That's How I Roll: A Novel Read online

  When I say “come back,” I don’t mean coming back to life. That doesn’t happen. What comes back are spirits. You can’t see them or touch them, but you know they’re still around.

  And nobody wants their attention.

  Outsiders could never understand this, but if I died while still keeping certain names from coming out of my mouth, those I protected by doing so would owe me a debt—a debt of honor. If they didn’t do what they had promised, they could never be sure I wouldn’t come right out of my grave. If there’s a God, even He’d know I’d had good reason.

  ou’ve come this far, why not go the rest of the way? Make your own judgments of me. I know you won’t all decide the same. And I truly don’t care.

  But your God … He just might.

  rom the beginning, anyone could take just one look at me and know I was born bad.

  Spina bifida. You get born with it. That’s why they call it “congenital,” because it comes right along with your body as it leaves the womb. That whole network of nerves which branch out from the end of your spine never gets fully developed.

  I never got told those words. Doctors don’t talk to children around here; they only speak to parents. To the Beast, it was just “that spine thing.”

  It’s a sorry world when a child has to look up his own disease in a book. I read everything I could find about it. When I came across speculation that there might be a genetic component involved, I let my eyes slide over those words.

  I even learned there’s ways you can help prevent it—the woman who’s carrying the fetus can, I mean. Folic acid is best. You can make sure you have it in your diet, or even buy pills in one of those vitamin stores.

  Not much brings a smile to my face, but the thought of Rory-Anne changing her diet so she could make healthier babies made me laugh inside.

  What she should’ve done was have abortions. Probably would have, too. But she wasn’t allowed—the Beast wasn’t going to lose out on any of the money the government paid Rory-Anne to look after us.

  ver since I can remember, I’ve been able to go away. Not walk away. And I sure couldn’t run. I mean, go away in my head. I saw things happen to Rory-Anne. I saw things happen to me. But it was all like watching some hideous horror movie—it terrified me, but I didn’t actually feel any of it.

  It’s not that I can’t feel pain. All that spinal thing did was numb me up pretty good downstairs. But the Beast knew he could hurt me, and that was real important to him.

  He’d punch me in my chest, backhand me across the mouth, stuff like that. But even though I could see the blood and the marks later on, I never felt anything while he was doing it to me. It was like I was floating above, watching it happen.

  It wasn’t only the Beast. One time, Rory-Anne told me she was going to teach me to mind her. I didn’t know what she meant, but I could hear the evilness in her voice.

  I watched her drag my chair over to the stove and hold my hand over the flame. It must have hurt—the skin on the back of my hand came right off—but I didn’t feel that, either.

  When she saw what my hand looked like, Rory-Anne got scared. She picked me out of my chair and threw me in her car. All the way to the hospital, she warned me what she’d do to me if I told. I was to say I accidentally fell against the stove when my wheelchair skidded, and I couldn’t move away from the fire.

  So that was the story I told. At the hospital, they made such a big fuss over me that I wished I could stay there forever. And I could see they didn’t want to turn me loose, either. Not because of the way they looked at me, because of the way they looked at Rory-Anne.

  All that happened before Tory-boy came.

  Tory-boy came and changed the world. My world, I mean.

  ater, I learned how my life might have turned out different. When I was first born, Rory-Anne wouldn’t claim me. The way I understand it, when she was told about the spine thing and all the special care I’d need, she just walked right out of the hospital, leaving me there.

  It took a while for the government people to locate Rory-Anne, so the people at the hospital had to name me themselves. By the time they carried me to where Rory-Anne lived with the Beast, my birth certificate read “Esau.”

  Naturally, Rory-Anne had never told them who my father was. They had to put something down on the birth certificate, so they used Rory-Anne’s last name.

  Branding me with the mark of the Beast.

  Some folks thought the Beast was doing a charitable thing, keeping me home after Rory-Anne had tried to abandon me. But most knew better than that. They knew he’d found out that a baby born as crippled as I was could fetch even more government money than a common Welfare child.

  Rory-Anne never got over hating me—never tired of telling me what an ugly, twisted thing I was. But Tory-boy was different. He was born so big and beautiful that the nurses said he looked like a little prince. They even took him in to show Rory-Anne, told her how lucky she was.

  So Rory-Anne not only claimed her second child; she even named him after herself.

  It wasn’t until a couple of years had passed that anyone knew Tory-boy was born as deeply cursed as me, only in a different way.

  o matter how bad things ever got after Tory-boy came, I always managed to keep things in balance. Not the perfect balance I learned later on, but close enough so that we could get by.

  “Getting by” is one of those sayings everybody uses. But those words mean different things to different people.

  For me, they meant I had to keep me and Tory-boy alive until I could find a way to get us both out.

  ory-boy never could understand complications. For him, having our own place, that was everything. He didn’t care what the furniture looked like, or if we had a big-screen TV or a microwave. Tory-boy never did covet things. But feelings, they were precious to him. And the most precious feeling of all was feeling safe.

  What Tory-boy prized above everything on earth was the knowledge that nobody was going to wake him up in the middle of the night and start hurting him.

