Ellissa Brewster
About Ellissa Brewster
Although she was raised on Long Island, New York , Ellissa Brewster has been a Texan most of her adult life and has enjoyed the good Corpus Christi life since 2006. She has worked as an organic farmer, a Montessori teacher, a journalist, a writing tutor and an ESL tutor. Most of her writing experience has been based on personal interviews related to public relations. Her work has been published in Tierra Grande magazine, The Business Journal of Corpus Christi, and Inspire, Coastal Bend Magazine. Ellissa’s hobbies include bird watching, gardening, book club, registering voters, and writing about her family’s history.
A Newsboy’s Christmas Memory as told to Ellissa Brewster
When you are a kid, things just are the way they are. You don’t have the perspective to judge if things should be different, nor do you know at the time which experiences are so unique that you will remember them 60 years later.
I grew up in Corpus Christi as a second generation Mexican American. I realize now that my family did not have as much as some people did, but we were happy. I did not feel as if we were suffering—life was the way it was. Sometimes I overheard my parents worrying over the bills. Sometimes we had a car; sometimes we didn’t.
I was the oldest boy in a family of eight. I worked at my father’s shoe-repair shop after school and on Saturdays. I helped out: took out old stitches from shoes, removed heels, cleaned the machines, swept, got change, ran errands, things like that. I was six when I started. It was a job. It was expected.
But on some Saturdays, I got a break to go to the movies with my friend Jerry. I earned the money for the movies from shining shoes with my shoeshine box. On the side, I had painted my slogan, “Best Shine.” In the summers or on breaks from school, I carried my shoeshine box to the local Wee Mart convenience store. There I shined shoes for men who sat on bar stools drinking beer in the “bar” section of the store. I charged 15 cents a shine (5 cents more than most boys) and that money was mine to keep or spend.
From my father’s shop, Jerry and I walked to the less-expensive movie houses, such as the Grande or the Amusu, which showed second-run American movies in English, or the Melba, which had Mexican movies in Spanish. Admission was 15 cents at these theaters, and we usually had a nickel for candy or a drink.
When I was 12, I got a new job as a paperboy. Before school, my dad would drive me on the route. We rolled down the passenger-side window, and I balanced on the window ledge with my legs inside the car. I hurled rolled-up Caller newspapers into yards, alternating over the car roof and to the side. In the afternoons, I tossed the Times from my bike. The rolled-up newspapers had enough weight to toss easily, but the Saturday Evening Times was so thin that my brother and I had to fold them into triangles—then they would whirl through the air like flying saucers.
I gave the money I earned to my parents to help with the family’s expenses. A couple of times, when my parents could not make the $60 mortgage payment on our home, they used my paperboy money.
On my first day of training for the paper route, the neighborhood manager took me along with some experienced paperboys on a tour of the neighborhood. I was the only Hispanic in the group. The boys were saying, “The Mexicans [customers] are no good, they don’t pay.” However, my manager Bill Carter was kind. He told the kids not to judge people like that. Before that day, I had not thought much about Mexicans being different from other people in a negative way. It was more a puzzle than an insult to me.
One year, I got a Big Box of Games, which included checkers, steeplechase, Parchisi, Chinese checkers, and other card and board games. However, my big present came from a man named Joe Simon, who owned the Nueces Furniture Store on Chapparal St. Now this was big.
I got an invitation to attend dinner on Christmas Day at the Robert Driscoll Hotel. All the paperboys in town received invitations, and our managers encouraged us to attend. Joe Simon was footing the bill. Before noon, my father drove me and my brother, who was also a paperboy, to the Robert Driscoll Hotel. I will never forget the distinct aroma and the luxuriousness of this place. We walked into the plush lobby with its stuffed wine-colored chairs and thick embossed wine-colored carpet, and we were dazzled. The aroma of coffee and a turkey dinner greeted us. Christmas music was playing. A sign told us where to go, “Paperboys: Terrace Room.”
The entrance to the Terrace Room was to the right of the lobby. The room was huge with a stage and many tables covered with linen tablecloths and the biggest, most splendid Christmas tree I had ever seen. There must have been 300 excited paperboys in that room. The room filled with boys’ voices and the sounds of those on the stage. My brother and I sat where we felt most comfortable, with the other Hispanic boys. We had a good view of the stage from our table.
I could not believe it. I had heard of the Galvans, renowned local musicians, and Bobby Galvan had even visited our school. However, I did not expect to see Ralph Galvan, the most famous Galvan Brother, playing songs like “White Christmas,” and other Christmas favorites to a group of paperboys on Christmas Day. Waiters brought us plates of food—a complete turkey dinner.
When we were finished eating, Joe Simon gave a speech. He told us about how when he was six years old, he had sold newspapers on a downtown corner in St. Joseph, Missouri. He had to be tough to defend his corner from other newsies and to bear the cold on snowy days. Like me, he knew what it was to take on responsibility as a boy. He said he made a vow in 1906 when he attended a traditional Christmas dinner that a local restaurateur sponsored for newsboys. “If I ever have a chance, I’m going to give such a party for kids,” he promised.
He kept his promise after he started his furniture store in Corpus Christi in 1925. That year and every year after, for more than 30 years, he hosted a party and celebrated Christmas Day with Corpus Christi newsboys. After his speech, Joe Simon went around to the tables and shook all of our hands. He was a big, bald man with a persistent, genuine smile.
We got presents from the publishers of the Caller and Times newspapers. I do not remember the presents except for one: The United Artists Book of Happiness. I had heard of it because it had been advertised on the KEYS radio program. It was a slender coupon book with balloons and stars on the cover. Inside were ten $1 coupons.
This special book allowed you to go to movie theaters owned by United Artists. My brother and I had never been to such expensive theaters (where admission was 65 cents). For us to be able to go to the Ritz or the Centre was something special.
Right after the party at the Driscoll, my brother and I walked through the pedestrian tunnel that led from the bluff to downtown and immediately redeemed some of those coupons. We saw Rio Bravo, a western with John Wayne, Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin. We used some of the coupons to make pigs of ourselves at the snack bar, wasting coupons on too much popcorn and orange soda.
After the show, my brother and I waited by the newsstand on the corner feeling nauseated from all the snacks. My father drove up in his clunker of a car, we got in. My most memorable Christmas was over.
Elizabeth Flores
About Elizabeth Flores
Elizabeth N. Flores taught government/political science for 43 years at Del Mar College. More about Elizabeth Flores at the end of this section.
Tribute
I wish I knew the boy's name.
He paid tribute to my dad,
a man I'm sure he didn't know,
as we left St. Joseph’s Church on
19th Street and headed to Holy Cross Cemetery.
The boy looked about ten.
He was sitting on the porch of a
house that also served as a
beauty shop for this
Westside neighborhood
and former neighbors
who now lived far and wide
on Corpus Christi’s Southside.
He was playing checkers
with an old man, probably his grandpa.
The boy looked up from the checkerboard
as our funeral procession passed, removed
his baseball cap, and ever so slightly
bowed his head.
I think back to the rituals at the church and the
cemetery that helped us pay tribute to a man
whose life was full and heart so big.
The little boy who effortlessly lay his head bare with
a willful nod brought the most comfort to my sad heart.
In my mind he joined the procession, and his presence
gave me the resolve to keep going, follow the road,
stay on 19th Street until we reached
that place where we lay the man down
to enjoy his final peaceful rest.
My Brother the Altar Boy
My brother was an altar boy for three years.
Until he wanted more time for baseball.
He was good at his altar duties.
He received a certificate for
“Outstanding Altar Boy” two years in a row.
I watched him at Mass and he didn’t fidget
or laugh or look bored during the priest’s
sermon. Or ring the bell too loudly.
He definitely deserved that award.
Grandma hoped my brother would become a priest.
She was of a generation that believed a priest in the
family brought a wide circle of blessings to all.
She prayed even harder when our family left the
safe and familiar environs of the Mexican American Westside
of Corpus Christi for that “noisy” Southside, as she called it.
But it was not to be. Maybe my brother would be a
deacon then, she told Mom.
One Saturday morning my brother told me he had a surprise
in his bedroom closet he wanted to show me. And that
I had to promise not to tell anyone about it. This both
scared and pleased me.
To have to promise to keep a secret—what if I wanted
to tell Mom and Dad? But I was honored that he would
share a secret with me. He was 14 and I was 10. He
must think I’m old enough to handle secrets.
We waited until Mom and Dad left to go to H-E-B. We had
reached an age when going to the grocery store was boring,
and we could persuade our parents we wouldn’t burn down
the house, or let strangers in, or injure ourselves in their absence.
Then my brother led me to his closet. He told me to
close my eyes and stretch out both hands. I did what
I was told.
I accepted what he placed in my hands and then opened
my eyes. I was holding two Holy Communion hosts.
The Holy Eucharist!
I wanted to drop the hosts, but I didn’t
dare. I kept my arms outstretched.
“Souvenirs,” my brother said with a proud smile.
“Are we going to play Mass?” I asked my brother.
“Sure, we can do that,” he said. “But first, I’ve got
to get some batting practice in before the game tonight.
Wanna help me?”
“Sure, I can do that,” I replied, as I placed the hosts
in my pocket, and followed my brother to the backyard
About Elizabeth Flores
Elizabeth N. Flores taught government/political science for 43 years at Del Mar College and was the college’s first Mexican American Studies Program Coordinator. Flores earned an MA in Political Science at the University of Michigan and a BA in Political Science at St. Mary’s University. She was awarded the LULAC Council 1 Educator of the Year Award (2014) and the Del Mar College Dr. Aileen Creighton Award for Teaching Excellence (2013). Flores retired from teaching in 2022. Writing poetry about family, memory and culture is her current area of interest.
Emma Helene Guerra
About Emma Helene Guerra
Emma Helene Guerra grew up in the Rio Grande Valley. She works daily on her writing to promote the representation for women, the Hispanic community, and the LGBTQ+ community.
Tooth Decay
I can feel my teeth rotting inside my mouth.
Brown-grey cavities jutting out in mangled bone
piercing my gums.
My tongue licking up the bitter taste of blood mixed
with saliva, my spit turning a burnt orange against the
porcelain sinkstained with mold and hair dye in shades
of black and blue.
A bruise on the delicate skin of emotional stability.
I remember how jealous I was of my younger
brother who left each dentist appointment with a
clean record, not racking up hefty bills for
pulled teeth and silver molars. His brush
remaining dry. Nightmares consumed my mind
of each delicate tooth falling from its spot,
my tiny pink hands unable to hold it all.
Every word equaled another sacrifice
as I pay close attention to not swallow one,
it would cut up my insides and I would simply
die. Soon enough, the pile would overflow
falling
down
slowly
into the black void of no return
I
wanted
help
from the thoughts I could not control, and the
harm being inflicted upon myself. All by myself,
but I did not want to die. Letting go was not an
option like the strangers online told me it was.
Despite the warning sign, physical and verbal,
my issues often went ignored and forgotten.
Brushed under the tethered rug of academic
achievement. Perfection was the unsaid bar I had
expected myself to reach, a bar that a child’s
hands cannot touch. My brother did not feel the
need to reach that same height. I wonder if my
parents just heard his screams better
since they did not sound like mine.
I remember how jealous I was of my younger brother.
Small Town Growth
The house I lived in was different than the other houses across
two main streets in my small town.
My House
One story, I watched its development from foundation to completion
in the memories of my five-year-old mind.
Plants overgrowing
in the backyard my brother and I grew up in.
The dirt
turning to mud while water sloshed out of a faded green hose.
It stuck everywhere just below the knees,
a cool relief to the sweltering days of early spring.
