My junior year at Crockett High a racist sociopath named Willie Clezell went crazy on his birthday and gunned down two black teachers and three black students. One student, a football player named Shaun Jackson, is a legend for shouting, "Doan fuck wit me!" before charging Willie with his Buck pocketknife. No one else resisted. Clezell cut him down point blank with his Ithaca Deer Slayer, a twelve-gauge auto loading shotgun designed with a rifled barrel to fire slugs that are, literally, fifty-caliber.

Before the school was remodeled in 1500, you could still trace spackled-over bullet holes along several walls. A twelve-gauge slug under Davy Crockett's chin in the foyer hadn't been completely disguised and some joker had magic-marked the depression right on! I was a student years before the memorial library and memorial cafeteria, gymnasium, fountain, and lounge were installed by special interest groups to ameliorate the past outrages of race-riots, National Guard-assisted integration, a principal arrested for multiple molestations, and the scene of a notorious killing spree immortalized by the Dead Fetal Pigs with their triple platinum single "Doan Fuck Wit Me."

Crockett (the mural of Davy was replaced by one of Martin Luther King, Jr. and although the school is still called Crockett High, there is pressure to rename it King High) sponsored a program that kept young men out of jail who worked "strategic" jobs (the oil-patch) and who had promised to finish high school. Everyone, even teachers, called them "Jelly-Beans," never "Developmentally Disabled" and to qualify for the program they had to be nonviolent offenders though most of them had actually been arrested for assault as well as B&E, GTA, even rape. Willie Clezell had a rap sheet a mile long, and had spent six months at the Northwest Texas State Hospital for molesting his six-year-old sister. These bearded behemoths worked nights on the Flatonia, Decatur, and Burkburnett rigs sinking pipe and capping blowouts: they scared the hell out of the rest of us, these monsters stuffed into tiny knife-scarred desks, snoring loudly in Algebra, detonating beer farts through Texas History.

Crockett High also sponsored a literary prize (fifty bucks and an Annotated Genuine Leather Bound Complete Sonnets of Shakespeare printed by Orion Press in Garland, TX). I won the prize my junior year for "Mr. Hull," a poem which ended:

His face

fly-blown honeysuckle,

a pale circle of dying firelight,

Kennedy roses shot with dew.

I was sixteen–scrawny, big nose, short hair, no hips or breasts, and those Jelly-Beans–hirsute mudmen, derrickmen, chainmen; true roughnecks–looked as old as my father. Writing poetry was so not cool. Classes were recessed so that I could accept my fifty dollar honorarium and book in the auditorium. Afterwards, finding myself up against a clammy tile wall, my feet a yard from the linoleum, my neck bunched in one of those diesel-stinking fists, I imagined somewhere an Oz where good books and nice boys—lads who washed daily, brushed their teeth, and didn't flick boogers or dip snuff—were the rule, not the exception, and all the other creodonts had been killed off in Vietnam or by the police. Dangling there, fantasizing about a better world, I thought of the self-defense trick Mr. Hull had shown me, and whether or not it might actually work.

I never had an opportunity to use Mr. Hull's testicle-crushing knee strike. He had fought in the army for medals, and in bars over spilt beers, card cheats, and hustled games of pool, and in prison not to be a "punk," but he'd been big young, and was still big—a stooped six-four, two-twenty pounds of gut, biceps and gristle, a tough old man. "Always go for the coin-purse, baby-girl," he said, showing me the move. Mr. Hull kneed the wall but made me actually knee him in the groin for "realism." He praised my strength then went into the bathroom and puked. Just as I was blacking out another Jellybean passed and grunted, "that's a girl, ya know."

"Oh fuck, sorry," the moron cried in disgust, dropping me. It was the first time I'd actually been deliberately touched by a boy, other than handshakes. He had stomped Shakespeare, and I still have it, and it remains tattooed with tarry Vibram waffle-sole tracks on the leather cover.

