I was six years old and had just started the first grade. Mi madre woke me up, and told me it was time to get up and get ready for school. I want through what was now my new morning routine every week day of the week except for Saturday and Sunday. I really didn’t like this new routine that started in September. I stood up, pulled my clothes on and went the kitchen sink to throw some water on my face to wake up. I grabbed the taco Amá was handing me as she slicked down my hair with a comb after she had splashed water on it. I took a mordida of what is now called a wrap but is really just un taco de tortilla de harina, as I continued getting ready for school. The taco was just about gone when I reached the door and walked out as I threw the last mordida down the hatch.
My home was the most peaceful tranquil place you could ever be in. I lived there twenty–four hours a day, seven days a week up until the day I was drafted into the “Elemen-tary Eschool”. At home, peace and love was the norm, no fighting with siblings, no fighting between parents. My dad told my mom what to do and that’s what she did. No need for arguing. Peace was more desirable and more enjoyable. He was usually gone most of the time anyway. As a child, I was brained washed by my mother’s love and care into being a lover of peace and harmony.
The first day as I walked back home I saw one of the kids from my first grade class walking home. He lived near my house. The second day I saw the kid again I walked over next to him and we started talking. ¿Donde vives, donde vives tu? We became friends on that second day. After that, I alwlays walked to and from school with Santiago.
My parents and my three siblings lived in a one room house behind my grandparent’s house. Every school day morning to get to school, I walked across the street in front of my grandfather’s house, walked between two houses to their back yard, crossed the alley and into Santiago’s back yard. Most houses didn’t have fences and if people recognized you, they didn’t mind you walking through their yard.
Santiago lived with his grandfather, just them two. I never did find out how come they were alone. Santiago’s abuelo was straight out of an old Mexican movie. A movie about how an old Abuelito bigoton wound up living alone with his six year old grandson en un barrio. He was mother, father, and grandfather to Santiago. He did all the housework and everything else that was needed to make a good home for his Grandson. With short slow steps he kept walking around doing this and that. He never stopped moving. Even though he was a gentile old man, Santiago’s Huelito never acknowledged my presence the whole time I was friends with Santiago. Not even when I was sitting at his kitchen table waiting on Santiago. I felt welcomed but he never addressed me in any way. Santiago was the focus of his attention one hundred percent of the time.
The third day of school, after crossing their back yard, I walked up the three wooden stairs and opened the screen door. Their little kitchen was cozy and the delicious aromas of what Welito had made for breakfast lingered in the air. I walked in to find Santiago getting ready for school using only his left hand, in his right hand he held un taco de tortilla con huevo with not more than two bites left in it. He took the last two bites one right after the other and finished getting ready. We both stepped outside the front door and onto the street.
Skinner Elementary in Corpus Christi was a little more than five blocks down the same street where Santiago lived. It was five blocks to the school if you walked straight through. Three blocks down there was a wooded area that covered four square blocks. We had to cross it to get to school. It was criss-crossed by many footpaths going in every direction; It was heavily wooded and sat right in the middle of the barrio. There was a small clearing right in the middle of it where all the veredas met. There was a small water reservoir in the monte, that everybody called “el tanke”.
On or about the third day from my emergence from the peace and quiet I’d been living in for the last six years at home, Santiago and I were walking to school. We got to “el tanke” and started walking into it. We heard dogs barking as we got closer to the open area. The closer we got, the louder the barking got. Now we could hear angry growls, too, as we approached the commotion.
A ragged old man with a long beard and only one leg was right in the middle of a fierce fight with a pack of dogs. There were at least eight dogs involved in the melee. The old man and his three skinny mangy dogs were being attacked by five bigger dogs. They were surrounding the old man who was holding on to a small home-made wagon with one hand. He had all his belongings piled up in the wagon, his cooking utinsels, bags of clothes and other bags full of other stuff, and a bunch of miscellaneous odds and ends. There was a pan with fresh bones for his dogs at the very top of the pile. I guessed that was what the dogs were after. He was frantically hopping around swinging a long stick with one end wrapped with a ball of old rags that he used for a crutch. He was swinging in all directions trying to fight them off. The attackers were perros bravos that used to roam around the barrio streets in the old days. Two of them were big mixed German Shepherds and one of the others was an oversized wooly mixed red chow with a purple tongue and a big black head. The viejo’s dogs were skinny and smaller, but they were putting up a fierce fight defending the old man.
Two of the shepherds knocked down one of the old man’s skinny mangy dogs and got on top of him and started to tear him up. The old man swung his long stick at the nearest one and I heard the sound of ribs cracking as one of the Shepherds yelped and flew off to one side. The other Shepherd grabbed the old man’s crutch in his jaws and pulled the old man down to the ground. One of his mangy mutts put a fierce bite on the Shepherd’s hind leg and he let go of the stick. The other Shepherd rushed the old man. He was an old skinny viejillo but very light on his feet. Before the dog could get to him, he hopped back on his one leg and swung the big stick catching the dog squarely on the jaw, knocking him down. The other dogs were quickly darting in and out trying to get around the old man and to the pan of bones and not get hit by the stick. His eyes were on fire. His head was spinning around swiftly back and forth watching every one of the attacking dogs making sure none of them could sneak up on him.
He was yelling and cussing the whole time, “perros hijos de sus chingadas madres”. He was growling mas maldiciones under his breath in-between the loud cussing. The yelling, the barking, and the growling came as quite a shock to me and to the relatively peaceful existence I had lived up to then. In other words it scared the shit out of me.
The dogs were running around trying to find a vantage point in the fierce struggle of man and beast. El pinche Viejo and the dog fight were blocking the entire clearing where the veredas met. We couldn’t get across it to get to school. Some of the more daring older kids ran around the edge the fracas when they got a chance; others saw the dogs and turned around and ran back to the street, preferring to walk the extra two blocks around the tanke. Some of the girls started crying as soon they ran into the vicious dog fight and retreated back down the path as fast as they could.
That’s what happened to Santiago and me. Before we could run back, two of the fighting dogs ran into us. They had a mouthful of each other’s hide and swung each other around in a circle. One of the dogs let go, the other one came rolling onto my leg. He jumped up and barked and snapped at my face twice in one quick motion. I saw his teeth one inch from my face. I pirouetted and “patas pa que son” I quickly disappeared back down the vereda in a flash with Santiago close behind me. I never knew how the fight ended, but I’m sure a couple of the one legged man’s dogs didn’t make it. They were already a bloody mess when we lost sight of them.
I had never been anywhere as frightened as I was that day. I had never even imagined such violence. The peaceful existence I had lived up to then was suddenly ripped away from me. The last thing I ever expected when I walked out of the tranquility of my home that morning was to have the living daylights scared out of me. As you might have gathered by now, after all these years, dogs still make me nervous.
Over the years I have come to know that dogs sense this latent fear in me. If I walk somewhere, even if I’m in a group and there are dogs around, I’m the only one they look at. Even if they are sleeping, they raise their head up to look at me. Somehow they know. I know what they’re thinking, too. They’re thinking, somewhere along the line some dog scared the living shit out of this guy and he has never forgotten it. And if dogs have any concept regarding good remedios, I know they are also probably thinking, what this guy needs es una buena curada de susto, so he can get over it, it has been just too damn long.