The garden itself never producing more than tomatoes and jalapenos,
the right ingredients for pico de gallo.
The front yard
lingers with Christmas lights hanging fresh on a Bird of Paradise tree
beginning to wake up after a bitter cold snap
36-95 degrees in a matter of hours.
The house across the main road on the right
established with a dripping AC clinging out the side of a window.
Maps labeling this area as a
Colonia.
I see it as history.
Two cars in the driveway,
one on the street.
Three generations of a family sharing a single bathroom.
Traditional charm in a different sense.
Chipped teal blue covers the wooden shingles
still as vibrant as the first coat in the 80’s.
Young children play soccer with one another behind a rusted chain-link fence,
dust devils emerging from their steps.
Grandmother’s watchful eye keeping them safe
from themselves and other.
The light on the porch always on, humming a soft yellow hue
only broken up by the tapping of a moth hitting its bulb.
The house across the main road on the left
brings a wave of new development as my small town becomes a city.
Polished stone exterior covering both stories,
a miniature mansion in the making.
Concrete being poured over the soil fertile enough
to hold the livelihood of an orange orchard.
16 years of that memory gone within a week.
Before the houses
Came towering concrete fences in an earthy pink paint,
keeping the secret of development inside for only those who can afford it.
The children in surrounding neighborhoods now excited
for this upcoming Halloween in hopes of the “good candy”.
They see it as a positive for now.
Layers of fluorescent green grass clutters each yard.
Beauty, and sophistication.
A lawyer, businessman, major could live here.
How unassuming,
the Elote man doesn’t even drive by them.
But such is growth.
The house I lived in was different than the other houses across
two main streets in my small town.
The memories, though, stay the same.
Counting Coins in the Dark
all we seem to know
is how to count coins in the dark.
blind to where they come from,
blind to where they’re going.
we support those who speak the loudest,
it doesn’t matter the message that echoes,
the vibrations guide us none the less.
a dollar in penny’s clothing,
we think them as one of us.
although, our voices never did matter,
just the sound of pockets flowing into another.
big sounds, big words, empty promises,
angry results.
like birds trapped on their telephone wires in search of spring,
we move one way in hopes of prosperity, growth.
when you turn on the lights,
we never moved at all.
and those pennies, nickels, and dimes?
gone.
Esther Bonilla Read
About Esther Bonilla Read
Esther Bonilla Read writes on a variety of subjects: her family; school; and of various incidents that have occurred in her life. She has two books: From the Porch Steps and After the Blessing. More at the end of this section.
My Mother Finally Speaks Up
Mother and Daddy came from Mexico, and after they met and married, followed the Mexican protocol in raising their families. My father was the head of the family and made all decisions relating to home and family, and Mother seemed quite happy with the arrangement. In fact, in school when a teacher said, “I’ll speak to your mother about it.” I always wondered why she didn’t say, “I’ll speak to your father about it.”
In addition to the obvious cultural differences Mother and Daddy practiced, there were other differences they must have noticed, such as the lack of ingredients necessary to make Mexican food. There were no avocados at the stores, no large peppers, no corn tortillas, and no masa needed to make corn tortillas or tamales. In Calvert, our hometown located in central Texas, no remnants of the culture they left behind were to be found.
I had noticed an odd thing on our back porch for some time that someone had given us or abandoned on our back porch. It was a rectangular stone that sat slanted toward the two short legs in front. A taller leg in the back completed it. A separate oblong-shaped stone lay on top it, all made of speckled stone. Lava stone, someone explained to me.
Mother said it was a metate (may-tah-tay) an antique used in Mexico and other countries in central and South America to grind corn, a staple eaten in all of the Americas. A “mano” was another part of the process used to grind corn. It was the oblong object you pushed to do the job. You would mash the corn, and a receptacle sat near the two legs to catch the ground-up corn. The metate was never used by anyone. It sat all alone on the back porch year after year, suffering the anger of the wind, rain, and snow. The fig tree lost leaves and found themselves nestled in the metate, that is until the rain came and bathed it and waited for the sun to dry it out.
My father, who operated a service station seven days a week, knew everyone in town. In addition, his place of business was a sort of way station. People would stop and sell him fish, eggs, vegetables, apples, oranges, or whatever they had to sell. If he found a good deal, he brought it to our home, which was full of boisterous children.
Mamá Grande or Grandmother, who lived in a small town in south Texas, came to visit us in Calvert about once a year in the summer. She had deep wrinkles on her face and wore dresses down to her ankles, and she put up with nothing from us. She sewed beautifully and made the girls nice dresses. Mother was delighted to have her mother visiting us. We had to admit having her around was a very good thing.
Daddy walked in one day with a grocery bag full of fresh corn, exclaiming, “Look what I’ve got!” Mother was happy, and we thought we would eat corn on the cob with butter I churned made from the cream from our cow. It was all a happy scene.
At that very moment, I think the cosmos conspired by bringing together my grandmother, the corn, and the metate. How else could the following have occurred?
Grandmother put her hands on her hips and, looking at my father, said, “Ruben, I can make tortillas de maíz (corn tortillas) with that corn, and I’ll use the metate.
The next morning Grandmother arose and, wearing an apron over her long dress, prepared everything she would need to convert the corn to masa. She had prepared the kernels and then washed and cleaned the metate and the mano. All in all, she was ready for the task. I stood to the side, ready to run any errand she might need.
She set up the metate on the porch and placed a shallow bowl at the front of the metate. Meanwhile, she kept a large bowl with the prepared corn near her. She placed a folded towel on the porch, sat on her knees, and began the grinding process. Pressing down and pushing. Pressing and pushing. After a while, she had an ample supply of ground-up corn or corn masa (dough).
She brought in the masa and placed a griddle on the stove to heat. She made balls out of the corn dough and then moved the individual balls from hand to hand in a slapping motion until she had a fat corn tortilla, something we had never seen in central Texas. She placed one on the hot greased griddle and, after a few seconds, flipped it over with a spatula. She continued until she had a nice stack of hot, homemade, thick tortillas de maíz on a plate. The smell of the toasted tortillas caused my mouth to water.
Meanwhile, Mother prepared lunch and placed the homemade salsa in the molcajete (like a mortar and a pestle) in the middle of the table beside the vermicelli and ground beef bowl. Daddy came in, took a whiff of the aroma, and smiled. All of us sat at the table and enjoyed a most unusual meal. Daddy said to her mother-in-law, “Mamá, these tortillas are wonderful!” And looking toward my mother, added, “I hope María will make these when you leave.”
My mother, all four feet-eleven-inches tall, stood up and exclaimed, “I shall never do that!” We turned to look at Daddy, who laughed it off, perhaps just to save face. And that is how we learned that Mother could stand up for herself. And Mother never did get down on her knees to grind corn. She only got on her knees to pray when we went to church.
The Lesson
It was right before Christmas, and we fifth graders in Mrs. Pietsch’s classroom were an excited group of chattering students. WWII was over. It was now peace time, and it was a time to be happy.
Most students in our school didn’t have an abundance of material things, but we didn’t know that. And the students who had the least were the children of itinerant or sharecropping farm workers. Some came to school barefooted. Others wore the same clothes over and over. No matter how much starch the mother used before she ironed the girls’ dresses, they were the same ones worn week after week.
Suddenly midst the chatter we heard our teacher Mrs. Pietsch raise her voice. She told us to be quiet as she had an announcement. She asked, “Who took a five dollar bill out of my purse?”
Everyone was quiet. We looked at one another with questioning faces. Only the voice of two students walking down the hallway could be heard. Some students in our class whispered to one another. Two or three chairs scraped the floor. Then one boy laughingly said, “Ben took it.” I knew my brother Ben didn’t take anything from anyone. He never would.
Mrs. Pietsch recognized it as a joke. Nonetheless, she responded, “He didn’t take anything. His father used to work with my husband, and he is an honest man.” That put that suggestion/joke to rest.
Again quietness. Mrs. Pietsch continued with her Civics lesson. Still, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. A five dollar bill; I had never even held one in my life, and I think very few students, if any, in my class had experienced that either.
Mrs. Pietsch didn’t mention it again. Eventually, a friend told me which classmate had taken it. She left school during our lunch hour and walked to town with the money to buy her little siblings toys at Kress, our local Five and Ten Cent Store. It seems because it was winter the farmers had little work for their sharecroppers and money was hard to come by. The girl hated the thought that the little ones in her family would wake up and have nothing on Christmas Day. Thus, she had taken the money so the little ones would have toys. She wasn’t thinking of herself, but of them.
Although I wondered how the problem would be settled, we followed the teacher’s lead and never mentioned the loss. Through that incident I learned much from Mrs. Pietsch. You can be strict but compassionate. There comes a time when diplomacy and gracefulness are to be used, and this was one of those times.
It could be that the student might have brought the teacher a dollar a month or something like that to pay her back. However the issue was resolved, we continued at school as though nothing had happened. But I can’t help but think back to Mrs. Pietsch.
Yes, Mrs. Pietsch taught us a great deal, and the lessons did not always come out of textbooks.
MOTHER AND THE GYPSIES
My mother was a product of the Great Depression. People of her era know exactly what I mean. For those of you who are younger, allow me to elaborate.
Mother knew what it was not to have one cent in the home. She knew what it was to have a husband come into the home and say, “I lost my job, and so did everyone else at the business.”
Not only did Mother know what it was like not to have any money, but she also experienced having hungry children waiting to be fed and not understanding why a bowl of oatmeal was not forthcoming. She had neighbors who were also hungry.
But, she told me, she had friends (comadres) who lived out in the country and came into town in wagons from time to time and brought her vegetables and some meat from a recently slaughtered pig. My mother and father even moved out to a farm for a while during the Depression to try to make a living out there, but Daddy, a former city boy, couldn’t tolerate it.
And in a few years the Depression lifted like a dark cloud that mysteriously disappears.
Daddy was called back to work and life became normal for the small family. Then the war came and again, items were scarce, but at least everyone seemed to be employed.
But my mother never forgot her experiences. She saved all things every opportunity she had. And she was resourceful. She made her own lye soap. She saved feathers when a chicken was slaughtered and made pillows. We were taught to mend clothes. Everything was used and then recycled before we knew what the word meant...
On Pedestals
Several years ago a nice woman wrote something like the following in the newspaper: Why do women argue for Equal Rights? Men place them on pedestals and there is no need to fight for equality.
Well, Folks, I have searched high and low for that pedestal, and I have never located it. Like the elusive "Fountain of Youth" for which Ponce De Leon searched and didn't find, so it is with me and the pedestal.
I am through looking.
copyright Esther Read
Zero
Coming Soon
About Esther Bonilla Read
Esther Bonilla Read was born and raised in Calvert, Texas, a small town in Central Texas. She graduated from Baylor University and began teaching school in Corpus Christi, Texas. This became home for her and her husband Nolan K. Read and their four children. She writes on a variety of subjects: her family; school; and of various incidents that have occurred in her life. She has been published by various newspapers; Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul and several anthologies and magazines. Her Book From the Porch Steps is available on Amazon
f.E.I.
About F.E.I.
F.E.I. prefers to write in an open room as if the stories emerging from the
process demand physical space. More about F.E.I. at the end of this section.
Super Singularity (from CCW2023)
At his retirement party, I was told by the affable man that I cried all the way from Chicago to Corpus, and my mother had asked if he would like to hold the bottle for me so she could use the bathroom. He had rosy apple cheeks that make you believe Norman Rockwell was a realist. He was my mother’s boss, but I’d never formally met him until then. What a dizzy scene.
