Growing Up Dead in Texas

by Stephen Graham Jones

  How we carried the little cars was a white five-gallon bucket.

  And if you want to know about the first betrayal I can remember, it’s coming home on a Saturday from somewhere, my brother out front with the bucket. There were more cars now, so it was overflowing into the grass. And he was trying not to smile.

  What had happened: he’d been buying the little cars one at a time all morning, from kids up and down the block. What he’d been paying for the cars with was my collection of 1972 silver dollars. Every birthday, Christmas and special day, I’d been getting one of them.

  This is when I stopped playing little cars.

  After that, what we used the bucket for was horny toads. Even in town, they were everywhere. You couldn’t hit an empty lot without stepping on one. Give us one morning, and my brother and me could fill that five-gallon bucket to the wire handle with horny toads, so that when our mom made us pour them out at the end of the day, the bottom third would usually be soggy, flat, and dead.

  It didn’t matter. There were more. And we knew them all, could tell the males from the females (spots), knew the drag race ones from the slowbies (light green under the armpit), knew how to tell when one was pregnant (the tail), and could even get them to spit blood from their eyes on command (Clayton next door’s yellow lab). I remember once even dragging my mom all the way down the block, so she could see a rare event: a horny toad giving birth. It was one of the big ones that fill your whole hand, their side armor poking your palm so you have to really want to hold on.

  My mom—this was in an abandoned carport—so willing to step into that hot shade, but already holding the back of her hand to her mouth as well. Her nose.

  What I thought was the miracle of birth was maggots boiling up from the split belly of the horny toad.

  My mom laughed and cried at the same time, kind of, and carried me away, even when I fought to go back, watch some more.

  Ten years later, moving pipe back in Greenwood, where there should really be horny toads, big ones like you used to see in aquariums in doctor’s offices, I only clearly remember seeing one. It had spent the night close to the aluminum pipe because the pipe had soaked up all of yesterday’s heat, I think. When I lifted the pipe, the horny toad just looked up at me, craning its head, its horns almost touching its back.

  “Hey, you,” I said to it, still balancing the pipe, ready to walk it twelve rows forward, shift it in with the last until the latch caught.

  The horny toad just looked up at me.

  “Don’t worry,” I told it, “I’m different now.”

  At six-thirty in the morning you talk to everything.

  It just kept staring up at me.

  I nodded bye to it, set the pipe then came back for the next, and the next, and, maybe four joints later, finally remembered that horny toad.

  Out in the dirt like that, exposed, it was hawk food. I guessed a hawk would eat one, anyway.

  So I went back, couldn’t find it, was finally forced to go footprint by footprint in the wet dirt, my keys out so I could drop them if I heard a truck, say they were what I’d been looking for.

  Then there it was, flattened under one of my heels, driven deep because I’d been carrying fifty pounds of pipe.

  I didn’t say anything to it.

  It was one of the fast ones, too. It could have run.

  I was by the Phillips place then, and didn’t have time for this kind of stuff, but did it anyway: buried that horny toad up in the pasture, the burial ground, in a hole I had to kick with my heel.

  There would be more, and more.

  And I’m lying again, can’t help it.

  That with the cars, it wasn’t my first betrayal.

  The first was in that square little white house I don’t remember, I think. It’s the only one that sort of matches, anyway. I’m maybe three here, could be four. In the kitchen on my knees, building a flat pyramid of blocks, the kind with letters all over them.

  It’s taken me all morning.

  The reason I’ve had all morning: my mom and dad have been screaming up and down the hall, into the living room. Doors slamming, brushes flying into walls, the dogs outside putting up a wall of sound.

  This is back when it used to be like that. It was something about whose fault it was. How it had changed everything. How it didn’t—they’d just been kids, for God’s sake. Kids.

  Or, that’s what I have them say now, anyway. What fits.

  I don’t know, though. Back then it was just noise.

  And then it draws near, all at once: my mom at the living-room doorway of the kitchen, her face a mess, my dad at the other doorway, the one that opens onto the hall.

  I’m perfectly between them.

  My mom says my dad’s name in a new way, and I look up to him, have to crane my neck to do it.

  What he does here is smile. Blow something like a laugh out his nose, but not. Definitely not.

  What he does here is step forward once, twice, and on the third step, his boot crashes directly through my pyramid, kicks through so the blocks explode all over the kitchen, letters on the counter, in the sink, my mom covering her face from them but reaching for me too.

  It’s the kind of dramatic he wants, and that’s where that scene cuts off sharp.

  That same year, though, another picks up: I’m with my Uncle Jackson. He’s picked me up from the house, let me stand in the seat of his truck beside him, is taking me nowhere particular. Just away.

  It’s perfect.

  Finally we end up at this road over towards Stanton that’s blacktop now but was dirt then. His friends are there—he’s still in high school, has these velvety skeleton posters in his room that terrify me—and they’re all racing their cars.

  I have about four seconds of this, total.

  It’s enough.

  I’m standing behind the two cars set up to go next, and then their tires start spinning and the world goes brown and loud, and the only thing I can hold onto is my uncle’s hand.

