in his antics around the tree well he was weighed down by the considerable bulk of an oversized striped cotton vest , probably his fathers , one of those serape vests without buttons which were popular in the southwest as costumes for children who wanted to be pancho villa for halloween and which his mother , like many others before her , had ruined by dunking in hot water ; none of the dyes on those vests were color fast , in hot water the blue and black stripes blended onto the white and over each other , and though my adult mind now knows that it ran in the wash , it occurred to me then that the fingers of the wind , which clutched at all parts of us that day , had now managed to smear clothing dye .