My Little Secrets

1

Can you keep a secret? You should. It is really not that hard to, especially when you know that there will be consequences if you can’t. My older brother Craig Jr., or C.J, as my parents called him, couldn’t keep a secret, and he found out what happens the hard way. We’ll get to that later. First, let’s talk a little bit about our background and how things ended up the way they are now.  

We were born and brought up in the small West Texas town of Little Comanche, population 247. Our parents, Craig and Janet, had already been married for six years before C.J. was conceived. Three years after he was born, I came along. They named me Landon which had also been the name of my grandfather on my mother’s side. He and his wife had died before C.J. was born. My father’s parents were still alive when my mother pushed me out and were named John Hawley and Loretta June-Hawley. They had both lived long lives—hers longer than his—in a house not far from ours. C.J. and I had spent a lot of time in that house when were kids and it is where I currently reside.  

My father had done odd jobs for living. He sold scrap metal, chopped and sold cords of firewood, maintained the lawns and gardens of folks who had been too old to do it themselves, and fixed people’s cars under the shade of the huge mulberry tree in our front lawn. He bought our tiny two-bedroom house with the money he got from the G.I. Bill benefits he earned while serving in the Army before me or C.J. came along. My mother had been a nurse and worked an hour away at the big hospital in Midland. She developed a pill addiction and eventually got fired for stealing a patient’s medication. That’s when the arguments and marital problems began.

I was 14 and had been in middle school. C.J. was beginning his senior year as a 17-year-old at Robert E. Lee High. My mother had started having an affair with one of her scumbag pill dealers and my father started drinking pretty heavily. They had blowout arguments just about every night and I’d go hang out at the neighbor’s house with my friend Juan. We’d do our homework together and then shoot hoops in his driveway late into the evening. His widowed mother Mrs. Rodriguez would always make enough dinner for me to stay and she’d let me sleep over on Friday and Saturday nights. My brother went to football practice after school and would hang out with his teammates until late in the evening when my father had passed out drunk allowing my mother sneak out until the next morning.  

One Friday evening, while I was having a delicious plate of enchiladas with Juan and his mother—fully expecting to spend the night—my mother came knocking on their front door. “Your father and I would like to speak to you, Landon. Please be home in five minutes,” she said and left me to break the news to Juan. His mother told me I was welcome to come back after the talk if my mother would allow it. When I got home my parents were sitting at the dining room table which was covered in empty Miller Lite cans. My mother was chain smoking cigarettes, most likely high out of her mind, and my father had been halfway through a fifth of Jack. “Where is your brother?” she asked.

“They have a game against Midland tonight, mom, “I said shaking my head in disappointment. Normally we’d have spent our Friday evening at that game as Midland had been the gods of the Texas religion known as high school football, and also, we’d never miss one of C.J.’s games. He was the starting quarterback—a goddamn good one with full scholarship potential—for Christ’s sake. “He won’t be back until late tonight.”  

“Well shit,” she said as she looked at my father who was pouring a shot. He was working his dipping tobacco into his gums. He spit thick black juice into a small empty coffee can. “You want to wait for C.J.?” she asked him.

“You may as well tell him now,” he replied in a dismissive tone before taking his shot.

“Alright then,” she said. “Come sit down, Landon.”  

I sat down at the table and looked at my dad who’d already been pouring another shot. He greeted me with a nod and I nodded back. “So, what is it now?” I asked.

“Your father and I have decided to get a divorce, Landon,” she explained. I knew this conversation had been coming for quite some time and it didn’t bother me at all. What had bothered me was what came next. “I’ll be staying at my friend Frank’s until I move to Austin to live with my sister and find a job.” I knew Frank. He was one of her druggy friends who lived in the shithole trailer park on the other side of the tracks.  

“And you?” I asked my father.  

“I’m gonna put the house up for sale and me and C.J. are gonna move to El Paso,” he said. “We’ll have to pull him out of Lee and fuck up this football thing here. But he can walk-on to a team there and take the starting quarterback job fairly easily, I’m sure. There will be more college scouts watching in a big city like El Paso, and I have a job offer.”

“You and C.J.?” I asked in absolute confusion. “And me?” 

“I want you to come to Austin with me,” my mother said. “It’s only fair since C.J. will be staying with your dad.  

“Austin?” I asked. “I don’t want to live around all those weirdos.”  

“I think it will be good for you, son,” she tried to explain. 

“I don’t!” I yelled. Tears had started to fill up my eyes. “I don’t want to be away from C.J., okay? Or dad. I’m not going.”     

