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

tallest ones I had, and scooped the broken thing into a shovel, carried it to the burn barrel, and, because a gunshot would send the horses through the fence, finally just raised a stray cinderblock over my head, held it there for what I know’s too long, and brought it down as hard as I’ve ever done anything.
    My mule-ear boots went to my knees, almost, were still too big, hand-me-downs, but they weren’t quite tall enough, either. My thighs got misted, coated, sprayed.
    And then it was just breakfast, school, the usual. Nobody even knowing. My mom never asked, I mean. It was how I knew I was grown up: I had things inside me that weren’t for anybody else. Things I’d have to carry from here on out.
    Was that what it was like for Tommy Moore that morning, looking up at Rob King’s fists?
    If that particular mom smoking her cigarette knew so much, she should have just told us all who did it, who started those fires.
    Then none of the rest of this would have happened.

***
    Why wasn’t Tommy Moore at school that morning?
    If I could find him anymore, or knew anybody who’d kept up—he’s in Austin, maybe?—this is what I’m pretty sure he’d say: that it wasn’t about the three and a quarter he was going to get for another hour of work. No, the reason he stayed on that morning, it had a lot more to do with what he was missing. What he would have paid to miss.
    In Greenwood that year, there weren’t enough coaches to go around. If you weren’t a three-sport player—we were 3A, but just barely—then you’d pretty much get ignored. Especially, say, if the whole school was gearing up for a game that had been rained out in October, a game with the Buffaloes, natural enemy to the Greenwood Ranger.
    It hadn’t always been like that, though, the hostility. In my dad and uncles’ time, Greenwood had just been a kindergarten through sixth grade affair. That sounds small, but compared to what used to be there, what my great-grandfather had pointed out to me one afternoon, it was an industrial complex, a series of buildings nobody could have predicted. What my great-grandfather pointed out to me was where Prairie Lee used to be. A one-room school, the only one between Midland and Stanton, the same way Midland was halfway between Dallas and El Paso. Prairie Lee was just a dull rise in the pasture now. My great-grandfather held his finger there for longer than he needed to, like he was maybe trying to see it as it had been. Long enough for me to see it, anyway. And I wouldn’t forget. A few years later, when that land was being developed, I’d be at a sleepover with a friend who lived next to that pasture and I’d sneak out after everybody was crashed, feel my way through the fence, see if there was anything to find of Prairie Lee. There wasn’t.
    That same year, though, following a different fence in a different pasture, I would find an old shack that looked like I imagined Prairie Lee had. Except instead of shattered chalkboards or old desks there would be beer bottles and bean cans, and, on one wall, more intricate than any blueprint I’ve ever seen, a pencil drawing of the floor plan of some holding unit—a jail or prison, I never knew. I left as quietly as I’d come in, kept following the fence, finally and unaccountably finding a bottle of Mennen aftershave on its side by the base of a locust post. Like it had just fallen from the sky. For me.
    I knew what it was, what aftershave was, but I had to trade for what I’d seen in that shack, too.
    I twisted the lid off, closed my eyes, and drank it all down at once, didn’t let myself throw it back up.
    The way I know it worked is that whoever was staying there, or had been staying there, they never came for me, or my family.
    Maybe that was a shed we all went to, though. We just never said anything about it to each other.
    Maybe Tommy Moore’s big brother had even been there years ago, but not found the right way to cancel it out, had just walked by