So he doesn’t even know until he’s there, down at the shattered white side glass, trying to rub a clean place in it as well.
And I wouldn’t be saying it like this if there wasn’t a reason, please believe me.
I don’t think he’d want me to do it any other way, though.
And as for that last name, Monahans, like the Sand Dunes, like the town at the other end of 20 out of Odessa, it’s real. Real enough. His mom had married the guy with that joke of a name when Larry was fourteen, so him and his baby sister had taken it, never questioned it.
As for why his daughter was sneaking down 349 that night in a borrowed car, though, making a midnight run on just a learner’s permit—everybody questioned it, and finally that afternoon, Daniel “Speedy” Gonzales, hiding at his girlfriend’s, the most obvious place, licked his lips and came forward. Told it to his uncle instead of Mr. Monahans, because everybody knew the stories about Mr. Monahans, how he used to be. And so Daniel Gonzales’ uncle got it to the police, what everybody in Greenwood already knew, pretty much, and would have said had Lamesa thought to ask: Stacy Monahans, summertime front desk girl for the chemical store on the north side of Lamesa, Stacy Monahans, barrel rider, Stacy Monahans, cross-country superstar, she had a boyfriend some three years older. From Greenwood.
Geoff Koenig.
What she’d borrowed Daniel Gonzales’ light little Brat for was to go see him again, Geoff, to be his Florence Nightingale, his— his Sheryl Ledbetter, standing by his bed, cupping the side of his face in her hand. Making promises. Saying them over and over. Never expecting somebody to have been blowing out their handlines in January, making run-off that, in the cool, stood for longer than it should have.
In this whole book, she’s the first person to really die all the way.
Mark that.
Chapter Six
In the background of some of the newspaper photos from the day of the shooting are the men already gathering by the bus.
Belinda King’s not there anymore, her robe full of burrs from running through the CRP, but the Sheriff ’ll get to her soon enough.
What he’ll ask, sitting in her living room, his tone mournful, like he doesn’t want the answer here: There was a box of .22 long rifle shells in the stocking a week and a half ago, right?
This time there were no mystery trucks in the area, their gun racks conspicuous. No suspicious basketball players drifting through the cotton.
Just a gun out there somewhere.
That and a gold medal the head coach from Iraan had driven up in their big bus, given to Geoff Koenig’s dad, his whole team in uniform, just to turn around and go home.
The medal’s in the display case in the new high school now. Along with a photo of the 1985 team, taken early enough to be sure and make the yearbook. Taken early enough that Tommy Moore’s there. In the photo, one of the players I would have to look up is kneeling, palming the ball, his lips unnatural from the effort it’s taking, his eyes proud all the same, and—I’m not just saying this—they do look like they could have won state. Austin should have driven that medal to us as well that year.
And, this time, unlike with the fire, it didn’t matter where the deputies were from. Canadian Mounties could have looked through the wall of people not saying anything, seen Jonas King back there, the butt of a still-new .22 resting on the toe of his right shoe.
But no.
Where they finally found him was where he always went, where Belinda King had even let him pitch a tent a time or two on condition that he’d flash his lantern when she flashed the headlights.
It was back at the edge of the section their cul-de-sac had been cut into, right at the corner where the CRP met three fields of dryland. A little pad of concrete. The most important one in the world to him that year. Maybe ever.
And I say the Sherriff or his deputies found him out there, yeah. But it was his dad. Walking the whole way out, not even driving. Touching the heads of this piece of tall grass or that and leaving them be. Just making that connection over and over.
And the concrete pad, it was set in the middle of three of the older, deader trees in Midland County. Three trees that had been planted nobody was sure how long ago, as windbreak for the house that had stood there, had probably been there when the Reverends Green and Wood planted their cross a half mile to the west and a little south.
Way up high in the trees—you could see it now that they were pale, leafless enough for the sun to dry out—there was even iron of some kind, its rust bleeding down the bark. From a tree house? But tree houses seem so recreational, too. It’s not what you think the covered wagon people had time for.
