That’s How I Roll: A Novel (22 page)

“Nice-looking woman like she is,” they’d say, “she doesn’t have a man, you know what that means.”

In one way, Jayne Dyson and Miss Webb were like sisters. They both showed proud. Never looked away, never let on they’d even heard the whispers. Always kept their backs straight and their heads high.

Jayne Dyson and Miss Webb, they wrapped themselves in their own self-respect, and no amount of nasty little whispering was ever going to crack those stone walls they put up.

Maybe that’s how they found their balance, just as I had.

I really and truly cared for Jayne Dyson. Respected her, too. And even before I was grown, I had loved different women for different reasons—like Mrs. Slater, for helping me raise Tory-boy.

But for myself, for me as a man, Miss Webb was the only woman I ever loved.

eople are always talking about how you have to make your own way in this world. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Make it on your own.

They’ll look at the TV hanging in a corner of some bar when it’s showing a black kid being handcuffed. They’ll tell each other that it’s niggers on Welfare that are ruining this country.

But the checks
they
get, the ones they drink up every month, those get called County Aid, or Disability, or Unemployment … anything but Welfare.

Grocery stores would go broke if they wouldn’t take food stamps in exchange for cigarettes or beer.

People blame their lives on anyone but themselves. Where we
live, if you want something better in life, you have to take some risks. Maybe that’s why the Klan never got any traction around here. People might sympathize, they might even use the same words, but they weren’t going to spend their own money to support it.

For me, it wasn’t a real choice. I needed something better if I was going to keep Tory-boy safe. We were both collecting Disability. For-real Disability, not the “I hurt my back at work” kind.

Ours was going to keep coming forever. It wasn’t ever going to stop, no more than I was likely to start running marathons or Tory-boy to get a college scholarship.

Those Disability checks wouldn’t be going away, but I was. And without me to guide things, no matter how much money I could put aside, it would never be enough to keep Tory-boy safe.

iss Webb would always be on me to use my mind. I could go to college, she’d tell me. And it wouldn’t cost me a cent. Just to make her feel better, I took this test she had sent away for. But when she got back the results, that only made her more determined.

So, one day when there was only the two of us in the library, I asked her if I might speak with her.

She looked at me kind of funny. I guess it did sound strange—I always spoke with her. But she got up from behind her desk and walked over to a far corner. Then she took down a big book from a high shelf—one I’d never be able to reach on my own—and laid it open on the table. If anyone walked in, it would look like the most natural thing in the world for us to be talking about that book.

I took that for understanding, so I asked her to please sit down. Sit next to me.

I told her then. I told her everything. I had to do that; it was only right. I just couldn’t bear to keep on disappointing her, and the only way to tell her why I would do a thing like that was to tell her the truth.

My truth was a long list of Nevers.

Never leave this place; never go to college; never accomplish anything the world would recognize.

And the worst of them all: never become a man worthy of her respect.

I told her why this had to be. I even told her what I’d been doing to make sure Tory-boy would always be safe.

I stripped it right down to the bone, so there was no misunderstanding: I’d have to do wrong to make things right. I’d been doing wrong, and I was going to have to do more. A lot more. A lot worse, too.

I don’t know what I expected, but Miss Webb breaking into tears wasn’t on that list. I reached for the fresh-clean handkerchief I always carry with me, but she already had her own out.

She stopped crying after a little bit. Dried her tears off her cheeks … but they stayed in her eyes.

“I understand, Esau.”

“I know I shouldn’t have said anything to you. I know I don’t have that right. But …”

“Then why did you?”

“Two reasons,” I told her. “One is that I’m forever indebted to you. I know I don’t come around as much as I once did, and I couldn’t have you thinking I didn’t want to come. With this Internet we have now, I can do so much research.…”

My voice trailed off like a dying man’s breath.

Miss Webb looked at me, and she wouldn’t drop her eyes. Blue eyes, she had. But not the blue-jean eyes some around here have—a lighter shade. I wouldn’t know the name for that color, or even if it had one. “You said two reasons,” she reminded me.

“I … I don’t feel right about the other one.”

“Why, Esau? After what you just told me, what could there be left?”

“Telling you that would be the same as telling you what it was. The reason, I mean.”

“And you don’t have that reason anymore?”

“Oh, no. That’s mine, and that’s forever. I’ll have it until the
day I die. Even after, maybe. What I’m saying is just what I said before. I’ve got a reason, but I don’t have any right to it.”

“Esau, you’re a grown man now, not a child.”

“I’m half a grown man.”

