Growing Up Dead in Texas Read Online Free PDF Page A

probably: “Still doing it, kid.”
    I never should have got in the truck with him.
    “You were
there
,” I tell him.
    He looks across at me, no smile now. Finally nods, tongues his lip out.
    “Okay then. What the hell. Sheryl Ledbetter?”
    Blank stare from me.
    “Ms. Godfrey?” he adds, his voice higher, mocking.
    Ms. Godfrey. Sheryl Godfrey. Senior English, more than twenty years ago.
    Pete nods, accelerates through the yellow light at Illinois, glaring into his mirror for blue and red lights.
    “Bet you didn’t know that part, did you?” he says, firing up another cigarette. “Nobody does, hoss.”
    He holds the pack out to me but I just say it back to him: “Ms. Godfrey?”
    Pete studies his cigarette like the story’s all right there. Like he’s reading it from that thin white paper.
    “Her and Tommy.” He shrugs. “She’d come to see him on the way to school, then he kind of, you know, convinced her to stay, yeah?”
    Ms. Godfrey. Seventeen years old, walking through a half-stripped field to bring breakfast to Tommy Moore.
    Or something.
    This would have been a thrill, twenty years ago.
    Now, now it’s like something being stolen from me.
    I lick my lips, nod that I get it, yeah.
    “And you don’t want any of that kind of action in the cab of 4440 now, do you?” He laughs. “If you have a choice, I mean.”
    “The modules,” I hear myself saying.
    It’s the part I never heard. The part only the people who were there know, I guess. And never told.
    Pete eases onto 20 proper, and for a few hundred yards we pace a plane coming in to land.
    He shrugs, says, “Then you know it all, then. They were up there fooling around. It could have just as easy been me, I mean. Any of us.”
    He’s right, too.
    In West Texas, there’s no trees, no contour to the land.
    If you want to hide, if you want a little privacy, all you can do, really, is climb up onto something. And, if you’re helping a girl up behind you, then the stretched-tight tarp of a packed module’s a lot better mattress than a pumpjack or water tank.
    Which is where Rob King found them.
    Unlike every other farmer in the county, in the history of farming maybe, none of Rob King’s trucks ever had glasspacks. You don’t put loud pipes on your truck because you think you’re still in high school, either, but because, after driving a tractor all day, getting in a truck so quiet you can’t hear it run, it’s creepy, makes you feel like a ghost, and you can pop your timing chain, turning the key over when the truck’s already started.
    Maybe because he always insisted on sticks, though, had an aftermarket RPM bolted onto the dash—I honestly don’t know, never thought to ask—Rob King had a truck that could sneak up on somebody like that.
    He wasn’t even looking for them, was just following his nose. That’s the thing that probably still tears Tommy Moore up, if he thinks about it. But he’s got to.
    The module they were bedded down on top of, it was on fire. Slow fire, deep inside. Which Tommy Moore would have known ten minutes earlier if he’d have been thinking halfstraight.
    He had a Ledbetter girl up there, though, was a long way from any kind of rational thought.
    Even when she was leading us through Hal Borland or “The Stone Boy” or prepositions, I mean, Ms. Godfrey, you could definitely have ideas you didn’t plan on.
    And what I’d guess is that Rob King, at first he figured that Tommy Moore’d already split for school, had left the stripper idling like that because he’d seen Rob’s truck coming, figured it was his shift. The black cotton Rob was smelling, he figured it was coming from the basket, was still contained.
    But then there’s a naked arm suddenly over the blue edge of the tarp, and then a face, and—this is where things go wrong— that face, it’s Tommy’s, and clamped in his lips is a cigarette, the cherry so red, so wrong, Tommy Moore’s eyes thin and satisfied at first.
    After that, it’s all