Growing Up Dead in Texas (22 page)

So, there was that.

But, here they are too, at the reunion for the first time. One a farmer himself, the kind who doesn’t smile a lot or ever take his hat off, the other a farmer’s wife, that one even living back in Greenwood, since her husband had put down roots in high school.

The girl who would have been Sterling King’s first grandchild standing on her toes at the water fountain, trying to keep her face dry. Stacy Monahans.

It’s the main memory Jonas has of her, of her trying to reach that sputtering arc of water. It’s what he plans to maybe use if Belinda goes into a rage about his shirt still being on the door.

He never has to, though.

Just when his parents’ voices are starting to get loud and lower at the same time, his brother opens the bathroom door behind him, and—this is all so fast—wails it down the hall: “Mo-om!”

Belinda King is there in an instant, Jonas’ hand still to the knob, him figuring out he’s caught, her understanding that he’s been listening in, when Rob King says it, from somewhere Jonas can’t see: “
Lin
.”

It’s the tone that turns her around.

Jonas follows.

His dad is at the kitchen window. Belinda now too.

Jonas doesn’t have to go that far, can see through the sliding glass door fine.

It’s the Sheriff. Just sitting there in his car.

Rob King steps onto the back porch and Jonas is about to follow when Belinda stops him, her hand on his shoulder, like pulling him out of a fast road.

“But—” Jonas tries.

Belinda doesn’t let him go.

Rob King takes his time making it out there, turning his face to Cloverdale for a moment, maybe to track a truck, heading east to cut north too, like they need to be doing as well. A couple sitting on either side of that bench seat, uncomfortable in their clothes, a covered dish between them.

Because the Sheriff doesn’t stand from his car— he’s the only one in it— Rob King has to lean down to the window, his loose jacket like a cape in the wind.

In answer to whatever the Sheriff’s asking, Rob looks all around, shakes his head, and the Sheriff stares straight ahead, like he expected no less here.

He’s not stupid either, though.

He tips the brim of his hat up, then, with that same hand, reaches out the window, waves Jonas over.

Jonas steps back, now.

“Mom?”

Rob King stands, looks over as well. Leans over to spit but never drops his eyes.

“Mom?” Jonas says again, holding her wrist now, keeping her hand on his shoulder, but Rob King nods, his eyes telling her something Jonas can’t crack into. It gets her to slide the door back.

“It’ll be all right,” she says, taking her hand back, but Jonas can hear the waver in her voice.

“Go,” she says to him when he looks up to be sure, so he does, stiff-legging it out across the packed dirt, past the blown-up pump house, all the way to the Sheriff’s car. Just finds himself there all at once.

“Looking for somebody, son,” the Sheriff says, like last time never happened.

“I already told you—” Rob starts, but the Sheriff stops him with “I’m asking the
boy
, Mr. King.”

Rob King bites his lower lip gently, raises both his hands, the good one and the broke one.

“Ask,” he says. “Same answer.”

The Sheriff smiles to himself, says, “I don’t doubt that,” then, to Jonas: “Mr. Holbrook. Earlybird Earl. Seen him today?”

What he’s doing is covering his bases. I know that now.

Earl Holbrook lost two modules in the fire.
Un
insured, because he hadn’t called the gin for his number yet—of all people, it was the gin manager who took too long to get his module logged in. The Sheriff’s office can’t have it looking like they were just targeting Pete Manson. It has to look like Pete Manson distinguished himself from the suspect pool all by himself. For reasons the jury will find all too obvious.

Jonas, though—this is all a mystery to him.

“Uncle Earl?” he says, stalling, squinting too much, overplaying, like he’s having to struggle to even connect the name to a face here.

“Friend of the family, I believe,” the Sheriff adds, nothing but a smile in his voice. “Seen him around these parts today?”

More than anything in the world, Jonas wants to look up to his dad, see the answer he needs to give, but this is the principal’s office, and sometimes you just have to throw an answer out there, make it right in the way you say it.