And the house, of course, it’s long gone by 1985. Not even boards, just some of those nails with the angled-over heads, their shanks clotted with boles of rust. The occasional hinge, frozen closed. If you dig deep enough where the trash pile used to be, there’s old-timey prescription bottles, more metal it would take a historian to identify.
I don’t know.
I act like that’s old, yeah, but I’ve talked to some of the old guys who have the stories from their childhoods, from the guys who were old to them. Stories about pushing cattle from Dallas to El Paso, how this country, from Midland up to Lubbock, there wasn’t even a single house, fence, nothing. Maybe an Indian or two out there, the kind who couldn’t believe in Oklahoma, but you don’t ever see them if they don’t want you to. All you ever do see, the whole day through, are east-facing dugouts in whatever slight rise there might be in the land. Dugouts people have evidently spent a winter in, the small, rounded openings black with soot, the punched-through chimneys long grown over.
As near as I can tell, though, none of those hands ever went into one of those dugouts and just sat there, pretended for a while. They had a job to do, I guess. A herd to tend. And now all those dugouts are caved in, plowed over.
And then there was the old timer I met in the back of a grocery store, who, sitting at a table half an hour later, bottles of coke between us—he must have bought them from the machine, because back then that’s the only places bottles were anymore, and I never have change—he remembered going up to Palo Duro Canyon some Sundays growing up. How his grandpa then had been too old for horse work but wasn’t dead yet, right? So they’d take the wagon down into the canyon floor, spend the day shoveling horse bones to haul to Amarillo, sell to the soap people. Indian horses. Another massacre.
And then my mom’s dad, talking about when the Sandhill cranes changed their migration, started blotting the sky out over Stanton. How he went out and drew a bead on one with a .22, just to see how bad they tasted.
And then— then his dad, talking about when tractors first came to this part of the country. How all the old men, used to working behind a pair of mules, would still stand up at the end of each row, to pull back on the traces. How each time you could hear them cussing when they fell off the back of the tractor, and how, if you knew what was good for you, you never asked them about it later.
This is the great-grandfather who, when he cut most of his foot off working one day, made his way over to the neighbor’s house and stood in her bathtub. He could have stood in his own, saved his own carpet, but then nobody would have ever found him.
Would he have known who used to live in that gone house they found Jonas at, though? Known whether the kids there went to Prairie Lee? How they got there? What Greenwood was like before the Reverends got there?
I doubt it.
And as for the concrete pad, it was a complete and wonderful mystery to Jonas. Rob King and Earl Holbrook’s best guess, going by how it’s shaped—more rectangular than square—and where it is, just off from where the house used to be, is that it’s an old storm cellar. Except, of course, that the tops of those old cellars, they’re not flat, are more bowed up, like they want to be domes. No clue why. Maybe a dome lasts longer than a flat roof, takes less crossbeams, or maybe it’s so water won’t stand there, leak down, or maybe it’s just so you can stand up
in the center of the room down there, I don’t know.
The pad wasn’t a dome by 1985, anyway. The concrete wasn’t contemporary with the fallen-down house either, was smooth, had a “1971” dragged into it by a finger. Earl Holbrook, standing over it that first day with Rob and Jonas King—Holbrook was a cousin, married into the family, was always around for his year between farming and the gin—he looks away and says that more than likely, the house, after it got abandoned, the animals all started moving in. Which is no problem, usually. Unless a bobcat plops its bloody suitcase down one day, kicks everybody else out.
Even more than mountain lions, bobcats are something people in West Texas are always interested in. Mythical almost, all fifteen pounds of them. I only ever saw a couple—one darting out of my headlights, that I would have thought was a thick jackrabbit if my dad hadn’t told me, and another on the bench seat of somebody’s truck. The guy’d popped the mom with a shotgun, taken care of all the cubs. Except one. But still, he was having to wear welding gloves even for that cub, and it had already got through to his hand in a place or two.
