Growing Up Dead in Texas

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Afterward, I was shaking so hard that all twelve guys in the tank came over, gave me their blanket. My teeth still chattered, until I had to feel each one, see if it was broke. And then feel them all again.

  Walking away the next morning, our court dates in our pockets, TJ bought me a honey bun with a dollar he somehow had (all my cash was in check form, from the city), laughed about the night before, and then there was a stroller suddenly by a dumpster. We took turns pushing it, ate the honey buns we hadn’t thought to get napkins for, and I don’t even know if I ever told him thanks. That this morning shouldn’t have been happening at all.

  As for where all of this started, though, I’m not stupid: 1985.

  It changed all of us.

  ***

  According to the Sheriff, it wasn’t an interrogation in Rob King’s living room that day. It wasn’t an interrogation and it wasn’t a boxing match, and it damn sure wasn’t a tractor race. It was an interview. It was just to establish certain facts, not cast suspicion.

  Still: “We’re going to need that rifle, son.”

  This to Jonas King, whose voice wasn’t something he could trust right then.

  “He told you, Jim,” Rob King said, “he lost it.”

  The Sheriff rolled his shoulders a bit, pulled his teeth from his lip as if this obvious lie was hurting him in some way, and said, “I’ll be talking to the boy, Mr. King. If that’s okay.”

  “You want Mr. King, his old ass is down the road there,” Rob said back, at which point Belinda said his name, just once, Rob. And quiet. Not a warning, but so he could hear for himself what this was all building to. That the script of how this was all going to play out, it was right there in his tone already.

  The Sheriff didn’t say anything. Could probably see it all even better, right down to Rob falling across the driveway in cuffs, climbing up into his 4440, black smoke belching up into the chill, the front wheels popping up a foot or so when he dropped it into gear, the throttle already buried.

  But that was all in a minute or two.

  “So ask him,” Rob King said, stepping aside, Jonas out in the open now.

  “I lost it,” Jonas said.

  “See?” Rob King stepped back in front of the Sheriff.

  Now the Sheriff smiled a bit, angled his mouth down to the CB on his shoulder. “Deputy Jenkins? Yeah, I’m going to need—”

  “You can’t pull me out of here,” Rob King said, setting his feet, “the law, it says—”

  “That one parent has to be present, Mr. King,” the Sheriff completed, not bothering to look over when Deputy Jenkins stepped in through the front door, careful to wipe his boots on the mat, and make apology eyes to Belinda.

  “Rob, if you’ll just—” he said.

  Rob King laughed. “You’re escorting me out of my own damn house, here? Am I missing something?”

  “Rob,” Belinda said again.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Before that day, the worst violence that had ever happened in the Kings’ living room, it had involved battery cases that wouldn’t come off new toys, precision screwdrivers that poked forward into the meat of somebody’s hand.

  Now, though. Now Belinda was going to need some new carpet.

  As for Jenkins, that’s not his real name. Because I promised way earlier not to use their real names.

  But it’s close enough.

  When he touched Rob King’s sleeve to guide him out, Rob King laid him out. And I know “righteous” is the wrong word here, is too celebratory, doesn’t show the proper respect to the law, but—Jonas remembers his dad coming home once from a sale, the pinky and ring finger of his right hand broke. Because somebody in a convenience store had said something to him about his wife, Jonas’ mom, and Jonas’ dad’s hand (the way Rob King told it) had come sailing through the air before he could even tell it to make itself all the way into a fist.

  At the store that day, though, Rob King just paid for his coke, walked out.

  There weren’t any other deputies to call in, I mean. There weren’t nightsticks in the general vicinity.

  After it was done and Rob’s already broke hand wouldn’t stop bleeding, the Sheriff shook his head in disappointment, called in an ambulance just to cover his ass.

  “Sorry you had to see that, ma’am,” the Sheriff said to Belinda King, who was holding Jonas to her side, and to Jonas, just staring at his dad in cuffs on the living room carpet, his eyes wild, air coming in rasps, shirt untucked in exactly the way Rob King was always warning Jonas about. “We might should just station the paramedics down at the church, think?” the Sheriff went on. “Just for him, and everything he thinks he can do.”

  Insert a picture of Belinda King here, just staring at him.

  The Sheriff smiled his good-old-boy smile, pinched his uniform pants up his thighs enough to lean down a smidge, say to Jonas, “Now, son, I just—”

  “He told you,” Belinda said, pushing Jonas behind her. “He lost that rifle.”

  At which point the Sheriff peeled his wide hat off, ran his hand through what was left of his hair.

  “Let’s,” he said, and opened the door for Deputy Gaylord, ushered Rob King out, guiding his head through the door, being sure to tell Gaylord to keep an eye on this one, that he might go rabbit.

  Gaylord laughed like “fat chance” and the Sheriff twisted the dead bolt shut.

  “I lost it,” Jonas King said, right when that bolt drove home.

  “Son,” the Sheriff said, disappointed.

  “It’s time for you to leave my house,” Belinda King said then.

  “Ma’am, Lindy—”

  “Please.”

  “I just, I just need to,” he said, reaching around her a bit, to pull Jonas back into view.

