Excerpt
We Burn Daylight
The White HorseJanuary 1993
Roy
In those raw first weeks of 1993, before my family broke apart and before the March fires, before the world turned its lurid attention our way and before her and before everything else that changed me, I was fourteen years old and learning to pick locks. I could open car doors with wire hangers, school lockers with a pocketknife, and almost anything else with tools my brother had sent me. Mason had been an infantry corporal in the marines, but he’d stayed in Iraq after the war to work as a contractor. He’d just turned twenty-one. We hadn’t seen him in years, and although he was supposed to return home in the fall, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining a future without him. Occasionally, when I struggled with a difficult lock, I’d pretend Mason was trapped on the other side of the door and his safety depended on my opening it in time. Sometimes I saved him, sometimes not.
My parents didn’t know about Mason’s tools or the pillowcase full of locks under my bed or the hours I spent picking when I should have been sleeping or studying. My mother was a hospice nurse then and my father was the high sheriff of McLennan County. Their minds were on graver subjects. At supper, one of us would say grace and then we’d tell a little bit about our days, hers tending to the infirm and his at the sheriff’s office and mine at school. We weren’t a family of bean-spillers or bucket-mouths. We curated our lives, gave each other wide berths. They knew Rosie had dumped me over Christmas vacation, but not that I’d stopped catching the bus from school to avoid seeing her on Isaac Garza’s lap the whole ride. And I knew my parents, who claimed not to smoke, shared cigarettes in the backyard when something rattled them at their jobs or with Mason. But none of this came up at the table. We just listened to the sounds of our forks and knives, our glasses being lifted and put down. We asked each other to pass the fried okra or the jar of tartar sauce. We said how good it would be when Mason came home, speculated on what he’d want to eat and do first. We made plans for the happier times ahead. This was how innocent we were, how gullible. This was Waco.
On the Lamb
Podcast Episode 12
Guest: Sheriff Elias “Eli” Moreland (retired)
Recorded: July 2024
Waco–McLennan County Central Library
Waco, Texas
Thank you for coming on. Ever since starting the podcast, I’ve wanted my listeners to hear your perspective. You were sheriff of McLennan County until 1993. Sammy Gregson was your deputy. Your son was—
Sammy had a bead on what was coming before I did. I’ll give him that. I’ll keep the rest of my opinions to myself.
Understood.
I’ve been away some thirty years. Down in Camp Verde now. Most days it’s still too close.
I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in the library.
If you want to hear what all I have to say, I’m going to smoke. I’m just as pleased to get back on the road and miss the traffic. Your call.
I’ll see if I can scare you up an ashtray.
See if you can scare up a couple.
Roy
We lived on the western edge of town where the Blackland Prairie gave way to wetlands. Acres of scrub brush and bluestem grass stretched between us and our neighbors. Our house was a two-bedroom ranch with a sagging fence. Root-buckled driveway, wood paneling, an avocado-green kitchen counter and matching phone mounted to the wall. My room was in the back corner of the house, north-facing, with matted brown carpet. Mason and I had shared it, but after he enlisted, I just used his bed as a place for my folded clothes because my dresser drawers were stuck shut. I had two windows and a television my parents bought cheap from the Olde Towne Motel when it went under. On my walls were posters of the Houston Oilers and The Terminator and a monster truck doing a backflip; Mason’s wall was covered by a huge Semper Fi banner. I’d been planning to change my side up over Christmas vacation, to hang manlier posters and rearrange my furniture, but after Rosie broke things off, it didn’t seem worth the bother.
Mason called on holidays and, if he could, every third Sunday; he used a satellite phone that made him sound even farther away than he was, like his words were echoing toward us from the past. He rarely sent photographs and letters, but when a new one arrived, my mother pinned it to the fridge with fruit-shaped magnets. More than once I’d come into the kitchen to find her rereading what he’d written. She seemed to be searching for a hidden meaning, some clue she’d overlooked. That Mason stayed in-country after his deployment had wounded her. She saw it as tempting fate, but also an affront: He’d had the opportunity to return to us, and he’d declined. I viewed it that way, too, and despite the tacit silences in our house, I worried one of us would cop to our bitterness. Or one of us would say something we’d regret if he didn’t come home. If she hadn’t heard me behind her in the kitchen, I’d ease out of the doorway and close myself in my room; I’d pull a random lock from the pillowcase and make myself crack it before venturing back into the kitchen. If she did hear me, we’d pretend she was upset about one of her patients.
“Mr. Raybourn might be glory bound soon,” she said one evening in early January. I’d come into the kitchen for some milk and found her wiping her eyes. She opened the fridge and squatted behind the door to gather herself.
“He has the wiener dog,” I said.
“That’s him.”
“We’ve never had one of those.”
Our pets always came from my mother’s patients. Sometimes their owners wrote her into their wills, sometimes the surviving family guilted her into taking the animal. We’d had as many as four dogs and three cats at one time. We’d had a blue macaw and a pair of box turtles. When she wasn’t working, my mother was finding homes for left-behind creatures. Forever homes, she called them. She placed ads in the paper, contacted veterinarians and ranchers, cajoled friends. She’d given goats to the 4-H club at my school, an aquarium of impossibly bright fish to the museum downtown, and an elderly hound to my friend Coop’s mother, though it didn’t last long. If she couldn’t find homes for the animals, we carted them out to my grandparents. They had land near San Saba and took in what others wouldn’t. That January, we were down to a black-and-white cat named Panda. She disappeared for days on end, and though we hadn’t had her long, her absence made the house feel lifeless.
“Mason likes wiener dogs,” I said, not because it was true but because hearing my brother’s name could buoy my mother’s spirits.
“Does he?” She took a beer from the fridge and started hunting for the bottle opener in the drawer. The clock on the wall ticked, ticked, ticked. My mother had gotten it as a grocery store promotion a while back; it had songbirds in place of numbers. She said, “Then he’ll be tickled come September. Yes, sir, he’ll be happy as a puppy with two tails.”
On the Lamb
Podcast Episode 12
Guest: Sheriff Elias “Eli” Moreland (retired)
Recorded: July 2024
Waco–McLennan County Central Library
Waco, Texas
They don’t have any ashtrays.
I’ll make do.
If someone from the library—
I was good to those people, even-handed. If there was word of some trouble, I’d call Perry and tell him to come in and we’d get it sorted. Civil-like. Aboveboard. I sent CPS out there, too. Clean reports. Those folks had their beliefs, but laws weren’t broken.
We thought of them as a different country, a territory with its own customs. They kept to themselves mostly. When they ventured into town, they were courteous and quiet. Never panhandled or pestered you with leaflets or spoke in tongues. They were friendly. I was trying to stop the raid right up until it happened.
