Dreamer of Dune by Brian Herbert Page B

before lifting it mouthward with a fork.
    Cockroaches were a great concern to us as well, and especially to my mother. Each morning we developed the habit of shaking out our clothes and shoes before putting them on. Many roaches entered through the drain in the bathtub, and if Mom or Norma saw them when they wanted to take a bath, they came out and waggled two fingers (like cockroach antennae) at one of the men. Then Dad or Jack went in and flushed the filthy creatures down the drain with hot water. Sometimes there were as many as twenty roaches at a time.
    Dad wrote of this and other adventures with Mexican insects in a humorous thousand-word piece, “Life with Animalitos.” (In Mexico, insects of all kinds are called “animalitos”—“little animals.”) It was a first-person story, written with Reader’s Digest in mind, since they paid well for such material. Unfortunately this yarn, like a number of others from the pen of Frank Herbert, did not find a receptive editor.
    I was tutored by my mother, using schoolbooks brought from the United States. She taught me Spanish as well, and what she didn’t teach me I learned from children in the streets.
    By Mexican standards, the cost of living was high in Chapala, and money was running low. Short story sales weren’t coming through for my father, and Jack wasn’t doing much better. Jack also lost one of his steadiest sources of income, the Captain Video TV show. It was decided that we could get by on less in a non-tourist environment.
    After two months in Chapala, we moved to another town in the state of Jalisco a few miles south, Ciudad Guzman. With a population of twenty-four thousand, it was considerably larger than Chapala. In Ciudad Guzman we rented a smaller, two-story adobe and white stucco house. It was in the midst of town, on a level street where the houses were lined up side-by-side, with small yards. Dad, recalling his farm upbringing, wanted to raise his own food and become as self-sufficient as he could. So he purchased a number of baby chickens, which he kept in an adobe-walled outdoor compound on the street side of the house.
    Some of the rooms in the house had earthen floors. I remember the loamy odors of earth there, and market smells, and donkeys in the streets swatting flies from their flanks with their tails. The outdoor markets bustled with activity.
    By now I was proficient in Spanish, so my parents decided to place me in Mexican public school, in the first grade. I wore a thin white peasant outfit like local children and carried my school supplies in a small canvas bag. I traveled to and from school on a unique schoolbus, an old station wagon with some of its windows broken out, including the back one. This allowed motor exhaust into the passenger compartment. I sat in the rear, probably the worst seat from the standpoint of air quality, scrunched up next to other kids.
    We had been in Ciudad Guzman for only a few days when the retired Mexican Army general who ran the town asked to see Frank Herbert, in order to evaluate his application for an extended stay in Mexico. One of the local merchants took Dad in a truck to the general’s beautiful three-story house, where flowers hung from wrought iron balconies. The general was very friendly. Several people were in attendance, and sweet cookies were served, which Dad liked. He ate two, realizing later that the others only took one apiece.
    When Dad returned to the merchant’s truck, he began to feel drunk. He told the merchant to go get their wives; they were going out to have a party. The merchant wanted no part of this, for he knew they would get into trouble. He told Dad that the cookies had been laced with the most expensive North African hashish in the world, flown in by the Mexican Air Force for the general.
    Dad recalled being taken into a beautiful building and guided up a long flight of stairs to a room with a table. There the merchant and a beautiful