Echoes of a Distant Summer (76 page)

M
exico City, sprawling under a haze of smog, lay in a highland basin surrounded by mountains. As his plane prepared to land at Benito Juárez Airport, Jackson could see the two extinct volcanoes rising above the miasma of pollution to the east. The plane swerved around to land into the wind and the western rim of mountains came into view, their uneven peaks reaching up like fangs through the man-made murk. It didn’t look pleasant. Eighteen-year-old Jackson wondered again why he had decided to come and visit his grandfather. He had not seen the old man in two years, not since the old man’s last trip
into the United States, and that was not a good memory. Jackson stared out the window as the plane sank into the gray-brown smog and wondered if anything positive would really be achieved in his visit.

The plane landed smoothly and Jackson passed through customs without more than casual inspection. He was carrying his bags toward the exit leading to the curbside taxis when a man wearing a cap and uniform came out of an unmarked door in the right wall of the corridor. The man walked directly over to Jackson and grabbed his arm firmly. It was Carlos.

“Go to that door just ahead on our left, Diablito! You are being followed! Hurry! The door will open as soon as we draw near!” Carlos pressed him into a quick step. The door opened as Jackson reached out to grab its handle. In a matter of seconds they were through the door and it was locked behind them. Jackson was led down some dark stairs to a waiting jitney. They took off across a vast interior parking lot that housed the vehicles which were used to maintain, service, and restock the aircraft. The jitney turned into a broad, two-lane tunnel running the length of the airport. Periodically, they passed driveways leading out to the tarmac and daylight.

A third man was driving. Jackson didn’t recognize him. He was a different man from the one who had opened the door. Jackson shook his head ruefully; another escape orchestrated by his grandfather. The jitney pulled to a curb behind a black limousine. Jackson’s bags were transferred to the trunk and he climbed into the backseat. Carlos joined him and the limousine made a couple of turns then pulled out of a long line of limousines that were waiting to pick up passengers. The dark-tinted windows dimmed the surprise of moving out into the sunlight.

“It’s been two long years, Diablito! Too long. We need to hunt and cook our food over an open fire and get to know each other again. Maybe go up to Gomez Palacios and hunt pig! A good idea, eh?”

“I’d love to spend some time trekking through high-desert country. I haven’t fired a gun or eaten game in ages.”

Jackson and Carlos exchanged pleasantries for nearly twenty minutes as the limousine made its way through the afternoon traffic. After a break in the conversation, Jackson turned to Carlos with a serious look on his face. “Who was following me?”

“Two men. If you were more observant, you might have seen them.”

“Why? I’ve never been followed in San Francisco!”

“How little you know. I followed you last summer for nearly two months. You had a girlfriend who lived off of Portola, but you used to like to sneak over and see that big Samoan girl in the Mission. Her sister’s going out now with one of your friends, a big football jock. Isn’t that right?”

Jackson was shocked. He had no words, he merely nodded that Carlos was correct.

Carlos continued, “The reason they leave you alone is because if they bother you, or anyone in the family, they know your grandfather will attack and kill as many of their family as he can. There is a truce as far as families are concerned. Still, they want to kill him. They continue to look for him. If they find him, the truce is over.”

Jackson had become distracted; he did not hear the grim tone in Carlos’s words. The limousine was now driving down the street that led to his grandfather’s villa. He was staring out the window like a child, trying to catch the first glimpse of the house.

The vehicle stopped in front of heavy wrought-iron gates that blocked the opening of a high stucco wall. Two men ran across the interior courtyard to pull the gates open and the car drove inside and stopped near the stairs of a three-story stucco mansion with a red-tiled roof. There were wrought-iron balconies jutting out over the courtyard for the rooms on the second floor. Jackson’s bags were taken inside. There was no sign of his grandfather as he walked into the cool darkness of the house.

As soon as he stepped into the foyer, he smelled his grandfather’s Cuban cigars, a woody, pungent smell. He called, “Grandfather?”

“No use to shoutin’, boy. I’s in my den. Come on in!”

