Growing Up Dead in Texas

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Sixteen counts later, Earl Holbrook sits down across from him.

  Jonas lets the coke back down the straw.

  Earl still has his gin-shirt on, has come straight from work, met Sissy there like every game night. They don’t have any kids in 1986, and won’t later either. Jonas’ mom knows Earl Holbrook from Lamesa, though he’d been a few years ahead of her, and she remembers Sissy as well, from her own grade, but mostly because of her big brother, always beating everybody up. Stories Belinda just shakes her head about.

  Rob isn’t so shy, though. The story he told Jonas about Larry—Sissy Monahans’ big brother—was that once he had come to the drive-in with a four-way lug wrench, of all things, taken on four Mexicans at once, their lowrider included, and that was when he was just a sophomore, still had two more years of legends to cut.

  In the pictures I’ve seen of Stacy Monahans (in the paper, at her funeral, in the Tornado yearbook), she doesn’t have Larry’s lantern jaw at all, but takes after her mother, Gwen: blonde hair, easy smile, eyes like a deer. None of the nervousness Gwen always had about her, that Jonas’ mom would never talk about either.

  That said enough, though. That Gwen hadn’t always been nervous like that. That she had once been like her daughter, dating a boy too tall, unsure where to put his hands, his eyes always looking somewhere else, like you might know what he’s thinking otherwise.

  She’s still around, too. I could ask her, I guess. But I won’t. I can’t.

  As for how her daughter Stacy Monahans, the untouchable girl from Lamesa, ever met Geoff Koenig, the soon-to-get-shot basketball star in Greenwood, it was the usual: Arthur King was paying Geoff by the hour to scythe down the weeds on his property that couldn’t be got to with a shredder, then to hoe up the ones a scythe couldn’t reach, and Stacy had been down with her dad’s single-horse trailer, running barrels in Arthur King’s new blue arena.

  Drop a girl as blonde as her in the same section as any sixteen-year-old boy, I mean, and he’ll find her inside of ten minutes, then just stand at the fence, his gloved hands cocked over the pipe, every last bit of his attention on the way her knees clamp onto that sorrel horse, her hat pulled down low like all the barrel girls do.

  And Geoff, he was like all the boys in Lamesa, had to have been—rangy, dark, shaggy in the summer, quick to smile, slow to talk— but he wasn’t from there, either, hadn’t known Stacy in second grade, when she used to always wear those lime-green tights every day she could sneak them out of the house.

  It matters.

  For Rob and Belinda, it had gone the same way, the girl in Lamesa, the boy from Greenwood, the two of them meeting at the Dairy Treat in Stanton when they could, at the rocket park after dark when they couldn’t. It had been the same for Earl and Sissy Holbrook, even, though Earl had been a Lamesa Golden Tornado until his junior year, his parents divorcing. They’d all met in the same choreographed ways too, like there was some agreement between the communities, to keep trading bodies back and forth, keep the blood fresh.

  Jonas the product of some of that trading.

  He can’t imagine ever living in Lamesa, though. It’s a whole different world. The moon, practically.

  Case in point: Six years later, his truck will break down there and he’ll walk into town. Like they’ve been waiting for him all month, then, five cops will swoop in, voices raised, guns out, thinking he either just robbed the convenience store or is just about to. Same old same old. They don’t believe him until he takes them back to his truck, either, and for once he remembers to not let them search it. It’s because of the pistol under the bench seat, that he almost went back for, in case Lamesa had dogs too.

  Sometimes the gods smile, I mean.

  The tournament, though.

  What Jonas is doing now, since Earl Holbrook sat down across from him, is watching his frito pie bag uncrinkle, the leftover chili slowing it down some. It’s a tin flower, blooming.

  Watching it, Jonas wonders what he would look like if he were someone else, a kid with blond hair, a gold rope chain around his neck.

  It would be perfect.

  He wouldn’t care about frito pie bags at all, then. Wouldn’t have to.

