Growing Up Dead in Texas Read online

Why wasn’t Tommy Moore at school that morning?

  If I could find him anymore, or knew anybody who’d kept up—he’s in Austin, maybe?—this is what I’m pretty sure he’d say: that it wasn’t about the three and a quarter he was going to get for another hour of work. No, the reason he stayed on that morning, it had a lot more to do with what he was missing. What he would have paid to miss.

  In Greenwood that year, there weren’t enough coaches to go around. If you weren’t a three-sport player—we were 3A, but just barely—then you’d pretty much get ignored. Especially, say, if the whole school was gearing up for a game that had been rained out in October, a game with the Buffaloes, natural enemy to the Greenwood Ranger.

  It hadn’t always been like that, though, the hostility. In my dad and uncles’ time, Greenwood had just been a kindergarten through sixth grade affair. That sounds small, but compared to what used to be there, what my great-grandfather had pointed out to me one afternoon, it was an industrial complex, a series of buildings nobody could have predicted. What my great-grandfather pointed out to me was where Prairie Lee used to be. A one-room school, the only one between Midland and Stanton, the same way Midland was halfway between Dallas and El Paso. Prairie Lee was just a dull rise in the pasture now. My great-grandfather held his finger there for longer than he needed to, like he was maybe trying to see it as it had been. Long enough for me to see it, anyway. And I wouldn’t forget. A few years later, when that land was being developed, I’d be at a sleepover with a friend who lived next to that pasture and I’d sneak out after everybody was crashed, feel my way through the fence, see if there was anything to find of Prairie Lee. There wasn’t.

  That same year, though, following a different fence in a different pasture, I would find an old shack that looked like I imagined Prairie Lee had. Except instead of shattered chalkboards or old desks there would be beer bottles and bean cans, and, on one wall, more intricate than any blueprint I’ve ever seen, a pencil drawing of the floor plan of some holding unit—a jail or prison, I never knew. I left as quietly as I’d come in, kept following the fence, finally and unaccountably finding a bottle of Mennen aftershave on its side by the base of a locust post. Like it had just fallen from the sky. For me.

  I knew what it was, what aftershave was, but I had to trade for what I’d seen in that shack, too.

  I twisted the lid off, closed my eyes, and drank it all down at once, didn’t let myself throw it back up.

  The way I know it worked is that whoever was staying there, or had been staying there, they never came for me, or my family.

  Maybe that was a shed we all went to, though. We just never said anything about it to each other.

  Maybe Tommy Moore’s big brother had even been there years ago, but not found the right way to cancel it out, had just walked by whatever bottle had been placed there for him. Whatever stray loop of barbed wire he could have cut himself on if he’d known. Cut himself deep, or shallow, in even lines above the hem of his sleeve, on the thigh just above the frayed bottom of a pair of jean shorts.

  I don’t know, would never ask him something that stupid, if anybody even knew where he was.

  Because—what if he shrugged, looked away, did know that shed?

  Either way, it went bad for Tommy.

  The reason he had an extra hour to kill on the stripper that morning, it was that athletics was first period, and he didn’t play football. There were six of them that year who didn’t get fitted for jocks and helmets, no matter who pulled them out of class, talked to them. Not just coaches but cheerleaders, cheerleaders on game day in their short blue skirts, their eyes painted to match.

  The reason: the year before, playing in Stanton, word had gotten over to Greenwood that if 30 got the ball even once, he was going to be leaving the field on a stretcher.

  It was the usual intimidation game, but then it wasn’t.

  Second quarter, 30 got the ball, went wide around the side where his speed could get him some room.

  The Buffaloes were ready, though. Choreographed, even. At least that’s how it looked from the visitors’ stands.

  30 hit one of them straight-on, and that Buffalo— this is what everybody focused on later, how that lineman outweighed our 30 by a good sixty pounds— that Buffalo let himself be thrown back, enough that 30 extended up at an angle, almost to his full length, like all he was trying to do here anymore was hold the ball down, keep it from floating away.

  In came the cornerback head first, aiming for 30’s armpit. Spearing him.

