Growing Up Dead in Texas (27 page)

The day after Earl Holbrook’s funeral, Jonas King wears one of Earl’s old hats to school. It’s the Stetson, is too big, is black and furry even, ridiculous, and Jonas has his mule-eared boots on too, and even his friend who said Ms. Everett’s name that time, he just nods to Jonas, standing alone at his locker long after class has started, then stands there a couple of lockers down until Jonas is ready, so it’s two people being late instead of just one.

And I want this to just be through already.

But there’s still the sacrifice.

Not the Jonas who finds his uncle’s shiny chrome rig in the church parking lot after school that day, goes to eat with him for the whole afternoon, and not the Rob King who was this same age once too, standing behind the house in his t-shirt and underwear one early morning, watching his dad use three hoses at once to wash a big brother’s brains out the back of a truck, but maybe the Jonas from before all this started, the Jonas trying to carry four old beer cans at once but dropping one into the floorboard, going after it, coming up instead with an old cardboard backing, the slick kind with a tab to hang by. It’s been lodged under the seat for years, so the sun hasn’t faded the words from it yet. The model.

But no. Not yet.

I’ve still left one scene open.

Two, really.

“Let’s pray for your father,” Belinda King says to her sons the day the trampoline blows away, the day the pump house explodes, and they do, holding hands behind the sliding glass door, the air still full of trash outside, grit in all the sills, fine like from an hourglass.

This is the week before the fire. Maybe ten days.

Just after Thanksgiving, always a bad time for her, now that she knows about Arthur King. The one time of the year she has to put on a good face, has to see him sitting there so content with himself, like he’s getting away with everything.

But she watches her boys when they’re over there, she watches them close even though he’s old now, has to be retired from all that. He’ll have have to answer for what he’s done, sure, but not to her, right?

It’s the peace she’s come to over the last few months.

Otherwise Rob’ll have no land to farm. Otherwise they won’t be able to keep paying for this house.

“Dear Lord,” she leads off, all of their eyes closed, and tries to will her husband safe, home again, and then leaves the boys with some cartoons, goes outside to try to get ahead of this trash eddying all around, rising just to fall again, and the prayer, it works. Rob King makes it home again that night, like always, like all the farmers always do, never mind the lightning, the wind, the machinery, the hundred ways to die out there.

Being a farmer’s wife, you have to trust that your man’s capable, and, after that, just leave it up to God’s will, right?

Right.

But when she comes in from cleaning up the trash, her hands black from the burn barrels—Jonas doesn’t know.

“Mom?”

She pulls her mouth into a smile, shakes her head no, nothing—“just thinking about your father, dear”—and she sleepwalks through the next week and a half, until, one morning, the boys’ pants in the dryer again for school, she looks over to Rob with his coffee at the kitchen window, sees how far outside he’s looking. How intentionally.

“Do you have to set them up like that?” he says, low enough that the boys won’t hear.

Like—?

She turns to the table: three boys eating cereal in their underwear, waiting for their pants to get warm.

“What if—what if somebody comes to the door?” he says, still looking through his own reflection, to the fields outside.

“They’re just boys,” Belinda says, smiling, her coffee to her mouth again, and then hears herself, hears her husband, and dabs her lips, manages to turn slightly away without dropping her cup.

But her hand’s shaking around it.

All day.

And her son, her oldest, this Jonas, if he stands up right that moment, if he walks a straight line from their front door, steps out across the CRP, across the pasture, clipping the corner of Rooster’s big field, where he’d be a quarter of a century later is in the cemetery behind the Greenwood church. The one he chased balls into at recess. It’s the place he’s been avoiding now for ten chapters. The place he’s waiting for, so he can say he did it the best he could. That it’s on paper now.

But then it’s not all on paper. Not yet.

There on Earl Holbrook’s weathered headstone, it’s a little car, a Hot Wheels, and, and.

Reach for it.

Don’t touch it.

Remember it.

Try not to.

Evil Weevil.

How Jonas knows the model is that when he was twelve, digging for cans in an old truck behind his granddad’s house, he found the slick cardboard backing for this car, wedged up under the seat like a joke—in Greenwood, Texas, all weevils are evil—and put it in his pocket to show his dad, ask him about it, but then used it for target practice instead, after all the cans were gone, and that was that.

Except.

Except Rob King wasn’t the one to put that little car at Earl Holbrook’s grave either, as apology, his most sacred thing, the thing he found under the seat one October day like his big brother had left it just for the twelve-year-old he’d been, the toy he opened then hid in his pocket the afternoon he met his wife.