His idea was to raise it, I think, like some people will when they shoot up a badger den or luck onto a baby raccoon while fishing—nobody’s stupid enough to try to make a coyote into a dog, though I did have a friend with a pet javelina, and another with a possum in a hutch—but I didn’t know the guy very well, didn’t keep up. I’d guess it ran off the first chance it got, that cub, learning to live off the bobcat version of slow elk: cats and chickens. Which is when an old house can get to be a problem: when there’s chicken feathers drifting across the wooden floor. A distinct feeling of contentment in the air.
Instead of going in with a shotgun or taking a match to the place, the thing to do, Earl Holbrook says, if you’re thinking like an old man anyway, is to push the whole affair over into a ditch, bury it, the same as you do with old cars and twisted-up windmills. Or, if there’s a collapsed cellar right there, then your job’s already half-done, two birds with one scoop, all that. Just set your front-end loader up, pack the house down to ground level in that cellar, and then, to keep the cattle from breaking their legs for generations, cover the whole thing in whatever cement you’ve got handy. Maybe even smooth the top down, so whoever comes later will know this was intentional, not just a place some extra concrete got spilled back when.
It’s what Jonas believed, anyway. A place almost as good as what the Phillips place will be for him someday.
Just a pad, though, that’s nothing, no matter what you want to be buried under that pad.
No, what made the place his in the way it needed to be was that Earl Holbrook—Jonas’ “uncle” since his other uncle was on all the roads but Cloverdale the last six months—had driven a six-inch pipe down at the eastern edge of the concrete, and clamped a backboard ten feet up it, helped Jonas measure out a free-throw stripe, spray paint a key, make hash marks about where the three-point line would be.
This is why the basketball goal up by the house was rusted, the net getting picked clean by birds.
Back here, Jonas could play whatever music he wanted. Flip the basket off when it spit his ball back. Cuss at it. Pee off the back corner, still standing on the concrete, the trucks passing on Cloverdale smaller than his pinky fingernail.
His brothers were still young enough that they couldn’t come all the way back this far yet, too.
It was his.
Aside from Rob King standing back there, drinking a beer one day then hiding the bottle in the basketball pipe—Jonas has dropped rocks down there, heard more than one bottle break— and Earl Holbrook, to twist the backboard back straight after the big wind, and once, if he’d admit it, Belinda King, when Jonas fell asleep, forget to blink his lantern back, Jonas was the only one who’d been out there. In years, probably. The only one who knew that if he didn’t keep that ball going, the snakes would come out of the grass in the afternoon to soak up the concrete’s heat.
And then there were the old dead trees around it. Not a windbreak anymore, but still, thick enough that nobody could tell if he was there or not. And the sound of the ball didn’t even carry across all that grass.
A perfect place if there ever was one. As close as you can find in West Texas, anyway.
Until Rob King walked up to it, the fingertips of his unbroken hand brushing the tops of the grass, so that Jonas wants to recite all the grass-judging he’s been studying. Side-oats grama. Cane bluestem. Perennial threeawns.
All that’s going away already, though.
This is just CRP grass. Filler, there to hold the dirt down.
Where we are now is the day after the shooting.
Jonas is dribbling, shooting, dribbling, dribbling, concentrating on making that next shot. That if he can swish it, then his dad walking up out of the field like he has been for the last two minutes, it’ll just be a mirage.
But then he back-irons the shot.
Rob King takes a jog step forward, cuffs the ball up from the grass and nods once for Jonas to cut to the basket, son.
For a moment, just a moment, Jonas hesitates, and then he makes the cut, faking one way then taking the other, and his dad hits him with a crisp, one-handed pass and Jonas goes up textbook, and neither of them say anything, just run it over and over until finally the Sheriff has to come out for the both of them.
***
Five years later I’d get stopped in the rich residential over behind Midland Lee. Not pulled over but waved down at a roadblock we knew better than to back away from. Already that month we’d been chased down once, stopped in the Western Auto parking lot on the drag. Because we didn’t have shirts maybe, the cops took apart the whole interior of the El Camino we were in, and dumped out all the cornflakes we’d been eating, just looking for a reason to haul us in.
