Growing Up Dead in Texas (19 page)

He keeps his head down, walks a straight line to the visitor side of the gym, stepping sideways through the kneeling cheerleaders, and slips up through the blue-pipe rails before anybody can say anything, then he’s running again, through the cafeteria, out into the parking lot, across to the field house.

His helmet’s already there, hanging off the throttle grip like the helmet in a movie.

Nothing done to it either, not even perfume, or ketchup, or the stubby little glitter pens all the girls are dangling from their wrists that year.

Jonas nods to himself that this is okay then.

That it wasn’t so bad.

He screws the spark plug back in through whatever grit’s on the threads, from his pocket probably, plants his feet on the pegs and rips the cord up into the sky.

The three-wheeler starts at once and he revs it too high, a message to everybody in the gym, but then it sputters out, won’t start from the cord anymore.

The plug. That has to be it.

Jonas checks it, making sure the wire hasn’t come off, then breaks it over with the little wrench, pulls it out to check the contact, see if it got bent shut when he was rolling under the gate.

But then he tastes the problem on the air.

Like his dad’s tea when they go to town to eat.

Under the three-wheeler, still fluttering away, pink sweetener packets, all the corners torn off perfectly, the way a girl would do it.

The Sweet ’N Low’s not just in the tank either, like could be siphoned out maybe, then flushed. It’s been poured in through the spark plug hole he left gaping.

It’s what the grit was.

He sticks his finger in, takes it back out. Cleans it in the dirt and then keeps cleaning it.

When the game’s over thirty minutes later, Jonas is waiting in the passenger seat of Earl Holbrook’s truck. Earl Holbrook studies him, like he’s trying to make sense of who this could be. Finally he climbs in anyway, no questions, the helmet on the seat between them leaning his way until Jonas catches it, pulls it back.

“Where’s Sissy?” Jonas says. It’s the only adult thing he can think of. Ten minutes ago she was silhouetted in the double doors, the man with the phone in his briefcase standing just behind her, watching her.

Earl just sits there, his hands on the wheel, his face pale. Blinking too much, it seems. Or, not too much, but in clumps, all at once.

“What?” Jonas says, tasting the air again, this time for smoke.

That’s not it, though.

But it kind of is, too.

Earl Holbrook laughs a sick little laugh to himself, a bad sound, and says it like the punch line of a joke, almost, something he’s just reciting to himself: “Her niece, Stacy, she died last night. They just…just—”

Ten minutes later, his truck turns left back onto Cloverdale instead of right, the direction he lives.

“Where’s he going?” Jonas says to his mom.

They’re at the door.

Belinda’s crying too, just heard about it over the phone.

“Home,” she says, “he’s going home,” then pushes away, runs to her room so that, when Rob King finally comes in, Jonas is feeding his brothers cartoon cereal with too much milk. At eleven o’clock, a black-and-white horror movie on the television.

“So where’s that death machine, then?” Rob says, using Belinda’s term for the three-wheeler, hanging his hat on the hook above the washer but moving slow too, like he doesn’t want to miss whatever Jonas’ answer might be here.

Jonas doesn’t have one, though.

“Where’s your mom?” Rob King says next, quieter, scanning the empty living room, and Jonas just looks out the window by the table, doesn’t have an answer for this either.

If he can get exactly four Honeycombs in each of his next three spoonfuls, though, then everything will be all right.

It matters.

A word about Hot Wheels.

A book about them, really.

The die-cast line of toy cars was born in 1968. And those first ones, they weren’t the same size as the ones we all know. The ones we all know are 1:43. In 1968, they were 1:64. That first year there were sixteen of them, just to test the market, see if boys would really be into these things—if there was enough room on the shelves for Matchbox
and
Hot Wheels.

There was.

There is.

Today, there’s some ten thousand different models in circulation.

These little cars, I mean, they never die.

All of the spirals and notebooks I used to carry in second grade, sure, there’d be KISS stickers on front—Barry Gibb, too, cut out from a record sleeve, the light hazy behind his hair— but the pages, they were littered with my designs. I was going to revolutionize the market for this toy. Make it not a toy at all, but a little reproduction. It would have real air conditioner ductwork, the hood on the Bandit-edition Trans-Am would open the right way, there’d be removable T-tops, pinstriping so fine it would have to have been drawn with a single hair, and then another traced right beside it, impossibly close.

This was the year we were living in town, on Roosevelt.

There were only so many hours of daylight after school (Midland Christian, the first failed experiment), but my brother and me, we were working in a scale so small— 1:43— that there would be weeks between three-thirty and dinner, generations of stories to untangle, drive our way out of. And if we couldn’t go outside, then the kitchen had linoleum, and we’d stage elaborate demolitions, one car at a time, marveling after each crash how all that ever happened was chipped paint, sometimes a wheel angled up into the well.

How we carried the little cars was a white five-gallon bucket.

And if you want to know about the first betrayal I can remember, it’s coming home on a Saturday from somewhere, my brother out front with the bucket. There were more cars now, so it was overflowing into the grass. And he was trying not to smile.

What had happened: he’d been buying the little cars one at a time all morning, from kids up and down the block. What he’d been paying for the cars with was my collection of 1972 silver dollars. Every birthday, Christmas and special day, I’d been getting one of them.

This is when I stopped playing little cars.

After that, what we used the bucket for was horny toads. Even in town, they were everywhere. You couldn’t hit an empty lot without stepping on one. Give us one morning, and my brother and me could fill that five-gallon bucket to the wire handle with horny toads, so that when our mom made us pour them out at the end of the day, the bottom third would usually be soggy, flat, and dead.

