Chapter 1

Border Justice

They were children themselves, my mother and father, when they started having children in 1967 on the border of South Texas. Dad had just graduated from high school and in a panic asked my mother to marry him because he wanted to avoid the Vietnam War draft. Mom had eagerly agreed, in order to escape something even worse.

They had three girls in three successive summers, and were then happily surprised by a boy the following year. Having done her duty in producing a son for her husband, Mom was allowed some ten months off from incubating yet another child. Or maybe Dad had finally discovered condoms. Perhaps they’d bought a television. Whatever the reason, there was a full eighteen months before I was born, the fifth child and a second son, at least for a while.

Most of the kids had been born in August or September, roughly nine months after Thanksgiving, when the Dallas Cowboys traditionally played. Dad had been a Cowboys fan since their inception, and their winning streak in the late 1960s coincided with the conception of most of his children. The year I was next to be born, the Cowboys didn’t win, so I was conceived sometime during grain season, when he was maybe flush with cash and had come home drunk, which is possibly the reason I hate sports and am very fond of bread.

Collectively, we have vague and dreamlike memories from those early days of the burgeoning family, but one stands out for all of us. In it, Dad surprises us one afternoon by bringing home the smallest puppy we had ever seen. We stand around him and watch him feeding it with a bottle, and after a while he cups it in the palms of his hands and offers it to one of my sisters while the rest of us watched this and cooed enviously: There was no way she was going to keep this dog to herself, we had all subconsciously decided.

The puppy was black, with tiny brown feet, and as we had only recently been introduced to English when the oldest kids entered kindergarten, we were limited on possibilities when it came time to name it. The name “Blackie” caught on quickly, and we were immensely satisfied with our creativity at giving the dog a name in English.

We were big on names back then. We each went by a nom de guerre as kids. The eldest, Sylvia, was called la flaca, or “the skinny girl.” Margarita, the second oldest, was Tata, or Títa when we were feeling kinder to her, because as toddlers, Sylvia would look at her and yell, “Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta!”—in Spanish, of course.

The third girl, Maria de los Angeles, was called la guera, or “blondie,” in a way, because she was fair skinned and born with light hair. My older brother Daniel was called ¡Denny!, always with that exclamation point. Dan grew up startled. And I was, as Domingo Martinez, Jr., called Yuñior, eventually to be called “June,” when we made the switch to English.

I was a boy named “June.”

This must have been about 1976, maybe 1977. When we got him, Blackie, a Chihuahua blend mixed with something equally rodentian, was still just a few weeks old. I remember we tried our best as a family to be as good to the dog as possible, even though I was just four or five years old. The dog was a new project; the pack of children had never quite come together like that before, and we tried to outdo one another showing kindness to the new family pet.

The dog, on the other hand, very likely would have disagreed, because in a family with five children under nine years of age, and parents who were no more than children themselves, Blackie must have thought he was a victim of relentless torment. But such was the love we knew.

Margarita, or Marge, as she was eventually renamed, had previously insisted on a dog, as she developed an early fixation with lap dogs that would last her whole life. I think Mom gave in to her as a way of an apology after Dan threw a large D-sized battery at Marge while they were playing under the laundry shack. It split her forehead open. Dan threw the battery out of jealousy, as he felt Mom was giving Marge far too much attention. Dan has always been a bit too protective of the things he loved.

So we were all surprised when Dad brought the tiny puppy home in a blanket, coddled it as it fed adorably on a disproportionately gigantic bottle of warmed milk, and then ceremoniously handed him over to Marge, who murmured lovingly at the dog and quickly forgot the huge cut on her forehead, though I don’t believe Mom really ever did. Mom was also quite overprotective of her favorite things.

Meanwhile, Blackie began his adjustment to the loud, large family. He was molecular in size—perfect for children—and we loved him to death. We doted on him constantly: We fed him and pet him until he was so annoyed at our attention that he snapped at us, yapped at us.

We didn’t care.

Marge made sure Blackie slept with her at night on her thin, yellow cotton blanket. He would curl up in the ribbed crook between her knees and growled every time she moved, so she’d wake up with a stiff back but she would never tell anyone about it. I would force a bowl of leftovers at Blackie when everyone else was gone, lying on the floor on my stomach so I could see eye-to-eye with this black and chocolate rat with the cold nose. He’d get annoyed with me and snap at my hand and face with his vicious, tiny teeth, but I didn’t care, because we all loved him, this yappy puppy with the heart of a wolf.

Mare, the third oldest and youngest of the girls, had always been a bit sickly and asthmatic. She had been delivered at home by a midwife, and it had been a difficult birth. She had come through with a caul, and because her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, she was blue and had to be resuscitated. Now at age six, she had developed allergies to almost anything with dander, and as such, she wasn’t very close to the dog, but Mare and Marge were best friends, so Mare loved the dog by proxy. Sylvia, as the oldest, joined in on the care and feeding and tormenting of the dog, but from a distance. Syl had the burden of being the oldest child, and that took up most of her focus, pushing the uncertain and undetermined boundaries.

Dan took care of the dog, too. He put Blackie in a big basket and carried him around the front yard and through the pervasive junk field from Grampa’s trucking business that perpetually surrounded our house. There were bits and parts of derelict dump trucks, machinery, backhoes and axles, open barrels of spent oil and split tires that wound in a trail through the back of our property. Somehow, every morning, Dad and Grampa would manage to put eight ailing dump trucks and a front-end loader/backhoe to work, out of the dismal lot. Dan would carry the dog in the basket on a tour of this, the only path we knew as kids with absolute certainty.