On perhaps the same exact short rattling plane, I was aware that I cried again. This would be my summer without Ian. He announced his engagement on an auditing trip, getting down on one knee with a Tiffany solitaire, on top of an Indian burial rock that apparently took them four hours to reach. Of course, I unfriended both.
My mother never really worked after that fateful plane ride, if you call bringing up me as working, then she kept both of us busy. Supposedly every passenger who walked past took a good look at me. “God made babies cute for very practical reasons.” The old man was a joker, but I had no doubt. Mother is doing fine without me. When she did call, I was suspicious. When we ran out of weather reports, she said she might appreciate some help. Her English is a bit distant and always formal. She didn’t have anyone to speak Chinese with since I chose to learn Spanish just to spite her. I retained a handful of childhood words but worried I would sound juvenile.
“What did you do, mommy?”
“What did I do? Nothing! Just getting out of bed, and heard the knee went click. Well, glad that part was over. Well, I called around and found a rental at Bayview. You haven’t seen my place, but I have no room.”
She has room. I am just messy. If we are in each other’s exclusion zones of operation, we adjust like two metal beads toying with the antithesis of polar charges. Only when she sees her physical therapist, I am the center piece of the Venn diagram.
This is a new city that we visited here once jointly, me, being two months old, really didn’t care. Being an expert rationalist, she somehow surprised me by settling here. “I can live anywhere.” She gave me free reign of the shadeless living room. “I am getting hummingbirds around here all the time. Can you believe it? They are marvelous! We should go to Gill’s to pick up some plants.”
When I saw her therapist called her inside, I settled back into the seat off of the front door. A lady across the floor from me next to the water cooler scanned me with her cool blue eyes. Her turmeric turban wrapped high, cutting her petite frame a grand figure. Her floral cane neatly sat by her chair.
“Heard this place is hard to book…Are you feeling better?” I said, since our eyes met already.
“Me? Oh no! I’m a worried mother tagging along with my son. He is inside.” She gestured with her sparkling eyes. They looked proud when she said “my son.” She opened a soft skinned purse by her hip and pulled out a neatly folded mask as she was about to cough. She wired the elastic around her face and said apologetically:
“Excuse me. Shoulda covered up the moment I came in. This is from my grandson. Just got into the air force. Send me a bunch of these. Said grandma should wear the top gun stuff!” She chuckled.
A dark, long-limbed man came out and grinned. The lady reached out to his hand, looked like she’d been leaning onto him to raise herself out of a chair for the one hundredth time, but quickly she realized her son was on a crutch, so she attempted to struggle alone. The son shook his head and gave me a knowing smile.
“See, she doesn’t trust me!”
“You are right my son. That’s why mama must come all the way here to see if you are doing a good job!”
“Ms. Michelle said I did a good job, ma. I am taking good care of myself. And I am thirty-eight!” He winked at me with such glee.
She relented and held on to his hand tightly.
My mother came out right at the point I was about to doze off, at two-thirty.
“Take me to Little Chinatown on Holly.” She must have spent a fortune there. She bought ten types of tofu, lotus roots, bottles and cans of pastes and deadly bundles of tiny red peppers. The little strip mall is like a windsock that catches everything: candy wrappers, soda bottles, lidded Styrofoam cups with straws stuck in them, swirling on the ground trying to make a mark in this corner of the world. Ian would have liked here better than the gentrified Chinatown in D.C.
I started a braised tofu pot with black mushrooms, plugged in the rice cooker I just bought. According to mother’s instructions, I also washed some millet and wrinkly dates for a porridge. I was rushing and didn’t want to miss the happy hour.
The flight school cadets had towels, beach balls and plates of grilled chicken thighs balanced on their glistening arms below my window. There were children with floaties hugged their limbs, and their tanned moms strolling in with canvas totes, ready to set up camp. So much sun burnt athleticism on display. The latissimus and rhomboids came up and down like whales diving for air. Their laughs punctuated the quietness and eventually dissipated along with the color blocking towels that wrapped around anonymous bouncy shoulders, walking slowly against the blinding setting sun, leaving behind the lone agave beyond the locked gate.
I woke up with a start, unfurling my legs from the stiff surfaced sofa. The low humming from the naval planes was relentless in their night flights. The orange light on the rice cooker looks like a lighting bug looking for the perfect patch of night. The pot will be all warm and syrupy in my car on its way to mother’s when the morning begins. BUY CCW 2023 AMAZON or BUY CCW2023 BARNES AND NOBLE
The Harbor
It reaches over
Hands me a golden apple
That nightfall
would soon wipe its
Sins and return it full blooded.
My car radio speeds
Amidst the brief
Warring peace
Toward the hero’s clamor:
This is for progeny.
Rowing
The sea charges her crescent bay
The wind hollows the emerald mine
As I tear every breath clean from shore
Burning heart swims in deficit
Flying past the ambitious brow
History roped me in reverse
Knotted on familiar posts that
Assuage my ancestors and my birth
As swiftly as the opium loaded cannon
To the black ship gliding beckoning
The dignitaries, where carriages
Scattered the sparrows in tandem
The years towed the open current
Slicing through with breathing swords
Raised a thin line of pelican
To an increasingly diminished return
About F.E.I.
F.E.I. prefers to write in an open room as if the stories emerging from the
process demands physical space. Of all the places she has lived,
literature and philosophy remained her constant spring. After moving to
Corpus Christi, she found that it has more space than she had hoped. Her
educational background is in finance.
Floyd Swydan
About Floyd Swydan
I grew up on my parents resort on the lake of the Ozarks in Missouri in the 1960s and 70s. I moved here in1980 and have had various jobs. Most memorable is that I owned a dog training company for 20 years called K-9 Coach. I have trained so many dogs and their human. Now in later years I manage a small apartment complex and watch for Cardinals.
The Red Bird
A long time ago there was a Bird. He wasn’t a big bird, or a tiny bird, just a regular size bird. Like all birds, when he woke up in the morning, he was hungry. He would fly to the bird feeder that the humans would keep full of food and have breakfast. All the birds that were having breakfast with him would all talk to one another. “Good morning” … “Good morning”… “Good morning to you too. Beautiful day…Great food”. However, no one ever talked to him. He was invisible. No one could see him. He couldn’t even see himself, and if he spoke, nobody could hear him. So, he would eat and be careful not to spill the seeds all over the ground like the others did. He did this because he really cared about others.
Now, you would think that not being seen or heard would make him sad, but this was not the case. After breakfast, he would fly to the park and spend the day there. He would sing and sometimes sit on a park bench. He noticed that, at times, there were other animals and even humans there that were sad for one reason or another; some were even crying. He saw that just by him being near—even though they could not see or hear him—they suddenly felt better…comforted.
One time there was a nest full of baby robins up in a tree. Momma Robin was off looking for worms to feed the baby birds. Out of nowhere, a big storm started, and it was raining very hard. The Bird knew that the momma couldn’t fly back in the hard rain, and the babies might drown. Therefore, he flew up to the nest and spread his wings like a tent over the baby birds. Do you know that even though his wings were invisible, the rain parted over their heads, and the babies hardly got wet. When Momma Robin returned, she was very happy.
Time goes by, and one morning the Bird was at the feeder having breakfast. All the other birds were greeting each other…all except for him. Suddenly, right next to his head, he heard, “Good morning, how are you today?” He didn’t answer back, surely, they weren’t speaking to me. Then he heard right next to his ear, “It sure is a beautiful day”. It was a female voice. She answered, “Yes, I am. Even though I cannot see you and you cannot see me, I know you’re there, and we can hear each other.” After breakfast, they flew off together to the park to talk about their new discovery of meeting each other. As they talked, the boy bird saw that the girl bird had the same positive effect on all around her that were sad. Together, wow—It was even stronger!
One morning at the park, they heard a crying coming from the woods and flew over to find a baby fox lost from its mother. It was scared and hungry. The girl bird said, “What should we do?” The boy bird thought for a minute and said, “You stay here and comfort the baby fox, I’ll fly around and see if I can find its mother.” As soon as he flew off, she got the baby fox to calm down, but he was still hungry. After flying around, the Bird was able to find the mother. Now, how was he going to get the mother to follow him? She cannot see or hear him. He flew right past her face and then off into the direction of her baby. He did this over and over until finally she went in the direction that he was trying to show her. Momma fox and baby fox were reunited and momma carried the baby home by the scruff of the neck. The baby fox probably was going to get a good taking about wandering off alone.
Time passes, and the two birds become very fond of each other. One particular morning, while eating breakfast with the other bird, something happened. It was a beautiful day, the sun was up, the temperature was perfect. The bird seed was great. The girl bird leaned and kissed the Bird…right on the beak! Then suddenly, both of them appeared. They were visible, and they were beautiful. He was magnificent__ bright red, redder than red, with a comb on the top of his head, black highlights on his face! She was gorgeous, a reddish brown with red highlights. They looked at each other and at the same time said, “Whoa!” You are the most beautiful bird I have ever seen. Then they smiled at each other. A sparrow looked up from eating and said, “Whoa!” (Birds say whoa a lot when they are surprised) You two are beautiful! What king of birds are you: The redbirds answered, “We don’t know. We have eaten with you many times, but you could not see us.” A blue jay flew down from a tree and said, “I used to think I was sharp looking with my blue and white stripes, but I think you have me beat. What kind of birds are you?” They said, we don’t know.” By now all the other birds at the feeder were staring at them with their mouths open. One bird spoke up and said, “Why don’t we go to the library and look in the Big, Big Book of Birds. This book has thousands of pages in it with a picture and name of every bird in the world. It also has a long paragraph about each bird, what they like, what their personalities are, what their jobs are. They all agreed this was a great idea and flew off to the library.
As the two redbirds and the others approached the librarian, she of course, said “Whoa:” Before she could say more, the Bird said, “We don’t know what kind of birds we are. We are wondering if we can take a look at the Big Big Book of Birds.” The librarian replied, “Of course, follow me.” They all went to the back of the library and there was the Big Big Book of Birds. The redbirds started going through the book page by page. There were so many pages; each with the picture and name of a type of bird, along with the story of the bird, but nothing about them. Every bird in the world was in the book, except the redbirds.
Then, all the birds scattered, and the two redbirds went off to the park together. Now, you would thing that they would be sad finding no information about them in the book. They stayed happy. Happy to finally see each other and happy to comfort others that were sad. Now that they were visible, people would see them from a distance and sometimes point at them and smile. This time in the park went by fast. They were discussing the fact that they had no idea of what type of bird they were and even wondered if they should make up a name for themselves. Before they realized it, it was dark. By now, they should have been back at their favorite tree sleeping.
Just as they were about to fly home, a big owl flew over and circled them. Owls hunt at night, and this frightened them. Not to worry, though…this was the wise old owl. He looked down and saw them. He didn’t say whoa, though. He probably thought he was too educated to say something a normal bird would say. He flew down and perched next to the redbirds. He said, “Good evening. I am the wise old owl for this area. I saw how beautiful you are and was wondering what kind of birds you are.” The redbirds told him they didn’t know and told him the whole story of how they were invisible, and how they appeared, and how they went to the library to look through the Big Big Book of Birds, but found nothing. The wise old owl thought for a few minutes; then he thought for a few minutes more and finally said, “I seem to remember something my father told me, that his father told him, that his father told him…. All the way back to the beginning of times. In the library, there is a secret room that nobody has ever been able to get into. Perhaps there could be a clue there.” He suggested that the redbirds go home and get some sleep, and he would finish hunting, and after breakfast in the morning, they meet in the library. The redbirds agreed. The next morning at the bird feeder, the redbirds told the other birds about meeting the wise old owl and his plan. After breakfast, they all headed off for the library to meet the wise old owl.
