Growing Up Dead in Texas (20 page)

If Geoff had been killed, though? If that animated bullet had slapped him in the temple instead of the shoulder?

Yeah.

The thinking at the Sheriff’s office, which had been at some point
out-loud
thinking, was that if Geoff Koenig had been shot like that, then the shooter, his misguided revenge would have been complete, right?

One of the players who had put the things in motion that got this shooter’s dad hurt, that player would have paid.

Jonas hadn’t gone back for the rest of the tournament, no.

Where he was, mostly, was in his dad’s shop.

The lesson he was learning was engine maintenance.

Instead of using a manual to take his little 110 motor apart, put it back together, his dad was making him do it by trial and error. At the end of the day, when it wouldn’t start again, his dad would lick his lips, nod, and ask Jonas if he’d scraped this gasket all the way flat, or if he’d made sure that valve was clean before tapping it back into place.

The first day the job had smelled like sweet tea.

Now it just tasted like hate.

For Shelly Graham. For Ginger Koenig, and for Melissa Simms, who’d been part of it too, and for Geoff himself, for sitting in that bus seat like an idiot. Leonard, for being in that part of the road at that bad moment. Coach Harrison, for thinking they even had a chance at that tournament without Tommy Moore to rain his special brand of fire down on Iraan and the rest of them.

Hate for Tommy Moore, for not fighting back.

This one Jonas dwelled on, was already preparing for in his head: some rough-handed farmer pulling
him
off a bale someday, and how he, Jonas, wasn’t going to just ball up like Tommy Moore.

Jonas was going to come off that bale swinging, until the deputies have to pull
him
off of Rob King.

Or whoever.

But all sons think this, yeah. Dream it. Never do it.

Another scene: this kid is sitting on his dad’s shoulders. He’s five or so. They’re walking down the packed-dirt driveway of the house where the dad grew up. Just going down to the road for some reason, when, before the sound even, the thunder that rattles their teeth, there’s this sudden spike of light standing in the ground past the fence from them, just across Cloverdale, maybe on it, even.

The kid’s looking right into it, too.

A dome of color swells up where it hits, holds for a flash, burns itself into his head, and then they’re running, the kid’s dad pulling him down into his arms so they won’t be so tall, and the kid, the whole time they’re running he’s just bouncing in his dad’s arms, and looking behind them, around his dad, at the flash. Thinking what if they’d already been down there.

Not quite eight years later, head swimming with comic panels, this kid will stand out on the concrete block porch of the house they’re living in, the one his grandfather’s letting them use until they find their feet again, moneywise.

What the kid’s out there for is the storm, the sky pulsing with light, the horses screaming back in the pens.

And he’s wet, and it’s cold, and his mom’s calling his name from inside, but instead of answering he just reaches higher up into the sky with the chrome car antenna he’s been saving, and this kid, what he’s doing is waiting to become somebody else.

By the time that happens, he’ll have pretty much forgotten who he’d ever been in the first place.

It won’t mean 1985 and 1986 never happened, though.

Just that they didn’t have to.

The morning of the funeral, Jonas is standing in the doorway of Rob King’s shop, watching Earl Holbrook ease past what used to be their pump house, his truck stepping up onto the CRP grass like a horse with tender hooves, testing every step.

Earl’s arm is out the window, his nice jacket already on. The passenger seat’s empty, a black dress for Sissy hanging from his gun rack in her place because she’s been in Lamesa since the first night of the tournament.

When Earl first nosed his truck up their road, Jonas had stepped out to meet him, to jump in back—Earl had to be there to fix the basketball goal, finally—but Belinda rapped on the kitchen window, shook her head no.

Because Jonas had already promised not to get his good pants dirty before the funeral—not to make this day any worse than it already was—he’d slouched back to his cinderblock in the shop, stared at his three-wheeler’s stupid, stupid engine, exploding the diagram of it in his head, trying to make sure he hadn’t forgotten some vital step, some essential part.

He knows better than to touch it with anything but memory, though.

Inside, his brothers are suffering the blow dryer, getting lectures about proper behavior.

Jonas almost has to smile about that.

“She make you promise too?” Rob King asks, suddenly in the shop.

“He need help?” Jonas tilts his head to the back of the section. To Earl Holbrook.

