Growing Up Dead in Texas Read online

  No.

  But there was something.

  To keep us from leering at her, Godfrey started wearing frumpier and frumpier clothes, her oldest sister’s I’d guess, so that we’d forget she was only five years ahead of us. I felt sorry for her for that, in a dull way. Like I knew I should be feeling sorry for her and wished I were doing it better. Or, I missed the way she’d been those first few weeks, anyway. Maybe selfishly. It made her a joke for the girls, too, the way she started dressing. But it’s not like we could stand up for her. We needed those girls, I mean. All we needed from Godfrey was a passing grade so we’d be eligible to play.

  But because I didn’t like what she was doing to herself, what we were making her do to herself, I slipped.

  She figured out I could read. Aloud.

  In Coach Roarke’s seventh grade life science, I’d always been the one who would read aloud at the end of class. Just because I could zip through a chapter in no time, and not miss a word. It was a joke, then.

  Not to Godfrey.

  We were reading Beowulf one week, going down the row, taking turns stumbling through the lines and when it was my turn—and after Michelle, the girl to my right, had shown me what page we were on, Michelle who had just been pointing out Godfrey’s barely too-long slip to another girl, maybe Kelly, then flaring her eyes and holding them wide like that—I pushed her Ranger-blue fingernail farther out of the way than I had to and fell right into the lope of that translation, pronounced all of those old words right, stresses, sentence breaks, all of it, like I’d been practicing all week. Not like this was my first time to open that chapter of our book. When I was done, ready to hand-off, it was quiet instead. Ms. Godfrey clapped.

  I smiled, wouldn’t look at her, but was suddenly the designated reader again, until in the locker room the guys were thou’ing and thee’ing me. Like I’d been reading the Bible in class, not Old English.

  Ms. Godfrey didn’t turn me on to reading, to writing— blame my uncle for that—but she did make me realize I was different. That I wasn’t like anybody else in that locker room.

  You made it, she’d told me, her eyes closed against my shoulder, all her weight on the back of my neck, only one foot on the ground.

  Thank you.

  ***

  “Pete, right?” she says to me after we’ve walked all the halls, my hand darting out at one point to touch the metal of my old locker, then the one two down from it. Where we are now is outside, the east side of the school, the south corner of what’s still the new part to me. It’s where Mr. Brenhemin’s shop class stood to watch the fire that morning.

  There’s young trees planted all around now, each with plaques I haven’t read yet, each with garden-hose-wrapped cable tying them down at three points. Against the wind. So they won’t be on Michael Graham’s next list.

  I nod yes to her, that Pete told me.

  She does her lips like she’s been expecting him to tell somebody, it’s just been a matter of time, then produces a pack of cigarettes from some pocket of her dress.

  It’s like catching your preacher holding a centerfold with one hand.

  “Pete the Rabbit,” she says, not really to me, I don’t think, cupping her hand around the flame.

  It’s what everybody used to call him, from the pattern he planted his cotton. I can’t remember exactly what it was now— there’s only so many variations with an eight-row planter— but I do remember that that’s always how you knew it was a Pete Manson field: the way he’d hop this row, or that one, nothing symmetrical. All his plows fitted for it, like he wanted to be sure nobody else could work his cotton but him. Like he knew his equipment was all going on the auction block soon, and he wanted to inconvenience whoever stole it.

  Ms. Godfrey doesn’t offer me a cigarette. That would be the worst thing ever.

  How old I am here is thirty-six.

  What I want to say, note out loud, is that she didn’t used to smoke. We would have smelled it on her, would have seen her out by the doors with the other teachers, the High Bun Club, the Cat Eye Crew. What I want to say is she’s doing this in remembrance, to honor Tommy. To go back to that morning again, smoke all around, and somehow step out of it in a different place.

  What I say instead is that those houses didn’t used to be there like that, in Rooster’s field. Did they?

  She inhales, holds it.

