That's How I Roll: A Novel Read online

  Don’t read me that speech about “bad choices.” I had all kinds of bad in my life, way before I had any choices.

  Put it this way: once I began, I never minded killing any more than I had ever minded dying. So, if it hadn’t have been for Tory-boy, there’s no evidence that I would have turned out any different than I did.

  But if it wasn’t for Tory-boy, I wouldn’t ever have gotten caught, either.

  They call us—me and the others locked up with me—they call us “condemned men.” Some snarl saying it, others sob.

  Neither changes a thing.

  I once had thoughts about what could have done that—what might have actually changed things? If I hadn’t been born bad, if I hadn’t seen things no child should, if … if I had been a normal man, could I have courted the woman I came to know as Evangeline? Could I have married her?

  Those thoughts almost killed me. I had to make a pyramid of them and set fire to it. Because I don’t lie to myself. And I know what I was really thinking, underneath all those dream-thoughts. I was thinking, what if Tory-boy had never come along?

  Here’s the truth I’m left with: if I hadn’t been afraid of losing Tory-boy to those Nazi idiots, I wouldn’t have blown up their fort, and doing that is what got me caught.

  But there’s a stronger truth, and that’s the one I hold closest: whatever good is in me, whatever honor I have, it all came from my little brother.

  ow that I think it through—and I do that every night—I realize that’s where my train went off the tracks. Not where, actually—more like Why. If I’d stuck straight to business, me and Tory-boy would still be going on just like we always had.

  It really started with Judakowski. Jayne Dyson had never told me about the man who … did what he did to set her on the only path she was allowed to walk. But after Judakowski beat her to death, it was the same as if she had.

  Sometimes, I get so full of how smart I am that I forget there’s others just as smart. And when it comes to certain things, a whole lot smarter.

  I was at Lansdale’s place. After we’d finished talking over some job that needed doing, he kind of casually mentioned how terrible it was, what had happened to Miss Jayne Dyson.

  I don’t think I showed anything on my face, even when he told me how the cops said whoever did that to her was some kind of animal—tore her up so bad they could tell it was the first time anyone had ever … had her that way.

  She had horrible bruising on her where no woman should have. And everybody knew Miss Jayne Dyson wouldn’t let anybody do something like that to her, no matter how much they offered.

  “I’ll tell anyone, Miss Jayne Dyson was a real lady,” Lansdale said that night. He looked genuinely sad. “But even if she was … something other than a lady, she didn’t deserve what was done to her.”

  I agreed with him. It was no secret that I had visited her a number of times. There’s no secrets in the part of town where she lived. But I think everyone assumed my visits were all about Tory-boy.

  Lansdale hadn’t made that assumption, although I didn’t figure that out until later.

  “She must’ve fought like a wildcat,” he told me. “I heard Judakowski’s face is going to be marked for life.”

  “Judakowski?”

  “Sure,” Lansdale said. “I think his last stay in the penitentiary gave him a taste for … well, you know what I’m saying, don’t you, Esau?”

  “Yes, I do. But why would he …? I mean, there’s plenty of other …”

  “That’s Judakowski,” Lansdale said, shrugging his shoulders. “He’s not a man you can say no to, not when he thinks he’s got power over you. He’s not even denying he did it. See Henry over there?” Lansdale nodded his head in the direction of a man sitting at the bar, his back to us. “He was in the Double-J a couple of nights ago. Judakowski has his own table, naturally, but Henry was close enough to hear him say, ‘You can’t rape a whore,’ like he was reciting a verse from the Good Book.

  “Of course, nobody argued with him. A man’d have to be crazy to do that in Judakowski’s own place, especially when he was all liquored up.”

  Then Lansdale went back to talking about other things.

  hen I called and told Judakowski there was something I wanted to talk over with him in private, I could see right inside his head. Judakowski was the kind of man who thought he knew the whole world just because he knew himself so good.

