Mexia: The Memoirs of J.C. Mulkey: a Novel

By Frederick L. Malphurs

Mexia is a novel that has been written in the form of the memoirs of J. C. Mulkey. J.C., at a very early age, discovers a murder. As he grows up, he discovers more murders and vows to protect, defend, and bring the perpetrators to justice. Along the way, he faces the challenges of growing up, getting educated, and tackling the trials and errors of justice, but through it all he maintains his optimistic nature, his problem solving, and focuses on what he thinks is most important in life.

J.C. loves his dogs and his mother. He is a loyal brother and son. He tries to do good things, but, sometimes he ends up putting himself in a frustrating position. Still, he triumphs because of the courage of his convictions that he will identify the murderer. He does his best to protect the community that he loves.

Just how this murder mystery happened in Mexia is part of the historical journey that J.C. must learn before he really builds the case. At risk of life and limb, J.C. successfully negotiates the perils that make his life so difficult.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 7, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440176029

Frederick L. Malphurs

Frederick L. Malphurs spent thirty-seven years working for the Department of Veteran Affairs and is the former CEO of the North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health Care System. Now retired, he lives in Gainesville, Florida, with his wife, Robin. This is his fourth book.

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Prologue

The Initial Accident

My parents waited until I woke up that morning to tell me my uncle by marriage, Bobby Watson, had been killed in a car accident. I learned the details by eavesdropping. Bobby’s 1960 Ford Fairlane 500 was found by the police at 2:30 am that Saturday. He was behind the wheel with his face and chest severely bruised—and he’d been drinking. The car had left the road and violently collided with an oak tree before rolling into a ditch.

I was eight years old at the time, and I lived in a world of books and television shows. I really couldn’t get my mind focused on what death meant, but I knew that I would miss Bobby. He was always smiling and ruffling my hair. Sometimes, he would give me quarters or dimes.

What particularly intrigued me was hearing my parents voice their suspicions that it wasn’t an accident. My eight-year-old mind became consumed with forming imagined details of how such a thing could have happened. My imagination was always a little too vivid and rambunctious for my own good. I had already learned to be cautious about delivering my ideas and opinions to others. I was still learning about myself, including how my thoughts were not always those of my parents. Sometimes it was cool, but sometimes what I was thinking would have embarrassed me if I had spoken those thoughts out loud. Anyway, I was sure curious about how such a thing—an accident—could be the source of the agony my parents and my aunt, the widow, were going through.

Bobby was married to my Aunt Berniece. I didn’t think that my aunt liked me much, and frankly I didn’t care that much for her. She was what my mother called high-strung, often yelling and quick to disagree and get her feelings hurt. I steered clear of her as much as possible. My other aunt, the second of my mother’s sisters, would often seek me out and talk to me about things that interested me, which were mostly television shows and cartoons. She would give me hugs and sometimes ask what I wanted to eat for dinner.

After Bobby’s death, I felt sorry for Aunt Berniece. She could cry on cue, but seldom did and then only in front of my grandmother. I thought she grew more hardened and disagreeable. After about six months, she met an oil field man, a mechanic they called him. Kept the inventory on all the tools and rationed them out. That man was so quiet, he was almost mute. They moved away and pretty much stayed away.

Dad went to the scene and took pictures. That was after the police had removed Bobby from the car. He said the front seat stank to high heaven of beer. I watched where he put the pictures, and as soon as I was left alone, I went into the living room and opened that drawer. I was transfixed by what I saw. The car did not look badly damaged. I was disappointed in that. I expected to see the car completely crushed. The car was nearly buried in vines and bushes. I could see dark stains on the car seats. The windshield was cracked, but not crushed open. I carefully put the pictures back.

When I read the obituary in the Mexia newspaper, I learned that Bobby was twenty-four years old, a graduate of Mexia High School, and a good employee of Henderson Farms. The obituary said he was a good husband who left a grieving wife, parents, a sister, and two brothers. It also said that he was a faithful member of the Temple of God. The paper described his death as tragic and said that the condition of the county’s unpaved roads probably contributed to the accident.

