Growing Up Dead in Texas (16 page)

T
he one person Rob King would never talk about was Sterling. His suicide brother.

I think I understand.

My nephew who was dying a few pages ago, that was the first time I’ve said anything about him in all these years.

His name was
Dallas
. His name was
Houston
.

It was Austin.

He was the first grandkid, the golden child, the same as Sterling had been, and Mouse before him.

Ms. Godfrey would have an explanation for that, I guess. A footnote or a play or a literary tradition.

She doesn’t know everything, though.

She doesn’t know that I used to save my fingernails, say. In a Tylenol bottle, back when everyone was sure every third Tylenol pill was poison. By fifteen, that little white bottle was almost full. Until my littlest brother found it when I was gone one day. I scooped what I could back into the bottle, stormed down the hall to my room, slammed the door hard enough that it would sound locked, anyway.

Two hours later, cooled down, I would open that door again. There on the carpet was my littlest brother’s apology: he’d found some clippers, cut all his own nails off. Deep, so that each one was bloody. Him waiting down the hall to see for himself that everything was okay now. It wasn’t.

Another thing Ms. Godfrey doesn’t know is that, moving up to Colorado, I finally had to let go of the backboard I’d been carrying with me from house to house ever since I left Greenwood. It was all warped and scarred, just the ghost of a red square on it anymore, and it took all kinds of mismatched washers and carriage bolts to even keep a rim up there, but still, each time I was fading away from it, in whatever driveway was mine at the time, I felt like I was still me. Like if I just made this shot, then everything would be all right, that I could keep the world together by placing that ball through the net one more time.

And she especially doesn’t know about Buddy.

My dog about four years ago, a golden boxer some eight-months old, with parvo.

We fed him goat milk and Enfamil and Gatorade and everything we could think of, but still, he was going, until one night it was time to shoot him. Except, up in the top of my closet, I didn’t have any more shells. Not in the ashtray of my truck either, and not in the pockets of any of my jackets, and not behind the
seat
of my truck, and not the ashtray again either, though I checked and checked, insisted. It was two in the morning already, the stores were closed, everybody I knew sleeping.

But still.

You can do it with a narrow rope if you have to, a parachute cord you bought at Army surplus because it only cost a dollar. You can do it if you don’t mind having that feel of muscle dying under your hands, the way it creaks like it’s drying out. You can do it if you don’t mind having that feeling in your hands for the rest of your life.

To even get there, though, what you have to do is dig deeper into your closet, for the mule-eared boots you haven’t tried to fit into for years.

They make it feel more like a movie, what you’re doing. Like you’re walking into a scene here. Like your lines are already all laid out for you, your actions blocked out. Like there’s some director watching you, nodding yes, that this is right, this is good, everybody quiet now.

Never mind the actor there, his knee between the dog’s shoulder blades.

I’m not going into that backyard again, though.

But it’s not always just a backyard, either. Sometimes it’s a whole county.

My favorite dog when I was twelve, one Friday afternoon when we were going to the lake, I couldn’t find her and couldn’t find her. Finally, when none of his excuses were getting us out of the house, my dad told my mom the story. They were in the garage, which is like trying to whisper in a cave. This is what he didn’t know I was hearing: that his buddy from way back, our neighbor, had gotten understandably tired of Sheba chasing his van every day, so had finally stopped that morning, turned that Chevy van around and chased the dog instead. All through the pasture, wider and wider loops, until he caught her. The fresh ruts were right there, obvious, would be for years. After he hit Sheba, then, she got up and kept running, made one more giant loop, going for all she was worth, then came back to the van, fell over in some kind of shock, her side rising shallow and fast. This was good, I thought, about to round the corner. She’d lived. It was what she always did. Except. Instead of scooping her into the back of the truck, my dad and the neighbor— Gene, Gene,
Gene
, I can’t say it enough times— put her in a plastic trash bag, dug a hole for her so that she probably didn’t die until she woke up.

We didn’t make the lake that weekend. They didn’t find me that night until almost dawn, and that was just because I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, or a flip switch to blow the world up.

Then my next dog, Pepper, a lanky tall black and brown goof who’d wandered up especially to help me be thirteen. At a barbecue one Sunday, one of my young cousins was petting one of the other dogs, and Pepper growled like he always did. Not at my little cousin—taller than me now—but at the other dog, for getting attention. It didn’t matter. My cousin’s dad heard, cocked his head to be sure he’d heard, then took two steps over to his car, leaned in through the open window, his cheeseburger plate balanced in his other hand the whole time. When he turned back around, he was leading with his nickel-plated .38. There in the middle of all of us, so we felt the spray even if it didn’t stain our clothes, he took half of Pepper’s head off, from the left eye back, and said it in the silence that followed, before we all started breathing again: that
no
dog was going to growl at his kid, by God. By the time the men came back from burying Pepper, the cheese on our burgers was cold, and none of the women were talking to any of the men, and I didn’t even run away, just sat there under the clothesline, staring out across the pasture.

All of which is to say that that night with Buddy, I should have known, should have been more ready. And it’s not like I hadn’t been shooting deer and elk and everything else in all the years before Buddy—a horse once, even, that I had to run away from, am still running away from—and not like I hadn’t sawed the heads off just-dead Hereford bulls, for their skulls, and dug through rotting cows for their elbow calluses and eye lenses, which I was collecting for a while, and not like I hadn’t killed who knows how many birds and snakes and rabbits by then, but Buddy—his name was no accident. That’s the best way to say it, maybe. He was Sheba and Pepper and the rest, only safe, far from Greenwood.

I don’t know.

I sat on the back porch with him for two days while he was dying, didn’t even read, and when he started peeing just sitting there, so that it ran onto both of us, his ears back from embarrassment, the pee still Enfamil practically, I told him it was all right, that it was all going to be all right, and just sat there with him some more, making promises, offering trades.

You don’t get to save them all though, I don’t guess. Even the important ones.

You’d think I’d have learned that by then.