Read Growing Up Dead in Texas Online
Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
Growing Up Dead in Texas (4 page)
“He didn’t deserve it, you mean.”
Pete blows smoke, smiles behind it.
“Still don’t know why you’re asking, amigo.”
“I just want to know.”
“Said the spider to the…what is it?”
“What?”
“No, it’s ‘said the snake to the—the—’ Nothing. Screw it.”
I suddenly want to ask him about his little brother. Just what his name was, even. If he remembers my mom like she used to be. What she did after that day. What all of them did.
His answer, probably: “Still doing it, kid.”
I never should have got in the truck with him.
“You were
there
,” I tell him.
He looks across at me, no smile now. Finally nods, tongues his lip out.
“Okay then. What the hell. Sheryl Ledbetter?”
Blank stare from me.
“Ms. Godfrey?” he adds, his voice higher, mocking.
Ms. Godfrey. Sheryl Godfrey. Senior English, more than twenty years ago.
Pete nods, accelerates through the yellow light at Illinois, glaring into his mirror for blue and red lights.
“Bet you didn’t know that part, did you?” he says, firing up another cigarette. “Nobody does, hoss.”
He holds the pack out to me but I just say it back to him: “Ms. Godfrey?”
Pete studies his cigarette like the story’s all right there. Like he’s reading it from that thin white paper.
“Her and Tommy.” He shrugs. “She’d come to see him on the way to school, then he kind of, you know, convinced her to stay, yeah?”
Ms. Godfrey. Seventeen years old, walking through a half-stripped field to bring breakfast to Tommy Moore.
Or something.
This would have been a thrill, twenty years ago.
Now, now it’s like something being stolen from me.
I lick my lips, nod that I get it, yeah.
“And you don’t want any of that kind of action in the cab of 4440 now, do you?” He laughs. “If you have a choice, I mean.”
“The modules,” I hear myself saying.
It’s the part I never heard. The part only the people who were there know, I guess. And never told.
Pete eases onto 20 proper, and for a few hundred yards we pace a plane coming in to land.
He shrugs, says, “Then you know it all, then. They were up there fooling around. It could have just as easy been me, I mean. Any of us.”
He’s right, too.
In West Texas, there’s no trees, no contour to the land.
If you want to hide, if you want a little privacy, all you can do, really, is climb up onto something. And, if you’re helping a girl up behind you, then the stretched-tight tarp of a packed module’s a lot better mattress than a pumpjack or water tank.
Which is where Rob King found them.
Unlike every other farmer in the county, in the history of farming maybe, none of Rob King’s trucks ever had glasspacks. You don’t put loud pipes on your truck because you think you’re still in high school, either, but because, after driving a tractor all day, getting in a truck so quiet you can’t hear it run, it’s creepy, makes you feel like a ghost, and you can pop your timing chain, turning the key over when the truck’s already started.
Maybe because he always insisted on sticks, though, had an aftermarket RPM bolted onto the dash—I honestly don’t know, never thought to ask—Rob King had a truck that could sneak up on somebody like that.
He wasn’t even looking for them, was just following his nose. That’s the thing that probably still tears Tommy Moore up, if he thinks about it. But he’s got to.
The module they were bedded down on top of, it was on fire. Slow fire, deep inside. Which Tommy Moore would have known ten minutes earlier if he’d have been thinking halfstraight.
He had a Ledbetter girl up there, though, was a long way from any kind of rational thought.
Even when she was leading us through Hal Borland or “The Stone Boy” or prepositions, I mean, Ms. Godfrey, you could definitely have ideas you didn’t plan on.
And what I’d guess is that Rob King, at first he figured that Tommy Moore’d already split for school, had left the stripper idling like that because he’d seen Rob’s truck coming, figured it was his shift. The black cotton Rob was smelling, he figured it was coming from the basket, was still contained.
But then there’s a naked arm suddenly over the blue edge of the tarp, and then a face, and—this is where things go wrong— that face, it’s Tommy’s, and clamped in his lips is a cigarette, the cherry so red, so wrong, Tommy Moore’s eyes thin and satisfied at first.
After that, it’s all legend.
Rob King dragging Tommy Moore down, beating him long after what little fight there was was over, and nobody pulling him off until Pete Manson and Arthur King got there in the same truck.
By that time it was too late, though.
Tommy Moore wasn’t getting up on his own for a couple of weeks yet.
According to Pete Manson, Arthur King planted his hand on Pete’s shoulder that day, so his old man legs wouldn’t fail. And Pete was proud to be solid enough to hold onto.
Out in the field before them now, the deputies are chasing Rob King down, all three of them falling again and again, Rob King’s right hand cut deep across the knuckles, one of his boots coming off.
He’s running for the buggy, and the tractor tied to it.
Pete laughs at how stupid it all was. That, then, none of them even knew that it wasn’t just that one module burning up, it was twenty-five modules, for a mile all around. An act of arson Tommy Moore paid for with his face, paid for with the rest of his life. An act nobody ever quite figured out, especially with what happened later.
But they all quit trying, too.
They didn’t have to make it make sense.
“Well,” Pete says, collecting his duffel from the bed of the truck.
I pat the bed of his truck in farewell, cringe from a plane blasting off just over our heads, and like that he’s walking away, turning sideways to fit between two cars.
For a few minutes I move a bent prybar back and forth in the bed of his truck, try to imagine what it was in its first life— tie rod from one of the tricycle tractors?—then swallow, turn back to the east, Greenwood thirty miles away now, and realize I don’t even know anybody’s number out there anymore.
