Growing Up Dead in Texas

by Stephen Graham Jones

  But there are moments like these, too.

  Belinda goes to him and he hugs her with the arm he has, looks over her shoulder to the sliding back door. His sons are there, each in pants, hair combed to the side.

  He’d called ahead, from the station, his voice the kind of muffled and insincere that meant he wasn’t alone.

  Fluttering in his hand is the warrant signed by one of Martin Ledbetter’s golf buddies. It’s for the whole section of CRP, neighbors’ yards included, but it’s for the house too.

  Everybody’s so apologetic.

  Rob even crosses the backyard, shakes Deputy Jenkins’ left hand, taking him away from the pump house long enough for them to talk about it like it’s getting rebuilt anytime soon. Like Jonas won’t be out there come October, wrapping the pipes against the cold.

  Behind them, the trampoline is becoming part of the old fence.

  Farther out than that, across the field, leaning against a white post on his porch, Arthur King is drawing a cigarette to his lips, the first in fifteen years. Though it’s not what he intends for it to do, the smoke will clear his wife’s eyes for the morning and she’ll be her old self, except she’ll think it’s 1968.

  He won’t correct her.

  ***

  As for how Rooster knew about Junior and Mouse, knew about Walter Jr.’s predilections, I never questioned it. But, from what I’ve heard about Mouse, it wouldn’t be like him to say anything bad about the family. The Kings have always been close-to-the-vest like that. At eighteen, the information itself was jarring enough that I didn’t even think to question it. Only kind of wished I didn’t have to know.

  Now, though, to keep from suspecting that he made it up, that him and Arthur King were that deep of enemies, what I have to imagine is that Rooster and Mouse weren’t just in the same squadron or troop or whatever the Army has. What I have to imagine is that maybe Rooster knew Mouse when he was young, somehow, even though Rooster only seems to have moved into Greenwood later in life, with money he got from the lawsuit after his work truck fireballed up all around him.

  Maybe he’d been here before, though.

  Maybe he grew up around Greenwood, made the kind of exit nobody noticed or would have cared about if they had, then, his ear melted off but his bank account full of blood money, he came back, started buying up the community that had ignored him growing up.

  Real Victor Hugo, yeah. But it’s got to be something like that.

  If he had known Mouse as a kid, anyway, then it would have been easier to see, I think. Just in Mouse’s behavior. Not that there are specific tells for that kind of stuff, I don’t think, at least to the untrained, but—if Rooster’s home life wasn’t quite ideal either, if he’d heard those same boots in the hall before, then maybe he could pick something up from Mouse. The way he acted, the front he put up. The smile he was known for.

  Somehow, Rooster knew the truth about the Kings.

  And Mouse, I think— you always want a witness, somebody who understands, who can nod that this is good, yes, this makes sense—he knew Rooster knew. It was why he was finally able to stand up in that field of grass in Germany or Italy or France or whatever made-up place it was.

  For him, I know, it was the yellow grass of an empty field in Greenwood, spreading out all around him, all the way back to Prairie Lee.

  He was home. His friend from second grade was here, the tremble in the ground wasn’t tanks but tractors, and he was home.

  When Rooster told me the story of it that one time, his old man lips were curled into a smile, but they were tight, too. Unsure. Like he was trying to give shape to something that at the time, for him, had had no shape, was too big for words.

  If he’d heard those boots in the hall, I mean, then what’s to keep him from standing up along with Mouse that day?

  This is key, I think.

  What can keep you from doing what Mouse did, it’s not strength or will or duty to those you’d leave behind, any of that, it’s that the family you come from, nobody would be surprised what was going on behind those closed doors. Maybe everybody even just assumes it, and lets it go.

  It makes your world make sense, kind of.

  Makes you want to come back, show them all.

  If you’re Mouse, though, and your dad, he’s a deacon, a booster, a landowner, legitimate West Texas gentry, then what you never can wrap your head around, it’s this division between the daytime world and the nighttime one. Not how blind everybody can be, but how these two worlds you’re living in, they don’t fit together, can’t fit together.

