Growing Up Dead in Texas (15 page)

Five years later I’d get stopped in the rich residential over behind Midland Lee. Not pulled over but waved down at a roadblock we knew better than to back away from. Already that month we’d been chased down once, stopped in the Western Auto parking lot on the drag. Because we didn’t have shirts maybe, the cops took apart the whole interior of the El Camino we were in, and dumped out all the cornflakes we’d been eating, just looking for a reason to haul us in.

There’d been nothing, though. Just a butterfly knife they flashed around, confiscated for their personal collection. Same old same old.

But that had been in the daylight, in a mostly legal car, with more cars always driving by. Now it was two in the morning, and we were in a blue Nova we’d just dropped a new engine into that afternoon, and there was nobody but us.

No knives this time, sure, but the two cruisers weren’t parked across the road for random knife checks either. Somebody’d been breaking side glass all up and down the street, snatching stereo decks.

We all kind of sighed collectively—we were just passing through, going home, calling it a night—and the cops even shook their heads at the sloshy bottle of gin in the glove compartment that we hated but were drinking all the same. Then, just to be following procedure, they asked us to pop the trunk if we didn’t mind, so we could be on our way.

We probably should have minded.

In there on a blanket were four stereos, wires going every which way from them.

It was a punch line. It made us a joke.

The police were not nice to us that night.

It’s hardly the worst, though.

Another time, what was supposed to have been the last semester of my senior year at Greenwood, which had turned into a stint at Lee that went bad as well, they would stop me at the edge of town, for what I thought was just going to be the usual harassment—they knew my truck—but then the rest of the cops showed up as well. And then the detectives.

What they were interrogating me over was a Midland High cheerleader gone missing a few days back. Old news. What was new news was that they’d just found her in a cotton field on the north side of town. In pieces, in a hole.

And I was their guy, yeah. For hours and hours, until— and this is the only time this has ever happened, maybe in the whole history of these kinds of run-ins—my long hair saved me.

Trick was, the guy they had eyewitnesses for, the guy last seen with the cheerleader in a truck just like mine, he had shaved-short hair, high and tight. And while I could have had long hair when abducting this cheerleader, then taken the clippers to myself for a more straight-up look, I couldn’t have gone the other way, from short to long.

So they took me back to my truck. Under the windshield were probably twenty notes, asking where I was, telling me where I should be. From everybody driving by. Some of them written on the back of beer bottle labels, or on the flaps of cases.

“Sorry,” the detective said, not getting out of his car.

Yeah.

Later that year I’d be arrested on that same road, would find myself suddenly alone in booking for a moment, trying to pocket my mug shots, which would have been cool and great if the Sheriff—a different one than came for Jonas that day—hadn’t noticed how blue my fingers were from whatever  they  used for mug shots.

Strike thirty-three, about.

It would be two years until my next arrest. Not two years for me to get hauled down to the station, locked in a room with a big mirror to study myself in, ashtrays to throw hard into the wall like I was the first one to ever think of that, but two years until the cuffs again, anyway. This time I wanted to fight, though. It was right outside Lubbock. I was going home to Midland for my brother’s son, who had been dying since he was born, who, when he
was
born, I’d been on this same exact road, my four-hundred-dollar truck broke down from pushing it too hard, trying to make it to the hospital.

And if only I had.

But now this DPS, all he wanted was to drive me back to Lubbock, lock me in their tank, dare me to call Midland, pull somebody away from their grandchild, their nephew, just because I was in jail again.

Fuck him.

I’m glad all he had was a Camaro, so we had to sit right beside each other the whole ride back into town.

And even that wasn’t the last time in. The last time, in a whole different part of Texas, I woke to a skinny guy on acid. He’d eaten it all to duck getting busted with it. TJ, initials for I don’t know what. “Angel” in some other, better language. We were in the tank, some twelve of us, all strangers, none of our stories any different, really. I could have thrown a bottle at a cop car to get pulled in, I don’t know. I remember thinking it that night, and having a bottle in my hand, so maybe. What TJ was doing when I woke was holding my head, his hand wrapped in as much of my hair as he could. He was trying to direct my vomit down into the drain. Only it wasn’t vomit, but blood.