The day after I read the obituary, I was nosing around in the chest of drawers in the living room. Grandmother kept the good linen and her papers in there. As I was going through her letters to her sisters in Waco, I found a copy of the accident report. The accident report was a mystery to me. I couldn’t get my mind to accept the idea that the police would get something like this so wrong. I believed my parents, and they said it couldn’t have been an accident. If they told me that the accident had been caused by visitors from Mars, I would have believed them.

About a week after the accident, and the day after the photographs arrived, my father took my brother, Roland, and me fishing. We walked from our house down to the tank. I learned many years later that a tank was really a pond everywhere else in the country. Fishing was something that seemed very important to Dad, so I tried to be patient with it. I think he was frustrated by a certain bungling nature that I seemed to possess—losing my bait, losing the fish on the hook, tipping over the bait box or the drinking water, or making too much noise. I didn’t mean to do any of it. I guess I simply approached fishing without the degree of solemn seriousness that Dad did.

While we were fishing, I asked Dad about the accident. If it wasn’t an accident, then who killed Uncle Bobby?

Dad thought for a long time. Then he gave me the look, as I would come to call it later in life. The look that said, What is in your head that you could say something like that? Then he told me, You shouldn’t be worried about that accident. Nothing can be done one way or the other.

I persisted, asking, Who would want to kill fun-loving Uncle Bobby? Dad started rubbing his crew cut.

After waiting for an answer, I pushed him again. I heard Mother and you saying it wasn’t an accident. Dad looked at me again with a questioning glance, which meant to me that he was not answering my question. I left it there.

On the way back to the house, I stepped into a hole and twisted my ankle. I cried. Dad was annoyed and angry. He let me crawl onto his back. My brother danced around calling me a jerk. He was three years older, and he was the jerk.

When we came in the door, Mother was immediately very concerned and anxious over my condition. She blamed my father. She got ice in a dish towel and placed it on my ankle. As she sat on the bed beside me, I asked her. Who killed Uncle Bobby?

Mother smiled tenderly at me and brushed my hair back off my forehead. She said, Uncle Bobby had a lot of girlfriends. When he got married, a couple of them were very upset. They hadn’t known that Bobby was dating other girls.

He had more than one girlfriend? I interrupted.

I’m afraid so, she said. One of them was with him that night. Her name was Kiki.

She stopped.

Was she hurt? Nobody said anything about a girlfriend, I prompted her.

The two of them were drinking beer in a honky-tonk outside of town. They left together, but she claims she made him drop her off, because Bobby was drunk and driving dangerously. Your dad and I aren’t sure we believe that.

So, you think she was with him?

I don’t know what happened. Bobby drank too much too often, and the police think that it just caught up with him. But don’t worry about it—it’s something that the adults need to get right.

I lost most of the respect that I had for Uncle Bobby during that conversation. In my youthful mind, having one girlfriend was bad enough, but to have more than one was repulsive.

After that, Mom and Dad refused to talk about it any more with me. I knew that they still talked about it with adults, but they shut down any further questions from me. I suppose they thought it might ruin my childhood. It didn’t, although I never let the matter drop far from my thinking.

This is the way that I imagined it. It was a hot, dry central Texas night. The dust kicking up from behind Bobby’s car as he drove too fast down a red dirt rural road was as vivid in my mind as it must have been then. I could see the young woman sitting close to him. That road was used for couples to pet or make love, and it still is. I sometimes drive out there and try to imagine that night.

My aunt left it all behind her. After her marriage, she became nearly invisible. She seldom called and only sent birthday cards to my grandmother, no one else. My parents’ divorce happened right after that. That was a sad and confusing time.

