That's How I Roll

by Andrew Vachss

  That’s not talk, that’s fact. Donna Belle Parsons kept a pistol behind the counter. Tommy Joe Knowles still walks with a limp because he’d thought she wouldn’t use it.

  I’ve noticed that men make that mistake about women all the time. Donna Belle Parsons was a tall, shapely woman, with a real pretty face and a sweet, soft voice. But the only reason Tommy Joe walks with a limp is because she hadn’t aimed that pistol of hers at his thick head.

  ’d shown Tory-boy how to hold the little bottle for the pups, and he got real good at it. Now they’re almost three years old. And if anybody or anything except me or Tory-boy came near our shack, they’d rip it apart, tearing off pieces like I’d seen those sharks do on TV.

  It might be another pit who got loose from one of the dog-fighters’ pens, might be a cat who should have had more sense, might be a sheriff, might be a preacher—to our dogs, it wouldn’t make any difference. Cross their line and you’d end up a shredded corpse.

  They didn’t act like that because they were mean—they were just doing their job. Tory-boy loved those dogs. He named them One, Two, and Three.

  Tory-boy was always patting them and cuddling them like they were big toys. That was the original reason I wanted to get pit bulls: most people think they’re just plain vicious, like it’s in their blood. It’s true enough that people have been breeding them since forever to be vicious, but that’s vicious to other dogs, not to people.

  You ever try and get near a dog that’s been hit by a car? Even though all you want is to help that dog, he’ll snap at you like a viper. Not a pit bull. If they were like that, how could people who fight them handle them down in the pit? How could they patch them up in the middle of a fight and send them right back to the scratch line?

  Tory-boy didn’t know how strong he was. So, when he started begging me for a puppy, I was afraid that he’d break one in half just petting it. That’s why I got him pups that were real strong themselves. I’d seen other pit bulls around little kids. Watched the kids pull their tails, squeeze them hard enough to crack a rib, even poke them in the eye … but those dogs acted like they didn’t even feel it.

  Turns out, I needn’t have bothered. Once I showed Tory-boy how, he hand-raised those pups. We fed them the best food, made sure they had all their shots, sheepskin blankets to sleep on, rawhide to gnaw on. Everything they wanted in life, it was me and Tory-boy who gave it to them. They reasoned it out the way animals do—anybody who threatened us was threatening them.

  Our dogs weren’t the kind you want to threaten. A bully might be dangerous, but a protector is deadly.

  We never locked our door. It was only plywood anyway. The dogs always let us know when anyone was near. Just a quiet little growling, deep in their throats, with the hair raised on the backs of their necks. Anytime they’d get like that, we’d all just sit and wait. Me, Tory-boy, and the dogs, all together in the dark.

  But after a while, the dogs would lie down and make another little sound. A different one. Probably telling each other how disappointed they were.

  t wasn’t only drugs that kept money coming in. Tory-boy just got stronger and stronger. He could work like two mules, so there was always some extra cash anytime we might need it.

  And before long, I was doing work for certain people. After that, it was just a matter of building our money until we had all we needed to make my plans come true. All my plans, even the exit one.

  ot a day passed but that I didn’t do some kind of work with Tory-boy, and he got pretty good at most things. As long as he didn’t speak up, people usually just took him for quiet. And when he was wheeling me around to see different people, I would do all the talking. Not to disguise anything—to teach Tory-boy more about the kind of answers you give to certain questions.

  And manners. I was known for my manners; everyone said what a gentleman I was. I wanted them to say the same about Tory-boy, and I know he copied me every way he could think of.

  By the time he was fifteen, Tory-boy was such an outright ox that the high-school football coach paid us a visit. That was right after I won a hundred dollars from Jasper Murdle when Tory-boy lifted the back end of Jasper’s old Chevy right off the ground like it was a box of cereal.

  The coach told me not to worry about Tory-boy’s grades, never mind his IQ—all that kind of thing could be taken care of. He told me what Tory’s contribution to the team would mean to the whole town. I tried to stay polite, but the man made it more and more difficult.

  He was so determined that I had to put in some real work to make him understand that there was no way to put Tory-boy out on a field with boys slamming into each other. Sooner or later, Tory-boy would cripple someone, or even kill them, and then the whole story would come out. Did the coach want to be the one to explain how a straight-A student couldn’t read or write?

  was almost thirty-four when the State finally executed him. A lot of folks praised Jesus when they got the news. I may be no match for them in church attendance, but they were putting the credit where it didn’t belong. I was the one who had truly slain the Beast.

  I was so proud that day. With him gone, I thought I’d made Tory-boy safe forever.

  We’d had our own house for some time by then. Not a trailer, a for-real house, with a nice porch, a fine roof, and plenty of room. There was even a special bathroom built for me.

  Our house sat on more than ten acres of ground, too. Most of it wasn’t cleared, and there wasn’t any fence around it that you could see. But anybody who stumbled across the first electrical barrier would see the flashing red lights and get their message.

  That message spread. It got so we wouldn’t see that flash for months at a time.

