Charisma announced it was time for the more pastoral portions of the program. Nestor Lopez was up. From Jalisco, by way of Las Cruces, the Lopezes were the first Mexican family to integrate the Farms. I was about seven when they moved in. My father used to complain about the music and all the cockfighting. The only homeschool lesson in Mexican-American history I’d ever received was “Don’t you ever fight a Mexican. Because if you fight a Mexican, you have to kill a Mexican,” but Nestor, even though he was four years older than me and I might one day have to kill him over an unreturned Hot Wheels car or some shit, was crazy cool. On Sunday afternoons, when he came home from catechism, we’d watch charro movies and shaky videotapes of ersatz small-town rodeos. We’d drink porcelain cups of hot and cinnamony ponche his mom had made for us, and spend the rest of the afternoon recoiling from macabre videos with titles like 300 porrazos sangrientos, 101 muertes del jaripeo, 1,000 litros de sangre, and Si chingas al toro, te llevas los cuernos. And yet, even though I saw most of the action through the cracks of my fingers, I’ve never been able to erase the images of those hard-luck cowboys riding bulls with no hands, no rodeo clowns, no medics, and no fear, as massive toros destructores bucked them into hatless invertebrate rag dolls. We’d bellow in vicarious pain as the incredibly pointy bullhorns punctured their rhinestoned shirts and aortas. High-five when a fallen rider’s jawbone and skull got stomped into the blood-caked dirt. In time, as black and Latin boys are wont to do, we drifted apart. Socialized victims of prison gang edicts that had nothing to do with us but stipulated the separation of niggers and spics. Now, other than the occasional block party, I see Nestor only on Career Day, when, to the accompaniment of the William Tell Overture, he comes tearing out from behind the defunct metal shop, trick-riding and bronco-busting his ass off.
I’ve never been able to figure exactly what career path Nestor represents—“show-off,” I suppose — but at the end of his rodeo sideshow, he doffed his ball-and-tasseled sombrero to the raucous applause of the crowd and stared me down with a “top that” sneer as he paraded past, doing a no-hand headstand in the saddle. Charisma then introduced me to a collective yawn so loud it could be heard throughout Dickens.
“What’s that sound, an airplane taking off?”
“No, it’s the nigger farmer. Must be Career Day at the middle school again.”
I led a jittery brown-eyed calf onto home plate of a baseball diamond backstopped with a rickety chain-link fence. Some of the braver children ignored their rumbling stomachs and vitamin deficiencies to break rank and approach the animal. Cautiously, afraid they might catch a disease or fall in love, they petted the calf, speaking the syntax of the damned.
“His skin soft.”
“Them eyes look like Milk Duds. I wants to eat them shits.”
“Way this cow nigger be licking his lips, mooin’ and droolin’ ’n’ shit, remind me of your retarted mother.”
“Fuck you. You retarted!”
“All y’all retarted. Don’t you know cows human, too?”
The irony of mispronouncing “retarded” notwithstanding, I knew that I was a hit, or at least the calf was. Charisma folded her tongue between her teeth and split the air with a sharp football-coach whistle. The same whistle she used to warn me and Marpessa that my father was making his way up the walkway. Two hundred kids quieted instantly and turned their attention deficit disorders toward me.
“Hello, everybody,” I said, spitting on the ground, because that’s what farmers do. “Like you guys, I’m from Dickens…”
“Where?” a bunch of students shouted. I might as well have said I was from Atlantis. The children weren’t from “no Dickens.” And they stood, throwing up gang signs and telling me where they were from: Southside Joslyn Park Crip Gang. Varrio Trescientos y Cinco. Bedrock Stoner Avenue Bloods.
In retaliation I tossed up the closest thing the agricultural world has to a gang sign and slid my hand across my throat — the universal sign for Cut the Engine — and announced, “Well, I’m from the Farms, which like all those places you’ve named, whether you know it or not, is in Dickens, and Assistant Principal Molina asked me to demonstrate what the average day for a farmer is like, and since today is this calf’s eight-week anniversary, I thought I’d talk about castration. There are three methods of castration…”
“What’s ‘castration,’ maestro?”
“It’s a way of preventing male animals from fathering any children.”
“Don’t they got cow rubbers?”
“That’s not a bad idea, but cows don’t have hands and, like the Republican Party, any regard for a female’s reproductive rights, so this is a way to control the population. It also makes them more docile. Anyone know what ‘docile’ means?”
After passing it under her runny nose, a skinny chalk-colored girl raised a hand so disgustingly ashy, so white and dry-skinned, that it could only be black.
“It means bitchlike,” she said, volunteering to assist me by stepping to the calf and flicking his downy ears with her fingers.
“Yes, I guess you could say that it does.”
At either the mention of “bitch” or the misguided notion they were going to learn something about sex, the children closed in and tightened the circle. The ones who weren’t in the first two rows were ducking and scooting around for better vantage points. A few kids climbed to the top of the backstop’s rafters and peered down on the procedure like med students in an operating theater. I body-slammed the calf on its side and kneeled down on his neck and rib cage, then directed my unlotioned cowhand to grab and spread his hind legs until the little dogie’s genitals were exposed to the elements. Seeing that I had their attention, I noticed Charisma checking on her still-whimpering employee, then tiptoeing back aboard Marpessa’s bus. “As I was saying, there are three methods of castration: surgical, elastic, and bloodless. In elastic you place a rubber band right here, preventing any blood flow going to the testicles. That way they’ll eventually shrivel up and fall off.” I grabbed the animal at the base of his scrotum and squeezed so hard the calf and the schoolchildren jumped in unison. “For bloodless castration, you crush the spermatic cords here and here.” Two firm pinches of his vas deferens glans sent the calf into whimpering convulsions of pain and embarrassment, and the students into spasms of sadistic laughter. I whipped out a jackknife and held it up high, twisting my hand in the air, expecting the blade to glint dramatically in the sunlight, but it was too cloudy. “For surgery…”