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

whatever bottle had been placed there for him. Whatever stray loop of barbed wire he could have cut himself on if he’d known. Cut himself deep, or shallow, in even lines above the hem of his sleeve, on the thigh just above the frayed bottom of a pair of jean shorts.
    I don’t know, would never ask him something that stupid, if anybody even knew where he was.
    Because—what if he shrugged, looked away,
did
know that shed?
    Either way, it went bad for Tommy.
    The reason he had an extra hour to kill on the stripper that morning, it was that athletics was first period, and he didn’t play football. There were six of them that year who didn’t get fitted for jocks and helmets, no matter who pulled them out of class, talked to them. Not just coaches but cheerleaders, cheerleaders on game day in their short blue skirts, their eyes painted to match.
    The reason: the year before, playing in Stanton, word had gotten over to Greenwood that if 30 got the ball even once, he was going to be leaving the field on a stretcher.
    It was the usual intimidation game, but then it wasn’t.
    Second quarter, 30 got the ball, went wide around the side where his speed could get him some room.
    The Buffaloes were ready, though. Choreographed, even. At least that’s how it looked from the visitors’ stands.
    30 hit one of them straight-on, and that Buffalo— this is what everybody focused on later, how that lineman outweighed our 30 by a good sixty pounds— that Buffalo let himself be thrown back, enough that 30 extended up at an angle, almost to his full length, like all he was trying to do here anymore was hold the ball down, keep it from floating away.
    In came the cornerback head first, aiming for 30’s armpit. Spearing him.
    People in the stands were crying, I remember. Some of the dads who had been high-schoolers at Stanton themselves, they were stiff-legging it out to the parking lot, their faces set, their hands already held in the shape of whatever they were going to thread out from behind their seat, wrench up from the bed of their truck. Their wives who had known them in high school following, holding onto them as they tried to walk back.
    Like Stanton had promised, 30 left on a stretcher, and we lost the game, and 30 was out for the rest of the season, only came back midway through basketball.
    The players who were on that team with him, they remembered how nervous he was about contact at first, so that when two-a-days started up in August, they stayed in their driveways shooting free throws. Concentrating on their form. Their sweet tea over there in the shade, the radio in their truck on, windows down. Their girlfriends just a phone call away.
    Their punishment, of course, was offseason basketball.
    All it was was running.
    One of the coaches (Fidel, a real name) would sometimes sit in a plastic orange chair to watch, but that was only if football was getting a lecture that day.
    Usually, the day’s work would be on the chalkboard in the locker room:
Second pump behind the Evans’, TWICE
.
    Instead of running around the track, taunting the football players crab-crawling out there like soldiers, the basketball team had to run, not lollygag (Fidel’s favorite word, after “yahoos”), through the cotton field next to the school. All the way to the second pumpjack, the one two miles off.
    You couldn’t cut it short, either, even if everyone agreed not to say anything.
    At unpredictable times, Coach Fidel would take one of the teachers’ cars, sneak past the back way by the water station, and be waiting behind the angle-iron rail of the pumpjack, just flicking the power switch on and off like he didn’t have anything better to do.
    Running through cotton, too, especially all through November and into December, it’s like wading through line after line of shrubs, like you’ve been sent to hell and it turns out hell’s a plant nursery. You can vault over for the first quartermile or so, if you get the rhythm right, but pretty