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

names out loud like this.
    Taylor O’Hara, Dwayne Roberts, and the other offseason basketball players.
    “Trevor and Tad and Marcus and Geoff… Geoff Koenig,” Ms. Godfrey says, grinding her cigarette out in the Diet Dr. Pepper can she already had out here, twisted into the grass. “The Three T’s.”
    There’s a yearbook photo of them the following year, hamming it up by the ball racks, their arms out beside them, three letter T’s.
    Three, not four.
    And—I’ve gone back, studied like it’s a test—the reason she tagged Geoff’s last name on like that is that there was another Jeff who graduated with her. Jeff Tarpley.
    “You’re just going to have to ask me,” she says, calling me by name, looking over at me until I have to turn, face her.
    Early, early on, kindergarten for me, maybe, one of the times we’d come back to Greenwood, I got led out into a field in late April, when the fields were all white crust and heat.
    What I was supposed to see was how all the cotton, the whole crop, it was all kneeling there just under that white crust. That all you had to do was scratch it open and the plant would stand up, delicate and white-green.
    I spent the rest of that day out there, scratching careful little holes.
    “Did they do it?” I manage to say to her, real casual, like it doesn’t even matter.
    Ms. Godfrey looks back to the field where the houses are now.
    She’s about to cry, I can tell.
    I won’t know what to do if she does.
    Run, get the principal? Light her another cigarette? What she’s thinking, I know: that it’s all her fault.
    And that’s what I’m really asking, under the tangle of facts, which never really matter anyway: why did it have to happen like it did?
    “I didn’t tell,” she says.
    “I won’t write any of this down,” I tell her.
    She laughs. Her shoulders hitch up once, anyway. I study a brown and bronze plaque angled under a young tree.
    “You have to write it down,” she says, looking over to me, her not-grey-yet hair blowing across her face. “That’s why—it’s why I got you, right?”
    “Got me?”
    “Things always fix themselves,” she says, “always come back around, don’t you know?”
    And then she tells me.

***
    When I don’t believe her, I drive back out to Pete Manson’s but then just sit on the road by his place, the sun angling down, the shadows of all his trees stretching towards me.
    After a while he sees my truck, stands on his porch smoking a cigarette, makes a production of dropping it, of grinding it into the dirt. Of going back inside, the screen door flapping behind him.
    I ease away, burn two days digging up Marcus Weeks, the 1986 team’s point guard. He’s a car salesman on the other side of Midland now, still favors his ribs on the left side, thinks I’m interested in buying at first but then makes me somehow. Shakes his head. Shrugs yes to what of Ms. Godfrey’s story I tell him—her and them and Pete that day by the stripper—but adds some too, like he thought I already knew. Like of everybody, I should be the one to have already known this.
    It’s why Ms. Godfrey never told. Why she never had to tell.
    That section across from the school, across from the church, that the basketball players had to run through for offseason, it had been broken up into fourths a generation ago. Like all the other sections had been when Arthur King’s dad Walter King, Jr. died, and the black cars stretched for half a mile down 307. They were quartered up because Walter Jr. had four kids— Arthur, Arthur’s older brother Walter III, dead in World War II, and two sisters, who only existed through the mail and in other people’s photo albums anymore, like black-and-white secrets. The King land had still been all together at Walter Jr.’s death because Walter Jr. had been the only one of his five brothers and sisters to go into the family business, to lay claim to the land by working it, inherit it from his father, the first Walter,