Mr. Hull provided my education in Advanced Life. Next-door neighbor, World War One Ace (17 aerial victories) convicted bank robber. He'd hijacked the Vernon Express in 1938, using a 1931 Hawker Fury biplane as his getaway vehicle in the biggest series of heists in Texas history (Brazos Trust, 1938; Wichita State Bank, 1939; Ft. Worth Guarantee, 1939). Mr. Hull spent eighteen years in Huntsville Prison, though the War Department (they were honest about their intentions then; it was called the Department of War, not the Department of Defense) paroled him briefly after Pearl Harbor.

The re-commissioned Second Lieutenant Hull (he'd been brevetted to Major in 1917) was delivered to the Red River Army Air Corps Training Center in Wichita Falls (now Sheppard AFB) where he trained pilots to "skip" flak (a maneuver much like the one my father employed over Vietnam to avoid SAMs). Mr. Hull's return to prison was not unexpected; his full pardon was ink-wet when he "skipped" an Army Air Corps trainer to Tulsa and robbed another bank. On the lam, Mr. Hull married a singer, a beautiful Cubana named Jorie de Reyes. Her stage name was Delores Cortez and they had a great time until G-Men blew a .45 caliber hole through their champagne bucket at the Toucan Can-Can in Chicago. Nineteen forty-three Mr. Hull was back in jail.

Jorie de Reyes was the absolute love of his life. Her portrait, on oil and velvet, hung in his bedroom, next to dozens of photographs of ancient aircraft. I heard her sing, too. Her voice, a lustful whisper, rose from the Bakelite Lloyd's turntable loaded with a stack of rose-glass medallions, thick old scratchy 78 rpm disks that Mr. Hull polished with Endust. They stayed married throughout his incarceration in Huntsville Prison; she lived with her brother in Miami, until her death, in 1955. Jorie sailed her black Cadillac, the one purchased in Chicago with the Tulsa money, into a fuel-oil truck with Oklahoma plates on the old Lake Okeechobee road and there was nothing left of her but a melted bracelet and some teeth. Mr. Hull went berserk and spent three months in solitary, convinced God had sent the fuel-oil truck all the way from Tulsa to avenge his crimes. He showed me once, lifting his Haines t-shirt, the runnels of proudflesh scarring all the places where they whipped him.

Mr. Hull lived in an off-white house on 9th Street. The war brought my family to town. My father had been shot down twice and was re-assigned TAD to Sheppard. My father had been TAD so many times from injuries that his drinking buddies nicknamed him "Tad." Then his back went out and the temporary assignment became permanent. Neither my father nor Mr. Hull made friends easily. That they were both pilots, loners, and alcoholics helped, I think.

Mr. Hull paid me twelve dollars to mow his lawn, an astronomical amount for three hour's work for a kid in 1972. Not that it was an easy job–northwest Texas lawn is a tough amalgam of ryegrass, sand bur, crabgrass, and milkweed. Through the undergrowth crawl fire-ants, scorpions, centipedes, the occasional stray diamondback rattler. When mom called The Orkin Man he rubbed his head, shook it too, then went to work and I heard him mutter shit! frequently. We were very clean people and yet The Orkin Man killed mice, two opossums, a nest of skunks, cockroaches, scorpions, black widow spiders, six fire ant mounds, an attic full of pigeons and their squabs, hornets, mud daubers, centipedes, and two water moccasins in the basement sump.

Fire-ants cement over the tops of their mounds with a cap of spittle and claya mower's blades will bend like tin if you run them over. I mowed with dad's Toro, a gaudy machine powered by a throaty Briggs & Stratton engine. The catch-bag was white nylon with TORO stenciled in red and hung starboard from a thick steel rod. The slew of clippings was driven into the bag from the whirring blades with such force that the fabric often tore, blowing out a vortex of shredded grass, dirt, diced pecan leaves, and furious fire-ants.