When they went into the library, the owl took the lead and went to the librarian and introduced himself and said, “My two friends were here yesterday searching for what kind of birds they are.” She said that she remembered and was sorry they went away without finding the information they needed. The wise owl asked her if she knew about a secret room here in the library. She said yes, there is a secret room in the basement, but nobody has ever been able to get in it. She told them it has a very heavy door with a big lock on it. Many have tried to open it, by picking the lock and even trying to break down the door. All have failed.
The wise old owl asked the librarian if they could take a look at it. She replied, “By all means, follow me.” They all went down to the basement and there was the door, big and strong, and locked. The wise owl put his talon in the keyhole and fiddled with it for a while, nothing. He tapped around on the door and frame, then shook his head, saying, “I don’t think anybody is getting in there.” The Bird said, “Let me take a look at the lock.” As soon as the Bird put his talon in the lock, it clicked and opened. Then, the big door eased open on its own. Everybody stared at the door. Should we go in? One bird said, “There might be spiders. We should let someone who eats spiders go first.” After much discussion, it was agreed that this room must have something to do with the redbirds, and they should go first.
The redbirds went in and saw in the middle of the room a table and a scroll on it. The scroll was open. (back in the old days, everything was written on scrolls).
They walked up and looked at the scroll. It read—If you are reading this, you are the chosen ones. You are called cardinals. You will go out to all places on this Earth and comfort those in need and bring joy to those who are sad.
Now, the male cardinal thought about this for a bit. Then he turned to the female cardinal and said, “It’s a mighty big world out there. It would take months to fly to the other side and then back to another place. How are you and I supposed to do this?” Suddenly, all the letters came up off the scroll. They started spinning around above the scroll table like a mini-tornado, and the letters started multiplying—more and more—Q’s, R’s, A’s, M’s—all the letters—the tornado grew, and then it started out of the room and up the stairs. Everybody followed it. It went outside and grew more—a huge spinning tornado of a million letters. Then all the letters shot up into the trees and turned into cardinals, both boy and girl cardinals. All the trees were full of red. The trees behind them were full of red, up on the hills, down in the valleys, everywhere you looked, red!
Then they heard a voice, not just the cardinals, but all the birds. The voice came from up above, way up above…the voice said, “My cardinals, you truly are my chosen ones. I have watched you from the time you were not seen and did good for others. You male cardinal, I watched you shield those baby robins from the storm. I watched you along with the female cardinal reunite the baby fox with its mother. I have watched you comfort so many. The time has come for you, all of you, to go all over the world and help. Go now…”
Then all the cardinals flew off. Some went to the other side of the world. Some went to South America. Some went to Canada. Everywhere… Now the boy and girl cardinal stayed right here in the city, to help anyone in need of their special talent.
Well, the wise old owl still had something on his mind. He was wondering something. So, he asked the librarian if they could go back into the library and look at the Big Big Book of Birds. She said yes. They all went back in, and the wise old owl opened the book and started going through it page by page. When he got to the very last page, he saw that it was a brand new page. The page was bright white, not like the other pages that were brown with age. There were no tears or wrinkles either. On the top of the page were pictures of the boy cardinal and the girl cardinal. They were beautiful! Glorious! Underneath, it said, “Cardinals.” The wise old owl looked down to read the big paragraph that tells everything about the cardinals. It was empty, blank, well, almost blank. It had one word--one six-letter word. The wise old owl read this word and smiled and nodded his head and said, “yep!”
All the birds behind him were trying to peek over his shoulder to see what it said. “Tell us, what does it say?” they asked. The wise old owl turned to the other birds and took a breath…It says… “ANGELS!”
Then all the birds together, even the wise old owl said, “WHOA!”
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Frank Rodriguez
About Frank Rodriguez
Frank Rodriguez is from Mathis, Texas. He is a full-time college stodent
Once Upon A Nightmare
That smile, that dang demented smile. It looms over the crevices of my soul. Shrouding the depths of my vision, blinding my reasons of existence. Why does nobody see it, what if I am going mad, mad as the devil. Am I yielding my tools of survival, and surviving off the sanity of my nemeses?
I know my thoughts and expressions appear disorderly, and that’s because they are. I cannot find an acceptable way to disclose what my eyes witness, my ears attend, or what my head assumes. There is nothing rational about it. I have not laid out entirely what I have endured and that is mainly due to recognition. I am scared of what I might face. An outcast, that is exactly what I am. There is no other way to label my existence, for it is unnatural and forbidden. I have kept these emotions and images to myself. If the world knew the reality of my unpleasant intellect, my world would simply perish. That’s it, my friends, my wife, and my children would disown the very depths of my existence.
I arose in the night, shivering in sweat, drenched in the memories created by fear of that smile. Closer, and closer, and closer. Footsteps approached. I closed my eye, my heart thudding, the steps closer and closer the. The question that looms over me is if I have in fact gone crazy or is my mind indeed playing tricks on me? What am I to do? If it comes out that I'm seeing this, it’ll be my end. What has become of me and why of me, and not anybody else.
Do the neighbors see the teeth? Perhaps I should ask, for me to know I am not going mad. What will they think? What if they think I am crazy? They must believe me. They have been my neighbors for years. They are like friends to me. They are my closest confidants. I do indeed trust them with my life, our kids' friends raised together. They must believe me.
Why do they not believe me? I am not going crazy. They have not talked to me since that day I told them. What if they told someone? No, they would not. They're my friends. They would not dare tell anyone. For they mustn't tell anyone; if my family finds out who knows what they
would do to me. If my wife was here, she would believe me. I do miss her dearly.
My kids found out, my friends have betrayed me, they betrayed the trust I had in my closest friends. I’m not going crazy. Why does anyone not believe me? Have I gone mad? What is happening to me? Why must my mind play tricks on me? My kids say I need help but they don’t understand no one does. I am alone.
The rambling of my mind reflects my loss. It is something I cannot contemplate. My family put me into this hospital, they said help is something I need but I know now that I am truly alone. As I talk to the therapist, I am forcefully told to talk too I see these big men coming towards me as I beg for my kids help I realize I am going away as the therapist suggested this to them.
Am I scared to face the fact that I need help? And if so, what am I doing to myself? As I talk to the counselor at the hospital, he asks me what I see, I cannot explain the horrors of the smile, because I do not know or understand. No matter how hard I try to admit I do indeed have to get help but to admit to this is hard for me.
I awaken to another day in the hospital cold and alone, isolated from everyone else. I ask the Doctor “When can I go home?”. And he tells me, “It is entirely up to me and my progress which at this rate won’t be soon”. Have I finally gone mad?.
Frederick Gonzales
About Frederick Gonzales
Fredrick Gonzales has called Corpus Christi, Texas home for over 20 years. After earning his Masters in Secondary Education he began his career as a teacher. More about Frederick Gonzales at the end of this section.
Crossing Borders
1942
The day we left was the saddest day of my life. We lived in a small village outside of Chihuahua. My three older brothers, my aunts and uncles, and even my cousins were there, but only Marisela and Rosita and I would cross. My brothers couldn’t go because my father needed their help in the fields. I could speak English good enough to get by, and this was important because you could never trust gabachos. The coyotes would only take us so far, and then they usually handed you over to another gabacho who would then take us the rest of the way. My mother said to stick close to Marisela, who had crossed before but gotten caught and sent back.
I had learned a little English from Miss Galindez. She told us that she graduated from the university in Mexico City. My mom called her 'la angelita de las montanas" because she was so pretty and because her face would always light up around kids. My mother and Miss Galindez both said I was the best hope our family had of someone actually doing something special. My father would not look at me. When he’d paid the coyote his life's savings, I could tell he was dying inside, his body was hard and thick and his hands rough and cracked like the dry creek beds in around the village was indifferent. At least he would have one less mouth to feed.
We had all heard stories about the lawlessness around the border. Some girls were never heard from again. They say that they were either raped or killed around the cities of Nogales and Juarez. My stomach felt queasy and I felt like I might throw up, kind of like when I see that boy Ramon.
My grandmother gave me her rosary, a beautiful black heavy cross with a silver image of Jesus Christo on it. I put it around my neck.
Just to be safe I asked my brother Miguel if I could have his knife. At first, he said no, he had made it himself and it was his keepsake. He thought the better of it and gave it to me with my mom's raised eyebrow and blessing. It had a beautiful handle made from a deer horn onto which he had carved a panther and an eagle. It was beautiful, but deadly and he sharpened it every night. I could hear him sharpening it as I lay on the floor of our home. The sound of the rock used to sharpen his blade sounded like the claws of a demon. An imagination like that was usually how our bedtime stories would get started, but my mom's rendition of La LLorona (Wailing woman) was the scariest. She had just drowned her kids, and I was scared she would come after me.
I climbed into the bed of an old pickup truck, along with myself, Rosita, and her sister Marisela. I had just turned seventeen and Rosita was my age, Marisela was about twenty-five which seemed old. I had never really spoken to her, but me and Rosita always talked at school about going to America, and about boys, especially Ramon. The day turned into night and as we all lay curled up in the bed of the pickup, I heard the hoot of a lechuza and poked my head out of my blanket. It had the head of a woman, and she was crying, this was a bad omen. I reached for my brother's knife and wrapped my other hand firmly around mi Jesus Christo. It was so dark, and we all at one time or another, fell on each other. I could see every star ever made, and it was so clear that you could see where the angels lived—if you tried really hard. But the lechuza kept coming back into my mind, and I knew it was only a matter of time until this trip ended badly.
The next day was spent travelling. As it was getting dark, I could tell we were getting closer because the chatter in the cab had increased. I could make out words in English like “property” and “drugs” along with "El Malito,” the sickly one, and "bitches," which I had never heard. We went off road for what seemed like miles and miles. It was really dark when we stopped. Somewhere off in the distance I saw the glow of what must have been the border towns of Juarez and El Paso. Mari told us to be ready for anything, so I stayed alert for any key words the gabachos used. I asked Mari who "El Malito" was, and she turned as white as the lechuza I had seen. They told all of us to get out of the truck, and I held on to Rosita's hand. Another truck drove up with its headlights turned off, and all we could see were shadows. I could make out the exchange of what appeared to be money and large packages being transferred from one truck to the next. The gabacho who had been driving walked up with a smile on his face, his face skinny and weathered with a scar on his left side that ran along his jaw. "Mr. Mah lee toh is going to be very happy with you all," he called over to the other guy in a squeaky voice. "Jonesy come on over here let’s get some free samples before we go dump these bitches off."
“Garner you know ‘El Malito’ don't like that shit and he'll kill me, and you, if his precious cargo got messed up.”
“Aw, a little fun ain't going to hurt none.”
Jonesy insisted that they had their dope and money, and that we were there to be delivered, no questions asked.
“Hey, you know these bitches are a dime a dozen, we can replace 'em in no time.”
“Hey, it's your funeral,” Jonesy answered.
Garner rested the barrel of his rifle on his shoulder, Mari gave me a look. Rosita whimpered. I pulled her behind me with my left hand and grabbed my brother's knife with my right. Garner grabbed Mari from the back of her hair and wrapped his forearm around her throat. He tossed his rifle towards Jonesy who wasn't expecting it, and he juggled his rifle and Garner's, and both rifles fell to the ground, one went off and shot the bed of the truck, which must have scared Garner really good because he let go of Mari, and started toward Jonesy, calling him a “dumb son of a bitch!”