It didn’t matter. There were more. And we knew them all, could tell the males from the females (spots), knew the drag race ones from the slowbies (light green under the armpit), knew how to tell when one was pregnant (the tail), and could even get them to spit blood from their eyes on command (Clayton next door’s yellow lab). I remember once even dragging my mom all the way down the block, so she could see a rare event: a horny toad giving birth. It was one of the big ones that fill your whole hand, their side armor poking your palm so you have to really want to hold on.

My mom—this was in an abandoned carport—so willing to step into that hot shade, but already holding the back of her hand to her mouth as well. Her nose.

What I thought was the miracle of birth was maggots boiling up from the split belly of the horny toad.

My mom laughed and cried at the same time, kind of, and carried me away, even when I fought to go back, watch some more.

Ten years later, moving pipe back in Greenwood, where there should really
be
horny toads, big ones like you used to see in aquariums in doctor’s offices, I only clearly remember seeing one. It had spent the night close to the aluminum pipe because the pipe had soaked up all of yesterday’s heat, I think. When I lifted the pipe, the horny toad just looked up at me, craning its head, its horns almost touching its back.

“Hey, you,” I said to it, still balancing the pipe, ready to walk it twelve rows forward, shift it in with the last until the latch caught.

The horny toad just looked up at me.

“Don’t worry,” I told it, “I’m different now.”

At six-thirty in the morning you talk to everything.

It just kept staring up at me.

I nodded bye to it, set the pipe then came back for the next, and the next, and, maybe four joints later, finally remembered that horny toad.

Out in the dirt like that, exposed, it was hawk food. I guessed a hawk would eat one, anyway.

So I went back, couldn’t find it, was finally forced to go footprint by footprint in the wet dirt, my keys out so I could drop them if I heard a truck, say they were what I’d been looking for.

Then there it was, flattened under one of my heels, driven deep because I’d been carrying fifty pounds of pipe.

I didn’t say anything to it.

It was one of the fast ones, too. It could have run.

I was by the Phillips place then, and didn’t have time for this kind of stuff, but did it anyway: buried that horny toad up in the pasture, the burial ground, in a hole I had to kick with my heel.

There would be more, and more.

And I’m lying again, can’t help it.

That with the cars, it wasn’t my first betrayal.

The first was in that square little white house I don’t remember, I think. It’s the only one that sort of matches, anyway. I’m maybe three here, could be four. In the kitchen on my knees, building a flat pyramid of blocks, the kind with letters all over them.

It’s taken me all morning.

The reason I’ve had all morning: my mom and dad have been screaming up and down the hall, into the living room. Doors slamming, brushes flying into walls, the dogs outside putting up a wall of sound.

This is back when it used to be like that. It was something about whose fault it was. How it had changed everything. How it didn’t—they’d just been
kids
, for God’s sake.
Kids
.

Or, that’s what I have them say now, anyway. What fits.

I don’t know, though. Back then it was just noise.

And then it draws near, all at once: my mom at the living-room doorway of the kitchen, her face a mess, my dad at the other doorway, the one that opens onto the hall.

I’m perfectly between them.

My mom says my dad’s name in a new way, and I look up to him, have to crane my neck to do it.

What he does here is smile. Blow something like a laugh out his nose, but not. Definitely not.

What he does here is step forward once, twice, and on the third step, his boot crashes directly through my pyramid, kicks through so the blocks explode all over the kitchen, letters on the counter, in the sink, my mom covering her face from them but reaching for me too.

It’s the kind of dramatic he wants, and that’s where that scene cuts off sharp.

That same year, though, another picks up: I’m with my Uncle Jackson. He’s picked me up from the house, let me stand in the seat of his truck beside him, is taking me nowhere particular. Just away.

It’s perfect.

Finally we end up at this road over towards Stanton that’s blacktop now but was dirt then. His friends are there—he’s still in high school, has these velvety skeleton posters in his room that terrify me—and they’re all racing their cars.

I have about four seconds of this, total.

It’s enough.

I’m standing behind the two cars set up to go next, and then their tires start spinning and the world goes brown and loud, and the only thing I can hold onto is my uncle’s hand.

It’s the least scared I’ve ever been.

Because Stacy Monahans’ funeral’s just in Lamesa, nobody from Greenwood starts heading that way until after lunch.

As for the investigation—investigations—there’s been zero progress: any one of a hundred made-up people could have started the fire, for any of a thousand reasons, though there’s still the rumor that the police have a bagful of guilty cigarette butts, and, though shooting into a moving bus is a very punishable crime, the Sheriff’s office finally has no slug to match with any shot-through medals, no gun to get more slugs from, and, aside from that, no real motive.

What they’ve tried to make stick, indirectly—they don’t say this in Belinda King’s living room, but still, people know—is that it was mostly King cotton that burned, and it was one King in specific who got a hospital wristband on his
other
wrist; Rob King’s first surgery is scheduled for the second week in February.

And if the pumper Steve Grimes didn’t start the fires, just for general mischief, then yeah, who else could have but the offseason basketball players? As a joke, maybe. Their way of telling Fidel to kiss it, that they hated this running through the cotton bullshit.

Or, at the end of December, right after Grimes was cleared, that was the thinking anyway.

Geoff Koenig getting shot changed all of that, though.

Now the basketball team was holy, the underdog, had never done anything wrong. Won even when they lost, just because they
played
.