Growing Up Dead in Texas Read online

  It would only take that dull orange glow a moment to touch a strand of lint, and for that strand to pass the glow onto the next strand, and so on, until what happened happens.

  The thing about cotton, too, is that it doesn’t burn like paper or wood or anything normal. Instead it smolders, roiling off pungent black smoke, like a stack of tires, the orange worms crawling there just under the black, but you can never step on them all. Stepping on them only gives the smolder more air, and water only flares it up for a few moments.

  All of which is to say that cotton, it only stops burning when the cotton’s gone.

  In 1963, King would have been nearly forty, working some of the outlying dryland fields for his father until he somehow got them to produce, could graduate to one of the two fields with a shiny new Tri-Matic lined up along the fence, and Mexicans to help roll it out.

  King would have undoubtedly been one of the men who came not to try to douse the cotton—though the grainy photographs do show an old Diamond T fire truck there, from Lenorah when it was a town—but to simply stand and watch.

  It was the worst thing anybody had ever seen. The following morning, the men, whose trailers were so covered in soot that they would have to scrape the black off to find their stenciled-or welded-on names, they didn’t come directly home. They walked through their stripped fields instead, the skin of their faces still drawn tight from the heat. They wouldn’t be drilling their fingers into the soil for moisture, or searching for lost tools or arrowheads, but probably finding the boll or two still out there, still clinging to the odd stalk. Finding those leftover bolls and then walking past them, their lips held tight, their eyes set on next season, if the bank would only understand about this season.

  But that’s always the story.

  ***

  Arthur King wasn’t the only one to smell the fire that morning, though.

  On December 4th, 1985, Cloverdale became a parking lot. Trucks slowed to a stop one after the other, the drivers standing in the ditch on the south side of the road, their hats worked back off their foreheads so they could squint better. And after the trucks, all the station wagons coming back from dropping the kids off, the mothers inside just sitting behind the wheel, whispering to themselves about Christmas. What they were going to do now, this time.

  The smell even made it all the way to school that morning, so that Mr. Brenhemin, the shop teacher, cocked his welding helmet up—he always made you use the torch outside, even if there was still frost on everything, because he never trusted anybody to tell between regular steel and galvanized—held his gloved hand out to the side, for quiet.

  And then the class caught the scent, followed it around the edge of the building.

  A half mile off, straight across the field to the east, there was the smoke.

  Nobody said anything.

  ***

  An hour before that, give or take, Belinda King, Arthur King’s daughter-in-law, wife to his son who finally stayed, is standing in her kitchen, staring out the screen door like every morning. Waiting for the day to start. Just one more cup of coffee.

  What she really needs to be doing, she knows, is cleaning Thanksgiving out of the refrigerator. But then she really needs to be doing a lot of things, she supposes.

  Right now, anyway, she’s just staring.

  Her husband Rob’s out there somewhere, running a buggy maybe, because the high school kid (Tommy Moore, a senior) didn’t show again, or maybe teaching one of the hands how to build a module so it doesn’t fall apart, or maybe just working the pedals of a stripper, trying not to drag any guide wires down this year, for once.

  Belinda smiles, covers it with her hand.

  What she remembers of stripping is her dad letting her and her brothers ride back in the basket. How they would scream and squeal whenever one of the two headers—strippers were small in the late sixties, in Lamesa—sucked up a rat, spit it down onto them, so that they’d be trapped with it until they could get their dad’s attention. How he’d always pretend not to understand what the problem was, almost until they were crying with what she’d later understand was joy.

  Right beside the screen door she’s holding open now is the dryer, three pairs of pants tumbling in it. Just behind that, on the way through the kitchen into the living room, three boys in their underwear, eating cereal.

  The pants weren’t wet when she woke up, but they were cold. Not as warm as her boys needed, anyway.

