Growing Up Dead in Texas (11 page)
Read Growing Up Dead in Texas Online
Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
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 three-wheeler 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 three-wheeler 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 three-wheeler 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—
M
ouse. Mouse King. 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.
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.