  It’s the least scared I’ve ever been.

  ***

  Because Stacy Monahans’ funeral’s just in Lamesa, nobody from Greenwood starts heading that way until after lunch.

  As for the investigation—investigations—there’s been zero progress: any one of a hundred made-up people could have started the fire, for any of a thousand reasons, though there’s still the rumor that the police have a bagful of guilty cigarette butts, and, though shooting into a moving bus is a very punishable crime, the Sheriff’s office finally has no slug to match with any shot-through medals, no gun to get more slugs from, and, aside from that, no real motive.

  What they’ve tried to make stick, indirectly—they don’t say this in Belinda King’s living room, but still, people know—is that it was mostly King cotton that burned, and it was one King in specific who got a hospital wristband on his other wrist; Rob King’s first surgery is scheduled for the second week in February.

  And if the pumper Steve Grimes didn’t start the fires, just for general mischief, then yeah, who else could have but the offseason basketball players? As a joke, maybe. Their way of telling Fidel to kiss it, that they hated this running through the cotton bullshit.

  Or, at the end of December, right after Grimes was cleared, that was the thinking anyway.

  Geoff Koenig getting shot changed all of that, though.

  Now the basketball team was holy, the underdog, had never done anything wrong. Won even when they lost, just because they played.

  If Geoff had been killed, though? If that animated bullet had slapped him in the temple instead of the shoulder?

  Yeah.

  The thinking at the Sheriff’s office, which had been at some point out-loud thinking, was that if Geoff Koenig had been shot like that, then the shooter, his misguided revenge would have been complete, right?

  One of the players who had put the things in motion that got this shooter’s dad hurt, that player would have paid.

  Jonas hadn’t gone back for the re
st of the tournament, no.

  Where he was, mostly, was in his dad’s shop.

  The lesson he was learning was engine maintenance.

  Instead of using a manual to take his little 110 motor apart, put it back together, his dad was making him do it by trial and error. At the end of the day, when it wouldn’t start again, his dad would lick his lips, nod, and ask Jonas if he’d scraped this gasket all the way flat, or if he’d made sure that valve was clean before tapping it back into place.

  The first day the job had smelled like sweet tea.

  Now it just tasted like hate.

  For Shelly Graham. For Ginger Koenig, and for Melissa Simms, who’d been part of it too, and for Geoff himself, for sitting in that bus seat like an idiot. Leonard, for being in that part of the road at that bad moment. Coach Harrison, for thinking they even had a chance at that tournament without Tommy Moore to rain his special brand of fire down on Iraan and the rest of them.

  Hate for Tommy Moore, for not fighting back.

  This one Jonas dwelled on, was already preparing for in his head: some rough-handed farmer pulling him off a bale someday, and how he, Jonas, wasn’t going to just ball up like Tommy Moore.

  Jonas was going to come off that bale swinging, until the deputies have to pull him off of Rob King.

  Or whoever.

  But all sons think this, yeah. Dream it. Never do it.

  Another scene: this kid is sitting on his dad’s shoulders. He’s five or so. They’re walking down the packed-dirt driveway of the house where the dad grew up. Just going down to the road for some reason, when, before the sound even, the thunder that rattles their teeth, there’s this sudden spike of light standing in the ground past the fence from them, just across Cloverdale, maybe on it, even.

  The kid’s looking right into it, too.

  A dome of color swells up where it hits, holds for a flash, burns itself into his head, and then they’re running, the kid’s dad pulling him down into his arms so they won’t be so tall, and the kid, the whole time they’re running he’s just bouncing in his dad’s arms, and looking behind them, around his dad, at the flash. Thinking what if they’d already been down there.

  Not quite eight years later, head swimming with comic panels, this kid will stand out on the concrete block porch of the house they’re living in, the one his grandfather’s letting them use until they find their feet again, moneywise.

  What the kid’s out there for is the storm, the sky pulsing with light, the horses screaming back in the pens.

  And he’s wet, and it’s cold, and his mom’s calling his name from inside, but instead of answering he just reaches higher up into the sky with the chrome car antenna he’s been saving, and this kid, what he’s doing is waiting to become somebody else.

  By the time that happens, he’ll have pretty much forgotten who he’d ever been in the first place.

  It won’t mean 1985 and 1986 never happened, though.

  Just that they didn’t have to.

  Chapter Nine

  This is what Larry Monahans will tell you, if you can ever get up the nerve to call him:

  • that it’s funny hearing from you, after all this time

  • that—what’s it run a person to hunt up there?

  • that he hates talking on the phone like this

  • that no, he doesn’t read much

  • that he doesn’t do much rocket science either

  • that—what’s this bullshit about ‘Monahans?’ Some kind of joke?

  What he won’t say, ever:

  • that it was his irrigation spillover Stacy hydroplaned on that night

  • that it was two hours before he got to a phone to call in about her

  • that maybe that’s why he hates carry-phones—for what they didn’t do for him that morning

  • that, still, he was maybe the fourth person in Dawson County to get one installed in his truck that year.

