Would I be out of line if I said I miss you?
March 03, 2005:
Twelve Year Anniversary was yesterday.
Rest in Peace,
Albert Joseph Fischer, Jr.
January 16, 1975 - March 03, 1993
MURDER ON THE BORDER
Joey Fischer was a teen-age honor student who flourished in the Texas border culture, but his death revealed a side of that culture he’d never imagined.
BY MARIE BRENNER
Last fall, my eighteen-year-old cousin Joey Fischer was assigned to read Gabriel García Márquez’s "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." Joey’s English teacher, Janice Johnson, believed that her honors students at St. Joseph Academy, a private school in Brownsville, Texas, on the Mexican border, needed to stretch themselves by taking on serious themes, such as the notion of mortality. In the book, Santiago Nasar, an amicable and rather feckless twenty-one-year-old, is murdered because he has possibly violated a daughter of the local town. Mrs. Johnson didn’t care that her students might not appreciate Márquez’s literary style of magic realism-his baroque chronicle of this particular killing which gradually reveals more and more details-but she was hoping that they would understand, and even be intrigued by, the subtext: that of a Latin culture in which a murder might be considered morally justifiable when it is motivated by the loss of a young woman’s honor. "This couldn’t happen," Mrs. Johnson later recalled Joey and his friends saying of the García Márquez novel. "This kind of thing only happens on soap operas."
Joey, whose full name was Albert Joseph Fischer, Jr., was slim and had neatly trimmed brown hair, a narrow face, and a wry smile; he was one of Mrs. Johnson’s most challenging students. At times, he could be as heedless as any other teen-ager, but she was impressed by his conversation, which was often serious. Joey had a deep voice and loved to bounce big words like "plethora," "lugubrious," and "pusillanimous" around with Mrs. Johnson. People who knew him often talked about him first in terms of his accomplishments: he had a 98.5 grade-point average for his senior year; he was eleventh in his class; and he had been immediately accepted into the honors program at the University of Texas at Austin. It could be argued that Joey’s confidence in his academic abilities gave him a certain margin to try to push his teachers to their limits. Joey always had a remark to make, on any subject. "One of these days, your mouth is going to get you in trouble," Mrs. Johnson often teased him.
However much Mrs. Johnson tried last year, she had a hard time getting Joey’s class to appreciate the rich ironies of "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." Joey told a friend of his that he thought all the omens were "ridiculous." He gave the friend the impression that he regarded the García Márquez novel as an anachronism, a throwback to the repressive sexual mores of Catholic mothers who chanted endless Rosaries to purify their daughters who had been degradadas. Joey said to Mrs. Johnson, "All the books you seem to pick for us are so morbid."
Mrs. Johnson was not originally from the border. As an outsider, she had a sharp sense of all the many contradictory aspects of the culture. St. Joseph Academy-and, for that matter, Brownsville-was at least eighty-five per cent Mexican-American. It was frequently said that the school, like the city, was "a mix of cultures," but it was impossible to think of either St. Joe, as the school is known, or Brownsville as an Anglo-versus-Hispanic world. Outside South Texas, it is often presumed that there is a continuing culture clash between the local Anglos and the Mexican-Americans. In fact, the closer you are to the border, the more the worlds meld together; ethnic and racial considerations are secondary to how rich a family is or how long it has lived in the area. On the border, the assumptions that outsiders make about the area often seem patronizing, because the Mexican-Americans define the culture and are its political power structure. It is common for the Mexican-Americans to tease their Anglo friends affectionately by calling them gringos, or even bolillos, meaning "white bread."
As an Anglo, Joey was most friendly with the Mexican-Americans in the school who were "second or third generation from across"-middle-class children whose last names were Ayala or Gonzalez, the kind of kids who wore boat shoes and polo shirts, sometimes applied to the Wharton School or Brown, and, at home, spoke Spanish mostly with their grandparents. This Brownsville world of established families does not show up in movies like "The Border" or "El Norte," for it is a society of subtle distinctions, in which Mexican-Americans and Anglos live in the same neighborhoods and go to the same schools and dances.
Joey and his friends could speak a perfect border Spanish, trilling their "r"s like natives, but for all their fluency in the language Mrs. Johnson remained convinced that they were unaware of the oddity of their environment. Brownsville is at the southern tip of Texas, across the Rio Grande from the Mexican city of Matamoros, and twenty-five miles from the Gulf of Mexico and the beaches of South Padre Island. It is a community of Bonanza restaurants, cineplexes, department stores, yogurt shops, and malls, where a small but significant number of the population truly believe that they have seen the Miracle Virgin of Guadalupe appearing in the clouds, on their tortillas, or, just recently, in the knot of a tree. It is a city where there are curanderos and curanderas-Mexican medicine men and women, sometimes benign but sometimes somewhat sinister, who practice brujería, or witchcraft. For a fee, the local curanderas will prescribe herbs for indigestion or employ spells, oils, and
incantations-and, on occasion, tarot cards-to put the mal ojo, or evil eye,
on straying boyfriends or unfaithful wives. A few miles from St. Joe, there are several storefronts advertising velas mágicas, aceite de suerte, sahumerio-magic candles, lucky oil, specially prepared incense-and other tools of curanderismo. Neither Joey nor his private-school friends appear to have ever shown the slightest interest in these things.
On Wednesday, March 3rd, in the sweet, nervous time of his last months of high school, Joey was up early, as usual. He put on one of the St. Joe uniforms-navy trousers and blue-and-white button-down-and then tried to get his younger brother, Eric, out the door; Joey always drove Eric to school. Just before seven o’clock, Joey went into the garage and backed his mother’s car into the circular driveway. The traffic was light on Highway 77/ 83, visible just beyond an allée of palm
trees in front of his house, on Cortez Avenue, in Rancho Viejo, an upper-middle-class community to the north of Brownsville. By Brownsville standards, Joey’s neighborhood was rich. A number of doctors and lawyers lived there, and so did executives of the local maquiladoras, the factories of vast American and Taiwanese companies, such as A.T. & T. and Zenith, in Matamoros. Rancho Viejo was the kind of place where people describe the houses by their measurements, as in "Look at the Hernándezes’-they have fourteen thousand square feet." One next-door neighbor, a Mexican national, had in his front yard a dozen plaster statues of ancient Greek goddesses holding urns. Compared with some of its neighbors, Joey’s house, a stucco ranch, was modest; it had a swimming pool, but a relatively small one.
Joey was one of only a few teen-age boys at St. Joe who did not have cars of their own, but his mother, Corinne, regularly let him borrow hers. After Joey backed the car up, he parked and got out to wash the dust off the car windows-a morning ritual. He walked to the front corner of the house, where the garden hose was curled on the ground. Suddenly, someone came up to the house with a .38-calibre pistol. As Joey stood with the hose in his hand, he was shot twice. The killer fired at close range, and one bullet tore into Joey’s chest and the other lodged in his brain. The killer did not use a silencer-the gunshots could be heard inside the house. It was later obvious to the sheriff that Joey’s killing was some kind of hit: the assassin had clearly sought him out.
Inside the house, Corinne went to the window to see what was going on. She thought, she later told Joey’s father, Buddy, that maybe some palm fronds had fallen on the roof or a car had backfired. She looked out the kitchen door but didn’t see her car. For a moment, she thought Joey might have gone to a convenience store to pick up something, but Eric told her that he saw her car in the driveway. Then Corinne, not moving much more quickly than usual, walked from the kitchen to the garage. When she opened the unopened door of the two-door garage, she saw Joey, lying face up, in the driveway. Later, Eric told his father that his mother’s scream was so terrifying that it would haunt him for the rest of his life.
