thank you,” I'm sure, for the hospitality of his final days. He was that kind of dog, always minding his manners. He was buried with the help of some unknown migrant in an unmarked grave out in the grape fields, but regally, in a quiet funeral fit for a dog king, a very long way from the Matamoros Bridge where he had started with the Mimis.

Chapter 11

Dan's First Fight

The summer he turned thirteen, Dan took up the role of his father's keeper. It was dusk, sometime after the Fourth of July, and we were still working at the grain fields, bringing in the final trailer load of the day and Dad's wiring was, as usual, faulty.

Every year we'd have to rebuild one or two of the thirty-five-foot trailers using cheap interlocking paneling intended for home construction as siding for the trailer, two-by-fours for support, and a chain and winch assembly to keep the integrity of the sides intact, across the iron bed. Into here would be poured cubic tons of grain and corn throughout the summer until school started again. We always worked through the Fourth of July, so it was never much of a holiday for us, and as an adult with work that was nonagriculturally based, I puzzled at the big deal others made of it.

Mom was also there some nights as the work wound down, as she would drive up with dinner sometimes and I loved it when she stayed, because she'd sit in the air-conditioned Bonneville and watch from a safe distance as the hopper would unload its fill into the trailer bed. Inside the car was the only place I could get away from the grain dust—this tiny, flaky allergen that would stick to you like itching powder, adhere to any exposed sweat-soaked flesh and irritate, just fucking irritate, you to insanity. Cornstarch and long sleeves were the only folksy preventive measures against this, but it was too hot to wear long sleeves. And the grain dust was invasive, viral, and I think responsible for all my allergies today.

Tradition had it that work ended at nightfall, but sometimes the Loops brothers—the farmers who contracted Dad to deliver their grain to the elevator—would insist on one or two more loads in the dark, using their “crazy white man big medicine,” this thing called “electricity.” Dad didn't like this because then it would be clearly evident that the lights on his trucks were on the blink, and besides, he'd usually go out after work when he was flush, and quite often, he had already been drinking during the later part of the day.

As night is falling this particular evening, he decides to do a preliminary check on the running lights down the length of the trailer and on its end. He's tired, has had a long day, and it is not likely over yet, so with some sense of resolve he lights it up and sure enough the lights blink, go out, blink back on, stay on, then go out, and then blink again. This means a short, and means he'll have to travel the length of the wiring with a flashlight for an exposed breach in the connections.

He takes one side of the trailer and Dan takes the other, just after one of the Loop boys, who is fourteen and one of Dan's friends, finishes loading the trailer and drives off in the dark to get refilled from the combine.

Dad then decides to pull out onto the state highway and onto the shoulder, the wisdom being that it might be too heavy to pull out of the muddy road with a full load. (I'm actually making that part up, in the retelling. I don't remember why he decided to do that.)

We are on a field immediately off of Highway 511, just a few miles from our house on Oklahoma Avenue, one of the more accessible and less remote farms that the Loop Brothers own. The dirt road intersects the state highway, and Mom and I are on the dirt road opposite, watching comfortably from the Bonneville as Dad pulls the trailer out and onto the pavement, and then lines it up on the shoulder, parallel to the field.

In the distance to the south, a tiny speck of light signals the rare oncoming car, heading in our direction. The trailer would be well off the road before there was any danger, it seemed. But the car, or truck as it turns out, is speeding and comes on very quickly, seems to slam on the brakes and skid to a halt, nearly ending in the ditch behind the trailer.

Neither Dad nor Dan hear any of this because they're back in search of the electrical short under the trailer, and the tractor is idling, but Mom and I watch this happen from the opposite side of the road, don't react or respond because we're not sure what it means, sitting safely in the Bonneville, listening to outlaw country music on the radio.

This is during my “Rambo” period, when I carried homemade knives with me everywhere I went and would incessantly whittle sticks into points, because I wasn't more creative. Mom wouldn't let me do that in the car, so I would just sit there with my blade
du jour
while we watched the combine doing its work, counting the turns on the rows of grain until that unending field was finished. I wasn't allowed to leave or go home, and if Dad needed me to help him, he'd signal, but until then, I could just sit in the car without inciting his ire. I was on call. I was eleven.

Mom and I watch as the guy driving the truck jams his transmission into park and throws open the driver side door, then plants his heavy frame onto the ground with both boots at once like someone intent on starting some shit. He's shortish, about five foot eight, and dressed in the Mexi-cowboy thing with his shirt opened down the front and wearing a cowboy hat. Pear-shaped, like our uncle Richard, like a fat Mexican bully with that thick, solid fat on his upper torso that could be shoved around to make his point.

He stomps up the length of the trailer and finds Dad, starts yelling at him. I can barely make out what he's saying, from the car. “What the fuck's your problem, you asshole?” he screams at Dad in Spanish.

Dad is not comprehending. He hasn't seen anything, nor heard anything, and this guy just appeared out of nowhere to him.

“You came out of that road right in front of me with no lights!” the guy yells. He's clearly drunk, and did not see the trailer pull out until the last minute. Granted, the lights may have been flickering.

Dad is in between the rear axle of the tractor, working on the male plug that goes into the electronics housing of the trailer. He's caught, defenseless, and the guy reaches up and punches Dad hard, right on the cheek. Dad gets hit, is surprised, but doesn't drop anything he has in his hands. He looks at the guy and yells back,
“¡Pendéjo!”
(“Asshole!”)

Out of nowhere, Dan, thirteen and big for his age, steps out from behind the guy and grabs him roughly by the shoulders, plants himself, and swings the short, fat guy around into the trailer, a concussion that makes the fat guy bounce back hard, and Dan gives him a three-punch combination to the head and chest, which makes the Mexi-cowboy think twice about what he wants to do next.

Dan and him square off, but the fat guy is stunned from the impact and has his hands down, while Dan has his fists up and wide, loud. Dan is clearly frightened. He's a thirteen-year-old boy. Our father, on the other hand, has not moved from his position or dropped the electronics in his hand, still not understanding he's in a fight, but he's at the very least in a position to the guy's back and rear so the guy doesn't know where the next threat is coming from when Leonard Loop comes down off the combine with a shovel and slaps it into the ground, making a loud cracking noise, like he's trying to separate fighting dogs.

The fat guy looks around him, spits out some blood from where Dan hit him and then turns and walks quickly back to his truck, gets in, and squeals off. The whole thing lasts about eight seconds.

Years later when we talk about this, even Dan admits that he would have been in trouble if the guy had more heart and fought back after that initial exchange. Dan was, after all, only thirteen.

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.