Growing Up Dead in Texas

by Stephen Graham Jones

  In the bed of that truck, now, it’s Pete Manson, holding onto the bed rail, and Belinda Brown, half under his arm, falling into him again and again.

  “Where are we going?” she says up to him, her voice shaking from the wind.

  They’re on 137, blasting south across the tracks.

  “Greenwood, probably,” Pete says, leaning out the side to eyeball the right turn to Cloverdale. “Larry’s got an uncle there.”

  “An uncle?”

  Pete shakes his head no, it’s nothing to worry about, and holds his can out to her. She takes it, looks around as if to be sure, and takes a sip, laughs about it.

  What Pete says, taking the can back, it’s “canteen kiss.”

  Belinda doesn’t say it isn’t.

  ***

  Not ten minutes later, the glasspacks on the green Ford are popping. They’re slowing down to make the turn into the King place.

  It’s where they find Rob. Pete never had a chance. Rob King is about halfway between the front house and the new barn. Not sitting in the broke-down truck but lying longways in it, his boots James Deaned out the passenger window, his head against the driver’s armrest, a line of cans on the dash, one of his hands up in front of him like he’s got a toy, is playing with it, swooping it under clouds, over buildings.

  Finally Larry has to race the engine of the Ford up, shatter the moment Rob was just pretending was there in the first place.

  “What?” he creaks out, then hooks an elbow up onto the lower lip of the missing back window, wrenches himself up, the day too bright for him.

  “Go away,” he says, just generally. “I’m thinking.”

  In response, Larry and Kenneth and Pete pelt the cab of the truck he’s in with cans, so that he has to turn a shoulder, roll away. Clambering out the driver’s door he stuffs his hand deep into his pocket, like hiding something, but comes up with a set of keys, locks the door behind him.

  “Stupid shit,” Larry says, because the truck has no back window.

  It’s the same way you lock your tree house, though, even when there’s no roof.

  “Uncle stupid shit to you,” Rob says, and Larry steps forward, ready for their fight, and they punch chests and shoulders, tackle each other into the dry weeds, come up with seedheads golden in the air all around them, and this is when Rob King first lays eyes on Belinda Brown, in the back of that truck.

  Like I said: Pete never had a chance.

  ***

  Two hours later, Tray Manson is dead.

  And if there were a way I could just leave it like that, I would. It pays him no respect for me to place his head under that

  tire again. To say something about pumpkins, just to establish it’s Halloween.

  I wasn’t there, I mean.

  He died before I was ever born.

  I’ve been to his headstone in Stanton, sure, my grand tour of West Texas cemeteries, “research,” but it’s just a piece of polished rock, some words. The grass around it not even manicured like it is around Stacy Monahans’ grave in Lamesa.

  What I tell him, standing there, is that it’s not his fault.

  And that I’m going to have to write about it. That that’s the only way.

  What I don’t tell him is that his big brother hasn’t returned from his last trip to Vegas yet. That maybe that means he’s having a good run, that he’s been awake for five days now, taking cards, pushing chips.

  What I don’t tell him is the picture I have of Pete Manson in my head. This big guy in a cap and overalls, walking by himself under all that neon, waiting for the house to let him win at last, because he deserves it. Because he never told anybody.

  But already he’s mixing in my head with Buford Wilson from the Tanya Tucker song. Buford Wilson who carried a letter in his overalls for years, Buford Wilson, who nobody would talk to, Buford Wilson who finally died in the street, none of his questions ever answered.

  Pete Manson, I’m sorry.

  And thank you.

  This is for you.

  1971.

  You’re in the back of a green Ford, bouncing through a field to an old falling-down house that King guy knows, and it’s a near-perfect day. A pretty girl beside you, half under your arm sometimes, a girl who isn’t from Stanton so doesn’t remember what you did in the fourth grade that time, a girl you’re only just now, from the way Larry introduced her, realizing is Kenneth Brown’s grown-up little sister.