  If Rob were here, he’d stand at the sink, looking out the window at the day, raise his coffee cup to his mouth then lower it deliberately, ask her why his sons have to sit around the kitchen table half-dressed like that. What if somebody comes to the door for him? Staring out the window the whole time, as far away as he can.

  Belinda’s best mental snapshot is of him doing just that a few mornings ago.

  It’s her worst, too.

  What she tells herself is that he’s right, probably. That maybe boys shouldn’t sit around in their underwear for breakfast. It’s not proper. No way to start the day.

  This morning, though, it’s just her and them. So.

  What Belinda tells herself is that she knew what she was getting into, marrying a farmer. That this is better than the early days anyway, when Rob had the side-row on a four-hour cycle so that he was easing that spindly chain along twice a night. Coming back to bed shaking from cold. Sleeping in his boots. Backing his truck out before he’d really even woke up again.

  It had been stupid and wonderful, and she wouldn’t trade it for anything.

  That had been in the old house, though, the small one at the King Place. The one the main hand Miguel lives in now.

  This one, it’s one of five, built in a wagon circle around a cul-de-sac cut ten acres deep into a field never taken out of CRP, so that, instead of cotton, what she looks out onto is a half-section of tufted yellow grass in every direction. Maybe what the county looked like before the Spanish cattle brought the mesquite in.

  All along the brick half-wall around the flowerbed in front are the rocks and grinders and rusted-solid tools the boys have found out in the fields. For most of the summer there’d been a series of eight cloudy old telegraph or telephone insulators, the kind made of glass that you can still find buried in a line in some pastures if you’re willing to walk. But ever since Jonas, her oldest, got that new .22, they went the way of every other bottle she hadn’t thought to lock away.

  It’s just as well. It’s better he broke them up out in the grass than them blowing off their perch, shattering on the welcome mat. And they would have two weeks ago, when the wind came like she couldn’t remember, like it had forgot it was November. It made Belinda miss their old house on the King Place. There, they’d always had the horses to watch. If Macaroni or Tall Boy started rolling their eyes and blowing, rearing up to pull the slats of the corral down, then Rob would herd her and the boys out to the old cellar. He’d lean back on the drill-bit counterweight so that only his boot heels were touching dirt and they’d feel their way down the crumbly rock stairs, hide until the clouds had drawn their funnels back up into the sky.

  Underground like that, even counting the time the bullsnake had climbed the wall to try to hiss them out of its den, she’d felt safe. So what if the house blew away, if the tractors all got piled up on the other side of the property?

  In the cellar, she had what was important.

  This new house, though, it was all above the ground.

  After the wind—Rob had been sandfighting the insurance dryland like everybody else, the blowing sand scraping electricity up from the ground so that the poles all around his field were lighting up like candles, telling him to get his plow out of the ground—after the windows stopped shaking, Belinda lifted the mattress off the bathtub, let the boys climb out, two of them crying.

  They were all right, though. Safe.

  It had just been wind, not a tornado. Not this late in the season.

  But: “Mom.”

  It was Jonas, at t
he sink window.

  He was so grown-up.

  Belinda went to the sliding glass door, looked out.

  Their trampoline, it was tangled in the fence across the pasture, its black skin hanging slack now, flapping slow, trash from the burn barrels still fifty feet in the air, in no hurry to settle. And the drums Rob had lined up by the shop were all toppled, seeping Paraquat down so that nothing was going to grow there for ten years. And their pump house, the one Rob and Jonas had built together while the roofing crew was nailing shingles down on the house, it had simply exploded.

  Belinda smiled just to keep from going the other way, then sucked her lower lip in. Pulled her boys close so they could see too, understand: this is where you live.

  “Let’s pray for your father now,” she said, and closed her eyes.

  ***

  Greenwood, Texas. 1985.

  According to the old plaque in front of the church, the name comes from the Reverends Green and Wood, who came to West Texas for what must have been some good reason, I guess. It doesn’t matter. What happened—it’s easy to tell—is that they planted a church, and a community grew up around it.

