THE FLY

By Ike Griffin
Note: Names of individuals and institutions have been changed. Circumstances are real, and are encountered frequently enough to believe they are representative of any number of the incarcerated.

Lito was half a mile from the murder scene on the outskirts of Sanderson, Texas when he realized the enormity of what he had done. Chinga tu madre, Cabron! What have you done? Pinche gringa! She shouldn’t have stopped. Why the fuck did she stop?
Born Daniel Quiroz, Jr., the son of Daniel Quiroz, whose father Winslado Quiroz had migrated from Rio Verde, San Luis Potosi, Mexico to Southwest Texas during World War II, when ranchers short of cowboys, hired willing hands on the spot, “si tenian tarjeta, o no!”

Winslado had brought his wife and family with him in 1942 to this rather barren land north of the Rio Bravo and south of the high plains, the llano estacado, shaped by rills and canyons running down to the Rio Grande west of Del Rio, and shaded by very little other than mesquites and an occasional oak mott and willows where a canyon stream flattened out enough to trap permanent water. Winslado found work on a ranch situated on Meyers Canyon north east of Sanderson. They were given a shack down by the horse barn in which to live and raise their family. His wife helped in the big ranch house and the children had the run of the place if they didn’t wander too far.

As Winslado’s hair turned white, he grew a beard under his sad eyes, they began to call him “Old Christmas Winseslaus,” even though he was slight of build and had no stomach at all. He smiled a lot. By now, a row of labor houses had been built and old Winslado and his wife had the most prominent one close to the main ranch house.

Son Daniel played with the pigs and chased the chickens and dreamed of one day having his own ranch. As he grew older, he was assigned chores around the ranch and began to collect an allowance from the rancher, the same as his own son. When he reached sixteen, Daniel moved into the bunk house with other bachelor cowboys and earned a real wage. Though the salary was barely enough to buy clothes, tack, and a few beers with the other cowboys on the weekend, Daniel was a happy cowboy.

A fine hand with the stock, Daniel knew every fence, pasture, gully, and scrub oak mott on the twenty sections that made up the ranch. Daniel eventually met a girl from a neighboring ranch in Sanderson on a Saturday afternoon and married her after receiving assurances from his employer that he could move out of the bunkhouse and claim a recently vacated labor house, complete with indoor plumbing and electricity. It was smaller than his parents’ assigned house, and it was down at the end of the dirt road jutting off to the West from the main corral and stock barn, but it was newer, and it was all theirs to enjoy while they worked for the ranch from sun up to sun down and explored one another into the night. As a result of their exploration, Daniel, Jr. was born within the year. They called him Danielito, or Lito for short.

Lito grew up on the ranch, just like his father before him, except that, unlike his father, his birth was registered and the county truancy officer made regular rounds of the ranches, so Lito had to go to school in town. There they would not allow him to speak Spanish as he had every day of his life on the ranch. At school, Lito was told he had to use English, and even though the white kids, the gringos, didn’t laugh at him, he felt that surely they must think him stupid. He couldn’t carry on a conversation with anyone except in Spanish. In English, half the words came out with a Spanish twist.

At night, Lito would hang his head and explain that he couldn’t seem to learn anything, and even though his parents loved him with all their hearts, they could not help him learn English, because neither of them had bothered to learn English. It was not required working around the ranch.

The ranch owner and his family spoke English, but only to one another. Anytime they addressed the labor, it was in Spanish, even if it was a fractured Spanish. No rancher worthy of the title would admit not speaking Spanish! No matter how poor their communication, if they addressed the help, it was in Spanish, or whatever passed for Spanish on that particular ranch. At least half of the things used in everyday life on the ranch were called a chingadera or “that fuckin’ thing.” Prestame la chingadera, el martillo, Viejo! (Loan me the fuckin’ thing, the hammer, old man!) Traiga la chingadera, eso que usan a cortar los huevos de los becerros. (Bring the fuckin’ thing, that which is used to cut the testicles off the calves.) A big complicated piece of equipment, like a tractor or scraper, was a chingazo! If things went amiss, they were chingado.

Lito, at school, was disciplined again and again for using bad language. His reputation sank lower and lower in the minds of the school faculty and they individually and collectively spent progressively less time trying to teach him. Lito also suffered from his small stature. He was much smaller than the other boys and was not good at athletics.

