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

I’ll do that too. Please
.
    It’s not something Arthur King would ever say out loud.
    After a few breaths, Tommy Moore’s dad nodded, looked back down to the bloodied ball of Rob King, and turned around.
    Except—Janna had seen
Terminator
I don’t know how many times by then—behind him, Rob King stood, somehow.
    This wasn’t any movie, though.
    Tommy Moore’s dad felt Rob King standing, or maybe Rob King said something, or breathed wrong. Either way, Tommy Moore’s dad turned around, not sure what Rob King wanted.
    More?
    When your son’s that deep in the hospital, I mean, you’ve always got more.
    But that wasn’t it.
    Rob King set his mouth, stepped forward, almost into Tommy Moore’s dad, his own dad calling something out to him but he ignored it.
    He leaned into the side of Tommy Moore’s dad’s truck, grabbed onto the shop-made bed rail with both hands, and closed his eyes, lowered his head, then came up again, turned to face Tommy Moore’s dad. For, in Janna’s words, “forever, almost.”
    She was kind of right, too. I can still see him there.
    Locked up for two days, two nights, he’d had the time to think about what had happened. What he’d done.
    Finally, he looked away, down to his right hand, the one still bloody-knuckled, and, with his left, popped Tommy Moore’s dad’s toolbox open. The hatch gull-winged up, bounced once or twice.
    “What?”
    It’s what Tommy’s Moore’s dad must have said.
    This: Rob King placing his hand there on the corner of the open toolbox, then, before anybody could stop, Janna’s mom only realizing it at the last moment, diving between the seats to block Janna’s view, Rob King brought that lid down with all the weight he had left, harder than he’d ever hit Tommy Moore.
    The lid came down far enough to catch, broke his hand bad enough for three surgeries that still left it wrong.
    It would be another two days before Arthur King made it home with his son.

***
    Ms. Godfrey—it’s an Old English derivation of a name, see?— doesn’t tell me any of this, of course. It’s legend. And if Janna was the main source of it all, then good for her. When you’re on crutches for six years, you need to be the one with the best story.
    And if she made it up, then good for her still.
    Rob King’s surgeries that spring were real, anyway. But maybe you can get three surgeries in your hand just from hitting somebody in the face over and over.
    It’s not the kind of thing you can ask a person, really. If this were some other book, too, there would likely be an X-ray here of Rob King’s hand. Or if those are all gone by now, I could probably even sub one of mine in—by the time I was twenty I’d broke my right hand three times, the bones in there gravel now, boxer’s fracture over and over—but that’s all it would be: the shadow of flesh around a confusion of bone. At first you wouldn’t know it was a hand, even, until you cued into the light dusting of arm hair, the empty space of the fingernails. What had to have happened to have done this.
    But this isn’t that book.
    What I have is this, Ms. Godfrey and me standing just around the side of the high school.
    “Does it change anything?” she’s saying to me.
    I kind of huff air out my nose, I guess.
    It’s no answer.
    “Pete saying you were there?” I tag on, half in apology.
    She nods.
    I swallow.
    “You and Tommy,” I say, not looking at her now.
    “He was beautiful back then,” she says.
    I’ve seen him in the yearbook, in his short eighties shorts, the segmented glass wall of the gym behind him, his mouth held in a way that you can tell the only thing in the world for him right then is that orange rim ten feet up.
    It’s what we all want, to exist like that, so deep in the moment that that moment never stops dilating out and out. Like being inside a balloon forever inflating. That sound of fullness. That
feel
.
    “But Taylor and Dwayne and the rest,” I try, eyes narrowed to be saying their