The week after their divorce, I started begging Grandmother Birdie to take me out to the accident scene. A day later, she relented and drove me out to the place where Bobby’s accident happened. She had made a cross with two wooden slats and had picked some flowers from her garden. After she placed the cross and flowers, she said a prayer for Bobby to be in heaven with Jesus. I simply nosed around the site, looking carefully at the ground for clues. I had seen television detectives doing this. I found a leather bookmark and a hankie. I was pulling these out from under the blackberry bush when I felt Grandmother Birdie pulling me out by the back of my pants. There’s rattlesnakes in there, Jett! she cried. I got the evidence into my pants pocket before she could see what I had found.

From then on, my life centered on searching for that person I labeled the Angel of Death and trying to protect others from her. I labored for years to prove the case that this Angel of Death killed Uncle Bobby and to prevent the taking of more innocent lives. I was not successful in the prevention of more deaths or even in limiting the damage that she caused. I was myself the victim of some of her nefarious misdeeds. But, I strived constantly to prevent further mayhem. To try to legal proof, I realized that I had to stay in my home town.

Chapter 1

Lost in the Weeds

On many occasions, I wondered about this mission to put the Angel of Death behind bars. I had to go to school, work, learn about life and love and sometimes I was tempted by good enough reasons to try forget about it, try to focus on something else. But I stayed the course. The concept that someone was murdering citizens of Mexia, Texas, grew steadily in my own mind over the years. Each murderous episode only reinforced the notion that I was the only one fully aware of this killer in our midst. My motivation to get the truth and justice for this villain propelled me to work hard. Until the final day of reckoning, I would try to prevent the Angel of Death from taking more lives—by containing, annoying, and distracting the killer wherever and whenever possible. But the ultimate proof of that lies in the hearts and minds of the citizens who lived through the perilous times. I did my very best in the desperate search for the answers.

The stage for this mystery is a little town in Texas: Mexia. That’s right, a not-too-fascinating stop on the roadmap of one of the many parts of Texas geography that have plenty of nothing. If you have ever roared up or down I-35, you may have come within forty-five miles of the place. If you have ever sped down or up I-45, you could have gotten even closer, about twenty-five miles from Mexia. My life since birth has been spent in or near this town, as I pursued my mission. Even searching the Internet, I have found no other documented story of this kind. Sometimes, after I was older, I searched the Internet for possible ideas or solutions to the problems that faced me. This is a story of men and women who worked hard and took care of their families and friends in spite of the tragedies, agonies, discomforts, and mistakes that confronted them.

Mexia is famous in certain settings. There is an ages-old joke that runs through the region periodically. Two old boys are driving down the highway. They see a sign that reads, Mexia. The first old boy says to the other, I bet you don’t know how to pronounce M-E-X-I-A. The second old boy says, Mex-ee-ah. The first says that’s wrong. The second says, I bet you a cup of coffee that I’m right. They spot a Dairy Queen restaurant just down the road and agree to pull in there for a cup of coffee and a final determination as to the pronunciation. They pull into the parking lot, walk in, and sit down in a booth. The waitress comes over. They order their two cups of coffee. When the waitress comes back they ask her, How do you pronounce the name of this place? She bends over, displaying plenty of quality cleavage, and says very slowly and deliberately, Dairy Queen. Everybody around laughs at that joke. The first old boy was right, of course. Mexia is pronounced Muh-HEY-a.

My name is Jethro Collen Mulkey. I hate the first two names. But those are the names on the birth certificate filed with the state by Mexia Hospital in Limestone County, Texas. After years of pleading with my parents, I made a deal with them. If I made the football team in junior high, made the band as a drummer, and maintained an A average in all my subjects, then they would allow me to tell the school to call me J.C. and my very own parents would also agree to call me J.C. Jethro Collen was the name of my mother’s favorite uncle, who, by the way, went by J.C. So, he didn’t like the name either, but somehow they thought I would. They were calling me Jett until we came up with this little bargain.

