Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (27 page)

In the years before, we had witnessed the great
despedida,
the deaths, all at once, of the grandmothers in our family. The elder Garcias, Uncle Frank, Pepa, Madrina, and the others, nearing their nineties now, were beginning to slow down. Even my uncles and aunts, and my parents, were beginning to show their age. On a recent morning, my father had opened one garage door and then promptly backed out the other.

The world we had known growing up in San Antonio, the family that had been so accustomed to living together, would eventually be dispersed, swallowed up, along with San Antonio itself, in the always deeper well of time. Along with all of my cousins, my generation was moving out farther into the worlds beyond Texas, further off from the source of the old Mexican time.

Uncle Beto’s
dicho
seemed right about how everything in this universe ends and is extinguished—except for the universe itself. An old Aztec song expresses the same sentiment,

 

 

But this wasn’t just an earthly predicament. Astrophysicists had just discovered the existence of black holes—infinite tears in the fabric of the cosmos that sucked matter through churning maws of death to we know not where. Things appeared and perished in the heavens, just as they appeared and perished on earth. Our vast galaxy is itself in perpetual motion, spiraling further outward into the chill vacuum that creation first exploded into. We have left our past—the journeys, marriages, and deaths along the way, all the bowls of
menudo—
scattered randomly across those vast arcs and loops, traced through millions of years, spun out across the void. This was our invisible momentum, always carrying us further from the sources of our stirring.

Uncle Lico died earlier that summer, but his story of our Mexican-ness had remained where he left it, gazing back into the abyss beyond 1770. Near the end of his life, he grew restless and urgent, as if he wanted to rage out of this world with all of his unanswered questions and unfinished family trees.

He had grown thinner, more serious. After thirty years of marriage, he left my aunt Mary and moved in with his wartime sweetheart, Amalia, from sixty years before. He drove his Mercury at two miles an hour over the lawns of his neighborhood on West Magnolia Street. On one evening, in front of his house, he brandished a pistol in one hand and a cigar in the other, before falling into a deep, diabetic sleep at his own front door.

After a couple of months of such raving, he returned home and my aunt took him back in. All he’d say about that time is that his damn diabetes prescriptions were all out of whack, and that his new doctor had things under control.

When he died, suddenly one afternoon, from heart failure, his children, all from an earlier marriage, took over the funeral plans and refused to allow a Catholic ceremony. Those cousins had all become born-again Christians, and they regarded the traditions of the Mexican
velorio
wake, with the long droning prayer chains of the rosary and the blessings and censing of the body, as little better than voodoo and pagan superstition.

They removed the San Judás Tadeo cards that people had brought from packages or letters Uncle Lico had sent them over the years. As each friend paid final respects, they laid the cards on his body in an act of homage. Only the card of his brother, Uncle Lauro, escaped detection, when one of my brothers placed it discreetly in an inside breast pocket of el Tío’s jacket.

As Uncle Lico lay in state in the funeral home chapel, a slick-haired Chicano minister from Laredo, dressed in a shiny black suit and a wide paisley tie, told us all that my uncle had secretly accepted Jesus as his personal savior. It had happened some weeks before in a private session with the minister.

“He found his peace then. He found his salvation and his ticket to everlasting life with our Lord.

“How many of you would now be prepared to do the same?”

All the old Mexicans shifted uncomfortably in their seats while my mother stared the ancient Mexican
mal ojo
at the ebullient minister from Laredo. Uncle Lico had told me that those born-agains were a bunch of crazy fanatics, and he said it used to drive him nuts how they ended every sentence with “Praise the Lord!” Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe, feeling his death coming very near, he too embraced a new god.

As we had carried his coffin to the waiting hearse, there was a crescendo of Nashville gospel music from the minister’s suitcase-sized boom box, as my cousins and their born-again confreres began singing “How Great Is His Name!” At the graveside, after the funeral, Anastasio, a friend of Uncle Lico’s who wore a brown straw porkpie hat like Uncle Lico’s, just shook his head and turned to make his way back to his car.