  What you know but won’t have the nerve to ask:

  • that before the insurance adjustor could get there the following week, Larry Monahans had already scraped a ditch as deep into the earth as his backhoe could reach, and then, using the back of that yellow shovel like a huge wrist, nudged a Subaru he didn’t have title to over into the ditch, packed the dirt back in over it

  • that the insurance adjustor was convinced to write his report all the same

  • that Daniel Gonzales, who had owned that Subaru, got a sudden urge to move in early 1986, before school was over, never mind that, according to the yearbook, track was his sport

  • that Daniel Gonzales’ uncle caught that urge to move as well

  • that a lot of Mexicans maybe did

  • that Larry Monahans still farms that same field Stacy died in, won’t let it rest even for a year

  • that it’s the cleanest field in the county

  • that Gwen, in 1986, she’d just been waiting for Stacy to graduate, so she could pack her bags

  • that she’s still waiting.

  What you’ll hear yourself saying, and cringe from:

  • that—is that burger place still there right when you come into town? Old red and white one?

  • that yeah, you know the Sky-Vue. You saw Footloose there once, a family tr—

  • that Wednesday’ll work, sure

  • that—that the laughter is what you’ll remember, when you remember the way that it was.

  That last part’ll just be in your head, though. It’s been there for more than half your life already, is sometimes the only piece of verse you can remember.

  As for who wrote it, maybe Gwen Monahans would know. It’s from the program for her daughter’s funeral. The script everybody got handed at the gate, so they’d know what to do, when to do it.

  It didn’t help.

  ***

  The morning of the funeral, Jonas is standing in the doorway of Rob King’s shop, watching Earl Holbrook ease past what used to be their pump house, his truck stepping up onto the CRP grass like a horse with tender hooves, testing every step.

  Earl’s arm is out the window, his nice jacket already on. The passenger seat’s empty, a black dress for Sissy hanging from his gun rack in her place because she’s been in Lamesa since the first night of the tournament.

  When Earl first nosed his truck up their road, Jonas had stepped out to meet him, to jump in back—Earl had to be there to fix the basketball goal, finally—but Belinda rapped on the kitchen window, shook her head no.

  Because Jonas had already promised not to get his good pants dirty before the funeral—not to make this day any worse than it already was—he’d slouched back to his cinderblock in the shop, stared at his threewheeler’s stupid, stupid engine, exploding the diagram of it in his head, trying to make sure he hadn’t forgotten some vital step, some essential part.

  He knows better than to touch it with anything but memory, though.

  Inside, his brothers are suffering the blow dryer, getting lectures about proper behavior.

  Jonas almost has to smile about that.

  “She make you promise too?” Rob King asks, suddenly in the shop.

  “He need help?” Jonas tilts his head to the back of the section. To Earl Holbrook.

  Rob King focuses out there, shrugs. “He’ll be all right,” he says. “And don’t think you’re getting out of riding with us up there.”

  Rob King smooths his grin down.

  “How far is it?” Jonas asks.

  “What?”

  “To Lamesa.”

  “Hour. Not even.”

  “So we’ll be back before dark?”

  “You want to ride it again, don’t you?” Rob King says.

  Jonas shrugs. He wants to ride that 110 faster than anybody’s ever gone, yeah. But he doesn’t say it.

  Rob King’s suit jacket, it’s draped over his slinged arm.

  “Did you know her?” Jonas says then, reaching out as if to touch the Honda’s plug wire, the last piece he snugged back on, becau
se that was where it all started. You have to remember those kinds of things.

  “Who?”

  “Stacy. The Monahans girl.”

  Rob King studies Jonas hard.

  “You know to be careful on water like that, right?” he finally says. “You can’t trust it.”

  “Her car was too light,” Jonas repeats. It’s what everybody’s been saying about the wreck.

  “She was your cousin,” Rob King says, looking back to Earl Holbrook again. “Second, I guess.”

  “It was like this for Uncle Sterling?” Jonas says then, pure ambush. “When he…you know?”

  Pure ambush if he’d actually said it, I mean.

  Rob King reaches across to the bench grinder, spins the stone wheel.

  “Yeah,” he says, or would have, watching the wheel slow, “yeah, it was just like this, pretty much.”

  Lies. All of it.

  ***

  This is piecemeal, secondhand, polluted, cleaned-up then tore down, worse, but still, it’s the only way it could have gone, too. The way it had to have been.

  The morning the wrecker delivered Sterling King’s truck back to Arthur King’s house, deposited it back by the silver fuel tanks for some reason, like that’s all it needed, another tank of gas, Arthur King and his wife didn’t even know the wrecker had been there.

  It was November, stripping season, so Arthur King hadn’t been home that night to get the phone call.

  Like his nephew an hour north and years and years later, Arthur King would be one of the first in his county to get a phone wired into the dash of his main truck.

  That’s all after the fact, though, after he woke one morning to smoke in the air, bellowed back inside for his wife to call the fire station, to call them all; after everything could have gone different, maybe, if she had called, let somebody in a fireproof jacket be the one to find Tommy Moore up on that module.

  But it wasn’t her fault, either, what Rob King had done to Tommy Moore that morning.