  So one day you finally see a crack between them, and stand up into it, and this is it, the calm place you knew had to exist.

  Of course you smile, standing there. A little bit with wonder. This is it, what you’ve been waiting for.

  Mouse.

  I never knew him, but still.

  Some people you don’t have to.

  ***

  That day of the search, what the six men from the Sheriff’s department finally found wasn’t the .22, but it didn’t help, either.

  Back in Jonas’ bedroom, high in his closet where his brothers couldn’t reach, was an olive-green index-card box. Keeping it closed were two red rubber bands, longways—not flat rubber bands that like to break, but the squarish ones that last—then one dried-out tan one around the middle. They were security, were wrapped that way—red-then-tan-then-red again, on top—so that Jonas would know if anybody’d been in there.

  Until the day of the search, no one had.

  The tan rubber band did its job, broke. But then the deputy just walked in, gave the box to the Sheriff. Didn’t care about getting caught. Had a warrant, I guess, could break whatever rubber bands he wanted to.

  At the kitchen table, Jonas sat up a little straighter.

  Belinda was across from him, her youngest in her lap.

  “What?” she said.

  Jonas shook his head no, nothing.

  At the kitchen table now, the Sheriff sighed. Studied a candle mounted on the wall, maybe. Something over there. But there was no answer, no good way to do this.

  What he pulled up from the box once it was quiet enough was four arrowheads, three of them found in a sandstorm off 137 just south of Lamesa with Earl Holbrook. Jonas and Earl had had to wear swim goggles the whole afternoon, walking up and down the rows that were blowing away. The fourth was bought for fifty cents at a flea market, was perfectly shaped, could never kill anything.

  Next were the front-elbow calluses from a series of dead cows, and after that was an unspent token from the Gold Mine Arcade, with a pinhole drilled through it, one just wide enough to pass twelve-pound test through.

  Jonas winced but the Sheriff just set it aside, reached deeper into the box.

  What he came up with this time, what the deputy had probably already told him was there, was one photograph and two medals. The photograph was old and brown and curling at the edges, was of a smiling, lanky seventeen-year-old kid from two generations ago, standing at an impossible angle by a tack shed fallen all the way over now. And the medals—Jonas had to look away.

  The medals had turned up missing from Jonas’ grandmother’s sewing kit two Thanksgivings ago. And, between the turkey and football and dishes, she’d noticed. Meaning she was always slipping off to hold them, be sure they were there? What other explanation could there be.

  She’d called the Sheriff in (that was how he knew what they were), but before he got there, everybody had had told her that those weren’t Sterling’s medals, Sterling had never gone to war. That she must be confused. That she was the right age to be confused.

  But she insisted he had. That he was a hero, had been fighting for them all.

  It wasn’t a good Thanksgiving.

  Jonas threw up from nerves back by the shop, and the dogs, Prince and Blackie and the rest, darted in to lick it up.

  It’s what he feels like doing now, too, not just from the sad way his mom’s looking at him, but from the way th
e Sheriff’s holding those two medals up like spectacles, to look through, his eyes black and glinty behind the neat bullet hole in each. The bullet holes that can, presumably, be matched to other bullet holes.

  Four years later, if the Sheriff’s horse suddenly dies, Jonas isn’t going to know anything about it. And none of his friends will either. And they’ll never go back to that pasture again.

  Chapter Eight

  The goats. I was lying earlier, I think, about that tractor and sunflower story being the first story I ever got noticed for. The year before, I won an award for a personal essay I’d done for some composition course. It was supposed to have been just filler, done at the last possible hour—the T.A. was soft—but when you don’t have enough time, it’s hard to make things up enough. To disguise them like you need to.

  The essay was about goats, but it was more, too.

  Me and my dad were supposed to be watching the neighbor’s goats while he took his family to Six Flags. It was just goats, though; my dad gave me twenty dollars in advance for the four-day weekend, and borrowed a threewheeler for me, my first, so I could ride over in the mornings, keep the goats in water and feed, wrestle with the boss goat now that Mr. Mercer wasn’t around to disapprove.