  That’s the boring way to say Greenwood, though. There’s a better way.

  Toilets.

  In 1978, we moved to Midland for two years, to make a go of it in town. No real clue why, and it’s too late to ask. Before that we’d been living pretty much with grandparents, though there’s a picture I found once, of a square little whitewashed house I have no memory of. It’s just sitting out in the middle of nowhere. I’m on the porch in a striped shirt, my feet apart, knees knocked together.

  It’s gone now, of course, that picture. One of the old ones that were rough like fabric on the front but somehow smooth too, like the picture was wet, or silk. There used to be home movies, too, but they’re all gone as well.

  I’m thinking that’s why I’m trying to write it all down, maybe. I have to have come from somewhere, I mean.

  But the toilets.

  When we moved to Roosevelt Street in Midland, Texas, my clearest memory is of standing in the bathroom and flushing the toilet over and over and over. There was enough water pressure for that. All I’d ever known before, the way I thought it was, was that you flushed a toilet once and then you waited a long time for the tank to fill and usually just got tired of waiting, went and did something else.

  Town was magic, though.

  I pushed that handle until I got in trouble, and then kept pushing it every chance I got, the best secret ever, like how I’d sometimes see the moon pale in the sky during daytime, and know that I was the only one who could.

  But we came back, of course. To Greenwood. In houses and trailers all over the district, with well water and septic tanks, no water pressure to speak of.

  And please understand here, that name, “King,” it’s not what I mean.

  Or, it’s exactly what I mean.

  And I say that the toilets are the thing I remember best about Roosevelt Street, but there’s something else too.

  In second grade, my last year there, my mom woke me up one night.

  I was in the kitchen, at the back door. A butter knife in my hand, wedged in between the strike plate and the tongue.

  I have no idea what I was trying to do, but not long after that we moved back. It’s the only time I’ve ever sleepwalked.

  ***

  As for Rob King that morning the cotton burned, he’d been awake then for nearly forty hours straight.

  There were more to come, too.

  He doesn’t die in some heroic way here either, using a neighbor’s backhoe to try to scrape dirt up around the fire, control it. He isn’t the one in that graveyard, I mean.

  By the time he caught scent of the fire, probably thirty minutes before his dad did, on the other side of Cloverdale, it’s estimated to have been already burning for at least eight hours.

  That’s the way it is with cotton.

  That hand at the Stanton co-op who ground his cigarette out under his boot could have been on his way to breakfast, not dinner.

  What cotton does is draw the heat in, let it grow, let it send its hot tendrils out, and by the time it surfaces, it’s hours and hours too late. All over the world, riverside warehouses have burned because one cotton bale was delivered two days ago with a secret ember for a heart.

  By the time Rob King knew his crop was on fire, it was too late.

  And it wasn’t what you might be picturing, either: kneehigh flames moving fast and nearly invisible across a field, leaving only ashes in their wake.

  A field in CRP, or hay grazer, it’d go like that, sure. Fast, so all you could do is get out of the way, try to drive ahead of it, open the gates for whoever’s cattle are in the next pasture. That happens all the time, from all the usual suspects—cigarettes, lightning, downed power lines, bottle rockets, truck exhausts. Even just cutting the metal ties from under a trailer home before you move it, those red-hot ends can start a grass fire.

  A cotton field in December won’t go like that, though.

  The plants are dead, definitely, you couldn’t strip any other way, but the chemicals the planes have already dusted them with to open the bolls and kill the plant, they’ve left an oily residue that you can smell on somebody’s pants when they finally come home, and those chemicals, for some reason they don’t burn.

  No, the only way to lose your year’s crop to fire, at least in the field, it’s at the end of stripping season, when your cotton’s sitting at the edge of all the fields in blocky, rectangular modules, waiting for the trucks to come for them.

