Carlos Navarro

Slayer of House of Navarro, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

Carlos Navarro was born in 1944 at Victoria, Texas, and lived seventy-five years as a high school coach and, from 1970, as a vampire slayer of the House of Navarro. The family book knows him as The Flint Mantle, a name for the grey, hard-wearing coat that a vaquero wears in a norther, and it classes him as a Vigilante, a hunter who acts on his own account, outside any chain of command, on behalf of the neighbourhood that has no one else. His craft was Vaquero Lasso, the use of the rope, the loop and the ranch hand's timing to take a creature off its feet, and his gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. He was called in 1970, in a boarding house, when a lodger paid in coins older than the building. He belonged to the Tejano ranching families who guarded the San Antonio missions. He raised one daughter, Melissa Navarro, born in 1969, a slayer in her turn, who in 1994 married Travis Proctor and so joined the Navarro and Proctor lines again. He died in 2019 of heart failure, aged seventy-five. The family remembers him as the coach of the Westside who threw a loop better than anyone alive and never once raised his hand to a child. Victoria in 1944 was a cattle and cotton town on the Guadalupe, a few miles from the Gulf, with a brick courthouse on a shaded square, a depot, a dozen cotton compresses and, on the edges, the long low ranches where the Tejano families had worked cattle for two hundred years. His father was a vaquero on one of those places, on the river a dozen miles out, a lean, silent, bow-legged man who had come up from the old ranch country with a coiled reata round his saddle horn, and the boy was born in the foreman's cottage, in a September heat, with a ranch dog at the door and the smell of cattle dip in the yard. His mother, who was a Navarro by birth and a San Antonio woman, had insisted on going to the ranch because it was the family's custom, and because, she said, a Navarro child who was to inherit a rope should be born within sound of cattle. He was a thin, wiry baby with large hands, and was in the saddle in front of his father, according to the family, before he was two. They came to San Antonio in 1950, when the ranch was sold, and took a house on the Westside, three streets from the mission of San José, where the Navarro cousins had for generations looked after the old stone church, the granary and the acequias of the five missions. The boy grew up between the two worlds, the barrio and the ranch, and spent his summers on the cousins' places in Goliad and Bandera. His father taught him to rope. It was the thing that he did best and the only thing he said much about. A loop, he told the boy, is a question that you put to an animal, and the animal answers with its feet, and you must be ready for either reply. He practised in the yard on a wooden calf with a painted face, for four hours a day, until he could drop a loop over a fence post at forty feet with his eyes shut, and the neighbours, who had seen it all, said that the Navarro boy would end by roping the moon. He was taught history by a priest and football by a coach, and he took to both. He was a lineman at his high school, a good, unfashionable player who held a line like a gate, and he went to a small Catholic college on a scholarship, studied history and physical education and came out in 1967 with a degree and a job at a Westside high school as assistant coach, where he taught the boys, in the end, a good deal more than football. San Antonio in 1968 was a city about to remake its centre. It had put the river, the old Spanish quarter and a hundred acres of cleared neighbourhoods into the great fair called HemisFair, with a tower, a convention hall and a thousand visitors an hour, and Carlos, who was twenty-three, worked the fair that summer as a security hand and a guide. He was entranced by the way the city, in a year, could knock down a barrio and put up a pavilion. He kept a photograph of it, with his mother's house, three streets away, in the foreground. He was called in 1970, in the winter, in a boarding house on the south side. He had taken a room for the week to see to a cousin who was in the hospital. The house was a big, decayed, creaking wooden pile on a corner near the railroad, kept by a Mrs Gonzales with a parrot, and in the next room, for three nights, there was a quiet lodger, a thin man in a good coat who went out late and came back before dawn. On the Friday he came to the landlady's table to settle his account. He paid in coins. They were silver, and black with handling, and some of them, as Carlos saw, as the landlady counted them out, bore a date earlier than the house, and one, a Spanish real, bore a head that had been dead for two centuries. The man looked at Carlos. It was a look that had no breath in it. Carlos, who had a rope in his bag, a pistol in his coat and a cousin in the hospital, put his hand on the table and said that he would be glad if the gentleman would stay for coffee. The gentleman did not. But Carlos followed him, across the yards and down the line of the old Southern Pacific, through the cold and the dark, and came up on him at last in a cattle pen by the stockyards, beside the loading chute, where there was a gate, a rail and a long, smooth, well-worn rope on the post. It is not recorded what he said. It is recorded that a loop of thirty feet went out in the dark, on a wet night, and took a creature by the shoulders, and that the creature, which had never been roped, did not know what to do. Carlos held it, in the open, in the cold, for four hours, in the Vaquero manner, with a turn on the post, until the sun came up behind the depot. He went home and told his father, who did not seem surprised. He said that it ran in the family, and that the old people had done it with horses. He was trained by cousins of the House, and in the winter of 1972 he was shown the mission ditches. The compositor Juan Navarro, The Hollow Ford, had drawn the gates and locks of the five missions' system from memory in his last illness and finished the final sheet a week before he died, and the keeper of the copy at the church by the river opened it for the young coach one evening, by candlelight, and left him alone with it. Carlos learned the gates, the sluices and the places where a creature stops. He grafted the loop on to the ditches. A creature that followed the water of the missions could be steered to a gate, closed in and roped from the bank, and the Vaquero Lasso became, in his hands, a way of working a city. He was a Vigilante, because he had no ledger of his own and wanted none. He worked the Westside and the Southside at night, in a grey canvas coat, on a bicycle, for no pay and no cause but that his neighbours had no other defender, and the barrio, which saw a good deal and said nothing, left a plate on his mother's porch on Sundays, without a word. Melissa Navarro was born in 1969, a year before he was called, a quick, brown-eyed, serious child who learned to throw a loop before she learned to ride a bicycle. The Ledger does not name her mother, and the family, which keeps its own counsel, has never said anything of it. Carlos raised his daughter, with his mother's help, in the Westside house, and she was a slayer by the time she was twenty. In the oil bust of the eighties, when the Texas towns went broke and the bases cut their hours, he coached in the daytime and worked evenings, and in the nineties he led the school's football team to the state quarter-finals, a feat of which he said very little. In 1994 he walked Melissa down the aisle at the mission church to marry Travis Proctor, of the White Ledger, and he gave her the rope. It was his father's reata, forty feet of braided rawhide, black with oil and thirty years old. He retired in 2008, at sixty-four, and spent the last decade of his life in the Westside house, teaching boys to rope in the yard, going to Mass and meeting the old men on the corner. On the eleventh of September 2001, he had stood in his classroom with the television on, and said to the boys, who were fifteen, that they were going to remember it, and that they should write down where they were. In the winter of 2019, in the early morning, he sat down on the porch step in his old grey coat, with a cup of coffee, and his heart, which had been failing for some time and which he had told nobody about, stopped. He was seventy-five. Melissa, who found him, said that he was holding the coffee quite level. Carlos Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as The Flint Mantle, the Westside coach who threw a loop in the dark and held a creature until the sun came up. In the Slayerverse he stands for the Vigilantes of the Navarro house, the hunters who answered to no one but the neighbours they defended, and who proved that a rope, a coat and the habit of staying up all night can guard a barrio as well as any army.