Growing Up Dead in Texas

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Whenever she talks about him, though, she’s talking about his younger brother, the one who died. It was Halloween, and my mom and Pete and the rest of whoever was there (I never asked) were in the back of a pick-up, out in some field. Pete’s little brother had tagged along, but promised not to say anything about the beer.

  I’m guessing on that part, but that’s just because my mom cleans all her stories up.

  Anyway, they were out there just tooling around, and Pete’s little brother kind of fell out the back, like happens all the time. He held on to the bed rail for a bit but then lost it, probably kicked free enough to not get clipped by the bumper.

  Everybody yelled and laughed for the truck to stop, and Pete’s little brother was okay, of course—it had only been two or three feet down, after all, and they weren’t pulling a trailer— so somebody raised their hand to guide the driver back, pick the kid up.

  Except Pete’s little brother didn’t get up when he should have. Maybe he’d had the wind knocked out of him? Maybe he was embarrassed?

  I have to imagine he was looking the other way, anyway.

  Slowly, with Pete watching, with all of them watching, none of them able to get the driver’s attention, the truck’s rear wheel backed over Pete’s little brother’s head.

  That’s where the story always ends, too. With Pete looking down at his little brother. Taking that image with him.

  I never asked for more, for the accusations that must have been everywhere, the weeks and months of screaming. All the people at church all the time.

  The only way I even know, or think I know, it was Halloween, it’s that my mom, once when she was driving me to the doctor and telling it, about to cry again, she said how Pete’s little brother’s head, it had been like a pumpkin.

  He wasn’t the only dead kid I grew up with, though.

  There was also somebody else’s brother, brained when the rim popped up from a tire he was working on. There was another kid, diving down into the stock tank of a windmill, the lip of an old barrel waiting for him just under the surface. My best friend’s brother shot in the face, on accident, with a shotgun, or another friend racing a train, almost making it. And more and more and more, so that by the time you make it to fifteen, you feel charmed, bulletproof. Able to live up to all of the stories your uncles probably shouldn’t have told you. Able to, one night, driving home the long way from a dance in Odessa, the fog thick, turn your headlights off and bury the pedal, trust that Telephone Pole Road’s just going to keep being there, mile after mile. Or that if it’s not, then you probably deserve that too.

  But, Pete.

  When I go see him now, he’s back in the game, farming. Everybody who washes out, they come back again. And he’s not a small man, either. Six feet up and four around, the way he says it, his right eye glinting. Still smoking every chance he gets. Big enough that he’s taken to wearing bib overalls, now. Carhartt brown but faded to the color of blown sand, the brim of his hat curled in on itself the way we used to all try to do in elementary.

  Flying Southwest, he has to purchase two seats.

  But it doesn’t matter: the seats are comp, courtesy of The Mirage. Las Vegas.

  What Pete Manson learned from the first time he washed out was that it was all a game, all a gamble. Flying to Nevada every other weekend to work the tables for two-and three-day stretches, it’s the same thing, more or less. He’s making it work, anyway, though he won’t tell me what his game is, or his strategy. Maybe he still remembers me lining up his cotton trailers for the bank, I don’t know.

  I catch him on a Friday, on his way to the Midland International Airport, and have to ride all the way there with him if I want to talk, leave my truck at his place.

  “Mind?” he says, flashing a cigarette between us, then rolls my window down before I can answer.

  On his dashboard are the rags and wrenches and pamphlets and papers you have to leave on your dash if you want to keep it from cracking open in the sun. I hold one of the crackly pages of something down for him; usually it’s just his window blowing.

  “So you want to know about Tommy Moore?” he says, cranking the wheel west.

  I shrug sure, like it’s his idea. Like Tommy Moore’s not exactly what I had my uncle prime him with on the phone.

  Pete hisses a laugh out, blows smoke into the cab.

  He never had any kids. One wife, but she left with the first farm—with one of the other farmers there to buy equipment for pennies on the dollar. Pete can wear bib overalls every day of the week if he wants to now, I mean. The same pair, even.

