That’s How I Roll: A Novel (36 page)

Or maybe he was showing me real respect by knowing I’d want to square accounts with Judakowski my own self. The way a man should.

None of that matters. If it wasn’t for Jayne being gone, I never would have told a word of how she’d healed me.

But I don’t mind admitting that when she’d said “honey” that night, it made me think of the first woman to ever use that word on me.

I don’t even mind admitting that I couldn’t wait to drop in at Lansdale’s bar. Once I’d made sure it was a night Nancy would be working, that is.

aybe it’s just as well my hand was forced. Sooner or later, the day would have come when Tory-boy wouldn’t have been able to drive me home. So what difference was there between the hospital and the penitentiary?

ven after Judakowski, I wasn’t in any danger. Nobody was going to suspect me of such a thing. Yes, Judakowski always had a lot of jobs out. What happened to him can certainly happen when a man doesn’t get paid for work he did. But even the cops who knew what I did and who I did it for, they believed I only worked long-distance. How else is a cripple going to shoot anyone, especially a wary man like Judakowski had been?

Judakowski was right to be wary. I doubt there was a person in the world he could truly trust. His men weren’t with him the way Lansdale’s men were with him. They were nothing but a paid labor force, and they had to know that.

You can buy obedience, but you can’t buy the kind of loyalty that makes a man throw himself between a pistol and his boss.

Lansdale might have had plenty of worries—being shot in the back was never one of them.

verything had been going along just perfect until those master-race morons showed Tory-boy a club he could join. Not some club that maybe might let him in if he did things for them; this club, they wanted him for himself.

“I’m a pure Aryan, Esau!” he told me, all excited. “See, there’s ice people and mud people, and I got the perfect blood in me. They’re a great group of guys. And they understand, too. The first night, they tried to get me to have beers with them. I told them I can’t do that. Mostly, when I say that, folks look at me funny. But not them, Esau. After I told them I had to keep bad stuff out of my body, they looked at me like I was just talking sense.

“The leader, he even said I was the ideal example! Pure, clean living, that was the way to build our race.”

thought it would pass. Tory-boy could get all excited about something and then forget about it by the next day.

But it only got worse. One morning at breakfast, Tory-boy told me he had a new girlfriend. “They picked her for me, Esau. And guess why! ’Cause we’ve got the best blood. She’s pure white, too. So we’re going to make babies. We’re going to uplift our race!”

I knew that was never going to happen. Years ago, I’d had Tory-boy fixed. I got the doctor to read the medical records, and he agreed a vasectomy would be “in the young man’s best interests.” With me signing as guardian, it was all over in an hour.

Tory-boy didn’t know why he was getting the “operation.” When I told him it had to be done, otherwise he could end up in a wheelchair like me, that was all it took.

I needn’t have bothered with all that. Tory-boy knew I never would do anything that wasn’t good for him, no matter what.

It would be a while before those skinhead imbeciles found out Tory-boy couldn’t make babies, but they already knew what he could do with a baseball bat.

They didn’t need Tory-boy, but they sure knew how to use him. When he told me about going out on “actions” with his “brothers,” I knew it was just a matter of time before they killed someone. And who would end up taking the blame for it.

I couldn’t put protection on Tory-boy anymore. He had learned too much new stuff. He wasn’t exactly sure why muds and homos and race traitors were all controlled by the Jews, much less why they all had to be exterminated. Still, he was ready to do his part.

I guess he didn’t remember the real reason why the Beast had killed Rory-Anne that long-ago night. Telling him nigger cock was much better than his was the same as her
asking
him to do it.

I felt my heart start to crack in my chest, stress fractures already forming on its surface.

had almost waited too long. When Tory-boy came home and showed me the swastika tattooed on his arm, that’s when I knew things had changed forever.

Not because of the tattoo—because he hadn’t asked me first.

That’s when Tory-boy told me he needed the tattoo because a real important meeting was due to happen the very next month. The big leader himself was coming all the way from Louisville to speak. Men were driving from Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Richmond … and a lot of other places. He couldn’t be the only one there without what he called “White Power ink,” could he?

The night of that important meeting, I suffered some kind of attack. It was so bad I could hardly speak, and my upper body was locked up so tight I couldn’t get much of a breath, either.

Tory-boy picked me up, carried me to the van, and drove me to the emergency room, paying no attention to red lights or stop signs.

When they took me in the back, the doctors told him he couldn’t
stay there with me. Tory-boy didn’t move. So some young doctor called for the security guards. But they were local boys, and they told the doctor they weren’t about to get themselves broken into pieces over nothing—all the young man wanted to do was stay with his brother, what was so wrong about that?

That really infuriated the doctor. He ordered a nurse to call the police. She told him, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’re not from around here. Trust me, the police won’t come, not if you tell them who it is you want them to try and haul out.”

t took a long time to run all their tests. They had my whole medical history there, and they could see I’d never had a seizure before. The doctors were puzzled, but doctors never admit that, so they kept at it for a long time before they said I was “stabilized,” but I’d have to go over to the state hospital for more tests pretty soon.

Tory-boy probably thought his “brothers” would understand, once he explained why he’d missed the big meeting.

aybe someday he’ll find another club that will want him to join.

The one he used to be in is gone, and I don’t think there’ll be another one taking its place, not around here. I can’t see them trying to start up a new operation in the same town where seventy-nine of them were all inside a concrete building—Tory-boy said they called it “The Bunker”—when a series of sequential explosions turned the whole thing into a giant incinerator.

Every one of them cremated, like they told Tory-boy they were going to do to the Jews someday.

he very next day—a Wednesday, it was—Tory-boy and I went for a long ride, all the way to the state capital. The people I make things for told me where I could find a needle artist who’d know better than to remember things. His shop was always closed on Wednesdays anyway.