Jackson pushed open a door on his left and saw his grandfather sitting at his desk with a pistol disassembled in front of him. There was also the odor of cleaning fluid mixed in with the cigar’s aroma. His grandfather stood and walked toward him. There was still a bounce in his step and fire in his eyes even though he was in his sixties.

“I’s happy to see you, boy.” The old man stuck out his hand.

Jackson returned the firm shake and said, “I’m glad to see you too, Grandfather. You don’t look like you’ve aged at all.”

“Nobody resists the force of time. You just done forgot what I looked like, but I ain’t forgot you! I sho’ see that you changed. You done filled out in the chest and arms. You got beard hair on yo’ chin and you done
graduated high school. You gon’ be a college man! I’m proud of you, boy! I knows it was easier to quit and give up. I knows you been unhappy with yo’ grandmother, but you hung in there, youngblood! You hung in there!”

Through the open door, his grandfather saw someone standing in the hall outside the room and beckoned them to come in. Two women entered the room quietly. One woman was in her late thirties or early forties, the other appeared to be about the same age as Jackson. Both women possessed beautiful large, hooded dark eyes like the actress Delores Del Rio and had long, flowing black hair. The Indian blood was strong in their veins. Their skin was a coppery tone and their faces had the prominent cheekbones and the broad flatness of the pure-blooded inland people.

“This here is Alma,” his grandfather introduced the older woman. “You may remember, she had just started working for me when you was last here.”

Jackson didn’t remember her, but he smiled and nodded his head in greeting. She gave him a warm smile in return.

“And this is her niece, Maria. Maria, this is my famous grandson, the one in all the pictures you see around the house.”

Maria turned her eyes to Jackson and immediately dropped her gaze bashfully. There was a trace of a smile on the edge of her lips. When she looked up at Jackson again, her large, dark eyes seemed full of emotion. It added a vulnerability to the smooth skin and even features of her face. For fear of falling into her eyes, Jackson merely nodded his head in greeting and looked away. She was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen.

He mumbled, “Nice to meet you,” and picked up his bags and took them to his room on the second floor. The room had the smell of lemon oil. It had been recently dusted and the wooden furniture had been polished. Heavy metal shutters had been pulled open to let the breezes through the screened windows. Over his dresser was the stuffed head of a bighorn sheep that he had shot when he was eleven. His .308 rifle was hung just beneath it. An old sombrero and a serape hung on the wall over his bed. On the nightstand beside his bed was a glass jar filled with dirt from the pit where he had fought Juan Tejate. It was a room filled with grim mementos and memories.

Later that afternoon, he joined his grandfather, who was working out
in the gym next to the dog kennel. His grandfather appeared to be in excellent health as he worked out on the heavy bag, landing hard punches with a savage regularity. Jackson began with stretches and then started on the speed bag. No word was spoken. The two men worked out together for nearly an hour until his grandfather took a break and sat down on the weight bench. The old man was perspiring and breathing heavily. Jackson went to the linen chest and took out a couple of towels and threw one to his grandfather.

“You all right, Grandfather?” Jackson asked as he watched his grandfather breathing deeply.

“Sho, boy! I’s just a little winded. It’s what happens when you gets this side of sixty.” He gave Jackson a long, penetrating look and asked, “You up for some huntin’? Maybe go up Durango way and get some pigs? What you say?”

Jackson returned his grandfather’s look and asked, “Aren’t you going to ask me why I haven’t come down here since I was sixteen? Shouldn’t we be talking about that? It seems like everything important in this family is covered with a veil of silence.”

King Tremain gave his grandson a long, evaluative look and said, “What’s to talk about? I know why you ain’t been down here. Ain’t no mystery to me.”

“You know? Don’t you think we should talk about it?”

“What’s to say? You didn’t like me killin’ that man in front of you! I told you it had to be done. I knew it was right, you thought it was wrong. What’s to say?”

“You shot him in cold blood, Grandfather! I knew you killed people, but I never thought I would have to witness you taking an innocent man’s life!”

“Don’t get it twisted, boy! He weren’t no innocent man. I knew him. He knew me. He was there to kill us both. Ain’t no mercy in war.”

“What war are you still fighting, Grandfather?”

