She wondered then if the game was just his way out of some other place, too.
And he never would have gotten off the sidelines had Tyler McGee not spun a shot glass off his girlfriend’s head two days before their season opener against Wofford. Tyler wasn’t even the starter, he backed up Billy Pressey. But when Billy suddenly got sidelined with appendicitis and Tyler got the call, he wanted to celebrate with a bar crawl, where he downed more than a few congratulatory Jäger shots and then got sideways with his girlfriend, Dominique.
He might have played anyway, the whole goddamn ugly episode buried, if not for the stitches. Not the fifteen it took to close up Dominique’s head; no, it was the six tiny stitches on Tyler’s hand, his throwing hand, cut by striking his knuckles on the bar.
That left Chris. Only Chris . . . suddenly walking into Floyd Casey Stadium in front of fifty thousand with “Old Fite” playing loud, over and over again, and his eyes hidden beneath his helmet.
Months later, when they were twined together in her bed, Chris admitted his hands had been shaking so badly he’d kept them clasped together in front of him like he was praying, and in a lot of ways, he was.
Still, it was only Wofford. The first game of the season, and the Bears would get back either Tyler or Billy before the real games. All Chris had to do was keep a cool head, not make any mistakes; let the defense and the running game hold the fort, and he’d have the win.But that game plan had only lasted through the first fumble, the first blocked punt, and a long run by a Wofford back who’d never gained more than eighty yards in any game. Chris once told her that when he walked onto the field for the second quarter, he didn’t really think much about his BBC games—all the games he’d played and won in high school—choosing instead to remember only what it was like to be here, in his backyard with his dad telling him to let ’er rip, just so they both could see how hard and high he could throw it.
And for the last half of the Wofford game, that’s all he did: let ’er rip. With fifty thousand fans watching to see how hard and high Chris Cherry could throw it.
He started the Louisiana-Monroe game the following week, and then again at Iowa State. Two days after that, Chris came up to her after practice and officially asked her out. He was so serious, so sweet and awkward about it, with his hair still wet from the showers and a bruise across his forehead from a hard hit turning blue to black, that she almost laughed.
Instead, she asked him why it took him so damn long.
They’d been together ever since.
• • •
Tyler McGee married Dominique and lost his scholarship, and Billy Pressey never took another snap as the starter. They talked about it a few times, how fast the pieces fell into place: Billy’s bad appendix and Tyler’s bad temper and a few stitches and some shitty team defense. All the little things adding up to Chris finally letting ’er rip all through the rest of his junior year, when packs of overweight, tired men with video cameras and cellphones and notepads sprouted in the stands like thick weeds, just to see him play.
And on through the long following summer, where they holed up in her apartment, sleeping but not really sleeping together in the bed that was too small for her, let alone Chris. Chris pushing himself harder and harder while she waited, supported. She didn’t really understand the secret language of the game, but she didn’t have to, because she understood the players . . . men . . . and all the things they needed. Although after they first heard his name together on SportsCenter she’d cried for an hour, while he sat there, quiet, twisting his callused hands.
Then his final year, and those first six wins and not one, but two, ESPN video profiles of Chris’s high school career in Murfee: all grainy, washed-out footage of Chris towering over fields far too small. He was noticeably heavier, and that was the reason, according to everyone, he’d never been given a serious look . . . but there was still that goddamn arm, always that arm—lightning chained to that earthbound body.
And finally, that heartbeat moment of the Kansas State game beneath the lights, the ESPN2 Game of the Week, where K State’s Lonnie Ray Holliday showed that he knew how to let ’er rip pretty damn well too, catching Chris clean from the blind side right at the knees and Mel knowing—knowing for goddamn certain—that it was all over even before it really began.
There was an agent, briefly, who popped in like a magic trick, wearing suits a bit too shiny at the cuffs, who talked big about Chris having the opportunity to show off all of his intangibles. But then his phone went dead and he was gone as if he had never even existed. Vanished like a rabbit in a hat. Mel had called the agent over and over again even after Chris wouldn’t, standing over their sink, smoking cigarettes, trying not to cry.
• • •
When she was thinking straight she didn’t blame Chris for the injury itself, no more than she’d blame someone for getting hit by a car he never saw coming. It was more about what happened after, all the things that didn’t happen. Chris had started working on a master’s degree in literature, but let that go. He rehabbed some more, worked out, but not that hard, not that serious, and the weight he’d cut started to hang on him again. He’d sit in her apartment in the dark, flipping through TV channels or reading books by whatever sunlight he let in through the windows.
Never sports, though, never that, and none since. Finally, when it was near unbearable, both of them washed out and colorless, he came in one afternoon and said he was going home, back to Murfee—a place to her that was only TV clips and high school game films. He’d made a call she knew nothing about to the sheriff’s department and they’d agreed to take him on. It was decent, honest work he could be proud of, and the old family house was still there and it was all set, easy. She knew without his saying it that he needed to get out of Waco, away once and for all. And standing there in the jeans he always wore so no one, most of all her, could see that white and coiled snake of a scar from the surgery, he’d almost been happy. Almost himself again.
