Growing Up Dead in Texas by Stephen Graham Jones Read Free Book Online

east, throwing breakers on pumpjacks. The meters confirmed what he’d written in the logs. He might have been a fired pumper, but he was still a pumper, I guess, unable to keep his nub of a pencil out of all those lined pages.
    After he was cleared, then, that left us back where we’d started: Tommy Moore. A possibility that had surfaced for a bit, early on, in relation to all the shady trucks in the area— every time there’s a bad wreck in Greenwood, there are always suspicious trucks and cars everywhere. A friend of mine even used one to explain a three-wheeler crash he had, one that left a line of scar tissue smiling inches back from each side of his mouth (barbed wire). Another friend I got in a fight with, just because somebody’d seen a car the color of his on the same road one of my cousins was bleeding out on.
    Nobody liked this story, though. The one with Tommy Moore still in it.
    But what else was there?

***
    To start at the beginning, it was early December. So, just why
wasn’t
Tommy Moore at school that morning? I can hear a particular mom in a kitchen in 1985, coffee on the table before her, a cigarette permanently clamped between her fingers like the least important thing, saying this to her friend across the table but leaning close too, like it’s an obvious, obvious secret: “Why
wasn’t
he up at the school, though?”
    It’s not something the men would have thought about. Just because it made perfect sense to them, putting tractor work before school work. Which of the two was actually going to get you somewhere, right?
    Tommy Moore wasn’t planning on staying around Greenwood, though. He already had a letter from Midland Junior College, was going to be a Chaparral, let basketball buy him a couple more years of school. It’s what his big brother was doing already, just with the military instead of sports, guns instead of basketballs.
    But he never had Tommy’s jump shot, either. Nobody did. That way he had of just blocking out the world, focusing only on that orange rim, no matter what hammer the other team had put on the floor just to show him how hard he could get nailed for every two points he drained.
    Could we have gone all the way to the state tournament his senior year, if Rob King hadn’t plowed his face into the ground?
    Nobody said it out loud, but we all knew.
    Teams like that happen once every ten years, if that. Returning seniors with a star to lead them.
    No, that next year, all of us who were old enough to be out in the fields alone but still too young to drive stripper, we’d get posted out by the modules. Guards. Our orders: not to confront, just run off, identify later.
    Which is just to say it again: nobody knew who’d done it last time. For all anybody knew, that firestarter could still be out there, striking matches in a darkened room. Waiting for the right night.
    And our moms hated it, of course, putting us out there like that, but they understood. Were proud of us the way I guess moms who send their uniformed sons overseas must feel. All the moms that year were Mrs. Moore, yeah.
    Except of course these moms, our moms, they could bring us dinner still hot in its foil, and we’d pretend we didn’t want it, didn’t need it, but then would keep them there too long all the same, just talking about nothing. Asking them questions about when they were girls.
    You always look for the moment you grew up, I think. Like it’s a thing that happens all at once.
    But sometimes it is.
    For me it wasn’t standing guard that next year, but my mom shaking me from bed one morning, my brothers still asleep, my dad already gone. What had happened was our year-old cat, still a kitten herself, had had a kitten. Just the one. But it was all wrong—no hair, not-yet-finished eyes. Just there on the concrete stairs that led to our screen door, breathing fast and shallow. Its mom watching it from the cinderblock fence, unconcerned.
    I put on my basketball shorts and my favorite boots, the