  I could see him thinking I was going to offer to take Lansdale out if Judakowski would make me a partner. He knew that respect was really important to me, so he figured maybe I was sick of being paid by the job.

  If he was right—and Judakowski would never even imagine otherwise—I wouldn’t want anyone else to hear me make that kind of offer; it would be too risky.

  Judakowski himself was always looking over his own shoulder. He didn’t trust everyone in his own crew. And if he didn’t trust people who worked for him, why would I trust them myself?

  What he didn’t figure on was me wheeling over to where he was sitting on a big tree stump in that clearing, working on a cigar. I wheeled over close enough to see his face. I had to see for myself those marks Miss Jayne Dyson had left.

  “I’m proud of you,” I said.

  Judakowski knew I wasn’t talking to him. But before he could open his mouth to ask a question, I shot him in the face. Right at the bridge of his nose. I didn’t want to spoil those rip scars on his cheeks if they decided on an open-casket sendoff.

  The shot hardly made a sound. And nobody was ever going to trace the bullet in Judakowski’s brain to the gun in my hand. I’d made that pistol myself; I knew how to unmake it just as well.

  I rolled up even closer. Then I held his head back by the hair and put two more bullets into his head, one for each eye.

  It was peaceful and calm in that glade. The birds kept on singing while I laid the pistol in my lap and took out my wire cutters.

  I left Judakowski’s tongue on his chest. More puzzle for the cops to solve, maybe. But, for sure, plenty enough to start lots of other tongues wagging.

  I’m not spiritual. But I know Miss Jayne Dyson watched every move I made.

  “Thank you,” I told her. “Thank you for everything. I swear on my brother, if I had known what was in his mind, I would have done this before he ever had a chance to hurt you.”

  ll Tory-boy knew was that he drove me to where I told him, and waited by the van for me to come back. He didn’t know who I was meeting up with, much less why.

  I guess someone might be able to trick things out of Tory-boy, if they asked the right questions. That’s why I’d always made sure to keep that kind of distance between what I did and what he knew. How was anyone going to make him tell what he didn’t know?

  ’d attended to Judakowski no more than a few weeks before when I was snatched up for atomizing those skinheads, or Nazis, or whatever they were calling themselves now.

  Maybe I’m rambling now. Not being precise, the way I like to be. All of this is a lot of stuff to put down on paper. And, like I said, things around here never seem to happen in a straight line.

  I guess it’s obvious by now that I killed Judakowski for my own reasons. And it’s even obvious that Lansdale had known that telling me how Miss Jayne Dyson had been raped to death had been signing Judakowski’s death warrant.

  So now it’s time to tell the Why of that.

  I once thought about my body and my mind as a single unit. That sounds strange, maybe—my mind can do all kinds of things, and my body can’t even carry me across a room. But what I’d been thinking about was the frozen part. My conscience should have stopped me from doing some things, so I told myself that it had just stopped working, as atrophied as my body.

  “Atrophied.” I hated that word as much as I loved “inertia.” Once you start rolling, you stay rolling, true enough. But if you never use something, it just … rots. Only Tory-boy wouldn’t let my legs rot. He’d grab my ankles and just work my legs. It hurt a bit, but I
remember it like a treat. A treat I’ll never have again now.

  I’m just dancing around the perimeter, and I know it. So here’s how it happened. I was over to Miss Jayne Dyson’s one afternoon. That was the way we worked it; if Tory-boy had a question that a woman should be answering for him, I’d call Miss Dyson and make an appointment. Then we’d drive over there.

  I always left them alone. I knew it would be easier for Tory-boy that way.

  He was in her little parlor a good half-hour that time. It takes Tory-boy a while to get something down. But once he gets it, he keeps it.

  I just waited on Miss Dyson’s porch. I knew people could see me out there, but it didn’t bother me a bit. None of those spike-tongued women would ever be talking about me to Miss Webb. And I didn’t care who else they told. Or what they told them.

