Growing Up Dead in Texas

by Stephen Graham Jones

  What it is is a little lead slug, a magic bullet all deformed, stretched out like a finger.

  Pete Manson thins his lips, shakes his head no.

  “Pete Manson,” the Sheriff starts, his tone slipping down into Miranda gear, but now Pete’s dislodging him, shaking him off like nothing. Taking a full step away from the rights he’s being read here.

  “I didn’t do it!” he says, no joke now, no smile, kind of blubbering, even.

  Silence.

  Nothing but.

  Just the basketball team, stepping in front of Geoff Koenig, probably not even aware what they’re doing.

  “I didn’t,” Pete says again, looking around again at all the faces, his jury for today, and settling on one in particular, her eyes hot back at him, her hand too tight around her son’s, and then she breathes in and steps forward, her voice not cracking at all, because she’s been practicing as well: “He didn’t,” she says. “He was with me that morning.”

  Belinda King.

  A whole different kind of silence now.

  The Sheriff looks over at her.

  “You sure, Lindy?” he says. “Haven’t got your dates messed around there?”

  Because it doesn’t make sense, her giving alibi for Pete Manson, when Pete Manson can take her son’s place on the gallows. To her son, it especially doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t she want everybody looking to Pete for the fire? That way nobody’s looking to Jonas for Geoff Koenig. It’s stupid. He wants to tug her arm and tell her, to press her hand like during a prayer, to make eyes. To run away.

  When he looks up to her, though, she pulls her hand away. She wants to be alone in this crowd.

  Or she doesn’t want to take anybody down with her.

  Across from her, Pete Manson, smiling.

  “What about this?” the Sheriff says, holding the slug up.

  “A present for her,” Pete says, nodding to Belinda, and now she closes her eyes, doesn’t even open them when Rob King steps forward, finishes what Larry Monahans started, slamming his cast into Pete Manson’s face.

  Surgery three, yeah.

  Because he’s cuffed, Pete Manson can’t stand up, just rolls on the ground and bellows, dirt all in his face, his hair.

  Rob King steps forward to follow Pete down but now Larry Monahans is stopping him. Blood blooming on the white cast. Larry Monahans gives Rob King his hat, and Rob King sets it back on with his left hand, the dust rising from it as he does, his breath coming in heaves.

  “You stupid shit,” the Sheriff says to him then, to Rob King.

  Rob King doesn’t hear, is only looking to Belinda, who’s not looking anywhere anymore, just down. Into her eyelids. Into a whole different decade.

  Somebody helps Pete Manson up and he shrugs them off, says it so everybody knows what he’s going to do here— “Robert!”—and charges headfirst forward for Rob King but there’s too many people now, enough that they don’t hear Jonas King at first. Just his voice, still high like a kid’s.

  What’s he saying? Trying to say?

  Again, the quiet.

  Everybody looking down to him.

  “Say again, son?” the Sheriff offers.

  Jonas King looks side to side, blinks long, then opens his eyes, looks to his dad, and opens his mouth—

  “I did it.”

  It doesn’t come from Jonas King’s mouth.

  The crowd parts again.

  At the end of that hall of bodies is Earl Holbrook, worrying his hat in his hands. He’s staring at Jonas. “I did it,” he says again, nodding over to Geoff Koenig.

  “Bullshit.” This from Larry Monahans.

  Earl nods, won’t look to Larry or his sister. Just Jonas.

  “No,” Jonas says, the shriek rising in his voice now, “no! It couldn’t have—he’s just—”

  Earl shrugs it true, though.

  Holds his wrists out, for the cuffs still on Pete.

  Later, in court, his story will be that he didn’t mean to, that he had been out in the field, was just holding the gun on that moving bus, saying what if, the crosshairs of his scope on no player in particular, no side glass at all, but then the gun went off somehow, just bucked in his hand. It wasn’t a .22 at all either, like the first hole in the window suggested, but a .22-250, a centerfire round that’s been around since 1937, was popularized just in time for World War II, and didn’t need animation at all to punch through a bus.

