The Kings of Big Spring

by Bryan Mealer

  Or what about the time Opal turned around in the department store in Midland to find Bobby peeing in the display toilet? All she did was laugh; Preston knew if that had been him, he’d still have trouble walking.

  Naturally, Preston took it upon himself to ensure the boy didn’t grow up a sissy. Once Bobby got old enough to run, Preston gave him a three-second start down the alley before firing on him with a BB gun.

  “Get fast, little brother.”

  And when Bobby dug tunnels into Bob’s dirt piles, a few of which he kept at the house, Preston waited until he was deep inside, then jumped on them in hopes of burying him alive.

  * * *

  At the age of six, Bobby walked down to the altar at First Assembly and gave his heart to the Lord, and when he returned to his seat, he saw that his mother’s eyes were raw with tears.

  Bobby loved the Lord with all his heart, loved Him the way she had taught him to love, and the Lord revealed Himself to the boy not as a cloud tyrant or a punisher, but as a master worthy of his mother’s voice.

  He realized early that his family was special in this regard. A feeling of pride washed over him whenever his mother and sisters stood before the church to sing, because the second they opened their mouths, the whole congregation fell under a spell. Even the Baptists and Methodists asked them to sing at their weddings and funerals.

  His mother sang all the time, and not just at church. She sang as she cleaned the house and cooked their meals and when she bathed him in the evenings, her voice like a meadowlark in the winter trees. And it was Opal’s voice that carried the family singalongs each Saturday night at his grandparents’ house. After supper, the grown-ups gathered in Clem and Cora’s tiny living room to sing songs like “On the Jericho Road” and “Just a Little Talk with Jesus” that lent themselves to harmony. With no air-conditioning in the house, they threw open the windows, and some nights they looked out and saw their neighbors sitting on lawn chairs listening.

  There was power in the music, and as Bobby sang along he felt what he’d later recognize as the Holy Spirit moving restless. Zelda’s voice alone was so potent that when Bobby was a toddler, his sister used to gather her girlfriends and say, “Watch this,” and sing a slow, woeful ballad, not even a religious one. Each time it brought the boy to tears, as if slowly turning a knob.

  In the moments down at the altar, or singing with his family, he wondered how anyone would not choose Jesus. Already he was aware how the family divided according to differences in belief or practice. Really, it came down to who drank and who didn’t. From hearing the grown-ups talk, he knew that a few of his cousins and uncles liked to have a beer or two after working in the oil patch.

  And his own father drank—an open secret in their house. Out in the toolshed, Bob kept a six-pack of beer in a cooler, which he sipped whenever alone and working on his trucks. He’d never dream of asking Opal to keep alcohol in her fridge, so when the beers got hot he drank them over ice. Opal knew about the drinking, though she never made a fuss. It was clear that she and Bob had reached an agreement over the fate of their respective souls. “I’m letting God work on him” is what Opal said. Nonetheless, every Sunday morning, she still paused at the front door and said to him, “We’re headed to church if you wanna come.”

  As if on cue, Bob started swatting the air, then offered his standard reply: “Y’all go on. I gotta stay here and kill these flies.”

  * * *

  After church the family gathered at Clem and Cora’s for Sunday lunch. They stood milling around the dining room table with its ring of mismatched chairs, which, to Bobby, seemed as long as a bowling lane. Soon the parade of food began, the trays piled with fried chicken and potatoes, bowls of gravy, beans, biscuits, sliced cantaloupe, and pots of coffee. Three pies sat cooling under cloth napkins, all of which Cora and her daughters had prepared before church. Opal, like her mother, could feed Coxey’s Army on a moment’s notice.

  Then Bob appeared, smelling of Varsol and degreaser, and endured a good-natured ribbing from the other men.

  “Missed you at church this morning.”

  “Oh, had a flat on that ol’ Ford.”

  “Killing flies again?”

  Here they were, the men of his childhood—Clem, Herman, Homer, Ed and Fred, Bob, Charlie, Bill, Tooter—back-slapping, talking trucks and the absence of rain, sharing lewd jokes under the earshot of wives. Then everyone squeezed into the small dining room, kids were summoned and told to hush, hands clasped in a great circle around the table, and Clem began to pray, Oh Heavenly Father. Within what seemed like minutes, the men were leaned back and reaching for toothpicks, calling on pie, shuffling the children back outside with a warning to not soil their clothes. And how many times did Bobby return inside to use the bathroom, to apply monkey blood to a skinned elbow, and find them all singing?