  People in the stands were crying, I remember. Some of the dads who had been high-schoolers at Stanton themselves, they were stiff-legging it out to the parking lot, their faces set, their hands already held in the shape of whatever they were going to thread out from behind their seat, wrench up from the bed of their truck. Their wives who had known them in high school following, holding onto them as they tried to walk back.

  Like Stanton had promised, 30 left on a stretcher, and we lost the game, and 30 was out for the rest of the season, only came back midway through basketball.

  The players who were on that team with him, they remembered how nervous he was about contact at first, so that when two-a-days started up in August, they stayed in their driveways shooting free throws. Concentrating on their form. Their sweet tea over there in the shade, the radio in their truck on, windows down. Their girlfriends just a phone call away.

  Their punishment, of course, was offseason basketball.

  All it was was running.

  One of the coaches (Fidel, a real name) would sometimes sit in a plastic orange chair to watch, but that was only if football was getting a lecture that day.

  Usually, the day’s work would be on the chalkboard in the locker room: Second pump behind the Evans’, TWICE.

  Instead of running around the track, taunting the football players crab-crawling out there like soldiers, the basketball team had to run, not lollygag (Fidel’s favorite word, after “yahoos”), through the cotton field next to the school. All the way to the second pumpjack, the one two miles off.

  You couldn’t cut it short, either, even if everyone agreed not to say anything.

  At unpredictable times, Coach Fidel would take one of the teachers’ cars, sneak past the back way by the water station, and be waiting behind the angle-iron rail of the pumpjack, just flicking the power switch on and off like he didn’t have anything better to do.

  Running through cotton, too, especially all through November and into December, it’s like wading through line after line of shrubs, like you’ve been sent to hell and it turns out hell’s a plant nursery. You can vault over for the first quartermile or so, if you get the rhythm right, but pretty soon your toes start catching the top of the plant, and by the time you’re through your first wind your shoes are stained wet green again. Never mind that Rooster, who farms the field, knows the head coach, and says he’s going to take it out of somebody’s skin if his bolls are all knocked off. Never mind that the dirt, cool under the shade of the cotton, is soft and deep, and that unless you catch the upsloping wall of the next furrow just right, your ankle’s probably going to grind against itself, make you very aware your Achilles tendon is a rubber band, one that’s only got so many stretches in it.

  All of which is to say that Tommy Moore, he had good reason to skip first period. Especially with the legitimate excuse of helping a booster, a deacon, an ex-school board member, get the cotton out of his field.

  However, a legitimate excuse to a coach is a good reason to get razzed as well. Especially from a pack of guys dripping green from their feet.

  The turnrow Tommy Moore was in that morning with Ms. Godfrey (I can’t call her Sheryl, never knew her as a Ledbetter), it was really Rooster’s turnrow, about forty feet outside the last rut Rooster’s circle system had carved into the ground all season. Just winter wheat matted down there, from the buggy getting pulled back and forth.

  It wasn’t that Rooster would just let anybody use his turnrow, but the
quarter-section his circle irrigated, it was land he’d bought from a King cousin. Land he’d outbid King for. So there was that. And, sure, in somebody else’s field, you can drive over a riser on accident—that’s why you don’t want just anybody there— but nobody would ever just leave that riser bubbling either. If you break it, you fix it, no questions asked. And it’s not like you can use up a turnrow, anyway. They’re made to do donuts in.

  Since 1985, that field of Rooster’s that ran alongside King’s has changed a lot, so there’s no way to tell anymore if you’re walking where it all happened or not. No way to tell if you should be feeling anything. Rooster’s field, even, it’s in development now, was too tempting, right across from the school like that. He wasn’t stupid when he bid, I mean. Back then, too, we could have gone out there on our threewheelers, touched the ground with our fingers, imagined we were touching dried blood. But then we’d have to see the burned-down modules as well. All of them, like an army had come through, left destruction in its wake, just smoldering piles. And we could get a rush from imagining dried blood on the pads of our fingers, sure. But that ash from the cotton. We knew better than to bring that home.

