Growing Up Dead in Texas

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Garrison,” he says, that thirteenth soldier. Garrison something, he doesn’t recall. What he had working against him, anyway, it was his height.

  When they all stood up to get across a fence, Garrison’s neck exploded. It was supposed to be his head, Rooster was pretty sure, but the neck would get the job done, sure.

  Garrison fell over, dead. No details there.

  This is when what the Midland Reporter-Telegram wanted to call heroics started.

  Mouse didn’t say any of the go on without me stuff, had no last messages to pass on to anyone back home.

  Instead, according to Rooster—all of them were facedown in the sharp grass, all their training gone—what happened was that one moment Mouse was lying there with the rest of them, but then his eyes changed, sort of. His face going calm. Not his whole life catching up with him, burying him, and not the future opening up before him either, too haunted. No, what Mouse felt, it has to be the same thing I felt one bad night in Austin, trying to merge onto a fast street deep in the morning: that if I just make one mistake here, one understandable bad judgment, the kind people make hundreds of times each day all over the world, then nothing will matter anymore. It’s the most vague way to say it, I know, but it’s not about ducking obligations, not about worries or responsibilities. It’s about stepping outside the cycle. Going somewhere else. Maybe nowhere.

  So, me, yeah, I pulled out into that road, my muscles tense for what I knew was coming, but then all the cars screaming past, a wall of them, fell in line around me somehow, carried me along. Two miles later, my hand shaking, I put my seatbelt on.

  Not Mouse.

  When he saw this way he could go, what could happen here if he let it, he just flicked his eyes to Rooster once, not even in farewell, more just acknowledging that Rooster was there. He stood, Mouse. Turned to face the direction Garrison had been shot from.

  And then he walked into it, even after that other soldier missed once, twice, four times, finally tugging at Mouse’s trench-colored pants leg.

  Mouse didn’t even look down, just stood there. His arms not out dramatic and sacrificial—he was a lanky farm boy from West Texas—his cheeks dry, but still, if he just would have flinched, maybe. Regretted this though it was too late. Anything.

  This war had been coming for him a long time already, though.

  It’s not easy being the one Daddy loved most.

  And here comes the animated part of this, the cartoon: a highly detailed, nearly lovable German or Italian slug splashing through Mouse and curving up after that, losing itself in the sky for nearly half a century, finally coming back down halfway around the world.

  December 1985, to be precise.

  Three days after Christmas.

  ***

  As for where exactly it happened, that’s the thing: none of them could say. None of the players, anyway.

  Anywhere between where they pulled up out of the parking lot and where Leonard finally stalled in the ditch, maybe a half mile later.

  It made all the difference, too, where it had happened. According to Trevor Watkins—the third T in the yearbook photo—he was rewinding his Quiet Riot to “Slick Black Cadillac” at the time. So he could hear, even past his headphones, but was mostly just concentrating on those two little sprocketed wheels, one pulling the other, one turning slow, the other furious. He was watching, his finger cocked on Stop, because this player, his brother’s, ate about every third tape, and this Quiet Riot was Amber Outlaw’s.

  So, he could have heard it, maybe did, even, but it didn’t register.

  He does remember Geoff Koenig standing, and stilt-arming it back through the seats, probably to trade tapes with somebody, or to dump the paper bag out the trash window— the one furthest from Leonard—get the smell of peaches gone.

  And he guesses, yeah, that Geoff Koenig did sit down. But maybe that’s where he’d been going the whole time. Nobody told him there was going to be a test, right?

  So, mark him off the witness list.

  Marcus Weeks too. At first he claimed to have seen it all, but then Tad’s story (these were the cops) was that he’d smuggled a certain kind of magazine onboard—like the music, to get ready for the game—and that Marcus and him had been nine seats back, directly behind Coach very much on purpose. Studying.

  Marcus claimed that didn’t mean he couldn’t have looked up, but he didn’t push it.

  And as for why Coach or Leonard didn’t hear it, they were at the front of the bus, where the floor’s thin, the engine right there under you, and getting up to speed after the turn onto Cloverdale, it was the kind of loud you needed ear protection for.

