Feebly, he tried to calculate the physics of this. Could he do it? Could he jump from the back of one moving truck to another?
“Don’t do it!” his sisters pleaded.
“Shut up, you little cunts! If he wants it so bad, let him jump for it!”
Buster did not want to see his hat ride away. He put one foot on the side of the truck and braced one hand on the top of the cab—where inside his foster parents sat, unaware.
“All right,” the passenger of the other truck said to Dominguez. “See you tomorrow at ten-thirty.” The contractor’s truck started to accelerate away.
“Don’t do it!” Buster’s sisters screamed.
Buster had already waited too long when he jumped. He missed the side of the passing truck, but managed to get his hands on the tailgate. Unfortunately, his long legs reached the road—the tips of his cowboy boots burning from the friction.
Inside the Dominguezes’ truck, Edita and Dominguez were too busy arguing to notice Buster being dragged past them.
“Do you have any idea how dangerous that was—what you just did? There is such a thing as a telephone, you know.”
“Shut up.”
“You have children in the truck,” she said, wanting to have the last word.
Now smoke began to billow into their windshield from the truck in front of them.
“I think he blew his rings. I better catch up and tell him.”
Dominguez sped up and as they drove through the smoke, he and Edita were able to see Buster hanging by his fingertips, his boots on fire.
“How the hell…?”
“¡Dios mío!” Edita cried.
Dominguez sped up and began honking his horn. In the meantime, Buster’s higher mammalian instinct for self-preservation overcame his fool’s insubordination and commanded all the strength of his tall, skinny frame to pull himself up. Slowly, his feet came off the pavement where the friction had already erased the points on his cowboy boots and the tips of his socks. Shaking and trembling at every juncture of muscle and tendon, Buster managed to get himself up on the rear bumper. He waited a moment to catch his breath then flipped himself over the back tailgate. Gone from view momentarily, he suddenly sprang to his feet—triumphantly waving his hat. All of this took place without the knowledge of the driver and passenger of Buster’s current vehicle—loudly singing along with Reba McEntire’s “Is There Life Out There?” on the radio.
After they recovered their wayward passenger, Dominguez pulled over and interrogated the children in the back of the truck.
“Who let him do that?”
Dominguez stood waiting for an answer. Cookie remained silent. The younger brothers cast their eyes to their laps. Finally, Dominguez looked to his little daughters. Surreptitiously, one of them pointed a teensy-weensy finger in the direction of Cookie.
“You little coc—” Dominguez said to Cookie, cutting off the obscenity.
Cookie just smirked at him. There it was—the dismissive expression of Guillermo Cantante. Dominguez balled his fist. He wanted to slam it into that insolent, fat face of his, but he could wait.
This being the Sabbath, Mrs. Dominguez prepared fish balls, boiled chicken, beef brisket served with little potato pancakes, and crepes filled with ricotta cheese and topped with applesauce. Dominguez, at his wife’s direction, was not allowed to kiln tiles on the Sabbath. In fact, the Cantantes had inculcated him with the notion that he was not to lift a finger until Sunday morning.
There were other strict observances in the Dominguez household—the most draconian being no television. Mrs. Dominguez, trying to identify the causes of Cookie’s nascent criminal pathology, had determined that television inspired violence and took the Emerson down to be sold at the This ’n’ That Shop. Instead, the children spent their typical evenings cleaning the house, reading, and doing their homework. When those tasks were completed, they were expected to work on their respective art projects.
Buster’s project had been the creation of frescoes made on the bedroom wall next to his bunk. There was no denying Buster’s eye for anatomy and composition. His subjects, always horses and cowboys, were applied to the wall in a classic seven-layer Flemish style. The problem, to Mrs. Dominguez’s chagrin, was that Buster used boogers and not paints to create these naïve masterpieces. The removal of this dried and hardened medium was impossible to achieve without the removal of the underlying paint as well. Patiently, Mrs. Dominguez redirected Buster’s artistic talent to the age-old Kasbah art form—where awl and ball peen hammer were employed to tap intricate bas-reliefs on metal plates—in Buster’s case, discarded pie tins from the Buttered Roll.
After dinner, Cookie was busy in the tool room where he had constructed a Red Grooms–like model of the Vanadium jail to the smallest detail—fabricating the steel bars for the cells from a shopping cart he boosted from the grocery store.
“Cookie Dominguez!”
It was his father bellowing. It was time to pay the piper for encouraging Buster’s truck hopping. Cookie turned off the soldering gun and stoically walked outside. His father was already standing there. He silently gestured to the kiln room, which was, in the Dominguez family, akin to “the woodshed.”
Cookie stepped into the outbuilding. Along the sides of the room were racks supporting sheets of tiles ready for boxing. But the centerpiece was the propane-fired, fifty-three-cubic-foot, front-loading Delphi kiln—the largest in the state of Colorado—capable of 2,350 degrees Fahrenheit. Without speaking, for they had been through this routine before, Dominguez gestured for Cookie to bend over a stack of boxes.
b
It was now Labor Day and the annual Vanadium Rodeo. The rodeo was a big deal in town. Everyone participated in some way. The girls, who weren’t riding in an event, baked pies and made lemonade for the refreshment booth, which donated its proceeds to 4H and Future Ranchers of Tomorrow. All the boys, if they didn’t want to be teased, competed in the junior rodeo events.
If there was one thing in Cookie’s life that he could point to with pride, it was his collection of blue ribbons for saddle bronc riding. He had been champion in the kids’ division five years running. While the other boys rode sheep in the kiddy events, Cookie rode the real thing—wild-eyed broncos. This year, however, he faced an unlikely competitor in his adopted brother. Buster, by the end of the summer, had reached the preternatural height of six-one, and while no one had ever shown him how to ride a horse, there was some innate quality in his undocumented DNA that gave him what they call in cowboy parlance “a leg up.” There was no other way to explain his aptitude—other than what life had taught him so far—to hang on.
In the saddle bronc riding event, Cookie drew the horse The Hell You Say. The Hell’s gimmick was to put his nose down as soon as he cleared the gate and kick his back legs straight up over his head. Most riders slid off this steep incline in the first second, but Cookie dug his spurs in hard above the horse’s shoulder and made it easily past the eight-second buzzer. Sheriff Dudival, who volunteered every year as a rodeo clown, helped him off and shooed the aggravated horse away. The Judges scored Cookie the full twenty-five points on the animal, twenty-one on the rider’s performance and a combined forty-nine other points, bringing his total to a hard-to-beat ninety-five out of one
