Growing Up Dead in Texas Read online

  If not for her aunt, though, then Kelly, right? Who wouldn’t even be at the front of the class to read that story then.

  And, Adam. Adam Moore.

  He won all-tournament in Crane as a sophomore, all-state his senior year, when basketball made regionals, but he fought too much in the parking lots too. He’s a roofer in Odessa now, in spite of his picture-book jumper, the way he could just launch back and hold, hold, release. The last I heard of him, I was already at college. He was doing the Midland thing. What it involved, mostly, was fighting, at least until he met a certain Stanton Buffalo in a field just north of town, one of the ones being converted to a neighborhood, so that it still had volunteer cotton coming up around the poles.

  Did he remember that Stanton’s who we played that first Friday, after the fire?

  I think so, yeah.

  It’s the first thing I thought when I heard about it, anyway.

  As to who that Buffalo was, it doesn’t matter. Or, I don’t want to make up a name for him. It’s enough that he came from a family known for fighting, and took Adam down fast and easy.

  But Adam, he wouldn’t stay down. That was always the thing about him.

  He came back again and again, and each time that Buffalo put him down, a little harder each time, until it got to where he had Adam flat against the ground, had a scrap piece of concrete held up above his head, above both their heads, screaming to Adam that all he had to do was say Stop and it could be over. That that was all he had to do.

  Adam was Adam, though.

  He’s still fighting, I know.

  ***

  As for that report I’d done two years before all this, it gave me zero insight into the fire. It was just a stupid report, I mean.

  Peeling back through the microfiche now, though—we all should have been reading those old papers.

  Three weeks to the day after the Stanton gin burned to the ground, an unidentified man was found dead just past the Martin County line, over into Glasscock. It wouldn’t have even made the Stanton paper except it was a couple of Stanton kids who’d followed the black funnel of birds out into the mesquite.

  It was 1963, sure, but still, it was obvious the man hadn’t died from natural causes. Unless pipes and ropes can count as natural.

  And I don’t even want to go back, put faces on the men behind the headlights whatever night that happened.

  I do know that, once, sent to get a part from an old neighbor I only knew to nod to, when he didn’t answer the door, I did what you always do: went around to the shop.

  It was one of those sun-bleached ones, patched over with sheets of corrugated tin, just waiting to fall down.

  I could tell that he only worked in the front part of it anymore, the high wooden bench with the grinder and the vise and the red and green loops of his torch. Back in the cobweb darkness, it was the usual leftover tractors and baskets from a farm winding down, forgetting itself. Not antiques, just trash. This place, too, this neighbor, he was just back from the cut-across road to Stanton. Meaning he would have been using the Stanton gin that season. Would have had his cotton checked in there, before the fire.

  I called his name out, got nothing back, and was about gone when a dull flash back in the junk part of the shop stopped me.

  A thousand coincidences of light and dust and angle had to line up for me to see it, and even then it was just some whiteness. A dab of reflection there in the grime.

  I looked behind me, for a shadow filling the door, but I was alone.

  I shrugged one shoulder for nerve, walked across that concrete floor, and got close enough to the white to see what had reached out for me: an old but still sturdy chair, wood, with a back that didn’t go up very high, like a barstool. But where it stopped, there was a flat curved panel, I guess you’d call it. A flat enough place to write something on with paint so thick that the wood had dried out under it, leaving the letters raised.

  KKK.

  I looked immediately up to a row of old tires stacked side by side on a shelf. So I could say that’s what I’d been looking at.

  But I was still the only one there.

  I walked out nodding to myself, lost in the complicated switchbacks of some fake thought, and only when I looked back did I see what I’d left: footprints in the dust, going all the way back. To no other place but that chair.

  I didn’t get whatever part I’d come back for, and sitting behind my steering wheel, my thumb cocked around the ignition, I understood for the first time why Rob King had never wanted loud pipes on his truck.

  ***

  Rob King. Robert Allen King.

  His initials don’t spell anything.

  And Arthur King didn’t have enough pull anymore to spring him from Midland lockup, but Rob King’s face never showed up in the Midland Reporter-Telegram either.

  Maybe it wasn’t news to Midland people, though. 1985 was a lull between oil booms. The early eighties had been extravagant, everybody driving off at any time of the day for their cabins in Ruidoso, to bet on the dogs, shoot at the fish, buy some kneehigh moccasins, and by the late eighties everybody would have tanning beds in their bedrooms, phones in their trucks, the phones tied into their horns and headlights so that at any of the Mexican food joints on the east side of town, the parking lots would jangle and flash all through lunch.

  Farmers beating each other up out in the fields had nothing to do with the price of a barrel of oil, I mean, so, no, Rob King was booked with no fanfare, was released two days later to no protest.

  On the way back, though, cutting across 1120, which was mostly still just trailers and roughed-in houses, Arthur King took his foot off the accelerator.

  Another truck was parked in the ditch, on their side of the road, the chrome backs of its side mirrors winking in the sun.

  Mr. Moore.

  “No, stop,” Rob King said to his dad, when Arthur King was pretending not to know who was waiting for them. For Rob King.