  He laughs again, thinking about it all, I guess, and my eyes are wet from the smoke but I don’t want him to know that.

  And, Tommy Moore.

  I’ve only ever seen him once, when I was sixteen. At a bar in Midland, the second Rumors. I’d got in all the usual ways. But Tommy Moore. One of the kids from my grade, Shane, he’d always had a half-moon dented in under his eye. It was from playing in the burn barrels, poking the fire with a stick until an aerosol can exploded up into his face. Another friend, Scott, had melted-looking skin all on his temple, from being dragged around by a dog when he was still in diapers.

  Tommy Moore was worse than both of them put together.

  He’d seen me looking too, had held my eyes over his beer for a few seconds too long.

  I lowered my hat, hid in the bathroom for the next few songs, sure he was coming in after me. That I was going to apologize if he did.

  He must have been about twenty, then. Twenty-one, maybe. His face the same as it had been since his senior year. Like it always would be.

  Now, riding in the truck with Pete Manson, who was there that morning in 1985, I have no idea where Tommy Moore might be.

  That’s a real name, too. It feels wrong to make everything okay by changing it.

  The rest of this isn’t exactly what Pete Manson says to me, though.

  Close enough, I hope.

  “Robert had been up then for about three days, I guess, shit. You know how it is, right, boss?”

  His hand, clapping onto my knee.

  And, boss. Because I’ve been to school. Because I don’t have to drive a tractor.

  “Tommy was in school then,” I say.

  “Should have been, yeah,” Pete says. “But not that morning.”

  By now we’re past 1120, past 1140, all the way to the sewage treatment plant—the “stinky bridge,” growing up—almost to Midland, where Cloverdale becomes Florida if you don’t hook it north up Fairgrounds.

  I hold my breath against the smell, am probably remembering it more than really tasting it on the air, and Pete smiles, shrugs his huge shoulders, says, “Why you even want to know?”

  “You were there.”

  He eyeballs me, shifts to the rearview mirror. Comes back to the road in front of us.

  “Tommy wasn’t bad, really,” he tells me. “You know how it is being seventeen, stupid as a jackrabbit and twice as horny.”

  “He didn’t deserve it, you mean.”

  Pete blows smoke, smiles behind it.

  “Still don’t know why you’re asking, amigo.”

  “I just want to know.”

  “Said the spider to the…what is it?”

  “What?”

  “No, it’s ‘said the snake to the—the—’ Nothing. Screw it.”

  I suddenly want to ask him about his little brother. Just what his name was, even. If he remembers my mom like she used to be. What she did after that day. What all of them did.

  His answer, probably: “Still doing it, kid.”

  I never should have got in the truck with him.

  “You were there,” I tell him.

  He looks across at me, no smile now. Finally nods, tongues his lip out.

  “Okay then. What the hell. Sheryl Ledbetter?”

  Blank stare from me.

  “Ms. Godfrey?” he adds, his voice higher, mocking.

  Ms. Godfrey. Sheryl Godfrey. Senior English, more th
an twenty years ago.

  Pete nods, accelerates through the yellow light at Illinois, glaring into his mirror for blue and red lights.

  “Bet you didn’t know that part, did you?” he says, firing up another cigarette. “Nobody does, hoss.”

  He holds the pack out to me but I just say it back to him: “Ms. Godfrey?”

  Pete studies his cigarette like the story’s all right there. Like he’s reading it from that thin white paper.

  “Her and Tommy.” He shrugs. “She’d come to see him on the way to school, then he kind of, you know, convinced her to stay, yeah?”

  Ms. Godfrey. Seventeen years old, walking through a half-stripped field to bring breakfast to Tommy Moore.

  Or something.

  This would have been a thrill, twenty years ago.

  Now, now it’s like something being stolen from me.

  I lick my lips, nod that I get it, yeah.

  “And you don’t want any of that kind of action in the cab of 4440 now, do you?” He laughs. “If you have a choice, I mean.”

  “The modules,” I hear myself saying.