  As to why the jury will believe Earl Holbrook when he says all this: his two modules, his thirty or so bales there, they were the only ones uninsured.

  He was gin manager, sure, but that was just until he could get it back together again farming-wise. Something he’d never be able to do now with this hit, this fire. And the land he was paying a quarter of his crop for? By rights, it should have been his wife’s by inheritance, should have been his. He shouldn’t have to be out scrapping, living on a shoestring.

  It doesn’t mean he pulled that trigger on purpose, though.

  Just that he had reason to.

  It’ll be enough. Twice over.

  “Earlybird?” Larry Monahans says across the crowd to Earl, and Earl just nods, once: yes, he killed Stacy Monahans. Your daughter, your only one. Yes, yes, yes.

  Larry Monahans shakes his head no, no, it couldn’t have been, it can’t be, and the first step he takes forward like he has to, because he is who he is, Rob King’s already there holding him back, but this time it takes all the suits, and more besides, until finally a shotgun blast silences them all.

  Cue Arthur King at his truck, his stock set against his thigh, the barrel wisping smoke.

  “Now then,” he says, and somehow Stacy Monahans gets put in the ground that afternoon, and that’s all it says in the Lamesa Press-Reporter: that services were held for the daughter of Larry and Gwen Monahans, and that she would be dearly missed.

  They got the last part right, anyway.

  Chapter Ten

  The date, it’s 1971.

  The year Bowie’s album Hunky Dory was released, probably never played in all of Midland or Martin Counties even once.

  Buried on it, the 1973 hit “Life on Mars?”

  A line from it: “to my mother, my dog, and clowns.”

  That was almost the epigraph for this, until I remembered Betty Underwood. I don’t know if she’ll remember saying what she said to me that day or not. If Ms. Godfrey will even tell her she’s in this one.

  So many things I don’t know, really.

  But some I do.

  Or, I know who to ask, anyway, though I promised myself not to. That I was going to do this without her, not pull her back into it all again, just let it all be over, done with, gone.

  I’m sorry.

  1971.

  There has to be an explanation for Belinda lying for Pete Manson at Stacy Monahan’s funeral.

  It has to have been a lie, I mean.

  Never mind that for proof the next day, she offered the Sheriff a crumpled pack of Chesterfields from on top of the kitchen cabinet, where she was keeping them until Pete came around again so her boys wouldn’t get into them. Rob sleeping at the hospital the night before and not home yet, maybe ever, provided his tractor never runs out of diesel.

  1971, though.

  Muhammad Ali goes down in Madison Square Garden, but gets back up. Jim Morrison goes down in Paris, doesn’t get back up. Evil Knievel jumps nineteen cars at once. All in the Family starts its eight-year run. Vietnam, Intel, Walt Disney World. Duane Allman dies. JFK’s still dead, Nixon in his place. Tornadoes, explosions, hostages. Somebody drives something on the moon.

  None of that matters here.

  All we’ll need here, we’ve already seen it: kids, a truck, some beer, maybe a cigarette or two to make them feel grown up.

  The truck’s a Ford, probably, one surely parted-out by now but probably old even then, the kind nobody’s going to care much if it’s gone for the day, so long as it makes it back to the barn at some point.

  And thi
s is not at all where this was supposed to go, ever.

  But she was always telling me, right?

  This is the day Pete Manson’s little brother goes under the truck.

  Her hands when she tells me are nervous, her fingers always pinching at the air, like trying to find her next breath.

  We’re on the back porch of a different house, in a different part of Texas altogether, but, still, squint your eyes right and the CRP comes back, stands up through the concrete and the asphalt, and—there’s no other way to say it—it beckons.

  When I was twelve, and all the years around it, I could always take off through it when I needed to, just run until I fell down, the grasshoppers lifting up in a cloud of legs to take my place, keep moving the direction I was, rattle off into the distance for me.

  It’s what I want to do now, too.

  So I can go back, whisper it to Jonas, make all the years between different? Tell Rob, get him to come in off the tractor finally?