  He probably thought that first little trailer of ours was magic. Oh, how he loved just hearing me say the words “our place.” I could see it on his face every time I said it. Like I was casting a spell to keep us safe.

  After a while, he started saying it himself.

  ory-boy wouldn’t ever be able to understand how all this had happened, how it started way before he was even born.

  I never burdened his mind with what I knew. Letting him believe in magic worked just as good. Better, really. There are things no child needs to know.

  Magic soothed Tory-boy, just as logic did for me. I don’t remember the exact day, but I remember the feeling when it hit me, like an invisible lightning bolt striking deep inside my body.

  From that moment on, I knew. It didn’t matter what road map you followed: magic and logic would take you to the same place.

  Place, that was the key. It’s not the place you live in that keeps you safe; what keeps you safe is your place in the world.

  nderstanding how something works isn’t enough. If you want to master it, be in complete control, first you have to take it apart … all the way down to its smallest component. Then you examine each separate piece to learn how they all fit together to form a functioning unit.

  Doesn’t matter if it’s a grandfather clock or a criminal organization, the same rule applies—once you truly understand how things work, you can make them stop working.

  I can do that. All of it. And I don’t say this lightly. I taught myself, and I tested myself. Over and over again.

  I had no other option. I knew I had to pass every test. So I stayed on every new one that popped up, like a barn owl who’d just spotted a mouse.

  Getting it right once isn’t worth a thing. That’s the difference between validity and reliability. If you add x and y, and get z one time, then z is a valid answer. But if every time you add x and y you get z, then z is a reliable answer.

  There’s no higher hono
r for a man than a reputation for reliability—folks saying that you can always be counted on. In my world, it didn’t matter whether folks said that about you in admiration or in fear. When they saw you coming, it didn’t matter if they ran over to greet you or ran to get out of your way.

  You aren’t what people call you; you are what you do. What people know you can do.

  So, when I say you need a place of your own to be safe, I’m not talking about some piece of ground. You can’t make something your own with a title or a deed. The only things that are really and truly yours are those that can’t be taken away. Being safe isn’t about keeping people out; it’s about bringing them in.

  Bringing them inside a place you control. If they act right, it doesn’t matter if they think they were invited in or just couldn’t be kept out. It’s only if they act wrong that they learn the truth.

  You can’t inherit a safe place; it’s something you have to make for yourself.

  That’s the way the world works—and not just around here, either. If people don’t need you for something, then they don’t need you at all.

  I’m not talking about some task you might be able to do, like washing their car or painting their house—that’s not needing you; that’s needing a job done.

  Needing you, that’s different. Reliability is the foundation to that. They not only have to need you, they have to count on you.

  If people don’t need you, there’s no such thing as a safe place.

  Plenty of people might have a use for you, but all that does is get you used up. It’s only while they need you that you’re in that safe place.

  Just because people can count on you doesn’t mean you can count on them. I once read that the definition of insanity is to act against your own self-interest. If that’s true, I guess the definition of stupidity is not to know your own self-interest.

  So you can never be sure of but one thing: sooner or later, you are going to get used up. Why people think they don’t need you anymore doesn’t matter. Any safe place you find, it’s temporary, not permanent. That’s why you always need the next place picked out in advance.

  Most folks wouldn’t understand how Death Row could be the safest place on earth. Not just for me—for Tory-boy, too. Every minute I stayed alive, he was safe.

  It was what came after I was gone that I fretted so much about. But once I had my plans, I tested them in my mind, over and over again. It wasn’t until I knew I could truly rely on them that I was finally at peace.

  hey always let Tory-boy visit me in the jail. The good folks around here, they might have lynched the Sheriff if he had barred that sweet, slow boy from visiting his crazy, crippled big brother.

  Besides, the Sheriff worked for the same people I did, and he wasn’t the kind of man who could live on his salary.

  “Esau, I’m scared,” Tory-boy whispered to me.

  “What have you got to be scared of? Didn’t I tell you our house was always going to be safe?”

  “I know. But … who’s going to tell me what to do now?”

  “Me. I am.”

  “But people say you’re going to …”

  “Die? You can say it out loud, Tory-boy. It’s not a spell-word. It won’t come true just because you say it. I promise.”

  Those last two words had been soothing him since he was a baby, and they had never failed to do so. “All right, Esau. Do you want me to—?”

  I held my finger to my lips. He knew that signal before he could talk.

  I didn’t like the way Tory-boy had been sneaking looks around the room where they let us have visits. I knew what was growing in his mind. Tory-boy can’t think more than an hour or so ahead, but inside of that hour, he could clamp down on any one thing. Clamp down and hold.

  I could see his mind: There’s no guard near us. They don’t even lock the door behind me. Only one man on the desk in front. I can hit him hard. Then I can wheel Esau right out and put him in the van. We can go back to our place.

  “I don’t want to get out of here.” I knew saying that wouldn’t frighten Tory-boy—he was used to me reading his thoughts.

  “But … but you always say there’s a way out, Esau. Like our secret mine, right? We can go home, and get right down there, like you said we might have to do someday—right, Esau?”

