soon your toes start catching the top of the plant, and by the time you’re through your first wind your shoes are stained wet green again. Never mind that Rooster, who farms the field, knows the head coach, and says he’s going to take it out of somebody’s skin if his bolls are all knocked off. Never mind that the dirt, cool under the shade of the cotton, is soft and deep, and that unless you catch the upsloping wall of the next furrow just right, your ankle’s probably going to grind against itself, make you very aware your Achilles tendon is a rubber band, one that’s only got so many stretches in it.
All of which is to say that Tommy Moore, he had good reason to skip first period. Especially with the legitimate excuse of helping a booster, a deacon, an ex-school board member, get the cotton out of his field.
However, a legitimate excuse to a coach is a good reason to get razzed as well. Especially from a pack of guys dripping green from their feet.
The turnrow Tommy Moore was in that morning with Ms. Godfrey (I can’t call her Sheryl, never knew her as a Ledbetter), it was really Rooster’s turnrow, about forty feet outside the last rut Rooster’s circle system had carved into the ground all season. Just winter wheat matted down there, from the buggy getting pulled back and forth.
It wasn’t that Rooster would just let anybody use his turnrow, but the quarter-section his circle irrigated, it was land he’d bought from a King cousin. Land he’d outbid King
for
. So there was that. And, sure, in somebody else’s field, you can drive over a riser on accident—that’s why you don’t want just anybody there— but nobody would ever just leave that riser bubbling either. If you break it, you fix it, no questions asked. And it’s not like you can use up a turnrow, anyway. They’re made to do donuts in.
Since 1985, that field of Rooster’s that ran alongside King’s has changed a lot, so there’s no way to tell anymore if you’re walking where it all happened or not. No way to tell if you should be feeling anything. Rooster’s field, even, it’s in development now, was too tempting, right across from the school like that. He wasn’t stupid when he bid, I mean. Back then, too, we could have gone out there on our threewheelers, touched the ground with our fingers, imagined we were touching dried blood. But then we’d have to see the burned-down modules as well. All of them, like an army had come through, left destruction in its wake, just smoldering piles. And we could get a rush from imagining dried blood on the pads of our fingers, sure. But that ash from the cotton. We knew better than to bring that home.
From the road now, anyway, you can see the old pad where the second pumpjack used to be, before the Permian Basin collapsed in the nineties. How close it seems to the school, too. How stupid we were back then.
And, no, that pack of offseason basketball players running that morning, I wasn’t one of them. Wasn’t old enough for junior varsity yet, even. But I can talk about it because I had to run just the same when I came up. The only difference was that now one of the coaches always had to pace us over on Cloverdale. Sometimes in his own car, the hazard lights on, sometimes in somebody’s truck. Close enough that we could all see his window down, his breath smoky.
And that’s what it was about, too: cigarettes.
When you’re sixteen, even if you don’t smoke, you do.
Sure, we’d all dipped our way through elementary, thumbing the cans into the seat pockets of our Wranglers then praying for that faded circle to appear, that badge that proved we didn’t do everything our moms told us. Rubbing concrete into the shiny lids then bending snips of coat hangers into the concrete, so that we’d get belt buckles that would last a week if we didn’t cinch our belts too tight. Sneaking our dads’ whiskey a drop at a time into our cans so we could act tipsy from the nicotine buzz, let
All of which is to say that Tommy Moore, he had good reason to skip first period. Especially with the legitimate excuse of helping a booster, a deacon, an ex-school board member, get the cotton out of his field.
However, a legitimate excuse to a coach is a good reason to get razzed as well. Especially from a pack of guys dripping green from their feet.
The turnrow Tommy Moore was in that morning with Ms. Godfrey (I can’t call her Sheryl, never knew her as a Ledbetter), it was really Rooster’s turnrow, about forty feet outside the last rut Rooster’s circle system had carved into the ground all season. Just winter wheat matted down there, from the buggy getting pulled back and forth.
It wasn’t that Rooster would just let anybody use his turnrow, but the quarter-section his circle irrigated, it was land he’d bought from a King cousin. Land he’d outbid King
for
. So there was that. And, sure, in somebody else’s field, you can drive over a riser on accident—that’s why you don’t want just anybody there— but nobody would ever just leave that riser bubbling either. If you break it, you fix it, no questions asked. And it’s not like you can use up a turnrow, anyway. They’re made to do donuts in.
Since 1985, that field of Rooster’s that ran alongside King’s has changed a lot, so there’s no way to tell anymore if you’re walking where it all happened or not. No way to tell if you should be feeling anything. Rooster’s field, even, it’s in development now, was too tempting, right across from the school like that. He wasn’t stupid when he bid, I mean. Back then, too, we could have gone out there on our threewheelers, touched the ground with our fingers, imagined we were touching dried blood. But then we’d have to see the burned-down modules as well. All of them, like an army had come through, left destruction in its wake, just smoldering piles. And we could get a rush from imagining dried blood on the pads of our fingers, sure. But that ash from the cotton. We knew better than to bring that home.
From the road now, anyway, you can see the old pad where the second pumpjack used to be, before the Permian Basin collapsed in the nineties. How close it seems to the school, too. How stupid we were back then.
And, no, that pack of offseason basketball players running that morning, I wasn’t one of them. Wasn’t old enough for junior varsity yet, even. But I can talk about it because I had to run just the same when I came up. The only difference was that now one of the coaches always had to pace us over on Cloverdale. Sometimes in his own car, the hazard lights on, sometimes in somebody’s truck. Close enough that we could all see his window down, his breath smoky.
And that’s what it was about, too: cigarettes.
When you’re sixteen, even if you don’t smoke, you do.
Sure, we’d all dipped our way through elementary, thumbing the cans into the seat pockets of our Wranglers then praying for that faded circle to appear, that badge that proved we didn’t do everything our moms told us. Rubbing concrete into the shiny lids then bending snips of coat hangers into the concrete, so that we’d get belt buckles that would last a week if we didn’t cinch our belts too tight. Sneaking our dads’ whiskey a drop at a time into our cans so we could act tipsy from the nicotine buzz, let
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