No.

And this is the part where Jonas dies, goes away forever.

The day after the trampoline blew away, what he found in the CRP behind the house, it doesn’t make sense until he sees that little car at the base of that headstone.

What he found back in the grass, just moving from yellow blade to yellow blade, like he was supposed to follow it, had to for maybe half an acre, was a single magazine page. Half a page, really.

But that page.

It’s a boy’s leg, no pants on, no underwear.

For years after he burns it in the barrels, getting in trouble for playing with matches but who cares, he’ll think it just blew in from some other place, like all the cusswords his mind spit back exactly when the Sunday school teacher told him they were sins.

The little car, though.

Yes, he’s seen it before.

It was in the back corner of his dad’s top drawer, rubber-banded to a yolky old photograph.

But his dad never came back for it, for any of his stuff, he left Belinda to clean it out, store it in the garage, finally throw it out, even though her sons had been pinching shirts from it for years already.

What he never understood, Rob, could never explain away, were those cigarettes up on top of the kitchen cabinets. The ones with a tax-stamp date the Sheriff’s office never thought to check, the same way they never thought to ask themselves why Arthur King had taken such a casual interest in what route Earl Holbrook’s prison bus was going to take up to Lamesa, say. The same way they ruled an accident what makes perfect sense when you take into account that Arthur King had one of those truck phones, and Larry Monahans did too, and that they were both Kings, and that, years and important years ago, Larry Monahans had taken some bad heat for Arthur King’s son, heat for backing over a twelve-year-old, heat that could have sent Arthur King’s last best chance of a son spinning out into a completely different life, what with his brother already a suicide and all.

But Rob’s there anyway.

Where he is now, it’s an old house, a tore-down and buried house, a house plowed under now, along with the concrete pad laid down beside it, and that concrete pad’s basketball pole, and whatever was in that pole. He’s in an old house that’s been there forever, and his right arm was never quite fixed, never got straightened out again, so what he does now is walk from room to room, tugging at your sleeve, seeing if you’ve got his good arm, if you can explain all of this to him maybe.

And you can explain it.

You don’t want to, but you can. For him.

The day after the trampoline blew away, this mom, this farmer’s wife, see, she walks out into the backyard to try to get ahead of the trash all blowing around, and then, like a message, it just settles all around her, and it’s the other half of the page her son will find the next day. It’s all the other halves of all the pages, it’s why her husband’s always said there’s only one key to the pump house.

And it’s not his fault either.

It’s his father’s fault.

His goddamn father. That monster. All his cotton out there waiting to get turned into more money, more reward.

Yeah.

This is what Pete Manson never tells anybody, this is the reason Belinda King lies for him at Stacy Monahans’ funeral: there’s these kids in a truck, on a Saturday, and they’re drinking and it’s not too hot and not too cold, and at some perfect moment in that day, this beautiful girl from another town, she reaches her hand down across the tailgate, passing her already-lit Chesterfield to an awkward boy who’ll smoke that brand from here on out now, in honor. Who will recognize that brand by all the black modules, and will fold that information into his overalls and keep it there forever, until he finally loses himself in a city he doesn’t know, maybe following a twelve-year-old boy he thinks he recognizes, that he can never quite catch up with, apologize to like he needs to.

And if you want to know how I know Belinda King put that little car there to try to close the circle, stop everything from happening, it’s not that she told me, it’s that, the morning Rob King beats Tommy Moore into the hospital, when Belinda King finally gets the call, she angles her head over, plucks her earrings out, and, just going by habit, starts to clink them into the marble ashtray by the phone, like always.

Except then she doesn’t.

For the first time ever—Jonas checks, cleans it out himself— there’s ashes in that ashtray, an empty pack of cigarettes hid up on top of the kitchen cabinets, and for years I fold this into my pocket, don’t tell anybody, because it means Pete Manson really was there, like she said.

But he never was.

And he never told.

I will, though.

And Ms. Godfrey will read it at least, and know.

No.

Sheryl Ledbetter will read it.

You made it, she says to me back in the second chapter.

I don’t know.

Minutes after she leaves me standing out there at the east corner of the new high school, the Diet Dr. Pepper can she was ashing in starts to blow away, so that I have to catch it, save it, can finally read that bronze plaque angled down by the three baby trees.

They’re planted in honor of Mr. Brenhemin, Shop Teacher, 1928–2006.

He’s still there at the corner of the school, watching the smoke rise.

We all are.