  “Your brother?” she asks, almost like she’s afraid what I might have to say.

  He had her for English too, three years after I did.

  For a while he was famous in Greenwood for lying on Cloverdale at night, on the yellow road stripes in front of the church, letting the cars blast by on either side. He was in sixth grade then, still had a lot of years left to luck his way through.

  I tell her where he’s living, what he’s doing.

  She narrows her eyes each time she inhales, the make-up by her eyes not quite moving with the skin.

  “I’m a character,” she finally says, looking over at me.

  In one of my books.

  I shrug.

  “You’re not going to use my real name?”

  “I’m changing them all.”

  “And Tommy?”

  “He’s somebody else too.”

  She nods, says, “That’s about true, yeah.”

  “Ms. Godfrey—”

  “What did Pete say?”

  I start to tell her, know I’m going to get it wrong and scrape something open between them, so I pull my truck around, the sole of my boot skating over the asphalt, gravel dancing up against my rocker panel.

  She reads the Pete part on my laptop, me blocking the sun, her blowing the dust from the screen, my hair in my eyes, but maybe that’s best.

  “How’d you get home from the airport?” she asks.

  “He got it right, then?” I ask back.

  “You used his real name.”

  “Not both of them.”

  She clicks the laptop closed, keeps the lid down with her fingers. It’s something I haven’t ever seen anybody do before.

  “You should be careful, you know,” she finally says.

  “I’m changing some of the dates too.”

  “It’s enough?”

  We both know it’s not.

  All around the school grounds now are houses. Baby Jessica used to live in one of them. A Texas Ranger in another. On one of the roads winding through the houses, when the houses were still just frames and tar paper, I jumped off a hay ride once, didn’t make the ditch, scratched the face off the cowboy on my belt buckle but got up and kept running, only fell down behind one of the houses, knees bloody, palms raw. Halloween. No clue why I jumped either. All that’s left is the brief flash of a girl I liked then. She’s singing a Tiffany song with all the other girls.

  What I want to tell Ms. Godfrey but know I won’t is that the first story I ever got noticed for, the first full-length story I ever wrote, it was “West Texas Dirt.” About this dad out beside a tractor, snakebit, dying, planting a sunflower weed back into the ground, his daughter seeing the whole field yellow two months later, and knowing it’s for her.

  It’s the stupidest story.

  No farmer would ever do that.

  Even when you see one of them up from a week down in McAllen or somewhere—funeral, wedding, cheap feed, whatever—they’ll always have some absolute tree of a cotton stalk in the back of their truck, but that’s all it’ll ever be. Never the leaves, the squares, the bolls. The stalk rubbed shiny even, likely with a gas rag, because nobody—and I mean nobody— wants to be the one to introduce some new brand of weevil to West Texas.

  But those contraband stalks. I remember old guys looking both ways down Cloverdale then pulling that ridiculously tall plant out from behind their bench seats, half hiding it behind their door just in case some county agent’s got them in a pair of binoculars.

  They’re holy relics, giant compared to our cotton, the elder gods of what we raise. And then you burn them in the barrels, get b
ack to real life.

  That’s what I should have written about in that first story, I think. Then I could have stepped out in a different place as well. The way you can stand in a young field in July and watch all the new leaves for hundreds of acres around you turn as one, following the sun? How, after the cropduster’s come, you can find these little dying owls out in the cotton, then carry them around all day in the truck with you, their yellow eyes just watching you the whole time? How terrifying it is your first time pulling a knifing rig, even though you’re just learning on hay grazer, so it doesn’t really count? How sometimes you can get thirsty enough to drink from the handlines, even though you’ve dug burst-open skunks and rabbits from those same pipes? How in a field that’s just been baled up, you can stand there after the tractor’s gone and hear the rattlesnakes buzzing in the square bales?

  Or, no.