“Just ain’t the way he would’ve wanted to say goodbye.”

 

 

Uncle Beto looked up from the big pot of
menudo
he was stirring, and asked about news of Sabinas. The day before, there had been bad news from Mexico. I had meant to spend that last weekend there, but had missed my ride south after returning late from another trip. Alejo, the ranch foreman, and his wife, Felipa, had a new daughter. They already had six children, but only one son, and Alejo was worried he would grow up effeminate with only sisters for siblings. So they kept having more children—four more—and every time a daughter. A big baptism party is a mainstay of
Norteño
tradition. And the party that night at their small house in town was already well under way, with a mariachi trio singing on the patio, when a group of local toughs, several brothers among them, crashed the fiesta and began menacing some of the guests. Alejo and others ejected them with little resistance, but an hour later they returned, with machetes. In the argument and altercation that followed, Alejo shot three of them, all brothers, killing one, and then went into hiding. After turning himself in several days later, it would take more than a year before Alejo was released on a local judge’s finding of self-defense, but he and his family had to leave Coahuila for fear of a vendetta by the surviving brothers of the dead man.

Earlier that same summer, during the long ride out from the stay at the remote ranch of Dr. Mata, far up in the mountains, there had been an eerie scene that had seemed like an augur of these times to come. The horse I had ridden in on had gone lame after our fall on the night of the stormy ride in, so my cousin Chickee and I, with some discomfort, were sharing a horse on the way out. By that time in the journey we all were irritating each other with every word and eccentricity, and Chickee and I let the others ride well out ahead, keeping our own silence, riding quietly through high mountain pastures and low swooping valley trails. Just past midday, as we came into a tree-circled clearing surrounding an earthen water tank, I pulled the horse’s reins to halt as we saw a medium-sized speckled doe stepping out of the bush just ahead of us, staring impassively in our direction. For a moment, we stared back, speechless.

The old
vaquero
from the Mata ranch, Don Tiburcio, had complained ceaselessly during our entire stay about the fact that we had lost the meat we had brought in on the night of the storm. After leaving it covered with tarpaulins, we had returned to the piney vale the next day to find the burro safe, but the provisions already looted by vultures or mountain cats. According to Don Tiburcio, he hadn’t had any fresh meat in two months, just damn beans, potatoes, some scraps of dried
machacado
beef—and mite-infested tortillas. For all of his cantankerousness about this, the night before we left he still managed to make a delicious fresh milk pudding for us, with sweet cream and aromatic wild mint from the mountains.

But game animals had been scarce all that summer, even the usually abundant rabbits, which were common Coahuila ranch fare. Tiburcio said the recent floods had carried them all away, leaving him hungry, desperate, and crotchety. During those weeks, on a couple of occasions, we had spotted deer, ambling distractedly, far off across a bare valley or standing on a small brushy plateau along a distant bluff. Both times, Tiburcio had taken a long bead and then fired his ancient rifle, only to have the animals jump off into cover, before the bullet was halfway to its target.

The doe was standing motionless, less than twenty yards in front of us. It wouldn’t affect Chickee or me if we let the deer go. We would be heading for San Antonio in the next days. Abrán, Dr. Mata’s son, would soon go back to university in Monterrey. But Tiburcio would be well stocked with meat for weeks. I wasn’t much of a hunter. Out on Rancho Los Generales, we shot rabbits now and then, to cook in very spicy stews with potatoes and fresh chile piquín. In east Texas, under the tutelage of one of our cousins’ husbands, my brothers and I had hunted bullfrogs with shotguns and raccoons with .22s. But I had never hunted for deer, and I had never had such an animal in a rifle sight. The only weapon I had with me now was a low-power, collapsible backpacking rifle that was so light it felt as if it was made out of aluminum foil. It had to be screwed together, like a billiards cue stick. And it was buried deep in my backpack.

“Get it!” Chickee whispered from the rump of the horse where he was riding. “We should get it now, while we can! For Tiburcio!”

