Growing Up Dead in Texas (10 page)

“Not if somebody doesn’t tell,” one of the three T’s calls back, his hands on his knees so he can breathe, his eyes locked on the chance of Ms. Godrey showing something. Of Sheryl Ledbetter letting a hand slip.

She slides to the other side of the tarp, away from leering eyes. Hands at her throat, arms straight down, only making it all better.

Marcus Weeks—this seems like him—nabs the shirt from Geoff Koenig, holds it to his face, breathes in deep, then it’s a game, them passing the shirt back and forth, Sheryl yelling down to them, one of the three T’s finally stopping, holding it up but taking it back at the last moment.

“Smoke?” he says up to the top of the module.

“
Tommy
,” Sheryl says, her eyes hot, this game so over.

But Tommy Moore’s laughing, can’t help it. Doesn’t know whose side he’s on here anymore.

He holds the empty pack up, crumples it, lets it fall, blow away.

“Well then,” whichever T has the shirt says, and the basketball players swirl around again through the stalks with their captured flag of a shirt, are running back to school, their footfalls so quiet, like they weren’t even there.

The next part you already know: Tommy Moore rolling to look over the edge of the module, expecting Marcus or Geoff to be there with the shirt, but instead, his last cigarette dangling from his lip so cool, he gets dragged down into a world of hurt, won’t be physically able to smile again for months, will have to go through nicotine withdrawal with an IV spiked into him.

And does he remember what happened next?

What had to have happened.

Arthur King rumbling up beside Rob King’s truck, Pete Manson’s door already opened. Pete Manson getting pushed away at first, falling back into Arthur King, then both of them looking up to the module, to the apparition there: one of the Ledbetter girls, the last one, standing there in the daylight in her bra—she had to look topless at first, as white as she is—but wholly unaware of it. Just screaming and screaming for Rob King to stop.

Seeing her up there like that, neither Pete Manson nor Arthur King could have had a single thing to say.

Just—just wrench Rob King away from the kid, try to hold him down for Chrissake, and somehow there’s already sirens. Everybody can smell the smoke by now.

And then, and this makes all the difference, Pete Manson looking up to Sheryl Ledbetter there on the module, and holding his hand out flat before him, telling her lower, lower, lie down. Hide.

December 1985. Three days after Christmas. The basketball tournament down in Iraan that afternoon and, if Greenwood wins, that night as well. It’s what offseason’s been all about: conditioning. One game at two, another at eight that you’re just as ready for.

In the locker room, everybody packing their gym bags and passing them to the right so somebody else can check, make sure there’s shoes, socks, jocks—it’s a drill by now, and for good reason—Coach Harrison sits down and looks from player to player, from face to face. And to the one missing, the one the team has already been to see again that morning.

Tommy Moore had held his hand up from his bed and each of them—the three T’s, Geoff Koenig, Marcus Weeks, Dwayne Roberts—touched their palm to him lightly, not sure how breakable he still might be.

None of them had said anything about Ms. Godfrey. Maybe to their parents, but Ms. Godfrey was a Ledbetter then, and if Tommy wasn’t giving her away, then no way any of them would. And, anyway, it hadn’t been her fault in the first place, right?

But, the basketball team.

Now that Steve Grimes was mostly cleared, everybody was looking back to them. And Coach knew it, had called all six of the players who hadn’t been wearing pads that morning into his office. Two of them had come out blinking away tears, but none of them said anything about Ms. Godfrey, and all of them swore that all they did was run out there, tell Tommy Moore to go to hell, then lean west, come back to the school one row at a time.

On the back of each of their left shoes, in careful electric tape, is the letter T. On the heel of the right, an M wide enough to cup the heel.

Coach has seen it but isn’t making them peel it off.

For a long time he just sits there, staring at the skating-rink smooth concrete. The preacher at the front of his congregation, listening for a voice only he can hear. Waiting for it to be done. Trying to get it into human words.

“We didn’t do it,” he says at last.

General agreement.

“And Tommy, he didn’t do it either.”

More agreement.

“And it’s not our job to figure out who did, right?” No, it’s not.

“What is our job?”

This is where you squint.

Finally somebody says it: “Play basketball, sir.”

Coach: “Excuse me?”

Louder: “Play basketball, sir!”

He smiles without really smiling, a trick only coaches ever learn, then nods. Then shakes his head no.

“Play basketball?” he says, standing. “Play basketball?”

Little to no eye contact now.