Afterward, I was shaking so hard that all twelve guys in the tank came over, gave me their blanket. My teeth still chattered, until I had to feel each one, see if it was broke. And then feel them all again.

Walking away the next morning, our court dates in our pockets, TJ bought me a honey bun with a dollar he somehow had (all my cash was in check form, from the city), laughed about the night before, and then there was a stroller suddenly by a dumpster. We took turns pushing it, ate the honey buns we hadn’t thought to get napkins for, and I don’t even know if I ever told him thanks. That this morning shouldn’t have been happening at all.

As for where all of this started, though, I’m not stupid: 1985.

It changed all of us.

According to the Sheriff, it wasn’t an interrogation in Rob King’s living room that day. It wasn’t an interrogation and it wasn’t a boxing match, and it
damn
sure wasn’t a tractor race. It was an interview. It was just to establish certain facts, not cast suspicion.

Still: “We’re going to need that rifle, son.”

This to Jonas King, whose voice wasn’t something he could trust right then.

“He told you, Jim,” Rob King said, “he lost it.”

The Sheriff rolled his shoulders a bit, pulled his teeth from his lip as if this obvious lie was hurting him in some way, and said, “I’ll be talking to the boy, Mr. King. If that’s okay.”

“You want Mr. King, his old ass is down the road there,” Rob said back, at which point Belinda said his name, just once,
Rob
. And quiet. Not a warning, but so he could hear for himself what this was all building to. That the script of how this was all going to play out, it was right there in his tone already.

The Sheriff didn’t say anything. Could probably see it all even better, right down to Rob falling across the driveway in cuffs, climbing up into his 4440, black smoke belching up into the chill, the front wheels popping up a foot or so when he dropped it into gear, the throttle already buried.

But that was all in a minute or two.

“So ask him,” Rob King said, stepping aside, Jonas out in the open now.

“I lost it,” Jonas said.

“See?” Rob King stepped back in front of the Sheriff.

Now the Sheriff smiled a bit, angled his mouth down to the CB on his shoulder. “Deputy Jenkins? Yeah, I’m going to need—”

“You can’t pull me out of here,” Rob King said, setting his feet, “the law, it says—”

“That one parent has to be present, Mr. King,” the Sheriff completed, not bothering to look over when Deputy Jenkins stepped in through the front door, careful to wipe his boots on the mat, and make apology eyes to Belinda.

“Rob, if you’ll just—” he said.

Rob King laughed. “You’re escorting me out of my own damn house, here? Am I missing something?”

“
Rob
,” Belinda said again.

It wasn’t enough.

Before that day, the worst violence that had ever happened in the Kings’ living room, it had involved battery cases that wouldn’t come off new toys, precision screwdrivers that poked forward into the meat of somebody’s hand.

Now, though. Now Belinda was going to need some new carpet.

As for Jenkins, that’s not his real name. Because I promised way earlier not to use their real names.

But it’s close enough.

When he touched Rob King’s sleeve to guide him out, Rob King laid him out. And I know “righteous” is the wrong word here, is too celebratory, doesn’t show the proper respect to the law, but—Jonas remembers his dad coming home once from a sale, the pinky and ring finger of his right hand broke. Because somebody in a convenience store had said something to him about his wife, Jonas’ mom, and Jonas’ dad’s hand (the way Rob King told it) had come sailing through the air before he could even tell it to make itself all the way into a fist.

At the store that day, though, Rob King just paid for his coke, walked out.

There weren’t any other deputies to call in, I mean. There weren’t nightsticks in the general vicinity.

After it was done and Rob’s already broke hand wouldn’t stop bleeding, the Sheriff shook his head in disappointment, called in an ambulance just to cover his ass.

“Sorry you had to see that, ma’am,” the Sheriff said to Belinda King, who was holding Jonas to her side, and to Jonas, just staring at his dad in cuffs on the living room carpet, his eyes wild, air coming in rasps, shirt untucked in exactly the way Rob King was always warning Jonas about. “We might should just station the paramedics down at the church, think?” the Sheriff went on. “Just for him, and everything he thinks he can do.”