  Arthur King thinned his old-man lips and pulled over a good ten yards past Moore.

  They didn’t say anything across the cab to each other, father to son. King didn’t even look across, was just watching Moore in the side mirror. Watching his son walk into that reflection, one of his hands still trailing gauze.

  Rob King didn’t have to say he was sorry. Or, the way he said it was by staring straight at Moore the whole way, holding his eyes, not letting them go.

  Moore probably rubbed a stray grain of dip from his mouth, then, once Rob King was close enough, he took him down with the tire beater he’d had run down alongside his right leg. Just like he’d been promising himself to.

  And then he flipped the tire beater into the tall grass of the ditch so this wouldn’t get out of hand and followed Rob down to the pavement, until Rob had to cover his face with arms.

  At some point Mr. Moore’s watch slung loose, hung in the air, clattered down. And the asphalt was probably hot enough that Rob’s back left a slight, temporary depression in it, one that would have held a drink or two of water that night if it had rained.

  But he never fought back, Rob King.

  Both of them crying in their way, there in the daylight. Both of them small and furious and sad in Arthur King’s side mirror.

  Finally Arthur King stepped down from the truck, his shoulders heavy, his cheeks slack, his twelve-gauge bellowing once up into the sky, and that’s how I want to leave them for now.

  ***

  By this time, two days, forty-eight hours later, last night’s victory over the Buffaloes hollow, a different story of the fire was surfacing. Not from the Sheriff’s office either. Not to say anything bad about them, but they never matched anyone to those twenty-five burnt-down modules, never found that smoking match. But then they could only see it from the outside. They had to have heard the stories, though.

  Two of the deputies back then even had connections to Greenwood— one had gone there for two years of high school, before transferring to Robert E. Lee in town, and the ot
her was married to a Greenwood girl.

  They still won’t talk about it, though. Not for the record, anyway. Even the one who quit the Sheriff’s office and’s back out there now, on his wife’s land, trying to make a go of it.

  The first still blames it on Stanton, that they were trying to get the Greenwood Rangers looking somewhere else instead of at the football game Friday night. But most of those players had grown up on farms themselves, would have been as physically unable as the rest of us to hold a match to their fathers’ hopes and dreams.

  The other deputy’s best guess is just a version of that: kids. General mischief. Except there were no guilty tire tracks out there—threewheelers, motorcycle, bikes, nothing. Not even horses.

  But again, why? We could all see the run-away-fast fun of hitting one module, maybe, hear how earnest we would promise each other never to tell, no matter what. All of the modules, though—mostly King cotton, but some of Rooster’s too, indirectly, and a couple of the narrow fields that were leased out between—to take the time to hit all of them, man.

  Kids out drinking on a Wednesday night?

  Not likely, deputy.

  And then there were all the suspicious trucks that had evidently been bumper to bumper on Cloverdale that Wednesday just before dusk, too. A suspicious truck convention, more or less. None of them with their headlights on, all the men and pairs of men behind the wheel thoroughly sunglassed, ungrinning, there with dark purpose, with specific intent.

  What would have been poetic, I think, though nobody hit on it, was if the family of whoever that was who’d turned up dead in 1963 had come back, had certain people in their targets. And a pocketful of matches.

  Nobody in 1985 was thinking about twenty years ago, though, and that’d be movie-of-the-week stuff anyway. You’d have already heard about it by now.

  Another possibility circulating fast and dangerous on Friday, even at school, was that some Mobil pumper’d had a blowout with his supervisor Wednesday morning then just blasted out to make his rounds anyway, never mind that he was fired. It was a thing of principle.

  Some of those modules that burned, yeah, there was a pump road that ran alongside them.

  And, if you don’t know what being a pumper was about in 1985: all day you’re in your truck, going to pad after pad, dragging a plume of caliche behind you, climbing those hot silver stairs, dropping your weighted tape down into the tank and reeling it back up slow, so you can record what the level is today. Then you write it in two logs—one in the box by the stairs, one in your truck—and you’re off to the next one, and the next one.

  It’s not a bad job at all, and even in the mid-eighties lull, that slack between legitimate booms, there were still enough tanks that you could pull all the hours you wanted, pretty much. And, it had the distinct benefit of not being a roughnecking gig. Meaning you only worked in the daytime hours, and got to keep all your fingers, didn’t have to have your big toes sewn onto where your thumbs used to be.

  As for this particular pumper, Steve Grimes, the deputies finally caught up with him Friday afternoon, at the old Monterey’s on the east side of Midland. He was sitting with some other oilfield guys, a pitcher of beer between them all, the table littered with chip baskets.

  In the parking lot was his truck, red Pegasus horse and all, officially stolen now, along with the radio and some tools.

  That was the least of his problems, though.

  He’d evidently spent most of the time between the fight with his super and now driving out to every pumpjack in the county, and flipping their breakers. Not driving a bar through the circuits or draining the fluid out so they’d seize, but just turning them off, simple as that.

  Though the ex-deputy who farms now—I’m not supposed to use his name, but come on—won’t talk about the cotton fire or what came after, he will talk about arresting Steve Grimes that day, so long as I don’t use any real names.