“The one you gon’ be fightin’ when I’m dead! What you don’t understand is, I done carved out something here that a black man in my day weren’t supposed to have the chitlins, much less the brains, to think about. Ain’t s’posed to have it today neither. Yet I got it. I’m a rich, independent black man, boy, at a time when there ain’t too many of us around. I knows you gon’ say that there’s plenty ways to get rich without killin’, but I ain’t just rich, boy! I’s feared and respected.”

“Respected? Grandfather, you’re in Mexico because in the United States there is a warrant out for your arrest, a warrant for the murder of four policemen. Let’s be real!”

“Just ’cause I’m wanted for them murders don’t mean I did ’em!”

“Probably the only four people who’ve been murdered on the western seaboard in the last ten years that you haven’t killed!”

His grandfather stood up and said with a slow smile, “You gettin’ smart mouth with me, boy? I ain’t ready for smart-mouthin’!”

Jackson stared at his grandfather. For the first time, he was eye to eye with the old man. A long silence began as the men separated by a generation evaluated each other. Jackson was slightly taller, but not as heavy or filled out as the older man. He had youth and speed, but he had seen the story of youth and speed vying against strength and wisdom played out in the pit many times. He broke the silence with his own smile and asked in a playful tone, “Would you kill me over this, Grandfather?”

King Tremain’s face cracked into an even larger smile. He retorted, “No, but ain’t nothin’ wrong with a decent ass-whippin’! Sometimes an AW administered at the right time makes the world look different!”

“I don’t want to have to fight you, Grandfather, but I want to be able to speak my mind. I deserve at least as much respect as you give the people working for you.”

“You got plenty ways of sayin’ what you mean without gettin’ smart mouth. My rules ain’t changed. They’re the same for every man-jack walkin’!”

“Okay, Grandfather, that’s straight up. I can deal with those rules.”

“Good! Now when you’s finished yo’ college work and got that big-time degree, what degree you gon’ have? You gon’ be a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, what?”

“I haven’t exactly figured that out yet. I’m pursuing a liberal arts curriculum. I’m thinking about possibly majoring in African history or social psychology. I haven’t made up my mind as yet.”

“What the hell you gon’ do with African history? What do that got to do with the price of beans or the problems black folks is facin’ in the States? And social what? What is that? Has these white folk done messed yo’ head up already? What you think America is, a free country? You better get yo’self some practical learnin’! Only way a man can be free is by usin’ what he know to make his own decisions. The more he know the more choices he got, the freer he is!”

Jackson attempted to be patient as he explained. “There are many learned people who believe that those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat the mistakes made in the past. Black Americans don’t know that they descended from princes and kings. We need to teach our people their history so that they can be proud of their heritage.”

“They ain’t teachin’ the real history of Africa! They’s teachin’ what the whites want you to know. Shit, even in Africa there was a whole lot more peasant folk than there was princes and kings! Damn few of us descended from royalty and it don’t matter a damn anyway! A man can only feel pride in who he is by what he does in the here and now! That’s the secret! You are what you earn! Whatever a man’s ancestors had is just a fart in the wind unless they kept it in the family. I ain’t met nobody who wasn’t dealin’ with the problems of the here and now. Them folks who got a sense of this royal history don’t seem to have no better handle on life than the rest of us. Hell, sometimes they even got less a grip!”

“Why are you cutting me down, Grandfather?”

“Boy, I ain’t disrespected you. I done spoke my mind. I’s tellin’ you my experience. You want to spend yo’ time doin’ somethin’ important? There’s only two ways you gon’ do somethin’ important: It happens because you is true in following a purpose, or it happens because you love what you doin’. Them’s the only two ways you put the necessary dedication on the line to do somethin’ important. Ain’t no reason to play fragile. This ain’t no storm. I’m just sayin’ what I think.”

“I don’t know what I want to do with my life yet, Grandfather. I chose liberal arts because I would have the broadest range of options and choices. I don’t know where the path leads, I just want to follow it for a while.”

“If you don’t know where you’s goin’, what does it matter which way you go?”

“If you don’t like my selection, you don’t have to finance it! I am prepared to pay my own way!”