  Leonard had eyes, though, and mirrors, and was used to watching for mischief, but he didn’t want Geoff Koenig to get benched just for trading seats, either, so he pretended to be concerned with making the next gear. With saying to Coach, “So that was them on the horn, yeah?”

  Coach, looking away, his thumbnail finding his teeth.

  Them: the college scouts already keeping a sheet on Tommy Moore. Scouts just coming back from break, just getting word that they could cancel this trip, maybe.

  Does Coach Harrison look out the window here as they pass the place in Rooster’s field where it happened?

  If he did, he doesn’t remember, has no story to fill in between leaving the parking lot and tilting into the ditch.

  Even then, he thought it was maybe something with the engine. Looked ahead for cows in the road, their hotwire grounded out. Another bus needing help. Fire trucks again.

  The road was empty.

  “Sir,” Leonard says, his eyes deep in the segmented mirror.

  It’s Geoff Koenig on the edge of an unoccupied seat about halfway back, his head bobbed down. Blood.

  Coach Harrison stands, and by pure luck—he missed Vietnam, never had to get those terrible instincts— sees the shatter point in the side window just about even with Geoff Koenig, and says it in the voice he doesn’t even use for regionals, “Down,” so that when Belinda King gets there, her mouth saying it even if she isn’t— thank you thank you thank you— at first she thinks the bus is empty, steps up through the open door like a woman in an urban legend.

  All there is is one boy, Lydia’s son, with the big feet. Just sitting there. Bleeding.

  He looks up to her and her lips are still whispering thank you, and she hates herself more than a little, turns her head down, to the flicker of motion beside her.

  Leonard, who Rob King has stories about. Hiding between two of the seats.

  Roger Harrison crouched in the next, his scalp shiny and wet through his flattop.

  “Down,” he whispers to her, mostly with his eyebrows, but she doesn’t. Just looks around, immediately sees—there are no heads in the way now—what the Sheriff’s office will draw yarn through and photograph from every possible angle: a bullet hole in one pane of glass on the driver’s side of the bus, and a bullet hole in another pane as well.

  “Mrs. King,” Geoff Koenig says then, his voice too chipper, too polite, then shakes his head no, that he doesn’t understand what’s happening here. But she is a mom. It doesn’t matter how tall he is anymore.

  As for what he would eventually say, he wasn’t going back to the trash window, and he wasn’t going back for a tape or to look at the magazine or for a different seat even, though that’s part of it, he guesses. It’s that in the paper bag, wrapped in foil so it wouldn’t get dirty from the shoes, had been a peach, for luck. And there was no eating on the bus, strict rule number one.

  He’d had to hide the peach in his shorts, even, when everybody smelled it. But the foil had kept it all right, and anyway, it was his shorts, right?

  He couldn’t not eat it now, after being scratched from that foil.

  Not up front with Coach, though.

  So he stands, almost loses his balance, the peach rolled in his sock now, but manages to make it back two rows, three, and won’t be able to remember for the Sheriff’s office where they were on t
he road exactly when he had to sit down. When he just found himself sitting.

  It was like he’d fallen, but, too—the peach. Shit.

  His mom, all our moms, had told us stories about being girls in the late summer. The boys off at the stock tanks if they were young enough, out in the fields if they were that old, the girls left to play all day at the house, finally getting shooed out the front door.

  It didn’t matter. Everybody had a peach tree or two growing. And nothing’s better on a hot afternoon. You don’t even have to clean them or anything.

  Once in all the girls’ lives, once that they’ll tell over and over, a defining afternoon, is the time one of those huge black and orange Mexican wasps that love the peaches came for them, and got them. On the back of the arm, the side, a calf, once was all it took to force this story this deep into them. And how it hurt, how they screamed, how their dads took five-gallon buckets of diesel rags out later that night and lit them, to smoke all the wasps away from their little girls. The best smell ever, why most of them grew up to marry farmers, probably: coming home from all day on the tractor, they smell like safety.

  According to Geoff Koenig, anyway, at first he thought it was a Mexican wasp, sluggish in the bag, crawling out halfblind, tearing into the first thing it saw.