  From the road now, anyway, you can see the old pad where the second pumpjack used to be, before the Permian Basin collapsed in the nineties. How close it seems to the school, too. How stupid we were back then.

  And, no, that pack of offseason basketball players running that morning, I wasn’t one of them. Wasn’t old enough for junior varsity yet, even. But I can talk about it because I had to run just the same when I came up. The only difference was that now one of the coaches always had to pace us over on Cloverdale. Sometimes in his own car, the hazard lights on, sometimes in somebody’s truck. Close enough that we could all see his window down, his breath smoky.

  And that’s what it was about, too: cigarettes.

  When you’re sixteen, even if you don’t smoke, you do.

  Sure, we’d all dipped our way through elementary, thumbing the cans into the seat pockets of our Wranglers then praying for that faded circle to appear, that badge that proved we didn’t do everything our moms told us. Rubbing concrete into the shiny lids then bending snips of coat hangers into the concrete, so that we’d get belt buckles that would last a week if we didn’t cinch our belts too tight. Sneaking our dads’ whiskey a drop at a time into our cans so we could act tipsy from the nicotine buzz, let everybody smell our breath. But now that we were starting to discover pool—some of the dads had mid-life pool tables in their bricked-over garages, and didn’t get a summer vacation like we did—smoking was the cool thing. We all wanted that cigarette hanging casual from the corner of our mouths as we lined up a shot. Wanted to have to squint through the smoke like tough guys. It was practice for who we were all planning to be.

  But that morning, none of the offseason basketball guys would have rolled a pack into their socks. It would have gotten beat to death against the cotton.

  Tommy, though, working. Of course he’d have some, right?

  It would have been a gamble, angling over to the stripper instead of the pumpjack, but sometimes a cigarette’s worth whatever else might happen. Too, if your lungs are already on fire, why not have smoke coming out your mouth, right?

  So that’s the story that started Friday, got upstaged by Steve Grimes, but was still there after Grimes had been cleared.

  Nobody knew who, exactly—nobody wanted to be that person—but there was word that when the first fire trucks arrived on the scene from Stanton, that, between those slowsmoking modules and the school, running through the cotton like ghosts, far enough away already that they looked motionless almost, was a pack of six offseason basketball players, their hands in fists by their sides, not even one of them looking back.

  And I wish I could leave them there like that too.

  Chapter Three

  In the GHS yearbook from ’85/’86, Ms. Godfrey is looking slightly out of frame. Like there’s something happening just behind the camera.

  Ms. Godfrey.

  Sheryl Ledbetter.

  At first I didn’t even look in the L’s for her.

  Worse, when I’m waiting in the main office, she remembers me. Doesn’t even break stride, just steps past the desk, wraps her arms around my neck. Has to stand up on one foot to do it. I smile, don’t know what to do with my hands.

  “You made it,” she whispers into my shoulder, and now I don’t know what to do with my eyes either.

  Instead of talking to me there, she takes me to the library, to my Dewey Decimal number. All my books are there. All the ones I never sent her.

  I made it.

  I don’t feel right in the teacher’s lounge—I only ever snuck in there once, for nothing remotely wholesome—so we walk the carpeted halls at four-thirty after school, my hands deep in my pockets.

  “Ms. Everett,” I say, passing one of the three labs. Another real name.

  Ms. Godfrey nods, looks pleasantly ahead of us, her lips held slightly different now, I think. As far as I know, she never knew Ms. Everett—Ms. Everett was both after and before Ms. Godfrey—but probably heard about the memorial service (the funeral was in Arkansas, where she was from). Ms. Everett, who had a seizure while ironing one morning before school, died like that. I got in a fight with a good friend about her the next day, still carry a scar on my back where he threw me into a paper towel rack in the cafeteria bathroom, the back of my shirt so bloody I had to wear a football jersey the rest of the day like I had spirit, rah rah, because the basketball jerseys didn’t have sleeves. My friend had probably just said her name wrong, I don’t know. Or probably he’d just said it at all. If she’d made it to school that day, though, then Coach Sharpe wouldn’t have been asked to finish her class for her— he had a B.S. in something, so maybe knew what a Bunsen burner was—and his Senior English wouldn’t have needed a semester-long substitute. One still finishing her degree.