  It wasn’t my fault either, what happened.

  Dogs.

  Later, in high school, one of my friends would weld a shop-made cowcatcher of pipe two feet in front of his bumper, just for plowing through the packs of dogs that kept happening. Chase them through the fields when they got too smart to come up onto the road. Why they were happening was that, during the boom, everybody in Midland had bought these big horse-dogs, showpieces really, but then got tired of the feeding, the mess, and what else do you do with a dog you don’t want, right? They brought them to us. The country. Greenwood.

  The result was all these motley packs of Labradors and Rottweilers, Irish Setters and every kind of Shepherd. Probably good-natured at one time, but hungry now, and thinking like a pack, not like pets. I didn’t have that big bumper on my truck, though, and was broke down so much it wouldn’t have mattered if I did. One Friday, even, the first semester of my senior year, I’m walking in a ditch well after midnight, my truck ticking down a mile or two behind me, a new dent kicked in its flank, when I hear them moving through the mesquite alongside me. The dogs. I broke immediately, slinging off my hat, my belt, anything to get them to stop even for a moment, and ran faster than I’ve ever run, until I was able to plant a boot on the brick planter in front of this house out in the middle of nothing, vault my midsection up into the eave, pull myself the rest of the way up. Stay there beating on the roof and throwing shingles at the dogs until my mom came slow down the road a few hours later, looking for me dead, like I think she always expected.

  That goes both ways, though.

  The year before the fire, when she’d go shopping at Albertson’s on Wednesday nights, I’d work myself into a panic each time, finally sneaking in to call the store, have her paged, then, when that didn’t work, gathering my little brother—usually having to drag him out of bed—and sitting by the window that faced Midland, making us hold hands so that when we prayed for her to make it back, it would be magnified by two, anyway.

  I was twelve, yeah. Maybe even eleven.

  Sometimes my dad would catch us like that and just lean against the door jamb, shake his head.

  It worked, though, right?

  But the dogs. They’d scattered the neighbor’s goats through the fence. Two of them they’d pulled down, one by the neck, dead already, and one hamstrung. Neither really eaten on that much, because they were domestic dogs, had the wrong instincts for all of this, but not exactly in the shape Mr. Mercer wanted them kept in either.

  I buzzed the threewheeler back to my mom, told her, and she went to the porch, studied the horizon to the north, then did that kind of mental calculus all farmers’ wives learn, the kind that plots out what field their husband said they were going to be in, but allowing for about six hundred variables, any one of which can lead to another and another, eventually land them in a strange tractor in some other field altogether.

  The dust she was seeing about a mile off, I mean, it wasn’t necessarily going to be my dad.

  But it was there or nowhere, too.

  “Okay,” she said, my little brothers at Vacation Bible School that week (this was my first year off—thank you, Mr. Mercer), and, instead of driving the long way around to flag him down, she stepped out of her shoes, told me to get back to the goats, keep them out of the road as best I could.

  “But—” I started.

  But I wasn’t supposed to go in the ditch.

  She didn’t hear, was already walking away the way she still did sometimes back then, barefoot, taking the caliche road to Cloverdale at first, chancing the ditch, then stepping into that good soft dirt of a plowed field. It was the only way to do it, she’d tell us. Otherwise your shoes fill up with dirt, right? And anyway, she’d grown up barefoot in cotton fields, her mom sending her out to fetch her dad for dinner most nights.

  My dad had warned her about walking around like that— snakes, chemicals, goat heads, white weeds, stalks left over from last season, fiberglass storage tanks spread out by the wind—but she didn’t care, and I think he liked finding her in the turnrow sometimes.

