Free That’s How I Roll: A Novel by Andrew Vachss Page B

going to make his move. When it came to business, the Beast could bury his own ego in a cake of ice. He was proud of saying that an ambush is better than a gunfight.
    Everybody hated him, but the Beast was always safe, because he had his place in the world. People needed him. Sometimes for certain kinds of work. But mostly what they needed was for him to leave them be.
    Nobody needed for him to leave
us
be.
    eople don’t take care of you just because it’s the right thing to do. The law might prohibit some things, but a man owns his children same way he owns his livestock. Despite what some said, I never could find anything in the Bible to back that up, but there was no need—the Beast himself had taught me even before I could read.
    He didn’t teach me by talking; he showed me.
    “Nobody’s coming,” he’d always say. “Nobody’s ever coming here, you crippled little piece of shit. Not without my say-so. Not unless they want to die. It’s my land they’d be stepping on. Ain’t nobody around would do that, not even the Law.”
    he Beast knew people would always deal with you if you had something they wanted. He didn’t have a friend in the world, butcertain people always had work for him. “Jobs” is what he called that kind of work.
    That’s how I first learned that being safe is all about your place in this world—nothing else matters.
    Later on, even when I was still a child, I could have found a place for myself alone easy enough. But had I done that, Tory-boy wouldn’t’ve lasted out the week.
    hen Rory-Anne got big in the belly, I told the teachers I wouldn’t be coming to school for a while. I could see they weren’t all that upset, but they were obligated to ask me why that was.
    When I told them Rory-Anne had a baby coming and I’d have to help her out, they just shook their heads.
    Just like most people around here: they might get sad, but never enough to get helpful.
    I read everything I could find about taking care of a baby, but there was no way around the one thing I’d never be able to do. If it wasn’t for Mrs. Slater, Tory-boy never would have made it.
    She came over one afternoon. The Beast’s truck was gone, and a whole carful of people had come by and picked up Rory-Anne. I guessed Mrs. Slater had been watching, waiting for the right time.
    “You know what every baby needs, son?” she asked me.
    “Yes, ma’am. Milk.”
    “Is that what you’ve been crying over?”
    “I guess so,” I said, even though I didn’t think there were any tears on my face—I had wiped it with my shirt soon as I heard the knock on the door.
    “All right,” Mrs. Slater said. “This is what we’re going to do. Can you make it over to the lightning tree by yourself?”
    “Yes, ma’am!” I was sure I could do that, because I’d already done it, plenty of times. That tree had been struck by lightning a long time ago—before I was born—and everybody steered clear of it because it’s supposed to be real bad luck to touch such a tree.The way I figured it, I’d already had about all the bad luck there was, so the lightning tree never spooked me.
    And everybody avoiding it made it a perfect place for me to hide whatever I didn’t want to keep in the shack.
    Now that I think back on it, I’m sure Mrs. Slater had seen me go back and forth between that tree and our shack. She lived not a hundred yards from us, but way higher on the hill, in a much nicer house.
    “God bless you,” I said to her. I had nothing else to offer, and I was still young enough to believe that truly meaning what I said would count for something.
    kept reading up on the subject, but mostly I learned just by taking care of the baby.
    That was my job. Nobody had to say it; I just knew. I knew nobody else was going to do it if I didn’t. I was bound to do it when I learned that Rory-Anne was going to give birth. But the first time I saw Tory-boy for myself, I
wanted
to do it.
    This is the best way to make you understand