Both Tory-boy and me said we’d love a glass of the lemonade she offered. We weren’t lying, either—the month of May can get brutal around here.
We each took a little drink, and Tory-boy beat me to telling her it was delicious. I was never prouder of him than that day—there wasn’t a single thing he did that wasn’t perfect.
When I told Mrs. Slater I was deeply sorry for her loss, she just nodded. I took that for what it was: an acknowledgment, maybe even thanks. But nothing more than that. Showing the truth of herself—this was not a woman who would ever seek sympathy, especially from a man who knew all about suffering firsthand.
Still, me and Tory-boy bowed our heads. A moment of silence for the departed.
She understood without a word being said.
After that, we went back to visiting. In the midst of all the polite talk, I saw the opening I’d been waiting for.
I almost never went to church when I was young. Even the most devoted of the congregation—the folks who’d come and carry you to church if you didn’t have your own way of getting there—they never came near our shack on a Sunday. In fact, Mrs. Slater was the only one who had ever dared.
But I’ve read my Bible and taught myself. I can talk Christian with the best of them. I knew I’d have to call on that skill if I was to succeed on that special Mother’s Day. In a way, I was just like the sniper who fired at Lansdale. My intent couldn’t have been more different from his, but, like him, I’d only get the one shot.
“Mrs. Slater, the reason I’m here today is because I’ve done wrong, and you’re the only one who can help me put things right.”
“What could you have done, Esau?” I didn’t get my feelings hurt. In fact, I felt some pride. I knew Mrs. Slater. I knew she wasn’t questioning what a crippled man like me could do, not after knowing how I’d raised Tory-boy all by myself. No, she was speaking of my character, of my reputation.
“I don’t want to come off as some kind of boaster, ma’am, but … well, I’m generally considered to be a pretty intelligent man.”
“Intelligent? Esau, you’re the smartest boy we ever had come from here. It was in the papers when you won first prize at that Science Fair, and everyone says you’re doing so well, earning such good money with your business and all. I’m not sure exactly what it is you do—”
“I’m a consultant, ma’am. It’s work I can do from home, and, what with the Internet, I can deal with problems all over the country. All over the world, in fact.”
“I am not one bit surprised.”
“And I thank you for that, ma’am. But let me explain what I meant about doing wrong. Now, you know what is written: if a man is blessed with powers, he is obliged to use them only for good.”
I waited for her nod of agreement—and the confused look on her face that came with it—before I went on.
“Well, the good Lord has blessed me with a fine mind. And I’ve used that mind to make a good living, for myself and my brother.
“So I had no need for money. But I was tempted, and I fell. Somebody told me about this big poker game they have in town every Saturday night.
“I know I shouldn’t have gone into a gambling den, but I told myself I was only curious about such things. And maybe that was actually true, at first. I couldn’t say what brought me there, because I honestly don’t really know.
“But what I do know is that I ended up studying that poker game. Not only the game, but the men who were playing. And I kept on doing that, week after week.
“If I had stopped there, if I had gotten bored, if I’d had my fill of the foul language some of them used, or the whiskey they swilled, there would be no story to tell.
“Only, it didn’t end there. One night, I brought my own money to that table, and sat down to play.”
Mrs. Slater sat there, waiting for me to finish my story. She worked at keeping a shocked look off her face, but she couldn’t do anything about her eyes.
“From the second I put my money down on that green felt table, I knew I was doing wrong,” I told her. “But my sin was much worse than gambling. You see, I had all the advantages over the others. I know how to compute odds in my head faster than this,” I said, snapping my fingers into a sharp crack. “And from having watched them so close for weeks, I knew what each man was holding. I could tell by the way they acted when they looked at their cards.
“This is what I mean: one man, every time he’s bluffing, he always takes a tiny sip of his whiskey while he’s waiting for other people to decide. Another one, he has a little tic in his right cheek that goes off every time he’s holding top cards.
“The plain truth is that there was no way I could lose. I wasn’t playing poker; I was using a poker game to take money from others. The only difference between what I did and sticking up a bank is that I didn’t use a gun.
“I have repented what I did. I know that’s not sufficient, and I accept the responsibility of that knowledge. But surely you understand that I can’t just give the money back. Not to those people—that would only cause more trouble. And I can’t keep the money, either.
“So I went over to see Pastor Knight—I don’t know if you’ve ever met him; his church is way over the other side of town. I was looking for guidance. To be honest, I thought he was going to tell me to give the money to the church.
“But the pastor told me he didn’t have an answer. He said such a question was too big for him—it was a question for the Lord Himself.
“I understood that to mean I would have to pray for guidance on my own. If my prayers were sincere, the Lord would answer. And I did pray on this. I prayed long and hard. Time passed—but the Lord finally answered. It was almost as if He was punishing me for my sins, making me prove I was truly penitent before He would show me how to truly atone.”
I drank some of her lemonade, as if it was a strength-giving elixir.
“The Lord told me that I must make an offering. Not to the church, but to a person who had both sacrificed greatly and suffered unjustly.