As he walked by with the dog in the basket, the oily Mexican mechanics and drivers who worked for Grampa would look up from their greasy business and snicker at Dan, because they saw him as a developing pansy. A young man showing affection—any sort of affection, even to a puppy—was not macho, even at six. His tight shorts didn’t help, either. But hey: It was hot, and the kid grew fast.

Some months later we couldn’t find Blackie one morning. We happily orchestrated a search party like we’d seen in cartoons and then spent the better part of the morning searching loudly around our house and in the native, still-wild property across Oklahoma Avenue. It was Gramma who finally found him, ripped to shreds behind her pigsty, bleeding from his eyes and ears, his tail chewed off completely. Dad was the first to respond to Gramma’s screams, the first to cry out, which immediately gave those of us who weren’t already doing it the cue to wail uncontrollably. None of us knew the dog had meant so much even to him, and though it came as an unsettling surprise to us in our collective horror to see our father crying, we each continued to anguish independently at the foul murder of our beloved Blackie.

But then Dad became quiet, uncharacteristically composed, as he dug a hole behind the pigsty where we would bury Blackie with the minimum pathetic honor a family of children could summon.

None of us questioned who’d been responsible. We all knew who had done it, who had been the villains behind such terrible violence. It was the dog pack that lived with Elogio, Dad’s stepuncle, a few houses to our west. We all knew this without evidence or even discussion, and needed neither for our conclusion. Elogio’s dogs, about five or six of them, terrified the dusty length of Oklahoma Avenue.

Elogio and his four sons clearly felt that Dad and his family did not belong in the Rubio barrio, since Gramma had married into the barrio when Dad was already four years old, a child from another man. Elogio was our Grampa’s usurping younger brother, and he wanted control of the family trucking business that Grampa had built. As Grampa’s stepson, Dad challenged Elogio’s succession. It was a Mexican parody of Shakespeare, in the barrio, with sweat-soaked sombreros and antiquated dump trucks.

Elogio’s near-feral dogs made it unsafe for anyone to walk on that dirt road. They would charge full speed at cars driving by. They were fearless and dangerous. Somehow, Blackie had managed to escape our house, and the dogs found him and tore him to shreds.

“Lo reventáron,” Dad had said to my mother when she showed up, describing in Spanish what had happened to Blackie. “Reventáron” is a difficult word to translate into English, and the very thought of that word gave me anxiety attacks in my adolescence, when the word would bubble to the surface of my thinking, after this experience. It’s a combination of sensations, actually: It’s part ripping, part tearing, but with an elastic resistance, like pulling apart a rubbery, living membrane—an image like bleeding rubber. When I would remember the word later, I thought the same thing was going to happen to my mind.

And that was what these dogs had done to Blackie, from what Dad had seen. That was his postmortem assessment. Bit down on each end and split the tiny mutt apart.

Dad wrapped Blackie in a white blanket as we all stood around weeping, unsure of what to do. He lowered the tiny bundle into the hole while we surrounded him, crying all the while, and then he filled the grave with the coal-colored loam upon which Gramma’s land was built, having been carved out of a larger cornfield. He affixed the small cross Gramma had fashioned from dirty, soiled planks over the small grave, and then he clutched his crying wife and children to him as Gramma said some sort of fiery prayer calling for vengeance, in Jesus’s holy name.

Dad must have been about twenty-six then, watching his family cry like that. And it’s only now, really, that I understood why he cried as much as we did, even though he was not exactly what you would describe as an animal lover.

There was another message in this horrible pet murder, something more disquieting that attacked the very position of Dad’s family in this barrio, something I understand now, from this distance. I know now why he wept like that, for that dog, for us.

The Rubios had kept these dogs unfed, unloved, and hostile. Presumably it was to keep burglars away from their prototypical barrio home: a main house, built by farmhands many years before, with subsequent single-room constructions slapped together according to the needs of the coming-of-age males and their knocked-up wetback girlfriends. As such, the houses were consistently in varying stages of construction and deconstruction, because the boys never left home; they just brought their illegitimate children and unhappy wives along for the only ride they knew, the one that headed nowhere.

The dog pack resulted from the same sort of impulsive decisions and behavior: They’d bring a feral puppy home when some overwhelming sense of crypto-macho sentimentality overtook them, and then they would leave the dog disregarded and abandoned, much like the families they were creating.

And now, whether consciously or subconsciously, the dog pack had grown to a level of domination on that street, establishing their position in the pack order of this barrio.

And those dogs had attacked our dog. And it would have to be answered.

The next morning is one of the few memories I have of seeing my father as an adult, as a man, as he climbed somberly into his dump truck. It’s the best truck of the lot, oversize and red, fancy for the barrio business. His CB handle is “Too Tall,” but the other drivers have difficulty with English, so instead they call him tútol.

As he pulls out of the driveway, Mom stands in the door of our house and tells me to walk out to the road, to watch as my father drives off just after the school bus had picked up the rest of the kids earlier that morning. Dad pulls out onto Oklahoma Avenue, the dirt billowing behind him as he makes his way to the state road about a mile west, a route that would take him past the Rubios’ house. I stand in the road and watch as Dad’s dump truck rumbles off while the low morning sun beats down on the tailgate, making the red paint glow orange through the dust cloud.

As if on cue, the wild dogs run at the dump truck when he drives past the Rubios’ house, barking and snapping at the tires. Except this time my father slows his truck with menacing purpose and leans out of the driver’s side window with a .22-caliber revolver. I hear him shoot repeatedly, shoot every single dog as close to the head as he can. And as they all lay there dying, gray and brown lumps in the dusty early morning road, he continues his drive to work, and I don’t ever remember feeling so proud of my father again.