“Oh yes you are, mister!” she said in a harsh tone that I did not take seriously. “It’s only a six-hour drive to El Paso. You can visit them anytime.” 

“You’re a drug addict!” I said as I quickly rose from from my chair. My midsection bumped the table hard enough to knock over a few of my dad’s beer cans. “I don’t want to watch you die of an overdose in Austin!”  

“And he’s a drunk,” she said pointing to my father. 

“Fuck you, bitch!” he blurted out.  

She fired back, “No, FUCK YOU, Craig!”

“Kiss my ass you cheating junky,” he shouted. This led to another one of their blowout arguments. I decided that I wasn’t going to stick around to listen to it.  

“I’m not fucking going!” I said as I stormed out of the house and headed back to Juan’s.

2

I came home on Sunday and found C.J. in the backyard throwing footballs through our old tire that swung. “Hey fucker,” he said when he saw me approaching.  

“You guys beat Midland!” I said excitedly. “Good shit, bro. Undefeated no more!”

“I threw 3 touchdowns and ran in 2 more,” he said proudly.

“I saw you on the news,” I replied. “Walk off touchdown in overtime. You’re a bad dude, man. West Texas player of the week. I’m gonna save the newspaper article.”  

“Thanks, little bro.”  

He zipped another ball through the tire swing that must have been 20 yards away and bent down to pick up another ball. I could never get a football through that damn tire but I was pretty good at it with a baseball. “Did you talk to mom and dad?” I asked. 

“Dad is fucking insane if he thinks I’m moving to El Paso,” he said, and then zipped the ball through the tire. “I have scouts from UT coming to watch me play at Lee.”

“Hook ‘em Horns,” I replied.  

“I’m just supposed to give that up because they can’t get their shit together?” he said and threw another ball. This time he was just off target. The ball bounced off the side of the tire and dropped into the grass. He picked up another ball from his pile. “Nope. Fuck them.”

“You think they’ll let us stay here?” I asked. “At Granny’s house?”

“Doubt it,” he said. “But we can ask. I’ll call mom and tell her to come home for dinner so we can talk to them about it. Stay home okay? I’ll take you out driving to practice for your permit test when were done talking.”

“Okay,” I agreed and went to our bedroom. I took a nap on my top bunk. Juan and I had stayed up late playing Fallout 4 and I needed to get some rest.

My mom agreed to come home for dinner and arrived on time. C.J. had made his world- famous spaghetti and meatballs. Dad had been working on our neighbor’s Buick all day and came inside to wash up when the food was ready. We sat at the table as a family for the first time in a long time and ate together. Mom and dad had not argued at all. They didn’t speak to each other but that was better than the yelling and screaming we had gotten used to. We decided not to address any of the problems until after we were all finished eating.  

C.J. gathered all of our plates and took them to the kitchen sink. Dad got up to grab two beers from the fridge and mom started chain smoking her Marlboro Reds. Her legs were crossed and her dangling bare foot shook up and down in a hurried proposition. She must have been ready to leave, or needed a pill, or both. Dad opened his first beer and chugged it down. He slammed the empty can on the table top and belched. “Excuse me,” he said as he opened his second.

“Okay. Let’s talk,” Mom said when C.J. sat back down. 

‘So,” C.J. began. “I think I speak for me and Landon when I say that neither of us want to move to Austin or El Paso. I’ve got things going on here and we want to stay with Granny. I know she’ll let us.”

“No, C.J.,” Mom said. “Not happening.” 

“Why the hell not?” he asked. 

“Because I have to move to Austin and I’m not going alone.”

“And you?” C.J. asked Dad. “Why do you have to leave?” 

Dad got up to get another beer. “Your uncle Tim offered me a job at a factory in El Paso and I took it.”  

“And why can’t we stay with Granny?” C.J. asked. “I’m almost 18 anyway. You guys are fucking up my future.” 

“She is old son,” Dad explained. “She doesn’t need to be responsible for two kids.

“She wouldn’t mind,” I said. 

“That’s enough,” Mom said as she put her cigarette out and left the table. “We’ve already talked about this and I don’t want to hear any more about it. Your father and I are going to talk to the divorce lawyer tomorrow. You guys have a nice night.” 

She grabbed her purse and tried to leave in a hurry but my father stopped her. “You said we were gonna talk tonight, Janet.” 

“And we will,” she said. “I just need to go to Frank’s for a few minutes. I’ll be back.”

She needed some pills. 

Later that night, C.J. said he was going to his girlfriend Liliana’s house and that he’d be back later. That usually meant I’d have the bedroom to myself because he slept over at her house a lot. “Don’t worry, little brother,” he said as he was leaving. “We’ll think of something.”

