Growing Up Dead in Texas Read online

  Rob King’s surgeries that spring were real, anyway. But maybe you can get three surgeries in your hand just from hitting somebody in the face over and over.

  It’s not the kind of thing you can ask a person, really. If this were some other book, too, there would likely be an X-ray here of Rob King’s hand. Or if those are all gone by now, I could probably even sub one of mine in—by the time I was twenty I’d broke my right hand three times, the bones in there gravel now, boxer’s fracture over and over—but that’s all it would be: the shadow of flesh around a confusion of bone. At first you wouldn’t know it was a hand, even, until you cued into the light dusting of arm hair, the empty space of the fingernails. What had to have happened to have done this.

  But this isn’t that book.

  What I have is this, Ms. Godfrey and me standing just around the side of the high school.

  “Does it change anything?” she’s saying to me.

  I kind of huff air out my nose, I guess.

  It’s no answer.

  “Pete saying you were there?” I tag on, half in apology.

  She nods.

  I swallow.

  “You and Tommy,” I say, not looking at her now.

  “He was beautiful back then,” she says.

  I’ve seen him in the yearbook, in his short eighties shorts, the segmented glass wall of the gym behind him, his mouth held in a way that you can tell the only thing in the world for him right then is that orange rim ten feet up.

  It’s what we all want, to exist like that, so deep in the moment that that moment never stops dilating out and out. Like being inside a balloon forever inflating. That sound of fullness. That feel.

  “But Taylor and Dwayne and the rest,” I try, eyes narrowed to be saying their names out loud like this.

  Taylor O’Hara, Dwayne Roberts, and the other offseason basketball players.

  “Trevor and Tad and Marcus and Geoff… Geoff Koenig,” Ms. Godfrey says, grinding her cigarette out in the Diet Dr. Pepper can she already had out here, twisted into the grass. “The Three T’s.”

  There’s a yearbook photo of them the following year, hamming it up by the ball racks, their arms out beside them, three letter T’s.

  Three, not four.

  And—I’ve gone back, studied like it’s a test—the reason she tagged Geoff’s last name on like that is that there was another Jeff who graduated with her. Jeff Tarpley.

  “You’re just going to have to ask me,” she says, calling me by name, looking over at me until I have to turn, face her.

  Early, early on, kindergarten for me, maybe, one of the times we’d come back to Greenwood, I got led out into a field in late April, when the fields were all white crust and heat.

  What I was supposed to see was how all the cotton, the whole crop, it was all kneeling there just under that white crust. That all you had to do was scratch it open and the plant would stand up, delicate and white-green.

  I spent the rest of that day out there, scratching careful little holes.

  “Did they do it?” I manage to say to her, real casual, like it doesn’t even matter.

  Ms. Godfrey looks back to the field where the houses are now.

  She’s about to cry, I can tell.

  I won’t know what to do if she does.

  Run, get the principal? Light her another cigarette? What she’s thinking, I know: that it’s all her fault.

  And that’s what I’m really asking, under the tangle of facts, which never really matter anyway: why did it have to happen like it did?

  “I didn’t tell,” she says.

  “I won’t write any of this down,” I tell her.

  She laughs. Her shoulders hitch up once, anyway. I study a brown and bronze plaque angled under a young tree.

  “You have to write it down,” she says, looking over to me, her not-grey-yet hair blowing across her face. “That’s why—it’s why I got you, right?”

  “Got me?”

  “Things always fix themselves,” she says, “always come back around, don’t you know?”

  And then she tells me.

  ***

  When I don’t believe her, I drive back out to Pete Manson’s but then just sit on the road by his place, the sun angling down, the shadows of all his trees stretching towards me.

  After a while he sees my truck, stands on his porch smoking a cigarette, makes a production of dropping it, of grinding it into the dirt. Of going back inside, the screen door flapping behind him.

