Growing Up Dead in Texas

by Stephen Graham Jones

  The best part of her had died seventeen years before with the phone call from Odessa. She hadn’t even been able to call the rest of her kids, all so many years younger than Sterling. She couldn’t even make her way out to the turnrow of whatever field Arthur was in, flash him down with her headlights.

  In 1968, Arthur’s mother was still alive, too. Living with them. Pushing her wooden walker from room to room, a chamber pot under her bed because that’s the way she still remembered things being.

  Days, she was generally okay, but during the night she wandered, scraping her walker’s legs across the floor. It had gotten regular enough that Arthur had tacked down the curls in the linoleum where it met the carpet so she wouldn’t topple over.

  The night Sterling died, she scraped all the way back into the closet of the master bedroom.

  It was where Cecilia King was hiding after the phone call. After the news. She had crawled back behind the dresses she cycled through each Sunday, a cycle twenty-two deep now, so deep that nobody could even claim it was a cycle, really. But Cecilia knew, kept careful count.

  When her mother-in-law found her, Cecilia had the doubled-over hem of one of her twenty-two dresses in her mouth, was trying to swallow it.

  And you can’t think bad of her for that, please.

  I remember in a department store once, during the Gulf War, a woman, obviously a mom, getting a call on her bulky cell phone, and then falling to the ground by the escalator but running with her feet at the same time so she was just pushing around on the tile floor, the phone still pressed to the side of her head, a sound coming from her mouth I don’t want to ever hear again.

  Nobody knew what to do with her either.

  But Mrs. King, with her daughter-in-law, she tried, held out the only thing she had, the main thing.

  Mouse’s medals.

  Over the years, Cecilia King would come to think they’d been her son’s. That Mouse and Sterling were the same person, somehow.

  And they kind of were, I guess.

  But she couldn’t tell anybody.

  Rob King, though.

  He had to have, at some point.

  None of this makes sense otherwise.

  And the truck, the one the wrecker delivered.

  When Arthur King got back from being on the stripper all night, because Sterling had never shown up for his shift, he saw Sterling’s truck back there by the tanks, and coasted past the house. Just to ask, as calmly as he could manage, What the hell, son?

  Except then Sterling wasn’t in the truck.

  And the truck’s back window, it was mostly gone.

  There are certain rear bumpers a person should never have to step up onto, so they can see into a bed.

  Or, no: there are certain bumpers some people should have to step up onto, so that they can look down on this bed they’ve made.

  Arthur King screws three garden hoses together, his hands shaking around the brass connectors so it takes longer than it should, then lowers the tailgate of the truck, sprays what’s in there out and keeps spraying, the mist all around him rising in a cloud.

  An hour later he goes into his house by the back door, leaves his boots by the mat and walks through the house, finally finds his mother.

  She’s on the train track rug in the boys’ room, the two youngest sleeping in their twin beds, the other one suddenly standing in the doorway in his underwear and a t-shirt, bleary-eyed.

  “Dad?” he says.

  This is Robert.

  “Go to sleep,” Arthur tells him, “it’s too early,” and guides him back.

  It takes him another half hour to locate his wife.

  She’s in the garage now, back in the corner.

  “Cecilia,” he says, holding a hand out for her, and she comes out too fast for him to stop, is hitting him in the chest over and over with the sides of her fists.

  He raises his chin, closes his eyes, wishes with all earnestness that she wasn’t so frail.

  ***

  Telephones.

  This isn’t a book about Hot Wheels, but a book about calling people.

  The phone rings at ten minutes past eleven, fifty minutes before Rob King’s said they have to leave to pay their respects. The call shakes the whole shop, it feels like, so that Jonas jumps. It has to be loud, though, if Rob’s going to hear it when he’s working.

  In a novel, Jonas would find a way to listen in, or would step out onto the apron of concrete in front of the shop, so that at the same time he could see his dad, leaning against the metal wall by his workbench, and his mom in the kitchen, listening in, and read the conversation by their faces.