  I laid on the bottom bunk and tried to read a book but my mind kept drifting away from the words. I heard my mother come home and my dad offered her a drink. She accepted. They talked and drank for a long time and it eventually turned into another shouting match. They both slurred most of their words and I could tell that they were very drunk. My mother sounded worse so I’m sure she was also high. After awhile my dad decided to go to sleep on the couch and my mom stumbled into the bedroom that they used to share. That’s when I got my bright idea.  

The next morning, an announcement came through the loud speaker in my English class. It was the school principal asking for my teacher to send me to the office. When I arrived I was greeted by the town sheriff John Brown. I’d known him from the few times he had come to my house when the neighbors called the cops on my parents when their arguments had gotten too loud. He took me outside, lit a cigarette, and told me that my brother had come home early that morning and found both of my parents dead. Apparently they had overdosed on a mixture of my dad’s liquor and my mother’s pain killers. I cried like a baby.  

3

C.J. had a hard time dealing with the death of our parents. We didn’t have to move to Austin and El Paso, and we didn’t have to deal with the upcoming divorce, but he still wasn’t happy. We didn’t have to share a room at my grandmother’s house either. I thought that it was nice to finally have some privacy, but C.J. was different. Some nights I could hear him crying through the wall. I could hear him speaking in what sounded like prayer, but it had been addressed to mom and dad. 

One day after school, I was in my grandmother’s backyard cleaning up her dog’s shit. I had already skimmed the leaves out of her pool and was planning on taking a swim while she was out shopping. She had a few chores like that around her house for me to do. I didn’t mind because sometimes she would slip me twenty dollars. I heard the side fence open and turned to see my brother who should have been at football practice. “No foozeball today?” I asked.

He had tears in his eyes. “I quit,” he said.

“No . . .,” I said. “You what?”

“I cant do it anymore. I don’t care about football.” He looked like he was going to cry. “I don’t care about anything.”  

“Football is your dream,” I said. “You have to go tell the coach you changed your mind. The UT scouts are . . .” 

“I don’t care about football, okay?!” he shouted at me. 

“That’s bullshit!” I shouted back. “I did this for us, bro!”

“You did what for us, Landon?”

“I killed mom and dad so you didn’t have to move to El Paso,” I said. “So the scouts could come see you play and so you’d get into UT. Hook ‘em Horns.”

Anger came over his face. “No you fucking didn’t.”

“I did,” I said. “I wasn’t moving to Austin with that bitch mother of ours. No way. They passed out drunk after arguing that night you went to Liliana’s house and I found two of mom’s pill bottles. I crushed them up, mixed them with dad’s Jack, and poured it down their throats while they were sleeping. Then I put plastic bags over their heads and went to sleep. Before school the next morning I took the bags and threw them in the dumpster behind the corner store. It’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone.”

“You’re fucking lying.”

“I’m not, C.J. I did it for you. So the scouts could see you play. And now look. You fucking quit.”  

C.J. rushed toward me and tackled me to the ground. He choked me while screaming about how much of a stupid little bitch I was. I could feel the life leaving my body just as he let go. I gasped for air while he stood over me in anger. “I’m telling Sheriff Brown, Landon,” he said. “I’m sorry bro, but I have to. You killed our fucking parents.”  

“I said it was a secret,” I said as I stood up. As he was walking away, I thought about how he was going to mess things up more than he already had by quitting the team. I killed our parents so I could live with my grandmother, not to live in a jail cell. I picked up the nearest rock and threw it as if it were a baseball and the back of his head had been our old tire swing. It hit him hard and I heard a thud. He fell on his face. I walked to him and saw that he’d been knocked unconscious. I picked him up over my shoulder and threw him into my grandmother’s swimming pool. I jumped in and held his head underwater for about 10 minutes. When I was sure he was dead I put him in the trunk of his car and drove him to the woods where I buried him. I ditched his car in the school parking lot and ran to my grandmother’s. After a shower, I watched TV and waited for her to come home.    

When she arrived, she made macaroni and served it with a rotisserie chicken and buttered bread. We ate together while we talked about how our day had been. I thought about telling her about what had happened in her backyard but decided against it. I was done trusting people with my secrets.  

My grandmother ended up filing a missing person report for C.J. As far as anyone knew, the last person to see him had been his football coach. He said that C.J. was very sad about his parent’s death and wouldn’t be surprised if he’d committed suicide. His car was located in the high school parking lot. His body was never found.