"Call 911!" Corinne shouted to Eric. "Call your father!" she shouted to Joey’s older sister, Kathy. Immediately, Kathy rushed to the telephone and called her father, who lived only a few miles away. (Corinne and Buddy were divorced six years ago, and both had remarried.) It was a few minutes past seven. Buddy was still sleeping, and Joey’s stepmother, Connie, was getting ready for work. Their five-month-old baby, Michael, was asleep in the next room. From the bathroom, Connie heard Buddy answer the phone. "What happened?" she asked. Buddy told her, "My son has been shot!" Connie had to stay with the baby, so Buddy pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt and raced his car down Tandy Road, a shortcut to Highway 77/83, which led to Joey’s house. He sped past the Rancho Viejo National Bank and Kay’s Cactus. He had no idea how fast he was going; at some point he looked down at the speedometer and noticed that it registered a hundred and ten miles an hour. He made frantic gestures with his left hand, as if to brush other cars out of his way. At that early hour, the highway was almost deserted. As he approached the red tile roofs of Rancho Viejo, he didn’t wait to get to the exit; he crossed the grass divider and careered through the allée of palm trees. He could see the flashing red lights of the Rancho Viejo police patrol cars; he felt himself go numb. He saw Corinne, sobbing, in the garage with Eric. Then he saw Joey lying in the driveway. When he got near his child, he saw that Joey was holding the garden hose. Nonsensically, he waited for Joey to see him and to say, "Hey, Dad, what’s up?"-his standard greeting. The flow of the water from the hose had covered the driveway with blood.
In the kitchen, Kathy telephoned Joey’s closest friend, Patrick Aziz. She was crying hysterically, "Patrick, did Joey have any enemies?"
Patrick couldn’t think of anyone who disliked Joey.
By the time Patrick got to school, he was almost incoherent, and stammered badly when he encountered Mrs. Johnson in the teachers’ workroom.
"My word, what is the matter with you?" Janice Johnson remembered asking him.
"They killed Joey," he told her.
Mrs. Johnson said, "What?" Then, "Do you have any idea who would want to do this?"
"Yes," Patrick said, remembering some boys he and Joey had got into a fight with at a football game.
Mrs. Johnson had a strange feeling that "this is going to come right back to our doorstep," she told me much later.
Corinne, Eric, and Kathy immediately moved into Corinne’s mother’s house. According to Buddy, Corinne was in shock, but she knew, she later told friends, that she could never spend one more night in the house where her son had been murdered.
I grew up with Buddy, in San Antonio. My father owned a small chain of discount department stores which had been started by my grandfather, Buddy’s great-uncle. Buddy’s father, Albert Fischer, was a surgeon, the chief of surgery of a local hospital. Buddy’s mother, Ella Zuschlag, was a highly respected pediatrician. His father and my father, both of whom still live in San Antonio, are first cousins, and so close that they are more like brothers; their connection is powerful, rooted in the nineteenth century in central Mexico, where their fathers, best friends from a small town in the duchy of Kurland, on the Baltic Sea, married two sisters and settled in Aguascalientes, hoping to strike it rich. By 1911, during the revolution, four Brenner children and two Fischer children were living in Aguascalientes. Pancho Villa’s troops massed in front of their ranch. Our grandmothers were often frightened by the local superstitions and folkways. From time to time, my grandmother told me years later, they found on their porches dead chickens or bananas wrapped in red cloths. They had no idea what the chickens and bananas meant. In the years when the revolution was brewing, a comet streaked across the sky, and my aunt Anita Brenner’s nurse, Serapia, held her up to look and said, "It means war, death, misery, hunger, and disease." Soon after, it rained ashes for a night and a day from a distant erupting volcano. Nearly two decades later, Anita wrote of these events in "Idols Behind Altars," a study of Mexican art and anthropology, published in 1929. The Brenners and the Fischers stayed in Mexico for only eleven years (they left during the revolution), but for eighty years most of my family has been unable to move any farther away from Mexico than South Texas. With time, the closeness of the clan weakened, but many of us have been drawn to the totems of the culture that drew our grandparents; our houses are full of Mexican paintings and religious kitsch. "For the dust of Mexico on a human heart corrodes, precipitates. But with the dust of Mexico upon it, that heart can find no rest in any other land," Anita wrote in "Idols Behind Altars."
Since the Brenners and the Fischers left Mexico, many interesting things have happened in our family. We have had relatives who achieved a degree of notoriety in Mexico for their various accomplishments; we have had the usual family betrayals, leading to arguments that wound up in litigation and court fights. There have been, as in most families, happy times and chilly remarks, broken relationships, money made, money lost and made again. We have had doctors, writers, newspaper editors, total failures, revolutionaries, merchants, lawyers, Communists, right-wingers. But until Joey was killed we had never had a murder in the family.
Some weeks after the killing, Buddy sounded withdrawn and tired on the telephone. A man who had always prided himself on his stoicism, he was now trying to stay in control of his emotions. The death of a child is every parent’s nightmare; the murder of a child is almost unimaginable. I had a sense from my father that my cousin was not only grief-stricken but also concerned that Joey’s killer, whoever he was, might never be brought to justice. Corinne, who may have shared his concern, had withdrawn completely, grieving in solitude.
Buddy and I had known each other well as children, but I hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years. On my first morning in Brownsville, I waited in the lobby of the Sheraton for my cousin and his wife to pick me up. Buddy and Connie work at a local maquiladora, KEMET de Mexico, a South Carolina electronics company that manufactures millions of electrical capacitors a day in Mexico. Buddy, a former banker, is a buyer and is implementing a new automated purchasing system for the factories in Mexico; Connie is an executive in charge of maintaining the quality of the product for all the Mexican factories. She worked her way through college and then took an M.B.A. in South Carolina. Connie’s intelligence and direct manner are not unlike those of Buddy’s mother, the only woman interne in her year at Robert B. Greene Hospital, in San Antonio.
As I waited for Buddy and Connie, tropical storm clouds from the Gulf of Mexico darkened the sky; the air was heavy, as if hurricane season were near. The palm trees in front of the Sheraton were bending in the wind. Many of the men who walked into the hotel were wearing guayaberas, shirts with pockets and pleated fronts. Suddenly, an athletic-looking man with a mustache, accompanied by a pretty blonde, walked up to me. It took me a moment to realize that they were my cousin and his wife. We walked through the parking lot to his car, a Subaru with a baby’s seat in the back. I noticed a plastic shopping bag filled with newspapers in it. "You need to read all of them," Buddy said. "These are all the clippings that have been in the papers since Joey was shot."
"It’s Brownsville" is an expression used by local Anglos and Mexican-Americans alike. It is meant to explain the lassitude of the city, the mañana attitude. "It’s Brownsville" is the reason given that, some years ago, Pan Am, after using the city as its South American headquarters for twenty-five years, finally moved away; Southwest Airlines lands in nearby Harlingen, which remodelled its airport and will be able to service the boom that the region has been anticipating if the North American Free Trade Agreement takes effect.
For a long time, there has been a feeling that Brownsville will become a boomtown at any moment, but in the last few years the city’s economy has been depressed. "I think it’s getting better," a friend of Buddy’s remarked to me. "It used to be when we would go through town there were no cars at the light. Now there are at least six." Since 1985, nearly a hundred major factories have opened in the industrial parks of Matamoros and the nearby Valle Hermoso. Matamoros is now a large industrial city with a population of almost a million. Brownsville’s development has been slower, although the city now has about a hundred thousand residents. "If General Motors has twelve thousand people at its plants in Matamoros, they might have eighteen working in Brownsville," a local businessman told me. It is often difficult
for outsiders in Brownsville to understand that the city’s power structure, which has slowly favored the ascent of Mexican-Americans, who now dominate political office, is representative of the city’s melded culture. These local politicians, like those anywhere in the United States, concern themselves with such matters as passing bond issues for a new convention center.
The closer you are to downtown Brownsville, the closer you are to Mexico. Just two or three blocks in any direction from Market Square and the cathedral, it is difficult to tell that you aren’t in Mexico. In downtown Brownsville, most of the signs are in Spanish. Soap operas blare out from dusty shops of ropa segunda; dozens of these secondhand-clothes stores line Adams Street, one of the town’s main thoroughfares. Fat blossoms of bougainvillea trail off Cyclone fences around many of the small frame houses a few blocks from the Rio Grande.