  I ease away, burn two days digging up Marcus Weeks, the 1986 team’s point guard. He’s a car salesman on the other side of Midland now, still favors his ribs on the left side, thinks I’m interested in buying at first but then makes me somehow. Shakes his head. Shrugs yes to what of Ms. Godfrey’s story I tell him—her and them and Pete that day by the stripper—but adds some too, like he thought I already knew. Like of everybody, I should be the one to have already known this.

  It’s why Ms. Godfrey never told. Why she never had to tell.

  That section across from the school, across from the church, that the basketball players had to run through for offseason, it had been broken up into fourths a generation ago. Like all the other sections had been when Arthur King’s dad Walter King, Jr. died, and the black cars stretched for half a mile down 307. They were quartered up because Walter Jr. had four kids— Arthur, Arthur’s older brother Walter III, dead in World War II, and two sisters, who only existed through the mail and in other people’s photo albums anymore, like black-and-white secrets. The King land had still been all together at Walter Jr.’s death because Walter Jr. had been the only one of his five brothers and sisters to go into the family business, to lay claim to the land by working it, inherit it from his father, the first Walter, “Walt,” who bought the land from the railroad or something, arrowheads and all. So, once Walter Jr. died, the land was quartered up section by section to the four kids, even though the one Walter Jr. had been gambling on was dead. It was supposed to be the most fair way to do it, so if one plot were more prime than the next, then each would get a part of that. And they’d also each get a quarter of the dryland, some of it up to thirty miles away. As for the dead brother’s quarter-sections, Arthur absorbed them into his own. Maybe he got his sisters to sign off on it somehow, in spite of their own husbands’ advice, farmers themselves in other counties, or maybe, because he was the brother, and the oldest, he could just say that’s how it was. Or maybe the sisters just didn’t want it, would have been reminded of Walter III every time a lease check came, I don’t know. These are all people you can’t ask anymore.

  So, the section by the school that had been quartered already, how it worked was Arthur King ran the east two quarters of it—his and his dead brother’s—and Rooster bought the front quarter, the one right on the corner by the church, from one of the sisters’ families. The quarter-section above that, though, that sister’s kids kept it, leased it out in strips. It changed hands almost every year. You never knew for sure who was working it.

  And all that, that’s the easy part of it.

  Arthur King, of course, had the four kids too, just like his dad. All boys this time, three of them set to inherit, the fourth one dead. The dead one’s name: Sterling. Sterling King, yeah. The one Arthur had been coddling his whole life, the golden boy, the oldest, the one who never got in trouble, did everything right, the apple of everybody’s eye, all that.

  The one who, in 1968, in the parking lot of a bar in Odessa at two in the morning, cocked a lever action .44-40 into his mouth and pulled the trigger, leaving a widow and two kids behind.

  That rear window shattering into the night behind him, it was loud enough that Arthur King’s wife, Sterling’s mom, heard it forty miles away, sat straight up in her bed, and then started—it’s the only way to say it—folding back into herself.

  I only remember her as a tiny woman in her big chair, her hands shaky and terrifying, her lips the same color as her face.

  But the land.


  Everything in West Texas, it always comes back to the land.

  Just as his father had before him, Arthur King quietly added his dead son’s quarter of that section to his own. And the rest of the quarter-sections too. Should it have gone to the ex-daughter-in-law, Sterling King’s widow? By law, maybe, though there was no will, because who ever thought Sterling could really die? Arthur’s argument, maybe: it was King land. And before two years were gone she was married again anyway, had a different name, one her kids took as well, so.

  Nobody said anything.

  That night Sterling pointed his own gun back at himself, Arthur King’s land holdings doubled.

  And, until that December seventeen years later, the year of the fire, he hadn’t sold a single acre of it off.

  Marcus Weeks was able to tell me for sure it was December because that’s when the Moores bought their new house, the one I thought they’d always lived in. And, so as not to get him in trouble, lose him any business (like that’s his real name), that’s pretty much all he told me. But that’s all I needed, too, to connect the rest of this.

  Come March 1986, it wasn’t one of Arthur King’s John Deeres pulling a breaking plow across that particular quarter-section, it was one of Rooster’s ugly red Cases. A four-wheeldrive job, the four-bottom plow set deep to turn all that land upside down.