Even still, the words were right there on the tip of her tongue, ready to spit it out: Go fuck yourself, Chris. He wasn’t going to make a decision like that on his own. He didn’t get to play house with her and then walk away, leaving her with nothing. He was supposed to be—was going to be, goddammit—different from and better than every other man she’d known from her daddy onward. She almost said all those things too—staring into his eyes, which were most often blue but other times appeared bottle green—when he finally smiled at her, wide, embarrassed.
Misunderstood. That’s when she understood he wasn’t talking about leaving Waco alone.
While he twisted his hands, hoping she got his meaning without making him put the words together out loud, she tossed water on that match-strike anger she’d struggled with forever—the same anger that had gotten her daddy in so much trouble for so much of their lives. An anger that had lit him from within, so that he was nearly glowing with it, his fists throwing sparks, always trying to set the world on fire. Burning them both.
Instead, she’d hugged Chris, face tilted down and hard, so he wouldn’t see her cry.
It took them a month to pack up what bits and pieces of a life they had in Waco, and then just like that they were here, in Murfee, unlocking the long-empty house he’d grown up in and where both of his parents had died. That first night there had been a rare West Texas rain, all noise and fury and white light against the dusty windows, and she’d given herself to him on a few blankets thrown down on the floor, with water dripping all round them.
She woke the next morning and stood on this still-wet porch and saw all the color that had sprung up overnight, the earth taking water like a dying man, with a pale mist falling skyward over hills that were the same sudden uncertain green of Chris’s eyes.
That had been truly nice, her best moment since coming here. Now the rain only reminded her that there were still a few holes in the roof Chris hadn’t gotten around to f
ixing yet.
• • •
Mel wasn’t sure what Chris thought coming back to Murfee might actually fix: his life, his knee, her. Them. If anything, coming home had made him more withdrawn, more sullen. Beyond the job, Mel couldn’t imagine what he was looking for here anymore. And that left her lost, alone, not knowing what she was fighting against or for.
But still they went on, rusting away minute by minute, until two days ago, when Chris had found the body out at a place called Indian Bluffs. It was all he thought about now—his investigation—and she hated herself for letting it get under her skin, letting it drive her fucking crazy. Chris was finally alive, awake, like those hills after the rain, and it had nothing to do with her at all.
• • •
Chris had snapped a few pictures on his phone and showed them to her that first night, sitting up in bed. She’d turned the phone this way and that, trying to make sense of the mess on the ground. That’s all she saw of the body.
After he got up to get them both a glass of water, she continued to thumb back and forth through the handful of other pictures on his phone. She saw none of her, none of their time in Waco, none of anything that might even make sense to her. It was all gone, deleted. Instead, there were images of cliff walls out in the desert where you could barely make out faded Indian paintings; a few more of ghost towns whose names no one remembered anymore; some of cracked earth circled over by big black birds in ugly skies.
And that damn body. All of Chris’s pictures were of dead places and things: memories and remains and ruins where people had once been and were no longer. By the time he came back with their glasses, she had put the phone on the bed and pretended to go to sleep.
• • •
She’d had a bad dream of her own last night, one where she was sitting on this very porch listening to a dying radio beneath a snapshot sky. She had tuned in to her favorite show, Dark Stars, hosted by a psychic who’d once been famous for solving murders and disappearances but now helped people connect with their dead relatives . . . with their ghosts. In her dream a voice had called in sounding just like her—in fact it was her—wanting to know what had become of Melissa Bristow. Rumor was, she’d gotten lost, disappeared in some oil field or ghost town that no one could find anymore. But Melissa had been right there, with a mouthful of dust, screaming at the radio, at herself.
I’m right here. But she wasn’t, not really. She was the ghost, haunting herself and Chris and the empty spaces between them.
She’d woken up cold and afraid and gasping, wanting and needing Chris and putting a hand out for him to feel his warmth and maybe his heartbeat, only to find his side of the bed empty. Instead, he’d been across the room, hunched in front of their laptop, his face hard angles in the screen’s glare . . . investigating.
Afterward, she’d struggled to find sleep, still angry. At him, at Murfee, at herself. The living she could compete with, fight against. She’d done it her whole life, so much like her daddy in more ways than she’d ever admit, who always fought for everything. But those things in his pictures? Ghosts and shadows and emptiness?
She didn’t even know where to begin. It was like her horrible dream and this house with its bad roof and its old books and this backyard with its lights and green grass—she was trapped inside one of Chris’s pictures, a picture of someone and something that didn’t exist anymore. But before she’d closed her eyes again, dropping into a sleep free of dead things, she’d imagined or dreamed, or just hoped, that Chris had climbed back in into bed with her and that she had reached out for him. Just to brush her fingers over him, to make sure he was real.
5
CALEB
There are so many stories about Phantly Roy Bean Jr., the infamous Hanging Judge Roy Bean—the self-proclaimed “Law West of the Pecos”—that it’s hard to sort the truth from the fiction. It’s hard to see the real man standing in the long shadow of one that may never have existed at all.
