Read Growing Up Dead in Texas Online
Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
Growing Up Dead in Texas (7 page)
But that morning, none of the offseason basketball guys would have rolled a pack into their socks. It would have gotten beat to death against the cotton.
Tommy, though, working. Of
course
he’d have some, right?
It would have been a gamble, angling over to the stripper instead of the pumpjack, but sometimes a cigarette’s worth whatever else might happen. Too, if your lungs are already on fire, why
not
have smoke coming out your mouth, right?
So that’s the story that started Friday, got upstaged by Steve Grimes, but was still there after Grimes had been cleared.
Nobody knew who, exactly—nobody wanted to be that person—but there was word that when the first fire trucks arrived on the scene from Stanton, that, between those slowsmoking modules and the school, running through the cotton like ghosts, far enough away already that they looked motionless almost, was a pack of six offseason basketball players, their hands in fists by their sides, not even one of them looking back.
And I wish I could leave them there like that too.
I
n the GHS yearbook from ’85/’86, Ms. Godfrey is looking slightly out of frame. Like there’s something happening just behind the camera.
Ms. Godfrey.
Sheryl Ledbetter.
At first I didn’t even look in the L’s for her.
Worse, when I’m waiting in the main office, she remembers me. Doesn’t even break stride, just steps past the desk, wraps her arms around my neck. Has to stand up on one foot to do it. I smile, don’t know what to do with my hands.
“
You made it
,” she whispers into my shoulder, and now I don’t know what to do with my eyes either.
Instead of talking to me there, she takes me to the library, to my Dewey Decimal number. All my books are there. All the ones I never sent her.
I made it.
I don’t feel right in the teacher’s lounge—I only ever snuck in there once, for nothing remotely wholesome—so we walk the carpeted halls at four-thirty after school, my hands deep in my pockets.
“Ms. Everett,” I say, passing one of the three labs. Another real name.
Ms. Godfrey nods, looks pleasantly ahead of us, her lips held slightly different now, I think. As far as I know, she never knew Ms. Everett—Ms. Everett was both after and before Ms. Godfrey—but probably heard about the memorial service (the funeral was in Arkansas, where she was from). Ms. Everett, who had a seizure while ironing one morning before school, died like that. I got in a fight with a good friend about her the next day, still carry a scar on my back where he threw me into a paper towel rack in the cafeteria bathroom, the back of my shirt so bloody I had to wear a football jersey the rest of the day like I had spirit, rah rah, because the basketball jerseys didn’t have sleeves. My friend had probably just said her name wrong, I don’t know. Or probably he’d just said it at all. If she’d made it to school that day, though, then Coach Sharpe wouldn’t have been asked to finish her class for her— he had a B.S. in something, so maybe knew what a Bunsen burner was—and his Senior English wouldn’t have needed a semester-long substitute. One still finishing her degree.
Ms. Godfrey.
We were all taller than her, I remember.
And English, it was supposed to be a joke. Sharpe’s English had been, anyway. All you had to do was prod him with the right questions and he’d pinch his polyester shorts up to sit on his desk and tell stories all period. Show us his fingers, how crooked they were from his wide receiver days. Tell us about his year on the motocross circuit, before he was married. It was a joke, fifth period. Right after lunch, after—if it wasn’t basketball season—we would have all been out in the parking lot, bottles stashed under the seats of our trucks, our jackets still exhaling smoke every time we moved.
Deal was, though, Ms. Godfrey, she’d been in that same parking lot just four years ago.
If I would have been one year older, I probably would have remembered her senior year. She’d be a face at the pep rallies, anyway; not out on the court, with pompoms, but one of the ones in the stands, going through the motions, waiting this thing out. Going on the yearbook photos, that’s what I’d guess her senior year was about. She’s not in Future Homemakers, isn’t a sweetheart for FFA, isn’t in any of the language or science clubs (or auto or meat judging), didn’t compete in UIL’s Number Sense, and didn’t get voted most anything or show up in nostalgic silhouette at the bonfire. After what Pete Manson told me, it makes sense: she was spending all her extra hours at the hospital, tending to Tommy Moore. And then, when he was home, she was over there nursing him, threading his bangs back behind an ear, lying to him that it was all going to be all right, that nothing had to change.
If you ask me, Ms. Godfrey and Tommy Moore should have been Homecoming King and Queen that year. Retroactively. Prom royalty as well. Mr. and Mrs. Everything, forever.
Instead, I think everybody kind of just pretended they weren’t there. Because if they were there in the halls, at the bonfires, in the stands, then they’d have to think about the rest—the fire, the trial, the guns, all of it.
It’s the crowd version of what finally pulled the two of them apart, I’d guess: Tommy, unable to look at her and not see her on top of the module that morning, screaming for Rob King to stop.
But I can’t ask her about that now, of course. If I ask what broke them up, then she’ll have to think about what if they didn’t, what if she’d stayed with him even though he was pushing her away, what if, like all the songs said she was supposed to, she’d stood by him?
Would he be lost down in Austin now?
If there were some way to just get this from the yearbook, I mean, believe me, that’s where I’d be. No offense, Ms. Godfrey, please. And I’m not ready to talk to Pete Manson again either, yet. I don’t want to have to see her through his eyes.
Just the facts, as far as I know them.
At college in Abilene, Sheryl Ledbetter met Roger Godfrey, who I don’t really know except to raise a finger to over my steering wheel. He’s about twelve years older than her, would have been a senior when she was just starting kindergarten. I can’t imagine they met in class one day at Hardin-Simmons, or that one of her friends introduced them.
You have to admit, though, his wiry mustache, his suit: he’s not Tommy, not who Tommy was going to grow into. Probably doesn’t ever even remind her.
But this book’s going to be on that shelf in the school library too, I know.