Using Mari as cover, I gutted Garner right across the stomach, just like my brother Miguel had taught me to gut a deer. His insides poured out and he fell to his knees. Mari ran towards Jonesy and started clawing at his eyes. Both me and Rosita ran for the rifles. I had never used a rifle before and neither had Rosita, but Mari had experience, so we gave her one of them. Just like a wrestling “Lucha Libre” team on the T.V. we switched, and me and Rosita proceeded to claw away at Jonesy as Mari aimed the rifle and yelled for us to move, We did, and she shot Jonesy right in the crotch, and all the while Garner was trying to stuff his insides back in his gut. Mari turned around and shot him in the same area as Jonesy. We dumped all the drugs and grabbed some of the money. Mari was the only one that knew how to drive, so we all hopped in the cab, screaming and crying, and somehow laughing at the same time.
"Vamos,” I yelled even though I had no idea where to go.
We crossed that night into El Paso, where Mari met up with some contacts. Later we were given food and water and a hot bath. I had never slept on a real American bed before. The lady who took us in was Maggie Galindez the sister of Miss Galindez. She helped get us into El Paso, and gave us direction as to how to start a new life in America. That summer with help from Maggie, I got a job at a local grocery store. My only hope is that my children and someday grandchildren will be real American citizens. They say there's no place like America. My name is Maria Helena Hernandez and I've made it.
1990
I couldn’t believe how many people came to see us go. The streets were all lined up with American flags. I climbed onto the bus and got a window seat. I could see all of my family. My mom and my brother, my little sister, even my grandmother was there waving her little American flag. My dad was the only one that didn't show up, he was against me joining from the beginning, that it was a man's job and a girl should be at home. Well Grandma Helena, as I called her said, “that a woman is much stronger than a man in many ways,” and I blamed her, for me joining the “Guard.” She was always telling me stories about how she was the fastest girl, and how she used to embarrass her brothers.
Yeah, it was the National Guard, but not one person in the unit ever thought that we would ever get deployed—especially to Iraq. There weren’t that many women in our unit considering it's a combat support unit. I worked in communications, but I also carried a S.A.W. (squad assault weapon). It's a light machine gun and I loved it; I could have it field stripped and reassembled faster than some of the guys.
Three weeks later, I was in Kuwait at a staging area for the 36th Infantry Division, getting ready to cross the border into Iraq. Me and Smitty, her real name was Angela Smith, joined straight out of high school, we went through basic training together. She was my driver, I was the gunner, and Sergeant Sanchez was our truck commander. Sgt. Sanchez was deployed during Desert Storm so we called her the old lady, but not to her face. Me and Smitty were just privates, fresh recruits. But we sure didn't lack motivation. Inside the truck, I stood between Smitty and Sgt. Sanchez; I had to stoop down just to talk to them, since my head stuck out of the cab of the truck we were in. We were mainly carrying communications equipment and some supplies. In front of us were Dominguez and Martinez, the fuel tankers, right behind us are the medics, Hernandez and Johnson, with the recovery vehicle and the last gun truck covering our rear. I wouldn't admit it to Smitty, but that was the most scared I'd ever felt in my life.
I looked around at the convoy and I saw the welded pieces of metal strategically placed to deflect the blasts from IEDs and RPGs. We'd already learned that they were using roadside bombs to target convoys. Someone said some contractors had been caught and killed in Baghdad, then hung from a bridge. The command to move out came over the radio, Sgt. Sanchez yelled to Smitty, "Let's Roll!", and we let out a whoop! whoop!, excited and scared of the unknown. Three days was the estimated time to get to our F.O.B. Badger just outside of Baghdad.
We trailed into the hot Kuwaiti desert, eyeing caravans of camels as we trudged on at 30mph. I was so excited, I yelled, “I want to shoot one!” I was just kidding of course, Sgt. Sanchez told me to "at ease the bullshit!" and scan my sector for enemy activity. I told her there's nothing out here but sand and sun. Just then out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a dead camel with a vulture feeding on its insides. When the vulture popped up its head to see us, it had the head of witch; her face was full of blood. I told Sgt. Sanchez to pass me up a cold bottled water out of our ice chest—the heat was really getting to me. That night I looked up at the stars and I wondered if my family back home looked at the same constellations I looked at. We moved out early that morning. I don't even know when or where we crossed into Iraq, but the sand started to kick up, and I was scared we might have a brown out (sandstorm). We made it into a little town, and it seemed every local was a potential enemy; you could hear, "we got a guy on the overpass! keep an eye on him!" Sgt. Sanchez told me to lower my silhouette in case of snipers. I continued scanning the roof tops, it was eerily quiet and once we reached a certain part of the town all the locals disappeared. All of a sudden, I heard Sgt. Sanchez yelling, “contact left! contact left!” My first instinct was to duck down although I didn't hear any gunfire. Just then our truck was rocked from the left side, and I was thrown to my right. It was an RPG. I felt my ribs crack, and dark smoke filled the cab. I somehow managed to keep my firing hand on my SAW, and I stood up to see the trigger man running down an alley, so I lit him up until I saw dust, and a pink mist where his head used to be. The pain in my ribs was terrible. I noticed we weren't moving, and I yelled at Smitty to "move out!” I looked down and yelled “Smitty, get us out of here! Move out!" but she was lying on her side; looking up at me, unblinking a look of surprise on her face, and with her mouth wide open. I yelled, “Smitty! Smitty!” She just stared, unmoving as if she were playing a bad joke. I looked over at Sgt. Sanchez slumped forward, her helmet all out of place. I looked up and the tanker in front of us had jack-knifed, there were three more explosions, and small arms fire from the rooftops, and windows. I swung my turret around and started firing blindly into the buildings. I could see Doc Johnson and Doc Hernandez maneuvering the wheeled ambulance into position, to get Smitty and Sgt. Sanchez, so I gave them as much cover fire as I could. A projectile with a line of gray smoke behind it fired right over the truck's hood and hit a donkey cart on the other side of the road, which sent the startled donkey screeching and trotting. The donkey was hit by one of our trucks coming around to provide cover. It seemed like a bad dream. I grabbed my SAW and tried to take it off the turret, but the pain in my ribs was too great. Just then the chalk that was ten minutes behind us was fast approaching. Their commander had luckily called in some Apache helicopter gunships, which proceeded to demolish the buildings that housed the enemy. My ears were ringing so bad I didn't even hear Doc Hernandez yelling at me to get off the truck. I barely remember being medevac’d out. They told me Smitty didn't make it, and that Sgt. Sanchez had a severe concussion, a broken jaw, and three cracked ribs, tough old lady, and as for me? Besides the cracked ribs, I had third degree burns all up and down my lower legs, I didn't even know it, but the burns were bad enough to send me to Brooks Army Medical Center in San Antonio. All I could think about is that I've got to get back. I got to get back to my unit. My name is Maria Helena Dominguez, I am a third generation Mexican American and I am proud to be called an American.
About Frederick Gonzales
Fredrick Gonzales has called Corpus Christi, Texas home for over 20 years. After serving in the active duty Army as a Combat Medic in West Germany, he settled in Corpus Christi in October of 1989. There he joined the Texas Army National Guard and after more than 20 years of service and 2 tours of duty in Iraq he retired from the Guard in April of 2013. While serving in the Guard he pursued and earned several degrees from Del Mar College and Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi respectively. After earning his Masters in Secondary Education he also began his career as a teacher. In the summer of 2019 while taking an advanced children’s literature course in pursuit of his Doctoral degree he decided to write a children’s picture book. He also wrote a short story titled “Crossing Borders” based on different generations of Mexican American women, who crossed different borders in relation to becoming and being an American citizen.
Gerald Beckman
About Gerald Beckman
Gerald Beckman was born and raised on a farm in West Texas and practiced law in Corpus Christi. More about Gerald and his novels at the end of this section. learn more at GeraldBeckman.com
A Cold Day in Hell
Cecil parked his pickup beside his office. A strong north wind had blown in during the night – not all that unusual this time of year, except this one carried snow with it.
The snow wouldn’t amount to much, though. This kind of wind would sweep the fields and plains clean of snow no matter how much fell, piling it into drifts with fantastic shapes along fence rows and bar ditches and on the lee sides of buildings. None of it would add any moisture to the drought-stricken fields or pastures in this part of the Texas Panhandle.
Well, let it blow. Neither drought nor blizzard slowed his practice down any. Legal problems proliferated in good times and bad, and that’s why he was in the office when the weather would have been a good excuse not to be. A problem solver is what he was. He rejected some folks’ notion that he made a living off the sufferings of other people, though there might be a kernel of truth in the contention.
He hung up his coat and checked his calendar. The deposition of an expert witness at ten, a docket control conference at two.
He glanced at the street outside his window. The swirling flurries seemed to be coming straight from the arctic ice cap.
He checked the call slips Rosie had stuck on his spindle. Standard stuff. A realtor, an adjuster, a court reporter – he’d return them after the two o’clock conference. He’d need to spend the morning preparing to depose the defendant’s expert.
He liked deposing experts. He had a knack for finding the nugget in a witness’s testimony and felt like he could do it in his sleep, but he didn’t want to take a chance on this one. Most of his injury cases were small potatoes, but this one involved the death of a young father of four. It would mean a huge payday if the expert testified as expected on cross.
He had just begun reviewing his notes when the intercom buzzed.
“Better take line three,” Rosie said. “He won’t identify himself but says he won’t call again.”
She had perfect pitch when it came to deciding which calls demanded immediate attention. He lifted the receiver.
“Ain’t none of my business,” the caller said without preamble, “but I drive by your pasture every day, and I been noticing your cows crowding the fence bawling like they’re starving to death. Ain’t Otto supposed to be taking care of ‘em?”
Otto was a fifty-year-old bachelor who earned minimum wages doing odd jobs for local farmers and ranchers. He worked hard when he worked but never let ambition get in the way of hunting geese or fishing for crappie in Buffalo Lake.
“Yes, as a matter of fact…”
“Well then, I guess you ain’t heard. The damn fool stumbled chasing after a downed goose, and his gun went off.. Shot three toes off his left foot. He ain’t been out of his house for nearly a week.”
A week? His cows hadn’t been fed for a week? Ah, Christ…
“Damn, I hate to hear that. Hope he’s okay. Know anybody willing to carry a pickup load of hay out there right now, this morning, maybe check the windmill? I’d be glad to pay whatever it takes.”
“I don’t know anybody like that, and it ain’t my call to find one.”
“Well…”
“Those damn cows need attention. If you can’t do it, you best get out of the business.”
The caller hung up.
Cecil had spent his whole professional life standing up to intensely practical people who didn’t hesitate voicing aversion to his charging a hundred dollars an hour for examining leases and attending water district meetings, or a minimum of a thousand dollars defending a DWI charge. Even less was he inclined to defer to them in a matter of personal conduct. Yet this coarse, angry voice had stirred a flush of shame.
Now what? He didn’t know anybody willing to face a blizzard to save the hide of an absentee land owner who didn’t have sense enough to take care of his own cows. He knew the opinion many farmers had of arrogant doctors and lawyers who bought up all the land they could get their hands on, then flaunted their ownership like an English Lord while paying bottom wages to misfits to do the dirty work, rather than leasing it out to self-respecting farmers like themselves. The caller was undoubtedly one of them.
What could he have been thinking, buying a 640-acre patch of dry caliche pasture with barely enough ground water to feed a windmill, and steep bluffs dropping a hundred feet all along the south half?
The idea had been to buy a few acres, hold them till he got tired of practicing law, then sell the whole shebang and hope to make enough to retire on. But the land was worth less now than when he bought it ten years ago. So why not make a few bucks raising cows? Hire somebody like Otto to haul them a load of hay every other day and count them, check the windmill and make sure the fence stayed in good repair – it would be easy…
It might have been a crank call, but since Otto didn’t have a phone, Cecil couldn’t verify the story. He’d have to run out to check on his cows personally. Thirty minutes to the pasture, thirty back. If they really were short of feed, it wouldn’t take more than a day or two to find someone to take Otto’s place. The cows could get by on the scant pickings that long.