  I wish.

  Instead, Jonas’ father hangs the phone up gently, the hand he was holding it with gloved because he wasn’t able to stop spinning that grinder wheel.

  He bites the glove off, drops it onto the bench. Spits the grit from his tongue, that black taste you always tell yourself to remember’s going to happen.

  “What?” Jonas says, ready for some reason to run again. To get his brothers somehow, in the red wagon maybe, and just take off through the grass.

  Rob King doesn’t answer, just shakes his head like he should have known.

  On the way through the door he clamps his left hand onto Jonas’ shoulder, pulls him along, to the house.

  Jonas shrugs his shoulder away, but follows.

  Belinda’s waiting for him in the kitchen, a white pen between her fingers that at first looks like a cigarette.

  “Who was it?” she says.

  Rob King looks around like it’s not the kind of thing just anybody can be hearing.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Jonas says, angling his eyes hard to his mom, for support.

  “What?” she says again to Rob.

  “Pete,” he says. Just that.

  Belinda stares at him, and the way she’s doing it, this is an old fight. One they don’t have time for right now.

  Not in front of Jonas, anyway.

  “Mr. Manson?” Jonas says.

  “Peter Rabbit,” Rob King says, his eyes on Belinda the whole time.

  “Goddammit,” Belinda says then, and Jonas feels the blood all wash from his face.

  Not because in Sunday school he’s been taught, and absolutely believes, that taking the Lord’s name in vain is the worst of the bad—his mind filling the moment the teacher said that, filling with profanity he didn’t even know he had—but because this word, this swear, it’s coming from his mom.

  Rob King, though, he smiles, hearing it. Like now things are getting interesting.

  “That was Dwayne Jenkins,” he says, hitting each syllable, each letter. “Deputy?”

  “The one you hit, yeah.”

  Rob King shrugs like that’s nothing, is already gone. That maybe they’ve been hitting each other as hard as they could since fourth grade or so. Doesn’t mean a thing.

  “I’m not going to play this,” Belinda says, scooping her earrings from the marble ashtray by the phone, angling her head over for them.

  “You don’t have to,” Rob says, “not anymore.”

  This doesn’t stop her forcing her earrings home, but it does settle her eyes on him.

  “Joney,” she says to Jonas, lifting her eyebrows to the back of the house. To his brothers, maybe. That this is where he leaves the room.

  “But, Mom—”

  “But nothing,” Rob says, not ever looking over at Jonas.

  Jonas sulks out, down the hall. Slams his door.

  Though he can’t see his parents anymore now, still, his hand to the knob so he can scoot in if he needs to, dive for his bed, he hears enough:

  Belinda: What do you mean we don’t have to anymore?

  Rob: I mean maybe it wasn’t …

  Probably a head nod here. Down the hall at a certain closed door.

  Belinda: He already told us he didn’t do it.

  Rob: Yeah, well. Telling’s one thing, this is another.

  Belinda: Who, then?

  Some crud
e pantomime of a gut, a belly, maybe.

  Belinda, hushing her voice: Pete?

  Most likely a smile here.

  No, a grin. A slow grin, Rob King milking the moment.

  Like he’s been waiting for it for years.

  And who knows.

  As for the rest, this isn’t all from what they say in the kitchen before the funeral that day, but that’s just because they didn’t have to say it all, already knew most of it.

  Pete Manson.

  Without physical evidence, the Sheriff’s office had fallen back to financials, to see if that would supply something along the lines of motive for the arson.

  Bingo.

  Pete Manson was going under, pretty much the same way cartoon cats drowned: holding his hand up once, somebody save me; twice, help; then the third time: later, dudes.

  And, just as important, though Arthur King had lost twenty modules to the fire, there’d been two strips of land leased there as well, with five modules packed down at the end of the turnrows.

  Two of them were Earl Holbrook’s, his only plot. He was either trying to get a toe-hold back into farming or he was farming just enough that he could still run farm tags on his trucks. Or just because it was in his blood, these plants.