  He didn’t plan on Belinda’s knee, though.

  Or that she would follow him down, tooth and claw.

  “Run!” she said back to Jonas, frozen there on the bloody carpet, “go, go, go,” and Jonas did, Jonas does, two miles through the field to his grandfather’s, to hide in the tack shed that’s already fallen down, already smells like porcupine. It’s not the deputies that find him that night either, but Arthur King’s five dogs.

  Two days later Arthur King will unceremoniously shoot all five of them, even the one that takes off across the field. The reason he gives is that they got into a skunk. Their names: Blackie and Cotton and Slim and Prince and Ranger. Prince is the last of a series of litters going back nearly forty-five years, to Mouse’s time. He almost makes it across the field, too.

  There are no graves for them, just this.

  ***

  In the best of the series of photographs from the day of the shooting, 1985, you can see the team bus, two DPS cars, the Sheriff’s cruiser, and farmers’ trucks lined almost all the way back to the church, out of the frame.

  The basketball players are all already gone, of course, Geoff Koenig sirened away by ambulance—yeah, if there’d been one by the church, it wouldn’t have hurt—Coach Harrison taking that ride with him. Leonard just walking back to the school, across the field. The bus is a crime scene now, won’t be moved for days. The keys are still in it.

  Of the farmers milling around in the ditch, waiting to volunteer whatever they can, there’s no Rooster, no Arthur King, no Rob King. And the ones who are there, they all look so young. Like, in the two or three years between that day and when I would be old enough to start working for them, they would have aged fifteen years.

  Or maybe it was just around me that they seemed older. Like they were letting me run a few hours on their 4440s out of duty, more or less, a burden of obligation that weighed on them, aged them around the eyes because when they looked at me they saw me standing there and they saw me as I had been, too.

  The money was the same, though. For a while.

  In that photograph—in all of them—most of the farmers are either looking into the ditch or out across the fields. Waiting for that next shot, maybe. Macy Barnes is there, his shirt whi
te and ironed, a businessman at the beginning of the day and a businessman at the end. I always half-expected him to have a briefcase. There’s Gary Wilkes squinting against the sun, a stem of grass fixed between his teeth like he’s posing for a postcard. Michael Graham’s dad, Rex Allen—no clue why you always had to say his middle name, just that you did—his signature Dr. Pepper in his right hand, his dentures loose in his mouth. Used to, whenever his wife would look away he’d wow his eyes out, thrust his teeth out on his purple stub of a tongue. Earl Holbrook, in the brown collar-shirt everybody was wearing that year at the gin, so you could tell who was working there, who was just hanging around for peanuts and coffee. Clete Jennings, staring out across the field to the south, where most of his fields still were. Maybe staring to see if there was going to be smoke this day or not. Martin Ledbetter, in long pants for once, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses that probably cost eighty dollars, had a matching alligator case on the dash of his truck. Pete Manson, a cigarette always to his lips, his wedding ring on the middle finger of his left hand, because his ring finger’s a nub.

  Of all of them, he’s the only one who never looks across all the stalks, for that next shot.

  Chapter Seven

  The one person Rob King would never talk about was Sterling. His suicide brother.

  I think I understand.

  My nephew who was dying a few pages ago, that was the first time I’ve said anything about him in all these years.

  His name was Dallas. His name was Houston.

  It was Austin.

  He was the first grandkid, the golden child, the same as Sterling had been, and Mouse before him.

  Ms. Godfrey would have an explanation for that, I guess. A footnote or a play or a literary tradition.

  She doesn’t know everything, though.

  She doesn’t know that I used to save my fingernails, say. In a Tylenol bottle, back when everyone was sure every third Tylenol pill was poison. By fifteen, that little white bottle was almost full. Until my littlest brother found it when I was gone one day. I scooped what I could back into the bottle, stormed down the hall to my room, slammed the door hard enough that it would sound locked, anyway.

  Two hours later, cooled down, I would open that door again. There on the carpet was my littlest brother’s apology: he’d found some clippers, cut all his own nails off. Deep, so that each one was bloody. Him waiting down the hall to see for himself that everything was okay now. It wasn’t.

  Another thing Ms. Godfrey doesn’t know is that, moving up to Colorado, I finally had to let go of the backboard I’d been carrying with me from house to house ever since I left Greenwood. It was all warped and scarred, just the ghost of a red square on it anymore, and it took all kinds of mismatched washers and carriage bolts to even keep a rim up there, but still, each time I was fading away from it, in whatever driveway was mine at the time, I felt like I was still me. Like if I just made this shot, then everything would be all right, that I could keep the world together by placing that ball through the net one more time.

  And she especially doesn’t know about Buddy.

  My dog about four years ago, a golden boxer some eight-months old, with parvo.

  We fed him goat milk and Enfamil and Gatorade and everything we could think of, but still, he was going, until one night it was time to shoot him. Except, up in the top of my closet, I didn’t have any more shells. Not in the ashtray of my truck either, and not in the pockets of any of my jackets, and not behind the seat of my truck, and not the ashtray again either, though I checked and checked, insisted. It was two in the morning already, the stores were closed, everybody I knew sleeping.

