"The Boy Kings of Texas" by Domingo Martinez
This story from our archives is featured in Epiphany’s My Last White Boyfriend anthology, available now for sale from Ristretto Books, which collects the last 20 years of Epiphany’s greatest prose hits.
Christmas with Gramma
Having grown up destitute during the Great Depression, Gramma had developed the survivor’s ability to draw profit from circumstances other people would find debilitating. She was depressed, sure; but what could she 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 though presumably doing nothing, meanwhile maintaining a status in the barrio as the chief moneylender. She always dressed like a regular widowed Mexican peasant woman, clutching her 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, meant to cover the garlic and cumin smells of meat-heavy cookery. And she would never wash away the bloodstains of a freshly slaughtered animal on her hands, which in Gramma’s cosmology truly 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 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-’80s, 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, he probably thought he was actually at home with Gramma, since both women looked alike and screeched identically in pidgin Spanish; it was not outside the realm of possibility that he had 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 promptly switched on him with Tylenol, as punishment, which would send him into a very public and very diabetic coma and then. . . would send him elsewhere.)
She had also cashed in on her brother-in-law’s policy: Lupe, the neighborhood pederast, who had died of a protracted and horribly painful (and well-deserved) stomach cancer.
So, with these two insurance policies, combined with Grampa’s benefits as a Korean War veteran, Gramma was set well into the 1990s. It’s funny to think that Grampa survived the retreat at the Chosin Reservoir but didn’t survive Gramma. She did what the Chinese Army could not do. That’s how tough Gramma was.
Anyhow, the rest of the family, we weren’t doing so well.
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 the Hot season, with a capital H. Christmas landed in the Hot season, as did Easter (and how), not to mention Thanksgiving, my birthday, the Victory at the Alamo, Charro Days . . . come to think of it, so did my siblings’ birthdays, and most of the rest of the year. 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 a week out of every year.
On these days, my brother Dan and I were allowed to sleep in, and I would lie in bed and watch the water making 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, and 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-worshipping vegan Wiccans go on and on about, but I had yet to identify autumn.
“Is this autumn?” I would ask people I worked with in Seattle. How they loved educating the expat Texan.
“No,” 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.”
“Ah,” I’d say, pretending to understand. “But I thought there were only four seasons.”
“There are only four seasons,” they’d said. “Fall, winter, spring, summer, but autumn kinda falls in between summer and fall.”
“Hunh,” 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. He worked primarily for the Loops 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 squash and onions that day. We never celebrated Independence Day, because we were in Texas; that’s America’s Independence Day, not ours. And there was sorghum to haul on that day.
But you can’t keep the promise of Christmas from anyone. Even Dan and I—forced labor that we were—had been allowed to look forward to Christmas, like all good Catholic boys should, even the ones with the really good 1970’s porn hidden in Gramma’s bathroom, under the loose plywood in the towel drawer.
Gramma, though, Gramma had her own rules around Christmas, made it pay out like a slot machine on tilt. See, Gramma had a year-long con involving a pig, which culminated on Christmas Day. It was an easy con, made even more sinister because of how transparently she went about it.
Every February or March, she’d buy a piglet. She’d pay about ten dollars for the healthiest of the litter from her brother Felipe, and she’d make a big noise about how damnably cute the thing was, and Dan and I would get suckered into playing with it, feeding it with a bottle of milk and holding it like it was a baby, and we’d take care of it while Gramma made a theatrical attempt at building a pigsty from the dried-up and bacterially infested pen that had only recently been vacated by the previous pig. She’d make a pathetic show of throwing plywood and rotten 2x4s around for a few minutes and then she’d stop, pant breathily and clutch at her chest, at a spot where her heart would have been, if she had one, and that was our cue to step in and take over. Gramma had a crowbar made out of passive-aggression that she would bring down on our heads if she couldn’t get it under our hearts, for leverage.
You see, Dan and I are dumb; we have no sense of history, not even our own immediate history. We fall for this trick for eight, maybe ten years in a row. Somehow, we never put it together: it was up we go and off we went whenever she’d do this, finishing any project Gramma had to only pretend to start. And it worked every single time, on anything Gramma wanted done.
So Dan and I finish building the pigsty with whatever rotted lumber is at our disposal, and we let the pig loose inside, and then it becomes our pig, and we imitate Gramma imitating the pig and call it, “Coche! Coche! Coche!” I didn’t know if that was an affectionate name for the pig—every pig—or if Gramma actually spoke “pig,” the language somehow kept intact from her Aztecan bloodline. But, miraculously, the damned pig would respond every time she called it, like it understood her, and she’d pour out a five-gallon bucket of swill, never really bothering to hit the trough that Dan and I had built for it.