  But Kenneth doesn’t care.

  In the cab, all he’s doing is ribbing Larry about his sister and Earlybird’s worm, Larry gunning the truck then stomping on the brakes again each time Kenneth tries to drink, everybody in the bed trying to roll with it.

  As for the falling-down house they’re going to, the King guy says it’s been empty forever already. That his big brother used to take him there, show him all the old stuff, like walking through a museum. And this brother used to scare him with that house too, about how the Reverends Green and Wood used to live there, that it was a church then, the first one in these parts, except, digging the cellar, they cut the arm off somebody already buried, so that now that dead guy walks the rooms, always just behind you, reaching out to you with his left arm, trying to see if you’re the one who has his other one, his good one. Or if he can borrow yours, maybe.

  When the King guy had told that, Tray had gone pale but tried to smile it off, and Belinda had just shook her head, not believed it.

  Get her in that old house, though, and it might be a different story. She might want to press up against somebody, to be safe.

  It’s an old game too.

  Except.

  One of the times Larry guns it, splashing Kenneth’s chin with beer at last, Tray topples out the back, over the tailgate. Just as quiet as can be.

  “Hold!” the King guy calls ahead, and Larry steps on the emergency brake again, the only real brake this truck has.

  “Lose one?” Larry says into his mirror, ducking the beer Kenneth’s trying to tip onto him, his smile sharp in the rearview but then gone again.

  “Just let him—” you start, not eager to remove yourself from this girl, but now the King guy’s got his hand up anyway, is guiding the truck back but is mostly just watching Kenneth shake a beer up, his fingers to the tab already, the afternoon ready to explode.

  And then the girl who was so close to you, she’s at the tailgate, leaning over, saying it once, loud, using the name Larry used to introduce him—Robert!— and you lean over too, to see what’s the matter here, and the emergency brake crunching down pushes you even farther out, so you have to see, and— and afterwards, after this afternoon explodes, after everybody knows it was stupid, that it was nobody’s fault, that if it was anybody’s, it was Larry Monahans’, who never says word one about it, just that yes, it was him at the wheel, after all of this, the girl, instead of consoling you about your brother, she finds the King guy.

  He’s back in that broke-down truck he sits in again, is hitting himself in the sides of the head because it’s his fault, because it should have been his head under that tire, and, because she was there, because she knows it was all of their faults, really, not just Larry’s like everybody’s saying, she opens that door, leads him away from that truck, into the rest of his life, a life that should have been yours. A life you can only watch now.

  What you would have said earlier, in response to the question I didn’t ask, about what you did after that day: You’re still doing it.

  I understand.

  III

  Chapter Eleven

  What else.

  I know. Ten chapters is such a good, even number. As far as I meant to go.

  But, eleven, those two parallel lines trying to touch—book eleven is where Odysseus performs the sacrifices that bring up the souls of the dead, right?

  Jonas is that sacrifice, I think.

  After telling her story, using her hands to both show and hide Tray Manson’s head under the tire that day, Belinda King stands up, walks out to the edge
of her new porch, where the flagstone shelves out over the grass.

  It’s July, late.

  “Now you know,” she says, laughing a little about it but not really. Using the side of her index finger to guide something out of her eye.

  Now you know.

  Of the dead, the people in the ground, there’s Mouse, there’s Sterling, there’s Stacy Monahans, there’s Tray Manson, and there’s even Rooster Jones, his plastic ear probably the only thing left of him down there anymore.

  And there’s one more.

  By the middle of March, 1986, Earl Holbrook has been convicted and sentenced.

  This is the exact middle of the economic sag between the early eighties and the late eighties, though; the county holding facilities are packed, not just with people trying to drink until the next boom, make the last one last anyway, but with people with their faces painted green, sleeping it off.