He put his coat back on and hurried out the door, assuring Rosie he’d be back in time for the deposition.
The wind nearly jerked the door out of his hands.
His pasture was four miles south of the community of Bright, and Bright, sometimes still referred to by its German name Hell by people who saw the humor in it, was fifteen miles west of his office.
The wind picked up on the way, buffeting his pickup and sending the snow flying horizontally. Visibility was down to a quarter-mile, and the temperature couldn’t be over twenty. Tumbleweeds blew across the highway like they were fleeing in terror. He pulled on his driving gloves and shivered.
Thirty head of cattle. Three hundred dollars a head, tops, probably not that given the shape they would be in if they hadn’t been fed properly. Nine thousand dollars at most if they were all still alive, and the deposition was part of a case that would bring ten, maybe twenty times that, just for his fee. So why was he wasting time on a miserable bunch of cows? If he had any sense, he’d turn his pickup around and get his ass back to the office.
Instead, he turned off the highway onto the section road running by his pasture.
What he saw nauseated him. The animals were skin and bones, heads hanging, necks scarred and bleeding from pushing their heads through the barb wire fence reaching for dry weeds; listless, facing downwind, visibly shivering. Clearly they had been hungry for longer than a week. He had assumed that even if the call were genuine, it would be an exaggeration. The cows had 640 acres, after all, and there were only thirty of them. Surely they could find enough pickings between the caliche rocks and prickly pear to survive on, but they looked like so many sacks of rattling bones.
He called his office from his cell phone.
“I can’t make the deposition,” he told Rosie, “and I can’t get hold of Joe. Call him for me, will you? Tell him…tell him I have to feed my cows.”
He detected disbelief in her silence.
“I have to have more than that,” she said. “His expert is driving in from Tulsa – he’s probably already here – and you know what a jerk Joe can be. He’ll go for sanctions, and with Judge Harlan he might get them.”
“Well then, don’t call him. If I’m not there when he and his witness show up, tell him…tell him you don’t know where I am, but I’ll make it as soon as I can.”
Yeah, opposing counsel didn’t owe him any favors, and Joe was the type who believed his duty to his client obliged him to take every advantage. And Judge Harlan – Cecil wished he had never gotten involved in that particular campaign. Harlan was a vindictive son-of-a-bitch with a long memory. Cecil had already tasted the bitter fruits of choosing the wrong side of that race, and Harlan wouldn’t let a few hungry cows get in the way of his idea of justice, especially if their condition was the result of Cecil’s own neglect, which Joe would be sure to point out. Joe might even argue it was a case of cruelty to animals, and he might be right. How much of a defense would trusting a guy like Otto amount to?
All of which was beside the point. These poor animals were suffering the pains of the damned, and his only choice was to get them feed immediately. He’d have to take his chances with Joe.
He had been buying hay from Edwin Wilke, a shrewd old farmer who had bought up all the wheat straw he could get his hands on for nearly nothing, then baled it for resale to cattlemen he knew would be in desperate need long before the drought ended. His farm was five miles north of Bright, but when Cecil got there, Edwin had taken a load of hogs to market, so Cecil had to load the twenty bales himself.
Suit, tie, overcoat, low-top shoes, thin socks, and driving gloves of fine Italian leather – hardly the garb for loading hay. Thirty years since he had lifted a bale, but the feeling of the taut wire under his gloved fingers was as fresh as the wind in his face.
The load shifted on the way to the pasture, making it too unsteady to stand on when unloading in the pasture. He had to pull the bales off the tail end of the pickup from the ground while the hunger-crazed animals pushed and shoved against him, smearing their freezing and dripping snouts on his clothes. Then he had to jostle the animals to retrieve the wires so they wouldn’t get tangled in their hooves.
He extricated his pickup from the melee and drove to the windmill fifty yards from where he dumped the bales. Six inches of ice had formed on the water in the stock tank. After thirty frustrating minutes of chopping with his lug wrench and producing a hole the size of a dinner plate, he thought to turn on the windmill. The wheel spun for five long minutes before water finally began pouring out of the discharge pipe to spread across the ice, hopefully faster than it would freeze.
By now, a thin line of cows was trotting clumsily toward the water, heads low, jerking from side to side, slinging saliva as they came. It broke his heart to see them.
The day began to clear, but the wind, strong as ever, continued pushing wispy clouds across the sky. It forced bitter cold through his ruined clothes and tattered gloves, but he continued facing into it, numb, shivering, and dejected by what awaited him at the office. By now, Joe would have produced his witness, made his record, and dictated a motion for sanctions. What defense could Cecil muster against a hostile opponent and a judge nursing a grudge?
He thought he remembered Rosie paying his E&O premium but felt a sudden need to be certain. With frozen fingers, he punched autodial on his cell phone. He turned away from the wind so he could hear Rosie’s voice.
“Rosie…”
“I’ve been trying to call you,” she said, “Joe called.”
Oh shit, here it comes. “I figured. What’d he say?”
“He wants to reschedule.”
“Reschedule? What does he want to reschedule?”
“The deposition. The blizzard has closed Interstate 40 from Amarillo to Shamrock, and his expert can’t make it through.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Said I’d have to clear it with you.”
Suddenly the frigid air changed from bitter and biting, to clean, fresh, and friendly. He breathed it deep, savoring it. His gaze lingered out over the barren breaks and the range country beyond. It all now looked wild and free and oh, so lovely.
“You still there?” Rosie said. “This connection isn’t so good…”
“Yeah, yeah I’m still here. Tell him we can reschedule, but he’ll owe me one — no, don’t tell him that. Just…just reschedule the damn thing.”
Why tempt fate on such a gorgeous day?
We Called It Baseball
Baseball as seen on television is the sport in its purest form. It’s where a superman makes a perfectly timed jump against an outfield wall to snatch a fly ball over his back; where a third baseman dives for an 85 mph grounder, scoops it out of the dirt, rolls to his feet and in the same graceful motion shoots it like a rifle shot to first in time to make the out; where a pitcher throws a ball at 100 mph to a target 17 by 30 inches over sixty feet away, almost never hitting a man hunkered six inches away from the target, while making the ball curve and jump, hop, drop, or rise; where hulking batters who can swing a bat nearly as fast as the pitch face those brain-rattling fastballs zipping inches past their skulls without fear; where every player knows instantly and exactly what to do on the next play, no matter what it is, and does it time and time again, flawlessly. That is what people call baseball nowadays. That’s what they talk about, that’s what they analyze, and that’s what they bet on while sitting in their living rooms sipping suds and nibbling nachos. It’s baseball to be sure, but it’s baseball in sanitized perfection. It’s nothing like the baseball I once knew and loved.
I loved the nitty-gritty, the wild, untamed, unsponsored and unorganized, almost totally infertile spawning grounds for professional players that thrived before the disappearance of tiny country schools, before unlimited school sports budgets, manicured playing fields, and helicopter parenting; where kids discovered the game on their own, where they played without adult interference for the pure love of it, where money and fame and free-agenting and endorsements were as immaterial, albeit unattainable, as the back side of the moon; where coaching was nil, rules unknown, or misunderstood, often, even, not applicable, even in the unlikely event a rulebook could be found and the pertinent rule pinpointed. I loved that version of the game so much that, forty-five years later, I still dream of playing it.
I was in first grade when I first swung a bat at a slow pitched softball. I remember it to this day. The ball was tossed by some chubby girl in the fourth grade from what must have been every bit of ten feet away, and I couldn’t hit it worth a flip. There was no backstop, no bleachers, no coaches, no organization, and no rules other than 1) try to hit the ball, and if you managed that, 2) run to first base, not third (a common mistake); 3) chase the ball (actually catching it was rare; even a slow grounder bouncing over the native pasture sod was harder to grab than a panicky ground squirrel); 4) throw the ball when you finally got to it, 5) run after it again, on and on until the bell rang at the end of recess.
Our equipment was one broken bat whose handle was repeatedly repaired by black electrical tape, and a ball whose cover kept coming off until some enterprising young lady had her mom stitch it back on. Rusty plow discs of different sizes placed at stepped-off distances forming a rough square served as bases, and a short piece of flat board placed somewhere close to the middle of the square was the pitcher’s mound — except, of course, there was no mound. In the early grades boys and girls played the game together. Later we played boys against girls, and because we were stronger (loading hay bales all summer long) and faster (endlessly chasing livestock from one pasture to another), the boys usually won. But not always.
As we got older, we got more sophisticated. We chose teams, taking turns, starting with the best, ending with the worst. That was usually Joey Saren, a poor kid absolutely devoid of anything approaching physical grace, but who bore his repeated humiliations with a different kind of grace and no apparent psychic scars. No longer were the games played only at school, where we were limited to a fifteen minute recess at midmorning, a one hour lunch break—wolfing down our sack lunches in less than five minutes so we could play ball—and another fifteen minute recess at mid-afternoon. Now, with the freedom afforded by a few additional years and balloon-tired bicycles, we could play for hours at a time in some farmer’s cow-pasture, using gunny sacks and flattened cardboard for bases. Still no coaching, bleachers or properly laid out diamond, but we did sometimes manage the side of a barn or storage shed as a backstop, and we had learned some of the rules, like a tie goes to the runner, a caught foul tip is a strike and not an out, and what a balk meant, though we could never agree exactly when it happened; and since the umpire was always the worst player (that’s why he was umpire) and knew even less about the rules than the rest of us, he wasn’t much help. It came down to which side shouted the loudest or was the readiest to quit if it didn’t get its way.
Though these games lasted longer than the ones at school, they had a downside that made them less popular than they might have been. Dodging prickly pears and cow pies while chasing balls detracted considerably from the fun of the game.
I was fifteen when I took the next step up the ladder. I was accepted to play for the Umbarger Blue Socks, one of seven teams made up of farmers from my age on up (some guys were pushing fifty) who got together and organized themselves into what they called the West Texas Irrigation League.
We played every Sunday, each team taking its turn to host the game in the town closet to their farms. Never any practice sessions, no warmups, just show up and play. Still no coaching, no grandstands, no snack bars, and mostly worn-out equipment, except for our gloves. Every player had his own glove, a significant investment, and he kept it clean and oiled. One player named Billy Tubman (more about him later), on the theory that if a little bit of oil was good, a whole lot of oil was a whole lot better, soaked his glove in a bucket of motor oil overnight. Like the rest of us, he had no money to spare, so he did everything imaginable to undo the damage, including backing over it with a truck tire to squish the oil out of it, soaking it in a bucket of gasoline to dilute the oil, stuffing flour in and around it, hanging it from a tree limb to evaporate whatever would evaporate, and washing it over and over in hot water and detergent. He finally got it back to a useable condition, and years later, when I got married and quit the team, he was still using it. True story.
The hosting team would provide two new baseballs for that day’s game, which we tried our best to make last. Young kids would race each other chasing the fouls, and if they returned it soon enough to use for the next pitch, we’d pay the winner a dime. Actually, we paid the dime anyway.
Our ball field was bounded on two sides by cow pastures, one along third base, the other beyond left and center fields. There was something about our games that attracted cows. They would start gathering along the fence toward the beginning of a game, and by the bottom of the ninth there were more cows watching than people. And since it’s not easy to housebreak a cow, lots of manure piles were scattered about. Sometimes a foul ball rolled through a fresh pile, which was one of the fastest ways to age a new ball. We had a sackful of used balls for such occasions. We all agreed that if spitballs were illegal, shitballs ought to be illegal too. I don’t remember who came up with that one, but everybody thought it was pretty funny.