  When Tory-boy finally came out, he really wanted to go see someone. Some girl, I guess.

  “Esau, I swear I won’t be but an hour. That’s if I go now. But if I have to drive you back home first—”

  “You think Miss Dyson is going to want me sitting out here for an hour, Tory-boy?”

  “No. No, Esau. I didn’t even ask her. I mean, she knew where I was going, and she asked if you wouldn’t like to take some tea with her. I said I’d ask you. So I am.”

  I was about to tell Tory-boy I’d have to check for myself when Miss Jayne Dyson came to the screen door.

  “That is exactly what I asked Tory,” she said, like she was reading my thoughts. “I could use some company. That’s why I always like seeing Tory. He’s a real gentleman, and I know who taught him that.”

  “I …” That was as far as I got—I guess I ran out of words. Miss Dyson held the screen door open, and Tory-boy wheeled me right inside. I swear our van was moving before Miss Dyson even got a chance to sit herself down.

  n the fall, darkness drops down quick. But I couldn’t really tell what time it was by the light—Miss Dyson had her parlor fixed so that it was always in some kind of soft shadow.

  I probably pay more attention to couches and chairs and such because I don’t know what it would be like to sit in them. Hers were old-style: built of a heavy, dark wood; the cushions covered with a kind of a velvety material as dark as dried blood.

  Every other time I’d been there, Miss Dyson would always seat herself on the divan, so there could be a long, low table between us. For putting cups and saucers on without making it awkward for me. But this time, she put herself in a high-backed straight chair near the corner. When she beckoned with her hand, I rolled my chair over to her. Fussing a little to myself about the wheels making marks on her carpet, but I could see she wasn’t paying attention. Or didn’t care about such things.

  “You just wait here a minute,” she told me.

  I don’t know how long she was gone. I was—I don’t know how to say it, exactly—maybe feeling the parlor. My eyes closed, and I was breathing through my nose.…

  “You take honey?”

  I had to come back from wherever I’d gone to, and I wasn’t sure I heard her last word right, so I just nodded.

  “Lemon?”

  “Yes, I do,” I answered, feeling better now that I was back all the way.

  “Not sugar, though?”

  “With that honey? No, ma’am.”

  “I thought I told you—”

  “I didn’t mean it like it came out,” I told her. “I was just trying to be … emphatic.”

  “Clear.”

  “Clear,” I agreed.

  e sipped our tea, polite as a church social. Then she put her cup and saucer down on the little table and leaned toward me, dropping her voice just a little. Miss Dyson never spoke loudly, but this was … not so much quieter as it was softer.

  “I know what you do, Esau,” she half-whispered. It didn’t feel like an accusation. More like it was something I should be proud of.

  I wouldn’t disrespect her by making a joke. And I couldn’t well deny what hadn’t been said. So I just put down my own cup and saucer and folded my hands, like I was expecting her to go on.

  “I don’t judge you for it,” she said. “I’ve been judged, and I know how that kind of meanness feels when you’re on the receiving end of it.”

  “Miss Dyson, I would never—”

  “Lord, did you think I was talking about you when I said that, Esau?”

  “Well … no, I suppose you wouldn’t do that. But I just wanted to make certain you knew—”

  “Esau Till, you can stop all that. Right this minute. It was me telling you, not the other way around.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant. Not exactly. So I was grateful when she broke the silence. “Does cigarette smoke bother you?”

  “Not at all,” I lied, but it felt right to do it then.

  She jumped up and ran off. Back almost before I knew it. But she wasn’t in her chair; she was on her knees, next to me.

  “It’s easier this way,” she said, handing me a lighter.

  I knew what to do with that—just part of good manners. I fired up the lighter, and held the flame until she got her cigarette going. Then I watched as she put the ashtray on the table with the cups and saucers.

  I couldn’t help looking down her dress when she did that. When I realized what that would make me look like, I straightened up quick.