  * * *

  It was an idyllic world, but one that came undone on April 6, 1961, the year Bobby turned seven. It was a Thursday night. Sister Sherrill from church had stopped by Clem and Cora’s for supper and fellowship. After coffee, she and Clem sat in the living room while Cora finished up the dishes. Clem was reading aloud from the Bible on his lap, one hand raised to proclaim the Word, when suddenly he fell silent. Sister Sherrill ran into the kitchen.

  “I say,” she told Cora, “I do believe something’s the matter with Brother Wilkerson.”

  The funeral was massive. Hundreds crowded the tiny tabernacle at First Assembly, so many they clustered near the doors and along the walls. The flowers concealed most of the stage and baptistery and filled the air with heavy perfume. An open casket held center stage. Inside was their beloved deacon, the man the Lord had scraped off a downtown street as a living testimony to them all, the man who built the very roof that sheltered them now from the howling April wind.

  “He died proclaiming the Gospel,” they said.

  “Ain’t a better way to go.”

  None of them doubted where Clem’s soul had gone—to that great family reunion, as he liked to say—and so there was joy swirling beneath the sorrow.

  But Cora and her family could not be consoled. They filled the first rows of pews and sat in disbelief. Opal and Zelda did not sing. Brother Homer Sheats drove down from Lubbock, where he pastored another church, and delivered the sermon. Already he had ministered to Bud during his dying hours back in 1936, then laid to rest both little Mary Lou and John Lewis.

  The family buried Clem at Trinity Memorial Park, three miles south of town. Riding out to the cemetery, Bobby and Preston stared out the back window and marveled at the long trail of cars. It snaked over the hills and seemed to have no end. As Clem’s casket was lowered into the ground, the wind shifted suddenly and turned the sky to rust, then ushered in one of the worst sandstorms of the year. People ran for cover and drove home with their headlights on. Clem was seventy-five years old.

  * * *

  Not long after Clem’s death, Bob’s family moved into a two-bedroom shotgun at the dead end of Owens Street. The property had a large back lot where Bob kept his dirt, and where Preston waited with a BB gun to shoot the cats that left it stinking of ammonia. On weekends, he disappeared with his father beneath one of the Fords like a prairie dog into its hole, while Bobby showed little interest in mechanics. Instead, he walked over to a large pasture at the end of the street where his friend Grady Cunningham waited.

  The pasture is where Bobby had first spotted Grady the day they moved into the house. Grady stood amid the mesquite and sticker burrs watching their car as it pulled into the drive. He was pale and fleshy, with freckles covering his face and arms. His hair, as red as a Martian sunrise, stood frizzy in the wind.

  Grady was eleven months older than Bobby. The two boys had attended different schools and, until now, had never met. Like Bobby, Grady was the youngest child, an accident baby. His father, Luther Cunningham, worked as an engineer on the T&P railroad, spending his days along the three hundred miles of track between Baird and Toyah. One of nine br
others, Luther was a solemn man who took great care to make himself invisible. He did not vote and never served on a jury. If he ate in a restaurant, it was never the Settles or the bustling Crawford, but the dark railroad cafés where he could vanish into the scenery. On rare days when he was home, Luther liked to sit in his chair and be left alone.

  His wife, Louise, was pragmatic and dutiful. She’d guided their two daughters, Nancy and Linda, with a firm but gentle hand and a steady Church of Christ upbringing. But in January 1953, when the girls were twelve and nine, their baby brother arrived and hijacked their mother’s affections.

  Born into the epic drought, Grady was allergic to water. Baths left festering welts on his skin, which Louise lathered in salves and creams to keep him from screaming. The best doctors in Big Spring and Lubbock were flummoxed. Luckily, the railroad provided Luther with good insurance, so he and Louise took Grady to the Cleveland Clinic, where a specialist diagnosed him with a rare form of psoriasis. Heavy doses of topical steroids soon allowed him to bathe.