“Son?” the Sheriff adds.

“He’s not your—” Rob King starts, the Sheriff cutting his eyes to him fast now, a warning Rob’s not backing down from anymore, and this more than anything, the way it’s going to end again if Rob King says anything else, this gets Jonas to finally say it: “He hasn’t been here all day.”

“Earl Holbrook hasn’t been here all day?”

Jonas nods that that’s correct, yes.

“See?” Rob King says.

The Sheriff smiles again, so tolerant, and lowers his cruiser into reverse. “Guess I got some bad information then,” he says, and nods his farewell, leaves Rob and Jonas King standing there behind him, Jonas already craning back across the grass, for Earl Holbrook.

Rob King, his hand to Jonas’ shoulder, guides his face back to the road, to Cloverdale.

Instead of turning right, back towards Midland, his office, the Sheriff brakes at the cattle guard and holds it, holds it, then finally turns left, the direction the trucks have been going all day.

Lamesa.

“Shit,” Rob King says, and doesn’t even tell Jonas not to repeat that word around his mother.

Jonas doesn’t anyway.

Not yet.

Because everybody from Greenwood cuts up 137 to get to Stacy Monahan’s funeral, none of them have to drive by the field on 349 she died in. The only reason she was on it instead of 137 is that she wasn’t going to Greenwood that night, but Midland, where Geoff Koenig had checked back in with a fever. Specifically, Midland Memorial Hospital, the place the doctors killed my brother’s son, the place I had to go in the third grade to have my tongue sewed back on, the place I went the first and second times I broke my hand, the first place that sewed my Achilles back together. The place we’d all been born. The place my mom had a head-on collision, so that the nurses just had to wheel a gurney out to the street.

She was okay, had been thinking about something else, had no explanation for drifting over to the wrong side of the road.

I didn’t come down from Lubbock that time. Everybody told me I didn’t have to, that it was just her truck that was hurt, but that’s not why I listened to them, I don’t think. When I was five, maybe, still riding in the passenger side floorboard, the one with a hole rusted in the bottom, she’d wrecked too, in Big Springs, and, what I remember is rolling forward in that floorboard over and over and over, somebody finally lifting me up from there so that I could stop rolling.

I don’t know.

The firemen thought I was broken, probably. Head trauma, repetitive motion. Everything else.

I was just being safe, though.

My mom was okay that time too, and all the rest.

And nobody rolls their truck over getting to this funeral, their covered dish floating right beside their head for some impossible moment.

Rob King even stops in Stanton, pulls his super cab up into the cinder block stall of the two-hole carwash, blows the grime off, Belinda and Jonas and his two brothers sitting inside, hundreds of pounds of water pressure hitting the glass from all sides.

“Little gentlemen,” Belinda says.

They all know.

When Rob gets back in, he’s mostly dry.

In Stanton, in 1986, the big M
OTEL
sign is still looming up on the other side of the road, a sign Jonas never understood, like it’s some artifact left over from when Stanton had been this huge, bright place. Except he knows it never was, will even sneak into the nine rooms of the broke-down motel years later, after the sign’s gone, to see if there’s an explanation in there, in the drawers, the rat-nest tubs. There won’t be. The only leftover, really, will be the giant concrete blocks that the sign had been set in. He’ll stand there between them, look up.

Generations of Buffaloes probably climbed it. Looked all around, the whole town there below them—three thousand people and a few old soreheads, according to the sign on the highway. They’d looked all around and wished they hadn’t climbed up there, didn’t have to see.

Sometimes it’s better to be the ant.

Because there’s no dryer at the carwash, Rob King punches the accelerator until Belinda says it without turning around: “Seatbelts.”

There’s only one that’s not lost under the shallow backseat, though.

Jonas clicks it closed three times, so they won’t have to make any more stops, and his brother’s eyes widen. He starts to say it again,
Mo-om
, but then sees that they’re sitting too close for that.

