Growing Up Dead in Texas (14 page)
Read Growing Up Dead in Texas Online
Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
And it’s not always just cows standing there either.
A friend tells me that one night he’s driving home. Too late, going too fast. Not paying enough attention to see the girl balancing on the stripe, reaching for him.
She’d been in the news then for eight days, an abduction case out of Midland. He clips her, sends her spinning into the ditch. Always the ditch.
The police don’t blame him.
Another friend is four-wheeling—this is after graduation, after he’s married and moved to Dallas— out at Possum Kingdom drinking by himself and climbing what he can, not rationing his gas at all, when he comes across a man hanging by his neck from a tree. The dead man’s been there for days already.
My friend doesn’t touch him, knows better. But he feels a kind of pride, too. Over his find. A completely understandable kind of pride. Hours later he stands by the state trooper’s car watching all this commotion he’s caused, and for the next few years, his girls cycling through soccer and karate and piano and cheerleading, he spends every weekend he can in more and more remote trails. Looking for dead people. Just one more.
I don’t know.
He should have stayed closer to home, maybe. A guy from the grade ahead of me, who used to beat me up, one of the guys who would kick his way into your bathroom stall, arc a line of pee down between your legs, tell you to sit still now, a guy who I was sure would live forever, could weather anything, he died on a four-wheeler. Or, under it. Just puttering back to feed the pigs one night after work, his house so full of kids, each of them his perfect clone. Another girl, two years ahead of him—one year behind Ms. Godfrey—she didn’t drive four-wheelers but did have this powder-blue Trans-Am, the decal on the hood sun bleached and as perfect as anything I’ve ever seen.
My first year driving, I would be showing off in the high school parking lot and slip into a bad series of donuts. It felt like a ride in the carnival teacups. All I could do was hold on, try to keep my head from flopping out the window. If there hadn’t been gravel loose on the asphalt, I would have been rolling, not sliding. When I finally stopped, the stock rear bumper of my Ford, it was nestled into the space above the bias-ply tire but below the rear fender of a baby blue Trans-Am. Shannon—I never talked to her, even once—looking at me from under the stands, cocking her head just enough for me to know how lucky I was here.
I lied, told everybody it was on purpose, placing my bumper there, and then had my friends stand in the bed so I could ease away, not take her chrome trim with me.
This is the car she would die in two years later. Its first and last body damage. She probably still had those same old tires on it. Her house was the one we always ran behind for offseason basketball. Her sweet TA beside it, the front wheels cocked just enough sideways to be forever cool.
And maybe—she was only a year behind, would have been prime—maybe she even dated Geoff Koenig when he came back to school a hero, could pick any girl,
all
the girls.
You’d think the story of him would be this guy, forty and filling out, three marriages behind him, more kids than he can remember birthdays for. Or that he’s the guy on the four-wheeler, out looking for bodies. The guy dying under the fourwheeler. The one hitting the missing girl, both hands tight on the wheel.
In a novel, maybe.
Today, Geoff Koenig doesn’t have any kids, jokes that all those rubbers were wasted money.
Five years after high school he enlisted with the Marines for the first Gulf War. To get shot again, feel that rush of living all over? For how everybody treats you different for a while after something like that?
I don’t ask him that.
He’s back in Greenwood now. On the other side of 80, behind Wallace’s grocery. In 1998, blind drunk, he drove his new Camaro under the rear bumper of a pipe trailer parked in the ditch on 1110, the road we all called Rabbit Run.
He lived again, somehow. Geoff Koenig had enough charm left for that, but lost most of his vision. I don’t know what he sees now, just know him as a voice on a phone. He thought I was in Colorado, not sitting in my truck down at Wallace’s.
What he is is another victim of that fire.
And it doesn’t stop with him.
Stacy Monahans. She’s another person I can’t ask about any of this.
Not because she was two years ahead of me, and not because she was fifty miles away in Lamesa, but because ten days into 1986, the Subaru Brat she’d borrowed from her friend’s boyfriend hydroplaned on 349, the road that angles from Lamesa down to Midland.
