Growing Up Dead in Texas (6 page)

Could we have gone all the way to the state tournament his senior year, if Rob King hadn’t plowed his face into the ground?

Nobody said it out loud, but we all knew.

Teams like that happen once every ten years, if that. Returning seniors with a star to lead them.

No, that next year, all of us who were old enough to be out in the fields alone but still too young to drive stripper, we’d get posted out by the modules. Guards. Our orders: not to confront, just run off, identify later.

Which is just to say it again: nobody knew who’d done it last time. For all anybody knew, that firestarter could still be out there, striking matches in a darkened room. Waiting for the right night.

And our moms hated it, of course, putting us out there like that, but they understood. Were proud of us the way I guess moms who send their uniformed sons overseas must feel. All the moms that year were Mrs. Moore, yeah.

Except of course these moms, our moms, they could bring us dinner still hot in its foil, and we’d pretend we didn’t want it, didn’t need it, but then would keep them there too long all the same, just talking about nothing. Asking them questions about when they were girls.

You always look for the moment you grew up, I think. Like it’s a thing that happens all at once.

But sometimes it is.

For me it wasn’t standing guard that next year, but my mom shaking me from bed one morning, my brothers still asleep, my dad already gone. What had happened was our year-old cat, still a kitten herself, had had a kitten. Just the one. But it was all wrong—no hair, not-yet-finished eyes. Just there on the concrete stairs that led to our screen door, breathing fast and shallow. Its mom watching it from the cinderblock fence, unconcerned.

I put on my basketball shorts and my favorite boots, the tallest ones I had, and scooped the broken thing into a shovel, carried it to the burn barrel, and, because a gunshot would send the horses through the fence, finally just raised a stray cinderblock over my head, held it there for what I know’s too long, and brought it down as hard as I’ve ever done anything.

My mule-ear boots went to my knees, almost, were still too big, hand-me-downs, but they weren’t quite tall enough, either. My thighs got misted, coated, sprayed.

And then it was just breakfast, school, the usual. Nobody even knowing. My mom never asked, I mean. It was how I knew I was grown up: I had things inside me that weren’t for anybody else. Things I’d have to carry from here on out.

Was that what it was like for Tommy Moore that morning, looking up at Rob King’s fists?

If that particular mom smoking her cigarette knew so much, she should have just told us all who did it, who started those fires.

Then none of the rest of this would have happened.

Why wasn’t Tommy Moore at school that morning?

If I could find him anymore, or knew anybody who’d kept up—he’s in Austin, maybe?—this is what I’m pretty sure he’d say: that it wasn’t about the three and a quarter he was going to get for another hour of work. No, the reason he stayed on that morning, it had a lot more to do with what he was missing. What he would have paid to miss.

In Greenwood that year, there weren’t enough coaches to go around. If you weren’t a three-sport player—we were 3A, but just barely—then you’d pretty much get ignored. Especially, say, if the whole school was gearing up for a game that had been rained out in October, a game with the Buffaloes, natural enemy to the Greenwood Ranger.

It hadn’t always been like that, though, the hostility. In my dad and uncles’ time, Greenwood had just been a kindergarten through sixth grade affair. That sounds small, but compared to what used to be there, what my great-grandfather had pointed out to me one afternoon, it was an industrial complex, a series of buildings nobody could have predicted. What my great-grandfather pointed out to me was where Prairie Lee used to be. A one-room school, the only one between Midland and Stanton, the same way Midland was halfway between Dallas and El Paso. Prairie Lee was just a dull rise in the pasture now. My great-grandfather held his finger there for longer than he needed to, like he was maybe trying to see it as it had been. Long enough for me to see it, anyway. And I wouldn’t forget. A few years later, when that land was being developed, I’d be at a sleepover with a friend who lived next to that pasture and I’d sneak out after everybody was crashed, feel my way through the fence, see if there was anything to find of Prairie Lee. There wasn’t.

