That’s How I Roll: A Novel (19 page)

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 objective 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.”