Mexia is famous in certain sectors of the populace because it was the self-declared hometown of Anna Nicole Smith. No, I was never a sperm donor for Anna Nicole. During her short time at Mexia High School, I was in college. I came back to Mexia High School to teach algebra I and II and trigonometry, but she never made it that far in math, having dropped out in her sophomore year. Mexia High School is a very good school; I’m proud of it, and I think we all are. Anna Nicole wasn’t missed in Mexia, and many resented her claiming it as her hometown.

I have to admit that I did visit the restaurant where she was once employed. I went a couple of times. Not that I was interested in dating or even ogling Anna Nicole. It was because celebrity does not come to Mexia that often. Even then, Anna Nicole was a celebrity, at least locally. I went to Jim’s Fried Chicken Restaurant simply to see the phenomenon myself. As you have no doubt read, many young men and some grown men grew weak and stupid in her presence. She married a local yahoo (pronounced yay-hoo). Then she left town. She left some angry relatives and some very disappointed young men.

Another local celebrity was Cindy Walker. She wrote songs and performed early in her career. She was from Mart originally, but she resided in Mexia for a long time. I liked some of her songs. One of her big hits was You Don’t Know Me. She died a few years ago. Cindy is buried in the cemetery beneath a pink granite guitar. She had quite a following.

A near-celebrity from Mexia is Ray Rhodes. Unless you follow football, you probably haven’t heard of him. He’s an African American who was born and raised in Mexia and played and coached in the National Football League. In fact, he was the head coach at both Green Bay and Philadelphia. I have never had the opportunity to meet Ray.

Since the 1920s, as far as I can tell, my relatives have lived around here. My grandfather, Harald Mulligan, came to town for the oil boom that began around 1920. He was from Alabama. Harald lost his job with the railroad during the Great Depression and never regained a permanent type of job. He might have been what you could call a loafer full-time after that.

After oil was discovered nearby, Mexia became an instant boom town. The population went from 3,482 to an estimated 35,000 in 1922. Mexia grew so fast and rowdy that martial law was briefly declared back in 1920. Right now, Mexia is hovering at slightly under 9,000 people.

My grandmother, Birdie Inez Marriott, was born and raised in Waco. She met Harald at church, at least that’s the story I heard. They were missionary Baptists. I loved Grandmother Birdie. She was short and rotund, but she could move real quick when she needed to catch a chicken for supper. She doted on my brother and me and, of course, on her three daughters. She played dominoes a lot and always let me sit in her lap and watch until I got too big for that. And she took me to the site where Uncle Bobby had the accident.

My dad teaches vocational agriculture and science at Corsicana High School. Mother is a registered nurse in Waco. Their divorce didn’t remove the bad feelings between them. In every dimension of a relationship except physical distance, they are much farther apart than those few miles that separate them now. They’ve developed a deep and abiding hatred for each other, which I’ve learned from their example is a very powerful and destructive emotion. One of my jobs is to help them avoid each other. I have a don’t ask, don’t tell policy about communicating with either of them anything about the other. Over the years, I’ve become convinced that a different kind of relationship between them is simply not possible.

I also have a brother, Roland. He’s three years older than I am and lives most of the time now in Fairfield. He’s a diesel mechanic. He was a delinquent all through high school. His antics almost certainly brought me more attention and surveillance from my parents and the authorities at school than I deserved. I love my brother. I help him out from time to time. Although he’s been married twice and should be settled down by now, he’s still in the hell-raising phase of life. If I were forced to say right at this very moment who or what the love of his life was, I’d have to say drinking lots of beer and hanging out in honky-tonks. Of course, he still chases after women, preferably barmaids, and he gets into a lot of fights. I could be wrong, but I think he’s getting smarter about getting into fights. Once in a while, he’s of some use to me.

Then there’s Uncle J.C. He runs a junkyard right outside of town. He’s about ninety, thin but agile, and has lost none of his mental faculties. Mother makes me go see him once in a while, just to check up on him. While I’m checking up on him, he puts me to work. He’s gruff, direct, and not much of a conversationalist. Never married, he seems to live to buy, sell, and trade for stuff. Once when I went over there he had two buffalo in his pasture that he taken in trade for a freezer, a sewing machine, and a generator.

