Growing Up Dead in Texas Read online

Until my sixth grade, anyway.

  I was standing in front of the school on a Friday night, waiting for the purple bus to come over from Stanton like a UFO. Waiting for Herb to unfold that magic door, ferry us to the skating rink for Van Halen and Ms. Pac-Man and hobo races and limbo and quarter refills at the fountain, dark corners and slow dances and fights in the bathroom, lockers by girls we were in love with. Our names said slow over the big speakers in a way I’ll never forget. It was the whole gang of us, the usual suspects, and then there was this blue-striped cab-over weaving into the parking lot too fast, swinging wide but close enough that we shielded our eyes from the gravel.

  Uncle Jackson. He’d changed rigs.

  I walked over, unsure, leading the pack.

  Soon enough the door opened and he half-fell, half-climbed down, leaving dark handprints on the chrome grab bar, something like steam rising from every part of him. Or smoke. Like he’d been in a whole other world, was just climbing back up to this one. For me.

  The way he was breathing, too, it was wrong, and it was almost dark already, and I was about to cry, I knew, even though I was twelve and all my friends were there.

  But then he smiled, his teeth the only thing on him that could reflect light.

  I never understood quite what, but the tank he’d just dropped off out on the Rankin Highway, it had hot oil in it, or oil that had got hot in the sun maybe, or out on the interstate, and some seal or line had burst, spilling that oil all over him, cap to boot laces. He was burned—burning—but not bad enough that he couldn’t still smile, show us not to be afraid.

  The reason he was there, though.

  This is the part I hate.

  He knelt, the rocks and broken glass sticking to the knee of his jeans in a way that made me pull my lips away from my teeth.

  “I need—need you to drive,” he told me, there in front of everybody, and then swallowed so that I could see the effort it was taking him to control his voice here.

  I opened my mouth, didn’t have any sound.

  He’d let me do it before, him working the complicated gears, the steering wheel like a huge bowl I could lean too far over, fall down into, but this, this was different.

  “Drive,” he said, like I wasn’t getting it. Like I didn’t understand the urgency. What this hot oil was doing to him. How hard it was to even be standing still.

  It was the closest he’d ever come to raising his voice to me.

  “I—I can’t,” I told him.

  My excuse that night at the skating rink would be that I didn’t want to go to jail for not having a license, and I’d try to say it like that was the only thing I could have done. Like I knew enough not to want to go to jail. Like I didn’t need that kind of hassle, not on a Friday night, when the cops could keep me all the way until Monday if they wanted.

  It’s dark at the skating rink, too. Whoever you’re couple-skating with, she usually can’t see your face.

  I didn’t get in any fights that night. Probably even won the limbo again, I don’t know. It was always mine for the taking. My friend Bryan—the one who lived by where Prairie Lee used to be—drank all the vinegar out of the gallon pickle jar and then threw up in the parking lot, had to beg his way back in, but that was nothing new.

  Hours before that, though. It was skating around and around in my head, like maybe if I looked close enough at the rail there would be a hand to pull me back, give me another chance. Let me do it again, right this time.

  But it only happens once in your life, a thing like this.

  In the parking lot, dusk all around us, Jackson cocks his head over, maybe not sure I’d really said that, that I didn’t want to drive, then looks to the rest of the sixth graders behind me. Not for someone else to drive, but like seeing them for the first time.

  “Just down to your dad’s, man,” he says, reaching for me, his arm almost straight. “C’mon, dude.”

  I flinch back. Have my favorite shirt on.

  “No,” I tell him, taking another step away, and he stays there on one knee for maybe ten more seconds, just staring at me, then nods, says it in a way that there isn’t any disappointment in his voice, “Cool, man,” and climbs back up, locks his left leg against the clutch, and, and—

  And the first novel I ever sketched out, that years later became my first novel except all different, the key moment is when this underage kid’s driving a cab-over rig by himself, trying to make it to these ancestral carnival grounds but he’s already late, so late.