But by then we did have a backstop. It was made of chickenwire mesh and cedar posts, and where the mesh overlapped, it was stitched together with baling wire. It didn’t take long for gaps to develop, which were patched, and repatched, and repatched again, until finally a good portion of the backstop was nearly impossible to see through. It made little difference though, since there were so few spectators. Human ones, anyway.
The quality of play was pretty pathetic. Pathetic: how else describe hitting a slow grounder to the shortstop, the shortstop scooping it up to throw to first, overthrowing the first baseman, the ball bouncing off the bumper of a parked car, careening into a patch of pigweeds, the batter rounding first and heading for second while the first baseman looks frantically in the weeds for the ball, finds it, hurls it to third, which by now is the destination of the runner, who rounds third and heads for home while the third baseman, figuring on a sure out, grips the ball to throw home for the tag, only to learn the hard way that a goathead was stuck in the ball which is painfully transferred to his hand, causing another wild throw, all of which results in a home run?
How else describe the visiting team showing up only to discover it forgot its sack of bats, so we, ever the gentlemen, offer to share ours, until the home plate umpire, which they supplied, calls a strike on one of our guys when the pitch was so wild it went behind the batter, and later called another strike when the ball bounced six inches in front of the plate with enough speed and power to cover home plate in dust, which the ump duly swept off with his little brush, and in neither case would change his call, so when their time came to bat we repossessed our bats and forced a forfeit?
Or the time one of our players who had been in a month-long slump hit a solid line drive down the third base line which should have been an easy base hit, but, in an excess of elation, tossed his bat up in the air and when it came down hit his head, dropped to the ground in front of him causing him to trip and stumble, and while he’s picking himself up, the left fielder throws the ball with all his might to first base, which doesn’t quite make it, so the first baseman runs to pick it up, dashes back to first base just as the runner gets there, they crash head on, both collapse to the ground, the first baseman drops the ball and a huge argument ensues as to whether or not the runner is out. It was a complicated question: did the first baseman beat the runner or vice-versa? And what about the dropped ball? Was it dropped before the collision or after? The runner and the first baseman were in no mood to be toyed with and both had already been humiliated beyond tolerance, so the umpire, fearing for his life, refused to make the call. Some genius solved the problem and saved some broken noses in the process by suggesting a coin toss. I don’t remember who won the toss, but everybody was satisfied.
And one more: How about the time during wheat harvest when everybody on the other side was busy cutting wheat (they were from a town a hundred miles south of Umbarger, so their harvest was in full swing and ours was just about to begin), and when their team showed up they were all girls! A high school girl team of fast-pitch softball players. Well, there were rules about who could or could not play on a West Texas Irrigation League team, one of which was, you had to be on the team’s official roster for a certain amount of time, and none of these girls were on that roster for any amount of time.
And they were girls! Sweet innocent little high school girls. So what the hell, a sure win, right? Not exactly a macho thing to do, but the possibility of another mark in our win column trumped any notion of chivalry lurking in our black hearts, so yeah, okay, we’d waive the rules, hee-hee! We‘d even let them pitch to us underhand. From forty feet away instead of sixty? Sure, why not? As long as our side could stick with the overhand style from sixty feet. Let’s get it done and over with.
Who knew they were tenacious, single-minded, organized, coached, trained, talented, dedicated, determined, capable, fast, agile, coordinated, and for this game, particularly motivated? Ever try to hit a baseball thrown underhand at 70 miles an hour from forty feet away?
They beat our pants off.
We had only two pitchers, Sammy Nelson and Billy Tubman, he of oiled glove fame. Sammy was a tall, lanky kid, clumsy and slow as a milk cow, but had a fastball that could suck the whiskers off your chin. And he was wild; oh man, was he ever wild. We won more than one game because of the fear he instilled in at least half of all opposing batters. I can still see the pose of the terrified batters: absurdly open stance, gingerly crowding the left back corner of the batter’s box, crouched, butt sticking over the edge of the box, front leg poised to collapse in a twisting plunge to the dirt, holding the bat at an impossible angle; what made it so fearsome was, the batter never knew whether a plunge toward the plate or away from it would give him the better chance. It’s hard to hit a pitch from a stance like that, but those that did, and the ones brave enough to squelch their fears, were the ones that regularly beat us. Vengeance of a sort was ours though, because a good many of them went home with saucer-sized bruises on their hips and arms.
When he was on, Sammy would whizz the ball so straight down the center that the catcher didn’t have to move his mitt a single centimeter to catch it. Sometimes he could do that several innings in a row, then something deep inside his control center would snap, and the walkathon would begin. A batter would be doing his jittery ready-to-dive dance at the corner of the batters’ box, suffer through four or five, sometimes six pitches flying in his general direction, then, with great relief, trot off to first. Same with the next, and the next. Soon a slow, musical-chairs sort of shuffle was milling around the bases as one player after another took his place in the queue heading for home.
Five walks in a row wasn’t unusual. That’s two runs, assuming no one was on base when the first batter walked.
That’s when Billy would take over.
Billy was a hulking bachelor who lived by himself on a farm about six miles west of town. His hands were the size of boxing gloves and his fingers the size of bratwurst sausages. His regular position was right field, but when he pitched, his specialty was the knuckler.
We all know that when you throw a ball, it spins, and if it spins fast enough in the right direction, it curves, rises, or drops. The reason is that the spin, in combination with the stitches, causes uneven air pressure on one side of the ball or the other. A good pitcher can control the spin so as to make it go up, down, or sideways.
But what if you throw the ball so it doesn’t spin? When that happens, the air makes the ball wobble and the stitches to randomly change positions relative to the direction the ball moves through the air, with the result that it floats like, to quote Willie Stargell, a butterfly with hiccups. It’s nearly impossible to hit. It’s called a knuckle ball, or knuckler, and Billy, with his oversized hands, had the knuckle ball down pat. I always believed that if he had thrown the knuckle ball exclusively, we could have won every game we ever played.
But he wouldn’t do it. He’d generally use it to strike out however many batters remained in the inning he relieved Sammy in, but then, no matter how much we badgered him, he’d revert to throwing what he considered his fast ball and his slow, sissy curve ball. Only problem was, his fastballs were as straight and pretty as the sunrise and not at all fast, and his curve balls had no more curves than a girl marathoner. That’s why he never started. Nobody could persuade him to throw his knuckler if he didn’t want to.
All that was the soup, the unitdy, unholy morass, the confusing, confounding, and endlessly fascinating and mostly unproductive breeding grounds where on rare occasions, true genius nevertheless germinated, and on even rarer occasions came to fruition. I saw it happen. One of our players, a kid named Barry Sizemore, two years younger than I, joined our team when he was fifteen. We went to the same small country school (total number of students including grades one through 12, hovered around fifty. That’s fifty, five-o, fifty), so I knew he was pretty good, but what the hell; he was just a skinny little twerp. He wouldn’t jeopardize my team standing any.
Then in one season he must have added five inches to his height and twenty pounds of muscle to his frame. Long story short: he showed enough promise that his daddy sent him to a month-long baseball school somewhere in Oklahoma, and when he returned, not only did he dominate every game he played in, which was all of them, but scouts began showing up around the League’s dilapidated facilities, not quite believing the five carat diamond they had found in the detritus. Whatever the rules were that governed professional recruiting, they prohibited scouts from even talking to Barry until he graduated high school, but when he walked off the stage on graduation night, he, under his daddy’s wing, signed with one of the majors. I think it was Brooklyn. Later that summer Brooklyn played a demonstration game in Phoenix, and the first time at bat, Barry hit one out of the park.
His mistake was marrying the wrong girl. She didn’t like him gone all the time, so he quit baseball after one year, bought a farm with his bonus money, fathered eight children, lost the farm, divorced his wife, remarried, and now lives in some small West Texas town pumping gas and bemoaning his lost chance. And what a chance it was. He was a natural. The only coaching he ever got, from anybody, was during the month he spent in Oklahoma, where he beat Mickey Mantle’s record for time from home plate to first base. True story.
That’s the baseball I remember and love. Is today’s version of the game better? Undoubtedly.
But it’s not as much fun.
Copyright Gerald Beckman
The Family
A South Texas lawyer gets sucked into the seamy underworld of drug dealers. Read the first chapter
or
Roughnecks and Rednecks
Two youngsters try to find their way in a clannish West Texas town. Read the first chapter
or
Powder Road
An aging drug lord needs an ally with a particular skillset to help him win an ongoing war with competing cartels to supply America’s illicit narcotics market. One of his minions finds a prospect, a high school senior who’s smart, follows orders, has no fear of the Man, and proves himself by tackling a job no other man would dare undertake. What forces compel a young man to embrace a world where torture and murder are commonplace, where love and loyalty are considered the marks of weakness?
About Gerald Beckman
Gerald Beckman was born and raised on a farm in West Texas and practiced law in Corpus Christi. Since retirement he has written numerous novels. He writes, travels, and does all those things he always wanted to do but never had time for. He serves on numerous committees and boards, and enjoys volunteering in community activities such as World Affairs Council of South Texas, International Education Committee at TAMUCC, the Building Committee at St. John’s Catholic Church, and Beautify Corpus Christi.
learn more at GeraldBeckman.com
Short fiction and essays
We Called It Baseball
Baseball as seen on television is the sport in its purest form. It’s where a superman makes a perfectly timed jump against an outfield wall to snatch a fly ball over his back; where a third baseman dives for an 85 mph grounder, scoops it out of the dirt, rolls to his feet and in the same graceful motion shoots it like a rifle shot to first in time to make the out; where a pitcher throws a ball at 100 mph to a target 17 by 30 inches over sixty feet away, almost never hitting a man hunkered six inches away from the target, while making the ball curve and jump, hop, drop, or rise; where hulking batters who can swing a bat nearly as fast as the pitch face those brain-rattling fastballs zipping inches past their skulls without fear; where every player knows instantly and exactly what to do on the next play, no matter what it is, and does it time and time again, flawlessly. That is what people call baseball nowadays. That’s what they talk about, that’s what they analyze, and that’s what they bet on while sitting in their living rooms sipping suds and nibbling nachos. It’s baseball to be sure, but it’s baseball in sanitized perfection. It’s nothing like the baseball I once knew and loved.
I loved the nitty-gritty, the wild, untamed, unsponsored and unorganized, almost totally infertile spawning grounds for professional players that thrived before the disappearance of tiny country schools, before unlimited school sports budgets, manicured playing fields, and helicopter parenting; where kids discovered the game on their own, where they played without adult interference for the pure love of it, where money and fame and free-agenting and endorsements were as immaterial, albeit unattainable, as the back side of the moon; where coaching was nil, rules unknown, or misunderstood, often, even, not applicable, even in the unlikely event a rulebook could be found and the pertinent rule pinpointed. I loved that version of the game so much that, forty-five years later, I still dream of playing it.
I was in first grade when I first swung a bat at a slow pitched softball. I remember it to this day. The ball was tossed by some chubby girl in the fourth grade from what must have been every bit of ten feet away, and I couldn’t hit it worth a flip. There was no backstop, no bleachers, no coaches, no organization, and no rules other than 1) try to hit the ball, and if you managed that, 2) run to first base, not third (a common mistake); 3) chase the ball (actually catching it was rare; even a slow grounder bouncing over the native pasture sod was harder to grab than a panicky ground squirrel); 4) throw the ball when you finally got to it, 5) run after it again, on and on until the bell rang at the end of recess.