Most of my ancestors and relatives never left Mexia, even when they died. I never left either, because I was on a self-determined mission. I often wonder about that. I questioned myself from time to time about that mission and its impact on me. Maybe my focus and choices weren’t quite right, but I knew enough not to discuss that mission with any guidance counselor. Maybe my relatives were afraid of what might lie just over the horizon. For sure, it wasn’t because the place was just so damn nice.

Over the years, my immediate family moved up from dirt poor to lower middle class. In fact, my maternal grandparents, if they had ever gotten a promotion, would have been sharecroppers.

I lived in Mother’s family’s home until I went to college. The house was out in the country, a slightly upgraded shack, really. The house never did have indoor plumbing. There’s a barn in the side yard that’s falling down. I don’t think the barn ever had a coat of paint. You can tell the house had once upon a time been painted, because there were still a few paint chips falling off. The old homestead did have electricity. I put a window air conditioner in my bedroom. My mother just had them run the electrical lines on top of the walls. All of the bedrooms are small, but my grandparents raised three girls there. It belongs to Mother now. I pretty much lived in the house without daily parental supervision from the day my grandmother died while I was in junior high until I left for college. During my freshman year at Baylor, somebody burned the old house down. That’s what the police told me. We knew who did it, but nobody saw anything.

I attended Mexia schools right through graduation from high school. When I was in high school, my mother, the registered nurse, would come over on her days off from work. She cleaned the old house and cooked meals. We’d freeze them, so I hardly ever needed to cook or eat out. Dad visited very often initially. But those visits gradually became less frequent. When they first got divorced, my brother and I were an inconvenience, because both of them were soon involved in other relationships destined for failure. So, in all the chaos, name-calling, insults, lies, and ferocious verbal hostilities, my brother and I were permitted to stay in the house, with Grandmother Birdie at first, and then, after she passed about three years later, by ourselves.

I left town to go to Baylor University over in Waco and get a college degree. One of my professors told me that I should go on to graduate school. I didn’t, mostly because I was the only one who would or could stop the murders that the Angel of Death was committing in Mexia. Maybe there had been a higher calling for me that I was too deaf or genetically inferior to hear. But that’s it; my life from the beginning to now has been right here in Mexia, except for four years of college. Even then, I came back to town every weekend that I wasn’t working.

One day when I was in high school, I came home to find an artist parked in the dirt yard. He was doing an oil painting of the house and the barn. He called the setting quaint, rustic, and romantic. That’s not my opinion, needless to say. I suppose from an artistic viewpoint, old and worn down is romantic. Of course, at that time, my appreciation for art was—and probably still is—very limited. I simply appreciated the utility of having the house available to me, and I am very glad that I didn’t have to move to Waco with my mother or to Corsicana with Dad.

I told you that this was a story about the Angel of Death. Over the years, I had many encounters with Mexia’s Angel of Death. I have to tell the story. Just to be perfectly clear, I am not a hero and I am not crazy. I think that this mission of proving that there was an Angel of Death was instilled in me one night years before when Bobby became the first victim of hers known to me. From then on, it was my mission to put a stop to her Angel-of-Death career. You will see that the Angel of Death was very real—and not just to me.

Just before that fateful ninth year in my life when my uncle died and my parents decided to quit feuding and split off from each other, a mystery entered my life. My aunt and her husband, Bobby, came to the house. Grandma was still with us then. My other aunt and her husband were there. It was past my bedtime, but I always enjoyed listening to the adult conversations. They were careful not to provoke me or ask me a question or want me to say something, because without really trying I could embarrass the hell out of them. I had a big vocabulary, but although I knew lots of words, I didn’t really know what they meant or how to use them accurately. What I did know was that very frequently after I said something, I got hustled out of the room and counseled. Little pitchers are better seen than heard. That was what they told me fairly often.