Many women who come to Brownsville with their husbands join a group called Border Maquiladora Wives. It is intended to help Anglo newcomers become acclimated, but it occasionally becomes a forum for anxious discussion about the area’s drug smuggling and violent deaths, which are often reported in the Brownsville Herald. On some level, these newcomers may actually be baffled by what they view as the heavy folk-Catholic underboil to the culture-a sense that some ideas from el otro lado ("the other side") remain completely unassimilated.
On my flight to Harlingen, I overheard a well-dressed Anglo woman talking to the woman next to her: "You go to a restaurant and all they speak is Spanish. You go to the beauty shop and all they speak is Spanish. I don’t know if they are laughing at me. I don’t know what they are saying." Like our grandmothers at the turn of the century, some of the maquiladora wives are put off by the local customs. They worry about the coyotes, sinister-looking men who sometimes circle the good neighborhoods to collect their weekly payment from illegals they have smuggled across, who now work as maids in the air-conditioned houses of the Anglos. And there are wives who find nothing charming about the local H.E.B. grocery chain, which has cafés that sell gorditas, fried-cornmeal pockets filled with beans and cheese or whatever you want. There are times when you cannot see an Anglo face in a grocery store. At the meetings of the wives’ group, the women sometimes talk as if they were expatriates, trying to cope in a colonial outpost.
In Brownsville, the story of Joey Fischer’s murder was given a banner headline on the front page of the Herald: "ST. JOE PUPIL SHOT TO DEATH IN DRIVEWAY." A photograph of his body covered in a bloodstained coroner’s cloth took most of the width of the front page. Buddy is prominent in town-he used to be the president of a local Rotary Club and was also active in a community group called Leadership Brownsville-and Joey’s grandfather on his mother’s side, Louis Lapeyre, had once been mayor of Brownsville, so it was not hard to understand why Joey’s death was big news in the Rio Grande Valley. Already, his short life was reduced to sound-bites. He was "the honor student," "eleventh in his class."
On the night before his funeral, more than six hundred people came to a Rosary service for him at St. Mary’s Church. His parents had decided that there should be an open casket with a kneeler, so that whoever wanted to could pray by the coffin, in the traditional Catholic manner. Corinne’s family, who were originally "Louisiana French," as one friend put it, were devout Catholics. Although Buddy’s father is Jewish, when Buddy married Corinne he converted to Catholicism and became active in his church. The funeral, also at St. Mary’s Church, was jammed with friends. Besides all of Corinne’s and Buddy’s acquaintances, many people from St. Joseph Academy appeared. Joey’s girlfriend Marianela Caballero and her mother attended both the Rosary and the funeral, and sat in a pew, sobbing. Joey’s family came up to Marianela to reassure her, saying, "Don’t worry, he looks just like himself." Nearby sat a former girlfriend, Cristina Cisneros, also weeping. Although many parents of St. Joe students came, Cristina’s mother was nowhere to be seen. Victor Ayala, who had been a friend of Joey’s since kindergarten, had volunteered to give a eulogy. Victor suddenly found himself having to reconstruct the history of a childhood friendship, and he was so worried about writing the speech that he felt unable to bring his close friend into focus.
For days after the funeral, Buddy and Connie’s house filled with friends. It was a long weekend, one of them told me, during which the parents of the teen-agers who had known one another since they were toddlers felt so intimately connected with Joey’s death that they could think of little besides their inability to protect their own children. Joey’s murder came to represent their own fears and sense of powerlessness. Buddy’s neighbor Mike Gonzalez, a partner in a local advertising agency, had seen Joey almost every weekend at his father’s house. His own son went to Pace, a public high school in Brownsville. After Joey was killed, Gonzalez became very strict with his son. "If it could happen to Joey Fischer, it could happen to any of our children," Gonzalez said. Another friend recalled, "We left Buddy’s house sobbing, imagining our own children lying in our driveways."
"How are you sleeping?" I asked Buddy on our first afternoon together.
"Not well," he said. "I have terrible dreams. Often I stay up all night long just so I won’t have nightmares." Buddy and I were sitting in the living room of his house-a modern house, with comfortable beige sofas and a large kitchen filled with cooking equipment and a sheaf of recipes clipped from Southern Living. He was smoking cigarette after cigarette and got up many times to show me yet another picture of Joey. "It’s like I am living somebody else’s life," he said. "I had a wonderful son for eighteen years."
Later that night, Buddy and I drove by Joey’s house. Buddy was driving fast; he wanted to show me the route he had travelled when he learned that Joey had been killed. We drove north on Highway 77/83; Buddy’s face was hard in the darkness. He took the exit for Rancho Viejo and then parked in front of the small house on Cortez Avenue. A "For Sale" sign stood in front of the house. Suddenly, Buddy said, "Another father might say, ‘If Joey came back, I would make this right with him.’ Or ‘I would make that right with him.’ But I don’t feel that way." He waited a moment. "I wouldn’t change anything about Joey," he went on. "Not one thing. I want my son back just the way he was." For the only time in the days we were together, I saw Buddy’s eyes fill with tears.
At eighteen, Joey’s personalitywas still in formation, but he loved basketball and computers, and often talked about his desire to become an engineer. At school, his class voted him, along with two others, "most sarcastic," and they posed for their picture carrying a sign that read "What Us Sarcastic?" He had a fine sense of the absurdity of high school. Once, a teacher took two balloons away from Joey and put them in a closet. A few days later, Joey asked for his balloons back. The teacher opened the closet and a bunch of balloons floated out. Joey waited a full beat. "That’s what happens when you leave two balloons alone," he said.
For an adolescent, Joey sometimes showed a surprising concern for his parents. In the spring of 1992, when his stepmother, Connie, was six months pregnant, she received a note from him. "So the baby is due in late September. I wonder if he’ll look like Mikey from ‘Look Who’s Talking’ or like Wally from ‘The Beaver.’ Either way, he should look pretty funny. But don’t you worry, I’ll take good care of him." Joey was twelve when his parents divorced, and he had had a hard time, but he and his father maintained their close relationship. There was never a Lakers game that Joey did not try to watch with Buddy.
Joey and his friends often complained that there was almost nothing to do in Brownsville. The parents of the girls they dated did not want them to drive to the beaches of South Padre Island except on special occasions. Across the Rio Grande was Matamoros, long the equivalent of a theme park for Texas teen-agers, with its easy liquor and, before the age of aids, quick and memorable sex in the red-light section. Soon after Joey and many of his friends got their driver’s licenses, at age sixteen, they visited the bars in "Mata" from time to time-places like Blanca White’s and Hobie. By the end of their junior year, the raffish atmosphere of Matamoros had become less appealing to them. Joey and his friends knew that their parents worried about occasional shootings in the bars and about people being kidnapped off the streets. Matamoros had had a lot of bad publicity in 1989, when Mark Kilroy, a University of Texas student, on the border for spring break, disappeared from a bar in Matamoros. His body and at least a dozen others were found buried on a desolate ranch nearby, apparently the victims of a cult involved in the drug trade whose members believed that sacrifice would make them invincible. The appearance of a satanic cult a few miles from their quiet neighborhoods had terrified many of the
St. Joe parents whose children were old enough to get their driver’s licenses.
