Once More to the River: Family Snapshots of Growing Up, Getting Out & Going Back

Childhood's End

Childhood's End

My childhood ended the summer I was seventeen and working the counter at the Pecos Bill Tall Tale Inn and Cafe at Walt Disney World’s Frontierland. I wore black garters on the sleeves of the candy-striped, button-down shirt that served as a uniform, but otherwise this was just a glorified fast-food gig no different from working at Whataburger. Over the clatter of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad—and the screams of all the thrill-seeking riders—I filled drink orders and got yelled at by moms from Buffalo who’d asked for no beans in their taco salad.

I’d never seen a taco salad in my life. I was from Mission, Texas, birthplace of legendary Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry, where the only cafe I knew was called Pepe’s. I’d spent previous summers working at a photography studio, washing the large windows at the downtown chamber of commerce, and cleaning out mobile home trailers for $50 each. What I really dreamed of doing? I could never really say. Growing up the middle child in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, all I knew was that I shouldn’t want too much.

That summer of 1987, I went to Florida to live with second cousins, and got hired at Disney. I think they stuck me in the Pecos Bill simply because I was from Texas. The Disney laundry service provided crisp Western shirts at the start of each shift, but I wasn’t much into playing “cowboys.” My mom had tried dressing me up in country-western “kicker” drag from Mission Dry Goods, but I always felt as ridiculous as a member of the Village People.

Among my high school classmates, the trend was Roper boots, but I was a loner geek who continued wearing his penny loafers and second-hand clothes bought by the pound from the local ropa usada. My stylish older sister Michelle hardly approved. A cheerleader, school paper staffer, and homecoming queen also-ran, my sister had big hair, a huge smile, and impossible dreams of getting out.

Our overprotective parents made it hard for her to go anywhere other than chaperoned school trips. None of us were allowed to stay out later than ten o’clock. She hollered for most of her life that she couldn’t wait to finish high school and leave. But until then, she made efforts to fit in, joining the Future Farmers of America and raising a sheep that sold to a local slaughterhouse at the Mercedes Livestock Show. She slipped in and out of her school-club jackets and sequined gowns with all the ease of the professional model and actress she hoped to become one day.

I had no real ambitions of my own—at least I never admitted them like she did—and blindly followed when she signed up for drama class, thinking it’d be an easy A. I must have also thought I’d get her approval. I landed every male lead and placed at local speech tournaments, outshining my sister, but only on stage. On campus, I was still a bit of a loser, with just a friend or two, while she maintained an almost oppressive popularity.

I can’t say going to Florida was my conscious attempt to set myself free, but maybe my sister’s ceaseless rebel call to “get out” had stirred me to run off ahead as she continued the battle at home.

Michelle had graduated that summer and fought to go upstate for college, but because she was a girl, my parents felt she’d be safer in the Valley, where she could attend the local commuter college that everyone derided as Taco Tech. I felt sorry for her, guilty that I had more freedom because I was a boy.

But mostly I missed her, and my little brother, Marco. This was the first time I’d been away from both of them, the first time I’d ever left Texas. I was reminded of it each time I turned on the radio. The rock ballad “Alone,” by Heart, was a huge hit that summer and everywhere I went the Wilson sisters wailed, pounded the keyboards, and pulled the strings of their electric guitars as if they were my own veins. I grew increasingly homesick, recalling the grumbling crop-dusters that banked low over our colonia as they made repeated sweeps of the nearby fields, hot afternoons spent making backyard “swimming pools” out of heavy garbage bags, and trying to finish rainbow-coloredraspasbefore they melted into a brown puddle.

The weekend of the Fourth of July, my Florida cousins went off to a Sunday barbecue. I stayed at the house, listening to firecrackers and illicit gunshots, eventually crying myself to sleep to memories of childhood sparklers that never burned out. A neighborhood dog howled through-out the night.

The following morning, I was awakened by a knock at my bedroom door. Mom was on the phone long distance. She said Michelle was missing.

My sister, who’d been to a cookout with her boyfriend, had come home the previous night to an empty house. Mom was cashiering a late shift at the H.E.B. grocery store. Dad and Marco were at the family ranch. By the time everyone returned home, my sister’s Camaro was still in the driveway, but she was gone.

When I arrived home the next day, Michelle still hadn’t turned up and I spent the afternoon driving Dad’s pickup truck around town, posting flyers that read “HAVE YOU SEEN HER?”

At dusk, my sister was found, her murdered body abandoned in a mesquite-studded pasture behind our house. I shouted her name into the darkness, trying to pry myself loose of every hand holding onto me as I struggled to reach the backyard fence and, just beyond, the flashlight beams cutting through the dry grass.

*

At my age, I’d attended a few funerals, including those of my dad’s parents, but this was the first time I was forced to make the arrangements. My parents just couldn’t. So on a rainy morning, lulled by the squeaky wipers smearing the windshield, I rode with a sales agent from Valley Memorial Gardens to the mortuary. I picked out a casket with interior upholstery a lighter shade of pink than my sister’s bedroom walls. I remember thinking how much I wanted Michelle to like what I’d picked out for her.

*

After the burial, our house went silent, feeling as locked up as a roadside fireworks stand now closed for the season. We blamed ourselves for not being home the night of my sister’s initial disappearance, but as the one who’d been the farthest away, the guilt left me feeling even more alone amid the family. Restless, I rode back to Florida with my cousins, who’d made the cross-country drive to offer their condolences. I never reported back to the Pecos Bill. Instead, through a neighbor, I got hired at a local nursery, where I pruned and repotted and shipped out orders of ivy, hibiscus and lilies of the valley.

I worked long hours in sweaty, suffocating greenhouses, ate brown-bag lunches with immigrant co-workers, and then waited out the terrible thunderstorms that rolled through every late afternoon before heading home. Having come from sturdynorteñostock, laborers who could barely scratch an X for their name, I told myself this was where I belonged, with my hands in the dirt—not in front of the painted backdrops of a fantasyland amusement park.

My sister’s murderer was never found. When I returned to school for my senior year, I kept a tearless, resentful front. I pushed everyone away, focusing on schoolwork and the speech and drama tournaments, ultimately winning the state championship medal. It was the first time in 25 years that anyone from our school had won anything at state, but I didn’t take much joy in it, and my parents barely noticed. I received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point and was set to report for summer Beast Barracks in June.

At my high school graduation ceremony, held out on the football field that once echoed with my sister’s cheers, I could no longer contain my sorrow, and so after tossing up my tasseled hat, I huddled with my family and cried under the harsh stadium lights. Fellow students and their families kept their distance—and I have, too. I haven’t spent another summer in South Texas since.