That’s How I Roll: A Novel (3 page)

I’ve never seen a real shark, and now I know I never will. But ever since I read that there’s a special kind of shark that can actually go from the ocean right into a river, and back out again, that just fascinated me. A bull shark—that’s what they’re called—is also the only shark that has a memory. There’s no place to hide from something like that, unless you spend all your life on dry land.

he more I read about that special shark, the more I wanted to be one myself. More like a mirror image of one, I guess—I wanted to become the kind of creature nobody would be safe from on dry land.

Maybe I’m just making myself sound too important—I know I have to guard against that. But I think there’s some value in me writing this down. I don’t have any such pretensions about the account of my life, but I know there’s been times when a record of truth actually changed the world. Some of it, anyway.

Actually
changing
things, that’s a high bar to clear. No conspiracy theory could ever do it. No interpretation of the Good Book, no “expert analysis.” What’s required is scientific truth.

I know what you’re thinking just about now. You never heard of “scientific truth.” No reason why you would. I made up that term because nothing else can explain what I did and why I did it.

I won’t deny that some part of me wants to brag on myself. Maybe all the years I’ve spent in this cell caused me to finally grow an ego—or maybe just acknowledge something I had never allowed to interfere during all those years of doing my work. Any ego surfacing in me, that’s only
now
. Only after I was caught.

Unlike so many others in here, I wasn’t caught because of my own boasting. Nor from taking false pride in the things I was able to do. If you burn a building to the ground, you have to first make sure that you know every single person who’s in that building. And make
real
sure that you’re willing for them to burn, too.

I understand all kinds and types of people may be reading this.
So, whoever you are, don’t mistake my motives. I don’t owe you—
any
of you—one damn thing. I never asked you for anything in my life, and I’m not asking now.

Don’t waste your time trying to decode me. Save your “profiles.” Forget any “psychiatric autopsies.” You’ll never know me. What you’re reading isn’t some “story.” It’s
my
story, but it’s all fact. If you actually knew me, you’d know my story couldn’t be any other way.

What I’m writing down here will pay off the only debt I have left—my life story is an accountant’s ledger. It will pay anything on my debit side, and I’m not asking for a discount.

That’s what I want people to say about me after I’m gone: “Esau Till, that was a man who paid his debts. Every single one. And he always paid in full.”

o mainframe computer could have predicted the intersection of runaway trains that caused me to get caught. And whatever put me in a position where I could get caught,
that’s
a true mystery. No matter how much I think back on it, no matter how deep I go, probing with the long, sharp-tipped points of my mind, I still can’t reach that part.

The mind protects itself, so I understand I might be avoiding the truth. I understand that maybe it took nothing more than a single petty emotion to bring me down. Envy is a sin. Not because the Bible says so, but because it can make you do stupid things. When you’re born and raised like I was, you figure it out quick: if the only thing keeping you alive is your intelligence, acting stupid is committing suicide.

So, despite my circumstances, I never coveted what others had. And when I learned how I could change those circumstances, there was no need for me to envy such things, anyway: houses, cars, jewelry, things like that. Things, that’s one key. But understanding yourself means you have to be able to open a two-key lock.

You might be able to look back and see where you went wrong. But that’s a vision, not a tool. You can’t use what you see in your past to go back and change it. Sure, you can buy things you never had before, but you can’t change the “before.”

When I found that second key, I realized envy is no sin—it can even be a motivation. Wanting what others have, that’s not wrong. It can make you strive. Work harder. Reach higher.

You
can
change your own future.

You might want a Cadillac. So might another man. You each envy the man who has one. And you each have choices. You can work and save your money until you have enough for that Caddy. You can steal money other people worked for; it spends just as good as money honestly earned. Or you can just sit there, stewing in your own bile. That’s poisonous stuff, bile.

When two men each want a Cadillac, they can go their separate ways to get one. Usually, they keep going those separate ways for the rest of their lives.

It’s only when you and another want the same thing—not an assembly line thing, something there’s only one of—that
real
sin knocks on your door. If you open the door, greed and possessiveness come right on in and make themselves to home. Once they’re in, they never leave.