T
hat night we all wanted the belly of the clouds to glow red like they did when a pasture was burning.
But of course cotton’s not like that.
Instead, like Pearl Harbor Day was suddenly a big deal in West Texas—all the veterans I knew back then were Air Force or Army, not Navy—everybody put their flags out on their porches, not just Arthur King, like usual.
Tommy Moore’s legendary big brother was enlisted, out there somewhere, so maybe it was all for him. To call him back.
There was a prayer meeting, of course, for Tommy. Everybody knew by then that it hadn’t been him.
Arthur King climbed into his truck, directed it to Midland, to see if he still knew the Sheriff enough to come back with Rob.
He didn’t.
Outside, all around the school, all over Greenwood, it was just butane pumps popping in the night. There was talk of canceling the make-up football game on Friday, even, but it was Stanton, the Buffaloes, so we couldn’t cancel. There were more fights than usual in the parking lot, though, and the band at halftime broke formation when two of the trombone players looked up into the stands and started crying.
Their mothers came out onto the field, led them to the red clay track, walked around it with them until they were out of the light.
The ribbons that week were
SHOOT THE BUFFS
, same as every year. I held hands with a girl in the stands for the first time ever, even though she was already moving away.
I don’t know what else to say about it, really.
How about this: way back in fourth grade, Ms. Easton’s history—one of three teachers who ever believed in me—we’d all had to read reports on some local event. We either had to look it up in the library, get it from the papers, or interview somebody.
Kelly Janer interviewed her aunt, who told the story of being a girl up in Tulia, how they had an old cellar for when the tornadoes came.
Not if the tornadoes came, but when.
The story that Kelly told was about how her aunt, when she was our age, remembers her dad building her just-married sister a house right next door to their house. The cellar, it was between the two houses. It made sense. So—Kelly’s mom had written this like always, we could all tell from the way Kelly was reading it, her lips all proper, in imitation—one day when the clouds were trailing what looked like smoke at their southeast edges, the sky green and quiet like it can get, everybody from both houses ran for the cellar. Only, at the metal door, there was this awkward moment, this bad piece of luck.
Kelly’s aunt’s big sister, she was pregnant at the time, and pretty far along.
And Kelly’s aunt, that month she had measles.
They couldn’t both go down into that cellar.
So what happened, Kelly said, why her aunt chases tornadoes now and is probably going to die from it someday, is that she had to stand out there by the door, holding onto the cable so tight that the rusted cable left a print in her jaw, her family all right there under her until the storm passed.
I always wanted to have a dream about that, about being that girl left up there like that for the storm, my hair lifting all around me, but you don’t get to choose, I guess.
Me, I went for the library option, looked up the Stanton coop fire in my grandmother’s scrapbook, recited what I could. Nobody cared, least of all me.
Michael Graham got a few laughs, though. What he’d done at the last minute was make a two-page list. The title was “Things The Wind Has Taken Away.” What he had listed were frito pies and hats and homework, especially—grinning at us over the top of his paper—homework.
Ms. Easton looked over her glasses at him, about this. Tried not to smile, I think.
We all wished we’d thought of that list, too. All had one ready, I mean, and were calling it out to him.
It was a hard act for Adam Moore to follow. Tommy’s littlest brother.
Because even as a freshman Tommy had already been a basketball star, Adam got his report from the box of newspapers his dad had saved. It was a run-through of last year’s district-winning season, of all the juniors returning that year as seniors, and then he broke down each player’s stats, finally trailed off when none of us were listening. Making a show of not listening, really. If we could have made cricket sounds with our mouths, we would have.
“Good, good,” Ms. Easton said, and then the bell rang and we were gone, and I never thought about that Stanton fire again until about a month ago, I don’t think.
Kelly Janer’s aunt’s story, though, it made sense just a year or two later, when I got to know her better, doing homework at her house, back in her bedroom, the door always open, her mom never more than a few feet down the hall. Her mom who had obviously written that report for her. Her mom who was that older sister, who had got to step down into that cellar. Kelly the oldest of her daughters, the first one, the one who had to be protected from the measles, from bad grades, from boys—from me.
If not for her aunt, though, then Kelly, right? Who wouldn’t even be at the front of the class to read that story then.
And, Adam. Adam Moore.
He won all-tournament in Crane as a sophomore, all-state his senior year, when basketball made regionals, but he fought too much in the parking lots too. He’s a roofer in Odessa now, in spite of his picture-book jumper, the way he could just launch back and hold, hold, release. The last I heard of him, I was already at college. He was doing the Midland thing. What it involved, mostly, was fighting, at least until he met a certain Stanton Buffalo in a field just north of town, one of the ones being converted to a neighborhood, so that it still had volunteer cotton coming up around the poles.
Did he remember that Stanton’s who we played that first Friday, after the fire?
I think so, yeah.
It’s the first thing I thought when I heard about it, anyway.
As to who that Buffalo was, it doesn’t matter. Or, I don’t want to make up a name for him. It’s enough that he came from a family known for fighting, and took Adam down fast and easy.
But Adam, he wouldn’t stay down. That was always the thing about him.
He came back again and again, and each time that Buffalo put him down, a little harder each time, until it got to where he had Adam flat against the ground, had a scrap piece of concrete held up above his head, above both their heads, screaming to Adam that all he had to do was say Stop and it could be over. That that was all he had to do.
Adam was Adam, though.
He’s still fighting, I know.
As for that report I’d done two years before all this, it gave me zero insight into the fire. It was just a stupid report, I mean.
Peeling back through the microfiche now, though—we all should have been reading those old papers.