  Except, from his shoulder, his arm—wasp bites don’t bleed, do they? Even Mexican wasps, however big they are, however mad.

  And where was it now?

  That’s probably why he sat down. To fan off the next attack.

  There was just that one bullet, though. One cartoon of a .22 slug, somehow not breaking up after one window. Having enough left to cut through him, enough left after that to make it out the other side. A one-in-a-thousand shot. One-in-a-hundred-thousand.

  For three days after this the ditches will be taped off, three metal detectors going at once. And when that doesn’t work, every kind of magnet. And when the magnets just get pull tabs and beer caps, lug nuts and sheared-off bolts, there’ll be grown men crawling through the grass finger by finger, then shoveling the dirt up into wheelbarrows, because somebody’s said you could probably pan lead out, right?

  But they don’t even know if they’re in the right part of the road.

  It could have happened right by the school’s the thing, when the bus was still on 1379, already whining down for the stop sign. Nearly an eighth of a mile of ditch to find one twisted slug in. Shattered glass all up and down it, from bottles and windshields and everything else; the church was the center of Greenwood, had been for nearly a hundred years. All manner of things had found their way out the car window on the way to Sunday school. Or even other ways.

  One of my clearest memories is this Torino we had with a rusted-out floorboard. Way before seatbelts. I’m in the front floorboard, notice my mom’s shiny hand. She passes her wedding ring down to me, the one from my dad’s great-grandmother. She tells me to be careful, and maybe two miles later, watching the asphalt blur past not fourteen inches under me through a rusted-through hole, I hold the ring there sideways, let it go.

  It doesn’t make a sound, is just gone, forever. If any of the men searching the ditch for that slug found it those last few days of 1985, too, then they palmed it, kept looking.

  Along with the slug?

  Exactly.

  ***

  If one of the things going on here’s going to be Michael Graham’s list that goes for all of us—Things the Wind’s Taken Away, almost the title of this, along with The Evil Good Men Do and Where the Truth Lies—then another has to be Things That Have Turned up in the Ditch.

  Cassette tapes I’ve spent hours respooling, just because I thought there was going to be a secret message there for me. Caps I snuck into the dishwasher when we had one, because the patch on them was so cool, the brim already broke in right. A bumpy Procter & Gamble coin that had to be from the Devil’s change purse, a coin I saved for a long time all the same, to look at in secret. Pot plants growing tall and proud. Wheel wells I used to hoard, sure they were going to be the perfect thing someday, not just the mosquito hatcheries they already were. Goats I chased down on threewheelers for a vacationing neighbor, chased down with my dad, each of us laughing so hard we could hardly drive. Once, over about a quarter mile, Polaroids of a girl in less and less clothes each time the flashbulb popped. She’s skinny, not smiling. Red around the eyes.

  We burned those.

  Never a body, though. But I always looked, always knew it was going to happen. Once at two in the morning there was a dog just standing there waiting for me to pass, a thing in its mouth I would swear to anybody was a human hand and forearm. By the time I went back the dog was gone. Another morning, alone, the night over, a just-dead mule deer doe, a pale animal feeding on it that I still can’t explain, an animal that tracked me as I passed, an animal that had this long tail not made for the burrs of West Texas. And coyotes, always watching. Just out there with a grin, a glint in their eyes, like they know something but are keeping it to themselves.

  And sometimes what’s in the ditch, it steps up onto the road. Just three months ago, in a store I’d never been to, a town I hardly knew, there’s the girl who spent our senior year in the hospital, after her little Sunbird couldn’t turn fast enough to avoid a night-black Angus just standing there, unafraid. At the end of the cereal aisle she talks about Greenwood like another life we all lived. She’s not wrong.

  And it’s not always just cows standing there either.

  A friend tells me that one night he’s driving home. Too late, going too fast. Not paying enough attention to see the girl balancing on the stripe, reaching for him.

  She’d been in the news then for eight days, an abduction case out of Midland. He clips her, sends her spinning into the ditch. Always the ditch.