July in northwestern Texas brings typical Panhandle weather, scorching hot; it's like marching under a magnifying glass' center point of searing light. The day Mr. Hull freaked out about Sonny the temperature had peaked one hundred eleven degrees by noon. Overhead smoldering, gangrenous anvil-headed cumulus piled up. The tornado sirens had howled off and on all morning. The clippings, greasy-moist and hot, stained my hands emerald green. Mockingbirds perched in the holly shrubs, beaks agape to cool themselves. Blackbirds rasped overhead in the pecans; the pwowf! of some delinquent's air rifle would echo down-alley, followed by the pack-pack-pack sound as he pumped the cylinder full again for the next shot.

I knocked on the door to collect my money. Mr. Hull invited me into the air-conditioned kitchen for a drink. He was drunk. "I ever tell you about Sonny?" He had, many times and many different versions, but I didn't care except for getting out of that heat. He poured me a lemonade then made himself another highball, using the cap to measure a jigger as drunks do when attempting moderation. He opened the freezer for more ice, and I slipped some whiskey into my lemonade then sat at the kitchen table, my forearms on the cold Formica. A plastic vase of white roses—Kennedy roses—formed the table's centerpiece. I hated the odor of the roses and pushed them over to Mr. Hull's side; he leaned forward and sniffed the flowers. The roses had been clipped from my mother's garden. Mr. Hull loved my mother with a paternal formality that in a young man would have seemed fatuous.

My mother grew roses of every variety. She offered five Kennedy bushes to Mr. Hull one evening after the end of a barbecue to which he'd brought a smoked ham, when the tornado sirens had blown but nothing happened. He tugged them right out of the ground. I remember he wasn't wearing gloves and his hands bled but he didn't care, he smiled and shook droplets of blood over his chinos and Frye boots. Mother also crossed roses; her most successful hybrid—of burgundy American Suave and beige English Royale—is referenced in Tyler's Roses. The bloom's odd fragrance—musty camisole—fitted well stems hobnailed with tumorous growths and stupendous thorns that cocked wickedly outwards like rooster's spurs. Mother called them "Priests in Heat" and every bush was destroyed by hail in the infamous tornado of 1979.

In the kitchen with Kennedys—I slumped in the cane-backed chair, holding the slippery glass of lemonade and booze between my green hands. The chilled wood was pleasant against my back, and I knew Mr. Hull wasn't going to pay me anyway until he'd made conversation. "How was Camping With Father?" he asked, placing the emphasis as if naming a soap opera. Dad and I had spent a week in Colorado, fishing. I knew my father as well as any son could, yet sometimes he appeared to me a complete stranger—coming out of the bathroom or up from the basement—an appearance as abrupt and unexpected as that of a prowler glaring in through a bedroom window late at night. It's the war, my mother always said at such times.

"We had fun." I hadn't seen my father for more than a week at a time in three years. He was born with money and graduated from MIT and didn't have to go to war at all; he forced the war to take him, he had powerful friends who got him in, then they quit being his friends, his stocks dwindled to zero because he wasn't home to monitor the portfolios but he didn't care, he was ferociously happy. He told me once, "You can't map the goddamn sky" and this, I believe—the ignoring of manmade parallels—defined his service, not politics. The trip to Colorado was spur of the moment inspiration; dad drove his '56 MGA downtown and returned with a GMC truck. We tossed our gear in back, dad shoved his Colt .45 under the front seat and we accelerated onto Interstate 40 west to Albuquerque singing "La Bamba" at the tops of our voices. I was happy to be going somewhere.

We halted in Tucumcari for gasoline, and I fell instantly in love with the old Spanish architecture, the solid conquistador dustiness of everything. Dad bought beer and sat on the hood of the ugly truck drinking a can. I pumped the gas then went inside the station to pay. The man said hola, I replied hola cuento suma, and he smiled and made change. I stood in the rest room, combing my hair with a black plastic GI comb dipped in water. Then came shouting: "sonofabitch broke my nose!"