  In the courtroom that day, all the Greenwood farmers are there. Not because they don’t think Earl Holbrook’s guilty— the ballistics proved it was him, made the case for the district attorney, and Earl had confessed anyway— but because he’s one of them. It’s weak to say, maybe, but it’s real, too. My single most distinct memory of the sixth grade, it’s the week I had to sit at the lice-head table, all by myself some days, and how my friends, and I can’t even remember what names I’m using for them now, don’t want to look—Brett and Steve and Teddy and Robert and Asael and Clayton and Lloyd and Randy, okay?—how they all filed out of the serving line but then swung wide, closer to my table than anybody else would, and held their hands out as they passed, to slap five with mine. This is what those other farmers were for Earl Holbrook the day he was sentenced, the day his five years of state time was supposed to start.

  There but for the grace of God, all that.

  It was a school day for all of us, though.

  Basketball, to be specific.

  Because varsity always got the big gym, we had to use the practice one, with the rubber floor that would throw you into the wall if it wasn’t squeaky clean.

  Between the two was a hall, the one Jonas had used to sneak out of the tournament a couple of months ago. Or, the hall he’d used to sneak back in, so he could make his big escape.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Earl Holbrook was sentenced by ten in the morning, and then it was just all the farmers milling around in front of the courthouse, waiting for Earl to be led out to the blue bus.

  Pete Manson is there, grinding a cigarette out then collecting it, putting it in his pocket. Rob King, in a new cast. Arthur King, still years from his own grave, wearing the same suit he’d worn to Stacy Monahan’s funeral.

  Ten minutes before noon, the deputies or marshals or bailiffs or whoever does this finally lead Earl and three other prisoners up the ramp from the basement. He’s still in his trial suit. No orange jumpsuit yet. And he manages to smile, even, at everybody there, nodding goodbye. All of them making promises to themselves that, when he comes back, if they ever have any extra work, it’s his.

  No Sissy, of course, but that’s just because she got to say bye inside. She isn’t going to Lamesa to live with her parents or her brother—never that—but’ll find something to do until Earl’s out again.

  About this time, Coach Harrison is rolling the television set out into the hall between the two gyms. It’s on a two-level plastic tray that was once intended for towels, probably.

  It’s on, too, this television. The news.

  We dribble for a while, don’t have any drills to do, and one by one cue into Coach, start to look into that hall.

  He’s not watching the noon update about Earl Holbrook’s case.

  1986 is the year Halley’s Comet passes, but it’s not that either.

  In Midland, the prisoners seated now, staggered out two on one side, one alone on the other—Earl—the bus folds its doors into itself, grinds away.

  For a few minutes, until everybody can decide where to eat, maybe—Monterey’s, on the east side—there’s just milling, shuffling. Pete Manson flaring another cigarette up against the day, blinking through the smoke at Rob King, talking to Jenkins now, making some joke or another about his new cast, Jenkins looking away, smiling his cop smile. Arthur King having serious words with the Sheriff, it seems, probably apologizing for all of this. Trying to mend what fences can still be mended. The Sheriff tilting his hat back on his head and watching the bus turn north, nodding to Arthur King. Nodding again, sure, then looking at his watch, remembering some other place to be.

  This is how stories end, with all these leftover characters, nothing left for them to do.

  These are real people, though.

  In the hall between the two gyms, Coach Harrison waves us in, tells us we need to see this, and we edge in, crowd the screen, don’t know what to say.

  Forty miles north, give or take—forty-two and six-tenths, exactly, thirty-eight and a smidge if you take 137— Earl Holbrook is sitting in his seat. What he’s doing is watching the cotton slip past. Looking down every row he can, like, if he can just focus on one for long enough, he’ll see straight down it maybe, right to the center of everything. See why that trigger had to be so touchy that day, the air so still for the first time ever, maybe. See why Geoff Koenig had to choose that moment to be walking through that part of the bus.

  But they’re both on buses now.

  It’s fitting, he thinks, and has the leading edges of a smile starting around his mouth when he cues into a tractor just ahead, waiting for the bus to pass so it can turn around, swing its plow into the road, not take any guide wires with it.