  I don’t know.

  ***

  As far as everybody was concerned in late January, the only reason Earl Holbrook was sticking to his story, that he was the one who shot Geoff Koenig, not Jonas, it was that if he ever stepped out from under the Sheriff’s wing again, Larry Monahans, brother-in-law or not, would plant him where he stood. Simple as that.

  In the Midland Reporter-Telegram, the trial coverage doesn’t say anything about the fire, really, or about Stacy Monahans either. All that matters to them is what they call a “hunting accident involving a school bus,” Earl Holbrook’s .22-250 being of course a known varmint rifle, rabbits being no friend of any farmer.

  It was the defense Earl Holbrook’s public defender— Earl refused to bankrupt Sissy even more, just for him, though that in itself’s a statement too, that she should have had land to sell, to buy him a proper defense—kept insisting upon, except, when Earl took the stand against all advice, he was quiet for a long time, getting his words together, the judge not even prompting him, and then he said it, what he’d been saying all along: that, yes, he was aiming at the bus; that, yes, his cotton had burned, with no recompense coming; that, yes, though he was at every game, still, at the time he did pretty much believe that those basketball players were the only ones who could have been responsible; that, no, he didn’t remember pulling the trigger, not really. Just the rifle, bucking in his hands, but even that was slight, as heavy as the gun was, as light as the round was.

  And, yes, he had helped the Sheriff’s office search for the slug that day under something like false pretenses, but, no, there was no collusion of any kind with Pete Manson. Pete Manson wasn’t holding that slug over his head, nothing as Falcon Crest as all that. Earl had just made a mistake, plain and simple. And then compounded it with more mistakes, each step no different than the last, until he was at the funeral that day in his best jacket, looking down on his only niece in a box.

  Which is where he leaves it, more or less.

  But that’s hardly where it ends.

  What he doesn’t say is what he was doing that morning before the funeral: putting lock washers on either side of the two large u-bolts holding a backboard to a thick rusted pipe set in the ground some five or six feet. When the backboard, really, had hardly even been that loose.

  But the pipe, the backboard.

  The Sheriff’s department was so blind.

  The year before, playing hide-and-seek with his cousins at his grandparents’, Jonas had, at the last possible moment before “100,” decided his perfect place behind the riding mower wasn’t so perfect after all and took off along the side of the house, rounded the corner just as the “ready or not” rang out behind him. Just as his cousin Audrey was clomping through the bushes, having heard Jonas running.

  Out in the peach trees, Jonas could see his little brother trying to stand skinnier than he was behind a trunk, and, in the tall grass of a plow that was just getting shredded around now, another shirt.

  And the footsteps are so close to him now, and Audrey, she’s two years younger, sure, but she’s faster than any of them, and there’s nowhere to go. Back here it’s just grass and the dogs’ water bowl where they found the coachwhip last year and, and—

  No time.

  Desperate, giving up, Jonas looks straight up.

  The roof’s too high, of course—he’s in fifth grade, still has to sneak up on top of the air conditioner first, which he’s under strict orders never to do again—but projecting out from the roof like spokes, like the rays of light saints wear in paintings, are these handle-sized arms of wood. Probably stylish in 1960-whatever, and about to be again.

  Jonas gathers himself, jumps higher than he ever has before, and hooks onto one of the low-hanging handles of wood with his right hand, manages to swing his left hand onto the next, and then pulls his body up flat under the eave, a reverse push-up, so that when Audrey comes around she just stands there not two feet under him, swiveling her head all around, finally seeing a knee behind a peach tree, taking off that way.

  Behind her, in plain sight all along, Jonas unfolds himself down from the roof. He’s a different person now. One who doesn’t have to panic so much, but can take stock of his situation, come up with the only way out.

  It’s a completely different world.

  Jonas smiles, walks over to base, is waiting there when Audrey comes back, so she has to do it all over again now.

  “Where were you?” she says, out of breath.

  For once, Jonas’ little brother doesn’t say anything, just smiles.