  What I should have written about is the transmission of my first truck. How it kept slipping, had nearly three-hundred-thousand miles on it already. But there’s a trick to that, too: eek two drops of brake fluid down that bent tube and the rubber seals all tighten up, you’ll get better pressure, and bam, assuming you’ve spitballed the vacuum modulator and taken a ballpeen hammer to your carrier bearing, you’ve got a smooth ride, with shifts that’ll throw you back in the seat a little, for the first few days at least.

  It worked for my truck, anyway.

  My friend, though.

  He had a mid-seventies Ford like mine, so we figured the brake fluid would work for his truck as well. We were sixteen; me and my mom and brothers were living in a trailer in the middle of a pecan orchard that year. Specifically, watching Dirty Dancing on VHS, a movie I’ve still never seen to the end.

  The reason is that those two drops didn’t work for my friend’s transmission. So he figured two more might be the ticket, then two more. Pretty soon it was half a quart and his transmission spun out, wouldn’t even pretend to grab.

  His dad found this out about seven-thirty, just before dinner. That the truck he’d just bought for his undeserving son was junk now.

  For thirty minutes he banged around the shop cussing, counting his rods and losing count each time, and when he finally came out again, it was after my friend, who I’m not going to name here. First it was just fists, some kicking, my friend all over their caliche drive, nothing new, but then he made the mistake of running out into the pasture, away from his dad’s steel toes.

  I picture him, my friend’s dad, standing in the floodlight, glaring into that darkness, then walking away himself.

  Next: headlights in the pasture, everywhere. My friend’s dad after him with the welding truck.

  By the time my friend made it to our trailer six miles away, it was ten-thirty, and he was torn and bleeding and limping; his dad had caught him once with the bumper, sent him rolling. Waited for him to get up before coming after him again, great roostertails of dirt geysering up behind him, pelting the roof of the house they were still building and would be for a few years yet.

  We kept him that night, and then the cops were there in three cars and I didn’t see him again for two years. By then his arms were nothing but scar tissue. Not from needles, but from the metal teeth that keep Ace bandages together.

  Locked up, all his shoestrings and belts and pants taken away, he’d figured out he could still cut himself with those little teeth.

  It’s a trick I would learn too, without him.

  Maybe like that shed, though, it’s something everybody figures out for a while. That they can trade. That you can always trade.

  And what I didn’t tell you about reading for Ms. Godfrey my senior year, what I didn’t want to say, it’s that once, going through Gawain or Gilgamesh— something with a G—it got to where I could hear my voice separate from myself, like another person altogether, and it was then that I knew I shouldn’t have done what I’d just been doing out in the parking lot, over lunch.

  I knew if I held onto my desk, everything would be fine, nobody would know. Except then I was holding onto my desk and the carpet was on the side of my face too, a scratchy red and grey weave I can still feel, and I was trying to speak, to read, and probably was, except Ms. Godfrey was shrieking across the classroom for me, cradling my head into her lap, onto her hand-me-down skirt.

  It was history all over again for her, I know now.

  Just how she’d wanted to hold Tommy Moore, when she thought he was dying.

  ***

  I should get Rob King and Tommy Moore’s dad out of that road now.

  My best friend from elementary’s big sister knows the story of it, kind of, and told us once when she was supposed to just be watching us. These were the years she was still in a leg cast from their family’s big car wreck in Midland. I never saw her walk without crutches until years after I’d last talked to her brother. I didn’t even recognize her. It’s one of those things I should be able to write better, make real, watching her glide past in a department store, how I felt everything shift around me, like I was in some slightly alternate Midland, Texas now, some charmed, accidental place.

  She was still beautiful, of course. The way she held the tips of her fingers together now that she didn’t have to be gripping foam handles. How happy her hands were.

  I’d been in elementary-school love with her for a while, ever since she let us listen to her Prince record but lifted the needle at certain times, so as not to corrupt us.

  Janna.

  That’s pretty much her real name, sorry. What she told us about what happened over on 1120 that day though, it’s no secret.