In eighth grade we had to write a paper about a famous Texan, and everyone thought I would write about Judge Bean. After all, my father is the new “Law West of the Pecos”—I read it all the time in the Murfee Daily, and that’s how the NBC Nightly News once referred to him. He’s a modern Roy Bean, always wearing either his custom Half-Breed hat or a Stetson; colorful and famous and outspoken, so much so that he’s been nicknamed the Judge. He’s even originally from Pecos. His family was once famous there.
In Murfee, he’s more than the sheriff. He’s larger than life. He is judge, jury, and executioner.
• • •
I almost wrote my paper on Gene Roddenberry, but at the last minute, chose Clyde Barrow instead. I thought it was funny that the sheriff’s son was writing about one of Texas’s most famous criminals. It was my raised middle finger to him. I was younger and dumber, and it was my awkward way of letting him know that I knew. That I knew all about him. My mom tried to talk me out of it before finally letting it go. She neatly corrected my punctuation and bought me a nice blue folder to put it in, even typing up the label for the cover. Back then, when my father was still pretending to be fatherly, or when he just wanted to push me or mess with me, he’d go over my homework. My mom had to lay it out for him next to his breakfast plate, to the left of the juice but not touching the fork, so he could scan through it with those gray eyes of his, searching for mistakes, tapping his long finger against the papers like a clock-tick. We both knew he wasn’t really reading. It was more about making me sit there watching him do it, waiting for him. But on that one morning, I saw that my Clyde Barrow report, that blue folder, wasn’t in his stack. My mom had already slipped it into my backpack next to the door. She never said anything and I never asked, even though we both knew he’d probably hear about it anyway. My father hears about everything that happens in Murfee, and if punishment was ever going to be given out over my disrespectful report, my mom would have gotten her measure of it, too. She sat there next to him while he read the rest of my work, calm, sipping her juice, never taking her eyes off me.
Walking to school and remembering my mom’s look—steady, warm, ready—I almost threw that fucking folder into the trash, willing to take the belt or the closet or whatever for the failing grade. But I didn’t. I turned it in, my hands shaking, and that’s when I learned that Amé Reynosa, who I’d never spoken to even though she sat next to me in homeroom because our last names both began with R, had written her paper on Bonnie Parker.
I knew I wanted to be her friend that day, and have been, ever since. I suffered for that paper later; my mom did, too.
But whenever I get to sit close and talk to Amé, I’m ashamed to admit I’m still glad I chose Barrow.
• • •
There are all these stories about Judge Bean, legends. Who knows what’s true anymore? He left Kentucky when he was sixteen to work Louisiana flatboats, then opened a trading post for a time in Chihuahua, where he killed a Mexican, forcing him to move on to Sonora and later San Diego, where he shot a Scotsman in a duel over a lady. He was arrested, and while he was waiting in jail, women he’d courted brought all kinds of presents: flowers, wine, cigars, food, including an iron skillet full of tamales, hiding knives he then used to dig his way out of jail.
Allegedly a group of men tried to hang him in San Gabriel after another duel left their friend, a Mexican army officer, dead. The issue? A woman, of course. They put Bean up on a horse and strung a noose around his neck and slapped the horse’s ass, but when it stood rock-still, just staring at them, they left Bean to twist and hang. The woman who’d been the source of all the trouble later cut him down, but Bean was forever branded with a rope scorch around his throat. He moved on to Pinos Altos in New Mexico and managed a merchandise store and saloon. Once he even used an old cannon to blast back an Apache war party. I read that you can still see that rusted piece of artillery.
Then he was running the Confederate blockades down to
Matamoros, opening a firewood business by cutting down a neighbor’s timber, operating a dairy farm and thinning down the milk with piss and river water. He even tried his hand as a butcher by cattle rustling. He married an eighteen-year-old girl, and after he was arrested for threatening her life, she still went on to have four children with him. He opened a saloon in his own tent city he named Vinegaroon, hard up on the banks of the Pecos River and deep in the Chihuahuan Desert, and got himself appointed justice of the peace. He heard cases in his saloon, drew the jurors from his best drinkers, and only ever used one lawbook—a dirty and water-stained 1879 edition of the Revised Statutes of Texas. Anything else he burned.
In a case where an Irishman shot a Chinese laborer, the Judge ruled that homicide was the killing of a human being, but he couldn’t find any law against killing a Chinaman.
Later, he moved his saloon and his courtroom to a railroad right-of-way, where he homesteaded for twenty years, illegally. He always made sure the school had free firewood in the winter. He ended every marriage service with “God have mercy on your souls.” They call Bean the Hanging Judge, but he really sentenced only two men to hang, and one of them escaped.
There are all these books and films, each one adding a little bit to the mystery and the legend, turning his violent exploits into jokes. He lied and cheated and stole at every turn; beat a teenage wife and killed men over other women. But he made sure a few cold kids got firewood, so all was forgiven or ignored.
He led a dark existence in a desperate time and place and became larger than life. He was life and death. But only in Texas, this godforsaken place where there’s more blood in the ground than water.
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