Free Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez Page B

a healthy robust one that was guaranteed an afternoon on a dirty plywood slaughtering table in eleven months, and then a tiny, defenseless pink piglet that had not even opened its eyes.
    Gramma’s older brother, Felípe, who’d sold her the larger piglet, had thrown in the smaller one for free, to sweeten the deal, so to speak, because—as the runt of the litter—it had no chance of surviving pigletness.
    She was excited when she got home, called me over to her huge fuckoff dark blue LTD before she had come to a complete stop and ground the transmission noisily into park.
    â€œ ¡Bien paca! ¡Bien míra ! ” she called to me like an excited teenager, bubbling with girlishness. (“Come here! Come look!”)
    I waddled over, a toddler freshly relieved of swaddles. Or maybe I was ten. I dunno. Memory overlaps over itself sometimes.
    She grabbed the squirming, struggling Christmas dinner under one arm, tucking him wriggling against her hip, and with her other hand, she gingerly pulled back a dirty cloth to reveal a sleeping, pink piglet. “ Mira, ” she cooed. “ ¡Tán pre cioso ! ” she continued in a moment of uncharacteristic tenderness. (“So precious!”)
    Gramma had decided that the runt would make a perfect pet for me, even though the chances of it dying in a day’s time were nearly certain. Actually, they were guaranteed.
    Still, she saw an opportunity to teach me a few Catholic lessons, without her realizing it superconsciously. The first was to expect crushing disappointment in life, the second was the absolute reliability of loss, and finally, the utter futility of faith.
    That might be a bit unfair, actually.
    I don’t really believe, now, that Gramma had intended for events to unfold in the manner that they did, but these incomprehensibly large and looming lessons were precisely what this piglet brought to my toddler’s door. Or ten year-old’s door.
    Gramma believed much more in the healing power of her faith and prayer and in odd adaptive measures mixed with traditional remedies, rather than in anything that might have been mistaken as “scientific” or “modern,” or, more sinister than that, “white.” (Gramma distrusted anything “white,” in fact. For a very long period after Dad and Mom were first married, Gramma referred to Mom as la vivora blanca, or “the white viper.”) In regard to trauma care, though, Gramma steadfastly ignored even basic medical assumptions; it was not unusual for her to treat our minor burns and scrapes with toothpaste (it was the “cooling” power of toothpaste that helped you heal). And once, when the skin had burned off my right hand in a natural-gas explosion while trying to light her water heater, she said a quick prayer to Jesus and then halved a tomato and placed it splat on the back of my hand, which was now missing the top two layers of skin. I nearly punched her from the agony. (As she got older, someone once told her that WD-40 was good for arthritic pain, in her joints. She told me this one Sunday afternoon, on my rare calls home when I could muster enough Spanish to communicate with her. I responded incredulously: “What are you, a robot?”
    But back to the piglet.
    Gramma gave me a crate and an old blanket for my new pet, even made room for it in a corner of an old room we called la oficína (“the office”), which was mostly used to warehouse bits and parts of the trucks, and a checkbook.
    She folded the blanket so that the piglet was kept overheated in the sweltering room and we carved a corner out of the mess and settled the piglet down. She gave me a baby bottle full of milk from the refrigerator and showed me how to warm it up, hold it to the tiny snout, and wait for the animal’s instincts to kick in. They never did.
    His eyes never opened, and really the only way I knew it was still alive was because it was