  Before module builders—picture a camper big enough to live in, but made of thick metal, with Death Star walls that press the cotton you dump in into a tight, dense block, and, when you’re a kid, not old enough to drive a stripper yet, this is where you always end up, which is right where you want to be: the handles of the module builder in your too-big gloves, thousands upon thousands of pounds of pressure at your fingertips now, the best video game ever—before module builders, farmers had to deliver their cotton to the gin in rickety trailers, but you lose a lot that way. Both cotton and time.

  With modules, all you do after you’ve made one is hook onto the builder and pull it a couple of lengths forward, holding your breath each time, because if you’ve done it even a little bit wrong, the modules can calve off five-hundred-pound sheets of themselves.

  After that, all you do is sling a fitted tarp over the top, call the gin for a number to spray paint onto each end, and only worry if the rain comes before the truck does. And the ditches of all the roads that lead to the gin, they’re not white like snow anymore for Christmas, but Christmas is going to be better for that.

  The trucks that pick the modules up, too, they’re kind of amazing. They angle their flat beds back to get a lip under the cotton, and then the wide belt on the floor groans into motion, pulling the whole module up, in. If that was all there was, though, the modules would fall apart—they weigh too much to be dragged like that. So, the fix is to gear the truck’s rear end with those rollers, and synch them up, so that as it pulls the module up and in, it’s also backing under it. What it looks like more than anything is a snake swallowing an egg: a slow process you can hardly look away from. It makes you realize how small you are.

  Ask any kid in Future Farmers of America why he wants to be a farmer, and he won’t have that solid an answer: it’s honest work, you’re your own boss; “it’s all I know.” Mine— Greenwood Independent School District’s always had a strict hair code—was that I could have my hair as long as I wanted, and never have to tuck my shirt in again.

  All those reasons are lies, though.

  None of us were ever articulate enough to get at what it really was. We could feel it, sure, but would never admit something like that.

  Watching a module builder pack fifteen bales’ worth of cotton into one thick block, or taking a double-fold disk to a field in March, so that by the end of the day you’ve covered
hundreds of acres, had fourteen hawks following your each turn, for the mice and rabbits you scare up, it’s a connection. You to something bigger. Out there in the kind of quiet left after ten hours of your tractor grinding, you’re part of it all, and don’t have to say anything about it, can just, for a moment, be.

  You know you’ll never be rich, but that’s only if you measure wealth by money. That old saying, yeah. Sew it on a pillow if you want.

  Ask how I got here, anyway, behind a keyboard instead of out in the field, and I’ll say that this wasn’t my first choice. Really, it’s a complete betrayal of who I used to be.

  I didn’t go to college to get a career, I went to college because I thought Lubbock, Texas would be cool. They got more concerts than the Ector County Coliseum. Even when I graduated, my plan was to come home, lease a tractor, custom farm for ten years or so, and read books alone in my trailer the nights I wasn’t in town, looking for the girl from TG Sheppard’s “Slow Burn,” that dark hair falling cross her shoulders, being that guy trying to find his way home in Roseanne Cash’s “Seven Year Ache.”

  Even that morning of the fire, though, I think I already knew I wasn’t staying, that I was running away the first chance I got.

  And I still haven’t told you about Rob King.

  ***

  Pete Manson knows better than I do, really.

  I never worked directly for him in high school, though I did help arrange toolbars and trailers when he went under a few years later, was having to get things lined up for the auction. The whole time he just stood by the barn and smoked cigarette after cigarette. I had no idea what to say to him, and knew that if I even tried, we’d end up where we always did: his nubbed ring finger.

  Back when he was in high school, he’d vaulted down from the mounded top of a cotton trailer, caught his graduation ring on a stray wire so that his finger stayed up there.

  Because of him, I never wore any rings or watches when I was working. So maybe I owe my hands to him, I don’t know.

  But, Pete.

  He was from my mom’s generation, but from Stanton, not Lamesa. Back then, they all seemed to know each other somehow. I’ve never understood it completely, especially since, when I was coming up, you didn’t go to Stanton alone if you didn’t want to get jumped.