Growing Up Dead in Texas Read Online Free PDF

legend.
    Rob King dragging Tommy Moore down, beating him long after what little fight there was was over, and nobody pulling him off until Pete Manson and Arthur King got there in the same truck.
    By that time it was too late, though.
    Tommy Moore wasn’t getting up on his own for a couple of weeks yet.
    According to Pete Manson, Arthur King planted his hand on Pete’s shoulder that day, so his old man legs wouldn’t fail. And Pete was proud to be solid enough to hold onto.
    Out in the field before them now, the deputies are chasing Rob King down, all three of them falling again and again, Rob King’s right hand cut deep across the knuckles, one of his boots coming off.
    He’s running for the buggy, and the tractor tied to it.
    Pete laughs at how stupid it all was. That, then, none of them even knew that it wasn’t just that one module burning up, it was twenty-five modules, for a mile all around. An act of arson Tommy Moore paid for with his face, paid for with the rest of his life. An act nobody ever quite figured out, especially with what happened later.
    But they all quit trying, too.
    They didn’t have to make it make sense.
    “Well,” Pete says, collecting his duffel from the bed of the truck.
    I pat the bed of his truck in farewell, cringe from a plane blasting off just over our heads, and like that he’s walking away, turning sideways to fit between two cars.
    For a few minutes I move a bent prybar back and forth in the bed of his truck, try to imagine what it was in its first life— tie rod from one of the tricycle tractors?—then swallow, turn back to the east, Greenwood thirty miles away now, and realize I don’t even know anybody’s number out there anymore.

Chapter Two
    T hat night we all wanted the belly of the clouds to glow red like they did when a pasture was burning.
    But of course cotton’s not like that.
    Instead, like Pearl Harbor Day was suddenly a big deal in West Texas—all the veterans I knew back then were Air Force or Army, not Navy—everybody put their flags out on their porches, not just Arthur King, like usual.
    Tommy Moore’s legendary big brother was enlisted, out there somewhere, so maybe it was all for him. To call him back.
    There was a prayer meeting, of course, for Tommy. Everybody knew by then that it hadn’t been him.
    Arthur King climbed into his truck, directed it to Midland, to see if he still knew the Sheriff enough to come back with Rob.
    He didn’t.
    Outside, all around the school, all over Greenwood, it was just butane pumps popping in the night. There was talk of canceling the make-up football game on Friday, even, but it was Stanton, the Buffaloes, so we couldn’t cancel. There were more fights than usual in the parking lot, though, and the band at halftime broke formation when two of the trombone players looked up into the stands and started crying.
    Their mothers came out onto the field, led them to the red clay track, walked around it with them until they were out of the light.
    The ribbons that week were SHOOT THE BUFFS , same as every year. I held hands with a girl in the stands for the first time ever, even though she was already moving away.
    I don’t know what else to say about it, really.
    How about this: way back in fourth grade, Ms. Easton’s history—one of three teachers who ever believed in me—we’d all had to read reports on some local event. We either had to look it up in the library, get it from the papers, or interview somebody.
    Kelly Janer interviewed her aunt, who told the story of being a girl up in Tulia, how they had an old cellar for when the tornadoes came.
    Not if the tornadoes came, but when.
    The story that Kelly told was about how her aunt, when she was our age, remembers her dad building her just-married sister a house right next door to their house. The cellar, it was between the two houses. It made sense. So—Kelly’s mom had written this like always, we could all tell from the way Kelly was reading it, her lips all