  That’s just twenty-two of the modules, though.

  The other three? Pete Manson’s.

  The idea—this was all later—was that he’d started setting his planters with odd skips in them so that, everything else being the same, Rooster might opt to just go ahead and let him lease those strips of land again, seeing as how they already had his signature rows up and down them. It was a way of holding on, of grubbing for just one more year.

  But—burn his own crop?

  This is key.

  Once you’ve packed your module and pulled the builder off it and called the gin for your number to spraypaint on the end, it’s insured by the gin. If it rains before the driver gets there, it’s their fault, and the gin pays out. But there’s some grey area there, too: if the module collapses before the gin’s truck gets there, then that’s your fault— you didn’t pack it tight enough. Or, in Pete’s case, you’d packed it with a module builder seeping hydraulic fluid from every piston, a module builder with walls that weren’t Death Star at all, that were leaving loose, crumbly modules.

  Even back then, Pete was gambling, yeah.

  But he was smart, too. He’d talked his agent into letting him pay a bit extra for a month or two, to put some insurance on top of what the gin would cover. And they did it without inspecting his module builder, even. And, better yet, if something happened to these modules, not only would the gin pay out—and, for fire, they would—but his side-insurance would as well, and at last year’s price per bale, which had been the highest in years.

  So there was motive, yeah. Where there’s money, there’s motive.The clincher was the two cigarette butts the Sheriff was finally letting out of the evidence locker.

  They were Chesterfields. Pete’s brand. Documented as his when he crushed one out in the road the day of the shooting, when he was looking for the magic bullet. When he crushed one out and the Sheriff stepped over, kept his boot on it until Pete was back in the ditch.

  Maybe inconsequential, considering Pete Manson was working those fields, had been giving Arthur King a hand when needed, and everybody knew he smoked, left his butts behind him like bread crumbs. However, add to this the insurance motive, how that insurance could float his farm another year, and then add to that that he was the first truck on the scene the day of the fire, and, well.

  It might be for a jury to decide. For some Midland lawyer, fresh from tennis with Martin Ledbetter, to shrug and present the facts with all due reluctance, like he’s just saying what these fine, sequestered people are already thinking: that, when Pete Manson pulled Rob King off poor Tommy Moore that fateful morning, a very decisive act, mind, a very decisive act from a man usually content to watch whatever goings-on he’s presented with, that—how could he have been so decisive, how could hehave been so certain Rob King was beating the wrong boy, right?

  Unless of course he knew something everybody else didn’t.

  ***

  This still isn’t the funeral, either.

  But we’re getting there.

  The house, Rob and Belinda King’s cul-de-sac cut into the middle of a field of what had been CRP. That stands for Conservation Reserve Program. Probably something I should have said way earlier, yeah.

  This isn’t my native mode, though, non-fiction.

  Each page, I want to quit.

  To keep the names and dates straight— properly crooked— it’s taken sheets and sheets of scratch paper.

  A reader not from Greenwood, reading this, maybe it’ll make some kind of sense, won’t feel like trying to hold too many marbles in your hand.

  Somebody who was there, though: I’m sorry.

  All the names you know, they’re attached to the wrong people. They’re hiding the right people.

  Rocket science, yeah.

  But we’re almost there, now.

  What you need to do here is picture Jonas in that hall, that morning before the funeral. His hand is still to the knob, his white shirt hanging on the other side of that door, and probably buttoned up besides.

  He’s prepared for the trouble he’s going to be in, too, when he has to push the door open, dive for the bed, unroll a comic book so it’s almost to the end.

  He just forgot to put his shirt on, Mom, okay?

  If he’s smart, what he would add there is a “goddammit,” to deflect her suspicion— direct her anger.

  If he could even say that word, I mean.

  Instead, he’s likely to say he was just thinking about Stacy Monahans. From the reunion that time, when the Kings used to have them down at the Greenwood Elementary, and the men would bring shoes for the basketball court and the women would sit in the cafeteria talking, the smaller kids underfoot, the older ones running through the whole school exactly like they own it. Larry Monahans just standing in the entry with his cousins, the three of them sharing a red cup to spit in.