  “I’m not going to die,” I promised my big, powerful, life-cheated little brother. “Not until I decide to.”

  Tory-boy nodded. I’d never need to tell him that again. If I said it, Tory-boy knew it was true. And once Tory-boy had something from me, King Kong couldn’t make him turn loose of it.

  “I’m just going to another place,” I told him. “You can come and see me there, too.”

  “Don’t you want to come home, Esau? To our place?”

  “Not yet. My plan is going to take years to work. In the meantime, I need a quiet place to think, so I can make more plans.”

  I could see by his face that he didn’t understand. But I never get impatient. And I knew just what to do.

  “ ‘Our place.’ Say it with me again, Tory-boy.”

  “Our place,” we said together.

  “Our place is always safe, isn’t that true? Nobody ever hurt us in our place, isn’t that the truth?”

  “Yes, Esau.”

  “Well, I have to stay here for a while to keep it that way. It’s part of the spell. This is one hungry spell, Tory-boy; I’ve got to keep it fed. Remember how I taught you all about that?”

  Now I had him—he was back on familiar ground. But when I told him I wouldn’t be coming home for a long time, it was more pain than he could conceal.

  “Esau …”

  “Don’t let me catch you crying,” I said, real soft.

  Tory-boy fixed his gaze on me. One blink—dry eyes.

  “You know how we watch TV together?”

  “Sure!”

  “We’ll still do that. I’ll be right next to you, like always. You won’t see me, but I’ll be there. I’ll always be there, Tory-boy. If you talk to me, I’ll answer. Right inside your head.”

  He nodded. But I wasn’t sure he had it locked in as deep as I needed. So I said, “Didn’t I swear to you that the Beast would never come into our place? Into any place we had?”

  “Yes, Esau.”

  “It’s been way over twenty years, Tory-boy. Isn’t that long enough for you to believe me yet?”

  “I always believe you!”

  “Shhhh … I know you do. So you best believe me now when I tell you that I’ll always be there, even if you can’t reach out and touch me. I will never allow the Beast inside our place. Do you believe that?”

  “Yes, Esau.”

  “That’s my baby brother. My strong baby brother. That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear. Now, tell me: are you still getting your checks?”

  “Miz Avery brings me the money every month. The first Monday. She always does.”

  “Good. And what do you do with the money?”

  “I keep one hundred dollars, and I give her the rest,” he recited.

  “Good! And she buys food and puts it in our house?”

  “Yes, Esau. Every time.”

  The electricity and cable are paid right out of my account. Same for the propane. There’s no landline, but the bank is set up for the cell-phone deductions, too. Tory-boy and me, we each have one. I’ve got all the right numbers programmed into his phone, and all the speed-dial numbers programmed into his head.

  The Sheriff was letting me keep my cell phone in the jail, but I know they won’t do that once I get to the penitentiary. Not unless money works as well in there as some people say it does.

  But I’m playing it safe. I’ll get Tory-boy ready for when he won’t be able to call me anytime he wants. And there’s enough in my bank account to cover my baby brother’s bills for the rest of his life. Even if he lives to be a hundred, he’ll never have to leave our place. Our safe place.

  “You know who to take your car to?” I asked him. I deliberately said
“your car,” because, the quicker he got used to not using that van we had all fixed up for me, the better.

  “Delbert’s place. Every month.”

  “Perfect!”

  He smiled when I praised him. If you want to see “innocent” for real, all you need is to watch Tory-boy smile. He doesn’t have any badness in him. None. Tory-boy’s as close to goodness as any man born of woman could ever be.

  Delbert knew he had to keep our near-new Camaro factory-fresh. He got three hundred dollars a month for that, regular as clockwork, even if he didn’t do anything but put gas in it.

  “That car’s still under warranty, Delbert. And I know Tory-boy’s not going to be using up that kind of money on gas and oil changes,” I’d told him when he came to visit me. “You’re getting money. Regular. In cash. So there’ll be plenty of extra for you to keep on the side. Sooner or later, that car’s going to need work. I don’t care if it needs a new engine, or transmission, or … anything. You have to keep that car working. That’s the car Tory-boy knows. It has to last him his whole life, even if you have to replace every panel on the body and every bolt in the chassis. Fair deal?”

  We shook hands.

  There was no need for threats. I knew Delbert wouldn’t cheat Tory-boy.

  he man Tory-boy knew could never come inside our place had been a huge, powerful monster. I never used his name. I never called him “Dad,” or “Father,” or anything like that. It wasn’t until Mrs. Slater snuck me over to church a few times while he was doing ninety days in the same jail they first put me in that I learned his true name. After that, in my mind, he was always “the Beast.”

  I don’t know what names other people had for him, but I suspect they were similar. He was a man who’d stomp you or stab you just for getting in his way. The Beast really liked hurting people, and he didn’t miss many opportunities.

  Drunk, he was dangerous. Sober, he was lethal. If you crossed him, he’d kill you right where you stood … unless there were witnesses around.

  Then he’d wait. And he wouldn’t touch a drop until he settled up. When he was doing that kind of waiting, the Beast would go as quiet as a snake watching a rat.