  Then, because the world’s against him, has been the whole time, the bridge he’s about to duck under— I’d seen Terminator 2 by then— it collapses. But he keeps on driving, shears the top off his rig, then sits up, lines that big steering wheel back into place and reaches down for a taller gear, twin plumes of black smoke chugging up behind him.

  I don’ t know.

  So, Parker, yeah, thanks, seriously and forever, and Jackson, man: you tried. The next time I saw you, it was at your mom’s funeral. Your blue rig was parked out on Cloverdale, past all the other cars. I stared and stared at it.

  ***

  And there’s Rooster. Rooster Jones. Jones being the real last name for once. But there’s a lot of us, don’t worry. And I wasn’t going by Jones that summer after graduation anyway, had been through so many names already that it might as well have been witness protection.

  Like he’d been waiting my whole life, too, like I should know this before he pulled up onto the road, as it might decide whether I went down it with him, he just told me up front why Arthur King didn’t prefer his company.

  It was Mouse.

  Rooster and Mouse had been in the same company in the Army. Before, the story I’d been able to put together involved

  Mouse staying behind to provide cover while the rest of his troop made it back to the trenches. Or that’s the one I’d been telling myself. Probably I got it from the movies. All I had to do was put that World War II uniform onto that kid leaning away from the tack shed, take it from there.

  As for why Arthur King didn’t enlist, why his brother was there instead of him, I suspect it had to with Walter Jr. needing to keep at least one of them there to plow the fields, tend the crop. At least one.

  How do you pick, though?

  Who has to stand on top of that cellar door, hold onto the cable?

  My guess: Mouse made the decision himself. Going by the stories I’ve heard about him, all cleaned up by time and telling, not only would he have never let it be anybody but him, but trumpets would have been sounding in the background, a lion roaring in the distance. Anyway, by that time, Arthur was already married, had a kid on the way, while Mouse was just Mouse. Spent so much time on the tractor that he probably didn’t even need a bed.

  And Walter Jr. couldn’t have said no, either. Maybe the war would be good for Mouse, get him on the family track, show him what’s important. Not that he wasn’t an excellent hand, not that anybody in the county disliked him, but if he was going to take over the whole operation, he was going to need a proper home to come back to at night, right? To remind him why he was working so hard.

  So, yeah, he signed up, actually got sent to the front lines instead of some safe post, and never came back. The usual tragedy. This is how you make a saint.

  Except for Rooster Jones.

  Even in 1945, I have to imagine he had about the same effect on people as he would forty-five years later, when I was riding around with him. And as for his home life, I have no idea. His wife was somebody he joked about every chance he got—Wanda, I think—but I never saw her step out of the house. And his three kids, all boys, were from my dad’s generation, one in jail for a good stretch, one looking to retire from the Army after his twenty, the other supposedly still around somewhere, just in some slightly different sphere of West Texas than I ever moved in.

  1990 doesn’t matter here, though. Just World War II. What really happened to Mouse.

  According to Rooster, the one time Arthur King ever graced his
porch was when he had a paper for Rooster to sign.

  It wasn’t quite a legal document, but it was phrased like an affidavit, anyway. For the Midland Reporter-Telegram. Because Rooster hadn’t been returning any of their letters, and never answered his phone.

  This is Titans meeting on that porch.

  Arthur stone-faced with jealousy, with resentment, because it wasn’t him who got to see Mouse go down, wasn’t him who got to nod goodbye, to pack everything into that nod: that they understood what he was doing, that it wouldn’t be forgotten. That they were all going to live with more purpose now, just in honor, in thanks.

  I can kind of see Rooster on that porch, too, shrugging his shoulders like he’d just thought of a joke, his round little sunglasses still on even though it’s almost dark, his whole manner saying that he was well aware what Greenwood thought of him: that he had got there seventy years too late. That the money he was buying their land up with, it wasn’t honest money.

  “They just want to know that’s how it happened,” Arthur King says here, to Rooster, holding the document between them. “It’s for the bicentennial write-up.”