This earliest mystery was reported by Aunt Berniece and Uncle Bobby. They were driving back from Waco when, just outside of Mexia, this diaphanous, black, ghostlike thing hit the windshield. Bobby kept the car from skidding out of control, but he pulled off onto a ranch road and they sat there for a long time. When their nerves quit jangling and they sobered up some, they drove on to the house. Bobby brought some cold beer with him.

Berniece swore it was the Angel of Death that hit the windshield and that it was a premonition. She was sure that it had been a young woman dressed in flowing black robes who had gently glanced off the windshield. The adults went outside to check. I peeked out the window of the bedroom I was in, but I couldn’t see anything. The adults spent a long time inspecting the windshield. Finally, they all bedded down. I was planning to go out to inspect the windshield in the morning, but Bobby had already left. It was two days later that the police found Bobby dead behind the wheel after crashing that car into an oak tree.

Most of the adults said afterward that the Angel-of-Death visitation was a premonition of Bobby’s impending demise. I thought if I was confronted by the Angel of Death that I would just sit on the couch and watch television for quite a while. Not take any chances, in other words. Stay sober, too. I also heard those whispers that someone real had caused Bobby’s death. I identified that person as the Angel of Death.

At school one day later that week, one of Bobby’s cousins talked to me outside after an assembly. He said that Bobby had two women, and one of them was now the high school’s librarian. He convinced me that the librarian had something to do with Bobby’s death. She had been riding with him that fateful night, according to my classmate. She had not been harmed in the accident that killed Bobby. I had already heard from many of my classmates that one didn’t cross the high school librarian. I vowed to stay away from her.

Fate intervened and kept me from maintaining that vow of avoidance. Like a lot of people my age did when things went wrong, I blamed the school. The geniuses who came up with the curriculum had determined that during our freshman year of English, we would have to spend a week in the library writing two book reviews. I actually asked my English teacher if I could check the books out and write my book reviews in homeroom or in the auditorium or outside. I couldn’t reveal my real reason, and I guess the lie I told wasn’t at all persuasive. I told her I got claustrophobic when I was closed up in a library. She laughed and told me to get a buddy. She must have thought that the buddy system would be all the protection I would need. I know now that she didn’t really think that I needed a buddy at all. I never did figure out who I should ask to be my buddy, as I imagined that would prove to be too embarrassing.

Anyway, the librarian was there during the entire fifty minutes of the allotted time for English class. The librarian’s name was Kiki Kodell. She stood about five foot, two inches tall and had dark hair approximating a hornet’s nest. I stayed busy and kept my head down. I like to read. I don’t mind writing. I mostly wanted to stay out of trouble. But Ms. Kodell thought that she needed to help people, and eventually came around to help me. She asked me what book I was reviewing. I told her: William Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp. This book is about the German political/industrial corporate powerhouse, a company called Krupp that built the World War II German military machine.

Ms. Kodell said, You haven’t read that book.

I said, Yes, I did. She put me down for detention for lying. Then, she looked under the table. That’s when I got another week of detention for not applying myself. I had just a moment before been distracted by Delectable Donna. As a result, I had an unplanned, unknown-about, and undesired erection.

Detention, although a respite from the outside world and a good place to get my homework done, also meant parental anger. Getting detention also meant that my dad would find out. His finding out meant that he would be revisiting with me the errors of my ways. I couldn’t imagine what discipline he would implement as a result of six days of detention, but I knew it would be real bad; maybe something like pulling weeds out of his front lawn with tweezers under the blazing hot sun, locked out of the house and having to drink water from the garden hose. I am exaggerating, but the punishment would involve hot, dirty yard work for sure.

