Free Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez Page A

by. She was armed with a machete, and a ten-year-old brother. She could do this, she thought to herself. She had enough time to cut down a sizeable branch and whack it into something resembling a club, handed the machete to Robé, who was terrified, and she set upon bludgeoning the cat, who was not cooperating. The ocelot fought back and got in a few scratches before Gramma brought the wood down on its head. A week later, when she came by to check the traps after the first ocelot, the traps had caught the mate, the female, and Gramma brought the club down on her as well and took down two ocelots, took two pelts, got fifty pesos for the male and thirty for the female (that one was damaged a bit more, because she put up more of a fight). Gramma fed her family for months. That was my grandmother. That was her reputation in South Texas.
    This morning, after the snakes, I believed everything I’d ever heard about her. Watching her go into a frenzied attack, when she felt threatened at a primitive, life-and-death level with another animal, watching her ego leave her and her reptile brain take over completely as she pummeled those rattlesnakes?
    Yeah, I was a believer.
    Gramma warns me to step back, since I am barefoot. The snakes could have lost their teeth in the grass or on the concrete walkway, she says, and I could still get stuck and poisoned. This frightens me, and I stay on the porch while she gets the hose and washes away the snake blood, and the parts. The mechanic cuts off both rattles and gives them to Gramma to keep as souvenirs. She eventually hangs them in her garage over her car. Rattlesnakes grow a section each year, and this pair was about nine years old, a year younger than me.
    I take the hose from her and continue to water down the area, feeling that it needed a good cleansing and that spraying water would cool off the morning anyway, and it reminds me of the time I was four and being stalked by a particularly dominating rooster, right here, in the same spot, near Gramma’s hen house. The rooster immediately saw me as a sissy and would attack me on sight, so that going from Gramma’s house to our house became something of a game of cat and mouse. My legs were riddled with small, bloody pecks from the fucking thing.
    I had told Gramma about this, but she didn’t believe me until the day the concrete slab was being poured. This was a sign of wealth in the barrio, that you had wealth enough to avoid mud, and I remember most of the day was spent in making a large singular concrete mold out of wood planks that led from the final step of her porch to the gate of the hen house.
    I had been helping gather nails, pouring water for the cement, patting it down—it was one single large pour that would break into pieces over the next ten years—when Gramma unexpectedly opened the chicken coop and suddenly the rooster ran out, flailing its bony wings and on the attack. I turned and screamed in the mostly cowardly, girly way possible, with this demon chicken swooping down behind me like an F-16, and I ran right past Gramma who, without missing a beat, grabbed the rooster by its neck and using the rooster’s own momentum swung it in a high wide arc that snapped its neck at the apex. We had a nice chicken soup for dinner that night, and while I felt quite avenged, I was also thoroughly humiliated.
    Don’t fuck with Mrs. Rubio, indeed.

Chapter 8
    Poo and Piglets
    Gramma was never at her cruelest as when she tried to be at her kindest.
    She was in the habit of buying a young pig at the start of every year, sometime in January, and raising it all year long, fattening it for the Christmas tamales.
    It wasn’t until I was older that I would come to appreciate the foresight involved in such a tradition, and I can say with a fair degree of certainty that this was about as far ahead as our planning for the future went—the Christmas tamales.
    One particular year, she came home with two piglets: