three-wheeler bouncing over him, his back for a moment bent like Belinda’s trying hard to forget.
If she could just be out there with them, she thinks.
She’d trade a quiet cup of coffee alone at the table for her boys, yes. Any day.
But she can’t hear the three-wheeler from the porch, so she steps out to the drive, to the basketball goal one of Rob’s brothers welded together as a housewarming gift, never mind that the cable rusted within the month, seized in the pulley, so the rim’s never been higher than seven feet six inches
It’s low enough she can hook the fingers of her right hand in the bottom of the net, lean there, study the horizon for a speck of Honda red.
Instead, she finds some school-bus yellow.
It’s just sitting there on Cloverdale, its nose in the ditch.
Belinda King tightens her grip on the net, pulls herself up to her toes to see better, and already her heart’s hammering in her chest.
They’re not supposed to cross the road.
They’re not supposed—
II
Chapter Five
M ouse. Mouse King. King Mouse. K-Man. Just “King,” like he was the only one, or “Walt,” like his dad, Arthur King’s grandfather.
I don’t know what they called Walter III in the Army.
That summer I rode around with Rooster, he only ever called him Mouse.
That summer Arthur King’s wife would be dead one morning on the couch when he came back in from his coffee, the television news flickering across her face.
By the time the medics got there, Arthur King would be back in the shop, hammering a sand-polished three-foot knife back to true, his plastic goggles on.
I like to think it was to keep the medics from seeing his eyes, from knowing he was human like them, but the truth is probably the same as it is for everybody who works in shops: you know somebody who caught a sliver of metal in their eye.
Get a splinter in your finger, your body’ll push it out after a while. In your eye, though, with metal— what happened with my Uncle Parker was it started to rust, to send out these branches of brown. He got to it early enough, though, got to keep his eyes. He was the uncle who’d opened his closet for me one day, told me I could take any three books I wanted— Mack Bolan, Louis L’Amour, Conan, Raymond Chandler, the paperbacks six thick in some places—then three more when I got through with those.
Four years later I’d burned through all of them, was raiding any other closet I could find.
Thank you.
But still, it was Jackson I tried to walk like, Jackson I still hold my head like. I can see it in pictures.
He wasn’t around Greenwood very much anymore, was usually pulling trailers of pipe or oilfield equipment back and forth between Dallas and El Paso, but sometimes went as far east on 20 as Jackson, Mississippi.
Whatever music he listened to, I listened to.
When he’d blast through, let me ride in his truck, pull the horn—he was my secret dad, the one never on a tight enough schedule that he couldn’t go back, see what that glittering thing had been in the ditch.
Until my sixth grade, anyway.
I was standing in front of the school on a Friday night, waiting for the purple bus to come over from Stanton like a UFO. Waiting for Herb to unfold that magic door, ferry us to the skating rink for Van Halen and Ms. Pac-Man and hobo races and limbo and quarter refills at the fountain, dark corners and slow dances and fights in the bathroom, lockers by girls we were in love with. Our names said slow over the big speakers in a way I’ll never forget. It was the whole gang of us, the usual suspects, and then there was this blue-striped cab-over weaving into the parking lot too fast, swinging wide but close enough that we shielded our eyes from the gravel.
Uncle Jackson. He’d changed rigs.
I walked over, unsure, leading the pack.
Soon enough the door opened and he half-fell, half-climbed down, leaving dark handprints on the chrome grab bar, something like steam rising from every part of him. Or
If she could just be out there with them, she thinks.
She’d trade a quiet cup of coffee alone at the table for her boys, yes. Any day.
But she can’t hear the three-wheeler from the porch, so she steps out to the drive, to the basketball goal one of Rob’s brothers welded together as a housewarming gift, never mind that the cable rusted within the month, seized in the pulley, so the rim’s never been higher than seven feet six inches
It’s low enough she can hook the fingers of her right hand in the bottom of the net, lean there, study the horizon for a speck of Honda red.
Instead, she finds some school-bus yellow.
It’s just sitting there on Cloverdale, its nose in the ditch.
Belinda King tightens her grip on the net, pulls herself up to her toes to see better, and already her heart’s hammering in her chest.
They’re not supposed to cross the road.
They’re not supposed—
II
Chapter Five
M ouse. Mouse King. King Mouse. K-Man. Just “King,” like he was the only one, or “Walt,” like his dad, Arthur King’s grandfather.
I don’t know what they called Walter III in the Army.
That summer I rode around with Rooster, he only ever called him Mouse.
That summer Arthur King’s wife would be dead one morning on the couch when he came back in from his coffee, the television news flickering across her face.
By the time the medics got there, Arthur King would be back in the shop, hammering a sand-polished three-foot knife back to true, his plastic goggles on.
I like to think it was to keep the medics from seeing his eyes, from knowing he was human like them, but the truth is probably the same as it is for everybody who works in shops: you know somebody who caught a sliver of metal in their eye.
Get a splinter in your finger, your body’ll push it out after a while. In your eye, though, with metal— what happened with my Uncle Parker was it started to rust, to send out these branches of brown. He got to it early enough, though, got to keep his eyes. He was the uncle who’d opened his closet for me one day, told me I could take any three books I wanted— Mack Bolan, Louis L’Amour, Conan, Raymond Chandler, the paperbacks six thick in some places—then three more when I got through with those.
Four years later I’d burned through all of them, was raiding any other closet I could find.
Thank you.
But still, it was Jackson I tried to walk like, Jackson I still hold my head like. I can see it in pictures.
He wasn’t around Greenwood very much anymore, was usually pulling trailers of pipe or oilfield equipment back and forth between Dallas and El Paso, but sometimes went as far east on 20 as Jackson, Mississippi.
Whatever music he listened to, I listened to.
When he’d blast through, let me ride in his truck, pull the horn—he was my secret dad, the one never on a tight enough schedule that he couldn’t go back, see what that glittering thing had been in the ditch.
Until my sixth grade, anyway.
I was standing in front of the school on a Friday night, waiting for the purple bus to come over from Stanton like a UFO. Waiting for Herb to unfold that magic door, ferry us to the skating rink for Van Halen and Ms. Pac-Man and hobo races and limbo and quarter refills at the fountain, dark corners and slow dances and fights in the bathroom, lockers by girls we were in love with. Our names said slow over the big speakers in a way I’ll never forget. It was the whole gang of us, the usual suspects, and then there was this blue-striped cab-over weaving into the parking lot too fast, swinging wide but close enough that we shielded our eyes from the gravel.
Uncle Jackson. He’d changed rigs.
I walked over, unsure, leading the pack.
Soon enough the door opened and he half-fell, half-climbed down, leaving dark handprints on the chrome grab bar, something like steam rising from every part of him. Or
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