  But still.

  You can do it with a narrow rope if you have to, a parachute cord you bought at Army surplus because it only cost a dollar. You can do it if you don’t mind having that feel of muscle dying under your hands, the way it creaks like it’s drying out. You can do it if you don’t mind having that feeling in your hands for the rest of your life.

  To even get there, though, what you have to do is dig deeper into your closet, for the mule-eared boots you haven’t tried to fit into for years.

  They make it feel more like a movie, what you’re doing. Like you’re walking into a scene here. Like your lines are already all laid out for you, your actions blocked out. Like there’s some director watching you, nodding yes, that this is right, this is good, everybody quiet now.

  Never mind the actor there, his knee between the dog’s shoulder blades.

  I’m not going into that backyard again, though.

  But it’s not always just a backyard, either. Sometimes it’s a whole county.

  My favorite dog when I was twelve, one Friday afternoon when we were going to the lake, I couldn’t find her and couldn’t find her. Finally, when none of his excuses were getting us out of the house, my dad told my mom the story. They were in the garage, which is like trying to whisper in a cave. This is what he didn’t know I was hearing: that his buddy from way back, our neighbor, had gotten understandably tired of Sheba chasing his van every day, so had finally stopped that morning, turned that Chevy van around and chased the dog instead. All through the pasture, wider and wider loops, until he caught her. The fresh ruts were right there, obvious, would be for years. After he hit Sheba, then, she got up and kept running, made one more giant loop, going for all she was worth, then came back to the van, fell over in some kind of shock, her side rising shallow and fast. This was good, I thought, about to round the corner. She’d lived. It was what she always did. Except. Instead of scooping her into the back of the truck, my dad and the neighbor— Gene, Gene, Gene, I can’t say it enough times— put her in a plastic trash bag, dug a hole for her so that she probably didn’t die until she woke up.

  We didn’t make the lake that weekend. They didn’t find me that night until almost dawn, and that was just because I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, or a flip switch to blow the world up.

  Then my next dog, Pepper, a lanky tall black and brown goof who’d wandered up especially to help me be thirteen. At a barbecue one Sunday, one of my young cousins was petting one of the other dogs, and Pepper growled like he always did. Not at my little cousin—taller than me now—but at the other dog, for getting attention. It didn’t matter. My cousin’s dad heard, cocked his head to be sure he’d heard, then took two steps over to his car, leaned in through the open window, his cheeseburger plate balanced in his other hand the whole time. When he turned back around, he was leading with his nickel-plated .38. There in the middle of all of us, so we felt the spray even if it didn’t stain our clothes, he took half of Pepper’s head off, from the left eye back, and said it in the silence that followed, before we all started breathing again: that no dog was going to growl at his kid, by God. By the time the men came back from burying Pepper, the cheese on our burgers was cold, and none of the women were talking to any of the men, and I didn’t even run away, just sat there under the clothesline, staring out across the pasture.

  All of which is to say that that night with Buddy, I should have known, should have been more ready. And it’s not like I hadn’t been shooting deer and elk and everything else in all the years before Buddy—a horse once, even, that I had to run away from, am still running away from—and not like I hadn’t sawed the heads off just-dead Hereford bulls, for their skulls, and dug through rotting cows for their elbow calluses and eye lenses, which I was collecting for a while, and not like I hadn’t killed who knows how many birds and snakes and rabbits by then, but Buddy—his name was no accident. That’s the best way to say it, maybe. He was Sheba and Pepper and the rest, only safe, far from Greenwood.

  I don’t know.

  I sat on the back porch with him for two days while he was dying, didn’t even read, and when he started peeing just sitting there, so that it ran onto both of us, his ears back from embarrassment, the pee still Enfamil practically, I told him it was all right, that it was all going to be all right, and just sat there with him some more, making p
romises, offering trades.

  You don’t get to save them all though, I don’t guess. Even the important ones.

  You’d think I’d have learned that by then.

  ***

  From their back window—this is still two weeks before Stacy Monahans’ funeral, which would change everything—Belinda King and her sons watch the Sheriff’s men move through the CRP all around their cul-de-sac.

  What the windbreakered men are after is the .22.

  Not that there’s a slug to match it to yet, or any witnesses, but still, if that little Savage .22 fell out of the horse scabbard bolted to the pushbar and fender of the threewheeler like Jonas says, then the Sheriff’s department wants to see it lying there in the grass. Know that it hasn’t been hidden.

  It’ll mean everything.

  If they don’t find it, too.

  “Mom,” Jonas says.

  Belinda King just stands there. Not tuned out, but tuned all the way in, it seems. Completely.

  The Sheriff’s men are sifting through the blown-up pump house now.

  “Wait here,” she says to him finally, “watch your brothers,” and then’s stalking out there, is going to tell Deputy Jenkins something, except before she can get there Rob King is rounding the corner.

  The Sheriff’s with him.

  Rob’s whole arm is in a sling now.

  They’re two days out from the first interview. The first time Rob’s been back since then.

  There’ll be no charges, so long as he cooperates from here on out. His second free pass in as many months, like he’s charmed.

  Ask him, you might get a different answer.