“Not to me, you’re not. You’re more man than anyone I ever knew. A man takes responsibility. Takes it and keeps true to it. No matter what it might cost him.”

That’s when I learned Miss Webb’s first name.

Evangeline.

I learned that right after those eyes of hers finally made me admit that I loved her.

hen you’re known to be a criminal, crime comes looking for you. One day, Tory-boy came into the house. All he said was that Sammy Blue was waiting outside the gate. Sammy didn’t want to buy anything; he just wanted to talk to me about something.

Sammy Blue knew I sold drugs, but that was all he knew. He didn’t have a clue about the real work I did, or who I did it for. There was no way for him to have known I was just about ready to get out of the drug business. I’d only sold the drugs when I had no other way to get the money I needed for my plan. But, now that I did, drug dealing was too much risk for too little gain.

But I knew what Sammy Blue did for his money—there weren’t too many around here that didn’t. So, before I went outside, I put my pistol under the blanket I always kept over my lap.

Tory-boy saw me do that. He knew what it meant. When he came with me to the gate, he wasn’t just pushing my wheelchair. The dogs were quiet, but they glared at Sammy Blue hard enough to burn holes through him.

I met Sammy Blue at the gate. I ignored the hand he offered me to shake. I wasn’t inviting him to pass through, and he wasn’t crazy enough to push the gate open without permission. There were a lot of rumors about what would happen to anyone who put
their hands on that heavy wrought iron without getting the okay from me first. Every one of them true.

“Esau, I drove over here—”

“The dogs aren’t for sale,” I cut him off. “And they’re not going in one of your matches, either.”

“You haven’t heard my offer,” he said, smiling like the two-faced, forked-tongue snake that he was.

“You don’t have any offer to make me. Those are Tory-boy’s dogs. He doesn’t want them sold. He doesn’t want them hurt. He doesn’t want to breed them to anything of yours. What my brother wants is for his dogs to stay here. With him.”

“Come on, Esau. You’re the one in charge here. What’s it matter what that—?”

I couldn’t let him finish that sentence. Whatever Sammy Blue had intended on saying died in his throat when he heard the sound of the hammer being pulled back. Maybe I didn’t have legs that worked, but my arms and hands are potent weapons. They got built up from all the years of them doing the work they had to do—before Tory-boy came along, and even more later, from taking care of him. Then it was those exercises, all those weights Tory-boy did with me every day. That’s how I taught him to count, and now it was a habit. One he cherished.

I held that Colt Python .357 in my left hand. It stayed as cold and steady as the steel it was made from.

“Don’t say another word,” I told Sammy Blue. “And don’t come back. I so much as see you around here, you’re dead where you stand.”

Later, I explained to Tory-boy that Sammy Blue hadn’t followed the rules about the drugs we sold, so I had run him off.

Tory-boy knew I could do that—he’d seen it for himself enough times, even if he couldn’t understand how I did it—so I didn’t have to explain things any deeper than I had.

If I’d’ve told my baby brother what Sammy Blue had wanted to do with his dogs, Tory-boy would’ve walked through the gate, pulled Sammy Blue apart, and tossed the pieces back over the fence. That way, we wouldn’t have to bother with burying him.

I couldn’t have allowed that. Sammy Blue had too many cop friends—he couldn’t have stayed in business otherwise. Like I said, the dogfighting was no secret. Sammy Blue’s operation generated cash that went straight to the Law—it was such small potatoes that neither of the two mobs that ran things around here was tapping it for a cut.

n fact, that was the biggest problem with the cops around this way—they weren’t as picky as the gang bosses. “Small-time greedy” is how we say it.

One day, the light started flashing in the house. Tory-boy went outside to check for money in the mailbox. But when he came back, I could see he was troubled.

“There’s a man out there, Esau. A man in a suit.”

“Did he say anything?” I knew Tory-boy could repeat things word for word, provided they weren’t too long, or hadn’t been said too long ago.

“He said: ‘Would you ask Mr. Till if I could have a few minutes of his time?’ ”

I knew when Tory-boy spoke like that, slow and careful, each word separate, he was as accurate as any tape recorder.

It was good that it had been such a nice warm day. Tory-boy had the dogs trained to let someone through the gate if he told them to. That way I could use the side yard for any conversations I might want to have.

But there wasn’t any way the dogs would let a stranger into our house. It was their house, too. That’s where they slept. If a leaf fell off a tree in the night, they’d all jump up. No barking, but I could tell by their cocked ears and the fur on their backs that they were ready.