In 1986, my family lived in Everman, Texas, up on a hill in a rented house at the end of a gravel road. On a cold Sunday near the beginning of spring, a knock at the door revealed Mario, our neighbor, standing on the front porch and looking disconcerted.
“Something killed our dog,” Mario said. “I think it was a mountain lion.”
Mario had a son named Rene. Rene was my best friend at the time by virtue of being the only other kid I knew in a new town. I was worried about him. My father pulled on his coat and told me to stay in the house. I followed along anyways.
Rene and I had a complicated relationship. I was seven years old but Rene was ten and in the fifth grade. This meant that Rene and I had no classes together and did not see each other at school. There was also a racial divide: Rene’s parents were first generation immigrants from Mexico. My family was what Mario sometimes called “your basic gringos.”
Mario was nice, but Rene’s mother was not fond of me. She said my mother was a brujah. Sometimes she would not tell me when my mother had called for me to come home, on purpose, so that I would later get in trouble. She would dutifully fulfill mom-bligations like making us snacks when Rene and I were hanging out at his house down the hill, but when Rene would go to the bathroom and we would be alone, she would say mean things to me.
My limited experience with other people’s parents did little to inform me of how wrong this was. We moved all the time when I was very young, and so I had only had one other real friend by this point, Jonathan, from when we lived in DeSoto. I rarely saw Jonathan’s parents, and all I really knew was that they kept trash bags of what I thought were lawn clippings all over their house. I was five when we lived down the street and around the corner from Jonathan, and when I told my parents that I did not want to go to Jonathan’s house one day “because of all the stinky grass everywhere,” they asked me for a few details and then administratively ended our friendship.
“Can you imagine keeping pot in the house with kids?” my mom asked my dad, chaining a menthol from the end of one pack to the start of another.
“But Mom,” I said, “we have pots all over the place and this isn’t fair.”
After my experience with Jonathan’s mom and dad, Rene’s mom didn’t seem so unusual, but things went downhill a few months into our friendship and several months before the mountain lion showed up. One night, while sleeping over, I got up to go to the bathroom and she caught me in the dark hallway, in transit.
“Evil boy! What you do?” She hissed this like she’d just caught a burglar.
“I hafta pee,” I managed, trying to shamble by.
“Evil boys are taken by night devils. Yours is short, and he blue. He has teeth and claws and will take you when sun goes down.” She made some sort of gesture that, in the years since, I have come to believe was the sign of the cross. “Get back!”
The image that filled up my mind in the gloom of that house down the hill was of a short, blue monster I’d seen a few weeks earlier on Tales from the Darkside. It lived in a small closet in a rented room and ate people who stayed there. It came out at dusk to feed. It pounced upon its prey in slow motion, impossibly large eyes rolling like a shark’s.
It didn’t occur to me at the time that maybe she’d seen the same episode on their little TV in the den, the same one we’d been playing Nintendo on earlier in the night. All I knew was that I was scared, and that maybe this woman would rid herself of me once and for all by summoning the minor devil, the blue meanie with wild teeth, the proverbial thing in the closet.
I went back to the pullout couch bed and lay there terrified until I passed out near dawn, exhausted. Some time after that, I pissed myself. Rene’s mom woke me up, and Rene was standing by her, back-lit and looming over me in the weird fall morning light. They both looked disgusted.
“Stupid boy. Don’t you know where toilet?” She tutt-tutted and pulled the sheets off the bed. I was not invited back to stay the night.
Rene and I had seen each other only a few times since that night and that suited me just fine. I had come to hate his mother in that simple way children hate mean cats and getting shots and things that hurt. Not that Rene and I would have had much to do anyways – most of our adventures took place outdoors, and the weather had turned cold. We saw each other at Halloween and we exchanged gifts at Christmas. Both of these happened up the hill, at my house.
Rene had gotten a dog that summer from one of Mario’s cousins, a massive slab of a Boxer with a name I do not remember. When Mario showed up that March morning, shifting his weight worriedly from foot to foot, I thought he meant their small terrier mutt was dead, the one that normally lived in the house. The Boxer was, to that point, the most powerful and muscular animal I had seen up close and in real life, almost as tall at the shoulder as my head.
It was friendly enough, but I also knew from experience that it was a serious dog, a dog that didn’t play much. The Boxer was A Dog That Did Not Take Shit From Anyone. My brain didn’t even bother with trying to imagine what could have been a match for the Boxer, let alone something that could have killed it.
I followed my father down the hill because I liked the terrier, which was a sweet old yellow thing, and because I thought Rene might be sad. I thought it would be nice for him to have a friend around. Even at that young age I turned to my friends in sadness before anyone else, and I figured it was the same for everyone, and would almost certainly be the case for boys with evil mothers.
We walked down the hill in a line, and I brought up the rear. Rene’s yard flattened out after a natural ridge at the bottom of the hill into a large, semi-circular area of dust and clay that met the house and then carried further down the hill, running grass to the creek below. Mario’s big open slat trailer was loose of any vehicle, parked near the tree where he’d built a fort for Rene the year before we’d moved to Everman. I looked up in the tree out of habit and saw a sullen Rene looking over the side. I waved. He didn’t wave back.