  She wasn’t sitting in some window spying on all of Greenwood either, her crutches leaned up against the window. From her house, all you can see is an old buffalo wallow and a flash of blacktop past it.

  No, the reason she kind of saw what happened was that she’d been coming back from town with her mom, one of her doctor appointments. Their long driveway started maybe twenty yards past where Arthur King was parked half in the ditch, half not, his door open.

  Janna was sitting in the back seat, of course, and knew so, so well not to run her leg alongside the driver’s seat anymore. Now she sat in the middle, her crutches beside her, stickers all up and down the wood.

  I don’t even want to write this.

  But. But they stopped, her and her mom, could each see Arthur King stepping from his truck, levering his seat forward, extracting the 870 he kept back there. Not the 16 gauge Belgium-made Browning Auto 5—you don’t let a gun like that bounce around behind your seat, don’t even let your grandkids ever shoot it—but the old pump he carried. Not for moments like these, I wouldn’t imagine, but still: it worked.

  He planted the butt against his thigh, angled it up into the sky, away from any transformer or utility pole, and, according to Janna, looked right into their car when he pulled the trigger. So they’d understand that they had nothing to be scared of, here. That this gun wasn’t for them.

  Janna’s mom, too, that day of their accident, she’d seen some things it’s not my place to mention, so, no, she didn’t go hysterical, start screaming. And Janna, she was in ninth grade that year. She just watched.

  In the silence the shotgun left, Tommy Moore’s dad rose up from Rob King, cut his eyes across the distance, to Arthur King.

  Arthur King didn’t angle the gun down at him, but he didn’t cock it behind his shoulder either.

  As for what they said, I have no clue; Janna’s mom had the heater blowing, the windows all up.

  Or maybe he didn’t even say anything. Because it was all already right there: What you’re doing for your son, I’ll do that too. Please.

  It’s not something Arthur King would ever say out loud.

  After a few breaths, Tommy Moore’s dad nodded, looked back down to the bloodied ball of Rob King, and turned around.

  Except—Janna had seen Terminator I don’t know how many times by then—behind him, Rob King stood, somehow.

  This wasn’t any movie, though. />
  Tommy Moore’s dad felt Rob King standing, or maybe Rob King said something, or breathed wrong. Either way, Tommy Moore’s dad turned around, not sure what Rob King wanted.

  More?

  When your son’s that deep in the hospital, I mean, you’ve always got more.

  But that wasn’t it.

  Rob King set his mouth, stepped forward, almost into Tommy Moore’s dad, his own dad calling something out to him but he ignored it.

  He leaned into the side of Tommy Moore’s dad’s truck, grabbed onto the shop-made bed rail with both hands, and closed his eyes, lowered his head, then came up again, turned to face Tommy Moore’s dad. For, in Janna’s words, “forever, almost.”

  She was kind of right, too. I can still see him there.

  Locked up for two days, two nights, he’d had the time to think about what had happened. What he’d done.

  Finally, he looked away, down to his right hand, the one still bloody-knuckled, and, with his left, popped Tommy Moore’s dad’s toolbox open. The hatch gull-winged up, bounced once or twice.

  “What?”

  It’s what Tommy’s Moore’s dad must have said.

  This: Rob King placing his hand there on the corner of the open toolbox, then, before anybody could stop, Janna’s mom only realizing it at the last moment, diving between the seats to block Janna’s view, Rob King brought that lid down with all the weight he had left, harder than he’d ever hit Tommy Moore.

  The lid came down far enough to catch, broke his hand bad enough for three surgeries that still left it wrong.

  It would be another two days before Arthur King made it home with his son.

  ***

  Ms. Godfrey—it’s an Old English derivation of a name, see?— doesn’t tell me any of this, of course. It’s legend. And if Janna was the main source of it all, then good for her. When you’re on crutches for six years, you need to be the one with the best story.

  And if she made it up, then good for her still.