Junior Bonner Is Gone...

"Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can't shoot them anymore.
That long black cloud is comin' down
I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door..."
- Dylan, Knockin' On Heaven's Door

By RON MEXICO
The Paz Files

COMBES, Texas - Writer Junior Bonner was laid to rest here early Friday morning in a ceremony attended by family and friends, all of whom said humanity and the world had lost a giant. Bonner died last weekend after suffering a heart attack. His body, carried by four Paz Files reporters dressed in World War II uniforms, was walked to a lonely grave in a field behind his doublewide mobile home in this dusty, one-horse town. As a large, bright sunball rose to greet the day, a single bugler played Taps on a nearby hillside.

"He was only 44 years old," Cylantra De la Torre told those gathered at the gravesite. "But Junior lived for centuries. His life will not be defined by his drinking or womanizing, but by his big heart. That is why he left the mobile home and its contents to me."

In the somber crowd was the husband of a woman who claimed to have had an affair with Bonner in the weeks before his death. Leopardo Elizondo, dressed in black, said he arrived to offer a send-off to a man he never met, but had heard much about.

"It's too late for me to be freakin' mad at him, for what he did with my wife," Elizondo told story-hungry reporters. "I think that we could have been friends, in fact." Elizondo confirmed reports that he and his wife, Ruby Archuleta, had called their marriage quits, adding that, indeed, Ruby had moved to Chicago.

At daybreak, soulful funeral music burst from inside Bonner's mobile home, where a woman had been assigned to handle the recordings on Junior's aging turntable. As the dirges played, those in attandance began to leave the home in a single file, women and children leading the way. Reporters kept a short distance away behind barbed wiring all lowered their heads as the procession ambled by, some sobbing heard from a Brownsville blogger who had angered Junior by posting photos of a fake, Gay-like Bonner. Stern-faced Combes police, joined by a few of their Harlingen brethren, enveloped the mourners as they headed toward the humble grave.

There, Father Gamaliel Galindo, read verses from Revelations someone said Junior Bonner often quoted before Cylantra, his longtime girlfriend, gave the signal for the wooden coffin's lowering. It was then that a three-member Mariachi stormed into a traditional Mexican burial tune, spooking a flock of birds from their nests in nearby mesquites.

"He's gone," someone said when the gravedigger filled the final resting hole...

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