Boy Kings of Texas Read Online Free

beatified look of churchgoers. There was more drama in the barrio, with Grampa coming home from a fling, a bender, and nearly dead. All was as it should be. It had a pacifying effect on them, to see someone else going through what they were all going through, though not publicly, not like Gramma.
    The next few weeks after the night he was caught are weird. Gramma is going to the cúrandera daily, the family witch doctor, and I have to accompany her when I can because that’s my role as the youngest boy.
    The cúrandera is known as La Señora . See, there’s the difference. The “good witch” and the “wicked witch” in The Wizard of Oz sort of thing. La Señora , or “The Lady,” is the good witch. La viéja , or “The Old Crone,” is the bad witch. It’s a classic tale of good versus evil, except with garlic. Gramma goes to La Señora for consultation, for help, for direction. But Gramma has darker thoughts than La Señora can get behind.
    She’s casting midnight spells with nail clippings and earwax, cheap powdery perfumes and dead toads in jars, carrying her 9 millimeter pistol in her car. She prays for strength. She prays for death. Not for herself or him. Maybe him. She prays to Pancho Villa, she prays to bad saints. One afternoon she and I are out driving along the port of Brownsville by that bar where la viéja supposedly met Grampa, near Portway Acres where she is rumored to live when Gramma sees that other woman driving by and Gramma guns the engine in her huge blue LTD and gives chase, screaming and blaring her horn, trying to run la viéja off the road.
    The woman turns onto a dirt road and rockets off, leaving an atomically billowing cloud of dust behind her while Gramma drives her LTD into a ditch and punches the ceiling repeatedly and depresses the horn until you think she’d kill the battery, so long did it howl.
    This sort of stuff is happening a lot more often now. We never catch a good look at that other driver, just the car, and we never know what she really looked like; we just see just images of a squat woman in a battered maroon car who turns tail whenever she sees Gramma’s blue LTD. It might not even really be the right person, just someone scared of the prowling lunatic in the LTD. My older brother Dan has many similar stories.
    Gramma’s house becomes a coven. The altar in the corner starts to bloom like a death flower, all rosaries and death spells with the Polaroids of Grampa all beaten up and drunk taped up all around. Basil, rosemary, lilac, rue, and peppermint are tied in bundles and placed under pillows; sage smoke saturates everything in both houses. Raw eggs hang suspended in half-empty glasses of water for interpretation, their milky tendrils growing rancid in the South Texas heat and giving the dark house a rank odor of putrescence, like something’s already dead here, already decaying wetly, we just don’t know what it is.
    No one talks about Grampa’s disappearances. He goes off for two, maybe three days at a time. Dad is quiet, Mom is nowhere. Am I going to school at this time? I had to be. Busy with my own second grade dramas, likely, as were the other four grandkids.
    When he does come home, Grampa is drunk and penniless, and once he returns without his shoes. I remember seeing him sitting on the concrete well that night, just outside their porch, with Gramma throwing his things out the front door while he nodded off, snoring quietly as he waited for her to finish.
    He notices me looking at him and smiles.
    â€œ Poongui, ” he says in Spanish. “ Bien paca. ” (Come here.) I do, and he hugs me quietly while Gramma howls from within the house. He smells of beer and cigarettes.
    This was about a week before Grampa died. The night his brothers were all called over, he’d been gone two or three days. I hadn’t noticed. We lived across the driveway, but Gramma and Grampa came and