  “Fourteen points,” Earl Holbrook says, placing his open hand on the table. Saying something because Jonas isn’t.

  Fourteen is how far Greenwood’s already behind. Sixteen now.

  Like any team can climb back from that in the third quarter, never mind one with just three bodies on the bench.

  “Single elimination?” Jonas says, though he knows.

  Earl nods, Jonas nods. All of Greenwood nodding.

  “Backboard’s doing that thing again,” Jonas throws out, tilting his flat hand back and forth. He’s talking about the backboard leaning over his concrete pad. “Maybe Robert’ll let me back the truck up, you know?”

  It’s what he calls his dad around Earl. Mostly because it’s what Earl calls Rob King. A joke of some kind, one Jonas has never quite got a handle on.

  Standing on the toolbox of his truck is how Earl tightens the u-bolts on Jonas’ backboard, anyway. Meaning Jonas will need a truck if he wants to tighten them himself.

  “Maybe we’ll put lock washers on both sides this time,” Earl says, his eyes on the game, then pulls his hand into a fist when one of the three T’s dribbles off his foot.

  Timeout.

  A minute fifty-four left until halftime.

  Where Earl and Sissy live is in a trailer way back behind the water station. The two-deep line of trailers where that roughneck who’s supposed to have a black panther in his freezer lives, where the pasture’s never been plowed into CRP, so that, his junior year, Jonas and his best friend can go out there with white gas, pump it into the holes, sell the rattlesnakes that come up at two and a half dollars per pound.

  Way out in that pasture too, once, there’ll be a dull silver tanning bed, almost new. For no reason at all, its cord tucked up into the bed part. Like somebody just didn’t want the bank to get it, maybe. It’ll look Egyptian, for some pharaoh way in the future. Even though it’ll be the summer they’re shooting everything, hawks and porcupines and transformers, anything stupid enough to get in range, still, they won’t shoot that tanning bed.

  “You see how that LaFayette kid always cuts on the weak side?” Earl says to Jonas.

  Again: he doesn’t have any kids of his own.

  Jonas shrugs, looks around.

  Pete Manson’s the first person he sees. Just standing there at the glass with his paper boat of nachos, the jalapeños self-serve, mounded on. Jonas has to look away from Pete’s finger stub, can’t imagine how he’d ever eat anything if his hand looked like that.

  Pete Manson nods, smiles around his nachos at Jonas.

  “What?” Earl says, half-turning in his Ranger-blue chair.

  “He only cuts when they’re in high-post,” Jonas says, bringing Earl back.

  Earl smiles, narrows his eyes, then shakes his head in wonder the next time LaFayette makes his cut.

  “You’re going to show them all, aren’t you?” he says, taking Jonas’ helmet up, studying the empty face.

  It’s what everybody’s been saying to Jonas already, since he started getting his height, his legs.

  Jonas smiles, says inside, yes.

  When you’re thirteen, it’s always yes.

  “Need anything?” Earl asks then, standing, his elbow cocked back, hand to his wallet.

  Jonas shakes his head no, scrapes the helmet back across the table, turns the empty face around, very aware that Earl isn’t leaving. Is just standing there.

  Finally he says it down to Jonas, what he’s been working up to: “It’s all going to be all right, you know?”

  It makes Jonas’ eyes hot.

  Because he’s afraid his voice might crack, he thins his lips and nods that he knows. That of course it’ll be okay. Then he swallows. It feels loud enough that everybody has to hear it.

  When he comes back to Earl, Earl’s seen all thi
s.

  “Cool?” he says to Jonas.

  “Cool,” Jonas manages to get out, and then Earl nods again, salutes Jonas as he’s walking away, the horn in the gym blowing, the crowd swelling with noise.

  Jonas goes to his straw for another drink of nothing, and Pete Manson’s still watching him. Pete raises his red cup to toast Jonas, sort of. To wish him well.

  Jonas nods back as little as possible.

  In 1986 Pete Manson doesn’t have any kids either, and won’t.