“It’ll run,” I replied, reaching behind me, down into the backpack, feeling for the parts of the rifle.

“It’s standing still. Get it while it’s standing still!”

I pulled out the detached butt and barrel of the rifle from my bag and carefully assembled it. With each turn, the threads let out a slow, high-pitch squeak that sounded like fingernails scratching on a blackboard, amplified by the silence of the wilderness around us. But the doe did not move, did not seem to even blink. Sitting in the saddle with Chickee holding the reins, I loaded a single .22 caliber bullet into the chamber and cocked the firing pin back to fire. At the edge of the tree shade ahead, the doe stood, staring at us, and the cool air was scented with sweetgrass, oregano, and pine.

I took aim for the animal’s heart, nestled just beneath the tuft of white fur on its breast, and when the shot pierced the air with a fiery crack, the echoes bounded off in all directions, scattering birds and sending snakes into their holes. We watched the bullet hit its mark, leaving a small red smear on the breast. But the deer did not fall, only taking a few steps forward to continue staring forward at us. The sharp metallic scent of the scorched gunpowder hung in the air around us.

Chickee and I were both taken aback, disappointed that the doe hadn’t run, but now the small wound my shot had made would no doubt eventually be fatal. I reloaded and took aim again. The deer looked back at us as if utterly resigned to its own sacrifice, as if there were some inexorable outcome to our meeting. The second shot hit again, this time in the shoulder and the animal flinched and steadied its step, but still did not fall or run. It began to feel as if we had been unknowingly enlisted into a strange ritual execution, with everyone involved following through on some unspoken
compromiso.
As I loaded the next bullet, it looked like a shiny, opalescent pearl before falling into the firing chamber.

It took three more shots before the doe finally weakened at its knees, and then leaned over and fell into a thicket of brush to one side. Abrán and Tiburcio, who had heard the shots, were standing nearby, waiting for the hunt to finish. Tiburcio let out a giddy whoop and rode out from a copse, preparing to field dress the quarry to take back to the ranch.

“¡Bien hecho, compañeritos, bien hecho!”
he shouted, trotting forward in a cloud of dust while the two of us were still quieted by the slow relay of shots I had just fired. We watched as Tiburcio quickly lashed the hind legs of the deer up onto the low branch of a tree and began to clean and skin it. He shouted praise for my feat of hunting and held back the neck to show the wounds, spaced like a perfect necklace.

I felt as if I had intruded into someone else’s sacrifice, knowing how close the
vaqueros
live to this land that I only visited during vacations. There was no remorse or guilt about taking a deer, especially when it meant Tiburcio eating meat after a long time without. I’d seen Alejo once torture a captured hawk that had been stealing eggs from the ranch henhouse for months, so deep had his personal enmity become for the predator bird. But even if my ancestors had once been of that world in north Mexico, I knew a part of that ranch life had ended for me. At the Rancho Los Generales, the cattle herd was gradually sold off and dwindled down to less than a hundred head. In the ten years that followed, a pageant of lackadaisical
vaqueros
let many of the fences and waterworks fall into disrepair, and the family from Sabinas and Texas didn’t visit much. With the news from Sabinas of the shootings at the baptism party, it seemed the life of the
ranchos
was ending everywhere.

Uncle Beto dropped handfuls of diced onions and chopped oregano into the boiling stew that had the rusty magenta color of dried chiles de arbol. Stepping away from the hot plate where he cooks his
menudo,
he began one of the flowery oratorical expositions he frequently delivers, based in part on the American citizenship exam he was forced to memorize over forty years ago.

“If, in order to please the people, for the party of the first part, and to guarantee again the principles on which this nation was at one time forefounded, then how can we not, now, being of sound mind,
alejamos de San Antonio,
and the nation on which it stands, saying goodbye to—tamales,
menudo, ranchitos
—so that we may then, perhaps, in the party of the second part, choose henceforth to go to
Inglaterra,
or England, as we sometimes call it, just as our forefathers recommended?”