That same year, though, following a different fence in a different pasture, I would find an old shack that looked like I imagined Prairie Lee had. Except instead of shattered chalkboards or old desks there would be beer bottles and bean cans, and, on one wall, more intricate than any blueprint I’ve ever seen, a pencil drawing of the floor plan of some holding unit—a jail or prison, I never knew. I left as quietly as I’d come in, kept following the fence, finally and unaccountably finding a bottle of Mennen aftershave on its side by the base of a locust post. Like it had just fallen from the sky. For me.

I knew what it was, what aftershave was, but I had to trade for what I’d seen in that shack, too.

I twisted the lid off, closed my eyes, and drank it all down at once, didn’t let myself throw it back up.

The way I know it worked is that whoever was staying there, or had been staying there, they never came for me, or my family.

Maybe that was a shed we all went to, though. We just never said anything about it to each other.

Maybe Tommy Moore’s big brother had even been there years ago, but not found the right way to cancel it out, had just walked by whatever bottle had been placed there for him. Whatever stray loop of barbed wire he could have cut himself on if he’d known. Cut himself deep, or shallow, in even lines above the hem of his sleeve, on the thigh just above the frayed bottom of a pair of jean shorts.

I don’t know, would never ask him something that stupid, if anybody even knew where he was.

Because—what if he shrugged, looked away,
did
know that shed?

Either way, it went bad for Tommy.

The reason he had an extra hour to kill on the stripper that morning, it was that athletics was first period, and he didn’t play football. There were six of them that year who didn’t get fitted for jocks and helmets, no matter who pulled them out of class, talked to them. Not just coaches but cheerleaders, cheerleaders on game day in their short blue skirts, their eyes painted to match.

The reason: the year before, playing in Stanton, word had gotten over to Greenwood that if 30 got the ball even once, he was going to be leaving the field on a stretcher.

It was the usual intimidation game, but then it wasn’t.

Second quarter, 30 got the ball, went wide around the side where his speed could get him some room.

The Buffaloes were ready, though. Choreographed, even. At least that’s how it looked from the visitors’ stands.

30 hit one of them straight-on, and that Buffalo— this is what everybody focused on later, how that lineman outweighed our 30 by a good sixty pounds— that Buffalo let himself be thrown back, enough that 30 extended up at an angle, almost to his full length, like all he was trying to do here anymore was hold the ball down, keep it from floating away.

In came the cornerback head first, aiming for 30’s armpit. Spearing him.

People in the stands were crying, I remember. Some of the dads who had been high-schoolers at Stanton themselves, they were stiff-legging it out to the parking lot, their faces set, their hands already held in the shape of whatever they were going to thread out from behind their seat, wrench up from the bed of their truck. Their wives who had known them in high school following, holding onto them as they tried to walk back.

Like Stanton had promised, 30 left on a stretcher, and we lost the game, and 30 was out for the rest of the season, only came back midway through basketball.

The players who were on that team with him, they remembered how nervous he was about contact at first, so that when two-a-days started up in August, they stayed in their driveways shooting free throws. Concentrating on their form. Their sweet tea over there in the shade, the radio in their truck on, windows down. Their girlfriends just a phone call away.

Their punishment, of course, was offseason basketball.

All it was was running.

One of the coaches (Fidel, a real name) would sometimes sit in a plastic orange chair to watch, but that was only if football was getting a lecture that day.

Usually, the day’s work would be on the chalkboard in the locker room:
Second pump behind the Evans’, TWICE
.

Instead of running around the track, taunting the football players crab-crawling out there like soldiers, the basketball team had to run, not lollygag (Fidel’s favorite word, after “yahoos”), through the cotton field next to the school. All the way to the second pumpjack, the one two miles off.

You couldn’t cut it short, either, even if everyone agreed not to say anything.

At unpredictable times, Coach Fidel would take one of the teachers’ cars, sneak past the back way by the water station, and be waiting behind the angle-iron rail of the pumpjack, just flicking the power switch on and off like he didn’t have anything better to do.