They didn’t find her until the next morning.
And I say “they,” but it was her father, Larry Monahans. Not out driving the roads looking for her, but sitting in a yellow seat in a turnrow, trying to rub a clean place in the glass, to see if that’s a car out there or what. And then recognizing it, shaking his head, remembering what it was like to be a junior in high school like Dan—that’s the Subaru kid’s name, right?
So he doesn’t even know until he’s there, down at the shattered white side glass, trying to rub a clean place in it as well.
And I wouldn’t be saying it like this if there wasn’t a reason, please believe me.
I don’t think he’d want me to do it any other way, though.
And as for that last name, Monahans, like the Sand Dunes, like the town at the other end of 20 out of Odessa, it’s real. Real enough. His mom had married the guy with that joke of a name when Larry was fourteen, so him and his baby sister had taken it, never questioned it.
As for why his daughter was sneaking down 349 that night in a borrowed car, though, making a midnight run on just a learner’s permit—everybody questioned it, and finally that afternoon, Daniel “Speedy” Gonzales, hiding at his girlfriend’s, the most obvious place, licked his lips and came forward. Told it to his uncle instead of Mr. Monahans, because everybody knew the stories about Mr. Monahans, how he used to be. And so Daniel Gonzales’ uncle got it to the police, what everybody in Greenwood already knew, pretty much, and would have said had Lamesa thought to ask: Stacy Monahans, summertime front desk girl for the chemical store on the north side of Lamesa, Stacy Monahans, barrel rider, Stacy Monahans, cross-country superstar, she had a boyfriend some three years older. From Greenwood.
Geoff Koenig.
What she’d borrowed Daniel Gonzales’ light little Brat for was to go see him again, Geoff, to be his Florence Nightingale, his— his Sheryl Ledbetter, standing by his bed, cupping the side of his face in her hand. Making promises. Saying them over and over. Never expecting somebody to have been blowing out their handlines in
January
, making run-off that, in the cool, stood for longer than it should have.
In this whole book, she’s the first person to really die all the way.
Mark that.
I
n the background of some of the newspaper photos from the day of the shooting are the men already gathering by the bus.
Belinda King’s not there anymore, her robe full of burrs from running through the CRP, but the Sheriff ’ll get to her soon enough.
What he’ll ask, sitting in her living room, his tone mournful, like he doesn’t want the answer here: There was a box of .22 long rifle shells in the stocking a week and a half ago, right?
This time there were no mystery trucks in the area, their gun racks conspicuous. No suspicious basketball players drifting through the cotton.
Just a gun out there somewhere.
That and a gold medal the head coach from Iraan had driven up in their big bus, given to Geoff Koenig’s dad, his whole team in uniform, just to turn around and go home.
The medal’s in the display case in the new high school now. Along with a photo of the 1985 team, taken early enough to be sure and make the yearbook. Taken early enough that Tommy Moore’s there. In the photo, one of the players I would have to look up is kneeling, palming the ball, his lips unnatural from the effort it’s taking, his eyes proud all the same, and—I’m not just saying this—they do look like they could have won state. Austin should have driven that medal to us as well that year.
And, this time, unlike with the fire, it didn’t matter where the deputies were from. Canadian Mounties could have looked through the wall of people not saying anything, seen Jonas King back there, the butt of a still-new .22 resting on the toe of his right shoe.
But no.
Where they finally found him was where he always went, where Belinda King had even let him pitch a tent a time or two on condition that he’d flash his lantern when she flashed the headlights.
It was back at the edge of the section their cul-de-sac had been cut into, right at the corner where the CRP met three fields of dryland. A little pad of concrete. The most important one in the world to him that year. Maybe ever.
And I say the Sherriff or his deputies found him out there, yeah. But it was his dad. Walking the whole way out, not even driving. Touching the heads of this piece of tall grass or that and leaving them be. Just making that connection over and over.