  He didn’t buy the land directly from Arthur King, though. Arthur King never would have dealt with Rooster. Like the bad guy in some worse play, Rooster, he had a way about him that…I don’t know. One ear was molded plastic, from some truck exploding on him before I was born, back when the gas tanks were behind the seats, and he always wore these little round black glasses that looked German somehow, and his blue and white tea jug, it was famous all through Greenwood for being the single most crusty thermos to ever wait all day in a truck or up in the cab of a tractor. Probably had third-generation fish in there, blind from the sugar he sweetened his tea with.

  Not that I never drank from it, but I drank from the handlines too, remember.

  There was a while the summer after I graduated that I would ride around with Rooster, listen to his stories. Be sure to be seen in that passenger seat.

  That’s all later, though.

  Then, December 1985—and it’s there in the heavy flat books of the county tax office, because nobody would tell me straight up, even Marcus Weeks, who has no stake out there anymore and’s already three marriages away from Greenwood—what was happening was Arthur King, for once, was selling some of his own land. Irrigated land.

  Worse, who he was selling it to: Martin Ledbetter. Old Man Marty’s son, not even pretending to farm anymore, now that his dad was gone.

  Martin Ledbetter, Sheryl Ledbetter’s dad.

  I’m not sure about property prices back then—now, even— but my guess is that Arthur King named his own price here, pretty much.

  Trick was, Martin Ledbetter wouldn’t have been buying land to farm. He wore slacks, had creases in the arms of his shirts, a tan from the golf course. No, what Martin Ledbetter was buying was Rob King. And who he was paying, through Arthur King—because that’s how the money had to go, the only way it could have gone—was Tommy Moore’s dad, who had every right, every reason to press charges, to demand justice.

  This is what Marcus Weeks means when he leans over the trunk of a Buick priced to move and crosses his arms at the wrist so that his hands just hang there in the heat, and tells me that that was when the Moores got that big new house that’d been for sale forever, yeah?

  The reason Tommy Moore’s dad didn’t press charges against Rob King was that Arthur King came to see him, had a clutch of cash, a handshake to follow. A hollow apology afterwards, to make sure the handshake stuck. This is how things are done in Greenwood, Texas.

  But this is also how things are done: the money was from Martin Ledbetter, who couldn’t have cared less if Rob King went away for a year or two. However, if Rob King did get prosecuted, then there would be witnesses. One in particular, his youngest, his last, the only one not married. And, if she did testify in open court, how could she ever marry then?

  Which is where Ms. Godfrey’s story picks up.

  ***

  Sheryl and Tommy are pretty much done up on top of the module. Laughing. They can see the school from here, even. All the little cars moving back and forth.

  Tommy puts his pants on without sitting up, just stands on his heels and the back of his head, looking through his eyebrows for a moment to Sheryl, shrugging into her bra.

  “Don’t,” she says, but doesn’t turn away from him either.

  Tommy pushes his hand deep into his front pocket, comes up with a crumpled pack of cigarettes, says to Sheryl “here.”

  He’s not offering her a smoke. It’s a kind of code between them, after these last two years together: when the wind’s up, she’ll let him use her shirt to make a calm space he can spark his lighter up in.

  It’s a stupid game, just an excuse to get her shirt off. But it’s a wonderful game too, the best one ever.

  Are they going to get married someday?

  It’s what you always think. What you can’t help but think. What I was already thinking, holding a girl’s hand at a football game.

  It’s not what you really want, though. What you really want, on top of a module like that, a girl billowing her shirt out so you can duck into it, get your cigarette going, is for that moment, for the two of you, to last forever. To live in the balloon.

  Another part of the game, especially if Sheryl’s wearing a front-clasp bra, is for Tommy to pretend he’s still trying to get his cigarette going. This involves holding that first drag in, and holding it, holding it, his lungs curling in on themselves but it’s worth it too, if he can reach through, undo that clasp.

  Except they’re usually not on top of a module when this happens.