  Ms. Godfrey.

  We were all taller than her, I remember.

  And English, it was supposed to be a joke. Sharpe’s English had been, anyway. All you had to do was prod him with the right questions and he’d pinch his polyester shorts up to sit on his desk and tell stories all period. Show us his fingers, how crooked they were from his wide receiver days. Tell us about his year on the motocross circuit, before he was married. It was a joke, fifth period. Right after lunch, after—if it wasn’t basketball season—we would have all been out in the parking lot, bottles stashed under the seats of our trucks, our jackets still exhaling smoke every time we moved.

  Deal was, though, Ms. Godfrey, she’d been in that same parking lot just four years ago.

  If I would have been one year older, I probably would have remembered her senior year. She’d be a face at the pep rallies, anyway; not out on the court, with pompoms, but one of the ones in the stands, going through the motions, waiting this thing out. Going on the yearbook photos, that’s what I’d guess her senior year was about. She’s not in Future Homemakers, isn’t a sweetheart for FFA, isn’t in any of the language or science clubs (or auto or meat judging), didn’t compete in UIL’s Number Sense, and didn’t get voted most anything or show up in nostalgic silhouette at the bonfire. After what Pete Manson told me, it makes sense: she was spending all her extra hours at the hospital, tending to Tommy Moore. And then, when he was home, she was over there nursing him, threading his bangs back behind an ear, lying to him that it was all going to be all right, that nothing had to change.

  If you ask me, Ms. Godfrey and Tommy Moore should have been Homecoming King and Queen that year. Retroactively. Prom royalty as well. Mr. and Mrs. Everything, forever.

  Instead, I think everybody kind of just pretended they weren’t there. Because if they were there in the halls, at the bonfires, in the stands, then they’d have to think about the rest—the fire, the trial, the guns, all of it.

  It’s the crowd version of what finally pulled the two of them apart, I’d guess: Tommy, unable to look at her and not see her on
top of the module that morning, screaming for Rob King to stop.

  But I can’t ask her about that now, of course. If I ask what broke them up, then she’ll have to think about what if they didn’t, what if she’d stayed with him even though he was pushing her away, what if, like all the songs said she was supposed to, she’d stood by him?

  Would he be lost down in Austin now?

  If there were some way to just get this from the yearbook, I mean, believe me, that’s where I’d be. No offense, Ms. Godfrey, please. And I’m not ready to talk to Pete Manson again either, yet. I don’t want to have to see her through his eyes.

  Just the facts, as far as I know them.

  At college in Abilene, Sheryl Ledbetter met Roger Godfrey, who I don’t really know except to raise a finger to over my steering wheel. He’s about twelve years older than her, would have been a senior when she was just starting kindergarten. I can’t imagine they met in class one day at Hardin-Simmons, or that one of her friends introduced them.

  You have to admit, though, his wiry mustache, his suit: he’s not Tommy, not who Tommy was going to grow into. Probably doesn’t ever even remind her.

  But this book’s going to be on that shelf in the school library too, I know.

  I’ll never see it, never sign it. Don’t want her (you, Ms. Godfrey, I’m sorry) to have to pretend she didn’t read this. To hug me again like I haven’t betrayed her, and everybody.

  So.

  What I Remember Best About Her Senior English.

  This is my report.

  What I remember best is that we gave her hell at first, until the principal had to come talk to us, her out in the hall, sure she’d done the wrong thing, calling in the brass. What I remember is the way our girlfriends and ex-girlfriends—this being all of the girls, yeah—would cut their eyes at us every time Godfrey turned to diagram a sentence on the board. What I remember is that she actually made us read and take quizzes on Red Badge of Courage and Heart of Darkness and The Great Gatsby, and Catcher in the Rye and The Last Picture Show, even though the librarian kept the copies of those last two behind the desk. And don’t worry, this isn’t some cornball light going off in my head, this life I’m in now suddenly taking shape ahead of me.