And the concrete pad, it was set in the middle of three of the older, deader trees in Midland County. Three trees that had been planted nobody was sure how long ago, as windbreak for the house that had stood there, had probably been there when the Reverends Green and Wood planted their cross a half mile to the west and a little south.
Way up high in the trees—you could see it now that they were pale, leafless enough for the sun to dry out—there was even iron of some kind, its rust bleeding down the bark. From a tree house? But tree houses seem so recreational, too. It’s not what you think the covered wagon people had time for.
And the house, of course, it’s long gone by 1985. Not even boards, just some of those nails with the angled-over heads, their shanks clotted with boles of rust. The occasional hinge, frozen closed. If you dig deep enough where the trash pile used to be, there’s old-timey prescription bottles, more metal it would take a historian to identify.
I don’t know.
I act like that’s old, yeah, but I’ve talked to some of the old guys who have the stories from their childhoods, from the guys who were old to
them
. Stories about pushing cattle from Dallas to El Paso, how this country, from Midland up to Lubbock, there wasn’t even a single house, fence, nothing. Maybe an Indian or two out there, the kind who couldn’t believe in Oklahoma, but you don’t ever see them if they don’t want you to. All you ever do see, the whole day through, are east-facing dugouts in whatever slight rise there might be in the land. Dugouts people have evidently spent a winter in, the small, rounded openings black with soot, the punched-through chimneys long grown over.
As near as I can tell, though, none of those hands ever went into one of those dugouts and just sat there, pretended for a while. They had a job to do, I guess. A herd to tend. And now all those dugouts are caved in, plowed over.
And then there was the old timer I met in the back of a grocery store, who, sitting at a table half an hour later, bottles of coke between us—he must have bought them from the machine, because back then that’s the only places bottles were anymore, and I never have change—he remembered going up to Palo Duro Canyon some Sundays growing up. How his grandpa then had been too old for horse work but wasn’t dead yet, right? So they’d take the wagon down into the canyon floor, spend the day shoveling horse bones to haul to Amarillo, sell to the soap people. Indian horses. Another massacre.
And then my mom’s dad, talking about when the Sandhill cranes changed their migration, started blotting the sky out over Stanton. How he went out and drew a bead on one with a .22, just to see how bad they tasted.
And then— then
his
dad, talking about when tractors first came to this part of the country. How all the old men, used to working behind a pair of mules, would still stand up at the end of each row, to pull back on the traces. How each time you could hear them cussing when they fell off the back of the tractor, and how, if you knew what was good for you, you never asked them about it later.
This is the great-grandfather who, when he cut most of his foot off working one day, made his way over to the neighbor’s house and stood in her bathtub. He could have stood in his own, saved his own carpet, but then nobody would have ever found him.
Would he have known who used to live in that gone house they found Jonas at, though? Known whether the kids there went to Prairie Lee? How they got there? What Greenwood was like before the Reverends got there?
I doubt it.
And as for the concrete pad, it was a complete and wonderful mystery to Jonas. Rob King and Earl Holbrook’s best guess, going by how it’s shaped—more rectangular than square—and where it is, just off from where the house used to be, is that it’s an old storm cellar. Except, of course, that the tops of those old cellars, they’re not flat, are more bowed up, like they want to be domes. No clue why. Maybe a dome lasts longer than a flat roof, takes less crossbeams, or maybe it’s so water won’t stand there, leak down, or maybe it’s just so you can stand up in the center of the room down there, I don’t know.
The pad wasn’t a dome by 1985, anyway. The concrete wasn’t contemporary with the fallen-down house either, was smooth, had a “1971” dragged into it by a finger. Earl Holbrook, standing over it that first day with Rob and Jonas King—Holbrook was a cousin, married into the family, was always around for his year between farming and the gin—he looks away and says that more than likely, the house, after it got abandoned, the animals all started moving in. Which is no problem, usually. Unless a bobcat plops its bloody suitcase down one day, kicks everybody else out.