  That first reunion she’s at— the only— she’s twelve, about, Stacy.

  It’s the first year for them and the Holbrooks both.

  But Earl, instead of talking to his brother-in-law in the entry, he’s in the gym, lobbing flat balls at the basket. Looking for a broom to get the ones down that stay up there, wedged against the back of the rim and the backboard. Jonas there too, sailing shots from the free-throw line, about as far as he can shoot from.

  And, I say it’s the first year they made the trip, but of course there’s more to it than the hour drive.

  Just as Arthur King, once upon a time, had quietly absorbed his brother Mouse’s quarter of the land, thereby doubling his own, so had he reabsorbed the land that had been intended for Sterling.

  Except, unlike Mouse, Sterling had left a couple of kids that would have been in that line of inheritance.

  Never mind that Sterling’s widow Macinaw—a name I’ve never heard again, and maybe just some version or mishearing of her birth certificate name—that she was already married to a farmer up in Lamesa. That her kids were taking his name now.

  But they were still Kings. Even if they wouldn’t understand what that meant for another year or two.

  It hit Sissy different than it hit Larry, yeah. Hit him over and over and over, until he started hitting back.

  So, there was that.

  But, here they are too, at the reunion for the first time. One a farmer himself, the kind who doesn’t smile a lot or ever take his hat off, the other a farmer’s wife, that one even living back in Greenwood, since her husband had put down roots in high school.

  The girl who would have been Sterling King’s first grandchild standing on her toes at the water fountain, trying to keep her face dry. Stacy Monahans.

  It’s the main memory Jonas has of her, of her trying to reach that sputtering arc of water. It’s what he plans to mayb
e use if Belinda goes into a rage about his shirt still being on the door.

  He never has to, though.

  Just when his parents’ voices are starting to get loud and lower at the same time, his brother opens the bathroom door behind him, and—this is all so fast—wails it down the hall: “Mo-om!”

  Belinda King is there in an instant, Jonas’ hand still to the knob, him figuring out he’s caught, her understanding that he’s been listening in, when Rob King says it, from somewhere Jonas can’t see: “Lin.”

  It’s the tone that turns her around.

  Jonas follows.

  His dad is at the kitchen window. Belinda now too.

  Jonas doesn’t have to go that far, can see through the sliding glass door fine.

  It’s the Sheriff. Just sitting there in his car.

  Rob King steps onto the back porch and Jonas is about to follow when Belinda stops him, her hand on his shoulder, like pulling him out of a fast road.

  “But—” Jonas tries.

  Belinda doesn’t let him go.

  Rob King takes his time making it out there, turning his face to Cloverdale for a moment, maybe to track a truck, heading east to cut north too, like they need to be doing as well. A couple sitting on either side of that bench seat, uncomfortable in their clothes, a covered dish between them.

  Because the Sheriff doesn’t stand from his car— he’s the only one in it— Rob King has to lean down to the window, his loose jacket like a cape in the wind.

  In answer to whatever the Sheriff’s asking, Rob looks all around, shakes his head, and the Sheriff stares straight ahead, like he expected no less here.

  He’s not stupid either, though.

  He tips the brim of his hat up, then, with that same hand, reaches out the window, waves Jonas over.

  Jonas steps back, now.

  “Mom?”

  Rob King stands, looks over as well. Leans over to spit but never drops his eyes.

  “Mom?” Jonas says again, holding her wrist now, keeping her hand on his shoulder, but Rob King nods, his eyes telling her something Jonas can’t crack into. It gets her to slide the door back.

  “It’ll be all right,” she says, taking her hand back, but Jonas can hear the waver in her voice.

  “Go,” she says to him when he looks up to be sure, so he does, stiff-legging it out across the packed dirt, past the blown-up pump house, all the way to the Sheriff’s car. Just finds himself there all at once.