  Jonas sits through the next dilated minute and a half of play— three twenty-second timeouts, the coaches reckless for some reason— doesn’t look back to Pete Manson but keeps looking the other way, like he’s expecting somebody. His uncle, in off the road. His grandfather, coming to his first district game in years. Tommy Moore on crutches, walking like the most careful spider.

  Instead it’s just somebody with a briefcase phone, trying to balance it on his shoulder while he pays his two dollars for a ticket.

  It looks fake, the phone, like a military radio in a World War II movie, and Jonas tracks the guy across the cafeteria, the guy walking with his head up, looking for somebody. Like anything’s important enough to interrupt the first varsity game of the new year.

  Jonas balls his frito bag up again, flinches when the buzzer crashes down all around him, Leonard holding the button down painfully long, and then the stands are emptying into the cafeteria for halftime. Jonas just sits at his table at first but nobody’s talking to him again, so he takes his helmet, deposits his trash in the farthest-away can, hoping to run into somebody, then weaves his way back past the concession stand, aiming for the bathrooms, where he won’t look so alone—where you’re supposed to be alone, just standing there, looking at nothing. But they’re too full, already have a line snaking down the hall.

  Just thirty feet down from them, though, where the hall goes carpet, becomes lockers and classrooms, the aluminum gate that’s usually pulled down, it’s only pulled down most of the way. Not enough to lock.

  Jonas takes his lower lip into his mouth, knows where another bathroom is, yes.

  To get there, he has to dawdle at the water fountain until nobody’s really looking, then retie his (buckle-only) boots back in the shadows, then step deeper, go belly-down on his fingertips, slide under the gate.

  When he reaches back to pull his helmet after him, though, it’s too tall. By an inch, maybe less.

  “Shit,” he hisses, his new word, and is about to lay it over on its side to angle it under, make his big escape, when suddenly there’s a low-cut white sneaker on top of the helmet, keeping it in place. On the heel—Jonas saw them all earlier, pretended to just be counting tiles in the floor—is the number 42 in black marker. Geoff Koenig’s number.

  Behind that white shoe, there’s seven others. Ninth-grader feet. Girl shoes.

  Shelly Graham, Michael’s big sister, asks Jonas where’s he going here? There a rifle hid back in one of these lockers, maybe?

  She fakes looking around for a police officer.

  Jonas pulls on his helmet again, no luck.

  Another of the ninth graders standing there is Ginger Koenig, her eyes twin tunnels of eyeliner.

  She’s breathing hard here.

  Jonas doesn’t know what to say to her, or how to say it, so he just opens his mouth, says her name like a question.

  It’s enough.

  Her right shoe comes down on his wrist, hard enough to make it roll sideways, palm up.

  Jonas tries to pull his arm to him, can’t, and is about to start making some noise about this when there’s a pair of heels clacking back past the water fountains, saying something stern that ends in a question mark but isn’t a question at all. A teacher. Ms. Marugg.

  Ginger Koenig’s shoe steps away, the four girls forming a fast wall, the helmet already under Shelly Graham’s arm somehow, like it’s been there all along, and by then Jonas is rolling back into the darkness, flattening himself in the shallow entry of a supply closet.

  Behind him, Ms. Marugg steps on the bottom lip of the aluminum gate, the lock catching with a dull, permanent thunk.

  Then nothing. Just Jonas, there.

  Crying at last but not too loud.

  He tries to push the tears back in with the heels of his hands. Tries pinching his thighs, then hitting them with the side of his fists. Finally just steps out and runs through the halls, the carpet hiding his footsteps.

  This is the night he steps into the teacher’s lounge, looks around, pees in the metal trash can. He calls it vindication, never tells anybody.

  Because all the doors to outside are locked, he has to cut through the visiting team’s locker room to the practice gym, then from there through the coaches’ offices, and out onto the floor of the main gym where the players enter.

  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 threewheeler 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 threewheeler, 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 brother
s 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 threewheeler, 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.