That's How I Roll: A Novel Read online

  And something you’d maybe never see again.

  I say it just happened because it started the way it always did. Rory-Anne came in real late one night. The Beast was waiting. He said he could smell it on her, what she’d been doing. Rory-Anne was too messed up to notice his eyes had already turned red.

  He made us watch. I was nearly fifteen then; Tory—the child she’d named after herself—he was turning seven. Old enough for school, but nobody ever thought of sending him. He’d watched the Beast hurt Rory-Anne plenty of times, just as I had. He didn’t understand that this time was going to be different. At first, neither did I.

  The Beast had done all kinds of things to Rory-Anne before. We were used to it; she was used to it. He always called it “God’s punishment for whores.” First he’d use his belt on her, and then …

  That night, when he was finished with the belt, he made her get on her knees. I thought I knew what was coming next—I’d seen that particular punishment a lot of times, even more since Tory-boy had been born.

  By then, I knew why the Beast wanted Rory-Anne to get pregnant again. He wanted a baby girl.

  The Beast unzipped his pants, but when he pulled his thing out, it just hung there, limp.

  Rory-Anne burst out laughing at him. She called him all kinds of dirty stuff. I thought he’d beat her some more for that, but he just zipped up his pants and walked away. I figured he was headed for one of the bottles he always kept in his room.

  When he walked back in, Rory-Anne was sitting on the couch. But she wasn’t crying, she was having a good time. Kept calling the Beast all kinds of foul names, pointing at him, laughing like a crazy person.

  “Good thing you can’t get that little thing up no more, old man. Nigger cock tastes a lot better than yours, anyway.”

  She didn’t stop talking that kind of stuff until she saw the pistol in his hand.

  The Beast walked up real close to her and shot her in the face. Pieces of her head flew off behind her.

  He looked at what was left of Rory-Anne’s face like he expected her to say something. Seconds passed. Then he put down the pistol, spun around, and walked over to the kitchen. He came back with the butcher knife in his hand.

  When he started to pull Rory-Anne’s body by the hair, I knew what he was going to do. And, sure enough, he told me what to tell the cops if they ever showed up.

  “I don’t expect no cops,” he told me. “That whore must’ve run off with someone. Not the first time she did that. But if they do show up …”

  The Beast told me that if I didn’t say what I was supposed to, say it exactly the way I was supposed to, the Law would carry him off.

  “Then you wouldn’t have nobody to take care of you and that little dummy,” he said. When he saw that wasn’t much of a threat, he told me if they put him in prison the Welfare would come and take me and Tory-boy away.

  That didn’t scare me, either. But the Beast knew me better than I thought. When he said the Welfare wouldn’t just take me and Tory-boy away from the house, they’d take Tory-boy away from me, those words stabbed me right in my heart.

  “They take me down for this and he’s gonna be put in one of those schools for retards, you understand that? You know what those places are like? You seen those things I always done to that whore for punishment? That’s what they’ll do to him. They’ll fuck him in his ass until he can’t walk. Every day. Every night. But you won’t get to see that for yourself. No, they’ll put you in a place for crips. You’ll never see that soft-in-the-head little freak again.”

  aybe the Beast had never read a book, but he knew a lot. He was always sly—crafty in his ways.

  It wasn’t just that he knew telling me what was going to happen to Tory-boy would fill me with terror; he also knew the cops wouldn’t believe any story he could make up. He knew most people believed he’d killed Rory-Anne’s mother.

  And why he’d done that, too.

  Where we lived wasn’t like what you see on TV—nobody was going to be digging up the ground looking for her body. But the Beast knew the cops wouldn’t hesitate to take him away if he didn’t have time to make Rory-Anne disappear. And if he had a pistol in his hand when they showed, they’d cut him down where he stood.

  The Beast was a very crafty man. He knew I’d expect the Law to take me and Tory-boy away—with Rory-Anne dead, they’d have no choice. But he also knew the cops would believe anything I told them.