I’ll never see it, never sign it. Don’t want her (you, Ms. Godfrey, I’m sorry) to have to pretend she didn’t read this. To hug me again like I haven’t betrayed her, and everybody.
So.
What I Remember Best About Her Senior English.
This is my report.
What I remember best is that we gave her hell at first, until the principal had to come talk to us, her out in the hall, sure she’d done the wrong thing, calling in the brass. What I remember is the way our girlfriends and ex-girlfriends—this being all of the girls, yeah—would cut their eyes at us every time Godfrey turned to diagram a sentence on the board. What I remember is that she actually made us read and take quizzes on
Red Badge of Courage
and
Heart of Darkness
and
The Great Gatsby
, and
Catcher in the Rye
and
The Last Picture Show
, even though the librarian kept the copies of those last two behind the desk. And don’t worry, this isn’t some cornball light going off in my head, this life I’m in now suddenly taking shape ahead of me.
No.
But there was something.
To keep us from leering at her, Godfrey started wearing frumpier and frumpier clothes, her oldest sister’s I’d guess, so that we’d forget she was only five years ahead of us. I felt sorry for her for that, in a dull way. Like I knew I should be feeling sorry for her and wished I were doing it better. Or, I missed the way she’d been those first few weeks, anyway. Maybe selfishly. It made her a joke for the girls, too, the way she started dressing. But it’s not like we could stand up for her. We needed those girls, I mean. All we needed from Godfrey was a passing grade so we’d be eligible to play.
But because I didn’t like what she was doing to herself, what we were making her do to herself, I slipped.
She figured out I could read. Aloud.
In Coach Roarke’s seventh grade life science, I’d always been the one who would read aloud at the end of class. Just because I could zip through a chapter in no time, and not miss a word. It was a joke, then.
Not to Godfrey.
We were reading
Beowulf
one week, going down the row, taking turns stumbling through the lines and when it was my turn—and after Michelle, the girl to my right, had shown me what page we were on, Michelle who had just been pointing out Godfrey’s barely too-long slip to another girl, maybe Kelly, then flaring her eyes and holding them wide like that—I pushed her Ranger-blue fingernail farther out of the way than I had to and fell right into the lope of that translation, pronounced all of those old words right, stresses, sentence breaks, all of it, like I’d been practicing all week. Not like this was my first time to open that chapter of our book. When I was done, ready to hand-off, it was quiet instead. Ms. Godfrey clapped.
I smiled, wouldn’t look at her, but was suddenly the designated reader again, until in the locker room the guys were thou’ing and thee’ing me. Like I’d been reading the Bible in class, not Old English.
Ms. Godfrey didn’t turn me on to reading, to writing— blame my uncle for that—but she did make me realize I was different. That I wasn’t like anybody else in that locker room.
You made it
, she’d told me, her eyes closed against my shoulder, all her weight on the back of my neck, only one foot on the ground.
Thank you.
“Pete, right?” she says to me after we’ve walked all the halls, my hand darting out at one point to touch the metal of my old locker, then the one two down from it. Where we are now is outside, the east side of the school, the south corner of what’s still the new part to me. It’s where Mr. Brenhemin’s shop class stood to watch the fire that morning.
There’s young trees planted all around now, each with plaques I haven’t read yet, each with garden-hose-wrapped cable tying them down at three points. Against the wind. So they won’t be on Michael Graham’s next list.
I nod yes to her, that Pete told me.
She does her lips like she’s been expecting him to tell somebody, it’s just been a matter of time, then produces a pack of cigarettes from some pocket of her dress.
It’s like catching your preacher holding a centerfold with one hand.
“Pete the Rabbit,” she says, not really to me, I don’t think, cupping her hand around the flame.
It’s what everybody used to call him, from the pattern he planted his cotton. I can’t remember exactly what it was now— there’s only so many variations with an eight-row planter— but I do remember that that’s always how you knew it was a Pete Manson field: the way he’d hop this row, or that one, nothing symmetrical. All his plows fitted for it, like he wanted to be sure nobody else could work his cotton but him. Like he knew his equipment was all going on the auction block soon, and he wanted to inconvenience whoever stole it.
Ms. Godfrey doesn’t offer me a cigarette. That would be the worst thing ever.
How old I am here is thirty-six.
What I want to say, note out loud, is that she didn’t used to smoke. We would have smelled it on her, would have seen her out by the doors with the other teachers, the High Bun Club, the Cat Eye Crew. What I want to say is she’s doing this in remembrance, to honor Tommy. To go back to that morning again, smoke all around, and somehow step out of it in a different place.
What I say instead is that those houses didn’t used to be there like that, in Rooster’s field. Did they?
She inhales, holds it.
“Your brother?” she asks, almost like she’s afraid what I might have to say.
He had her for English too, three years after I did.
For a while he was famous in Greenwood for lying on Cloverdale at night, on the yellow road stripes in front of the church, letting the cars blast by on either side. He was in sixth grade then, still had a lot of years left to luck his way through.
I tell her where he’s living, what he’s doing.
She narrows her eyes each time she inhales, the make-up by her eyes not quite moving with the skin.
“I’m a character,” she finally says, looking over at me.
In one of my books.
I shrug.
“You’re not going to use my real name?”
“I’m changing them all.”
“And Tommy?”
“He’s somebody else too.”
She nods, says, “That’s about true, yeah.”
“Ms. Godfrey—”
“What did Pete say?”
I start to tell her, know I’m going to get it wrong and scrape something open between them, so I pull my truck around, the sole of my boot skating over the asphalt, gravel dancing up against my rocker panel.
She reads the Pete part on my laptop, me blocking the sun, her blowing the dust from the screen, my hair in my eyes, but maybe that’s best.