Running through cotton, too, especially all through November and into December, it’s like wading through line after line of shrubs, like you’ve been sent to hell and it turns out hell’s a plant nursery. You can vault over for the first quartermile or so, if you get the rhythm right, but pretty soon your toes start catching the top of the plant, and by the time you’re through your first wind your shoes are stained wet green again. Never mind that Rooster, who farms the field, knows the head coach, and says he’s going to take it out of somebody’s skin if his bolls are all knocked off. Never mind that the dirt, cool under the shade of the cotton, is soft and deep, and that unless you catch the upsloping wall of the next furrow just right, your ankle’s probably going to grind against itself, make you very aware your Achilles tendon is a rubber band, one that’s only got so many stretches in it.

All of which is to say that Tommy Moore, he had good reason to skip first period. Especially with the legitimate excuse of helping a booster, a deacon, an ex-school board member, get the cotton out of his field.

However, a legitimate excuse to a coach is a good reason to get razzed as well. Especially from a pack of guys dripping green from their feet.

The turnrow Tommy Moore was in that morning with Ms. Godfrey (I can’t call her Sheryl, never knew her as a Ledbetter), it was really Rooster’s turnrow, about forty feet outside the last rut Rooster’s circle system had carved into the ground all season. Just winter wheat matted down there, from the buggy getting pulled back and forth.

It wasn’t that Rooster would just let anybody use his turnrow, but the quarter-section his circle irrigated, it was land he’d bought from a King cousin. Land he’d outbid King
for
. So there was that. And, sure, in somebody else’s field, you can drive over a riser on accident—that’s why you don’t want just anybody there— but nobody would ever just leave that riser bubbling either. If you break it, you fix it, no questions asked. And it’s not like you can use up a turnrow, anyway. They’re made to do donuts in.

Since 1985, that field of Rooster’s that ran alongside King’s has changed a lot, so there’s no way to tell anymore if you’re walking where it all happened or not. No way to tell if you should be feeling anything. Rooster’s field, even, it’s in development now, was too tempting, right across from the school like that. He wasn’t stupid when he bid, I mean. Back then, too, we could have gone out there on our threewheelers, touched the ground with our fingers, imagined we were touching dried blood. But then we’d have to see the burned-down modules as well. All of them, like an army had come through, left destruction in its wake, just smoldering piles. And we could get a rush from imagining dried blood on the pads of our fingers, sure. But that ash from the cotton. We knew better than to bring that home.

From the road now, anyway, you can see the old pad where the second pumpjack used to be, before the Permian Basin collapsed in the nineties. How close it seems to the school, too. How stupid we were back then.

And, no, that pack of offseason basketball players running that morning, I wasn’t one of them. Wasn’t old enough for junior varsity yet, even. But I can talk about it because I had to run just the same when I came up. The only difference was that now one of the coaches always had to pace us over on Cloverdale. Sometimes in his own car, the hazard lights on, sometimes in somebody’s truck. Close enough that we could all see his window down, his breath smoky.

And that’s what it was about, too: cigarettes.

When you’re sixteen, even if you don’t smoke, you do.

Sure, we’d all dipped our way through elementary, thumbing the cans into the seat pockets of our Wranglers then praying for that faded circle to appear, that badge that proved we didn’t do everything our moms told us. Rubbing concrete into the shiny lids then bending snips of coat hangers into the concrete, so that we’d get belt buckles that would last a week if we didn’t cinch our belts too tight. Sneaking our dads’ whiskey a drop at a time into our cans so we could act tipsy from the nicotine buzz, let everybody smell our breath. But now that we were starting to discover pool—some of the dads had mid-life pool tables in their bricked-over garages, and didn’t get a summer vacation like we did—smoking was the cool thing. We all wanted that cigarette hanging casual from the corner of our mouths as we lined up a shot. Wanted to have to squint through the smoke like tough guys. It was practice for who we were all planning to be.