  Everyone seemed to feel sorry for me, but kind of proud of me at the same time. They’d say what a shame it was, that spine thing, me being such a genius and all. After I won the State Science Fair, they said things like that even more.

  Why would a boy like me tell a lie?

  As the Beast talked, I felt the balance-power grow inside me. It became so powerful that it took over my entire spirit. I could feel it telling me that, for the first time in my life, I could put my own hand on the scales.

  That feeling, it transformed me. Even my voice came out different. When I spoke to the Beast, he listened real close. It was like I was the one in charge, and he wanted to be sure he did everything I told him correctly.

  What I told him was to give me his pistol, so I could put Rory-Anne’s prints on it, too.

  He looked at me strange when I said that, but he didn’t argue. When I told him that nobody would believe any story about Rory-Anne running off, not with what they already suspected about his wife, he listened like missing a single word could cost him his life.

  I told him how hard the ground would be that time of year; how it was already near four in the morning—it would be getting light too soon. If he tried to dig deep enough to bury Rory-Anne all by himself, he’d probably be caught in the act.

  “The only way out for you is self-defense,” I told him. “Now, you listen. I’m going to tell you what happened here, and I need you to memorize it.”

  He nodded his head when I spoke. If he’d been a dog, it would have signaled that he was submitting.

  “That pistol there?” I told him. “That was Rory-Anne’s. Not yours—hers. Understand? She always carried it around. I saw her put it in her purse myself, plenty of times.

  “Now, what happened was, she just walked in the door, sat down on the floor, pulled out that pistol, and said she was going to kill herself.

  “Rory-Anne said things like that before, but this time she wasn’t playing. We both saw her pull back the hammer and hold it right to her head. That’s when you jumped up and snatched it away from her.

  “Next, you went into the bathroom to find some of her pills. I kept trying to calm her down, but she wouldn’t listen to anything I said.

  “Then she kind of staggered up on her feet. Before you could stop her, she ran into the kitchen, grabbed that butcher knife, and charged right at me, screaming and slashing like in that old Psycho movie.

  “You didn’t have any choice—if you hadn’t shot her, she would have hacked me to death.

  “There’s plenty of proof of that. Rory-Anne always hated me. She hurt me before—just look at the back of my hand; they’ve got hospital records on that—but she never actually tried to kill me before.

  “Maybe it was the drugs or the liquor—you know the cops are going to find plenty of both in her body when they cut her open.”

  I could see the Beast nodding to himself, taking it all in. Tory-boy was wailing. When I whispered to the Beast that I’d take care of the baby, get him to say the right things, too, he believed me.

  Why shouldn’t he? He knew Tory-boy would do anything I told him to do.

  That was the first time the Beast ever acknowledged me. “You’re a good son, Esau. And you always did have the brains in the family.”

  With that, he acknowledged something else: this time, I was driving the car. He was just a passenger.

  I told him to go brush his teeth, get that alcohol smell off, clean himself up. We still had plenty of time. There was no phone in the house, and the Beast would have to walk up the hill to get Mrs.
Slater to call the police. This time of night, he’d be waking her up. Wouldn’t do if he showed up looking like he was drunk, would it?

  He went right off to do like I told him. But somebody must’ve heard the shot. It had to have been Mrs. Slater, although nobody ever said. The Beast was still in the bathroom when the Law showed.

  he Beast heard them pull up. He ran right out of the bathroom, his face still all soapy. He was just in time to hear me tell the cops how he made Rory-Anne get on her knees, then shot her like he was putting down a sick dog.

  I had Tory-boy on my lap, holding him while I talked to the police. He was sobbing, and I was rubbing his chest to make him stop, the way I always did. None of the cops asked him any questions.

  All the time they were cuffing him up, the Beast kept staring at me. He never said a word, but I could feel his hate. A white-hot arrow lanced out of each eye, seeking my soul.