This situation had all come about because of my temporary physical problem. The first inkling I’d had of it came when I was in the eighth grade. The Baptist church that I attended had dancing classes. I was more or less urged, if not ordered, by the pastor’s wife to attend these dancing classes, which were held on Sunday afternoon. The pastor’s wife, Becky Bedford, loved these lessons. We were to call her Sister Bedford. She would tell us about courtesy, decorum, and being polite and considerate. She said that was all a part of learning to dance properly and to be socially presentable. She selected the music, so there was no country music at all and the rock and roll was of the tame variety. Sister Bedford preferred—no, insisted—that the couples touch while dancing. This meant holding hands at the very least, and while it definitely didn’t mean dirty dancing, it did mean close dancing

During one of these close dances, I speared my partner with my erection—an erection of which I was totally unaware. I was embarrassed, mortified, and shocked. I promise you, I was not thinking about girls, sex, or anything like that. My penis did this of its own volition. And it didn’t even tell me. The girl with whom I was dancing blushed slightly and smiled. I immediately apologized and backed way off away from her body. Looking back at this, I know that we appeared to be dancing like statues. This is what first attracted Sister Bedford’s attention. As she was coming up to us, she saw our profile. That means she saw my erection. I got the bum’s rush out of there. That was the end of my dance training, but only the beginning of my problems with my autoerotic penis.

Wednesday evening was a big time for church activities. My activity was choir practice. The Wednesday after the Sunday afternoon dancing incident would prove to be the end of my singing career. I was enthusiastic and truly felt some kind of spirit was with me while I was singing. Maybe I enjoyed the feeling that I was kind of holier than others, who only sat in the pews on Sunday. I don’t really know.

We were lined up singing away when Sister Bedford got my attention. Her lips were pursed and the trigger finger on her right hand was swaying gently back and forth. I took this to mean that she wanted me to sing more softly. About ten minutes passed. I was definitely singing softly when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Sister Bedford. The hand was pulling on my shoulder, so I followed it in the direction that it was pulling.

We were soon cloistered in the entryway to the choir rehearsal room. She told me in no uncertain terms that I was singing too loud. I told her that I was sorry, that I would sing lower still. She very reluctantly agreed to permit me back into choir practice. Then I noticed that she grabbed the nice lady who was the choir leader and dragged her over to the entryway. After that I simply lip-synched the words. I felt stupid. My mind wandered. After choir practice, the two of them were waiting for me. They banned me from the choir. I think it had something to do with the unwanted erection the Sunday before. Sister Bedford didn’t want me accidentally or on purpose spearing any more of her precious angels in the choir. In a way, I can see it. But my feelings were badly bruised, and I was sad for a few weeks.

The rest of ninth grade went by in slow motion. I stayed away from girls in general. I think that I tried to stay in the shadows, not draw any attention, not get in the way in any way whatsoever. I did get called to the front of the room once to recite in English class. We had to memorize poems. Anyway, when my turn came, I was distracted by Delectable Donna’s thigh. I had to fake a coughing fit and slowly get out of my chair, bending over a little. I still got caught. My teacher sent me out to get some water. At least that was the last week of the school year.

Chapter 2

El Tigre Grande Profundo

Early in the next year, in the tenth grade, there was another unfortunate encounter with the Angel of Death. This cute little Mexican American girl, Maria Garza, was found hanging from a second-floor banister in the school. She was found by the custodian. The nearest school room to where she was found was the library. We were all deeply saddened by the death. I don’t mind saying that I cried myself to sleep that night. Maria was always very nice to me. She was smart and as far as I know worked hard for good grades in school.

The entire community was in deep grief. That grief lasted for a long time. The usual commentary was made in the newspaper, at church, and at school: how could this have happened? She was always such a friendly and happy child. She loved her parents, her sisters, and her brother. They loved her. Was there a sign? Did we all miss it? When the grieving eased, most of us agreed that it was a mystery, one of those mysteries of life that everyone except me was beginning to realize they would never fathom.

