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Chapter 10
- Texas A&M University Press
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Afterthebreakfastcrowdclearedout,Miguelsquintedoutthewindow of the marina cafe and bar and spied a wavering vee of geese heading for the rice fields inland to feed. He plucked a toothpick out of the little toothpick deal by the cash register and stuck it in his mouth. Hewasstartingtolikethissleepylittletown.AlotmorethanHouston. Here, nobody from the Syndicato was hassling him to shake down a local mom and pop store or to smoke a gang rival. He didn’t miss the mean streets of Space City, not even a little bit. Being on parole was boring, but not as boring as being locked down in the joint twenty-two hours a day. Much to his surprise, Miguel found himself acquiring a taste for the quiet life. But now a gangster of a different stripe threatened to fuck everything up. He decided to pick up the phone and call his case officer. “Hey, chica, you know Johnny’s got a brother?” “Yeah, I met him last night,” Marisol answered from her room at the Surfside Inn in Rockport. “And I was not impressed. He’s nothing like Johnny.” Miguel was thinking he was a whole lot like Johnny, but he didn’t tell Marisol that. Miguel wasn’t a big phone talker. “Well, now that he’s here, maybe he’ll help us find out what happened to your novio.” CHAPTER 10 62 10| “Not us Miguel. Never us.” It was Marisol’s professional duty, and her personal desire to keep her friend from doing anything to violate his parole. “Your only job is to stay behind that counter and keep out of trouble. And you can forget about Johnny’s brother. He won’t be any help on this. He’s…” she searched for the right words, “…not interested.” “You sure you don’t want somebody with some huevos to be, ah, interested?” “Miguel,” Marisol replied quickly. “You stay out of this!” “Okay, okay…I wasn’t sayin’…I was just sayin’.” “I mean it, Miguel.” Miguel Negron had not grown up misunderstood or with poor selfesteem .Hedidn’thave“issues.”Hewasabadmanwhohaddonebadthings. He could live with that. Sometimes he did them for money, sometimes to serve a raw, unarticulated sense of frontier justice. That same rudimentary sense of fair play occasionally compelled him to do bad things for good reasons. Or even, rarely, good things for the right reasons. It balanced the scales a little he supposed. And sometimes he just liked fucking with people’s expectations. A restless child from far South Texas, he ran away to Houston at fourteen and spent the remainder of his misguided youth as a pachuco street fighter, boosting cars and selling weed. Miguel built up a small but useful reputation as a strong-arm guy and petty enforcer around Houston and Galveston. In that capacity, he’d drawn a sevenyear manslaughter bit in the penitentiary in Huntsville for killing a dogmeat police informer. (Miguel claimed self-defense.) Once inside, he made a quick, life-saving decision to roll with the Texas Mafia, the Chicano prison gang with cells in every prison in Texas and most of the Southwest. He kept to himself as much as possible, and tried to take a minimal role in the sadistic hazing of the new “fish” who appearedonthecellblockperiodically.AbeefwithanAryanBrotherhood redneck ended with the white trash peckerwood being pulled out of the grease trap behind the mess hall. The broken neck he’d incurred seemed redundant. Miguel never spoke about the incident and his habitual silence made him even more imposing to his fellow inmates. By the time he’d come up for parole, Miguel had determined to work out a new path for himself, and the day he got out in 1979 he took a bus to his probation office in Austin and found himself sitting across a desk from…Marisol Cavasos. Marisol, on the other hand, did have issues. She had grown up [3.86.235.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:56 GMT) 63 |10 on the vast King Ranch of South Texas, the daughter of the unmarried schoolteacher who taught the children of the Kiñenos, as the multi-generational families who worked on the great rancho were called. She and Miguel had known each other as children. Once a week, after Mass, they were thrown together in Sister Teresa’s Sunday school class in Kingsville, the small town that was founded by and designed to serve the ranch. Marisol never knew her father, an itinerant surveyor who had passed through the ranch...