Growing Up Dead in Texas (3 page)

That’s the way it is with cotton.

That hand at the Stanton co-op who ground his cigarette out under his boot could have been on his way to breakfast, not dinner.

What cotton does is draw the heat in, let it grow, let it send its hot tendrils out, and by the time it surfaces, it’s hours and hours too late. All over the world, riverside warehouses have burned because one cotton bale was delivered two days ago with a secret ember for a heart.

By the time Rob King knew his crop was on fire, it was too late.

And it wasn’t what you might be picturing, either: kneehigh flames moving fast and nearly invisible across a field, leaving only ashes in their wake.

A field in CRP, or hay grazer, it’d go like that, sure. Fast, so all you could do is get out of the way, try to drive ahead of it, open the gates for whoever’s cattle are in the next pasture. That happens all the time, from all the usual suspects—cigarettes, lightning, downed power lines, bottle rockets, truck exhausts. Even just cutting the metal ties from under a trailer home before you move it, those red-hot ends can start a grass fire.

A cotton field in December won’t go like that, though.

The plants are dead, definitely, you couldn’t strip any other way, but the chemicals the planes have already dusted them with to open the bolls and kill the plant, they’ve left an oily residue that you can smell on somebody’s pants when they finally come home, and those chemicals, for some reason they don’t burn.

No, the only way to lose your year’s crop to fire, at least in the field, it’s at the end of stripping season, when your cotton’s sitting at the edge of all the fields in blocky, rectangular modules, waiting for the trucks to come for them.

Before module builders—picture a camper big enough to live in, but made of thick metal, with Death Star walls that press the cotton you dump in into a tight, dense block, and, when you’re a kid, not old enough to drive a stripper yet, this is where you always end up, which is right where you want to be: the handles of the module builder in your too-big gloves, thousands upon thousands of pounds of pressure at your fingertips now, the best video game ever—before module builders, farmers had to deliver their cotton to the gin in rickety trailers, but you lose a lot that way. Both cotton and time.

With modules, all you do after you’ve made one is hook onto the builder and pull it a couple of lengths forward, holding your breath each time, because if you’ve done it even a little bit wrong, the modules can calve off five-hundred-pound sheets of themselves.

After that, all you do is sling a fitted tarp over the top, call the gin for a number to spray paint onto each end, and only worry if the rain comes before the truck does. And the ditches of all the roads that lead to the gin, they’re not white like snow anymore for Christmas, but Christmas is going to be better  for that.

The trucks that pick the modules up, too, they’re kind of amazing. They angle their flat beds back to get a lip under the cotton, and then the wide belt on the floor groans into motion, pulling the whole module up, in. If that was all there was, though, the modules would fall apart—they weigh too much to be dragged like that. So, the fix is to gear the truck’s rear end with those rollers, and synch them up, so that as it pulls the module up and in, it’s also backing under it. What it looks like more than anything is a snake swallowing an egg: a slow process you can hardly look away from. It makes you realize how small you are.

Ask any kid in Future Farmers of America why he wants to be a farmer, and he won’t have that solid an answer: it’s honest work, you’re your own boss; “it’s all I know.” Mine— Greenwood Independent School District’s always had a strict hair code—was that I could have my hair as long as I wanted, and never have to tuck my shirt in again.

All those reasons are lies, though.

None of us were ever articulate enough to get at what it really was. We could feel it, sure, but would never admit something like that.

Watching a module builder pack fifteen bales’ worth of cotton into one thick block, or taking a double-fold disk to a field in March, so that by the end of the day you’ve covered hundreds of acres, had fourteen hawks following your each turn, for the mice and rabbits you scare up, it’s a connection. You to something bigger. Out there in the kind of quiet left after ten hours of your tractor grinding, you’re part of it all, and don’t have to say anything about it, can just, for a moment, be.

You know you’ll never be rich, but that’s only if you measure wealth by money. That old saying, yeah. Sew it on a pillow if you want.

Ask how I got here, anyway, behind a keyboard instead of out in the field, and I’ll say that this wasn’t my first choice. Really, it’s a complete betrayal of who I used to be.

I didn’t go to college to get a career, I went to college because I thought Lubbock, Texas would be cool. They got more concerts than the Ector County Coliseum. Even when I graduated, my plan was to come home, lease a tractor, custom farm for ten years or so, and read books alone in my trailer the nights I wasn’t in town, looking for the girl from TG Sheppard’s “Slow Burn,” that dark hair falling cross her shoulders, being that guy trying to find his way home in Roseanne Cash’s “Seven Year Ache.”

Even that morning of the fire, though, I think I already knew I wasn’t staying, that I was running away the first chance I got.

And I still haven’t told you about Rob King.

Pete Manson knows better than I do, really.

I never worked directly for him in high school, though I did help arrange toolbars and trailers when he went under a few years later, was having to get things lined up for the auction. The whole time he just stood by the barn and smoked cigarette after cigarette. I had no idea what to say to him, and knew that if I even tried, we’d end up where we always did: his nubbed ring finger.

Back when he was in high school, he’d vaulted down from the mounded top of a cotton trailer, caught his graduation ring on a stray wire so that his finger stayed up there.

Because of him, I never wore any rings or watches when I was working. So maybe I owe my hands to him, I don’t know.

But, Pete.

He was from my mom’s generation, but from Stanton, not Lamesa. Back then, they all seemed to know each other somehow. I’ve never understood it completely, especially since, when I was coming up, you didn’t go to Stanton alone if you didn’t want to get jumped.

Whenever she talks about him, though, she’s talking about his younger brother, the one who died. It was Halloween, and my mom and Pete and the rest of whoever was there (I never asked) were in the back of a pick-up, out in some field. Pete’s little brother had tagged along, but promised not to say anything about the beer.