  The police don’t blame him.

  Another friend is fourwheeling—this is after graduation, after he’s married and moved to Dallas— out at Possum Kingdom drinking by himself and climbing what he can, not rationing his gas at all, when he comes across a man hanging by his neck from a tree. The dead man’s been there for days already.

  My friend doesn’t touch him, knows better. But he feels a kind of pride, too. Over his find. A completely understandable kind of pride. Hours later he stands by the state trooper’s car watching all this commotion he’s caused, and for the next few years, his girls cycling through soccer and karate and piano and cheerleading, he spends every weekend he can in more and more remote trails. Looking for dead people. Just one more.

  I don’t know.

  He should have stayed closer to home, maybe. A guy from the grade ahead of me, who used to beat me up, one of the guys who would kick his way into your bathroom stall, arc a line of pee down between your legs, tell you to sit still now, a guy who I was sure would live forever, could weather anything, he died on a fourwheeler. Or, under it. Just puttering back to feed the pigs one night after work, his house so full of kids, each of them his perfect clone. Another girl, two years ahead of him—one year behind Ms. Godfrey—she didn’t drive fourwheelers but did have this powder-blue Trans-Am, the decal on the hood sun bleached and as perfect as anything I’ve ever seen.

  My first year driving, I would be showing off in the high school parking lot and slip into a bad series of donuts. It felt like a ride in the carnival teacups. All I could do was hold on, try to keep my head from flopping out the window. If there hadn’t been gravel loose on the asphalt, I would have been rolling, not sliding. When I finally stopped, the stock rear bumper of my Ford, it was nestled into the space above the bias-ply tire but below the rear fender of a baby blue Trans-Am. Shannon—I never talked to her, even once—looking at me from under the stands, cocking her head just enough for me to know how lucky I was here.

  I lied, told everybody it was on purpose, placing my bumper there, and then had my friends stand in the bed so I could ease away, not take her chrome trim with me.

  This is the car she would die in two years later. Its first and last body d
amage. She probably still had those same old tires on it. Her house was the one we always ran behind for offseason basketball. Her sweet TA beside it, the front wheels cocked just enough sideways to be forever cool.

  And maybe—she was only a year behind, would have been prime—maybe she even dated Geoff Koenig when he came back to school a hero, could pick any girl, all the girls.

  You’d think the story of him would be this guy, forty and filling out, three marriages behind him, more kids than he can remember birthdays for. Or that he’s the guy on the fourwheeler, out looking for bodies. The guy dying under the fourwheeler. The one hitting the missing girl, both hands tight on the wheel.

  In a novel, maybe.

  Today, Geoff Koenig doesn’t have any kids, jokes that all those rubbers were wasted money.

  Five years after high school he enlisted with the Marines for the first Gulf War. To get shot again, feel that rush of living all over? For how everybody treats you different for a while after something like that?

  I don’t ask him that.

  He’s back in Greenwood now. On the other side of 80, behind Wallace’s grocery. In 1998, blind drunk, he drove his new Camaro under the rear bumper of a pipe trailer parked in the ditch on 1110, the road we all called Rabbit Run.

  He lived again, somehow. Geoff Koenig had enough charm left for that, but lost most of his vision. I don’t know what he sees now, just know him as a voice on a phone. He thought I was in Colorado, not sitting in my truck down at Wallace’s.

  What he is is another victim of that fire.

  And it doesn’t stop with him.

  ***

  Stacy Monahans. She’s another person I can’t ask about any of this.

  Not because she was two years ahead of me, and not because she was fifty miles away in Lamesa, but because ten days into 1986, the Subaru Brat she’d borrowed from her friend’s boyfriend hydroplaned on 349, the road that angles from Lamesa down to Midland.

  They didn’t find her until the next morning.

  And I say “they,” but it was her father, Larry Monahans. Not out driving the roads looking for her, but sitting in a yellow seat in a turnrow, trying to rub a clean place in the glass, to see if that’s a car out there or what. And then recognizing it, shaking his head, remembering what it was like to be a junior in high school like Dan—that’s the Subaru kid’s name, right?