The swill Gramma would bring home was made out of leftovers she’d purchase from a local tortilleria, effluvium from the tortilla-making business, made up of dough and grease and lard and other sundry proteinaceous crap that she bought on a weekly arrangement, and when she poured it over the side of the sty, the swill would spill out and blend into the mud and the pig’s own filth, and the coche would stick its snout into the mess and suck and chew and bite, and, well, it was actually very charming. Pigs are really damned cute, even when they’re wallowing in their own filth. But don’t be fooled: they’ll take your hand right off and eat it calmly while looking at you with that dead shark eye stare of theirs.
This is why I have no compunction in eating a ham sandwich.
Anyhow, so that was our pet.
And Gramma would con us into taking care of it all year round, going to the torterilla, bringing back the swill in an open five-gallon bucket that would slop and spill in her car, and the pig would turn into a hog that would just explode in size, so that come December, our two-pound piglet was nightmarishly big, big enough to eat an average person in a few minutes. In short, we’d grow a monster in Gramma’s back yard and consider it a pet, lovingly calling it “coche.”
Then Christmas would come, and Gramma would kill it, right in front of us, as we all stood watching.
Back then, in the 1980s, she would do it herself—take the single-shot .22 caliber rifle my Grampa left behind and put a small bullet dead center in the pig’s forehead. It got to where I could tell, from a very early age, when she was going to do it. The pig, a rope around its neck, would be led into a garage by two or three strong Mexican men, cousins and uncles, and it would be made to stand next to a fire that had been going all morning, with a blackened tin tub set upon it with water boiling, like a witches’ cauldron, and the pig would somehow know its ticket was up and it would pull this way and that way, its eyes alive like they’d never been before, and then Gramma says “Coche! Coche! Coche!” and when the pig looks, that’s when Gramma would pull the trigger, sometimes not even looking down the sights, and the rifle would jump, and the pig would first fall straight down onto its haunches, then heavily onto its side, and everyone would be still for a moment.
Then it was time to party. The pig was hoisted onto a wobbly handmade table of scrounged 2x4s and plywood, mostly from its own sty and usually constructed that very morning, and the boiling water was poured over the carcass by the women, like they were dressing a body for burial. The boiling water would make the hair and outer skin easier to shave, and they’d take to it with sharpened knives, and the hair from our year’s coche would come off easily, in a weird, satisfying scrape, and then they’d move the pig to the end of the table so that its head would dangle off the end, and then they’d cut its throat so that a huge bowl would catch as much blood as possible, and they’d let it drain at length, then remove the head altogether with a large butcher’s knife, while kicking at the dogs who’d sneak underfoot attempting to lick up any blood spills.
And there was one ceremonial moment, every Christmas, that made Dan and me feel very special, singled out, though it might—retelling it here—seem totally twisted. There’s this particular cut of pork—and I have no idea where exactly it is, anatomically, except that it’s close to the heart—that was considered the finest and most delicate cut of meat on a pig, and early in the reduction, that part was cut out, put on wooden stakes cut from tree branches, and cooked right there in the fire, and then handed to me and Dan and Dad and Gramma.
Anyhow, they called it “lomo,” and I have never tasted anything like it. The closest thing I can compare it to is foie gras. It was barbarically rich, crisped on the outside and delicately soft, melting with blood, on the inside.
***
Gramma had everyone in the barrio working for her on Christmas, and conned them all into thinking it was a holiday. Her people would show up at six in the morning for the preparations of the slaughter, and then they’d really get to work, transforming the animal into negotiable goods. People would arrive in our driveway all day long and buy fresh cuts of pork for their Christmas dinner. It was tradition.
Gramma must have cleared a thousand dollars that day, from her ten-dollar piglet. Which is a phenomenal amount, when you consider the income for an average family at the time in Brownsville was roughly
$10,000 a year.
Our own family—and I should mention here that my mother, who wasn’t a native of the barrio and found all this very disturbing, well, she kept her daughters from Gramma as much as possible. Her sons were a different story. Me and Dan: we were Dad’s property, so we could go as injun as necessary.
But for Christmas? We went all out, after the slaughter was done.
We were all under Gramma’s dominion.
By mid-afternoon, it would have taken a forensics team to determine that there had been a complete pig in Gramma’s garage earlier that morning. The skin and fat had been boiled in oil to make chicharonnes, the head baked whole in tinfoil and dismantled to make barbacoa, the hooves thrown to the hounds, the blood boiled down into a fantastic gravy, the better cuts of proper meat auctioned off, the globular organs made into sweetmeats, and the intestines boiled down into tripe. Total reduction.
