Jimmy Bayles Morgan wanted to keep him for his own, but the Women’s League of Vanadium would not hear of it. Buster was no stray calf, dog, or crippled chipmunk that had limped into cow camp. He was a human being, they said, and more importantly a Christian—despite his dubious pedigree. Besides, Jimmy Bayles Morgan was a rough character and a blasphemer to boot. And so, the town set out to find Buster a good Christian home.
CHAPTER TWO
Adopted by the Dominguez Family
Buster’s mother was buried on a sunny January day at the Lone Cone Cemetery. The storm that caused her death was long gone. In fact, all the roadside snow had already melted, and it now looked as if the storm had never happened. Mrs. Poult brought Buster to say a final goodbye before showing him off to local prospects for adoption. Serving as Official Breast Feeder was beginning to show its wear and tear on poor Mrs. Poult. It was virtually impossible to get Buster to give up a sore nipple once he had clamped on. Mrs. Poult would be forced to pinch Buster’s nostrils together making him gag for air while she switched him off to the auxiliary. Once, when she had fallen asleep while nursing, she awoke to discover the breast that Buster had been suckling had been reduced to the size of a zucchini, while the other one was still the size of a 4-H winning eggplant.
After the last shovelful of dirt had been thrown on his mother’s coffin, Buster was passed around to interested parties. Everyone agreed that he was a nicely behaved baby of sanguine temperament. Jimmy Morgan looked on grumpily as Edita Dominguez held Buster over her head and jiggled him until a long strand of drool ran from his mouth down onto the head of her eldest son, ten-year-old Cookie. From the expression on his face, one could gather that he was none too happy to acquire a new brother, although perhaps it was too soon—it had been only three months since his last baby brother suffocated mysteriously in his crib. Mrs. Dominguez, on the other hand, was thrilled to tears as she hugged Buster and looked entreatingly to the Vanadium Women’s League for approval. They gave it.
Mrs. Dominguez was a Cantante. The Cantantes were a famous Hispanic family who, some people said, lived in Vanadium before the Indians used the area as a respite from the brain-cooking heat of Sleeping Ute Mountain. When the whites came, the Cantantes were able to coexist peaceably with them because they had nothing the whites wanted. The Cantantes did not compete with them for grazing land, for they raised no cattle. Nor were they involved in the early contretemps between the cattlemen and the sheep men, for they herded no sheep. They already had a trade—one that had been passed down through generations. They were tile makers. Their work could still be found on every countertop and in every restroom in Vanadium. They manufactured their products at their ten-acre homestead and were particularly famous in tile circles for their “Negrita,” a small black octagon which received its distinctive lustrous ebony patina by way of a long-held family secret: the tiles were kilned under layers of sheep manure.
The Cantantes were the first Vanadians to keep books and have a bank account. During the Great Depression, they were the first to supply food and clothes to the needy, even to the Indians. The Cantantes were the first to use a lawyer instead of arson and firearms to resolve a business conflict, the first to suggest a tax to provide schooling for Vanadian children, and the first to suggest having a lawman who was responsible for keeping the peace in the town.
Edita Cantante was the first woman to be elected President of the Vanadian Rotary. She was also the head of the PTA and the Library Association. To their faces, the Cantantes were respected. But to their backs, Vanadians distrusted them. They were suspicious of their success and their ability to handle money. Some people said the Cantantes were Maranos—secret Jews hiding from the Spanish Inquisition—in spite of the fact that they wore conspicuous crucifixes and attended Catholic mass three times a week. That’s why the family always felt they had to try a little harder. They drew the line, however, with the first serious man to court their eldest daughter, Edita Theresa, Buster’s new mother.
Carlito Dominguez had been a drifter and a small town Romeo when he met the zaftig and serious-minded Edita. He was quick to size up her family’s influence in the area. Likewise, her father, Jorge and his brother, Guillermo, were quick to size him up as a loser devalued further by the mestizo cast to his features. Needless to say, they disapproved of the match.
“Edita,” they said. “You don’t have to marry the first man you meet.”
“Why not?”
Why not, indeed? After all, who was she to meet in this county of Anglos and Indians? Dominguez was the first Hispanic to come to Vanadium in a long time. There was no telling when the next one would breeze through in an emerald AMC Gremlin. In the end, her family would be worn down by her mopiness and her silence around the dinner table. They agreed to let them marry. Despite their nagging reservations, they took Dominguez in and taught him the family business. Then he was found, soon after the nuptials, drunk at the High Grade, Vanadium’s only café and bar, bragging about how much money his new family had. Guillermo Cantante, Edita’s uncle, dosed Dominguez’ tequila with a maggot he had harvested from a two week-old road kill. That night, Dominguez ran a fever of one hundred and seven degrees and dry-vomited and shat for eleven hours straight. When the concerned Edita stepped out of the room to empty his chamber pot, Carlito was given some friendly advice. He was told he was never to drink and talk about the family’s money again. After that, he didn’t. And when Carlito was found having an affair at the Geiger Motel with a divorcée who worked at the cooling and heating store, once again, Uncle Guillermo stepped in. A large and powerfully built man, he grabbed Dominguez through the window of his truck before he could pull out of the parking lot and drove him to a far out location on Lame Horse Mesa. There, Guillermo staked him five feet from a red ants’ nest and painted his genitalia with clover honey. When Guillermo returned three hours later after meeting friends in town for coffee, Dominguez’s bitten member had already swollen to the size and color of a Chinese Emperor’s coy. Once again, Uncle Guillermo gave him some friendly advice. Don’t be unfaithful to Edita. After that, he wasn’t. Years passed, and the old Cantantes eventually died off leaving Dominguez as head of the family. His ascension to the tile throne was soured by a daily reminder of his treatment at the hands of the Cantantes. His son Cookie, by some cruel genetic twist of fate, had grown into the spitting image of his old nemesis, Guillermo Cantante.
Enter Buster. He went from being an orphan to the center of attention with his three brothers and two sisters. Cookie, the eldest, did not take part in the joy of having a new baby in the family. Instead, he observed from the shadows. While technically still a child, Cookie already had the personality of a dyspeptic adult soured on the world. He was scary-looking to begin with. Even before he got diabetes, even before he was on his own and became bloated and puffy from alcohol, cheese sticks, and TV trays of Banquet fried chicken, his eyes—two malevolent drips of Bosco—looked swollen shut in a wince of unspeakable pain; pain that, when the time was right, Cookie Dominguez would make sure the world came up with the balance due.
One day, completely out of the blue, Cookie asked sweetly if he could feed the baby. Edita was heartened by his, request—pleased that Cookie had finally accepted his new little brother. Patiently, she instructed Cookie on how to lift Buster into his high chair, how to tie the bib around his neck, and make up his little food tray with a little dab of mashed peas, apple sauce, and pureed carrots, and how much food he should put on the spoon. Then she put the spoon in Cookie’s hand and stood back with her hands on her hips waiting for Cookie to begin. He put the spoon down.
“What’s wrong?” She said.
“I want to feed him by myself.”
“Can’t I stand here and watch, bollito?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I want to be alone with him.”
Edita