  Of course there would only ever be the obituary, that one PFC photograph.

  This is the why of that.

  Rooster laughs here, rubs his nose with the back of his always-buttoned sleeve—his burn-scarred arms still sensitive to the sun—and shakes his head no, Artie. No.

  Some pretty serious silence here. Mrs. Jones maybe at the window, holding her breath. A jackrabbit out grubbing up pink careless weed roots but stopped now, its lanky ears cocked over.

  “Why?” Arthur King says. “Can you tell me that, at least?”

  A smile from Rooster. A simpering, simpering smile, like the mischievous dog in a cartoon.

  “This is probably something for Junior to be relating, think?” Rooster says then.

  “You were there,” Arthur King says.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Rooster says back, shrugging that, more than anybody, he wishes he hadn’t been.

  How long Arthur King stands there after this, I don’t know. But they don’t say anything else, don’t nod bye. At some point one of them finally just turns away, goes either to his truck or his front door, and in this way it’s over, and the article never gets into print.

  It’s still floating around, though.

  Forty-five years later, Rooster screws the cap off his rancid thermos and gives it to me, tells me what Arthur didn’t ask—what Arthur didn’t have to ask—tells me it like it’s my inheritance, but first asks me what I know.

  “He stayed back,” I say, trying to shrug it real, “he stayed back, held the Germans off, so the rest of you…you know.”

  It feels so strange to even be saying it, at eighteen. Saying it out loud. And I realize I never have. How thin it is, this story. How flimsy. “The Germans.” I didn’t even know what that meant, back then. Shouldn’t even be allowed to say it at all.

  Rooster smiles, splashes a few swallows of his milky tea into the cap, passes it over to me.

  I swirl it around to try to get the sediment or backwash to be harder to see, anyway, then drink it down in two shuteyed gulps.

  Rooster nods, fills it again and drinks it off, holding it in his mouth a bit before swallowing, like getting all the taste out. Or waiting for it to warm down enough for his throat. Then he screws the cap back on and taps the thermos into place between us.

  “Mouse,” he says, not looking at his cotton so much anymore. “This would be a different countryside now, you know?”

  I don’t, but nod anyway.

  One old guy could have made everything different?

  Or, one old guy did, I guess. Has.

  “Ever wonder why Mouse didn’t leave any little Mouslings behind?” Rooster says, scurrying his fingers up the face of the dash.

  “He died,” I say back. It’s obvious.

  Rooster pinches some chewing tobacco up, packs it in. Lets the juices build until I think I might have to scream.

  Where we are is back by the Phillips place, the pasture between the fields always a haunted place for me. Most of the owls and snakes I killed, I hid them there. According to Jackson, he and Parker used to think it was an Indian burial ground. Before the mesquite— and maybe this is a story he got secondhand, as the mesquite there are trees— the pasture was supposed to have been lumpy, back when. Evenly lumpy, in rows.

  Because that’s how Indians buried their dead, yeah.

  But who knows.

  It wasn’t always Indians burying the Indians, either.

  The Phillips place was always kind of special to me, anyway. The only place I ever saw a mountain lion track. Just a line of them, angling towards Cloverdale through the soft dirt. Huge pads, no claws. I was moving pipe that morning. Everybody else always had stories about seeing them, just at the edge of their headlights. About pulling up to a draw and jumping a big one, one that moves like smoke from a yellow smoke bomb. About the guy at the trailer park back by the water station who’d hit a black panther one night after the bar and has it in his chest freezer now.

  All I ever got were the tracks, though, so I had to make the cat up myself, then be afraid to bend over for the pipe, because I’d made it up too good.

  Like I say, though, I wasn’t writing then, wouldn’t even be considering that until my other uncle got burned. Parker, eighty percent of his body third-degree.

  This time I went.

  The campus police came and got me from world lit, even.