  Not many folks around here pay cash for a house, but they all gossip. I didn’t want extra attention, so I took out a mortgage, 10 percent down. Those payments came right out of the bank account, too, along with the property taxes and the insurance. Hardly made a dent.

  e didn’t need the “our place” spell anymore. Tory-boy always felt safe now. The Beast would never come back, never torment him again.

  They’d taken him away for killing Rory-Anne. The “guilty” verdict, that was expected. But it was the Beast’s own testimony that had brought it all the way up to Murder One.

  When that happens, they hold another trial to decide what happens to the defendant. That’s how I knew all about that “penalty phase” thing before I ever faced it myself, so many years later.

  Once it was a sure thing that the Beast was going to be caged for a long time—the lightest Murder One sentence here is life without parole—it seemed like half the people in town had some story to tell about him.

  If ever a man needed killing, it was him. They all said that, one way or another. A few actually said those very words.

  Of course, none of those cowards had ever said so out loud before that day.

  It was the first time anyone could remember that Pastor Booker didn’t testify in such a case. You could always count on him to talk about how some killer found Jesus while he was awaiting his sentence. He’d always say every man was worthy of a chance to redeem himself, even behind bars.

  Pastor Booker not speaking up for the Beast, that was the same as him saying he’d finally found a man who was past even God’s forgiveness.

  The Beast had the right to put on his own witnesses, too. That was as valuable to him as the right to drink a glass of cyanide.

  The jury stayed out just long enough to make it look as if they’d actually considered the matter. When they came back, they carried the death penalty along with them.

  he Beast lasted a long time before they finally put him down. I remember the first appeal. The DA called me and told me about it—some kind of challenge to Tory-boy’s testimony, claiming he wasn’t competent to testify.

  When the DA asked me to come down to his office a few months later, it was only so he could crow in front of an audience. He showed me where the appeals court wrote that the “thorough and objecti
ve questioning of the child by the trial judge” prior to allowing Tory-boy to testify was sufficient. More than sufficient.

  They made that last part real clear. I didn’t have to be a lawyer to understand what they meant by the “overwhelming weight of the evidence.” Even if Tory-boy had never said a word, there were enough reasons to find the Beast guilty a dozen times over. And not a single one to spare his life.

  I had stopped worrying about the Beast a long time ago. I knew he was already dying, no matter how any of his appeals might turn out. They’d already taken him off the Row and moved him to the prison hospital.

  The way I heard it, there was this cat that had the run of the Row. He didn’t belong to any particular prisoner, but most of them saved up treats for him, made toys for him to play with, patted him every chance they got. Always proving to that cat that they were worthy of being his friend.

  Somehow, the Beast lured the cat to come into his cell. A few minutes later, he threw the cat’s dead body out through the bars, its head twisted so bad it had about come off.

  None of that was in the newspapers, but it came to me from a very reliable source.

  A few weeks after that happened, the Beast started screaming in the middle of the night. The guards let him carry on for a few hours, until morning, when the prison doctor made his regular rounds.

  The doctor couldn’t find anything, so they took him over to the clinic for X-rays. Still nothing, so they threw him back in his cell.

  But the Beast kept running a real high fever. Even the painkillers couldn’t calm him down. After a while, he couldn’t even take food; they had to keep him alive with an IV tube.

  Finally, they took him to an outside hospital, under heavy guard. They knocked him out and opened him up, but what they called “exploratory surgery” came up with more questions than answers.

  It was all very mysterious. The Beast’s whole intestinal tract was lacerated—“as if the patient had swallowed finely ground glass,” one report said—and he also had certain symptoms of septic shock you could only get from being poisoned. But the Beast had eaten exactly the same meal as everyone else on the Row the night he took sick.

  No responsible party was ever identified.

  I know all that last part because the Beast’s lawyers had made an application for a pardon, on compassionate grounds. They said he was barely alive, in constant pain, too weak to be a danger to anyone.

  The DA showed me a copy of the pardon application. This time he wasn’t boasting; he wanted my opinion, he said. I knew what he really wanted without him having to say a word. He needed me to write out that me and Tory-boy were still terrified of the Beast.

  I could do that, easy enough. But, seeing as I was there anyway, I asked the DA if he believed the Beast was too weak to pull a trigger.

  He liked that so much he put it into the thick stack of papers he filed against letting the Beast out on any grounds. The State put him in the Death House to die—die healthy, die sick, made no difference in the eyes of the law.

  But the Beast’s lawyers kept on trying, right up to the night the prison changed what they’d been sending down that IV tube.

  hen he was just a child, some of the kids would do cruel things to Tory-boy. Not just torment him; some of what they did was downright evil, done for its own sake. Most of the time, I would wheel myself over and talk to the other kids’ folks, usually their mothers.

  By the time I arrived, anyone could see how much effort I’d had to put in to make the trip. And I was always polite and respectful when asking their help.

  I made sure they understood I knew I couldn’t take the chance of telling the Beast. Not that anyone thought he cared about his children—he just never needed much of an excuse to hurt people, and that they knew real well.

  Most of the time, the kid who’d been doing things to Tory-boy, he’d get a whipping, and the promise of more to come if he ever did it again. Decent people don’t hold with picking on a little boy who isn’t right in his head.