The trip is eight songs long at truck-drying speed. 92.3, country, where the dials on all the tractors are set.

Jonas doesn’t want to, but he knows every song, will forever.

They’re not late, either, but already cars are having to park two and three blocks from the church. All the high school kids crying, their parents shepherding them, always keeping a hand to their backs.

Inside it smells like a church, like Bible pages and hymns, and Rob takes his hat off and they sit up in the family pews, Belinda having to carry Jonas’ little brother when he can’t walk in front of all these strangers.

All through the prayers and the song (“Amazing Grace”) and the sniffling, Jonas reads the program he got at the door, imagines some conductor up front, nodding
now… now this, yes
.

It could be anybody.

But, no.

It could only be one person.

Larry Monahans, too tall for the front row, and never turning around to get a sense of the crowd, the congregation. Gwen beside him, not standing so well, then Sissy Holbrook, Earl edged in at the end of the pew, looking past the preacher, at the wall behind him maybe, the big wooden cross there.

If I had a snapshot of the four of them standing there, I wouldn’t even need to be writing this, I don’t think.

The cemetery’s where it happens.

Dramatic, I know. But sometimes life really is, I guess. For once, the wind isn’t turned on, there’s no grit in the air.

Just blue sky for miles in every direction.

By the time Rob King cocks his truck up in the ditch across from the front gates, Stacy Monahans’ casket is already graveside.

“Look there,” Rob King says, leaning to the windshield for Belinda, “I’m not the only one, right?”

One of the guide wires for the utility pole, somebody’s stretched it with a plow so that it’s unraveling now, the pole starting to lean over, the way all the sagging cables are pulling it.

Belinda King shakes her head in exasperation—
this, now?
— but pats his cast on the seat all the same, and then they’re serious again, all of them single-filing through the headstones, Rob leading, Belinda trailing, three kids between, holding hands like first grade. Like a family.

At least until Jonas says it, half under his breath but loud enough: “
Shit
.”

Belinda squeezes her hand around his some but Rob understands, looks up, ahead.

“Shit,” he says as well.

The Midland County Sheriff is here. In uniform.

A few years down the road, Jonas will find a saddle for sale in the
Thrifty Nickel
for thirty-five dollars. It’ll have California fenders on it, a chest harness, the works. For thirty-five dollars.

When he gets to the guy’s house that afternoon, it’s the Sheriff, retired, living alone, waiting it out.

He doesn’t need the saddle anymore is the thing, is selling it cheap so long as whoever buys it promises to work it like it deserves, like it was made for.

Jonas will promise, sure, always keeping his hat brim down, his voice different, and fifteen years after that, he’s still never put that saddle across a horse’s back. Doesn’t know where it might take him, what sunset he might have to ride into. Fall out the other side of.

“Rob?” Belinda King whispers forward, and Rob nods that he sees, yes, how could he not, and they keep walking.

Everybody from Greenwood is there too, even the basketball team, standing together, Geoff Koenig in a sling and sunglasses, always looking down, never up, where he might cross eyes with Larry Monahans.

Word later will be that they all showed up in their high-tops, but then Coach knew enough men in Lamesa that he was able to scrounge black dress shoes and boots for all of them. White socks against black leather, pleated pant legs never long enough, flapping.

If only that could be the main image of this funeral, I mean.

Pete Manson is there, though, leaning down for one last smoke at his truck before standing up for this with everyone else. Earl Holbrook up on the carpet grass with Sissy, his jaw muscle worrying, his left hand tight around hers. A hundred people Jonas doesn’t know by name but recognizes all the same: him two years ago, when he was a shuffling kid, hands always nervous from wall ball; him in two years, always licking his lips, wanting nothing more than to explode out of this place; him in his twenties, dark from work, nervous that he’s not out in the field right now, a wife beside him he can’t even imagine but trusts will be there all the same, stepped up from the song she’s been living in.