Outside, one man was down on his knees in the dirt--the one doing all the shouting. He held his hands to his face as if praying, blood squirted out between his fingers. Dad was holding up pretty well against a second taller, heavier opponent—striking the biker with fast jabs one-two-three, connecting every time, but it looked like the whole gang would pitch against him. Their circle kept closing in. I ran to the GMC and pulled out the Colt. Dad duked the bearded guy's face rapid-fire one-two-three as if his head were a stationary punching bag but I could see that dad was tiring. Then a fat shaved-head guy with handlebar mustaches jumped behind dad and lashed his shoulders with a drive-chain. I fired. The shot from that .45 roared cannon fire into the clouds, the recoil pushed my skinny arms high into the air. The ejected brass went plink–plinking across the gravel lot flipping end over end like a tiny crashing jet.

The bearded guy watched me approach with the Colt. "Hey man, that your kid?"

"Yeah," said dad. They both lit cigarettes, dad pushing his face towards the biker's Zippo then pointing to one of the man's tattoos. "That's 1st Cav."

"Yeah. Where were you?"

"In the sky." Dad wiped blood from his chin. "F-4s." His shirt was shredded in back where the chain had fallen, buttons ripped in front and the gold-plated pilot's dog tags, symbol of one hundred sorties, were visible to all. The bald biker stuck the chain back in his pocket, then Dad and the bearded guy embraced. I handed the Colt to Dad; he stuck the pistol behind his belt. They were Satan's Aces, a now–defunct "outlaw" gang that at their peak roamed the southwest during that strange and revolutionary season known as the Late Sixties. We followed them into the La Luz for beers. The owner of La Luz was president of Satan's Aces. He showed me how to take a shot of tequila: wet the back of your hand with spit, shake a stripe of salt into the wetness, lick up the salt, dump the liquor, take a bite of lime. I liked him. He had mean eyes but a deep voice full of raunchy jokes and quick laughter. That was Tucumcari.

We made camp on the South Platte side of Glentivar, Colorado the following evening: raised the tent and dining fly, arranged camp stools and performed the delicate ritual of correctly burning down the cloth mantles in the Coleman lanterns to an even luminescence. Dad cracked a pint of Beam and drank it while arranging his tackle, tying on a Royal Coachman six loops snug. The air was cold for summer. "It's getting dark," I said. "You won't be able to see anything."

He took off, flinging himself into the bush and I followed but he was stronger, faster, and stayed well ahead. He fell over branches and root snags and each time he fell I heard the solid thud of smooth boulder against his body. He plunged into the river, shifted the wicker creel over his left hip, cast out his line expertly—each contortion of his torso, every twist, recapitulation and lunge during the casting and retrieval of filament orchestrated to gain him advantage over the wary trout. Dad danced this water ballet and as he moved, hooking and releasing small rainbow, the light faltered, fragmented suddenly into a thousand orange bands behind tall aspens; a mountain sundown.

Dad caught and released another tiny trout. He was so close to the rapids I could not hear him pull the hook from its gasping mouth but I imagined the sound of wet tearing. The rapids crashed with cymbals, lutes, and sitars. "Come on in, dad, come back!" I yelled. He called something in return, held up the flashing, flipping body, but I lost his words in the roar of water. He was out much too far and struggled against white riffles, the current so strong it smashed against him, spewing plumes of black water across his chest and into the tops of the waders.

My father went under. His head surfaced and I saw on that handsome face not terror but hatred for the river, for anything that dared put him down. He spat water and went under again, resurfacing thirty or forty feet downstream. He was trapped in the waterlogged hip waders. I dove in—there was nothing actually heroic about it at all, I could not have saved dad with my own strength but I cut the rubber straps of the waders so he could swim to shore.

We were freezing by the time we reached camp. I stripped off my clothes, changed into warm cotton sweats, and stuffed dad into his mummy bag. Jagged red welts from the drive-chain crisscrossed his broad back. I ran my finger down one of the zigzags. Dad was already asleep, snoring into whiskey REMs. I zipped up the tent, built a fire nearby, and nodded off. Animal voices–coyotes, loons, the insistent belling of owls—woke me and I returned to the tent.

