Growing Up Dead in Texas Read online

  It makes you want to turn the picture one way, then another.

  His smile doesn’t go away, either, is at the exact center.

  On the back of the picture, too, in careful pencil that’s almost gone, just one word, Mouse.

  It’s what everybody called Walter III.

  The only other place I can find any photograph of him, it’s his obituary. He’s not smiling as big in it, and his hair’s been buzzed off, but still, it’s him.

  Growing up, all I ever knew about him was that he died in World War II. That he was a legitimate hero, enough that Walter Jr. got his medals in the mail, then a handshake at the door, a thank you that was supposed to be from the whole country.

  Did Walter Jr. stand there on the porch for half an hour after that black car was gone, his cheeks sucked in, just staring, until his wife came out, led him back into the house?

  I think so, yes.

  But that’s not where it ends.

  ***

  December 1985. Three days after Christmas. The basketball tournament down in Iraan that afternoon and, if Greenwood wins, that night as well. It’s what offseason’s been all about: conditioning. One game at two, another at eight that you’re just as ready for.

  In the locker room, everybody packing their gym bags and passing them to the right so somebody else can check, make sure there’s shoes, socks, jocks—it’s a drill by now, and for good reason—Coach Harrison sits down and looks from player to player, from face to face. And to the one missing, the one the team has already been to see again that morning.

  Tommy Moore had held his hand up from his bed and each of them—the three T’s, Geoff Koenig, Marcus Weeks, Dwayne Roberts—touched their palm to him lightly, not sure how breakable he still might be.

  None of them had said anything about Ms. Godfrey. Maybe to their parents, but Ms. Godfrey was a Ledbetter then, and if Tommy wasn’t giving her away, then no way any of them would. And, anyway, it hadn’t been her fault in the first place, right?

  But, the basketball team.

  Now that Steve Grimes was mostly cleared, everybody was looking back to them. And Coach knew it, had called all six of the players who hadn’t been wearing pads that morning into his office. Two of them had come out blinking away tears, but none of them said anything about Ms. Godfrey, and all of them swore that all they did was run out there, tell Tommy Moore to go to hell, then lean west, come back to the school one row at a time.

  On the back of each of their left shoes, in careful electric tape, is the letter T. On the heel of the right, an M wide enough to cup the heel.

  Coach has seen it but isn’t making them peel it off.

  For a long time he just sits there, staring at the skating-rink smooth concrete. The preacher at the front of his congregation, listening for a voice only he can hear. Waiting for it to be done. Trying to get it into human words.

  “We didn’t do it,” he says at last.

  General agreement.

  “And Tommy, he didn’t do it either.”

  More agreement.

  “And it’s not our job to figure out who did, right?” No, it’s not.

  “What is our job?”

  This is where you squint.

  Finally somebody says it: “Play basketball, sir.”

  Coach: “Excuse me?”

  Louder: “Play basketball, sir!”

  He smiles without really smiling, a trick only coaches ever learn, then nods. Then shakes his head no.

  “Play basketball?” he says, standing. “Play basketball?”

  Little to no eye contact now.

  Usually his sermons are about defense, about fouls, about what the team should remember about Crane or Colorado City from last year, since most of their players are returning as well.

  “That’s our job, gentlemen? To just go out there, say we played?”

  A few smiles now. On accident.

  “We’re supposed to win, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Win, sir. We’re supposed to go out there and win the basketball game.”

  Again, Coach looking from face to face. Not asking for it back at him louder this time, because quiet’s louder now.

  “For the one of us who can’t be here,” he adds, taking somebody’s shoulder in his hand, shaking that whole player gently, fatherly. “For the one—”

  And here he doesn’t finish.

  It may as well be screaming into a bullhorn. Everybody blinking away the stuff rising in them. Everybody knowing they’re going to win, that they have to win, that that’s all there is this time. That if they win, then everybody will know they were out running the whole time, not cadging smokes from Tommy Moore. Not running from module to module, grinding cherries into those crumbly white walls, even though the new rumor is that there had been a cigarette butt at each module, that the Sheriff’s office still has those butts in some evidence locker like Cinderella’s shoe.

  Never mind that the fires had already been burning for eight hours by the time they were lacing their shoes that morning in the locker room.

  Everybody knows that. But they also can’t imagine who else could have been out there. Maybe the fire department’s wrong about the time. Cotton’s finicky, not something you can understand in a lab. And, anyway, none of the suspicious trucks have turned up. It has to be somebody. Or a team of somebodies.

  But if they can play hard enough, come back with the medal, well. There’s no better way to get in the good graces of a West Texas community.

  So they check each other’s bags, and the manager pulls the clean jerseys from the blue box, calls out numbers each player responds to, and then they’re sitting on the bus at eighty-thirty in the morning. Slapping each other on the back, most of them plugged into Walkmans, making promises to themselves, trading the rest of their lives for one perfect shot, if that’s what it takes for Tommy.

  It’s still Christmas break, so the parking lot’s empty, the whole school’s empty.