Rob King focuses out there, shrugs. “He’ll be all right,” he says. “And don’t think you’re getting out of riding with us up there.”

Rob King smooths his grin down.

“How far is it?” Jonas asks.

“What?”

“To Lamesa.”

“Hour. Not even.”

“So we’ll be back before dark?”

“You want to ride it again, don’t you?” Rob King says.

Jonas shrugs. He wants to ride that 110 faster than anybody’s ever gone, yeah. But he doesn’t say it.

Rob King’s suit jacket, it’s draped over his slinged arm.

“Did you know her?” Jonas says then, reaching out as if to touch the Honda’s plug wire, the last piece he snugged back on, because that was where it all started. You have to remember those kinds of things.

“Who?”

“Stacy. The Monahans girl.”

Rob King studies Jonas hard.

“You know to be careful on water like that, right?” he finally says. “You can’t trust it.”

“Her car was too light,” Jonas repeats. It’s what everybody’s been saying about the wreck.

“She was your cousin,” Rob King says, looking back to Earl Holbrook again. “Second, I guess.”

“It was like this for Uncle Sterling?” Jonas says then, pure ambush. “When he…you know?”

Pure ambush if he’d actually said it, I mean.

Rob King reaches across to the bench grinder, spins the stone wheel.

“Yeah,” he says, or would have, watching the wheel slow, “yeah, it was just like this, pretty much.”

Lies. All of it.

This is piecemeal, secondhand, polluted, cleaned-up then tore down, worse, but still, it’s the only way it could have gone, too. The way it had to have been.

The morning the wrecker delivered Sterling King’s truck back to Arthur King’s house, deposited it back by the silver fuel tanks for some reason, like that’s all it needed, another tank of gas, Arthur King and his wife didn’t even know the wrecker had been there.

It was November, stripping season, so Arthur King hadn’t been home that night to get the phone call.

Like his nephew an hour north and years and years later, Arthur King would be one of the first in his county to get a phone wired into the dash of his main truck.

That’s all after the fact, though, after he woke one morning to smoke in the air, bellowed back inside for his wife to call the fire station, to call them all; after everything could have gone different, maybe, if she had called, let somebody in a fireproof jacket be the one to find Tommy Moore up on that module.

But it wasn’t her fault, either, what Rob King had done to Tommy Moore that morning.

The best part of her had died seventeen years before with the phone call from Odessa. She hadn’t even been able to call the rest of her kids, all so many years younger than Sterling. She couldn’t even make her way out to the turnrow of whatever field Arthur was in, flash him down with her headlights.

In 1968, Arthur’s mother was still alive, too. Living with them. Pushing her wooden walker from room to room, a chamber pot under her bed because that’s the way she still remembered things being.

Days, she was generally okay, but during the night she wandered, scraping her walker’s legs across the floor. It had gotten regular enough that Arthur had tacked down the curls in the linoleum where it met the carpet so she wouldn’t topple over.

The night Sterling died, she scraped all the way back into the closet of the master bedroom.

It was where Cecilia King was hiding after the phone call. After the news. She had crawled back behind the dresses she cycled through each Sunday, a cycle twenty-two deep now, so deep that nobody could even claim it was a cycle, really. But Cecilia knew, kept careful count.

When her mother-in-law found her, Cecilia had the doubled-over hem of one of her twenty-two dresses in her mouth, was trying to swallow it.

And you can’t think bad of her for that, please.

I remember in a department store once, during the Gulf War, a woman, obviously a mom, getting a call on her bulky cell phone, and then falling to the ground by the escalator but running with her feet at the same time so she was just pushing around on the tile floor, the phone still pressed to the side of her head, a sound coming from her mouth I don’t want to ever hear again.

Nobody knew what to do with her either.

But Mrs. King, with her daughter-in-law, she tried, held out the only thing she had, the main thing.

Mouse’s medals.

Over the years, Cecilia King would come to think they’d been her son’s. That Mouse and Sterling were the same person, somehow.

And they kind of were, I guess.

But she couldn’t tell anybody.

Rob King, though.

He had to have, at some point.

None of this makes sense otherwise.

And the truck, the one the wrecker delivered.

When Arthur King got back from being on the stripper all night, because Sterling had never shown up for his shift, he saw Sterling’s truck back there by the tanks, and coasted past the house. Just to ask, as calmly as he could manage, What the 
hell
, son?