  As Grady grew older, Louise dragged him to a chiropractor for rounds of colonic hydrotherapy, which was thought to flush allergens from the body. Yet for the rest of his life, things like cows, dust, and certain grasses—the very furniture and fixtures of the plains—caused his skin to blossom with hives.

  While Louise coddled her sickly child, Nancy and Linda faded from the foreground. Louise smothered the boy with so much attention that he grew anxious and hyperactive and raged whenever deprived. In order to control him—and also out of spite—his sisters tied him to a clothesline pole whenever they hung the laundry.

  Each Sunday Louise drove her kids to the Church of Christ on Fourteenth and Main. The church clung to lean restorationist principles, singing their hymns a cappella because the New Testament never mentioned instruments. There was little hellfire in the Church of Christ—they had no truck with the Holy Spirit or bizarre heavenly tongues—but on visits to First Assembly with Dad, Grady found inspiration.

  Like Bobby’s older sisters and cousins, Grady liked to play church, and he liked to preach. But the way he did it was like a jester tap-dancing on the altar. Out in the pasture, he cleared a place under a mesquite tree and muscled over a block of sandstone for his pulpit. With a Bible in his hand, he took on the persona of a Pentecostal flamethrower, hurling sharp rebukes at his assembled flock—usually Bobby.

  “Repent!” he shouted. “Repent, or be h-e-l-l-l-bound!”

  * * *

  In second grade, Grady started wearing his sister’s clothes. He put on one of Linda’s dresses and smeared his mouth with bright red lipstick, then walked over to Bobby’s to play. Nancy and Linda complained to their mother, worried how the neighborhood might respond, but Louise defended her son, saying, “I see nothing wrong with a little dress-up.” Bob found it hilarious. Whenever he answered the door, he turned and yelled to Bobby, “Sister Grady’s here to see you.”

  Bobby never saw Grady as “peculiar,” which was how adults sometimes described him. The cross-dressing turned out to be a phase anyway, and the boys continued their games in the pasture, playing baseball with other neighborhood kids, catching horny toads along the grass line, and sneaking Luther’s cigarettes—an act that filled Bobby with guilt.

  As the summers passed, Bobby sprouted tall and lean while Grady grew pudgy. Once, while horsing around, Bobby tried wrapping Grady in a scissor hold, only to find himself pinned with Grady’s knees in his chest. His strength was surprising. During another scuffle, Grady stunned Bobby by ramming a sharp pencil into his stomach and drawing blood.

  In school, teachers often punished Grady for rude behavior. He burst into song during their lessons—“They say don’t go … on Wolverton Mountain”—daydreamed, and slacked on his homework. And Grady could be sadistic, especially to girls. He shot spit wads into their hair and once trapped a classmate in the restroom by pushing a desk against the door.

  Bobby noticed how few kids wanted to play with Grady and how he walked alone in the hallways. Even Opal noticed this, saying, “Bobby, you must be that boy’s only friend,” in a tone that suggested both pride and pity.

  Sensing loyalty, Grady nudged closer to Bobby. He invited him to his regular chiropractor appointments, showing him the table where they inserted the tube that power-washed his insides. After Grady disappeared with the doctor, Bobby sat there with Louise, trying to read a magazine over the humming of the machine.

  Sometime the following year, when the boys were ten and eleven, Grady took Bobby to meet a new friend. They rode their bikes over to a small clapboard home that had a tidy yard and potted flowers up the walkway. An old man answered the door and Bobby recognized him as a friend of Grady’s father, Luther, who also worked for the railroad. The man took Grady down into the basement but made Bobby wait outside. After half an hour, he saw his own way home.

  Bobby was never invited back. “He doesn’t like you,” Grady told him. The old man had a homely-looking wife and two grown children who apparently never suspected a thing. The same went for Luther and Louise, who allowed the man unlimited access to their son.

  At one point, a Herald photographer even captured them after a fishing trip. In the photo, Grady stands next to the man and his wife, who is smiling. The man wears a straw hat and a chambray shirt tucked into a pair of high-waisted jeans, his geriatric flesh sagging beneath his clothes. Grady—stout, his hair styled in a buzz cut—clutches a fourteen-pound catfish caught off a trotline. The caption reads, “Luck at Lake Thomas.”