  Except.

  Except the plow hitched onto that tractor, it’s not stalkcutters, it’s not discs, it’s not a breaking plow, it’s a knifing rig.

  Why would anybody be tied onto a knifing rig when the seed’s not even in the ground yet?

  And then Earl sees the man up in that cab, that pulled-down way he wears his hat, how he tucks his long sleeves into his gloves, and it’s his best friend from high school. His best friend, who told Earl he wouldn’t trust his sister with anybody else, serious.

  Larry Monahans times it perfect, from years in that seat.

  He throttles ahead a jump, mashing the left brake sharp so the tractor pirouettes around in the ditch, the leading right edge of the knifing rig slicing up over the road, into the side of the bus Earlybird’s on, each knife three feet long, polished by miles of sand, and Earl Holbrook only has time to hold his hands up before his face—they’re chained to the floor— only has time to close his eyes, to tell Larry that he understands, that if he’d only ever had a child, it might be him up there in that yellow seat, out there, if only—

  And then it’s over.

  On the news that night, the whole episode gets maybe a minute and a half.

  It’s an accident between a tractor and a prison bus, not even in Midland County. The only newsworthy bit about it, even, it’s that the farmer driving that tractor— nothing about a knifing rig, nothing about that being the low place on 349 where a girl died back in January, the first fatality of the new year for Dawson county— the only thing, according to the scraped-up bus driver, is that that farmer, he came down from his tractor and stepped onto that bus with a lever-action .44-40, and kept the two remaining prisoners in their seats until the authorities showed up, and how you could tell he was regretful, it was because he was crying, looking down the barrel of that rifle.

  It was an accident.

  And the reason it only gets ninety seconds: In the hall between the gyms that day, what we’re all watching, some of us crying, because some secret part of us is still sure we can be astronauts too, is Challenger, spread out across the sky, falling, falling, Michael Graham maybe going home that day after school and finding his old list from fourth grade, adding this to his list of things that have been taken away, and then letting that list go as well, across the field, a prayer of sorts, for all of us.

  ***

  The day af
ter Earl Holbrook’s funeral, Jonas King wears one of Earl’s old hats to school. It’s the Stetson, is too big, is black and furry even, ridiculous, and Jonas has his mule-eared boots on too, and even his friend who said Ms. Everett’s name that time, he just nods to Jonas, standing alone at his locker long after class has started, then stands there a couple of lockers down until Jonas is ready, so it’s two people being late instead of just one.

  And I want this to just be through already.

  But there’s still the sacrifice.

  Not the Jonas who finds his uncle’s shiny chrome rig in the church parking lot after school that day, goes to eat with him for the whole afternoon, and not the Rob King who was this same age once too, standing behind the house in his t-shirt and underwear one early morning, watching his dad use three hoses at once to wash a big brother’s brains out the back of a truck, but maybe the Jonas from before all this started, the Jonas trying to carry four old beer cans at once but dropping one into the floorboard, going after it, coming up instead with an old cardboard backing, the slick kind with a tab to hang by. It’s been lodged under the seat for years, so the sun hasn’t faded the words from it yet. The model.

  But no. Not yet.

  I’ve still left one scene open.

  Two, really.

  ***

  “Let’s pray for your father,” Belinda King says to her sons the day the trampoline blows away, the day the pump house explodes, and they do, holding hands behind the sliding glass door, the air still full of trash outside, grit in all the sills, fine like from an hourglass.

  This is the week before the fire. Maybe ten days.

  Just after Thanksgiving, always a bad time for her, now that she knows about Arthur King. The one time of the year she has to put on a good face, has to see him sitting there so content with himself, like he’s getting away with everything.

  But she watches her boys when they’re over there, she watches them close even though he’s old now, has to be retired from all that. He’ll have have to answer for what he’s done, sure, but not to her, right?

  It’s the peace she’s come to over the last few months.