  This time, with the wind going, Ms. Godfrey’s shirt doesn’t fall over Tommy’s head like it usually does. No, this time it lifts up, drifts cleanly off the module, floats for ten feet, twenty feet and only stops when Geoff Koenig snatches it from the air, holds it up like a prize he’s won, the rest of the basketball team whooping and hollering.

  Tommy Moore stands from the blue tarp, says it: “Fidel’s going to bust your asses, you know?”

  “Not if somebody doesn’t tell,” one of the three T’s calls back, his hands on his knees so he can breathe, his eyes locked on the chance of Ms. Godrey showing something. Of Sheryl Ledbetter letting a hand slip.

  She slides to the other side of the tarp, away from leering eyes. Hands at her throat, arms straight down, only making it all better.

  Marcus Weeks—this seems like him—nabs the shirt from Geoff Koenig, holds it to his face, breathes in deep, then it’s a game, them passing the shirt back and forth, Sheryl yelling down to them, one of the three T’s finally stopping, holding it up but taking it back at the last moment.

  “Smoke?” he says up to the top of the module.

  “Tommy,” Sheryl says, her eyes hot, this game so over.

  But Tommy Moore’s laughing, can’t help it. Doesn’t know whose side he’s on here anymore.

  He holds the empty pack up, crumples it, lets it fall, blow away.

  “Well then,” whichever T has the shirt says, and the basketball players swirl around again through the stalks with their captured flag of a shirt, are running back to school, their footfalls so quiet, like they weren’t even there.

  The next part you already know: Tommy Moore rolling to look over the edge of the module, expecting Marcus or Geoff to be there with the shirt, but instead, his last cigarette dangling from his lip so cool, he gets dragged down into a world of hurt, won’t be physically able to smile again for months, will have to go through nicotine withdrawal with an IV spiked into him.

  And does he remember what happened next?

  What had to have happened.

  Arthur King rumbling up beside Rob King’s truck, Pete Manson’s door already opened. Pete Manso
n getting pushed away at first, falling back into Arthur King, then both of them looking up to the module, to the apparition there: one of the Ledbetter girls, the last one, standing there in the daylight in her bra—she had to look topless at first, as white as she is—but wholly unaware of it. Just screaming and screaming for Rob King to stop.

  Seeing her up there like that, neither Pete Manson nor Arthur King could have had a single thing to say.

  Just—just wrench Rob King away from the kid, try to hold him down for Chrissake, and somehow there’s already sirens. Everybody can smell the smoke by now.

  And then, and this makes all the difference, Pete Manson looking up to Sheryl Ledbetter there on the module, and holding his hand out flat before him, telling her lower, lower, lie down. Hide.

  Chapter Four

  The only snapshot left of Walter King III, the only I’ve ever seen anyway, is this skinny kid by the tack shed at the King Place. It wasn’t new even then, that shed, was already leaning over, had been built with some flaw right from the beginning.

  In the square little picture—one of his sisters holding the camera?—he’s standing by the shed, his arms crossed, his smile nearly as wide as his face.

  His sister’s probably smiling too, having a hard time keeping Walter III still, or getting his shakiness to match up with the camera’s, anyway. I have to guess this is the one picture from the roll that came out like they wanted. And how long would they have had to wait for it, to see? Like we all used to, I’m sure they had to go to the Stanton drugstore to drop the film off, then wait a week, two weeks. Until the film was ready and they had a reason to be in Stanton.

  It was worth it, though.

  What they’d done, what took some time doing, was they’d pulled an old pair of boots down from somewhere, then—roofing nails would be best, but I’d guess they stacked washers—they, or probably Walter III, nailed that pair of boots to a wide plank. Next they somehow (you can’t tell from the picture) anchored that plank so that it canted away from the tack shed.

  So, then—this is the joke—Walter III could step into those boots, wave his arms around for balance, and, at some perfect moment, cross his arms and hold it, let his sister take this impossible snapshot: him leaning away from the shed at the same angle the shed’s leaning away from him.