  I used my balance on those arrows. I could feel it working that time, just as I had felt his hate so many times before. But I was losing strength. Somehow, I knew my only chance was to get him inside the rings. And, sure enough, the very instant I parted those rings the Beast charged on through—he wanted to get at me so bad nothing else mattered.

  That’s when he learned that even his evil power wouldn’t work from inside my balance rings. Every new blast he threw only made the blades spin faster and faster, stabilizing the center post. I was getting stronger, but the Beast kept on coming—it was all he knew.

  A black-widow spider can kill a man. But if the man has that spider inside a glass jar, all the spider can do is wait—it’s not his choice to make, not anymore.

  t first, the DA was real worried. In fact, he was terrified. People around here don’t pay much attention to what goes on in the court. They’re a lot more interested in close-to-home gossip, like whether it’s true about the pastor’s wife and that guy they send out when your satellite dish needs an adjustment. But get yourself known for losing a big trial—especially one people really wanted you to win—and they will remember that.

  “No offense, son, but your sister did have herself quite a reputation, if you know what I mean.”

  I knew what he meant, all right. But it wasn’t Rory-Anne’s reputation that made the DA’s hands tremble and his voice go thin; it was the Beast’s.

  The DA was standing between two men on a dueling ground. He knew if he offered a nice enough deal—say, two, three years in prison—the Beast would not only snatch at it, he’d be beholden to him as well. But then the town would have a new thing to gossip about.

  And not the usual petty stuff—rumors of corruption would be flying about. Worse yet, everyone wanted the Beast gone, and they expected the DA to handle that business for them.

  There was no real possibility of compromise. The DA was an expert in such things, but no matter how he tested those waters, they came up foul. So he not only had to charge the Beast with murder, he had to make it stick.

  Sure, he was a politician, and he didn’t want to chance losing an election. But this was worse. A whole lot worse. When you dealt with the Beast on any matter, win-or-lose always came down to live-or-die. Either he’d owe you a debt, or you’d owe him a death.

  If the DA lost any murder trial, that would cost him some prestige. But if the Beast walked out of the courtroom without shackles on his wrists, the DA knew it was only a matter of time before dirt would be shoveled over his own coffin.

  t’s not a question of believing you, Esau. I know you wouldn’t lie. But juries are funny—you just never know how they’re going to act.”

  “But—”

  “Let me finish, now, son. It’s not as cut-and-dried as you seem to think. See, we don’t really have that ‘forensics’ stuff juries expect to see today. All that damn TV, it’s polluted their minds. Sure, we have the pistol, we have the bullet, and we can prove that your father …”

  I hadn’t said anything, but he must have felt some of the rage coming off me when he used that word. The Beast wasn’t my father. He wasn’t anybody’s father.

  “… that the defendant”—he switched words so smoothly that I knew he must have had a lot of practice—“shot the … victim. But there was that butcher knife out in plain view, and everyone in the house had left some prints on it. Even you.

  “So what it comes down to is one person’s word against another’s. And that’s never a choice you want to leave up to a jury.”

  “There isn’t a person in this town that wouldn’t take my word over his,” I told him.

  “I’m not saying that isn’t true. But Lord knows your sister had good reason to hate that man. You, too, truth be told. And everybody in this town knows that, too.”

  When a silver-tongued man says something blunt, you’d best listen. The DA was warning me what was going to come out at the trial—what would be all the motivation I would ever have needed to hate the Beast. Even enough to lie under oath.

  I visualized a horde of savage termites attacking our house, boring their way in so deep that the wood was going to collapse in on itself.

  I reached desperately for my balance like a man grabbing for a handhold while tumbling down a quarry wall. I clawed my hands until they caught. Then I hauled myself up, hand over hand. A man doesn’t need legs for that.

  That’s when I started talking. And I didn’t stop until I’d blocked those termites with my sworn promise that the DA would never lose that trial.

