That’s How I Roll: A Novel (35 page)

“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 doctor. 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.

I must’ve gotten lost in that thought, because the next thing I remember was, Jayne started panting like she’d just run a race, making little gasping sounds. She bucked so hard I was afraid she’d come loose from me, but she put her face down and bit into the pillow I’d learned to slip under my head.

I don’t know how to write down the sound she made before she collapsed against my chest. But she recovered quick enough.

“Don’t stop, Esau. You’re not done yet. Come on!”

ou want to know what that was all about, don’t you?” she said, a few minutes later.

“Not if you—”

“Ssssh. That was an orgasm, Esau. That’s what you have every time when you … shoot off inside me. It’s not the same for a woman. We don’t feel such things in only one place; it takes over our whole bodies.”

“But you never—”

“Did that before? Of course not. I didn’t even know I could. Listen to me go on. I know what they’re supposed to feel like—I’ve faked them often enough.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Not every man wants the same thing, Esau. Most of them, all they care about is satisfying themselves. But there’s always a few that want to believe they’re such bulls in the bedroom that they can make any woman … come, that’s the word they use. Any woman, even a whore.”

“You’re no—”

She put two fingers over my lips. “Not to you, Esau. I know that. Just like you’re no … client to me. I knew you were a very special kind of man the first time I ever met you.”

“I—”

“Shush, now. I’m telling you things of value. It’s kind of a tradition around here for men to bring their sons to a … to an experienced woman for their first time. But they don’t really want their boys to learn anything, not from a woman like me. The only lesson they want taught is that there are women so low you can pay them to have sex with you.

“But you, you wanted Tory-boy to learn to be gentle. To kiss a girl sweet. None of these men wanted their boys to kiss a … woman like me at all. They didn’t want them to learn how to talk, how to caress, how to … well, really, how to do anything at all. What they wanted is to be able to take their boys down to wherever they hang out and brag that he’s a man now.”

“So, when a boy like that gets full-grown, when he gets married, what does he know about … doing it right?” I asked her.

“
Nothing
is what he knows. Why do you think they’re all brought up to marry virgins? How is someone going to spot your ignorance if they’re ignorant themselves?”

“That all seems so … Well, you said it yourself just now: ignorant.”

“That doesn’t matter. Not to the men. If their wives don’t know what to do, there’s always women like me.”

“But there are folks who love each other. I know there are.”

“Don’t confuse those things, Esau. Just because a man may be faithful, he’ll still feel it’s up to the woman to make him happy. And the only way a man is going to be happy is if he thinks he’s got the magic touch when it comes to his own woman.”

“How would he know that?”

“Remember what I said before? About faking an orgasm? Well, for that, a woman has to be good. Good and kind, both. Faking the orgasm, that’s just a skill. Something you can learn; something you can get good at doing. With most men, you don’t even have to be all that good to fool them, because they
want
to be fooled.

“But kindness, that isn’t faking it at all. There’s nothing in that for the woman, you might think. But you’d be wrong. Doing a kindness because you want to make your man feel more like a man, that’s love. True love.”

“So, before, you—”

“Just stop right now! You’re supposed to be such a genius, can’t you use your mind? If I was faking—before, I mean—if I was faking just to be kind, why in the world would I explain how that works? In this bed, that first time, the only virgin there was you. Understand? That was you, trusting me. Can’t you keep on doing that, Esau?”

“I never stopped,” I told her. And it was the truth.

aybe Lansdale had just used me to get rid of an old enemy, the way Judakowski had sent that hyped-up young man into Lansdale’s bar a year or so back.