People in Brownsville sometimes say that the parents who send their children to St. Joseph Academy want them to be "part of the St. Joe mafia" and "meet the right kind of people." St. Joe is one of the few private schools in Brownsville; the tuition is three thousand dollars a year, and ninety-eight per cent of the students go on to college. The school occupies a red brick building in Rio Viejo, one of the most elegant of the Brownsville neighborhoods. The building, which has open-air corridors and
patios, to take advantage of the mild Brownsville winters, stands near a resaca, one of many charming old cutoff river channels to be found all over Brownsville, and is surrounded with flowering cenizo shrubs, which are indigenous. Most of the children at St. Joe are wealthy: the sons and daughters of the rich families of the Rio Grande Valley; the children of Taiwanese entrepreneurs who came to the border to run the maquiladoras; and even the children of several rumored drug and arms dealers in the area. In the morning, the St. Joe parking lot fills with expensive cars, some of them, it has been thought, surely belonging to drug dealers’ children. The counselling problems at the school are idiosyncratic in the extreme; guidance counsellors had to use special expressions like being "in the paper a lot" when one of the fathers-allegedly a member of a Matamoros-based drug ring linked to a Colombian drug cartel-was indicted last year. On the surface, all the different Hispanics, Taiwanese, and Anglos at St. Joe seem to get along with one another, but, as in every high school, there are cliques. Some of the more assimilated Mexican-American students have little to do with the Mexican-Americans from el otro lado.
In the view of one person who knows the school and its students well, the lack of much to do in Brownsville for the middle-class teen-agers leads to a great deal of early sex. "It is surprising that, with the Catholic doctrine and the Mexican-American doctrine, there is so much sex going on, but the parents and the school refuse to talk about the problems," this person told me. "They say, ‘That doesn’t happen here, and neither does anorexia, or drug or alcohol abuse.’ " Some of the Anglo boys at St. Joe who get involved with the girls from the old-fashioned families have no idea of the expectations and pressures that are put on the Mexican-American daughters.
In Brownsville, Mexican-American girls are often pushed to marry as soon as possible after high school.
Joey was often attracted to the more Latina girls of the school. During his junior year, he asked out Cristina Cisneros, a sophomore. The other boys were surprised. "I didn’t really know that much about her," a close friend of Joey’s told me. Cristina, the youngest of five children, had long curly dark hair and a pretty face with small features. Although she once tried out for cheerleader, for the most part she seemed to keep to herself. "In the cafeteria at lunch," one of her friends told me, "when all of us would be laughing, Cristina would be very quiet." Another friend saw her differently: "Cristina could be quiet when you didn’t know her, but when you know her she’s bouncy, happy, and friendly."
Joey may have appeared to Cristina’s mother, Dora Cisneros, to be a catch: he was an ambitious student from a good family, and he wasn’t wild, like many of the St. Joe boys. Cristina and Joey often played tennis together or swam in his pool. His stepmother, Connie, thought they were "just friends." Some weekends when Cristina was at Joey’s house, she would sit by herself playing video games while Joey did his homework in the dining room. "It was strange," Connie told me. "I never saw anything remotely intimate between them. They didn’t even hold hands."
One day, Joey told one of his closest friends that he and Cristina had gone alone to South Padre Island, to a condo her parents had there. It is impossible to know exactly what went on there between Cristina and Joey, but Joey later told his friends that they had slept together. He didn’t brag about it, his friends told me, and one friend said that he even seemed to regret it. His friends think that Joey and Cristina slept together only once or twice, but they have no doubt that Joey was telling them the truth. Cristina later denied that anything had happened between them, according to a friend of hers. In any case, later that spring Joey took Cristina to the junior prom; a photograph of Joey in his tuxedo was taken.
That June, Joey broke up with Cristina. One of his closest friends told me that he thought Joey had decided that it had been just a physical attraction, and that there weren’t many emotional ties between them. He wanted to get out honorably, without "hurting her feelings," he told his father. He had given Cristina his ring, and when he broke up with her he asked for it back, but she refused. During the first few weeks of the summer, Buddy told me, Dora Cisneros began to call Joey. She was very polite on the telephone. "Why have you broken up with Cristina?" she would ask. Joey, uncomfortable at hearing from Cristina’s mother, was apparently almost excessively polite, using his Catholic-school manners. "Well, Ma’am, I think she is very nice," he would say, "but I just want to see other girls." According to Buddy, Mrs. Cisneros called him and asked him why Joey had broken up with her daughter. At first, Buddy remembers, he thought Mrs. Cisneros was just being "a concerned parent," but when he realized that she was truly concerned about a high-school romance that had fizzled he could not understand how a mother could risk humiliating her daughter by calling her boyfriend’s parents.
Joey was angry that Cristina had not returned his ring, and he decided he would write her a polite but firm letter asking for it back. To his teen-age mind, the letter had a menacing legal tone. Buddy, who had seen the letter, recalled that it said, in effect, "You have ten days to return my ring or I am taking action."
After Joey sent the letter, according to Buddy, Dora Cisneros called Buddy at home and said, "I want to meet you and talk to you about Joey’s ring and other things." Buddy agreed to meet her at a Burger King. When he got to the table, he saw Cristina sitting there with her mother. An outsider might have thought they had come to negotiate a marriage, an old-fashioned Mexican custom. Dora Cisneros again asked, "Why did Joey break up with Cristina?" Buddy answered, "This is really between Joey and Cristina. It has nothing to do with us." Buddy expressed the opinion that Joey was old enough to conduct his own personal affairs, and that, as the father, he had to stay out of it. Inexplicably to Buddy, as Mrs. Cisneros talked about her daughter’s private life Cristina did not protest but remained silent for most of the meeting.
Then Dora Cisneros said to Buddy, "Are you aware that your son drinks?"
Buddy wasn’t particularly upset. He remembered his own teen-age years in South Texas. "What eighteen-year-old doesn’t?" he answered.
"I’ve seen him drunk once," Cristina said.
"Well," Buddy said, "if Joey has been drunk, he has never been drunk in front of me."
The meeting, however bizarre, was perfectly friendly, Buddy recalls. The subject of sex never came up. Buddy told Mrs. Cisneros that he would talk to Joey about being "a gentleman." Mrs. Cisneros told Buddy that Joey would get his ring back. "I just want him to sweat a little bit," she said. When Buddy got home, he told Joey, "If you are breaking up with Cristina, please be a gentleman about it. If you have done anything to offend her, please write her a note or call her to apologize. Tell her you want to be just friends." No one knows whether Joey took his father’s advice. But, according to Joey’s friends, Mrs. Cisneros continued to call him. Joey told a friend that she had offered him five hundred dollars a month to take Cristina out. Eventually, the situation reached a point where he later confided to another friend, "I have never told an adult off before, but, yeah, I told her off."
At the beginning of his senior year, Joey met Marianela Caballero, a new girl in school. Marianela had long, dark hair and an infectious laugh. Her mother, who was originally from San Luis Potosí, spoke Spanish with her daughter, and Marianela had a Mexican lilt to her voice. Joey invited Marianela to homecoming, but the relationship did not take off. "I didn’t want a commitment then," Marianela told me. But during February their flirtation intensified. The Saturday before Joey was killed, he attended a friend’s quinceañera, the traditional coming-out party given for a Mexican-American girl’s fifteenth birthday, and became confused that Marianela paid more attention to another boy than to him. Marianela might have been unsure that Joey really cared for her. Like many of the more traditional Mexican-American girls, she did not want the sort of casual romance favored by the Anglo boys. Her mother had talked to her at great length about "reputation." On the Monday after the quinceañera, Joey wrote her a long letter explaining his intentions: "I know how I feel, and it’s all up to you. You need to let me know. You wanted sincere, this is how I feel. I like you alot, but it’s all up to you. . . . Please let me know how you feel. I sincerely care for you." On Tuesday-the night before he was murdered-Joey and Marianela were on the telephone for more than three hours. His friends Patrick Aziz and Erika Borrego were over at his house, as they often were, ostensibly to study calculus but really just to hang out. Before Patrick and Erika left, the three friends started kidding around with Joey’s electric razor. They held Joey down and tried to shave his legs. At one point during the evening, Joey said that he had heard that another boy was now taking Cristina Cisneros out. "Good luck," Joey said. On another occasion, he told that boy’s cousin, "Tell him not to worry. If he wants to take Cristina out, that’s fine." He also startled Patrick and Erika. "Did you know that Mrs. Cisneros offered me money to take Cristina out?" he asked. "God. Really, God, what a nut!" Patrick recalled telling him.
Joey was serious. He told them she’d offered him five hundred dollars a month. All three were casual about this information; their minds were on other things.