“And then it came to me, like a bolt of lightning in the night. A true vision, it was. I looked back on how you had sacrificed to make sure that I could raise my baby brother. I saw how you had suffered the loss of your husband.… God’s truth, there was nobody else I could see—the harder I prayed, the more you flooded my mind.”
“Now, Esau—”
“Please forgive me interrupting, Mrs. Slater. But Tory and me, we are each bound to ask you to grant our greatest wish. Each of us has a wish, and you are the only person on God’s earth who could grant either one.”
“Esau, you know if there’s anything I can do …”
“Two things,” I told her. “For me, I must hand this over to you, and I beg you to accept it.”
I had the money in one of those oversized yellow envelopes, the kind that are bigger and stronger than the regular ones. I reached it out to her. Reached out to her as I had so many years ago.
The way I put it, she couldn’t refuse. I knew that, just as I knew she wouldn’t open the envelope until I was gone.
She tucked it into her apron, signifying my part was done. Then she turned to Tory-boy.
Oh, sweet Jesus, he was just perfect. Better than perfect. I swear there was a glow all around him when he leaned forward and said:
“Mrs. Slater, ever since I was old enough to understand, I always called you ‘Mom’ in my heart. On this day, if you would allow me, I would like to say it out loud, just this one time. It would mean the world to me.”
Even though I expected tears, I wasn’t prepared for Mrs. Slater crying and smiling at the same time. She didn’t say anything, but I nodded at Tory-boy as if she had.
He reached over and took her hand. “Thank you, Mom,” he said. “Thank you for giving me life.”
We stayed with her for quite a while after that. I didn’t think she would ever stop crying, but she finally did. Then she had to hug Tory-boy and kiss him. Over and over.
I hadn’t prepared
Tory-boy for all this, but he took in every drop of that mother’s love he’d been starving for his whole life.
It was the finest day any man was ever blessed with. I can’t say it any better than that.
ven if Mrs. Slater had wanted to check into my story—and I knew that was highly unlikely—there were any number of folks who’d tell her that winning $18,475 in one night wasn’t anywhere near unusual, not with the stakes those people played for.
She was a strong woman, there was no doubt on that score. When I first heard about her husband passing, I feared what we call “busted nerves.” I never heard of a man getting a case of it, but it’s not uncommon for a woman who’s lost her husband and has no children.
They don’t get thoughts of suicide, but you can tell they have no real interest in living, either. Like flat tires with punctures that can’t be repaired. Just sad and empty. Sometimes they have all kinds of physical pains, too, but the doctors never find anything wrong with them, so they write them up as depressed or whatever, and they end up on Disability.
I don’t know what this place would be without those kind of paychecks. Probably like that little mining town built all around Grant’s Tomb.
The next time we went, Tory-boy took her a gift as natural as you please. Miss Webb had shown him how to make a bouquet from wildflowers, and he’d done a beautiful job.
Miss Webb even looked up the records, so we knew when Mrs. Slater’s birthday was.
When Miss Webb told me the date, I wasn’t surprised. But when she told me it was Tory-boy who had asked her to find it for him, my hopes for my baby brother took off like a bottle rocket.
Tory-boy handed over the bouquet the next time we visited. “For you, Mom,” is all he had to say.
After that, he said it a lot.
ver since we’d given up selling my drugs, I’d kept Tory-boy a good distance away from crime. I never tried to cut myself in on anyone’s operation. I never wanted to run anything. I didn’t even want to have anyone working for me.
No crime I ever did was on a contingency basis. I didn’t want a percentage share; I wanted to do a job of work and get paid for it. Nothing more, and surely nothing less.
he way it is here, it’s not just the poverty, or crooked politicians, or anything else you might want to blame. It’s … environmental, I believe. An invisible cold gray acid rain that never stops falling.
Around here, even dying can be hard. Horribly hard. Only death itself comes easy.
By easy, I mean frequent. Death happens so often around here that people regard it pretty much the same as that never-ending rain.
When life itself is hard, you have to be hard to live. Even a bitch will cull one of her own pups if she doesn’t think he’s going to be tough enough—she knows she’s only got but so much milk, and there’s none to waste.
Around here, survival isn’t some skill you learn—it’s in all our genes. Nobody needed to be told to step aside when they saw the Beast coming. But not everyone stepped fast enough.
“Hard” isn’t the same as “mean.” We’ve got all kinds here. Some of the finest, most honorable folks are also the kind you don’t want to interfere with. But they don’t give off signals like the Beast did, so a lot of mistakes get made. And people die.
Death is always here. Black lung takes longer than a methane-gas explosion, but they end the same way.
There’s always hunters in the woods. The ones hunting for food aren’t dangerous, but those hunting for fun sure can be.
Everyone keeps some kind of firearm around. Most carry a knife, others keep taped-up lead pipes in their trucks. There’s whole barns full of decomposing dynamite.
The only difference between one Friday night and another is that they’re not all fatal.
But when they are, if the dead man left kin, you know there’s going to be more than one funeral.
Going to prison is pretty common. Coming out a better person than when you went in, that’s never been done.
