Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez Page A

four or five o’clock in the morning on the West Coast, about two hours after I got the call from Robert, Mom’s second husband, that Derek was in the hospital in Austin, with the back of his head crushed, that I felt that I didn’t have a choice, that I had to go to that door, to God’s door, and ring that doorbell after all this time. I had an image of myself standing in a downpour, my hat in my hand, in the middle of the night, asking to be let back in. God’s porch light turning on. Me swallowing hard, about to say something, when the door knob turns. . . .
    But I can’t get into that right now.

Chapter 9
    Christmas with Gramma
    Having grown up destitute on a dead Mexican farm during the Great Depression, Gramma had developed the survivor’s ability to draw profit from circumstances other people would find debilitating. If there had been a “Great Depression” in the 1930s, she hadn’t noticed it. She was depressed, sure; but what can you or anyone else do about it? You’re a starving twelve-year-old Mexican girl on a dying farm; you deal with it, find a way to cope. You don’t have a choice.
    This is how Gramma learned to live during her entire adolescence and into her first marriage: coping with circumstances others would find crushing, terminal.
    She was like a labor boss in this regard, able to secretly earn a fairly good living while presumably doing nothing, and maintaining a status in the barrio as the chief moneylender. She always dressed like a normal, widowed Mexican peasant woman, holding on for dear life to a bulging black imitation leather purse and she kept her gold Catholic idolatry to a minimum. She wouldn’t wear the cheap floral perfume popular in the barrio at that time that covered the garlic and cumin spice smells of a recently cooked, meat-heavy dish. And she would never wash away the blood red stains of a freshly slaughtered animal on her hands that truly —in Gramma’s cosmology—defined wealth.
    Jewelry, electronics, perfume, real estate, travel—none of this mattered to Gramma. It was hollow wealth. You can’t eat a diamond ring. You can’t eat a Ford. You can’t eat a trip to San Antonio. Gramma knew where she was going to keep her money: under her mattress, and in guns.
    Guns never depreciate on the border, in Texas.
    Everyone in the barrio owed her money, even me, since I was about twelve years old and wanted that Indiana Jones action figure Mom wouldn’t buy for me.
    It also helped that Gramma had the reprehensible habit of putting sub-rosa life insurance policies on all the males of the barrio, betting the odds that at some point, some bit of malfeasance would befall us and she’d be able to tuck away a nice bit of change, maybe kicking in a couple thousand to the grieving family for the funeral. By the mid-1980s, she’d cashed in on Grampa’s policy, after having “accidentally” dispatched him when he came home from that three-day binge he’d blindly spent at the home of his mistress. (In his defense—and knowing my Grampa—he probably thought he was actually at home with Gramma, since both women looked and screeched identically in pidgin Spanish; it was not outside the realm of possibility that he had, mistakenly, spent the three drunken days with the wrong woman and then, when he realized his mistake, wandered home to the appropriate house for his diabetes medicine, which Gramma is rumored to have switched on him, as punishment.)
    I should mention here that this was a conclusion most of the barrio had reached, and that after Grampa’s death, Gramma and Mom had taken what was left of Grampa’s diabetes medication back to his Mexican pharmacy and were told by the pharmacist that it wasn’t, in fact, diabetes medication, but some sort of vitamin. Mom swears Gramma’s reaction was honest when she yelled and cried and threatened to kill everyone in the pharmacy,