Twelve Year Anniversary was yesterday.
Rest in Peace,
Albert Joseph Fischer, Jr.
January 16, 1975 - March 03, 1993
MURDER ON THE BORDER
Joey Fischer was a teen-age honor student who flourished in the Texas border culture, but his death revealed a side of that culture he’d never imagined.
BY MARIE BRENNER
Last fall, my eighteen-year-old cousin Joey Fischer was assigned to read Gabriel García Márquez’s "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." Joey’s English teacher, Janice Johnson, believed that her honors students at St. Joseph Academy, a private school in Brownsville, Texas, on the Mexican border, needed to stretch themselves by taking on serious themes, such as the notion of mortality. In the book, Santiago Nasar, an amicable and rather feckless twenty-one-year-old, is murdered because he has possibly violated a daughter of the local town. Mrs. Johnson didn’t care that her students might not appreciate Márquez’s literary style of magic realism-his baroque chronicle of this particular killing which gradually reveals more and more details-but she was hoping that they would understand, and even be intrigued by, the subtext: that of a Latin culture in which a murder might be considered morally justifiable when it is motivated by the loss of a young woman’s honor. "This couldn’t happen," Mrs. Johnson later recalled Joey and his friends saying of the García Márquez novel. "This kind of thing only happens on soap operas."
Joey, whose full name was Albert Joseph Fischer, Jr., was slim and had neatly trimmed brown hair, a narrow face, and a wry smile; he was one of Mrs. Johnson’s most challenging students. At times, he could be as heedless as any other teen-ager, but she was impressed by his conversation, which was often serious. Joey had a deep voice and loved to bounce big words like "plethora," "lugubrious," and "pusillanimous" around with Mrs. Johnson. People who knew him often talked about him first in terms of his accomplishments: he had a 98.5 grade-point average for his senior year; he was eleventh in his class; and he had been immediately accepted into the honors program at the University of Texas at Austin. It could be argued that Joey’s confidence in his academic abilities gave him a certain margin to try to push his teachers to their limits. Joey always had a remark to make, on any subject. "One of these days, your mouth is going to get you in trouble," Mrs. Johnson often teased him.
However much Mrs. Johnson tried last year, she had a hard time getting Joey’s class to appreciate the rich ironies of "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." Joey told a friend of his that he thought all the omens were "ridiculous." He gave the friend the impression that he regarded the García Márquez novel as an anachronism, a throwback to the repressive sexual mores of Catholic mothers who chanted endless Rosaries to purify their daughters who had been degradadas. Joey said to Mrs. Johnson, "All the books you seem to pick for us are so morbid."
Mrs. Johnson was not originally from the border. As an outsider, she had a sharp sense of all the many contradictory aspects of the culture. St. Joseph Academy-and, for that matter, Brownsville-was at least eighty-five per cent Mexican-American. It was frequently said that the school, like the city, was "a mix of cultures," but it was impossible to think of either St. Joe, as the school is known, or Brownsville as an Anglo-versus-Hispanic world. Outside South Texas, it is often presumed that there is a continuing culture clash between the local Anglos and the Mexican-Americans. In fact, the closer you are to the border, the more the worlds meld together; ethnic and racial considerations are secondary to how rich a family is or how long it has lived in the area. On the border, the assumptions that outsiders make about the area often seem patronizing, because the Mexican-Americans define the culture and are its political power structure. It is common for the Mexican-Americans to tease their Anglo friends affectionately by calling them gringos, or even bolillos, meaning "white bread."
As an Anglo, Joey was most friendly with the Mexican-Americans in the school who were "second or third generation from across"-middle-class children whose last names were Ayala or Gonzalez, the kind of kids who wore boat shoes and polo shirts, sometimes applied to the Wharton School or Brown, and, at home, spoke Spanish mostly with their grandparents. This Brownsville world of established families does not show up in movies like "The Border" or "El Norte," for it is a society of subtle distinctions, in which Mexican-Americans and Anglos live in the same neighborhoods and go to the same schools and dances.
Joey and his friends could speak a perfect border Spanish, trilling their "r"s like natives, but for all their fluency in the language Mrs. Johnson remained convinced that they were unaware of the oddity of their environment. Brownsville is at the southern tip of Texas, across the Rio Grande from the Mexican city of Matamoros, and twenty-five miles from the Gulf of Mexico and the beaches of South Padre Island. It is a community of Bonanza restaurants, cineplexes, department stores, yogurt shops, and malls, where a small but significant number of the population truly believe that they have seen the Miracle Virgin of Guadalupe appearing in the clouds, on their tortillas, or, just recently, in the knot of a tree. It is a city where there are curanderos and curanderas-Mexican medicine men and women, sometimes benign but sometimes somewhat sinister, who practice brujería, or witchcraft. For a fee, the local curanderas will prescribe herbs for indigestion or employ spells, oils, and
incantations-and, on occasion, tarot cards-to put the mal ojo, or evil eye,
on straying boyfriends or unfaithful wives. A few miles from St. Joe, there are several storefronts advertising velas mágicas, aceite de suerte, sahumerio-magic candles, lucky oil, specially prepared incense-and other tools of curanderismo. Neither Joey nor his private-school friends appear to have ever shown the slightest interest in these things.
On Wednesday, March 3rd, in the sweet, nervous time of his last months of high school, Joey was up early, as usual. He put on one of the St. Joe uniforms-navy trousers and blue-and-white button-down-and then tried to get his younger brother, Eric, out the door; Joey always drove Eric to school. Just before seven o’clock, Joey went into the garage and backed his mother’s car into the circular driveway. The traffic was light on Highway 77/ 83, visible just beyond an allée of palm
trees in front of his house, on Cortez Avenue, in Rancho Viejo, an upper-middle-class community to the north of Brownsville. By Brownsville standards, Joey’s neighborhood was rich. A number of doctors and lawyers lived there, and so did executives of the local maquiladoras, the factories of vast American and Taiwanese companies, such as A.T. & T. and Zenith, in Matamoros. Rancho Viejo was the kind of place where people describe the houses by their measurements, as in "Look at the Hernándezes’-they have fourteen thousand square feet." One next-door neighbor, a Mexican national, had in his front yard a dozen plaster statues of ancient Greek goddesses holding urns. Compared with some of its neighbors, Joey’s house, a stucco ranch, was modest; it had a swimming pool, but a relatively small one.
Joey was one of only a few teen-age boys at St. Joe who did not have cars of their own, but his mother, Corinne, regularly let him borrow hers. After Joey backed the car up, he parked and got out to wash the dust off the car windows-a morning ritual. He walked to the front corner of the house, where the garden hose was curled on the ground. Suddenly, someone came up to the house with a .38-calibre pistol. As Joey stood with the hose in his hand, he was shot twice. The killer fired at close range, and one bullet tore into Joey’s chest and the other lodged in his brain. The killer did not use a silencer-the gunshots could be heard inside the house. It was later obvious to the sheriff that Joey’s killing was some kind of hit: the assassin had clearly sought him out.
Inside the house, Corinne went to the window to see what was going on. She thought, she later told Joey’s father, Buddy, that maybe some palm fronds had fallen on the roof or a car had backfired. She looked out the kitchen door but didn’t see her car. For a moment, she thought Joey might have gone to a convenience store to pick up something, but Eric told her that he saw her car in the driveway. Then Corinne, not moving much more quickly than usual, walked from the kitchen to the garage. When she opened the unopened door of the two-door garage, she saw Joey, lying face up, in the driveway. Later, Eric told his father that his mother’s scream was so terrifying that it would haunt him for the rest of his life.