Even more than mountain lions, bobcats are something people in West Texas are always interested in. Mythical almost, all fifteen pounds of them. I only ever saw a couple—one darting out of my headlights, that I would have thought was a thick jackrabbit if my dad hadn’t told me, and another on the bench seat of somebody’s truck. The guy’d popped the mom with a shotgun, taken care of all the cubs. Except one. But still, he was having to wear welding gloves even for that cub, and it had already got through to his hand in a place or two.
His idea was to raise it, I think, like some people will when they shoot up a badger den or luck onto a baby raccoon while fishing—nobody’s stupid enough to try to make a coyote into a dog, though I did have a friend with a pet javelina, and another with a possum in a hutch—but I didn’t know the guy very well, didn’t keep up. I’d guess it ran off the first chance it got, that cub, learning to live off the bobcat version of slow elk: cats and chickens. Which is when an old house can get to be a problem: when there’s chicken feathers drifting across the wooden floor. A distinct feeling of contentment in the air.
Instead of going in with a shotgun or taking a match to the place, the thing to do, Earl Holbrook says, if you’re thinking like an old man anyway, is to push the whole affair over into a ditch, bury it, the same as you do with old cars and twisted-up windmills. Or, if there’s a collapsed cellar right there, then your job’s already half-done, two birds with one scoop, all that. Just set your front-end loader up, pack the house down to ground level in that cellar, and then, to keep the cattle from breaking their legs for generations, cover the whole thing in whatever cement you’ve got handy. Maybe even smooth the top down, so whoever comes later will know this was intentional, not just a place some extra concrete got spilled back when.
It’s what Jonas believed, anyway. A place almost as good as what the Phillips place will be for him someday.
Just a pad, though, that’s nothing, no matter what you want to be buried under that pad.
No, what made the place
his
in the way it needed to be was that Earl Holbrook—Jonas’ “uncle” since his other uncle was on all the roads but Cloverdale the last six months—had driven a six-inch pipe down at the eastern edge of the concrete, and clamped a backboard ten feet up it, helped Jonas measure out a free-throw stripe, spray paint a key, make hash marks about where the three-point line would be.
This is why the basketball goal up by the house was rusted, the net getting picked clean by birds.
Back here, Jonas could play whatever music he wanted. Flip the basket off when it spit his ball back. Cuss at it. Pee off the back corner, still standing on the concrete, the trucks passing on Cloverdale smaller than his pinky fingernail.
His brothers were still young enough that they couldn’t come all the way back this far yet, too.
It was his.
Aside from Rob King standing back there, drinking a beer one day then hiding the bottle in the basketball pipe—Jonas has dropped rocks down there, heard more than one bottle break— and Earl Holbrook, to twist the backboard back straight after the big wind, and once, if he’d admit it, Belinda King, when Jonas fell asleep, forget to blink his lantern back, Jonas was the only one who’d been out there. In years, probably. The only one who knew that if he didn’t keep that ball going, the snakes would come out of the grass in the afternoon to soak up the concrete’s heat.
And then there were the old dead trees around it. Not a windbreak anymore, but still, thick enough that nobody could tell if he was there or not. And the sound of the ball didn’t even carry across all that grass.
A perfect place if there ever was one. As close as you can find in West Texas, anyway.
Until Rob King walked up to it, the fingertips of his unbroken hand brushing the tops of the grass, so that Jonas wants to recite all the grass-judging he’s been studying. Side-oats grama. Cane bluestem. Perennial threeawns.
All that’s going away already, though.
This is just CRP grass. Filler, there to hold the dirt down.
Where we are now is the day after the shooting.
Jonas is dribbling, shooting, dribbling, dribbling, concentrating on making that next shot. That if he can swish it, then his dad walking up out of the field like he has been for the last two minutes, it’ll just be a mirage.
But then he back-irons the shot.
Rob King takes a jog step forward, cuffs the ball up from the grass and nods once for Jonas to cut to the basket, son.
For a moment, just a moment, Jonas hesitates, and then he makes the cut, faking one way then taking the other, and his dad hits him with a crisp, one-handed pass and Jonas goes up textbook, and neither of them say anything, just run it over and over until finally the Sheriff has to come out for the both of them.