  I promised him that by the time they held that trial Tory-boy would be a witness, too. Nobody would doubt anything a child like Tory-boy said—they’d know he couldn’t make up a lie if he wanted to.

  I even told the DA he could test it for himself. Give me a couple of months to work with my baby brother. Then he could ask Tory-boy anything he wanted. If he didn’t like the answers, he could make whatever deal with the Beast he wanted to.

  The DA, he was an important man. Not just a lawyer, the prosecutor over the whole county. But when I looked into his eyes, I saw just what I expected to see.

  I think maybe that was the first time I realized the full truth about how having your place in the world was the only thing that could keep you safe.

  For as long as people needed you, you were safe from them.

  For that long, and no longer.

  he DA had Tory-boy tested. They let me be there while they did it—they knew they couldn’t leave him in a room with a bunch of strangers and expect much more out of him than throwing a fit. And even at his age, nobody wanted to be around Tory-boy when he went off.

  The social workers and the psychologists wrote reports. They all said the same thing. They sometimes used different terms, but “developmentally delayed” was their clear favorite.

  That just means slow, not stupid. No reason in the world why Tory-boy couldn’t do the same things other children did, he’d just always be a little behind his years, and he’d never catch up.

  Although he tested out to have a mental age of about five, Tory-boy was almost nine at the time. So first they had to hold this little trial—I think they called it a “hearing” because there was no jury there—to see if he’d be allowed to testify at all.

  The judge was real clear about that—it wasn’t the age of the witness that mattered; it was whether he knew the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie. And whether he knew it was wrong to tell a lie.

  Some children were so young that, no matter how smart they might turn out to be later in life, they couldn’t do those things. A two-year-old, you wouldn’t expect he could do that.

  But a five-year-old, he could. So, even if Tory-boy was behind other kids his own age, he might be allowed to testify. That’s what we were all there to find out.

  The Beast’s lawyers only had a couple of hours to break Tory-boy. They’d’ve had a better chance of digging a mine shaft with their bare hands.

  Two hours, when I’d had every other hour of his life to teach him what he needed to know. Passing school tests wasn’t my conce
rn; I just had to teach my little brother how to answer the kind of questions that I knew were going to be asked. The DA gave me some transcripts to study first, so it was even easier.

  It wasn’t about memorizing. I had Tory-boy’s total, absolute trust. If I told him he had seen something happen, he had seen something happen.

  He looked so magnificent in court, sitting up straight, handsome and proud. What he was proud of was that he knew the answers I’d taught him—I was the only person in the world he’d ever wanted to please.

  “A lie is when you say something that isn’t true,” he spoke right up, clear and confident.

  One of the Beast’s lawyers—the older one—tried to trip up Tory-boy by asking a long, complicated question. But Tory-boy was ready for him. He remembered what I’d taught him to say, and he’d die before any old man in a suit could make him say different.

  “Well, then,” the Beast’s lawyer asked, “how do you know when something isn’t true?”

  “A truth is what is real. If something really happened, and you say what really happened, you’re telling the truth.”

  The lawyer kept trying, but you could see Tory-boy had taken all the heart out of him. Finally, the judge stepped in and took over.

  “Do you know the difference between a truth and a lie, son?” he asked Tory-boy.

  “A truth is right. A lie is wrong.”

  “What happens if you tell a lie?”

  “Telling a lie is a sin,” Tory-boy recited, letter-perfect. “If you tell lies, you burn in Hell.”

  “Seems clear enough to me, counsel,” the judge said to the Beast’s lawyer. “There’s plenty twice his age who don’t know as much as this boy does.”

  “But, Your Honor—”

  “Enough!” the judge snapped at him. “You’re asking the same questions over and over. We are finished with this witness.” I took that as a signal to roll over to where Tory-boy had been sitting and pick him up. I was almost eighteen then, but Tory-boy was damn near my size. If it wasn’t for all those years rolling myself around, all those exercises I did with Tory-boy, I doubt I could have carried him away like I did.