Usually his sermons are about defense, about fouls, about what the team should remember about Crane or Colorado City from last year, since most of their players are returning as well.

“That’s our job, gentlemen? To just go out there, say we
played
?”

A few smiles now. On accident.

“We’re supposed to win, sir.”

“What?”

“Win, sir. We’re supposed to go out there and win the basketball game.”

Again, Coach looking from face to face. Not asking for it back at him louder this time, because quiet’s louder now.

“For the one of us who can’t be here,” he adds, taking somebody’s shoulder in his hand, shaking that whole player gently, fatherly. “For the one—”

And here he doesn’t finish.

It may as well be screaming into a bullhorn. Everybody blinking away the stuff rising in them. Everybody knowing they’re going to win, that they have to win, that that’s all there is this time. That if they win, then everybody will know they were out running the whole time, not cadging smokes from Tommy Moore. Not running from module to module, grinding cherries into those crumbly white walls, even though the new rumor is that there had been a cigarette butt at each module, that the Sheriff’s office still has those butts in some evidence locker like Cinderella’s shoe.

Never mind that the fires had already been burning for eight hours by the time they were lacing their shoes that morning in the locker room.

Everybody knows that. But they also can’t imagine who else could have been out there. Maybe the fire department’s wrong about the time. Cotton’s finicky, not something you can understand in a lab. And, anyway, none of the suspicious trucks have turned up. It has to be somebody. Or a team of somebodies.

But if they can play hard enough, come back with the medal, well. There’s no better way to get in the good graces of a West Texas community.

So they check each other’s bags, and the manager pulls the clean jerseys from the blue box, calls out numbers each player responds to, and then they’re sitting on the bus at eighty-thirty in the morning. Slapping each other on the back, most of them plugged into Walkmans, making promises to themselves, trading the rest of their lives for one perfect shot, if that’s what it takes for Tommy.

It’s still Christmas break, so the parking lot’s empty, the whole school’s empty.

And the ankles traded for Tommy Moore in this tournament, the knees wrenched diving after a ball he would have dove for, the noses bloodied in his honor: none. Not a one.

But that’s not to say that nobody gets hurt here.

One of the stories my dad used to tell me about basketball was a tournament he played in high school. Stanton was up against one of the even smaller schools, the ones that don’t exist anymore, that, driving out on some narrow, unmaintained road, you can still stumble across like the ruins of some unrecorded civilization. The gym a Quonset skirted in brick, its metal doors chained shut, that floor space not reclaimed by senior citizens because the roof’s not stable enough anymore.

I used to find them all the time, for hundreds of miles in any direction I went.

This game my dad would tell me about, it was one of those small gyms, probably one of the ones I saw, even, where the walls of the place were—except for one side, where the shallow stands were—almost right at the base- and sidelines. So you didn’t dive out of bounds to save the ball like you can now with the extra room.

Except for once, that is, this particular game. A player from the other team, a player who’d spent hours and hours in that gym, had grown up in it, likely. Knew every dead spot, all the angles.

What happened was the ball was careening down for the baseline, and, because there was no air conditioning for a place that large, and it was night anyway, the single doors at both ends were chocked open.

What he did, then, what he knew to do, had probably done a hundred times in practice, was plant a foot at the baseline and jump, reaching for the ball, all his momentum aimed to carry him through that open door. An instant later the ball would come slinging back and the crowd would erupt. The best magic trick ever. How heroes are made.

The only difference—and I’m not even sure I’m not being lied to here—the only difference this time was that this player wasn’t moving at practice speed but at game speed, where things count.

He planted like usual, jumped, got his palm on the ball just as it was slipping out the door, but he was moving too fast, went too high, high enough that his face connected with the top of the door frame, acted as a hinge for the rest of him, folding out into the night.

No ball came back. No player.

By the time everybody followed, he was just laid out, there was nothing they could do. Breathing, but bleeding chunky gouts from the mouth with each breath.

It was only after they’d carried him away to somebody’s station wagon, the two-row stands emptied, that one of the Stanton players jerked his hand back from the door frame he’d been hanging onto, to lean out, watch these strange goings-on.

The knocked-out player’s two front teeth were up there, buried in the wood.

Yeah, I don’t know.

I’ve been in those gyms, though, through the windows with the grates folded up just enough, and I can see where a story like that might have happened once somewhere—some teeth lost anyway—then got improved in the retelling, told around here like it was true. Told to me like it was gospel, the most amazing thing ever. A lesson, even, that some balls aren’t worth going after.