  Jonas shrugs, nods his head for her to count again, and runs ahead a year so that he’s sitting on a threewheeler now. A little less than a half-mile in front of him, on Cloverdale, is a bus.

  It’s stopped, angled down into the ditch.

  His mom is running towards it, her robe catching on the barbed wire fence. She turns around, rips it free so hard she goes to her hands in the ditch. But then she’s there on the blacktop, didn’t even look both ways twice, to be sure.

  Jonas swallows, tries to see into the bus, and then a few minutes later the trucks and cars and sirens are all crowding around, a haze of dust hanging over them. There’s men in the ditch, men in the road, men in their trucks, and finally Jonas pulls the clutch with his left hand, shifts down into first, is going to go help, at least see.

  Except—the rifle. The .22.

  There are police there, an ambulance now.

  And something about the window midway down the side of the bus, everybody standing there, studying it, looking from there down some line of sight that ends in the open fields. Jonas understands, feels it hollow in his chest.

  What he’s spent the morning doing is shooting at birds. With a rifle. Because it’s what his mom’s dad did with the cranes, an impossible thing. But the way his granddad had told it, what it was like to have them coating the sky black with their bodies, and then to aim up into that darkness, and pull the trigger, opening up a single column of light.

  Jonas wants that. Wants to stand in that column of light for a moment.

  Except the few birds he’s been able to scare up, they’re erratic, won’t hold still for his sights.

  How far can a .22 slug travel, though?

  He has no idea. Couldn’t even say for sure where he was each time he brought the stock to his shoulder.

  They can’t go as a high as a plane, anyway. He’s tried, then closed his eyes, promised himself not to shoot at anything else all day, if those people up there can just get to their airport.

  As high as a transformer, he guesses—okay, knows—up on the utility poles like a robot koala, like a dull grey porcupine. But he knows better than to shimmy up that creosote, feel the entry holes with his index finger, has seen the hawks and owls fried from that already.

  This couldn’t have been him, though, could it?

  And, why him, with every kid with a rifle doing the exact same thing all across the county?

  It’s not fair.

  He loves this g
un.

  But still.

  Instead of winding up on the hand-grip, throttling a rooster tail of dirt up into the sky like usual, Jonas clicks up into second, burns the clutch a little trying to keep the pipe quiet, and turns around wide and dustless, his chest close to the gas tank, Indian style.

  Where he goes is back to the basketball pad. Parks the threewheeler as close to the tree as he can, so the seat won’t heat up too much in the sun. Hooks the rifle over his shoulder and, making the ritual up as he goes, walks from corner to corner of the concrete pad, inscribing a deep, invisible X there.

  On a map, it’s where your treasure will be, yeah. Whenever you come back for it.

  Finally Jonas shrugs, turns around to face the basket, hitches the rifle back to the center of his back and takes off running.

  Just like with the wood arm reaching out from his grandparents’ house a year ago, Jonas’ fingers hang in the net just enough.

  He swings his other hand around, his feet running in the air, finally finding the rusted pole.

  After this, all he has to do is hand-over-hand it up the net— he’s already up to the eighth hole on the pegboard in the old gym—grab onto the bird-shit back of the rim where the ball never can hit if it’s aired up enough, and wrap his leg up onto the top of the pole. The top of the pipe.

  With one arm hooked at the elbow in the rim, any kid not too worried about falling—worried more about jail—can let go enough with the other to shake a rifle sling down to his hand. Can hold on like that long enough to angle the barrel up into the uncapped top of that pipe, where his dad’s been hiding his beer bottles, wedge it in at a painful, scratching-the-blueing-off angle, but then get it straight, let it drop down into that broken glass where nobody’ll ever think to look. Not unless they’re up there, say. Not unless they’ve stopped by because they promised to put a set of lock washers all around a couple of u-bolts. Not unless they’re somebody who doesn’t have any kids of their own to trade themselves in for.

  And, the reason it’s barrel-first is easy: Jonas doesn’t want it filling with rainwater. Because he’s coming back for it, isn’t going to forget it.