By three in the afternoon, the drunk cousins and uncles had all made off with hefty portions of the meat for their own families’ dinner, and the women would either stick around to help make the sauces and meats and beans for the tamales or they would go off to their own families for the afternoon, but this is when the second shift would begin for the rest of us.
In preparation for the slaughter, Gramma had already purchased a huge vat of masa, or corn dough, from the torterillas that she’d been in cahoots with all year long to fatten up the coche, and she’d also bought plenty of the corn husks that were used to bake the tamales and were freely available anywhere in the endless geometry of farms that surrounded us, but Gramma—who had a status to uphold in the barrio—had them store-bought. If she could have collected the freerange corn husks for free—or had us do it—I’m sure Gramma would have.
Anyhow, we kids did the actual rolling. We were set up in the back yard next to the now vacant pigsty in the open yard and were set to the task: one kid would grab a good handful of dough, roll it into a ball, and put it down. Then repeat ad nauseam.
The next kid would pick up that ball of dough, plop it into the center of a store-bought corn husk they were holding in their left hand, and then smooth out the dough onto the corn husk with the rounded back part of a spoon, and lay it next to Gramma. Then repeat ad nauseam.
The kid next to her would then pick up the corn husk, with the dough already spread on it, and add whatever ingredient was next, or was plentiful. We normally had two to choose from: refried beans, or a meat catastrophe with raisins that had been made from the minced brains, eyes, lips, and cheeks of the pig. Delicious. Better yet: the person who found the bullet in the dicing of the brain? That person got a shot of Bacardi as a reward.
Anyhow, so this was how Christmas afternoon went: an endless procession of dough, ball, smooth, beans or meat, fold, and then pile.
We’d make a pyramid of a dozen, then the kid at the end would be charged with packaging the dozen tamales in aluminum foil and they would be carted off by one of the old crones who would be in charge of the fire and the tin washtub and the steaming. These were Gramma’s female cousins or neighbors. All day long, they would huddle around a tin washtub, blackened by the smoke of an open fire, and they’d leave a small level of water readily at the boil on the bottom quarter of the washtub, and a sort of grill would be set above the waterline, and the tamales would be placed there in dozens and left to steam for an hour, and if the Catholic church had seen this, they would have burned us all at the stake, because it looked like textbook witchcraft.
This was the tamale-manufacturing business. Eventually I saw through Gramma’s scheme and realized the weak point in her operation: she had only a limited amount of masa, the dough. That was her dearest investment in this. When I realized this, I developed a cunning plan of my own to get this operation in arrears by 6 P.M., because there were some Star Wars action figures and play sets that needed tending to, even if I owed Gramma another fifty bucks with a three-point vig due by the following Saturday or she would have someone break my knees.
So, when no one was looking, I started throwing every second dough ball over my shoulder onto the roof of her house. Every fifth or so dough ball would go to the dogs, already happily stuffed with the viscera that happened to spill off the autopsy table, but more than happy to eat until they burst.
No one would notice as I’d roll another clump and then toss it high over my shoulder, where it would land on the tarred roof, blistering because the sun was out in full force, since it was, you know, Christmas Day. It kind of made her whole house into one giant tamale.
See, we couldn’t possibly eat a third of the tamales that day would generate, even if we froze them. We would have been eating tamales until June. The rest would be sold at about $7 to $10 a dozen, and it would be Gramma who kept the money. So we kids couldn’t care less: the dough had to go. Eventually, when my brother and sisters realized what I was doing, they laughed and started participating, too.
So up on the roof the masa went, and it was all going according to plan until the crows came and started swarming around Gramma’s roof. But by then we were very nearly done, and she would yell, “¡Yunior! Traeme la veintedos!”
A true border widow, she was drunkenly calling out for a rifle, Grampa’s old .22 single shot. And as a Texan, I love the sound of gunplay, so I dropped what I was doing and brought her Grampa’s rifle, and she shot at the crows until they flew away, swarmed, and returned unharmed, because Gramma was kinda drunk by this time, and so I shot and killed a few of them, to make her feel better, and she never found out that I had been the one to bring the crows in the first place.
And besides, I wanted to be on her good side while she was drunk and armed.
Domingo Martinez is the New York Times Best Selling author of The Boy Kings of Texas and was a finalist for The National Book Award in 2012. The Boy Kings of Texas is a Gold Medal Winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award, a Non-Fiction Finalist for The Washington State Book Awards, and was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize.