  It’s the part I never heard. The part only the people who were there know, I guess. And never told.

  Pete eases onto 20 proper, and for a few hundred yards we pace a plane coming in to land.

  He shrugs, says, “Then you know it all, then. They were up there fooling around. It could have just as easy been me, I mean. Any of us.”

  He’s right, too.

  In West Texas, there’s no trees, no contour to the land.

  If you want to hide, if you want a little privacy, all you can do, really, is climb up onto something. And, if you’re helping a girl up behind you, then the stretched-tight tarp of a packed module’s a lot better mattress than a pumpjack or water tank.

  Which is where Rob King found them.

  Unlike every other farmer in the county, in the history of farming maybe, none of Rob King’s trucks ever had glasspacks. You don’t put loud pipes on your truck because you think you’re still in high school, either, but because, after driving a tractor all day, getting in a truck so quiet you can’t hear it run, it’s creepy, makes you feel like a ghost, and you can pop your timing chain, turning the key over when the truck’s already started.

  Maybe because he always insisted on sticks, though, had an aftermarket RPM bolted onto the dash—I honestly don’t know, never thought to ask—Rob King had a truck that could sneak up on somebody like that.

  He wasn’t even looking for them, was just following his nose. That’s the thing that probably still tears Tommy Moore up, if he thinks about it. But he’s got to.

  The module they were bedded down on top of, it was on fire. Slow fire, deep inside. Which Tommy Moore would have known ten minutes earlier if he’d have been thinking halfstraight.

  He had a Ledbetter girl up there, though, was a long way from any kind of rational thought.

  Even when she was leading us through Hal Borland or “The Stone Boy” or prepositions, I mean, Ms. Godfrey, you could definitely have ideas you didn’t plan on.

  And what I’d guess is that Rob King, at first he figured that Tommy Moore’d already split for school, had left the stripper idling like that because he’d seen Rob’s truck coming, figured it was his shift. The black cotton Rob was smelling, he figured it was coming from the basket, was still contained.

  But then there’s a naked arm suddenly over the blue edge of the tarp, and then a face, and—this is where things go wrong— that face, it’s Tommy’s, and clamped in his lips is a cigarette, the cherry so red, so wrong, Tommy Moore’s eyes thin and satisfied at first.

  After that, it’s all legend.

  Rob King dragging Tommy Moore down, beating him long after what little fight there was was over, and nobody pulling him off until Pete Manson and Arthur King got there in the same truck.

  By that time it was too late, though.

  Tommy Moore wasn’t getting up on his own for a couple of weeks yet.

  According to Pete Manson, Arthur King planted his hand on Pete’s shoulder that day, so his old man legs wouldn’t fail. And Pete was proud to be solid enough to hold onto.

  Out in the field before them now, the deputies are chasing Rob King down, all three of them falling again and again, Rob King’s right hand cut deep across the knuckles, one of his boots coming off.

  He’s running for the buggy, and the tractor tied to it.

  Pete laughs at how stupid it all was. That, then, none of them even knew that it wasn’t just that one module burning up, it was twenty-five modules, for a mile all around. An act of arson Tommy Moore paid for with his face, paid for with the rest of his life. An act nobody ever quite figured out, especially with what happened later.

  But they all quit trying, too.

  They didn’t have to make it make sense.

  “Well,” Pete says, collecting his duffel from the bed of the truck.

  I pat the bed of his truck in farewell, cringe from a plane blasting off just over our heads, and like that he’s walking away, turning sideways to fit between two cars.

  For a few minutes I move a bent prybar back and forth in the bed of his truck, try to imagine what it was in its first life— tie rod from one of the tricycle tractors?—then swallow, turn back to the east, Greenwood thirty miles away now, and realize I don’t even know anybody’s number out there anymore.

  Chapter Two

  That night we all wanted the belly of the clouds to glow red like they did when a pasture was burning.

  But of course cotton’s not like that.