Insert a picture of Belinda King here, just staring at him.

The Sheriff smiled his good-old-boy smile, pinched his uniform pants up his thighs enough to lean down a smidge, say to Jonas, “Now, son, I just—”

“He told you,” Belinda said, pushing Jonas behind her. “He lost that rifle.”

At which point the Sheriff peeled his wide hat off, ran his hand through what was left of his hair.

“Let’s,” he said, and opened the door for Deputy Gaylord, ushered Rob King out, guiding his head through the door, being sure to tell Gaylord to keep an eye on this one, that he might go rabbit.

Gaylord laughed like “fat chance” and the Sheriff twisted the dead bolt shut.

“I lost it,” Jonas King said, right when that bolt drove home.

“Son,” the Sheriff said, disappointed.

“It’s time for you to leave my house,” Belinda King said then.

“Ma’am, Lindy—”

“
Please
.”

“I just, I just need to,” he said, reaching around her a bit, to pull Jonas back into view.

He didn’t plan on Belinda’s knee, though.

Or that she would follow him down, tooth and claw.

“
Run!
” she said back to Jonas, frozen there on the bloody carpet, “go, go, go,” and Jonas did, Jonas does, two miles through the field to his grandfather’s, to hide in the tack shed that’s already fallen down, already smells like porcupine. It’s not the deputies that find him that night either, but Arthur King’s five dogs.

Two days later Arthur King will unceremoniously shoot all five of them, even the one that takes off across the field. The reason he gives is that they got into a skunk. Their names: Blackie and Cotton and Slim and Prince and Ranger. Prince is the last of a series of litters going back nearly forty-five years, to Mouse’s time. He almost makes it across the field, too.

There are no graves for them, just this.

In the best of the series of photographs from the day of the shooting, 1985, you can see the team bus, two DPS cars, the Sheriff’s cruiser, and farmers’ trucks lined almost all the way back to the church, out of the frame.

The basketball players are all already gone, of course, Geoff Koenig sirened away by ambulance—yeah, if there’d been one by the church, it wouldn’t have hurt—Coach Harrison taking that ride with him. Leonard just walking back to the school, across the field. The bus is a crime scene now, won’t be moved for days. The keys are still in it.

Of the farmers milling around in the ditch, waiting to volunteer whatever they can, there’s no Rooster, no Arthur King, no Rob King. And the ones who are there, they all look so young. Like, in the two or three years between that day and when I would be old enough to start working for them, they would have aged fifteen years.

Or maybe it was just around me that they seemed older. Like they were letting me run a few hours on their 4440s out of duty, more or less, a burden of obligation that weighed on them, aged them around the eyes because when they looked at me they saw me standing there and they saw me as I had been, too.

The money was the same, though. For a while.

In that photograph—in all of them—most of the farmers are either looking into the ditch or out across the fields. Waiting for that next shot, maybe. Macy Barnes is there, his shirt white and ironed, a businessman at the beginning of the day and a businessman at the end. I always half-expected him to have a briefcase. There’s Gary Wilkes squinting against the sun, a stem of grass fixed between his teeth like he’s posing for a postcard. Michael Graham’s dad, Rex Allen—no clue why you always had to say his middle name, just that you did—his signature Dr. Pepper in his right hand, his dentures loose in his mouth. Used to, whenever his wife would look away he’d wow his eyes out, thrust his teeth out on his purple stub of a tongue. Earl Holbrook, in the brown collar-shirt everybody was wearing that year at the gin, so you could tell who was working there, who was just hanging around for peanuts and coffee. Clete Jennings, staring out across the field to the south, where most of his fields still were. Maybe staring to see if there was going to be smoke this day or not. Martin Ledbetter, in long pants for once, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses that probably cost eighty dollars, had a matching alligator case on the dash of his truck. Pete Manson, a cigarette always to his lips, his wedding ring on the middle finger of his left hand, because his ring finger’s a nub.