  * * *

  Sadly for Bob, orders for red cat-claw steadily declined after the drought ended, forcing him to realign his vision of an empire built on sand. Already he was a man alone. His cohorts in the dirt game, Charlie and Bill, had long sold their trucks, having grown fed up with the hard work and low returns. Bill even started prank-calling Bob to toy with his temper.

  “Mr. Mealer, I hear y’all are having some weather up there. Is there any chance of you bringing me a load of snow?”

  “Snow?!”

  For a while Homer drove one of the Fords, but he quit after he got married and found a better job. So the day Preston turned fourteen, Bob went down to the DMV and got him a hardship license, and they drove together all summer. But once school started back, Bob had a hell of a time hiring help. The best he managed to find was a dimwit rounder named John Lee who abandoned one of the trucks by the highway rather than change a blowout. Bob was furious.

  “Why didn’t you call me from a station?” Bob demanded.

  “I didn’t have your number,” John Lee said.

  “The heck you mean you didn’t have my number?”

  “Well, not with me, Bob. Got it wrote on the ol’ wall at home.”

  Out in Odessa, the company that Fannie and Abe’s boys ran, Jones Brothers Dirt and Paving Contractors, was growing fast—so fast that Raymond and Troy were buying horse ranches and Cadillacs. Thanks to the Spraberry oil boom in the fifties, Odessa added over fifty thousand people, and the Jones boys were building new roads to fit them all. Hearing that Bob was having hard luck, they offered him a job, but Bob was reluctant to accept on account of a recent tragedy.

  Just two years earlier, in August 1962, Norma Lou’s ex-husband, Bill Glaesman, was hauling equipment down to Sanderson for the Jones boys when he dozed off at the wheel. He managed to wake up just as his semi left the pavement, but the act of correcting the rig caused it to jackknife and flip. Bill was thrown from the cab and his truck caught fire. He died on the side of the road.

  Bill and Norma had split up a couple of years earlier, and Bill had left her with a boy, Rodney, to raise on her own. But despite this, Bob was fond of Bill, and news of his death landed pretty hard—it was the only time Bobby can remember ever seeing his father cry. The Jones boys, for their part, had paid a handsome settlement to Bill’s new wife, even though the crash was no fault of theirs. For Bob, the tragedy still lingered. But as much as he hated to do it, he hired out his trucks to his nephews and mov
ed the family sixty miles to Odessa.

  Compared to Big Spring, Odessa was grubby. While it was bigger (pop. 80,000) and offered more in terms of shopping and restaurants, its landscape was mostly flat and choked with mesquite. Over the years it had become the well-established work camp of the oil patch, while Midland, which sat between it and Big Spring, seemed to attract a higher class of people. Midland was smaller (pop. 62,000) but it had the oilmen, executives, and tall buildings, while Odessa settled for hard-luck roughnecks, truckers, and broken-down cowboys. People like the Mealers.

  Bob and Opal took a two-bedroom house on the north side of town, right on West County Road where oil trucks and semis rumbled past night and day. Bobby started fifth grade while Preston enrolled at Odessa High and joined the football team. At seventeen, he stood over six feet tall, and his brawny physique rippled with power. “Much of a man,” Bob liked to say, reaching up to slap the boy’s shoulders the way he’d kick a set of Michelins. Preston played junior varsity defensive end, and his strength and quickness off the line left his coaches marveling.

  “You’ll be All-American if you stay with it,” they told him.

  His friend Larry Gatlin played varsity quarterback and sang in a gospel trio with his brothers. They sang at the Mealers’ church, Bethel Assembly, and performed on local radio and TV. Larry’s daddy was a driller, but Larry liked to talk about college and a life somehow absent of sand and sulfured coveralls. Some nights, after hanging out with the Gatlins, Preston would lie in bed and imagine himself a college man, the All-American.

  But Bob and Opal never approved of Preston playing football and offered little support. During his senior year, his grades slipped anyway and he quit the team. After graduation, Larry Gatlin accepted a scholarship to the University of Houston to play wide receiver, then moved to Nashville and cut albums with the help of Dottie West and Kris Kristofferson. Preston got married and went to the oil patch, laying pipe for two dollars an hour.