While the grief was dissipating and people were turning their attention to more current events, a rumor began circulating among the students. When I heard it, I was chilled to the bone. The rumor was that while Maria had been in the library writing the required freshman English book reviews, she’d had an argument with Ms. Kodell. The librarian had accused Maria of not reading the book that she was reviewing. Unlike me in my own encounter, Maria argued with her. Maria had been writing a review of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Love in the Time of Cholera. Ms. Kodell gave her a week of detention, which Maria protested immediately. Maria said that she had to help her mother after school, that she had read the book, and that she didn’t deserve detention. Now, I am sure that every word of this was true. What’s also true is that that very afternoon, after detention, Maria was found hanging by the neck from the second-floor banister. If it was suicide, where did Maria get the rope? The family said that the rope didn’t belong to them and that Maria hadn’t had a rope when she had gotten onto the bus that morning. For me, this was more reinforcement that Kiki Kodell was the Angel of Death.

Like all of the cities and towns in Texas, Mexia is a football town. When they lose, the players can’t go anywhere, including church, school, the store, or any restaurant, without hearing about what they should have done to win that game. As the starting left tackle, my primary job was to protect the quarterback in passing situations and to block to the outside any player lined up on my nose. Blocking rules were simple, the variations were based simply where the defense was lined up. When that fall practice began, it helped to take my mind off the sadness of death of Maria Garza. And, whenever I went to church or the store, I was reminded by the townsfolk of the need to be tougher, hit harder and play smarter.

Practice started as usual: three days of extreme soreness and feeling tired all the time. Football practice for the truly athletically gifted must be a wonderful and fun entertainment. This was never the case for me. I constantly entertained the idea of quitting, but never did. Usually I played on defense as well when any of the defensive linemen needed a breather. Coach Figgins never thought that I needed a breather. I was resolute, always went full speed, and never minded playing rough even though I was a bleeder. I bled on a lot of teammates and opposition. This was before the AIDS scare changed the rules about bleeding in my senior year. My nose was delicate, easily offended by the hot air on the playing field and jarring hits to my face mask. I was yelled at on a continuous basis by Coach Figgins. I was his emotional outlet, his whipping boy, and a ready excuse for the travails that the offense seemed to go through with amazing regularity.

The quarterback, Snoopy Sneider, was a classmate of dubious intelligence. I thought he really didn’t understand the plays, and although he never criticized me directly, I do believe he complained to Coach Figgins about me and my fellow linemen. Fortunately for us, the opposing teams evidently usually had even bigger issues to deal with, so we won a lot.

One hot and windy afternoon at practice, Coach Figgins started yelling at me. This was after running the same play, a sprint out by the quarterback to my side, that we had just run three or four times. The right guard was supposed to pull and lead the quarterback. The quarterback was supposed to make a last-second decision about whether to pass or run. I was bleeding as usual when, after what seemed to me to have been a gratuitous late hit by the defensive tackle, Coach Figgins started screaming, Jesus Christ, Mulkey! After every additional repetition, he would resume screaming at me, Jesus Christ, Mulkey!

Now, by my count, I had only erred three times. Twice I had gone over the line too soon, removing quarterback’s option to pass. But, he should have run both times. That’s a penalty with a loss of five yards if it had been an actual game. My other error was that I blocked Sonny Aguilar, the strong safety, and not the linebacker, Teddy Tolbert. The problem on that one was that I was thinking. Teddy was slower and meaner, but not as good a tackler. Sonny was very fast and a sure tackler. In a real game, I wouldn’t have had this detailed knowledge of the opposition, so my assignment would definitely be the linebacker. My quarterback tripped over his own feet twice, overthrew wide-open receivers three times, and when he was forced to run looked like a frightened, spastic little girl. I suppose that in Coach’s mind I could take the verbal abuse, whereas our fragile, dimwitted quarterback could not.

After this practice, which went on for nearly an hour longer than usual, I was soaking in the hot showers alongside Sonny Aguilar. In my peripheral vision, I spotted something on his penis. I knew that I was not supposed to look at other guys’ equipment at any time, and definitely not in the locker room. Sonny and I had always been pals in school, having known each other for more than ten years or so, and that made this situation a little more comfortable for both of us than it otherwise would have been. But Coach’s "Jesus Christ,