There’d been nothing, though. Just a butterfly knife they flashed around, confiscated for their personal collection. Same old same old.
But that had been in the daylight, in a mostly legal car, with more cars always driving by. Now it was two in the morning, and we were in a blue Nova we’d just dropped a new engine into that afternoon, and there was nobody but us.
No knives this time, sure, but the two cruisers weren’t parked across the road for random knife checks either. Somebody’d been breaking side glass all up and down the street, snatching stereo decks.
We all kind of sighed collectively—we were just passing through, going home, calling it a night—and the cops even shook their heads at the sloshy bottle of gin in the glove compartment that we hated but were drinking all the same. Then, just to be following procedure, they asked us to pop the trunk if we didn’t mind, so we could be on our way.
We probably should have minded.
In there on a blanket were four stereos, wires going every which way from them.
It was a punch line. It made us a joke.
The police were not nice to us that night.
It’s hardly the worst, though.
Another time, what was supposed to have been the last semester of my senior year at Greenwood, which had turned into a stint at Lee that went bad as well, they would stop me at the edge of town, for what I thought was just going to be the usual harassment—they knew my truck—but then the rest of the cops showed up as well. And then the detectives.
What they were interrogating me over was a Midland High cheerleader gone missing a few days back. Old news. What was new news was that they’d just found her in a cotton field on the north side of town. In pieces, in a hole.
And I was their guy, yeah. For hours and hours, until— and this is the only time this has ever happened, maybe in the whole history of these kinds of run-ins—my long hair saved me.
Trick was, the guy they had eyewitnesses for, the guy last seen with the cheerleader in a truck just like mine, he had shaved-short hair, high and tight. And while I could have had long hair when abducting this cheerleader, then taken the clippers to myself for a more straight-up look, I couldn’t have gone the o
ther way, from short to long.
So they took me back to my truck. Under the windshield were probably twenty notes, asking where I was, telling me where I should be. From everybody driving by. Some of them written on the back of beer bottle labels, or on the flaps of cases.
“Sorry,” the detective said, not getting out of his car.
Yeah.
Later that year I’d be arrested on that same road, would find myself suddenly alone in booking for a moment, trying to pocket my mug shots, which would have been cool and great if the Sheriff—a different one than came for Jonas that day—hadn’t noticed how blue my fingers were from whatever they used for mug shots.
Strike thirty-three, about.
It would be two years until my next arrest. Not two years for me to get hauled down to the station, locked in a room with a big mirror to study myself in, ashtrays to throw hard into the wall like I was the first one to ever think of that, but two years until the cuffs again, anyway. This time I wanted to fight, though. It was right outside Lubbock. I was going home to Midland for my brother’s son, who had been dying since he was born, who, when he was born, I’d been on this same exact road, my four-hundred-dollar truck broke down from pushing it too hard, trying to make it to the hospital.
And if only I had.
But now this DPS, all he wanted was to drive me back to Lubbock, lock me in their tank, dare me to call Midland, pull somebody away from their grandchild, their nephew, just because I was in jail again.
Fuck him.
I’m glad all he had was a Camaro, so we had to sit right beside each other the whole ride back into town.
And even that wasn’t the last time in. The last time, in a whole different part of Texas, I woke to a skinny guy on acid. He’d eaten it all to duck getting busted with it. TJ, initials for I don’t know what. “Angel” in some other, better language. We were in the tank, some twelve of us, all strangers, none of our stories any different, really. I could have thrown a bottle at a cop car to get pulled in, I don’t know. I remember thinking it that night, and having a bottle in my hand, so maybe. What TJ was doing when I woke was holding my head, his hand wrapped in as much of my hair as he could. He was trying to direct my vomit down into the drain. Only it wasn’t vomit, but blood.
Growing Up Dead in Texas Page 11