  Instead, like Pearl Harbor Day was suddenly a big deal in West Texas—all the veterans I knew back then were Air Force or Army, not Navy—everybody put their flags out on their porches, not just Arthur King, like usual.

  Tommy Moore’s legendary big brother was enlisted, out there somewhere, so maybe it was all for him. To call him back.

  There was a prayer meeting, of course, for Tommy. Everybody knew by then that it hadn’t been him.

  Arthur King climbed into his truck, directed it to Midland, to see if he still knew the Sheriff enough to come back with Rob.

  He didn’t.

  Outside, all around the school, all over Greenwood, it was just butane pumps popping in the night. There was talk of canceling the make-up football game on Friday, even, but it was Stanton, the Buffaloes, so we couldn’t cancel. There were more fights than usual in the parking lot, though, and the band at halftime broke formation when two of the trombone players looked up into the stands and started crying.

  Their mothers came out onto the field, led them to the red clay track, walked around it with them until they were out of the light.

  The ribbons that week were SHOOT THE BUFFS, same as every year. I held hands with a girl in the stands for the first time ever, even though she was already moving away.

  I don’t know what else to say about it, really.

  How about this: way back in fourth grade, Ms. Easton’s history—one of three teachers who ever believed in me—we’d all had to read reports on some local event. We either had to look it up in the library, get it from the papers, or interview somebody.

  Kelly Janer interviewed her aunt, who told the story of being a girl up in Tulia, how they had an old cellar for when the tornadoes came.

  Not if the tornadoes came, but when.

  The story that Kelly told was about how her aunt, when she was our age, remembers her dad building her just-married sister a house right next door to their house. The cellar, it was between the two houses. It made sense. So—Kelly’s mom had written this like always, we could all tell from the way Kelly was reading it, her lips all proper, in imitation—one day when the clouds were trailing what looked like smoke at their southeast edges, the sky green and quiet like it can get, everybody from both houses ran for the cellar. Only, at the metal door, there was this awkward moment, this bad piece of luck.

  Kelly’s aunt’s big sister, she was pregnant at the time, and pretty fa
r along.

  And Kelly’s aunt, that month she had measles.

  They couldn’t both go down into that cellar.

  So what happened, Kelly said, why her aunt chases tornadoes now and is probably going to die from it someday, is that she had to stand out there by the door, holding onto the cable so tight that the rusted cable left a print in her jaw, her family all right there under her until the storm passed.

  I always wanted to have a dream about that, about being that girl left up there like that for the storm, my hair lifting all around me, but you don’t get to choose, I guess.

  Me, I went for the library option, looked up the Stanton coop fire in my grandmother’s scrapbook, recited what I could. Nobody cared, least of all me.

  Michael Graham got a few laughs, though. What he’d done at the last minute was make a two-page list. The title was “Things The Wind Has Taken Away.” What he had listed were frito pies and hats and homework, especially—grinning at us over the top of his paper—homework.

  Ms. Easton looked over her glasses at him, about this. Tried not to smile, I think.

  We all wished we’d thought of that list, too. All had one ready, I mean, and were calling it out to him.

  It was a hard act for Adam Moore to follow. Tommy’s littlest brother.

  Because even as a freshman Tommy had already been a basketball star, Adam got his report from the box of newspapers his dad had saved. It was a run-through of last year’s district-winning season, of all the juniors returning that year as seniors, and then he broke down each player’s stats, finally trailed off when none of us were listening. Making a show of not listening, really. If we could have made cricket sounds with our mouths, we would have.

  “Good, good,” Ms. Easton said, and then the bell rang and we were gone, and I never thought about that Stanton fire again until about a month ago, I don’t think.

  Kelly Janer’s aunt’s story, though, it made sense just a year or two later, when I got to know her better, doing homework at her house, back in her bedroom, the door always open, her mom never more than a few feet down the hall. Her mom who had obviously written that report for her. Her mom who was that older sister, who had got to step down into that cellar. Kelly the oldest of her daughters, the first one, the one who had to be protected from the measles, from bad grades, from boys—from me.