Two men want the same woman. This can bring blood, but that’s pretty rare. Most of the time, the man who’s not the woman’s choice gets over being rejected.

Sometimes, the woman doesn’t even know she’s wanted by that man. He might believe he wouldn’t be her choice, and keep his own feelings to himself. So there’s no rejection to resent … or regret.

But what about the man who
does
get what he wanted so bad?

He could treat his woman like a princess. Be grateful every day of his life that he got so lucky. Work three jobs to buy her nice things.

Or he could treat her like a slave. Not just making her work, but beating on her when she doesn’t work hard enough. Hard enough to support him when he quits his job or gets laid off.
Hard enough to make him forget he’s got twice the stomach and half the hair he used to have.

Some men, the only work they do is keep watch on their woman—go through the phone bills to see if there’s any strange numbers there; sit outside a tavern where she’s playing a few games of eight-ball with her friends to see who she leaves with; third-degree question her every time she comes back into the house.

And some are too lazy to do even that much. They just keep their woman in the house. Cut her off from her friends, even from her own family.

That sometimes works. But it’s got strong potential for backfire, too. If a man catches his woman in bed with another man, and he ends the affair with a pistol, the jury’s not going to treat him too harshly. They call it the “unwritten law.”

But that only works for men. If a woman’s husband staggers in one night, drunk and nasty, a whore’s lipstick smeared all over him, she might be able to shoot him and get the law to treat her lightly, too. But only if she remembers to say he was acting like he was about to kill her. Self-defense. Around here, that means she only gets to fire once. A shotgun works a lot better than a pistol for that.

Now that I’m taking stock, I have to face up to things like that. Admit that it might have been something as small and petty as my own possessiveness that brought all this down.

“Might have,” that’s speculation. But this, this is absolute truth: I was never going to let anyone or anything take my little brother from me. That was never going to happen, no matter what the cost, or who had to pay it.

’d seen these same bears plenty of times—I’d been seeing them one way or another ever since I started earning money. The bears were all after the same thing. They all worked the same way. I’d
seen them tear hives apart often enough. But this was the first time I’d ever
been
that hive-protected honey.

The kind of men I did work for, some of them would talk about how terrible the bears could make it for you if you stopped them from getting their paws on the honey. How much strength it took to hold them off. How that tested a man, deep inside.

Bragging? I don’t know. Maybe the men who never said a word about such things were the only ones who had really passed that test.

But I didn’t have to believe any of those stories to know how to behave when those bears came for me. All I had to do was act the way the storytellers claimed they had.

The whole thing was kind of stupid, because the one thing the bears
did
know was that I wasn’t going to talk. They never even
hoped
I would; it was as if something forced them to go through the motions anyway. Kind of like a dance, only with no music.

t was also a race with no winners.

The bears were racing to defuse one bomb, but all that time, I was busy building another. I even had a punch list, like the construction bosses always carried with them. I didn’t have a yellow pad, or an aluminum box to keep it in, but I had a better place to store things.

Step One came naturally. The locals always get the first chance—not only do they know the territory best, they’re already inside it before word reaches beyond their borders.

But this time, they knew they had to work fast, and that knowledge drove them something fierce. When you feel the Devil’s own breath on the back of your neck, you can’t even waste the energy it takes to turn around and see how close that hellhound is.

Even so, they couldn’t just crash through the brush without worrying about how much noise they made. Knowing the territory best also meant everyone in that territory knew
them
, too.

They would have liked to have the hive completely surrounded before they made their move, but they didn’t have that luxury. They had always been the top dogs here, but they knew that was due for a change.

And quick, too.

Bigger and more deadly bears were on their way; you could already feel the ground trembling under their weight. The locals knew they would never be able to drain the hive dry—the best they could hope for was to pull out anything that could hurt them before they were shoved out of the way.

hose bigger bears had no need to poke and probe and look for openings. They didn’t have to pussyfoot around—no matter what popped out when they squeezed, nothing in that hive posed a danger to any of them.