When the county Truant Officer quit insisting that he go to school, Lito gave it up as a bad cause. He had never thought of it much before, but he began to think of gringos as the “others,” and the “others” always seemed to be comfortably standing where he wanted to be and where he couldn’t seem to reach because he did not know the rules nor have the tools to get there. His dad’s dreams of one day owning his own ranch began to haunt him. Late at night, his father had talked of having the fortune of owning his own little ranchito “de nada mas unas hectarias.” Though it had never been promised, Daniel dreamed that one day, the ranch owner would help him own something of his own after two generations of service to the ranch. That dream died when Daniel was killed in an accident while working on a windmill on the far side of the ranch. For whatever cause, he fell from the top and broke his neck. He had been dead for more than a day when the other cowboys found him.

Lito began cow-boying in earnest. He could ride well and handle a rope with the same dexterity he could drive staples into a fencepost or stretch sagging wire with a come-a-long, una chingadera.

Lito moved into the bunkhouse to become one of the ranch’s cowboys. During most of the year he shared the bunkhouse with only one other young Mexican, but during Spring roundup, the bunkhouse would fill every one of the ten beds. He saved enough to buy an old Chevy with slick tires and lots of miles, but it had a good body and no rust. Suffering from a poor self image, Lito began to take on a macho swagger, and bought some aviator glasses so people could not see his eyes. The other cowboys began to call him Mosca, Fly. The big mirrored aviator glasses on his small head really did make him look like a fly.

One Saturday night, after having spent the entire afternoon and evening in a local Sanderson saloon drinking beer with off-work cowboys and talking about how suppressed the Chicanos were by the Gringos, Fly headed home to the ranch. Beyond the edge of town, one of his smooth tires blew out, and of course, he had no spare, and no jack to lift the car even if he had a spare. He hoped some sympathetic soul would come by to help him, but none stopped. About midnight, an elderly grandmother was headed home after babysitting with her grandchildren, and stopped to offer aid. She loaned him her jack, and her spare tire, with the promise the spare tire would be returned the next day, Sunday, but only in the afternoon, because she always went to church Sunday mornings.

As Lito, the Fly, jacked up the car and changed the tire, he was having trouble focusing his attention on the job. He kept asking himself why it had to be an old white-haired Gringa who came to his aid? She represented the oppressor of his people. Perhaps twenty or thirty cars that passed that night, and she was the only one to come to his aide. She was the only one who recognized his plight and trusted him to take her good tire out of her own trunk on a promise that is would be returned. It wasn’t right.

After he lowered the car and removed the jack, he bashed her head in with the jack handle, put the jack into his trunk with the blown out tire, and left the scene.

Chinga tu madre, Cabron! What have you done? Pinche gringa! She shouldn’t have stopped. Why the fuck did she stop?


FERGUSON UNIT, TDCJ
1986

Lito, Fly, Quiroz stepped up to the microphone at the closing of the Kairos weekend and delivered a profound, if brief, report as to his thoughts of the weekend he had just experienced.

”Forgive my Englich, I no speak so good. They call me Fly because I so small and nobody see my eyes. Nobody know what I think. I wear this glasses so nobody see me. I take them off now for you. You good people an I want you see me. Tank you!”

At monthly reunions of the Kairos community at Ferguson, Fly would always find a chair next to mine. We didn’t talk much because his English was even more limited than my Spanish, but when there was time to tell our stories, we did find that we could communicate he told me the story and of his family history, but not his crime, not the one that brought him to Ferguson.

Our team of volunteers scheduled a two day retreat for the community every six months. These retreats are very intense, as we all comfortable with one another and for two full days, we eat, laugh and tell our stories. On this particular retreat, Fly followed me around like a dog that has miss-behaved and wants to make up. I could not turn around suddenly lest I run over him.

Following lunch one day, I sought a quiet place behind some filing cabinets and stretched out on my back for a short rest. After a bit, I felt a head lay down touching my head, crown to crown. I knew it was Fly, but nothing was said for several minutes. Fly spoke, “Ike, you the first gringo I trust.”
Gracias, mi hijito.

Fly told me of the night he crushed the skull of the kindly old woman who stopped to help, his deep regret, the guilt he carried for his role in class warfare. By confessing to me, he confessed to all gringos everywhere. By laying crown to crown, no shades were required, I could not see his face as he confessed, weeping as he did so.

Gracias, mi hijito.