Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez Page B

anyone responsible for the error.
    Dan and I did not know what to believe, so we believed the worst. It was safer that way.
    Writing this, it’s actually kind of funny, in a twisted sort of way, to think that Grampa survived the retreat at the Chosin Reservoir, in Korea, but he didn’t survive Gramma. She did what the Chinese Army could not do, in killing him, either accidentally or intentionally. That’s how tough Gramma was.
    Anyhow, the rest of the family, we weren’t doing so well in the early 1980s, after losing Grampa.
    Belts that had long gone out of fashion were tightened, gas-guzzling luxury cars had long lost any sense of luxury and were just guzzling gas, and we kids, well, we didn’t really know much about any of this because we were just kids involved with our own kid stuff, going to school and humiliating each other as best we could.
    When Christmas would swing around, it was always unexpected, like a relative getting out of prison. There was only one season in South Texas, and that was Hot, the Hot season, with a capital “H.” Christmas landed in the Hot season, as did Easter (boy, did Easter ever), as did Thanksgiving, my birthday, the Victory at the Alamo, summer, Charro Days, winter, and . . . come to think of it, so did my siblings’ birthdays, and well, most of the rest of the year. Every now and again it would rain, and the rain would be a bit cooler than usual, and then we knew it was winter. Winter, when it made an appearance, was usually just a succession of rainy mornings, which was a shame, really, because we had an odd tendency to overspend money on sweaters and fancy clothes meant for the cold, though it was cold in Brownsville for maybe one week out of every year.
    On these days, Dan and I were allowed to sleep in, and I would lie in bed and watch the water make shapes on the screened window by my bed, and it would sometimes sprinkle through and land on my face, or on the book I was reading. These quiet mornings were the best moments I had growing up, and eventually, would become the reason I moved to Seattle, to follow the rain, and find more of those moments.
    Moving away was also the reason I was convinced people in Texas didn’t age: There are no seasons there, so there’s no time to measure. Also, when I would go back to visit, everyone remained exactly the same, while I grew older. I aged about five years the first summer I spent in Seattle.
    But, in return, I finally understood all the hubbub around the death of fall and the rebirth in spring, and what all those heathen, Devil-worshiping vegan wiccans go on and on about, but I had yet to identify autumn.
    â€œIs this autumn?” I would ask people with whom I worked, in Seattle. How they loved educating the ex-pat Texan.
    â€œNo,” they’d say. “It’s late summer. If it goes on too long, then it’ll be an Indian summer, and then it’ll be autumn. After that, it’ll be fall.”
    â€œAh,” I’d say, pretending to understand. “But I thought there are only four seasons?”
    â€œThere are only four seasons,” they’d said. “Fall, winter, spring, summer, but autumn kinda falls in between summer and fall.”
    â€œHunh,” I said. “Like sometimes ‘y’ for the vowels.”
    Then they would look at me funny.
    Another reason I was seasonally deficient was because of the trucking business Dad owned while I was growing up, where he worked primarily for the Loop Farms, hauling cotton, grain, corn, oranges, grapefruit, sunflower seeds, and other things, and so our business—his business—had a different calendar, a different set of moons and suns, and we set our clocks by those, like Hindus and Hebrews. We never celebrated Halloween because we were busy hauling onions that day. We never celebrated Independence Day because, well, we were in Texas; that’s America’s Independence Day, not ours. And there was