  I buzzed back to the Mercers’, tried to get the hamstrung goat to drink some water, like that could help, and then we both looked up. There was a chainsaw in the air. My dad, on some impossible Yamaha threewheeler he’d commandeered. I laid the goat’s head back down, rode out to meet him, and we spent the rest of the time before lunch screaming and laughing and coughing in the ditch, chasing one goat back through the hole just to have another skate out onto the asphalt. Dust and grass so thick in the air that we could hardly see each other sometimes. The way I wrote it in that essay—I don’t have it anymore—the way I wrote the end of it is that everything then, the dirt in the sunlight, it was golden, it was perfect, and then I closed that shutter, just let that day stay like that.

  That night, my dinner wrapped in foil on the seat of the threewheeler I was already in love with, the hamstrung goat would finally die, its head on my lap. The dogs barking out in the draw, waiting.

  With the rifle I was about go home and ask for as matter-of-factly as I could, I lined up on each one of them, pulled the trigger until I was out of make-believe shells, so that when they came for me six or seven years later, I knew to run, and not to stop.

  ***

  The next game for the basketball team is eleven days into 1986. A tournament Greenwood’s hosting. All the other teams’ buses parked in the high school parking lot at exactly the same angle: Colorado City, Iraan, Big Lake, Stanton, Monahans, maybe one more.

  Greenwood’s not just short Tommy Moore now, our star, but Geoff Koenig, who’d averaged eight points per game the year before. All of them trash, sure, no plays ever run directly for him, but still. Instead of all seniors, there’s a junior and a sophomore in the starting lineup, even after Coach gave his big lecture about no more lower classmen moving up, even if we made regionals.

  Before Greenwood’s first game there’s a moment of silence for Tommy and Geoff. Some of the high schoolers hold their lighters up like a concert but get their arms guided back down. Fire’s where it all started, after all. They’re not doing it in bad taste, but, most of them not being eighteen yet, there’s no good reason for them to have those lighters either, right?

  They have good intentions anyway.

  Tommy Moore’s mom cries in thanks, and everybody pretends not to see her. If you do, then you might have to say something. Mr. Moore isn’t there to put his arm around her, either, and Ms. Godfrey’s probably standing in their driveway at that exact moment, making promises to herself. That she’ll never leave Tommy after this, never, no matter what.

  The only Kings at the tournament are Earl Holbrook and his wife Sissy, though nobody really considers them Kings, even though Earl did lose two modules in
the fire. Arthur King lost an even twenty. Earl had already been at the gin that morning, though, had been for most of the night, only got back to his modules after the volunteer fire department had blown them apart with water, then raked them into the dirt looking for coals.

  Where Earl and Sissy sit every game is half court, six rows up, right where the seats change color, so they’re each in a different one, reaching across the middle for popcorn, coke. To hold hands.

  The only King-by-name in attendance at the tournament is Jonas, his threewheeler hidden back by the field house, the spark plug in his pocket like his dad taught him.

  So everybody will know he’s ridden in, not just been dropped off by his mom, he’s keeping his Honda-red helmet cocked under his arm, has his jeans tucked into the heavy motorcycle boots he’s going to have to grow into. They make his steps large and deliberate, make him want to see the shadow he’s throwing here, how epic it has to be.

  In the concession-stand crush before tip-off—no accident he waited until then—he places the helmet up on the counter to pay for his frito pie so that the booster handing him his seventy-five cent coke has to call him back to get it, his helmet.

  It’s only then he realizes that that’s the first anybody’s spoken to him. Even his friends. They haven’t said anything about his boots, his dad, any of it. He’s not even sure they’re there.

  What he does instead of cruising the visitor stands with them like usual is sit in the cafeteria and spork his food in, make his coke last until the second quarter and flinch more than he means to when the ball slaps the glass by his table. Then he notices that everybody on the Greenwood side is watching. Not the game, not the ball being thrown back in fifteen feet away, but him, Jonas King.

  The spark plug is hot in his front pocket.

  He lowers his face to his coke, tells himself he’s just making things up, and pulls the last drink halfway up the straw and holds it there. The trade is that if he can do it like that for a ten-count, a twenty even, the coke just standing there against all common sense, then when he finally lets it go, everything will be all right again.