I’m guessing on that part, but that’s just because my mom cleans all her stories up.

Anyway, they were out there just tooling around, and Pete’s little brother kind of fell out the back, like happens all the time. He held on to the bed rail for a bit but then lost it, probably kicked free enough to not get clipped by the bumper.

Everybody yelled and laughed for the truck to stop, and Pete’s little brother was okay, of course—it had only been two or three feet down, after all, and they weren’t pulling a trailer— so somebody raised their hand to guide the driver back, pick the kid up.

Except Pete’s little brother didn’t get up when he should have. Maybe he’d had the wind knocked out of him? Maybe he was embarrassed?

I have to imagine he was looking the other way, anyway.

Slowly, with Pete watching, with all of them watching, none of them able to get the driver’s attention, the truck’s rear wheel backed over Pete’s little brother’s head.

That’s where the story always ends, too. With Pete looking down at his little brother. Taking that image with him.

I never asked for more, for the accusations that must have been everywhere, the weeks and months of screaming. All the people at church all the time.

The only way I even know, or think I know, it was Halloween, it’s that my mom, once when she was driving me to the doctor and telling it, about to cry again, she said how Pete’s little brother’s head, it had been like a pumpkin.

He wasn’t the only dead kid I grew up with, though.

There was also somebody else’s brother, brained when the rim popped up from a tire he was working on. There was another kid, diving down into the stock tank of a windmill, the lip of an old barrel waiting for him just under the surface. My best friend’s brother shot in the face, on accident, with a shotgun, or another friend racing a train, almost making it. And more and more and more, so that by the time you make it to fifteen, you feel charmed, bulletproof. Able to live up to all of the stories your uncles probably shouldn’t have told you. Able to, one night, driving home the long way from a dance in Odessa, the fog thick, turn your headlights off and bury the pedal, trust that Telephone Pole Road’s just going to keep being there, mile after mile. Or that if it’s not, then you probably deserve that too.

But, Pete.

When I go see him now, he’s back in the game, farming. Everybody who washes out, they come back again. And he’s not a small man, either. Six feet up and four around, the way he says it, his right eye glinting. Still smoking every chance he gets. Big enough that he’s taken to wearing bib overalls, now. Carhartt brown but faded to the color of blown sand, the brim of his hat curled in on itself the way we used to all try to do in elementary.

Flying Southwest, he has to purchase two seats.

But it doesn’t matter: the seats are comp, courtesy of The Mirage. Las Vegas.

What Pete Manson learned from the first time he washed out was that it was all a game, all a gamble. Flying to Nevada every other weekend to work the tables for two- and three-day stretches, it’s the same thing, more or less. He’s making it work, anyway, though he won’t tell me what his game is, or his strategy. Maybe he still remembers me lining up his cotton trailers for the bank, I don’t know.

I catch him on a Friday, on his way to the Midland International Airport, and have to ride all the way there with him if I want to talk, leave my truck at his place.

“Mind?” he says, flashing a cigarette between us, then rolls my window down before I can answer.

On his dashboard are the rags and wrenches and pamphlets and papers you have to leave on your dash if you want to keep it from cracking open in the sun. I hold one of the crackly pages of something down for him; usually it’s just his window blowing.

“So you want to know about Tommy Moore?” he says, cranking the wheel west.

I shrug sure, like it’s his idea. Like Tommy Moore’s not exactly what I had my uncle prime him with on the phone.

Pete hisses a laugh out, blows smoke into the cab.

He never had any kids. One wife, but she left with the first farm—with one of the other farmers there to buy equipment for pennies on the dollar. Pete can wear bib overalls every day of the week if he wants to now, I mean. The same pair, even.

He laughs again, thinking about it all, I guess, and my eyes are wet from the smoke but I don’t want him to know that.

And, Tommy Moore.

I’ve only ever seen him once, when I was sixteen. At a bar in Midland, the second Rumors. I’d got in all the usual ways. But Tommy Moore. One of the kids from my grade, Shane, he’d always had a half-moon dented in under his eye. It was from playing in the burn barrels, poking the fire with a stick until an aerosol can exploded up into his face. Another friend, Scott, had melted-looking skin all on his temple, from being dragged around by a dog when he was still in diapers.

Tommy Moore was worse than both of them put together.

He’d seen me looking too, had held my eyes over his beer for a few seconds too long.

I lowered my hat, hid in the bathroom for the next few songs, sure he was coming in after me. That I was going to apologize if he did.

He must have been about twenty, then. Twenty-one, maybe. His face the same as it had been since his senior year. Like it always would be.

Now, riding in the truck with Pete Manson, who was there that morning in 1985, I have no idea where Tommy Moore might be.

That’s a real name, too. It feels wrong to make everything okay by changing it.

The rest of this isn’t exactly what Pete Manson says to me, though.

Close enough, I hope.

“Robert had been up then for about three days, I guess, shit. You know how it is, right, boss?”

His hand, clapping onto my knee.

And, boss. Because I’ve been to school. Because I don’t have to drive a tractor.

“Tommy was in school then,” I say.

“Should have been, yeah,” Pete says. “But not that morning.”

By now we’re past 1120, past 1140, all the way to the sewage treatment plant—the “stinky bridge,” growing up—almost to Midland, where Cloverdale becomes Florida if you don’t hook it north up Fairgrounds.

I hold my breath against the smell, am probably remembering it more than really tasting it on the air, and Pete smiles, shrugs his huge shoulders, says, “Why you even want to know?”

“You were there.”

He eyeballs me, shifts to the rearview mirror. Comes back to the road in front of us.

“Tommy wasn’t bad, really,” he tells me. “You know how it is being seventeen, stupid as a jackrabbit and twice as horny.”