The story I actually told in the kitchen was much more abbreviated, much less personal: I stuck to describing Colorado. When I finished, Mr. Hull lit a cigarette. He'd emptied his highball while I talked, then fetched the bottle of Johnny Walker Red to the table. He filled his glass halfway with the liquor. "Now I'm gonna tell you about Sonny." I had begun to suspect in the old man the search for a confidant—an ear for some terror imbedded beneath all the humorous anecdotes and ribald whimsy. I picked at the green stains on my hands. "I was your age when I killed my first man," he said. "Sixteen. He hit my mother so hard he knocked out the few teeth she had left, so I jumped in. There was this gun—it was his gun—and I shot him."

I nodded. "Your dad?" In one of the versions he killed his step-dad, and in another version, his brother killed his real father.

"Naw. Sonny was just some bastard she shacked up with. The juvenile system then was nothing like it is now; imagine a church-run concentration camp full of mean old biddies and their perverted husbands. They kept me in Juvie until I was eighteen and mom never came to see me, she was actually mad I killed her boyfriend! But—that's when it started."

"It?"

Mr. Hull laughed bitterly, his clean and square artificial teeth gleaming. "Oh, you'll know what I mean, someday—the constant goddamn sorry for everything mode that becomes a lifetime curse! Every simple pleasure you devise will fall to it, and fail because of it. Being good won't make it go away so you'll feed it badness—thinking that it can be appeased, like a God. But it's no God, baby-girl, it's your own stinking heart." I wished then that he were in his bedroom staring at the velvet and oil Jorie de Reyes; that always helped. He pushed the whiskey bottle into his mouth and sucked. Gadzooks, the Persian watched us from the windowsill. He had a crooked grin on his pink cat's mouth. I jumped up and Mr. Hull grabbed me. "Don't ever kill anyone! Not for any reason! No cause is good enough! God will curse you for life if you kill!"

"I don't plan on killing anybody," I said. I smiled, hoping to ease him up a bit because he was very drunk and I didn't like it when Mr. Hull was so drunk and so serious. He pulled me to him then and kissed me, his tongue rubbing my lips, those huge scarred hands making circles on my flat chest. He stopped and I backed away.

"Baby! Don't leave now, oh my God let's talk, don't run out like I'm some kind of monster because I'm not, it's not what you think." He sobbed, the large drops streaking across his ugly old face. I knew then that even the wise, the tough, the learned, age only to cast their misery onto the shallow waters of sympathy, fishing for an impossible absolution.

"I don't think you're a monster," I finally said. I was thinking of the smoked ham he brought, of his digging up roses while his hands bled. I was thinking it felt nice to be kissed, even the tongue thing, but I wanted it to be gorgeous Todd Erskine, not some old man even if he was a very nice old man.

Mr. Hull clutched his chest, holding the agony like a baby, as if his past centered and struck at that powerful and incorruptible organ once believed to be the seat of emotion. "Listen to me! I want to keep you young, and good; I don't want anyone to ever spoil you."

I went outside, to the mower, and shook the dirt and fire-ants from the catcher bag. Mr. Hull followed me out. The heat struck us like a war-club, as if the sun despised us; we were both panting, but as Mr. Hull talked, fluids sprung from the collar and armpits and chest of his shirt and his face seemed to melt. He resembled a vampire falling to pieces in the sun, reduced to an ashy skeleton. I noticed how thin his hair was, as crinkly as rice noodles, the yellow light crashing through onto his sweaty, brown-spotted scalp. I noticed that the bronzing cream he colored his face with ran in murky rivulets and that the lines indenting the corners of his eyes were deeply interwoven like a pattern of cyclone fencing. He could have been six hundred instead of seventy.

He talked and I kept saying "sure," "yeah," or "I don't know." He begged me not to tell anyone and I said, "What's to tell?" and I meant it. He was my friend, the only real friend I had. "Oh baby-girl I'm so sorry," he kept saying. "Please forgive me." The Kennedy roses were thick with hornets. Mr. Hull shooed them angrily with his straw hat, and the cloud of poisonous insects dispersed around him with droning wails. To avoid being stung I rolled the lawnmower across his driveway. "Wait!" Mr. Hull cried, although he was right behind me and I lived a hundred feet past the lawn, "wait!" as if I would leave him wandering lost and alone in the woods with sundown approaching.

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