"Call 911!" Corinne shouted to Eric. "Call your father!" she shouted to Joey’s older sister, Kathy. Immediately, Kathy rushed to the telephone and called her father, who lived only a few miles away. (Corinne and Buddy were divorced six years ago, and both had remarried.) It was a few minutes past seven. Buddy was still sleeping, and Joey’s stepmother, Connie, was getting ready for work. Their five-month-old baby, Michael, was asleep in the next room. From the bathroom, Connie heard Buddy answer the phone. "What happened?" she asked. Buddy told her, "My son has been shot!" Connie had to stay with the baby, so Buddy pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt and raced his car down Tandy Road, a shortcut to Highway 77/83, which led to Joey’s house. He sped past the Rancho Viejo National Bank and Kay’s Cactus. He had no idea how fast he was going; at some point he looked down at the speedometer and noticed that it registered a hundred and ten miles an hour. He made frantic gestures with his left hand, as if to brush other cars out of his way. At that early hour, the highway was almost deserted. As he approached the red tile roofs of Rancho Viejo, he didn’t wait to get to the exit; he crossed the grass divider and careered through the allée of palm trees. He could see the flashing red lights of the Rancho Viejo police patrol cars; he felt himself go numb. He saw Corinne, sobbing, in the garage with Eric. Then he saw Joey lying in the driveway. When he got near his child, he saw that Joey was holding the garden hose. Nonsensically, he waited for Joey to see him and to say, "Hey, Dad, what’s up?"-his standard greeting. The flow of the water from the hose had covered the driveway with blood.
In the kitchen, Kathy telephoned Joey’s closest friend, Patrick Aziz. She was crying hysterically, "Patrick, did Joey have any enemies?"
Patrick couldn’t think of anyone who disliked Joey.
By the time Patrick got to school, he was almost incoherent, and stammered badly when he encountered Mrs. Johnson in the teachers’ workroom.
"My word, what is the matter with you?" Janice Johnson remembered asking him.
"They killed Joey," he told her.
Mrs. Johnson said, "What?" Then, "Do you have any idea who would want to do this?"
"Yes," Patrick said, remembering some boys he and Joey had got into a fight with at a football game.
Mrs. Johnson had a strange feeling that "this is going to come right back to our doorstep," she told me much later.
Corinne, Eric, and Kathy immediately moved into Corinne’s mother’s house. According to Buddy, Corinne was in shock, but she knew, she later told friends, that she could never spend one more night in the house where her son had been murdered.
I grew up with Buddy, in San Antonio. My father owned a small chain of discount department stores which had been started by my grandfather, Buddy’s great-uncle. Buddy’s father, Albert Fischer, was a surgeon, the chief of surgery of a local hospital. Buddy’s mother, Ella Zuschlag, was a highly respected pediatrician. His father and my father, both of whom still live in San Antonio, are first cousins, and so close that they are more like brothers; their connection is powerful, rooted in the nineteenth century in central Mexico, where their fathers, best friends from a small town in the duchy of Kurland, on the Baltic Sea, married two sisters and settled in Aguascalientes, hoping to strike it rich. By 1911, during the revolution, four Brenner children and two Fischer children were living in Aguascalientes. Pancho Villa’s troops massed in front of their ranch. Our grandmothers were often frightened by the local superstitions and folkways. From time to time, my grandmother told me years later, they found on their porches dead chickens or bananas wrapped in red cloths. They had no idea what the chickens and bananas meant. In the years when the revolution was brewing, a comet streaked across the sky, and my aunt Anita Brenner’s nurse, Serapia, held her up to look and said, "It means war, death, misery, hunger, and disease." Soon after, it rained ashes for a night and a day from a distant erupting volcano. Nearly two decades later, Anita wrote of these events in "Idols Behind Altars," a study of Mexican art and anthropology, published in 1929. The Brenners and the Fischers stayed in Mexico for only eleven years (they left during the revolution), but for eighty years most of my family has been unable to move any farther away from Mexico than South Texas. With time, the closeness of the clan weakened, but many of us have been drawn to the totems of the culture that drew our grandparents; our houses are full of Mexican paintings and religious kitsch. "For the dust of Mexico on a human heart corrodes, precipitates. But with the dust of Mexico upon it, that heart can find no rest in any other land," Anita wrote in "Idols Behind Altars."
Since the Brenners and the Fischers left Mexico, many interesting things have happened in our family. We have had relatives who achieved a degree of notoriety in Mexico for their various accomplishments; we have had the usual family betrayals, leading to arguments that wound up in litigation and court fights. There have been, as in most families, happy times and chilly remarks, broken relationships, money made, money lost and made again. We have had doctors, writers, newspaper editors, total failures, revolutionaries, merchants, lawyers, Communists, right-wingers. But until Joey was killed we had never had a murder in the family.
Some weeks after the killing, Buddy sounded withdrawn and tired on the telephone. A man who had always prided himself on his stoicism, he was now trying to stay in control of his emotions. The death of a child is every parent’s nightmare; the murder of a child is almost unimaginable. I had a sense from my father that my cousin was not only grief-stricken but also concerned that Joey’s killer, whoever he was, might never be brought to justice. Corinne, who may have shared his concern, had withdrawn completely, grieving in solitude.
Buddy and I had known each other well as children, but I hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years. On my first morning in Brownsville, I waited in the lobby of the Sheraton for my cousin and his wife to pick me up. Buddy and Connie work at a local maquiladora, KEMET de Mexico, a South Carolina electronics company that manufactures millions of electrical capacitors a day in Mexico. Buddy, a former banker, is a buyer and is implementing a new automated purchasing system for the factories in Mexico; Connie is an executive in charge of maintaining the quality of the product for all the Mexican factories. She worked her way through college and then took an M.B.A. in South Carolina. Connie’s intelligence and direct manner are not unlike those of Buddy’s mother, the only woman interne in her year at Robert B. Greene Hospital, in San Antonio.
As I waited for Buddy and Connie, tropical storm clouds from the Gulf of Mexico darkened the sky; the air was heavy, as if hurricane season were near. The palm trees in front of the Sheraton were bending in the wind. Many of the men who walked into the hotel were wearing guayaberas, shirts with pockets and pleated fronts. Suddenly, an athletic-looking man with a mustache, accompanied by a pretty blonde, walked up to me. It took me a moment to realize that they were my cousin and his wife. We walked through the parking lot to his car, a Subaru with a baby’s seat in the back. I noticed a plastic shopping bag filled with newspapers in it. "You need to read all of them," Buddy said. "These are all the clippings that have been in the papers since Joey was shot."
"It’s Brownsville" is an expression used by local Anglos and Mexican-Americans alike. It is meant to explain the lassitude of the city, the mañana attitude. "It’s Brownsville" is the reason given that, some years ago, Pan Am, after using the city as its South American headquarters for twenty-five years, finally moved away; Southwest Airlines lands in nearby Harlingen, which remodelled its airport and will be able to service the boom that the region has been anticipating if the North American Free Trade Agreement takes effect.
For a long time, there has been a feeling that Brownsville will become a boomtown at any moment, but in the last few years the city’s economy has been depressed. "I think it’s getting better," a friend of Buddy’s remarked to me. "It used to be when we would go through town there were no cars at the light. Now there are at least six." Since 1985, nearly a hundred major factories have opened in the industrial parks of Matamoros and the nearby Valle Hermoso. Matamoros is now a large industrial city with a population of almost a million. Brownsville’s development has been slower, although the city now has about a hundred thousand residents. "If General Motors has twelve thousand people at its plants in Matamoros, they might have eighteen working in Brownsville," a local businessman told me. It is often difficult
for outsiders in Brownsville to understand that the city’s power structure, which has slowly favored the ascent of Mexican-Americans, who now dominate political office, is representative of the city’s melded culture. These local politicians, like those anywhere in the United States, concern themselves with such matters as passing bond issues for a new convention center.
The closer you are to downtown Brownsville, the closer you are to Mexico. Just two or three blocks in any direction from Market Square and the cathedral, it is difficult to tell that you aren’t in Mexico. In downtown Brownsville, most of the signs are in Spanish. Soap operas blare out from dusty shops of ropa segunda; dozens of these secondhand-clothes stores line Adams Street, one of the town’s main thoroughfares. Fat blossoms of bougainvillea trail off Cyclone fences around many of the small frame houses a few blocks from the Rio Grande.
