Growing Up Dead in Texas
Page 21
Otherwise Rob’ll have no land to farm. Otherwise they won’t be able to keep paying for this house.
“Dear Lord,” she leads off, all of their eyes closed, and tries to will her husband safe, home again, and then leaves the boys with some cartoons, goes outside to try to get ahead of this trash eddying all around, rising just to fall again, and the prayer, it works. Rob King makes it home again that night, like always, like all the farmers always do, never mind the lightning, the wind, the machinery, the hundred ways to die out there.
Being a farmer’s wife, you have to trust that your man’s capable, and, after that, just leave it up to God’s will, right?
Right.
But when she comes in from cleaning up the trash, her hands black from the burn barrels—Jonas doesn’t know.
“Mom?”
She pulls her mouth into a smile, shakes her head no, nothing—“just thinking about your father, dear”—and she sleepwalks through the next week and a half, until, one morning, the boys’ pants in the dryer again for school, she looks over to Rob with his coffee at the kitchen window, sees how far outside he’s looking. How intentionally.
“Do you have to set them up like that?” he says, low enough that the boys won’t hear.
Like—?
She turns to the table: three boys eating cereal in their underwear, waiting for their pants to get warm.
“What if—what if somebody comes to the door?” he says, still looking through his own reflection, to the fields outside.
“They’re just boys,” Belinda says, smiling, her coffee to her mouth again, and then hears herself, hears her husband, and dabs her lips, manages to turn slightly away without dropping her cup.
But her hand’s shaking around it.
All day.
And her son, her oldest, this Jonas, if he stands up right that moment, if he walks a straight line from their front door, steps out across the CRP, across the pasture, clipping the corner of Rooster’s big field, where he’d be a quarter of a century later is in the cemetery behind the Greenwood church. The one he chased balls into at recess. It’s the place he’s been avoiding now for ten chapters. The place he’s waiting for, so he can say he did it the best he could. That it’s on paper now.
But then it’s not all on paper. Not yet.
There on Earl Holbrook’s weathered headstone, it’s a little car, a Hot Wheels, and, and.
Reach for it.
Don’t touch it.
Remember it.
Try not to.
Evil Weevil.
How Jonas knows the model is that when he was twelve, digging for cans in an old truck behind his granddad’s house, he found the slick cardboard backing for this car, wedged up under the seat like a joke—in Greenwood, Texas, all weevils are evil—and put it in his pocket to show his dad, ask him about it, but then used it for target practice instead, after all the cans were gone, and that was that.
Except.
Except Rob King wasn’t the one to put that little car at Earl Holbrook’s grave either, as apology, his most sacred thing, the thing he found under the seat one October day like his big brother had left it just for the twelve-year-old he’d been, the toy he opened then hid in his pocket the afternoon he met his wife.
No.
And this is the part where Jonas dies, goes away forever.
The day after the trampoline blew away, what he found in the CRP behind the house, it doesn’t make sense until he sees that little car at the base of that headstone.
What he found back in the grass, just moving from yellow blade to yellow blade, like he was supposed to follow it, had to for maybe half an acre, was a single magazine page. Half a page, really.
But that page.
It’s a boy’s leg, no pants on, no underwear.
For years after he burns it in the barrels, getting in trouble for playing with matches but who cares, he’ll think it just blew in from some other place, like all the cusswords his mind spit back exactly when the Sunday school teacher told him they were sins.
The little car, though.
Yes, he’s seen it before.
It was in the back corner of his dad’s top drawer, rubber-banded to a yolky old photograph.
But his dad never came back for it, for any of his stuff, he left Belinda to clean it out, store it in the garage, finally throw it out, even though her sons had been pinching shirts from it for years already.
What he never understood, Rob, could never explain away, were those cigarettes up on top of the kitchen cabinets. The ones with a tax-stamp date the Sheriff’s office never thought to check, the same way they never thought to ask themselves why Arthur King had taken such a casual interest in what route Earl Holbrook’s prison bus was going to take up to Lamesa, say. The same way they ruled an accident what makes perfect sense when you take into account that Arthur King had one of those truck phones, and Larry Monahans did too, and that they were both Kings, and that, years and important years ago, Larry Monahans had taken some bad heat for Arthur King’s son, heat for backing over a twelve-year-old, heat that could have sent Arthur King’s last best chance of a son spinning out into a completely different life, what with his brother already a suicide and all.
But Rob’s there anyway.
Where he is now, it’s an old house, a tore-down and buried house, a house plowed under now, along with the concrete pad laid down beside it, and that concrete pad’s basketball pole, and whatever was in that pole. He’s in an old house that’s been there forever, and his right arm was never quite fixed, never got straightened out again, so what he does now is walk from room to room, tugging at your sleeve, seeing if you’ve got his good arm, if you can explain all of this to him maybe.
And you can explain it.
You don’t want to, but you can. For him.
The day after the trampoline blew away, this mom, this farmer’s wife, see, she walks out into the backyard to try to get ahead of the trash all blowing around, and then, like a message, it just settles all around her, and it’s the other half of the page her son will find the next day. It’s all the other halves of all the pages, it’s why her husband’s always said there’s only one key to the pump house.
And it’s not his fault either.
It’s his father’s fault.
His goddamn father. That monster. All his cotton out there waiting to get turned into more money, more reward.
Yeah.
This is what Pete Manson never tells anybody, this is the reason Belinda King lies for him at Stacy Monahans’ funeral: there’s these kids in a truck, on a Saturday, and they’re drinking and it’s not too hot and not too cold, and at some perfect moment in that day, this beautiful girl from another town, she reaches her hand down across the tailgate, passing her already-lit Chesterfield to an awkward boy who’ll smoke that brand from here on out now, in honor. Who will recognize that brand by all the black modules, and will fold that information into his overalls and keep it there forever, until he finally loses himself in a city he doesn’t know, maybe following a twelve-year-old boy he thinks he recognizes, that he can never quite catch up with, apologize to like he needs to.