There’s rock slides. Floods, too. Those are natural phenomena. You live here, you expect them. But just because a man’s found under tons of rock, or floating in the river, doesn’t mean his death was due to natural causes.
Folks drink a lot. Wives get beaten something fierce. Some of those wives can shoot pretty good. And some of their husbands never think it can happen to them, even when they’re sleeping off a drunk.
Any old man who tells some story about how the town was once prosperous, people just think his brain’s gone soft.
I’m not saying that there isn’t good in the folks we have here, only that it isn’t appreciated like it might be in other places.
There’s supposed to be good and bad in everyone. Probably is. But here, it’s the bad in you that’s more often the most useful.
Like the difference between climate and weather. Most folks around here don’t view a killing as good or bad—just something that happens, like a flood or a fire.
That’s why a whole lot of bodies never get viewed at all.
or a man like me, this is a good part of the country to do my work. I don’t care what stupid book you read or what silly TV show you watch, it never so much as occurred to me to enjoy my work. No more than it would occur to me to work without getting paid.
I did take pride in the quality of my work, but I never deceived myself that every death at my hands was justified, never mind righteous or noble.
I never saw myself as … much of anything, really. I was a crippled, cornered rat, trying to protect my little brother with whatever I could use. In the process, I learned a lot of things. But I never did anything without testing it first.
Not everything I experimented with was a success. A lot of that was my own fault. I spent weeks putting together what looked like a pair of clamps. The top clamp had a pair of hollow steel tips on its upper side. And a spring that would discharge venom from the fangs as soon as they closed down.
I knew the width of a mature timber rattler’s fangs. I knew how a pit viper delivers its poison, and how deep its fangs would penetrate. I practiced on different slabs of meat. Naturally, full penetration was easiest on fat, harder on muscle, hardest of all on bone.
Collecting some of that venom was no problem. Tory-boy could move faster than any copperhead. After all, he’d been training to move fast ever since he could crawl. Besides, the snakes would usually freeze in position, because that’s how they got their prey to come close enough for them to strike—camouflage.
But after all that work creating what I thought would pass any autopsy test as an accidental snake bite, I discovered that the chances of someone actually dying from a bite were pretty remote. In fact, snake handling was such a common practice—mostly Pentecostal, but other sects did it as well—that it was even outlawed in some areas. Some of the handlers had been bitten dozens of times, and were none the worse for it. Timber-rattler neurotoxin was designed for varmints, not humans.
So, even with all that custom design work, the only time I ever used my invention was on a man with an impressive potbelly and a known habit of going hunting alone. He claimed to have invented a 12-gauge deer slug that was as accurate as any rifle bullet, and he wasn’t giving anyone a look until he got it patented.
He had another habit, too. I don’t know for a fact that this habit would have bothered Judakowski under other circumstances—it wasn’t cutting into his business. But one of Judakowski’s girlfriends had a little boy who the fat man was bothering in a real bad way.
“It has to be an accident,” Judakowski told me. He didn’t believe in warning people off like Lansdale did.
The man’s name was Jonah. I didn’t know if that was first or last. Or even why Judakowski thought knowing his name at all would be useful to me.
By the time they found that Jonah, all my work to mislead an autopsy turned out to be needless. The copperhead struck so perfectly that its fangs hit a prominent vein on his forearm, and the fat man must have stepped into a bear trap as he tried to r
un for help.
It’s not legal to trap bears, so, the way the cops figured it, whoever set that trap had gone back to check it, seen Jonah caught in it, and faded back into the forest.
They did the autopsy anyway, but they stopped just about as soon as they opened him up—his heart had blown its valves, probably from a combination of pain and fear. No need to look further. He could’ve also died from loss of blood, but “accidental” was the only possible entry on the death certificate.
Besides, by the time someone stumbled across what was left of him, he’d been out there over a month, and various creatures had sampled his flesh.
“Worth every penny,” Judakowski told me as he handed over the rest of the cash he owed me.
I thought it was worth that much to him because his girlfriend would be so pleased with how he’d handled her little boy’s problem without going near the police. But it wasn’t even two weeks later that she disappeared. Her and her little boy, too—vanished without a trace.
lowing up those White Power defectives who had tried to take Tory-boy from me wasn’t hard. With all the advance notice I got from him about their big meeting, I was able to drop over a dozen of my little black helicopters on the flat roof of their bunker. I had the position dialed in; I only flew them real early in the morning, when it was still dark; and they hardly made a sound.
It was the worst kind of luck that the FBI had a man planted inside one of those groups that had come there that night. Like I said, they never would have caught me otherwise.
Why would it have been anything else but bad luck? Bad luck had been in charge of our lives from the very beginning. Me and Tory-boy were born under the most evil sign there was.
Don’t read me that speech about “bad choices.” I had all kinds of bad in my life, way before I had any choices.
Put it this way: once I began, I never minded killing any more than I had ever minded dying. So, if it hadn’t have been for Tory-boy, there’s no evidence that I would have turned out any different than I did.
But if it wasn’t for Tory-boy, I wouldn’t ever have gotten caught, either.
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