  She took a short little puff on her cigarette. Ladylike, I guess it was. Then she said, “I was close to twelve. I remember because my twelfth birthday was coming, and I was hoping for … Well, it doesn’t matter. That’s how old I was when a terrible thing happened to me.”

  “What was—?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she shushed me. “Not anymore, it doesn’t. By the ninth grade, people were talking about me. Behind their hands, but I could see it in their eyes. And the boys, they made it impossible for me to stay here.”

  “You went away?”

  “For a time I did, yes. But I came back. Maybe ten years later it was, but it might as well have been the day I left. Only, by then, I knew how to turn their meanness into money.”

  I didn’t say anything. Just watched her puff on her cigarette a couple more times.

  “Some of us, we get marked,” Miss Dyson said. “Me, not even twelve. And you, from the moment you were born. But those kind of marks aren’t any stupid 666 brand, like some wish they were. What they really are is trail markers. And we, all of us with those kind of marks, we’re bound to follow them.”

  “You didn’t have to come home.”

  “Home?” She kind of laughed. “No, Esau. I didn’t have to come back here. Any more than you didn’t have to stay.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her about Tory-boy, but then I snapped it shut when it came to me that she knew all about that. Wasn’t I the one who’d brought him to her in the first place?

  “Are you familiar with what they call the Bernoulli effect?” I asked her instead.

  “No. No, I surely never heard of anything like that. Why do you ask?”

  “If you force smoke through a pipe, the more narrow the pipe, the faster the smoke will move. Think of it as if you blew your cigarette smoke through a soda straw.”

  “Ah! So, if you only have one road to go down, a real narrow one …”

  “You’ll move faster than the others. Be ahead of the field by the first lap. That’s a scientific truth. And that’s how I always saw you, myself.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you, Esau. Not one damn thing.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t see how she could say such things to a man in a wheelchair.

  “If you’ll trust me, I can give you something,” she said, so soft I could feel the words brush against my cheek. “I can give you something you thought you could never have.”

  “What could you—?”

  “Do you trust me, Esau?”

  Her eyes only left me but one answer. “Yes” is all I said.

  efore Tory-boy came back, Miss Dyson had healed me. I don’t mean like a doc
tor. Or a preacher, either. Only a person marked like we both were could ever really do what she’d done, and then only for another of our own kind.

  For the first time, I was glad I wasn’t really paralyzed below the waist. I would have traded every pain I’d ever felt in my whole life for what Miss Dyson showed me I could do.

  When she was done—when I was done, I guess I mean—she just stood up and walked off.

  She came back quick enough. All she’d done was put some retouching on her face.

  Something, something powerful, told me that if I had offered her money then, I would have lost something more than precious. Something I could never replace.

  When she said, “Now, you have to promise to do something for me,” I thought maybe she wanted somebody to die. But I didn’t really know her, not then.

  “Now—and from this moment on—you have to call me by my name,” she said. “Jayne. That’s my name, Esau. Jayne.”

  went to see her any number of times after that. Tory-boy would drive me over, and come back whenever I told him to. Once I got him a cell phone, I didn’t even have to say a word. One ring followed by a hang-up, Tory-boy would know it was me.

  At first, there wasn’t but one way we could … make love. I feel I have a right to call it that, because I know what was in my own heart. I had to lie on my back, and Jayne would kind of straddle me.

  Later, she showed me some other things. They all worked, too. I mean, I worked. No, that’s wrong. Nothing we ever did was work. What I’m trying to say is that parts of me worked.

  It was as if everything had come full circle. I remembered how proud Tory-boy had been when he was telling me he could cast spells himself. How he could turn a girl into a lady, by treating her like one. But that spell only worked if she believed she was a lady herself.

  I realized, lying there, my arms around Jayne as I kept myself inside her, that she must have believed what she told me, too, that first time. She wasn’t casting any spell; she knew.