  If I hadn’t reached back for my backpack, too, I wouldn’t be here right now. In that backpack was the spiral I was supposed to have been taking notes in.

  The reason the campus police got me was that I was the only family Parker had in Lubbock, where he’d been flown to the burn unit. The only reason they got me was because he wasn’t supposed to live.

  Of course I couldn’t go back, see him, so just sat there at the doors, with this other family.

  What had happened to them was—this was Halloween too, like with Pete Manson’s little brother—this dad, a guy about six-and-a-half feet tall, a biker like everybody in the waiting room, he’d been out trick-or-treating with his six-year-old. In the car. Only, they didn’t drive it very much, so the tires had got weathered. Just a few houses in, not even half a bag of candy collected, the driver’s side rear popped. Not a blowout or anything, just a flat. This was out on the Slaton Highway, I think (my freshman year, every Lubbock road I didn’t know was the Slaton Highway). So this guy, this dad, he’s out there changing the tire, and some repeat offender weaves by, slams right into him, drags him two hundred feet down the road, leaves him all over the asphalt. The kid just sitting there in his mask.

  And that should have been it, yeah. People don’t live through that.

  But this guy was, somehow.

  He was in the ICU slot closest to the door, all his family and friends bunched up around it. What kept happening was that he was waking up, ripping all the cords and hoses and lines from his face and body, fighting the doctors so he could get off that bed. The only thing he was saying was his son’s name. His son there once, in the remains of his five-dollar costume, his candy bag a plastic pumpkin with a delicate black chinstrap for a handle.

  Because I had to be looking somewhere, not at him, I opened my spiral, tried to go anywhere else. By the time I came back, the dad had died.

  Parker was supposed to too, but didn’t.

  The other day, on my birthday, he called me, even. I had no clue he had my number. Where he lives now is an apartment in Dallas that I’ve never been to. Since the accident, he doesn’t read anymore, says he can’t stay focused that long.

  What I always want to ask him is about the graves, though. The Phillips place. If Jackson and him ever just dug out there one day. What they could have found if they had.

  Skeletons of all of us, I’d guess. Hiding, waiting. Trying to pull the dirt back over.

  ***

  According to Roost
er, what Mouse did in World War II, it didn’t have anything to do with medals. But it made a kind of sense, too.

  Junior had a certain sickness, was the thing.

  The kind that only ever fixes on one of the kids. The one he named after himself.

  Of course Mouse went to war instead of his brothers. It’s what he’d already been doing his whole life, every seventh or eighth night when the boots came down the hall. When he was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, praying it wouldn’t be tonight. That he’d worked hard enough already.

  And Arthur King had to have known. To have remembered. To have forgotten ten thousand times but then had it rise back up a hundred more. For the sisters too, I’d guess, but they could marry out. Try to shake these childhoods off, be somebody else. Never come back, even for Christmases, even for all the funerals. Never mind the land. Never mind any of it.

  So, the story Rooster tells is that their company, fourteen of them that day, were moving through light cover, trying to make it back to the trucks. But it was the middle of the day. And there wasn’t some whole battalion dogging their every step, about to roll over them. Eventually, sure, but not right then.

  What there was was a single soldier out there, separated from his unit. A single soldier with a single rifle.

  One scared guy, herding Rooster and Mouse’s whole company.

  “Medals,” Rooster says, then laughs a sick little laugh.

  And I know this was 1945, but I don’t know France from Italy from any other World War II battlefield. I know they were over there, somewhere. In dry grass, not snow. And that—this an embellishment from the obituary, probably Walter Jr.’s doing, because he did know enough people—Mouse’s “valorous” action resulted in twelve soldiers making it back to their families.

  Twelve, not thirteen. Which is what you get when you take one Mouse away from fourteen soldiers.

  I mention this to Rooster. Like I’m the new Arthur King, trying to poke holes in the story.

  “Good eye,” Rooster says, leaning out the window to trail a line of spit that’ll only make the ground after following the swelled contour of his door. A streak of rust already starting there, under the stain.