Arturo El Animal

A 1500 word story about the murder of a Mexican immigrant by a South Texas deer hunter, through the eyes of his great grandson.

The road to the ranch our family leased for deer hunting was long and dusty, turning off a desolate highway nearly twenty miles from the nearest town, a heartbeat of a place, where the red traffic light pumped life to the single gas station. We knew we were getting close when the dim lavender of dawn would begin to silhouette the oil rigs on the ridges around us, and the iconic windmill which stood sentinel over the cabins where we would sleep, began to loom in the horizon. This is when my father would start to eagerly scan the country side, driving ever so slowly for the last of three hundred miles, hoping to spy the old buck on which he would spend one of his precious few tags.

At the cabins we were greeted by my uncles, my grandfather and my great-grandfather, all of them trimmed in camouflage and hunting gear, coffee mugs in hand and small smiles of optimism tucked beneath their bushy mustaches. I felt overwhelmed with pride. My cousins and brother had stayed behind this once, ushering me down the path to manhood with this singular opportunity to kill a deer, field dress it and bring it back home as food. I realized this as I sipped bitter coffee, chewed small plugs of tobacco and spat occasionally with the other men as we huddled around the tailgate of a pickup, taking turns offering positive criticisms of the day’s harvest. And no greater path to manhood had I yet discovered.

My uncles and father were all very tough men, tempered by the harsh blows from their father and sharpened by the scraping of my great-grandfather like a whetstone against their lives. They did not bicker about who would take me out on the first hunt, it was understood that my own dad would do that duty. But when he spotted his old buck in the dry creek, he decided on a solo hunt the first evening and I was put in the care of my great-grandfather, the shortest straw I felt I could have drawn. It was not that he was boring, quite the opposite in fact. It was that he was ornery, ornery as hell. He seemed to live for the opportunity to complain about something, always observing his environment with skeptical, squinted eyes below his silver brow and scoffing at anything unfamiliar.

“Hand me that damn thermos!” he suddenly barked at me as we drove his rattling pickup to the hunting blind. His tone suggested I should have anticipated his need for coffee, and made me feel stupid or inept for not thinking of it sooner. As we arrived at the wide spot in the road where we would park, he began lecturing me on the importance of silence and stealth, glaring at me with those sharp eyes, his tone still debasing.

I walked on the outside edges of my feet, as quietly as I could manage, to the blind, where my great-grandfather unlatched a trap door through which we would climb in without a fuss. Opening the windows and adjusting our small seats once inside proved easy enough too, the only ‘racket’ coming when I accidentally kicked his spittoon against the inside wall of the small space. That earned me a scoff and a glare as he put a jagged finger to his lips and warned me against ruining his hunt. We sat and waited for the sun to lower and the deer to begin making their way to the dry corn feeder positioned a hundred yards north of us. The corn was set to be distributed by a small wheel ran by a battery on a timer, erupting in a small burst of noise which would draw in any local game a few times per day. My great-grandfather checked his watch and looked around using the scope on his gun.

“Something is wrong,” he said in a whisper. I looked at him in fascination, able to discern no difference between normal or wrong. The timer suddenly went off and the sound of corn spinning from the metal plate echoed around the sage hills. “We should have deer in here,” he clarified. I shrugged my shoulders. We waited a few more minutes.

“I think there’s a damn w*****k down there,” great-grandfather quietly offered. “They sneak through here and eat the damn corn on their way north.” I had no idea what he was talking about. Growing up in Texas, I had heard the term ‘w*****k’ before, but it did not seem to apply in this case and thus, led me to believe my great-grandfather had placed this moniker on some animal. Maybe he called the beaver a ‘w*****k’?

Then, he spotted something and sat bold upright and looked down his rifle through the scope. I followed its aim to the edge of the clearing in which sat the feeder and saw what he had predicted. It was a Mexican immigrant, new to the United States by no more than a day, given the distance to the border, hungry and tired. My great grandfather bristled as he watched the man move toward the feeder. “Son of a b***h is trying to steal my corn!”

His tone seemed playful, as though he was as fascinated with the man below us, yet he began to position his body and gun against the window of the blind as if he were about to take a shot. My heart suddenly began pounding and I wanted to jump out of the blind and run away as fast as possible, away from my great-grandfather, away from South Texas, away from manhood. I closed my eyes and began to cover my ears when he tapped me gently on the arm. “Just a warning shot,” he assured.

I left my eyes open but continued to cover my ears and still, the shot rang out like a dynamite blast. The first thing I took in were the myriad others who had been hidden among the sage thicket now scurrying away to safety. But one man, the one from the deer feeder, was now moving toward us at a fast pace, fearless and confident. His arms were in the air as if to say, ‘What the hell was that?’
No doubt he wanted to parlay, to get a warm bed, maybe a meal, use the insult of the warning shot as a means to gain favor perhaps.

Instead, my great-grandfather simply bolted another round, took aim at the man’s chest through the scope and pulled the trigger from about forty yards away. The man collapsed in the dirt in an instant, a hole in his chest the size of a quarter; one is his back the size of a baseball.

“Take your gun,” my great-grandfather told me in an eerily calm tone, “Go back to the truck and wait for me.” I did as I was told, my hands shaking as I tried to descend the ladder from the blind. On the way back to the pickup, I began to cry. First a small flash of fear, a tear, then I was sobbing. When I reached the pickup, I locked myself inside and put my head on my knees, waiting for my great-grandfather like a cold waits for pneumonia.

He came an hour later, just as dark was settling in and started up the pickup without a word. “I took care of that son of a b***h,” he finally offered. “Hand me that damn thermos!” We never spoke of the man again.

The rest of the hunting trip played out behind a veil of fear, and my once narrow path to manhood had grown into a wide berth. I said nothing of the shooting to anyone, not even my father, fearful perhaps of some consequence that had been previously alien to me.

After a few years of early adolesence had akwardly grinded past, my great-grandfather died of a heart attack. All I recall of the funeral was the impossible emotion shown by my rugged father and his two hardened brothers. I still said nothing of the incident.

A few years later, our family lost the lease on the hunting ranch and no one in the family would ever go back there, excpet for myself. I had been married only a few years, we were expecting our first child and, well, there are just some things in life that cannot go unresolved.

The ranch had changed over the decades, the granduer of the place had eroded with time and no life was evident. I didn't stay long, deciding instead to cross the border and visit the town from which the immigrants had come.

When I arrived in the small Mexican community, I was at once struck by the myriad posters, banners, hats, t-shirts and hand-braided bracelets all emblazoned with the words "Arturo El Animal." It was everywhere. Vendors sold the items from behind wooden tables, each shop had a poster in their window. I spoke with an old woman who was offering me a bracelet in exchange for 30 pesos.

"Quien es Arturo el Animal?" I asked in the most authentic accent I could manage.

The woman told me the story of thier biggest folk hero, Arturo, who had left the village two decades earlier to find a better life, more security and a future for his family, only to be shot down by white hunters like an animal.

"Por robar maiz!" she exclaimed at the end. For stealing corn, I translate to myself.

She told me his body was buried in a shallow grave just over the border, instructing me in great detail how to find it, but I knew all too well. I gave the old woman an American twenty-dollar bill and purchased the braided bracelet from her. Closure was close, but I still had one task yet to do.

A few days later I visited the cemetery where my great-grandfather had been laid to rest. There was no prayer, no words, no tears, no anger. I simply took out the bracelet and perched it atop the headstone thinking, somehow, it may comfort Grandfather's soul. For, of all the trophies he had claimed as a gamesman, how could any compare with this?

©2014 Wesley D. Stein