“Now, your going off with Mr. Lopez and Rubin,” Mom said, “that’ll be our secret. No reason to tell your daddy.”
I agreed: there was no reason to tell Dad, or Mom, anything about my trip to the beach.
No reason at all.
CHAPTER 10
After the incident in the van, I saw Rubin differently. Before that, I knew that he could be hurtful, mean, but now I knew he could be cruel, and I didn’t want to be around him. That was why I started staying in the greenhouse in the afternoons, helping Mom move the yucca plants Dad had brought back from his trip. Dad returned from South Florida two days after my visit to the beach, and on his trip he had come across a fellow whose nursery was being repossessed and had needed to get rid of his plants as soon as possible. Dad saw a chance to beat the man to the fuck and bought all the man’s yucca plants, which had a stalk like corn and would cut you with their leaves. Being sliced by those leaves was the price I was willing to pay not to go to Rubin’s or to the dojo. And Dad let me get away with it for the first week he was home.
But after that week, Dad no longer bought my industrious streak. “Boy, you ain’t never been productive,” he said from the greenhouse door. “You hate tae kwon do that bad you’d rather sweat to death out here?”
“I’m helping Mom.”
“You don’t never get in this much of a hurry when I ask you to help me.”
“Maybe you don’t ask right,” I said.
Dad tilted his head. “Well, I’m not asking you now, I’m telling you: go get ready for tae kwon do.”
“It’s not time yet,” Mom said. She was at the table in the center of the greenhouse, up to her elbows in potting soil, sweat rolling down her face.
“I’m gonna take him by Rubin’s first,” Dad said. “So just stay out of this.”
“Stay out of it?” Mom said. “Well, I won’t. Wesley’s all the help I got out here.”
Dad marched to the table in three long strides, and I stood motionless, holding a yucca in each hand.
“What are you trying to say, woman?”
“That while I’m out here sweating like a nigger, you’re under the air in the house.”
Dad grabbed Mom behind the neck with one hand and slapped her face with the other.
Her glasses hung crooked, and through tears she straightened them and tried to step back, but Dad didn’t loosen his grip on her neck.
“Don’t tell me how to raise my boy.”
“He came out of me; I know for sure he’s mine.”
He slapped her two more times; her glasses fell to the greenhouse floor and Mom burst into full-blown sobs.
“Go get ready for tae kwon do, boy!”
I dropped the yucca plants and ran, Pal and Mountie at my heels, to the house. A few minutes later I was in my gi and waiting for Mom to come in and tie my belt, but I didn’t hear her or Dad in the house. I hoped he wasn’t out there going to town on her. Dad’s anger was vicious, but usually short-lived. He soon wanted to make up, to explain that it was his way, and his daddy had been just as hard on him, it was for your own good—his lines applied to Mom or me.
I peeked out the kitchen window. Pal and Mountie lay in the sand by the back door, their heads up and their ears at attention. Dad strode from the greenhouse with arms swinging furiously at his sides. This was bad. I had to get my belt tied quickly, and be waiting at the back door ready to go when he entered the house, or a Texas tornado would rip through me.
I’d seen Mom tie the belt dozens of times, and told myself over and over: I can do this. I held the belt in front of me, halved it, wrapped it around my waist, kept it straight and made certain it didn’t twist; wrapped it again, kept it straight and pulled the two ends from around my back, hoping they would be long enough to tie. And they were. I looped the two ends, then looped them again in reverse, and made a flat knot just like Mom.
“I knew you didn’t need your mama to tie your belt for you. Now get your ass in the car.”
During the entire drive to the Lopez house, Dad ranted about Mom and how when he met her she didn’t have a pot to piss in or window to throw it out of, that she was just a dumb Coonass, that he even had to teach her how to eat. Damn it, gal, you break bread with your hands, not tear it with your fork, he had told her.
On the back porch with Mr. Lopez, Dad continued talking, but his subject switched to me, how I’d become a black belt in no time, I’d go off to Texas A&M and be either an engineer
or a veterinarian. “A good job to keep him occupied until he inherits the Royal empire.”
Empire? It was 500 acres of a West Texas oil field, with new wells going in yearly, and the old wells only in the first layer of sand. Twenty-thousand acres of farmland in eastern Colorado, along the Kansas state line, the flat side of Colorado, because I didn’t see one mountain the time we went and visited the farm. It wasn’t one farm, but many, spread out over the entire county, with local farmers living and working on them. Grandmother Royal got a percentage of the profit each year and didn’t do any work from her penthouse in Amarillo. A sweet deal for her and just the way Grandfather Royal left it, which pissed off Dad, who believed that, as the only son, he should have been left in charge of the family businesses. When he wasn’t, Dad hit the road behind the steering wheel of a Peterbilt.
The Royal empire, according to Dad, would come to me in the future, but the Space Invaders game was something I could get from Rubin now. And I could see if he’d started the Captain America drawing, let him know I hadn’t forgotten, and that what had happened in the van didn’t change a thing.
But it had. Seeing Rubin, I lost all my nerve. Instead of making my demands, I quietly followed him as he led me through the yellow belt form, which I hadn’t practiced or thought about since the night of my celebratory dinner at the Lopez house.
Throughout the yellow belt form, I rarely made eye contact with Rubin, and the few moments that our eyes did connect hurt me. I whimpered inside, remained silent, and kept my head down, catching bits of Dad’s conversation with Mr. Lopez got a chance to speak. I was balanced on one foot, performing a side-kick, when I heard Mr. Lopez say, “Wesley enjoyed the beach, Señor Royal.”
“That boy ain’t never been to the beach.”
“Yes, he has. I took him.” Mr. Lopez smiled as if he expected to be thanked.
“Did Raynell go with you?”
“No, she and Maria stayed at your house and had a women’s cackling session.”
“You took my son off by yourself?”
“Rubin came, too. Just a day at the beach for the boys, Señor Royal.”
“Like hell it was! You don’t take Wesley nowhere without asking me first.”
“You weren’t here. Be reasonable, Señor Royal.”
“I don’t need you telling me to be reasonable. You just don’t take Wesley off anywhere anymore, comprende?” Dad’s finger was in Mr. Lopez’s face.
Mr. Lopez looked at the finger, then to me and Rubin, then back to the finger, and with just a flick of his wrist he flung his rum and Coke at Dad’s chest.
“Come on, Wesley, we’re going home.”
Dad, surprisingly, stepped back instead of landing a jab on Mr. Lopez’s nose. But I could feel his anger in his grip on my shoulder as he steered me to our car.
“How could you let that salt-water nigger take you to the beach?”
“I wanted to go to the beach,” I said.
“Haven’t I told you never to go off with people?”