Many women who come to Brownsville with their husbands join a group called Border Maquiladora Wives. It is intended to help Anglo newcomers become acclimated, but it occasionally becomes a forum for anxious discussion about the area’s drug smuggling and violent deaths, which are often reported in the Brownsville Herald. On some level, these newcomers may actually be baffled by what they view as the heavy folk-Catholic underboil to the culture-a sense that some ideas from el otro lado ("the other side") remain completely unassimilated.
On my flight to Harlingen, I overheard a well-dressed Anglo woman talking to the woman next to her: "You go to a restaurant and all they speak is Spanish. You go to the beauty shop and all they speak is Spanish. I don’t know if they are laughing at me. I don’t know what they are saying." Like our grandmothers at the turn of the century, some of the maquiladora wives are put off by the local customs. They worry about the coyotes, sinister-looking men who sometimes circle the good neighborhoods to collect their weekly payment from illegals they have smuggled across, who now work as maids in the air-conditioned houses of the Anglos. And there are wives who find nothing charming about the local H.E.B. grocery chain, which has cafés that sell gorditas, fried-cornmeal pockets filled with beans and cheese or whatever you want. There are times when you cannot see an Anglo face in a grocery store. At the meetings of the wives’ group, the women sometimes talk as if they were expatriates, trying to cope in a colonial outpost.
In Brownsville, the story of Joey Fischer’s murder was given a banner headline on the front page of the Herald: "ST. JOE PUPIL SHOT TO DEATH IN DRIVEWAY." A photograph of his body covered in a bloodstained coroner’s cloth took most of the width of the front page. Buddy is prominent in town-he used to be the president of a local Rotary Club and was also active in a community group called Leadership Brownsville-and Joey’s grandfather on his mother’s side, Louis Lapeyre, had once been mayor of Brownsville, so it was not hard to understand why Joey’s death was big news in the Rio Grande Valley. Already, his short life was reduced to sound-bites. He was "the honor student," "eleventh in his class."
On the night before his funeral, more than six hundred people came to a Rosary service for him at St. Mary’s Church. His parents had decided that there should be an open casket with a kneeler, so that whoever wanted to could pray by the coffin, in the traditional Catholic manner. Corinne’s family, who were originally "Louisiana French," as one friend put it, were devout Catholics. Although Buddy’s father is Jewish, when Buddy married Corinne he converted to Catholicism and became active in his church. The funeral, also at St. Mary’s Church, was jammed with friends. Besides all of Corinne’s and Buddy’s acquaintances, many people from St. Joseph Academy appeared. Joey’s girlfriend Marianela Caballero and her mother attended both the Rosary and the funeral, and sat in a pew, sobbing. Joey’s family came up to Marianela to reassure her, saying, "Don’t worry, he looks just like himself." Nearby sat a former girlfriend, Cristina Cisneros, also weeping. Although many parents of St. Joe students came, Cristina’s mother was nowhere to be seen. Victor Ayala, who had been a friend of Joey’s since kindergarten, had volunteered to give a eulogy. Victor suddenly found himself having to reconstruct the history of a childhood friendship, and he was so worried about writing the speech that he felt unable to bring his close friend into focus.
For days after the funeral, Buddy and Connie’s house filled with friends. It was a long weekend, one of them told me, during which the parents of the teen-agers who had known one another since they were toddlers felt so intimately connected with Joey’s death that they could think of little besides their inability to protect their own children. Joey’s murder came to represent their own fears and sense of powerlessness. Buddy’s neighbor Mike Gonzalez, a partner in a local advertising agency, had seen Joey almost every weekend at his father’s house. His own son went to Pace, a public high school in Brownsville. After Joey was killed, Gonzalez became very strict with his son. "If it could happen to Joey Fischer, it could happen to any of our children," Gonzalez said. Another friend recalled, "We left Buddy’s house sobbing, imagining our own children lying in our driveways."
"How are you sleeping?" I asked Buddy on our first afternoon together.
"Not well," he said. "I have terrible dreams. Often I stay up all night long just so I won’t have nightmares." Buddy and I were sitting in the living room of his house-a modern house, with comfortable beige sofas and a large kitchen filled with cooking equipment and a sheaf of recipes clipped from Southern Living. He was smoking cigarette after cigarette and got up many times to show me yet another picture of Joey. "It’s like I am living somebody else’s life," he said. "I had a wonderful son for eighteen years."
Later that night, Buddy and I drove by Joey’s house. Buddy was driving fast; he wanted to show me the route he had travelled when he learned that Joey had been killed. We drove north on Highway 77/83; Buddy’s face was hard in the darkness. He took the exit for Rancho Viejo and then parked in front of the small house on Cortez Avenue. A "For Sale" sign stood in front of the house. Suddenly, Buddy said, "Another father might say, ‘If Joey came back, I would make this right with him.’ Or ‘I would make that right with him.’ But I don’t feel that way." He waited a moment. "I wouldn’t change anything about Joey," he went on. "Not one thing. I want my son back just the way he was." For the only time in the days we were together, I saw Buddy’s eyes fill with tears.
At eighteen, Joey’s personalitywas still in formation, but he loved basketball and computers, and often talked about his desire to become an engineer. At school, his class voted him, along with two others, "most sarcastic," and they posed for their picture carrying a sign that read "What Us Sarcastic?" He had a fine sense of the absurdity of high school. Once, a teacher took two balloons away from Joey and put them in a closet. A few days later, Joey asked for his balloons back. The teacher opened the closet and a bunch of balloons floated out. Joey waited a full beat. "That’s what happens when you leave two balloons alone," he said.
For an adolescent, Joey sometimes showed a surprising concern for his parents. In the spring of 1992, when his stepmother, Connie, was six months pregnant, she received a note from him. "So the baby is due in late September. I wonder if he’ll look like Mikey from ‘Look Who’s Talking’ or like Wally from ‘The Beaver.’ Either way, he should look pretty funny. But don’t you worry, I’ll take good care of him." Joey was twelve when his parents divorced, and he had had a hard time, but he and his father maintained their close relationship. There was never a Lakers game that Joey did not try to watch with Buddy.
Joey and his friends often complained that there was almost nothing to do in Brownsville. The parents of the girls they dated did not want them to drive to the beaches of South Padre Island except on special occasions. Across the Rio Grande was Matamoros, long the equivalent of a theme park for Texas teen-agers, with its easy liquor and, before the age of aids, quick and memorable sex in the red-light section. Soon after Joey and many of his friends got their driver’s licenses, at age sixteen, they visited the bars in "Mata" from time to time-places like Blanca White’s and Hobie. By the end of their junior year, the raffish atmosphere of Matamoros had become less appealing to them. Joey and his friends knew that their parents worried about occasional shootings in the bars and about people being kidnapped off the streets. Matamoros had had a lot of bad publicity in 1989, when Mark Kilroy, a University of Texas student, on the border for spring break, disappeared from a bar in Matamoros. His body and at least a dozen others were found buried on a desolate ranch nearby, apparently the victims of a cult involved in the drug trade whose members believed that sacrifice would make them invincible. The appearance of a satanic cult a few miles from their quiet neighborhoods had terrified many of the
St. Joe parents whose children were old enough to get their driver’s licenses.
People in Brownsville sometimes say that the parents who send their children to St. Joseph Academy want them to be "part of the St. Joe mafia" and "meet the right kind of people." St. Joe is one of the few private schools in Brownsville; the tuition is three thousand dollars a year, and ninety-eight per cent of the students go on to college. The school occupies a red brick building in Rio Viejo, one of the most elegant of the Brownsville neighborhoods. The building, which has open-air corridors and
patios, to take advantage of the mild Brownsville winters, stands near a resaca, one of many charming old cutoff river channels to be found all over Brownsville, and is surrounded with flowering cenizo shrubs, which are indigenous. Most of the children at St. Joe are wealthy: the sons and daughters of the rich families of the Rio Grande Valley; the children of Taiwanese entrepreneurs who came to the border to run the maquiladoras; and even the children of several rumored drug and arms dealers in the area. In the morning, the St. Joe parking lot fills with expensive cars, some of them, it has been thought, surely belonging to drug dealers’ children. The counselling problems at the school are idiosyncratic in the extreme; guidance counsellors had to use special expressions like being "in the paper a lot" when one of the fathers-allegedly a member of a Matamoros-based drug ring linked to a Colombian drug cartel-was indicted last year. On the surface, all the different Hispanics, Taiwanese, and Anglos at St. Joe seem to get along with one another, but, as in every high school, there are cliques. Some of the more assimilated Mexican-American students have little to do with the Mexican-Americans from el otro lado.