  After the Beast first got sent away, I didn’t have the implied threat of his violence going for me. Still, I was usually successful. But not every time. So I had to learn how to fix such things myself.

  That turned out to be not so difficult as you might imagine. Folks around here put a lot of stock in signs. Omens. “Portents” is what the elders called them.

  So, when things kept happening to the parents of kids who tormented Tory-boy, people started talking.

  There was plenty for them to talk about. It was no secret that I loved my little brother. That much was fact. God knows Esau Till has got him one powerful mind, people would say. But maybe he had other powers, too: casting spells, hexing, putting the evil eye on someone.

  I know what Mrs. Birdsong said about me. She’s over one hundred years old, folks say. That’s a woman you listen to when she speaks. The way it was told to me, what she said was:

  “Satan cursed that poor boy, crippling him so bad like he is. And that wasn’t the only cross Esau has had to bear. But he never turned his back on the Lord. Nobody ever knew him to feel sorry for himself, or ask for pity. And look how he raised that brother of his all by himself. That’s a good man there. God and Satan, they’re always at war. God can’t undo Satan’s work, but He can grant the strength to overcome it, if you’re worthy. So it could be that God Himself blessed Esau with powers. Everyone knows how smart that boy is. You think that’s an accident? Maybe he’s even smart enough to use some of Satan’s own spells on those who do him wrong.”

  remember one of those parents that something truly terrible happened to. He was a short, stocky man with big arms and cruel eyes. When I told him his two sons had made Tory-boy eat dirt in front of everyone, he said if that big-head little brother of mine couldn’t take care of himself, that wasn’t his problem—nobody was going to tell him how to raise his own kids. “That father of yours ain’t around no more, crip. So just wheel yourself on out of here.”

  When they found that man, his face was split all the way through. That can happen when the brake on your chainsaw fails—it can kick right back on you, still spinning all those killer steel teeth.

  People just shook their heads. Had to happen sooner or later, they said. Everyone knew that man was an idiot with machinery. Probably been drinking, too.

  fter a while, nobody tried to tell Tory-boy to eat dirt anymore. Maybe some did believe I had hexing power. But what stopped them dead in their tracks was that Tory-boy’s strength was just enormous. Nobody knew its limits, and that was something they damn sure didn’t want to find out for themselves.

  ater on, instead of tormenting Tory-boy, different people would ask him about going along on some kind of crime with them. And he’d always say the same thing: “I got to ask my brother.”

  Anyone with a drop of sense would leave it at that. But, one time, some fool just had to say, “What you got to ask that cripple for? Is he your momma?”

  The very second those words came out of his mouth, the other men who’d been standing around jumped out of the way. And kept on running.

  When the police came to see him in the hospital, the dumb-mouth joker proved he wasn’t a total fool. He told them he’d been so wasted on shine and pills that all he remembered was falling off that rock ledge.

  I guess he realized that getting beat up, that’s something that can happen a lot of times in a man’s life. Getting killed, that only happens once.

  hortly after that, I became a kind of permanent employee of certain people. From then on, all Tory-boy had to say was he had to ask his brother first. His brother, Esau.

  Anyone who heard Tory-boy say my name, they knew that they were standing in a minefield. And that the only way out was to back out.

  That was because the people I did various things for needed me for those things. That was my place in the world, doing those things. Murderous things.

  The people I did work for knew they would lose my services if anything ever happened to Tory-boy. So they
’d spread the word. Spread it wide, deep, and thick. If you even asked Tory-boy to get involved in something that might get him locked up, that was the same as asking for very serious trouble from some very serious people.

  Those people didn’t do that as a favor to me. They weren’t the kind to do favors for free, and I would never have allowed myself to be obligated by asking them.

  The way they thought was always the same, and it always applied to every situation. They’d reason it out like this: if Tory-boy ever got himself arrested, who knew what he might tell the Law, a simpleminded boy like him?

  So they kind of looked at people threatening Tory-boy the same way our dogs would. If anyone hurt Tory-boy, there was no guessing to be done—they knew what I’d do. And they didn’t want me doing it.

  That wasn’t out of regard for me; they were just watching out for themselves. They knew I was a professional, and part of that is being extremely careful—it might take me weeks just to put a plan together. But killing someone who hurt my brother, they knew I couldn’t wait on that. Worse, they knew I wouldn’t care what it cost, or who got hurt in the bargain.

  They’d seen that for themselves, the first time we ever met. The time I put in my job application.

  y plan finally came true. That’s because it was a plan. Not some dream, not some prayer, some actual thing I made happen all on my own.

  I knew this the same way I knew about my balance. If you wanted to think the spirits spoke to me, I wouldn’t call you a liar.

  We had to get our own piece of ground. Bought and paid for, cash money. No landlord means no rent—no rent means no excuses to stop by.

  Tory-boy didn’t really understand why our own land made us safer. As far as he was concerned, as long as the Beast couldn’t get inside, a trailer was as good as a palace.

  I didn’t have any real use for the library anymore, not with the Internet. But I still went over there at least once a week.

  I could have asked myself why, but I was afraid of the answer I’d get.