  And the ankles traded for Tommy Moore in this tournament, the knees wrenched diving after a ball he would have dove for, the noses bloodied in his honor: none. Not a one.

  But that’s not to say that nobody gets hurt here.

  ***

  One of the stories my dad used to tell me about basketball was a tournament he played in high school. Stanton was up against one of the even smaller schools, the ones that don’t exist anymore, that, driving out on some narrow, unmaintained road, you can still stumble across like the ruins of some unrecorded civilization. The gym a Quonset skirted in brick, its metal doors chained shut, that floor space not reclaimed by senior citizens because the roof’s not stable enough anymore.

  I used to find them all the time, for hundreds of miles in any direction I went.

  This game my dad would tell me about, it was one of those small gyms, probably one of the ones I saw, even, where the walls of the place were—except for one side, where the shallow stands were—almost right at the base-and sidelines. So you didn’t dive out of bounds to save the ball like you can now with the extra room.

  Except for once, that is, this particular game. A player from the other team, a player who’d spent hours and hours in that gym, had grown up in it, likely. Knew every dead spot, all the angles.

  What happened was the ball was careening down for the baseline, and, because there was no air conditioning for a place that large, and it was night anyway, the single doors at both ends were chocked open.

  What he did, then, what he knew to do, had probably done a hundred times in practice, was plant a foot at the baseline and jump, reaching for the ball, all his momentum aimed to carry him through that open door. An instant later the ball would come slinging back and the crowd would erupt. The best magic trick ever. How heroes are made.

  The only difference—and I’m not even sure I’m not being lied to here—the only difference this time was that this player wasn’t moving at practice speed but at game speed, where things count.

  He planted like usual
, jumped, got his palm on the ball just as it was slipping out the door, but he was moving too fast, went too high, high enough that his face connected with the top of the door frame, acted as a hinge for the rest of him, folding out into the night.

  No ball came back. No player.

  By the time everybody followed, he was just laid out, there was nothing they could do. Breathing, but bleeding chunky gouts from the mouth with each breath.

  It was only after they’d carried him away to somebody’s station wagon, the two-row stands emptied, that one of the Stanton players jerked his hand back from the door frame he’d been hanging onto, to lean out, watch these strange goings-on.

  The knocked-out player’s two front teeth were up there, buried in the wood.

  Yeah, I don’t know.

  I’ve been in those gyms, though, through the windows with the grates folded up just enough, and I can see where a story like that might have happened once somewhere—some teeth lost anyway—then got improved in the retelling, told around here like it was true. Told to me like it was gospel, the most amazing thing ever. A lesson, even, that some balls aren’t worth going after.

  The gym I grew up in, the old gym in what used to be the main part of Greenwood, it was a Quonset too, though with more room around it. Not enough to dive through, but enough for cheerleaders anyway, if they were careful, kind of kicked to the side. The lights took something like fifteen minutes to heat up. One time, kicked out of the school I’d been trying to go to for a couple of weeks (Midland Lee or Midland High, I tried them both), I sneaked back, lucked my way through the halls of Greenwood and hid in that gym shooting baskets in the dark until my old math teacher zeroed in on the dribbles I couldn’t help—the clock always counting down from ten—just stood there in the doorway and told me, her voice not even raised, that I was wasting all my potential, that I didn’t have to do this, that I could be anything, that other kids would kill to have what I had. The usual story; I’d heard it before, from Ms. Everett, from Ms. Easton, and would get it in the way Godfrey looked at me that last semester before I was supposed to have graduated. I’m not mad at her for it. When Ms. Marugg told me that, I mean, she was probably younger than I am now.

  I don’t know.

  As to why I came back there instead of the thousand and one more places I could have gone, it has something to do with that basketball tournament after the fire, I suspect—after that morning, basketball was sacred, a holy act, you were pure just because you played— but it also had something to do with my uncles telling me in the fourth grade to look on the wall for their initials.

  It took until the sixth grade, when the pegboard was the hot thing, but I finally found them, up high on the wall, like they’d carved them in their day.

  It felt good, rubbing my fingertips over those grooves, those scars.

  Because they’d been just as stupid as I was being, I mean— here was the proof—but they’d made it through somehow, got away. Maybe I would too. Maybe this was all part of it.

  I was a long way from that shed I’d found, anyway. A long way from just drinking sudden aftershave.

  Here I am though, right?

  Because of—I don’t know.

  According to Ms. Godfrey, it’s to write all this down, to be that player disappearing into that square of night, slinging the ball back that can save the game once and for all.

  I kind of doubt it.

  ***

  It was because Leonard was late to start the bus. It was because Geoff Koenig’s mom had to drive his shoes up, pass them through the window in a folded-over paper bag that smelled like peaches. It was because Fidel made one of the three T’s go back inside, shave. It was because Coach got a phone call just as they were all walking out. It was because the sun was shining, it was because the Reverends Green and Wood had liked the lay of this land, it was because Texas had been stolen from Mexico.

  It was none of that. It was all of that.

  It was the team and the coaches and the two managers watching the rows of cotton to either side of them speed up, whip past.