Our equipment was one broken bat whose handle was repeatedly repaired by black electrical tape, and a ball whose cover kept coming off until some enterprising young lady had her mom stitch it back on. Rusty plow discs of different sizes placed at stepped-off distances forming a rough square served as bases, and a short piece of flat board placed somewhere close to the middle of the square was the pitcher’s mound — except, of course, there was no mound. In the early grades boys and girls played the game together. Later we played boys against girls, and because we were stronger (loading hay bales all summer long) and faster (endlessly chasing livestock from one pasture to another), the boys usually won. But not always.
As we got older, we got more sophisticated. We chose teams, taking turns, starting with the best, ending with the worst. That was usually Joey Saren, a poor kid absolutely devoid of anything approaching physical grace, but who bore his repeated humiliations with a different kind of grace and no apparent psychic scars. No longer were the games played only at school, where we were limited to a fifteen minute recess at midmorning, a one hour lunch break—wolfing down our sack lunches in less than five minutes so we could play ball—and another fifteen minute recess at mid-afternoon. Now, with the freedom afforded by a few additional years and balloon-tired bicycles, we could play for hours at a time in some farmer’s cow-pasture, using gunny sacks and flattened cardboard for bases. Still no coaching, bleachers or properly laid out diamond, but we did sometimes manage the side of a barn or storage shed as a backstop, and we had learned some of the rules, like a tie goes to the runner, a caught foul tip is a strike and not an out, and what a balk meant, though we could never agree exactly when it happened; and since the umpire was always the worst player (that’s why he was umpire) and knew even less about the rules than the rest of us, he wasn’t much help. It came down to which side shouted the loudest or was the readiest to quit if it didn’t get its way.
Though these games lasted longer than the ones at school, they had a downside that made them less popular than they might have been. Dodging prickly pears and cow pies while chasing balls detracted considerably from the fun of the game.
I was fifteen when I took the next step up the ladder. I was accepted to play for the Umbarger Blue Socks, one of seven teams made up of farmers from my age on up (some guys were pushing fifty) who got together and organized themselves into what they called the West Texas Irrigation League.
We played every Sunday, each team taking its turn to host the game in the town closet to their farms. Never any practice sessions, no warmups, just show up and play. Still no coaching, no grandstands, no snack bars, and mostly worn-out equipment, except for our gloves. Every player had his own glove, a significant investment, and he kept it clean and oiled. One player named Billy Tubman (more about him later), on the theory that if a little bit of oil was good, a whole lot of oil was a whole lot better, soaked his glove in a bucket of motor oil overnight. Like the rest of us, he had no money to spare, so he did everything imaginable to undo the damage, including backing over it with a truck tire to squish the oil out of it, soaking it in a bucket of gasoline to dilute the oil, stuffing flour in and around it, hanging it from a tree limb to evaporate whatever would evaporate, and washing it over and over in hot water and detergent. He finally got it back to a useable condition, and years later, when I got married and quit the team, he was still using it. True story.
The hosting team would provide two new baseballs for that day’s game, which we tried our best to make last. Young kids would race each other chasing the fouls, and if they returned it soon enough to use for the next pitch, we’d pay the winner a dime. Actually, we paid the dime anyway.
Our ball field was bounded on two sides by cow pastures, one along third base, the other beyond left and center fields. There was something about our games that attracted cows. They would start gathering along the fence toward the beginning of a game, and by the bottom of the ninth there were more cows watching than people. And since it’s not easy to housebreak a cow, lots of manure piles were scattered about. Sometimes a foul ball rolled through a fresh pile, which was one of the fastest ways to age a new ball. We had a sackful of used balls for such occasions. We all agreed that if spitballs were illegal, shitballs ought to be illegal too. I don’t remember who came up with that one, but everybody thought it was pretty funny.
But by then we did have a backstop. It was made of chickenwire mesh and cedar posts, and where the mesh overlapped, it was stitched together with baling wire. It didn’t take long for gaps to develop, which were patched, and repatched, and repatched again, until finally a good portion of the backstop was nearly impossible to see through. It made little difference though, since there were so few spectators. Human ones, anyway.
The quality of play was pretty pathetic. Pathetic: how else describe hitting a slow grounder to the shortstop, the shortstop scooping it up to throw to first, overthrowing the first baseman, the ball bouncing off the bumper of a parked car, careening into a patch of pigweeds, the batter rounding first and heading for second while the first baseman looks frantically in the weeds for the ball, finds it, hurls it to third, which by now is the destination of the runner, who rounds third and heads for home while the third baseman, figuring on a sure out, grips the ball to throw home for the tag, only to learn the hard way that a goathead was stuck in the ball which is painfully transferred to his hand, causing another wild throw, all of which results in a home run?
How else describe the visiting team showing up only to discover it forgot its sack of bats, so we, ever the gentlemen, offer to share ours, until the home plate umpire, which they supplied, calls a strike on one of our guys when the pitch was so wild it went behind the batter, and later called another strike when the ball bounced six inches in front of the plate with enough speed and power to cover home plate in dust, which the ump duly swept off with his little brush, and in neither case would change his call, so when their time came to bat we repossessed our bats and forced a forfeit?
Or the time one of our players who had been in a month-long slump hit a solid line drive down the third base line which should have been an easy base hit, but, in an excess of elation, tossed his bat up in the air and when it came down hit his head, dropped to the ground in front of him causing him to trip and stumble, and while he’s picking himself up, the left fielder throws the ball with all his might to first base, which doesn’t quite make it, so the first baseman runs to pick it up, dashes back to first base just as the runner gets there, they crash head on, both collapse to the ground, the first baseman drops the ball and a huge argument ensues as to whether or not the runner is out. It was a complicated question: did the first baseman beat the runner or vice-versa? And what about the dropped ball? Was it dropped before the collision or after? The runner and the first baseman were in no mood to be toyed with and both had already been humiliated beyond tolerance, so the umpire, fearing for his life, refused to make the call. Some genius solved the problem and saved some broken noses in the process by suggesting a coin toss. I don’t remember who won the toss, but everybody was satisfied.
And one more: How about the time during wheat harvest when everybody on the other side was busy cutting wheat (they were from a town a hundred miles south of Umbarger, so their harvest was in full swing and ours was just about to begin), and when their team showed up they were all girls! A high school girl team of fast-pitch softball players. Well, there were rules about who could or could not play on a West Texas Irrigation League team, one of which was, you had to be on the team’s official roster for a certain amount of time, and none of these girls were on that roster for any amount of time.
And they were girls! Sweet innocent little high school girls. So what the hell, a sure win, right? Not exactly a macho thing to do, but the possibility of another mark in our win column trumped any notion of chivalry lurking in our black hearts, so yeah, okay, we’d waive the rules, hee-hee! We‘d even let them pitch to us underhand. From forty feet away instead of sixty? Sure, why not? As long as our side could stick with the overhand style from sixty feet. Let’s get it done and over with.
Who knew they were tenacious, single-minded, organized, coached, trained, talented, dedicated, determined, capable, fast, agile, coordinated, and for this game, particularly motivated? Ever try to hit a baseball thrown underhand at 70 miles an hour from forty feet away?
They beat our pants off.
We had only two pitchers, Sammy Nelson and Billy Tubman, he of oiled glove fame. Sammy was a tall, lanky kid, clumsy and slow as a milk cow, but had a fastball that could suck the whiskers off your chin. And he was wild; oh man, was he ever wild. We won more than one game because of the fear he instilled in at least half of all opposing batters. I can still see the pose of the terrified batters: absurdly open stance, gingerly crowding the left back corner of the batter’s box, crouched, butt sticking over the edge of the box, front leg poised to collapse in a twisting plunge to the dirt, holding the bat at an impossible angle; what made it so fearsome was, the batter never knew whether a plunge toward the plate or away from it would give him the better chance. It’s hard to hit a pitch from a stance like that, but those that did, and the ones brave enough to squelch their fears, were the ones that regularly beat us. Vengeance of a sort was ours though, because a good many of them went home with saucer-sized bruises on their hips and arms.
When he was on, Sammy would whizz the ball so straight down the center that the catcher didn’t have to move his mitt a single centimeter to catch it. Sometimes he could do that several innings in a row, then something deep inside his control center would snap, and the walkathon would begin. A batter would be doing his jittery ready-to-dive dance at the corner of the batters’ box, suffer through four or five, sometimes six pitches flying in his general direction, then, with great relief, trot off to first. Same with the next, and the next. Soon a slow, musical-chairs sort of shuffle was milling around the bases as one player after another took his place in the queue heading for home.
Five walks in a row wasn’t unusual. That’s two runs, assuming no one was on base when the first batter walked.
That’s when Billy would take over.
Billy was a hulking bachelor who lived by himself on a farm about six miles west of town. His hands were the size of boxing gloves and his fingers the size of bratwurst sausages. His regular position was right field, but when he pitched, his specialty was the knuckler.
We all know that when you throw a ball, it spins, and if it spins fast enough in the right direction, it curves, rises, or drops. The reason is that the spin, in combination with the stitches, causes uneven air pressure on one side of the ball or the other. A good pitcher can control the spin so as to make it go up, down, or sideways.
But what if you throw the ball so it doesn’t spin? When that happens, the air makes the ball wobble and the stitches to randomly change positions relative to the direction the ball moves through the air, with the result that it floats like, to quote Willie Stargell, a butterfly with hiccups. It’s nearly impossible to hit. It’s called a knuckle ball, or knuckler, and Billy, with his oversized hands, had the knuckle ball down pat. I always believed that if he had thrown the knuckle ball exclusively, we could have won every game we ever played.
But he wouldn’t do it. He’d generally use it to strike out however many batters remained in the inning he relieved Sammy in, but then, no matter how much we badgered him, he’d revert to throwing what he considered his fast ball and his slow, sissy curve ball. Only problem was, his fastballs were as straight and pretty as the sunrise and not at all fast, and his curve balls had no more curves than a girl marathoner. That’s why he never started. Nobody could persuade him to throw his knuckler if he didn’t want to.
All that was the soup, the unitdy, unholy morass, the confusing, confounding, and endlessly fascinating and mostly unproductive breeding grounds where on rare occasions, true genius nevertheless germinated, and on even rarer occasions came to fruition. I saw it happen. One of our players, a kid named Barry Sizemore, two years younger than I, joined our team when he was fifteen. We went to the same small country school (total number of students including grades one through 12, hovered around fifty. That’s fifty, five-o, fifty), so I knew he was pretty good, but what the hell; he was just a skinny little twerp. He wouldn’t jeopardize my team standing any.
Then in one season he must have added five inches to his height and twenty pounds of muscle to his frame. Long story short: he showed enough promise that his daddy sent him to a month-long baseball school somewhere in Oklahoma, and when he returned, not only did he dominate every game he played in, which was all of them, but scouts began showing up around the League’s dilapidated facilities, not quite believing the five carat diamond they had found in the detritus. Whatever the rules were that governed professional recruiting, they prohibited scouts from even talking to Barry until he graduated high school, but when he walked off the stage on graduation night, he, under his daddy’s wing, signed with one of the majors. I think it was Brooklyn. Later that summer Brooklyn played a demonstration game in Phoenix, and the first time at bat, Barry hit one out of the park.
His mistake was marrying the wrong girl. She didn’t like him gone all the time, so he quit baseball after one year, bought a farm with his bonus money, fathered eight children, lost the farm, divorced his wife, remarried, and now lives in some small West Texas town pumping gas and bemoaning his lost chance. And what a chance it was. He was a natural. The only coaching he ever got, from anybody, was during the month he spent in Oklahoma, where he beat Mickey Mantle’s record for time from home plate to first base. True story.
That’s the baseball I remember and love. Is today’s version of the game better? Undoubtedly.
But it’s not as much fun.
Copyright Gerald Beckman