Mario had walked to the corner of the trailer furthest from the fort and the house and stopped, looking down in the brush. I was still following close behind my father as he rounded the trailer to join Mario when he stopped short, sucking in his breath. I crashed into his back and then sidestepped, apologizing and peeking at the same time.
The remains of The Boxer lay in the tall grass – most of a torso, most of three legs. No head, very little left from the chest forward. I had never seen anything dead that was bigger than a bug. My brain couldn’t make sense of it.
“What is that?” I asked. My father and Mario didn’t answer, already deep in manly conversation.
“Do you have any guns bigger than that .22,” my father was asking, “or that .410 I saw Rene with last summer?”
Mario nodded. “Sí, I have a .357.”
“Dad.” I said. “What is that?”
“Any rifles? I have a .30-06 if you need it.”
Mario grunted. “How will we find it?” He toed an enormous track in the dirt, pads and claws outlined in sharp relief.
My father looked around the yard, spying the terrier which was sniffing the ground and walking nervously back and forth under the tree. “A cat like this will come back. It didn’t take everything the first time, not even all of…” He trailed off, gesturing to the incomplete thing in the grass.
A mounting horror was quickly taking hold of me and my mind was racing. “Dad,” I said again, my voice breaking towards shrill. “That isn’t really The Boxer, is it?”
“Yes, Josh. That’s The Boxer. Something a hell of a lot meaner killed it.”
I looked up to see Rene climbing down the improvised ladder, sawed-off wooden planks nailed into the tree at irregular intervals. He was looking over his shoulder at me and he looked mad. He reached the ground and stood under the tree, making no move to join us.
“Why are you crying? She was my dog.” He glared at me, crossed his arms, looked at the ground.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry about this. About your dog.” I was crying freely now, close to giving over to wracking, childish sobs. “I’m just… so… sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
“What are you talking about, you baby? Just leave!” Rene spun and went back towards the house, where the front door was already opening.
His mother pulled the door open and stood in the interior gloom, her form a spare silhouette against the brightness of the arid yard. After an impossibly long time, the door started to close, but seemingly of its own power: the shape of the woman never moved.
I staggered backwards and into my dad, again. I turned around and tried to say “Let’s go.” I was crying too hard to form words.
“I’m gonna take him home,” my father said to Mario. “I’ll be back a little later and we can make a plan.”
I started saying “No no no no no” and my dad picked me up and told me to hush and carried me over the ridge. When we got up the hill a ways, he put me down.
“I’m sorry you saw that,” he said, “but I told you to stay at home. Mountain lions are nasty.”
“You can’t go back there, Dad. That wasn’t a mountain lion.”
“What are you talking about?” He stopped and gave me a look I catch myself giving other people these days, the considering kind that says are you crazy or full of shit or do you have something important to say? I’m not sure yet.
I shook my head, but then caved. “Rene’s mom killed The Boxer. If you go down there she’ll kill you, too.”
“Oh, Josh,” he said, shaking his head and turning for home. “I know you don’t like her but that’s ridiculous. Come on.”
I knew that was the end of it so I kept my mouth shut. Still, I invented ways to keep him around the house the rest of the day. A few weeks later, Mario called my dad, telling him that he’d heard the big cat the night before and that the hunt was on. I don’t remember my father going down the hill, or what weapons he took, but I know they killed the beast as it charged into that dusty half-circle, gunning it down from their perch in Rene’s tree house. It had killed almost a dozen neighborhood dogs and cats and one young horse before the two men shot it.
The confirmation of the death of the big cat made me sad, but the proof of the thing’s existence was of great comfort. I hadn’t slept in weeks. Every night between that cold Sunday morning and the night Mario and my father killed the mountain lion, my closet door was flung wide and every light was on. Every night I talked myself into exhausted oblivion, passing out after hours of panicked internal monologue. Every night, tracking shadows on the ceiling, wondering if I was an evil boy, I thought of what Rene’s mom knew, and what lurked in her closet.
Rene’s mom thought your mom was a witch? On one of my visits to my aunt and uncle who lived in South Texas, I remember hearing my aunt having a very serious conversation with my uncle about an elderly Hispanic woman whom she called a brujah. I asked her what that meant and she told me and I, all of 12 years old, laughed. I got the shit knocked out of me for thinking that was funny. We’d been out on the ranch earlier that day and my aunt said that the brujah had been following me all day long. She’d seen her. She was a crow. I though that she’d fallen and bumped her head or something; all I knew was that I wasn’t going to laugh again. My aunt and uncle were as solidly white and Methodist as you could get then or now, but my aunt was dead serious about that woman being a brujah.
It’s a different ballgame.
Another very compelling story, señor. You’ve got the gift.
Thanks, Patrick.
And: I don’t think she really thought my mother was a witch. I think she just didn’t like me at all and so was as unpleasant to me as an adult can be to a child without breaking laws.