  Instead of going straight up FM 1379 to the Garden City Highway to hook it through Rankin to Iraan, they turned left out of the high school parking lot and stopped at the church, Leonard looking both ways three stupid times like he always did then turning east on Cloverdale, no traffic at all, not a car or truck or witness for miles.

  And maybe that was it, yeah. Instead of going across on 20, to Odessa, and because 1379 was torn up in some way up the road—Leonard still lived up toward Sprayberry, would have known— the bus was hooking it over to 137, to go south.

  By this time, Rob King was home, of course, his right hand useless to control the throttle on a tractor, but he could throttle and steer with his left hand, and dump the baskets too, or run the module builder, whatever was needed, his cast the whole time wrapped in a plastic bag, his co-op hat pulled low so nobody could see his eyes, his left hand always opening and closing these days. Opening and closing.

  As for the trampoline that had blown into the fence or his pump house that the wind had exploded, those weren’t important yet. There was still some cotton to be packed into modules, anyway.

  Christmas had been quiet, strained.

  All the boys wore pants to the breakfast table, chewed their food thoroughly. Belinda King cried, swept away in her robe, came back ten minutes later, her cheer such a mask that the two younger boys started crying too.

  Rob King stood at the window, stared down the empty rows, the brown stalks arm bones to him. All the people planted out there, reaching up for something.

  He understood.

  Under the tree was supposed to have been the spark plug to a threewheeler for the boys to share, a Honda 110 he’d been talking about since school had started.

  None of them had asked after it, though. Not out loud.

  The skin of the trampoline caught in the fence was losing its basket weave, the fibers fraying. By dusk it was some crash-landed wraith. The biggest, deadest crow ever.

  By noon he was back out in the fields, stripping alone.

  Soon enough Arthur King joined him and they worked together, no words necessary after all these seasons.

  In the back of his truck, Arthur’s, wrapped under a tarp, was the Honda 110.

  Rob King didn’t say anything, just nodded, took it home filled with gas, and the headlight worked, and that night there were two boys with blue lips, one helmet between them, Belinda King on the porch, trying not to say anything.

  Rob King probably puts his arm around her waist here.

  Give them that.

  Three days later, though, he’s in the fields again, the boys too, with promises to be careful, to take turns. But Belinda’s standing on the porch just the same. Already Jonas has got his heel caught on the knobby front of one of the rear tires, been pulled down between the fender and peg, the threewheeler bouncing over him, his back for a moment bent like Belinda’s trying hard to forget.

  If she could just be out there with them, she thinks.

  She’d trade a quiet cup of coffee alone at the table for her boys, yes. Any day.

  But she can’t hear the threewheeler from the porch, so she steps out to the drive, to the basketball goal one of Rob’s brothers welded together as a housewarming gift, never mind that the cable rusted within the month, seized in the pulley, so the rim’s never been higher than seven feet six inches

  It’s low enough she can hook the fingers of her right hand in the bottom of the net, lean there, study the horizon for a speck of Honda red.

  Instead, she finds some school-bus yellow.

  It’s just sitting there on Cloverdale, its nose in the ditch.

  Belinda King tightens her grip on the net, pulls herself up to her toes to see better, and already her heart’s hammering in her chest.

  They’re not supposed to cross the road.

  They’re not supposed—

  II

  Chapter Five

  Mouse. Mouse Kin
g. King Mouse. K-Man. Just “King,” like he was the only one, or “Walt,” like his dad, Arthur King’s grandfather.

  I don’t know what they called Walter III in the Army.

  That summer I rode around with Rooster, he only ever called him Mouse.

  That summer Arthur King’s wife would be dead one morning on the couch when he came back in from his coffee, the television news flickering across her face.

  By the time the medics got there, Arthur King would be back in the shop, hammering a sand-polished three-foot knife back to true, his plastic goggles on.

  I like to think it was to keep the medics from seeing his eyes, from knowing he was human like them, but the truth is probably the same as it is for everybody who works in shops: you know somebody who caught a sliver of metal in their eye.

  Get a splinter in your finger, your body’ll push it out after a while. In your eye, though, with metal— what happened with my Uncle Parker was it started to rust, to send out these branches of brown. He got to it early enough, though, got to keep his eyes. He was the uncle who’d opened his closet for me one day, told me I could take any three books I wanted— Mack Bolan, Louis L’Amour, Conan, Raymond Chandler, the paperbacks six thick in some places—then three more when I got through with those.

  Four years later I’d burned through all of them, was raiding any other closet I could find.

  Thank you.

  But still, it was Jackson I tried to walk like, Jackson I still hold my head like. I can see it in pictures.

  He wasn’t around Greenwood very much anymore, was usually pulling trailers of pipe or oilfield equipment back and forth between Dallas and El Paso, but sometimes went as far east on 20 as Jackson, Mississippi.

  Whatever music he listened to, I listened to.

  When he’d blast through, let me ride in his truck, pull the horn—he was my secret dad, the one never on a tight enough schedule that he couldn’t go back, see what that glittering thing had been in the ditch.