  What “Steve Grimes” did was pull a chair out, slosh the pitcher over, invite the good old boys from the Sheriff’s office to take a load off.

  By then, because he’d still been using his company gas account, they knew he’d been through nearly four tanks. Making caliche loops back and forth, all over Midland county.

  “You should know the pumps are back on,” the other deputy told Steve Grimes.

  “Just wanted a day off, yeah?” Grimes said back, lifting his beer for the other guys at his table to cheer in.

  They leaned back, hissed smiles, found other places to rest their eyes.

  They still had to work, I mean.

  And it was easy as that. No fight, no tortilla chips flying onto other tables, no beer mugs thrown.

  Finally, too—though we wouldn’t know this until just after our quiet, quiet Christmas— the electric company was able to clear Grimes. Caprock Electric, out of Stanton, who still had most of the rural contracts in the eastern part of Midland County back then, and over into Martin.

  The night of the fire, Steve Grimes had been way east, throwing breakers on pumpjacks. The meters confirmed what he’d written in the logs. He might have been a fired pumper, but he was still a pumper, I guess, unable to keep his nub of a pencil out of all those lined pages.

  After he was cleared, then, that left us back where we’d started: Tommy Moore. A possibility that had surfaced for a bit, early on, in relation to all the shady trucks in the area— every time there’s a bad wreck in Greenwood, there are always suspicious trucks and cars everywhere. A friend of mine even used one to explain a threewheeler crash he had, one that left a line of scar tissue smiling inches back from each side of his mouth (barbed wire). Another friend I got in a fight with, just because somebody’d seen a car the color of his on the same road one of my cousins was bleeding out on.

  Nobody liked this story, though. The one with Tommy Moore still in it.

  But what else was there?

  ***

  To start at the beginning, it was early December. So, just why wasn’t Tommy Moore at school that morning? I can hear a particular mom in a kitchen in 1985, coffee on the table before her, a cigarette permanently clamped between her fingers like the least important thing, saying this to her friend across the table but leaning close too, like it’s an obvious, obvious secret: “Why wasn’t he up at the school, though?”

  It’s not something the men would have thought about. Just because it made perfect sense to them, putting tractor work before school work. Which of the two was actually going to get you somewhere, right?

  Tommy Moore wasn’t planning on staying around Greenwood, though. He already had a letter from Midland Junior College, was going to be a Chaparral, let basketball buy him a couple more years of school. It’s what his big brother was doing already, just with the military instead of sports, guns instead of basketballs.

  But he never had Tommy’s jump shot, either. Nobody did. That way he had of just blocking out the world, focusing only on that orange rim, no matter what hammer the other team had put on the floor just to show him how hard he could get nailed for every two points he drained.

  Could we have gone all the way to the state tournament his senior year, if Rob King hadn’t plowed his face into the ground?

  Nobody said it out loud, but we all knew.

  Teams like that happen once every ten years, if that. Returning seniors with a star to lead them.

  No, that next year, all of us who were old enough to be out in the fields alone but still too young to drive stripper, we’d get posted out by the modules. Guards. Our orders: not to confront, just run off, identify later.

  Which is just to say it again: nobody knew who’d done it last time. For all anybody knew, that firestarter could still be out there, striking matches in a darkened room. Waiting for the right night.

  And our moms hated it, of course, putting us out there like that, but they understood. Were proud of us the way I guess moms who send their uniformed sons overseas must feel. All the moms that year were Mrs. Moore, yeah.

  Except
of course these moms, our moms, they could bring us dinner still hot in its foil, and we’d pretend we didn’t want it, didn’t need it, but then would keep them there too long all the same, just talking about nothing. Asking them questions about when they were girls.

  You always look for the moment you grew up, I think. Like it’s a thing that happens all at once.

  But sometimes it is.

  For me it wasn’t standing guard that next year, but my mom shaking me from bed one morning, my brothers still asleep, my dad already gone. What had happened was our year-old cat, still a kitten herself, had had a kitten. Just the one. But it was all wrong—no hair, not-yet-finished eyes. Just there on the concrete stairs that led to our screen door, breathing fast and shallow. Its mom watching it from the cinderblock fence, unconcerned.

  I put on my basketball shorts and my favorite boots, the tallest ones I had, and scooped the broken thing into a shovel, carried it to the burn barrel, and, because a gunshot would send the horses through the fence, finally just raised a stray cinderblock over my head, held it there for what I know’s too long, and brought it down as hard as I’ve ever done anything.

  My mule-ear boots went to my knees, almost, were still too big, hand-me-downs, but they weren’t quite tall enough, either. My thighs got misted, coated, sprayed.

  And then it was just breakfast, school, the usual. Nobody even knowing. My mom never asked, I mean. It was how I knew I was grown up: I had things inside me that weren’t for anybody else. Things I’d have to carry from here on out.

  Was that what it was like for Tommy Moore that morning, looking up at Rob King’s fists?

  If that particular mom smoking her cigarette knew so much, she should have just told us all who did it, who started those fires.

  Then none of the rest of this would have happened.

  ***