Growing Up Dead in Texas by Stephen Graham Jones

Author:Stephen Graham Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 2012-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

***

Five years later I’d get stopped in the rich residential over behind Midland Lee. Not pulled over but waved down at a roadblock we knew better than to back away from. Already that month we’d been chased down once, stopped in the Western Auto parking lot on the drag. Because we didn’t have shirts maybe, the cops took apart the whole interior of the El Camino we were in, and dumped out all the cornflakes we’d been eating, just looking for a reason to haul us in.

There’d been nothing, though. Just a butterfly knife they flashed around, confiscated for their personal collection. Same old same old.

But that had been in the daylight, in a mostly legal car, with more cars always driving by. Now it was two in the morning, and we were in a blue Nova we’d just dropped a new engine into that afternoon, and there was nobody but us.

No knives this time, sure, but the two cruisers weren’t parked across the road for random knife checks either. Somebody’d been breaking side glass all up and down the street, snatching stereo decks.

We all kind of sighed collectively—we were just passing through, going home, calling it a night—and the cops even shook their heads at the sloshy bottle of gin in the glove compartment that we hated but were drinking all the same. Then, just to be following procedure, they asked us to pop the trunk if we didn’t mind, so we could be on our way.

We probably should have minded.

In there on a blanket were four stereos, wires going every which way from them.

It was a punch line. It made us a joke.

The police were not nice to us that night.

It’s hardly the worst, though.

Another time, what was supposed to have been the last semester of my senior year at Greenwood, which had turned into a stint at Lee that went bad as well, they would stop me at the edge of town, for what I thought was just going to be the usual harassment—they knew my truck—but then the rest of the cops showed up as well. And then the detectives.

What they were interrogating me over was a Midland High cheerleader gone missing a few days back. Old news. What was new news was that they’d just found her in a cotton field on the north side of town. In pieces, in a hole.

And I was their guy, yeah. For hours and hours, until— and this is the only time this has ever happened, maybe in the whole history of these kinds of run-ins—my long hair saved me.

Trick was, the guy they had eyewitnesses for, the guy last seen with the cheerleader in a truck just like mine, he had shaved-short hair, high and tight. And while I could have had long hair when abducting this cheerleader, then taken the clippers to myself for a more straight-up look, I couldn’t have gone the other way, from short to long.

So they took me back to my truck. Under the windshield were probably twenty notes, asking where I was, telling me where I should be.

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