And if you want to know how I know Belinda King put that little car there to try to close the circle, stop everything from happening, it’s not that she told me, it’s that, the morning Rob King beats Tommy Moore into the hospital, when Belinda King finally gets the call, she angles her head over, plucks her earrings out, and, just going by habit, starts to clink them into the marble ashtray by the phone, like always.
Except then she doesn’t.
For the first time ever—Jonas checks, cleans it out himself— there’s ashes in that ashtray, an empty pack of cigarettes hid up on top of the kitchen cabinets, and for years I fold this into my pocket, don’t tell anybody, because it means Pete Manson really was there, like she said.
But he never was.
And he never told.
I will, though.
And Ms. Godfrey will read it at
least, and know.
No.
Sheryl Ledbetter will read it.
You made it, she says to me back in the second chapter.
I don’t know.
Minutes after she leaves me standing out there at the east corner of the new high school, the Diet Dr. Pepper can she was ashing in starts to blow away, so that I have to catch it, save it, can finally read that bronze plaque angled down by the three baby trees.
They’re planted in honor of Mr. Brenhemin, Shop Teacher, 1928–2006.
He’s still there at the corner of the school, watching the smoke rise.
We all are.
Growing Up Dead in Texas
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Janet Doggett, whose title this really is. Thanks to Darla Graham; if you hadn’t posted an old photo of me online, I would never have even realized that I used to be somebody else. Thanks to my uncles, my aunt, to my mom, my dad, my brothers, my grandmother Ninee. To Gordon Highland, for saying a thing once about burying the lead; it made me wonder what a story that did that might be like. Thanks to all my art teachers, for never teaching me to draw. Thanks to Shooter Jennings; without tracks two through twelve, but especially twelve, I don’t know how I could have done this. Thanks to Monster-Quest. Thanks to Paradise Lost (the documentary). VALIS. Duell McCall. Sam the Lion. Thanks to Brenda Mills and Mirka Hodurova and Christopher O’Riley and Jesse Wichterman, for reading early on. And Serena Chopra for reading first. And to Stefanie Hafey, for asking just how one goes about writing a novel for the first time. Thanks to those who remember when Challenger maybe really happened. Me too. Very distinctly. Thanks to Sidney Goldfarb, for saying once in a poem that this isn’t true, but it’s accurate. Thanks to Guy Intoci, for carrying this manuscript from coast to coast and then editing it until, like Mr. Seger says, it shines. Thanks to Kate Garrick, my agent through all of these books. And thanks finally and most sincerely to my wife Nancy, for everything, but apologies too; of most everybody who reads this, you’re the one who’ll have the hardest time, just because every one of these stories, you know some version of them. It won’t fool you at all. But I never would.
Author Bio
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES grew up in a land shaped by animals. The first bird he shot, he shot in a buffalo wallow. There would be countless more—owls and ducks, flying away with his pellet gun pellets lodged in them, doves he wouldn’t learn to clean and eat for years, the blood on their yellow breasts like a dab of jelly on butter toast. Quail that were beautiful and pliant in his hand, scissortails that fell in looping arcs, their tails disappointing up close. Mounds of red and white and black woodpeckers his grandmother would point out for him, that, even with their bodies full of birdshot, still needed to be chased down in the tall grass. Once, on accident, a mockingbird that wanted to put him in jail, take away his gun. The hole he dug to hide it in was deep.
There would be more.
A bullbat, just to see if he could. A compact little hawk of a kind he’s never seen again. He buried it in a hole he kicked in the dirt then took three steps away, found a pair of rattlesnakes mating, and watched them until they saw him and tried to break apart, couldn’t. Hours later, skinless, headless, no guts, they still rose from the pan of grease he was cooking them in, struck at him with their blunt necks. Another time he walked onto a pair of sand rattlers, never knew how purple and pink their belly skin was until they were dead. That same year another rattlesnake pulled at his pantsleg but couldn’t get through. He killed it for so long that the venom got in his arm, swelled it from wrist to elbow. Days after that, just to see if it was a thing he could do, or to see if it was something he shouldn’t do, he got down on his knees with a ballpeen hammer, stared at a rattlesnake until it started striking.
He buried that snake in a deep hole with an owl he’d killed that same day, then, to keep them there, upended a fifty-five gallon drum, hammered it down around the owl and the snake until it was level with the ground, and told himself it was over, now—him, them. That he was sorry and it was over.
He was wrong.
Later that year he would stand in the brake lights of a pick-up truck and help beat rabbits’ heads against the bumper, because they weren’t dead enough yet, then throw them into the pile already spilling over the bed rails. After that, with slide action rifles that felt so much like the air-pumps on his pellet guns, he would run down elk from the dancing beds of trucks, shoot prairie dogs to sight his gun in. Look through his scope one afternoon at what should have been a cow moose thirty yards out, broadside, but instead stood into a cinnamon grizzly, her two cubs tumbling into view.
That time, his great uncle guided the barrel of his gun down for him, and kept it there, and he looked over the top of his scope at that mother bear and wondered where his uncle had been three years ago in the buffalo wallow, when, out of birds but not daylight, he’d aimed for too long straight up, into a power line, and hit it, then felt the small slug immediately in the ground by his left foot, instead of the bones of his face. He dug the slug out. It was shaped like a mushroom, still hugging the power line, and he did any of a thousand things with it then. None of them right.
If I call it a novel, it is only because I don’t know what else to call it… and, no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.
—MAUGHAM, CHABON