In the view of one person who knows the school and its students well, the lack of much to do in Brownsville for the middle-class teen-agers leads to a great deal of early sex. "It is surprising that, with the Catholic doctrine and the Mexican-American doctrine, there is so much sex going on, but the parents and the school refuse to talk about the problems," this person told me. "They say, ‘That doesn’t happen here, and neither does anorexia, or drug or alcohol abuse.’ " Some of the Anglo boys at St. Joe who get involved with the girls from the old-fashioned families have no idea of the expectations and pressures that are put on the Mexican-American daughters.
In Brownsville, Mexican-American girls are often pushed to marry as soon as possible after high school.
Joey was often attracted to the more Latina girls of the school. During his junior year, he asked out Cristina Cisneros, a sophomore. The other boys were surprised. "I didn’t really know that much about her," a close friend of Joey’s told me. Cristina, the youngest of five children, had long curly dark hair and a pretty face with small features. Although she once tried out for cheerleader, for the most part she seemed to keep to herself. "In the cafeteria at lunch," one of her friends told me, "when all of us would be laughing, Cristina would be very quiet." Another friend saw her differently: "Cristina could be quiet when you didn’t know her, but when you know her she’s bouncy, happy, and friendly."
Joey may have appeared to Cristina’s mother, Dora Cisneros, to be a catch: he was an ambitious student from a good family, and he wasn’t wild, like many of the St. Joe boys. Cristina and Joey often played tennis together or swam in his pool. His stepmother, Connie, thought they were "just friends." Some weekends when Cristina was at Joey’s house, she would sit by herself playing video games while Joey did his homework in the dining room. "It was strange," Connie told me. "I never saw anything remotely intimate between them. They didn’t even hold hands."
One day, Joey told one of his closest friends that he and Cristina had gone alone to South Padre Island, to a condo her parents had there. It is impossible to know exactly what went on there between Cristina and Joey, but Joey later told his friends that they had slept together. He didn’t brag about it, his friends told me, and one friend said that he even seemed to regret it. His friends think that Joey and Cristina slept together only once or twice, but they have no doubt that Joey was telling them the truth. Cristina later denied that anything had happened between them, according to a friend of hers. In any case, later that spring Joey took Cristina to the junior prom; a photograph of Joey in his tuxedo was taken.
That June, Joey broke up with Cristina. One of his closest friends told me that he thought Joey had decided that it had been just a physical attraction, and that there weren’t many emotional ties between them. He wanted to get out honorably, without "hurting her feelings," he told his father. He had given Cristina his ring, and when he broke up with her he asked for it back, but she refused. During the first few weeks of the summer, Buddy told me, Dora Cisneros began to call Joey. She was very polite on the telephone. "Why have you broken up with Cristina?" she would ask. Joey, uncomfortable at hearing from Cristina’s mother, was apparently almost excessively polite, using his Catholic-school manners. "Well, Ma’am, I think she is very nice," he would say, "but I just want to see other girls." According to Buddy, Mrs. Cisneros called him and asked him why Joey had broken up with her daughter. At first, Buddy remembers, he thought Mrs. Cisneros was just being "a concerned parent," but when he realized that she was truly concerned about a high-school romance that had fizzled he could not understand how a mother could risk humiliating her daughter by calling her boyfriend’s parents.
Joey was angry that Cristina had not returned his ring, and he decided he would write her a polite but firm letter asking for it back. To his teen-age mind, the letter had a menacing legal tone. Buddy, who had seen the letter, recalled that it said, in effect, "You have ten days to return my ring or I am taking action."
After Joey sent the letter, according to Buddy, Dora Cisneros called Buddy at home and said, "I want to meet you and talk to you about Joey’s ring and other things." Buddy agreed to meet her at a Burger King. When he got to the table, he saw Cristina sitting there with her mother. An outsider might have thought they had come to negotiate a marriage, an old-fashioned Mexican custom. Dora Cisneros again asked, "Why did Joey break up with Cristina?" Buddy answered, "This is really between Joey and Cristina. It has nothing to do with us." Buddy expressed the opinion that Joey was old enough to conduct his own personal affairs, and that, as the father, he had to stay out of it. Inexplicably to Buddy, as Mrs. Cisneros talked about her daughter’s private life Cristina did not protest but remained silent for most of the meeting.
Then Dora Cisneros said to Buddy, "Are you aware that your son drinks?"
Buddy wasn’t particularly upset. He remembered his own teen-age years in South Texas. "What eighteen-year-old doesn’t?" he answered.
"I’ve seen him drunk once," Cristina said.
"Well," Buddy said, "if Joey has been drunk, he has never been drunk in front of me."
The meeting, however bizarre, was perfectly friendly, Buddy recalls. The subject of sex never came up. Buddy told Mrs. Cisneros that he would talk to Joey about being "a gentleman." Mrs. Cisneros told Buddy that Joey would get his ring back. "I just want him to sweat a little bit," she said. When Buddy got home, he told Joey, "If you are breaking up with Cristina, please be a gentleman about it. If you have done anything to offend her, please write her a note or call her to apologize. Tell her you want to be just friends." No one knows whether Joey took his father’s advice. But, according to Joey’s friends, Mrs. Cisneros continued to call him. Joey told a friend that she had offered him five hundred dollars a month to take Cristina out. Eventually, the situation reached a point where he later confided to another friend, "I have never told an adult off before, but, yeah, I told her off."
At the beginning of his senior year, Joey met Marianela Caballero, a new girl in school. Marianela had long, dark hair and an infectious laugh. Her mother, who was originally from San Luis Potosí, spoke Spanish with her daughter, and Marianela had a Mexican lilt to her voice. Joey invited Marianela to homecoming, but the relationship did not take off. "I didn’t want a commitment then," Marianela told me. But during February their flirtation intensified. The Saturday before Joey was killed, he attended a friend’s quinceañera, the traditional coming-out party given for a Mexican-American girl’s fifteenth birthday, and became confused that Marianela paid more attention to another boy than to him. Marianela might have been unsure that Joey really cared for her. Like many of the more traditional Mexican-American girls, she did not want the sort of casual romance favored by the Anglo boys. Her mother had talked to her at great length about "reputation." On the Monday after the quinceañera, Joey wrote her a long letter explaining his intentions: "I know how I feel, and it’s all up to you. You need to let me know. You wanted sincere, this is how I feel. I like you alot, but it’s all up to you. . . . Please let me know how you feel. I sincerely care for you." On Tuesday-the night before he was murdered-Joey and Marianela were on the telephone for more than three hours. His friends Patrick Aziz and Erika Borrego were over at his house, as they often were, ostensibly to study calculus but really just to hang out. Before Patrick and Erika left, the three friends started kidding around with Joey’s electric razor. They held Joey down and tried to shave his legs. At one point during the evening, Joey said that he had heard that another boy was now taking Cristina Cisneros out. "Good luck," Joey said. On another occasion, he told that boy’s cousin, "Tell him not to worry. If he wants to take Cristina out, that’s fine." He also startled Patrick and Erika. "Did you know that Mrs. Cisneros offered me money to take Cristina out?" he asked. "God. Really, God, what a nut!" Patrick recalled telling him.
Joey was serious. He told them she’d offered him five hundred dollars a month. All three were casual about this information; their minds were on other things.